ABSTRACT
In December 1636, the aristocratic prophetess Lady Eleanor Davies vandalised the altar hangings at Lichfield Cathedral (newly installed by the Laudian bishop), before sitting on the episcopal throne and declaring herself ‘Primate and Metropolitan’.1 In October 1656, the Yorkshire Quaker James Nayler rode on a horse through the suburbs of Bristol attended by women singing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, in an apparent parody of Christ’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem.2 On a market day in Dover during the apocalyptic year 1666, Katherine Hearne ‘went naked for a sign’ in public, covering herself only in sackcloth and ashes, and going through the streets calling the people to ‘Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’.3 The farm labourer John Taylor went about Guildford in 1675, preaching that Christ was a ‘Whoremaster’ and a ‘Bastard’, that ‘Religion is a cheat’, and that he himself was an ‘Angell of God’.4 The radical prophets of the seventeenth century, in which category I include members of the bewildering number of spiritual sects and movements which proliferated after the English Revolution and the collapse of ecclesial discipline and censorship (among them Ranters, Quakers, Seekers, Fifth Monarchists, Baptists, Independents, and so forth), are best known for their eccentric gestures and extravagant claims, which helpfully make for attention-grabbing anecdotes during a dreary lecture or class. There is much that we find ridiculous about these episodes: their grandiosity, and its juxtaposition to local, human and often vulgar detail, such as the utterance of obscenities in Guildford, or a triumphal entry into Bristol, or vandalism in Lichfield. It is difficult to regard such apparent absurdity as in any sense ‘mystical’ behaviour. We prefer our mysticism in modest, literary, even genteel forms which transcend or withdraw from the historical and the particular. However, what makes these figures so important for historians and theologians alike is not their strangeness or frivolity, but precisely their seriousness and centrality to the story of revolution and dissent in seventeenth-century Britain. This was a prophetic, intensely creative moment which swept up the revolutionary forces of a Republican army in its spirit.
