The king encountered difficulties not only in the neighboring towns, but likewise in his own capital, and even in his harem. There was at Munster a woman of great courage and determination, who boasted that no man should ever marry her. John of Leyden commanded that she should be carried off and placed in the number of his wives; but the woman, with her independence of character, finding the morals and the manners of this harem intolerable, made her escape. This was in the king's eyes a very great crime. He therefore had her arrested, conducted her himself to the great square, cut off her head with his own hand, and then, filled with wrath and vengeance, trampled her body in the dust. Bockhold had ordered that all his other wives should be present at this hateful scene, and had directed them to sing a hymn of praise after the execution. These unhappy creatures did, accordingly, strike up their song in the presence of the mutilated and desecrated body of their companion.[523] CHAPTER V. THE ANABAPTISTS OF MUNSTER. CHASTISEMENT. (1535-1536.) [Sidenote: CHASTISEMENT.] The landgrave Philip of Hesse having, meanwhile, entered Westphalia with the troops which had just made the conquest of Würtemberg, Munster was soon so completely invested that nothing, and especially no food supplies, could any longer enter the town. The dearth became more and more severe, and the miserable people were driven to have recourse for sustenance to the most unaccustomed food. They ate the flesh of horses, dogs and cats, dormice, grass, and leather; they tore up books and devoured the parchment. Half the population of the town, it was said, died of starvation. These fanatics had trusted in the word of their king and prophet, and had awaited with confidence the succor which he promised them; but, as this succor did not arrive, murmurs began to be heard from some of them, and others appeared to go mad. Bockhold had told them that, if it were necessary for saving his people, 'the stones would be turned into bread.' Consequently, some of these votaries might be seen stopping in the streets, biting the stones and attempting to tear them to pieces, in expectation of their being converted into nourishment.[524] At length despair, madness, and inhumanity proceeded to the bitterest extremities. The wife of the senator Menken, one of the working men raised to this dignity by Bockhold, killed her three children, salted their bodies, and placed the parts thus cured in jars, in this way making abominable provision for her own subsistence, and on this she fed day by day.[525] The wretched inhabitants of this ill-fated town wandered with tottering steps about the streets, the skin wrinkled over their fleshless bones, their necks long and lank, hardly able to sustain the head, their eyes haggard and opening and shutting with sudden jerk, their cheeks hollow and emaciated, with