Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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       JOHN ROBINS’S ADDRESS, Ling Alley

      Robins, a mid-seventeenth-century Moorfields mystic, failed in his plan to take nearly 150,000 followers to the Holy Land, and feed them solely on dry bread, raw vegetables and water. Robins explained that he had previously spent time on earth both as Adam and Melchizedek (an Old Testament high priest), but when he claimed in 1651 that his wife, Joan, would give birth to Jesus Christ, the authorities committed her to the Clerkenwell House of Correction and his scheme withered away.

      Peckham

       WILLIAM BLAKE’S VISION, Goose Green

      At the age of nine in 1766 William Blake, who went on to become England’s greatest religiously inspired painter, claimed that he saw a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, then in the countryside at the south-eastern fringe of London. He went home and told his father, who thrashed him until his mother intervened. Blake also once described seeing the face of God pressed against the window of his parents’ Soho shop. Blake later discovered, to his great pleasure, that his birth year – 1757 – had already been marked down by his mentor, the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, as a special one when the last judgment would come to pass in the spiritual world.

      Although many of Blake’s paintings and poems were inspired by biblical imagery, confusion has long surrounded the identity of the Nonconformist sect he was born into. That his parents were Nonconformists was certain, for they were buried in Bunhill Fields, Moorgate, like Blake himself. Peter Ackroyd, Blake’s most extensive biographer, has debated whether William’s father, James, was a Baptist on Grafton Street, a Moravian on Fetter Lane, a Muggletonian, Sandemanian, Hutchinsonian, Thraskite or Salmonist, such were the bewildering number of non-establishment Protestant groups present in London in the mid-eighteenth century.

      Blake’s own views were idiosyncratic. He designed a mythology based upon the Bible and the Greek classics, and rejected what he called ‘arid atheism and tepid deism’. He was wary of conventional religion, and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) wrote: ‘Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion . . . as the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys,’ a line borrowed from the Book of Proverbs.

      In his epic poem Jerusalem (1804–20) Blake posed the ancient queries of the Christian Kabbalists that James I had revived when he moved to London from Scotland in 1603 to take the throne: was Britain the primitive seat of the patriarchal religion? Was Britain home of a purer Christianity than Rome? Was London the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, the centre of a world of one God, one religion, one nation?

       If it is true, my title-page is also True, that Jerusalem was & is the Emanation of the Giant Albion. It is True, and cannot be controverted. Ye are united O ye Inhabitants of Earth in One Religion. The Religion of Jesus: the most Ancient, the Eternal: & the Everlasting Gospel – The Wicked will turn it to Wickedness, the Righteous to Righteousness. Amen! Huzza! Selah! All things Begin & End in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.

      Plumstead

      The south-east London suburb beyond Woolwich was home in the mid-nineteenth century to one of the capital’s most esoteric and strictest religious cults, the Peculiar People of Plumstead. They took their name from the verse in the Book of Deuteronomy which runs: ‘And the Lord hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people.’ Although the Peculiar People merited an entry in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, they soon died out as their religion forbade them from seeking medical help, a stance that presaged their doom during a typhoid epidemic.

      Primrose Hill

      William Blake, walking here early in the nineteenth century, had a vision of the ‘spiritual sun, not like a golden disc the size of a guinea but like an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy, holy, holy” ’.

      According to the fifteenth-century soothsayer Mother Shipton, if Primrose Hill were ever surrounded, the streets of London would become rivers of blood.

      → Intrigue involving James II at St James’s Palace, p. 94

      The Popish Plot

      One of the most infamous religious conspiracies in London history, the Popish Plot unfolded after the body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, MP, JP and well-known Protestant, was found on Primrose Hill in October 1678, impaled on his own sword.

      As speculation mounted about who could have murdered Godfrey, the conspiracy theories began to emerge. Perhaps the murder was connected with an anonymous pamphlet, believed to have been written by the poet Andrew Marvell, which suggested that the Catholics were plotting to take control of London, and make their religion that of England?

      Back in August the king, Charles II, had been told by his chemist, Christopher Kirkby, while walking in St James’s Park, that the Catholics were planning to massacre Protestants, burn down the staunchly Protestant City of London (as the papists had been accused of doing after the 1666 Fire), overthrow the government, and replace Charles with his brother, the Catholic Duke of York (later James II).

      Kirkby told the king he knew the names of assassins who planned to shoot him. If that failed, the queen’s physician would poison him. Now Godfrey was dead, so perhaps the putsch had begun. The House of Commons was searched in case another Gunpowder Plot was imminent. The grapevine buzzed with talk of how the letters of Godfrey’s name could be rearranged into the anagram ‘Died by Rome’s revenged fury’. A cutler made a special ‘Godfrey’ dagger. On one side were the words ‘Remember the murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey’, on the other, ‘Remember Religion’. He sold 3,000 in one day.

      A cleric called Titus Oates told the authorities that there definitely was a Popish Plot to take over the country. He made more than forty allegations against various Catholics, and even accused the queen’s physician and the secretary to the Duchess of York of planning to assassinate Charles II. Soldiers were seconded to help Oates root out these saboteurs, and on 3 December 1678 the Duke of York’s former secretary, Edward Colman, was sentenced to death.

      Parliament passed a bill barring Catholics from membership of both Houses (a law not repealed until 1829), while Oates received a state apartment in Whitehall and an annual allowance of £1,200. Far from being sated with his illicitly gained power, Oates succumbed to megalomania. He claimed assassins would soon shoot the king with silver bullets causing wounds that would not heal. But public opinion began to turn against him after he had fifteen mostly innocent men executed. Oates was eventually arrested for sedition (accusing the Duke of York of treason) and fined £100,000.

      When the Catholic Duke of York took the throne in 1685 as James II he sought revenge. Oates was sentenced for perjury and given a life term. He was removed from his cell wearing a hat emblazoned with the slogan ‘Titus Oates, convicted upon full evidence of two horrid perjuries’ and put into the pillory in Westminster so that passers-by could pelt him with unwanted food. William of Orange pardoned him in 1688.

      It later transpired that Godfrey had been murdered not on Primrose Hill but at Somerset House, by a silversmith called Prance, hired by Titus Oates and his associate Israel Tongue, and that the body was then taken to Primrose Hill.

      Putney

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