When Carnival arrived, a grand anti-Catholic procession was organised, to incite afresh the hostility of the people to the ancient Church, its rites and ceremonies. First, a company of maskers dressed like monks, nuns, and priests in their sacred vestments, led the way, capering and singing ribald songs. Then followed a great chariot, drawn by six men in the habits of the religious orders. On the box sat a fellow dressed as a bishop, with mitre and crosier, scourging on the labouring monks and friars. On the car was a man represented as dying, with a priest leaning over him, a huge pair of spectacles on his nose, administering to the sick man the last sacraments of the Church, and addressing him in the most absurd manner, loudly, that the bystanders might hear and laugh at his farcical parody of the most sacred things of the old religion. The next car was drawn by a man dressed as a priest in surplice and stole. The other cars contained groups suitable for turning into ridicule devotion to saints, belief in purgatory, the mass, &c.[155] [155] Kerssenbroeck, p. 509. The prophets now decided that it was necessary to be prepared in the event of a siege. They, therefore, commissioned the preacher Roll to visit Holland and raise the Anabaptists there, urge them to arm and to march to the defence of the New Jerusalem. Roll started from Münster on the 21st of February, but the Spanish Government in the Netherlands, alarmed at what was taking place in the capital of Westphalia, ordered a strict watch to be kept on the movements of the fanatics, and Roll was seized and executed at Utrecht. The next step taken by the prophets was to discharge the members of the senate from the performance of their office, because they had been elected "according to the flesh," and to choose to fill their room another body of men "elected according to the Spirit." Bernard Knipperdolling and Gerhardt Kippenbroeck, both drapers, were appointed burgomasters.