Martin Luther was disappointed he wasn’t the first martyr of the Reformation. That honor falls to a group of Augustinian monks in Antwerp. During the 1520s, the Netherlands was under the control of Queen Margaret of Austria, who was an aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. After the Diet of Worms, Queen Margaret attempted to terminate the spread of Luther’s teaching in support of her nephew’s anti-Luther edict.

The story starts with Jacob Propst, a former student of Luther. When Propst returned to Antwerp after studying in Wittenberg, he was arrested for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. Imprisoned at Brussels, Propst endured enhanced interrogation until he recanted publicly. Upon release, Propst retracted his recantation and continued preaching the gospel. He was arrested a second time. He escaped and returned to Wittenberg.

Propst’s replacement in Antwerp was Henry van Zutphen, who bravely defied the ban on evangelical preaching. Queen Margaret initiated a crackdown and had Zutphen arrested. But the very night of his arrest, a crowd of women—some would say a mob—freed Zutphen, who fled northward to Bremen. There, he settled in at St. Ansgar’s chapel to preach regularly.

Queen Margaret’s response was to arrest all the monks of the Antwerp Augustinian monastery. All were interrogated. If they didn’t recant, they would be burned at the stake. All but eight recanted. The eight Augustinians were prosecuted under the terms of Charles V’s Edict of Worms. Queen Margaret put them through the wringer: Arrested, unsanitary conditions, inquisitions, and threats of execution. Five of the eight buckled under pressure. They recanted and were released. Then there were three: Lambert Thorn, Hendrik Voes, and Johann van Esschen.

They were interrogated again and turned over to the secular authorities. Their sentence was death by burning. They were given one final chance to recant. Esch and Vos refused immediately. Thorn asked for four extra days to consult with the Scriptures. Thorn died in prison five days later. Esch and Vos burned to death at the Brussels marketplace on July 1, 1523.

When Luther received the painful news, he began to cry silently. But then he gave thanks to Christ for the faithfulness of the first martyrs of the Reformation. Luther was inspired to write his first hymn, “The Ballad of the Martyrs of Brussels.”

The first stanza is as follows,

A new song to the Lord we’ll raise,

Of what His truth hath done;

For His great glory and His praise

A triumph He hath won.

At Brussels in the Netherlands,

His might has been made known;

Two boys who loved the Lord’s commands,

The power of the truth have shown:

Great was the faith the Lord of heaven

To these two Christian boys had given

The last stanza reads,

The summer now is at the door,

The winter’s gloom is gone;

The vernal gales are flitting o’er,

Bright days are coming on:

God hath Himself His work begun,

His work He never leaves undone.

Bibliography

Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2017), 300-303.

Martin Luther, Spiritual Songs of Martin Luther, from the German by J. Hunt. (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1853), 68

Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.