Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ Cromwell’s Commonwealth. In his final speech on 22 August 1651 he announced: ‘I am exchanging a pulpit for a scaffold and a scaffold for a throne. I am exchanging a guard of soldiers for a guard of angels to carry me to Abraham’s bosom.’ An onlooker watching Love go to the scaffold repented and claimed to be born again as the martyr died.

      • Simon, Lord Lovat, 1747

      The last Tower Hill execution took place in 1747 when Simon, Lord Lovat, was beheaded for supporting the Jacobite attempt to seize the throne of England.

      → Smithfield execution site, p. 33

       TOWER OF LONDON, Tower Hill

      Britain’s major tourist attraction has been palace, mint, menagerie and most notably a prison, especially to London’s medieval Jewish population who endured much misery here in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (→ Old Jewry, p. 24).

      Sir John Oldcastle, the most famous of the Lollard Bible reformers, escaped from the Tower in October 1413 after being imprisoned here for heresy. With a group of followers he had made a botched attempt to seize the capital, planning to kidnap the royal family from Eltham Palace. The plot failed when one of the group betrayed them. Oldcastle was eventually executed at St Giles, central London.

      John Gerard, a Jesuit priest during a period of severe restrictions on Catholics, escaped from the Salt Tower, one of the wings of the complex, in 1589. He had been arrested soon after landing in England after a spell on the continent. In the Tower he was tortured by being suspended from chains on the dungeon wall, but managed to escape using a rope strung across the moat, which he somehow managed to negotiate despite his ravaged hands. Gerard fled to Morecrofts, a house in Uxbridge that was home to Robert Catesby, the Gunpowder Plotter of 1605. Thanks to his daring escape Gerard managed to avoid execution and died in Rome aged seventy-three.

      William Penn, one of the first Quakers, was imprisoned in the Tower in 1668–9 for publishing controversial religious pamphlets. Here he wrote another, No Cross No Crown, ‘to show the nature and discipline of the Holy Cross of Christ; and that the denial of self . . . is the alone way to the Rest and Kingdom of God’.

       WELLCLOSE SQUARE, St George’s

      Now a ravaged location overlooked by fearsome tower blocks and slum estates, Wellclose Square has an extraordinary religious history. It was built as Marine Square, the first planned residential estate in east London, and was aimed at intellectuals and free-thinkers. Indeed it was the apex of the new London devised by the team around Christopher Wren that reshaped London after the 1666 Fire. Using biblical measurements connected with the ancient notion of ‘sacred geometry’ (→ p. 38), Wren and his assistants created the square 2,000 cubits (a biblical measurement, around ⅔ of a mile) from St Dunstan-in-the-East, his favourite church, which itself stands the same distance from St Paul’s. Smart houses lined the square around a railed-off grassed area at the centre of which stood a church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Danish architect Caius Gabriel Cibber, the designer of the relief on the Monument based on the Book of Lamentations.

      In the eighteenth century two illustrious religious figures – the Kabbalist extraordinaire Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk and the scientist-cum-theologian Emanuel Swedenborg – lived on Wellclose Square. Falk was known as the Ba’al Shem of London, a master of the secret names of God which in biblical times the high priest used to invoke special powers.

      Over the years a succession of legends arose regarding Falk’s stay here. He could work miracles, such as saving the Great Synagogue from fire (→ p. 20). He could re-enact the ancient Kabbalistic experiment in which the essence of God, containing the ten stages of primal divine light, appears from holy vessels. As Falk’s reputation grew, so did the invitations to impart Kabbalistic advice. In London he was visited by the lothario Giacomo Casanova, who wanted to gain insights into Kabbalistic sexual techniques. He met the great occultist Cagliostro with whom he discussed the idea of founding a new Freemasonry that would restore the religion of Adam, Noah, Seth and Abraham. But he also had many detractors.

      A feature in the Gentleman’s Magazine of September 1762 lampooned Falk as a ‘Christened Jew and the biggest rogue and villain in all the world, who had been imprisoned everywhere and banished out of all countries in Germany’. The anonymous writer explained that when he asked the Kabbalist to reveal one of his ‘mysteries’ Falk told him to avoid all churches and places of worship, steal a Hebrew Bible and obtain ‘one pound of blood out of the veins of an honest Protestant’.

      Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish visionary, scientist, philosopher and Christian theologian whose work was a major influence on William Blake, moved to Wellclose Square in 1766 at the age of seventy-eight. Twenty-one years earlier Swedenborg had given up science after experiencing an epiphany, and from then on he devoted himself to God. He wrote voluminous works interpreting the Scriptures and warned that ‘no flesh could be saved’, according to Christ’s words in Matthew 24, unless a New Church was founded. It was, in London, after his death.

      Swedenborg and Falk met to discuss the history of knowledge – the earliest knowledge saved by Noah before the Flood, which, according to ancient myth, was recorded on two indestructible pillars: one of marble, which could not be destroyed by fire, the other of brick, which could not be dissolved by water.

      In 1845 St Saviour, the Wellclose Square church, was let to the Anglo-Catholic movement, led locally by the charismatic Revd Charles Lowder. He converted the church into a mission hall, which imposed a strict ascetic regime, and co-founded a secret brotherhood for priests, the Society of the Holy Cross. Its members worshipped the True Cross – the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified – fragments of which had come into Lowder’s possession by a circuitous route.

      One night in 1862 a woman knocked at the mission in some distress. Her daughter had died. Two missionaries, Joseph Redman and Father Ignatius of Llanthony, left for the woman’s house with a fragment of the True Cross. Father Ignatius laid the relic on the dead girl’s breast and proclaimed: ‘In the name of Jesus Christ I say unto thee, “Arise!” ’ Remarkably the girl’s right hand moved slowly, tracing a cross in the air. The shocked Redman quietly breathed: ‘Father, what have you done?’, to which Father Ignatius replied: ‘I have done nothing, but our Lord has done a great thing indeed.’ Doctors soon explained away the ‘miracle’. Evidently the girl had been unconscious, not dead, and the clerics’ arrival had merely catalysed her revival. Those involved with the mission and Lowder’s society believed otherwise.

      Father Ignatius made a name for himself locally when he burst into Wilton’s Music Hall one night and oblivious to the intoxicating atmosphere of mild ale and shag tobacco, gingerly made his way to the centre of the dance floor and announced to the startled crowd: ‘We must all appear before the Judgment Seat of Christ,’ before stealing away.

      → Little Gidding, p. 106

      Hampton

       HAMPTON COURT PALACE, Hampton Court Road

      The palace was built in the twelfth century for the Knights Hospitallers, religious warriors who took over from the Knights Templars as protectors of pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. It became a royal palace under Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor 400 years later, and was where in 1604 a conference led to the production of the greatest English Bible – the King James.

      The Hampton conference was organised not to produce a new Bible but to seek a settlement between the Puritan and Anglican wings of the Church. The Puritans expected James to be sympathetic to their cause. But John Reynolds, СКАЧАТЬ