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

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      Girlingite meetings took a set form. Bible verses were read and debated, followed by prayer. But then came the strange dancing and trance-like speaking in tongues which Eliza Folkard had exhibited, and which were already attracting crowds. These shaking fits earned the sect the nickname Convulsionists, although they preferred to call themselves Children of God, from St John’s gospel, ‘… to all those who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of flesh nor of the will of man, but of God’. Like the Corinthians in the wake of St Paul’s mission, they would ‘jabber and quake’ when in the spirit, led by Mary Ann herself, leaping from foot to foot while waving her arms as if beckoning while she exhorted the Lord’s name. To some these antics resembled the dance of a savage; others watching the ‘springy, elastic movements and considerable waving of her arms … could hardly resist the comic aspect of the scene’.

      Soon enough these rites attracted the attention of the press, and on 20 April 1871 a headline appeared in the Woodbridge Reporter & Aldeburgh Times:

       MOBBING A FEMALE PREACHER.

      The accompanying story may have been the first occasion on which Mary Ann’s name appeared in print; it was certainly not the last.

      Reporting on a case heard at the Framlingham Petty Sessions by F. S. Corrance, the local Member of Parliament, and two clergymen – the Reverends G. F. Pooley and G. H. Porter – the newspaper gave details of five young men, William Goldsmith, James George, Samuel Crane, James Nichols and John Barham, who were charged by a farmer with ‘riotous behaviour in his dwelling, which is registered as a place for religious worship’.

      At first it seemed a matter of mere youthful high spirits. The farmer, forty-eight-year-old Leonard Benham of Stratford St Andrew, worked 138 acres – belonging to the Earl of Guildford – where he employed three men and a boy, as well as two household servants (one of them being twenty-year-old William Folkard, a kinsman of Eliza’s). But Benham was also a member of the Children of God, and had resolved to support Mary Ann ‘at any cost’. He would pledge his entire family – his wife Martha, forty; his daughters Ellen, twenty, Emma, thirteen, and Mary Ann, then four years old; together with his sons Arthur, then aged sixteen, William, fifteen, and George, just five – to the cause.

      That Sunday afternoon, a meeting had been held in Benham’s house which was attended by the five defendants – not by invitation. As the Girlingites prayed, one of the young men, John Barham, began to talk and laugh. When asked to be quiet, he replied by singing and hallooing, with his friends joining in.

      ‘I went to the door and stood near them,’ Leonard Benham told the court. ‘They said, “Take your sins off your own back, we won’t believe you, you’re a liar.” I told them mine was a registered house. They told me not to daubt them up with untempered mortar’ – an obscure metaphor which would pursue the Girlingites, along with mobs hurling slack, or slaked lime.

      The hooligans then began pulling off his wallpaper, and declared that ‘they would be d—if they wouldn’t kiss Mrs Girling before they left’. Failing in this, they tried to kiss another member of the congregation, Robert Spall. ‘Not being able to do that, they said they would kiss Mrs Spall, but did not attempt to do it.’

      That night the gang came back to finish what they’d started. ‘What a pity it is you young men come here and make a disturbance,’ Benham told them. ‘The law is very stringent about this, and you’ll hear something from me about it.’ But Nichols strode into the room and began shouting and stamping, while Goldsmith mockingly held up a stick to which he’d attached a red handkerchief, saying, ‘This is a flag of distress.’ He then began to declaim a text of his own, and sat down to light his pipe. Crane, also smoking, cried, ‘Pinpatches and sprats at three pence a quarter.’ The scene turned violent as the gang began to break up the furniture, with Barham sitting on the window-sill shouting, ‘My wife has run away with a man that has three children, and when she comes back I’ll be d—if I have her again.’

      The mob had tailored their insults to the Girlingites, and their actions had the air of a concerted assault rather than the casual vandalism of bored young men with nothing better to do on a Sunday night in a small country village. The explanation became clear when Benham told the court that such meetings were held every three weeks at his house.

      ‘We have two or three places where we worship under the head of Mrs Girling. Singing hymns is part of the services, which were usually well attended. I have never seen anyone on the floor fainting. Mrs Girling has a husband and two children at Ipswich. The rooms will hold one hundred people.’

      Mr Jewesson, acting for the defence, asked, ‘You’re one of the disciples, ain’t you?’, his biblical overtones somewhat undermined by his grammar.

      ‘Yes, and thank God for it,’ replied Benham, who proceeded to give intriguing details of the sect and the power of their leader. ‘There is silence generally when Mrs Girling reads the word of God … It is customary for any person to pray who likes. I never saw two or three praying at once – one stopped till another had finished. Mrs Girling was the only one that read and expounded.’ He admitted, modestly, ‘I am not sufficiently high to read and expound the Word of God; I wish I was.’

      It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to his stature or his spiritual status. Mary Ann had first come to his house eighteen months ago – ‘Eliza Folkard sometimes expounded, but not publicly’ – and although he had never seen anyone faint at any of these services, ‘I have seen them fall under the power of God.’ As an elder of the Children of God, Benham sought to counter some of the more extraordinary rumours already gathering around them. He told the court that their services differed little from those of other dissenting chapels:

      ‘It is just the same with the exception that other people give out a text while Mrs Girling only expounds the word of God.’

      Yet there was the sense of something other at work, not least in the shape of Mary Ann herself and the transcendence to which she aspired.

      ‘By our people I mean the people who follow Mrs Girling. We subscribe money amongst ourselves. We only provide Mrs Girling with clothes and boots. We pay nothing for the rooms; I give mine gratis.’

      ‘You speak of falling down,’ remarked Mr Corrance, ‘when does that occur?’

      ‘Very often, sir,’ replied Benham. ‘We see people fall down by the power of God.’

      ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Corrance.

      ‘They go into a trance, sir, and can see all things that are going on around them. We allow them to remain till they come to themselves.’ Benham insisted that they never disturbed anyone: ‘We have never recognised these roughs as part of our congregation … They are the Devil’s congregation, and ours are the children of God.’

      This testimony was supported by key figures in the movement: Alfred Folkard, Eliza’s father; Cornelius Chase, a twenty-seven-year-old coachmaker, and Isaac Batho, postmaster and shoemaker, both of Benhall; and Sally Spall, wife of Robert, a machinist from Hascheston, with whom Mary Ann had been staying during her missionary work. Sally Spall bore witness to the ‘kiss of charity’ which had prompted the gang’s sarcastic amorousness.