ABSTRACT
It was during her marriage to William Leade that Jane met John Pordage, who was to be one of the most influential figures in her life and who evidently encouraged her to write. She wrote that 'my first Acquaintance with him was in the Year 1663'.' In her autobiography, she described Pordage as an enlightened man 'who understood the deepest of God's secrets'.2 Pordage had formerly been the minister of Bradfield, Berkshire. There he had been at the centre of a religious community of 'spiritual thinkers' . Richard Baxter noted that 'Dr Pordage amid his Family .. Jive together in Community, and pretend to hold visible and sensible Communion with Angels, whom they sometime see, and sometime smell'. 3 Whilst at Bradfield, Pordage had been charged with heresies which included 'denying the Scriptures to be the Word of God, denying the divinity of Christ, and communing with the spirits', and he was also charged with 'fathering a bastard child,.4 Pordage was clearly an antinomian like Crisp. Forced out of the ministry altogether when the Act of Uniformity was introduced in 1662, he moved to London and gathered around him his own religious group. He maintained a connection with the Church and recruited those of any religious persuasion to join him.
