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

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СКАЧАТЬ It was a mirror of St Paul’s mission, and in order to fulfil her duty, she must leave her home and family ‘and go forth into the streets, declaring the message; and … all who believed must be prepared to do the same’.

      The cumulative weight of these supernatural events proved too much for a woman’s body already weakened by miscarriage. For six weeks Mary Ann was stricken by a paralysis which twisted her mouth, as if in punishment for her ill-tempered tongue, a God-sent witch’s scold. This physical ultimatum, in her own account, also caused blindness in one eye and seized her body – perhaps the result of a minor stroke. She was faced with a choice: she could either disregard the visions and remain in this helpless state, or obey her holy orders. And so she told the Lord that He must do with her as He would. As a result of this epiphany – in its original meaning, the manifestation of a god – she immediately recovered. But later, Mary Ann would claim that the last of her visions left her with a yet more extraordinary legacy. At Christmas 1864 she received the sign for which Julian had prayed. The stigmata appeared on her hands, feet and side, erupting in imitation of Christ’s crucified body. Like some sacred statue brought to life, Mary Ann’s flesh itself bore testament to her Saviour’s sufferings. It was as if these wounds were symptoms of her death, as though she had died and been reborn without sin.

      

      Was she a sinful woman, this sometime purveyor of illicit liquor, as yet unmarried in the eyes of the Church, now an evangelist? Records do not tell us, although the guilt Mary Ann may have felt for her children – born dead and out of wedlock – may indicate something for which she needed to atone: a recovered memory, perhaps of abuse within the crowded childhood home. Nor was she beautiful; her face was no lure to lust, and what was interbred emerged in sharp features set awry by harsh experience. Yet she was tall and imposing, with a magnetic stare; as if, in compensation for her lack of beauty, she relied on other means to command attention. There was a sensuality in the way her hair curled in dark locks over her shoulders, although her physical stance spoke against desire and her wide, thin lips bore the memory of paralysis. Her gaunt frame rejected consumption and sexuality in favour of asceticism and spirituality; a visionary aspiration in retreat from the world and its demands. In retrospect, it seems Mary Ann may have suffered some kind of dietary disorder; certainly her body was unnaturally slender. ‘The only emaciated being we saw was the prophetess herself’, one witness would note, ‘and her desperate enthusiasm would burn the flesh from any flame.’

      Perhaps her passion fed on her body, exchanging the one for the other. In the process, her resolve was stiffened, as if that heaven-sent rictus were a physical reaction to or a prevention of sin, tensing her body against evil. And if she had been a sinful woman, then her sins were forgiven. Her manner, once inflexible and intolerant, was now gentle and generous. Seeing this, her newly married husband gave up his initial opposition – an acquiescence he would maintain throughout all that was to come. Mary Ann explained that having experienced the ‘perfect presence of Jesus’, it was impossible to remain with him, ‘for her spirit being once set free to enter the paradisiacal state, it was not lawful to enter the state of matrimony again’. Instead she became a bride of Christ, and returned to her chapel – only to find that the congregation refused to listen.

      It is easy to imagine their reaction, faced with this woman whose duty lay at home with her children, yet who chose to lecture them on their sins. Mary Ann burned to communicate the wonder of what she had seen, and rejection merely made the fire glow brighter. Shortly after, she saw a crowd listening to a male preacher on a street corner. Someone asked her to speak, and soon, like Wesley, she had her own audience in the open air. But for Mary Ann there was something more to her commission than human history, and she was reminded of it every day by her hidden, holy scars, as if God’s words were written on her skin.

      

      We all reinvent ourselves. We conflate memory and fact, and reinterpret the pleasure and pain of the past to suit the present and form our future. Mary Ann too was convinced of her story, and felt the need to share it – a desire only heightened by the obstacles placed in its way, not least that of her sex. Yet being born a woman was not necessarily a bar to her calling: not only were there precedents for female preachers among the Methodists and the Quakers, but her experience – the loss of her children, her lowly origins – made her message more immediate. It was said that her ‘thrilling, and often overpowering speeches had a vivid effect on sympathetic lady hearers, for she observed proprieties of behaviour, and there was nothing coarse or vulgar about her’. And like other female mystics, from Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, to Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila and Joan of Arc, she cited higher authority; like the Maid of Orleans’ armour, her visions were a defence against male prejudice. Who could doubt the Word of God, even if it came from a farm labourer’s daughter?

      The world had always been reluctant to give women a voice; yet more so when their prophecies crossed the barrier between Christian and pagan, between witch and saint. In Yorkshire, Mother Shipton had seen the future from her Knaresborough cave and its dripping well, where I was taken as a boy to see strange objects dangling from a rock ledge, the pale brown mineral-rich water turning soft toys into modern fossils. Around the same time as Shipton made her predictions of telegrams and aeroplanes, the Holy Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Burton, was hanged for prophesying Henry VIII’s death. In Mary Ann’s native East Anglia, the power of magic lingered long after it had faded elsewhere. The eastern counties became home to the Family of Love, a heretical cult imported across the sea from the mirror-lowlands of Holland, which preached that heaven and hell were to be found on earth and that it was possible to recreate Eden through communal living; Ely was declared an ‘island of errors and sectaries’, and parts of this countryside were said to be heathen until the draining of the fens in the 1630s – as if the act of reclamation deprived the land of its ancient aquatic spirits.

      Perhaps devils took hold instead. In 1645, Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, instituted his campaign in Suffolk, when neighbour denounced neighbour and women were walked to keep them awake until their demonic familiars came to betray them. Those who miscarried or whose children were stillborn were accused of sacrificing their offspring. At Aldeburgh, seven women were hanged as witches, and the Borough paid Hopkins £2 for his work. Had she been born two centuries earlier, Mary Ann too might have been stripped and searched for the devil’s marks – although her searchers would have found Christ’s.

      

      Two hundred years after Matthew Hopkins’ reign of terror, Mary Ann left Ipswich to travel the villages around Woodbridge and Saxmundham, the land she knew so well from her childhood and where she thought her words would be heard. As she preached in the open air at Little Glemham, it must have been odd for her young children to witness the change in their mother, leaving the family home for the fields of rural Suffolk. Mary Jane, then in her teens, would assist at the services by teaching and playing the piano, although she was soon to marry; William, however, just six years old when Mary Ann’s mission began, would find himself caught up in her cause.

      The Primitive Methodists were well represented in these places, and Mary Ann was invited to preach at their chapel at Stratford St Andrew’s. But her unorthodox ideas offended them, and many of those who had listened now refused to hear her increasingly radical ideas. So Mary Ann sermonised in market squares, a soapbox orator in shirtwaist and curls. Unconfined by marriage or maternal duties, she took her message to the disenfranchised and the dispossessed – just as the first British Christians had been lowly peasants who found a new sense of community in their faith, and just as the same common people had been identified as God’s chosen ones during the religious revolutions of the seventeenth century, with its own dreams of ‘utopia and infinite liberty’ and a theocracy led by another East Anglian prophet, Oliver Cromwell. In her version of Christ’s elegantly paradoxical beatitudes, which called for the poor to be rich and the downtrodden СКАЧАТЬ