England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare

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      In their battles they were led by a former shepherd, Jean Cavalier, guided by God and punished by the Beast. Apprehended Camisards were tortured by being broken on the wheel, their limbs smashed until they could be made to fit its circumference, just as the orthodox world demanded that they should conform their beliefs. Fleeing from persecution, some were exiled to New Orleans (where, in a later civil war, black troops would call themselves Camisards, as rebels within a rebellion), while in 1704 another group, led by Cavalier, escaped to London. They settled in Spitalfields where ‘they ranted profusely, and made converts of many English people, chiefly of the devouter sex … Miracles, too, were performed in abundance.’ Their ‘mystical phalanx’ was promulgated in tracts such as An Account of a Dream at Harwich, In a Letter to a Member of Parliament about the Camisars, a portentfilled reverie to rival Revelations and haunted by two figures: a horseman in golden armour, and a monstrous female, ‘her Eyes glaring like Lightning’:

      Out of her Nostrils came a sulphurous Smoke, and out of her Mouth Flames of Fire. Her Hair was frizled, and adorn’d with Spoils of ruin’d people; her Neck bare, with Chains about it of Dice, mix’d with Pieces of Gold; which rattling, made a horrid Noise, for her Motions were all fierce and violent, her garment was all stain’d with Tears and Blood: There hung about her several Pieces of Parchment, with Bits of Wax at the end, with Figures engraved on them. She cast her Eyes often with Rage and Fury at that bright appearance I have describ’d [the golden horseman] over whom having no force, she toss’d her Head with Disdain, and glared about on her Votarys, till we saw several possess with her …

      

      This nightmare, experienced on the Suffolk coast close to Mary Ann’s own birthplace, seemed to engulf all England; another pamphlet, Clavis Prophetica, feared that these French Prophets had imported anarchy, and would cover ‘the whole Face of our Heaven with Darkness’.

      At Christmas 1707, an English Camisard convert, Dr Thomas Emes, died on the eve of the millennium he had predicted. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, but it was foretold that God ‘wou’d attest this Publication of our Lord’s Approach as Bridegroom, and Return as a King, by raising Dr Emes from the Grave on the 25th of next Month, above 5 Months after his Interment …’ Accordingly, on 25 May 1708, a crowd estimated at between twenty and sixty thousand gathered in Bunhill Fields to await the doctor’s resurrection. Their disappointment was blamed on ‘the fact of some unfaithful person looking on’; denied their miracle, the mob managed to do great damage both to Emes’s resting place and other graves as they rioted through the cemetery. Yet the French Prophets’ fire still burned fiercely: four hundred converts spread out through the country, bearing their pentecostal message like Shelley’s miniature balloons, and holding nocturnal meetings at which crowds gathered to see prophetesses sigh and quake. By the 1740s, their influence had reached the north of England, where it was claimed to have inspired James and Jane Wardley of Bolton-le-Moors, with that ‘further degree of light and power’ which would define their own and yet stranger sect.

      They called themselves the United Society of Believers, to differentiate from the Quakers’ Society of Friends, founded by George Fox on his Mount of Vision, Pendle Hill. But just as the latter were so called because they quaked at the word of the Lord, so the Wardleys earned the nickname of Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, a term of abuse which they turned and took upon themselves. The same soubriquet had been given to the Ranters in 1648: it was as if Shakerism was a delayed reaction to those revolutionary sects – the Familists, the Grindletons, the Seekers, the Diggers, the Ranters and the Levellers – who were themselves influenced by foreign heresies.

      The early Quakers had interrupted church sermons to castigate the preachers, and had stripped naked as a protest. In the 1650s, John Gilpin wanted to cut a hole in his throat to let out the spirit’s tongue. Local lads were encouraged to throw stones at itinerant Quakers, and in their stronghold at Bristol, Wakefield’s James Nayler re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, with his long hair, riding on a donkey with women strewing palms before him – a blasphemy for which he had his tongue bored and his forehead branded. But with the Restoration, Quakerism lost its messianic fervour and settled into silent meditation. The Shakers, however, rejoiced in noise. It was as though they registered a seismic preecho of the impending industrial revolution. One Shaker described how ‘a strange power begins to come on, and takes place in the body … which sets the person agaping and stretching; and soon sets him a twitching, as though his nerves were all in convulsion. I can compare it to nothing nearer in its feelings, than the operation of an electerising machine.’ These tremors were symptoms of a new revolution to which the operators of Manchester’s mechanised cotton looms would be shackled, in thrall to the processes of mass production while their children scurried perilously beneath eternally shuttling frames. Shakerism would offer an alternative to such slavery.

      ‘… Amend your lives,’ demanded Mother Jane Wardley. ‘Repent. For the kingdom of God is at hand. The new heaven and new earth prophesied of old is about to come …’ Her female ministry had its precedent in the French prophetesses, such as the fifteen-year-old Isabeau Vincent, who conducted services while sleeping and maintained, ‘It is not I that speak, but it is the spirit within me’; or the elderly Dorothy Harling, the ‘Permanent Spring’ who whipped her followers and urinated on their limbs. Here in the northern forests of Pendle and Knaresborough a dangerous memory lingered; that of a holocaust in which as many as eleven million, mostly women, had died throughout Europe. The same suspicion would taint all female prophets, whose daughters would inherit what their mothers had endured. It was not until 1736 that the laws against witchcraft were repealed – the year in which Ann Lee was born in Manchester.

      Even her street had the name of a witch’s familiar: Toad Lane, an alley in a pre-industrial city still surrounded by wilderness, a devil darkness which Saddleworth Moor does little to dispel today. Like Mary Ann, Ann Lee was the daughter of a labourer – her father was a blacksmith – and she too was subject to divine inspiration, ‘especially concerning the lusts of the flesh’. Ann would admonish her mother against sex and, as her father attempted to whip her, ‘threw herself into her mother’s arms, and clung around her to escape his strokes’, a scene in which we might detect the traces of other abuse. And like Mary Ann, we have little record of how Ann Lee looked, only a strange phrenological portrait, an imaginary impression.

      ANN LEE.

      After working at a cotton loom and as a velvet-cutter, Ann became a cook in the Manchester Infirmary, while her father joined the Wardleys’ congregation. In September 1758, aged twenty-two, she too became a Shaker and was soon disrupting services in Manchester’s cathedral, questioning the priest’s words. Four years later, she was persuaded to marry John Standerin, another blacksmith. The lateness of their union owed much to Ann’s mistrust of marriage – legacy of seventeenth-century radicalism which saw marital union as another form of slavery. For Ann it was a protest vindicated by a terrible sequence: the death of her four children in infancy. And as with Mary Ann, these losses became the catalyst for her own rebirth.

      After the painful and dangerous forceps delivery of her youngest daughter, Ann lay for hours in a kind of coma, as if by giving life her own had been suspended. When she recovered, her fear of her husband’s concupiscence СКАЧАТЬ