‘Frantique Handmaids’

Joining a society of Baptists was an independent choice made by many women, often, as we have seen, without the permission of their fathers, husbands, or brothers. Sectarian worship, rejecting the rituals and traditions of the established church, was a sign of disagreement and of rebellion because the Anglican Church was controlled by the state. A woman choosing to worship in this way, separating herself from both the state-controlled church and potentially her family, was then doubly rebellious, leading sensational pamphleteers to focus on sectarian women’s exploits as symptomatic of the breakdown of established religion and authority. This was a period of revolution and change in the nature and breadth of ecclesiastical control: the Civil Wars of the 1640s, the move towards Restoration and subsequent persecution of 1658–62, and after Charles II’s second Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. It is no coincidence that at this time, sensational pamphlets focusing on the rebelliousness of the sects proliferated. Such pamphlets played on contemporary anxieties: the villainous ‘Anabaptists’, as they were called, were supposedly behind insurrections and murders, and could use their devilish charm to seduce young women to their cause, baptising them naked in freezing rivers during the night. Women who easily submitted to such seductions were labelled ignorant or ‘silly’, lascivious, and disorderly, and their heretical behaviour was thought to provoke harsh judgement from God who punished them with hardships including death, illness, and madness. Many Baptist women, therefore, experienced the judgement of their friends and neighbours. Tobie Allein recorded in 1657 that he was ‘perplext to hear daily the Scoffs and Taunts wherewith some of our brethren have every where at their doors; and shops, and tables vilified’ his wife Mary, who had become a separatist and then repented, which damaged their cloth business. ¹ An anonymous female convert of another gathered church also addressed her Anglican relatives from her deathbed, urging them to leave off their ‘wild discourses’, where they called her conversion ‘Phrenzy’ (or mental derangement), her holy conversation ‘Phanat[ic]ism, or (which is worse) Sedition and Rebellion; and the words wherein it is held out, Canting’. ² The texts from which these accusations are taken were intended as vindications from the aspersions of the writers’ geographical and familial communities, and so this chapter will not only explore popular beliefs about the disorderly behaviour of female Baptists, but it will also show how the women themselves responded to these ideas in their writings.