Enlightening enthusiasm: Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England 9781784997250

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Enlightening enthusiasm

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Enlightening enthusiasm Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

Lionel Laborie

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Lionel Laborie 2015 The right of Lionel Laborie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 8988 6  hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of illustrations List of tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Note on style and dates Introduction

page vi vii viii x xii 1

1 The origins of the French Prophets

16

2 From the Désert to the New Jerusalem

43

3 The final reformation

78

4 Going public

121

5 Enthusiasm, blasphemy and toleration

166

6 Medicalising enthusiasm

204

Conclusion

243

Appendix: Chronological profile of the French Prophets 250 Bibliography 285 Index 345

Illustrations

1 Casper Luyken, Le Theatre de la guerre dans les Sevennes (Rotterdam, 1703), © Amsterdam Museum page 19 2 The English and French Prophets Mad or Bewitcht (London, 1707), © Houghton Library, Harvard University 96 3 Letter from Marie Huber to Nicolas Fatio (3 February 1719), © Bibliothèque de Genève 103 4 S. Conneand, New Prophets: Their Historical and True Picture (London, 1708), © Houghton Library, Harvard University 125 5 Charles Corbett, Enthusiasm Display’d; or, The Moor-Fields Congregation (1739), © Wellcome Trust Library 151 6 Pillory Disapointed; or, The False Prophets Advancement (London, 1707), © Bodleian Library, Oxford 181

Tables

1 Occupations of male believers 2 Known occupations of male believers by denomination (per cent) 3 Sentences at common law for offences in relation to religious opinion

page 50 55 182

Acknowledgements

This book developed from my PhD thesis and took several more years to complete. I first came across the French Prophets about ten years ago during a research visit to the British Library and I  immediately decided this would be the subject of my PhD Ten years later, I am still amazed to find new traces of them in remote European archives. I have had the opportunity to meet many people since I began this adventure, some of whom have become friends over time, and all have contributed to this book in one form or another. First of all I  would like to acknowledge the assistance of a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council that enabled me to do this PhD and carry out the necessary fieldwork for it. I am equally grateful to the Société Genévoise pour l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français for its generous support upon completing my doctorate. My greatest debt goes to Hillel Schwartz: for his encouragement and hospitality, for giving me full access to his personal archives, and for reading earlier drafts of this book. I am also greatly indebted to Mrs Shirley Stack, who welcomed me into her beautiful house and allowed me to consult her family archives. In addition, I wish to express my gratitude to the staff of the Bibliothèque de Genève, the Bibliothèque de la Société du Protestantisme Français, Chetham’s Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Dr Williams’s Library, Lambeth Palace Library, the Wellcome Library, Cambridge University Library, the Historical Library of the Francke Foundation, the Cheshire and Hertfordshire Archives, the House of Lords Records Office, the Friends House Library, the London Metropolitan Archives, Bethlem Royal Hospital, and The National Archives. I have also greatly benefited from the kindness, support, advice and expertise of many friends and colleagues on numerous occasions, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank (in alphabetical order) Rebekah Ahrendt, Irena Backus, Philip Benedict, Christopher Bonfield,

Acknowledgements

ix

Martha Campbell, Jean-Paul Chabrol, Emmanuelle Chaze, Beverly Collins, Jean-Noël Commères, Birgit Emich, Olivier Fatio, Abe Garfield, Malcolm Gaskill, William Gibson, Crawford Gribben, Jürgen Gröschl, Petra Hahm, Ariel Hessayon, Michael Lackner, Véronique Lacoste, Charles-Edouard Levillain, Amy Levinson Sosnick, Carolyn Lougee Chappell, Matthew Mesley, Martin Mulsow, Andreas Pecˇar, Cristina Pitassi, Evelyn Rymus, Nat Schmelzer, Christopher Slattery, Blodwen Tarter, Jean-Paul and Sara Trelaun, David van der Linden, and Ruben Verwaal. My final thanks go to my family: my parents Guy and Véronique; my siblings Aurore, Clément and Joël; and of course my long-time partner Daniel.

Abbreviations

Add. Ch. Add. MS AFSt BGE BL Bodl. BPF

Additional Charters Additional Manuscript Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Halle Bibliothèque de Genève, Geneva British Library, London Bodleian Library, Oxford Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, Paris Brand Samuel Keimer, A Brand Pluck’d from the Burning (London, 1718) BRHA Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives, London CALS Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester Chetham’s Chetham’s Library, Manchester CUL Cambridge University Library DWL Dr Williams’s Library, London FHL Friends’ House Library, London HALS Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertford HLRO House of Lords Record Office, London KB King’s Bench Kingston I Richard Kingston, Enthusiastick Impostors No Divinely Inspir’d Prophets, Vol. I (London, 1707) Kingston II Richard Kingston, Enthusiastick Impostors No Divinely Inspir’d Prophets, Vol. II (London, 1709) LMA London Metropolitan Archives LPL Lambeth Palace Library, London MMM Abraham Mazel and Elie Marion, Mémoires inédits d’Abraham Mazel et Elie Marion sur la guerre des Cévennes, ed. Charles Bost (Paris:  Librairie Fischbacher, 1931) Ms. fr. Manuscrits français

List of abbreviations

NRL ODNB PROB SP SPCK SPG StAB Stack TNA TSC

Warnings I Warnings II Warnings III WL

xi

Nouvelles de la république des lettres, 2nd edn (Amsterdam, 1720) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, www.oxforddnb.com Prerogative Court of Canterbury and related Probate Jurisdictions:  Will Registers, The National Archives, Kew State Papers, The National Archives, Kew Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Staatsarchiv des Kantons Bern Private collection of manuscripts of Mrs Shirley Stack, Taunton The National Archives, Kew François-Maximilien Misson, Le Théâtre sacré des Cévennes; ou, récit de diverses merveilles nouvellement opérées dans cette partie de la province de Languedoc (London, 1707) John Lacy, The Prophetical Warnings of John Lacy, Esq. (London, 1707) John Lacy, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit … The ­Second Part (London, 1707) John Lacy, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit … The Third and Last Part (London, 1707) Wellcome Library, London

newgenprepdf

Note on style and dates

All quotations from manuscripts and printed primary sources are rendered in their original spelling. The Le Sage papers in Geneva consist essentially of notes written on the backs of playing cards and are therefore referred to by the figure and suit they correspond to. All dates follow the ‘old style’ calendar as found in the original British sources, except for Continental sources, which should be understood as ‘new style’. In either case, 1 January is taken to mark the beginning of the year, according to the modern practice.

Introduction

The Enlightenments The long eighteenth century is generally associated with the Enlightenment, an intellectual golden age that established rationalism as the basis of modern thinking. Proponents of this philosophical revolution engaged in the development of sciences and attempted to rationalise faith, tradition and superstitions.1 For Louis Dupré, ‘thinking became simpler, more rational, and more methodic. Religion and morality continued to be primary concerns, but they became subjected to a critical examination.’2 Europe saw at last the light of Reason and reached its intellectual maturity after centuries of religious obscurantism, ignorance and tyranny. Resolutely optimistic and humanistic, the European Enlightenment was thus driven by ideals of individual freedom, and scientific and social progress. In its emancipation from religion lies what we define as the origins of modernity. The story of the Age of Reason has long lived. It should not come as a surprise if it was first sketched out by none other than the philosophers of the long eighteenth century themselves. Dan Edelstein even traces its origins to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in late seventeenth-century France.3 Endlessly repeated, the Enlightenment narrative has been revised and nuanced in recent decades. Strong national variations are now recognised within this European movement to begin with. Much focus has been placed on les Lumières because of their distinctive anticlericalism, on L’Encyclopédie and the climax of the French Revolution; or on die Aufklärung for its classical aestheticism, its nationalistic inclinations and its self-awareness as a philosophical movement.4 There was also a Dutch Enlightenment, rooted in science, free press and the emergence of a public sphere;5 a Scottish Enlightenment, liberal and particularly concerned with the

2

Enlightening Enthusiasm

common good; and, of course, an English one. The latter, generally believed to begin around the Glorious Revolution, emphasised natural rights and Government reforms. Once European, several historians have reclaimed the Enlightenment as originally English, even though its distinctiveness from the British Enlightenment has long remained an enigma.6 Beyond the sterility of such questions, a consensus has emerged over the multifaceted nature of this intellectual golden age, whose delineated national boundaries have opened the door for further revisions. More importantly for our purposes, the European E ­ nlightenment has been deconstructed in recent years into countless variants both within and across these national boundaries: it may henceforth be described as radical, pragmatic, urban, democratic or popular, but also racist, postcolonial, industrial, medical, religious, ­theological, Catholic, Jewish, Rosicrucian, feministic or libertine, among other things.7 Although contested, interrupted and with numerous ­enemies, it now has its own genealogy and lately became rural and even edible.8 The eighteenth century undoubtedly marked a period of great changes and transformations, for better or worse. Yet in light of such recent foci, the Enlightenment no longer appears as a linear, coherent transnational intellectual movement, some even denying its existence altogether. No matter which Enlightenment we choose to look at, r­eligion remained central to eighteenth-century life and its intellectual ­developments. As Justin Champion pointed out, the very fact that ­antireligious opinions were increasingly expressed in public implies the persisting centrality of the Church. The political, cultural and ­intellectual transformations of this period ought as a result to be placed back into their immediate religious context.9 This was true of the English Enlightenment, but also of its Continental counterparts. Yet the former, perhaps more so than any of the latter, was not driven by anticlerical ideals. On the contrary, it arose within a ­heterogeneous religious matrix delineated by the Toleration Act of 1689. Free from the threat of persecution, nonconformists, deists and freethinkers not only challenged the grounds of the Established Church, and consequently political rule, but also played a significant role in the development of the sciences and rationalism.10 It may be argued for this reason that religion influenced early ­Enlightenment science to a greater extent than the other way around. Both should in fact be regarded as complementary rather than opposites. The English Enlightenment remained, in other words, intrinsically ­religious.11

Introduction

3

Enthusiasm This book does not intend to add yet another variant to the growing plethora of Enlightenments mentioned above. Nor does it deny their existence. Instead, it concentrates on what is generally regarded as the shadow of the ‘Age of Reason’, its negative mirror or its ‘Antiself’, namely enthusiasm.12 Enthusiasm, as we understand it here, was a far cry from its modern meaning. From the Greek entheos meaning ‘inhabited by God’s Spirit’, the term ‘enthusiasm’ appeared in the English language in the late sixteenth century to denigrate the spawn of the Reformation. The translation of the Bible into the vernacular helped to disseminate the Scriptures to a wider audience and gave more visibility to more obscure parts, such as the books of Daniel and Revelation. Luther’s defence of an individual interpretation of the Scriptures had indirectly produced an effervescence of radical sects such as the Anabaptists and the Familists, who developed new doctrines based on divine revelation.13 These enthusiasts – Schwärmer in German  – claimed to be possessed by the Holy Spirit and defended an exclusive relationship with God. The Spirit allegedly infused them with the power to foretell the future (prophecy), perform miraculous cures (thaumaturgy) and speak in tongues (glossolalia), and often led them to challenge any form of authority.14 Enthusiasm was thus fundamentally transgressive. In short, it epitomised the Reformation gone out of (ecclesiastical) control. Its true essence, however, did not only reside in the conviction of infallible divine inspirations, but also and perhaps mainly in the visible presence of the Holy Spirit in their bodies. For these moments of inspiration were typically accompanied by convulsions and a large range of physical manifestations, which Ronald Knox referred to in terms of ‘ultrasupernaturalism’. Enthusiasts presented themselves as ‘Instruments’ of the Spirit; their bodies served, in their view, as empty vessels channelling the divine  – an ataxic religious experience that made enthusiasm both natural and supernatural, corporeal and ethereal, material and spiritual.15 Enthusiasm often emerged in turbulent political and religious times. Having unmasked the Pope as the Antichrist, many Protestants henceforth believed that the world was in its latter days. The wars of ­religion seemed to corroborate this view and confirmed enthusiasts in their millenarianism  – that is the belief in Christ’s imminent Second ­Coming ahead of his thousand-year reign, the Millennium.16 Similarly, the Civil Wars and Interregnum in the mid-seventeenth century offered fertile ground for enthusiasm in England. Numerous self-proclaimed

4

Enlightening Enthusiasm

visionaries and pseudo-messiahs announcing the end of the world emerged during this traumatic interval, often within larger movements like the Quakers, the Ranters, the Diggers, the Fifth Monarchists and the Muggletonians.17 These enthusiasts typically counterposed their indefectible faith to human reason and challenged both secular and clerical authority. Conversely, Anglican ministers embraced rational theology as a weapon against enthusiasm from the mid-seventeenth century, in response to what they perceived as a threat to political and religious stability and social peace.18 Although a common deroga­tory synonym for religious fanaticism in the mouth of most ­Anglicans, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was also employed more broadly against ­Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers, or anyone claiming superior knowledge.19 If  the term  itself dates back to the early Reformation, enthusiasm did not become a major concern of public debate until the English Revolution, and ­ ­ ultimately became the eighteenth-century smear word par excellence.20 Historians have argued that the English Enlightenment emerged in response to the proliferation of enthusiasm in the mid-seventeenth century.21 Yet the historiographical emphasis on the advent of rationalism eclipsed for too long the religious reality and developments that ensued from this pivotal period. Even such a classic as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic only dedicated a few pages to the question of enthusiasm, suggesting instead that supernatural beliefs and practices dwindled by 1700.22 More recent studies have substantially revised this view to reveal a much more complex relationship between faith and reason in the long eighteenth century. Clarke Garrett broke a ­historiographical taboo by rehabilitating millenarian beliefs in ­prophecy and miracles as part of a ‘mystical E ­ nlightenment’.23 More recently, Jane Shaw, Susan Juster and Paul Kléber Monod, among others, have demonstrated the persistence of miraculous, prophetic and occult literature throughout the eighteenth century and even argued for a revived interest in the supernatural around the revolutionary period.24 For all their individual merits these studies only address the question of enthusiasm in passing. Few scholars have given it proper consideration since Ronald Knox. His Enthusiasm remains a worthy read despite the author’s Catholic bias and misleading attempt to capture medieval heresies and radical Protestant movements into a single ­Christian narrative. More focused studies have followed since then. David Lovejoy looked at the transatlantic implantation of enthusiasm and the evangelical revival in mid-eighteenth-century America. Michael

Introduction

5

Heyd has provided us with an important analysis of the opposition to religious enthusiasm in the dawn of the Enlightenment. Klein and La Vopa took a wider perspective on the subject to illustrate the semantic variations attached to the notion of enthusiasm across Europe, while Jordana Rosenberg recently traced the English narrative of secularisation and modernity in eighteenth-century anti-enthusiastic discourse. Drawing from several disciplines, Ann Taves made the most significant contribution to our understanding of enthusiasm by breaking for the first time its conventional polarisation between plebeian experiences of religion and patrician critique. The reality and dynamics of enthusiasm were indeed far more complex than has long been assumed, as the following case aims to show.25

The French Prophets In the summer of 1706, three prophets arrived in London from the southern French province of Languedoc and were to give birth to one of the most controversial cases of enthusiasm in eighteenth-century ­England. Durand Fage (1681–c. 1750), Jean Cavalier (1686–c. 1740) and the charismatic Elie Marion (1678–1713) were Camisards, Calvinist rebels from the last French war of religion (1702–10) who had fought against Louis XIV’s persecution of his Protestant subjects. These three men immediately delivered apocalyptic predictions in ecstatic trances to the local Huguenot community, but rapidly saw an influx of English followers, chief among whom were John Lacy (1664–1730), a well-todo Justice of the Peace; and the Irish baronet and Fellow of the Royal Society Sir Richard Bulkeley (1660–1710); as well as Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664–1753), a Swiss mathematician of international fame, also a Fellow of the Royal Society and a close friend of Isaac Newton. With almost 500 followers in two years, their movement quickly became known as the ‘French Prophets’ in reference to its founders rather than its actual composition. The support they received from their wealthy disciples enabled the Prophets to broadcast their message to Londoners more easily and thus contributed to the group’s expansion. If England was no stranger to millenarian predictions from both Anglicans and dissenters alike, as Warren Johnston’s brilliant study recently demonstrated, the French Prophets sparked a new, heated debate on the nature of enthusiasm and the limits of toleration.26 Their international and socially transgressive identity, combined with a physical approach to religion that ranged from visions, convulsions, foaming at the mouth and swelling bellies to howling and grunting, left nobody indifferent. Like their

6

Enlightening Enthusiasm

millenarian predecessors of the Civil War period, the Prophets sought to revive the communal spirit of primitive Christianity and to reconcile Protestant denominations by emphasising religious experience over theological boundaries. In short, their enthusiasm was not the expression of, but the remedy to, sectarianism. Yet their physical extravagance caused much turmoil in London, which resulted in Marion’s condemnation to the scaffold for blasphemy with two of his scribes in November 1707. Still, the group’s defiance showed no limits; Lacy was subsequently predicted to raise his coreligionist Dr Thomas Emes from the dead on 25 May 1708, but the miracle failed to occur. The group then proceeded to expel impostors from its ranks and divided into twelve missionary tribes according to the twelve tribes of Israel. Prophetic expeditions followed across the British Isles, on the ­Continent and even to colonial America over the following years, with the most successful missions in Quietist Scotland and Pietist Germany. Although dispersed and largely discredited, the French Prophets maintained some activity in England until the 1740s, but their numbers had already decreased sharply. Their movement was eventually absorbed under Quaker and Methodist influences into the foundation of Shakerism by James and Jane Wardley around Manchester in 1747. One of their disciples, Ann Lee, emigrated to America with her followers in 1774 and founded the first Shaker colony in upstate New  York. Only a handful of Shakers remain today, at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.27 The French Prophets deserve our attention in many ways as the epitome of eighteenth-century enthusiasm. One may be tempted to view them on a radical spectrum, filling a chronological gap between Civil War and Restoration dissenters on the one hand, and mid-eighteenth-century revivalists on the other. If, as Monod argued, western esotericists  – broadly defined as astrologers, ­alchemists and magicians – freely drew from one another, the prospect of a ­traceable English radical tradition spanning across the early modern period seems absurd. It would only perpetuate the polemic c­onstructions found in famous heresiographies like Thomas Edwards’s G ­ angræna (London, 1646)  and anti-enthusiastic Augustan narratives. As ­ ­Hessayon and Finnegan remind us, radicalism is a modern concept applied ­retrospectively and often teleogically to early modern events. In this context, enthusiasts were radical in the etymological sense of the term; they bypassed and dismissed their contemporaries or ­predecessors to return directly to the roots of Christianity.28 As such, enthusiasm may be considered as a sporadic pattern stemming from the Radical Reformation, rather than underlaying schismatic tradition.

Introduction

7

Often cited – not without some condescension – as an entertaining anecdote in late Stuart and early Hanoverian history, the French Prophets had in reality a substantial impact on the society of their time. They explicitly denounced the supremacy of rationalism in what is regarded as the early English Enlightenment, a particularly rich and dynamic period supported by a free press and fast-growing public sphere. Little wonder that, as we shall see, they attracted the attention of the most eminent minds of their time, including ­Daniel Defoe; Jonathan Swift; Joseph Addison; Richard Steele; Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury; or even Isaac Newton. More importantly, the fact that the Prophets caused riots, a prodigious battle of pamphlets, that they challenged the limits of ­religious tolerance and fed into a medical debate on madness, suggests that this new episode of enthusiasm touched upon some of the most sensitive questions that animated and divided eighteenth-century English society.

Approach For all the ink spilled over their enthusiasm at the time, the French Prophets received little historiographical attention thereafter. ­Ironically, the first accounts came from France around the turn of the twentieth century as a sequel to the better known Camisard rebellion in the Cévennes.29 Although Knox dedicated a chapter to the Prophets in his survey of enthusiasm, it was not until the 1970s that the first dedicated studies of their movement appeared in English.30 Similar case studies on the English Revolution and Restoration sects appeared in the same period, many of which have since become classics in their field. It was Hillel Schwartz who in 1980 offered the best and most in-depth account of the French Prophets, based on an unprecedented range of archival research.31 Clarke Garrett subsequently traced their enthusiasm across the Atlantic through the Shakers in North America.32 After another period of silence, the Camisard Prophets inspired a third generation of scholars and even saw some of their original works reprinted in the past twenty years.33 Despite this renewed interest, Schwartz’s work undoubtedly remains the best researched and most authoritative scholarship on the French Prophets to date. This book does not intend to rewrite Schwartz’s sociocultural hist­ ory of the French Prophets, but rather to offer a new perspective on their controversy by focusing on enthusiasm and subsidiary issues at stake. It proposes therefore to leave aside the Prophets’ millenarian

8

Enlightening Enthusiasm

missions across the British Isles and on the Continent for a ­separate study, and to concentrate instead on eighteenth-century English ­society. More ­precisely, its chronological framework spans from the ­Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the reign of James II in 1685 to the French Prophets’ extinction by the mid-eighteenth c­entury. Although the Prophets will remain the focus of our study, this wider chronological scope will enable us to consider other prominent enthusiasts of the period such as John Taylor, John Mason, Thomas ­Beverley, Thomas Moor(e) or William Freke, as well as larger movements like the ­ Quakers, the Philadelphian Society and the early ­ Methodists. Together these enthusiasts will provide a powerful insight into the ­religious landscape of eighteenth-century England. Surveying such a range of enthusiastic cases requires some terminological clarification in order to distinguish among sub-currents both within and outside the French Prophets’ movement. By ­‘Camisards’ is understood here those prophets who took part in the rebellion in the Cévennes mountains, while ‘French Prophets’ denotes more broadly the followers of their movement in England, regardless of their actual nationality. Since most of them were in fact English, they will be referred to as ‘English Prophets’ whenever national differences are discussed within their community. Similarly, the term ‘Instrument’ will be used to designate those charismatic members who claimed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and to possess the gifts of prophecy, tongues or miracles among the group. Lastly, it is important to bear in mind that the French Prophets remained at first non-sectarians and that enthusiasm as a religious experience could be found both within and outside the Church of England. Enthusiasm cannot therefore be automatically equated with radical dissent, hence its complex and controversial nature. The sheer number of millenarian works published in that period suggests an unshaken fascination for, if not an obsession with, enthusiasm throughout the eighteenth century. This book therefore aims to explore the nature and significance of enthusiasm through related issues at stake such as social norms, millenarianism, ecumenism, ­freedom and censorship, toleration and madness. It argues that the English understanding of enthusiasm shifted from a wholly religious issue to an epistemological one around 1700, with the recognition of nonconformity, the expansion of a public sphere and the emergence of a medical market.34 It contends on that basis that this debate was in fact largely driven by the fear of a social epidemic and even that of a contagious physical disease ravaging early eighteenth-century ­England. In light of these considerations, this book calls as a result

Introduction

9

for a more comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, which its thematic structure seeks to reflect in six chapters. Chapter  1 traces the footsteps of the French Prophets from their origins in the Cévennes mountains to their arrival in London. It identifies the Camisards as a poorer Huguenot subculture animated by beliefs in prophecy and martyrdom. An examination of their rebellion and enthusiasm in France will prove essential to understanding the controversy around the French Prophets in England throughout the rest of the book. Drawing from extensive prosopographical research, the second chapter will then explore the formation, composition and organisation of the French Prophets’ movement. It argues on the basis of their great confessional, social and national heterogeneity that they formed a socially transgressive ecumenical society rather than a ­dissenting sect. A  comparison with contemporary communities will suggest more ­generally that enthusiasm ought to be dissociated not only from ­sectarianism and radical dissent, but also from what historians often reduce to ‘popular religion’. Chapter 3 explores the Prophets’ beliefs and practices in an attempt to understand how their enthusiasm fitted into the English religious landscape. By transcending the denominational boundaries of their time, the Prophets sought to revive the communitarian spirit of primitive Christianity ahead of Christ’s Second Coming. Often compared to the early Quakers, they dismissed seventeenth-century enthusiasts and drew instead directly from the Montanist movement in the post-apostolic age. If their ecumenical outreach appealed to both Anglicans and nonconformists alike, this chapter will show that the group remained plagued by diverging millenarian aspirations that eventually precipitated it into disbandment. Having established the presence of pre-existing networks of wealthy supporters and printers among their ranks, Chapter  4 will consider the Prophets’ enthusiastic irruption into the English public sphere that developed from the Toleration Act in 1689 and the lapse of the ­Licensing Act in 1695. This process took place in two forms: orally through the holding of ecumenical millenarian assemblies and in print through the publication of their prophetical warnings. Their acute sense of publicity, the crowds they attracted and the battle of ­pamphlets they inspired reveal a persisting fascination for enthusiasm across all levels of eighteenth-century English society. Chapter 5 draws on these street and print controversies to e­ xamine the political response to enthusiasm in post-Toleration England. It argues that the French Prophets challenged the limits of toleration

10

Enlightening Enthusiasm

with their heterodox practices and that public pressure prompted both religious and secular authorities to rid society of these foreign enthusiasts. Looking at Elie Marion’s trial in light of other criminal cases of the period, this chapter surveys the evolution of the law on blasphemy and seditious libel and studies Government response to enthusiasm. Lastly, the book will consider the scientific debate on the nature and physicality of enthusiasm. Although clerics and natural philosophers increasingly resorted to a medical terminology to explain enthusiasm during the Interregnum and the Restoration, it was not until the early eighteenth century that physicians began to show an interest in its physical symptoms. Chapter 6 will thus consider to what extent this perceived social epidemic might be medicalised into an actual bodily disease. It will be argued that the French Prophets in particular and enthusiasm in general contributed to the emergence of a medicine of the mind in the early Enlightenment. Overall, the book aims to debunk a number of myths on enthusiasm in eighteenth-century England based on new archival research. In addition to key archival records already examined by Schwartz such as the Fatio papers in Geneva or the Stack collection in Somerset, this book also builds largely upon new primary source materials discovered in recent years and even months. These include in particular the original court record of Elie Marion’s trial, six manuscript volumes on the French Prophets’ assemblies, foreign accounts of their activities in England and several pamphlets by or against the Prophets, as well as a previously unknown engraving.35 It also makes use of ­hitherto neglected French Prophets’ works and integrates new biographical and prosopographical data on their movement. These results are ­compiled into a list of followers in the appendix.36 The case of the French Prophets, considered through their ­ecumenical appeal to both Anglicans and nonconformists alike, suggests that England retained a vibrant millenarian culture at all levels of society throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. This unique social and denominational diversity reflects the transgressive nature of enthusiasm. In light of this evidence, this book argues that enthusiasm ought to be dissociated from religious dissent and more generally from ‘superstitious’ or irrational popular religion. Refusing to acknowledge this reality, the Enlightenment understanding of enthusiasm was that of a multifarious concept, halfway between a religious fanaticism, a social plague and a bodily madness. Yet, as we shall see, the former owes in reality much to the latter.

Introduction

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Notes 1 Allen W.  Wood, ‘The Enlightenment’, in Lindsay Jones (ed. in chief), ­Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edn, 14 vols (New York: Macmillan, 2005), Vol. IV, pp. 2795–99. 2 Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of ­Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. xiii. 3 Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment:  A  Genealogy (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 37–43. 4 Dupré, The Enlightenment, pp. 8–9. 5 Titles in notes 5–8 not included in the bibliography are cited for illustrative purposes only and have not been consulted directly. Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijhnhardt (eds), The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 6 Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge and New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2003). Frederick C.  Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason:  The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, in Perez Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics, From Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 91–111 (p. 91). 7 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment:  Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Dennis Carl Rasmussen, The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Richard Squibbs, Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay:  Transatlantic Retrospects (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment:  Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011). David Worrall, Harlequin Empire:  Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular ­ Enlightenment (London and Brookfield, VT:  Pickering and Chatto, 2007). Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA:  Blackwell, 1997). Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (eds), Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Peter M. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment:  Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1820 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2013). Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (eds), The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). David Jan Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2008). Jeffrey Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment:  Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in

12

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Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Ulrich Lehner and Michael O’Neill Printy (eds), A ­Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden and B ­ oston, MA: Brill, 2010). Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment ­(Philadelphia: ­University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Frances Amelia Yates, The ­Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London and New  York:  Routledge, 2002 [1972]). Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution:  Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became ­Modern (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2010). P.  M. Cryle and Lisa ­ O’Connell (eds), Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and Licence in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 8 Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested:  Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford and New York: Oxford ­University Press, 2006). Michael Steinberg, ­ Enlightenment ­Interrupted: The Lost Moment of German Idealism and the R ­ eactionary Present ­(Winchester: Zero Books, 2014). Darrin M. McMahon, E ­ nemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the ­Making of Modernity (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001). ­Edelstein, The ­Enlightenment. John Fea, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early ­ America (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). E.  C. Spary, ­ ­Eating the Enlightenment Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 ­(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 9 J. A.  I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken:  The Church of ­England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 15–16. 10 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment’, in Lawrence E.  Klein and Anthony La Vopa (eds), Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850 (San Marino:  Huntington Library Press, 1998), pp. 7–28 (pp. 26–8). Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 28–9, 33–40, 54. 11 S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of ­Modernity (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2003), p.  122. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, p. 103. Richard Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration:  ­Historical Myth versus Political History’, in Richard Kroll, Richard ­Ashcraft and Perez Zagorin (eds), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in ­England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 151–77 (p. 156). Barry Coward, The Stuart Age:  A  History of E ­ ngland 1603–1714, 2nd edn (London:  Longman, 1994), pp.  458–63. Porter, The ­Enlightenment, p. 35. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England’, p. 105. Barnett, The ­Enlightenment and Religion, p.  122. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p. 24. 12 Pocock, ‘Enthusiasm’.

Introduction

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13 James D.  G. Dunn, ‘Enthusiasm’ (1987), in Jones, Encyclopedia of ­Religion, Vol. IV, pp.  2804–9. Ronald A.  Knox, Enthusiasm:  A  Chapter in the History of Religion (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1995 [1950]), p. 4. Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 11–15. Richard H. Popkin, ‘Predicting, Prophecying, Divining and Foretelling from Nostradamus to Hume’, History of European Ideas, 5:2 (1984), 117–35 (pp. 120–1). Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997 [1971]), p. 141. 14 Anthony La Vopa, ‘The Philosopher and the “Schwärmer”: On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60:1/2 (1997), 85–115. 15 Knox, Enthusiasm, p.  2. Adrian Johns, ‘The Physiology of Reading and the Anatomy of Enthusiasm’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew C ­ unningham (eds), Religio Medici:  Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century ­England (Aldershot:  Scolar Press, 1996), pp.  136–70 (p.  145). Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 132–50. 16 Hillel Schwartz, ‘Millenarianism’, Encyclopedia of Religion, 9, pp. 6028–38. 17 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972). Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 187. David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 101, 104, 114–15. Knox, Enthusiasm, pp. 140–1. 18 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 10. Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, pp. 155–60. 19 Michael Heyd, ‘Medical Discourse in Religious Controversy: The Case of the Critique of “Enthusiasm” on the Eve of the Enlightenment’, Science in Context, 8:1 (Spring 1995), 133–57 (p. 134); and ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, p. 4. Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 187. Coward, Stuart Age, p. 460. Knox, Enthusiasm, pp. 5–6. 20 Knox, Enthusiasm, p.  6. Dunn, ‘Enthusiasm’, pp.  2804–5. Thomas, ­Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 132–50. 21 Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion, p. 48. Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 184. Gerald Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 70. Allison Coudert, ‘Henry More, the Kabbalah, and the Quakers’, in Kroll et al., Philosophy, Science and Religion, pp. 31–67 (p. 47). 22 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 132–50. 23 Clarke Garrett, ‘Swedenborg and the Mystical Enlightenment in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 45:1 (1984), 67–81. 24 Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Susan Juster, Doomsayers:  Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

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2006). Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 25 Knox, Enthusiasm. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World. Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’. Klein and La Vopa, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe. Jordana Rosenberg, Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Ann Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 26 Warren Johnston, Revelation Restored:  The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY:  Boydell Press, 2011). 27 Anon., ‘The Last Seven Shakers in the World’, The Economist (13–19 February 1999), 61. Stacey Chase, ‘The Last Ones Standing’, The Boston Globe (23 July 2006). Jane Harrigan, ‘New Hampshire’s Shaker History:  The Enduring Simplicity of the Shakers’, New Hampshire Magazine (October 2013), www.nhmagazine.com/October-2013/ New-Hampshires-Shaker-History/. 28 Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, pp. 9–13. Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan (eds), Varieties of 17th- and Early 18th-Century English Radicalism (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), especially pp. 1–29. 29 Paul Vesson, ‘Les Prophètes Camisards à Londres’, Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, inscriptions et belles-lettres de Toulouse, 9:5 (1893), 65–94. George Ascoli, ‘L’Affaire des prophètes français à Londres’, Revue du XVIIIe siècle, 1 (1916), 8–28; and 2 (1916), 85–109. Abraham Mazel and Elie Marion, Mémoires inedits d’Abraham Mazel et d’Elie Marion sur la guerre des Cévennes 1701–1708, ed. Charles Bost (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1931). 30 Knox, Enthusiasm, pp.  356–71. Charles Andrew Domson, ‘Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and the Prophets of London: An Essay in the Historical Interaction of Natural Philosophy and Millennial Belief in the Age of Newton’ (PhD  thesis, Yale University, 1972), later published under the same title (New  York:  Arno Press, 1981). Hillel Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen and the Subtile Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706–1710 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978). 31 Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets:  The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 32 Clarke Garrett, Spirit Possession and Popular Religion: From the Camisards to the Shakers (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); reprinted as Origins of the Shakers:  From the Old World to the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 33 Maximilien Misson, Le Théâtre sacré des Cévennes, ed. Jean-Pierre Richardot (Paris:  Les Editions de Paris, 1996). Jean-Paul Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu (1678–1713):  Prophétisme et millénarisme

Introduction

15

protestants en Europe à l’aube des Lumières (Aix-en-Provence:  Edisud, 1999). Abraham Mazel, Elie Marion and Jacques Bonbonnoux, Mémoires sur la Guerre des Camisards (Montpellier: Presses du Languedoc, 2001). Daniel Thorburn, ‘Prophetic Peasants and Bourgeois Pamphleteers:  The Camisards Represented in Print, 1685–1710’, in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2003), pp.  163–90. Elie Marion, Avertissements prophétiques (Grenoble: Jérome Millon, 2003). John Lacy, The Spirit of Prophecy Defended, ed. J.  Ramsey Michaels (Boston, MA and Leiden: Brill, 2003). Georgia Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy and Clandestine Worship in the Eighteenth Century:  ‘The Sacred Theatre of the Cevennes’ (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2005). Catherine Randall, From a Far Country: Camisards and Huguenots in the Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). 34 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 193. 35 The National Archives, Kew (TNA), King’s Bench (KB) 28/22/29. Chetham’s Library, Manchester (Chetham’s), Mun.A.2.82, Mun.A.2.103, Mun.A.2.114, Mun.A.4.33 and Mun.A.6.14/1–2. Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Halle (AFSt), H C144a. Anon., The French Prophets New Catechism; Compiled for the Use of All Those Disciples, who Are Willing to Know the Grounds of Their Religion (London, 1708). Anon., A New Dialogue between the Ghost of Dr Emes, Lately Deceas’d, and the Prophet of Aldermanbury (London, 1708). S. Conneand, New Prophets: Their Historical and True Picture (London, 1708). Anon., An Alarm to the Christian Church: A Discourse Concerning the Great and Wonderful Events Now Approaching (London, 1712). 36 In particular John Lacy, The General Delusion of Christians, Touching the Ways of God’s Revealing Himself, to, and by the Prophets, Evinc’d from Scripture and Primitive Antiquity … (London, 1713). Hannah Wharton, Divine Inspiration: Or, a Collection of Manifestations to Make Known the Visitation of the Lord, and the Coming of His Kingdom … by the Mouth of Hannah Wharton at Birmingham and Worcester (London, 1732).

1 The origins of the French Prophets

The story of the French Prophets did not start in London in 1706, but some twenty years earlier in the southern French province of Languedoc. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 marked a major turning point in French history, causing the exile of tens of thousands of Huguenots abroad. Far from a local issue, the resistance that was to take place in Languedoc against this renewed persecution rapidly gained an international dimension thanks to the support of a highly organised Huguenot network across Protestant Europe. The French Prophets’ migration therefore involved many subsidiary political, social, economic and religious questions  – questions that are essential to understanding the controversy the Prophets later raised in England. This chapter will consequently explore the origins of the French Prophets from their Cévenoles roots to their settlement in England.1

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes In 1661, the twenty-three-year-old Louis XIV (1638–1715) took full command of his country, which he was to rule for over half a century.2 The new King was no diplomat and devoted most of his reign to fighting neighbouring nations. As a staunch Catholic seeking to reinforce France’s independence, Louis decided to sever his kingdom from foreign influences and unify it around a single religion, his own.3 Whilst his grandfather Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes had granted toleration to French Protestants in 1598, Louis presumptuously believed he could achieve a stronger unity by eradicating them: ‘Mon grand-père aimait les Huguenots et ne les craignait pas; mon père ne les aimait point, et les craignait; moi je ne les aime, ni ne les crains.’4 Of his twenty million subjects, fewer than a million were Protestants; they formed a declining minority, mostly concentrated in Normandy and the south, with one-quarter of them  – 200,000 according to contemporary

The origins of the French Prophets

17

accounts  – in Languedoc.5 Except for Rohan’s wars (1620–29) and the Siege of la Rochelle (1628), the Edict of Nantes had somewhat tamed the dispersed Huguenot nobility, who no longer represented a cohesive force by the mid-seventeenth century.6 The recent agitation of the Fronde still prompted Louis to tighten his grip on the Huguenots despite their loyalty toward the new King. He increased the fiscal exploitation of Languedoc’s booming economy, based on a solid textile industry, and on maize and wine production, to fulfil his absolutist aspirations.7 Such brutal bias fuelled tensions between obedient Calvinists and ruling papists, who respectively understood Catholicism as a synonym for tyranny and Protestantism as another word for sedition. The coercion of the Huguenots unfolded progressively over a quarter of a century. Between 1661 and 1679, a strict reading of the Edict of Nantes combined with fiscal and financial incentives first sought to make Catholicism a more advantageous religion.8 This led to the destruction of thirty-five temples in Languedoc, where the authorities concentrated their efforts. From 1679 onward, decrees were issued further revoking the guarantees that Protestants had obtained in 1598.9 For example, they could no longer work in the civil service, occupy a position of power, or practise medicine.10 Mixed courts, composed of an equal number of Catholic and Protestant jurors, were also banned. Children had to convert from the age of seven, which in practice meant that any child found playing on the street or in an open garden could be taken by force to be raised in a Catholic institution at his parents’ expense, a practice that was far from exceptional:11 ‘The Clergy shut up in Convents and Seminaries all their Children of both Sexes, in order to instruct them in their Religion; hoping by that Means, that when the Old People were dead, the Protestant Religion in France would be at an End.’12 The year 1681 marked the beginning of the notorious dragonnades, decentralised military campaigns instigated by provincial intendants to crush civil resistance throughout southern France. Dragoons were billeted in Protestant homes, their costs to be covered by the ­occupied families.13 Facing death threats, the Huguenots’ conversion followed the dragoons from west to east, from the Béarn area to the safe P ­ rotestant haven of Montauban and finally Languedoc. ­Montpellier converted on 29 September 1685, followed by neighbouring towns and villages of the Cévennes:  Anduze (7 October); Saint-Jean-­­du-Gard (8 October); Sauve, Saint-Hyppolyte-du-Fort and Ganges (11  ­October); and Barre (12 October).14 Restrictions multiplied to such an extent that Louis no longer saw any point in protecting a minority now numerically insignificant. On 18 October 1685, he

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signed the Edict of Fontainebleau to repeal that of Nantes, ostensibly because so many of his subjects had abjured their ‘so-called Reformed religion’ to embrace Catholicism.15 The intensity of the dragonnades in Languedoc was anything but incidental, for this province occupied a peculiar place in France, both geographically and historically. Under Louis XIV, it was the largest in the kingdom, considerably larger than it is today: from west to east it spanned from its Catholic capital Toulouse to the Rhône River, and north to south from the Massif Central down to Narbonne, on the Mediterranean coast (see Figure 1). It consisted of the County of Toulouse and the provinces of Quercy, Rouergue, Gévaudan, Vivarais and Velay. This large territory had for a long time enjoyed political autonomy and was strategically important, as it offered access to the sea and the Pyrenees to secure French borders from Spain. The Cévennes mountains, north of Montpellier, stood out for their distinctive topography and identity. This rugged area abounded with forests, caves, gullies and remote villages, and was regularly cut off from the outside world by cold winters and snows between October and March. Villagers often had two occupations to cope with the seasons; shepherds and peasants in springtime and summertime; and carders and weavers for the rest of the year. They sold their wool down in the valley, in Mende, to be exported to Germany, Italy, Spain and Turkey, although bed-linen and silk were the most important manufactures of the area.16 Communication with the outside world depended heavily on trade, but both were limited by seasonal conditions. The lack of roads connecting the villages of the Cévennes to the surrounding towns of Montpellier, Nîmes or Mende meant that people simply relied on goat paths and a thorough knowledge of the terrain. Unlike mainstream Huguenots – a disproportionately urban population of artisans, merchants, soldiers and bankers with a higher literacy rate  – the Cévenols were a distinctively poorer, rural population and lived in a particularly austere environment.17 This partly secluded rural population was also confronted with a language barrier. Seventeenth-century France remained linguistically divided: although French had become the official language in 1539 under Francis I  (1494–1547), it was mostly spoken north of the Loire Valley and in southern towns, whilst rural areas kept their dialects.18 Beside hindering the spread of popular literacy, since books and official ­ records were published in French, this also meant in practice that the authorities in Montpellier still experienced difficulties communicating with the Cévenols into the late seventeenth century, with the mutual

The origins of the French Prophets

19

Figure  1. Casper Luyken, Le Theatre de la guerre dans les Sevennes (Rotterdam, 1703).

mistrust that went along with it.19 Some craftsmen, travelling merchants or local ruling classes could of course speak French, but the existence of a double language in the same region concealed a double culture as well. Languedoc was also a province of particular historical interest. It was once the homeland of Catharism and had suffered one of the most ruthless crusades in medieval history.20 The success of Catharism in the thirteenth century and the indigenous people’s inclination to experience a more individualistic faith may explain why Protestantism found a resounding echo in Languedoc after the Reformation. Spreading across southern France along the main trading routes from the Swiss border to Béarn, birthplace of Henry IV, Calvinism became particularly popular among Cévenol shepherds and peasants.21 Even the reformer Théodore Beza was surprised to see how such an intractable population converted to Protestantism so easily.22 Whilst no direct filiation has been established between medieval Catharism and Calvinism, the Cévennes nevertheless remained the theatre

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of numerous revolts and heresies over five centuries.23 In the seventeenth century alone, the area saw the wars of the Duke of Rohan (1620–29), a period of turmoil in 1666 and a movement of civil disobedience led by Claude Brousson in 1683.24 If the overall proportion of French Protestants had severely declined by then, it remained up to 90 per cent of the Cévennes’ demography. Topography alone cannot explain this strong concentration, for entire villages in the region also remained inexplicably Catholic throughout the early modern period.25 Still in the early eighteenth century, most Cévenols continued to assert their Cathar heritage and proudly claimed to have been recognised as proto-Calvinists long before the Reformation.26 The Catharist obsession with purity, protected for centuries by the altitude, seems to have predisposed the people of the Cévennes to become the diehards of the Protestant cause in France, which may not have survived otherwise.

The birth of the resistance The dragonnades may have accelerated abjurations from Poitou to Dauphiné, but the intendants’ zeal also embittered the Cévenols more than ever before. Still, rebellion was not an option, not only because of disproportionate means, but also because Calvinism compelled them to remain loyal to their divinely chosen sovereign.27 The Cévenols opted instead for a daily pacific resistance, taking the religious education of their children into their own hands. Every evening, women thus reviewed and debunked with their children what priests had taught them at school during the day.28 As Jean Cavalier recalled: My Mother us’d to instruct us in her Religion, and to explain to us the Errors of Popery, which she was very capable of doing, as understanding perfectly well the Holy Scriptures: She would dispute on Matters of Religion with the Missionaries, who came to Preach at our House, and would often confound them, which occasion’d great Persecutions against her, and cost my Father (who was very timorous, and who went to Mass, to shun the cruel Persecutions) a vast deal of Money. We continued to go to School however, and consequently to Mass: But my Mother’s Instructions ran in my Head, and altho’ very young, I began to have some Distaste for the apish Tricks at Mass.29

Men also took part in their children’s education, the ablest of them preaching in secret to replace those ministers who had abjured or fled into exile.30 Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people gathered in nocturnal assemblies in the woods and up in the mountains, calling upon God to protect them from oppression. This new chapter of

The origins of the French Prophets

21

clandestine worship in the history of French Protestantism known as le Désert was to last until the French Revolution.31 Orality formed an integral part of the Cévenole resistance, as did beliefs in prophecy and miracles.32 From the beginning of 1688, extraordinary events were being reported across Languedoc. Children had become agitated in the neighbouring province of Dauphiné, where fifteen-year-old Isabeau Vincent prophesied in her sleep. Vincent urged her visitors to repent and prepare for the deliverance from their persecution due in September of the same year. She also prophesied in French instead of her native dialect, claiming the Spirit was speaking through her. Observers regarded her youth and ignorance as a sign of purity. Many would travel at their perils from as far as Switzerland and Holland to witness the Spirit speak through her lethargic body.33 Vincent was soon arrested, but her prophetism had already crossed the Rhône and contaminated Vivarais, north of the Cévennes. Hundreds more young prophets appeared with similar symptoms, most famously with Gabriel Astier, but the phenomenon remained confined to Vivarais.34 This mysterious multiplication of inspired children led to much speculation about its cause. Patrick Cabanel has recently suggested that prophets resorted to prostitutes to multiply more quickly, but Catholics originally fomented the idea of a ‘prophet factory’ in Dauphiné through the legendary figure of Guillaume du Serre.35 Jean-Baptiste l’Ouvreleul (1652–1728), a Catholic priest of the Cévennes, reported that this old glassmaker first fell into a state of ecstasy in 1686 after reading Pierre Jurieu’s Accomplissement des prophéties (1686) and received the order to preach. He then recruited local children as apprentices to his furnaces, officially to teach them the catechism. Instead, he allegedly initiated them to prophethood through the physical ordeal of privation and thus had them fast for three to four days a week for a month. Prone to hallucinations and manipulation, du Serre would then brainwash them into memorising selected passages from the book of Revelation, announcing the near liberation of the True Church from the Antichrist and his empire –the Pope and the Catholic Church. Du Serre ultimately encouraged them to perform spectacular gestures to elevate them beyond their limited human abilities. Inspired children would then experience violent convulsions and foam at the mouth which, according to l’Ouvreleul, they welcomed as a form of authority over their adult audience.36 Whether du Serre ever existed or not, l’Ouvreleul’s account of the old glassmaker remains nonetheless of particular interest, as it is consistent in many ways with the French Prophets’ ecstatic trances later in England.37

22

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As the nocturnal assemblies grew more frequent and virulent, the authorities began deporting hundreds of Protestants to Canada and remote islands in 1686. Military and justice intendant Nicolas Lamoignon de Basville, the king’s local administrator in Montpellier, was indeed convinced that only the fear of deportation could discourage rebellious minds.38 Yet their most established preacher, François Vivens, a twenty-six-year-old wool-carder, was already exhorting his followers to take up arms to defend their assemblies. A  charismatic figure, Vivens was first caught in 1687, but was able to negotiate his departure with Basville, as exile was otherwise punishable by death.39 Upon his return from Holland in July 1689, Vivens failed to launch another armed uprising and he was eventually killed in 1692. The topographical specificities of the Cévennes described above provided its population with a cultural barrier that helped protect its distinctive identity. With the number of preachers reaching the thousands, Basville understood that taming the Cévenols entailed taking control of the terrain. He then gathered an army of 40,000 men and spent the following two years building military bases and some twenty-eight connecting roads to reinforce the centralising presence of the absolutist State in the remotest areas.40 Ces montagnes étoient impraticables et rien ne contribuoit tant à rendre ces gens-là mutins et séditieux; en effet, il falloit un fort petit nombre d’hommes pour arrêter une armée entière. Ces travaux ont bien réussi et ont beaucoup facilité tout ce qu’il a fallu faire pour remettre ces peuples dans l’obéissance.41

Basville’s campaign helped to pacify the region: his troops were able to stop more clandestine assemblies, and they enforced further restrictions and sanctions.42 Hundreds of people were caught over the following years, with many women hanged and men sent to the galleys.43 Yet, despite such cruel repression, the Cévenols remained united and confident, qualities that enabled one of the longest examples of civil resistance in French history.

Languedoc in the wider European context For all its remoteness and apparent isolation, the Cévenol resistance cannot be understood outside its international context. The Cévenols’ determination remained unaltered in good part because they were hoping for foreign relief. Vivens had established contact with foreign forces during his exile before attempting a second armed insurrection upon his return.44 His companion Claude Brousson had likewise been pleading the cause of persecuted Huguenots in Switzerland, Holland

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and England, but began advocating passive resistance after Vivens’s death in 1692.45 A  lawyer at the Parliament of Toulouse, Brousson was a highly educated man and therefore an exceptional figure in the Désert. Acting as an itinerant preacher, he was also the one who instilled in the Cévenols the belief in martyrdom and likened their plight to the persecution of the Jews in the Bible.46 The shifting international balance of powers seemed to confirm Brousson’s parallel and further encouraged the resistance in the Cévennes. Since 1687, Louis had been at war against the Habsburgs to pursue his expansionist ambitions. France was defeating a coalition of several enemy states – the Grand Alliance, or League of Augsburg – formed in 1686 by Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I  (1640–1705) with the German provinces of Bavaria, Saxony and the Palatinate, and later joined by Savoy, Sweden and Spain.47 But this situation changed in 1688 when the Catholic James II of England was overthrown by his son-in-law, the Prince of Orange, who became William III. French domination was now seriously challenged, with the Grand Alliance extended to include Holland, Brandenburg and England. News of a coalition led by the Stadholder-King against France soon reached Languedoc, where political events were read through a millenarian lens. Vincent had prophesied the deliverance of God’s elected people for the autumn of 1688, and the Cévenols regarded the Glorious Revolution as the accomplishment of Jurieu’s prediction of ‘the ruin of the Roman Antichristian Empire’.48 William III, whose family originated from the French principality of Orange bordering Languedoc, henceforth personified the champion of Protestantism and representative government, and a potential saviour to the Huguenots.49 For, during the War, we flatter’d ourselves, that some Protestant Powers would interest themselves in our Misfortunes, especially King WILLIAM of glorious Memory; but this was to expect our Deliverance from Man, instead of expecting it from God, being a Work worthy of him, and above the Capacity of Man; tho’ he was ever so willing.50

The international context of the late seventeenth century resonated well with Brousson’s millenarian teachings:  the Pope was the Antichrist, William of Orange the Saviour and England the Promised Land. With such signs and continuing persecution, the contemplation of a massive exodus and the crossing of the Channel took on additional significance. One-fifth of the Huguenots fled at their peril to Switzerland, Holland, Brandenburg-Prussia and England, mostly to the benefit of those countries.51 The French commissary general of fortifications, Vauban (1633–1707), reported to the King on the massive exile of

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some 100,000 Protestants and the ruin of the national industry.52 By contrast, only 5 per cent of Cévenols fled abroad as their agricultural activities tied them to the land.53 For all their efforts and determination, the Cévenol resistance was gradually tamed at the end of the seventeenth century. The ratification of the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697 completely crushed their hopes for freedom. France kept its territorial acquisitions in Europe and India and Louis XIV recognised William III as the King of England, who did not mention Languedoc in return.54 William also regained the principality of Orange as a Protestant territory, but a royal decree expressly forbade French Protestants to go there.55 The following year, Claude Brousson, France’s main public enemy, suffered an exemplary martyrdom on the wheel in front of 20,000 people. According to his executioner, ‘he died a saint, and sealed the truth which he had preached with his heart’s blood’.56 For a while the resistance remained headless.

The War of the Cévennes (1702–04) European nations resumed fighting in 1701 in the War of the Spanish Succession. Louis XIV sought to impose his grandson Philip of Anjou as the Bourbon heir to the throne of Spain in order to expand his dynasty.57 To do so, he moved his army of dragoons from Languedoc over to the Pyrenees. Meanwhile, Basville, ‘le plus cruel et le plus barbare de tous les tyrans’, was trying to please his King by executing more Protestants in hope of an important ministry.58 The Cévenols’ resistance had been embittered by his inventive cruelty and was now encouraged by Louis’s military reshuffle, since Catholics, and above all priests, were now far less protected. The Cévenols’ millenarian reading of the conjunctures revived hopes for their anticipated liberation of Israel. Some 8,000 prophets appeared across Languedoc in late 1701. The most successful included Daniel Raoul and Etienne Gout, who kindled their respective dioceses of Uzès and Gévaudan before their executions shortly afterwards.59 The inspired of the Désert announced the destruction of the devil’s empire, of the Beast and the False Prophet. Twenty-four-year-old Abraham Mazel, who was to become the first and last hero of the insurrection, became inspired in October 1701 and experienced violent convulsions when seized by the Spirit. A few months before taking up arms, he had a vision ordering him to chase fat black bulls away from eating cabbages in a garden, which God later revealed to him symbolised priests devouring the True Church. On 22 July 1702, the Spirit ordered him and four of his brethren (Salomon Couderc, Pierre

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Séguier, Jean Rampon and Jacques Couderc) to take up arms and assemble on Mount Bougès, where on 24 July the Spirit announced to all five men in front of sixty people that they would liberate their brethren imprisoned in Pont-de-Montvert.60 The recent return of Archpriest François de Langlade du Chaila to Languedoc marked a turning point in the conflict, for his brutality was legendary.61 He was now acting as an inspector to the Cévennes and handed over prisoners to Basville, a collaboration that intensified the climate of terror in the Protestant community. Du Chaila had even turned his own cellar into a prison, where he tortured and starved detainees, including children, before condemning them to the galleys or the gallows. On the night of 24 July, Mazel, Couderc, Séguier, Rampon and their men marched to du Chaila’s residence in Pont-deMontvert in ranks of four. They found him with other clergymen and capuchins of the neighbourhood, and demanded the liberation of their relatives and friends. The altercation degenerated upon his refusal; the rebels locked the house and set it on fire. Du Chaila and some others escaped by the windows, but he was injured in the fall; he was found hiding in the garden by Mazel, Séguier and Nicolas Joani and was killed, his body being stabbed fifty-two times.62 Du Chaila’s murder was a severe blow to Catholics. It marked both the end of the passive resistance and the beginning of the last French war of religion. Basville’s authority was now seriously challenged. He relied more than ever on denunciations for financial reward to catch those warrior-prophets, thanks to which he had Séguier burned alive on 12 August.63 With the harvesting season over, another 1,000 men joined the initial group of sixty young men in the Désert. Two charismatic leaders rapidly emerged:  Pierre Laporte or ‘Roland’ (1680–1704), a wool-comber, and ‘Colonel’ Jean Cavalier of Ribaute (1680–1740), a baker’s apprentice.64 The group split into five smaller units, each corresponding to a county, and each with an elected leader.65 Under Cavalier’s orders were Elie Marion, Durand Fage and Jean Cavalier of Sauve, who would later become the future French Prophets in England.66 In the course of what became a prophetic war, not all belligerents proved equal. Leaders were in fact elected upon their level of inspiration and thus received divine orders on the conduct of the insurrection. There were four degrees of inspiration in total: l’Avertissement acknowledged the presence of the Spirit, a stage above the ordinary state of prayer; le Souffle marked the general inspiration, when the Spirit would answer prayers; la Prophétie enabled the recipient to make judgements and specific predictions, as with the Camisards’

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leaders; the final stage, le Don, was the ability to work miracles and withdraw from earthly matters, to which all aspired.67 This spiritual hierarchy was described by Napoléon Peyrat as a ‘military theocracy’, in which the Holy Spirit, not the soldiers, dictated the strategy to adopt.68 According to Durand Fage: ‘in the Troop where I served, the Officers, and in particular Mr. Cavalier, were all graced with extraordinary Gifts, and they were constituted such for no other Reason, having otherwise no Knowledge of Military Affairs, or other thing to recommend them, but all was given them in that way.’69 Behind these prominent war heroes were soldiers and less able prophets, who hosted assemblies in the Désert to enlist new volunteers. Women also preached and supported their menfolk:  thousands of women allegedly received inspirations, for which several hundred were hanged.70 Colonel Cavalier later acknowledged this female contribution to the Camisards in his account of the war:  ‘Providence gave such Courage to some of the Women, that as soon as they were engaged, they encouraged the Men, and pursuing the enemy, with Stones in their Hands, were a great Help to me.’71 Most of the prophets were in fact children.72 Young prophets held a double function among the Cévenols: they perpetuated the Calvinist oral tradition of the Désert for the new generation and also embodied innocence and purity to the older one. Like du Serre’s apprentices, they would often speak in tongues – in French – which conferred on them a degree of authority with their audience. Fage testified that: ‘We obeyed constantly the Inspirations of little Children, and People never so simple, especially when there appear’d a more than usual Earnestness in the Words or Agitations of the Extacy, and when several concurr’d in the same thing.’73 Witnesses were struck by the sheer number of these infant prophets, by their charisma and ability to prophesy in French. In his declaration on the mystical events of the Cévennes, Jean Dubois testified to seeing sixty of them in the Désert, the youngest just fifteen months old.74 While glossolalia was certainly part of the millenarian ethos of the Cévennes, the miraculousness of their speaking in French should however be pondered. The language barrier between the authorities and the mountaineers was not in reality completely impermeable. Unlike Catholic priests, who preached in the local patois to make themselves understood, ministers would preach in French, the language of Calvin’s Bible de Genève. After the Revocation, Bibles were smuggled back into Languedoc to be read in clandestine assemblies. They played a key part in the education of children who, not being able to read, memorised biblical passages from an early age. The Cévenols were therefore not entirely unfamiliar with the ‘holy tongue’,

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as evidenced by their chanting of the epic sixty-eighth Psalm before attacking their enemies, and by the refugees’ almost seamless communication with other Huguenots abroad.75 For a while the identity of the rebels within a distinctively poorer mountaineer population remained enigmatic to the authorities. Catholics contemptuously referred to them as Barbets, a term originally coined against the Waldenses after ‘an ugly and shaggy Kind of Dogs’; but also as Osards, ‘the daring’; or more euphemistically Mécontents, ‘the Malcontent’.76 By the beginning of 1703, the rebels finally became known as ‘Camisards’, after the characteristic white smock – la camise  – they wore for mutual identification.77 They adopted a strategy of diffusion and seemed ubiquitous thanks to an excellent communication network to coordinate simultaneous attacks against the more numerous and better equipped dragoons. The Camisards waged guerrilla warfare, ambushing royal troops in forests and the mountains thanks to their unmatched knowledge of the terrain. They would also hide in caves, which they turned into cellars to store food and ammunition, or hospitals, where their two surgeons Chabrier and Tavan treated the wounded.78 Such organisation and efficiency impressed their opponents, who reportedly ran away at their encounter. Having downplayed the crisis to Versailles, Basville now had to beg for more troops. In January 1703, Marshal de Montrevel arrived in Languedoc with an additional 10,000 troops and unprecedented equipment.79 The Camisards were nevertheless able to secure major successes in the mountains, destroying 30 churches and 140 houses and castles, and killing over 100 people. Overwhelmed, Montrevel evidently thought they numbered at least 20,000, while they were never more than 3,000 in total.80 Mysterious, sporadic ambushes greatly puzzled the authorities, who failed to understand who the instigators of this guerrilla warfare really were. W.  Gregory Monahan has recently shown that Basville and many Catholics believed Roland and Cavalier to be noblemen.81 The latter jokingly signed ‘Prince des Cévennes’ and Roland was generally known as ‘Comte Roland’, whilst in fact he was an illiterate wool-comber, barely able to sign his own name.82 Despite the extensive use of torture and the lack of evidence, the authorities failed to acknowledge that they were facing a wholly popular uprising. The remaining Protestant nobility remained carefully neutral during the war, caught between an embarrassing peasant prophetism and the fear of being stripped of their estates by the authorities.83 Camisard survivors would later blame them, together with exiled ministers, for their cowardice. Although they pillaged local castles, the Camisards’

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revolt was not fiscally motivated, but was fought to restore freedom of conscience in France.84 Rather, it was Catholics of the neighbouring Rouergue area who rebelled against heavy taxation and threatened the authorities with joining the Camisards.85 Significantly, the Camisards did not enrich themselves, for most of the goods they stole were weapons and pewter dishes, which they could melt into bullets.86 Violence continued to escalate throughout 1703, when the spectre of a crusade against heretics resurfaced. On 1 May, Pope Clement XI excommunicated the Camisards and began issuing indulgences to battalions of a Catholic order of hermits taking up arms under Gabriel de la Fayolle. A suggestion was even made to Michel Chamillart, France’s minister of war at the time, that he launch a crusade against these new Albigenses with the help of between 10,000 and 12,000 monks ready to fight from across the country. The proposition was rejected, but hermits continued fighting in the Cévennes mountains, proudly brandishing crosses and flags, despite the reluctance of Esprit Fléchier, the Bishop of Nîmes.87 Meanwhile, Montrevel’s policy was proving at least as ruthless as Basville’s: on Palm Sunday, he had a mill set on fire, in which 300 Protestants – mostly women, children and the elderly – were worshipping, killing all. Despite destroying country mills and ovens to force the Cévenols into the surrounding towns, Montrevel failed to break their support of the Camisards, who supplied the local population with food.88 He finally entrusted Monsieur de Julien, a Protestant renegade turned Catholic persecutor, with a depopulation project effective from 29 September.89 C’est ne rien faire que de tuer seulement ceux qui portent les armes; les communautés fournissent aussitôt d’autres combattants; les masses sont toutes gangrenées: il faut donc passer au fil de l’épée tous les protestants des campagnes, et brûler tous leurs villages; ainsi l’insurrection ne pouvant plus se recruter, se nourrir, s’abriter, périra d’elle-même, et sa destruction ne coûtera pas la vie à un seul catholique.90

By 14 December, over 400 villages and hamlets in 32 parishes had been completely burned down by 8,000 troops, and their inhabitants forced to emigrate.91 Cavalier vowed in retaliation to exterminate Catholics from the Cévennes and, in March 1704, achieved two major victories over the King’s troops in Martignargues and Anduze that provoked consternation in Versailles.92 Louis XIV recalled Montrevel and sent Marshal de Villars in May 1704:  ‘Vous me rendrez un service bien important si vous pouvez arrêter une révolte qui peut

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devenir très-dangereuse, surtout dans une conjoncture où, faisant la guerre à toute l’Europe, il est assez embarrassant d’en avoir une dans le coeur du royaume.’93 Villars’s memoirs reveal some fascination for Cavalier’s military genius and he reportedly compared him to Caesar.94 Fearing the imminent arrival of some foreign military support, Villars offered an amnesty to any Camisard willing to surrender. Cavalier responded pragmatically at the risk of compromising the Camisards’ unity:  his men were exhausted and many had died; they desperately lacked supplies and the long-promised foreign support had yet to come. It became clear that the Camisards’ ultimate defeat was only a matter of time and negotiating peace appeared the only way to spare lives.95 Cavalier surrendered triumphantly to Villars in May 1704 and signed a treaty in Nîmes that was to grant freedom of worship to the Protestants, at least on paper.96 Yet Louis XIV stubbornly refused to honour Villars’s promises and, despite Cavalier’s conciliatory efforts, many Camisards resumed fighting under Roland’s command. The Treaty of Nîmes thus ended Roland and Cavalier’s friendship and divided their forces unevenly, with only 100 men following the latter.97 Assured by Tobie Rocayrol, England’s messenger to the Cévennes, that English reinforcements were on their way to Languedoc, Roland continued the war, but was betrayed and killed three months later, on 14 August 1704.98 Cavalier later went to Versailles and met both Chamillart and Louis XIV, to whom he justified his resistance by citing Basville’s cruelty, and refused to convert to Catholicism despite receiving a pension for his surrender.99 He left France forever at the age of twenty-four and arrived in Lausanne on 1 September 1704. With the loss of their leaders, the remaining Camisards were forced to surrender over the following months. Salomon Couderc, Abraham Mazel, Elie Marion and others found temporary refuge in Switzerland in November 1704, but vainly attempted a second insurrection in the Cévennes the following year. Marion surrendered again and fled to Geneva; Couderc was eventually burned alive in January 1706, while Mazel continued to fight until his capture and execution in 1710.100 Villars’s anticipation of a foreign invasion of Languedoc to support the Camisards relied on accurate intelligence. The rebels had been in contact with several Protestant nations, especially England and Holland, thanks to their exiled relatives and friends. The Marquis de Miremont (1656–1732) occupied a central position in this exiled Huguenot network. As the last Protestant Bourbon, he had migrated to England in 1685 as lieutenant-general of His Majesty’s armies and

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took charge of invasion plans against France under William III.101 During the war in the Cévennes, Miremont repeatedly urged Queen Anne and the Dutch Grand Pensionary Heinsius to send troops and ammunition to Languedoc, and also raised regiments of Huguenot volunteers in London.102 Yet his actual powers were limited and the Queen’s half-heartedness to send troops could be sensed as far as Languedoc.103 Miremont had a good knowledge of the Camisards’ situation and corresponded with Cavalier via his envoy to the Cévennes, David Flotard. Despite their efforts, there was no foreign military intervention in Languedoc during the war, but only one unsuccessful naval expedition led by Admirals Allemonde and Shovell in September 1703. On board with the latter was Flotard’s cousin, secretary to Miremont and chief commander of the army, Charles Portalès, who was to become the French Prophets’ first contact and supporter in London.104

Camisards in the Refuge By the end of the rebellion, there were two different types of Camisards. The best prophets were elected at the head of soldier units and praised as heroes, whereas less prominent ones acted as soldiers and troop recruiters in the neighbouring villages. Little is known about the prophetic abilities of Cavalier or Roland, for while Mazel and Marion proudly recalled their inspirations in the Désert, Cavalier carefully avoided the prophetic tradition of the Camisards when writing his Memoirs.105 Once abroad, he was never visited by the Spirit again. Yet the Camisards’ prophetic tradition did not die with their insurrection, although it was the less well-known survivors who were to revive it abroad. Durand Fage, Jean Cavalier of Sauve and Elie Marion did not arrive together in England, even though Marion and Fage had been acquainted since 1705. All three men had in reality little to do with Colonel Cavalier and his military achievements, and he was later to repudiate them after their arrival in London.106 Fage was a young silk-weaver with a low profile and little is known of his activities during the rebellion, except that he first carried weapons for the dragoons before deserting to join the Camisards. He also attended a Last Supper celebration in the Cévennes and gave a precious account of Colonel Cavalier’s performance.107 Jean Cavalier of Sauve, who always claimed to be the Colonel’s cousin, attracted suspicion concerning his commitment to the Camisards because of his seven-year Jesuit education. He had allegedly been inspired since 1701 and claimed to have been imprisoned in Perpignan

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until 1704, whilst other accounts accused him of spying on the Camisards for Basville and of having a dubious relationship with a judge. His actual role during the war therefore remains obscure, even more so as Marion claimed not to have heard of him before arriving in London.108 Elie Marion was not the most active fighter and had been a background figure during the insurrection, but he was an accomplished prophet and became the real successor of the Languedocian cause. He was a unique character among the Camisards, as he came from a well-to-do family and had trained in Toulouse as a lawyer’s clerk. His education enabled him to act as an intermediary between the Cévenols and the authorities, and even put him on the front row to negotiate a peace agreement with Villars in September 1704.109 As part of the Huguenot exodus, Marion, Fage and Cavalier initially took refuge in Switzerland. A  group of Camisards was receiving some temporary financial relief from England and Holland while in the canton of Vaud, but Geneva soon turned out to be far from welcoming. The Camisards were preceded by the glorious legends of Roland and Cavalier and people expected accordingly to see imposing war heroes. The reality proved disappointing, as most were instead skinny, uneducated young men, lacking any charisma. A strong sense of incomprehension settled between the Genevan authorities and the Camisard refugees. Marion spoke openly against exiled ministers, whom he accused of cowardice and opportunism, and went to work in Lausanne for a few months. Arrested with a group of fifty Camisards seeking to join Colonel Cavalier in Piedmont in November 1705, Fage was evicted from the canton of Bern and left Switzerland after seven months. He intended to join the new regiment that Colonel Cavalier was forming in Holland with fellow refugees from Germany, in the hope of a return to Languedoc.110 Cavalier reached Geneva in January 1706 and left after two months via Lausanne for the same purpose. However, Fage claimed that he arrived too late to be enlisted; Cavalier merely pretended to be seasick and Marion remained in Switzerland until July 1706.111 All three men had obtained certificates of good behaviour in Switzerland to facilitate their prospective journeys, though no mention was made of their prophetic gifts.112 Durand Fage arrived in London in June 1706, and joined the flourishing textile industry of Spitalfields as a weaver. At only twenty-five years old, he became the first Camisard to prophesy in England, even though he had not been inspired for several months.113 It is not clear why he began to prophesy on his own, considering that he had never been prominent, although he may have anticipated the arrival

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of Cavalier and Marion. Fage probably had connections in London, through which he met two compatriots, Jean Daudé, a lawyer from Nîmes, and Charles Portalès, Miremont’s secretary, as well as the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, who later embraced the group as their third scribe.114 All three men put their education at the service of the Cévenol oral prophetic tradition and began minuting Fage’s inspirations. His assemblies only attracted a few refugees or acquaintances nostalgic of the Désert initially and remained largely unnoticed.115 Two months later, Jean Cavalier of Sauve arrived from Holland and settled in Soho at the house of his cousin, the cabinet-maker Jean Allut.116 His arrival seems to have created some tensions, as shortly beforehand Fage had allegedly warned Portalès that Cavalier had led a scandalous life and had betrayed the Camisards. Conversely, Cavalier declared Fage ‘a rogue’, and their mutual dislike triggered a prophetic competition over who was the legitimate heir of the Camisards.117 In this, ‘C[avalier] voulut faire voir que son Esprit êtoit plus habile que celui de F[age]’, with more acrobatic inspirations and violent convulsions that rapidly eclipsed his rival and attracted an increasing number of people.118 Fage nevertheless continued to prophesy, as they shared benefactors and connections. The Presbyterian minister Thomas ­Cotton began hosting assemblies on 15 August and, with Allut simultaneously opening his house to the public near the French church on Greek Street, the Prophets began to attract more interesting guests.119 In Switzerland, Marion had received an inspiration on 22 July, ordering him to go to England, just a few days before the Geneva consistory evicted Camisard refugees. When he reached Holland, guided by David Flotard, they received a letter from Portalès announcing that two other Prophets were already in London. Marion joined his coreligionists on 16 September 1706, and immediately settled the Fage–Cavalier rivalry by taking over as the main Prophet. His greater age and education secured his authority within the group, which he was able to unify. Thus, by the end of the summer, the three prophets, their three scribes and Allut had formed the original nucleus of what would soon be known as the ‘French Prophets’.120 *** The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 marked a milestone in Louis XIV’s reign, causing the exodus of some 200,000 of his loyal and relatively prosperous Huguenot subjects over twenty years. Of these, 25,000 settled in Switzerland, 30,000 in Germany (four-fifths of these in Brandenburg-Prussia), 60,000 in the Dutch republic, 50,000 in England, 10,000 in Ireland, 2,000 in Denmark and northeast Europe, and 10,000

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in the New World.121 Together, these countries formed what is known as ‘the Refuge’, and this extraordinary confluence toward it was only made possible thanks to a network of solidary connections:  travelling was both very costly and dangerous and therefore had to be planned well in advance. Those who could afford it would send their children or young adults abroad for business purposes, as well as to learn languages and receive education in the Protestant religion. These split families maintained connections over several countries and would inevitably contemplate further migrations, as people sought to reunite.122 The departure of the Camisard survivors thus occurred within the last wave of a larger exodus of a relatively cosmopolitan Huguenot community toward Protestant refuges across Europe. The Cévenols belonged, however, to a distinct Calvinist subculture shaped over centuries by its geographical isolation and partial cultural insulation. Notwithstanding modern historians’ views on the origins of Protestantism in this area, the Cévenols regarded themselves and were acknowledged as the proud heirs of the Cathars. More than a temple, the Désert was a haven for divine manifestations, a place where young, innocent children fell into agitations, spoke in tongues and delivered millenarian predictions, very much to the embarrassment of the Huguenot nobility and community at large. The Camisards were therefore the armed defendants of the oral prophetic tradition of the Cévennes and resisted, as Alan C. Clifford points out, on Vivens’s principles rather than Brousson’s.123 Yet, as their most prominent leaders were killed during the war, only rebels of lesser fame and prophetic abilities reached the Refuge to start a new life. Fage, Cavalier and Marion experienced the presence of the Spirit separately and only met after the end of the war, but claimed that the Spirit guided them from the Cévennes to the streets of London to revive the support of their fellow refugees and free their land from persecution. Despite cultural barriers, social cleavages and much hostility, these three French Prophets would follow their divine mission to ensure the survival of the Spirit beyond the last French war of religion.

Notes 1 For the first in-depth account of this period in English, see W.  Gregory Monahan, Let God Arise: The War and Rebellion of the Camisards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 He officially succeeded his father Louis XIII in 1643 at the age of five. Because of his young age, France was placed under the control of Cardinal Mazarin, who died in 1661. By that time, Louis XIV had come of age and could rule by himself. Jean-Christian Petitfils, Louis XIV: La gloire et

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les épreuves (Paris: Tallandier, 2006). Robin Briggs, Early Modern France, 1560–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 134–59. 3 Matthew Glozier, The Huguenot Soldiers of William of Orange and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688: The Lions of Judah (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), pp. 31–2. 4 ‘My grandfather liked the Huguenots and did not fear them; my father disliked them, and feared them. I  do not like them, nor do I  fear them’ (my translation). Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2005), p. 654. 5 Philip Benedict, The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, 1600–85 (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2001), pp.  60–95. Nicolas Lamoignon de Basville, Mémoires secrets de Lamoignon de Basville, intendant du Languedoc … (Montpellier:  Bureaux d’abonnement des chroniques de Langeudoc, 1877), p. 3a. Briggs, Early Modern France, pp. 16, 116. 6 Clarke Garrett, Origins of the Shakers: From the Old World to the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 15–16. 7 Fiscal exploitation of Languedoc had been growing under Cardinal Richelieu since 1624. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Huguenots contre Papistes’, in Philippe Wolff (ed.), Histoire du Languedoc (Toulouse:  Privat, 1990 [1967]), pp. 313–53 (pp. 337–9, 348). 8 Louis XIV, King of France, Oeuvres de Louis XIV, ed. Philippe-Henri, comte de Grimoard and Philippe-Antoine Grouvelle, 6 vols (Paris and Strasbourg:  Treuttel et Würtz, 1806), Vol. I, pp.  84–9, and Vol. VI, pp. 353–8. 9 Over 100 edicts and declarations were published in the last 30 years of Louis XIV’s reign. Herbert Lüthy, La Banque protestante en France, de la Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes à la Révolution, 2 vols (Paris: SEVPEN, 1959), Vol. I (1685–1730), p. 21. 10 Anon., Arrest du Conseil d’Etat, Portant défenses à tous chirurgiens & apothicaires faisant profession de la R. P. R. de faire aucun exercice de leur art (Paris, 1685). 11 Elisabeth Labrousse, ‘Une foi, une loi, un roi?’: Essai sur la révocation de l’Edit de Nantes (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1985), pp. 156–72. 12 Jean Cavalier, Memoirs of the Wars of the Cevennes … (Dublin, 1726), p. 9. 13 Jacqueline Gratton, ‘The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Role of the Intendants in the Dragonnades’, French History, 25:2 (2011), 164–87. Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, pp. 28–32. 14 Liliane Crété, Les Camisards (Paris: Perrin, 1992), pp. 25–6. 15 F.  L. Carsten (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. V:  The Ascendancy of France: 1648–88 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 141. 16 Basville, Mémoires secrets, p. 5a. Yves Krumenacker, Des Protestants au siècle des Lumières:  Le modèle lyonnais (Paris:  H.  Champion, 2002), pp. 145, 149. Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Huguenots contre Papistes’, pp. 337–9. 17 Benedict, The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, pp.  40, 135–49. Robert Sauzet, Les Cévennes catholiques: Histoire d’une fidélité,

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XVIe–XXe siècle (Paris:  Perrin, 2002), pp.  17–22. Robin D.  Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of Huguenots in Britain (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), pp.  17–18. Lüthy, La Banque protestante, Vol. I, p. 9. 18 The name ‘Languedoc’ is the contraction of ‘langue d’oc’  – language of Oc – ‘oc’ being a common word for ‘yes’ to southern dialects. 19 Briggs, Early Modern France, p. 189. 20 See especially Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Histoire d’un village occitant. De 1294 à 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 21 Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Huguenots contre Papistes’, p. 318; Briggs, Early Modern France, pp. 10–13. 22 Théodore de Bèze, Histoire ecclesiastique des Eglises réformées au royaume de France, 3 vols (Anvers, 1580), Vol. I, p. 218. Monahan, Let God Arise, pp. 7–20. 23 Briggs, Early Modern France, pp.  116–17. Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Huguenots contre Papistes’, p. 318n106. 24 Louis XIV, Oeuvres, Vol. II, pp. 239–41. Walter C. Utt and Brian Eugene Strayer, The Bellicose Dove:  Claude Brousson and Protestant Resistance to Louis XIV, 1647–1698 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2003), pp. 20–33. 25 Anon., Etat et description des Sevennes par rapport à ce qui s’y passe aujourd’huy (London, 1703), p.  3. Benedict, The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, pp.  79–82. Sauzet, Les Cévennes catholiques, pp. 13–15. 26 Anon., Manifeste des peuples des Sevennes sur leurs prise d’armes (Berlin, 1703), p. 3. Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. xi–xii, 218. Maximilien Misson, A Cry from the Desart, 2nd edn (London, 1707), p. 6. 27 Myriam Yardeni, ‘Le Protestantisme français et le Refuge’, in Birnstiel and Bernat, La Diaspora des Huguenots, pp.  27–42. Cavalier, Memoirs, p. 303. Anon., Manifeste des peuples des Sevennes, pp. 3–4. 28 Jean-Paul Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p. 35. Monahan, Let God Arise, pp. 19–20. 29 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 10–11. G. Charvet, Jean Cavalier: Nouveaux documents inédits (Avignon: Seguin Frères, 1882), pp. 10–11. 30 Anon., Manifeste des peuples des Sevennes, pp. 8–9. 31 Although the term Désert refers to the period between 1685 and 1789 in France, it is generally associated with Languedoc, and the Cévennes in particular. It also symbolically echoed the wandering of the Jews in the Old Testament as a period of trial for God’s elected people. 32 Philippe Joutard, ‘Protestantisme populaire et univers magique:  Le cas cévenol’, Le Monde alpin et rhodanien, 5:1–4 (1977), 145–71. 33 Pierre Jurieu, The Reflections of the Reverend and Learned Monsieur Jurieu, upon the Strange and Miraculous Exstasies of Isabel Vincent, the Shepardess of Saov in Dauphiné (London, 1689). Philippe Joutard, La Légende des Camisards:  Une sensibilité du passé (Paris:  Gallimard, 1977), p. 26. Koen Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the

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Imagination. Part I: A Case-Study on Prophecy, Vapours and the Imagination (1685–1710)’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 35 (2004), 561–91 (pp. 562, 564). 34 Anon., A Relation of Several Hundreds of Children and Others (of Dauphiné) that Prophesie and Preach in Their Sleep (London, 1689). 35 Jean-Baptiste L’Ouvreleul, Histoire du fanatisme renouvelé (1703), ed. Patrick Cabanel (Montpellier: Les Presses du Languedoc, 2001), p. 23. 36 L’Ouvreleul, Histoire du fanatisme renouvelé, pp. 55–6. Richard Kingston, Enthusiastick Impostors No Divinely Inspir’d Prophets, Vol. I  (London, 1707; hereafter Kingston I), p. 2. 37 Several historians have discredited his existence. Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, pp. 72–8. Crété, Les Camisards, pp. 58–62. 38 Jean Cavalier, Mémoires sur la guerre des Camisards, ed. Frank Puaux (Paris: Payot,1987), p. 29n2. 39 Napoléon Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert: Depuis la révocation de l’Edit de Nantes jusqu’a la révolution française, 1685–1789, 2 vols (Paris: M. Aurel, 1842), Vol. I, pp. 160–1. Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, Paris (BPF), MS 757, fol. 21. Monahan, Let God Arise, pp. 21–3, 33. 40 Basville, Mémoires secrets, p. 12a. 41 ‘These mountains were impassable and nothing contributed more to make those people mutinous and seditious. As a matter of fact, a very small number of men sufficed to stop an entire army. These roadworks have succeeded and much facilitated everything that needed to be done to submit those peoples back into obedience’ (my translation). Basville, Mémoires secrets, p. 8a. See also Robert Poujol, Basville: Roi solitaire du Languedoc, intendant à Montpellier de 1685 à 1718 (Montpellier: Presses du Languedoc, 1992), pp. 85–6. 42 They trebled the cost for hosting a dragoon and published the penalties for anyone caught in an assembly: ministers coming back from exile were to be sentenced to death; men were to be sent to the galleys and women were to have their heads shaved and spend their lives in prison. Cavalier, Memoirs, p. 11. 43 The Marquis de Guiscard reported that thousands of women prophesied and hundreds were hanged. François-Maximilien Misson, Le Théâtre sacré des Cévennes; ou, récit de diverses merveilles nouvellement opérées dans cette partie de la province de Languedoc (London, 1707; hereafter TSC), p. 18. 44 Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert, Vol. I, pp. 210–12. Monahan, Let God Arise, pp. 33, 42. 45 Alan C.  Clifford, ‘Reformed Pastoral Theology under the Cross:  John Quick and Claude Brousson’, The Evangelical Quarterly, 66:4 (1994), 291–306. Utt and Strayer, The Bellicose Dove, pp. 34–50. 46 Accordingly, the names of many important Camisards (Abraham, Elias, Salomon, Daniel, David, Moses, Isaac …) also bore biblical connotations.

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37

Yves Krumenacker likewise calculated that 17.7 per cent of the names of the Huguenots in Lyon came from the Old Testament:  Des Protestants au siècle des Lumières, p.  125. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p. 57. 47 Briggs, Early Modern France, pp. 145–7. 48 Pierre Jurieu, The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies, or the Approaching Deliverance of the Church (London, 1687), p.  36. Jurieu (1637–1712) strongly encouraged rebellion and even had four spies (Saint Martin; Desgranges, or ‘la Cousture’; Henri Francillon; and Samuel ­Pouilloux) serving against France. His writings were translated into ­several ­languages and circulated well across Europe. BPF, MS 871/1. Yardeni, ‘Le Protestantisme français et le Refuge’, pp. 33–4. British Library (BL), ­Additional Manuscript (Add. MS) 61258, fols 171–4. Schwartz, French Prophets, pp. 19–20, 170–2, 258. 49 BPF, MS 871/1. Charles-Edouard Levillain, Vaincre Louis XIV: Angleterre, Hollande, France. Histoire d’une relation triangulaire, 1665–1688 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2010), p. 108. 50 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 21–2. BPF, MS 871/1. 51 Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, pp. 3–5. 52 Bernard Cottret, Terre d’exil: L’Angleterre et ses réfugiés francais et wallons, de la Réforme à la Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes, 1550–1700 (Paris: Aubier, 1985), p. 244. 53 Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, p.  25. Crété, Les Camisards, pp. 27–8, 33. 54 With the exception of the Palatinate, which was given to the Holy Roman Empire. Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith:  Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 341. 55 Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, p.  28. Royal decrees (23 November 1697 and 13 January 1698), repealed in May 1704. Louis XIV, King of France, Declaration du Roy, Portant défenses à ses Sujets de s’établir à Orange, & d’y faire Exercice de la R. P. R. Donnée à Versailles le 23. Novembre 1697 (Paris, 1697); and Declaration du Roy, sur ce qui doit estre observé par les Nouveaux Convertis qui iront à Orange pour leur Commerce. Donnée à Versailles le 13. Janvier 1698. Registrée en Parlement (Paris, 1698). 56 Clifford, ‘Reformed Pastoral Theology’, p. 305. Cavalier, Memoirs, p. 19. 57 Petitfils, Louis XIV, pp. 231–48. 58 ‘[T]‌he most cruel and barbarous of all tyrants’ (my translation). Cavalier, Mémoires, p. 37. See also Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, p. 799n2. 59 Sauzet, Les Cévennes catholiques, pp.  185–6. Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, p. 27. Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy, pp. 43–4. Monahan, Let God Arise, pp. 52–3. 60 Abraham Mazel and Elie Marion, Mémoires inédits d’Abraham Mazel et Elie Marion sur la guerre des Cévennes, ed. Charles Bost (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1931; hereafter MMM), pp. 3–6.

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61 Robert Louis Stevenson later said of him:  ‘A missionary in his youth in China, he there suffered martyrdom, was left for dead, and only succoured and brought back to life by the charity of a pariah. We must suppose the pariah devoid of second-sight, and not purposely malicious in this act. Such an experience, it might be thought, would have cured a man of the desire to persecute; but the human spirit is a thing strangely put together; and, having been a Christian martyr, Du Chaila became a Christian persecutor.’ Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (London: Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1900 [1879]), p. 131. For a complete biography, see Robert Poujol, L’Abbé du Chaila (1648–1702), bourreau ou martyr?:  Du Siam aux Cévennes (Montpellier: Presses du Languedoc, 2002 [1986]). 62 MMM, pp. 7–10. Cavalier, Mémoires, pp. 49–52. Paul Vesson, ‘Les Prophètes Camisards à Londres’, p. 68. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, pp. 37, 42. Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert, Vol. I, pp. 291–8. 63 Basville’s success depended mostly on denunciations, for which he had been offering rewards since 1686. BPF, MS 757, fol. 13. MMM, pp. 13–14. 64 MMM, pp. 22–4. Cavalier had returned from Geneva shortly before the beginning of the hostilities. Memoirs, p. 31. 65 The five groups were led by Nicolas Joani in la Faux-des-Armes (modern Lozère), Salomon Couderc and Abraham Mazel in the Hautes-Cévennes (between Anduze and the Tarn River), André Castanet in l’Aigoal (western Cévennes), Roland in the Basses-Cévennes (south of the mountains) and Jean Cavalier in Bas-Languedoc (between Alais, Uzès and Nîmes). 66 Jean Cavalier de Sauve should not be confused with the leader. He claimed to be the cousin of the latter, who always denied it. 67 W.  H.  G. Armytage, ‘Camisards in London (1706)’, Notes and Queries (November 1957), 471–4 (p. 472). Knox, Enthusiasm, p. 359. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 29. Monahan, Let God Arise, p. 39. 68 Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert, Vol. I, p. 334. Knox, Enthusiasm, p. 359. De Brueys, Histoire du fanatisme de notre temps, ou l’on voit les derniers troubles des Cevenes, 4 vols (Montpellier, 1709–13), Vol. I, p. 374. 69 Maximilien Misson, A Cry from the Desart: or Testimonials of the Miraculous Things Lately Come to Pass in the Cévennes, Verified upon Oath, and by Other Proofs, 1st edn (London, 1707), p. 68. 70 TSC, p. 18. Monahan, Let God Arise, pp. 55–6, 90–3. 71 Cavalier, Memoirs, p. 185. 72 TSC, p. 122. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p. 44. 73 Misson, A Cry from the Desart, 1st edn, p. 68. 74 TSC, p. 32. 75 Cavalier, Memoirs, p.  35. Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy, pp.  93–4. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 272. 76 Maximilien Misson, Meslange de littérature historique & critique, sur tout ce qui regarde l’état extraordinaire des Cévennois, appelez Camisards (London, 1707), p. 45. Cavalier, Memoirs, p. 47. Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, pp. 78–84.

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77 L’Ouvreleul, Histoire du fanatisme, p. 313. Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 157–8. 78 Cavalier, Memoirs, p. 109. Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, pp. 41–3. Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert, Vol. I, pp. 334–7. 79 Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert, Vol. I, pp. 405–6. Cavalier, Memoirs, p. 89. 80 BL, Add. MS 61258, fols 100–4. Tobie Rocayrol, Relation exacte et circonstanciée de la conduite du Colonel Rocayrol, et de ce qu’il a souffert de la part de la France … dans le Languedoc et dans les Sevennes (c. 1750), p. 18. Joutard, Les Camisards, p. 177. 81 W. Gregory Monahan, ‘Between Two Thieves:  The Protestant Nobility and the War of the Camisards’, French Historical Studies, 30:4 (Autumn 2007), 545–50. 82 Rocayrol, Relation exacte, p. 14. Cavalier, Memoirs, p. 236. Abel Boyer, The Lawfulness, Glory and Advantage, of Giving Immediate and Effectual Relief to the Protestants in the Cevennes (London, 1703), p. 15. 83 Monahan, ‘Between Two Thieves’, pp. 544–5. Crété, Les Camisards, pp. 140–4. 84 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 240–1. Joutard, Les Camisards, p. 153. 85 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 240–1. MMM, p. 73. 86 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 106–9. 87 Anon., The Present Pope’s (Clement XI) Plenary Indulgence to All that Shall Take Arms against the Distressed Protestants from the Cevenennes (London, 1703). Sauzet, Les Cévennes catholiques, pp. 188–92. 88 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 215–16. 89 Cavalier, Mémoires, p. 85n2. 90 ‘Killing only those under arms is like doing nothing; the communities immediately provide other fighters. The masses are all contaminated. It is therefore necessary to slay all the Protestants in the countryside and burn all their villages. Thus, the insurrection will no longer recruit, find resources or shelter. It will die out by itself and its destruction will not cost the life of a single Catholic’ (my translation). Julien, quoted in Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert, Vol. I, p. 377–8. 91 MMM, p.  53. Jean-Baptiste Louvreleul, The History of the Rise and Downfal [sic] of the Camisars: Giving an Account of Their False Pretences to Prophecy and Inspiration (London, 1709), p. 85. Abel Boyer, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne, Digested into Annals. Year the Second (London, 1704), pp. 9–11. Monahan, Let God Arise, pp.140–57. 92 Montrevel’s intransigence was also meant to send symbolic messages. When Cavalier’s mother died, Montrevel had her body thrown to the dogs as a public warning. Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 221–5. Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert, Vol. I, p. 501. 93 ‘You will do me a very important favour if you can stop a revolt that can become very dangerous, especially in a situation when, waging war against the whole of Europe, it is rather embarrassing to have one in the heart of the kingdom’ (my translation). Claude Louis Hector de Villars, Mémoires du Maréchal de Villars, Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France, 2nd series, 68–71 (Paris: Foucault, 1828), Part II, p. 139.

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94 Villars, Mémoires, Part II, p. 149. 95 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 256–60, 289. 96 Cavalier was granted a regiment of 2,000 Protestant soldiers to serve the King under his command in Portugal. He also obtained some relief for his coreligionists and the liberation of galley slaves, but was denied the establishment of Montpellier, Perpignan and Sète as Protestant “safety towns” and the restoration of the original Parliament of Languedoc. A copy of the treaty of Nîmes is available at the British Library: BL, Add. MS 61258, fol. 117. Cavalier’s copy of the treaty differs in parts. Memoirs, pp. 266–74. MMM, p. 61n1. 97 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp.  282–9. Anon., ‘Estat des cens Camisards partis avec Cavalier’ (1704), Bulletin historique et littéraire, 33 (1884) 235–40. 98 Rocayrol, Relation exacte, p.  3. BL, Add. MS 61258, fols 91–2. MMM, p. 72. 99 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 300–13. Frank Puaux, ‘Louis XIV et Cavallier’, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 59 (1910) 7–19. Laurence Huey Boles, The Huguenots, the Protestant Interest, and the War of the Spanish Succession, 1702–1714 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 109. 100  MMM, pp.  88–149. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, pp. 73–82. Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, pp. 32–3. 101 Charles E.  Lart, Huguenot Pedigrees, 2 vols (Baltimore:  Genealogical Publishing Company, 1967), Vol. II, p. 32. Lüthy, La Banque protestante, Vol. I, p. 20. Cavalier, Mémoires, pp. 243–4. 102 BL, Add. MS 61258, fols 56–84. BL, Add. MS 61122, fol. 109. BL, Add. MS 29590, fol. 245. Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols (Farnborough: Gregg, 1969), Vol. I, p. 464; Vol. V, pp. 291, 447, 452–43, 458, 465–6, 493, 555; and Vol. VI, p. 9. 103 Cavalier, Memoirs, pp. 171–3. 104 BL, Add. MS 29590, fol. 245. Boyer, History of the Reign of Queen Anne, Year the Second, pp.  101–5. Edmund Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, with Some Reflections on the Times I Have Lived In (1671–1731), 2nd edn, 2 vols (London:  Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), Vol. II, pp. 71–2. 105 Several testimonies confirm that Cavalier received inspirations while in the Cévennes. TSC, pp. 110–15, 117. MMM, pp. 3, 5, 16, 46. 106 ‘N.B. After I had finish’d this Collection, I learnt that a Person of Note had writ from Holland, that Colonel Cavalier told him, that the Three Camisars, who act the Prophets, were Three great Rogues; likewise, That the said Colonel had certified in Writing, that C[avalie]r, who calls himself his Cousin, is of no Kin to him; That F[age] is a Vagabond; and that M[ario]n gave Occasion to some Complaints against his Conduct in the Cevennes; upon which he was forbid to meddle with any thing, under Pain of Punishment.’ Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, Lately Come out of the Cevennes and Languedoc (London, 1708), p. ii.

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107 TSC, pp. 104–25. Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, p. 8. MMM, p. 120. For more clarity, we shall henceforth refer to him as ‘Colonel Cavalier’. 108 TSC, pp.  38–60. Anon., Nouveaux Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des Trois Camisars, où l’on voit les déclarations de Monsieur le ­Colonel ­Cavallier (London, 1708), pp.  4, 22–3. Particulier, Troisieme lettre d’un Particulier, à Monsieur Misson, l’honnéte homme … (London, 1707), p. 3–4. MMM, p. 154. Daniel Vidal, L’ablatif absolu, théorie du ­prophétisme, discours camisard (Paris: Anthropos, 1977), p. 18. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, pp. 97–8. 109 MMM, pp. 43–6, 56, 88–92, 95–100, 125, 133. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, pp. 25–82. 110 MMM, pp. 143–53. TSC, pp. 84, 125. 111 TSC, pp. 58–60, 125. MMM, p. 152. 112 Cavalier was denied a certificate in Geneva because of his notorious reputation, but was allegedly delivered one in Lausanne, while Marion and Fage obtained one from both cities and possibly another in Nijmegen. Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviours of the Three French Prophets, pp.  25, 35–6. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p.  229n283. TSC, p.  125. Marion’s certificate from Lausanne:  private collection of manuscripts of Mrs Shirley Stack, Taunton (Stack), 12g, fol. 37 (reproduced in MMM, pp. 200–1). 113 Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, pp. 38–9. 114 French refugees knew exactly where they were going and how to find hospitality in their exile. Hans Bots, ‘Le Refuge dans les Provinces-Unies’, in Birnstiel and Bernat, La Diaspora des Huguenots, pp. 63–74 (p. 64). It is possible that Fage came in touch with Portalès through David Flotard. He had also visited the Hubers in Lyon, a family of powerful bankers (established in Geneva as well) related to Fatio, who connected several refugees. They were also at that time in contact with Cavalier’s cousin Jean Allut, probably already in London, and his brother in Lyon. ­Krumenacker, Des Protestants au siècle des Lumières, p.  117. Fatio was teaching mathematics in Spitalfields around that time. ­Bibliothèque de Genève, Geneva (BGE), Manuscrits français (Ms. fr.) 605/7a, fol. 1r. Charles Andrew Domson, ‘Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and the Prophets of London:  An Essay in the Historical Interaction of Natural P ­ hilosophy and Millennial Belief in the Age of Newton’ (PhD thesis, Yale ­University, 1972), p. 83. The Portalès were a family of merchants based in N ­ eufchatel. Charles Portalès stayed in Languedoc after abjuring in 1685, but sent his two sons, Charles and Jacques, to Switzerland and became a banker for fugitive Protestants. Lüthy, La Banque protestante, Vol. I, p. 29. Schwartz, French Prophets, pp. 24–26n33. 115 François-Maximilien Misson reported in late April 1707 that the French Prophets had been the subject of a controversy for seven to eight months. This coincides with Marion’s arrival in September 1706 and suggests that earlier events were relatively unnoticed. TSC, p. i.

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116 Stack, 1j, fol. 24. MMM, p. 157. 117 Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, pp. 4–6, 21, 25–7. Particulier, Troisieme lettre, pp. 3–4. Anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, p. 22. 118 ‘C[avalier] wanted to show that his Spirit was defter than that of F[age]’ (my translation). Anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, p.  29. Lambeth Palace Library, London (LPL), MS 932/10; MS 934/52, fols 9–10. 119 BGE, Ms fr. 605/7a, fol. 1r (June to 30 August 1706). MMM, p. 157. 120 MMM, pp. 152–7. 121 Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, pp.  23–4. Fabienne Chamayou, ‘Le Refuge dans les îles britanniques’, in Birnstiel and Bernat, La Diaspora des Huguenots, p. 47. Jean-Pierre Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier (eds), Histoire des populations de l’Europe, 3 vols (Paris:  Fayard, 1997), Vol. I, p. 267. 122 Krumenacker, Des Protestants au siècle des Lumières, p.  92. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, p. 27. Lüthy, La Banque protestante, Vol. I, p. 27. 123 Clifford, ‘Reformed Pastoral Theology’, p. 305.

2 From the Désert to the New Jerusalem

Fage, Cavalier and Marion most certainly experienced a major culture shock when they arrived in London from the Cévennes via Geneva. That they settled in west London suggests that their first contacts were among the privileged classes.1 The first assemblies in the summer of 1706 took place near the French church on Greek Street in Soho, where luxurious coaches parked to witness the Prophets’ inspirations.2 This prestigious milieu contrasted sharply with the modest origins of the three Camisards, although Marion came from a wealthier family and had received some formal education.3 The story of the French Prophets was essentially one of transition and adaptation, from the mountains of the Désert to the streets of London, from an oral tradition to a flourishing print industry, from the French peasantry to the British gentry, from French to English. While Marion remained prominent until his death in 1713, Fage and Cavalier were rapidly eclipsed by the intriguing presence of their well-established Huguenot supporters, such as Portalès, Daudé and Fatio. Within a matter of weeks, they were joined by the Revd Thomas Cotton; Sir Richard Bulkeley, an Irish baronet and FRS; and John Lacy, a Justice of the Peace and distant relative of Samuel Pepys; as well as the internationally renowned writer François-Maximilien Misson.4 Together they introduced the Camisards to new audiences across all levels of the social ladder, a rare achievement that turned their enthusiasm into a perceived social disease.5 Perceived, but not necessarily pandemic; for the French Prophets’ fame did not reflect their actual numbers. Over the forty-year period of its existence, between 1706 and 1746, the group grew from 3 Camisards to some 665 French Prophets, whose assemblies often attracted over 100 people at a time. These figures should however be considered with great caution, for they included sympathisers and mere observers, as the names of participants were systematically recorded by the Prophets’ scribes during

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each event. Their compulsive documentation can therefore prove a mixed blessing, incurring the risk of inflating their actual number of believers. Yet it is also a goldmine of information. In this chapter, I want to exploit this rare prosopographical ore to look more closely at who the French Prophets really were and how they operated as a group. This will help us understand the religious and cultural stakes of enthusiasm respectively defined in our subsequent chapters. The fact that they maintained lists of their followers gives us a unique insight into late Stuart and early Hanoverian English society, thus revealing pre-existing connections and networks before the Camisards set foot in London. We will firstly examine the Prophets’ occupations and social status in light of contemporary movements. Far from marginals, it will be seen that the Prophets were for the most part well integrated and that millenarianism remained widespread in early eighteenth-century English society.6 Secondly, we will explore the place of women and gender roles within the group and, finally, trace the formation, evolution and demise of their movement over four decades. The results of this prosopographical research are compiled in the appendix.

From Camisards to French Prophets Location was key to the Camisards’ transition from the Désert to the London scene, and the social status of their hosts determined the nature of their new audience. Thanks to the diplomatic contacts they established during their rebellion and family relations, the Camisards first assembled in west London. The Marquis de Miremont lived in Somerset House on the Strand, Jean Allut in Soho, Fatio in Holborn and Misson on Tower Street. The first English converts also lived in the same vicinity and some were in fact neighbours. Bulkeley rented a house on Great Russell Street, Lacy lived in St Giles and James Keith near Red Lion Square.7 From the spring of 1707, the Prophets’ assemblies gradually expanded toward the east side of the capital. Rebecca Critchlow opened her house in Baldwin’s Gardens on 28 May 1707, even though she did not register it for dissenting meetings until 1 August;8 John Lacy rented a meeting house on Bridgewater Square in Barbican for at least six months from June and, by September, assemblies were even held in Hoxton, home to the late Philadelphian matriarch Jane Lead.9 The movement continued to spread over the capital as new locations were added in the following months. The houses of Abraham Whitrow, Thomas Dutton, Peter Cuff and Francis Moult in Hatton Garden became prime locations, but more assemblies mushroomed at

FROM THE DÉSERT TO THE NEW JERUSALEM

45

the same time in Whitehall, St Pancras, Goodman’s Fields, Holloway, Kensington Gravel Pits, Hackney Marsh, Westminster, Fleet Street and Southwark, where several important followers lived.10 Most of these hosts and guests were in fact already acquainted, if not connected, prior to 1706, which suggests that the three Camisards did not appeal to isolated individuals, but rather to pre-existing networks. Among their main affiliations were the Royal Society (Fatio and Bulkeley); the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (Lacy and Cotton) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, or SPG (Bulkeley and John Hooke);11 and the Huguenot Church of Threadneedle Street (Havy, Audemar, Raoux, Verduron);12 as well as the Apothecaries’ Society and the Royal College of Physicians (James Keith, John Coughen, Francis Moult).13 Businesses like the luxury watchmaking company of Pierre and Jacob de Beaufre (or de Baufre) also counted Fatio, Louis-Henri de Mazières de Voutron and Benjamin Steele among their shareholders or customers.14 Finally, the choice of a larger venue at Rebecca Critchlow’s house in Baldwin Gardens brought in many Philadelphians (Richard Roach, Mr Knight, John Kemp, Peter Cuff, Daniel Critchlow, John Basin, Caleb Gilman, John Hartland, William Spong…), whose disbanding religious society offered a crucial platform for the French Prophet’s meetings.15 A  further examination of the bulk of the group’s membership reveals numerous friendships and business partnerships alongside family relations. The data compiled in the appendix shows that at least two-thirds of the Prophets’ overall members and affiliates were connected to someone else in the group.16 Well-connected figures and pre-existing networks enabled the Camisards to grow into the French Prophets within a few months. Their movement counted 25 followers by 1 January 1707 and 50 by 15 August of the same year.17 An assembly held on 19 January 1708 attracted 107 participants, which appears to have been the average size of their meetings at the time, according to contemporary observers.18 Richard Bulkeley reported at the end of the same month that the French Prophets were already 200 strong and kept growing each day.19 The group indeed saw an exponential growth in the spring of 1708 as a result of the well-publicised announcement of Dr Emes’s resurrection. On 25 August, the Prophets already boasted over 60 inspired members or ‘Instruments’ for a total exceeding 450 followers by the autumn.20 By comparison, John Pordage’s Behmenist assemblies attracted around 100 disciples in the 1670s, and John Mason’s between 40 and 100 followers in the 1690s; 248 Muggletonians attended Lodowick Muggleton’s funeral in 1698; and the Wardleys gathered some 30 Shaking Quakers in the late 1740s.21 Such figures, however, must be taken with

46

Enlightening Enthusiasm

caution, as the Prophets inflated their numbers by listing observers alongside actual believers. Indeed, an anonymous spectator reported that Richard Bulkeley had once demanded the names of all the people in the audience before Lacy could perform a miracle on the young prophetess Betty Gray in August 1707; the latter, under inspiration, threatened those who refused to comply that God’s wrath would strike them blind.22

Public image Trust and reputation proved key to venturing into a millenarian assembly. Observers of the French Prophets often emphasised from the beginning the presence of magnificently dressed gentlemen at their assemblies. Those such as Lacy, Bulkeley or Fatio were well known, but there were more intriguing guests and this evidently wealthy entourage left a memorable impression on newcomers, making them feel socially secure. Samuel Keimer remembered Thomas Dutton, ‘a Lawyer, seiz’d, being a Man well dress’d, in a long Tie-Wig, and I think having a Sword by his Side’.23 Thomas Terrier once reported that, after four Huguenots were arrested and condemned to pay a fine for supporting the New Prophets, a man (possibly Charles Portalès) dressed all in white and wearing a black wig and a sword came to rescue them with five guineas each.24 Women too were sometimes noticed for their impressive appearance, as with the ‘well drest’ one kneeling before Lacy to receive his blessing.25 First impressions of this kind created a feeling of reassurance that emanated from the French Prophets. Onlookers were comforted in their attendance by the presence of socially important members, who enhanced the credit of the group and impressed the masses. Conversely, the presence of well-established observers also worked as a catalyst for publicity in itself. Fatio recorded the visit of M. de Gornay and M.  La Perrine; the Dutch diplomat René Saunière de l’Hermitage (1653–1729); Jean Graverol (1647–1717) and Jean Dubourdieu (c. 1643–1720?) and other French ministers; as well as Sir John Philipps (c. 1666–1737), the future Bishop of St David’s Richard Smalbroke (1672–1749) and the third Lord Shaftesbury (1671–1713); but the Swiss mathematician Georges-Louis le Sage (1676–1759), the Quaker William Penn (1644–1718), the Bishop of Gloucester Edward Fowler and the Earl of Chesterfield are also known to have attended such assemblies.26 From the earliest stage in their movement, the Camisards drew the attention of some of the most distinguished minds of their time, in sharp contrast with the popular assemblies of the

FROM THE DÉSERT TO THE NEW JERUSALEM

47

Cévennes. Shaftesbury realised this at his expense when he saw that his mere presence at one of their assemblies in 1707 indirectly boosted their credibility. Similarly, the pamphlets, letters or sermons some of them subsequently produced may have inadvertently served to publicise the very cause they were combating.27 Although tarred with the eighteenth-century brush of enthusiasm from the beginning, the French Prophets attracted in fact socially respectable and morally irreproachable followers, which even their fiercest opponents acknowledged and deplored. John Lacy, for example, was regarded as ‘a very sober, honest gentleman’ ‘of exemplary morals’, ‘much respected and of good reputation’, ‘known by many to be a man of sobriety and substance’. Similarly, Fatio was ‘a gentleman … of considerable learning, and well known in the world’; Bulkeley ‘a gentleman of learning’; Thomas Dutton ‘a sober ingenious man’; and James Cuninghame ‘a man well read, a good scholar … a traveller of sober life’.28 Observers and opponents alike frequently reported that they had been introduced to the group by ‘a respectable gentleman’; ‘a very worthy gentleman’; ‘an honest and respectable man, reputed for his knowledge’; or ‘by the invitation of several sober well-meaning People’.29 Perhaps the sharpest contrast in the transition from Camisards to French Prophets was that of their overall level of education. If Marion had received some formal education and worked as a notary’s clerk in his youth, the Camisards consisted of a rural population of peasants, who were illiterate for the most part. Many prominent members of the French Prophets, however, were highly educated and acted as a general rule as their scribes and amanuenses. At least twenty-one of them held a university degree, whilst others proved equally well read and engaged in intellectual correspondences.30 Charles ­Portalès’s notebook, for example, contains references to both classical  – S­ ocrates, Plutarch and Lucretius  – and modern  – Machiavelli, Montaigne and Descartes  – p ­ hilosophers, as well as to the German theosopher Jacob Boehme.31 John Lacy was the only son in his family not to have attended ­university, but his writings nevertheless reveal great e­ rudition, citing among others Plutarch, Cicero, Mede, Grotius, S­ pinoza, Beza, ­Dodwell, Arnold and Locke;32 both Caleb Gilman and William Freke published millenarian pamphlets during their ­ presence among the French ­Prophets;33 and the Quaker merchant Benjamin Furly owned one of Europe’s largest ­ private libraries. His house in ­ Rotterdam was  the centre of the Lantern, an early Enlightenment intellectual society, whose ­visitors included Algernon Sidney, John Locke, the first Earl of ­Shaftesbury, John Toland, Pierre Bayle and Jean le Clerc.34

48

Enlightening Enthusiasm

The support of such an elite audience for their persecuted Protestant coreligionists of the Cévennes ensured the successful transposition of the Camisards’ oral prophetic culture to London’s vibrant print market. In this manner, it propelled prophecy and enthusiasm to the front stage of the eighteenth-century public sphere.

The social disease It is this visibility that spread the fear of enthusiasm as a contagious social disease. As prophetical warnings were published and followers flocked to their assemblies, the Prophets alarmed their contemporaries both by their numbers and by the social diversity of their audience. Beside the aforementioned networks, the presence of children and servants among these suggests entire households joined the French Prophets at once; yet it may not reflect the true size of their movement, as they had little choice but to follow their parents or employers. Many of these only feature once or twice in the Prophets’ publications or extant records. Still, a closer look at their diverse socio-denominational background offers a rare snapshot of England’s early eighteenth-century religious landscape. Of the 341 adult male believers I was able to identify, 154 have a verified occupation or status. Table 1 compiles these results into professional categories according to the appellations found. The most prominent categories at a glance include the gentry (17 individuals), the clergy (15 ministers and chaplains), medicine (5 physicians, 7 chemists and apothecaries, and 1 student), the textile industry (11 weavers and wool-combers), the publishing sector (9 printers and booksellers), legal practice (8 lawyers), and trade (7 merchants). Evidence suggests that most of these were already acquainted and even business associates prior to engaging with the French Prophets. Another 30 individuals have unconfirmed occupations and were therefore not counted for the purpose of this study. The scarce indications I found nevertheless suggest that most of these may have been professionals or traders. Including them would therefore further substantiate the Prophets’ public image as a well-off, urban movement. Since the French Prophets formed an international movement consisting of approximately 73 per cent of British and 25 per cent of French followers, a national distinction should be made when examining the group’s wealth.35 A Royal Bounty of up to £15,000 per annum assisted the Huguenot community proportionally to their social and marital status, number of dependants and specific needs (medical, burial expenses, clothes etc.), to help them settle and open their own

FROM THE DÉSERT TO THE NEW JERUSALEM

49

businesses.36 This helped an average of 10,000 people a year, including future followers of the French Prophets such as Jacques and Elizabeth Charrier (8s in 1705), Olivier de Brossard des Préaux and his wife (£16 in 1705), Jaquette and Marguerite Perrot (£10 15s in 1705 and £9 in 1706), Jean Guillemot (£1 15s in 1705 and 18s in 1708), Marie Bouhaut (£6 in 1705, 1706 and 1708), Susanne Devaux and her daughter (£8 19s 2d in 1705 and £9 in 1706), Jacques Bernard and his family (£6 in 1705 and 1706, and possibly 18s in 1708) and Pierre and Jeanne Raoux (£4 8s in 1705).37 All appear in the Royal Bounty records as either commoners or bourgeois, corroborating protests from poorer refugees against what they denounced as an unfair distribution of funds.38 Most Huguenot craftsmen lived in east London, with Spitalfields at the heart of their weaving industry, but they did not necessarily live in dire poverty. London offered higher wages than the Low Countries, in itself a major incentive to extend their exile to England. Whereas the majority of poor Huguenot migrants went to Holland for its numerous charities and eventually burdened the Dutch economy, those who settled in England contributed significantly to its prosperity. A popular saying in the early eighteenth century claimed that having one drop of Huguenot blood was worth £1,000 a year.39 With an average income ranging between £40 and £80 per annum, supplemented by their wives’ and children’s wages, the Spitalfields weavers thus belonged to the middling sort.40 British followers, by contrast, received little financial aid, and some, like the bankrupt victualler John Glover, were in a precarious situation.41 It is noteworthy, for instance, that all of the servants and lone teenagers identified in the appendix were British. This may explain why opponents of the Prophets saw the group as consisting of an elite core manipulating vulnerable masses.42 For example, John Humfrey described the Prophets’ new recruits as consisting of ‘Boys, Maids, Women, and Children, who upon Sight of their Agitations and Example do fall into the like (by Imitation or Infection it is like rather than by any Spirit) and after a Time they come to speak likewise, and become Prophetesses, and small Prophets, whom Multitudes admire’.43 Even the Prophets themselves acknowledged this influx of poorer converts, whose ignorance allegedly evidenced the purity of the Spirit which inhabited them.44 Prophesying in public and evangelising a nation required organisation and, of course, means. The Camisards’ success owed much to the financial support of their followers. Among the most prominent benefactors should be cited Nicolas Fatio (cofounder of a luxury

Table 1.  Occupations of male believers STATUS OR OCCUPATION

Gentlemen Professionals  Astronomers  Clergy  Informers/spies  ‘Inventors’  Lawyers   Military and navy  Musicians  Physicians  Politicians   Secretaries, clerks and agents  Students   Tutors and teachers  Writers

HUGUENOTS

ENGLISH

Number

Number

6

8–13

4

16

20–33

22 1 8

5

5

3–4

2

6–10

1 2

1 1 2

5

3–7

3 1 1

2

15 1

14–28

1 2

1 1

Retail traders  Bakers   Booksellers and printers  Butchers  Cane-makers   Chemists and apothecaries  Furriers  Hatters   Innkeepers and victuallers  Peruke-makers  Shoemakers   Tailors and stay-makers   Tallow chandlers

2–5

4 1

4

2

%

2 3

1 4

Wholesale traders and large producers  Merchants  Tanners  Meat-packers

Artisans and labourers  Apprentices  Blacksmiths  Brasiers  Cabinet-makers  Cutlers  Engravers  Goldsmiths  Hammermen

%

28 2 6 1 1 7 1

17–36

3 1 2 2 2 19–31

15 1 1 1 1 1 1

9–20

OTHER/UNKNOWN

ALL

Number

Number

%

%

7

7–25

17

5–11

13

13–46

51 1 15 1 2 8 4 1 5 1 4 3 5 1

15–33

2 1 4 1 1 2 2 2

2–7

2

1

1

3–6

7 1 1 1–4

34 2 9 1 1 7 1 1 5 1 2 2 2

10–22

2–7

32 2 1 1 2 1 2 3 1

9–21

1

2 1

9

52

Enlightening Enthusiasm

Table 1. (cont.) STATUS OR OCCUPATION

 Joiners  Leatherworkers  Patten-makers  Sawyers  Textile  Watchmakers

HUGUENOTS

ENGLISH

Number

Number

%

1

1

1 1 2 4

9

Other  Sailors/seaman  Servants  Soldiers  Watermen

1

‘Commoners’

3

%

1–2

4

2–5

3

1

1 4–6

0

TOTAL KNOWN

48

78

OUT OF

80

161

0

Table 1 builds upon Appendix IV in Schwartz, French Prophets (pp. 318–9), which is itself based on Richard T. Vann, The Development of English Quakerism, 1655–1755 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 59–60. The percentage columns express a range, with the minimum number representing the percentage of all males of the given nationality and the maximum number that of all the males whose occupations are known. Percentages have been rounded up for more clarity. Unconfirmed occupations were not taken into account. Unconfirmed nationalities appear in the ‘other/ unknown’ column, owing to a lack of evidence. For those with several occupations, only the primary one was taken into account. Some occupations are grouped for more clarity. ‘Military and navy’ thus includes captains, colonels and lieutenants, and ‘textile’ weavers, carders and wool-combers.

watchmaking company with the De Beaufre brothers after perfecting a technique for piercing rubies, allegedly worth £1,500 per annum); Sir Richard Bulkeley (wealthy Baronet); John Lacy (worth £2,500 per annum); Francis Moult (manufacturer of Epsom Salts); Peter Cuff (wealthy watchmaker); Robert Douglas (rich merchant of the East India Company); and Joseph Hodges (very rich heir).45 Charles Portalès may not have been rich at the height of the Prophets’ m ­ ovement, but he certainly made profitable investments in the York Buildings ­Company and his annual family expenses amounted to £3,858 in 1739.46 These followers generally acted as hosts or ­charitable donors toward their necessitous brethren and enabled the Prophets to reach new audiences through publication and evangelisation. They also

FROM THE DÉSERT TO THE NEW JERUSALEM

OTHER/UNKNOWN

ALL

Number

Number

%

53

%

1 1 1 1 11 4 3 2 1

3–11

8 2 4 1 1

2–5

0

0

3

1–2

28

154

100

341

bailed them out whenever the Prophets ran into trouble with the magistrates.47 The commitment of these generous benefactors was not just the expression of a Protestant solidarity, but rather that of a ­confidence in an ­impending millennium, for which they were p ­ repared to leave their theological divergences aside and renounce their material comfort.48 As John Court reminds us, Christian millenarianism did not always come from the lower sort; among the Franciscans in the medieval Church were wealthy, educated people who likewise embraced poverty for mystical reasons.49 The considerable social disparity among members of the group inevitably fuelled criticisms. Rumours that wealthy Prophets actually subsidised their needy brethren rapidly spread to explain the adherence of

54

Enlightening Enthusiasm

poor workers to an otherwise exclusive congregation.50 The Revd Josiah Woodward accused them of targeting ‘poor ignorant people to be of their sect and number by allowing some fifteen shillings a week, some ten, and some five, thereby keeping them in subjection, that they dare not declare the truth; for then they would be deprived of all means of subsistance.’51 Betty Gray, a fourteen year-old candle-snuffer, a­ llegedly received ‘six shillings a week in Money, besides other things’.52 In their defence the Prophets admitted to providing some material assistance – food and clothes  – to their most necessitous followers, but not cash allowance.53 This did not prevent another gentleman observer from hinting at a price scheme according to which the Prophets allocated their money: ‘I have heard also, that when any of the Inspired list their Friends or Trade by adhering to their Party, they have had five or ten pounds sent them from unknown hands … And that all the rest that want it have handsome Allowances, for they all live toppingly.’54 It is almost impossible to evaluate accurately the proportion of necessitous members among the French Prophets because of the difficulty of identifying them. Yet, visible as they may have appeared, these poor converts did not by any means constitute the bulk of the group, which in reality consisted of the ‘middling sort’, workers, artisans or even bourgeois.55

English religious landscape Such an unusual social disparity among members of the same congregation ought to be considered in light of other contemporary denominations. Regrettably, only a few scholars have attempted to draw a sociological profile of early modern dissenters and millenarian movements, leaving behind a significant research gap in the age of social networks. Michael R. Watts’s data on the occupations of male Presbyterians, Independents and Quakers in various parts of England, roughly between 1680 and 1720, may not be necessarily precise, but provides an overview of the dissenters’ social ranks in various parts of the country.56 Broadly speaking, there was a large proportion, if not a majority, of tradesmen and artisans among dissenters.57 Artisans in London constituted almost three-quarters of the recorded Presbyterians and nearly half of the Quakers, well above the average for the city’s population as a whole.58 More recently, Bill Stevenson’s study of male Quakers in Huntingdonshire between 1655 and 1724 revealed that over one-half were traders or craftsmen, while only 40 per cent held an agrarian occupation.59 This phenomenon can be explained for the most part by the restriction imposed upon nonconformists by the 1661 Corporation Act and the 1673 and 1678 Test Acts, which banned them from holding office or taking part in public affairs, leading many

newgenrtpdf

Table 2.  Known occupations of male believers by denomination (per cent)

33

19.6

Seamen, soldiers

Labourers and servants

Textile

31.2 12.4 16.8

Mechanic trades

3.5 7.7 4.7

manufactures

trade

Artisans Tailors, shoemakers etc.

7.9 13.4      6.1 13.6

Textile

6

4.9 5.3 2.8 9.5

goods

  11

5.1   0 2.6 9.5

Food consumption

French Prophets

3.5 3.6 7.5 1.4

Farmers and

0.6 0.3 2.8 3.2

husbandmen

1.9 1.3   0 0.8

Yeomen and Freeholders

Merchants

General population Presbyterians Independents Quakers

Professions

Gentlemen

Tradesmen

 39.3 10.3 20.2 14.4

25.5 14.1 20.6

 7.4  1.4 22.6  3.8

29.4  4.3  1.3  1.8

  23.5

2

  2.6

Table 2 is designed to match Michael R. Watts’s comparative table in The Dissenters, pp. 350–1. Figures are percentages and do not claim to give an accurate representation of the occupations of male dissenters, but rather a general estimate, as none of the records used can be held as entirely reliable (Watts, Dissenters, pp. 346–9). Watts’s results for the general population (1688–1706), Presbyterians (1701–35), Independents (1670–1725) and Quakers (1652–1725) are each based on several records and have been averaged for more clarity. Because of the different methodologies involved in this table, figures for the French Prophets have been recalculated in order to match Watts’s categories as closely as possible. Likewise, only the figures for male French Prophets whose occupations are known have been taken into account.

56

Enlightening Enthusiasm

instead to specialise in commerce.60 As a general rule, religious dissent remained predominantly a provincial or rural phenomenon in the early eighteenth century; the Quakers, Independents, Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists emerged largely in the countryside.61 Yet this is precisely where the French Prophets differed. Although the Camisards originated from the Désert in a foreign and, what is more, enemy country, they immediately emerged as a cosmopolitan, urban movement. The closest and more recent sociological profile remained by far the Philadelphian Society, another millenarian movement with Continental ramifications. Save for Jane Lead (1624–1704), who depended upon foreign patronage, the Philadelphians gravitated around a financially secure, university-educated gentry or middling bourgeoisie, including figures such as John Portage (1607–81), Francis Lee (1661–1719) and Richard Roach (1662–1730).62 Hence it is no surprise if nearly seventy Philadelphians and affiliates reappeared in the French Prophets’ assemblies after Lead’s death in 1704. A broader comparison with other denominations shows that the gentry comprised 11 per cent of the French Prophets’ composition; professionals 33 per cent; and merchants, including some very wealthy ones (Robert Douglas, Benjamin Furly and Francis Wynantz), 6 per cent. To this must be added the presence of eleven members of the French and British nobility, amounting to nearly 2 per cent of the overall group. Such figures were significantly higher than those of the general population, but it is also striking because aristocrats did not generally associate with nonconformists in order to preserve their social and political ambitions.63 Their presence among the French Prophets, therefore, seems to concur with the perception of the Prophets as an ecumenical religious society rather than a dissenting sect. An estimation of the Prophets’ wealth suffices to contrast them with the Ranters, the epitome of religious enthusiasm in the seventeenth century who attracted mostly London’s urban poor, landless rural population, as well as criminals and prostitutes.64 Similarly, the Muggletonians appealed mostly to the servant classes of the English capital by the late seventeenth century.65 By contrast, the French Prophets appealed essentially to an urban middling sort. Artisans and craftsmen earned an average of 15s per week or £40 per annum between 1700 and 1720, and up to £800 for the most successful goldsmiths, watchmakers, pewterers, hat-makers and tobacconists. A  London labourer received about 10s per week or between £25 and £30 per annum, bearing in mind that these wages may be underestimated as they do not take into account payments in kind or any additional income brought to the household by other family members.66 Judging exclusively from the confirmed occupations of their male followers, it can reasonably be estimated that

FROM THE DÉSERT TO THE NEW JERUSALEM

57

about 50 per cent of the sampled French Prophets were commoners and that another 40 per cent were anywhere from comfortable to wealthy, allowing only 10 per cent to the lower sort.

French Prophets or English Prophetesses? A closer look at the Prophets’ composition reveals interesting demographics in terms of both gender and nationality. If we exclude the 341 adult males mentioned above, as well as children and young people whose age could not be determined, women accounted for about 50 per cent of the Prophets’ overall numbers. Yet they also proved considerably harder to track down for several reasons pertaining to their time. The majority of them were, first of all, illiterate, and as a result left hardly any trace behind. Those able to write generally did so privately as cultural constraints restricted the topics it was proper for women to address in order to be published. Moreover, most women’s activities were generally recorded by men, and women were typically identified by their marital status, rather than their personal occupations; their own activities usually integrated within those of the household or in their husband’s names. Indeed, what we today understand as an occupation refers mostly to a single, specialised activity that largely suited men and has been recorded as such, whereas wives and daughters earned income from a variety of tasks.67 All this distorts the picture of what women actually did and any combination of these factors therefore reduces early modern women as social adjuncts. Women were typically referred to as the ‘daughter of’ or ‘wife of’, regardless of their own activity, as exemplified among the Prophets by Sara Dalgone, a surgeon’s wife; Jeanne Raoux, a notary’s wife; Mme La Jonquière, a weaver’s wife; Jaquette and Marguerite Perrot, ‘filles de Marchand’; or Margaret Middleton, daughter of the Principal of King’s College, Aberdeen, and a relative of the wife of the great Scottish physician George Cheyne.68 There are, however, occasional glimpses of the occupations of some female members. Joan Comb, Jenny Courtney, Mary Parks, ‘Betty’ and ‘Ramsay’ worked as servants;69 the widow Isabel Hughes owned a cook shop, Arabella Moreton a print-house; Mrs Manwayring was a housekeeper, Mary Whitrow a licensed midwife; and Mary Bullmore was known to have servants.70 Ann Watts was a shop maid also known as ‘Pudding-Pie Moll’; and another, unnamed woman was a pastry cook in Place Yard near Golden Lane.71 Although many were probably illiterate, the Prophets also included educated women such as Arabella Moreton, Mary Calverley and Hélène Jurieu.72 Similarly, Joanna Keimer supervised the education of her children, Samuel and Mary, herself; and the Spirit’s promise to make her a ‘mother in Israel’ – that is, a nurturing

58

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matriarchal figure in the Quaker tradition  – indicates that she was socially secure.73 Women of a higher social rank also appear in the Prophets’ lists:  the Perrot sisters and Marie Bouhaut belonged to the middling sort or bourgeoisie;74 Mary Moult’s marriage to Charles Portalès in 1714 brought him a fortune that he successfully invested in his trade;75 while Mme Daudé, Mme Boussac, Mrs Keith and Mrs Shovell were respectively married to Jean Daudé (lawyer), Moïse Boussac (lieutenant), James Keith (physician) and Sir Cloudesley Shovell (admiral), and each consequently shared her husband’s social rank.76 Moreover, Clara Gordon, Katherine Pringle, Jean Forbes and Margaret Irvine each bore the title ‘Lady’, indicating a female aristocratic presence among the group.77 In short, women’s social backgrounds proved as diverse as those of their male counterparts among the Prophets, but this, however, did not necessarily confer on them the same role within the group. Gender historians under feminist influence for too long gave in to the temptation to victimise women and to rewrite history from a female perspective instead of redefining sexual roles in society.78 The study of enthusiasm may offer glimpses of female emancipation, but it is nevertheless striking that none of the most charismatic Prophetesses (Henriette Allut, Betty Gray, Ann Watts, Mary Keimer, Mary Beer, Ann Good, Elizabeth Charras, Anna Maria King, Jeanne Raoux, Mary Turner, Anne Steed or Ann Topham) could be identified independently of their husbands or fathers. This was true of their social position, but not so much of their role in the group. Some Prophetesses, such as Allut, Jeanne Cavalier and Gray, generally spoke alongside their husbands or lovers; while others were never associated with them. Charras, for instance, was married to Jean Cachar (or Cachard) and had received 5s in aid from the Royal Bounty as Elizabeth Cachard in 1705, but she always went by her maiden name among the Prophets, as did Sarah Dalgone, married to Etienne Moleron.79 The main reasons for this documentary discrepancy between genders are twofold. Women tended, first of all, to be considerably younger than their male counterparts. With the exception of Allut, Charras, Raoux and Steed, all Prophetesses were aged twenty and under by the time they became inspired, whereas male Prophets were at least in their late thirties or older.80 This age gap implied marital discrepancies: all the Prophetesses, save again for the former three, were unmarried. It was not uncommon for women to join the French Prophets on their own or alongside other female relatives.81 The influx of mothers, daughters and sisters may suggest broken households, deprived of a supporting patriarch, as further evidenced by the active participation of at least sixteen confirmed widows.82 Among them, Sara Dalgone’s husband was serving as a surgeon in Spain when she testified in the Théâtre sacré; Elizabeth Charras lived

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on her own and joined the Prophets early; Mrs Shovell had two teenage daughters and first appears in the group’s records in 1707, shortly after the death of her husband, the admiral who had led the failed naval expedition to Languedoc four years earlier (see Chapter 1, p. 30); as did Susanne Devaux, widow, and her disabled fourteen-year-old daughter, Marie.83 Women among the French Prophets were also less likely to be educated  – in any case almost all the group’s scribes were men  – and most were socially vulnerable.84 Possibly, then, the prospect of a weekly allowance of a few shillings, if verified, proved attractive to orphaned teenage girls, single women and widows, and might well complement or largely account for their enthusiastic zeal. Josiah Woodward, for example, once met a desperate woman who deplored the loss of her prophetic allowance after being expelled from an assembly for denying the efficiency of an exorcism against a devil she did not know was inside her.85 The anthropologist I. M. Lewis recently argued that enthusiasm served across ages and cultures as a pretext for female emancipation from social norms.86 While the reality was more subtle than an organised scheme against male domination, female enthusiasts certainly enjoyed a degree of publicity in the late Stuart period. Sarah Apetrei has shown that millenarians in general and Behmenists in particular, including men, aspired from the Reformation to the restoration of the sexes into a perfect, androgynous body in its prelapsarian state of creation – the doctrine of apokatastasis.87 Central to this belief was the rehabilitation of the Virgin Mary by Behmenists, Philadelphians and even some French Prophets, as both a redemptive figure of Eve’s sins and God’s vessel mothering the Messiah. A  restoration of women’s condition in the temporal world constituted as a result a prerequisite for the advent of the Millennium.88 Yet female historians have perhaps been too prompt in portraying Behmenism as an early modern feminism. For if Boehme’s theosophy was indeed gender-oriented, Brian Gibbons reminded us that its English reception remained in fact deeply divided over the role of women in the third dispensation. Jane Lead’s emphasis on Sophia as the personification of the Virgin Wisdom was in reality controversial among her brethren. Many English Behmenists proved indeed conservative, even misogynistic, in their reading of Boehme. Their movement was, after all, almost entirely deserted when Lead took it over after Pordage’s death in 1670, leaving her with only three members.89 By their own admission, Lead embodied a divisive figurehead among the Philadelphians. She may have had a German readership, but her works remained ‘almost unknown in her own Country’.90 Still, England’s recent political history looked unusually rich in apokatastic symbolism. The dual reign of William and Mary in the

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1690s and Queen Anne’s succession in 1702 seemed to corroborate the millenarian belief in the rise of a ‘female embassy’, to use Roach’s expression.91 In a sermon delivered in September 1704, the Baptist preacher John Piggott compared the new Queen to ‘the Deborah of our English Israel, and a nursing mother to all the reformed churches’.92 On a more general level, enthusiasm may likewise have elevated women to charismatic positions on a par with their male counterparts, but not necessarily as leaders of a movement. Among the French Prophets, it enabled Betty Gray and Mary Keimer to impersonate on occasions the Whore of Babylon, Henriette Allut the Angel Gabriel or Mary Beer the Church.93 Women represented in fact 52 per cent of the Prophets’ inspired members (53 out of 101 confirmed Instruments) over the group’s lifespan, so that, statistically speaking, their movement might have more aptly been named the ‘English Prophetesses’ than the French Prophets. This proportion proves lower, however, than previously thought, and contrasts with other episodes of early modern heart religion, where women tended to dominate.94 Despite the apparent rise of a female embassy, neither the French Prophets nor contemporary millenarian movements adopted the matriarchal model of prominent mystics like Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80), Jane Lead (1623–1704) and Jeanne Guyon (1648–1717), whose influence could be felt both in Britain and on the Continent.95 Each community devised instead its own model, assigning specific gender roles to its members. The Society of Friends believed the ‘Inner Light’ was equally present in both men and women, on which ground Margaret Fell Fox had even pleaded for an equal right for women to preach in 1667.96 Quaker women abandoned around the same time the ecstatic culture of the previous generation to become instead ‘mothers in Israel’, socially secure matriarchal figures who henceforth acted as ‘hostesses, patrons, and general stabilizers of the movement’.97 Yet while the Quakers encouraged such social function as well as female preaching, which John Wesley originally criticised them for, they also maintained separate female meetings throughout most of the eighteenth century.98 Similarly, Peter Vogt has shown that Moravianism also tended toward equality against what Zinzendorf regarded as a misogynistic Church, although it also restricted women to preaching to their sisters.99 By allowing women to speak alongside men, the French Prophets undoubtedly showed unprecedented latitude. Unlike Quakers and Moravians, they never adopted sexually segregated assemblies, nor did the Spirit appear to discriminate against women when choosing his Instruments. However, the short majority of inspired women left no room for female authority among their movement. Overzealous

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Prophetesses were not tolerated and there are indications that women were kept under control despite appearances. For example, at least ten significant female followers were excluded by the group between 1708 and 1712, including the self-proclaimed ‘Saviour of womankind’ Dinah Stoddart, the sadistic Prophetess Dorothy Harling (see Chapter  4) and the Philadelphian Sarah Wiltshire, who was severely pummelled by Louis Joineau for prophesying the failure of her brethren’s predictions.100 Others like Mary Turner and Ann Topham survived the purge, but occasionally faced the Spirit’s wrath for their rebelliousness, leading male Instruments to pull them out of an assembly by their hair.101 Domestic issues sometimes also turned public when entire families joined the Prophets. The Philadelphian and controversial Prophet Abraham Whitrow repeatedly beat his wife with a horsewhip for committing adultery, despite the Spirit’s defence of the poor woman through the mouths of several Prophets. Although wife-beating was common practice within the limits of the ‘rule of thumb’, the degree of violence used by Whitrow shocked his coreligionists and denotes a growing difficulty in controlling some women.102 Similarly, when Arthur Lacy refused to be blessed by his father, John Lacy ‘knockt his Sons Head against the Wainscot, and struck him so severely upon his Mouth with his Fist, that he beat out one of his Teeth, and made his Head and Face swell in an extraordinary Manner’.103 The great schism of 1708 not only marked a wave of prophetic cleansing, starting with Whitrow himself, but also revealed palpable tensions involving unruly women. Whereas Phyllis Mack has argued that early Quaker women spoke with the voice of male biblical prophets, female Prophets spoke with that of Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, Noadiah and Anna, although their group remained less socially egalitarian than the Quakers. As passive Instruments of the Spirit, the French Prophets observed a clear distinction between preaching and prophesying and only allowed their women to speak in the latter case. Those attempting to interpret the Scriptures and preach like the Quakers were immediately reproved. The Prophets based their approach to gender roles on 1 Timothy 2:12 and argued that biblical prophetesses were described in gender-neutral terms in ancient Greek.104 In other words, female enthusiasts were not to interpret God’s written word, but only to vocalise the Spirit, or, as John Lacy put it: ‘Womens Preaching as ordinary Ministers is one thing, and God speaking in his own name through their Organs is another.’105

From ecumenism to sectarianism Behind such enthusiastic displays of gender libertarianism and social transgressiveness lay in reality an implicit yet scrupulous sense of

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organisation. A first look at the French Prophets’ archives immediately demonstrates a compulsive, methodical recording need in preparation for the Second Coming. There were no strictly assigned roles within the movement, although followers generally acted as either prophet, host or scribe. Some evolved over time, whilst a few prominent members cumulated all three responsibilities. Instruments delivered God’s word to the audience, hosts had accommodation capacity and managerial skills, while scribes documented the content of each assembly. They recorded spoken prophecies, with dates and locations, and compiled lists of attendants, as well as alphabetical, chronological and thematic indexes. Most handwritten accounts were also filled with biblical references in the margins and even footnotes referring to earlier printed collections of warnings or contextualising a particular event. From the day Durand Fage set foot in England, the French Prophets demonstrated a degree of systematicity unknown to the Camisards, as if to prepare for great things to come. The Prophets’ millenarian enterprise for the establishment of a Universal Church on earth entailed an informal foundation and shaky hierarchy.106 When compared with John Lilburne and the Levellers, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, George Fox and the Quakers, Thomas Venner and the Fifth Monarchists, Lodowick Muggleton and the Muggletonians, Jane Lead and the Philadelphians or John Wesley and the Methodists, the French Prophets’ principal weakness may have resided in their lack of unity behind a clear and strong or charismatic figurehead. Of the original Instruments, Fage and Cavalier were rapidly eclipsed by Marion from September 1706 until Lacy supplanted him at the head of the group during his trial for blasphemy in the summer of 1707. Marion’s influence remained considerable until late in 1708 when he co-nominated missionary tribes, though he interacted mostly with his fellow French supporters by then. Nor did John Lacy, albeit the most notorious Prophet by far, outlast his predecessor by much. He had already expressed personal doubts shortly before Thomas Emes was due to rise from the dead, and seemed less active in the Prophets’ missionary expeditions before he eventually withdrew to Lancashire in 1711.107 From around 1709, he was succeeded by James Cuninghame, a Scot who rapidly emerged as a charismatic figure during the missionary expeditions to Edinburgh. The Prophets’ configuration constantly evolved into a polymorphous movement thereafter. The death of Dr Emes in December 1707 and the failure of his resurrection five months later undoubtedly marked the first restructuring phase in the history of their movement. From January 1708, the group

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introduced nationally segregated assemblies, an organisational trend further accentuated by growing internecine tensions.108 It is noticeable, for instance, that the French nucleus (Marion, Allut, Fatio, Portalès and Fage) did not get involved in the promotion of Emes’s resurrection, nor did they interact as much with the English core (Lacy, Potter, Cuninghame and Gray) afterwards. Although the Prophets’ later publications do show mixed assemblies held in both languages, there was noticeably only a small minority of French followers, most of whom were recent recruits.109 This gradual distancing between French and British followers no doubt reflected difficulties in communication, particularly if one could not speak in tongues, but probably also personal rivalries among their most charismatic figures. It is no coincidence, for instance, that Lacy and Marion were almost never reported prophesying together in an assembly.110 Only after the latter’s death and the former’s withdrawal did some rapprochement occur between some French and English followers. The occasional appearances by Fatio and Allut at Hannah Wharton’s meetings in the 1730s may exemplify this, but by then the Prophets already presented a very different image and had an entirely new British base.111 As the supreme miracle announced by the English Prophets failed, the group began purging its dissenting Instruments. First among these was the former Philadelphian Abraham Whitrow, whose ‘Levellism’ the Prophets blamed on the Antichrist.112 While John Lacy received mixed signals from the Spirit shortly before the event, Whitrow went to Bunhill Fields cemetery alone to raise Emes’s body from the dead, causing the group to be publicly humiliated. Around the time, Whitrow advocated a redistribution of wealth to their poorest followers, a belief that the rest of the group condemned unequivocally. His departure caused the first schism within the movement in the summer of 1708, as Richard Bulkeley, one of the Prophets’ most ardent and wealthiest supporters, followed him. Together they embarked on dissenting missions of their own and founded a redistributive millenarian community in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, a few miles away from John Mason’s followers.113 Between 1708 and 1715, over thirty Instruments were excluded from the Prophets, including many women whose enthusiasm had evidently taken them too far. This period of questioning and reorganising also marked a progressive rift between the French Prophets and the Philadelphians. Conflicting millenarian aspirations and approaches to divine inspiration resulted in warnings against the Philadelphians, and ultimately the departure of Richard Roach and Sarah Wiltshire in 1710/11.114

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Tribes Between August and December 1708, the Prophets restructured their movement into twelve missionary tribes according to those of Israel mentioned in Revelation 7:4–8, although organised in a different order. Marion and the widow Raoux dictated twelve lists of missionaries under divine inspiration, which Fatio, Daudé and Portalès compiled. Each tribe contained twelve missionaries, save for the 28 members of the tribe of Levi, thus totalling 160 people.115 Elected participants were also renamed after biblical figures. Fage became ‘Gedeon’, Lacy ‘Jeremiah’ – the prophet of disasters – while Marion remained ‘Elias’ – the harbinger of the Second Coming.116 Other key supporting believers likewise embraced evocative roles. The travelling writer Misson was renamed after Paul the Apostle, Fatio ‘Daniel’ – the dream interpreter – Francis Moult ‘Micah’ – the promoter of social justice – and Charles Portalès ‘Samuel’ – the rallier of the twelve tribes. The printer Samuel Keimer even received a certificate reading ‘JONATHAN of the Tribe of Aser. Keep this as a precious Pearl’, which he was to carry with him during those expeditions.117 Accordingly, the Prophet Guy Nutt still presented himself as ‘Matthew’ during his mission to Dublin in 1711.118 Although a French initiative conjointly devised by a male and female Instrument, tribe-naming belonged to a radical English tradition dating back to the Interregnum.119 The French Prophets’ reorganisation constitutes the first and perhaps only evangelical experiment in the Huguenot diaspora. This pivotal episode in the Prophets’ history may be read as both an attempt to reconcile French and English followers, and the opening of an era of religious itinerancy, with missions to Bristol, Coventry, Chichester, Worcester, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Turkey, Italy and the New World. The Prophets’ missionary enterprise was primarily targeted, with some occasional success, at the conversion of the Jews, but it cannot be addressed in fairness here, given its logistical complexity and geographical scope.120 Travelling across the British Isles and Europe certainly constituted more than new adventures in the history of the French Prophets. It required of course a more complex organisation than previously adopted.121 Dividing the group into tribes involved selecting members, assigning each one of them a preaching area and maintaining long-distance communication between them in order to be successful. More pragmatically, it also required more money to pay for travel, food and lodging expenses, which neither Lacy nor Bulkeley funded.122 It was instead generous benefactors like Francis Moult, the wealthy

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apothecary, who subsidised these expeditions. According to the apostate Prophet Samuel Keimer, Moult spent ‘many Hundreds, if not Thousands of Pounds, for the carrying on and spreading that Delusion’.123 In July 1712, Moult  – ‘Micah’  – was appointed ‘Ruler in Israel’, in charge of organising and administering assemblies to prevent disorders.124 Beside his wealth from extracting Epsom Salts, Moult was also a natural connection between the French and English Prophets, being related to the Portalès family through his niece Mary and close to several key English followers. His promotion was no coincidence, for he had been formally blessed fifteen times in public between 1708 and 1709, at the time of the first missions.125 Hatton Garden thus became the centre of the Prophets’ activity in London in the 1710s and the heart of their international network. Moult’s fortune determined to some extent the mobility of some of the Prophets’ most vulnerable followers. Unsurprisingly, women were almost absent from the dominant tribes of Levi and Benjamin, yet much more numerous in the later ones. These were formed hastily over a much shorter period of time, and women were generally entered last, thereby indicating their auxiliary role.126 While Jeanne Raoux named the tribes with Marion, and several Prophetesses even led missionary expeditions across Britain and Holland alongside men, women only made up 51 of the 160 designated tribespeople, or less than one-third of the missionaries, and at least 32 of these were directly related to another tribesperson.127 Their participation depended more on their family situation than their individual merit. Yet all tribespeople were prepared to make both personal and professional sacrifices to fulfil their mission. When the Spirit ordered them to abandon their businesses, John Potter, Thomas Dutton, Nathaniel Sheppard, Francis Moult and others all gave up or reduced their activities dramatically, and some young followers even renounced their prospective careers.128 Women like Joanna and Mary Keimer, Ann Watts and the widow Isabel Hughes also sacrificed their businesses to the cause of the ­ Spirit.129 Some, like Henriette Allut, proved particularly mobile despite having two very young children.130 Phyllis Mack showed that prophetesses and female preachers typically continued to undertake their daily chores, preaching during the day while serving dinner to their families at night. Those who embarked on missions entrusted the care of their children to their relatives temporarily and never left for more than a few weeks or months.131 That is how Allut, Isabel Hughes and her daughter took part in the Dutch missions, and how Raoux and Anne Brunelle prophesied in Switzerland at the same time.132 As their missionaries roamed across Europe, the Prophets entered a wave of spiritual reforms and introduced disciplinary rules to reinforce

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cohesion at a time when their movement was expanding both at home and abroad. During a series of assemblies held in London between 1712 and 1715, the most charismatic Instruments purged their movement of overzealous believers in an attempt to curb individual ambitions on the basis that unity was holy and division human. Attendance henceforth became compulsory, and newly inspired Prophets became subject to the approval of at least three qualified Instruments. Unqualified believers, including volunteer scribes, were excluded from assemblies, as Cuninghame and Potter announced the establishment of a new Church centred around the primitive celebration of Communion. More importantly, the Spirit exhorted his Children to silence and repentance, a stark contrast to the enthusiastic displays of the preceding years.133 The result was an entirely reconfigured and more discreet community, marked by the advent of a new generation of Prophets and the loss of the most charismatic ones. Jean Cavalier and his wife also left the group in 1709, but they had been ostracised by their brethren for a few months before. Bulkeley died in 1710, Marion and Jurieu in 1713, and Cuninghame in 1716; whereas Lacy withdrew to Lancashire in 1711 only to reappear sporadically until his death in 1730. Fage’s last known participations in prophetic assemblies were in 1715 and he may have returned to France afterwards. Francis Moult condemned the prophetess Hannah Wharton as a bigot after the failure of a mission to Wales in 1715.134 The group’s centre of gravity slowly moved from London to Birmingham and Worcester with Fatio, Joineau and the Alluts in 1717, and to Bristol and Lancashire thereafter. Later regional assemblies could be found in York in 1730, for example.135 Those of Mary Lavington attracted early Methodists, who often experienced similar agitations and subsequently came to embody eighteenth-century enthusiasm.136 Others, like Jean Pellet, also interacted with Wesley’s followers at the Fetter Lane Society and appealed to several Moravians in the 1740s.137 Although French Prophets’ meetings were still reported in Clerkenwell around that time, their movement merged with Quaker renegades under James and Jane Wardley in Bolton near Manchester, where this new community became known as the Shakers in 1747.138 *** We know of at least 665 followers of the French Prophets in the forty-year lifespan of their movement in the British Isles. If this figure appears comparable to the size of the Muggletonians at the same time, it remained at least six times stronger than the Philadelphians, but numerically insignificant against some 40,000–50,000 Quakers; 58,000 Baptists; 59,000 Independents or Congregationalists; 115,000

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Catholics; and 179,000 Presbyterians by 1720.139 Looking more closely at their composition, it rapidly becomes clear that the French Prophets were by far the most ecumenical, universalist and socially transgressive religious movement of their time. The denominational diversity of their audience shaped the Prophets into a constantly evolving movement with floating ecumenical boundaries. The vast majority of their believers joined the group in the first two years of its existence, in the heat of their controversiality, whilst it dispersed around 1709 under growing internecine tensions. The result was a more private and secluded millenarian community, yet not necessarily dwindling, as they attracted provincial followers. Their movement saw a structural solidification in 1715 that ensured the Prophets’ survival around a clearer set of beliefs confined to private chambers, rather than public assemblies. Despite their decreasing visibility after a few years of existence and a declining dissenting population in the first half of the eighteenth century, the French Prophets left a considerable mark on the religious landscape of their time.140 They had already made a name for themselves in many parts of Britain by 1708 and their enthusiasm still haunted the revivalist movement half a century later.141 This success was the result of a sharp sense of publicity and organisation, without which the Prophets would simply never have existed. However, the group was nevertheless weakened by apparent age, nationality and gender discrepancies from an early stage, which an ill-defined and unstable leadership further accelerated. As they ramified across Britain and on the Continent, their movement homogenised into a more coherent and cohesive separatist community beyond 1715. The contrast between the Prophets’ numbers and the publicity they received reflected more their social transgressiveness than the ecumenical content of their message. Their enthusiasm was subversive not just by its convulsive form, but rather because it affected the elites as much as the masses. Nowhere else could one see wealthy gentlemen and Fellows of the Royal Society dedicate their time and fortunes to transcribing the words of illiterate maids. The mutual consent of these social extremes to engage in communal religious experiences not only went against social norms, but also challenged the foundations of the Anglican and nonconformist churches legitimated in 1689 by the Toleration Act. In other words, it distilled the essence of Christianity to release it from its institutional boundaries. Thus, if the revolutionary radicalism of the Civil War had sought to ‘turn the world upside down’, eighteenth-century enthusiasm became the symptom of a social disease that could potentially turn it inside out.142

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Notes 1 William Henry Manchée, ‘Huguenot London. The City of Westminster:  Soho’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, 14:2 (1931), 144–90 (p. 144). 2 A.  J. Veenendaal (ed.), De Briefwisseling van Anthonie Heinsius 1702–1720, Vol. VI (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), p. 257. 3 Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, pp. 29–30, 37. 4 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1. Timothy C. F. Stunt, ‘Lacy, John (bap. 1664, d.  1730)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, www.oxforddnb.com (ODNB) (2008). Samuel Pepys had married the Huguenot Elizabeth de St Michel. Randolph Vigne, ‘In the Purlieus of St Alfege’s: Huguenot Families in 17th–19th Century Greenwich’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, 27:2 (1999), 257–73. 5 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, p. 52. 6 See Chapter 3. 7 P.  J. Shears, ‘Armand de Bourbon, Marquis de Miremont’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, 20:4 (1958–64), 405–18 (p.  417). Misson, Meslange de littérature historique, p.  3. Kingston I, pp.  35, 65, 73. The Post Boy, 2958 (22–4 April 1714). BL, Sloane MS 4043, fol. 307. Lart, Huguenot Pedigrees, p.  74. Scwhartz, French Prophets, pp.  72–3. John Flamsteed, The Correspondence of John Flamsteed, the First Astronomer Royal: 1703–1719, ed. Eric G. Forbes, Lesley Murdin and Frances Willmoth (Bristol: Institute of Physics, 2002), pp. 334–6. 8 London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MJ/SP/1707/07/074. Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, index V, fol. AA. See also Edwin Welch, ‘The Registration of Meeting Houses’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 3:3 (1965), 116–20. 9 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 2–3. Richard Kingston, Enthusiastick Impostors No Divinely Inspir’d Prophets, Vol. II (London, 1709; hereafter Kingston II), p. 26. 10 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, index V, fols AA–FF. Anon., ‘Declaration de Gabriel de Mulier, & autres’, in Nouveaux Mémoires, pp.  18–19. The prophet Thomas Moor(e) also held his millenarian assemblies in Southwark in the 1690s. Samuel Keimer, A Search after Religion, among the Many Modern Pretenders to It … (London, 1718), p. 19. William Burns, ‘London’s Barber-Elijah:  Thomas Moor and Universal Salvation in the 1690s’, Harvard Theological Review, 95:3 (2002), 277–90 (p. 279). 11 AFSt, H C144a, no.  12. A Collection of Papers, Printed by Order of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts … (London, 1715), pp. 72, 74. Schwartz, French Prophets, pp. 51, 79–80. Fatio also knew Dr James Keith by June 1706. Flamsteed, Correspondence, pp. 334–6. 12 Anon., ‘Lettre écrite par Ordre & au Nom de l’Eglise Françoise de Threadneedle-Street à My Lord Evêque de Londres’, in Nouveaux Mémoires, pp. 14–15. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 103n85.

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13 William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians, 2 vols (London:  Longman, 1861), Vol. I, p.  344; and Vol. II, p.  18. Juanita G.  L. Burnby, ‘A Study of the English Apothecary from 1660–1760 with Special Reference to the Provinces’ (PhD thesis, University College London, 1979), pp. 172–3, 185, 203–4. Although he graduated from the medical faculty of Avignon in 1715, Robert Eaton became a physician thanks to the encouragements of his ‘worthy and honoured Friend Mr. Francis Moult’. BL, Additional Charters (Add. Ch.) 53510. Robert Eaton, An Account of Dr. Eaton’s Styptick Balsam (London, 1723), p. 56. 14 BGE, Ms. fr. 602, fol. 242. 15 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2r. Stack, 1j, fol. 30. Bodleian Library, Oxford (Bodl.), MS Rawlinson D1152, fol. 55r–v. LMA, MJ/SP/1707/07/074. 16 See appendix. 17 BGE, Ms. fr. 2043a/28 (1 January 1707). AFSt, H C144a, no. 12. 18 BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fol. 241; BGE Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 3r, 4r (22 July 1708 and 30 September 1708). The Post Boy, 2111 (23 November 1708). Kingston I, p. 46. 19 Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets. In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1708), pp.  6, 8.  The precise publication date (31 January 1708) can be found in The Post Man and the Historical Account, 1871 (3 February 1708). 20 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 3, 8. 21 Brian Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and Its Development in England (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 144, 158. Philip Almond, ‘John Mason and His Religion: An Enthusiastic Millenarian in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, The Seventeenth Century, 24:1 (2009), 156–76 (p. 163). William Lamont, ‘The Muggletonians 1652–1979:  A  “Vertical” Approach’, Past & Present, 99 (1983), 22–40 (p. 23). 22 Anon., The Honest Quaker: or the Forgeries and Impostures of the Pretended French Prophets and Their Abettors Expos’d … (London, 1707), pp. 2–3. 23 Samuel Keimer, A Brand Pluck’d from the Burning:  Exemplify’d in the Unparallel’d Case of Samuel Keimer … (London, 1718; hereafter Brand), p.  9. Bearing swords was enforceable by law, and permitted to gentlemen only. Portalès, Daudé, Fatio and several other French refugees were also reported to carry swords. Stack, 1g, fols 47–8. The Post Boy, 2111 (23 November 1708). Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘The Westminster Impostors: Impersonating Law Enforcement in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38:3 (2005), 461–83 (p. 470). Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms:  The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, MA and London, 1994), Chapters 1–3. 24 Anon., ‘Lettre écrite par Ordre & au Nom de l’Eglise Françoise’, pp. 14–16. 25 Brand, p. 6. 26 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 1r–3r, 8; BGE Ms. fr. 2043a/28. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 93n58. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield,

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Miscellaneous Works of the Late Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield …, ed. M. Maty, 4 vols (London, 1779), Vol. II, pp. 523, 555. 27 See Chapter 4. 28 Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, pp. 73, 75, 76, 111. Brand, pp. 6, 56–7, 63. Kingston I, p. 37. John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, 4 vols (London: Colburn, 1838), Vol. IV, pp. 199, 299. 29 Henry Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested with Their Corrupt Doctrines and Conversations, wherein All the Decays of the Nerves, and Lownesses of the Spirits are Mechanically Accounted For (London, 1708), p.  7. Anon., A Warning Concerning the French Prophets: Being Advice for Those that Go after Them, to Take Heed Lest They Fall into Fits, as They Do and Others Have Done, by Often Seeing and Continuing among Them (London, 1707), p.  1. ‘Declaration de Mademoiselle N. N.’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, p. 27. Brand, p. 5. 30 Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 328. 31 Stack, 1c. Stack 1l, fols 13, 22–4. On Boehme’s reception, especially in England, see Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei (eds), An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013). 32 Lacy, General Delusion. 33 Caleb Gilman, Veritas Exultans, Truth Exalted and Self Abased or, A Call to Come out of Babylon, Both in Its Gross and More Refin’d Appearance, in, and amongst All Professors … (London, 1708). William Freke, Elijah’s First Appearance to the Several Churches and Nations of the Earth … (London, 1709). 34 Sarah Hutton (ed.), Benjamin Furly, 1646–1714:  A  Quaker Merchant and His Milieu (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007). Regrettably, this volume misses out on Furly’s dedicated support of the French Prophets. 35 Rough estimation based on extant data over their entire lifespan. 36 Many of the commissioners of the Royal Bounty were also members of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). William Kemp Lowther Clarke, A History of the SPCK (London: SPCK, 1959), pp. 132–3. Mary Clement, The SPCK and Wales, 1699–1740 (London: SPCK, 1954), pp. 87–8. 37 Cottret, Terre d’exil, pp.  251–2. For the individual distribution of the Royal Bounty see Comité François, Estat de la distribution de la somme de douze mille livres sterling, accordée par la reine aux pauvres Protestants françois refugiez en 1705 (Londres, 1707), pp.  1, 6, 13, 16, 17, 31, 65, 67; Estats de la distribution de la somme de douze mille livres sterling, accordée par la reine aux pauvres Protestants françois refugiez en 1706 (Londres, 1708), pp. 5, 7, 11, 14; Estats de la distribution du reliqua de la beneficence de 1707, et de la beneficence de 1708, accordée par la reine aux pauvres Protestants (London, 1709), pp. 3, 5, 19. 38 Nouvelle de la république des lettres, 2nd edn (Amsterdam, 1720; hereafter NRL), Vol. XXXVII (April 1706), pp.  464–9. Typically, over half

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of the Royal Bounty was distributed among the gentry, bourgeoisie and extraordinary payments (people not usually requiring financial assistance), and about one-third to commoners. For the year 1705, the distribution of £12,000 went as follows: gentry (£2,295 9s); bourgeoisie (£3,170 15s 1d); extraordinary payments (£1,830 1s 1d); ecclesiastics (£161 10s); orphans (£144 4s 1d); pesthouse (£445 3s 2d); provincial churches (£417 6s); commoners of the districts of Westminster (£1550 16s 6d), London and Spitalfields (£1629 17s 9d); medical expenses (£270 17s 4d); handling fees (£84). Comité François, Estat de la distribution de la somme … en 1705, p. 84. 39 Maureen Waller, 1700: Scenes from London Life (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), pp.  271–4. Chamayou, ‘Le Refuge dans les îles britanniques’, pp. 51–2. Bots, ‘Le Refuge dans les Province-Unies’, p. 70. 40 R. O. Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England, 1485–1714: A Narrative History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 364–5. Alfred Plummer, London Weavers’ Company 1600–1970 (London and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 167–8, 171. Roy Porter estimates the Spitalfields weavers’ income at between £2 and £3 per week – a higher, probably exaggerated ­figure – and claims that a family could then survive on 10s a week. English Society in the 18th Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 217. 41 The London Gazette, 4302 (30 January–3 February 1706), p. 2. 42 Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, p. 3. 43 John Humfrey, A Farther Account of Our Late Prophets, in Two Letters to Sir Richard Bulkley … by Mr. Humfrey, His Neighbour (London, 1708), p. 29. 44 Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets, pp. 6–9. 45 On the Prophets’ education, see Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 328. Fatio allegedly spent all his income on the group and was already ruined by 1707; Kingston I, p. 73 (his name was misprinted as ‘Pario’). Lacy’s income in 1708 was estimated at £2,500 per annum; Stunt, ‘Lacy, John’. House of Lords Record Office, London (HLRO), HL/PO/JO/10/6/154/2519. On Moult and Douglas, see Brand, pp.  61, 76. On Douglas, see also James Samuel Barbour, A History of William Paterson and the Darien Company (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1907), pp. 21, 30, 99. 46 Anon., The Case of William Jackson, Richard Fowler, and Charles Portales, Three of the Assistants of the York-Buildings Company (London?: 1734?). Stack, 1c, fol. 20r. 47 Stack, 1j, fol. 41. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2r. Kingston I, p. 51. 48 On the Prophets’ ecumenical outreach, see Chapter 3. 49 John M. Court, Approaching the Apocalypse: A Short History of Christian Millenarianism (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008), p. 6. 50 Francis Hutchinson, A Short View of the Pretended Spirit of Prophecy, Taken from Its First Rise in the Year 1688 to Its Present State among Us (London, 1708), p. 11. 51 Josiah Woodward, The Copy of a Letter to Mr. F—. M—. a Gentleman, who Is a Follower of the Pretended Prophets (London, 1708), p. 2.

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52 Kingston I, p. 74. 53 Humfrey, A Farther Account, p. 6. Brand, p. 35. 54 Kingston I, pp. 73–4. 55 For the debate on the emergence of an English middle class or middle sort, see Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.  220–53. H.  R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–1750 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007). 56 Michael R.  Watts, The Dissenters:  From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 346–7. 57 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 348. Porter, English Society in the 18th Century, p. 179. 58 Watts, The Dissenters, pp. 350–1. 59 Bill Stevenson, ‘The Social and Economic Status of Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660–1725’, in Margaret Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 332–59 (p. 339). 60 William Gibson (ed.), Religion and Society in England and Wales 1689–1800 (London and Washington:  Leicester University Press, 1998), p. 56. Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, p. 53. Watts, The Dissenters, pp.  360–1. Frank Manuel, The Age of Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 72. 61 Stevenson, ‘Social and Economic Status’, p. 357. Watts, Dissenters, p. 353. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 181. 62 D.  P. Walker, The Decline of Hell:  Seventeenth Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago:  Chicago University Press, 1964), p.  255. Nils Thune, The Behmenists and the Philadelphians:  A  Contribution to the Study of English Mysticism in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Uppsala: Almqvist och Wiksell, 1948), pp. 81–90. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, pp. 11, 106–19. Ariel Hessayon, ‘Pordage, John (bap. 1607, d. 1681)’, ODNB. 63 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 360. 64 Ariel Hessayon, ‘Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 346–74. 65 Lamont, ‘The Muggletonians’, p. 23. 66 In 1695, Gregory King estimated that 40 per cent of England’s population were poor, earning under £10 per annum. A housemaid normally received about £5 per annum. Elizabeth W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), pp. xx–xxi, 18–19, 254, 256, 258. Plummer, London Weavers’ Company, pp. 205–6. Bucholz and Key, Early Modern England, pp. 364–5. Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 131–2. Porter, English Society in the 18th Century, p. 43. Waller, 1700, p. 8.

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67 See Robert B.  Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850:  The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London and New  York:  Longman, 1998), pp. 12–14. 68 La Jonquière might have been married to Henry Jonquière, who appears as a foreign weaver in London in 1710. William Chapman Waller (ed.), Extracts from the Court Book of the Weavers’ Company of London, 1610–1730, Huguenot Society of London, Quarto series, 33 (Frome: Butler and Tanner, 1931), p.  63. Anon., Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, traduit en anglois sous le tître de Cry from the desart (London, 1708), p. 27. Comité François, Estat de la distribution de la somme … en 1705, pp.  13, 67. Anita Guerrini, ‘Cheyne, George (1671/2–1743)’, ODNB (2004); and Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), p.  79. David M.  Bertie, Scottish Episcopal Clergy, 1689–2000 (Edinburgh:  Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000), p. 97. Mary Grey Lundie Duncan, History of Revivals of Religion in the British Isles, Especially in Scotland (Edinburgh: William Oliphant, 1836), p. 395. 69 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 8.  Brand, p.  39. Duncan, History of Revivals, p. 399. See also appendix. 70 Keimer, A Search after Religion, p. 9; and Brand, p. 63. LPL, VX IA/11, fols 146–7. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 8. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 313. See also appendix. 71 Brand, p. 60. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 8. 72 Hélène Jurieu was regarded as a scholar by her contemporaries, who accused her of engaging her husband Pierre in the French Prophets in the belief that the Millennium was imminent. ‘Rev. de Superville to Rev. de la Mothe (Rotterdam, 18 Apr. 1711)’, in Winifred Turner (ed.), The Aufrère Papers:  Calendar and Selections, 1:80, Huguenot Society of ­London, Quarto Series, 40 (London: Huguenot Society of London, 1940), pp.  66–7. Although very little is known about Mrs Moreton, she was most likely a scholar, as women constituted a small minority of printers and printing required some level of education. Lady Calverley was close to The Revd Pierre Allix and Anglican divines, with whom she corresponded. Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertford (HALS), DE/P/F54. 73 Brand, pp. 3, 43. On the ‘mothers in Israel’, see Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 215–35. 74 Comité François, Estat de la distribution de la somme … en 1705, pp. 6, 13. See also appendix. 75 Brand, p. 61. Stack, 12g, fols 11–12. 76 See appendix. 77 Duncan, History of Revivals, p. 397. See also appendix. 78 Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, pp. 1–5. 79 Charras may have used her maiden name to preserve her reputation. She had been in a very precarious situation while in Geneva and Cachard

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accused her of making him drink and forcing him into marrying her in order to stop begging. Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, pp. 27–8. Comité François, Estat de la distribution de la somme … en 1705, p. 51. 80 See appendix. 81 See for instance ‘Ann Good et sa mère’, ‘Mrs. Harling et ses deux filles’, ‘Mrs. Hughes et sa fille’ and ‘Mrs. Madocks et ses deux filles’. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 8. See also appendix. 82 Rebecca Critchlow, Joanna Oxenbridge, Anne Finkley, Jeanne Raoux, Mary Emes, Marie Sterrill, Elizabeth Shovell, Isabel Hughes, Mrs Roberts, Mary Willis, Suzanne Devaux, Mary Calverley, Judith Misson, Arabella Moreton, Katherine Pringle and Elizabeth Keith of Caddom. 83 Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, pp. 27–8. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 8. John B. Hattendorf, ‘Shovell, Sir Cloudesley (bap. 1650, d. 1707)’, ODNB (2008). Comité François, Estats de la distribution de la somme … en 1706, p. 7. Marie Devaux married Jacques Portalès in 1711. Stack, 12g, fol. 2. 84 Archibald Lundie, for instance, said of Ann Topham:  ‘She is, as I  am informed, a very dull, ignorant creature, scarce able to speak any tolerable sense when free of those agitations.’ Duncan, History of Revivals, p. 394. The widow Hughes was also known to be illiterate; Brand, p. 62. 85 Woodward, The Copy of a Letter to Mr. F—. M—., pp. 6, 8–9. 86 I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 26. 87 Sarah Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Chapters 5–8, especially pp. 244–55. 88 Lacy, General Delusion, p. 504. Sarah Apetrei, ‘A “Remarkable Female of Womankind”:  Gender, Scripture, and Knowledge in the Writings of M.  Marsin’, in Sylvia Brown (ed.), Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 139–60 (p. 147). Julie Hirst, ‘ “Mother of Love”: Spiritual Maternity in the Works of Jane Lead’, in Brown, Women, Gender and Radical Religion, pp.  161–87 (pp. 167–8). 89 Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, pp. 144–6, 163–79. 90 Bodl., MS Rawlinson D833, fol. 56r. 91 Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion, p. 251. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, p. 156. 92 Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists: Comprising the Principal Events of the History of Protestant Dissenters from the Revolution in 1668 till 1760; and of the London Baptist Churches during That Period, Vol. III (London: B. J. Holdsworth, 1823), pp. 39–41. 93 Brand, pp. 53–4. AFSt, H D61, fols 404–7. 94 Schwartz, French Prophets, pp.  322–6. Clarke Garrett, Origins of the Shakers:  From the Old World to the New World (Baltimore:  Johns ­ ­Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 21, 45.

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95 Mirjam de Baar, ‘Conflicting Discourses on Female Dissent in the Early Modern Period:  The Case of Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680)’, L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, http://acrh.revues .org/1399. Julie Hirst, ‘Mother of Love’. Paula McDowell, ‘Enlightenment Enthusiasms and the Spectacular Failure of the Philadelphian Society’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35:4 (2002), 515–33. Anita Guerrini, ‘The Hungry Soul: George Cheyne and the Construction of Femininity’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:3 (1999), 279–91 (pp. 280, 282). 96 Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, p. 47. Mack, Visionary Women, p. 176. 97 Mack, Visionary Women, p. 234. 98 Phyllis Mack, ‘In a Female Voice:  Preaching and Politics in Eighteenth-Century British Quakerism’, in Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J.  Walker (eds), Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 248–60 (p. 255). Ruth Tucker and Walter L. Liefeld, Daughters of the Church: Women and Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1987), p. 240. 99 Peter Vogt, ‘A Voice for Themselves: Women as Participants in Congregational Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Movement’, in Kienzle and Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets, pp.  227–47 (pp. 229–30). 100 Keimer, A Search after Religion, p. 15; Brand, pp. 54, 63, 111. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 5 (27 July 1709). Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, pp. 168–9. 101 Chetham’s, Mun.A.4.33, fols 182–7. 102 Brand, p.  35. Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, pp.  19–20. Elizabeth Pleck, ‘Criminal Approaches to Family Violence, 1640–1980’, Crime and Justice, 11 (1989), 19–57 (p. 32). Margaret Hunt, ‘Wife Beating, Domesticity and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London’, Gender and History, 4:1 (Spring 1992), 10–33. 103 Anon., The French Prophets’ Mad Sermon, as Preacht since Their Sufferings at Their Several Assemblies Held in Baldwin’s Gardens, at Barbican, Pancras-Wells, and Several Other Places in and about London (London, 1708), p. 3. 104 Lacy, General Delusion, pp. 393–4. 105 Mack, ‘In a Female Voice’, p. 250; and Visionary Women, pp. 141, 174. Misson, A Cry from the Desart, 2nd edn, p. xvii. 106 Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets, p. 6. 107 George S.  Pidgeon, Spiritualism and Spirit Phenomena in 1707 (San Diego:  Pidgeon, 1890), p.  195. Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, p. 113. Stunt, ‘Lacy, John’. 108 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 7. Brand, p. 22. 109 A Collection of Advertisements Respecting the Regulation of Assemblies, and Containing the Rules of Discipline:  Wherein Are Comprehended

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Several Orders and Commands; Exhortations and Admonitions; and Instructions. And Some Examples of the Lord’s Jealousie (London, 1715). 110 Marion also expressed divergences with Lacy in a letter addressed to Fatio on 5 August 1707: BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fol. 241. 111 Wharton, Divine Inspiration, pp. 73, 81, 93. 112 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, index IV, fol. viii. 113 Whitrow had allegedly used some of Bulkeley’s money to purchase ‘a large Brick House with Brew House, Barn, Stable, and other Out-houses, several Gardens, with very good Fruit-Trees, 2 little Wood, in all 32 acres of Land Freehold … near Chasham in the County of Bucks, on a pleasant Hill’, which he put up for sale in 1714. The Post Boy, 2958 (22–4 April 1714). Almond, ‘John Mason and His Religion’, p. 156. 114 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, fols 431–2. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1318, fols 55–6. 115 BPF, MS 302, fols 4r–5r. 116 BPF, MS 302, fol. 4r. 117 Brand, p. 47. 118 O. E., The Shaking-Prophets Alarm’d, in Beholding a Lighted Candle, Taken from God’s Sanctuary: Or, a Bacon [sic] Fir’d on the Top of an Hill, to Give Men Light in the Night of Time. Being a Sober Warning, to the Publishers of Warnings, to Take Care of Deceiving, and Speaking Lies in the Name of the Lord (Dublin, 1711), p. 11. 119 Sarah Apetrei, ‘The “Sweet Singers” of Israel: Prophecy, Antinomianism and Worship in Restoration England’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 10:1 (2009), 3–23 (p. 12). 120 Lacy, General Delusion, pp. 137–8. On the conversion of the Jews as a prerequisite for the Second Coming, see the next chapter. 121 The first prophetic mission went to Enfield in February 1708 and therefore preceded the Prophets’ schism later that year. A second mission followed in March to Colchester, where Lacy, Gray and Dutton were invited to speak at Quaker, Baptist and Independent meetings, while Havy, Daudé and Fatio failed to meet with the local French Church. Their venue caused much turmoil in the city, forcing the group to return to London, while others were sent to Ipswich and encountered the same fate. Stack, 1j, fols 40–2. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 3 (8 and 16 March 1708). 122 Lacy retired with Betty Gray to Lancashire, ‘a cheap country to live in’, around the same time, and Bulkeley had been recently expelled for supporting Abraham Whitrow in his ‘levelling’ enterprise to redistribute money to the poorest members. Edmund Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, p. 113. Brand, pp. 34–5. 123 Brand, pp. 39, 71–2, 76. Stack, 1j, fols 40–51. 124 Chetham’s, Mun.A.2.114, fols 167–9, 179–82. 125 Chetham’s, Mun.A.4.33, fols 27, 34, 58, 73, 204, 211, 228, 248, 269, 277–8, 286, 288, 307, 326. 126 BPF, Ms. 302, fols 4r–5r. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 3–4.

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127 This figure does not include Betty Gray, who was already Lacy’s lover by then, and other women whose family relationship could not be established. BPF, MS 302, fols 4r–5r. 128 Brand, pp. 28, 42, 76. 129 Brand, p. 43. 130 Jacob was born on 15 January 1708 and Jerome in September 1709. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 3r–5. 131 Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 178–9. 132 Staatsarchiv des Kantons Bern (StAB), AII 631, no. 45, fols 491–3. 133 Anon., A Collection of Advertisements. 134 Brand, p. 57. Anon., A Collection of Advertisements, pp. 115, 121, 144. BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fols 216, 218; Ms. fr. 605/1, fol. 18. Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Fatio, Nicolas, of Duillier (1664–1753)’, ODNB (2004). BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fols 260–1. Stack, 1l, fol. 2. MMM, p. xiv. 135 BGE, Ms. fr. 2043a/28/4♢. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont:  Diary of Viscount Percival, Afterwards First Earl of Egmont, 3 vols (London: HM Stationery Office, 1920–23), Vol. I, p. 32. 136 Bristol seems to have been a religious battleground between later French Prophets and early Methodists. K. G. C. Newport, ‘Early Methodism and the French Prophets: Some New Evidence’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, 50:4 (1996), 127–40. See also Jonathan Barry, ‘Bristol as a “Reformation City” c. 1640–1780’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London: UCL Press, 1998), pp. 261–84. 137 Schwartz, French Prophets, pp. 202–10. 138 Anon., A Complete Guide to All Persons who Have Any Trade or Concern with the City of London, and Parts Adjacent, 2nd edn (London, 1740), p.  91. Armytage, ‘Camisards in London’, p.  474. Terrie Dopp Aamodt, ‘Wardley, Jane (fl. 1747–1770)’, ODNB (2004). 139 Douglas G. Greene, ‘Muggletonians and Quakers: A Study in the Interaction of Seventeenth-Century Dissent’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 15:2 (1983), 102–22 (p.  102). McDowell, ‘Enlightenment Enthusiasms’, p. 524. Watts, The Dissenters, p. 270. Mack, Visionary Women, p. 1. Porter, English Society in the 18th Century, p. 179. 140 The number registrations for dissenting houses was divided by three between 1710 and 1740. William Gibson, The Church of England, 1688–1832:  Unity and Accord (London and New  York:  Routledge, 2001), p. 93. James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 91–105. 141 ‘Seconde Lettre à l’auteur du Livre, intitulée, Histoire de la Vie des Trois Prophetes François, &c’, in anon., Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, pp. 1–2. Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions, p. 15. 142 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1973 [1972]).

3 The final reformation

Upon their arrival in London, Fage, Cavalier and Marion began prophesying in front of a small audience of Huguenot refugees and sympathisers with the French Protestant cause. They exhorted to immediate repentance and announced the fall of the Antichrist soon to be followed by Christ’s Second Coming – the Parousia. London, however, was not the Désert, and the transposition of their Cévenol ­prophetism into an English cosmopolitan refuge would naturally yield different reactions. England already had a long millenarian tradition by the turn of the eighteenth century and the Toleration Act of 1689 secured freedoms for religious dissenters that were unimaginable in France.1 The young Voltaire described England as ‘the country of sects’ during his exile in London in the late 1720s, and thirty years later The Connoisseur reported: ‘It is observed by the French, that a cat, a priest, and an old woman, are sufficient to constitute a religious sect in England.’2 However, these denominations were not culturally isolated and belonged to a wider European tradition. Many had their roots in the radical Reformation in which England often served as a fertile platform between the old Continent and the New World.3 The Reformation owed much to the printing press for facilitating the circulation of new ideas and beliefs that later generated a wave of creative, plebeian theologies during the English Revolution. New sects challenging the authority of the Church of England appeared virtually every year during this period and inevitably introduced a fierce competition for spiritual authority. Each of these sects sought to impose its own set of beliefs and practices by systematically condemning its rivals and predecessors as rogues and impostors, even though new sects were invariably compared to the previous ones.4 Half a century later, the French Prophets made no exception to this rule. On 7 January 1707, Marion prophesied:  ‘The abominable Sects shall be destroy’d. I  will purge out Iniquity: I will abolish their superstitious Ceremonies: I will

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rend the Vail that covers them  – that wraps them up in their own Ignorance.’5 In this context, the French Prophets’ attempt to reunite Christendom into a universal Church probably became the most challenging religious enterprise of its time. This chapter proposes to examine the place and impact of the French Prophets’ enthusiasm in the religious landscape of late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. After surveying England’s millenarian tradition since the Restoration, it first reviews the Prophets’ core beliefs and rituals before looking at their religious experiences and pretended miracles. If it will be seen that the French Prophets capitalised on a vibrant millenarian culture, this chapter argues that they should not be considered within a line of radical dissenters, but rather as an ecumenical movement whose enthusiasm inspired spiritualist revivals throughout the eighteenth century.

Le Pays des sectes The Restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England in 1660 had largely eradicated the religious turmoil of the preceding two decades. Whilst some sects had grown and secured a sufficiently large base to survive the Interregnum, the persecution of religious dissenters resumed under Charles II to reinforce the authority of the Anglican Church over Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Independents.6 From the 1670s, latitudinarians called for a broader religious unity between Anglicans and nonconformists among fears of French expansionism on the Continent and, worse still, of the Stuarts’ conversion to Catholicism. Years of passionate debates on religious tolerance, further fuelled by the Declaration of Indulgence (1672), the Popish and Rye House Plots (1679–82) and the Glorious Revolution (1688), as well as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France (1685) and its influx of Huguenot immigrants, contributed finally to the passing of the Toleration Act in May 1689. All Trinitarian Protestants were henceforth granted the right to worship in public, thereby appeasing tensions between Anglicans and nonconformists, while further marginalising religious radicalism (see Chapter 5).7 Still, visionaries, mystics and pseudo-messiahs continued to announce the Second Coming throughout the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution even prompted a new millenarian impetus that would last into the eighteenth-century.8 Joseph Mede’s Clavis apocalyptica (1627) was the landmark of seventeenth-century millenarianism both in England and on the Continent. His interpretation of the Revelation of St John led many to believe that the Second Coming

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was at hand and inspired several generations of exegetes as millenarianism appealed to wider audiences in the following decades.9 The self-proclaimed Jewish messiah Sabbatai Zevi received considerable publicity in England from 1669 to the early 1700s under these circumstances;10 but many English visionaries also emerged in the same period. The wealthy female mystic M. Marsin, for example, claimed she had been chosen by Christ himself to announce his return.11 Jesus allegedly appeared to Barbara Cadell in London in 1694.12 The Revd John Mason had the same vision in Water-Stratford; he believed the Millennium was to begin the same year and that he would live for another thousand years, while his two disciples, Thomas Ward and Valentine Evans, claimed to be the two witnesses of the Apocalypse (Revelation 11:3).13 Similarly, the Independent minister Thomas Beverley predicted the Second Coming for 1697, which the Origenist Thomas Moor(e) claimed to fulfil as the new Elijah until his condemnation for blasphemy in 1699.14 The Philadelphian Society for the Advancement of Divine Philosophy, named after the sixth church of Revelation 3:7–13, emerged in the same decade as the most prominent universalist movement of its time. Deeply influenced by the theosophy of the German mystic Jacob Boehme, introduced in England in the 1640s by John Pordage, the Philadelphians and their Continental network promoted a doctrine of ‘Universal Love’ and salvation, and sought to reconcile Judaeo-Christian denominations ahead of the Second Coming.15 They did not view themselves as a separate Church, but rather as an ecumenical religious society gravitating around the matriarchal figure of Jane Lead, a charismatic blind widow whose visions they translated and disseminated across Protestant nations. The Society collapsed after Lead’s death in 1704, but some of their most prominent figures still expected Christ’s millennial advent and became some of the French Prophets’ earliest supporters.16 Millenarianism was also widespread within Anglicanism throughout the seventeenth century, despite its effort to moderate atheism, enthusiasm and superstitions as a middle-way, rational Church.17 The Glorious Revolution undoubtedly marked the climax of Anglican apocalypticism. Clerics like Henry More, Edward Stillingfleet and Gilbert Burnet all regarded the Scriptures as accurate history.18 Many theologians regarded William III’s victory over James II as the fall of the Beast, and the advent of a Protestant king as a sign of Christ’s approaching return. After 1689, English millenarianism gradually shifted from domestic politics to the Continent, in the firm belief that England would soon play a role in the fall of Rome. Anglican divines

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such as William Lloyd, Thomas Tenison and John Tillotson, respectively Bishop of Worcester and Archbishops of Canterbury, regarded the war against France as the accomplishment of scriptural prophecies, as did Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester and future critic of the Prophets.19 Although it increasingly refrained from making dated predictions, Anglican apocalypticism nevertheless survived beyond 1700. Depending on when they located the beginning of the Antichrist’s 1,260-prophetic-day or calendar-year reign, usually during the rise of the Catholic Church in the fourth or fifth century, some believed the Parousia would take place in the eighteenth century.20 William Lloyd, for example, remained obsessed with the Apocalypse and calculated the New Age to begin in 1715.21 Likewise, the mathematician and theologian William Whiston, Newton’s disciple and successor in Cambridge in 1702, first predicted that the Millennium would begin in 1716 and then by 1766.22 Newton himself did not expect it until at least 2060.23

Creed The Millennium and beyond In the context of such a long millenarian tradition shared, as we have seen, by both Anglicans and dissenters, the appeal of the French Prophets did not so much reside in their ability to introduce a new eschatology, but rather in their conflation of the doctrinal ingredients of their predecessors. Like most early modern enthusiasts, the French Prophets were pre-millenarians:  they believed the Antichrist’s reign would soon end with Christ’s return on earth inaugurating his thousand-year reign.24 However, such chronological expectations should also be examined in light of their wider apocalyptic framework. Hillel Schwartz has distinguished for this matter four millenarian ethe within Christian eschatology, each offering a different answer to the problems of personal autonomy and social cohesion that every religious group must face within a coherent, yet not too restricted, symbolic system. Accordingly, the ethos of Judgement stresses the importance of a virtuous social cohesion before God’s final sentence. Its inverse, the Pentecostal ethos, emphasises an individual relationship with God through inward spiritual gifts. The ethos of cataclysm is concerned with the precariousness of the material world and the search for personal redemption on the model of the apostolic Church. By contrast, the communal ethos of the New Jerusalem seeks to establish a universal Church in

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preparation for the millennium, in which one’s redemption depends upon that of the entire community.25 No millenarian group fits neatly into a single category of this complex Christian universe, although Schwartz contends that ‘most millenarians conflate the restorative and retributive’.26 This was also true of the French Prophets, as we shall see, for the Camisards’ appeal to English millenarians turned them into a bilingual and denominationally diverse group, whose spiritual aspirations would ultimately clash. Perceptions of the Millennium varied considerably with their politico-religious framework. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes instilled the ethos of the New Israel among Huguenot exiles, whose collective works subsequently contributed to their prosperity and the establishment of a French Protestant merchant and banking network across Europe.27 By contrast, as we saw in Chapter  1, the Camisards’ martial background was animated by a cataclysmic ethos, in which they embraced martyrdom as an integral part of their faith. They had preached in the Désert the tenets of the Apocalypse, interpreted the contemporary political balance of powers in light of Jurieu’s L’Accomplissement des prophéties and compared their own fate to that of the Jews long before the war in the Cévennes.28 Their belief in martyrdom found its source in the fifth seal of Revelation 6:9–11 and entailed numerous sacrifices before the fall of the Antichrist. Inspired by Brousson’s Passion in 1698, Camisard martyrs had offered an elevated Platonic response to the materialistic preoccupations of their persecutors inflicting physical pain at the stake. In sum, executioners may crush bodies, but they remained powerless against defiant souls. Once in England, Fage and Cavalier delivered sporadic millenarian inspirations announcing the fall of the Beast, but Marion was visited daily by the Spirit with increasingly bellicose announcements, as he originally hoped to raise an army of Huguenot refugees to return to the Cévennes.29 On 18 September 1706, only two days after his arrival, Marion prophesied: ‘Prepare thy self to depart within a short time out of this Country, and go to thy Brethren, to fight there more than ever.’30 Judging from the small number of followers at the end of 1706, Marion’s call did not resonate well with exiled Huguenots.31 If the prophetic spirit of the Cévennes may be understood as a cry of protest against an oppressive force, it became largely irrelevant to new audiences when transposed into the Refuge, where his vocalisers appeared both out of place and out of date. The survival of the Spirit thus depended upon his adaptability and self-transcendence into a more receivable millenarianism.32

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Only when they faced the growing hostility of Huguenot ministers and made their first British converts did the Camisards embrace the utopian ethos of the New Jerusalem, which Marion first identified as London in September 1707.33 As a prerequisite for the Second Coming, he had already prophesied: I will, in a little time, open the Eyes of the Jewish Nation: They shall be the first I will call to the Knowledge of me: Their Captivity shall not be long: I come to break their Chains. I remember, I tell thee, the Covenant, which I have made with their Fathers; I  come to renew it, my Child:  I  come to take away the Vail, that is before their Eyes, and to bring them into my Church. They have separated themselves from it; but I come out of Pity to gather them again, and join them (to it).34

The Camisards’ philo-Semitism largely developed from their international encounters in London. It did not belong to their bellicose rhetoric in the Cévennes, and Jurieu had hitherto warned that only miracles would bring Jews to Christianity.35 The conversion of the Jews, especially since their readmission in 1656, had become a mainstream millenarian belief in England equally anticipated by Boyle, Newton, M. Marsin, Thomas Moor(e) or the Masonites around the turn of the eighteenth century.36 The arrival of British followers opened at last the prospect of a universal Church for the Camisards and, with it, that of the Parousia. Richard Bulkeley believed the call of the Jews was at hand;37 John Lacy attended the Presbyterian congregation of Edmund Calamy, who preached the same;38 Rebecca Critchlow, Richard Roach and the Philadelphians already anticipated the imminent conversion of the Jews, as did James Keith, Pierre Poiret’s correspondent for the circulation of Quietist literature in London.39 The immanent universality of the True Church as announced by the French Prophets rapidly found an echo within a confessionally partitioned yet volatile English society. As we saw in Chapter 2, the participation and growing support of Bulkeley and Lacy in the winter of 1706–07 brought an influx of English supporters from the following spring, as the Spirit now addressed them in their native tongue.40 The group began indeed to attract Huguenots, Anglicans, Philadelphians, Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, Quietists, Roman Catholics and Jews alike.41 Little is known about the latter’s involvement in London, save perhaps for the appearance of one Mr Israel and his wife on one of the Prophets’ lists. They may have been part of the Sabbatean entourage of Rabbi H￸akham Solomon Aailion (c. 1660–1728), even though further research is needed here.42

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The French Prophets’ appeal to such a denominationally diverse and spiritually insatiable audience provided some answers beyond the bounds and strictures of their respective churches. Historians have shown that there was a great degree of interaction and conversion among early sects like the Ranters and the Quakers, for example.43 The French Prophets likewise reflected the confessional volatility of their time: Nicolas Fatio had been successively known as a Spinozist and a Socinian before joining the Prophets;44 their printer Samuel Keimer was raised a Presbyterian, but became Quaker, a Baptist before returning to Quakerism after adhering to the Prophets. Other followers like Mary Rigby and Robert Eaton even converted to Roman Catholicism after leaving the group.45 The eighteenth-century religious landscape proved deeply unsettled and its floating theological boundaries reveal the existence of dissent within dissent, which largely accounts for both the Prophets’ success and their demise.46 Like the Philadelphians shortly before them, the French Prophets were universalists and displayed no separatist ambition. They assembled as an open congregation devoid of any explicit rules and presented themselves as an ecumenical religious society addressing the entire Judaeo-Christian community. Many followers flitted between two religious environments, attending the Prophets’ assemblies alongside their regular services, as with Marion, Cavalier and Fage until their excommunication by the French Church of the Savoy on 30 March 1707.47 Daniel le Tellier and his wife Marie, Pierre Dubuc, Jeanne and Madeleine Raoux and Isaac Havy were also banned from communion in August and September 1707 for the same reason.48 James Jackson, Mary Turner, Isabel Hughes and Anne Steed were likewise expelled from the Quakers in 1708 for supporting the Prophets.49 The great proportion of Anglican and Philadelphian followers among their ranks suggests their non-sectarian nature.50 Yet with the exception of Jean Lions and a few other ministers reluctant to repudiate them, the French Prophets remained ironically stigmatised as a new sect they never intended to form.51 Although French and English Prophets struggled to merge their denominational components into a homogeneous cult, they were nevertheless largely driven by their anti-establishmentarianism. Enthusiasts typically targeted institutional religion on the basis that it relied on human doctrines and ceremonies rather than personal revelation and experience.52 Churches were accordingly artificial and therefore corrupt. Marion and his compatriots concentrated their attacks on the Roman Catholic Church for persecuting Protestants in Languedoc, but Maximilien Misson also accused the Huguenot Church of the

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Savoy in London of being manipulated by the Church of England.53 Several pamphleteers noted the group’s particular contempt for the Anglican Church since Lacy’s spiritual ascension in June 1707, with one Prophet asking about its ministers: ‘You say the Devil is Black, (or you paint him so) but why will you wear his Colour?’.54 As they envisioned an anti-establishmentarian New Jerusalem, the French Prophets always retained a mystical focus. Most dissenters of the English Revolution had beforehand attempted to transpose their spiritual views into the temporal world to reform it ahead of the Second Coming. Christopher Hill has argued that ‘collective manuring of the common lands was a religious act for the Diggers’;55 the Levellers likewise shook contemporary social rules with their campaign against primogeniture in the name of equal rights, and the Fifth Monarchists even justified the use of physical violence to restore power to the people.56 Similarly, the Quakers’ objections to swearing oaths or paying tithes may be understood as a form of political protest.57 Yet this is precisely where the French Prophets drew a line, emphasising religious experience over worldly reforms. Shortly after the failure of Emes’s resurrection in 1708, Abraham Whitrow sparked the Prophets’ first schism, having persuaded Sir Bulkeley to redistribute his wealth to their poorer brethren until he had dilapidated his fortune by 1710.58 Unconcerned by the perfectibility of the physical world, the Prophets immediately expelled him and ascribed his ‘levelling’ enterprise to the Antichrist.59 Few enthusiasts expressed so little interest in temporal matters before the French Prophets. The Ranters, Familists and Muggletonians might come to mind as seventeenth-century precedents, but the former two indulged in antinomian sins whilst the latter were no millenarians.60 An anonymous pamphlet hitherto unattributed to the French Prophets illustrates the extent of their contempt for the world they lived in. An Alarm to the Christian Church, probably written under the Camisards’ cataclysmic impulse, reasserted the threat of God’s punitive Judgement against earthly pleasures such as food and alcohol, buying and selling, and even marriage.61 Despite the excesses discussed in Chapter 4, the Prophets proved very conservative in their attitudes toward sexuality. Some (Lacy, Bulkeley, Thomas Cotton, John Hooke) also belonged to the Societies for the Reformation of Manners or the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), which respectively worked to suppress vice by taking prostitutes, homosexuals and alcoholics to court, and supported the evangelisation of pagans abroad.62 Indecent behaviour was often sanctioned during the Prophets’ assemblies. The Spirit through the notoriously austere Guy Nutt

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once reproved a ‘carnal woman’ and ordered ‘one of their Society, then Agitated, to take her by the Hair of the Head, and pull her out of the Room, as a Punishment for her Offence’.63 The equation made by some Prophets between sex and consumerism, marriage and commerce, may be at the origin of the Shakers’ belief in celibacy. For several prominent members – Fage, Marion, Fatio, Misson, Francis Moult, James Cuninghame … – never married, and the group also attracted a strong proportion of widows.64 Yet their condemnation of marriage as a trade emphasised above all the corruption and precariousness of material society. As Chapter 2 showed, many wealthy followers spent their fortunes away as an enthusiastic renouncement of a world they believed would soon end. Although often amalgamated as examples of England’s religious plurality, the contrast between the Prophets and earlier millenarian cases reflects in reality two distinct traditions, delineated by radical dissent on the one hand, and western esotericism on the other. Whereas Interregnum sects engaged in social reforms and generally belonged to the lower classes, the mystics of the turn of the eighteenth century – Philadelphians, Marsin, Mason, Beverley, Moor(e) – were instead generally wealthier and more educated. They remained exclusively concerned with the spiritual world, the Kabbalah, alchemy and prognostication, in which Behmenist theosophy played a prominent role. The French Prophets may be viewed to a limited extent as part of the latter tradition. They adopted the nuptial rhetoric of Christ’s mystical wedding to his Church and aspired above all to the restitution of all things – the doctrine of apokatastasis  – a central Behmenist belief mediated through the Philadelphians.65 Yet they never at any point in their writings acknowledged the works of Boehme, Pordage or Lead and instead directly placed themselves in the footsteps of the early Church Fathers. Unsatisfied with the religious divisions of their time, they sought to finish the work of Luther and Calvin to re-form primitive Christendom – Lacy presented seventy theses in defence of prophecy and the early Church – and ultimately restore Mankind to its prelapsarian state of perfection.66 Yet this mystical symbiosis with the Philadelphians also had its limits, for the French Prophets with Camisard impetus still subordinated the loving communal spirit of the New Jerusalem to God’s ineluctable wrath, leading the two movements eventually to clash.

The new Quakers The French Prophets may have provided a natural outlet to the Philadelphians, but critics always compared them to the early Quakers.

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Their claims to divine inspiration not only seemed to echo the Friends’ ‘Inner Light’ doctrine, but the Prophets’ spectacular agitations also resembled their eponymous shakings. Incidentally, it is worth noting that French Quakerism first appeared with the Benezet family in Calvisson in the Cévennes during the Camisards’ uprising, although the former rejected the use of violence and did not take part in the hostilities; today the nearby village of Congénie still hosts France’s first and only Quaker meeting house.67 If the Benezets’ later interactions with the Camisards in London remain unclear, the French Prophets certainly capitalised on the English Quaker heritage. The Scot James Cuninghame reckoned that ‘there was some good in the beginning of that sect’ in a letter to his Quietist friend Dr George Garden.68 Frederick Beiser’s definition of the prophet as an exegete can only highlight the conspicuous absence of a proper doctrine here.69 Many, like the Presbyterian minister Edmund Calamy, regarded them as mere impostors gathering on no theologically defensible ground, and Calamy asked in a sermon:  ‘And what have we more in their Warnings, but I’ll tell thee, my Child, I’ll tell thee, I’ll tell thee, My Child, my Child, a thousand times over, where all that is told, is no more than every Man knows already.’70 John Lacy himself admitted that: ‘This mission brings no new doctrine with it, nor advances any thing dissonant from the Scriptures.’71 The Prophets’ mission was intended as one of reconciliation and restoration, hence their appeal to earlier proponents of religious experience. The older generation was indeed struck by their similarities to the first Quakers. Eighty-six-year-old John Humfrey not only accused the Prophets of stealing their doctrine by announcing the Parousia, but also compared their naked church performances to the Friends’ early Adamite habits.72 More to the point, the Prophets actively reached out to the Quakers, meeting with William Penn in February 1708 and gaining the precious and unconditional support of Benjamin Furly the same year.73 They emerged at a critical time in the Quakers’ history and reminded them of their convulsive origins, when the latter had largely moved away from ecstatic religious experiences over the previous twenty years. The ex-Quaker William Rogers emphasised these theological resemblances to defend the Prophets’ legitimacy against his former coreligionists.74 Another former Quaker, the Prophetess Anne Steed, had a compelling vision in 1708, representing Theodore Eggleton, George Whitehead, William Bingley, John Field, William Warren, George Owner, William Penn, John Butcher and Samuel Waldenfield as fallen rulers mourning over heaps of Quaker corpses.75 By then, the Quakers counted some 40,000–50,000 members and had largely abandoned

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their original ecstatic state, some even denouncing the Prophets’ agitations, which arguably further isolated them as enthusiasts in the early eighteenth-century Protestant landscape.76

Baptism Baptism proved a particularly divisive issue in the adhesion process to the Prophets’ movement. Huguenots had traditionally minimised the importance of baptism, even more so in Languedoc, where many disregarded its value for salvation.77 Some French Prophets, however, continued to attach a great importance to the first sacrament within their original Church. In September 1707, Daniel le Tellier presented his son Samuel to be baptised by the ministers of the Huguenot Church of the Artillery, who refused to deliver the sacrament as long as his father did not abjure the Prophets. Samuel was not baptised until 27 January 1709, when the Spirit ordered le Tellier and Isaac Havy to christen him themselves with his newborn sister Elisabeth. The ritual took place in one of the Prophets’ assemblies, during which le Tellier and Havy washed the children’s heads and feet under inspiration.78 Meanwhile, and by contrast, newborn Jacob Allut was merely blessed in the name of the Spirit by Marion in January 1708, who simply laid his hands upon him in lieu of a formal christening.79 English followers of the Prophets diverged considerably on the first sacrament according to their religious backgrounds. Benjamin Steele, for instance, had his son baptised in the Anglican Church, while the former Quaker Samuel Keimer rejected infant baptism as a human invention unknown to early Christians of the first and second centuries;80 and when Thomas Dutton sent for a minister to baptise his daughter Martha in January 1708, ‘the Spirit, by his Maid, who was inspired, prohibited him, crying out, Let no Black-Coats come here’;81 Instead, Lacy merely blessed the child and declared: The Mysteries of ye Kingdom are not yet known. Ye are but Babes, & cannot bear them. The Doors of my House, are not yet Open. But such a solemn Entrance into them, shal be given, as exceeds what is Now Known or Practic’d. Baptizing & Receiving the Holy Ghost, none knows now how it is practicable with Infants. Nor, what that means, of being Baptiz’d soe, as to be invested with a Title to ye First Resurrection. I do not now, Acquaint you herewith.82

Unlike the Philadelphians, who remained attached to the first sacrament, the Prophets generally overlooked baptism as necessary for salvation and blessed instead their newcomers by laying-on of hands on their heads.83 Here again, their defiance of the liturgy proved

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reminiscent of the Quakers; they denied for the most part the validity of baptism delivered by uninspired ministers as a spiritual passport to heaven.84 One anonymous pamphleteer suggested a more pragmatic explanation for the Prophets’ ambiguous position over baptism, which he regarded as an ecumenical strategy to attract the greatest number of followers without the prospect of conversion: systematic baptism would lose its appeal to the Quakers, infant sprinkling to the Baptists and adult immersion to the Pædobaptists.85 The French Prophets’ substitution of a symbolic blessing for formal baptism derived from Hebrews 6:2 and was equally performed by men and women. It was universal by essence, open to Christians, Jews and Gentiles alike, a view they shared with the Origenist Thomas Moor(e).86 The Prophets considered it a duty to bless all nations before the Second Coming and for that reason welcomed virtually anyone, even the unbaptised, much to their opponents’ outrage.

Salvation Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of the Prophets’ theology, albeit consistent with their universal outreach, was their rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.87 They shared with the Quakers, Thomas Moor(e), the Philadelphians and, to a partial extent, the Muggletonians, the belief in universal salvation and therefore stood in this respect at the very end of the Protestant spectrum.88 Salvation could allegedly be earned through free will rather than personal election, but it could never be taken for granted by anyone, not even the most charismatic Prophets.89 John Potter under inspiration once interrupted an assembly ‘crying out with a thundering Voice, GRACE, GRACE, GRACE’, and handed pieces of paper to the audience that read:  ‘Here’s your Pardon purchas’d by the Blood of the Lamb, for all your Sins past to this Day. Sign’d and seal’d by the Great Jehovah.’90 Christian theology distinguished between sanctifying grace, the gift by which one became fit for salvation through the virtues of faith, hope, justice and charity; and edifying grace, which enabled its recipient to teach others through prophecy, glossolalia or thaumaturgy. The first form was commonly shared across Christendom, while the second belonged to biblical times, but was also claimed by early modern enthusiasts.91 Drawing upon a steady British Behmenist tradition of universal love and salvation, the French Prophets offered, in other words, a Protestant alternative to Roman Catholicism  – an etymologically universal Church – through their defence of individual merit against predestination.92 Yet critics saw in the Prophets’ redemptive

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latitude evidence of their loose morals and lack of requirements for admitting newcomers who, in their view, consisted predominantly of ‘Atheists, Papists, Quakers, Anti-Scripturalists, Socinians, Rantars [sic], Muggletonians and Debauchees’.93 Such accusations only reflected the Prophets’ unconditional outreach to social rejects and antinomians. Several belonged to the Societies for the Reformation of Manners or to the SPG and took pride in turning the ‘dissolute’ into devout servitors of God.94 As part of their ecumenical ambition, conversion did not entail adherence to a strictly codified doctrine, but rather to a few basic Christian beliefs and principles espoused through individual revelation and sanctioned by a blessing.

The Eucharist The sacrament of communion may be read as the cursor that the Prophets placed between their ecumenical aspirations and the limits of their universalism. Although French followers continued to attend church services until their excommunication, the group did not celebrate the Eucharist in public assemblies.95 Instead, they regularly held exclusive meetings or ‘love feasts’, during which real bread and wine were given to ‘select Companies’, who then proceeded to wash each others’ feet.96 This ritual was based on the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:17–34 and John 13:4–15) and became a recurrent practice among the group as a sign of brotherly love. It also rarified the Reformation celebration of the regular communal Eucharist to elevate it to an occasional spiritual privilege.97 Once Lacy even went a step further by taking the holy sacrament to a strictly Platonic level. During a retreat at Bushy on 6 August 1707, he celebrated the Eucharist with empty dishes before prominent members (Fatio, Bulkeley, Betty Gray, Jean Allut and his wife Henriette) in an attempt to wean his brethren from the earthly elements he deemed ‘flattering the Palate, and spoiling the Stomach’.98 As he completely eradicated the magic of transubstantiation from the Eucharist, Lacy sought to strengthen their faith for future trials. Indeed, this celebration occurred while Marion, Fatio and Daudé were being prosecuted for blasphemy (see Chapter 5) and was never replicated afterwards. None of the original three Camisards participated in this retreat, and Marion remained perplexed by its motivations.99 Back in London, the Prophets abandoned their Eucharistic experiment and returned to bread and wine to be shared among privileged brethren. Either way, the Prophets’ Eucharistic model predated the Reformation and found its origin among primitive Christians who,

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according to Jurieu, only celebrated communion outside the church to commemorate Christ’s sacrifice at home before dinner.100

The Montanist precedent The paradigm of primitive Christianity for both Camisards and French Prophets resided in Montanism, a second-century heresy that counterposed the centrality of prophecy and religious experience against the growing institutionalisation and hierarchisation of the Catholic Church. Named after the prophet Montanus, self-proclaimed Paraclete, the Montanists emerged in Phrygia in AD 157 to perpetuate the ecstatic culture of ancient prophets at a time when the biblical canon was being compiled. They defended the gift of tongues and the reality of miracles, and offered a prominent place to charismatic women such as the prophetesses Priscilla, Maximilla and Quintilla. Reading the book of Revelation (3:7–13), written only half a century earlier, they believed in the continuation of miracles rather than a distant Parousia, and expected the imminent foundation of the New Jerusalem in Pepouza, which became an important pilgrimage site until AD 550.101 Their heterogeneous and gender-balanced movement rapidly spread across Asia Minor and north Africa in defiance of ecclesiastical authority; it conflated Jewish rites with Christian millenarianism, a hybrid theological equation that saw them alternatively portrayed as uncircumcised Jews or Christian Judaists. In their own way, the Montanists reconciled the Old and New Testaments and died as palaeochristian martyrs for challenging Catholic orthodoxy.102 The Montanists’ legacy was rediscovered at the Reformation as Protestants revisited early Christian writings. Pierre Jurieu referred to Tertullian, Church Father and Montanist convert, to demonstrate how the Catholic Church had allegedly corrupted the sacrament of baptism at the end of the second century.103 Palaeo-Christian fraternity and martyrdom could be observed a few years later in the Cévennes mountains, where women prophesied among the Camisards within a spiritually egalitarian and self-governed community.104 Montanism had already impacted England by 1700, where ecstatic inspirations had translated into the eponymous Quakers. But more to the point, it was among the Philadelphian Society that the Montanist influence could mostly be felt. Indeed, their ecumenical movement was named after the ancient city of Philadelphia (today Alasehir), where Montanism had emerged upon the promise of an imminent New Jerusalem in the letter to that church (Revelation 3:7–13). That the Philadelphians

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announced the conversion of the Jews ahead of the Parousia should come as no surprise, nor should the publication of the first history of Montanism in 1709 by Francis Lee, Jane Lead’s son-in-law.105 Whilst Lee never joined the French Prophets and had left the remaining Philadelphians, the latter rehabilitated the Montanist precedent as evidence of divine miracles beyond the apostolic era.106 The Montanist paradigm is therefore key to understanding the Prophets’ ecumenism and, more importantly for the remaining part of this chapter, their enthusiastic approach to Christianity, which they allegedly practised as it existed after Jesus’s death.

Praxis The cessationist debate The central argument on which the French Prophets and other enthusiasts based their legitimacy lay in the practice of Christianity in the immediate post-apostolic age. Looking in particular at the Corinthian and Montanist churches, they argued that prophecy remained a key component of primitive Christianity for at least three centuries. This went against the cessationist stance of the Catholic Church under Constantine, which ruled that spirit possessions had ended with the apostles in the first century.107 John Lacy’s revisionist take on the foundations of Christianity directly questioned the legitimacy of the Papacy. He accused Rome of usurping its authority by deliberately excluding post-apostolic writings from the Canon as a pretext to subdue true Christians and persecute them as heretics. Written in the same prophetic vein as the book of Revelation, the epistles of Clement and Barnabas, the visions of Hermas or the Montanist prophecies belonged in his view to the tenets of the early Church, leaving the New Testament as a truncated Christian narrative.108 Lacy’s charge was also directed by extension at Protestant churches whose semi-Reformed tameness or cowardice, in his view, had led them to reject the true  – enthusiastic – essence of their faith.109 From there it ensued that Christianity was originally a religion of experience or experiences, rather than a human institution ruling over a supposedly perfectible world. Although the Church of England maintained the cessationist position of the Reformation, the question of modern prophecies and miracles was never entirely clear-cut. For Anglican ministers still exorcised demons, and Queen Anne likewise continued to touch for scrofula until her death in 1714.110 Once a cessationist himself, despite his aforementioned chronological objections, Lacy ascribed the

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decline of enthusiasm to the reign of the Antichrist and argued that this period of divine silence had now come to an end.111 Without going into details, he referred to the enthusiastic effervescence and the readmission of the Jews during the Interregnum as evidence that England was the chosen country for the Second Coming. This was further corroborated by the recent arrival in London of the prophet Elias (Marion), the harbinger of the Messiah (Matthew 17:11).112 International events also seemed to confirm that prophecy was now alive and well again. The Prophets pointed at foreign cases of enthusiastic manifestations, such as the Camisards in the Désert; the Swedish maidservant, Ester Jönsdotter, fasting for seven years; or the infant prophets in Silesia, as further evidence that God had resumed his activity on earth.113 These simultaneous manifestations in Protestant territories suggested that the Parousia was approaching and convinced the Prophets to resurrect Christian enthusiasm where the Montanists had left it. In Richard Bulkeley’s own words, the French Prophets represented what the Church ‘never dream’d of, and what they are unwilling to believe’.114

Spiritual Instruments As its etymology implies, the essence of enthusiasm lay primarily in its incorporation of the Spirit – pneuma –, whose manifestations ranged, for example, from ecstatic trances and convulsions (possession) to speaking in tongues (glossolalia) or parasensory experiences (dreams and visions).115 The diversity and complexity of these manifestations throughout Christian history makes it difficult to sort them into strict, objective categories. The study of enthusiasm – or religious experience, to use a less derogatory term  – is interdisciplinary by nature and therefore prone to methodological issues precisely because of its contested nature. In a recent article, Ann Taves weighed the benefits and drawbacks of detachment and engagement for cultural historians, anthropologists, theologians and psychiatrists in defining particular forms of spirituality. If historians of enthusiasm can borrow from other disciplines, they inevitably remain dependent upon the former approach because of the rarity and bias of extant sources, as well as the pejorative connotations originally attached to the word itself.116 Enthusiasm, as defined in the introduction, was an early modern derogatory term for religious experience. It was by nature subjective, multifarious and consequently prone to contestation, not only from an external perspective, but also within a given community such as

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the French Prophets. As Durand Fage explained, body language varied considerably among his brethren: God has diffused upon us various Gifts, and as it has pleas’d him to send us a Diversity of Graces, it has also been his good Pleasure, that there be not only somewhat of more or less, but Variety too, in the Extasies of those who are Partakers of the self same Gift; every individual Person is different in his Agitations, according to the Circumstances and Nature of those things, he is to pronounce; but all those who speak by Inspiration have this in common, which is (as I have already observ’d) that the Words are formed in their Mouth, without any Purpose or Direction on their Part; in like manner, is their Body moved by an over-ruling Influence, unto the Power of which their several Members are yeilded [sic] up.117

Since divine manifestations appeared in the Cévennes, the Prophets had claimed to be inhabited by the same Spirit that had visited the biblical prophets Isaiah, Elijah and Daniel, and even Balaam’s donkey.118 During these pneumatic possessions, the Spirit allegedly took full control of their bodies and used them as communicative vessels or intermediaries to demonstrate its supernatural power over the physical world. This translated in their case, for example, into ‘Gulpings, Sighings, Sobbings, Groanings, Hiccuppings, Heavings, Shakings of the whole Body, and inarticulate Voices, and mimical Gestures and Postures, and Repetitions of the same things a great many times over.’119 Such symptoms may be regarded as the successful transposition of the prophetic culture of the Désert to the streets of London but, as Garrett reminds us, they essentially perpetuated ‘a distinctively Protestant form of spirit possession’ that spanned from sixteenth-century Germany to nineteenth-century New England.120 The overpowering force with which the Spirit seized the Prophets’ bodies effectively reduced them to the condition of empty vessels conveying the word of God.121 The intensity of these possessions tended to be inversely proportional to the physical weakness of the subjects, for example women, children and the sick. Enthusiasts typically suffered lapses of consciousness; their minds became momentarily dissociated from their bodies, which the Spirit animated as his passive ‘Instruments’, a term largely used by the Quakers and many seventeenth-century mystics.122 Marion’s description of his pneumatic experiences is a case in point here: When the Spirit of God is about to seize me, I feel a great Heat in my Heart and the Parts adjacent; which sometimes has a shivering of my whole Body going before it; At other times I am seized all at once, without having any such

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preceeding Notice. As soon as I find my self seized, my Eyes are instantly shut up, and the Spirit causes in me great Agitation of Body, making me to put forth of great Sighs and Throbbings, which are cut short, as if I were labouring for Breath. I  have also frequently very hard Shocks; but yet  all this is without Pain, and without hindering me of the Freedom of thinking. I continue thus about a Quarter of an Hour, more or less, before I  utter one Word. At last I feel that the Spirit forms in my Mouth the Words which he will have me to pronounce, which are almost always accompanied with some Agitations, or extraordinary Motions, or at least with a great Constraint. Sometimes it is so, that the first Word that I am to speak next, is already formed in my own Idea; but I  am very often ignorant how that very Word will end which the Spirit has already begun. And it has happened sometimes, that when I thought I was going to pronounce a Word, or a Sentence, it proved to be only a mere inarticulate Sound that was formed by my Voice. During all the time of these Visits I always feel my Spirit extreamly enlarged toward my God.123

The French Prophets’ possessions surpassed their predecessors’ by their corporeal intensity and the bizarreness of the symptoms displayed. The Spirit evidently took over every part of his Instrument’s body and played it to a millennial tune. This mediation between the spiritual and the temporal remained essentially oral and visual, although John Lacy and Jean Allut were also known to have performed automatic writing under inspiration.124 Similar manifestations were common practice in the early Church, among both the Corinthians and the Montanists, for instance, or even St Paul, whom the Prophets proudly labelled an enthusiast for his ecstasies and gift of tongues.125 Collective memory, however, only stretched as far back as the early Quakers a few decades earlier, and for many the Prophets produced carbon copies of their eponymous agitations. Still, if the general consensus seemed that the Prophets out-quaked the Quakers, their trances differed in nature. For where the latter’s enthusiasm expressed an intimate relationship with God, the Spirit did not likewise communicate to the Prophets, but through them, thereby annihilating individual identity to channel the divine.126 Pneumatic possessions did not merely convey the presence of the Holy Spirit, but generally announced a mystical promotion. Bodily emotions, as the Prophets called them, reinforced one’s faith by their visible effects due to climax in the gift of prophecy.127 On the other hand, mental dissociation from physical incorporation excluded individual responsibility from any controversial word or deed as it involved temporary amnesia.128 The altered state of consciousness of spirit possessions implies a de-possession of the self, what anthropologists call the ‘soul-loss’.129 When the Spirit plays his Instrument, the

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Figure 2.  The English and French Prophets Mad or Bewitcht [sic], at Their Assemblies in Baldwins-Gardens, on Wednesday the 12th, of November … (London, 1707). The ‘Explanation of the Cut’ reads as follows: A. The French Prophet stamping with his Foot. B. Benjamin Jackson, Writing what they all say. C. The other Writer. D. Sir Richard Buckley, to be made straight by the Power of the Prophets in 6 Months. E. Master Dutton the Lawyer. F. Mr. Lacy shaking his Head. G. G. Converts not yet come to the full Spirit of Prophecy. H. H. H. Spectators. I. A little Boy being about 10 Years of Age being disturb’d, fell a Cursing the People, and threw himself on the Ground upon his Belly. K. A Young Female Prophet of Seven Years of Age. L. Mrs. Betty Gray sitting at a Table with a Dove, which flew upon her Shoulder; she is termed among the Prophets an Angel of Light.

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prophet loses consciousness and with it his memory.130 Both Cavalier and Lacy claimed to have no recollection of their inspirations, while Marion remained in a semi-conscious state – epipnoia – sufficient to correct his scribes’ minutes.131 Freed from personal responsibility by the Spirit, the Prophets’ agitations and extravagance rapidly spread to new recruits of all ages, sexes and social rank from the summer of 1707, such as John Potter, Betty Gray, Abraham Whitrow, John Glover, Mary Keimer, Anna Maria King, Mary Beer and thirteen-year-old Ned. One Prophet, for example, was seen ‘shaking his fingers as if he had no Joints’, and Lacy was reported ‘shaking his head as if he was mad’ (see Figure  2).132 Disjointed bodies seemingly transcended the laws of nature and aroused both fear and fascination among the community: even Bulkeley and Misson acknowledged the peculiarity of such manifestations, although the presence of agitated children, like five-year-old Marthe Vergnon, clearly reinforced their faith.133 Children and ignorant women embodied an innocence that could not but accredit the group’s extravagances. With children shaking, convulsions remained extraordinary, yet more believable.

Tongues and voices Whilst the Prophets claimed passively to vocalise divine speech, not all of them prophesied in the same manner. The first assemblies in the summer of 1706 reveal different processes of intermediation before Marion’s arrival in London. Both Fage and Cavalier originally invoked the Spirit to imbue their bodies in a shamanic style, whereas later Instruments insisted they were visited against their will. Fage’s incantations were particularly explicit: ‘Endors l’Esprit de la Chair, afin que je ne puisse prononcer aucune Parole que par ton Esprit &c. Que ma Langue s’attache à mon palais, plûtôt que je ne prononce aucune Parole, qui ne vienne de ta Volonté’, whereupon he was immediately seized by the Spirit and began speaking in a supernatural voice.134 Fage and Cavalier originally performed two roles, alternating between human and divine voices, natural and supernatural speech:  an approach that, given its early date, may have replicated the original assemblies in the Désert. Save perhaps for John Potter, albeit on rare occasions, subsequent inspirations seemed predominantly unsolicited and always vocalised the Spirit in the first person in the Montanist fashion.135 As with any enthusiasts, critics challenged the Prophets to demonstrate their alleged supernatural powers and argued after St Paul (1 Corinthians 14:1–25) that the gift of tongues was critical in distinguishing true prophets from false ones.136 It is important to differentiate

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here between speaking in existing foreign tongues – xenolalia – and unknown languages that required the gift of interpretation.137 The Prophets also regarded glossolalia as a divine blessing confirming the apostles in their evangelical missions. Yet only four or five people, by Lacy’s account, were able to speak in tongues – French, Latin, Greek or Hebrew – under inspiration among the English Prophets by 1708, figures that barely changed afterwards.138 Once a distinctive power of inspired children prophesying in French in the Désert, where they reconciled the peasant’s dialect with the master’s language, xenolalia sought to transcend linguistic, generational, religious, social and ultimately political divisions ahead of Christ’s Universal Church.139 Yet none of the Camisards exported the gift of tongues to England and only one – presumably Fage – was subsequently able to prophesy in English after their arrival.140 John Lacy was by far the most talented of their English followers, delivering warnings in French, Latin and Greek.141 Whilst xenolalia was targeted at the unbeliever according to the Pauline example (1 Corinthians 14:18–22), Lacy’s supernatural gifts failed to impress observers; he had already translated Misson’s Théâtre sacré from the French and received some basic instruction in Latin and Greek. Still, the apostate Henry Nicholson judged his linguistic abilities very poor and his Latin ‘such as a School-Boy ought to be whipt for’.142 Even stranger were those prophecies delivered in unknown languages that required the gift of interpretation. Although Paul had insisted on the intelligibility of the glossolalic gift (1 Corinthians 14:19), the Prophets regarded its mystery as an edifying sign of their divine mission, for men cannot utter words beyond their understanding unless infused to them by the Spirit. ‘Hoc, Hoc, Hoc’, once cried out one Prophet, stamping his feet to crush the wicked.143 Katherine Orum also spoke in an unknown language in Scotland, but it was Durand Fage who made the biggest impression when he prophesied:  ‘Tring Trang, Suing Suang, Hing Hang’! Even such a knowledgeable man as Nicolas Fatio, who was credited with mastering fifty-two languages, failed to identify this one and concluded in favour of a Hebraic dialect, corroborating the anticipated conversion of the Jews.144 Despite their quest to restore the primitive Church in anticipation of the Parousia, few seventeenth-century English enthusiasts are known to have claimed the gift of tongues. This may have been because St Paul had ranked glossolalia lower than prophecy in the hierarchy of spiritual gifts as the intelligibility of tongues rapidly became an issue for the early Church (1 Corinthians 14:9–11).145 However, the French Prophets, and Lacy in particular, pointed out that Paul’s speech was not always

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intelligible, yet its divine origin remained unquestionable. He further insisted that such spiritual blessing must always retain a degree of mystery, thereby distinguishing glossolalia from interpretation.146 Not only was the gift of tongues valued again for its empowering qualities but, as Dale Martin observed, glossolalists also generally enjoyed a higher social status among their community.147 This became especially true of the later Pentacostal movement, for whom tongue-speaking constituted the ‘initial evidence’ of pneumatic possessions preceding the gift of prophecy.148 The French Prophets arguably pioneered the rehabilitation of glossolalia as mainstream palaeo-Christian praxis long before the Shakers.149 It should come as no surprise if the first Pentecostal, Edward Irving (1792–1834), was a reader and printer of John Lacy’s work.150 The French Prophets’ pneumatic experiences went beyond the gift of tongues and also affected its very medium: the voice. Ecstatic trances were often accompanied by a variety of discursive transgressions conferring upon the voice supernatural qualities. Here again, Lacy offers a revealing example. His speech appeared noticeably syncopated, if not at times unintelligible. As the Presbyterian minister Edmund Calamy reported upon visiting his former parishioner: The speech was syllabical, and there was a distinct heave and breathe between each syllable; but it required attention to distinguish the words. I shall here add it as far as my memory serves:– ‘Thou–hast–been–my–faith-ful–ser-vant–and–I–have–ho-nour-ed–thee.– But–I–do–not–take–it–well–that–thou–slight-est–and–op-pos-est–my– ser-vants–and–mes-sen-gers.–If–thou–wilt–fall–in–with–these–my–ser-vants,– thou – shalt– do – g reat– things – in – this – dis-pen-sa-tion; – and – I – will–use –thee –as–a– glo-ri-ous–in-stru-ment–to –my–praise,–and– I– will–take–care–of–thee–and–thine.–But–if–thou–go-est–on–to–op-pose–my– ser-vants,–thou–wilt–fall–un-der–my–se-vere–dis-plea-sure.’151

French historian Daniel Vidal has argued that inspirations typically consist of unnatural discursive paces, endless logorrhoea or, conversely, prophetic silences. The enthusiast accordingly cried out to break the normal flow of speech and impose instead his voice as a self-sufficient medium.152 If his speech was not always intelligible, the volume of his voice, however, was intended to reach everyone from believers to observers. In 1711, for instance, James Cuninghame interrupted a sermon in St Paul’s cathedral, his voice being louder than the organ.153 Rebecca Cuff was likewise reported to: Roar out in so hideous a manner, The D-A-V-I-L, The D-A-V-I-L, The D-AV-I-L, that it has terrify’d the Believers themselves, and had not the Windows

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of the Rooms we were in, been close stopd up with Shutters, Ruggs and Blankets to drown the Noise, the Outcries must needs have put the Parish in an Uproar.154

Similar to Ignatius and the Montanists in the early Church, the Prophet’s voice proved as instrumental as his body and as a result conveyed a significance of its own.155 It was verbal in order to be understood, yet  also unnaturally vocal to exclaim God’s threatening power over an audience.156 The enthusiast’s voice under inspiration was no longer natural, but supernatural; his body virtually disappeared behind the volume produced, thereby elevating the voice to an ultimate object of fascination.157 So loud were the French Prophets’ pneumatic voices that they in fact dehumanised them. It was reported of Jean Cavalier (of Sauve), perhaps the most expressive of the three Camisards, that ‘when he speaks, the poor, harmless People think that God thunders, and would swear, that it is not the voice of a man’.158 Cavalier’s voice apparently transgressed the physical limits of his body; he intimidated, not as a human authority, but as a timeless vessel of God’s Spirit. This dehumanisation was further evidenced by the Prophets’ uttering of animal sounds.159 Samuel Keimer recalled that several of his brethren sometimes barked and snarled at one another like dogs, and the Revd ­Josiah Woodward reported an assembly at the Copenhagen tavern near ­London, where the Prophets howled like dogs and destroyed everything.160 Still thirty years later, in 1738, when the Methodist cofounder Charles Wesley visited Isaac Hollis, one of the last Prophets, the latter ‘fell into violent agitations, and gobbled like a turkey-cock’.161 Such animalism certainly disrupted the natural order and raised a more disturbing question: was the prophet reduced to a beast or was the animal speaking through him? Either way, the enthusiast was losing his humanity as he lost his natural speech. Despite the Calvinist emphasis on sobriety, southern France was also part of an inspired Protestant musical tradition that survives to this day in America.162 Languedocians were indeed reputed ‘powerful psalm singers’ and the Protestant stronghold of Nîmes was famous for its dances.163 Marion perpetuated this charismatic culture at his arrival in London and sang as he prophesied as a prelude to God’s impending glory.164 Similar practices existed in England, where Quakers, Sweet Singers of Israel, Philadelphians, Masonites and some Baptist churches all valued music and singing as a superior religious experience.165 Marion’s use of music as a universal language soon found an echo among British followers. The Prophets often hummed to synchronise their

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voices before conveying the Spirit, like a rehearsal before a performance.166 Harmonising plunged the assembly into a collective trance through a meta-language announcing greater performances. Here agitations prepared the voice for inspired singing by oppressing the body, allegedly to extract a powerful, supernatural voice, so pure, in their view, that it could only originate from God.167 That is why the Prophets all experienced agitations several days before becoming inspired, some never even reaching the latter stage. ‘Like most trance phenomena, these began with inarticulate pre-verbal sounds, screams, convulsions, quivering, shakings – in their case, interpreted as the catharsis of sin and guilt’, argues Enrique Pardo.168 In other words, the voice expressed pneumatic emotions through the Instrument’s organs, which is the opposite of what Connor describes as ‘the disembodied speech of the ventriloquist’.169 For the enthusiast’s voice was not mediated by the body, but formed instead its own body. This culture of charismatic singing and dancing remained central to eighteenth-century revivalism; it was perpetuated by the Prophets’ descendants, the Shakers, as well as by the Methodists, albeit with a more distant and cautious approach to religious experience and emotions.170

Dreams, visions and stigmata Pneumatic inspirations were generally multisensory experiences during which the Spirit manifested himself to and through his Instruments in many forms. Dreams and visions, for example, proved just as common among early modern mystics as in biblical narratives.171 These were not exclusive to prophets, however, for scribes such as Nicolas Fatio and Charles Portalès also experienced visions without ever receiving prophetic gifts.172 Yet they often preceded a first inspiration, as Jeanne Cavalier, Henriette Allut, Susanne des Brousses, Annes Voyer, Daniel le Tellier and Isaac Havy all dreamt of the Spirit before he visited them.173 While prophecies were allegedly delivered by the Spirit through the mouths of his Instruments, these parasensory manifestations also d ­ iffered from divine warnings in that they remained subject to personal interpretation in order to be understood.174 Lucia Dacome has argued in this respect that ‘dreams, as much as ecstatic visions, were unrelated to the external world. And yet dreamers could stage scenarios of social and political overturning, and interpret them in the light of their own inner conviction, just as the enthusiasts did.’175 In the same way, John Lacy’s apocalyptic vision in 1715 can only be understood in relation to the recent Jacobite attempt to invade England.176 As Chapter 5 will show, this episode proved particularly divisive for

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the Prophets, as several significant Scottish followers and apostates actively supported the rebellion.177 Mystics typically regarded oneiromancy, or the interpretation of dreams in order to foretell the future, as a science in itself. Looking at the positions of the planets and the activity of comets, they reconciled astrology and eschatology to calculate the date of the approaching Judgement, in the belief that dreams and visions were premonitory.178 Nicolas Fatio proved the follower most committed to this task among the French Prophets. He collected cabalistic writings and retained a great interest in astrology all his life, which his brother deplored as a sign of great credulity.179 In 1716, he further theorised that aurorae borealis were signs of God’s activity and argued that the biblical prophet Ezekiel had witnessed them in his visions.180 Three years later, Fatio’s niece, the Pietist theologian Marie Huber (1695–1753), solicited his oneiromantic expertise from Lyon to elucidate the recent apparition of a beast in the sky near Yverdon for twelve days and nights (see Figure 3).181 Unfortunately, many gaps remain in their correspondence and Fatio’s answer is not known. Despite the Prophets’ demise and his professional ruin, Fatio never renounced divination, nor did he lose hope for the relief of French Protestants and the fall of the Roman Babylon. His last recorded dream, dated 15 October 1732, recounts his kissing of the late Charles XII for three or four seconds, under a fairy holding a book, until a light blush appeared on the Swedish King’s cheek.182 Lastly, spirit possessions also resulted upon rare occasions in the sight of blood. Blood was an important symbol for the French Prophets and early modern mystics alike; it recalled of course the stigmata of Christ’s martyrdom or the persecuted Protestants in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), but it might also refer to the first plague of Egypt (Exodus 7:14–25). Blood was the medium of life and spiritual regeneration, hence its significance when its sight had no natural cause such as a wound.183 Fatio noted in his calendar that John Moore shed tears of blood on 5 October 1708 and that three drops of the vital fluid had fallen from Marion’s nose in a remarkable manner on 4 September 1709.184 Marion had already wept tears of blood in the Désert and would suffer abundant nosebleeds on his last mission to the Continent in 1712–13.185 He probably died of consumption, the archetypal disease of eighteenth-century evangelicals and itinerant preachers.186 Mystical bleeding nevertheless materialised the supernatural presence of the Spirit among the Prophets and evidenced the martyrdom of their persecution and humiliation by an incredulous audience. This came as a supreme honour, for the belief in their own sacrifice can be traced

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Figure 3.  The Beast of Yverdon: letter from Marie Huber to Nicolas Fatio (3 February 1719), BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fol. 217v.

back to the Camisards in the Désert, as we saw in Chapter 1, and Fage had announced more trials to come shortly after his arrival in London.187 Blessed with the stigmata of martyrdom, the French Prophets ultimately sacrificed their bodies as vessels, where the spiritual sphere transcended the physical world.

Miracles If possessions, prophecy and glossolalia allegedly evidenced the Spirit’s presence among them, sceptics countered that only the ability to perform miracles  –thaumaturgy  – could legitimise the French Prophets. Quakers and earlier enthusiasts had faced the same challenges from Protestant Churches, at the risk of contradicting themselves:  the Church of England was officially cessationist, yet it also demanded miracles from modern enthusiasts. Caught between the superstitious beliefs of Roman Catholicism and the Puritans’ cessationism, its clergy strove to offer a via media to their parishioners’ beliefs in miracles and thus it never completely turned its back on providential interventions.188 On the contrary, instead of declining, as some secularisation theorists would have it, interest in miracles actually climaxed around

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1700, including at the highest levels of the public sphere. William Fleetwood’s Essay on Miracles (1701) had rekindled the Anglican debate on divine intervention, and the demand and pressure for public evidence was now stronger than ever against the Prophets.189 As with most revivalist circles, miracles occupied an essential part of the Camisards’ and French Prophets’ creed and praxis. Their role was threefold: they provided evidence of God communicating through the Prophet, they paved the way to the Millennium, and finally they converted the unbeliever to God’s True Church. Of course, the definition of a miracle differed greatly between the Prophets and their opponents, who contested the supernatural achievements claimed by the group. Despite many proclaimed miracles, very few descriptions of these survive, which leaves the modern historian to deal with the Prophets’ exaggerations and their opponents’ derision. At least four Prophets (Fatio, Thomas Emes, Nathaniel Sheppard and Mr Boulter) were promised the gift of miracles by the Spirit between 1707 and 1711, though none effectively received it, the latter three all dying shortly afterwards.190 There is evidence, however, that other significant members gained authority over their brethren through their thaumaturgical powers. Jean Cavalier, for example, allegedly quenched a great fire with his bare hands for four minutes without any burns.191 Abraham Whitrow was likewise credited with the miraculous cure of a man, and several followers were also successfully exorcised among the group.192 Yet neither of these Prophets matched the notoriety of John Lacy, whose charisma and healing gifts undoubtedly contributed to the expansion of the group. Between August 1707 and April 1708, he attempted to cure over a dozen people, of blindness, carbuncles, ulcers, fevers and consumption, allegedly with some success, though always in the privacy of a chamber.193 At a time when the French Prophets were facing a growing hostility, thaumaturgy was intended to assert or confirm the group’s legitimacy and spiritual authority by presenting evidence of divine intervention among them ahead of the approaching Millennium. It offered a challenge to the cessationist stance of Protestant churches, as well as to the limits of human understanding of the laws of nature. Lacy’s private healings helped in reality pave the way for what would become their most public and spectacular prophecy yet: the resurrection of Dr Thomas Emes. In November 1707, while Marion, Daudé and Fatio were being prosecuted for blasphemy, Emes, an apothecary and recent follower of the Prophets, fell ill. Seized by violent fits under inspiration, he had fallen and cracked his skull on the paved stones of his kitchen floor, a most unexpected and embarrassing death for a

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Prophet, who ‘went out of the World like a Fool’.194 Lacy visited him on 5 December and spoke under the influence of the Spirit: ‘Fear not. Whatever I do for thy Trial, thou art in safe Hands. For, if I command thy Life away, yet I will restore it again.’195 Emes died on 22 December and was buried at six o’clock in the evening on Christmas Day in the cemetery of Bunhill Fields.196 The death of a member was a first for the group, and marked the beginning of a highly trying period for the Prophets. Hillel Schwartz argued that it ‘challenged the hope that the present believers would be participants in the coming Kingdom’.197 The group had indeed been announcing the Parousia for the past year and the unexpected death of a prophet would certainly have compromised their credibility. On 23 December, twelve-year-old Anna Maria King prophesied that Emes’s body would be raised from the dead and that ‘more marvellous Things’ should ‘come to pass in a little Time’. The meat-packer John Potter announced a few days later the date of the awaited miracle to be performed by Lacy’s hand: ‘Know ye the Day in which my Servant was interred? Five Months from that Day, the Twenty Fifth Day of May, you shall behold him rise again. One Month above the Number of Days that Lazarus was in his Grave.’198 Raising the dead formed an integral part of early Christianity. Along with healing the sick and exorcising demons, it had been commanded by Christ himself (Matthew 10:8), which both Peter (Acts 9:37–42) and Paul (Acts 20:9–12) fulfilled after his death. The Thessalonians, Montanists and Church Fathers perpetuated this belief in the post-apostolic age, which was subsequently reappropriated at the Reformation.199 Followers of Richard Farnham and John Bull, as well as the Quakers, also attempted to bring the dead back to life later in the seventeenth century.200 Embracing persecution as a sign of their divine mission, the French Prophets had by 1708 grown sufficiently confident to challenge the impossible. The five months separating Emes’s burial and his predicted resurrection marked a period of intense activity among the group. They advertised the forthcoming miracle both in print and on the streets, and fasted repeatedly for collective purification, whilst Lacy was healing the blind and sick ahead of his ultimate mission.201 On 25 May 1708, an estimated 20,000 people went to Bunhill Fields to watch Emes rise from the dead, but the Prophets feared London’s negative atmosphere would prevent the miracle and stayed instead at home or retreated to the countryside, where the Spirit had announced they would be safe.202 The prophecy naturally failed, the crowd hurled insults and the French Prophets became the laughing stock of the press (see Chapter 4).

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The spectacular failure of Emes’s resurrection marked a turning point in the history of the Prophets’ movement, both structurally and theologically. The previous chapter showed how its immediate consequence was the exclusion of several false Prophets from the group and its reorganisation into twelve missionary tribes. On a religious level, it triggered the Prophets to distance themselves from attempting further miracles and dated prophecies to focus instead on religious experience. Speaking before an assembly on the meaning of Revelation 11 in October 1709, Marion, ruled: Jesus Christ tells you that his Testimony is the Spirit of Prophecy; Tis then by the Holy Spirit, By the Spirit of Prophecy that you are to have Enlightening in the Scriptures, by the same Spirit that dictated them. That same Spirit who has traced you the Way, is that same Spirit who is to conduct you to the Life Everlasting. It is not Miracles that are given for the Seal of the Lord, if they are not attended with a Conformity to the Laws of the Lord, that is, If the Doctrine of the Spirit working Miracles does not conduct you in the Law of the Lord. For you see what the Lord said This wicked and Adulterous Generation requires a Sign [Mat. 12:39] and there shall arise False Prophets with Signs and Wonders.203

From then on, the group cultivated inspirations as the sole evidence of the Holy Spirit’s presence among them and dedicated their time to holding ecumenical assemblies both at home and abroad. With Marion’s death on the way to Rome in 1713 and the dispersal of their members into missionary tribes, the French Prophets gradually evolved into an underground network of regional assemblies, avoiding the publicity of the previous decade at all costs (see Chapter 2). But the end of an era also marks the beginning of a new one: relocation to a more peaceful, less materialistic countryside, where the New Jerusalem seemed more in sight. The Camisards’ thundering Judgement gave way to a merciful God as inspirations evolved from cataclysmic warnings to blissful experiences. In 1731, Hannah Wharton prophesied that ‘the Spirit of the Lord is a Spirit of Understanding, Joy and Rejoycing’.204 The Prophets’ latter days were thus marked by the promise of a glorious, utopian future. *** This chapter has argued that the French Prophets capitalised to a large extent on England’s vibrant millenarian culture through radical  – in its etymological sense of ‘root’  – and hence unquestionable palaeo-Christian beliefs and praxis to appeal to almost the entire spectrum of Protestant denominations of their time. As a truly ecumenical

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movement, they conflated in many ways the Camisards’ apocalypticism with the Quakers’ eponymous agitations and the Philadelphians’ universalism. Yet, unlike seventeenth-century radical – in the modern sense  – dissenters, they advocated spiritual reforms over temporal ones.205 By rehabilitating Pauline communities and post-apostolic heresies like Montanism, the French Prophets reminded Christendom that enthusiasm as a pneumatic religious experience was mainstream to the essence of Christianity rather than a marginal deviance. As a result, they not only debunked the legitimacy of Roman Catholicism, but also criticised Protestant churches precisely for their lack of enthusiasm, and thus sought to complete England’s long Reformation with the re-formation of the early Church. Enthusiasm did not of course begin and end with the French Prophets. Their spirit possessions belonged instead to a long mystical tradition in England, and in many ways bridged a gap between early Quakerism and the charismatic Methodism of Wesley and Whitefield soon afterwards.206 Unlike the former, the French Prophets never renounced their convulsionary culture and we find them in ecstatic trances as late as the 1740s. Their appeal to Quaker renegades and expellees nostalgic for their movement’s original agitations would ensure the survival of their enthusiastic culture through the foundation of Shakerism. Meanwhile, Methodism had become the target of enthusiastic accusations by the mid-eighteenth century. Although John Wesley was very critical of the French Prophets, some of whom nevertheless interacted with the Methodists in the 1740s, he also defended the importance of religious experience against Anglican formalism and explored the Prophets’ theological foundations. Reading Lacy’s General Delusion of Christians in the 1750s, Wesley became convinced that the Montanists were the true perpetuators of the Christian spirit in the post-apostolic age. On this premise was born the Methodist defence of religious experience and by extension eighteenth-century English revivalism.207

Notes 1 For the best study on English millenarianism, see Johnston, Revelation Restored. See also Court, Approaching the Apocalypse, pp. 104–10. 2 Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques (1733) (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 56. Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style:  The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 130. 3 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 187. The Anabaptists, for example, found their first English sympathisers among the Lollards in the sixteenth century. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, The Anabaptists (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 33–4.

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4 Knox, Enthusiasm, pp. 1, 4. 5 Elie Marion, Prophetical Warnings of Elias Marion, Heretofore One of the Commanders of the Protestants, that Had Taken Arms in the Cevennes (London, 1707), pp. 110–11. 6 Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, pp.  50–64. Shagan, Rule of Moderation, pp.  288–325. Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in ­Restoration England:  The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 163–202. 7 Shagan, Rule of Moderation, pp.  288–325. Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, in Kroll et  al., Philosophy, Science, and Religion, pp. 151–77. 8 Johnston, Revelation Restored, pp. 189–247. 9 Johnston, Revelation Restored, pp.  23–7. Sarah Hutton, ‘The Appropriation of Joseph Mede:  Millenarianism in the 1640s’, in James E.  Force and Richard H.  Popkin (eds), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Vol. III (Dordrecht:  Kluwer Academic Press, 2001), pp.  1–14. Hillel Schwartz, ‘The Eschatology of Everyday Things, England, 1600–1800’, in Force and Popkin, Millenarianism and Messianism, Vol. III, pp. 171–80 (pp. 173–4). Court, Approaching the Apocalypse, pp. 104–10. 10 Richard H.  Popkin, ‘Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story’, Jewish History, 8:1–2 (1994), 43–54. Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 16–17, 111; and ‘Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in the 1689 London Sermons of H￸akham Solomon Aailion’, in Chanita Goodblatt and Howard Theodore Kreisel (eds), Tradition, Heterodoxy, and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2006), pp. 139–65. 11 Sarah Apetrei, ‘A “Remarkable Female of Womankind”: Gender, Scripture, and Knowledge in the Writings of M. Marsin’, in Brown, Women, Gender and Radical Religion, pp. 139–60. 12 Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 37. 13 Almond, ‘John Mason and His Religion’, pp. 156, 159–160. 14 Thomas Beverley, The Kingdom of Jesus Christ Entering Its Succession at 1697 (London, 1689). Johnston, Revelation Restored, pp.  214–18. Burns, ‘London’s Barber-Elijah’. A long-standing debate opposed Christian and Jewish exegetes on the resurrection of Elijah. Jews anticipated God’s Last Judgement based on the Old Testament (Malachi), whilst Christians identified John the Baptist as the new Elijah and the precursor of Christ. Origenists believed this biblical prophecy had yet to be fulfilled. See Markus Öhler, ‘The Expectation of Elijah and the Presence of the Kingdom of God’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 118:3 (1999), 461–76. 15 Douglas H. Shantz, Between Sardis and Philadelphia: The Life and World of Pietist Court Preacher Conrad Bröske (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2008), pp. 132–4. On Pordage and the reception of Boehme’s writings

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in England, see Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, pp. 106–19. Hessayon and Apetrei, An Introduction to Jacob Boehme. 16 McDowell, ‘Enlightenment Enthusiasms’. Thune, The Behmenists and the Philadelphians. Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion, pp. 177–207. 17 Johnston, Revelation Restored, pp.  125–51. Shagan, Rule of Moderation, pp.  254–325. Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed:  A  Social History of Calvinism (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 395–405, 408–22. William Gibson, The Church of England, 1688–1832: Unity and Accord (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–23. 18 Popkin, ‘Predicting, Prophecying, Divining and Foretelling’, p. 122. Tony Claydon, ‘Latitudinarianism and Apocalyptic History in the Worldview of Gilbert Burnet, 1643–1715’, The Historical Journal, 51:3 (2008), 577–97 (pp. 585–8). 19 Margaret C. Jacob, ‘Millenarianism and Science in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37:2 (April–June 1976), 335–41. Warren Johnston, ‘Revelation and the Revolution of 1688–1689’, The Historical Journal, 48:2 (2005), 351–89 (p. 352). 20 On millenarian calculations, see Johnston, Revelation Restored, pp. 53–8. 21 Bodl., MS Smith 62, fol. 373. Maria-Cristina Pitassi, Inventaire critique de la correspondance de Jean-Alphonse Turretini (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009), p. 261. 22 Although he had initially shown an interest in the Prophets, he publicly rejected them in 1713 after hosting a conference with them at his house, and deemed them to be animated by evil spirits. William Whiston, The Literal Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecies:  Being a Full Answer to a Late Discourse, of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1724). Lucia Dacome, ‘Resurrecting by Numbers in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 193 (2006), 73–110 (p.  84). Stephen D.  Snobelen, ‘Whiston, William (1667–1752)’, ODNB (2004). 23 Stephen D.  Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic:  The Strategies of a Nicodemite’, British Journal for the History of Science, 32:115 (1999), 381–419 (pp. 391–2). James E. Force, ‘The Virgin, the Dynamo, and Newton’s Prophetic History’, in Force and Popkin, Millenarianism and Messianism, Vol. III, pp. 67–94 (pp. 74–9). 24 Chetham’s, Mun.A.2.114, fols 56–7, 88–92. 25 Schwartz, French Prophets, pp. 3–6. 26 Hillel Schwartz, ‘Millenarianism’, in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. IX, pp. 6028–38 (p. 6029). 27 Lüthy, La Banque protestante, Vol. I, p. 11. 28 Anon., Avis de saison à tous les François, tant Catholiques Romains que ceux qu’on appelle Nouveaux Réunis, au sujet des mouvemens des Sevennes, et des tremblemens de terre survenus a Rome & aux environs, en la présente année 1703 (Adrianople, 1703), pp. 82–3. Crété, Les Camisards, p. 24. See Chapter 1.

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29 Yves Krumenacker, Des Protestants au siècle des Lumières, pp. 115–16. 30 Marion, Prophetical Warnings, p. 1. 31 Marion, Prophetical Warnings, p. 6. See appendix. 32 Daniel Vidal, Le Malheur et son prophète: Inspirés et sectaires en Languedoc calviniste (1685–1725) (Paris: Payot, 1983), p. 123. 33 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2v. 34 Marion, Prophetical Warnings, p. 96. 35 Pierre Jurieu, lettres pastorales addressées aux fidèles de france, qui gémissent sous la captivité de babylon (Rotterdam, 1686–1689), Vol. III: Troisième Année (1688), p. 29. Chetham’s, Mun.A.2.114, fol. 69. 36 Johnston, Revelation Restored, pp.  51–3. J.  Wojcik, ‘Robert Boyle, the Conversion of the Jews and Millennial Expectations’, in Force and Popkin, Millenarianism and Messianism, Vol. III, pp.  55–65 (pp.  58–61). Force, ‘The Virgin, the Dynamo’, pp. 74–9. Apetrei, ‘Remarkable Female of Womankind’, p. 142. Burns, ‘London’s Barber-Elijah’, p. 283. Almond, ‘John Mason and His Religion’, p.  166. See also Ariel Hessayon, ‘Jews and Crypto-Jews in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England’, Cromohs: Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, 16 (2011), 1–26. 37 Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets, p. 22. 38 Edmund Calamy, Comfort and Counsel to Protestant Dissenters:  With Some Serious Queries to Such as Hate and Cast Them out; and a Friendly Admonition to Such as Desert Them. In Two Sermons … by Edmund Calamy, Part 4 (London, 1712), p. 37. 39 Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1152, fols 17v, 82v. Julie Hirst, Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2005), pp.  118–19. George David Henderson, Chevalier Ramsay (London and New York: Nelson, 1952), p. 19. On the Scottish Quietists, see Michael Riordan, ‘Mysticism and Prophecy in Scotland in the Long Eighteenth Century’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2014). 40 See appendix. 41 See appendix. Anon., An Appeal from the Prophets to Their Prophecies. Evidencing the New Dispensation They Pretend, to Be of the Same Stamp and Authority with Their Predictions (London, 1708), p. 12. Brand, p. 2. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 321. 42 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 8.  Goldish, ‘Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy’, pp. 139–65. 43 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, p.  12. Jerome Friedman, Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy: The Ranters and the English Revolution (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), p. 272. Hessayon, ‘Abiezer Coppe’, p. 363. 44 Abel Boyer, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne, Digested into Annals. Year the Sixth (London, 1708), p. 371. Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, p. 73. Thomas Hearne, Reliquiæ Hearnianæ: The Remains of Thomas Hearne. Extracts from His MS Diaries, Collected with a Few Notes by P.  Bliss, ed. Philip Bliss (Oxford:  James Wright, 1857), p. 149.

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45 Brand, pp. 8, 38, 42, 70, 100, 105. 46 Schwartz, French Prophets, pp. 217–19. 47 BGE, Ms Fr. 605, fol. 1v. 48 Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 103n85. 49 William Rogers, Quakers, a Divided People Distinguished (London, 1708), pp. 13–15. 50 See appendix. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 321. Anthony David Garland Steer, ‘ “New Light” Thinking and Non-Subscription amongst Protestant Dissenters in England and Ireland in the Early 18th Century and Their Relationship with Glasgow University and Scotland’ (PhD thesis, Glasgow University, 2006), pp. 125–6. 51 Jean Lions, Relation de ce qui s’est passé entre Jean Lions ministre, et ses consistoires (London, 1707); Apologie de Jean Lions ministre, avec des reflexions sur les ecrits des sieurs Pegorier, Lamote & Rival (London, 1708); and Examen de la pretendue refutation de l’apologie de Jean Lions ministre (London, 1708). 52 Knox, Enthusiasm, p. 590. James D. G. Dunn, ‘Enthusiasm’. 53 Misson, Meslange de littérature historique, p. 35. 54 Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, pp. 22–3. 55 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 53, 105. See also Ariel Hessayon, ‘Early Modern Communism:  The Diggers and Community of Goods’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 3:2 (2010), 1–49. 56 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, p. 117. Johnston, Revelation Restored, pp.  69–80. Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men:  A  Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London:  Faber and Faber, 1972). Bernard Capp, ‘A Door of Hope Re-Opened:  The Fifth Monarchy, King Charles and King Jesus’, Journal of Religious History, 32:1 (2008), 16–30. 57 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 265. Charles F. Mullett, ‘The Legal Position of English Protestant Dissenters, 1689–1767’, Virginia Law Review, 23:4 (February 1937), 389–418 (pp.  389, 396, 406). Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain, 1646–1666 (Philadelphia:  Pennsylvania University Press, 2000), pp.  65–6, 70, 89, 99, 117–18, 179, 182–3. 58 See p. 76 n113. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 4–5 (7, 24, 25 September 1708; 6, 18 July and 7 September 1709). Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, p. 75. 59 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, index IV, fol. viii. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/4, fol. 26. 60 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p.  202. Friedman, Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy, p. xi. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World, p. 114. Knox, Enthusiasm, pp. 140–1. 61 Anon., An Alarm to the Christian Church. 62 Stunt, ‘Lacy, John’. Stuart Handley, ‘Hooke, John (1655–1712)’, ODNB (2008). Schwartz, French Prophets, pp.  79–80. Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 290–300.

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Robert Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment:  Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 238–72. Gibson, Religion and Society, p. 53. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, p. 62. 63 O. E., The Shaking-Prophets Alarm’d, pp. 4–5. 64 Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p.  154. Schwartz, French Prophets, p.  280. On Fatio’s ambiguous relationship with Newton, see BGE, Ms. fr. 602, fol. 58. Domson, ‘Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’, p. 36. 65 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, fols 361–5, 561–70. Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, pp. 203–13. Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion, pp. 244–55. 66 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/2, fol. 179; and Mun.A.2.82, fol. 34. Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets, p.  22. Lacy, General Delusion, pp.  485–9. Lacy, Spirit of Prophecy Defended, pp.  399–401. See more generally Tyacke, England’s Long Reformation. 67 Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania, 2009), pp. 2–9. Jackson’s case for connections between Benezet and the Camisards remains unconvincing and contains inaccuracies. 68 G. D.  Henderson (ed.), Mystics of the North-East (Aberdeen:  Spalding Club, 1934), p. 206. 69 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 190. Jean Gailhard, ‘A Discourse about Prophets and Inspirations’, in Discourses on Several Useful Subjects (London, 1708), pp. 175–208 (p. 184). 70 Edmund Calamy, A Caveat against New Prophets, in Two Sermons at the Merchants Lecture in Salters Hall (London, 1708), p. 28. 71 John Lacy, The Prophetical Warnings of John Lacy, Esq. (London, 1707; hereafter Warnings I), p. xii. NRL, 42 (September 1707), p. 334. 72 Humfrey, A Farther Account, pp. 15, 20–1. John Lacy, Predictions Concerning, the Raising the Dead Body of Mr Thomas Emes … (London, 1708), p. 8. Anon., The French Prophetess Turn’d Adamite Being a True and Comical Account of a Pretended French Prophetess, who on Sunday the 16th of November, Did in a Very Immodest and Indecent Manner (Being Inspired with a Pretended Spirit) Undress Her Self Stark Naked at the Popish Chapel in Lincoln’s-Inn Fields (London, 1707). On the Quakers going naked as a sign (Isaiah 20:3), see John Miller, ‘ “A Suffering People”:  English Quakers and Their Neighbours c.  1650–c. 1700’, Past & Present, 188 (August 2005), 71–103 (pp.  71, 75, 92). Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 184, 258. 73 BGE, Ms fr. 605/7a, fol. 3r. See also anon., ‘Friends and the French Prophets’, Journal of the Friends Historical Society, 22:1 (1925), 1–9. 74 Rogers, Quakers, A Divided People Distinguished, pp. 1–10, 16–22. 75 Brand, pp. 71–3. 76 Watts, The Dissenters, p.  270. George Keith, The Magick of Quakerism or, The Chief Mysteries of Quakerism Laid Open. To which Are Added, a Preface and Postscript Relating to the Camisars, in Answer to Mr. Lacy’s

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Preface to the Cry from the Desart (London, 1707). Vale, The Imposture Detected: Or, The Modern French Prophets, Exemplified (London, 1711). 77 Benedict, The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, pp. 52–8. 78 Stack, 1j, fols 35–6. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2v (14 September 1707). Lions, Relation de ce qui s’est passé, pp. 6–7. 79 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 3. 80 Brand, pp. 8, 86–7, 115. 81 Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, p. 24. 82 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, fol. 400. 83 Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, pp. 5–6. See in particular Chetham’s, Mun.A.4.33. 84 On the Quakers and baptism, see Moore, The Light in Their Consciences, pp. 56–7; and Janet Scott, ‘Good and Evil in an Ecumenical Perspective’, in Jackie Leach Scully and Pink Dandelion (eds), Good and Evil: Quaker Perspectives (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 163–71 (pp. 168–9). 85 O.E., The Shaking-Prophets Alarm’d, p. 11. 86 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, fols 14, 170. Burns, ‘London’s Barber-Elijah’, p. 283. 87 ‘Reasons of the Hope yt is in us, or Matters of Fact: Consisting of Miraculous Experiences both External & Internal, or Miracles & Experiences Altogether New & Unparallell’d, since the Times of the Apostles & Primitive Christians in ye First Centuries’ (1717?), fol. 22. 88 Muggletonians were semi-universalists: they believed that only half of the world would be saved. Lamont, ‘The Muggletonians’, p. 30. 89 Chetham’s, Mun.A.2.114, fol. 140. 90 Brand, p. 23. 91 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, pp. 189–90. 92 ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fol. 22. See also Brad Stephan Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Morwenna Ludlow, ‘Universalism in the History of Christianity’, in Robin A. Parry and Christopher Hugh Partridge (eds), Universal Salvation?:  The Current Debate (Grand Rapids:  Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004 [2003]), pp. 191–218 (pp. 203–4). David Hilborn and Don Horrocks, ‘Universalistic Trends in the Evangelical Tradition:  A  Historical Perspective’, in Parry and Partridge, Universal Salvation?, pp.  219–45 (221–2). Arlene A.  Miller, ‘The Theologies of Luther and Boehme in the Light of Their Genesis Commentaries’, The Harvard Theological Review, 63:2 (1970), 261–303 (p. 302). 93 Kingston II, p. 132. Anon., An Appeal from the Prophets, p. 12. Anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, p. 6. Calamy, A Caveat, p. 53. 94 ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fol. 14. 95 Garrett, Spirit Possession, pp. 55–6. 96 Stack, 1j, fols 38–9, 55–6. Brand, pp. 29–30. Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/2, fols 173–90.

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97 See Amy Nelson Burnett, ‘The Social History of Communion and the Reformation of the Eucharist’, Past & Present, 211:1 (2011), 77–119. 98 John Lacy, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit … The Second Part (London, 1707; hereafter Warnings II), pp. 105–8. 99 Warnings II, pp. 102–10. BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fol. 241. 100 Pierre Jurieu, Lettres pastorales, Vol. I , pp. 60, 69. 101 Court, Approaching the Apocalypse, pp. 51–6. Christine Trevett, ‘Apocalypse, Ignatius, Montanism:  Seeking the Seeds’, Vigiliae christianae, 43:4 (1989), 313–38; and Montanism: Gender, Authority, and the New Prophecy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1996]). 102 J. M.  Ford, ‘Was Montanism a Jewish-Christian Heresy?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 17:2 (1966), 145–58. 103 Jurieu, Lettres Pastorales, pp. 57–8. 104 Cambridge University Library (CUL), Cholmondeley (Houghton) political papers 26, no. 3, §7. 105 George Hickes, The Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcised: In a Sermon Preach’d before the University of Oxford, &c. The Fourth Edition, Much Enlarg’d. By George Hickes. D.D. With Two Discourses Occasioned by the New Prophets Pretensions to Inspiration and Miracles. The First the History of Montanism, by a Lay-Gentleman. The Other the New Pretenders to Prophecy Examined. By N. Spinckes, a Presbyter of the Church of England (London, 1709 [1680]), pp. 73–352. 106 Stacey Searl-Chapin, ‘Francis Lee and the French Prophets: The History of Montanism [1709]’, in John Christian Laursen (ed.), Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp.  33–49. Lacy, General Delusion, pp. 229–360. 107 Jon Mark Ruthven, ‘Cessationism’, in Stanley M. Burgess (ed.), Encyclopedia of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity (New  York:  Routledge, 2006), pp. 84–6. 108 Lacy, General Delusion, p. 380. 109 Lacy, General Delusion, pp. 384–5. 110 Mark Corner, Signs of God:  Miracles and Their Interpretation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 113–15. Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 64. See also Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London, 1973). 111 Lacy, General Delusion, pp. 376–438. 112 Lacy, Spirit of Prophecy Defended, pp. 385, 394, 399–401. 113 Jönsdotter’s lethargy began in the summer of 1703 at the peak of the Camisards’ uprising, and the Silesian revival coincided with the death of Thomas Emes in December 1707. John Lacy, A Relation of the Dealings of God to His Unworthy Servant John Lacy, since the Time of His Believing and Professing Himself Inspir’d (London, 1708), p. 31. ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fols 28, 43. Anon., Le Nouvel Hosanna des petits enfans: ou

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relation des assemblées saintes & admirables que sont presque tous les enfans dans la silésie pour adorer dieu, translated by Richard Bulkeley (London, 1708); rélation de l’état admirable d’une jeune fille suedoise, présentement vivante qui n’a pris aucune sorte de nourriture pendant plus de six ans. Extrait des originaux suédois, tout nouvellement envoyez par l’evesque de skara, en suéde, au lord evesque de Bristol. Traduit de l’anglois; & augmenté de la rélation d’un autre fait memorable, & nouveau. Avec quelques réflexions (London, 1711). Magnus Gabriel von Block, Betänckiande Öfwer Ester Jöns-dotters Långwariga Fastande &c. &c. I Skåne, Yttrat Uti Ett Swar Uppå Kongl. Götha Hoffrättz Bref Af Den 29. April An. 1714 (Stockholm, 1719). 114 Richard Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets, p. 4. 115 Alan Humm, Psychology of Prophecy in Early Christianity:  Prophetism and Religious Altered States of Consciousness (Piscataway:  Gorgias Press, 2009), pp. 207–12. See also Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion. Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2009). Bettina E.  Schmidt and Lucy Huskinson (eds), Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London and New York: Continuum, 2010). 116 Ann Taves, ‘Detachment and Engagement in the Study of “Lived Experience” ’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 3:2 (2003), 186–208. 117 Misson, A Cry from the Desart, 1st edn (London, 1707), pp. 71–2. 118 Calamy, A Caveat, p. 10. NRL, 43 (February 1708), p. 134. Lacy, A Letter from J. Lacy to T. Dutton, Being Reasons Why the Former Left His Wife, and Took E. Gray a Prophetess to His Bed (London, 1711), p. 9. 119 Calamy, A Caveat, p. 28. 120 Garrett, Spirit Possession, p. 21. 121 Vale, Imposture Detected, p. 4. 122 Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light:  Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (New York: Alfred A.  Knopf, 1999), pp.  5, 47. Naomi Baker, ‘  “Break Down the Walls of Flesh”:  Anna Trapnel, John James, and Fifth Monarchist Self-Representation’, in Brown, Women, Gender and Radical Religion, pp. 117–38 (pp. 123, 129). Apetrei, ‘A Remarkable Female of Womankind’, p. 145. Curtis W. Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-Century England. A  Reader (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2011), p.  xiii. See also Jean La Fontaine (ed.), The Devil’s Children. From Spirit Possession to Witchcraft:  New Allegations that Affect Children (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 123 Elie Marion, The French Prophet’s Declaration; or, An Account of the Preachings, Prophecies and Warnings of Elias Marion (London, 1707), p. 2; and Prophetical Warnings, p. vii. 124 ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fol. 65. Jean Allut, Eclair de Lumière descendant des cieux, pour découvrir, sur la Nuit des Peuples de la Terre, la Corruption qui se trouve dans leurs Tenebres … (Rotterdam, 1711), p. 14. 125 Lacy, General Delusion, p. 89.

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126 I am using ‘channelling’ in its literal sense here – that is to convey through a medium, where psychologists understand it as a conscious act. Humm, Psychology of Prophecy, p. 207. 127 ‘Reasons of thee Hope’, fols 7–8. 128 Humm, Psychology of Prophecy, pp. 34–7. 129 Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, pp. 40–1. 130 Daniel Vidal, Le Malheur, p.131. Lacy, A Relation of the Dealings of God, p. 15. 131 LPL, MS 934/52, fol. 10. ‘Déclaration de F.  G.’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, p. 26. Anon., Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, p. 30. Anon., An Appeal from the Prophets, p. 17. Marion, French Prophet’s Declaration, p. 3. Humm, Psychology of Prophecy, pp. 39–40. 132 Anon., French Prophets’ Mad Sermon, p. 2. 133 Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets, p. 23. Edmund Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, p. 74. [François-]Maximilien Misson, Plainte, & Censure Des Calomnieuses Accusations Publiées Par Le Sr. Claude Groteste De La Motte, Contre Ceux Qui Ont Reçu Les Dépositions Du Theatre Sacre Des Sevennes (London, 1708), p. 82. 134 LPL, MS 934/52, fol. 1. 135 Brand, pp.  16–17. Court, Approaching the Apocalypse, p.  52. Trevett, ‘Apocalypse, Ignatius, Montanism’, p. 316. 136 Humfrey, A Farther Account, p. 17. Stack, 1j, fol. 3. 137 Frank D. Macchia, ‘Glossolalia’, in Burgess, Encyclopedia of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, pp. 223–5. 138 John Lacy, Mr Lacy’s Letter to the Reverend Dr. Josiah Woodward (London, 1708), p. 21. ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fol. 32. Samuel Keimer, Jonathan Taylor, John Potter and Nicolas Fatio were subsequently promised to join this exclusive group, but there is no evidence that they ever spoke in tongues. Brand, p. 33. 139 TSC, pp. 14–15, 22, 32. Vidal, Le Malheur, p. 146. 140 Hutchinson, A Short View, pp. 17–18. 141 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2 (2–6 July and 28 September 1707). 142 Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, p. 30. BGE, Ms fr. 605/7a, fol. 1v. 143 Anon., The French Prophets’ Mad Sermon, p. 2. 144 Particulier, Troisième Lettre, p.  4. Kingston I, pp.  22–3, 36. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 164. 145 Dale B. Martin, ‘Tongues of Angels and Other Status Indicators’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 59:3 (1991), 547–89 (p. 569). 146 Lacy, General Delusion, pp. 130–1, 221, 295, 400–1; Spirit of Prophecy Defended, pp. 411–12. 147 Martin, ‘Tongues of Angels’, pp. 563, 577. 148 Frank D.  Macchia, ‘The Question of Tongues as Initial Evidence: A Review of Initial Evidence, Edited by Gary B. Mcgee’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 1:2 (1993), 117–27. See Gary B. McGee, Initial Evidence:  Historical and Biblical Perspectives on the Pentecostal

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Doctrine of Spirit Baptism (Peabody, MA:  Hendrickson Publishers, 1991). 149 Martin, ‘Tongues of Angels’, p. 553. 150 Lacy, Spirit of Prophecy Defended, pp. xvii–xix, xxvi and xxxvii–lix. 151 Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, p. 97. Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, p.  14. James Sutherland, Background for Queen Anne (London: Methuen, 1939), p. 48. 152 Vidal, Le Malheur, pp. 123–7, 137–8. Steven Connor also underlines that miming pertained to the Camisards’ inspirations, which may explain why some of their English descendants (Sarah Critchlow, John Harling and Robert Eaton) were later agitated, but never delivered divine speech. Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 189. 153 Brand, p. 68. 154 Brand, p. 53. 155 Trevett, ‘Apocalypse, Ignatius, Montanism’, pp. 317–18. Humm, Psychology of Prophecy, pp. 112–15. 156 Vidal, Le Malheur, p. 123. 157 Lacy’s voice was accordingly ‘so strong, clear, and harmonious, that his natural one could never furnish’. John Lacy, The Mighty Miracle; or, The Wonder of Wonders at Windmill-Hill (1708), repr. in William Oldys, John Malham and Edith Goodkind Rosenwald, The Harleian Miscellany, 12 vols (London, 1808–11), Vol. XI, pp. 62–4 (p. 63). ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fol. 65. 158 Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, p. 23. 159 Vidal, Le Malheur, p. 126. 160 Josiah Woodward, The Copy of a Letter to Mr. F—. M—., p. 7. 161 Charles Wesley, The Journal of Charles Wesley, online edn, http://wesley .nnu.edu/charles_wesley/journal/index.htm, 11 December 1738. R.  E. Davies, ‘Strange Bedfellows: Isaac Hollis and Family, Baptist Benefactors’, Baptist Quarterly, 41:5 (January 2006), 263–80. 162 Enrique Pardo, ‘The French Prophets: Prelude to a Myths of the Voice Festival’, www.pantheatre.com/pdf/6-archives-MV05-french-prophets-gb.pdf, p. 4. Anon., A Wonderful Account from Orthez, in Bearne, and the Cevennes, of Voices Heard in the Air, Singing the Praises of God, in the Words and Tunes of the Psalms; Used by Those of the Reformed Religion: At the Time of Their Cruel and Inhumane Persecution … By the French King: Credliby [sic] Attested (London, 1706). 163 Angela McShane, ‘A Resounding Silence? Huguenots and the Broadside Ballad in the Seventeenth Century’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 28:5 (Summer 2007), 604–25 (p. 605). 164 Elie Marion, Avertissemens prophétiques d’Elie Marion, l’un des chefs des protestans, qui avoient pris les armes dans les Cévennes (London, 1707), pp. 10–13. 165 H. Larry Ingle, First among Friends:  George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.  142, 258.

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Apetrei, ‘The “Sweet Singers” of Israel’, p.  13. McDowell, ‘Enlightenment Enthusiasms’, p.  520. Tom Dixon, ‘Love and Music in Augustan London; or, The “Enthusiasms” of Richard Roach’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 4:2 (2007), 191–209 (pp. 197–9). Almond, ‘John Mason and His Religion’, pp. 161–2. Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists, Vol. III, pp. 345–7. 166 Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, p. 14. 167 Connor, Dumbstruck, p. 188. 168 Pardo, ‘The French Prophets’, p. 2. 169 Connor, Dumbstruck, p. 189. Garrett, Spirit Possession, p. 4. 170 B. C.  McInelly, ‘Raising the Roof:  Hymn Singing, the Anti-Methodist Response, and Early Methodist Religiosity’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 36:2 (2012), 80–110. Edward D. Andrews, ‘Shaker Songs’, The Musical Quarterly, 23:4 (1937), 491–508. Garrett, Spirit Possession, pp. 74–139. 171 Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, pp. 50–9. Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, pp. 177–9. 172 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 1r, 2v (30 December 1706 and 8 November 1707). BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fol. 241. 173 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1 (11–13 April 1707). 174 Humm, Psychology of Prophecy, pp. 38, 46–7, 210. 175 Lucia Dacome, ‘ “To what purpose does it think?”:  Dreams, Sick Bodies and Confused Minds in the Age of Reason’, History of Psychiatry, 15:4 (2004), 395–416 (p. 396). A rare and noteworthy exception among seventeenth-century mystics are the Muggletonians, who ascribed dreams, visions and inspiration to the imagination, rather than the divine. Lamont, ‘The Muggletonians’, p. 28. 176 John Lacy, The Vision of John Lacy, Esq; and Prophet, on Thursday the 9th of June 1715 (London, 1715). 177 James Keith, Chevalier Andrew Ramsay, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo, Lord Deskford, George Garden, James Cuninghame and George Cheyne belonged to a mystical circle of Scottish Quietists and broke from the French Prophets at an early stage. Cuninghame remained active among the Prophets until the Battle of Preston in 1715. Henderson, Mystics of the North-East, pp. 11–70, 194–9. Guerrini, ‘The Hungry Soul’, pp. 280–3. Daniel Szechi, 1715:  The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 96, 217. 178 Comets were recorded in England in 1664, 1665, 1680, 1682 and 1710. Anon., The Age Of Wonders: or, A Farther and Particular Discriptton [sic] of the Remarkable, and Fiery Appartion [sic] that Was Seen in the Air, on Thursday … May the 11th 1710. Also the Figure of a Man in the Clouds with a Drawn Sword (London, 1710), pp. 2–8. Bernard Capp, ‘The Millennium and Eschatology in England’, Past & Present, 57 (November 1972), pp. 156–62. Dacome, ‘To what purpose does it think?’, pp. 395, 409. 179 BGE, Ms. fr. 603, fols 33–61. BGE, Ms. fr. 609, fols 17–56, especially fol. 34. BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fol. 146. 180 BGE, Ms. fr. 2043a/34.

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181 See Maria-Cristina Pitassi, ‘Marie Huber, Genevoise et théologienne malgré elle’, Bulletin de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Genève, 25 (1995), pp. 83–96. 182 BGE, Ms. fr. 602, fol. 209. 183 Susan Juster, ‘Mystical Pregnancy and Holy Bleeding: Visionary Experience in Early Modern Britain and America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 57:2 (April 2000), 249–88 (p. 267). See also Jean-Paul Roux, ‘Blood’, in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. II, pp. 985–7. 184 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 4–5 (5 October 1708 and 4 September 1709). 185 Stack, 1j, fol. 18. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p. 122. 186 Juster, ‘Mystical Pregnancy and Holy Bleeding’, p. 270. 187 LPL, MS 934/52, fol. 1. Stack, 1g, fols 47–8. 188 Corner, Signs of God, pp. 113–15. Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, pp. 4, 62–3, 134–5. 189 Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, p. 29. 190 Brand, pp. 11–12. Warnings II, p. 21. Kingston I, p. 70. 191 ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fol. 53. Brand, p. 53. 192 See ‘batelier gueri par Whitrow’ in BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 8. ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fol. 15. Chetham’s, Mun.A.2.114, fols 125–30. 193 Lacy, A Relation of the Dealings of God, pp. 24–7. Lacy, Mighty Miracle, pp. 62–4. Kingston I, p. 57. 194 Anon., A New Dialogue, p. 3. 195 Lacy, Predictions Concerning the Raising the Dead Body of Mr Thomas Emes, p. 1. 196 Bunhill Fields was London’s burial ground for dissenters between 1665 and 1854 and includes the graves of George Fox (Quaker), John ­Bunyan (Baptist), John Owen (Independent), Jane Lead (Philadelphian) and later on Daniel Defoe (Presbyterian). Alfred W.  Light, Bunhill Fields ­(London:  Farncombe, 1913), pp.  14–28, 84–92, 156–63. Sylvia ­Bowerbank, ‘Lead, Jane (1624–1704)’, ODNB (2004). Other followers of the French Prophets (Nathaniel Sheppard, Mary Moult) were also ­buried near Emes. Brand, p. 48. Stack, 1l, fol. v. 197 Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 113. 198 Lacy, Predictions Concerning the Raising the Dead Body of Mr Thomas Emes. The Post Boy, 1975 (10–13 January 1708). 199 Court, Approaching the Apocalypse, pp.  34, 57. Trevett, Montanism, p.  33. Umphrey Lee, The Historical Backgrounds of Early Methodist Enthusiasm (New York: AMS Press, 1967), pp. 21–3. 200 Jerome Friedman, ‘Their Name Was God:  Religious Charlatans in the Seventeenth-Century English Popular Press’, Journal of Popular Culture, 25:1 (March 2004), 55–66 (p.  57). Mack, Visionary Women, pp.  184, 199. Coudert, ‘Henry More’, pp. 46–7. 201 Brand, p. 13. On the group’s publications in that period, see Chapter 4. 202 The Flying Post: or, The Post Master, 2040 (25 May 1708). ‘Reasons of the Hope’, fols 50–1. John Lacy, Esquire Lacy’s Reasons why Doctor Emms was not Raised from the Dead, on the Twenty-Fifth Day of May,

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According to the French Prophets Prediction (1708), repr. in Oldys, Malham and Rosenwald, Harleian Miscellany, Vol. XI, pp. 64–5. Lacy had expressed personal doubts over the miracle shortly beforehand and wrote a letter to the city marshal on the same day. Abraham Whitrow may have been the only Prophet who attended according to some sources. Lacy, A Relation of the Dealings of God, p. 31. 203 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/2, fol. 153. Marion and the French nucleus  – Fatio, Daudé, Allut and Portalès  – did not associate themselves with the English prophecy of Emes’s resurrection. A  few years later, Lacy also denied the necessity of working miracles. Lacy, Spirit of Prophecy Defended, pp. 419–27. See also Chetham’s, Mun.A.2.114, fol. 65. 204 Wharton, Divine Inspiration, p. 5. 205 On radicalism and anachronism, see Hessayon and Finnegan, Varieties, pp. 1–29. 206 ‘While I was preaching, one before me dropped down as dead, and presently a second or a third. Five others sank down in half an hour, most of whom were in violent agonies. We called upon the Lord and he gave us an answer of peace.’ John Wesley, quoted by Cragg in The Church and the Age of Reason, p. 144. 207 Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions, pp. 15, 50–9.

4 Going public

The late Stuart era reintroduced a degree of freedom England had not seen since the Interregnum. Political journalism flourished after the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695. The end of press censorship enabled the growth of newspapers to outpace the 25 per cent expansion of the electorate.1 By 1704, nine newspapers had a combined weekly circulation exceeding 44,000 copies and London boasted eighteen periodicals, distributed by an estimated 4,000 street sellers four years later.2 Upon their arrival in England, Fage, Cavalier and then Marion therefore discovered an accessible print market, as well as an avid, continuously growing readership.3 Broadcasting the Spirit certainly necessitated some adaptation to take full advantage of this new medium. Such initiatives did not originate with Fage, but from his educated supporters, who almost immediately constituted themselves as his scribes. Fatio, Daudé and Portalès were already recording Fage’s inspirations in July 1706 and those of Cavalier in August before Marion’s arrival in September (see Chapter  1).4 However, it was only with the latter – a clerk – that the desire to print their inspirations became systematic. The material support of wealthy benefactors enabled the Camisards to reach a wider audience and ensured the transition from their oral prophetic tradition of the Désert to the English print market. These favourable conjunctures rapidly placed the French Prophets, and more generally enthusiasm, at the centre of a fierce battle of pamphlets. Broadly speaking, by 1700 there was an overconfident sense among some of the intellectual elite that enthusiasm belonged to the past and that the religious frenzy of the mid-seventeenth century was at last over. In a letter written to the Swiss theologian Jean le Clerc in Amsterdam on 5 March 1706, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury rejoiced that ‘as to Blasphemouse Enthousiasts and reall Phanaticks we have few or none very dangerouse remaining’.5 His statement was more

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wishful thinking than a realistic assessment of his time. He only had to wait a few months to reconsider his judgement. After looking at their internal dynamics and their religious beliefs in the preceding two chapters, in this chapter we now examine the French Prophets’ place and image in the non-Habermasian ­public sphere – that is one that includes religious discourse. It first visits their assemblies and their use of the printed medium to publicise their cause, before diving into the battle of pamphlets they sparked and its legacy to the wider Enlightenment debate on enthusiasm.

Dramatic assemblies Away from the mass gatherings of the Désert, the Camisards’ first assemblies remained confined to the privacy of their hosts’ chambers for at least the first year of the French Prophets’ existence.6 Their promotion, as we saw in Chapter two, owed much to the respectability of their hosts, whose networks rapidly enabled the Camisards to move from one location to the next. The attention they initially received resulted to a large extent from the publicity generated by Huguenot pamphleteers to support the rebellion in the Cévennes. Yet the curiosity of influential sympathisers could not but challenge the secrecy of their meetings almost from the beginning.7 Already in August 1706, the street where Jean Allut lived in Soho was often blocked by the magnificent coaches of important spectators coming to see his cousin Jean Cavalier prophesy.8 A prestigious entourage amassed by word of mouth around the Camisards, providing them with a secure environment and valuable attention across London (Chapter 2). By the spring of 1707, after almost a year of private assemblies, those henceforth known as the ‘French Prophets’ were about to go public. Enthusiasm as an externalised form of religious experience was by essence meant to be seen, heard and shared. Taverns, inns and coffee houses offered an ideal platform for the dissemination of the Prophets’ warnings, just as they had provided crucial meeting points for religious dissenters since the Civil War. According to Roy Porter, London had 207 inns, 447 taverns, over 2,000 coffee houses, 5,875 alehouses and 8,659 brandy shops at that time, places the French Prophets certainly took advantage of to attract newcomers.9 But one venue in particular was to transform to Prophets’ publicity. From 14 June 1707, whilst Marion, Daudé and Fatio were indicted for blasphemy, John Lacy rented a meeting house on Bridgewater Square in Barbican to host larger, public assemblies. Twenty-two large, bilingual meetings were held in Barbican alone to reach a wider, English-speaking audience of

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Philadelphians and Quakers.10 The strategy certainly worked as the targeted audience responded massively with a continuous influx of new adherents until 1712.11 Much can be learned about the dynamics of their meetings by tallying with their records. The Prophets kept a very close eye on their numbers, and scribes monitored meeting attendances with great caution. For example, 107 people were recorded at a private meeting on 19 January 1708; 78 were blessed among the audience on 22 July 1708 and 58 people attended on 30 September of the same year. Numbers varied of course with the venue, date and time of the event, but they do not necessarily indicate an early decline of followers. Five months after the disastrous failure of Emes’s resurrection, around 100 French Prophets gathered in Hackney Marsh on 14 October 1708, and another 200 from seven denominations celebrated the Lamb’s Banquet at James Jackson’s house on 2 January 1709.12 The 160 missionaries listed as part of the Prophets’ tribes the following March and the 600 or so followers by 1712 likewise suggest a steady devotion. Such emphasis on the numbers and names of their followers reveals a unique image-consciousness that would rapidly translate into dramatic performances.13 Unlike Reeve and Muggleton, who presented themselves as the two witnesses of the Apocalypse, James Nayler as the Messiah or Thomas Moor(e) and William Freke as the new Elijah, the French Prophets never claimed to embody a specific biblical figure supposed to usher in the Second Coming. Rather, they acted as God’s Instruments performing an apocalyptic scenario such as the fall of the Whore of Babylon. In so doing, they first and foremost added more immediacy to the book of Revelation by helping their audience visualise the impending punishment of the wicked before the Millennium. While the Anglican Church was distancing itself from millenarian calculations, the Prophets purportedly offered their audience a confrontation with their destiny. According to their printer, Samuel Keimer, witnessing a French Prophet’s inspiration felt like speaking with God ‘Face to Face’.14 Vivid accounts of these assemblies survive, their theatricality being best exemplified in the Southwark meetings: At one of their Meetings, one of the Prophets personated GOD, a second the Angel Gabriel, a Third the Devil, and the Fourth (who was Mary Beer a Prophetess) acted the Church […] John Glover, who acted the Devil, making such a grim and distorted Face, as if indeed he had been a Fiend of Hell in human Shape, pretending a Right to the Church, and John Potter, (whom I think) personated God, threaten’d the Devil at a great Rate, the Devil commanding him that personated God, to bless the Church. After a great deal spoke by Way of

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Dialogue between ’em, each striving which should have the Church, who was toss’d and tumbled to and fro, much like a Football, the Believers were pluck’d down (by the Inspired under Agitation) into the middle of the Room, tumbled one on the Top of the other, Heels over Head, wallowing on the Ground in a great heap, in a filthy manner, sometimes the Spirit tumbling an Inspir’d down Stairs headlong, enough to have kill’d him.15

This performance, still according to Keimer, lasted several hours, during which spectators locked themselves up in another room out of fear. This was not unusual during the Prophets’ dramatic assemblies, which typically degenerated into terror and chaos upon performing the fall of the Antichrist. On 22 July 1707, the eyewitness W. C. reported that: At a Meeting at Sir Richard Bulkeley’s Chamber … Betty Grey, under violent Agitations, personated the great Whore of Antichrist. Took all the Chairs in the Room, and barricadoed the Door, that no body might come in or go out. This done, she laid aside her Manteau and Night-clothes, tyed up her Hair … then taking a Peruke and Hat that she found in the Room, put them on her Head, and sat down in an Elbow Chair very majestically, with her Arms a Kembo: After this she rose out of the Chair, and for about an Hour together, thump’d and beat with her Fist every one in the Room in their Turns, except Mr. Lacy. … Then Mr. Allut falling into Agitations, and being commanded by the Spirit to combat this Female Fury, cries out es tu la Grande Bête, la Putain de Babylon? Art thou the Great Beast the Whore of Babylon? Then rose up, pull’d her down upon the Floor, stamp’d upon her, kick’d her about as if she had been a dead Cat, and walking in Triumph on her Body, stood upon her Breast till she appear’d Lifeless. Then to try whether she was living or dead, Mr. Allut alternately lifted up her Legs and Arms, which fell down again upon the Floor, like the Limbs of a dead Body. Immediately after she rose up, spoke, and gave Thanks that Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon were overcome; upon which, both their Inspirations ceas’d, and both the Actors declar’d that they had no Sense or Remembrance of what had pass’d in this Rencounter; though they made such a horrid Noise in the House, that Sir Richard’s Landlady gave him Warning to be gone.16

Of course, critics may have exaggerated the dramatic nature of these assemblies to discredit them. But if Lacy denied the presence of one W. C. on this occasion, he did not say a word about the scene described above, which seemed compatible with their own assembly accounts.17 There was something bizarrely entertaining in their assemblies (see Figure 4). They blurred the line between what were presented as prophecies on stage and what increasingly looked like staged inspirations. Many observers compared the Prophets’ assemblies for this reason

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Figure  4. S. Conneand, New Prophets:  Their Historical and True Picture (London, 1708), Houghton Library, Harvard University, EB7 L1196 P708c.

to a troupe of actors performing a play: ‘What an idle and insignificant mixture of Comedy and Tragedy is contain’d in this Farce, sometimes acting like an Antick or Buffoon, in singing French to an English Assembly that understood none’, once mocked Richard Kingston.18 Such theatrical parallel made sense, for the Prophets presented themselves as the Spirit’s ‘Instruments’ acting in altered states of consciousness. Their raptures thus waived personal responsibility and allowed room for great scenes of violence and bestiality, as when Betty Gray burned John Glover’s face with a fiery handkerchief or when some inspired howled like dogs at the Copenhagen tavern.19 The Prophets’ performances failed to impress critics, who promptly derided their assemblies as a ridiculous imposture. One may be tempted to dismiss them as masquerades, but our approach to popular representations has been largely shaped by the writings of Augustan moralists and Enlightenment sceptics. Several anthropologists have likewise

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presented religious experience as a revengeful compensation for one’s feelings of dejection, isolation or inferiority.20 Such condescending judgement echoes in fact the patrician response to enthusiasm in its insistence on the ignorance and destitute condition of these believers. The present case, however, suggests otherwise. The demographic composition of the Prophets examined in Chapter 2 revealed a far blurrier picture of the social reality of enthusiasm in eighteenth-century England. That some highly educated men sacrificed their wealth and reputation to support and even perform within a millenarian movement tells us a lot about the sincerity of that faith. What critics viewed as a masquerade debasing the Church, the Prophets claimed on the contrary to enliven it based on the same scenario. After all, their assemblies only dramatised the very prophecies and allegories that both Anglicans and nonconformists would preach at the pulpit.21 But the growing popularity of masquerades as a plebeian genre remained heavily resented by Augustan moralists and satirists in the early eighteenth century. These kinds of religious enactments constituted, in their view, a moral threat freshly imported from the Continent against English values and mores. As they always strove for public engagement, enthusiasts offered in turn perfect models for satire.22 Embodying the Holy Spirit could not suffice to convince sceptics in an increasingly cessationist environment. Prophecy and glossolalia would have to be complemented by thaumaturgy to authenticate enthusiasm in the public eye, but they would first be tested upon believers. On 30 July 1707, a few days after he received the gift of tongues, John Lacy defied the laws of physics during a retreat at Bushy and stunned his closest brethren: Mr. Lacy being under Extasy, and standing strait up right in a Corner of the Chamber, with his Heels, Calves of his Legs, close touching each other, his Hands also thrust athwart into his Bosom, was carry’d, in this Posture, strait forward, to the other side of the Room, being the space of ten or eleven Foot. He was mov’d as Sliding. His Motion lasted four Seconds of Time, and made the Chamber shake.23

Spectacular as it might have been, this miracle was only mentioned in passing amid Lacy’s collection of warnings. It was in fact performed again a week later, albeit in a different style, but exclusively before four prominent members, namely Jean and Henriette Allut, Betty Gray and Nicolas Fatio.24 Having worked on gravity with Newton a few years earlier, the latter was particularly impressed by Lacy’s transportation.25 Yet this was merely understood as a sign of greater miracles to come. Lacy would soon walk on water and, more importantly,

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heal the sick. Miraculous cures were first claimed over the summer of 1707. Even though thaumaturgy contains in itself dramatic qualities, these alleged miracles remained confined to the privacy of the patient’s chamber.26 The nature of the Prophets’ miracles contrasted with their unusual discretion over their importance. Miracles were an essential component of the early Church, but they faced growing scepticism in the late Stuart era. Enthusiasts and particularly Quakers were regularly challenged to perform miracles throughout the Interregnum and the Restoration. The persistence of such challenges in the early Enlightenment suggests that Protestants did not entirely rule out the possibility of divine miracles, but that there was an increasing demand for evidence and empirical verification. Many Anglicans continued to believe in miracles in the late Stuart period. The unexplained cure of four women captivated the Royal College of Physicians, bishops and even Queen Mary herself in the 1690s. The Anglican divine William Fleetwood likewise defended the reality of miracles in 1701 and Queen Anne continued to touch for scrofula until her death in 1714, a ritual she had revived at William III’s death and that the Stuarts perpetuated in exile. Healing the King’s Evil was for this reason punished as a political challenge to divine-right monarchy.27 Jane Shaw recently argued that the case of the French Prophets marked a significant milestone in the Enlightenment debate on miracles.28 Despite the prodigious battle of pamphlets discussed below, the authenticity of the Prophets’ miracles was arguably the least discussed aspect of their enthusiasm. This is all the more noteworthy as the debate began only six years after the polemic over Fleetwood’s Essay on Miracles. A possible reason for the public oversight of the Prophets’ thaumaturgic claims may have had to do with external circumstances. For if Lacy’s levitation was scrupulously recorded by Fatio at the time, it was not publicised until six weeks later, on 4 September, when Lacy’s second volume of prophetical warnings was printed. By then, much of the focus remained on Marion’s prosecution for blasphemy (Chapter 5). Lacy’s thaumaturgical exploits were not criticised as a result until late in 1707 and even well into 1708 – that is after Marion’s condemnation to the scaffold and, more importantly, when all eyes were set on Thomas Emes’s resurrection. The relative disinterest of the Prophets’ critics in their claims to miracles may consequently reside in the interval between their supposed achievement in private and their publication. As they gained confidence, however, the Prophets attempted their first public miracle shortly after Lacy’s private levitation. On 17 August 1707, an assembly was held at Thomas Emes’s house on Old

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Street Square, where Betty Gray was to be cured from a tumour growing in her throat (see ‘EG’ and ‘L’ in the background of Figure 4). The same miracle had allegedly been performed nine days earlier during an exclusive retreat to St Albans with only six of her brethren. This time, however, it would be replicated to convince the unbelievers. Gray’s neck was considerably swollen and suffocated her. Her chin was pressed down against her throat, which became so stiff that her entire face and bosom blackened. She was unable to eat or drink, but made strange inarticulate sounds in her rapture, at which point it was announced that Lacy would relieve her. Before proceeding, he invited the audience to feel her neck and pulse to assess the gravity of her affliction, which several observers refused to acknowledge. One of them, John Davis, forcibly lifted her chin and noticed that she started to breathe normally again before she resumed her position. Dr ­Timothy Byfield was nonetheless called upon to examine her and declared that only divine intervention could save her from an imminent death. After eight hours of curiosity, impatience and questioning from the audience, the miracle was eventually cancelled; Gray and Bulkeley accused spectators of disrupting the assembly’s divine atmosphere by their incredulity.29 To the Prophets, miracles were meant to test one’s faith. Lacy had reportedly dissolved Gray’s tumour with his hands during a private assembly on 8 August, but he failed to replicate the same miracle in public. Like his alleged levitation, the validity of miracles depended upon the collective subjectivity of believers, rather than an objective assessment of a mixed audience. In other words, Lacy preached to or, more exactly, flew past the converted, who fondly embraced this performance as irrefutable evidence of the Spirit’s presence among them. The Prophets’ first public attempt to thaumaturgy was disputed, albeit briefly, by their critics as evidence of their imposture. The Quakers proved particularly virulent on this occasion. Having moved away from the enthusiasm that stigmatised the early days of their movement, they sought to distance themselves from the Prophets at a time when the latter seemed increasingly appealing among their ranks. Mary Beer, Joseph and Beata Tovey, Anne Finkley, the Keimer family, Hugh Preston and Anna Maria King all joined during that period (see appendix). The school master James Jackson was excommunicated by the Quakers for embracing the Prophets after they healed his blindness, as were Mary Turner, Isabel Hughes and Anne Steed for claiming the gift of inspiration. Once the paragon of enthusiasm, the Quakers were effectively purging their quaking Friends by the early eighteenth century.30 After the failure of the public miracle on Gray’s neck, Lacy continued

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to heal people until 16 April 1708, though always within the privacy of the chamber.31 Subsequent miracles would not reach outsiders until they were printed with a lag of several weeks or a month. Some, like the visiting German Pietist Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf, gave the Prophets the benefit of the doubt in the meantime, but their caution would not last very long.32 The episode of Dr Emes’s resurrection due on 25 May 1708 undoubtedly marked the climax of the Prophets’ publicity. By that time, they had been delivering warnings for almost two years; their audience had become predominantly English, which in effect sealed the successful transition from the Désert to an urban audience of Londoners. The prophecy was first pronounced at a most humiliating time for the group: Marion and his scribes had just been exposed on the scaffold and Emes’s accidental death following a violent inspiration rapidly fuelled the derision of their critics. Satirical poems and pamphlets were printed on that occasion. One of them, discovered recently, was ‘licensed according to order’ by one opponent to discredit them. It featured the late Emes accusing the prophet of Aldermanbury – John Potter – Lacy and their brethren of imposture and exhorted them to stay away from his grave.33 The Prophets had actively publicised the miracle in the preceding weeks and months, but the satirical campaign of anti-enthusiasts indirectly contributed to their publicity. The attendance of some 20,000 people for the announced miracle speaks for itself. By contemporary standards, this meant that about 4 per cent of London’s population were physically present in Bunhill Fields cemetery on that day, with at least three or four times as many more who would have probably heard of it.34 No fewer than two regiments of armed forces were sent pre-emptively to the cemetery to contain the angry crowd over the Whitsuntide, evidently in vain.35 The French Prophets were now publicly ridiculed.36 If the miracle’s failure finally waived the public’s benefit of the doubt hitherto conferred on the Prophets by the privacy of their thaumaturgical achievements, this episode remained significant for the conduct of their subsequent assemblies. As the burial place of dissenters, Bunhill Fields was meant to host the Prophets’ first large open-air congregation, an empowering yet also daunting design beyond the confining walls of the meeting house. The Instruments did not perform the predicted scenario in front of the audience, but they increasingly held open assemblies alongside private ones thereafter. Several meetings were held in Hackney Marsh the following autumn and even on public squares during their subsequent missions, which I hope to explore in a dedicated study. One such open-field congregation was held at the

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eponymous ‘Prophets’ Barrows’ near Stonehenge around 1710, where they ‘preach’d to the enthusiastic multitude’, probably on a mission to Bristol.37 The significance of such an ancient site in the vicinity of a Huguenot community in Crockerton may have inspired the theatre of a new Désert. For if open congregations were by no means unprecedented among English enthusiasts, Bristol and its surroundings would soon play a critical role in the emergence of Methodism and the revivalist movement of the ‘Great Awakening’.38

From orality to print Marion’s arrival in London in September 1706 marked the beginning of a mutation of enthusiastic speech. The Spirit that had spoken profusely through the Camisards in the Désert reduced his discursive pace to dictate the word of God to his servants. By their own admission, the Prophets began to speak conveniently slowly and use recurrent phrases such as ‘I tell thee, my Child’ to allow their scribes more time to take full notes.39 Holy utterance began systematically to materialise into sacred text as, between 18 September 1706 and 30 March 1707, scribes compiled Marion’s prophecies on a daily basis into a new Gospel. Attendants could even order free copies of their transcripts with a one-to-two-day delivery.40 The Spirit made explicit the move toward the printed medium on 9 December 1706 and repeatedly ordered his Children to publish his word thereafter. The group’s efforts resulted in the publication of Marion’s Avertissemens prophétiques on 5 April 1707.41 This transition toward the written medium was partly motivated by François-Maximilien Misson, a Norman travelling writer, of international fame since his New Voyage to Italy (1695).42 Misson had joined the Prophets in November and began to interview Cévenol refugees about the supernatural phenomena of the Désert with the clear intention of publishing their testimonies.43 His move was an effort to counterpoise the growing criticisms of the consistory of the French Churches of London upon the three Camisards.44 Acknowledging that Marion, Fage and Cavalier had aroused a controversy since September, Misson did not present them as war heroes, but instead as the last survivors of a persecuted movement and the living proofs that divine manifestations had occurred in the Cévennes: ‘Ces trois braves Soldats Chrétiens, Etrangers, Pauvres, Foibles, presque autant dignes de compassion que d’estime, & cruellement molestez, trouvent leur apologie parmi les autres, dans ces Témoignages.’45 Misson spent the winter of 1706–07 collecting testimonies from Cévenol refugees with Lacy’s

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help. In so doing, he staged for the first time the dramatic scene of a land he never visited. His compilation was published under his own name on 24 April 1707 as Le Théâtre sacré des Cévennes, to this day one of the most emblematic accounts of the French Protestants’ plight under the Ancien Régime.46 Twenty-six people testified on behalf of the Camisards in London, twelve of them taking an oath before John Edisbury, Esq. and Richard Holford, ‘Masters in Chancery’. These included the original Prophets (Marion, Fage and Cavalier), their scribes (Portalès, Fatio and Daudé) and fellow refugees from Languedoc: Jean Vernet, Claude ­Arnassan, Jacques Mazel, Jeanne Castanet, Jacques Dubois and Elizabeth ­Charras. It is not clear how and why they were chosen, but promoting the original Prophets no doubt required witnesses with trustworthy reputations.47 Colonel Cavalier nevertheless questioned their credibility and the veracity of their testimonies: ‘Ce sont là des témoins à dire toutes choses, mêmes avec serment; pourvû que leur Déposition serve à entretenir la credulité qui les fait vivre.’48 Some, he further argued, were not even in England when Misson conducted his interviews, whilst others had subsequently refuted their oaths in 1708, which suggests that Colonel Cavalier followed the progression of the French Prophets very closely.49 His allegation also indicates that some refugees such as Arnassan or Jean Cabanel may have briefly joined the Prophets, before retracting for fear of retribution. Of all these witnesses, only Charras became an active follower.50 Most of these testimonies acknowledged the three Camisards’ participation in the rebellion and, more importantly, its prophetic dimension. An extraordinary number of infant prophets had allegedly spoken in tongues, some as young as fifteen months  – evidence, it was claimed, that their inspirations could not have been simulated.51 Thousands of women were likewise inspired and preached to support their menfolk, for which hundreds were martyred.52 Yet, as Georgia Cosmos argued, their declarations were not necessarily transparent insofar as they were probably shaped by the questions and bias of those who collected them. The final product should be regarded in this respect as a compromise between the Camisards’ enthusiastic statements and the normative bounds imposed upon them by the Masters in Chancery.53 Further publications rapidly followed Marion’s Avertissemens and Misson’s Théâtre sacré as the Prophets sought to reach a wider audience. As the local Huguenot readership was limited and the potential English-speaking market growing fast, it rapidly made sense to address Londoners in their own language. John Lacy had worked feverishly since January 1707 on an English translation of Misson’s

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Théatre Sacré, which he completed on 1 March and which was published as A Cry from the Desart around the same time as its original.54 Marion’s Avertissemens prophétiques were also translated as Prophetical Warnings, barely three weeks after the original, on 30 April, albeit that Lacy’s contribution here remains unclear.55 Thus, in the space of four weeks, the group had released four volumes in two languages, and targeted both Londoners and Huguenots. The publicity the French Prophets generated, short-lived as it was, owed as much to the quality of their entourage highlighted in Chapter  2 as to Marion’s aura. Nobody had heard of Marion, Fage and Cavalier before, whereas the names of respectable and well-connected gentlemen like Bulkeley, Misson and Lacy were well known and therefore accredited the Camisards’ cause.56 Their financial means enabled them to inundate the print market with ‘above Forty Pounds worth of Books’ by the end of April 1707.57 Such figures suggest a high print run, possibly well above the average of 1,000 copies for a book at that time, even though exaggerations cannot be ruled out.58 One thing for sure is that their subsequent output did not diminish. While Misson’s Cry from the Desart was already going through a second edition on 9 June 1707, Lacy published three volumes of his own warnings by the end of November, which Bulkeley had in the meantime advertised by London street sellers.59 The temporary follower Henry Nicholson also reported on their broadcasting methods in 1708: Mr. Lacy, in my hearing, was ordered by his Spirit, speaking to him in the ­Person of God, to buy up all his Books of Warnings, leaving as many as might probably be vended in this City [London], and to send them Gratis all over this Kingdom; some to the Northern Parts of it, some to Wales, and some also to Ireland. This Command, to my certain Knowledge, they have begun to put in Execution.60

His allegation was corroborated the same year by an anonymous ­traveller: Le soin qu’a eu Monsieur Lacy de faire repandre sa Traduction dans le Royaume, avec une liberalité digne d’un meilleur Livre, à [sic] prévenu beaucoup de Personnes dans les Provinces les plus reculées. Il m’est revenu de plusieurs endroits, que le sort de la plûpart de ceux que l’on a abusez, étoit le Theâtre sacré.61

If the French Prophets’ transition toward the printed medium owed much to their wealthy supporters, the group also relied largely on its

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members’ personal devotion and conveniently included nine confirmed printers and booksellers.62 Samuel Keimer, for example, paid his master £10 he had received from his mother for the publication of some warnings at his press.63 His vindictive account of his experience among the French Prophets accused the group of exploiting the credulity of their followers, after having lent them great sums of money at 500 per cent interest, which he never recovered.64 Fatio’s calendar also accounts for William Rogers printing some warnings between August and October 1708; and another agreement was later made on 3 January 1710 with Robert Roger, printer of Marion’s Avertissemens prophétiques and Misson’s Théâtre sacré, to print another volume of warnings.65 Samuel Noble also printed and sold prophetic collections on several occasions and Johann Christoph Sauer was accused of printing for the Prophets in Germany.66 Such a reliance on devoted printers and booksellers helped in many ways lower the cost of printing and hasten the publication process. More collections of prophecies followed at an uninterrupted rate until 1714. Many of these were otherwise compiled as a result of the group’s missionary expeditions across the British Isles and on the Continent, where they needed to broadcast their message to new audiences. At least thirty-one different collections of prophecies alone were published in French, English and Latin during this period, not including pamphlets and letters published in response to their opponents’ criticisms. The total number of the French Prophets’ publications amounted to at least fifty-seven over an interval of eight years, to which should be added several unpublished collections, indexes and catalogues, including three hitherto unknown volumes of Lacy’s warnings.67 Jürgen Habermas has famously anchored the emergence of the public sphere in eighteenth-century England. His rather Whiggish view of a secularising European society spearheaded by an emerging bourgeoisie and literary sphere has been severely criticised by early modern scholars. It certainly does not do justice to the flourishing coffee-house and print culture of the mid-seventeenth century, and even less so to the Dutch golden age.68 The French Prophets’ compulsive use of the printing press was anything but new in this context. It perpetuated instead an indefatigable appeal of print to dissenters, as Mark Knights observed on their Interregnum predecessors: Print could create textual communities on a wider scale than was possible in a scribal culture. Some groups, such as the Levellers and Quakers, were so good at exploiting the potential of the medium that one might almost say they were in part created through print. Print could also enhance identities, including those relating to gender and nationality, and widen participation by marginal groups.69

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The development of print in England was prodigious from the mid-seventeenth century and provided dissenters with a new voice. It helped disseminate their ideas by reaching new audiences beyond the boundaries of their local communities. Setting words on paper also secured the content of a message from the author to the reader to avoid the distortions and prejudices of oral intermediaries.70 If the Restoration marked an era of renewed persecution, the Toleration Act and the lapse of the Licensing Act reopened a favourable ground for heterodox expression by the turn of the eighteenth century. Still, interest in eschatology remained unshaken over that interval; numerous pseudo-scientific manuals and guidebooks based on astrological and mathematical predictions appeared around Newton’s time to calculate the year of the Second Coming or to answer questions on the soul’s journey after death.71 The publicity around the Prophets should not come as a surprise in this context; just as they capitalised on a vibrant millenarian landscape to develop, the French Prophets exploited and supplied a pre-existing demand for mystical literature in early eighteenth-century England. That is not to say that the transition toward the printed medium compromised the Camisards’ oral prophetic culture. On the contrary, the printing press complemented divine inspiration, but never supplanted the Prophets’ communication. For print only transcribed the Word of God, whilst the voice channelled it and therefore remained the chief medium of expression. Chapter  3 revealed their persistent emphasis on glossolalia, vocal volume and of course hymn singing throughout the history of their movement. More generally, the primacy of the spoken word remained an essential component of the Protestant faith. From the Reformation onward, as Robert Scribner points out, ‘it was not held to be sufficient to read printed tracts or even the Bible: the desire was to hear the word’.72 The pulpit therefore became a medium of mass communication throughout the early modern period and even more so during the Restoration. The popularity of charismatic preachers such as Richard Baxter, Robert South, Edward Stillingfleet and John Tillotson exemplifies what James Downey called ‘the golden age of English pulpit oratory’, which expanded into the eighteenth century with Gilbert Burnet, Edward Fowler, Edmund Calamy, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley and John Henley, as well as outside institutional walls with the evangelical awakening. Whether recited or simply read aloud, the sermon remained quintessentially oral, and its publication, generally edited by the author rather than reproduced verbatim, its natural outlet. For this reason, the flourishing and highly lucrative sermon literature of the late seventeenth and

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early eighteenth century – and with it the emergence of sermon plagiarism – reflected not only the growth of print and literacy, but also first and foremost the importance of orality among both Anglicans and nonconformists.73 Despite the unquestionable proliferation of print, orality remained the primary medium of communication in eighteenth-century culture, whether in the form of parliamentary speeches, law-court pleadings, sermons, teaching or apprenticeship. Even the wholly illiterate were not excluded from the printed word, as newspapers were often read in public and ballads sung in taverns or fairs. If print permeated oral culture from an early stage, it did not weaken it, but reinvented it.74 Adrian Johns has metaphorically captured communication in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as gravitating around two powerful black liquids: coffee and ink.75 The French Prophets’ communication followed the same media and maintained the Camisards’ oral culture of apocalyptic warnings while transcribing and translating them into print to reach new audiences. They arguably shocked their contemporaries more by their bizarre vocalisations and ecstatic performances than by publishing their warnings. Whether oral or printed, the Prophets’ spectacular communication converged upon a grand design:  ‘I will have thee to be an Offence to the World. I will that the World be offended in thee. The World follows the World: the Devil goes along with it. But I am with my Children.’76

The battle of pamphlets The print offensive against the Camisards’ enthusiasm began in May 1707 with a series of French pamphlets directed at Misson.77 Their first publications and the riots they had caused in April began to attract the attention of distinguished intellectuals, theologians, politicians and physicians, thereby opening the way for an early Enlightenment debate on enthusiasm. This controversial case gave birth to a formidable battle of pamphlets: the 58 publications they delivered caused another 92 reactions, in the form of pamphlets, sermons, public letters and a play, for a total of 150 titles in England alone. To these figures must be added dozens of newspaper articles between 1707 and 1710. The relationship between the Prophets and the early modern press proved complex and inextricable. Not only did they exploit the press, but the virulent response the Prophets received mechanically promoted them at the heart of the public debate. It is precisely this kind of publicity that prompted Shaftesbury to denounce the Prophets as attention-seekers and to advocate ignoring them.78

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As with all controversies, participants were fuelling the issue to secure significant profits and the battle of pamphlets also involved a battle of printers. Jonathan Swift’s printer, the Tory John Morphew, thus engaged in the publication of numerous anti-enthusiastic pamphlets, although with the exception of Bulkeley’s Impartial Account of the Prophets.79 His involvement was both lucrative and conformed with the Tories’ continuous attempt to repeal the Toleration Act in the early 1700s (see Chapter 5). Others, like Benjamin Bragg[e]‌and Robert Roger, simply exploited the market and published for both sides of the battle.80 Such practices were common after the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695. With over 60 printing houses and 150 bookshops in London by 1705, competition was therefore harsh and printers happily fomented controversies to encourage better sales.81 Samuel Keimer, the French Prophets’ unfortunate printer, was imprisoned several times for publishing libellous pamphlets.82 He later confessed to exploiting the attempted Jacobite invasion of Scotland to publish a false article in his newspaper –The London Post– that earned him £15! This success encouraged him to publish more provocative articles against the ­Government until he was imprisoned again.83 The French Prophets created such stir that even their notoriety soon expanded beyond the British Isles. A letter from Jean-Christophe Fatio to his brother Nicolas, dated 14 June 1707, attests that he had heard from various sources in Geneva that the latter was supporting the Prophets.84 Another letter, dated 5 March 1708, confirms the flow of information in Switzerland, when Jean-Christophe wrote that the whole Fatio family was covered with shame, following Nicolas’s exposition on the scaffold the previous December.85 The foreign press also reported on the Prophets’ controversy, no doubt inspired by the battle of pamphlets in England. Marion, Cavalier and Fage appeared in Le Journal des sçavans and La Gazette de Paris in 1708; the monthly Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in Amsterdam reported on the Prophets six times between June 1707 and April 1708, for a total of fifty-two pages; and further accounts of the Prophets appeared in Holland, Germany and Sweden.86 Such a wide coverage thereby indicates that they had successfully acquired international attention through the European media. Whilst the heat of the polemic radiated abroad, the heart of the debate on enthusiasm remained centred on London. In his study of the opposition to the French Prophets, Hillel Schwartz identified four main heads of accusations against the group: imposture, demonic possession, delusion and disease.87 Enthusiasm expressed to a large extent a combination of all of the above. The former two are discussed below,

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while the latter two shall be discussed in Chapter 6 as part of a wider medical debate on enthusiasm, which occupied in fact a small part of the battle of pamphlets at the time. Most of the contemporary criticisms published proved in reality much more personal and pragmatic.

Imposture The immediate accusation that enthusiasts faced from sceptics was of course that of imposture. If they did not by any means rule out the possibility of providential intervention in the temporal world, cessationist critics demanded evidence. Enthusiasts were invariably challenged to perform miracles to prove their divine election, even more so in the case of the French Prophets, who delivered specific and dated predictions, thereby making such threats more tangible and imminent. Aside from Emes’s resurrection announced for 25 May 1708, the Prophets also predicted the imminent destruction of the cities they visited. London was not explicitly mentioned, but Marion’s prophecy of the burning of the great city due three weeks after 4 November 1706 was unequivocally understood to mean the English capital, a prophecy made explicit by John Potter for 25 March 1709 and reiterated by Anne Steed on 30 March 1717.88 Likewise, in the summer of 1707, John Lacy announced that the guns of the Tower of London would roar ‘in a few days’, while more warnings were also delivered to and against Enfield, Chichester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Dublin and Glasgow.89 The failure of all of these apocalyptic predictions only helped fuel further criticisms and became instrumental in demonstrating their imposture. The French Prophets New Catechism gives a perfect example of early Enlightenment scepticism here. Although ecumenical and non-sectarian, its anonymous author encapsulated the Prophets within a radical tradition he conveniently forged to serve his purposes. As an Anglican, he referred to Matthew 24:24 against the emergence of false prophets and messiahs in the post-apostolic age. As a rationalist, he also expected Emes’s resurrection to fail  – though he cautiously did not exclude its possibility  – on the basis that the predictions of the Anabaptists, John of Leyden, David George, the Quakers, John Reeve and Muggleton had all failed in the past. His assumption was by default that the French Prophets formed yet another avatar of enthusiastic imposture. Modern miracles might occur, but they would not be recognised until they ‘publickly heal the Sick, make the Lame Walk, the Blind to See, cast out Devils, and raise the Dead’.90 His scepticism even seemed to have pervaded Quaker critics, who wondered how ‘in so Learned an Age, and among so wise, so discerning, and so

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penetrating a Nation … Impostors have daily the Confidence to set up’.91 Thus if faith in miracles and prophecies subsisted among their opponents, their rational approach to enthusiasm shifted the public focus on the need for evidence. In response to material demands, the Prophets essentially reasserted the primacy of faith over reason. Far from impressed, they would not admit their delusion and instead turned the blame back to their critics. For their predictions were not invalidated; it was their opponents’ interpretation that had failed. Lacy contended indeed that the gift of prophecy also required that of interpretation. Since the former was already a miracle in itself and that its divine nature was in no doubt, human reason was therefore showing its limits in attempting to interpret truths beyond its understanding. What rational men took as literal calendar days, weeks or months ought in reality to be understood in prophetic time, whose ratio could not be calculated. Rather than undermining the Prophets’ confidence, the perceived failure of their predictions by their critics comforted them in their faith. Scepticism may have compromised Emes’s resurrection in May 1708, but the Prophets continued to expect it three years later, this time within a more protected and private audience of believers.92

Possession and the decline of magic? In this battle of pamphlets, demonic possession came as both the oldest and least prominent argument against the French Prophets’ enthusiasm, despite the visible presence of inspired women among their ranks. It could be traced back to Luther’s repudiation of German enthusiasts – Schwärmer – at the beginning of the Reformation and dominated the theological critique until the scientific revolution of the mid-seventeenth century.93 The Anglican divine Meric Casaubon played a pivotal role in the evolution of the anti-enthusiastic debate. His Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, first published in 1655, distinguished between two genuine kinds of enthusiasm, namely natural and supernatural. The former originated in the body, while the latter designated a true spirit possession, whether divine or demonic.94 Such a dualistic approach to enthusiasm was partly motivated by his political allegiance. As a staunch royalist, Casaubon reasserted the reality of demonic possessions, which he used to stigmatise atheists and religious dissenters in a zealous effort to please the not-yet-restored Charles II.95 On the other hand, he emphasised the physical nature of enthusiasm and located its origins in the body, opening the way for a future medical debate that will be the focus of Chapter 6. In sum,

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Casaubon’s comprehensive position conflated the theological with the scientific at a time of extreme religious tensions. The production of anti-enthusiasm literature never ceased to grow from then on. As shall be seen below, those like Henry More’s Enthusiasmus triumphatus (1656) and George Hickes’s The Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcis’d (1680) privileged natural causes over demonic ones. John Locke’s essay Of Enthusiasm proved pivotal in this debate. Writing in response to the sectarian proliferation of his time, Locke counterposed enthusiasm and revelation, and castigated the former as a deceptive and irrational form of the latter. Locke’s rule of thumb was that ‘reason must be our last judge and guide in everything’. True revelation, in this context, was indeed supernatural; it enlightened man’s natural reason with God’s superior truth. By contrast, enthusiasm arose from an imagination induced by melancholy that persuaded the subject of his divine election against any verifiable evidence. If he offered no solution to his philosophical diagnosis, Locke enshrined the primacy of rational thinking in religious matters. The enthusiast’s unrestrained imagination obstructed his natural ability to distinguish between a genuine inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the Satanic delusion.96 Schwartz made a point that those who accused the Prophets of demonic possessions, or of at least contemplating its possibility, in the early 1700s – the nonconformist pastor John Humfrey (b. 1621), the bishop Edward Fowler (1632–1714) and the political writer Richard Kingston (c. 1635–1710?)  – all belonged to the older generation.97 Humfrey even applied Casaubon’s distinction between natural and supernatural enthusiasm to the French Prophets half a century later.98 Like him, most of these critics did not deny the supernatural nature of enthusiasm, but rather its divine origin. Although a small proportion of the critique, demonic allegations reflected the late Stuart ambivalence toward the supernatural. The cessationist stance of Protestant churches, discussed in Chapter 3, and the increasing influence of natural philosophy did not necessarily entail the decline of supernatural beliefs.99 If most officially denied the reality of miracles beyond the apostolic age, evil spirits remained an accepted belief, including among prominent literary figures, throughout the eighteenth century. For example, Joseph Addison reasserted his belief in witchcraft in 1711, and Daniel Defoe’s Political History of the Devil (1726) ascribed the party rivalries plaguing the State to Satan’s influence.100 Religious dissenters and the younger generation also emphasised the reality of demonic possessions. The thirty-year-old printer Samuel Keimer claimed in 1718 to have ‘acted very madly and bewitchedly, (as being no less than infatuated by the Devil)’ during the ten years or so he had

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spent among the Prophets, and John Wesley even claimed years later that ‘the giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible’.101 In fact, the publication of miraculous and providential accounts actually increased throughout the ‘Age of Reason’, so much so that the Pentecostal movement even reconciled Calvinism and miracles thereafter, making cessationism a declining Protestant belief in North America today.102 The use of a modern electronic catalogue likewise suggests that the number of titles published on enthusiasm continued to grow throughout the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century maintained a strong yet ambivalent relationship to the supernatural, a fascination that kept enthusiasm at the heart of the public debate. The growing influence of Locke’s natural philosophy did not eradicate, but cohabited with, supernatural beliefs in the Enlightenment. It sought to offer an alternative, rational interpretation to enthusiasm by focusing on the body and increasingly on the mind.103 In contrast to the demonological argument, proponents of natural interpretations were all born in the second half of the seventeenth century. They seemed more receptive to new ideas on enthusiasm, especially those of More, Hickes or Locke, and showed a more compassionate approach to the Prophets, portraying them as ignorant people deluded by their imaginations.104 Enthusiasts, in their view, did not undermine society, the Church or the State, but suffered from an unrestrained imagination. They were of a weaker constitution and deserved more compassion than persecution. As Chapter 6 will discuss in greater length, delusion and bodily distemper emerged around 1700 as stronger candidates behind the social disease. However, invoking physical dispositions did not necessarily entail providing a medical diagnosis of enthusiasm; most critics arguing in favour of a delusion remained on a philosophical level. In his study of the opposition to the French Prophets, Schwartz noted that all critics regarded their bodily agitations and beliefs as ‘something abnormal in the soul–body alliance’, albeit with different opinions on their cause.105 If it would be exaggerated or simplistic to say that the adoption of this naturalistic approach was politically motivated or party-specific, there were nevertheless ideological divergences in the interpretation of and response to enthusiasm. For Schwartz, ‘the difference between possession and delusion was the difference between exorcism and pity, and as one expressed pity, one adopted natural explanations’.106 Coming under fire from the Tories for allowing dissenters to worship in public (see Chapter 5), the Whigs tended to defend the Toleration Act by ascribing the excesses of enthusiasm to natural, rather than supernatural, causes.107 John Locke had located its origin in a ‘warmed or overweening brain’, and both Addison and

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Defoe expressed compassion for the French Prophets.108 Defoe, himself a nonconformist, regarded the French Prophets as victims of a delusion and called for lenient judgement, instead of their condemnation to the scaffold for terrorising the Queen’s subjects.109

The philosophy of satire Tories were especially vehement against what they regarded as the fanatical excesses of a divided Church. Jonathan Swift, the greatest satirist of this generation and also an Anglican minister, had been very active and unforgiving in his attacks. Swift continuously ridiculed dissenters, enthusiasts and astrologers, often spoofing prophecies as a literary genre under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff.110 In this context of tense ideological rivalries, the best example and most often-cited work of natural philosophy on our subject likewise came from another prominent Whig figure. Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm was much debated both at home and abroad, yet it is also the least representative work of the battle of pamphlets. To begin with, it went counter to the Reformation backlash against enthusiasm to rehabilitate it as a positive, even creative passion. Secondly, it criticised the foundations of Christianity and Protestant churches alike and, thirdly, it advocated derision over repression in response to enthusiasm. Central to his argument was the novel distinction between a vile and a ‘noble enthusiasm’. Shaftesbury’s understanding of the former kind relied on the premise of a delusion induced by melancholy:  men find pleasure in deluding themselves by unbinding their imagination to palliate a deeply entrenched sadness, caused by either love or religion.111 Shaftesbury ascribed the latter case, embodied in his view by the French Prophets, to the victimising Protestant approach to religion in preaching a threatening, punitive God.112 At the risk of offending his contemporaries, he concluded on this basis that ‘Many of our first Reformers, ’tis fear’d, were little better than Enthusiasts.’113 Repression could only be counterproductive in Shaftesbury’s view, for its immediate effect would be to increase melancholy and strengthen the imagination. Many, like the Camisards, embraced martyrdom as a divine honour, which magistrates should therefore deprive them of.114 Instead, Shaftesbury pleaded for a dose of ‘good humour’ and freedom in religion against the proliferation of modern enthusiasts. Ancient societies had faced the same problem after all; their example showed that only wit and free philosophy could successfully balance out, if not moderate, this vile, superstitious sort of enthusiasm now embodied by the French Prophets.115

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It is indeed in the arts and humanities that Shaftesbury sought to foreground his belief in a superior, creative enthusiasm against all Reformation and early Enlightenment trends on the subject. He compared his epoch of religious toleration and a free press to the advanced intellectual state of the classical age and ascribed the glory of ‘Heroes, Statesmen, Poets, Orators, Musicians, and even Philosophers’ to this ‘noble Enthusiasm’.116 On free philosophical discourse thus depended the eradication of modern superstitions and credulity. Shaftesbury went even further in rehabilitating enthusiasm when he published The Moralists a year later. This philosophical tale narrated the encounter of an enthusiast, a sceptic and a melancholic in the countryside, in which the former proved the most sociable of the three. Enthusiasm did not undermine social cohesion, Shaftesbury argued against the general consensus, but actually promoted it. The enthusiast’s passionate force prompted him to meet and exchange with his contemporaries and even feel empathy for their emotional states (see Chapter 6). Shaftesbury put his ‘homosocial propensities’ into practice shortly afterwards and withdrew to the countryside to contemplate the beauty of the arts, before finally moving to southern Italy until his death.117 Ironically, the only protagonist to subscribe to Shaftesbury’s view in this debate was none other than the enthusiast John Lacy himself, who resurrected the classical sense of enthusiasm to bring it closer to our modern understanding, that of inner passion longing for a better future. The identity of this rare support, however, probably did not help Shaftesbury’s philosophical cause.118 Shaftesbury’s defence of enthusiasm seems like a philosophical bottle thrown in the public ocean that would not be found until years after the time of the French Prophets. Far from popular, his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm was instead severely criticised by his contemporaries, especially the Tory feminist writer Mary Astell and the Bishop of Gloucester Edward Fowler. Astell accused Shaftesbury of trivialising religion by subjecting God to humour like ‘the Jews, who spit upon our Saviour’.119 The Whig natural philosopher’s overemphasis on God’s goodness indirectly minimised, in her view, the need for individual repentance. In so doing, he debased the foundations of religion to a matter of laughter and encouraged enthusiasm in such vulgar and socially divisive manifestations as Bartholomew’s Fair.120 Fowler did not share Shaftesbury’s sense of humour either. Writing the same year as Astell, he regarded enthusiasm as a very serious subject and a ‘catching disease’.121 Accordingly, he rebuked Shaftesbury as a dangerous man, a social disrupter – hence an enthusiast himself – and derided his opponent’s use of wit as a direct threat to social order:

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Let but Farces and Puppet-shews universally prevail, and down comes all Madness and Enthusiasm in a trice … Instead of Bibles we are to read Plays; and instead of going on Sunday to Churches, or Chapels, we should go to Booths and Theatres; and instead of hearing Divines, see Actings and Puppet-shews.122

Beyond Shaftesbury’s humorous take on enthusiasm, it was in fact his morality that Fowler attacked. He reminded the reader of Shaftesbury’s deism and disbelief in revealed religion. This undermined his legitimacy against religious fanatics and therefore made him ‘too fit for a place in a Hospital’.123 The public debate on the French Prophets consisted of pamphlets, public letters or sermons, but also satirical poems and songs.124 Such diversity of responses also reflect the Prophets’ appeal to both polite and plebeian culture, each choosing its favourite format to debunk or simply deride its victims.125 In May 1709, Thomas d’Urfey, a prolific playwright of Huguenot descent, had his satirical comedy The Modern Prophets performed at the Theatre Royal in the gentrified neighbourhood of Drury Lane.126 A  play was certainly the most relevant medium used against the Prophets; it could reproduce their dramatic performances and it could be printed too. Featuring a main character named Betty Plotwell, in reference to the young prophetess Betty Gray, the play emphasised the Prophets’ ability to simulate convulsions and therefore compared them to actors.127 In many respects, The Modern Prophets resembled a play within a play, in which Plotwell revealed to the audience her tricks to make her belly swell and confessed her imposture. D’Urfey presented young female debauchees under faked inspiration seeking to attract wealthy, deluded old men. This licentious portrayal may not have been far from the public’s perception of the Prophets, but the play turned out to be a failure and was only performed for three nights. It was criticised several times for its mediocrity or distasteful piety, but its opening was also untimely, almost one year after Thomas Emes’s failed resurrection.128 D’Urfey himself deplored that it took so long for his comedy production to be staged on account of a series of unfortunate events and the two-month closure of theatres to mourn the death of Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George, at the end of 1708. The number of publications against the Prophets also decreased from 1709, coinciding with the group’s first schism and missionary expeditions. D’Urfey’s play was thus performed at a time when public interest in the Prophets had already begun to fade; it was vividly criticised, ironically enough, for lacking inspiration.129 Perhaps the most dramatic and satirical response to the French Prophets’ enthusiasm was Martin Powell’s puppet show in Covent

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Garden. Despite their condemnation to the scaffold in 1707, the failure of Emes’s resurrection and other predictions, the Prophets continued to assemble in public in 1710. Powell was the greatest puppeteer of his time and his shows a precursor of the eighteenth-century masquerade; they even used animals, including a tame pig he would dance with on stage. His performances had become so popular in the early 1700s that they allegedly distracted people from going to church on Sunday mornings. Popular performances and masquerades remained frowned upon as a debasing foreign genre in the early 1700s. Yet the Government’s decision to order a puppet show from Powell against the Prophets effectively turned satire into a political weapon for the maintenance of public order in an unusual lapse of anti-Augustan moralism. By targeting the masses in this manner, it rested on the belief that society can regulate itself without the intervention of an authoritarian government.130 The strategy was a clever one; it mocked the Prophets’ performances at Barbican and humiliated them before a much wider and popular audience than that enjoyed by d’Urfey play. According to contemporary accounts, Powell’s performances wiped out the French Prophets from the public sphere, thereby verifying Shaftesbury’s promotion of humour.131 Yet it was this kind of popular satire that Astell and Fowler deplored as vile distractions from one’s religious duties, and Shaftesbury may have felt the same in retrospect. He distanced himself from satire over time in an effort to please England’s polite readership over its vulgar satirical appetite.132

Settling scores If the battle of pamphlets propelled to some extent an intellectual debate on the nature of enthusiasm, most titles published in this period were instead more personal in their attacks. Many protagonists were in fact personally acquainted with the Prophets and continued in print the disputes they had had in private. For instance, Edmund Calamy was Lacy’s minister, John Humfrey Bulkeley’s neighbour, and Richard Kingston had attended several assemblies where he had argued directly with Fatio and Bulkeley.133 Others, like Henry Nicholson or Samuel Keimer, were apostates and therefore provide us with precious insiders’ accounts of the Prophets’ activities. The French origins of their movement at a time when England was at war against France rapidly fomented conspiracy theories among their critics (see Chapter  5). This could be expected of English protagonists, but the most virulent and conspiracist charges came in fact from the London Huguenot community. Huguenot ministers targeted

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more particularly the life and behaviour of the three Camisards during the war in the Cévennes. Some pointed out that Cavalier had failed to obtain certificates of good reputation in Switzerland when he fled France.134 Fage had first served in the King’s army against the Camisards before changing sides, which inevitably led to suspicions that he had infiltrated the rebels to betray them.135 Likewise, Cavalier’s role during the rebellion remained obscure and his Jesuit upbringing undermined his credibility as a Protestant prophet.136 Marion’s case proved more complex; although he received a certificate from the ministers of Lausanne, he had also worked as a clerk in Toulouse, then the Catholic capital of Languedoc, and had not made a name for himself during the insurrection.137 In many ways, the bottom line behind the conspiracy theory lay in the generation gap that separated Huguenot ministers from the Camisard Prophets. The former were all in their fifties and over, and had left France at the Revocation in 1685, while the latter were all born around that time. The Camisards had in fact emerged as a lay substitute for a Calvinist clergy they had never witnessed. The Prophets’ rapid growth despite the swift reaction of the Huguenot ministry was resented as a challenge to their authority and kindled fears of separatism within the exiled French community. To such accusations, the Prophets denied receiving money from France or Rome and reinstated their Protestant faith and allegiance to the English Crown.138 Behind the public settling of scores between the Prophets and the London Huguenot ministry also took place a more personal one among the Camisard refugees. Both Colonel Cavalier and Colonel Billiard are listed among their attendants even though the former had publicly repudiated Fage, Cavalier and Marion in the battle of pamphlets.139 The great Camisard hero had been accused by the Prophets and witnesses of the Théâtre sacré of experiencing similar divine inspirations and agitations in the Cévennes. Marion even claimed that he secretly supported them and produced letters in Colonel Cavalier’s hand to prove it.140 César Gallois likewise declared in January 1708 that Jean Cavalier de Sauve kept letters from his alleged cousin the Colonel, in which the latter begged him not to say a word of what had occurred in the Désert for no one would believe it.141 Perhaps more tellingly, the Scottish Prophet Thomas Dutton reported the recent death of Colonel Cavalier as the loss of another spiritual Instrument in June 1740, by which time the Prophets had long dispersed and for the most part lost touch.142 Despite Colonel Cavalier’s public rebuke of the Camisard Prophets, the relationship between the two parties nevertheless remained ambivalent. For if the former carefully avoided the sensitive

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issue of divine inspirations later in his memoirs, his engagement with pneumatic experiences was recently demonstrated by the discovery a manuscript in Germany.143 Behind appearances, both parties shared in reality a common spiritualist approach to religion and warfare, which only the Prophets defended publicly. More personal still were the Prophets’ supposed mores. The almost unprecedented social range among the French Prophets’ followers fuelled fears of a social disease contaminating London’s respectable spheres. Many critics of the Prophets endeavoured to debunk their individual reputations in order to discredit their movement as a whole. Fage was allegedly a notorious debauchee and rogue, for instance; Cavalier a homosexual; and Fatio a Spinozist-turned-Socinian.144 Opponents documented their cases with numerous third-party testimonies to unmask the French Prophets as a conniving enterprise feeding on the credulity of the masses. Richard Bulkeley, who set himself as the Prophets’ public defender, not only denied such accusations by insisting on the moral probity of his brethren, but also emphasised that both France and England had recently witnessed infant prophets, whose young age excluded by nature the possibility of an imposture. Furthermore, the fact that the Prophets delivered dated prophecies could only be read as a sign of sincerity. In sum, enthusiasts were not impostors motivated by personal ambition, but respectable men sacrificing their material comfort to live with the lower sort in a Christian manner.145 Although it was not published until 1718, Samuel Keimer’s Brand Pluck’d from the Burning is perhaps the most detailed account of the French Prophets. It is also the most personal and vindictive one, having spent almost ten years among the group. Some allegations may have been exaggerated or even falsified given his bitter experience, but most facts and allegations were in fact corroborated elsewhere in the battle of pamphlets, including by the Prophets themselves. Keimer, like most critics, debunked his former brethren’s credibility by emphasising their immoral behaviour. If the Prophets’ ‘love feasts’ were indeed ‘perform’d by select Companies meeting at proper Places’ to celebrate communion with bread and wine, as we saw in Chapter 3, Keimer offered a very different version of their content: the Prophets would ‘kiss, and tickle one another, chucking one another under the Chin, laughing and crying out, He, He, He, He, He, He, and using many lascivious Postures’.146 Further evidence suggests that the Prophets’ dramatic assemblies turned into a theatre of love. Aside from the formation of lawful couples within the group, some Prophets were accused of pushing a licentious agenda.147 The butcher Samuel Thomlinson was thus commanded by the Spirit to ‘lie carnally with one Anne Steed’ who, at first

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reluctant, consented upon the seventh attempt, ‘being unwilling (as she said) to resist any longer, for Fear of the Judgements of the Lord’.148 Guy Nutt once danced a jig with Ann Topham holding a broomstick in her hand, kissing her under agitations. Similarly, Rebecca Cuff, being inspired, kissed all the men in the room during a meeting, and when men and women fell down one on top of each other, the candles were magically blown out by the Spirit.149 Whilst many followers were apparently involved in such practices, opponents of the French Prophets often regarded those scenes as gender-related. Some women, it is true, exhibited extravagant performances, both inside and outside assemblies. Betty Gray, for example, impersonated the Whore of Babylon in the Catholic chapel of Duke Street in November 1707, stripping naked and adopting indecent poses on the altar.150 Mary Keimer, acting the same allegory, jumped on another woman’s body under inspiration, treading violently over her breasts, belly and legs as a sign of imminent punishment of the impious, and was described by her own brother as ‘a lusty young woman’, a rather unveiled reference to the prophetess’s idiosyncratic mores.151 The most shocking episode came with Dorothy Harling, an old lady known as ‘Permanent Spring’, who would lash her male spectators ‘with a Whip knotted, with sharp Needles or Pins fastned thereto’ after hearing their confession, whereupon she would lift her skirt, screaming ‘come in Christ, come in,– Come in Christ, come in’, and then proceed to a purificatory urination on their wounds. She was rapidly expelled from the group for her indecency, but some members followed her nonetheless.152 Although women’s precariousness may have pushed a few to seek a more prominent place in the group, their growing number among the Prophets in fact put an end to accusations of debauchery made against them. By the turn of the eighteenth century, attitudes toward the female sex were beginning to change. Women were less likely to be perceived as carnal predators, but increasingly as virtuous, innocent and sexually passive.153 Conversely, prophetesses tended for the most part to be regarded as weak, deluded creatures, more passionate and therefore prone to hysteria.154 Accusations of immorality, debauchery and licentiousness were instead levelled predominantly at male prophets, seen by many as manipulating and taking advantage of their female coreligionists. The recently discovered French Prophets New Catechism derided the Prophets for inspiring young women for their own uses, while Richard Kingston accused Marion of entertaining widows and preying on their bodies.155 Fage was notorious for his loose relationships with girls while in the Cévennes; and worse still,

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Fatio was depicted as secretly homosexual and Cavalier as a preying paedophile, who had also attempted to rape a young servant on his way between Lausanne and Frankfurt.156 Similar behaviours were also seen during the Prophets’ assemblies: At another Meeting, John Glover under Agitations, imitated Conjugal Affection with a Prophetess on a Bed, before a Number of Believers present. This was likewise look’d upon as a Sign; but of what I can’t tell, except it was, that the Prophet would willingly perform That in Reality, which he did there shew but in Effigies.157

Perhaps the greatest controversy, and one that divided the Prophets themselves, occurred after the battle of pamphlets, when John Lacy abandoned his wife and five children for Betty Gray in 1711.158 His relationship with Gray was not entirely unpredictable; observers had reported his infatuation with the young girl as early as 1707. Evidently he had been preying on her for a while, taking lascivious postures with her in bed whilst claiming to be under inspiration.159 Lacy’s claim that this reflected a divine order from the Spirit failed to convince the rest of the group, particularly Thomas Dutton, Mary Keimer and other prophetesses, who felt their most charismatic member was breaking the seventh commandment.160 Lacy justified his separation on the grounds that Gray would give birth to a second messiah. The adulterous couple moved to Great Budworth, Cheshire, but would in fact have four surviving daughters.161 Lacy’s past eventually caught up with him; he was found guilty of adultery in 1720, forced to move to a new house and was never allowed to speak to his second family again.162 By that time, the French Prophets had disappeared from the public sphere.

The debate goes on Public interest in enthusiasm did not decline when the French Prophets went underground. It resurfaced in 1719 with the Salters’ Hall meetings, during which some 150 dissenting ministers of various denominations assembled in London after the repeal of the Schism Act to determine their subscription to the doctrine of the Trinity and the articles of the Church of England and thus clear themselves from accusations of Arianism. If, as we shall see in the next chapter, Anglicans had anchored the toleration of dissenters to the guarantee of their Trinitarianism, diverging interpretations of the Trinity rapidly plagued the assemblies and spread beyond the capital. Subscribers included most Independents, conservative Presbyterians and Particular Baptists; while

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non-subscribers consisted mainly of Presbyterians and General Baptists. The former side held that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were three different forms of the same God – Sabellianism – and the latter argued that the three Persons existed independently from each other – tritheism. The divide between subscribers and non-subscribers was only denominational in part, and degenerated as ministers failed to agree and some changed sides.163 As the dispute continued to grow, the dissenting minister-turned-Deist Thomas Morgan (1671–1743) accused the leader of the subscribers’ party, the congregationalist Thomas Bradbury (1677–1759), and his adherents of enthusiasm. A new battle of pamphlets ensued, albeit less personal in content and smaller in size, in which enthusiasm was used in a broader, pejorative sense to discredit one’s opponents and prefigured the Enlightenment smear word par excellence. Behind their catchy titles, the main pamphlets published within this controversy offered instead philosophical reflexions on the nature of faith and its relationship with reason.164 Morgan’s views proved in many ways in line with the progressivist historiography of the Enlightenment. He accused enthusiasts of placing faith and revelation over reason, which he claimed should prevail over religion under all circumstances. He insisted that personal revelation was only valid if in accordance with both the Scriptures and reason. Thus the orthodox stance on the Trinity, whereby God was equally present in all three Persons at the same time, was in his view unintelligible. Bradbury and his fellow enthusiastic subscribers therefore preached an ignorant and irrational religion, when faith ought to denote the belief in something credible. It was this ‘light of Truth’, substantiated by evidence and reason, that distinguished men from passion-driven brutes. In other words, enthusiasts embodied for Morgan a dangerous obscurantist force against an emancipated, Enlightened religion.165 A new battle of pamphlets against enthusiasm began in the late 1730s with the emergence of the Methodist movement in the dawn of the Great Awakening. As may be expected by now, the controversy followed the same pattern as that against the French Prophets: Methodists were not at first perceived as a distinct, original movement, but rather as yet another resurgence of enthusiastic display, much like a chronic social disease relapsing at more or less regular intervals. Conversely, the anti-enthusiastic response was not very new and different either; it waved the flag of previous religious traumas and revived older counter-arguments, like those of the Restoration Platonist Henry More on the physiological nature of enthusiasm, for instance.166 But instead of a philosophical debate on an outbreak of religious madness,

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it was again the conspiracist argument that prevailed among early attacks on the Methodists. They were immediately compared to the Civil War sects and social disrupters. Corbett’s etching of George Whitefield carried aloft by his female followers (Figure 5) is a famous example of England’s growing appetite for satire of revivalist movements, which was brilliantly fed a few years later by William Hogarth’s Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762). In short, early Methodist enthusiasts were either vilified as malevolent religious impostors and accused of manipulating the credulous masses or ridiculed as deluded and ignorant zealots.167 Although still active – Fatio was compiling and translating prophecies in the 1730s – but less visible (see Chapter 2), the memory of the French Prophets remained very much alive in mid-eighteenth-century England and the spectre of their enthusiasm was to haunt the debate on revivalist movements throughout the Enlightenment. The American congregationalist Charles Chauncy (1705–87) published (although his authorship has been questioned) A Wonderful Narrative: or, A Faithful Account of the French Prophets in 1742 in response to the Methodist revival in England and America.168 Not only did he appeal to the collective memory of the Prophets’ enthusiasm and failed predictions – several eyewitnesses of Thomas Emes’s failed resurrection had allegedly moved to New England in the meantime – but Chauncy recontextualised them in Christian history to stigmatise enthusiasm as a recurrent religious pattern. In so doing, he sketched a traceable genealogy of enthusiasm, spanning from the Montanists to the Methodists via the Quakers, the Masonites and other Restoration movements, as well as Roman Catholicism and Islam. The fact that he chose the French Prophets over the Methodists as the paragon of enthusiasm further anchored their impact in English collective memory, as well as in America, where they seem to have required no introduction half a century later.169 Chauncy’s anti-revivalist criticism conflated orthodox Calvinism with natural philosophy: from his viewpoint, God revealed the Gospel to men within the bounds of their rational understanding. Only those with a warm imagination made claims to visions and revelations in the past, which suggested that enthusiasts suffered from a form of religious madness in which melancholy was the main ingredient (Chapter 6).170 Chauncy’s efforts to contain the proliferation of enthusiasm in America were immediately echoed in England by Anglican clergymen, moderate revivalists and Deists alike. Bishop of Exeter George Lavington’s Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared (1749) was arguably the most important anti-Methodist pamphlet of the mid-eighteenth century. The Bishop not only drew the same genealogy of enthusiasm

Figure 5.  C. Corbett, Enthusiasm Display’d; or, The Moor-Fields Congregation (1739).

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descending from the Montanists but, and perhaps worse still, equated the Methodist revival to Catholic saints and mystics. Lavington’s main criticism focused on the infallibility of pretended inspirations, which he debunked by pointing out the recent precedent of the French Prophets’ predictions of Christ’s imminent Second Coming.171 Ironically, revivalists themselves appeared divided over such claims and above all their external manifestations. For if reformers like the Oratorian John Henley (1692–1756) and the early Methodists strove to rehabilitate the passionate bodily eloquence of the primitive Church against patrician and establishmentarian sobriety, moderate revivalists such as George Whitefield and Charles Wesley sought to distance themselves from accusations of enthusiasm and actively discouraged bodily agitations.172 This was all the more difficult as many early Methodists engaged with the French Prophets in the late 1730s (see Chapter 2), an ambivalence that has now famously cast John Wesley as a ‘reasonable enthusiast’.173 The paradox of mid-eighteenth-century revivalism resided in the promotion of a liberating religious experience within the bounds of orthodox liturgy, a tricky balance to maintain in the immediate aftermath of the French Prophets’ scandal. If Methodist reformers defended a middle way between institutional and revealed religion, the line between revivalism and enthusiasm remained very fine indeed. The growing influence of Deist ideas in the public debate imposed a clear-cut demarcation between natural religion – that is a minimalist form of belief subject to rational criticism – and the claims to miracles they systematically dismissed as superstitious. Their position was quintessentially elitist and patronising, only allowing room for either the rational religion of the educated few or the enthusiastic propensity of the credulous masses.174 The Enlightenment sceptic David Hume polarised this debate on different bases by distinguishing enthusiasm from superstition, presenting them as mutually exclusive. Both developed from ignorance, but with opposite results: superstition prevailed among the weak and fearful, whilst enthusiasm was animated by pride and imagination. The former characterised institutional religion and priests in particular, whereas the latter grew outside ecclesiastical authority and even defied it. In short, Hume equated enthusiasm with sectarianism and cited the Anabaptists, the Levellers or the Camisards as prominent examples. Interestingly enough, however, his essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ did not mention the Methodists, who had supplanted the Prophets as the epitome of enthusiasm by the time he was writing. Their revivalism remained intra-Anglican, however, and therefore did not fit into Hume’s system.175 Like Shaftesbury a few decades earlier, his position remained isolated from his contemporaries, who systematically associated enthusiasm and superstition instead.

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With the rise of Methodism in the late 1730s and its defence of miraculous gifts, witchcraft and divine manifestations, the Enlightenment debate on enthusiasm was in fact only beginning on either side of the Atlantic. Over 900 titles were subsequently published against the Methodists, with the French ­Prophets always in the background.176 *** Despite their relatively small size compared to the Quakers or the Methodists and the short lifespan of their public presence, the case of the French Prophets was far from anecdotal. The Camisards’ irruption into the English public sphere proved symptomatic of the pragmatics of its print industry in a period free from censorship, very much like their enthusiastic predecessors during the English Revolution. The publicity around the French Prophets was overall rather phenomenal when considering their actual numbers. Such disparity reflects an exceptional sense of communication and promotion thanks to the unconditional support of their wealthy scribes and hosts, whose presence ensured a swift transition from the oral prophetic culture of the Désert to London’s booming print market. With their bold predictions and transgressive assemblies, the Prophets attracted the attention of many of their contemporaries, but their notoriety may be best measured from later accounts. Half a century after Dr. Emes’s failed resurrection, Theophilus Evans estimated that thousands of people in London still remembered this event very well.177 And when writing his history of London in 1773, John Noorthouck recorded only two significant events for the year 1707: the Union Act and Elie Marion’s trial (see ­Chapter 5).178 Although long forgotten today, the French Prophets continued to intrigue or inspire prominent figures such as Cotton Mather, John Byrom, John Wesley, Benjamin Frankin, Voltaire, Edward Irving and Germaine de Stäel; their works were even reprinted during the revolutionary period and beyond.179 Conversely, the sheer number of anti-revivalist titles published throughout the eighteenth century suggests, if not betrays, a real fascination for enthusiasm, and for good reasons. Enthusiasts and revivalists were powerful orators in the golden age of the pulpit; their voices and sense of communication certainly reached a much larger audience than those of Anglican clergymen, the Deists and prominent figures of the Enlightenment during their lifetime. George Whitefield’s open-air congregation before 50,000 people in Kennington may have appalled Bishop Lavington, but it certainly also forced his admiration.180 The natural eloquence of such revivalists directly challenged the borders of polite society, forcing the latter to react. Such frenetic and almost compulsive responses to enthusiastic manifestations and the perceived social

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threats they supposedly entailed not only publicised its significance, but also helped define a so-called enlightened approach to religion. By their promotion of an unregulated and liberating religious experience in the public sphere, enthusiasts acted in other words as a motor for the Enlightenment, that is as the antithesis of what we define as modernity.181

Notes 1 Coward, Stuart Age, pp. 390, 395–6. 2 Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain:  Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 226–7. Adam Fox and Daniel R. Woolf claim that another 130 newspaper titles were established in England between 1700 and 1760. The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 22. 3 It is estimated that at least 50 per cent of adults in England could read print by 1700. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 19. 4 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1r. LPL, MS 932/10; MS 934/52. 5 Rex A. Barrell, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), and ‘Le Refuge français’ Correspondence (Lewiston, NY:  Mellen, 1989), p. 92. 6 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1r (June 1706). Stack, 1j, fols 23–4. MMM, p. 154. 7 Lionel Laborie, ‘Huguenot Propaganda and the Millenarian Legacy of the Désert in the Refuge’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 29:5 (2012), 640–54. 8 MMM, p. 157. 9 Meetings were recorded at the Bear Tavern, Copenhagen; Bells Kensington Gravel Pits; and the Blue Boar, for example. Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1, Index V, fols AA–FF. Anon., A Reply to the Main Argument, in a Paper, Entituled An Impartial Account of the Prophets in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1708), p. 11. Josiah Woodward, The Copy of a Letter to Mr. F—. M—., p. 7. Taverns had become crucial meeting places in the early eighteenth century. Roy Porter, English Society in the 18th Century, pp. 217, 226. 10 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2 (14–15 June 1707). Kingston II, p. 26. 11 LPL, MS 934/52, fol. 1. ‘Reasons for the Hope’, fol. 50. 12 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 3–5. The Post Boy, 2111 (23–5 November 1708). 13 Anon., Honest Quaker, pp. 2–3. 14 Brand, p. 24. 15 Brand, p. 53. 16 Kingston I, pp. 66–7. 17 John Lacy, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit … The Third and Last Part ­(London, 1707; hereafter Warnings III), p. 6.

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18 Kingston I, p. 20. [N. N.], An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, Lately Come out of the Cevennes and Languedoc (London, 1708), p. ii. NRL, 42 (September 1707), p. 336. 19 Brand, pp. 109–10. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 3r (5 January 1708). Woodward, The Copy of a Letter to Mr. F—. M—., p. 7. Marion, French Prophet’s Declaration, pp. 2–3. Anon., A Collection of Advertisements, pp. 18, 24, 37–8. 20 James Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances:  The Play of Tropes in Culture (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1986), pp.  20–5, 42–3. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, p. 26. 21 Jacob, ‘Millenarianism and Science’, pp. 335–6. 22 Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization:  The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 2–8, 63. 23 Warnings II, pp. 64–5. 24 Warnings II, pp. 65, 116. 25 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2r (30 July 1707). BGE, Ms. fr. 2043a/30/4♠. 26 Warnings II, pp. 118–20. 27 Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, pp.  29, 64, 134–5. Edward Gregg, ‘The Exiled Stuarts:  Martyrs for the Faith?’, in Michael Schaich (ed.), Monarchy and Religion:  The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 187–213 (p. 205). Roy Porter, Bodies Politic, Disease, and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (London: Reaktion, 2001), p. 26. 28 Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, pp. 153–4. 29 Warnings II, pp. iii–viii, 145–9. Anon., Honest Quaker, pp.  1–9. Vale, Imposture Detected, pp. 6–15. 30 Friends’ House Library, London (FHL), Box A1/5, fol. 95. BGE, Ms fr. 605/7a, fol. 3r (25 February 1708). Rogers, Quakers, a Divided People Distinguished, pp. 13–18, 22. 31 Lacy, A Relation of the Dealings of God, pp. 24–7. 32 AFSt, H D23b, fol. 178; H C144a, no. 2, 12. 33 Anon., A New Dialogue, pp. 2–3. 34 Lacy, Mighty Miracle. Charles Chauncy, The Wonderful Narrative:  or, a Faithful Account of the French Prophets, Their Agitations, Extasies, and Inspirations … (Glasgow, 1742), p. 55. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 122. London’s population was estimated at around 500,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the century. Waller, 1700, p. 1. 35 Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, Vol. VI, p. 307. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 3r. 36 Anon., The French Prophet’s Resurrection: With His Speech to the Multitude that Behold the Miracle (London, 1708). The French Prophets Confounded: or, The Dead Man’s Speech to the Presumptious Miracle-Workers. Deliver’d under the Similitude of a Dream (London, 1708). Edward Ward, ‘An Epitaph on the French Prophet, who Was to Make His Resurrection

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on the 25th of May’, in The Wars of the Elements: or, a Description of a Sea Storm (London, 1708), pp. 55–7. 37 William Stukeley, Stonehenge a Temple Restor’d to the British Druids (London, 1740), p. 46. Mark Bowden, David Field and Sharon Soutar, ‘Stonehenge World Heritage Site Landscape Project: Lake Barrows, the Diamond and Normanton Gorse. Archaeological Survey Report’, Research Report Series, 29-2012 (Swindon: English Heritage, 2012), pp. 11, 25. 38 Elizabeth Crittall (ed.), A History of Wiltshire, Vol. VI ([S.l.]: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1962), p. 220. Newport, ‘Early Methodism and the French Prophets’, p. 128. Barry, ‘Bristol as a “Reformation City” ’, pp. 261–84. 39 Marion, Prophetical Warnings, pp. xiii–xiv. Jean Gailhard, Discourses on Several Useful Subjects (London, 1708), p. 181. Sutherland, Background for Queen Anne, p. 53. Vidal, L’Ablatif absolu, p. 35. 40 Kingston II, p. iii. Brand, pp. 9–10. 41 Marion, Avertissemens prophétiques, pp. 50–2. Stack, 1j, fols 23, 27. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1v. 42 Marion, Avertissemens prophétiques, p. 88. The original version was written in French and published in 1691 as Nouveau voyage d’Italie, and was regarded as the first travel guide of its time. It is thought that Misson also influenced Defoe for both his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain and Robinson Crusoe. Craig Spence, ‘Misson, Francis Maximilian (c. 1650–1722)’, ODNB (2011). 43 TSC, p. i. See also Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy, pp. 23–36. 44 Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy, p. 23. 45 ‘These three brave Christian soldiers, poor, weak strangers, almost as worthy of compassion as of esteem, and cruelly molested, find their apologia among others, in these testimonies’ (my translation); TSC, p. i. This sentence does not appear in either of the English versions published simultaneously. 46 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1v. MMM, p. 159. 47 Maximilien Misson, A Cry from the Desart: or Testimonials of the Miraculous Things Lately Come to Pass in the Cévennes, Verified upon Oath, and by Other Proofs, 1st edn (London, 1707), pp. i–ii. Castanet may have been related to the Camisard leader of the same name. See above p. 38, note 65. Abraham Mazel was in Lausanne at that time. His testimony is included in Marion’s declaration. MMM, pp. 201–6. 48 ‘These witnesses are willing to say anything, even under oath, provided that their deposition maintains the credulity that they make of living of’ (my translation). Colonel Cavalier’s declaration in anon., Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, p. 12. 49 This included Abraham Mazel, M. Caladon and Boissier. MMM, p. 202. 50 Anon., Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, pp. 13–29. Vidal, L’Ablatif absolu, p. 190. 51 TSC, p. 32. 52 TSC, p. 18.

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53 Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy, p. 25. 54 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1v. A Cry from the Desart was published in late April/early May 1707, just a few days after Misson’s original. MMM, p. 159. 55 Charles Bost attributes this translation to Lacy, but does not support his argument. No evidence confirms this so far. MMM, p. 159. 56 NRL, 43 (February 1708), p. 129. Anon., Dialogue entre deux freres, touchant les prophetes Cevenois (London, 1707), p. 2. I was unable to find any account of the Camisards’ rebellion and their leaders that mentioned Marion before his arrival in London. On reports of the dragonnades and the Cévennes, see Thorburn, ‘Prophetic Peasants’, pp. 163–81. 57 Anon., A Full and True Account of the Apprehending and Taking Six French Prophets, near Hog-Lane in Soho, who Pretended to Prophecy that the World Should Be at an End within This Three Weeks (London, 1707). 58 Schwartz, French Prophets, p.  81n23; and Knaves, Fools, Madmen, p. 40n19. Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy, p. 130. Francis Moult had published 1,500 copies of an unauthorised translation of a Latin treatise by Nehemiah Grew in the 1690s in order to steal the latter’s business. This anecdote seems to confirm that 1,500 represented a very large edition then. Adrian Johns, Piracy:  The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 89–93. 59 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2 (25 July 1707). A third, previously unknown edition, published by H. Hills in 1707, is kept at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I have not been able to examine this copy. 60 Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, p. 2. 61 ‘The care with which Mr Lacy diffused his translation in the kingdom, with a generosity that is worthy of the best books, alerted many people in the most remote provinces. I have heard from several places that the fate of most of those who have been abused was indeed the Cry from the Desert’ (my translation). Anon., Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, pp. 1–2. 62 Robert Roger, Samuel Keimer, William Rogers, Ebenezer Draycott, Mrs Moreton, William Wilkins, Samuel Noble, Jaques Levi and Johann Christoph Sauer. 63 Keimer’s chronology is not always clear, but this most probably occurred around 1707/08. Brand, p. 52. 64 Brand, pp. 76, 78, 80–1. 65 Although he appears in the Prophets’ records, Roger’s involvement with the group remains uncertain as he later printed pamphlets against them. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 3v, 6r. 66 James Cuninghame, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit, Pronounc’d by the Mouth of James Cuninghame, during His Imprisonment in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh … (London, 1712); and Fifteen Warnings of the Eternal Spirit, Pronounc’d by the Mouth of James Cuninghame, Being Mostly Explications of Scripture (London, 1712). Lacy, General Delusion. William Smith, A Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania (London, 1755), p. 26. 67 Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/1.

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68 Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere:  An Encyclopedia Article (1964)’, New German Critique, 3 (1974), 49–55. Brian Cowan, ‘The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, 47:1 (2004), 21–46. 69 Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, p. 236. 70 Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 202–75. Christopher Hill, World Turned Upside Down, p. 14. 71 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 50. 72 Robert Scribner, ‘Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas’, History of European Ideas, 5:3 (1984), 237–56 (p. 238). 73 James Downey, The Eighteenth Century Pulpit: A Study of the Sermons of Butler, Berkeley, Secker, Sterne, Whitefield and Wesley (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1969), pp.  1–29 (p.  3). W.  Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson:  A  Study of Its Literary Aspects (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), pp. 14–38. 74 Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in Gerd Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 97–131. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, pp. 5, 50. 75 Adrian Johns, ‘Coffeehouses and Print Shops’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. III: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 320–40. 76 Marion, Prophetical Warnings, pp. 9–10. 77 Anon., Dialogue entre deux freres; Second dialogue entre deux freres, touchant les prophetes Cevenois (London, 1707); Troisieme dialogue entre deux freres, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Du XXX May (London, 1707); Quatrieme dialogue entre deux freres, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Extrait du procez qui a été intenté contre les pretendus profetes, dans la Maison de Ville, au banc de la seine, le 4 Juillet 1707 (London, 1707); Cinquieme dialogue entre deux freres, & Timante leur ami qui survient pendant leur entretien, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Du 23. Juin 1707 (London, 1707); Sixième dialogue entre deux freres et leur ami Timante, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Du 8. Juillet 1707 (London, 1707); Septieme et dernier dialogue entre deux freres et leur ami Timante (London, 1707). 78 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, to My Lord ***** (London, 1708), pp. 31–2. 79 See, for example, Kingston I; [N. N.], An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets (1708); Marc Vernous, A Preservative against the False Prophets of the Times (London, 1708); G. P., The Shortest Way with the French Prophets, or, an Impartial Relation of the Rise, Progress, and Total Suppression of Those Seducers who Attempted Lately to Pervert Several Inhabitants in the Town of Birmingham in Warwickshire (London, 1708); and Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. On Morphew, see Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1968), pp. 210–11.

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80 Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers, p.  47. Bragg[e]‌ printed all three volumes of Lacy’s Prophetical Warnings and Misson’s Cry from the Desart, as well as virulent anti-enthusiastic pamphlets such as Observations upon Elias Marion and His Book of Warnings (1707), George Philadelphus’s The Right Way of Trying Prophets (1708) and the second volume of Kingston’s Enthusiastick (sic) Impostors (1709). Roger specialised in the plight of French Protestants. His earlier production include Histoire abrégée de la ville de Nîmes (1703); Liste des Protestans françois réfugiez en Angleterre (1703/04); and Histoire abrégée des dernières révolutions arrivées dans la principauté d’Orange (1704). He printed Marion’s Avertissemens prophétiques and Misson’s Théâtre sacré des Cévennes and Plainte et censure, but also Jean Graverol’s Sentimens désintéressez de divers théologiens protestants (1710). 81 Adrian Johns, ‘Printing, Publishing and Reading in London, 1660–1720’, in Patrick Karl O’Brien (ed.), Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 264–86 (p. 265). 82 Robert T.  Sidwell, ‘ “An Odd Fish”:  Samuel Keimer and a Footnote to American Educational History’, History of Education Quarterly, 6:1 (Spring 1966), 16–30 (p. 20). 83 Brand, p. 84. 84 BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fols 145–6. 85 BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fol. 149. 86 Le Journal des sçavans (Paris, 1708), pp. 11–15. Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy, p. 133. NRL, 41 (June 1707), pp. 688–90, (July 1707), p. 110; 42 (September 1707), pp.  331–9; and 43 (January 1708), pp.  105–6, (February 1708), pp. 122–47, (April 1708), pp. 404–14. De Propheten in Engeland, na de raad onses heeren, geoordeeld aan hare vrugten: In een brief, geschreven aan een vriend (Rotterdam, 1708). Hallische Zeitungen (4 July, 30 August, 11 September, 1 and 27 November, and 28 December 1708; 12 January and 23 December 1709). Unschuldige Nachrichten von alten und neuen theologischen Sachen, Büchern, Uhrkunden, Controversien, Anmerckungen und Vorschlägen, 1, pp. 340, 634–6, 771–7; 2, pp. 128–30; 5a, p. 519; 5c, p.  1072. Wöchentliche Relation der merckwürdigsten und zur Conservation der neuen Historie hauptsächlich dienenden Sachen (1709), pp. 183–4; (1710), pp.  76, 83. Magnus Gabriel von Block, Åtskillige Anmärkningar Öfwer Thesza Tiders Falske Astrologiska, Phantastiska Och Enthusiastiska Prognostiker, Spådomar Och Prophetier, Beträffande Menniskjans Wäsende Och Wandel I Gemen; Men I Synnerhet Religions- Och Statz Saker, Förnemligast: I the Nordiska Länder. Såsom Ock Then Andra Christi Tilkommelse, Jämwäl Sidsta Wärldenes Ända (Linköping, 1708), pp. 39–40. 87 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, pp. 31–70. 88 The prediction was originally announced as ‘in three weeks’, but was replaced in the book by ‘in a few days’. Marion, Avertissemens prophétiques, p. 11; and Prophetical Warnings, pp. 11–12. Kingston I, pp. 23, 55. Calamy, A Caveat, p. 34. Brand, pp. 31, 73–4.

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89 Calamy, A Caveat, p. 34. Kingston, Enthusiastic Impostors, p. 72. Abraham Whitrow, A Prophetical Warning Pronounced by Abraham Whitrow Woolcomber, under the Operation of the Spirit, to the People of Enfield ([London?],1708). Mary Turner, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit, to the Priest and People of Chichester, Pronounc’d by Mary Turner, Ann Topham and Anna Maria King (London, 1709). Mary Beer, A Collection of Prophetical Warnings, Pronounc’d under the Operation of the Holy Eternal Spirit, to the Inhabitants in and about the City of Bristol &c. … (Bristol, 1709). Thomas Dutton, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit, to the City of Edenburgh, in Scotland by the Mouths of Thomas Dutton, Guy Nutt, and John Glover:  In Their Mission, by the Spirit, to the Said City (London, 1710). Margaret Mackenzie, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit, to the City of Edenburgh, Pronounc’d by the Mouths of Margaret Mackenzie and James Cuninghame (London, 1710). John Moult, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit, to the City of Dublin, Pronounc’d by the Mouths of John Moult, Guy Nutt and John Parker (Dublin, 1710). James Cuninghame, Warnings of the Eternal Spirit, to the City of Glasgow, in Scotland. By the Mouths of James Cuninghame, and Margaret Mackenzie (London, 1711). 90 Anon., French Prophets New Catechism, pp. 2–4. 91 Anon., The Honest Quaker, p. i. 92 Lacy, General Delusion, pp. 130–1, 221, 295, 400–1. Anon.., Clavis prophetica; or, a Key to the Prophecies of Mons. Marion, and the Other Camisards, 2 vols (London, 1707), Vol. II, pp.  35–6. Glasgow City Archives, Mitchell Library, Slains Castle Library, MS 562590: letter from James Cuninghame to Alexander Falconar (26 September 1711). 93 Heyd, Be Sober and Reasonable, pp. 11–43. 94 Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, as it is an effect of nature: but is Mistaken by Many for Either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolicall Possession (London, 1655), p. 17. 95 Ann Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions, p. 18. 96 George I Mavrodes, ‘Enthusiasm’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 25:3 (1989), 171–86. 97 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, pp.  41–2. Humfrey, A Farther Account, p.  14. Edward Fowler, Reflections upon a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord ***** (London, 1709), p. 3. 98 Humfrey, A Farther Account, p. 34. 99 Anon., The Devil of Delphos, or, The Prophets of Baal Containing an Account of a Notorious Impostor, Call’d Sabatai Sevi, Pretended Messiah of the Jews, in 1666 … (London, 1708), pp. 75–6. 100 Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 79, 108–9. Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations c.  1650–c. 1750 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 111–16, 136–8. 101 Brand, pp. 26, 37, 78. Brian P. Levack, ‘The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecution’, in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian Levack and Roy

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Porter, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London:  Athlone Press, 1999), pp 1–94 (p.  44). Bostridge, Witchcraft, pp. 109–11. 102 Ruthven, ‘Cessationism’, pp. 85–6 103 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, 5th edn (London, 1706), p. 588. 104 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, pp. 82–3. 105 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, p. 31. 106 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, p. 44. See also Bostridge, Witchcraft, pp. 108–38. 107 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 232. Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 119. Coward, Stuart Age, p. 283. Gibson, Religion and Society, p. 75. 108 Locke, An Essay, p. 588. Addison, The Spectator (20 November 1711). Daniel Defoe, A Review of the State of the British Nation (London, 1707–), 5:32 (10 June 1708). 109 Incidentally, his empathy can be explained not only by his personal experience of the pillory five years earlier, but also by the adherence to the French Prophets of his printer, Samuel Keimer (1689–1742). 110 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). J.  R. Crider, ‘Dissenting Sex:  Swift’s “History of Fanaticism” ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 18:3 (1978), 491–508. Tim Thornton, Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006), pp. 99–102. 111 Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, pp. 7–8, 20–1. 112 Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, p. 50. 113 Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, p. 44. 114 Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, pp. 26, 41–3. 115 Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, pp. 21–32. 116 Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, p. 82. 117 Lawrence E.  Klein, ‘Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60:1/2 (1997), pp.  153–77; and ‘Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713)’, ODNB (2008). 118 Lacy’s General Delusion reasserted the central role of spirit possessions in post-apostolic praxis. He reminded his readers of the Greek etymology of enthusiasm as a divine manifestation and claimed by this token that St Paul was himself an enthusiast. Far from offended by the term, Lacy embraced it as the utmost honour a man could be gifted with and counteracted his detractors for their staidness. See Chapter 3. 119 Mary Astell, Bart’lemy Fair or, an Enquiry after Wit; in which Due Respect Is Had to a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, to My Lord ***. By Mr. Wotton (London, 1709), p. 35. 120 Astell, Bart’lemy Fair, pp.  27–32. D.  P. Alvarez, ‘Reason and Religious Tolerance:  Mary Astell’s Critique of Shaftesbury’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44:4 (2011), 475–94 (pp. 479–80).

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121 Fowler, Reflections, p. 1. 122 Fowler, Reflections, pp. 25–6. 123 Fowler, Reflections, pp. 6–7, 9. 124 Anon., The Prophets:  An Heroic Poem. In Three Cantos. Humbly Inscrib’d to the Illumin’d Assembly at Barbican (London, 1708). 125 Jonathan Barry, ‘Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture: Reading and Writing in Historical Perspective’, in Tim Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 69–94. Thomas, ‘Meaning of Literacy’, pp. 97–131. 126 John Harrington Smith, ‘Thomas Baker and The Female Tatler’, Modern Philology, 49:3 (February 1952), 182–8 (p. 184). 127 Schwartz, French Prophets, p.  139. Shaftesbury’s satirical take on the French Prophets may have been influenced by the character of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, performed in 1707. Richard B.  Wolf, ‘Shaftesbury’s Wit in “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” ’, Modern Philology, 86:1 (1988), 46–53 (p. 52). 128 Harrington Smith, ‘Thomas Baker and The Female Tatler’, pp.  184–5. TheTatler, 43 (16–19 July 1709). 129 Larry Dooley, ‘The Playwright and the Prophets: Thomas D’Urfey’s The Modern Prophets (1709)’, Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance, 1:1 (2003), 9–18. Paul Bunyan Anderson, ‘The History and Authorship of Mrs Crackenthorpe’s Female Tatler’, Modern Philology, 28:3 (February 1931), 354–60 (p. 357). 130 Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Miscellaneous Works of the Late Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield … To which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life …, ed. M. Maty, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London, 1779), Vol. IV, pp. 309–10. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, pp. 2–8. 131 The Spectator, 14 (16 March 1711). 132 Wolf, ‘Shaftesbury’s Wit’, pp.  46, 52. Richard B.  Wolf, ‘Shaftesbury’s Just Measure of Irony’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 33:3 (1993), 565–85. 133 Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, p. 76. Humfrey, A Farther Account, p. 3. Kingston II, pp. 26, 72, 77. 134 Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, p. 25. 135 Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, pp. 35–9. ‘Certificat de Monsieur Cavallier, Colonel’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, p. 8. 136 Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, p.  24. ‘Declaration de Cesar Gallois’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, pp. 22–3. 137 Stack, 12g, fol. 37. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p. 7. 138 Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets, p. 8. 139 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 7–8. ‘Certificat de Monsieur Cavallier, Colonel’ and ‘Autre declaration du Colonel Cavallier’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, pp.  6–9. L’Hermitage to The Revd C.  G.  de la Mothe (La Haye, 13 December 1707), in Turner, Aufrère Papers, pp. 63–4.

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140 TSC, pp. 29, 110–15, 117. MMM, pp. 167–77. 141 ‘Lettre écrite par Ordre & au Nom de l’Eglise Françoise de Threadneedle-Street à My Lord Evêque de Londres’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, pp. 22–3. 142 Glasgow City Archives, Mitchell Library, Slains Castle Library, MS 562590 (28 June 1740). 143 AFSt, H C144a, no. 15. Laborie, ‘Huguenot Propaganda’, pp. 653–4. 144 Kingston II, pp. 59–68. 145 Bulkeley, An Impartial Account of the Prophets, pp. 5–9. 146 Brand, pp. 29, 71. 147 Jean Cavalier married Jeanne Verduron in 1707; one believer fell reportedly in love with Mary Beer and Samuel Keimer married her sister, a well-established woman among the group, in 1713; Joseph Steel married Mary Aspinal; Jacques Portalès Marie Devaux; Charles Portalès Mary Moult; and John Potter Margaret Moult. ‘Jean Cavalier de Sauve to his wife’ (The Hague, 16 May 1710), in Turner, Aufrère Papers, Part III, pp. 64–5. Brand, pp. 31, 60, 61, 65, 74. Stack, 12g, fols 2, 11–12. 148 Brand, p. 71. 149 Brand, p. 109. 150 Anon., French Prophetess Turn’d Adamite. 151 Brand, p. 54. 152 Keimer, A Search after Religion, p.  16; and Brand, pp.  38–9, 80, 111. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 5 (27 July 1709). Lawrence Stone discovered the existence of a sadistic, Antinomian community in Norwich around the same time, although I was unable to find any relation with the French Prophets. Lawrence Stone, ‘Libertine Sexuality in Post-Restoration England: Group Sex and Flagellation among the Middling Sort in Norwich in 1706–07’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2:4 (1992), 511–26. 153 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex:  Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 149–52. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, pp. 9, 23, 33. 154 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, p. 62. Juster, ‘Mystical Pregnancy and Holy Bleeding’. 155 Anon., French Prophets New Catechism, p. 8. Kingston I, p. 33. 156 On Fatio’s relationship with Newton, see BGE, Ms. fr. 602, fol. 58. Domson, ‘Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’, p. 36. Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap, 1968), Chapter  9. On Cavalier, see ‘Declaration de Gabriel de Mulier, & autres’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, pp. 17–18. Frank Puaux, ‘L’Histoire des amours des prophètes’, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 40 (1911), 281–2 (p. 282). Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p. 153. 157 Brand, p. 54. 158 HLRO, HL/PO/JO/10/6/154/2519. John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History, Vol. IV, p. 199. 159 Kingston I, pp.  46, 70, 73. Particulier, Deuxième lettre d’un particulier, à Monsieur Misson, l’honnête homme, touchant les absurditez …

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contenues dans les Avertissemens prophétiques de Monsieur Lacy … Ce 31 d’octobre, 1707 (London, 1707), p. 5. 160 Brand, p. 57. Jeanne Cavalier was also reportedly jealous of Gray’s affair with Lacy. Kingston I, p. 73. 161 Lacy, Letter to T.  Dutton. Keimer, A Search after Religion, p.  16; and Brand, p. 115. Humfrey, A Farther Account, p. 8. Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester (CALS), WS 1729 (26 November 1729), fols 1–3. 162 CALS, EDC 5/1718/9; EDC 5/1719/2; and EDC 5/1720/2. 163 Gibson, Church of England, p.  201. David L.  Wykes, ‘Subscribers and Non-Subscribers at the Salters’ Hall Debate (act. 1719)’, www.oxforddnb .com-theme-print.jsp (accessed 17 February 2014). Anon., ‘Salters’ Hall 1719 and the Baptists’, Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society, 5:3 (1917), 172–89. 164 Thomas Morgan, The Nature and Consequences of Enthusiasm Consider’d (London, 1719); Enthusiasm in Distress: or, An Examination of the Reflections upon Reason, in a Letter to Phileleutherus Britannicus. By Thomas Morgan (London, 1722); The Absurdity of Opposing Faith to Reason, or a Defense of Christianity against Enthusiasm (London, 1722); A Defence of the Two Letters to Mr. Tong, Mr. Smith, Mr. Robinson, & Mr. Reynolds, against Mr. Fancourt’s Enthusiasm Retorted. By Thomas Morgan (London, 1723); A Postscript to Enthusiasm in Distress, Occasion’d by a Pamphlet Intitled, Comprehension More Properly than Enthusiasm in Distress. Said to Be Written by One Mr P. Nisbet in Defence of Phileleutherus Britannicus (London, 1723); A Second Postscript to Enthusiasm in Distress. Occasioned by Mr. Nisbett’s Second Letter, Intitled, Comprehension Confusion. Address’d to Mr. Nisbett, by Thomas Morgan, M.D. (London, 1724). 165 Morgan, The Nature and Consequences of Enthusiasm Consider’d, pp.  15–19, 29; The Absurdity of Opposing Faith to Reason, pp.  7–9, 12–17; A Defence of the Two Letters, pp. 6, 19; A Second Postscript to Enthusiasm in Distress, p. 5. 166 Henry More, Enthusiasm Explained: or, a Discourse on the Nature, Kind and Cause of Enthusiasm. With Proper Rules to Preserve the Mind from Being Tainted with It. Extracted from a Learned Piece of a Late Eminent Writer (London, 1739). 167 Anon., Enthusiasm No Novelty or, The Spirit of the Methodists in the Year 1641 and 1642 (London, 1739). 168 Amy Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 224n22. 169 Anon., The Review: Being a Short Account of the Doctrine, Arguments, and Tendency, of the Writings Offered to the Publick (Dublin, 1754), p. 7. William Smith, A Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania, p. 26. Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 5 vols (Warrington, 1785), Vol. III, p.  32. Benjamin Franklin, The Life of Dr.  Benjamin Franklin.

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Written by Himself (Philadelphia, 1794), p. 47. John Hill Burton, Political and Social Economy: Its Practical Applications (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1849), pp. 234–5. 170 Chauncy, The Wonderful Narrative, pp. v–vi. Charles Chauncy, Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against: A Sermon Preach’d at the Old Brick Meeting-House in Boston, the Lord’s Day after the Commencement, 1742 (Boston, MA, 1742), p. 3. See Chapter 6. 171 George Lavington, The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared, 2nd edn (London, 1749), pp. iii, 49–50, 80–1. Lee, Historical Backgrounds, pp. 130–2. 172 Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 [2004]), pp. 60–90. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, p. 19. 173 See Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (London: Epworth Press, 2002). 174 Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, pp. 177–9. 175 David Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh, 1741), pp. 143–51. See also James E.  Force, ‘Hume and Johnson on Prophecy and Miracles:  Historical Context’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 43:3 (1982), 463–75. 176 Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, pp. 177–9. Goring, Rhetoric of Sensibility, p. 72. See also Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, pp. 15, 50–9. 177 Theophilus Evans, The History of Modern Enthusiasm, from the Reformation to the Present Times, 2nd edn (London, 1757), p. 106. 178 John Noorthouck, A New History of London:  Including Westminster and Southwark (London, 1773), pp. 292–4. 179 Lacy, Spirit of Prophecy Defended, p. xvii. Cotton Mather, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, ed. Kenneth Silverman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 270–1. Michel Delon, ‘La Saint-Barthélémy et la Terreur chez Mme de Staël et les historiens de la Révolution au XIXème siècle’, Romantisme, 11:31 (1981), 49–62 (p.  56). Orianne Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 67–74. Sir Richard Bulkeley, Johann Amos Comenius, Johann Maximillian Daut and Maximilien Misson, Prophetical Extracts (G. Terry, 1795). Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Vol. XX in Oeuvres de Voltaire (Paris: Lefèvre, 1830), p. 401 (earlier editions do not mention Fatio and Daudé’s names, which suggests later revisions). 180 Lavington, Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared, pp. 11–12. 181 Goring, Rhetoric of Sensibility, pp. 60–90.

5 Enthusiasm, blasphemy and toleration

Because they first attracted respectable gentlemen among their ranks, the French Prophets were rapidly perceived as mind corrupters, religious perverters and social disrupters to the point of making the tolerated ‘intolerable’. Soon after initiating a battle of pamphlets, the Prophets faced an even more virulent opposition on the streets that would soon take them to court. The prospect of a judicial intervention was to prove particularly edgy. The Toleration Act in 1689 had changed the way England dealt with religious heterodoxy. Discrimination and persecution of dissenters were brought to an end with the recognition of all Trinitarian Protestants, at least in theory. The French Prophets also fell into this category. They assembled in Barbican claiming the protection of the Toleration Act and therefore could not be prosecuted on religious grounds.1 Looking at contemporary trials for blasphemy and seditious libel, this chapter considers the political dimension of the Camisards’ case and how their enthusiasm challenged the limits of toleration in eighteenth-century England.

Toleration and its limits Although the Prophets were often compared to the Quakers, they emerged in a different context and faced less adversity. George Fox’s Friends epitomised enthusiasm during the Restoration and became the prime victims of the Clarendon Code, a series of acts – Corporation Act, Act of Uniformity, Conventicle Act and Five Mile Act  – passed between 1661 and 1665 to impose restrictions on nonconformists.2 Persecution of dissenters reached a peak during Charles II’s reign and was further exacerbated by the Popish and Rye House Plots in the early 1680s. As Mark Goldie and Alexandra Walsham have shown, religious intolerance was in fact largely presented as a Christian duty to coerce dissenters into conformity based on the writings of

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St Augustine. In a kingdom where the monarch was also the head of the Established Church, many further argued that religious dissent and sedition went hand in hand. Quakers were among the prime targets of Anglican persecution; it is estimated that some 15,000 Friends were fined or imprisoned between 1660 and 1685 and that 500 of them died in prison.3 Toleration had no doubt been one of the most sensitive political issues of the preceding two decades, with attempts to introduce some sort of relief to nonconformists on thirteen occasions between 1662 and 1688.4 As a general rule, the Whigs tended to support religious toleration and individual freedom, while the Tories remained loyal to the Established Church and the Crown.5 The Toleration Act was finally passed in 1689 thanks to a large Whig majority, but its real motivation has been much debated. Historians have for a long time argued that it was enacted out of necessity rather than general acceptance, in order to preserve religious cohesion and promote national unity because of the growing influence of dissenters in society.6 Its original intent was in fact to reintegrate Presbyterians into the Church of England as a supplement to the Comprehension Bill. However, their exclusion from political, judicial and administrative positions encouraged the development of trade and crafts, which constituted a growing economic force that gradually tilted the political balance toward the Whigs.7 Martin Sutherland has revised this ‘prosperity’ interpretation in favour of a more complex, political one. It is now recognised, Sutherland contends, that nonconformism existed at all levels of society and that the London merchant elite supported uniformity. Instead, the debate over toleration resulted primarily from tensions over constitutional power between the Crown and Parliament, more than economic or religious factors.8 International circumstances also played a significant part in the adoption of the Toleration Act, and more specifically the religious situation across the Channel. Toleration had been after all a French policy since the Edict of Nantes in 1598. Religious pluralism also became associated with the religious excesses of the Civil War as well as with England’s worst rival and enemy in the mid-seventeenth century: the Dutch Republic. Both England and France increasingly coerced their religious minorities into conforming from the 1660s and blamed one another for their respective treatments of Catholics in Ireland and Protestants in France.9 As geopolitical alliances switched in the late 1670s and France intensified the persecution of its Huguenots, toleration increasingly appealed to English parliamentarians as a necessary evil. The French anti-model, as Chapter 1 has shown, produced

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internal tensions, insurrections and even wars, when its original aim had been to strengthen national unity around a single religion. England too was in need of unity, but it would have been self-destructive to impose further restrictions upon religious minorities, as nonconformists accounted for no less than 10 per cent of the whole population, whereas the Huguenots barely constituted half of that proportion in France.10 The Anglo-Dutch rapprochement leading to the Glorious Revolution modified the political dynamic on religious pluralism, especially as Whigs remained ideologically turned toward the Continent. The fear that Louis XIV was encouraging Stuart absolutism was rife; several political opponents had returned from exile in Holland and prominent tolerationists like Algernon Sidney, John Locke or Gilbert Burnet had also visited Languedoc during the Restoration to promote their views.11 Despite England’s religious diversity and growing political support for it, the Toleration Act was not preceded by any doctrine of tolerance as such – quite the contrary. It was instead a pragmatic political compromise between William III and his Parliament to unite Protestants against the perceived threat of Catholic persecution and French expansionism.12 From 1689, nonconformist Trinitarian Protestants could gather and worship publicly provided that their congregations were duly registered with a licence and their ministers approved. Historians estimate that between 2,500 and 3,901 meeting houses were registered in England by 1710. Over the 1690s, dissent was on the increase and contributions to the Church of England conversely fell.13 The significance and immediate consequences of the Toleration Act should not be overrated, however. If Trinitarian Protestant churches like the Presbyterians, Baptists and Quakers were now recognised and granted protection by the Crown, the Act proved narrower in scope than the millenarian assemblies of the Philadelphians or French Prophets insofar as it still excluded Unitarians, Socinians, Jews and Catholics.14 While Robert Shoemaker has claimed that ‘the Toleration Act and changing attitudes towards religious nonconformity … led to the virtual disappearance of indictments for religious offences after 1689’, religious dissenters were still deprived of many rights.15 Heterodoxy remained punishable under 5 Eliz. C. 1 and 13. Car. II st. II. C. 1, as the Toleration Act did not in effect revoke the C ­ onventicle and Test Acts of 1664, 1670 and 1673.16 Tolerance in England proved in reality more restrictive than the terms of the Edict of Nantes passed nearly one century earlier in 1598. Many dissenters lost their original hopes as a result and bitterly resented the Toleration Act for its ­limitations. They could not hold office, bequeath their estates or

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attend university, and dissenting schoolmasters, for example, could still be prosecuted. The Quakers suffered the most from such restrictions because of their refusal to take oaths or pay tithes, for which many were still imprisoned or fined long after 1689. Barry Coward and others have argued for this reason that the Toleration Act was one of the most misnamed legislations ever passed in English history, and Walsham even described it as ‘a notable step backwards’ from the position attained under James II.17 By the turn of the century, party rivalries were inflamed, and religious dissent remained a hot political topic. The Tories had passed a Blasphemy Act in 1698 against Unitarians and an act against Popery in 1700 in order to limit further the terms of the Toleration Act, which they attempted to repeal upon several occasions in the following decade.18 Unsurprisingly, the arrival of three Camisard refugees in London between June and September 1706 did not go unnoticed, especially as they attracted some of the most highly lauded minds of the time. For the Tories, this was a unique opportunity to blame the Toleration Act and the Whigs for allowing, and perforce encouraging, such things to happen. Growing popular discontent pressed the authorities to react, for many regarded the Prophets as ungrateful dissenters abusing the law by holding controversial assemblies; some even feared a conspiracy against the Crown, partly because of the Prophets’ French origins.19 An anonymous pamphleteer best expressed the feelings of his contemporaries:  ‘I only ask, if any Nation can tolerate Persons, who, by a Principle of Religion, believe they may kill, rob, break their Promise, cheat, betray, and commit all other Crimes; the Devil cannot invent a Religion more to his liking than this.’20 It is in this Francophobic context, further exacerbated by the War of the Spanish Succession, that the French Prophets appeared as a particularly problematic movement that flirted with the limits of Toleration.

Popular protests Whilst the number of their followers continued to grow, the French Prophets also began to face anger and hostility. An explosive religious controversy, they appeared halfway between fanatical preachers and bestial madmen to many observers, causing fear and distress among the population. As seen in the previous chapter, the Prophets had successfully promoted their cause well beyond London, using every possible means to attract attention and reach a wider audience. Whether they distributed books for free, hired street advertisers, held public assemblies in meeting houses, preached on the street or had young

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girls strip naked in public (see Chapter  4), the French Prophets certainly did not leave their audiences indifferent. London had seen visionaries in the past, but the protests and assaults on the Prophets reflected both people’s exasperation and a genuine feeling of fear, as evidenced in the verdict of Marion’s trial below. The likelihood that the Prophets were taken seriously by some could explain both the success of the group in recruiting new followers and also the degree of anger expressed against them. Beside the anxieties caused by the end of the seventeenth century, the 1700s were years of incertitude and the Prophets’ emergence occurred in turbulent times.21 For example, extreme weather conditions produced unusual consequences that might have been interpreted as a divine warning. On 16 November 1703, the nation was visited by one of the most destructive calamities in nature; a hurricane whose fury was astonishing and the effects terrible. The number of buildings in London and Westminster exposed the inhabitants particularly to the distresses attending the shattering of houses all around them … Our island first received the impressions of this singular storm, which in its course over Europe, traversed England, France, Germany … The wind had blown exceeding hard for fourteen days preceding the fatal night of its extream violence.22

At least 2,000 roofs were destroyed, 21 people died under collapsed buildings, over 200 were maimed, and more were drowned in the Thames or simply never found.23 1704 was an exceptionally dry year; there was a solar eclipse in May 1706 and London was suddenly plunged in the dark for about an hour on 2 and 3 November.24 A heat wave hit London the following year: In the latter end of this summer [1707], such prodigious quantities of flies pestered the city, that the impressions of people’s feet in the streets where they lay, are said to have been as perceptible as upon snow: but though some hundreds of bushels were swept into the kennels, yet happily the inhabitants escaped without having their health injured by them.25

In contrast, 1708 was the second coldest year in half a century, and the winter of 1709 one the harshest in early modern Europe, with temperatures falling to 0 °F (–17.78 °C) in London and frost lasting for three months.26 Severe climatic conditions, combined with shaky politico-economic circumstances, may have added to the fear of an impending divine judgement, thereby offering a favourable ground for prophetism. England had also been at war against France since 1702, which inevitably

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created uneasiness concerning the community of Huguenot refugees. The country needed growing resources to support the cost of the war, but one George Whalley recalled that trade collapsed around the time of the Prophets, adding anxiety to an already unsettled time.27 Moreover, in March 1708, James Edward the Pretender attempted to invade England from Scotland with the support of France. The Prophets brandished the spectre of a Catholic invasion and the Spirit asked his followers to buy large supplies of food ahead of a period of famine.28 Opposition to the Prophets rapidly degenerated into a wave of violence. On 22 April 1707, a crowd gathered to insult Jean Allut and Cavalier in front of their house in Soho and forced the two cousins to flee with their wives, while Marion, Portalès, Daudé and Fatio headed toward Northfleet for the day, some eighteen miles east of London.29 On 25 April, rioters abused the first English-speaking supporters of the Prophets. John Lacy, Sir Richard Bulkeley and Dr James Keith had stones thrown at their windows, causing serious damage to their houses. This time, however, these more influential victims fought back and had the rioters arrested on 28 April.30 Significantly, a petition signed by the leading rioters, probably in May or June 1707, reveals that the three gentlemen had aroused their anger by supporting ‘imposters’ who sought ‘daily to revenge themselves by making the French odious to the Nation’, following an article Lacy had published in The Flying Post. The signatories’ names  – Portal, Tournard, Baudry, Gautir, Fordan, Janson, Arnaud, Bouillard – also confirm that, although ‘great multitudes of People both English and French’ gathered around their houses, the most virulent of them were Huguenot refugees.31 Attorney General Simon Harcourt’s report, dated 21 June, provides further details on the circumstances of these riots. Unsurprisingly, those indicted appeared to bear French family names. Despite their assembling ‘in so great a number and such a manner as is not strictly justifiable by law’, the rioters were acquitted of charges of violence against the Prophets.32 Misson’s house on Tower Street was next assaulted, forcing Fage, Cavalier, Marion and the Portalès brothers to seek protection from a judge near the King’s Mews. As the Prophets toiled through the crowd, insults and stones, rubbish and even putrescent carcasses of cats and dogs were hurled at them. The judge eventually let them out by the back door, but protesters stayed until night, occupying what is today Trafalgar Square.33 The turmoil continued a few more days, each time targeting a different house, including Fatio’s, with a dozen Prophets returning to Northfleet until the atmosphere calmed down. Although historians attributed those riots to the publication of Marion’s Avertissemens, the two events occurred seventeen days

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apart. The crowd’s anger therefore cannot be ascribed to an impulsive reaction to printed prophecies, especially because the consistory of the Savoy had released their ‘acte noir’ against the Camisards three months earlier and excommunicated Marion, Fage and Cavalier in March.34 Jean-Paul Chabrol has also argued that such upheavals could not have been spontaneous, given that they involved both English and French protesters, and therefore required some consultation beforehand. He further suggests that agitators might have been bribed by the Tories to stir trouble, as had been the case against Protestant dissenters toward the end of Charles II’s reign.35 While plausible, Marion’s memoirs indicate instead that William Portal, formerly of the conformist Church of the Savoy, and several ministers had been encouraging those riots, but that the latter were not arrested. Marion’s testimony is precious here, as it confirms not only the role and initiative of French refugees in those protests, but also that the French ministry moved from preaching and publishing against the Prophets to agitating the crowds on the street.36 On a different note, the Prophets were also feared as a potentially violent and therefore dangerous group, whose assemblies rapidly became notorious for their unpredictable nature. Some Prophets once ‘threw one another on the Fire-back, and made Motions to cut one another with knives’ at the Swan Tavern, while others destroyed everything around them at a meeting on Copenhagen street.37 Several accounts also noted that both Fage and Lacy were prepared to kill even their own fathers if commanded by the Spirit,38 and Samuel Keimer, writing retrospectively about his indoctrination, recalled: For my Part, I had such a thorough Belief of the Divinity of the Spirit presiding, that had John Potter under Operation, commanded me to kill my Father, Mother, or even the late Queen on the Throne, I  sincerely believe I  should immediately have attempted it. To such a Heighth of Diabolical Madness was I with others, arriv’d to!39

Many Prophets were furthermore reported to carry swords, thus feeding fears of a seditious conspiracy or a Popish Plot. A gathering of 100 armed followers in Hackney Marsh in November 1708 degenerated into a riot when challenged by angry Huguenots, who subsequently denounced the Prophets as a threat to their peaceful coexistence with Londoners.40 It was the fear of such gatherings that had led the Government to anticipate violence in Bunhill Fields a few months earlier. Narcissus Luttrell reported about Emes’s well-publicised resurrection that ‘two regiments of our train’d bands are ordered upon the guard during

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the holydayes, to prevent any disorder which may happen by the mobb on that occasion’.41

The Huguenot community of London Most of the animosity the group inspired lay, first and foremost, in the nationality of its original members, at a time when England and France were at war. Although the Crown had almost always led a welcoming policy in favour of French refugees, Francophobic attitudes had been growing since the Treaty of Dover in 1670, which its opponents at the time saw as a rapprochement with France. Moreover, Charles II’s mother, Henrietta Maria, was French and, together with her daughter and other son, the future James II, was a Catholic. The Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 fuelled fears that Charles might restore Catholicism as England’s official religion, even though he only converted on his deathbed in 1685.42 His brother and successor, the openly Catholic James II, was very unpopular for the same reason and was overthrown by William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution in 1688. He found refuge in France, but his son James Edward ‘the Pretender’ remained the hereditary heir to the throne and fears of a Jacobite invasion persisted well into the eighteenth century, with attempts indeed made in 1692, 1696, 1701–02, 1708 and 1714–15.43 England under William III and Mary II, and then under Anne, strongly needed the support of French refugees in the war against France. Ever since Edward VI’s Charter of 1550, all English monarchs, with the exception of Mary Tudor (reigned 1553–58), had followed a favourable policy toward Huguenot immigrants. England guaranteed them freedom of worship and protection, including in times of war against France.44 William had even created a Royal Bounty of £15,000 per year to help them to settle, which Anne perpetuated, and both gained their unconditional devotion. The argument had attracted some 200,000 Huguenots since the sixteenth century and they had grown into a solidary network, whose own institutions distributed money to their paupers, widows and children (see Chapter 2).45 The law did not, however, favour the French Prophets, and concerns about their own legal status pressed the Huguenots of London to reject their Camisard relatives. Many were still waiting to be naturalised after the 1681 Edict of Hampton Court, but too many restrictions and probably a lack of political motivation turned it into a huge disappointment. It was not until 1709 that they would finally be naturalised under an act itself soon to be repealed by the Tory Government three years later.46 By 1706, therefore, the Huguenots were still not

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recognised as de facto English citizens, and instead the 50,000 or so refugees who had settled in England since 1660 remained denizens, holding intermediate status between a subject and an alien. Technically speaking, denizenship was granted upon a letter of authorisation from the Crown and offered permanent residency with royal protection, subject to customs and higher taxation.47 Maureen Waller rightly argues in this respect that ‘Parliament was reluctant to grant the Huguenots full naturalisation, which would allow them to bequeath land to their heirs’, hence their need to show continuing devotion to the monarch.48 If the Huguenot exodus inflicted moderate damage on the French economy, it made a considerable contribution to the growth of their host country. In England, denizenship was very lucrative for the Government and the advantages of heavy taxation on a dynamic workforce prevailed over their systematic naturalisation. The Huguenots in France had been confined to a limited range of occupations such as craftsmanship, commerce, banking and legal practice, and the refugees in London, including the French Prophets, reflected these backgrounds. For instance, Jean Allut was a cabinet-maker, Jean Cavalier a weaver and Elie Marion a clerk.49 Jean-Pierre Poussou’s study also reveals that the Huguenots specialised in glass, bed linen and oil works in Brandenburg; they were active in banking in Switzerland and excelled in paper and silk manufacturing, as well as in jewellery and clock-making in England.50 Xenophobic feelings against French refugees prevailed mostly among the English lower classes, who were confronted by harsh foreign competition. French fashion was already in vogue by 1700, but London merchants and workers often resented the presence of a cheaper Huguenot labour force with superior production techniques as an unfair competition.51 Such depictions did not reflect an actual social cleavage among the refugees that more obviously divided them between Spitalfields and Soho. A conservative estimate suggests that by 1700, 15,000 Huguenots had settled among English textile workers in the poorer, East London neighbourhoods, while another 8,000 lived in the western part of the capital, where many luxury craftsmen and professionals found a wealthy clientele.52 David Lovejoy’s claim that ‘Englishmen were sympathetic to the Huguenots and admired the patience and constancy they exhibited despite intense suffering’ may be true of some Francophile gentry concerning well-off Huguenots, but it is inaccurate with regard to the East London refugees and local workers.53

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The discrepancy between a Francophile Government and a mainly Francophobic people deeply hindered the integration of the Huguenots into English society. Fabienne Chamayou has based her assessment of the integration of French immigrants on the practice of exogamy, though this suggests assimilation rather than integration. Her study nevertheless reveals that transnational weddings only began to occur well into the eighteenth century, and involved second- and mostly third-generation Huguenots: a blood mix that coincided with the progressive desertion of French churches and temples.54 Maureen ­Waller likewise reckons that it took at least three or four generations for those who arrived in the 1680s to be fully assimilated, though there is also evidence, including among the French Prophets, that Huguenots started marrying outside their community earlier.55 Beyond economic competition and legal discrimination, Waller argues that ‘anti-popery was the strongest emotional force in England at the end of the seventeenth century’, and it certainly remained so when the French Prophets arrived.56 Even John Lacy, a future leader of the French Prophets, had warned the Queen in 1704 that her ‘Kingdoms, and the True Protestant Religion establisht among us, are in this present Juncture threatned’.57 Anglicans and dissenters all agreed on the necessity to stand united against popery. Ironically, the Huguenots, and even for some time the French Prophets, were regarded as disguised Catholics and part of some popish plot, a logic based upon the propositions that all papists were foreigners and all foreigners were potential papists.58 So widespread and strong was this popish paranoia that it even pervaded the Huguenots themselves, particularly the conformists. Beside their integration problems, the Huguenots were also religiously divided, which may explain why many attended Marion’s assemblies yet so few actually joined the French Prophets, for anyone associated with them ran a serious risk. In 1700, London already counted twenty-eight French Protestant churches, seven of which were in Spitalfields.59 The Huguenot community as a whole tended to polarise into the French Reformed Church of Threadneedle Street, founded in 1550 near Spitalfields, and the conformist Church of the Savoy on the Strand. Broadly speaking, this partition divided the Huguenots more or less evenly between the two ends of London.60 With French refugees needing to demonstrate their loyalty to the English Crown and make themselves accepted by the population, the arrival of the three Camisards in 1706 provided a test for the Huguenot community. It is therefore not surprising that it was the French ministry who first mobilised against the Inspired and brought their case

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to the English authorities. Marion was the third Camisard prophet to come to London and more might have been on their way too. As their assemblies kept growing in size and frequency, the ministers of Threadneedle Street arranged a meeting with the Prophets on 18 September, but the latter failed to appear. Two days later, Aaron Testas (d. 1721), one of their ministers, met with Fage, Cavalier, Marion and Fatio; their confrontation was fruitless and Cavalier accused French ministers of cowardice for leaving France. The consistory submitted a report to Henry Compton, Bishop of London and ardent supporter of the Huguenots, to inform him of the situation.61 The Prophets then met five times in October with the consistory of the Savoy, presided over by Jean Dubourdieu. The ministers offered them some financial relief or to put them on English vessels. After failing to reason with them, they released a ‘black act’ on 5 January, declaring Marion, Fage and Cavalier to be impostors in full control of their agitations and a serious danger for all Protestant churches. The act was finally published in The Post Boy on 8 May; and the choice of this Tory newspaper by the conformist ministers of the Savoy was no coincidence.62 By making this report public, the Savoy had thus kindled a fierce political debate. Indeed, its public repudiation of the Prophets went beyond a mere spiritual condemnation; it was an act of self-censorship for the Huguenot community. As a conformist Church, the Savoy was consequently accountable to the Crown. Its ministers (Jean Graverol, Aaron Testas, Claude Grotesthe de la Mothe) also sat in the French committee in charge of the distribution of the Royal Bounty and worked in collaboration with the English committee, some of whom (Thomas Stampe, John Houblon, Charles Duncombe, Robert Beachcroft and John Ward) were former or future Lord Mayors of the City of London.63 The same ministers who promptly and vehemently attacked the French Prophets were therefore answerable to both the Bishop of London and the secular authorities. The rapidity with which they reacted against the Camisards reflects the degree of pressure they were placed under.64

The trial of Elie Marion Although Marion, Cavalier and Fage had been excommunicated in March 1707, this was not to be the trial of the French Prophets as a group, nor even of these three men. Instead it was Marion, Fatio and Daudé who were cited on 5 May to appear at the Savoy’s request before Chief Justice John Holt (1642–1710) the following day. They presented themselves on the 6th and were bailed out by John Lacy three days later.65 Their trial occurred in two parts and was to last until November.

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On 12 May, the accused appeared for the first time before the Court of Queen’s Bench in Guildhall. The Attorney General, Sir Simon Harcourt read charges against them: Marion was to be indicted for promoting opinions with his Avertissemens prophétiques and Daudé and Fatio for publishing them, as well as with holding unlawful assemblies and spreading fear and terror among the people of London. Six warnings were deemed blasphemous and five of them tending towards sedition: When the Spirit of God is about to seize me, I feel a great Heat in my Heart and the Parts adjacent; which sometimes has a shivering of my whole Body going before it; At other times I am seized all at once, without having any such preceeding Notice. As soon as I find my self seized, my Eyes are instantly shut up, and the Spirit causes in me great Agitation of Body, making me to put forth of great Sighs and Throbbings, which are cut short, as if I were labouring for Breath. I have also frequently very hard Shocks; but yet all this is without Pain, and without hindering me of the Freedom of thinking. I continue thus about a Quarter of an Hour, more or less, before I utter one Word. At last I feel that the Spirit forms in my Mouth the Words which he will have me to pronounce, which are almost always accompanied with some Agitations, or extraordinary Motions, or at least with a great Constraint. My Child, I come to make thee glad, I tell thee … Thy Days draw near; Thy Days are coming to an End. Thy Kingdom is coming: Thou shalt reign with me; I must come, I tell thee, arm’d with Lightnings and Thunder-bolts, to root out that wretched Nation, who would reject my Glory, and deprive my People of the Light everlasting. I will, in a few Days, I tell thee, set this City on Fire. I will send Division into it, my Child; this is my Will. You blind my Children, you wretched Teachers, unworthy to bear my Name, unworthy to go up into my Pulpits. My Child, I  will avenge me of those Traytors, who destroy my Word; They corrupt it. They shall not fail to be punish’d: Their Crimes shall be chastised. My Judgements are ready: They will not tarry long, I tell thee; before they come down, yes, yes, upon this Place, where thou art at present. Royal Cities! Pompous Mosques! Tabernacles of Satan! Behold your Destruction.66

The three men were defended by John Hooke, an Irish sergeant-at-law, founding member and treasurer of the SPCK, whom the Prophets also counted among their followers; but only Richard Harcourt, ‘clerk for the Crown in the Court of Queen’s Bench’ is listed in the court record as their defending attorney.67 The Bench was presided over by John Holt, and judges included Peter King, John Powell, Robert Eyre, and probably John Turton, Littleton Powys and Henry Gould.68 The case was not tried at statutory law, as previously thought, but constituted

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instead a non-capital offence at common law involving ‘Impostures in Religion, as falsly pretending to extraordinary Commissions from God, and terrifying or abusing the People with false Denunciations of Judgments, &c.’69 What appears as the trial of three reckless Huguenots was in reality a highly symbolic affair. For the King’s Bench was a superior court of common law dealing mostly with issues affecting the Crown, political cases, lawsuits involving important subjects and the maintenance of public peace.70 The indictment of Marion and two of his scribes was thus designed to be as public and talked about as the Prophets’ assemblies and predictions had been. Incidentally, all four extant broadsides reporting this case refer to the French Prophets in their titles, rather than the actual individuals convicted.71 More audiences followed on 26 May and 13 June, with key witnesses appearing in court. François-Maximilien Misson, the acclaimed novelist, made a long plea in favour of his coreligionists, in which he argued that the Spirit that animated them was the same one that had spoken through Balaam’s donkey. His efforts did not impress the jury and one judge constantly interrupted him.72 The printer Robert Roger came next and claimed that Marion was never involved in the publication of his Avertissemens prophétiques, since it was Fatio and Daudé who had given him the manuscript, which the latter confirmed. Lastly, Charles Portalès testified to support Marion’s sincerity and even asked to be indicted, having introduced the Camisard prophet to Fatio and Daudé and transcribed more warnings than them. The interrogatory led to heated altercations: as Marion and Daudé understood little or no English, Fatio spoke on their behalf and warned the judges against rejecting a message sent by God. Several jurors were also challenged on two occasions, possibly in an attempt to buy time, and new ones were subsequently appointed. Following the advice of Sergeant Hooke and Richard Roach, who attended the session, the accused eventually pleaded not guilty, but were nevertheless found ‘guilty of printing and publishing the book’ on 4 July, and forbidden to hold assemblies. Given the length of the trial, the legal term had already been exceeded and the sentence was therefore delayed until the next term.73 Meanwhile, the verdict served the French Prophets and helped to promote their growth, their numbers doubling between the two terms. Marion was able to turn the sentence to his own advantage, arguing that neither the prophecies, the rituals nor any doctrine had been targeted through this condemnation.74 Yet efforts were also made to comply with the law and thus remain under the aegis of the Toleration

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Act. For example, Rebecca Critchlow and John Lacy began registering meeting places for the group and respectively hosted their first assemblies on 28 May and 14 June.75 English supporters were now taking the future of the group into their own hands and needed to avoid further prosecution. The odds were not on their side, however. The charges against the Huguenot rioters were dropped by Simon Harcourt on 15 June and Lord Chief Justice Holt was notoriously merciless in matters of sedition. He had often overruled jurys’ verdicts at the King’s Bench to aggravate the repression of libel over the preceding decade.76 Writing as both a Prophet and a Justice of the Peace, Lacy requested a nolle prosequi from Holt for his indicted brethren on 17 and 18 June, in vain.77 As their numbers grew and their composition evolved, the identity and character of the Prophets inevitably changed. Lacy in particular gave a new impulse to the group, now claiming to speak in tongues and to have miraculously healed several people, and he prepared three volumes of warnings published between 18 July and 3 November. These alleged miracles and the influx of new converts over the summer gave the Prophets more confidence in the significance of their coming martyrdom. They now claimed to have the power to strike their opponents dead on the spot and Jean Cavalier prophesied that a boat would soon sail on the blood due to flow on the streets of London. John Potter openly defied the authorities, addressing a warning to the judge in October: And poor Lord chief Justice Holt (since dead) was thundringly threaten’d by the Spirit in John Potter, that while he was sitting to give Judgement, the Blood should burst out of his Veins from Head to Foot, and that he should in an Agony, cry out, to this Effect, Behold the Judgments of the Great God upon me, by the Hands of his Servants.78

Marion, Daudé and Fatio returned before the judges on 6 November to hear their final sentence, but a clerk’s mistake was discovered in the first verdict and Holt ordered the case to be retried, to the defendants’ satisfaction.79 On 22 November, the three men were eventually found guilty by the jury. They were condemned six days later to stand on the scaffold for one hour on two consecutive days and pay a fine of 20 nobles each (roughly £6 12s).80 The sentence was executed on 1 December at Charing Cross and at the Royal Exchange the following day. They were forced to wear paper inscriptions on their hats: ‘Elias Marion, Convicted for falsly [sic] and profanely pretending himself to be a true Prophet; and printing and uttering many things, as dictated and revealed to him by the Spirit of God to terrifie the Queen’s people’

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and ‘Nicolas Facio [and] John Daudé, convicted for abetting and favouring Elias Marion in his wicked and counterfeit Prophecys [sic], and causing them to be printed and published to terrifie the Queen’s people’.81 Away from charges of sedition, Marion, Fatio and Daudé were essentially condemned for spreading fear across London. They had disrupted public order and now faced the anger of the crowd. Fatio’s entourage attempted to alleviate their sentence the best they could; his nephew Mr Marcombes, a minister of the Savoy Church, obtained from the judges that his uncle be exposed on the scaffold rather than the pillory. This allowed them to remain free-standing instead of having their heads and hands locked together into a more humiliating wooden framework (see Figure 6). Similarly, the Duke of Ormonde, whose brother the Earl of Arran had been tutored by Fatio, sent constables and beadles to contain protesters, but they could not prevent the angry crowd from spitting and throwing rubbish at them; Marion was wounded in the face and Fatio’s left eye severely injured by a stone.82 Harsh and humiliating as it may appear, their sentence was in fact deplored as too lenient by their contemporaries and, although the fine exceeded Marion’s assets, it was easily paid by his coreligionists on 2 December.83 The late seventeenth century had seen a rapid decline in the prosecution of self-proclaimed prophets, miracle workers and witches, even though supernatural beliefs persisted long afterwards. This was to a great extent the consequence of a lack of tangible evidence in supposed supernatural matters. Thus the last execution for witchcraft took place in 1683 in England and the last trial  – Jane Wenham’s case in 1712  – was dismissed by Chief Justice Hale on the basis that ‘there was no law against flying’. Holt and Powell epitomised such judicial scepticism and only condemned Marion, Fatio and Daudé for terrifying Londoners by printing prophecies and holding illegal assemblies, thereby ignoring claims of sedition, conspiracy or diabolical imposture.84 Unless prescribed by a statute, judges would also typically take into consideration the gravity of the offence as well as the gender and status of the offender when determining the amount of the fine, hence their decision to halve that of Marion and his scribes.85 The judges’ clemency proved a great disappointment for the Prophets’ opponents, who had been instead calling for an exemplary sentence. A Huguenot pamphleteer deplored that English laws were too favourable to the accused and argued that Marion would have been burned alive in Paris, citing the similar case of Simon Morin half a century earlier.86 G. D.  Nokes’s study of the crime of blasphemy compiled similar common-law cases between 1617 and 1922, thereby providing us with

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Figure 6.  Pillory Disapointed; or, The False Prophets Advancement (London, 1707).

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a wider picture of the sentences delivered.87 His results confirm a particularly lenient sentence for Marion and his acolytes. As Table 3 shows, all of the reported convicts between 1676 and 1749 were imprisoned or exposed on the pillory – often both – their fines ranging between 20 marks (about £13 6s 7d) and £500. The Presbyterian minister Thomas Emlyn caused such an outrage for publicly questioning the Holy Trinity in 1703 that he was even condemned to one year’s imprisonment and a £1,000 fine. Judges spared him the pillory, lest the mob kill him.88

Table 3.  Sentences at common law for offences in relation to religious opinion DATE

NAME

OFFENCE

COURTa

SENTENCEb

1676 1677 1682 1683 1685 1690 1693 1694 1699 1698 1702 1703 1706 1707

Taylor Muggleton Ludlam Delaune Baxter Lowthorp* Hambleton* Frekec Moor(e)d Fowles* Burridge* Defoe* Ward Marion, Daudé, Fatio Howel* Payne Woolston Astley Darney

Words Libel Words Libel Libel Libel Libel Libel Libel Words Libel Libel Libel Libel

KB OBJ QS OBJ KB OB OB KB OB OB OB OB QB QB

1000 m. F, IPS £500 F, IPR £100 F 100 m. F, IR £500 F, IS 500 m. F, I £200 F, I £100 F, R 20 n. F, R 100 m. F, IPS £40 F, IP 200 m. F, IPS 40 m. F, IRP 20 n. F, IP

Libel Libel Libel Libel Words

OB KB KB KB QS

£500 F, 3 years’ I, S £100 F, I £100 F, IS £100 F, RS 1 month’s I

1717 1724 1729 1746 1749

Table 3 combines Appendices B and C in Nokes, Blasphemy, pp. 145–67. For more legibility, I have only included the cases where the defendants were found guilty and selected a few from each decade. Cases marked * come from Appendix C (probably at common law, but not inspected by Nokes). a OB = Old Bailey; QS = Quarter Sessions; KB = King’s Bench; OBJ = OB presided over by a judge of KB; QB= Queen’s Bench. b F = fine; I = imprisonment (F implies I until the payment or release of the F); m. = marks; n. = nobles; P = pillory or scaffold; R = defendant’s own recognisances; S = surety’s recognisances. c Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, Vol. III, p. 315. d Old Bailey Proceedings Online, trial of Thomas Moore (24 May 1699), www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?ref=t16990524-40.

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While Marion’s sentence was far more lenient, his trial also differed given his claims to deliver judgements from God. Few cases brought to the King’s or Queen’s Bench effectively resulted in a trial, and the prosecution of the three men therefore indicates a serious offence. Yet the condemnation of enthusiasts and religious impostors seems to have moved away from corporal punishments in favour of imprisonment and systematic fines. Up until 1612, death by fire was the standard punishment for the most serious cases of blasphemy.89 In August 1650, the House of Commons passed ‘An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to humane Society’. This Blasphemy Act targeted antinomians in general and Ranters in particular, with a sentence of six months’ imprisonment without bail upon the first offence and banishment from the country upon the second.90 Six years later, the Quaker James Nayler had his tongue bored, and was whipped, branded with the letter ‘B’ on his forehead and exposed on the pillory for impersonating Christ. Blasphemy, or the expression of heterodox beliefs in public, became a common-law offence during the Restoration. Fines and imprisonment came to replace torture in response to the persistence of religious dissenters beyond the Interregnum. The Baptist minister Benjamin Keach, for example, was fined £20 and imprisoned for libel against ‘the Book of Common Prayer, and the Liturgy of the Church of England’ in 1664.91 The real turning point in the criminalisation of blasphemy came, however, in 1675–76, with the case of John Taylor, a former Sweet Singer of Israel. This religious offender from Surrey was indicted by the King’s Bench ‘for uttering of divers Blasphemous Expressions, horrible to hear, (viz) That Jesus Christ was a Bastard, a Whoremaster, Religion was a Cheat; and that he neither feared God, the Devil, or Man’.92 Taylor admitted saying these words, but claimed their meaning had been misunderstood. The judges sent him to Bedlam for a medical examination and received confirmation of his sanity a few weeks later. Upon his return before the judges, Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale proclaimed blasphemy a common-law offence in response to Taylor’s lack of repentance: such kind of wicked Blasphemous words were not only an Offence to God and Religion, but a Crime against the Law, State and Government, and therefore punishable in this Court. For to say, Religion is a Cheat, is to dissolve all those Obligations whereby the Civil Societies are preserved, and that Christianity is parcel of the Laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian Religion is to speak in Subversion of the Law.93

Taylor was eventually sentenced to the pillory and to pay a fine of 1,000 marks.94

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The passing of the Toleration Act in 1689, as we saw earlier in this chapter, expanded the expression of religious opinions, but still excluded anti-Trinitarian views. In 1699, for example, the barber enthusiast and Origenist Thomas Moor(e) was fined 20 nobles by the Old Bailey for seditious libel and pretending to be the biblical prophet Elijah.95 As renowned sceptics of prophetic claims, Holt and Powell disregarded in effect the supernatural pretence of Marion’s inspirations as well as their seditious nature and focused instead on their publication, which in their view disrupted the public order. In so doing, they settled for a smaller fine, preferring for Marion, Daudé and Fatio public humiliation on the scaffold.96 While the trial was officially that of three individuals for publishing a book of prophetical warnings, the sentence was in effect delivered to the whole group and was advertised and perceived as such.97 Exposing key members of the group to public shame on the scaffold was intended to discredit what had at first appeared as a socially reputable congregation. Significantly, several men condemned for sodomy were originally due to be exposed on the scaffold on 2 December, but their sentence was postponed to the following day in order not to assimilate the Prophets with sodomites, and thus gave them their full share of humiliation.98 The Prophets’ condemnation thereby marked an early triumph of the Huguenot community over their zealous Camisard relations and helped to demonstrate their loyalty to the English Government. Indeed, the Savoy and neighbouring French churches released a public advertisement on 6 December to notify Londoners that they initiated and covered the cost of their prosecution, in response to accusations against Huguenots of fomenting sedition.99 Exposing Marion, Fatio and Daudé on the scaffold served the double purpose of abashing the French Prophets and appeasing popular anger in parts of London. This was only short-lived, however, for the Prophets welcomed their martyrdom as part of the prerequisites of the Second Coming.100 On 4 July 1707, the Spirit had already spoken through the mouth of John Lacy in French to comfort Marion, Fatio and Daudé on the day of their first verdict: ‘Pauvre Enfant, (que) tu es, & timide, Je te donnerai courage: Je t’affermirai contre toutes les Tempetes, les Reproches (& les) Insultes qui t’arriveront … Je ferai éclater ma Gloire, au milieu de cette Ville. Tant plus qu’il [sic] vous persecutent, tant plus de Joie intérieure je te donnerai.’101 Proud in appearance, the three convicts nevertheless proved more inconspicuous over the following months, as their English coreligionists raised the prospects of the group’s most extravagant prophecy. John Lacy and his new converts remained unshakeably defiant and continued

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to hold public assemblies. On 5 December, only three days after his brethren’s humiliation on the scaffold, Lacy went to Dr Emes’s house and assured his dying friend of his resurrection.102 But the damage had already been done; the Prophets’ image had been tarnished for good and the news of their condemnation to the scaffold was promptly reported across Europe.103 Marion, Daudé and Fatio suffered to some extent for their brethren, many of whom could equally have been indicted. Strictly speaking, therefore, this trial was not that of the Camisards, insofar as Fage and Cavalier were never cited, although they were the true originators of the Camisards’ prophetic revival in London, having held assemblies for two months before Marion.104 Both men had been actively prophesying in London throughout the summer of 1706 until Marion eclipsed them upon his arrival. Cavalier’s cousin Jean Allut, another Cévenol, had been inspired since 6 February 1707 and was arguably the second most charismatic French Instrument after Marion. The fact that his house was even attacked by the angry crowd on 22 April indicates some degree of notoriety before the prosecution began.105 Along with Daudé and Fatio, Charles Portalès was the French Prophets’ third official scribe and had also taken part in the publication of Marion’s Avertissemens. While he appeared as a witness in the latter’s trial and had sworn Marion was genuinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, Portalès was never indicted. Even if this came as a surprise to some, his good relations certainly spared him a trial. His employer the Marquis de Miremont had supported the French Prophets since August 1706 and was close to Queen Anne, while his cousin David Flotard had served as an emissary during the Camisard insurrection. Portalès was never as outspoken and defiant as his fellow scribes and instead accredited his indicted brethren with his reputation; but he was also probably too close to the Government and his indictment might have created a stir in Parliament.106 Marion, Daudé and Fatio were the only active members who could be easily stigmatised by the authorities in their discreet attempt to stop the French Prophets. Lastly, it was common practice in early eighteenth-century England to indict anyone associated with the publication of a book or pamphlet, including the printer himself. Printers were required by law to give their name and address on the cover of any publication they printed, so that they could be easily identified and found by the authorities. This prerequisite led many to be imprisoned and saved the authorities the embarrassment of a public trial that could have been perceived as an encroachment upon the freedom of expression guaranteed by

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the lapse of the Licensing Act of 1695.107 Samuel Keimer, printer to the Prophets as well as to Daniel Defoe, later spent time in prison on numerous occasions for printing libellous pamphlets and false news.108 The year 1707 in particular saw a wave of prosecutions of printers at the Queen’s Bench for publishing obscene libels. Yet Robert Roger, the printer responsible for the publication of Marion’s Avertissemens, was cited as a witness to the latter’s trial the same year, but somehow was not indicted and even agreed later to print further prophecies.109 Many if not all remained convinced that Lacy and Bulkeley were the real masterminds behind the French Prophets. There was substantial ground for this, yet neither suffered the fate of their three brethren. Both men were well known in and around London for their support of the Prophets, whether by subsidising the diffusion of their prophecies in print or organising assemblies, and both were for this reason targeted by angry rioters in April 1707. Between June and November 1707, John Lacy had become the leading and most charismatic adept by far, prophesying in tongues, predicting catastrophes and divine punishments, and even performing miracles. He had also published a compilation of three large volumes of his own prophecies between the first trial and Marion’s exposure on the scaffold.110 The failure to silence the Prophets with the scaffold raised the stakes of their enthusiasm to a higher, political level. Angered by the Prophets’ unrepenting defiance of the authorities, Queen Anne ordered her Attorney General in person to prosecute Lacy, Bulkeley ‘and other ringleaders’ on 11 December 1707 in an attempt to thwart the group’s expansion, the scaffold having failed in this respect.111 This highly political decision would certainly have constituted the official trial of the French Prophets by the English Government, at the risk of blurring the line between disruptive enthusiastic behaviour and religious dissent. Earl Godolphin, the Queen’s closest advisor, and Mr Harley, future Earl of Oxford, sent the diplomat Alexander Cunningham (1654–1737) in January 1708 to consult with the Presbyterian minister Edmund Calamy about the Prophets, possibly also because of his personal acquaintance with Lacy. As Calamy recalled in his memoirs: Though I had been with him in company, yet I never had seen him at my house before. I  presently concluded there was an end to be served, and therefore determined to be the more cautious. I did not go about to conceal my surprise, but told him it was such an unexpected honour he did me, in quitting the company of so many great persons as he daily conversed with, to come and take notice of so obscure a person as myself, that I could not but apprehend there was something considerable at the bottom.

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He was not free to own his visit had any special design; he always had a respect for men of worth, of all characters and denominations, and it was to show me that he had so, that he came to pay his respects to me, and that was all; upon which we entered into a general conversation about news and affairs of the world, &c. Sometimes he would ask me some questions about the new prophets, and then would go off again to some other subject.112

Although the Queen’s decision to prosecute the Prophets had been publicly announced, Calamy’s testimony reveals a great degree of uncertainty and embarrassment from the Government concerning the most appropriate response to their enthusiasm. Prosecuting the Prophets would assuredly confirm a tough stance on radical dissenters at a time when the Tories attacked them on toleration, yet it might also send the wrong signal to all nonconformists. As a respected moral authority among dissenters, Calamy therefore advised his interlocutor not to intervene in the matter and allow the Prophets to discredit themselves with further failed predictions.113 He had good reasons to think this way and the timing could not have been better: Thomas Emes had died in the meantime and the Prophets had already announced his resurrection. As a dissenting minister, Calamy’s attitude to enthusiasm anticipated to some extent Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, which was published the following year after its author witnessed Lacy speak in Latin in an assembly.114 Yet Calamy’s view proved more concerned with the maintenance of public order than the promotion of satire. He not only feared that repression might fail to convince the public of the Prophets’ imposture or delusion, but also that it might indirectly promote them as martyrs, which dissenters would no doubt interpret as a revision of the Toleration Act, creating irreparable tensions between the Government and a considerable proportion of the population so ‘heartily engaged in the public interest’. Instead Calamy successfully convinced the English Government via Cunningham to abandon all charges against Lacy and Bulkeley.115 The defence of toleration and political stability remained the top priority of the moderate Tory Government, then on the verge of collapsing. Queen Anne had herself once declared:  ‘I shall be very careful to preserve and maintain the Act of Toleration, and to set the minds of all my people at quiet.’116 It was in this context that the Prophets were left free to hold their assemblies and to attempt to raise Thomas Emes’s body from the dead on 25 May 1708.

French Prophets and politics It may seem somewhat ironic that the French Prophets became the target of the English Government’s wrath and the epitome of religious

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heterodoxy when they were never politically minded as a movement nor saw themselves as dissenters. As Chapter 2 showed, their activities always remained on a mystical level and, unlike their millenarian predecessors of the Interregnum, they showed little concerned for temporal reforms. Abraham Whitrow was certainly an exception here, as his rapid exclusion from the group attests. His ‘levelling’ project to redistribute the wealth of the Prophets’ benefactors to their poorer brethren was immediately sanctioned by the overwhelming majority of the group’s most charismatic figures, with the notable exception of Richard Bulkeley.117 That is not to say that individual followers objected to charitable acts on a personal level. Several notable members – Bulkeley, Hooke, Bridges – also belonged to either the SPCK or the SPG, two religious societies engaged in the education and relief of the poor, whilst some French followers had their own charity network. However, if the French Prophets engaged in charitable works as part of their temporal lives, they did not view it as part of their millenarian mission, that of an irenic ecumenical movement seeking to reconcile the Judaeo-Christian world ahead of the Second Coming. The Prophets did, however, deliver politically laden prophecies from an early stage, albeit in different forms. The original nucleus – Fage, Cavalier and Marion  – only spoke in general terms of divine punishments such as the fall of Babylon, whereas their English followers proved more explicit in their predictions. On 26 July 1707, John Lacy warned Louis XIV of France against his imminent fall and urged him to convert to Protestantism, while Versailles and Toulouse were to be reduced to ashes and Toulon would soon be taken.118 George Johnson once had a revelation that he was inhabited by the spirit of the late Prince George and went to court to marry the Queen. On another occasion, John Potter and others prophesied that: The late Queen Anne should become a Prophetess, and be agitated in the like Manner as they were, the Spirit calling her by the name of, My Servant Anne, that she should go to Barbican, which Place was prophecy’d should become more noted over the whole World, than ever Jerusalem had been, and there preach the everlasting Gospel, and that the Queen should give Mary Beer … the right Hand of Fellowship, as her elder Sister, as being the elder Prophetess.119

That they addressed or mentioned monarchs in their inspirations does not mean that the Prophets were making political claims. Instead, they understood the European political chessboard in millenarian terms, trying to make sense of the wars opposing Protestant and Catholic nations as signs of an imminent Doomsday, in a more explicit but

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nonetheless similar fashion to eminent mystico-scientists such as Isaac Newton and his successor, William Whiston.120 As an ecumenical movement consisting of at least seven denominations, the question of the Prophets’ political allegiance proves thorny at best and inextricable at worst. It may be tempting to reduce them as radical dissenters and therefore label them as ardent Whig supporters. Despite a great number of Quakers and other dissenters among their ranks, the French Prophets proved as politically unreadable as they were socially and religiously heterogeneous. First of all, they did not see themselves as a sect; many were in fact Anglicans, just like the Philadelphians who constituted part of their movement. John Lacy, arguably the most controversial and notorious figure of the movement, is a case in point here. He grew up as an Anglican and had been an active member of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in prosecuting vice; yet he also contributed to Calamy’s election at the Presbyterian chapel of Tothill Street and attended his service. More to the point, he had publicly defended both toleration and the practice of occasional conformity.121 Richard Bulkeley, also Anglican, was by contrast an ardent Whig supporter, while the anonymous author of an anti-Whig satire presented himself as ‘an Acquaintance of Dr. Eems’ (Thomas Emes).122 In the first few years of existence, the French Prophets also attracted via the Philadelphian Society a number of Scottish Quietists with Jacobite inclinations. These included members of the aristocracy, some of whom even fought against the English army during the rebellion of 1715.123 Conflicting political aspirations in their millenarian reading of the conjunctures undoubtedly increased tensions within the group. Having moved to Great Budworth near Warrington, Lacy had an apocalyptic vision of the nearby Jacobite invasion of the Cheshire coast in 1715. Yet if most Scottish Quietists had left the Prophets by then, James Cuninghame remained one of their most active and charismatic Instruments until his death, despite fighting for the Pretender at the Battle of Preston.124 Further political divergencies can be observed between Scottish and English followers, for example. Whilst I intend to examine the Prophets’ missions across Britain, Europe and New England in a separate study, their success among Highland Cameronians should be cited as another puzzling example with regard to Britain’s political situation. For if both the Prophets and the Philadelphians celebrated the Union Act of 1707 as a sign of peace and reconciliation, Cameronians remained notoriously opposed to it. They equally rejected alliances with the Jacobites, thereby ruling out the possibility of a coherent political line for the French Prophets as a religious movement.125

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In addition to the aforementioned denominations within the group, the presence of more obscure figures calls for attention. Edmund Everard and Joseph Tiley in particular were two British spies who had respectively been involved in the Popish and Rye House plots in 1681 and 1683 and remained in contact while adhering to the Prophets. The former had even converted back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism according to the various, often conflicting interests that he successively served. Both men reappeared almost simultaneously in the Prophets’ records in 1707. Everard was even designated as a missionary the following year, a task he was still fulfilling in 1711 when he visited the Earl of Cromarty, one of the negotiators of the Union Act and an avid reader of prophecies.126 As they prepared to disperse into missionary tribes, on 20 August 1708  ‘the Spirit commanded the Believers to wear a Green Ribbon, of about a Yard long, as a Mark for the destroying Angel to know us by, when he should come to execute the Judgements of the Lord’.127 The adoption of such a symbol may have marked a first step toward introducing some organisation into the group to ensure its survival after the spectacular failure of Emes’s resurrection and the expulsion of ‘false’ prophets. The group’s purchasing of the ribbon may also have been facilitated by its close ties with the Spitalfields weaving industry. Of course, wearing this green ribbon also made their identification easier for their enemies: on 7 October 1708, an assembly in Hackney Marsh was interrupted by angry Huguenots who attacked the Prophet Isaac Havy and pulled his ribbon from his hair. A  week later, 9 of these Huguenot rioters returned to the same place, but this time were attacked by about 100 Prophets, and later reported to a Justice of the Peace that their aggressors all wore a green ribbon on their hats and swords under their upper garments.128 The fact that their enemies aimed specifically for this ribbon when fighting against the Inspired indicates that it carried a deeper symbolism than a mere fashion accessory. The green ribbon had indeed been notoriously associated with radical dissenters in the seventeenth century and in particular with the Levellers. It then became linked with political dissidents in the 1670s and probably derived from informal coffee-house and tavern meetings. A  Green Ribbon Club even appeared around the same time as the most notorious of the thirty or so Whig clubs in existence during the Restoration, whose activities included burning effigies of the Pope and anti-Duke of York propaganda. The Club consisted of radicals of every part of the social ladder and marked the emergence of a revolutionary political movement in the 1680s. Some members or sympathisers like Everard and Tiley

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had been particularly active in the Rye House Plot and Monmouth’s rebellion.129 Titus Oates, the fabricator of the Popish Plot, also reportedly wore a black hat with a green ribbon.130 Such fresh and infamous memories of political dissidence make the perception of the French Prophets as conspirators very plausible and may therefore explain the Huguenots’ anxiousness to destroy their ribbons a few months before their naturalisation in 1709. Schwartz also suggested that Marion may have sought to echo the Camisards’ practice of wearing green-and-red ribbons in England, just six days before Abraham Mazel returned to the Cévennes to launch a new insurrection.131 Yet accounts differ greatly on the Camisards’ semiotics, pointing at monochromatic red, blue, black, white and silver ribbons.132 Even if true, the Prophets’ English followers could not have ignored the significance of such a symbol and the dangers it would expose them to. Yet Margaret Jacob’s implication that it evidenced a political claim is undoubtedly exaggerated, for politics was not part of the Prophets’ inspirations. Green was the colour traditionally associated with Christ the Redeemer and the ribbon was ‘look’d upon as a Bride Favour for the Marriage of the Lamb’.133 For this reason the Prophets were prepared to embrace martyrdom as part of divine plans leading to the Second Coming. As a result of a divine command, only the millenarian symbolism of the green ribbon mattered and its association with radical dissent may simply have been the result of an unfortunate cultural coincidence.

Blasphemy in Georgian England The death of Queen Anne and with it the end of the Stuart dynasty on the British throne relieved to some extent the tensions between the traditional Tory-Anglican versus Whig-dissenter alliances. The last five years of her reign had been particularly unfavourable to nonconformists in general. The High Church clergyman Henry Sacheverell had opened the hostilities against dissenters and toleration with his sermon The Perils of False Brethren in 1709. Sacheverell was renowned for his fiery preaching; he regarded dissenters as fanatics, accused them of schism and implicitly criticised the Glorious Revolution for ousting a legitimate ruler. His attack could not but find an echo in the immediate aftermath of the French Prophets controversy. It sparked one of the most important battles of pamphlets of the eighteenth century, as well as the most violent riots London had seen since the Civil War. Sacheverell infuriated the Whig Government, who, he implied, condoned if not encouraged divisions within the Anglican Church. As part of a

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highly political trial, he was impeached in the House of Lords early in 1710 and his sermon was burned in public. His sentence was deemed very lenient by his opponents and nevertheless undermined the Whig majority.134 The Tory landslide that followed the general election the same year increased pressure on nonconformists. The Occasional Conformity Act was passed in 1711 to disqualify dissenters who accepted Anglican communion from holding office. Three years later, the Schism Act was adopted to prevent them from training their own ministers. Both Acts restricted in effect the remit of the Toleration Act, which Tories had nevertheless promised not to repeal. Many disillusioned dissenters had voted for them as a result, but the Tories’ victory owed even more to their high abstention rate.135 With the Hanoverian succession and the return of the Whigs to power, the terms of the debate on toleration changed, especially as the threat of a Jacobite restoration loomed again with the rebellion of 1715. George I was Lutheran and appeared favourable to dissenters, giving them good reasons to hope for the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts. The new King conformed to the Church of England and appointed moderate bishops, but it was not until 1719 that both Acts were repealed. This effectively marked a return to the terms of 1689. The death of prominent Whig leaders  – Stanhope in 1721 and Sunderland in 1722 – rapidly crushed hopes for an extension of the Toleration Act, as Walpole’s moderation strove to placate both Anglican and dissenters.136 The reign of George II – crowned in 1727 – opened an era of relative peaceful religious cohabitation in England that impressed the young Voltaire during his visit in the late 1720s. However, religious enthusiasm and disruptive behaviour continued to cause public offence even though prosecutions of blasphemy and seditious libel appear to have fallen rather quickly after the case of the Cambridge scholar Thomas Woolston in 1729. Influenced by Origen and early Christian writings, Woolston had published six discourses on miracles between 1727 and 1729 in which he openly questioned Christ’s miracles – including his resurrection  – as absurdities. Instead, he argued that the Scriptures should be read on a purely allegorical level rather than accounts of genuine wonders. His heterodox views effectively denied the divinity of Christ and therefore opened the door to the toleration of Socinians if unrepressed. Having crossed the limits of toleration, Woolston was convicted of blasphemous libel and sentenced to a £100 fine, one year’s imprisonment and a further £2,000 penalty for the payment of sureties in 1729.137

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Half a century after the Toleration Act, Anglicans and Protestant dissenters had learned, it seems, to tolerate each other and coexist peacefully. The same was not necessarily true of Catholics, who remained suspected of sedition and suffered a wave of violence following the Jacobite invasion of 1745.138 Minor concessions were subsequently made to Protestant dissenters, especially the Quakers, but the Test Act (1672) remained in force until the Dissenters’ Relief Act of 1779, and their overall numbers had declined sharply by the mid-eighteenth century.139 *** Although atypical in its verdict, the trial of Marion and his two scribes remains significant in the history of religious enthusiasm in eighteenth-century England for several reasons. On a local level, it illustrates the solid collaboration that existed between the London Huguenot ministry and the English Government. The latter proved particularly embarrassed over the appropriate response to foreign enthusiasts in times of war against France. On a political level, the trial was also symptomatic of the tensions between Tories and Whigs over the Toleration act, some twenty years after it was passed. Toleration remained a contentious issue in subsequent decades and Marion’s case was to serve as a precedent for the prosecution before Parliament in 1795 of the MP Nathaniel Halhed, an ardent disciple of the prophet Richard Brothers.140 Such cases constituted more the exception than the rule by that time. Enthusiasm continued to challenge authority, but its understanding and response to it, as the next chapter will show, increasingly shifted toward a medical paradigm over the course of the eighteenth century.141

Notes 1 Anon., The French Prophets’ Mad Sermon, p. 3. Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, Vol. VI, p. 231 (8 November 1707). 2 John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 94–115. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, pp. 53–8. Coward, Stuart Age, pp. 282–97. 3 Mark Goldie, ‘TheTheory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration ­England’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan Irvine Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 331–68, especially pp. 335–50. Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred:  Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700. Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 40–9. Marshall, John Locke, pp. 440–66. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion, p. 82.

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4 In 1662, 1663, 1664, 1667, 1668, 1669, 1671, 1672, 1673, 1675, 1680, 1687 and 1688. Mullett, ‘Legal Position’, p. 414. 5 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 232. Coward, Stuart Age, p. 283. 6 Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, pp. 151–2. 7 Kaplan, Divided by Faith, pp. 137–8. Watts, The Dissenters, pp. 346–66. 8 Martin Sutherland, Peace, Toleration and Decay: The Ecclesiology of Later Stuart Dissent (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006), pp. 12–14. 9 Marshall, John Locke, pp. 31, 55–61. Goldie, ‘Theory of Religious Intolerance’, pp. 359–62. Geoffrey Adams, The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787:  The Enlightenment Debate on Toleration (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991), p. 11. 10 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 270. Marshall, John Locke, p. 17. Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority (Philadelphia: Diane Publishing, 1994 [1991]), pp. 7–18. 11 Steve Pincus, ‘Absolutism, Ideology and English Foreign Policy: The Ideological Context of Robert Molesworth’s Account of Denmark’, in David Onnekink and Gijs Rommelse (eds), Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe (1650–1750) (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 29–54 (pp. 41, 54). Marshall, John Locke, pp. 35–7, 56. Algernon Sydney, A Copy of a Prophecy, Sent by the Late Honourable Algernoon Sydney Esq., in the Year 1666 from Montpelliers, to Benjamin Furly of Rotterdam, and by Him Accidentally Found among Old Papers, Feb. 18/28, 1689 (London, 1689). On shifting political alliances during the Restoration, see Levillain, Vaincre Louis XIV. 12 Jonathan Israel, ‘William III and Toleration’, in Grell, Israel and Tyacke, From Persecution to Toleration, pp.  129–170 (pp.  154–6). Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Toleration and Religion after 1688’, in Grell, Israel and Tyacke, From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 389–410, especially pp. 390–3. Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, pp. 151–2. 13 Edwin Welch, ‘The Registration of Meeting Houses’. Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, p.  212. Israel, ‘William III and Toleration’, p.  154. Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 145. 14 J. C. D. Clark, English Society (1688–1832) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 283. 15 Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, p. 133. 16 Gibson, Religion and Society, p. 31. Clark, English Society, p. 283. William Salkeld, Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Court of King’s Bench; With Some Special Cases in the Courts of Chancery, Common Pleas and Exchequer from the First Year of K. William and Q. Mary, to the Tenth Year of Queen Anne, 2 vols (London, 1717), Vol. I, pp. 167–8. 17 Mullett, ‘Legal Position’, pp. 389, 396, 406. Coward, Stuart Age, p. 355. Trevor-Roper, ‘Toleration and Religion’, pp. 390–3. Walsham, Charitable Hatred, pp. 267–9. 18 Gibson, Church of England, p. 15. Mullett, ‘Legal Position’, p. 394. Clark, English Society, p. 286.

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19 Kingston I, p. 49. Joseph Trapp, The Character and Principles of the Present Set of Whigs (London, 1711), p. 44. 20 N. N., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, p. 22. 21 See Hillel Schwartz’s account of the 1690s in Century’s End: An Orientation Manual for the Year 2000 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996), pp. 84–100. 22 Noorthouck, A New History of London, pp. 288–9. 23 J. H. Brazell, London Weather (London: Stationer’s Office, 1968), pp. 10–11. 24 Brazell, London Weather, p. 7. The eclipse was total in Geneva, but was nevertheless observed from Greenwich. John Flamsteed, ‘Observations of the Solar Eclipse, May 1/12 1706 at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, etc.’, Philosophical Transactions, 25 (1706), 2237–41. Flamsteed, Correspondence, pp. 334–6. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol.1r. 25 Noorthouck, A New History of London, pp. 293–4. 26 Brazell, London Weather, pp. 9, 12, 152. Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, p. 176. 27 Anon., The Ordinary Of Newgate, His Account of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words, of the Malefactors who Were Executed at Tyburn (London, 1738), pp. 7–8. See also Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 85. 28 Brand, p. 28. 29 MMM, p. 158. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1v. 30 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1v. 31 BL, Add. MS 61618, fol. 138. 32 BL, Add. MS 61618, fols 135–6. 33 MMM, pp. 163–5. 34 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1v. 35 Chabrol, Elie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu, pp. 135–6. 36 MMM, p. 158. 37 Anon., A Reply to the Main Argument, p. 11. Josiah Woodward, The Copy of a Letter to Mr. F—. M—., p. 7. 38 N. N., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, p. 21. Kingston I, pp. 28–9. Robert Calder and James Cuninghame, A True Copy of Letters Past betwixt Mr. Robert Calder Minister of the Gospel, and Mr. James Cuninghame of Barns … (Edinburgh, 1710), p. 15. Evans, History of Modern Enthusiasm, p. 98. 39 Brand, p. 30. 40 Stack, 1g, fols 47–8. The Post Boy, 2111 (23 November 1708). 41 Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, Vol. VI, p. 307. Vesson, ‘Les Prophètes Camisards à Londres’, p. 28. 42 Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, p. 54. Thune, The Behmenists and the Philadelphians, p. 62. 43 Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, p.  18. Gregg, Queen Anne, pp. 261–3. 44 Salkeld, Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Court of King’s Bench, p. 46.

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45 Cottret, Terre d’exil, pp. 251–2. Chamayou, ‘Le Refuge dans les îles britanniques’, pp.  53–5. David Carnegie A.  Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France in the Reign of Louis XIV; or, The Huguenot Refugees and Their Descendants in Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols (London:  Reeves and Turner, 1871–74), Vol. I, pp.  58–65. Anne J.  Kershen, ‘Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields and the Spirit of Capitalism’, in Anne J. Kershen (ed.), London: The Promised Land? The Migrant Experience in a Capital City (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997), pp. 66–90 (p. 70). Raymond Smith and the Huguenot Library, Records of the Royal Bounty and Connected Funds, the Burn Donation, and the Savoy Church in the Huguenot Library, University College, London: A Handlist, Huguenot Society of London, Quarto Series, 51(London: Huguenot Society of London, 1974), pp.  1–10, 27–31. Natalie Rothstein, ‘Huguenot Master Weavers:  Exemplary Englishmen, 1700–c. 1750’; and Eileen Barrett, ‘Huguenot Integration in Late 17th- and 18th-Century London: Insights from Records of the French Church and Some Relief Agencies’, in Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton (eds), From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Eastbourne:  Sussex Academic Press, 2001), pp.  160–71 (pp.  163–5), and 375–82, respectively. 46 Stat. 7 Ann. C. 5 repealed by Stat. 10 Ann. C. 5. ‘An Act for Naturalizing Foreign Protestants’, in Owen Ruffhead (ed.), The Statutes at Large: From the Tenth Year of the Reign of King William the Third, to the End of the Reign of Queen Anne, Statutes at Large, 4 (London, 1786), pp.  326–7. William A. Shaw (ed.), Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland 1603–1700, Huguenot Society of London, Quarto Series, 18 (Lymington: Huguenot Society of London, 1911), pp. i–xvi. William O’Reilly, ‘The Naturalization Act of 1709 and the Settlement of Germans in Britain, Ireland and the Colonies’, in Vigne and Littleton, From Strangers to Citizens, pp. 492–502. 47 Daniel Statt, ‘The Birthright of an Englishman: The Practice of Naturalization and Denization of Immigrants under the Later Stuarts and Early Hanoverians’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 25:1, 61–74. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, p.  57. Cottret, Terre d’exil, p. 320. 48 Waller, 1700, p. 268. 49 See appendix. 50 Jean-Pierre Poussou, ‘Migrations et mobilité de la population en Europe à l’époque moderne’, in Bardet and Dupâquier, Histoire des populations de l’Europe, Vol. I, pp. 262–86 (p. 267). On the cultural influence of the Huguenots, see Vivienne Larminie, ‘Immigrants in the DNB and British Cultural Horizons, 1550–1750: The Merchant, the Traveller, the Lexicographer and the Apologist’, in Vigne and Littleton, From Strangers to Citizens, pp. 175–83. 51 Catherine Swindlehurst, ‘ “An Unruly and Presumptuous Rabble”:  The Reaction of the Spitalfields Weaving Community to the Settlement of the

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Huguenots, 1660–1690’, in Vigne and Littleton, From Strangers to Citizens, pp. 366–74. Kershen, London: The Promised Land?, p. 71. Waller, 1700, p. 273. 52 Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, pp. 36–8. 53 David S.  Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1985), p.  169. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, p. 4. 54 Chamayou, ‘Le Refuge dans les îles britanniques’, p. 60. 55 Charles Portalès married Mary Moult in 1714. Stack, 12g, fols 11–12. Waller, 1700, p. 274. See also Kershen, Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields, p. 70. Rothstein, ‘Huguenot Master Weavers’, pp. 160–1. 56 Waller, 1700, p. 267. 57 Lacy, A Moral Test, the Manifest Intent in Law, of the Sacramental (London, 1704), p. 6. 58 Cottret, Terre d’exil, pp. 232–4. Swindlehurst, ‘An Unruly and Presumptuous Rabble’, p. 368. 59 Waller, 1700, p. 265. 60 Robin D. Gwynn, The Huguenots of London (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), pp. 9–22; and Huguenot Heritage, pp. 36–8. Chamayou, ‘Le Refuge dans les îles britanniques’, pp. 55–6. Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy, pp. 13–21. Samuel Smiles, The Huguenots: Their Settlements, Churches, and Industries in England and Ireland (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1868), pp. 270–4. 61 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 1r. ‘Lettre écrite par Ordre & au Nom de l’Eglise Françoise de Threadneedle-Street à My Lord Evêque de Londres’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, pp. 1–5. On Compton and the French Churches, see Sugiko Nishikawa, ‘Henry Compton, Bishop of London (1676–1713) and Foreign Protestants’, in Vigne and Littleton, From Strangers to Citizens, pp.  359–65. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, p.  38. David Hayton, ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons’, Past & Present, 128 (1990), 48–91 (p. 76). 62 MMM, pp. 156–7. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 1r–2r. Boyer, History of the Reign of Queen Anne. Year the Sixth, pp. 369–70. Smiles, The Huguenots, pp. 248–9. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, p. 228. 63 Comité François, Estat de la distribution de la somme (1707), p. i. Estats de la distribution (1708), p.  i; Estats de la distribution du reliqua, p.  i. H. G. Roseveare, ‘Houblon, Sir John (1632–1712)’, ODNB (2008). G. E. Aylmer, ‘Duncombe, Sir Charles (bap.  1648, d.  1711)’, ODNB (2007). www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/5C61458D-4D0A-4C07AE3E-90C1C20B1E71/0/LH_HC_lordmayors1189.pdf. 64 Maximilien Misson, Meslange de littérature historique, p. 35. 65 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2r. 66 TNA, KB 28/22/29, fols 1r–2r. The original passages are cited in French from Marion, Avertissemens prophétiques, pp. vi, 19, 42, 63, 117, 126, and roughly translated into English. I  am using the published English translation from Marion, Prophetical Warnings, pp. vii, 21, 46, 69, 129,

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138 for more convenience. The first passage was subsequently published as Marion, French Prophet’s Declaration. 67 TNA, KB 28/22/29. Kingston I, p.  50. On Hooke, see Thomas Byrne, ‘From Irish Whig Rebel to Bourbon Diplomat:  The Life and Career of Nathaniel Hooke (1664–1738)’ (PhD  thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2006), pp. 68–71; and Handley, ‘Hooke, John’. On Harcourt, see ‘Warrant Books: October 14th, 1706’, in William A. Shaw (ed.) Calendar of Treasury Books, 32 vols (London, 1949), Vol. XXI, Part II (1706–07), p. 60. 68 TNA, KB 28/22/29. Edward Foss, The Judges of England, 9 vols (London:  Lomgman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848–65), Vol. VII (1660–1714), pp. 379–80, 383–95, 399–401, 404–6. David Lemmings, ‘King, Peter, first Baron King (1669–1734)’, ODNB (2008); and ‘Eyre, Sir Robert (1666–1735)’, ODNB (2004). Stuart Handley, ‘Powys, Sir Littleton (1647–1732)’ and ‘Gould, Sir Henry (1643/4–1710)’, ODNB (2008). 69 William Hawkins, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown: or a System of the Principal Matters Relating to that Subject, Digested under Their Proper Heads, 2 vols (London, 1716–21), Vol. I, pp. 6–7. English statutory law sanctioned blasphemy and profaneness more severely. Under I Eliz. C. 2, laymen were to be fined 100 marks upon their first offence, 400 upon the second and to face life imprisonment and forfeiture of their goods upon the third. 5 Eliz. C. 15 also punished false and pretended prophecies by a fine of £100 and one year’s imprisonment upon the first offence, and forfeiture of all goods and chattels and life imprisonment upon the second. Under the Blasphemy Act of 1698, anyone denying the Trinity or the authority of the Bible, or holding polytheist beliefs, violated the Toleration Act and incurred interdiction to hold any ecclesiastical, civil and military office upon the first offence, and was to be deprived of their civil and legal rights and imprisoned for three years upon the second. Giles Jacob, The Common Law Common-Placed: Containing the Substance and Effect of All the Common Law Cases (London, 1726), p. 73. Anon., Readings upon the Statute Law. Alphabetically Digested …, 5 vols (London, 1723–25), Vol. I, pp. 244–7. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769, 4 vols (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Vol. IV, pp. 59, 149. Mullett, ‘Legal Position’, p. 394. 70 J. H.  Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th edn (London:  Butterworths, 2002), pp.  37–47. George O.  Sayles, The Court of King’s Bench in Law and History (London: Quaritch, 1959). Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, pp. 22, 131. 71 Anon., An Account of the Tryal, Examination and Conviction, of Elias Marion, and Other the French Prophets … (London, 1707). Anon., An Account of the Tryal, Examination & Conviction of the Pretended French Prophets (London, 1707). Anon., The Tryal, Examination and

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Condemnation of the French Prophets, who Were Sentenced on Friday the 28th of November, at the Queen’s-Bench-Bar at Westminster, for Holding Several Unlawful Assemblies (1707). Anon., Pillory Disapointed, or, The False Prophets Advancement (London, 1707). 72 Anon., Sixième dialogue entre deux freres et leur ami Timante, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Du 8. Juillet 1707 (London, 1707), p. 4. NRL, 43 (February 1708), p. 134. 73 Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1152, fol 63r. TNA, KB 28/22/29. Stack, 1g, fols 25v–26r. Anon., An Account of the Tryal, Examination and Conviction, of Elias Marion. 74 Stack, 1g, fol. 26. 75 BGE, Ms fr. 605/7a, fol. 2r. 76 BGE, Ms. fr.605/7a, fol. 2r. BL, Add. MS 61618, fols 135–6. Philip Hamburger, ‘The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press’, Stanford Law Review, 37 (1985), 661–765 (pp. 751–3). Paul D. Halliday, ‘Holt, Sir John (1642–1710)’, ODNB (2009). 77 Kingston I, p. 50. 78 Brand, p. 31. Holt died in 1710. 79 Particulier, Quatriême lettre d’un particulier, à Monsieur Misson, l’honnête homme, pour montrer que son Mêlange de litterature, est un tissu d’emportemens furieux, de pauvretez & d’impertinences. Ce premier jour de l’an 1708 (London, 1708), pp. 18–19. 80 Anon., Tryal, Examination, and Condemnation, of the French Prophets claims the sentence was delivered by John Powell, but his name does not appear in the court record. Albert Edgar Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling:  A  History of English Money (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 30–1, 38–40. Stack, 1g, fol. 62. Boyer, History of the Reign of Queen Anne. Year the Sixth, p. 371. 81 Stack, 1g, fols 62, 67. 82 BGE, Ms. fr. 2043a/28; Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2v. Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, Vol. VI, p. 240. 83 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2v. Stack, 1g, fol. 68. 84 Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise:  Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), pp.  220–8. Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 198:1 (2008), 33–70. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England, pp. 79–119. TNA, KB 28/22/29. 85 Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, pp. 156–60. Stack, 1g, fol. 68. 86 Particulier, Troisiême lettre, p. 9; Quatriême lettre (London, 1708), p. 8. Anon., Arrest de la cour de parlement. rendu a  l’encontre de simon morin: natif de richemont proche aumale, portant condamnation de faire amende honorable d’estre bruslé vif pour avoir pris la qualité de fils de l’homme, entendu fils de dieu, ensemble la condamnation de ses complices (Paris, 1663).

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87 G. D. Nokes, A History of the Crime of Blasphemy (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1928), pp. 147–60. 88 William Gibson, ‘The Persecution of Thomas Emlyn, 1703–1705’, The Journal of Church and State, 48 (2006), pp.  525–40, especially pp. 530–1. David Lawton, Blasphemy (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 129–30. T. C. Barnard, ‘Reforming Irish Manners: The Religious Societies in Dublin during the 1690s’, The Historical Journal, 35:4 (1992), 805–38 (p. 830). 89 David Edwards, ‘Toleration and the English Blasphemy Law’, in John Horton and Susan Mendus (eds), Aspects of Toleration (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 75–98. 90 Leonard W.  Levy, Blasphemy:  Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 156–8. 91 Nokes, Blasphemy, p. 38. Anon., Readings upon the Statute Law, Vol. I, p. 247. Levy, Blasphemy, p. 212. 92 Peyton Ventris, The Reports of Sir Peyton Ventris Kt, Late One of the Justices of the Common Pleas. In Two Parts, 2 vols (London, 1716), Vol. I, p. 293. 93 Ventris, Reports, Vol. I, p. 293. 94 Elliott Visconsi, ‘The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy:  Rex v.  Taylor (1676)’, Representations, 103:1 (2008), 30–52. Apetrei, ‘The “Sweet Singers” of Israel’, pp. 3–4. 95 Old Bailey Proceedings Online (t16990524-40). Keimer, A Search after Religion, p. 19. 96 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England, pp.  82, 91. Knights, Devil in Disguise, pp. 217–19, 227–8. 97 Particulier, Cinquiême lettre d’un particulier, à Monsieur Misson, l’honnête homme, pour montrer que son Mélange de litterature, est rempli de pauvretez, & d’ignorances, & d’impertinences. Ce 15 de Janvier, 1708 (London, 1708), p. 12. 98 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2v. The Post Man and the Historical Account, 1857 (2–4 December 1707). 99 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2v. NRL, 43 (February 1708), p. 133. 100 Stack, 1g, fols 47–8. 101 ‘My poor and timid Child, I shall give thee Courage: I shall make thee strong against all the Tempests, Blames and Insults thou wilt face … My Glory shall prevail, in the midst of this City. The more they persecute thee, the more Joy I will give to thy Hearts’ (my translation). Warnings I, pp. 62–3. 102 Lacy, Predictions Concerning the Raising the Dead Body [sic] of Mr Thomas Emes, p. 1. 103 BGE, Ms. fr. 601, fol. 149. 104 Misson, Meslange de littérature historique, p. 30. 105 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 1v–2v. 106 NRL, 43, p. 134.

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107 P.  B.  J. Hyland, ‘Liberty and Libel:  Government and the Press during the Succession Crisis in Britain, 1712–1716’, English Historical Review, 101:401 (October 1986), 863–88. 108 Brand, pp. 81–2, 84, 88, 97. Sidwell, ‘An Odd Fish’, pp. 20, 30n28. 109 Levy, Blasphemy, pp. 305–6. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 6. 110 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2r–v. 111 Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, Vol. VI, pp. 243–4. Ascoli, ‘L’Affaire des prophètes français à Londres’, 2, p.  93. Vidal, L’Ablatif absolu; and Le Malheur, p. 27n27. 112 Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, pp. 105–6. 113 Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, pp. 106–10. 114 Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, pp. 70–1. 115 Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, pp. 106–10. 116 Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 159. 117 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fols 3r–5. 118 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 2r. Lacy, Warnings II, pp.  40–2. John Humfrey, A Farther Account, p. 11. Jean Cavalier travelled to Nottingham in March 1708 to meet the Earl of Tallard, a French colonel held prisoner there between 1707 and 1711. He may have sought to plead for the relief of Protestants in France, but there is no evidence that he either met Tallard or prophesied in Nottingham. ‘Déclaration de Thomas Terrier’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, p. 16. 119 Brand, pp. 31, 114. 120 Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic’. Popkin, ‘Predicting, Prophecying, Divining and Foretelling’, pp.  121, 124–5, 130. Jacob, ‘Millenarianism and Science’, pp. 335–41. 121 Stunt, ‘Lacy, John’. John Lacy, A Letter to Sir H. Mackworth, Concerning His Treatise about the Late Occasional Bill (London, 1704). 122 Barnard, ‘Reforming Irish Manners’, p. 818. Anon., A Wonderful New Prophecy: Giving a Certain and True Account when the Church Ills Will Be Great Again (London, 1711). 123 Henderson, Mystics of the North-East, pp. 28–32. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, pp. 9–10. 124 Lacy, Vision. Brand, p. 199. 125 Wöchentliche Relation der merckwürdigsten und zur conservation der neuen historie hauptsächlich dienenden Sachen (Halle, Germany), 46, p. 184. Evans, History of Modern Enthusiasm, pp. 87–92. Jeffrey Stephen, Scottish Presbyterians and the Act of Union 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 157–70. 126 BPF, MS 302, fol. 4r. Dr Williams’s Library, London (DWL), MS 12.107(75). Brand, p. 61. John Lacy, A Relation of the Dealings of God, pp.  26–7. Melinda S.  Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp.  11, 25, 131, 141, 145–6, 200. Richard L.  Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom:  British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1992),

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pp.  13, 23–4, 98–9, 102, 107–8, 119, 133, 154, 296–302. Alan Marshall, ‘Everard, Edmund (fl. 1673–1691)’, ODNB (2004) (incomplete biography). Colin Kidd, ‘Mackenzie, George, First Earl of Cromarty (1630–1714)’, ODNB (2006). 127 Brand, pp. 26, 47, 86–7; and A Search after Religion, p. 16. BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 3. 128 The Post Boy, 2111 (23–5 November 1708). 129 Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics, pp.  7–13. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom, pp.  9–11, 33, 98–9. Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660–1740 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 90–1. Odai Johnson, Rehearsing the Revolution: Radical Performance, Radical Politics in the English Restoration (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), pp.  64–80. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 143–4. Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, p. 252. 130 Thomas Salmon, Tryals for High-Treason, and Other Crimes. With Proceedings on Bills of Attainder, and Impeachments. For Three Hundred Years Past, 9 vols (London, 1720–31), Vol. IV, p. 320. 131 Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 128. 132 Anon., Histoire des Camisards, ou l’on voit par quelles fausses maximes de politique:  Et de religion, la France a risqué sa ruïne, sous le regne de Louis XIV (London, 1744), p. 212. Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du Désert, Vol. I, p. 354. 133 See Margaret C. Jacob, review of Schwartz, French Prophets, Isis, 73:3 (September 1982), 473–4. Brand, pp. 26–7. The Post Boy, 2241 (22–4 September 1709). 134 W. A. Speck, ‘Sacheverell, Henry (bap. 1674, d. 1724)’, ODNB (2004). Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, Both in Church and State … (London, 1709), p. 4. Gibson, Church of England, pp. 78–80. Knights, Devil in Disguise, pp. 142–92. 135 Gibson, Church of England, pp.  80–3. William Gibson, ‘Dissenters, Anglicans and Elections after the Toleration Act, 1689–1710’, in Robert Cornwall and William Gibson (eds), Religion, Politics and Dissent, 1660–1832: Essays in Honour of James E. Bradley (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 129–46. Trevor-Roper, ‘Toleration and Religion after 1688’, pp. 394–407. Hamburger, ‘Development of the Law of Seditious Libel’, pp. 747–51. 136 Gibson, Church of England, pp. 83–4. Stephen Taylor, ‘The Clergy at the Court of George I and George II’, in Schaich, Monarchy and Religion, pp. 129–51 (pp. 137, 142). 137 James Oldham, ‘The Indispensability of Manuscript Case Notes to Eighteenth-Century Barristers and Judges’, in Anthony Musson and Chantal Stebbings (eds), Making Legal History: Approaches and Methodologies (Cambridge and New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.  30–52 (p.  33). Levy, Blasphemy, pp.  308–15. David Nash,

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Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (Chicago: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 64. 138 Kaplan, Divided by Faith, p. 342. 139 David L. Wykes, ‘Religious Dissent, the Church, and the Repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, 1714–19’, in Cornwall and Gibson, Religion, Politics and Dissent, pp.  165–83. Gibson, Church of England, p. 93. 140 The London Packet; or, New Lloyd’s Evening Post, 4024 (29 May 1795). 141 Michael MacDonald, ‘The Secularization of Suicide in England 1660–1800’, Past & Present, 111:1 (1986), 50–100 (pp. 86–7).

6 Medicalising enthusiasm

As the Enlightenment smear-word par excellence, enthusiasm first evolved, as we have seen, from a religious issue to a perceived social threat. By the turn of the eighteenth century, it also became problematised in medical terms under the impulse of the scientific revolution, namely as a disease somatising divine inspirations through a large range of physical manifestations, even though this medical debate can be traced back over several centuries on the Continent.1 The Cartesian system played a significant role in the medicalisation of religious enthusiasm because of its dissociation of the body from the soul. It maintained that ethereal and corporeal substances existed and could be understood independently of one another. Both matter and spirit coexisted in men, which established the mind as an autonomous entity filled with innate ideas and effectively reduced the body to a mere machine.2 This dualistic approach entrusted human reason to seek out natural causes of mental distempers, but the interactions between the soul and the body remained largely controversial, and even more so in the case of enthusiasts. In 1701, a few months before the war in the Cévennes, Louis XIV’s intendant in Languedoc, Basville, had ordered a medical examination of convulsive children in the town of Uzès: The learned and famous College of Physicians at Montpellier … were much more used to the Study of Nature, than to look into Things supernatural, they would neither affix the Name of Prophet, nor of Demoniack, to the inspired Children; nor could they find sufficient ground to ascribe to them any bodily Distemper, as the Cause of their Agitations and Discourses … a Brand therefore must be fixed upon the Inspired, and no better one could be found than that of FANATICK, for in all Ages as well as ours, the Prophet was accounted a Fool, and the Inspired a Madman.3

The French Prophets’ spectacular enthusiasm raised similar questions across the Channel, where this ‘social disease’ contaminating the body politic found a natural and immediate echo in a new medical debate.

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The discoveries of the circulation of the blood and the nervous systems and the emergence of great physicians such as William Harvey, Thomas Willis and Thomas Sydenham had fuelled a medical effervescence within a few decades. Clinical observations and experiments confirmed the Cartesian view of the human body as a machine that was progressively revealing its secrets to human understanding. By the eighteenth century, physicians henceforth shared the ambition to cure virtually anything, including old age.4 In the light of this new medical debate, this chapter retraces the problematisation of enthusiasm in medical terms over the first half of the eighteenth century. It argues that although Restoration clergymen and natural philosophers increasingly resorted to a medical terminology against enthusiasm, it was not until the turn of the eighteenth century that physicians truly began to consider this issue. Furthermore, it will show that the French Prophets stood at the centre of this medical debate, with physicians making explicit reference to their case. The phenomenal battle of pamphlets they triggered allowed room for natural interpretations of enthusiasm and thus indirectly contributed to the emergence of a medicine of the mind.

Possession to medicalisation Throughout the Middle Ages and until Locke, the Christian soul ensured the incorruptibility of the mind, and madness and deviant behaviour were generally ascribed to supernatural causes. Sometimes interpersonal conflicts resulted in barren accusations of witchcraft or demonic possession.5 The difficulty of proving such allegations and the lack of tangible evidence often led to high acquittal rates and a growing judicial scepticism. The last execution for witchcraft occurred in 1682 in England and, according to Ian Bostridge, by the 1690s ‘the symbolic appeal which the witch had, as amphibian denizen of the secular and sacred jurisdictions, was necessarily dissipated by the Lockean conception of society and toleration’.6 Although witchcraft prosecution fell dramatically afterwards, the belief itself underwent many transformations and survived among both polite and plebeian societies, with accusations sporadically reappearing throughout the eighteenth century.7 Disbelief in the reality of witchcraft was as old as the belief itself and, although sceptics privileged a natural explanation of demonic possession, we should not assume that they rejected the supernatural altogether.8 The Dutch physician Johann Weyer (1515–88), often hailed as a pioneer psychiatrist and a witchcraft sceptic, regarded witches as innocent victims prone to melancholy, but described enthusiasts as

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agents of Satan.9 Weyer’s theory of an imbalance of humours was no revolution and he maintained the role of the devil in manipulating the imagination. In fact, his ‘diagnosis’ proved consistent not only with mainstream astrological calculations that ascribed a strong influence to Saturn over melancholy, but also with medieval theological views such as those of Hildegard von Bingen. The latter had argued in the late 1100s that melancholy was the predominant humour after the Fall and was responsible for sins and diseases.10 Natural and supernatural explanations continued to coexist throughout the seventeenth century, although the scientific revolution increasingly brought forward melancholy as a convenient label to designate all sorts of distempers.11 The prospect of enthusiasm as a disease was not new to early modern England and goes back, in reality, to Plato. So long as disturbances of the mind in their broadest sense were attributed to an imbalance of humours in the Middle Ages, enthusiasm did not enter the religious vocabulary and was mostly thought to be the work of the devil until the mid-seventeenth century.12 Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) is generally regarded as a turning point in the ‘medicalisation’ of enthusiasm. But this had more to do with his coining the phrase ‘religious melancholy’ as a physiological transposition of pneumatic possessions than to the novelty of his interpretation. Burton drew indeed on an existing medical and philosophical debate that had taken place on the Continent for several centuries.13 And if Burton’s Anatomy bridged the gap between the Continental and English debates on the issue, it still ascribed religious melancholy to the influence of the devil.14 With the politico-religious turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century and the scientific revolution, it was in fact Restoration clergymen and divines who first adopted a new medical terminology against enthusiasm, regardless of its religious, philosophical or artistic forms.15 Meric Casaubon’s Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (1655) is a classic example of Anglican anti-puritanism in the Interregnum. It established for the first time a clear distinction between natural and supernatural enthusiasm that echoed his belief in the interdependence of the body and the soul. Accordingly, natural enthusiasm was the result of a physiological distemper affecting the soul’s capacity to govern the body. Melancholy and the imagination were thus to blame for the enthusiast’s ecstatic trances. By contrast, supernatural enthusiasm not only acknowledged the reality of pneumatic possessions, but also reflected the limits of the Anglican cessationist stance: ‘By supernatural [enthusiasm], I  understand a true and reall possession of some extrinsecal superior power, whether divine, or diabolical, producing effects and

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operations altogether supernatural:  as some kind of divination, … speaking of strange languages, temporary learning, and the like.’16 Casaubon stressed in a nutshell the primacy of natural symptoms without excluding the possibility of supernatural causes of enthusiasm. His approach entailed the risk of a contagious humoral disease having proliferated in England since the Civil War. As a royalist writing in the Interregnum, Casaubon did not advocate a medical response to the enthusiasm of his time, but instead a repressive one. One year later, in 1656, the Cambridge Platonist and ardent royalist Henry More built upon Burton and Casaubon’s works, but ruled out the possibility of supernatural causes in favour of a strictly physiological interpretation. Enthusiasm in his view was a melancholic disposition caused by an excess of bile in the brain that overheated the imagination. A  strong, irrational feeling of pride ensued from this affliction causing the enthusiast to believe they were inspired by God. More and other Restoration divines also engaged in apocalyptic predictions; but these were the result of rational calculations based on close readings of the Scriptures. What Enthusiasmus triumphatus (1656) emphasised was the supremacy of reason in religious beliefs and praxis. Enthusiasts were by this token dominated by their imagination and therefore their personal ambition. More’s main target was the Quakers, ‘the most melancholy sect’, who, despite modest appearances, threatened the authority of the Church of England and thus ought to be confined.17 Several prominent ministers and divines continued to write against enthusiasm throughout the Restoration. Joseph Glanvill (1636–80) pleaded in 1676 for a moderate and rational Church against what he denounced as an outbreak of fanaticism.18 The non-juror Bishop of Thetford, George Hickes (1642–1715), regarded enthusiasts as dangerous lunatics or impostors conniving with or secretly supported by Papists.19 His Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcis’d (1680) originally targeted the Quakers, but it was reprinted in 1709 as part of the battle of pamphlets against the French Prophets. Richard Baxter (1615–91), also writing against the Quakers, ascribed their enthusiasm to melancholy, a disease of the imagination fuelled in his view by individual sorrow and superstition.20 A few years later, John Moore (1646–1714), Bishop of Norwich, described enthusiasm as a physiological disease affecting the most devout Christians who lost hope in their salvation. His more compassionate approach to enthusiasm warned against the evils of idleness, the mother of melancholy, and advocated restraining one’s passions and the imagination. His sermon Of Religious Melancholy (1692) already suggests a semantic evolution of the term ‘enthusiasm’,

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which by then no longer denoted a religious deviance, but increasingly a bodily distemper of religious origin.21 Despite the increasingly naturalistic rhetoric of Restoration divines and clergymen, it was not until the early 1700s that a real medical debate on enthusiasm emerged in England. The French Prophets were no strangers to this; having sparked a spectacular battle of pamphlets, their case now became a matter of action. Many protagonists believed they should neither hold assemblies, nor be confined within Newgate prison.22 A growing number compared their convulsions to symptoms of mental distempers: ‘Another prophet fell a shaking lamentably, as if he had been one of the Lunaticks of Bethlehem.’23 Fears of what Schwartz describes as a ‘social disease’ convinced many of the necessity to confine enthusiasts for the perceived threat they posed to society.24 John Tutchin (c. 1660/64–1707), the Whig editor of the controversial Observator, who had himself been condemned for seditious libel in 1704, went further in calling for the creation of a specific Bedlam for such enthusiasts: We have a Bedlam for Mad-men, and why these should not be admitted into their Society, I  know not. Religious Mad-men ought especially to be taken Care of, because their Madness is more dangerous: And I really believe, were these Men under close Confinement, their Heads shav’d, Phlebotomy and the necessary Operations of Physick and Chyrurgery us’d, Mankind would be convinc’d, that this Practice would tend more to the effecting a Cure, than all the Recipe’s prescribed by the Physicians of Doctors-Commons or the Crown-Office.25

More than pity and compassion, confining enthusiasts became the only viable alternative to imprisonment in a post-Toleration context. The French Prophets not only revived the need for a social moderation of enthusiasm in late Stuart England, but they also initiated a medical debate on madness.

The diagnosis Around 1700, English physicians began to answer the call for a medicalisation of enthusiasm alongside ministers. The French Prophets may perhaps offer the most compelling evidence of this secularisation of enthusiasm. In the autumn of 1706, shortly after the Camisards’ arrival and months before the battle of pamphlets, The Consistory of the Savoy employ’d some Physicians, who have studied those Symptoms, and have made an exact Perquisition. Among many other

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Persons who have been Witnesses of the Spectacle, the Physician who takes care of the French poor in Spittlefields, has declar’d, That there was nothing but what is natural in the Agitations of our Prophets; and by the Attestation of a great Number of judicious Witnesses, worthy of Credit, it appears, that the three Camisars have Agitations of the Body and Head, more or less violent, according to their Strength; but Agitations that may be easily imitated, and that many have exactly imitated, without pretending to Inspiration.26

The respective roles of the minister and the physician in the battle against enthusiasm were however by no means clear-cut, as they often continued to encroach on each other’s sphere throughout most of the eighteenth century. The Scottish physician George Cheyne (1671–1743), arguably the most reputed practitioner in England at the time, reconciled this rivalry with his consensual view on the medico-religious issue of the passions:  ‘The Diseases brought on by the Passions, may be cured by Medicine, as well as those proceeding from other Causes, when once the Passions themselves cease, or are quieted. But the preventing or calming the Passions themselves, is the Business, not of Physick, but of Virtue and Religion.’27 Cheyne’s call for temperance resonated well with both Galenic medicine and the doctrine of sin. Ministers like John Moore, Bishop of Norwich in 1692, insisted on the importance of repressing the passions in order to prevent minds from degenerating into madness.28 As a particularly devout man once destined for the ministry, Cheyne endeavoured to reconcile his medical knowledge with his faith at a time when medical practice was becoming increasingly secular.29 A growing number of his colleagues were convinced that enthusiasm was not a disease of the soul, but a matter for the physician. Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) explained in 1725 that enthusiasm falls out in almost all Instances of great Melancholy (the unhappy sufferers are more to be pitied than derided and exposed) and the Patients themselves and their Relations should be convinced, that such religious Melancholy is as much a bodily Disease, as any of another Class and a different Nature; and they must more depend upon the Art of the Physician, and the Force of Medicine, than the Skill and Reasonings of the Casuist, for their Recovery.30

Four years later, Nicholas Robinson (c. 1697–1775), a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and an administrator of Bedlam, reiterated the physician’s legitimacy to cure enthusiasm based on the recent case of the French Prophets: ‘And certainly a great many of our religious Visionaries, and French Prophets, that swarm’d here in such Numbers, would have done much better under the Hand of the Physician, than

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the secular arm.’31 The boundary between a medical and a religious approach to enthusiasm still remained in the mid-eighteenth century. Some even accused physicians of encroaching too much on the clergymen’s duties in healing the mind. Susannah Wesley once wrote to her son John in 1746 about the misdiagnosis of Mr Mac-Cune at a Chelsea madhouse and even questioned the honesty of the great Dr Monro.32 Thirteen years later, the Methodist founder likewise wondered: Why, then, do not all physicians consider how far bodily disorders are caused or influenced by the mind, and in those cases which are utterly out of their sphere call in the assistance of a minister; as ministers, when they find the mind disordered by the body, call in the assistance of a physician? But why are these cases out of their sphere? Because they know not God. It follows, no man can be a thorough physician without being an experienced Christian.33

Clergymen and physicians thereafter continued to compete over the healing of the mind, which both groups regarded as the seat of the rational soul. As shall be seen below, economic circumstances played a significant role in both the medicalisation of enthusiasm into a religious madness and the secularisation of its diagnosis. This medico-religious rivalry over mental distempers would not be settled until the end of the eighteenth century.

Taxonomy Translating enthusiasm into a disease did not always fit neatly into the taxonomical framework of the early 1700s. The consensus had remained since Burton that enthusiasts suffered from religious melancholy, a feverless delirium typically characterised by a passion or dotage such as the despair of one’s salvation. In Galenic terms, it resulted from an excess of black bile, a cold and wet humour influenced by the planet Saturn.34 One was not born melancholic, but those of a weaker constitution were believed to be prone to it until an emotional trauma triggered the disease. The over-secretion and stagnation of the black bile in the body was allegedly visible in dark skin complexions, hair and eyes. Solitude and idleness further emancipated the imagination from the moderation of reason; they filled the enthusiast’s mind with false ideas and persuaded him either of his eternal damnation or of his divine election. The physiological complexity and the range of its supposed manifestations helps explain why melancholy was often used as a generic term for any mental distemper.35 Other forms of madness were also recognised at the time, albeit unrelated to religious causes. Mania, for example, constituted a

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feverless delirium with frenetic fits. These alienated the mind from the body and granted the maniac exceptional physical strength as well as insensitivity to pain.36 Galenic medicine ascribed it to an abundance of yellow bile or ‘choler’ in the body, a hot and dry humour that in turn generated heat in the body and made the brain crumbly. The discovery of the nervous system by Thomas Willis (1621–75) added a new medical layer onto to its diagnosis. Willis had redefined mania as an inverted form of melancholy rather than a separate disease on the mental continuum. In so doing, he recast the body in terms of nervous dynamism in which a moderate tension of the fibres, rather than a humoral balance, was key to good mental health.37 Unlike the two forms of consequential madness delineated by melancholy and mania, lunacy epitomised the most common form of original or innate madness. It had been known since ancient Greece as an astrological disease of the mind: just as melancholy was ascribed to the influence of Saturn, lunacy denoted a behavioural instability that reflected the phases of the moon – luna. The lunatic’s mood was deemed changing; his violent condition was the consequence of a chronic and incurable disease. If lunacy remained in its strictest sense a disease influenced by the planetary conjunctures throughout the eighteenth century, it also became by its unpredictability a synonym for ‘madness in general’ over the same period.38 Far less represented in the contemporary medical debate was idiocy, an innate lack of understanding and judgement thought to be caused by defective senses. Such congenital retardations had been examined by Willis in the 1670s and substantiated the equation of the deaf and dumb with idiocy.39 Two additional mental distempers should be mentioned despite their semantic elasticity, namely hypochondria and hysteria. Both were believed to be related to melancholy; according to Galenic medicine, the former was caused by vapours produced by the spleen, whilst the latter emanated from the womb.40 Building upon the mechanistic discoveries and observations of Willis and Sydenham, eighteenth-century physicians moved the source of these diseases to the hypersensitivity of the nerves. For Richard Blackmore, a fragile constitution and skinny physique exposed the hypochondriac to absent-mindedness and intermittent memory losses. Similar manifestations affected hysteric women, only their illness was henceforth located in the brain.41

Body and soul Enthusiasm as a religious madness could not but be a bodily disease in line with the recent anatomical discoveries of the scientific revolution.

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Descartes had been critical in the understanding of the body–soul relationship by distinguishing the latter from the sources of life. He argued on this basis that animals and plants had no soul and compared them to automatic organisms. The vital principle resided, in his view, in the animal spirits: a ‘rarified’, ethereal fluid believed to circulate between the body and the soul. Descartes declared the pineal gland the seat of the soul, which could be reached by the animal spirits through the veins and arteries, as well as the nerves.42 With Thomas Willis, the nerves became the main means of communication between the body and the soul. Willis described the nerves as hollow pipes conveying the animal spirits to the pineal gland and activating the muscles as they circulated in the body. Although a widely accepted notion at the time, physicians still disagreed on the seat of this ethereal substance, some locating it in the blood and others in the nerve canals. For this reason historians have described the animal spirits as a floating concept, about which nobody could demonstrate anything more definite than a mysterious connection between soul and body.43 Eighteenth-century English medicine was also heavily influenced by the Lockean notion of the tabula rasa: the mind was completely blank at birth and developed from ideas transmitted by the senses to the brain. Misconceived ideas and dreams thus resulted from erroneous sensations that, in turn, arose from dysfunctional organs and nerves. The insane, unlike idiots, had not lost their reason, but were simply making deductions from wrongly associated ideas.44 Empiricists thus rejected the Cartesian postulate of innate ideas and argued that the thinking soul communicated with the body through the animal spirits. Given that the Lockean mind was continuously shaped by its corporeal envelope, the main difficulty for physicians of the mind became how to differentiate between their patients’ perception and illusion.45

Causes Two factors were generally incriminated for delusion, namely the passions and the imagination. George Cheyne, himself a mystic with close ties to the Scottish branch of French Prophets through his patient James Cuninghame and his friends Dr James Keith and Chevalier Andrew Ramsay, dedicated his life to repressing the passions, knowing from personal experience the dreadful consequences they could have on a patient’s health.46 In his best-selling Essay of Health and Long Life, he defined the passions as follows:

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1. The Passions have a greater Influence on Health, than most People are aware of. 2. All violent and sudden Passions, dispose to, or actually throw People into acute Diseases; and sometimes the most violent of them bring on sudden Death. 3. The slow and lasting Passions, bring on chronical Diseases; as we see in Grief, and languishing hopeless Love. 4. Therefore the sudden and acute Passions are more dangerous than the slow or chronical. 5. Men of lively Imaginations and great Vivacity, are more liable to the sudden and violent Passions and their Effects. 6. Thoughtful People, and those of good Understanding, suffer most by the slow, and secretly consuming Passions. 7. The Indolent and the Thoughtless, suffer least from the Passions: The Stupid and Ideots not at all.47 Cheyne’s ideas on the passions were widely admitted as a threat to the animal economy and directly echoed the views of Restoration clergymen like John Moore, for example. Yet the threat was not the same for everyone; women, children and ‘cowardly’ men were thought to be more impressionable and sensitive to the passions, which in turn unleashed the imagination, or fancy.48 This irrational faculty served as a universal toolbox for the explanation of mental distempers by the turn of the eighteenth century.49 Unrestrained passions allegedly overheated the imagination and filled the patient’s mind with wrongly perceived ideas. Women’s weaker constitution allowed their imagination to take over their mind, which was systematically blamed for abnormal births and mystical pregnancies. For instance, the Mary Toft scandal in 1726 was just one example of how the power of the imagination over the body remained deeply entrenched even among some of the most reputable physicians of the eighteenth century.50 Unsurprisingly, the imagination was often cited as the main cause of enthusiasm.51 However, Nicholas Robinson distinguished himself from his contemporaries by fully dismissing the imagination as a causative factor of medical distemper. If all diseases found their origin in the body, as we have seen above, ‘I hope these gentlemen [i.e. incompetent physicians] will be so candid as to inform us, from whence that wrong Turn of the Fancy it self arises, that is suppos’d to give Being to all those Symptoms’, for ‘it’s impossible that the Mind can suffer, and the Body be unaffected at the same Time, & vice versa’.52 Robinson was convinced that the soul suffered from the affections of the body and, just as he had attempted to find its location in the brain, he went further

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than anyone in advocating a fully physiological approach to religious enthusiasm. Less prominent, though worth mentioning, was the incrimination of the diet in the diagnosis of mental and bodily distempers. Dieting had more to do with lifestyle than with one’s physical constitution; those physicians stressing its importance also adopted a strong moralist tone in their diagnoses. Temperance and moderation had become the watchwords of the Augustan age and formed of course an integral part of the contemporary medical debate. Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) was perhaps the first one to draw attention to the influence of an unbalanced diet on dreams, nightmares and visions, which established him as a pioneer of vegetarianism.53 The Surrey physician David Irish insisted around the same time on the virtues of a balanced diet against mental illnesses and was keen to cite biblical references to support his hypothesis.54 George Cheyne’s more established position enabled him to make a healthy, vegetarian diet a national cause through his best-selling medical treatises. Writing from his own experience of melancholic obesity, he argued that ‘all Diseases whatsoever … so far as they are natural and internal Distempers, and not caus’d by Accident, must in the main proceed … from Intemperance, or some Error in the Quantity or Quality of their Food, and Laziness or Neglect of due Exercise’.55 By denouncing extravagant lifestyles, Cheyne essentially posited that one was what one ate and directly proscribed the dietary excesses of the wealthy. In so doing, he defined a new sort of mental distemper plaguing Enlightenment society: the ‘English malady’.

The English malady In the first half of the eighteenth century emerged the idea of a national distemper afflicting the privileged classes. This ‘English Malady’, named after Cheyne’s best-selling treatise, had already found supporters and typically designated melancholy or the spleen.56 As a mechanistic approach to the body came increasingly to replace Galenic humoralism, this bourgeois melancholy became ‘a disease of civilisation’, to use Roy Porter’s expression, and took the attention of elite physicians away from the maniacs, raving lunatics and idiots of Bedlam.57 Physicians now held that lax fibres and nerves, fluctuating body temperature, and heavy and thick blood caused melancholy, rather than the humour of the same name – and religious melancholy in the case of an exceptionally devout patient.58 Such afflictions, it was thought, only plagued the idle and overly pensive wealthy as the price to pay for England’s economic prosperity and individual freedom.

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The Moisture of our Air, the Variableness of our Weather, (from our Situation amidst the Ocean) the Rankness and Fertility of our Soil, the Richness and Heaviness of our Food, the Wealth and Abundance of the Inhabitants (from their universal Trade) the Inactivity and sedentary Occupations of the better Sort (among whom this Evil mostly rages) and the Humour of living in great, populous and consequently unhealthy Towns, have brought forth a Class and Set of Distempers with atrocious and frightful Symptoms, scarce known to our Ancestors, and never rising to such fatal Heights, nor afflicting such Numbers in any other known Nation. These nervous Disorders being computed to make almost one third of the Complaints of the People of Condition in England.59

Later in the century, James Boswell even prided himself on his affliction as the legitimating basis for social hierarchy: ‘we Hypochondriacks may console ourselves in the hour of gloomy distress, by thinking that our sufferings make our superiority’.60 Along with this English malady circulated the widespread belief in an equally insular proneness to suicide. Once a demonic crime against God’s creation and authority, self-murder became increasingly accepted as unfortunate consequence of madness from the late seventeenth century. Michael MacDonald has shown in a brilliant article how a fast-growing proportion of suicides were subsequently declared non compos mentis – mentally irresponsible – in the following decades, with the immediate consequence of sparing surviving heirs the humiliation of being dispossessed from their goods. He ascribes this secularisation of suicides to a combination of factors and agencies, in particular the emergence of a medical market and shifting legislations reinforcing landowners’ rights, as well as the rise of a literate middling sort among whom jurors were selected for coroners’ verdicts. The result was an empathic exculpation of suicides, whose crime became culturally and socially tolerated at least for the protection of their families and estates, especially for the gentry.61 England’s reputation as a melancholic nation already was widespread on the Continent, where observers also emphasised the country’s propensity for suicide.62 In Enlightenment France, for instance, suicide was understood as a bodily disease rather than a theological issue. As Montesquieu noted: We do not find in history that the Romans ever killed themselves without a cause; but the English destroy themselves most unaccountably; they destroy themselves often in the very bosom of happiness. This action among the Romans was the effect of education; it was connected with their principles and customs; among the English it is the effect of a distemper; it is connected with the physical state of the machine, independent of every other cause.63

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Comparing the body to a machine of triggers and hydraulics was typical of the scientific revolution and early Enlightenment medicine. Montesquieu was only echoing the Cartesian tradition of mechanist physicians like Matthieu Chastelain and Philippe Hecquet (1661–1737) in this respect.64 John Woodward (1665–1728) argued in 1707 that heredity aggravated melancholy considerably as the distempers of both parents became concentrated into a single individual.65 Many ascribed this melancholic scourge and suicidal tendencies to the peculiar instability of the climate in the British Isles, an idea that can be traced as far back as Hippocrates.66 Not only did the weather affect the health of respectable Britons, but England’s religious diversity also made the country susceptible to enthusiasm by the same token.

Enthusiastic madness Despite the widely accepted Burtonian transposition of enthusiasm into a religious melancholy, the term lacked precision. The French Prophets’ enthusiasm had indeed little to do with the solitary despair that typically characterised melancholy, and taxonomical confusion prevailed in the Augustan age. John Woodward diagnosed an enthusiast as a delirious maniac suffering from excessive melancholy in 1713, while Thomas Fallowes, a notorious London quack, claimed that melancholy, mania and lunacy were merely words that could interchangeably designate the same disease.67 Although on the Continent Lodovico Ricchieri had classified enthusiasm as a mania of divine origin as early as 1517,68 it was not until 1729 that a clearer distinction appeared in England, when Nicholas Robinson counterposed religious melancholy and enthusiasm, henceforth linking the latter with religious mania: Sometimes this raging Lunacy is improv’d upon the Habit of warm, biliose Constitutions, from a set of religious Objects, and then it arises to Enthusiasm; a Species of Madness quite different from religious Melancholy, and which produces different Effects: For whereas the Patient under the Symptoms of religious Melancholy, was greatly oppress’d with Fear, Sadness, and Despair; these, on the contrary, from an over-weening Opinion of their own Sanctity or Holiness, are elevated to the highest Degree of Familiarity with their Maker:  They are his Viceroys, chosen Saints and Servants, sent on especial Errands, to reclaim the unbelieving World.69

Like his Newtonian colleagues, Robinson rejected the idea of an autonomous mind separated from the body and filled with innate ideas. Instead, religious melancholy originated in his view from a combination of lax fibres, want of spirits and a heavy, thick blood that set a fixed

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idea – dotage – on the patient’s doomed fate. By contrast, the religious mania or enthusiastic madness of George Fox, James Nayler and Lodowick Muggleton arose from contracted nerves and a fevered brain, and [f]‌rom this Way of reasoning we may gather, that all these fantastick Agitations of our modern French Prophets, and other late Visionaries, were nothing else but strong convulsive Fits, which those Wretches had habituated their Bodies to, from the Strength of their Passions, and a strong Persuasion, that they were illuminated from Above.70

Diagnosing enthusiasm and madness became a critical issue with direct social repercussions in early Enlightenment England. Whilst melancholy gentrified into an illness of the idle rich, enthusiasm continued to stigmatise religious zealots throughout the eighteenth century. Such were the stakes, for example, of the pious Dame Sarah Clerke’s case in 1718, whose fate and estate depended on the nature of her distemper and the motivations of her entourage.71 As we saw with John Lacy and Nicolas Fatio in Chapter 2, the brush of enthusiasm was generally unforgiving and the reputations tarred with it irrecoverable.

Contagion The French Prophets’ agitations would certainly not have occupied Londoners’ attention had these involved a single individual. Rather, Marion, Fage and Cavalier’s ability to attract English followers reinforced the threat of a convulsive contagion that could spread throughout a religiously unsettled and vulnerable country. The Prophets’ printer, Samuel Keimer, reported that the Infection began to spread and operate most unaccountably upon the Bodies and Minds of Men, Women and Children, who were generally Persons that had made a serious Profession of Religion, under the various Denominations in this our Land, viz. those of the National, Presbyterian, Independent and Baptist Perswasion.72

Eighteenth-century England lived in the permanent fear of a resurgence of fanaticism and, worst of all, Catholicism and suspicions that the French Prophets might be disguised papists were fuelled by their steadfast growth.73 From three original Prophets in September 1706, the group had gained nearly 500 followers by the end of 1708.74 The Nouvelles de la République des Lettres had reported in Holland the birth of a new sect in London as early as June 1707.75 The fear of an epidemic of fanaticism therefore seemed well grounded.

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The precise modes of contagion continued to divide the medical world in the eighteenth century. There was little new or practical on offer by then and the miasmatic theory – contagion by ‘bad air’ – of the environmentalists seemingly remained the most logical cause for enthusiasm.76 Physicians therefore followed the tradition of emphasising prevention or avoided the subject, as neither Galen nor the Hippocratics had mentioned contagion in the past.77 Among those who confronted the issue, Henry Nicholson (fl.1683–1723), M.D. and a future lecturer in botany at Trinity College Dublin, produced a retrospective diagnosis of the six weeks he spent among the French Prophets. While admitting that he had experienced convulsions himself, Nicholson also insisted that his own differed from those displayed by the rest of the group and he therefore suspected some fraud on their part. After carefully observing them, he concluded that their contagion derived from mimicry, rather as the act of yawning produces a similar reaction in those watching. Nicholson further argued that a sound technique called ‘harmonising’  – synchronised humming  – shared by the Quakers and the Philadelphians, contaminated the spectator by overheating his or her imagination. The nerves then inflamed and triggered heavy convulsions in the subject. This practice was based on the Platonic belief that the soul harmonises with the cosmos through the senses and thus relied on music to connect the microcosmic inner self with the macrocosmic outer world.78 Another interpretation, published in a British Journal article on 13 April 1723, related this phenomenon to ‘an unusual Kind of Epileptick Fits, which often actuate the Organs of Speech without the Patient’s knowing it, and have often been mistaken for divine Trances, and their incoherent Rapsodies been esteem’d Revelations’.79 Such trances, as the author emphasised, were common among the Quakers and the French Prophets, but his diagnosis converged with the emerging theory that defined enthusiasm as an airborne illness – miasma – that carried the emanations of the bodies of the sick – effluvium – to those of the healthy.80 There seems to be no Difficulty, in conceiving that the Effluviums, which steam from the Body of an Enthusiast, should infect others suitably qualify’d with the same Distempers, as Experience shews us, that the minute Particles, which are convey’d by the Bite of a mad Dog, cause Madness, and will make the Person infected bark like the Dog who bit him; and such Particles, and in other Instances may be convey’d through the Pores, and in a common Instance undoubtedly are so.81

By ‘minute particles’ one should understand ‘seeds of disease’, a remotely Galenic idea that anticipated bacteriology and held that the

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wind transported invisible animalcules from infected bodies.82 This theory provided a ready-made explanation for smallpox and syphilis in the early modern period, but also for convulsions in the eighteenth century.

Confining treatments The trade in lunacy The immediate response to the perceived proliferation of enthusiasm in Augustan England was that of confinement. The only public asylum in the country remained the notorious ‘Bedlam’, founded in 1247 as the priory of the Order of St Mary of Bethlehem. It had accommodated lunatics since 1377 and passed under the city’s public authority in 1546. The original site was destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, but Bedlam reopened on a grander scale in Moorfields ten years later. Its new architecture, inspired by the Tuileries in Paris, reflected the medical ideals of its time: high windows and ceilings allowed for more air, light and space and offered a healthy environment to the mad, thanks to the exemption of hospitals from the window tax.83 Yet lack of funds and a cultural fascination with madness were also what helped popularise the term ‘Bedlam’ in the English language. Bedlam’s doors were indeed opened to the public once a week for 1d per person. It had become one of London’s most popular attractions by 1700 with an estimated 100,000 tourists per year.84 Famous visitors included the polymath Thomas Tryon, the poet Thomas Fitzgerald and the novelist Samuel Richardson.85 A former administrator of Bedlam, Jonathan Swift described its typical occupant ‘tearing his straw into a piece-meal, swearing and blaspheming, biting his grate, foaming at the mouth, and emptying his pis-pot at the spectator’s faces’, or as ‘a surly, gloomy, nasty, slovenly mortal, raking in his own dung and dabbling in his urine’.86 Such public displays of obscenity effectively turned the asylum into a freak show rather than a place of medical care. England’s second asylum did not see the light of day until 1713, when Mary Chapman founded Bethel Hospital in Norwich, the country’s second largest city then. Bethel could only accommodate up to thirty patients at a time, insufficient to supply the growing demand for confinement of the insane.87 Guy’s Hospital in London opened a new wing dedicated to the care of lunatics in the 1720s thanks to the support of generous donors; but the development of public asylums did not really begin until the second half of the eighteenth century, with the foundation of St Luke’s Hospital in London (1751) and a

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multitude of regional establishments (Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, York, Exeter, Newcastle …) thereafter.88 With the economic developments of the late seventeenth century, England saw the emergence of a new medical market with the proliferation of private madhouses in response to the lack of public offer. Profit-making and claims of specialism contributed considerably to the medicalisation of religious enthusiasm and insanity in general. Private madhouses were first recorded in the 1670s and included Old Manour House in Clerkenwell Green (1672), Hoxton House (1695) or David Irish’s house near Guilford, Surrey (1700).89 Daniel Defoe estimated their number at fifteen nationwide by 1724.90 This ‘trade in lunacy’ was privately supplying the seclusion of what the public viewed as social disease.91 Madness became a competitive, unregulated and lucrative market; unlicensed practitioners exploited this insular conjuncture and ruled more or less benevolently.92 Results and the level of care varied considerably from one institution to another, but depended mostly upon the patient’s means. University-trained physicians were not necessarily exempt from greed either; many also had their own private practice alongside their hospital positions. Nor did they have any real medical alternative to offer against the remedies of empirics and quacks. Clinical observations pioneered by Sydenham had not yet impacted the English medicine of the mind by the time of the French Prophets: most physicians practised medicine either for the wealthy or from a distance.93

Mad laws The lack of specific laws and regulations only made the insane more vulnerable to abuses of all sorts. The oldest mental condition legally recognised was idiocy, that is ‘one that hath no understanding from his nativity; and therefore is by law presumed never likely to attain any’.94 Idiocy was incurable in legal terms and it was determined in court by a jury with a test consisting of series of practical questions: Did the defendant know their name? Could they count up to twenty? Did they recognise their parents and relatives? Could they tell their age? And so forth. The fate and possessions of the defendant depended on his or her answers. Henry Roberts, whose case in 1743 was exceptionally subjected to the medical expertise of James Monro, Frank Nicholls and Richard Mead, recalled his intimidating experience: They came around me and asked their Questions together, without giving me Time to answer. They asked me what a Lamb and a Calf was called at one,

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two and three years old. They gave me a Sum of Money to tell, which I miscounted; and then I heard them say, he is not capable of managing his Affairs, we will return him incapable …95

Thereupon Roberts was declared purus idiota and was dispossessed of his goods. According to the Royal Prerogative of 1324 (17 Edw. II. C.  9), the idiots’ possessions were to pass under royal authority throughout their confinement and be restituted to their heirs at the time of their death.96 Lunacy in the broader sense of the term was the other form of madness recognised by law: as an accidental loss of reason, be it temporary or permanent. Subjects falling under this category were declared non compos mentis when they failed the practical questions of the jury. Despite the proliferation of madhouses, it is important to remember that the confinement of the insane did not occur on a large scale, but only when the latter disrupted the social order by blaspheming, stealing, walking naked in public, showing violent behaviour or attempting to commit suicide, for example. The fate of these disruptive mentally ill was by law – Poor Law Act (1601) and Act of Settlement (1662) – entrusted with that of paupers to their local parish or workhouse, which often became a dumping ground for the socially undesirable.97 A clause in the Vagrancy Act (1714) required for the first time the systematic confinement of the ‘furiously mad and dangerous’, who were to be ‘safely locked up in some secure place’ as long as ‘the lunacy of madness shall continue’. Abusive procedures were not of course uncommon, and for this reason the subject’s direct heir was not permitted to be part of a jury; but this did not prevent wrongdoings. Medical certificates were not required by law until 1774 for the confinement of the insane, and unscrupulous physicians could always provide one for a fee otherwise, leaving the door open to all sorts of embezzlements.98 An anonymous pamphlet of 1740, entitled Proposals for Redressing Some Grievances which Greatly Affect the Whole Nation, accounted for these excesses: [S]‌everal are put into Mad-Houses, as they are called, without being mad, Wives put their Husbands in them that they may enjoy their Gallants, and live without the Observation and Interruption of their Husbands; and Husbands put their Wives in them, that they may enjoy their Whores, without Disturbance from their Wives; Children put their Parents in them, that they may enjoy their Estates before their time; Relations put their Kindred into them for wicked Purposes.99

A virtually unregulated market facilitated the confinement of fragile or burdensome relatives without requirements for providing medical

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care. These kinds of abuses led to the Vagrancy and Houses of Correction Act in 1744, which introduced the ‘keeping, maintaining and curing’ of detained insane alongside the use of chains to restrain them whenever necessary. The impact of such measures would not be felt until the rise of the public asylums in the latter half of the eighteenth century.100

An unfair competition? Juicy economic opportunities do not alone suffice to explain the emergence of a medical market; it was also a matter of professional legitimacy. The Royal College of Physicians sought to control the practice of medicine and increasingly targeted rivals – apothecaries, barber-surgeons, quacks, but also clergymen – as illegitimate practitioners.101 Enthusiasts were not spared by this trend for defending an alternative approach to the medical market: the gift of miraculous cures or thaumaturgy. For this reason enthusiasm constituted in many ways a scientific and intellectual threat as much as a religious and social one in Augustan eyes. Just as they challenged the authority of the Church with lay preachers of the Gospel, as we saw in Chapter  3, enthusiasts were also vehemently outspoken against academic knowledge and practices.102 John Lacy, who did not attend university, unlike his siblings, prophesied several times against intellectuals and academic education:  ‘I am come down to reason with you. O ye learned Doctors, Sucklings shall confound you, you, you. I will make Babes teach you.’103 Many enthusiasts had been known since the mid-seventeenth century to promote a distinctively empathic form of healing based on spiritual counselling, prayers and fasting, as well as Paracelsian chemistry. Religious and medical heterodoxy often went hand in hand; both counterposed their popular roots to the rise of academic science and Anglican authority to offer an alternative, accessible care to the poor.104 Similarly, the French Prophets repeatedly defied science and medicine with alleged miraculous cures of blindness, fevers, consumption, gout, breast cancer or melancholy, which they proudly counterposed against the growing rationalism of their age.105 As an acclaimed thaumaturge among the group, Lacy promised to straighten Richard Bulkeley, a hunchback and one of the group’s wealthiest benefactors. Bulkeley had suffered from many ailments all his life and had lost his trust in physicians by the time he joined the French Prophets in hope of a miracle, though he died before one was achieved.106 The presence of licensed physicians and apothecaries among the French Prophets, as outlined in Chapter  2, further blurred the line

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between divine and human medicine. At least thirteen physicians and apothecaries featured among their followers, including some well established in their practices.107 Henry Nicholson was still a medical student in 1708, but became an M.D. shortly afterwards and taught botany at Trinity College Dublin, between 1711 and 1715;108 the Scot James Keith belonged to the Royal College of Physicians and pioneered inoculation against smallpox in 1717 after losing two sons to this disease;109 Patrick Urquhart was a professor of medicine at King’s College, Aberdeen;110 Robert Eaton was a ‘priest-physician’ who graduated in Avignon in 1715 and obtained the letters patent from the King for his ‘Balsamick Styptick’ against bleedings in 1724. He was still in business with his former coreligionists Daniel Critchlow and Francis Moult despite having allegedly converted to Catholicism in Rome.111 From their enthusiastic perspective, God remained the supreme healer over university-trained physicians. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, if none of the followers mentioned above received the gift of healing. In 1711, Jean Allut lamented that medicine was becoming a dispirited discipline: Chercherions-nous soulagement, d’autre Medecin que de Toi? Non, Seigneur Jesus; car Tu est nôtre Medecin. Veuille, Seigneur, t’aprocher de nous avec ton huile operante, afin que Tu oignes nos coeurs. Le baume de ta Maison n’est plus sur la Terre. Les Medicins du Monde n’emploient plus la Cause de ton Esprit, qui est la veritable Huile, le veritable Onguent pour guérir.112

Accordingly, Lacy sent for a doctor to examine Betty Gray before attempting to remove a tumour from her swollen neck. Upon arrival, Timothy Byfield, M.D.  duly declared to the audience that medicine could not cure her and that only Lacy could accomplish such a miracle, although evidently the Spirit did not seize Lacy because of the audience’s overpowering incredulity.113 The relationship between radical dissenters and medicine was complex and often difficult to disentangle. Some, like the Ranters and the Seekers, embraced the new medicine of the mid-seventeenth century, while others, like Lodowick Muggleton, openly despised physicians.114 His contemporary George Fox claimed to have received the gift of healing, and several Quakers had also attempted to resurrect their coreligionist James Parnell in Colchester in 1656.115 By their alleged miraculous cures and their attempt to raise Thomas Emes from the dead, the French Prophets likewise challenged the laws of physics and denounced medicine as an arrogant human attempt to compete with God.

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As Mark Jenner has shown, quacks and enthusiasts maintained an intricate relationship in the seventeenth century, a trend that could still be observed among the French Prophets.116 The Socinian apothecary Thomas Emes was not of great reputation and had been excluded from the Baptist church in Cripplegate in 1694 for denying the divinity of Christ and the Holy Trinity.117 John and Francis Moult, both apothecaries, were eminent members of the group. Francis, ‘chymist’ and fellow of the Apothecaries’ Society, was involved with his other brother, George, F.R.S., in a great controversy over a patent that granted Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), M.D.  and F.R.S., the exclusive right to extract Epsom Salts  – ‘bitter purging salts’  – in 1698. Francis quickly translated Grew’s treatise Tractatus de salis cathartici amari in aquis Ebeshamensibus into English without permission, and the brothers discovered another spring, whence they began extracting their own salts in violation of Grew’s patent.118 Because their spring proved richer in minerals, they were able to cut the price of their salts considerably from 1s an ounce to 3d a pound, and achieved a great impact on the medical market prices. Moult was later accused of selling poisonous salts that allegedly killed an unfortunate Irish bishop.119 By the time he joined the French Prophets, Francis Moult had become one of the richest men in London and one of their most active supporters.120 Moult’s former business associates, Daniel Critchlow and Timothy Byfield, also joined the French Prophets from an early stage.121 Byfield obtained a patent for his Sal oleosum volatile in 1711, an alleged panacea intended to save a thousand children annually from fatal convulsions and cure all mental distempers; the fact that more established physicians like Richard Blackmore recommended it against hypochondria suggests that Byfield enjoyed some credit at the time.122 Satires published shortly after Emes’s failed resurrection also portrayed him asking his brethren for medicines.123 The French Prophets may have offered an effective conduit and an associated market. But the prominence of medical professionals among their ranks suggests instead a different approach to medicine – that is one that complements, but by no means takes over, religion. For not only did these individuals never claim to have the gift of thaumaturgy, but many also ruined their reputations and businesses to follow their beliefs. They believed that their trade and discipline only offered limited relief compared to the powers of spirituality. Chemistry in this context did not compete with faith, but instead contributed to religious experience.124

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Drugs The noticeable presence of apothecaries at the Prophets’ core only helped fuel rumours of fraud and imposture against the movement as a whole. Most of their opponents did not believe in an epidemic or a new disease, but suspected instead perfectly simulated convulsions in order perhaps to cover a political plot.125 A common ritual among the group was the recurring practice of purificatory fasts. Upon his arrival in London in September 1706, Marion ordered his followers to fast repeatedly for three or four days in preparation for great events to come.126 Similar practices were observed among English followers, with Dr Craven’s widow allegedly fasting for forty days and John Potter’s friends for months.127 Frequent periods of abstinence certainly weakened the body and could not but cause visions and hallucinations among the group. Such practices proved a common denominator in trances and visions among enthusiasts and pseudo-prophets of all times.128 Many nevertheless agreed that the Prophets’ agitations surpassed those of the early Quakers and that their fasting alone could not account for imposture, since it was a biblical practice and remained an essential component of Christianity. Henry Nicholson, himself an apostate Prophet, suggested instead in 1708 that ‘they may be assisted by the immediate power of a separate Agent, from any thing in them; because some of their Actions seem to be, sometimes, beyond the Power of meer Nature’.129 Resort to an hallucinogenic substance was later echoed by Samuel Keimer, who recalled that Marion once handed him a piece of Communion bread and that his ‘Mind was rais’d higher than any Rocket’.130 This testimony was probably more than just a metaphor, as it supports accusations that Marion drugged his coreligionists, which the presence of apothecaries among the group certainly facilitated.131 Similarly, in December 1706, Thomas Artisien, a forty-year-old Huguenot refugee, reported seeing ‘on a table, a small phial inside which there was a liqueur similar to oil; and all those around the table passed around the said phial, giving it to one another, and pushing it towards the said Elias Marion.’132 François Pommier was likewise given some unidentified powder whereupon he began beating his wife, who refused to join the group.133 Several accounts suggest that the French Prophets drank posset during their assemblies. This drink, made of hot curdled milk with ale or wine together with garlic or spices was particularly popular against fevers in those days. On 5 August 1707, Lacy, under inspiration, ‘lay

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about three Hours, in the Condition of a Bedrid Person, not able to rise, nor to turn himself, nor to stir upon the Bed’. Being manifestly afflicted with several diseases, Lacy fainted and had ‘to be refresh’d by smelling to a Bottle of Sal Armoniac’, at which point he ‘call’d for, and drank some Posset-drink, which accidentally was at hand, and so was instantly cur’d’.134 This posset might have been prepared by Francis Moult, whom Lacy sometimes asked to serve drinks to the audience, or by the medical professor Patrick Urquhart when hosting a love feast.135 The Prophets also used to drink very good wine when celebrating the Communion, just as the Ranters consumed alcohol and tobacco during their mystical experiences.136 Modern studies have suggested another explanation for ecstatic phenomena by ascribing them to convulsive ergotism. This neurological disease, also known as ‘St Anthony’s fire’, was caused by a fungus – Claviceps purpurea – contaminating rye or wheat, from which LSD is derived, and affected first and foremost children, the elderly and people of weak constitutions. Eating poisoned rye bread typically caused hallucinations and violent convulsions from tingling limbs; the extremities became cold and black as they gangrened, leading to death in the case of prolonged absorption.137 Outbursts of ergotism were particularly frequent in the Middle Ages and throughout the early modern period. Several scholars have implied, if not argued more or less convincingly, that ergotism was behind the religious revivals of North America or the witch crazes in seventeenth-century Norway and Salem, whilst others excluded this possibility in the case of Scotland.138 Although it may be tempting to consider enthusiastic manifestations in the light of such biomedical analyses, I  shall refrain from speculative, retrospective diagnoses, especially as there is no evidence yet of bread poisoning in or around seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. It is worth mentioning, however, that the last recorded case of convulsive ergotism in Western Europe took place in 1951 in Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the heart of the Cévennes. Over 300 villagers were contaminated in total, leading to five casualties and thirty or so confinements in local asylums.139

Medical armementarium If the medicalisation of enthusiasm was underway by the time of the French Prophets, physicians were not yet able to offer a specific treatment. Religious melancholy did not differ, in their view, from conventional melancholy as far as the body was concerned; the patient’s mind simply focused on his or her salvation instead of a passion such

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as love. Proprietary medicines were flooding the medical market with both brand remedies and numerous counterfeits, some henceforth targeting the insane as part of the trade in lunacy.140 Quacks like Thomas Fallowes simply offered secret recipes of their own make against all mental distempers, such as ‘the incomparable Oleum Cephalicum’.141 The works of Roy Porter and Andrew Wear suggest that chemistry had a very limited impact on eighteenth-century bedside medicine, and university-trained physicians continued to offer their treatments in the lineage of Galenic medicine.142 Sir Richard Blackmore privileged evacuative treatments to relieve his patients from madness, precisely because its cause lay in the body. He advocated purgatives, vomitives and stimulants (usually liquors) against melancholy, although he debunked the benefits of bloodletting believing it further weakened the body. They were, however, most useful (10–12 ounces a month) against hypochondria, together with long-term-effect purgatives (aloes), immediate emetics and alkali (coral, pearl and crabs’ eyes) to counterbalance the acids in the stomach.143 Nor was Nicholas Robinson’s approach more innovative. Like many contemporaries, he emphasised the importance of rigour and discipline against the chaos of insanity, and believed the patient was to be confined, to ensure his own safety and that of his entourage.144 As Thomas Willis’s heir, Robinson focused his treatment on the nerves, which he deemed responsible for the maniac’s convulsions. Convinced that the remedy ought to be as strong as the illness, Robinson opted for an abundant evacuation of bodily fluids: ‘In this Case, therefore, the most violent Vomits, the strongest purging Medicines, and large Bleedings, are often to be repeated.’145 His treatment relied on both conventional and iatrochemical measures, including the use of black hellebore, a toxic plant renowned since the ancient Greeks for its purgative virtues, and Ens veneris, a compound of copper and ammonium chlorides created by George Starkey and Robert Boyle around 1650.146 Both medicines were believed to relax the fibres of the brain and restore the patient to a normal condition, although the violence of the treatment was to equal that of the original shock that plunged the patient into his maniacal condition. Conversely, antispasmodics, such as opium and camphor, were to be prescribed as stimulants against melancholy.147 Despite pleading for a medicalisation of enthusiasm into a religious mania based on the recent precedent of the French Prophets, Robinson remained an heir of the English medical tradition rather than a pioneer in the medicine of the mind by holding to the traditional therapeutic armementarium. The latter began to change in the mid-eighteenth century with the progressive elimination of such

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ingredients as human fat, spider webs, moss grown on the human skull and unicorns’ horns, though woodlice, coral, pearls and vipers remained in use. Most animal ingredients disappeared with the 1788 edition of the Pharmacopoeia.148 George Cheyne was in many ways an exception among his colleagues. His watchwords, based on his own experience of morbid obesity and spiritual despair, were moderation and temperance. A mystic himself with close ties to the Quietist circle of George Garden in Aberdeen and, through them, to the French Prophets, Cheyne advocated a gentle vegetarian diet consisting of milk, vegetables and seeds as a curative against melancholy. As a reader of Jacob Boehme and Antoinette Bourignon, he promoted in fact a ‘female’, apokatastic diet of milk, whose motherly qualities were meant to counterbalance the dominant masculine meat diet to restore good health.149 Beyond its mystical dimensions, Cheyne’s treatment, in effect, reasserted the values of virtue against vice. At the time he was writing, coffee houses were indeed springing up across London, obesity was rife among the upper classes and the gin craze was beginning to ravage the poorest. A cure based upon natural foods satisfied Cheyne’s religious beliefs, and the cautious medicine he practised complemented religious views without encroaching upon the minister’s sphere.150 The understanding and use of remedies often differed considerably from one practitioner to another in the medical market. Yet an increasing number of them converged on the unparalleled virtues of disciplinary shock treatments in the cure of maniacal or melancholic convulsions as the mechanistic approach to the body eroded the humoral one. The celebrated Richard Mead (1673–1754) maintained that madness was incompatible with physical pain since the mind was alienated from the body, and therefore that maniacs could endure the harshest living conditions.151 Robinson, Cheyne and their colleagues all subscribed to this repressive view which characterised Bedlam, whilst delicate bourgeois melancholics were sent to Bath. Cold baths and flagellation were believed to enliven the patient’s spirit and restore them to their senses by counterbalancing their original shock with a new one. The Irish physician Patrick Blair likewise extolled the virtues of water-shock treatments in the 1720s and 1730s. Instead of the patient being given a cold bath, they should fall into one or be surprised with icy cold showers for a greater effect.152 By the mid-eighteenth century, electric therapy and spinning chairs joined whips and chains in the asylum as part of the patient’s treatments. It is precisely this consensual dimension of confinement and repression that led historians to summarise Enlightenment medicine as ‘a disaster for the insane’.153

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Confining enthusiasm Although it remains difficult to assess because of its semantic confusion, enthusiasm became an increasing cause of confinement in the later seventeenth century. Among early enthusiasts confined in Bedlam were the bigamist and Christ-impersonator Richard Farnham, the apocalyptic prophetess Lady Eleanor Davies, the blasphemer John Taylor and the self-proclaimed prophet Abraham Baron (or Barrow). Both the poet Christopher Smart and the weaver Edward Osburne were sent to Bedlam in 1700 for claiming divine inspirations.154 Michael MacDonald has also pointed at nineteen enthusiasts presented as lunatics to the Court of Chancery between 1719 and 1733.155 The confinement of the French Prophets remains unclear; the general admission registers of Bethlem Royal Hospital present several potentially matching profiles, which cannot however be authenticated owing to the lack of further evidence.156 Without risking the anachronism of a retrospective diagnosis, evidence suggests nevertheless that some followers suffered from mental distempers or experienced deep emotional distress shortly before joining the group. Samuel Keimer’s obsession with his salvation resembled greatly a case of religious melancholy: I had very awakening Thoughts of my Soul, and would many Times in great Distress of Mind weep by my self, wishing I had never been born; and being willing to be inform’d rightly in those Things which concern’d my eternal Welfare, I  read all the Books I  could get that treated on Religious Subjects, and amongst the rest, I had in my Search, got some destructive Books of those False Teachers, who hold, That God has elect’d such a particular Number, and reprobated all the rest, who must unavoidably perish. This Doctrine fill’d my poor distracted Soul with fresh Fears.157

Others, however, presented symptoms of religious mania. The baker Richard Gardiner became raving mad and had to be tied to his bed; some also attempted suicide, and both John Harling and John Dutton succeeded. Mary Keimer tried to immolate herself, and ‘Spragg’s Lad, about 15 Years of Age … ran mad with ’em, barking like a Dog, and was put into Bedlam, or some other Madhouse.’158 It must be noted, however, that such acts were not committed out of any despair, symptomatic of religious melancholy, but in clear defiance of the laws of nature, since the Spirit had promised them many great things. Mental distempers can be more easily identified higher in the group’s hierarchy. Richard Bulkeley, often mocked as a deluded old man, was declared non compos mentis by the Chancery Court, and his house

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at Ewell was sold in order to pay the debts he had accumulated to support the Prophets.159 Domson’s biography of Nicolas Fatio reveals that the Swiss mathematician did not turn toward prophecy with the Prophets, but rather in the early 1690s under Newton’s influence.160 Indeed, Fatio had shown little interest in religion prior to his arrival in England and became a suspected Spinozist, too rationalist and not Newtonian enough for the Royal Society.161 Fatio went into a severe depression upon his mother’s death in 1692, shortly before Newton’s spiritual crisis, but never fully recovered. He subsequently developed an interest in alchemy and the Kabbalah around that time, and even considered becoming a physician to cure the world with his own remedies. The two men ended their relationship over the French Prophets in 1707, although David Ramsay, one of Fatio’s students, claimed that Newton hankered for the group, but was stopped by his friends, who feared he would fall into similar disgrace.162 Lastly, John Lacy was undoubtedly the one who best epitomised eighteenth-century enthusiasm among the French Prophets. As a respected Justice of the Peace, Lacy had been deeply affected by the loss of an important lawsuit in 1704 – a cause he deemed just, but that had infuriated Chief Justice Holt at Westminster Hall. The Presbyterian minister Edmund Calamy visited his parishioner at Mrs Lacy’s request: I left Mr. Lacy much dejected upon the loss of his lawsuit, though I was not able at that time to form any positive judgment what his concern might issue in. He soon proved delirious, Was forced to be confined, and kept in the dark, &c. For awhile, his language was raving, and very sad; such as he never used before, though not uncommon with delirious persons.163

Lacy never really recovered from his mental breakdown. He attempted to sell his land and manor in Littlebury, Essex, in 1708, hoping to raise £10,000 to pay off his debts and provide for his wife and five children, whom he abandoned shortly after for Betty Gray, a teenage prophetess due to give birth to the second Messiah.164 Unrelated to the French Prophets, but no less emblematic of the confinement of enthusiasts, was the case of Alexander Cruden (1699–1770). Cruden was an erudite scholar from Aberdeen who was regularly locked away in several madhouses throughout his adult life. His first confinement occurred in Tolbooth in 1720 as a result of a love estrangement. Upon his release, Cruden moved to London and became a tutor thanks to the support of Edmund Calamy. He also worked as a proofreader when he decided to undertake his major achievement, a Concordance of the Bible to which he dedicated ten years of his life, counting and indexing every word (2.4 million!). The Concordance was first published in

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1737 and remains the most exhaustive one to this day. It aimed to make the Bible more accessible to Christians and had received the patronage of Queen Caroline; but her death a few days after its publication left him with heavy debts, as he never received his subsidy. Cruden attempted to marry a rich widow, but his rival found out about his past and had him locked away for the second time at Matthew Wright’s madhouse in Bethnal Green. He escaped seventy days later and sued both his former rival and Dr James Monro, but was declared an enthusiast by the court. He was confined a third time in Chelsea in 1753 by his own sister after causing a fight with soldiers who had sworn in public. He spent the remaining part of his life relentlessly editing his Concordance, leaving uncertainties over his sanity.165 Although a priori isolated, such cases suggest that enthusiasm became an increasing factor of confinement in Georgian England. By the later eighteenth century, ‘religion and Methodism’ represented no less than 10 per cent of asylum admissions.166 *** Over the course of the seventeenth century, enthusiasm evolved in England from a theological issue into a medical one as a naturalistic consequence of the scientific revolution. Yet unlike on the Continent, where it may be traced back several centuries, this medical debate on enthusiasm and its physical manifestations did not effectively take place in England until the early 1700s. This insular peculiarity owed of course much to the religious and political instability of the mid-seventeenth century, hence the immediate reaction of Anglican clergymen who first resorted to a medical terminology to explain the nature and causes of enthusiasm. The French Prophets and contemporary millenarians played a pivotal part in this debate. Their ecstatic trances and convulsions, much emphasised by their critics in the virulent battle of pamphlets, prompted physicians to join clergymen in circumscribing enthusiasm as a contagious social disease. The emergence of a private and competitive medical market opened the doors to the ‘trade in lunacy’ and the ‘golden age of the quack’, and most importantly the advent of Augustan medicine.167 Enthusiasm as a proliferating social issue thus indirectly contributed to the emergence of a medicine of the mind over the first half of the eighteenth century. Conventional taxonomy was progressively revised over this period, thereby debasing enthusiasm to a religious mania, whilst melancholy gentrified into a self-proclaimed insular and elitist affliction: the English Malady. The debate on enthusiasm marked by no means a sudden or definite shift in its understanding, as clergymen and physicians continued

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to encroach on each others’ spheres throughout most of the Enlightenment. Broadly speaking, theologians tended to focus on doctrinal matters and the legitimacy of millenarian predictions by the early eighteenth century, while an increasing number of medical practitioners began to consider enthusiasts’ bodily symptoms as a potential disease. It was nevertheless too early to talk about a medicine of the mind, as physicians agreed that madness originated from the body. Being confronted by a new sort of disease, they strove to understand it and concentrated, generally speaking, on its diagnosis rather than its cure. For beside opiates, Paracelsian and Helmontian chemistry still had but a limited influence on everyday medicine, which left physicians almost helpless against insanity.168 It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century, with the introduction of moral treatment in William Battie’s Treatise on Madness (1758) and the foundation of the York Retreat in 1796, that the medical focus moved onto the mind and that madness therefore became a mental disease as such.169

Notes 1 Michael Heyd, ‘Robert Burton’s Sources on Enthusiasm and Melancholy:  From a Medical Tradition to Religious Controversy’, History of European Ideas, 5:1 (1984), 17–44. Christine Orobitg, ‘La Réception des théories de Ficin sur la fureur inspirée en Espagne des XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, in Lucien Faggion, Pascal Gandoulphe and Théa Picquet (eds), L’Humanisme italien de la Renaissance et l’Europe (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2010), pp. 201–13. 2 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind:  A  Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 217–18 (p. 242). Roger French, ‘Harvey in Holland: Circulation and the Calvinists’, in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1989]), pp. 49–58. Dupré, The Enlightenment, pp. 46–8, 50–2. 3 Misson, A Cry From the Desart, 1st edn, p. 76. 4 Andrew Wear, ‘Medical Practice in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eigheenth-Century England: Continuity and Union’, in French and Wear, The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, pp. 294–320. Harold Cook, ‘From the Scientific Revolution to the Germ Theory’, in Irvine Loudon (ed.), Western Medicine: An Illustrated History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 80–101. Roy Porter, ‘Was There a Medical Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England?’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 5:1 (Spring 1982), 49–63 (pp. 54–55); and English Society in the 18th Century, p. 284. 5 R.  A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 316–22.

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6 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England, pp.  79–88. Bostridge, Witchcraft, p. 101. 7 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England, pp.  89–119. Bostridge, Witchcraft, pp. 118, 139–202. 8 Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2006), pp. 62–3. 9 Heyd, ‘Robert Burton’s Sources’, pp.  23, 28–30. Peter Elmer, ‘Science, Medicine and Witchcraft’, in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 33–51. 10 Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964). Heinrich Schipperges, Hildegard of Bingen: Healing and the Nature of the Cosmos (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997), p. 66. 11 Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, pp. 62–3. Houston, Madness and Society, pp. 319–22. 12 Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, pp. 7, 41–3, 45. 13 See n. 1 above. 14 Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, p. 68. Porter, Bodies Politic, p. 31. Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 206. Julia Keay, Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius who Unwrote the Bible (London:  HarperCollins, 2004), p. 96. 15 Bostridge, Witchcraft, pp.  53–84. Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, pp. 72–108. 16 Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, p. 17. 17 Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, pp. 92–108. 18 Leigh Wetherall Dickson, Allan Ingram and Stuart Sim (eds), Depression and Melancholy, 1660–1800, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), Vol. I, pp. 29–30. 19 Hickes, Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcised, pp. 64–8. 20 Dickson et al., Depression and Melancholy, Vol. I, pp. 47–8. 21 John Moore, Of Religious Melancholy:  A  Sermon Preach’d before the Queen at White-Hall, March the 6th, 1692 (London, 1692), pp. 20, 23–4. On ‘priest-physicians’, see Gunter Risse, ‘Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment’, in Andrew Wear (ed.), Medicine in Society: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 149–96 (p. 187). 22 Anon., Honest Quaker, p. ii. 23 Anon., French Prophets’ Mad Sermon, p. 4. 24 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, p. 52. 25 The Observator, 6:42 (23–6 July 1707), p. 2. 26 Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, p. 39. 27 George Cheyne, An Essay on Health and Long Life (London, 1724), p. 171. Guerrini, ‘Cheyne, George’. Anita Guerrini, ‘Newtonianism, Medicine and Religion’, in Grell and Cunningham, Religio Medici, pp. 293–312 (pp. 295, 301).

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28 John Moore, Of Religious Melancholy, p. 24. 29 See Roy Porter’s introduction to George Cheyne, The English Malady, ed. Roy Porter (London: Tavistock and Routledge, 1991), especially p. xxxvi. 30 Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: Or Hypocondriacal and Hysterical Affections (London, 1725), pp. 159–60. 31 Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hyponchondriack Melancholy: Wherein All the Decays of the Nerves, and Lownesses of the Spirits, are Mechanically Accounted For (London, 1729), pp. 406–7. Norman Moore, ‘Robinson, Nicholas (c. 1697–1775)’, ODNB (2004). 32 Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535–1860:  A  History Presented in Selected English Texts (London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982 [1963]), p. 423. 33 12 May 1759. Nehemiah Curnock (ed.), The Journal of John Wesley, 8 vols (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1909), Vol. IV, p. 313. On Wesley’s holistic approach to medicine, see Randy L. Maddox, ‘John Wesley on Holistic Health and Healing’, Methodist History, 46:1 (2007), 4–33. 34 Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 127–33. 35 Wellcome Library, London (WL), MS.MSL/25/1, fols 180–1; MS.MSL/85/1, fols 65–70. 36 WL, MS.MSL/25/1, fols 75–6; MS.MSL/85/1, fols 59–65. 37 Dickson et al., Depression and Melancholy, Vol. II, pp. x–xi. 38 Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions … to which Is Added, a Discourse of the Causes, Natures and Cure of Phrensie, Madness or Distraction, 2nd edn (London, 1700), pp.  55–7. Richard Mead, A Treatise Concerning the Influence of the Sun and the Moon (London, 1748). 39 Zoltán Molnár, ‘Thomas Willis (1621–1675), the Founder of Clinical Neuroscience’, Nature Reviews, 5 (2004), 329–35 (p. 333). 40 Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours, pp. 1–2. 41 Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours, pp.  11–12, 15, 24, 96–127. On the redefinition of hysteria as a nervous disease, see Molnár, ‘Thomas Willis’, p. 332. 42 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, pp. 31–7. Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, pp. 109–43. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, pp. 27–9. 43 M. J. Eadie, ‘A Pathology of the Animal Spirits: The Clinical Neurology of Thomas Willis (1621–1675). Part II: Disorders of Intrinsically Abnormal Animal Spirits’, Journal of Clinical Neuroscience, 10:2 (2003), 146–57. Vermeir, ‘Physical Prophet’, p. 569. 44 Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 243, 271. 45 Lucia Dacome, ‘To what purpose does it think?’, p. 404. 46 Henderson, Mystics of the North-East, pp. 63–5, 193. Gerda J. Joling-van der Sar, ‘The Spiritual Side of Samuel Richardson: Mysticism, ­Behmenism and Millenarianism in an Eighteenth-Century English Novelist’ (PhD ­thesis, Leiden University, 2003), pp. 169–70. 47 George Cheyne, An Essay of Health and Long Life, pp. 170–1.

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48 Anon., A Plain and Succinct Discourse on Convulsions in General; but More Particularly in Children … (London, 1721), pp. 12–13. 49 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p. 339. 50 Mary Toft, wife of a poor journeyman clothier, caught sight of rabbits while pregnant and allegedly gave birth to seventeen dead rabbits over several days in 1726. The delivery was first verified by several physicians and later invalidated as a hoax, which exposed the medical profession to ridicule. S.  A. Seligman, ‘Mary Toft:  The Rabbit Breeder’, Medical History, 5:4 (1961), 349–60. Jane Shaw, ‘Mary Toft, Religion and National Memory in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:3 (September 2009), 321–38. 51 Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, p. 48. 52 Robinson, A New System, p. 176. 53 Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions, pp. 25, 49, 251. 54 David Irish, Levamen Infirmi: Or, Cordial Counsel to the Sick and Diseased … (London, 1700), p.  42. Dickson et  al., Depression and Melancholy, Vol. II, pp. 21–2. 55 George Cheyne, The English Malady, or a Treatise of Nervous Disease of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers (London, 1733), pp. 57–8. 56 Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours, p. vi. Paul Laffey, ‘Two Registers of Madness in Enlightenment Britain. Part 1’, History of Psychiatry, 13 (2002), 367–80 (pp.  369–70). Dickson et  al., Depression and Melancholy, Vol. II, pp. xiv–xv. 57 Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder:  Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1989), p.  55. Roy Porter, ‘The Rage of Party:  A  Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?’, Medical History, 27 (1983), 43–5; and Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone Press, 1987), pp. 81–9. 58 Robinson, A New System, p. 290. 59 Cheyne, English Malady (1733), pp. i–ii. 60 Quoted in Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 88. 61 MacDonald, ‘Secularization of Suicide’ pp. 58, 75-6. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. IV, pp. 24–5. See below for the legislation on madness and the ‘trade in lunacy’. 62 Cheyne, English Malady (1733), p. i. Porter, ‘The Rage of Party’, p. 42. 63 Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, ed. David Wallace Carrithers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 253–4. 64 Matthieu Chastelain, Traité des convulsions et des mouvemens convulsifs, qu’on appelle à présent vapeurs (Paris, 1691), p.  2. Hecquet even talks about ‘a string machine’. Philippe Hecquet, Naturalisme des convulsions, dans les maladies de l’épidémie convulsionnaire (Soleure, 1733), Part III, p. 40.

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65 John Woodward, Select Cases, and Consultations, in Physick (London, 1757), p. 245. 66 Cheyne, The English Malady (1733), pp. i–ii. Andrew Wear, ‘Place, Health, and Disease: The Airs, Waters, Places Tradition in Early Modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38:3 (2008), 443–65. 67 Woodward, Select Cases, p. 47. Thomas Fallowes, The Best Method for the Cure of Lunaticks. With Some Account of the Incomparable Oleum Cephalicum Used in the Same, Prepared and Administred (London, 1705), p. 7. Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder, p. 59. 68 Marie-Luce Demonet, ‘De la maladie poétique’, Les Cahiers du Centre d’Etude et d’Histoire de la Médecine de Toulouse, 8 (2000), 48–62. 69 Robinson, A New System, pp. 245–6. Guerrini, ‘Newtonianism, Medicine and Religion’, p. 306. 70 Robinson, A New System, pp. 247–8. 71 Jonathan Andrews, “In Her Vapours … [or] Indeed in Her Madness”? Mrs Clerke’s Case: An Early Eighteenth Century Psychiatric Controversy’, History of Psychiatry, 1:1 (1990), 125–43 (especially n. 19). 72 Brand, p. 2. 73 As we saw in Chapter 5, Jacobite plots and attempts to invade England occurred in 1692, 1696, 1701–02, 1708 and 1714–15. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, p. 18. Gregg, Queen Anne, pp. 261–3. 74 See appendix. 75 NRL, 41 (June 1707), p. 689. 76 Graham A.  J. Ayliffe and Mary P.  English, Hospital Infection:  From Miasmas to MRSA (Cambridge and New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–9. James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (Basingstoke:  Macmillan, 1987), pp.  16–19. Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 259. 77 Lawrence I. Conrad (ed.), The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 39-70 (p. 54). On preventive medicine, see Riley, Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease, pp. ix–xi, 52–3. 78 Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, pp. 11–14. Peregrine Horden, Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 159. Angela Voss, ‘ “The Power of a Melancholy Humour”: Divination and Divine Tears’, in Patrick Curry and Angela Voss (eds), Seeing with Different Eyes:  Essays in Astrology and Divination (Newcastle:  Scholars Press Cambridge, 2007), pp. 143– 172 (p. 158). On the Philadelphians and music, see Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1152, fols 11v, 15r, 21v; and Tom Dixon, ‘Love and Music in Augustan London; or, The “Enthusiasms” of Richard Roach’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 4:2 (2007), 191–209. 79 The British Journal, 30 (13 April 1723), p. 2. 80 An estimated 7,000 children died from convulsions every year in London alone. Anon., A Plain and Succinct Discourse, p.  v. Riley,

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Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease, pp.  139–40. Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, p. 53. 81 The British Journal, 30 (13 April 1723), p. 2. 82 Vivian Nutton, ‘The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance’, Medical History, 27 (1983), 1–34. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in Early Modern English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 200, 261, 370. Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 428–9. 83 Kathleen Jones, Asylums and After:  A  Revised History of the Mental Health Services. From the Early 18th Century to the 1990s (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 37. Ayliffe and English, Hospital Infection, p. 17. 84 Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 122. 85 Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions, pp. 289–90. Thomas Fitzgerald, Poems on Several Occasions, 2nd edn (London, 1736), pp. 1–11. Samuel Richardson, Familiar Letters on Important Occasions, ed. Brian Westerdale Downs (New  York:  Dodd, Mead, 1928), pp.  200–1. See also Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1975). 86 Swift, A Tale of a Tub, pp. 85–6. 87 Steven Cherry, Mental Health Care in Modern England: The Norfolk Lunatic Asylum (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2003), p. 25. 88 Scull, Andrew, The Most Solitary of Afflictions:  Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 18. 89 Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, pp.  200–1. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 160–1. Irish, Levamen Infirmi. 90 Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Philip Nicholas Furbank, W.  R. Owens and Anthony J.  Coulson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 157. 91 William Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). Jones, Asylums and After. 92 England had indeed few hospitals compared to the Continent. Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp.  198, 239. Cook, ‘From the Scientific Revolution to the Germ Theory’, pp. 80–101 (pp. 82, 88). 93 Porter claims that Cheyne never treated a patient personally. See his introduction to Cheyne, English Malady, ed. Porter, p. xiv. 94 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. I, p. 302. 95 Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, pp.  112–13. For more detail on this case, see Allan Ingram (ed.), Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), pp. 101–6. 96 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. I, pp. 302–3. 97 Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 38. 98 Jones, Asylums and After, pp. 14, 35.

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99 Anon., Proposals for Redressing Some Grievances which Greatly Affect the Whole Nation. With a Seasonable Warning to Beautiful Young Ladies against Fortune-Hunters; and a Remedy Proposed in Favour of the Ladies (London, 1740), p. 24. 100 Jones, Asylums and After, pp. 14, 35–7. 101 Roy Porter, ‘The Eighteenth Century’, in Conrad, Western Medical Tradition, pp. 371–475, esp. pp. 440–63. 102 Mark Jenner, ‘Quackery and Enthusiasm; or, Why Drinking Water Cured the Plague’, in Grell and Cunningham, Religio Medici, pp.  313–40 (p. 330). Michael Heyd, ‘The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century: Towards an Integrative Approach’, Journal of Modern History, 53:2 (1981), 258–80 (p. 278). 103 Warnings I, p.  34. Missions were also launched to Oxford and Cambridge in 1709 to prophesy against the universities. Stack, 1j, fols 53–5. 104 Michael MacDonald, ‘Insanity and the Realities of History in Early Modern England’, Psychological Medicine, 11:1 (1981), 11–25 (pp.  20–1). Andrew Wear, ‘Making Sense of Health and the Environment in Early Modern England’, in Wear, Medicine in Society, pp. 119–47 (pp. 120–2). 105 John Lacy, A Relation of the Dealings of God, pp. 24–7. Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, p. 154. Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 184. 106 See Bulkeley’s correspondence with his physician. Bodl., MS Lister 3, fols 44–55. Warren Johnston, ‘Bulkeley, Sir Richard, second baronet (1660–1710)’, ODNB (2004). 107 James Keith, Daniel Critchlow, James Craven, Timothy Byfield, Thomas Emes, John and Francis Moult, Nathaniel Sheppard, Patrick Urquhart, Thomas Lardner, Henry Nicholson, John Coughen and Mr Wall. See appendix. Robert Eaton did not become a physician until 1715 and was accounted for as a minister in Table 1. 108 P. S.  Wyse Jackson, ‘The Botanic Garden of Trinity College Dublin, 1687–1987’, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 95 (1987), 301–11 (p. 302). 109 Stanley Williamson, The Vaccination Controversy: The Rise, Reign and Fall of Compulsory Vaccination for Smallpox (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 29. Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 210. See also BL, Add. MS 15911, fols 30, 33; and Add. MS 23204, fols 20, 26, 39. 110 Rosalie Stott, ‘The Medical Practice of George Chalmers, M.D.’, Archivaria, 10, 51–67 (p. 52). 111 BL, Add. Ch. 53510. Stack, 1l, fol. 5r. Brand, p. 38. The Daily Post, 1629 (15 December 1724). Jenner, ‘Quackery and Enthusiasm’, pp. 323–8. 112 ‘Should we seek relief from another physician than You? No, Lord Jesus, for You are our physician. May You, Lord, come closer to us with Your effective oil and anoint our hearts. The balm of Your house is no longer on earth. The physicians of the world no longer use the cause of Your Spirit, which is the true oil, the true unguent, to heal’ (my translation). Allut, Eclair de Lumière, p. 16.

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113 Anon., A True and Faithful Narrative of the Sayings and Actions of Elizabeth Gray, at Esquire Lacy’s Congregation, Held on Sunday the 17th of August, 1707 (London, 1707), pp. 1–8. 114 Peter Elmer, ‘Medicine, Religion and the Puritan Revolution’, in French and Wear, The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, pp. 22–3. 115 Kroll et al., Philosophy, Science, and Religion, pp. 46–7. Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 163–4, 183–4. 116 Jenner, ‘Quackery and Enthusiasm’, pp. 313–40. 117 Michael Bevan, ‘Emes, Thomas (d. 1707)’, ODNB (2004). 118 A. D. Fortes, ‘From Surrey to the Moons of Jupiter (via Mars): The Story of Epsomite’, Axis, 1:9 (2005), 1–28 (p. 3). David Boyd Haycock, ‘Medicine within the Market: Proprietary Medicines in Seventeenth-Century England’, www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/seminars/­Haycockpaper.pdf (accessed 16 March 2008), pp. 5–6. 119 The Post Boy, 511 (11 August 1698), p. 2. Josiah Peter, Truth in Opposition to Ignorant and Malicious Falshood:  Or a Discourse Written to Vindicate the Honour, and to Assert the Right of Dr. Nehemiah (London, 1701). Juanita G.  L. Burnby, ‘A Study of the English Apothecary from 1660 to 1760’, Medical History, Supplement 3 (1983), 48–9. Adrian Johns, ‘When Authorship Met Authenticity’, Nature, 451 (2008), 1058–9 (p. 1059). 120 Brand, p. 76. 121 Little is known about Critchlow, except that he and Francis Moult won a lawsuit against Byfield before 1715 that ruined their former associate. Although many sources labelled Byfield as a quack, Schwartz claims that he had graduated at Trinity College Dublin. Schwartz, French Prophets, p. 328. TNA, Prerogative Court of Canterbury and related Probate Jurisdictions:  Will Registers (PROB) 11/594/370. The Craftsman, 422 (3 August 1734), reproduced in Thomas Lockwood, ‘Did Fielding Write for The Craftsman?’, Review of English Studies, 59:238 (March 2007), 86–117 (p. 103). 122 TNA, SP34/16/55, fol. 92. Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours, p. 70. Haycock, ‘Medicine within the Market’, p. 6. 123 Kingston II, pp. 141–2. Anon., French Prophet’s Resurrection, p. 2. 124 Roy Porter, Health for Sale:  Quackery in England, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 21–59. 125 Humfrey, A Farther Account, p. 16. NRL, 37, p. 465. 126 Marion, Prophetical Warnings, pp. 7, 29, 55. TSC, pp. 67–8 (erroneous pagination; should read pp. 75–6). 127 Brand, pp. 13, 115. 128 The biblical prophet Daniel, for instance, had a vision by the river after three weeks of abstinence. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 2 vols (Washington, DC:  Government Printing Office, 1896), Vol. II, pp.  928–47 (pp.  930, 933, 938). Mack, Visionary Women, pp.  7, 116, 191–3. Juster, ‘Mystical Pregnancy and Holy Bleeding’, pp.  259, 280.

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See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 1988). 129 Nicholson, The Falshood of the New Prophets Manifested, p. 15. 130 Keimer, A Search after Religion, p. 17. 131 Vidal, L’Ablatif absolu, p. 201. 132 Anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, p. 19. 133 ‘Declaration de Magdeleine Pommier’, in anon., Nouveaux Mémoires, pp. 16–17. 134 Lettre d’un particulier à Monsieur Misson, l’honnête homme, touchant les miracles burlesques, faits depuis peu de la manière qu’ils font rapportez dans un livre anglois, qui a pour titre … (London, 1707), pp.  11–12. Warnings II, pp. 96–8. Kingston I, p. 58. 135 BGE, Ms. fr. 605/7a, fol. 3 (7 April 1708). Chetham’s, Mun.A.6.14/2, fols 173–81. 136 Brand, p. 29. Hessayon, ‘Abiezer Coppe’, pp. 359–63. 137 Ralph Stockman, ‘The Cause of Convulsive Ergotism’, The Journal of Hygiene, 34:2 (1934), 235–41. David Riesman, ‘Deceased Diseases’, Annals of Medical History, 8:2 (1936), 160–7. 138 Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, ‘Ergotism and the Salem Village Witch Trials’, Science, 194:4272 (December 1976), 1390–4. Mary Kilbourne Matossian, ‘Views:  Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair. An Outbreak of a Type of Food Poisoning Known as Convulsive Ergotism May Have Led to the 1692 Accusations of Witchcraft’, American Scientist, 70:4 (1982), 355–7. Mary Kilbourne Matossian, ‘Religious Revivals and Ergotism in America’, Clio Medica, 16 (1982), 185–92. Kirsty Duncan, ‘Was Ergotism Responsible for the Scottish Witch-Hunts?’, Area, 25:1 (1993), 30–6. Pieter W. J. van Dongen and Akosua N. J. A. de Groot, ‘History of Ergot Alkaloids from Ergotism to Ergometrine’, European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, 60:2 (1995), 109–16. Torbjørn Alm, ‘The Witch Trials of Finnmark, Northern Norway, during the 17th Century: Evidence for Ergotism as a Contributing Factor’, Economic Botany, 57:3 (2003), 403–16. 139 Steven L.  Kaplan, Le Pain maudit:  Retour sur la France des années oubliées, 1945–1958 (Paris: Fayard, 2008). 140 Parry-Jones, Trade in Lunacy. Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, pp. 136–55. 141 Fallowes, Best Method for the Cure of Lunaticks. 142 Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 207, 232. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, pp. 46–7. 143 Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours, pp. 61–9, 167–73. 144 Robinson, A New System, p. 243. 145 Robinson, A New System, p. 402. 146 Robinson, A New System, p.  395. Anon., The Dispensatory of the Royal College of Physicians in London (London, 1727), p. 269. William R. Newman and Lawrence Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey,

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Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp.  9, 221–3. David Boyd Haycock, ‘ “A Thing Ridiculous”? Chemical Medicines and the Prolongation of Human Life in Seventeenth-Century England’, Working Papers on The Nature of Evidence:  How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel?, 10:6 (London:  London School of Economics, 2006), 1–32 (p. 19). 147 Robinson, A New System, pp. 394–7. 148 Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 269. 149 Guerrini, ‘Hungry Soul’, pp. 279–91. Another Behmenist mystic, Thomas Tryon, pioneered vegetarianism in England shortly before Cheyne. Virginia Smith, ‘Tryon, Thomas (1634–1703)’, ODNB (2004). 150 See Roy Porter’s introduction to Cheyne, English Malady, ed. Porter, especially p.  xxxvi. Guerrini, ‘Newtonianism, Medicine and Religion’, pp. 301, 307. 151 Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder, p.  57. See also Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions, p. 279. 152 Robinson, A New System, pp. 398, 404–7. Ingram, Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 73–5. Porter, ‘The Rage of Party’, p. 38. Keay, Alexander the Corrector, p. 113. 153 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 230. 154 Jonathan Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited:  A  History of Bethlem Hospital c. 1634–1770’ (PhD thesis, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1991), pp. 486–9. Visconsi, ‘Invention of Criminal Blasphemy’, p. 31. 155 MacDonald, ‘Insanity and the Realities of History’, p. 17. 156 Mary Turner, Mary Moore and Betty Gray. Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives, London (BRHA), ARA-03, A12/1, fols 18, 36, 215. Mary Moseley, Elizabeth Hubbard and William King. BRHA, ARA-04, A12/1, fols 18, 152, 261. 157 Brand, pp. 7–8. 158 Brand, pp. 79, 114–15. 159 Johnston, ‘Bulkeley, Sir Richard’. George Berkeley, The Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T.  E. Jessop, 9 vols (London:  Nelson, 1949–64), Vol. VIII, p. 31. K. Theodore Hoppen, ‘The Royal Society and Ireland: II’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 20 (1965), 79–99 (pp. 82–3); and The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century:  A  Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1708 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 40, 186. 160 Domson, ‘Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’, p. 63. 161 Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, p. 73. Domson, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, p. 137. 162 BGE, Ms. fr. 2043a, nos 30–2. Domson, Fatio, pp.  30–1, 47, 58, 63, 101–2. Michael White, Isaac Newton:  The Last Sorcerer (Reading, MA:  Helix Books, 1999), p.  300. Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic’.

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Margaret C. Jacob, ‘Newton and the French Prophets: New Evidence’, History of Science, 16 (June 1978), 134–42. 163 Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, pp. 94–5. 164 HLRO, HL/PO/JO/10/6/154/2519. 165 See Alexander Cruden, The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured, or A British Inquisition Display’d … (London, 1739). Keay, Alexander the Corrector. 166 Methodists were also considered to be more prone to suicide. Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited’, pp. 488–9. 167 Porter, ‘Was There a Medical Enlightenment?’, p. 58. 168 Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 194, 227. 169 Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, pp. 402–10, 684–90. Paul Laffey attributes the paternity of the moral treatment of the insane to Samuel Johnson. Paul Laffey, ‘Two Registers of Madness in Enlightenment Britain: Part 2’, History of Psychiatry, 14 (2003), 63–81 (pp.  69–76). Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p.  273. Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder, p. 65.

Conclusion

The French Prophets’ legacy The controversy around the French Prophets, short-lived and intense as it was, does not do justice to the legacy of their movement. In fact, it only covers their first few years of public existence, mostly in a joint propaganda campaign to discredit them. Scholars have often drawn upon this literature without paying as much attention to who the Prophets really were. After one year of private assemblies the Camisards became publicly known thanks to the material support of Misson, Lacy and Bulkeley. By 1708, their movement had completely changed in nature and form under the predominant influx of British millenarians. The episode of Thomas Emes’s failed resurrection marked a turning point in their history and precipitated their public demise over the following months. At this point they formed twelve missionary tribes and dispersed across Britain and the Continent to announce the Millennium to the world. Away from the public eye, the Prophets remained active in subsequent decades and resurfaced sporadically until the foundation of Shakerism in 1747. This book does not claim to give an exhaustive account of the French Prophets from their origins to their disappearance, nor of their international ramifications. It attempted instead to explore the eighteenth-century understanding of enthusiasm through their activities in England, and for the most part in London. Much research remains to be conducted about their movement, especially in their later years. Archival records are indeed as scattered as the geographical range of their prophetic missions, which went as far as Dublin, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Halle, Vienna, Stockholm, Constantinople, Rome and colonial America. The logistical complexity of their international millenarian network calls in my view for a dedicated study. For if they lost their most charismatic Instruments by 1715, the French

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Prophets survived and evolved in both form and nature under the influence of new millenarian currents. Their network as we currently know it encompassed over 800 followers across seven countries. If they were active on the Continent until at least the 1730s, the heart of their network remained in England, essentially among London, Birmingham, Worcester, Bristol and Manchester.1 Their activity and numbers remain unclear, but their influence nevertheless persisted beyond the eighteenth century and the last Shakers continue to refer to them today as their direct ancestors.2 More than an obscure religious movement, the French Prophets, by their demographic, social and denominational diversity, offer in reality a powerful insight into eighteenth-century England. An examination of their inner workings as a group reveals the survival of a vibrant millenarian culture across the religious spectrum and up to the highest levels of society in the dawn of the ‘Great Awakening’. By contrast, the intensity of the debate on enthusiasm suggests that religious pluralism remained a highly sensitive issue in the aftermath of the Toleration Act. We too often assume that toleration appeased tensions between dissenters and the Church of England and that it put an end, as a result, to a constructed tradition of religious radicalism. Yet the premise of a denominational divide proves fundamentally flawed in light of the present case. For it would be simplistic to equate enthusiasm with dissent, when in reality it was universal. The Philadelphians, the Masonites, the Camisards or the Methodists, for example, all appealed to both Anglicans and dissenters alike, and the latter – we often forget – remained non-sectarian until the late eighteenth century. It is this rare ability to transcend the religious, social and intellectual boundaries of its time that rapidly transformed enthusiasm into an epistemological issue. By 1700, the term ‘enthusiasm’ designated a complex, somewhat ungraspable, yet ostensibly dangerous phenomenon that raised concerns far beyond its religious motivations. Its multifaceted nature, I have argued, calls for a more comprehensive approach. Chapter  1 tracked the origins of the French Prophets in southern France and established the Camisards as a distinct minority within the Huguenot community. They generally came from a poorer, less educated rural background and, more importantly, they claimed Cathar ancestry and had fought the last French war of religion. Most were also born around the time of or shortly after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and inspired the oral prophetic culture of the Désert as a lay substitute for an exiled Calvinist ministry. Their rebellion and their belief in prophecy and martyrdom would largely determine their reception in England.

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If their first contacts in London were Huguenot diplomats and sympathisers of the French Protestant cause, the Camisards rapidly attracted a majority of British millenarians. Their phenomenal growth – from three refugees to nearly 500 followers in two years – suggests that they capitalised on a vibrant millenarian culture shared by all levels of the social ladder, from socially vulnerable women and children to wealthy gentlemen and aristocrats, with entire networks of lawyers, clergymen, physicians, printers and traders in between. Far from a merely popular religious expression challenging patrician rule, or an outbreak of radical dissent, enthusiasm transpired as an intrinsically transgressive phenomenon. Its ability to bring together all ages, sexes and classes on a par through religious experience fuelled fears of a social epidemic threatening the established order. In the context of a tolerant yet volatile religious landscape, Chapter 3 established the French Prophets as a religious movement rather than a radical sect. Their emphasis on pneumatic inspiration over a strictly codified doctrine and rituals federated across religious, national and linguistic boundaries in an irenic attempt to reconcile Judaeo-Christian denominations into a universal Church. In so doing, their enthusiasm emancipated faith from its institutional borders and soon even from its physical walls through open-air congregations. The intense physicality of their raptures, combined with their claims to prophecy, glossolalia and thaumaturgy, thus reminded their contemporaries of the enthusiastic essence of primitive Christianity. On a cultural level, this book showed how the French Prophets in particular and enthusiasts in general occupied a prominent place in the eighteenth-century public debate. As Instruments of the Holy Spirit, they enacted to a large extent the very biblical allegories preached by ministers at the pulpit and served in other words as lay spiritual performers. Empowering as it may have been, enthusiasm was not simply a pretext for female emancipation, for most charismatic women remained under the authority of their male brethren. Many among the latter proved educated and socially secure, and also engaged in prophecy. The debate on enthusiasm was simultaneously transposed into print with the battle of pamphlets around the French Prophets. Their case may have inspired Shaftesbury’s reappraisal of religious experience as a creative emotion, but the Augustan response to enthusiasm remained overwhelmingly hostile throughout the eighteenth century. The Camisards’ rapid notoriety caused street violence and revived the spectre of a fanatical disruption of the public order and even that of a conspiracy. As some contemporaries argued, this was a new sort of enthusiasm, precisely because it was not only foreign, but French.

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Ironically, Chapter 5 showed that it was among the local Huguenot community that the Prophets found their fiercest and earliest opponents. National identity played a significant part in the prosecution of Marion and his two scribes at a time when Britishness was also being defined. Disregarding public opinion, English judges and government gradually moved away from repression in favour instead of Augustan satire. The examination of their trial in light of contemporary cases suggests that enthusiasm was no longer perceived as a threat to secular authority by the eighteenth century. Lastly, Chapter 6 has argued that the case of the French Prophets coincided with and even contributed to the emergence of a medical debate on enthusiasm. Although Restoration clergymen had pushed for a naturalistic approach to enthusiasm, English physicians did not answer their call until around 1700. At this point, enthusiasm gained yet another dimension as it evolved from a social disease into a religious madness. Its taxonomy, diagnostic and cure remained highly contentious over that period, while the necessity of its medicalisation became by contrast more consensual among both religious and secular spheres. Medicine offered to some extent an answer to ecstatic religious experience, not by its ability to cure the irrational, but more pragmatically by its willingness to isolate it from society. If enthusiasm constituted a disease at all in the first half of the eighteenth century, it was certainly a bodily disease rather than a mental one. Each of these perspectives intended to reflect a different facet of enthusiasm, at a time when the term was itself used in a very loose, derogatory manner. Based on its comprehensive approach, this book has argued that the perception of enthusiasm shifted around 1700, denoting anything from a fanatical rapture to a contagious social plague, a legal limbo and eventually a physical disease, without ever losing its religious character. This semantic evolution occurred around the time of the French Prophets and may be observed in the controversy they sparked. By then, enthusiasm had become the eighteenth-century smear-word par excellence, to be invariably applied to charismatic preachers and movements, Anglican or dissenter, as well as more loosely against anyone claiming some sort of authority.

Reappraising enthusiasm Like any controversy, however, there was another side to the story, which I hope to have told here: that enthusiasm as defined by enthusiasts themselves was Christian through and through. By emphasising its Greek etymology, they insisted that spirit possession was reminiscent

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247

of the early Church and even claimed by this token that St Paul had been an enthusiast himself.3 Far from offended, some enthusiasts consequently embraced the eighteenth-century smear-word par excellence and contributed to its semantic evolution, bringing it closer to our modern definition. To them, enthusiasm conveyed positive qualities too seldom recognised in their own time. It was engaging, communicative, empowering, ecumenical, irenic and optimistic. It showed little concern for the present and its materiality, and longed instead for a better future supposedly at hand. Enthusiasm expressed in other words a Christian utopia; it brought together all levels of the social ladder, genders and ages under a common spiritual umbrella: the confidence in a better world to come, fraternal, charitable and just, that the developments of the early modern period no doubt failed to deliver. The present case of the French Prophets suggests that enthusiasm appealed to a wide and diverse audience in eighteenth-century England. The last few years have seen a profusion of similar case studies pointing in the same direction.4 That is not to say that these movements and communities belonged to a common, traceable radical culture spanning from the Reformation to nineteenth-century romanticism. This would be impossible to demonstrate, given the denominational, geographical, social, political and linguistic disparities between them. It would also perpetuate the constructed heresiographies of the early modern period while contemporaneous enthusiasts almost systematically accused one another of imposture and therefore did not see themselves in the same tradition at all. Still, all of them shared a common defiance of institutional religion and ecclesiastical doctrines through which they reasserted the authority of personal revelation over reason. The impossibility of knowing God meant, from their perspective, that faith was a matter not to be reflected upon, but experienced. Recent scholarship has likewise shown that the intellectual debate on enthusiasm only securalised to a limited extent under Locke’s influence in the early 1700s. The Age of Reason actually saw a steady increase in the publication of prophetic and miraculous literature. There is no doubt that enthusiasts enjoyed a much wider audience than the most prominent names of the Enlightenment at the time, both through print and through open-air congregations. The proliferation of and publicity around such communities nevertheless indicate a persistent and widespread interest in supernatural beliefs throughout the eighteenth century, including among the English elite, who increasingly translated them into providential terms in the latter part of the century.5 We should be careful not to polarise the debate on enthusiasm between faith and reason, nor between plebeian and patrician

248

Enlightening Enthusiasm

authority. Doing so would only perpetuate the progressivist Enlightenment narrative first defined by none other than its main protagonists. It would occlude an inconvenient truth, that Enlightenment and enthusiasm even went hand in hand at times.6 Many Enlightenment ­figures  – Descartes, Pascal, Swammerdam, Newton, Fatio, Whiston, Swedenborg, Rousseau, l’Abbé Grégoire or the Duchess of Bourbon – experienced mystical revelations at some point in their lives and retained a strong interest in the supernatural until their deaths. Such evidence has led historians over the past thirty years to reconsider the premise of a single, secular Enlightenment in new terms, including mystical ones.7 Conversely, those tarred with the brush of enthusiasm did not always fit neatly into the patrician dismissal of ‘popular superstitions’. As is often the case, a closer look at the archives suggests a different reality than the Augustan, largely hostile literature we usually draw upon. Many enthusiasts and mystics were also educated and even sometimes socially secure individuals. The French Prophets gravitated around a wealthy urban middle-class nucleus and counted Fellows of the Royal Society among their ranks, whilst both the Philadelphians’ and the Methodists’ founders included Oxford graduates, for example. These and the Enlightened mystics mentioned above bring into question the nature of the Habermasian, secular and bourgeois public sphere. For these movements attracted men and women of varied milieus and were extensively debated throughout the eighteenth century. From clergymen to secular authorities, from gentlemen to maids, from the elderly to the young, enthusiasm did not leave anyone indifferent. It blurred in fact the traditional boundaries that defined eighteenth-century life, both horizontally across the religious spectrum and vertically by transcending the traditional plebeian–elite opposition. In this perpetual transgression resides the eighteenth century’s fascination with enthusiasm. All of these examples suggest that we should be cautious about making sweeping generalisations about the missing chapter in the Enlightenment narrative, whose appeal ought to be found elsewhere than in a sense of dispiritedness or a desire to overthrow the social order. No matter how hard we try, our approach to this fascinating period remains heavily influenced, if not shaped by, the writings of Augustan moralists and contemporary philosophers. Yet enthusiasts challenged the dominant mindset of their century and introduced as a consequence new ideas in the public debate. Shaftesbury, Voltaire and Hume were among the few Enlightenment writers who acknowledged the intellectual contribution of enthusiasts in their day, respectively

Conclusion

249

highlighting their sociability and defence of civil liberty. Rather than a secularisation of the public sphere, the eighteenth century saw in reality a constant interplay between reason and religion. The Enlightenment, optimistically driven by ideals of individual liberty and social progress, eventually integrated many heterodox beliefs of contemporary enthusiasts. For as much as we like to portray ourselves as the heirs of the Enlightenment when tracing our modernity, we should not forget that the abolition of primogeniture and of capital punishment and slavery, that universal suffrage, female preaching, the education of women and black slaves, freedom of conscience, philosemitism or the moral treatment of the insane, were to a large extent first promoted by those whom the Enlightenment once tarred with the brush of enthusiasm.

Notes 1 Lionel Laborie, ‘Etat des lieux du rayonnement Camisard dans les Refuges Protestants’, in Sophie Bisset, Marie-Claude Felton and Charles Wolfe (eds), La Face cachée des Lumières:  libres penseurs, hérétiques, espions (Paris: Honoré Champion, forthcoming). 2 Benjamin Seth Youngs and Seth Y. Wells, The Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing:  Containing a General Statement of All Things Pertaining to the Faith and Practice of the Church of God in This Latter-Day, 2nd edn (Albany:  E.  and E.  Hosford, 1810), pp. xxiii, 406–8. Calvin Green, Seth Y.  Wells and J.  P. MacLean, A Summary View of the Millennial Church, or United Society of Believers (Commonly Called Shakers):  Comprising the Rise, Progress and Practical Order of the Society; Together with the General Principles of Their Faith and Testimony (Albany: Packard and Van Benthuysen, 1823), pp. 2–5. 3 Lacy, General Delusion, p. 89. 4 For example, Daniel Vidal, ‘Expériences de fin du monde: Un jansénisme en convulsion, un calvinisme en prophétie’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 114 (2001), 21–37. Burns, ‘London’s Barber-Elijah’. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought. Hirst, Jane Leade. Isabelle Noth, Ekstatischer Pietismus (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2005). Brown, Women, Gender and Radical Religion. Dixon, ‘Love and Music’. Almond, ‘John Mason and His Religion’. Apetrei, ‘The “Sweet Singers” of Israel’. Deborah Madden, The Paddington Prophet: Richard Brothers’s Journey to Jerusalem (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 5 Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, pp. 176–9. 6 Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism:  A  Concise History, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), pp. 53–67. 7 Garrett, ‘Swedenborg and the Mystical Enlightenment’. Pocock, ‘Enthusiasm’.

Appendix Chronological profile of the French Prophets Abbreviations and symbols ENTRY NAME DOB POB DOD REL

OCC/STAT ROLE

T

Date of first known appearance among the French Prophets * indicates apostasy or exclusion from the group Date of birth (a. = ante, c. = circa, p. = post) Place of birth (EN  =  England, FR  =  France, GE  =  Germany, HO  =  Holland, IR  =  Ireland, NE = New England, SC = Scotland, SW = Switzerland) Date of death (a. = ante, c. = circa, p. = post) Religion (A = Anglican; B = Baptist; C = non-sectarian Protestant; H  =  Huguenot, including children born in England from Huguenot parents; I = Independent; J = Jew; M = Methodist/Moravian; P = Presbyterian; Ph  =  Philadelphian; Pi  =  Pietist; Q  =  Quaker; (Q) = Quaker claimant; Qt = Quietist; RC = Roman Catholic; SPCK  =  Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; SPG = Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; SwPr = Swiss Protestant) Occupation or status Function within the group (A  =  has agitations but does not speak; C  =  receives cure; H  =  Host; M = Missionary; P = Prophet; S = Scribe; ? = unconfirmed believer, possible sympathiser or mere observer Tribe (1  =  Levi, 2  =  Benjamin, 3  =  Issachar, 4 = Naphtali, 5 = Zebulon, 6 = Simeon, 7 = Judah,

This list compiles all the data accumulated from the research conducted for this book. Categories are based on Appendix I in Schwartz, French Prophets, pp. 297–315.

Appendix

CONN

251

8  =  Gad, 9  =  Ruben, 10  =  Osser, 11  =  Menasseh, 12 = Joseph; @ = appointed apostle to that tribe) Connections within the group, as follows: = married to + nuclear relationship (father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter) & other kinship relations [] friend, religious or business associate, or employer ? unconfirmed relationship

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

CONN

PM MSH MS

1 1 1

[4, 10] = 36 [9, 432] = 279 + 280 & 22 & 117 [8]‌

1706 1 2 3

June June June

FAGE, Durand DAUDE, Jean PORTALES, Charles

1681 1651 1676

FR FR FR

c. 1750? c. 1730? 1763

H H H

4

10 August

*CAVALIER, Jean

1686

FR

c. 1740?

H

Soldier Lawyer Secretary, chief commissary in the army, merchant Weaver

5 6

15 August 15 August

ALLUT, Jean BULKELEY, Richard

1682 1660

FR IR

a. 1740 1710

7

15 August

*COTTON, Thomas

1653

EN

1730

H A, SPG, SPCK P

Cabinet-maker P M H Baronet, CSH inventor (FRS) Minister H

8

20 August

BOURBON-MALAUZE, Armand de

1656

FR

1732

H

H

9

30 August

FATIO DE DUILLIER, Nicolas

1664

SW

1753

SwPr

Marquis de Miremont, agent to Queen Anne Mathematician (FRS), tutor

10 11 12 13

16 September September 1 October November

MARION, Elie ROUVIERE, Jean BOISSIER, Matthieu MISSON, François-Maximilien

1678 a. 1683 a. 1685 c. 1650

FR FR FR FR

1713

H H H H

Clerk Innkeeper Wool-carder Writer

PM H

1722

PM

MSH

S

3

= 31 & 5 & 21 & 119 [1, 12] = 29 + 159 & 4 [9] [15, 87, 244, 308] = 381 + children [9?, 15?] [3, 22]

1

[2, 5, 7?, 26, 120, 117, 148, 367, 466] 1 [1, 22, 232] + 76 & 359? [4, 13] @2 + 282 + 444 + 445 & 218 & 219 [12, 291, 360, 432]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

CONN

14 15

23 November November/ December December

DALGONE, Sara LACY, John

a. 1680 1664

FR EN

1730

H A/P

Surgeon’s wife JP, gentleman

? PHM

1

CRITCHLOW, Rebecca

a. 1675

EN

p. 1710

Ph

Widow, preacher H

= 25 [6, 7?, 26, 47, 426] + 49 +/& 39 & 142 & 143 & 40?

Minister Carder Baronet/arts master?

16

1707 17 18 19

4 January 14 January 14 January

MAJOU, Jérémie *ARNASSAN, Claude PHILIPPS, John

1645 c. 1679 c. 1666

FR FR EN

20 21 22 23

February February 1 March 5 March

*D’HUISSEAU, Anne *VERDURON, Abraham FLOTARD, David CHARRAS, Elizabeth

a. 1688 a. 1668 1670 a. 1670

FR FR FR FR

p. 1741 p. 1711

H H A, SPCK, SPG H H H H

24

7 March

*ROACH, Richard

1662

EN

1730

A/Ph

Silk-weaver Agent for no. 8 Wife of a gunsmith Minister

25 26

1 April 1 April

GRAY, Elizabeth (Betty) KEITH, James

1692 a. 1684

EN SC

p. 1729 1726

A? Qt

Candle-snuffer Physician

1737

? ?

+ 453

? = 119 + 31 & 4 & 3 [8, 10]

PM

5 7 1

H

9

PM

6

+ 44 & 58 [26, 38, 41, 43, 46, 48, 64, 50, 51, 57, 61, 75, 85, 91, 98, 101, 104?, 113, 115, 157, 180, 186, 236, 239, 260, 275, 366, 382, 410, 650] = 15 [73, 37] = 114 [9, 15, 24, 503]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

1 April 1 April 7 April 11 April 11 April 11 April 13 April 13 April

*LIONS, Jean ROGER, Robert ALLUT, Henriette DES BROUSSES, Susanne *CAVALIER, Jeanne VOYER, Anne *HAVY, Isaac *LE TELLIER, Daniel

a. 1675 a. 1660 a. 1685 a. 1685 1637? a. 1680 a. 1670

FR FR FR FR FR FR FR FR

35 36 37

28 April 29 April 28 May

PRADE, Antoine DAUDE, Marie? CUFF, Peter

a. 1680 c. 1650 1676

38 39

28 May 30 May

KNIGHT, Mr CRITCHLOW, Daniel

40

31 May

41 42 43 44 45

REL

OCC/STAT Minister Printer

p. 1727

H H H H H H H H

FR FR EN

H H Ph

Innkeeper

a. 1725? p. 1722?

a. 1680

EN EN

p. 1724

Ph Ph

? Chemist, surgeon A

CUFF, Rebecca

1675

EN

p. 1722

Ph?

3 June

KEMP, John

1665

EN

1717

Ph

Antiquarian

3 June 3 June 3 June 6 June

KING, William WELLS, Mrs ROACH, Anne POTTER, John

a. 1680

EN EN EN EN

1740

Ph/Q? Ph Ph? B

Tallow chandler S ? H? Meat-packer PM

a. 1642 1673

DOD

p. 1745

Widow? Weaver Weaver

Watch-maker

ROLE

T

CONN & 435?

? PM P PM P PM P H SH HA

P

8 = 5 + 159 11 = 4 + 21 + 119 3 @2 @1 = 99 + 88 + 328 + 329 + 496 1 = 456 + 334 + 335 =2 6 = 40 + 502 + son? [25, 106] [24] 3 = 142 +/& 16 + 49 + 143 +/& 40 [71, one servant] = 37 +/& 39 + 502 + son? =/+ 53, & 191 & 451 & cousins & nieces [24] 5 = 310 + 118 + 292 [24] + children + 24 @4 = 448 [82, 78]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

46

15 June

CLERE/CLARE, William

a. 1680

EN

47 48 49

17 June 21 June 21 June

ATKINS, John BODIN, Mrs CRITCHLOW, Sarah

1685?

EN

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

21 June 24 June 1 July 1 July 5 July 5 July 5 July 12 July

WARD, Catherine BRIDGES, Charles HOOKE, John KEMP, M. EYTON, Marie EYTON, Mme TUCKEY, Mary CRAVEN, James

58 59 60

12 July 12 July 20 July

LAUGHTON, Mary OXENBRIDGE, Joanna BEER, Mary

61 62 63 64

20 July 20 July 1 August 1 August

PENNY, Mrs TAYLOR, Mr BASIN/BAZIN, John GILMAN, Caleb

DOD

a. 1687

EN

1757? p. 1717 p. 1712

1670 1655

EN EN IR

p. 1726 1747 1712

a. 1680 a. 1680

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

Ph

Minister

H

Surgeon?

?

Widow?

A

10 = 174 + 173 + one son + one daughter [24] [15] [24] + 39 +/& 16 & 142 & 143 [24] [24, 75] [6?] =/+ 41 +/& 191 + 55 + 54

Ph? Ph

Ph Ph, SPCK Educator A, SPG Sergeant-at-law Ph? H Widow? H

a. 1668

FR FR EN EN

p. 1722

Ph/RC

Chemist

a. 1670 a. 1687 1694

EN EN EN

p. 1729 a. 1720 a. 1737

Ph Ph Q?

Widow Orphan

1670

EN EN EN EN

p. 1722

Ph Ph? Ph Ph

P H P H ? H P PM H

Physician? Founding member of the Philadelphian Society

9

CONN

= 384 & 126 & 127 & 128 & 129 [24, 117] & 24 [91, 180] [24] = 651 + 254 + 261 + 262 & 82 [77, 78] [24] + son = 353 + 354 = 180 + one daughter [24]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

65 66 67 68

1 August 1 August 6 August 9 August

69

10 August

*HARTLAND, John SPONG, William CHANIER, Mme W––re, Edward (aka ‘Ned’) *WHITROW, Abraham

a. 1646 a. 1687 1694

EN EN FR EN

p. 1712 p. 1726

Ph Ph H

a. 1670

EN

p. 1712

70

10 August

*WHITROW, Deborah

a. 1670

EN

71 72 73 74

17 August 17 August 17 August 24 August

BYFIELD, Timothy BYFIELD, Dorothy WATTS, Anne BLANDFORD, Elizabeth

c. 1650 a. 1675 1690? a. 1668

EN EN EN EN

1723 1743 p. 1718

75 76 77 78

24 August 24 August 26 August 26 August

HOFFMAN, Francis ROUVIERE, Anne TOVEY, Beata TOVEY, Joseph

p. 1712

a. 1667 a. 1667

EN FR EN EN

79

August

DRAYCOTT, William

a. 1685

80 81

August August

FINKLEY, Anne KEIMER, Mary

82

August

*KEIMER, Samuel

Ph

OCC/STAT

Wife of a tailor from St Albans Wool-comber

Ph? A

ROLE

T

P C H

@10 3 = 464

PMH

= 482 + 70 + 226 + 227 [425] + 69 + 226 + 227 + 482 [425] = 72 [39, 117] = 71 1 [25] 12 + sisters & 78 & more [24, 51] 3 + 11 [162] 9 = 78 [60, 264, 636] 1 = 77 & 74 & five nieces [45, 60, 264, 304, 504] 2 = 305 + 178 + 179 + 278 [170] 9 + 238 10 + 82 + 83 + 300 [626] 10 = 262 + 81 + 83 + 300 & 60 [45, 130, 588]

H Physician Shop maid

PM H

Engraver

A

1736 1737

Ph H Q Q

EN

p. 1712

B

Brasier

SH

a. 1668 c. 1686

EN EN

p. 1712 p. 1718

Q P/B/Q

Widow

H PM

1688

EN

1742

P/B/Q

Printer

H

Ph

H Tallow chandler H S

CONN

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

83 84 85 86 87 88

August 2 September 2 September 5 September 5 September 5 September

KEIMER, Joanna GOOD, Anne *WILTSHIRE, Sarah EMES, Thomas JACKSON, Benjamin LE TELLIER, Samuel

a. 1666 1697 a. 1680 a. 1670 a. 1670 1707

EN EN EN EN EN EN

p. 1718

P/B/Q

p. 1710 1707 p. 1722 p. 1709

Q/Ph B/C Ph? H

Widow? Chemist Inventor Child

89 90 91 92

11 September 12 September 12 September 15 September

DUTTON, Thomas ARCHDALE, Mr PITKIN, Mr BULLMORE, Mary

1679

EN EN EN EN

p. 1741

Q? Ph Ph Ph

Lawyer

93 94 95 96

15 September 15 September 21 September 21 September

EVERARD, Edmund HAMMOND, Mr/Dr DUBUC, Pierre RAOUX, Jeanne

c. 1660

p. 1712 p. 1722

RC/C Ph? H H

Informer, spy Politician? MP?

1645

SC EN FR FR

97 98 99

21 September 25 September 27 September

RAOUX, Madeleine EYRES, Daniel LE TELLIER, Marie

1674 a. 1692 a. 1675

FR EN FR

100 101 102 103

29 September 1 October 1 October 5 October

TAYLOR, Jonathan GILES, John LESTER, Mrs EAST, Rachel?

a. 1689 a. 1670

EN EN EN EN

1733 p. 1721

104

5 October

STEFFKINS, Christian

p. 1646

GE

1714

105

10 October

*STODDART, Dinah

EN

p. 1713

OCC/STAT

Ph? Pi Ph?

P P PHC SM PM ? ? P A P

Wife of a notary, P widow by 1709

H Ph H Ph? Ph? Q

ROLE

T

1 2

5 9 PM MSH

Daughter of a grocer Viol player at court

H S P

= 300 + 81 + 82 + 405 [24, 45, 220] = 112 + son + 591? [6]‌ + 34 + 99 + 328 + 329 = 154 + 130 + 231

[24, 58, 180, 536] 10 = 363 + mother [356] 1 [109, 9?] [24?] 4 1 + 97

H Cabinet-maker Merchant

CONN

1

5

+ 96 + 395 [24] = 34 + 88 + 328 + 329 [121, 123] [24, 632] [24] + family [24?, 199]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

106

31 October

c. 1693

FR

107 108 109

1 November 1 November 10 November

NOUAL/NOEL/NOWEL, Jean MOSELY, Mrs PRESTON, Hugh TILEY, Joseph

1630 a. 1660

EN EN EN

110 111 112

15 November 30 November 5 December

JACKSON, James REASON, Hal EMES, Mary

1636 1683 a. 1675

113 114 115 116 117

6 December 6 December 6 December 7 December 12 December

EASTMAN, Susannah KEITH, Mrs WIDOWS, Mr ROGERSON, Mr MOULT, Francis

118 119 120 121 122 123

14 December 18 December 19 December 25 December 25 December 25 December

KING, Anna Maria *VERDURON, Marie DE BEAULIEU, M. *HALFORD, Stephen NUTT, Guy WHARTON, Richard

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

H

Apprentice

P

p. 1712 1708?

Q A

EN EN EN

p. 1721 p. 1722

I/Q A? Ph? B

Servant? Lawyer/MP for Exeter? Teacher Writer? Widow by December 1707

EN SC

p. 1712

a. 1685

Ph? Qt? Ph?

a. 1675

EN EN

1733

A

p. 1712

Q? H SwPr? Q? (Q)

1695 a. 1668 1687 a. 1685 a. 1689

EN FR SW? EN EN EN

DOD

p. 1712 a. 1737

Apothecary

Patten-maker

CONN + 144 [37]

C C CH

6

= 457 [93]

CH S

6 5

[220] [24?] = 86 + son

3

[24] = 26 [24]

1

& 3 & 140 & 202 & 279 & 448 [9, 57, 71, 263, 466, 498, 613, 639, 650?] + 42 + 292 + 310 = 21 + 31 & 4 [9] [100, 123] = 293 = 479 + 323 + 324 + 480 & 644 & 645 & 637 [121, 100]

H MSH

PM Cutler

T

P PMH

5 5 8

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

124 125 126

26 December 28 December 28 December

TURNER, Mary COCK, William CRAVEN, Thomas

a. 1688

EN EN EN

p. 1712

Q

PM

11 [220] + 152 = 127 + 128 + 129 & 57 & 384 = 126 + 128 + 129 & 57 & 384 + 126 + 127 + 129 & 57 & 384 + 126 + 127 + 128 & 57 & 384 6 + 89 & 154 & 231 [82]

127

28 December

CRAVEN, Susan

EN

p. 1712

128

28 December

CRAVEN, Samuel

EN

p. 1712

129

28 December

CRAVEN, Susan

EN

p. 1712

130

28 December

DUTTON, John

EN

c. 1712

Tailor

131 132 133

28 December 28 December 28 December

HEDLEY, Mary HUBBARD, Elizabeth NOBLE, Samuel

a. 1680

EN EN

p. 1712 p. 1712 p. 1737

Bookseller

MSH

134

28 December

*PARKER, John

a. 1688

IR

p. 1713

Colonel? Bookseller?

PM

135 136

28 December 28 December

PARKER, Mrs WALDIN, Mr

IR?

p. 1712 p. 1712

FR EN EN EN

Upholsterer? a. 1712

CONN

8 5

= 268 + 259 + 276 + one son 11 = 135 + one son

A?

= 134 + one son

1708 137 138 139 140

January January January January

CLARK/CLERK, Mary HOLLOWAY, John MOORE, Mary MOULT, John

141 142

1 January 1 January

BARKER, Charles CRITCHLOW, Mrs

a. 1670

EN

Q? Apothecary

C C C C P?

Attorney

S

Gentleman? A? p. 1721?

8 + 279 + 448 & 117 & 202 = 163 = 39 + 143 & 16 & 49

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

143

1 January

CRITCHLOW, Mary

a. 1688

EN

144

1 January

145

1 January

NOUAL/NOEL/NOWEL, Marianna PELLET, Jean

146

1 January

147 148

1 January 1 January

149

DOD

REL Ph

FR?

p. 1712

1669?

FR

1752?

H

PELLET, Judith

a. 1663

FR

p. 1712

H

p. 1690 1665

EN FR

1711

A? H

3 January

SHEPPARD, Nathaniel DE MAZIERES, Louis-Henri PELLET, Ms

FR

p. 1712

H

150

5 January

GLOVER, John

1652

EN

a. 1736

A? B

151

10 January

ASPINAL, Mary

a. 1688

EN

p. 1710

152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162

11 January 11 January 11 January 11 January 11 January 11 January 11 January 15 January 19 January 19 January 19 January

COCK, John COOMES, Mrs DUTTON, Mary HUGHES, Elizabeth PIGGOTT, Mary *STERRILL, Marie TINSLEY, Mr ALLUT, Jacob *ANGIBERT, Anna AUDEMAR, Jeanne AUDEMAR, Pierre

a. 1680

EN

p. 1716

A? Ph?

a. 1680 1688

EN EN EN FR

p. 1737 p. 1718 p. 1712 p. 1712 p. 1712

A? Q B? H/Ph/Q

a. 1650 1708 c. 1662 1662

EN FR FR FR

OCC/STAT

H H H H

Teacher

ROLE

T

CONN

A

11 + 39 + 142 & 16 & 49 + 106

H

= 146 + four children (149) H = 145 + four children (149) Apothecary M S P? @4 [605] Sieur de Voutron, 1 = 590 [9] gentleman + 145 + 146 + three siblings Victualler, PM 1 = 403 + children preacher Stay-maker’s PM 6 = 467 wife Clock-maker H 7 + 125 PM

= 89 + 231 & 130 11 + 230 [24?] 2 [24, 375]

Widow

A

Silk-weaver

P H 4 MCH 1

+ 5 + 29 = 162 = 161 [76]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

163 164

19 January 19 January

BARKER, Elizabeth BENNET, Elizabeth

a. 1680

165

19 January

BENNET, John

a. 1680

EN

166 167 168 169 170

19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January

BERNARD, Esther BERNARD, Jacques BOUSSAC, Mme BRUMSTON, Margaret CARTER, James

1671 1657 a. 1688

171

19 January

CHARRIER, Elizabeth

1675

FR FR p. 1721? FR EN? EN? IR? FR

172

19 January

CLARK/CLERK, John

173 174

19 January 19 January

CLERE/CLARE, John? CLERE/CLARE, Mrs

175 176 177 178

19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January

179

19 January

COOPER, Elizabeth DES PREAUX, Olivier DES PREAUX, Renée DRAYCOTT, Anna/ Hannah DRAYCOTT, Sarah

180

19 January

GILMAN, Mrs

a. 1688

181

19 January

GLADMAN, Joseph

a. 1675

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

EN Shoe-maker, arts master H H H

7 2

Engraver H

= 141 = 165? + 315 & 355? = 164? + 315 & 355? = 167 + 316 = 166 + 316 = 361

10 + 175 [79] H

Royal Bounty recipient

Gentleman

2

EN p. 1700 a. 1680

EN EN

1662 c. 1662 a. 1675

EN FR FR EN

p. 1712

H H B

EN

p. 1712

B

EN

p. 1712 p. 1712

CONN

PS

= 288 + three children 4 + 277 + 306 + 373 + 491 + 46 + 174 = 46 + 173 + one son + one daughter + 170 & 661? 3 +/= 177 12 +/= 176 10 + 79 + 179 + 278 + 305 10 + 79 + 178 + 278 + 305 = 64 + one daughter [24, 58, 91] 5

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195

19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January

GRAISSMIT, Mr(?) GUILLEMOT, Isaac GUILLEMOT, Susanna HODGES, Joseph HUMPHREYS, William HUNT, Sarah JACKSON, George JANSON, Jean KELL, Abraham KEMP, Joyce LA JONQUIERE, Mme LE PAGE, Jean MADDOX, Mary MAHIEU, Abraham

196 197 198 199 200 201 202

19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January

MAHIEU, Susanne MARSHALL, Elizabeth MIDDLETON, Thomas? MONIN, Mr MOREL, Jeanne MORETON, Elias MOULT, John

203 204

19 January 19 January

205

19 January

NAIT, Mr NOLIBERT/NOLIBET, David OWEN, Isaac

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

a. 1689 1659 1688 a. 1688

FR FR EN EN

a. 1688

EN FR

H?

EN FR FR EN FR

H H Ph? H

OCC/STAT

H H 1722

ROLE

T

CONN

S

4

+ 184 + 299 = 299 + 183

8

[24]

Very rich heir Ph?

a. 1675 1666 a. 1688 a. 1670 a. 1670

p. 1732

Wife of a weaver 1 Stationer’s wife? Weaver H

H

a. 1688 a. 1689 p. 1696 1694

FR EN SC FR FR EN EN

A

P M?

a. 1680

FR? FR

H? H

M

p. 1679

EN

Qt H H

a. 1718

P

1

H Principal?

A P

Student, son of a M S minister

& 41 & 53 + daughters = 311 & 313 + 248 + 274 = 196 + 200 [one apprentice] = 195 + 200

+ 524 [26?] [104] 9 + 195 + 196 8 + 447 @3 + 279 + 448 & 117 & 140 1 12 [friends]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

206

19 January

PERROT, Jaquette

1652

207

19 January

PERROT, Marie

208 209

19 January 19 January

210 211 212 213 214 215

19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January

216

19 January

*PLASS, Edward PLEURET/PLURET, Elizabeth RAMSAY, Ann *RIGBY, Mary RIGBY, Thomas ROSE, Mrs SANGER, Susanna SEWARD/SOUART, Thomas SHOVELL, Elizabeth

REL

OCC/STAT

FR

H

c. 1650

FR

H

Daughter of a merchant Daughter of a merchant

a. 1685

IR? FR

217 218 219 220 221 222 223

19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January 19 January

224 225 226

a. 1695 a. 1675

SC? EN EN EN? EN EN

DOD

p. 1712 p. 1712

1659

EN

SOULET, Susanne SOUTHOUSE, Anne SOUTHOUSE, Filmore STEED, Anne THIBAULT, Marie TOPHAM, Ann URQUHART, Patrick

a. 1680 p. 1695 a. 1685 a. 1679 1693/94 1641

FR FR EN EN FR EN SC

19 January 19 January

VALETTE, Pierre VAULOUE, Pierre

1644 a. 1689

FR FR

H H

19 January

WHITROW, Ann

p. 1696

EN

A

p. 1712 1725

CONN

6

+ 207 + 333 + 557 & 13 + 206 + 333 + 557 & 13 = 454 + 244

4

A

+ 212 + 494 12 = 494 + 211

PMS

12 = 636

Cane-maker

c. 1730

p. 1731 p. 1731 p. 1718

T

H

p. 1721 p. 1718

1732

ROLE

A H H H Q H Q? RC?

Admiral’s wife, widow

[3?] 8 7 7

Widow? PM Professor of Medicine at King’s College, Aberdeen Merchant Son of a goldsmith?

PM AH

+ 219 & 13 + 218 & 13 [85, 110, 124, 625] = 291

8 12 3 = 472? [apprentice, servant] 1 1

+ 473 + 474 + 69 + 70 + 227 + 482

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

227

19 January

WHITROW, Deborah

p. 1696

EN

p. 1712

A

228 229 230

19 January 19 January 24 January

WILLSON, Sarah YONGE, Mme HUGHES, Isabel

p. 1712

a. 1668

EN EN? EN

1709

Q

231 232 233 234 235 236

29 January February 4 February 4 February 4 February 7 February

DUTTON, Martha MAZEL, Abraham ROBERTS, Mrs BURBURY, Thomas *CASH, Samuel DOWNING, Mr

1708 1677 a. 1678

EN FR EN EN EN EN

1708 1710

H

1734

Ph?

237 238 239 240 241 242 243

23 February March 2 March 11 March 18 March 30 March 1 April

PLYMORE, Mrs FINKLEY, Nathan BULL, Richard? POMMIER, François RAYNER/REYNER, Mr MOORE/MORE, John MOORE, John

a. 1688

244 245 246 247 248 249

6 April 11 April 11 April 11 April 11 April 11 April

PLASS, Timothy BARBER, John? PAIN(E), John HARLEY, Sarah MADDOX, Mrs PIKE(S), Mary

p. 1690

1676

a. 1675 a. 1688 1642

EN? EN EN FR EN EN EN IR EN EN EN EN EN

p. 1718 p. 1721 p. 1721 p. 1710 p. 1719

p. 1712 p. 1712 p. 1712 p. 1712

OCC/STAT

T

CONN + 69 + 70 + 226 + 482

Cook shop, widow Child Wool-comber Widow

M P H ?

Printer and bookseller?

A/J Q? Furrier Ph? SPG? H B Minister Clog-maker A/B P Minister, of Kinnersley A? Student

Ph?

ROLE

+ 155 + 89 + 154 & 130 [10]

& 6? [24] S A CH P P

10 + 80 [24] 4 [24?] @6 + 208 + 454 [6] = 351 & 411? + 194 + 274

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

250

11 April

251 252 253 254

14 April 29 April 5 May 23 May

WELLING/WALLING, William RUSTBACK, Mrs BYWORTH, James WILLIS, Mary BEER, Beata

255 256 257

28 May June June

SHAW, Samuel LARDNER, Thomas *NICHOLSON, Henry

a. 1689 c. 1679 1683

EN EN IR

p. 1712 c. 1736 p. 1723

Q A A

P Apothecary MS Student, A physician; Professor of Botany, Trinity College Dublin

258 259 260

13 June 13 June 13 June

BAKER, Elizabeth NOBLE, Ms RICHARDSON, Robert

a. 1691

EN

p. 1712 p. 1732?

Ph

261 262 263

20 June 20 June 20 June

BEER, Harmond BEER, Sarah EATON, Robert

a. 1680

EN EN EN

Societies of P writers to the signet? M

264 265 266 267

20 June 23 June 18 July 18 July

COURTNEY, Jane/Jenny a. 1700 CHENEY, Richard a. 1678 FOROLESWORTH, Mary LEVIT/LEVETT, Mrs

c. 1678 a. 1651

POB

DOD

EN?

p. 1712

EN EN EN EN

EN EN EN

REL

RC?

p. 1712 A p. 1712 p. 1712

ROLE

T

CONN

12

Q

1728

OCC/STAT

Victualler Widow

C C P

Minister and son A of a minister, physician Servant Waterman C

12 + 60 + 261 + 262 & 81? [304] 3

+ 133 + 276 & 268 12 [24] 9 + 60 + 254 + 262 12 = 82 + 60 + 254 + 261 [117] [77, 78] [6]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

EN

p. 1712

REL

268

18 July

NOBLE, Rebecca

269 270 271 272

18 July 18 July 25 July 1 August

PUGH, Gwen PUGH, Joel RAWSON, Benjamin DOUGLAS, Robert

273 274 275 276 277

1 August 11 August 22 August 22 August 22 August

LOW/LOE, Robert MADDOX, Grace FORESTER, Mr NOBLE, Mrs CLARK/CLERK, John Jr

EN EN EN

278

22 August

DRAYCOTT, Ebenezer

EN

p. 1712

279

22 August

MOULT, Mary

1690

EN

1726

A

280 281 282 283 284

25 August 28 August 1 September 14 September 21 September

PORTALES, Jaques ROGERS, William MISSON, Jaques GRENIER, Jean SOULIER, Jaques

p. 1676 a. 1660 a. 1660

FR EN? FR FR FR

1765 p. 1712

H Q? H H H

285 286 287 288

1 October 5 October 10 October 10 October

POMEE, Mr *WISE, Robert BOUET, Marie CHARRIER, Jaques

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

= 133 + son & 259 & 276 + 270 + 269

p. 1712 p. 1712 a. 1678

EN SC

CONN

P p. 1712 p. 1712 p. 1712 p. 1712 p. 1712

Rich merchant of the East India Company

4

[528?]

12 Ph Ph

Oilman?

?

EN Printer

Gentleman Printer Gentleman

MS

Merchant hatter?

P

Sawyer

P

+ 194 + 248 [24] + 133 + 259 & 268 9 + 172 + 491 & 306 & 373 10 + 79 + 178 + 179 + 305 6 = 3 + 140 + 202 + 448 & 117 1 = 309 + 3 6 1 + 13 + 444 + 445 1 1 [195]

p. 1712 1688 1674 1673

EN FR FR

H H

Commoner

2 2

= 171 + three children

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304

10 October 10 October 10 October 14 October 14 October 14 October 17 October 17 October 17 October 17 October 17 October 17 October 17 October 17 October 17 October 18 October

GERALD, François MONY, Jean THIBAULT, Thomas KING, William Jr NUTT, Mrs SLYE, Elizabeth BAGNAL, John BAGNAL, Mary DUCROS, Daniel GEIPIN, Mr GUILLEMOT, Jean KEIMER, Samuel Sr MAYN, Mr OLIVER, Mr THOMPSON, Mrs PICKWORTH, Henry

a. 1688 a. 1688 a. 1679 p. 1700

FR FR FR

305

29 October

DRAYCOTT, Mrs

306

31 October

307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315

31 October November 7 November 7 November 7 November 7 November 14 November 23 November 23 November

CLARK/CLERK, John Adam SMALL, Elizabeth FURLY, Benjamin DEVAUX, Marie KING, Emma LE PAGE, Catherine PAYN, Jean LANGTUIT, Pierre ARPWOOD, Thomas BENNET, Stephen

EN a. 1695 c. 1688

EN

DOD

FR FR? FR EN FR? FR?

1673

EN

p. 1712 1738

EN

p. 1712

EN

a. 1688 1636

EN EN FR EN FR FR? FR SC EN

a. 1680 a. 1664 a. 1688 p. 1700

OCC/STAT

H H H

Commoner

p. 1712 p. 1712 p. 1712 1768?

a. 1688 1642 a. 1666 a. 1688 a. 1688

a. 1680

REL

ROLE

Goldsmith

Printer? H H? H

p. 1718

T

CONN

2 2 2 6

= 321 = 446 = 221 [13] + 42 + 118 + 310 = 122 [servant]

5

= 296 + 326 = 295 & 326

3 Commoner Blacksmith

SH ?

3

= 184 + 183 = 83 + 81 + 82

H? H?

1714 p. 1723?

Q

Wealthy tanner

Q/C H

Merchant Commoner?

H H? H

Butcher? Merchant

A?

SH

P P

[78, 255, 587, one friend] = 79 + 178 + 179 + 278 4 = 373 + 172 & 277 & 491 4 = 318 [6, 382] 5 = 280 + 332 10 = 42 + 118 + 292 5 = 193 + 313 + child 5 6 + 311 & 193 @7 7 + 164 + 165 & 355

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

316 317 318

23 November 23 November 23 November

BERNARD, Joseph FOSTER, Mary SMALL, Thomas

1702

EN EN EN

319 320 321

23 November 23 November 28 November

VERGNON, Louise VERGNON, Samuel Jr GERALD, Anne

a. 1682 FR a. 1694? EN a. 1688 FR

322

28 November

PARIS, Jaques

a. 1665

323

28 November

WHARTON, Edward

EN

324

28 November

WHARTON, Isaac

EN

8

325 326 327 328

3 December 3 December 3 December 3 December

ALDERIDGE, Thomas BAGNAL, George HARLING, Sarah LE TELLIER, Daniel Jr

EN 1703

EN EN

H

329

3 December

LE TELLIER, Jaques

1705

EN

H

330 331 332

7 December 7 December 7 December

BARRE, Handrin BARR, John Jr DEVAUX, Suzanne

1653?

EN EN FR

H

9 9 + 295 & 296 10 + 412 @9 + 34 + 88 + 99 + 329 + 496 9 + 34 + 88 + 99 + 328 + 496 11 + 331? @11 + 330? 11 + 309

333

7 December

PERROT, Marguerite

1653

FR

H

a. 1688

FR

DOD

a. 1710?

REL

T

CONN

H

7 7 7

H H H

7 7 8

+ 166 + 167 = 586? = 307 & female relative = 476 + 320 + 475 + 319 + 475 + 476 = 289

8

[13]

8

+ 123 + 324 + 479 + 480 & 637 & 644 & 645 + 123 + 323 + 479 + 480 & 637 & 644 & 645

H

OCC/STAT

ROLE

Wife of a commoner Tradesman? Commoner? Receiver general?

MS Silk merchant’s widow Daughter of a merchant

11 + 206 + 207 + 557

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

334 335 336

7 December 7 December 7 December

PRADE, Jean PRADE, Josué ROCHFORT, Peter

c. 1705 c. 1705 a. 1688

EN EN EN

337 338 339

12 December 15 December

SPRAGG, John *ARTAUD, Pierre ALLIX, Pierre

a. 1688 1641

EN FR FR

1717

H H

340

ALLIX, Marguerite

c. 1650

FR

1739

H

?

341

ALLIX, Jean Pierre

1679

FR

1758

H

?

342

ALLIX, William

1688/89 EN

1769

H

?

343

ALLIX, Marie

1692

H

?

344

ALLIX, Gilbert

1693/94 EN

H

?

345

ALLIX, Margaret

1698

EN

H

?

346 347

*ARTAUD, Catherine ASH, Mr

a. 1688

FR

H

H H 1737?

T

CONN

11 + 35 + 335 + 456 11 + 35 + 334 + 456 11

Mime, inventor of the mock-trumpet

12

EN 1767?

Minister

?

= 346 = 340 + 341 + 342 + 343 + 344 + 345 [365] = 339 + 341 + 342 + 343 + 344 + 345 + 339 + 340 + 342 + 343 + 344 + 345 + 339 + 340 + 341 + 343 + 344 + 345 + 339 + 340 + 341 + 342 + 344 + 345 + 339 + 340 + 341 + 342 + 343 + 345 + 339 + 340 + 341 + 342 + 343 + 344 = 338 = 348

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355

ASH, Mrs ASHEY, Elizabeth BALBING, John BARBER, Mrs BARKER, Joshua BASIN, Mrs BASIN BENNET, George

356 357

Betty BILLARD, Daniel Guy

358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365

BISHOP, Mrs BOISSIER, Abraham BOUHAULT, Marie BOUSSAC/BOISSAC, Moïse BROUSSE, Elizabeth BULLMORE, Mr? BURROUGHS, Rebecca CALVERLEY, Mary

366

CASE, Mary?

367 368

CASWELL, John CAVALIER, Jean

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

CONN = 347

EN EN EN

= 245

EN c. 1665

EN FR

H

1658 a. 1688

EN FR FR FR

H H H

1631

FR EN EN EN

1714

Ph?

EN

p. 1711

Ph?

EN FR

1712 1740

A H

1655 1681

p. 1711

Servant Lieutenant/ colonel Bourgeoise Lieutenant

H

P

H

= 63 + 354 + 63 + 353 & 164? & 165? & 315? [92] [3?, 22?, 232, 391] & 12? [13] = 168 [419?, servant]

P = 92 Lady, widow, mother of Thomas Fuller, M.D. Astronomer Colonel

[24?, 339]

?

+ family & relatives [24] [9, friends] & 4?

newgenrtpdf

NO.

NAME

DOB

POB

369 370

CHILD, Martha CHOLMONDLEY, Mr

a. 1688

EN EN

371 372 373

CHOLMONDLEY, Mrs CHOLMONDLEY, Ms CLARK/CLERK, Mrs

a. 1688

374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382

COLLISON, Mrs COMB, Joan CONWAY, Mr COOK, Thomas COOK, Mrs COOT, Mrs CORBYN, Joseph COTTON, Mrs COUGHEN, John

a. 1688 a. 1700

383 384

COULON, Mlle? CRAVEN, Elizabeth

385 386 387 388 389 390 391

CREAM, Joan CREED, Mr CROISSAC, Mlle DARBY, Mr DAVIES, William DAWSON, Hannah DU PONT/DUPONT, Antoine DURAND, Mr

392

ENTRY

a. 1680

a. 1673 a. 1673

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

Colonel? Lord Viscount?

EN EN EN

CONN = 371 + 372 = 370 + 372 + 370 + 371 = 306 + 172 & 277 & 491

Q

EN EN EN? EN

T

Servant

[157] = 478 + daughters = 378 = 377 [436?]

Q

EN S a. 1670 c. 1638

NE EN

p. 1713

P? Ph

a. 1678

FR EN

p. 1713

H Ph

1677

EN EN FR EN? EN EN FR

a. 1688

FR

= 7 + children + one daughter [24, 308]

Physician

= 57 & 126 & 127 & 128 & 129

H

H H

Secretary

?

[357] = 393 & 566?

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

393 394 395

DURAND, Mme EASTON, Mrs EYRES, Mr

a. 1688

FR EN EN

p. 1712

396

FOWLER, Edward

a. 1632

EN

1714

397 398 399 400

FOWLER, Elizabeth FOX, Mrs FOULSTER, Mary FREKE, William

1662

EN

1744

A

401

DE GAUJAC, P.

1655

FR

p. 1726

H

402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411

GENTIL, Mlle GLOVER, Constance GODFRY, Mr GOOD, Mrs GREEN, Anna GROVES, Joan HALL, Martha HALLOWAY, William HAMMOND, Mrs HARLEY, Edward

1658

FR EN

412

HARLING, Elizabeth

413

HARRYS/HARRIS, Timothy

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

CONN

H

= 392 + 566?

A

+ 98 + son & relative = 397 + children [586] = 396 + children

Bishop

1732

? ?

EN 7

H

1735

a. 1668

p. 1712

EN

?

[24?]

? ? = 150 + children

a. 1677 EN a. 1675? EN a. 1688 EN EN EN EN 1664? EN EN

Gentleman, writer Minister and translator

+ 84 & 526? [220?]

Ph? A

Writer?

S?

Lawyer? Politician

?

[24] & 247? [9?] + 327 + 522? + one daughter & 530?

Ph?

Gentleman?

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431

HARTLET?, John HARTMAN, John HEADLEY, Mary HICKES, Mr HIDE, John HOAR, Mr HODGKINS, Elizabeth HOWE, Susannah Humfrey Israel, Mr Israel, Mrs Joan John JOHNSON, Elizabeth JOHNSON, George KINNADY, Mrs LADORE, Pierre? LAMB, Bulfinch

432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439

LA TOUCHE, Jaques LE ROI, Mr LEVI, Jaques LION, Susannah LOCKART, Mrs MAGPETH, Mr MARTIN, Susannah MARTIN, Mr

DOB

POB

DOD

EN EN EN EN EN EN EN EN

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

Goldsmith Q?

[361, servant] H?

Apprentice Maid Coachman

FR? EN

a. 1670

FR FR FR FR? EN SC? SC?

CONN

from Colchester

J J? EN EN

T

p. 1712

Ph? Ph? H?

p. 1731

p. 1727 p. 1736

H H H H?

AP

[447] = 424 = 423 + parents [69, 70] [15] [24?] [24?]

Joiner? Captain? Merchant of the English African Company? [2, 13] Bookseller & 27? [379?] = 439 + sister = 438 & sister-in-law

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

440 441 442 443 444

MAZARGUILLE, Mr MAZARGUILLE, Mme MESSENGER, Mr MESSENGER, Mrs MISSON, Judith

445 446 447 448

MISSON, Marguerite MONY, Mme MORETON, Arabella MOULT, Margaret

449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460

NEVILLE, Mr ORPEWOOD, Mr PATERSON, Ann/Hannah PEARSON, Mrs PHILIPPS, Elizabeth PLASS, Mrs PONTIN, Mlle PRADE, Jeanne PRESTON, Mrs PRICE, Humphrey PRICE, Mrs RAMSAY, Andrew Michael SAUNIER, Mme SHEPHERD, Richard SPAVEN, Mary SPONG, Rebecca

461 462 463 464

DOB

POB

DOD

REL H H

a. 1640

FR FR EN? EN? FR

H

a. 1678 1694

FR EN EN

H

p. 1711 1726

OCC/STAT

Printer, widow A

T

CONN = 441 = 440 = 443 = 442 + 13 + 282 + 445

Minister’s wife, widow

EN? EN EN

H ?

+ 13 + 282 + 444 = 290 + 201 + sister [422] = 45 + 140 + 202 + 279 & 117 & 41 + sister + 19 = 208 + 244

a. 1680 H H

1686

FR FR EN EN EN SC

H

a. 1646

FR EN EN EN

a. 1680 a. 1680

ROLE

Qt

Ph?

Tutor, secretary

= 35 + 334 + 335 = 108 = 459 = 458 [503, 528, 533]

= 66

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

465 466

STAMPLE, Sarah STEELE, Benjamin

a. 1680

EN EN

p. 1744

Ph

Watch-maker

S

467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479

STEELE, Joseph STEVENSON, Mr STEVENSON, Mrs SUTTLE, Mary TILBY, Joshua URQUHART, Mrs VALETTE, Ms VAULOUE VERGNON, Marthe VERGNON, Samuel WALL, Mr WEBSTER, Sarah WHARTON, Hannah

480

WHARTON, Joseph

481 482

WHITEHEAD, Thomas WHITROW, Mary

483 484 485 486 487 488

WILLSHIN?, Mrs WILLSON, Betty WILLSON, Mary Mr Ms/Mrs Mr

a. 1688 a. 1688 a. 1688

EN EN EN EN EN

T

+ 467 +/= 643 [9, 117] = 151 + 466 = 469 = 468

Stay-maker Ph? Ph? p. 1712

1702 a. 1682 a. 1688

EN FR EN EN

= 223? H H

P P Physician

p. 1713 p. 1740

EN a. 1680

EN

c. 1695 c. 1688

EN EN

1748

CONN

Q

Merchant Midwife

H

4

+ 224 + 319 + 320 + 476 = 319 + 320 + 475 +/= 615? = 376 + daughters = 123 + 323 + 324 + 480 & 637 & 644 & 645 + 123 + 323 + 324 + 479 & 637 & 644 & 645 & 654? = 69 + 70 + 226 + 227 [16]

EN Q

Sailor/seaman Pastry cook from Bristol

+ son [friends]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

1644 1637

FR FR

1720 1713

H H

Scholar Minister

H H

H

Child

T

CONN

1709 489 490 491

early early 9 January

JURIEU, Hélène *JURIEU, Pierre CLARK/CLERK, Ms

492 493 494 495 496

9 January 9 January 9 January 9 January 27 January

MILLS, Margaret MILLS, Eleanor RIGBY, Mrs SMALE, Mrs LE TELLIER, Elisabeth

497 498 499 500 501 502 503

30 January 5 February 8 February 18 February 7 April 5 May June

SMALE, Mr James MUNN, Mrs PRIOR, Mrs LEARNER, Mr CUFF, Rebecca CUNINGHAME, James

504 505

June 3 July

506

3 July

GORDON, Kennet YENDALL/YEWDALL, Zachariah BUNDY, Joseph

507

3 July

BUNDY, Joseph Jr

p. 1712 p. 1712 a. 1675

EN

1709

EN

p. 1712 H EN

Servant

= 490 [616] = 489 [308] + 172 + 277 & 306 & 373 + 493 + 492 = 212 + 211 = 497 + 34 + 88 + 99 + 328 + 329 = 495 [117]

p. 1712 p. 1712 S c. 1665

SC

a. 1712 1716

a. 1688

SC

p. 1737

a. 1680

EN

Qt Qt B

Child ‘laird’ Advocate Sea-faring man

PMH SH P?

+ 37 + 40 [26, 460, 520, 521, 529, 544] + 519 + 535 [78] = 508 + 507 + 509 + 510 + 511 + 512 + 513 + 506 + 508 + 509 + 510 + 511 + 512 + 513

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

508

3 July

BUNDY, Mrs

509

3 July

BUNDY, Fidelia

510

3 July

BUNDY, Ann

511

3 July

BUNDY, Abraham

512

3 July

BUNDY, Samuel

513

3 July

BUNDY, Josiah

514 515 516 517 518 519 520

3 July 3 July 3 July 3 July 3 July 14 July 25 July

YAPP, Thomas YAPP, Mrs John Dorothy William GORDON, Clara *PRINGLE, Katherine

1688 c. 1682

SC SC

521 522 523 524

25 July 27 July 12 August 12 August

ORUM/OREM, Katherine *HARLING, Dorothy a. 1679 IRELAND, Mrs MIDDLETON, Margaret 1675

SC EN SC SC

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

CONN = 506 + 507 + 509 + 510 + 511 + 512 + 513 + 506 + 507 + 508 + 510 + 511 + 512 + 513 + 506 + 507 + 508 + 509 + 511 + 512 + 513 + 506 + 507 + 508 + 509 + 510 + 512 + 513 + 506 + 507 + 508 + 509 + 510 + 511 + 513 + 506 + 507 + 508 + 509 + 510 + 511 + 512 = 515 = 514

1747

Qt Qt

p. 1722?

Qt B

Black boy Maid Manservant ‘Lady’, widow? ‘Lady Abden’, widow

Principal’s daughter

PM P

+ 504 [503]

AP P A A

[503] + 530 + 198

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

525 526 527 528 529

12 August 29 August 2 September 11 September 1 October

CAMERON, Isabel GREEN, Mr ABTOUN, Mary HOPE, Thomas SPENCE, David

530 531 532

December December 6 December

HARLING, John NEWSON, Mr CAMERON, Jane

DOB

POB

1633 a. 1669

SC EN SC SC SC

a. 1699

EN EN SC

DOD

p. 1740

REL

Qt Qt

c. 1711

OCC/STAT

Baronet Lawyer? Treasurer of the Bank of Scotland? Secretary to the Darien Company? Barber?

Qt

ROLE

T

CONN

A ? P ? S

+ 532? & 406?

A A PM

+ 522

A P P

[460] + 504 & 598? [91] Woolmote family Woolmote family

[272?, 460, 503] [503]

+ 525?

1710 533 535 536 537 538 539 540

3 January 5 February 5 February 9 March 9 March 9 March 23 April

541 542 543 544

1 May 2 May 2 May 31 May

HOGG, James IRVINE, Margaret INGLIS, James ? RAMSAY GIBS, Mr CARRIAGE/CARRIDGE, Lydia STUART, Robert CARNEGY, Mr FERGUSON, Mr FALCONAR, Alexander

a. 1673 a. 1690 a. 1695 a. 1690

SC SC SC

p. 1740 P/Ph

Minister? Lady Clava Minister Chaplain Servant maid

EN

a. 1682

SC SC SC

P P A ? ?

1745

Qt

Lawyer

[503]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552 553 554 555

31 May 3 July 29 September 15 October 24 December 24 December 24 December 24 December 25 December 27 December 31 December

556

31 December

DOB

POB

DOD

a boy MACKENZIE, Margaret a. 1688 DRAKE, Mrs HONIMAN, Rachel DU LAURIER, Jonathan DU LAURIER, Marie DU LAURIER, Mme WALLER, Mary 1689? GERVAISE, Louis JOINEAU, Louis 1648 EVERSDEN, Ann/Hannah

SC EN SC FR FR FR EN FR FR EN

p. 1710 p. 1712

EVERSDEN, Mr

EN

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

Servant

T

CONN [504]

PM H

1722 p. 1732 p. 1718

H H H A H H B

Leatherworker Daughter of a baker Baker

H P S PM P

+ 550 + 551 + 549 + 551 + 549 + 550 = 619 [3?, 5? 9?] + 556 & 568

H

+ 555

H

+ 206 + 207 + 333 [559, 604] [558, 604]

1711 557 558 559 560 561 562 563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571

2 January February February 8 February 8 February 11 February 11 February 11 February 11 February 17 February 25 February 1 March 6 March 6 March 6 March

PERROT, Jeanne HICKS, Nathaniel TODD, Samuel OVERAN, Mary RIGGS, Thomas? MEARS, John NORTHEAST, John WOFFINTON, Grace WOOD, John BRUNELLE, Anne PHILLIPS, Jacob GARDNER, Thomas DOAN, Mrs FLOYD, Richard HALL, John

a. 1684 a. 1684

FR EN EN IR IR IR? IR? IR? IR? FR IR? EN IR? IR? IR?

H B B A?

Poor woman Gentleman

H J p. 1713

Antiquarian?

P? M? P? M? P? M? P? M? P H AP P? M? P? M? P? M?

+ 579 & 555

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

572 573 574 575 576 577 578 579 580 581

6 March 6 March 6 March 6 March 6 March 6 March 6 March 6 March 12 March 16 March

582 583

26 April 2 May

584 585 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597

2 May 2 May 23 May June June June 3 6 June 17 June 21 June 21 June 23 June 29 June 23 July 8 August

HARRIS, Mrs HILL, Mr HILL, Mrs MACGUIRE TROUGHTON, Ann WALKER, Robert WALKER, Margaret WOOD, Mary MILL, John FORBES OF PITFICHIE, John PETITMAITRE, Mme FORBES OF PITSLIGO, Alexander *PICKERING, Christina PICKERING, Mr FOSTER/FORSTER, John BURGIS, Timothy PARKS, Mary P. I., Mr DE VOUTRON, Mme JACKSON, Miss BROUCKTOF, Mme MARSH, Mr? BARKER, Gyles VALENTIN, Judith SEAGER, Henry FORBES, Jean

DOB

POB

1680

EN IR? IR? IR? IR? IR? IR? IR? SC SC

1678

SW SC

a. 1680

EN

1657

EN EN EN FR EN SW

a. 1664

EN FR? EN SC

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

1715

Qt

P? M? A M? P? M? P? M? P? M? P? M? P? M? P? M? PM Son of a baronet P

1762

SwPr Qt

Laird?

A

Widow?

A Q Q H H

Minister, priest

p. 1721 p. 1712 p. 1712

ROLE

T

CONN & 628 = 574 = 573 + 578 + 577 + 565 & 583 & 597

P

Servant

& 581 PA A ASH P? P

= 585 = 584 = 317? [304] [82, 304]

S

= 148 + 87?

H P P P M A?

& 581 [503]

SwPr H? Qt

‘Lady’

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

598

8 August

599 600

18 September 26 September

IRVINE/IRWIN/ERWYN, Henrietta SWAN, George OGILVIE, James

601 602

26 September 10 October

MILNE, John KEITH, Elizabeth

603 604 605 606

10 October 5 November December 12 December

SHARP, Daniel SALTER, Mark BOULTER, Mr KEITH, Mr Gilbert?

POB

DOD

REL

p. 1643? SC

p. 1712

C?

a. 1681 1663

SC SC

1730

Q Qt

Hammerman Lord Deskford, politician

1674

SC? SC

p. 1724

Qt

‘of Caddom’, widow

a. 1689

SC EN EN SC

a. 1680

EN FR? EN EN EN

a. 1689

OCC/STAT

B

ROLE

& 535?

H ?

[503]

P H

+ 606

PM Minister?

CONN

PM

c. 1711 Qt

T

A

[558, 559] [147] + 602

1712 607 608 609 610 611

19 March 4 May 15 May 15 May 6 June

ANDREW, Mr BOUCHE, M. C. ASKU, Mrs NIP, Mr PHILLIPS, William

612 613

? ?

BROWNE, N. MANWAYRING, Mrs

EN EN

[5, 9] H? A? p. 1721

B Ph?

p. 1730

H

PH Weaver, arts master? Housekeeper, widow?

[117]

1713 614 615 616

20 March 3 June 13 June

617 618

15 June 6 July

*HANET, Paul WALL, Mary DE RIDDER, Marie Hélène JAMETS, Etienne GARDINER, Richard

a. 1680 1690

FR EN? HO FR EN

Goldsmith ? P

B? H Baker

P PA

+ 477? [489]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

REL

619 620

20 July 13 November

JOINEAU, Brunelle DOLADILLE, Jean-Jacques

1671

FR FR

1761

H

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

CONN = 554?

PM

1714 621 622 623 624 625

3 August 5 September 30 September 20 October ?

BOUCHER, Mr PETERSON, Ann PAGEZ, François ROUSSIERE, Daniel TOMLINSON, Samuel

a. 1694

FR?

H

FR FR EN

H H (Q)

Hatter

FR?

H?

Widow?

EN EN

B

Butcher

P PM PM A

[220]

1718 626

PIGRIN, Mme

[81]

1719 627 628

1 March 23 July

HATTON, Mrs HARRIS, Robert

a. 1699

H & 572

1720 629 630 631

? 10 November 10 November

SAUER, Johann Christoph 1695 BABER, Ann EVANS, Mary

GE EN EN

SWIFT, Mr PITT, Mr AYLMER, Mr

EN EN EN

1758

Pi B B

Printer

? [631] [630]

1721 632 633 634

17 August 17 August 17 August

[101] Joiner Peruke-maker

P P

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

635

17 August

male child

c. 1721

NE

WILKINS, William

a. 1690

EN

DOD

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

CONN

P

1726 636

1751

Printer

= 214 & 78

Physician?

& 123 & 323 & 324 & 479 & 480 + 644 + 645

1730 637

25 March

WHARTON, George

EN

638 639 640 641

26 April 1 May 27 September ?

CLAY, Charles WEINTRAUB, William IRELAND, Timothy ZEIDIG, Johanna C.

EN

p. 1732

Watch-maker Pi?

1699

GE

p. 1732 p. 1740

[117] S

Pi

Minister’s wife

1731 642

22 August

COSTIN, Mr

Innkeeper

H

1732 643 644

Early

STEELE, Elizabeth WHARTON, Mary

EN

645

Early

WHARTON, Sarah

EN

646 647 648 649 650

Early 12 September 1 October 1 October 3 October

WYNANTZ, Francis HAINES, Susannah ARNOLD, Philip MICHAUT, Jean HOLLIS, Isaac

c. 1712 1712 1699

GE EN GE FR? EN

1774

Pi

1774

Pi? H? B, SPCK

+/= 466 & 123 & 323 & 324 & 479 & 480 + 637 + 645 & 123 & 323 & 324 & 479 & 480 + 637 + 644 &3

Merchant

Gentleman

? P A

[649] [648] [24, 117?]

newgenrtpdf

NO.

ENTRY

NAME

DOB

POB

DOD

STUBBES, George

c. 1683

EN

1742

REL

OCC/STAT

ROLE

T

CONN

1736 651

652

March

DELBOSE, Mme

FR?

H?

653 654

March June

SAUDIGNAN, Simon WHITEHEAD, Joseph

FR? EN

H

Fellow of Exeter College, reverend, chaplain Wife of a H merchant? P

= 60 [636]

& 481?

1739 655 656 657 658

28 January 28 January 17 April 20 April

PLEWIT, Mary SELLERS, Lydia SHAW, Mr *BRAY, John

659 660 661 662 663 664

28 April 16 May 7 June 7 June 7 June 13 June

*BOWERS, Mr FISH, William COOPER, Mrs LAVINGTON, Mary WISE, Mr WOLF, Shepherd

a. 1720

EN? EN EN EN

Widow? p. 1744

EN EN EN EN EN EN

M M M

P M

M M P P

Q? M

1746 665

18 February

DU PLAN, Benjamin

1688

FR

1763

H

Gentleman

H

[658] [658] [656, 657, 659, 660] [658] [658] & 175? [663] [662]

Bibliography

Manuscripts France Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme français, Paris (BPF) MS 302, Papiers Coquerel   fols 3–5, lettre de Charles Portalès à David Flotard (22 April 1709)   fols 6–7, lettre de Charles Portalès et Elie Marion à David Flotard (26 September 1709) MS 757, fols 11–29, royal edicts and decrees (1686–92) MS 765/4, fol. 61, ‘Mémoires sur les Afaires de la Religion et de l’Eglise Réformée de France, présenté à leurs Hautes Puissances nos Seigneurs les Etats Généraux des Provinces Unies’ (10 January 1707) MS 871/1, Jurieu et l’organisation de son espionage en France (1693–96)

Germany Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Halle (AFSt) H C144a, correspondence of Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf with his brother Georg Melchior (1695–1710) H D23b, fol. 178, letter from Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf to Herr von Holsten (London, 22 September 1707) H D61, fols 404–7, letter sent by the Prophets in London to their brethren in Halle (c. 1713)

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Bibliography

Great Britain Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives, London (BRHA) ARA-03, A12/1, general admissions (1702–15) ARA-04, A12/1, general admissions (1716–36) Bodleian Library, Oxford (Bodl.) MS Lister 3, fols 44–55, correspondence of Richard Bulkeley with his physician Martin Lister MS Rawlinson D833, Roach Papers MSS Rawlinson D1152–D1155, diary of Richard Roach (1706–30) MS Rawlinson D1318, fols 55–6, ‘POLEMICA SACRO-Prophetica Anti=ROACHiana-WILTSHIREiana (1710) MS Smith 62, fol. 373, letter from Thomas Smith to Thomas Hearne (1 May 1708) British Library, London (BL) Add. Ch. 53510. Avignon, diploma of the University to R.  Eaton, M.D. (1715) Add. MS 15911. Letters to the Revd S. Ockley, 1711–20   fols 30, 33. James Keith, M.D., letters to the Revd S.  Ockley (1711–18) Add. MS 23204. Literary correspondence of Professor Ockley, 1689–1718   fols 20, 26, 39. Dr James Keith, letters to the Revd S.  Ockley (1716–18) Add. MS 29590. Hatton–Finch Papers, letters of Sir John and Paul Methuen   fol. 245. Armand de Bourbon, Marquis de Miremont, instructions, as Envoy to the Cévennes (1703) Add. MS 36123. Hardwicke Papers, DCCLXXV   fol. 18. Robert Eaton, M.D, patent for medicine (1722) Add. MS 61122. Blenheim Papers, XXII   fol. 109. memorial to Privy Council (1705) Add. MS 61257. Blenheim Papers, CLVII   fols 7–8, 13–14, Marquis de Guiscard, correspondence with the Duke of Marlborough Add. MS 61258. Blenheim Papers, CLVIII   fols 56–84. Letters from Lt.-Gen. Armand de Bourbon-Malauze, Marquis de Miremont (1705, 1706)

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  fols 85–116. Letters from Capt. David Flotard, agent of the preceding (1704–11)   fol.117. ‘Copie de la Capitulation du 11 may 1704’   fols 119–20. ‘Copie d’une lettre ecrite de Nimes le 14 may 1704’   fols 121–2. Michel Chamillart, French Minister of War, letter to J. Cavalier (1704)   fols 123–70. Maj.-Gen. Jean Cavalier, Lieutenant-Governor of ­Jersey, letters to Queen Anne, the Duke of Marlborough and A. Cardonnel   fols 171–4. Pierre Jurieu, Huguenot minister at Rotterdam, letters to the Duke of Marlborough [1704?]   fols 182–3. ‘Mémoires de Nicolas Clignet sur l’affaire des Cévennes’   fols 203–5. Petition of French deserters from Cevennes to Queen Anne Add. MS 61618. Blenheim Papers, DXVIII   fols 135–6. ‘Attorney General Report about French Protestants, June 21, 1707’   fol. 138. James Janson, Huguenot, of London, petition to Queen Anne (1707) Sloane MS 4043. Letters to Sir Hans Sloane, VIII   fol. 307. Nicolas Fatio Duillier, letter to Sir H. Sloane (1714) Sloane MS 4055. Letters to Sir Hans Sloane, XX   fol. 27. Nicolas Fatio Duillier, letter to Sir H. Sloane (1736) Sloane MS 4065. Sir Hans Sloane’s Papers, XXX   fols 4, 22, 24, 37, 64, 116–18. Henry Nicholson, Professor of Botany at Dublin, letters to J. Petiver (1711–13) Stowe 223. Hanover State Papers, II (1707–10)   fol. 345, Nicolas Fatio Duillier, leaf from his memorandum-book (1710) Stowe 748. Dering Correspondance, VI (1703–59)   fol. 63, John Lacy, letter to — (1707) Cambridge University Library (CUL) Cholmondeley (Houghton) political papers 26, no. 3. ‘Relation d’un voyage fait en Cevennes, par Tobie de Rocayrol (1704)’ Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester (CALS) EDC 5/1718/9 (Great Budworth). Office c.  John Lacy for adultery with Elizabeth [Betty] Gray in 1717 and 1718 – libel

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Lambeth Palace Library, London (LPL) MS 931/22. Letter from Josiah Woodward, East India Company’s ­minister at Poplar, to the same, from Poplar, 11 March 1710, ­giving an account of a conference with Mr. [John] Moult and his assistant Dutton, formerly a lawyer in the Temple, concerning prophecies apparently of some sect MS 932/10. ‘Preciz du Discours de Mr. Durand Fage d’Aubaye, ­prononcé sous l’Opération de l’Esprit, à Londres le 30 Aoust 1706, A 8 ou 9 Heures du matin’ (1706) MS 934/52. ‘Preciz du Discours de Mr. Durand Fage d’Aubaye, prononcé sous l’Opération de l’Esprit, A  Londres, le 3e 7bre ­ 1706; à 8 ou 9 heures du matin’ (1706) VX IA/11. Midwives Licences, 1669–1772, fols 146–7: Mary Whitro London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) MJ/SP/1707/07/074. Registration of Rebecca Critchlow’s house for dissenting meetings (1 August 1707) The National Archives, Kew (TNA) KB 28/22/29. R. v. Marion & ors. (Trin. 6 Anne) PROB 11/584/293. Will of Maximilian [sic] Misson (5 April 1722) PROB 11/594/370. Will of Timothy Byfield (19 December 1723) PROB 11/659/153. Will of Francis Moult (17 May 1733) PROB 11/684/188. Will of Joseph Tovey (21 July 1737) PROB 11/902/150. Will of Charles Portales (18 September 1764) PROB 11/917/141. Will of James Portales (3 March 1766) SP 34/16/55. Secretaries of State: State Papers Domestic, Anne   fol. 92. ‘Petition of Timothy Byfield, doctor of physic, to queen, ­desiring letters patent for his new medecine, known as “sal volatile” ’ (1711) Private collection of manuscripts of Mrs Shirley Stack, Taunton (Stack) 1. Charles Portalès’s manuscripts   c. Notes by Charles Portalès   g. ‘ “Récit” abrégé des persécutions & oppositions faites par les prétendus ministres de Christ de la Nation Françoise contre le message de l’Eternel, et contre ses serviteurs, qu’il a envoyez au Roïaume d’Angleterre, mais prémierement à la ville de Londres, capitale du Roïaume’ (1707)

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  i. Bound manuscript of ‘Mémoires de la Guerre des Cévennes’ by Elie Marion and Abraham Mazel   j. ‘A Historical Relation of the workings and operations of the Holy Spirit concerning the everlasting Covenant which Jesus Christ comes to establish upon the Earth with his people. To be left as a memorial for ever unto his universall Church upon the Earth 1710’   l. Green notebook and commonplace book 2. Frances Belchier’s manuscripts   a. Commonplace book, 1789 12. Various letters to Francis Malcom Evory Kennedy   g. Bound notebook entitled ‘Portales Family’ Wellcome Library, London (WL) MS.MSL/25/1. Notes on diseases (17th–18th centuries) MS.MSL/85/1. Notes on nervous diseases

Privately reproduced manuscripts James Cummins, bookseller, New York, Ref. 6268. Letter from John Gyles to Mr Swift in Worcester (17 August 1721). Courtesy of Michael Bliss. ‘Reasons of the Hope yt is in us, or Matters of Fact:  Consisting of Miraculous Experiences both External & Internal, or Miracles & Experiences Altogether New & Unparallell’d, since the Times of the Apostles & Primitive Christians in ye First Centuries’ (1717?). Courtesy of Hillel Schwartz.

Switzerland Bibliothèque de Genève, Geneva (BGE) C2/IV/3. ‘Testament de Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’ (19 December 1745) D10/VI/1. ‘Tableau des membres de la societé royale de Londres’ Ms. fr. 601. ‘Lettres adressées à Nicolas Fatio et à Jean-Christophe Fatio’   fols 64–65. ‘Lettre de Duclos à Nicolas Fatio’ (6 April 1727)   fols 86–163. ‘Lettres de Jean-Christophe Fatio à son Frère Nicolas Fatio’ (1685–1719)   fol. 209. ‘Lettre d’Isaac Hollis à Nicolas Fatio’ (3 October 1732)   fols 211–14. ‘Lettres de Jean Huber à Nicolas Fatio’ (1716)

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  fols 215–16. ‘Lettre de Marthe Huber à Nicolas Fatio’ (30 April 1718)   fols 217–18. ‘Lettre de Marie Huber à Nicolas Fatio’ (3 February 1719)   fol. 239. ‘Lettre d’Abraham Mahieu à Nicolas Fatio’ (14 September 1732)   fols 241–2. ‘Lettre de Marion à Nicolas Fatio’ (5 August 1707)   fol. 253. ‘Corbyn Morris – lettre à Nicolas Fatio’ (27 January 1735)   fols 258–62. ‘Lettres de Charles Portalès à Nicolas Fatio’ (1719–32) Ms. fr. 602. ‘Documents sur la vie et les écrits de Nicolas Fatio’   fols 19–21. ‘Extrait du Journal que tenoit Nicolas Fatio des ­Evenemens qui concernoient les pretendus prophetes Camisars & leurs adhérens’   fols 22–5. ‘Correspondance de Jean-Christophe & Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’   fol. 26. ‘Extrait de ce qui concerne Mr. Nicolas Fatio de Duilier’   fol. 27. ‘2 Songes de Jean Allut a Worcester’ (22–4 May 1719)   fol. 58. ‘Fatio to Jean-Robert Chouet’ (21 November 1689)   fol. 114. ‘Minute de Lettre à mon Aîné’ (16 September 1707)   fol. 115. ‘Lettre à mon Frère Aîné’ (19 December 1707)   fols 116–17. ‘Lettres à mes Frères de Lion. Londres’ (1716)   fol. 122. ‘Nicolas Fatio à Worcester à Charles Portales à Londres’ (27 May 1719)   fols 123–4. ‘Longitude. Nicolas Fatio à Charles Portales’ (26 December 1719)   fols 125–36. ‘Succession de Jean-Christophe Fatio’   fol. 137. ‘A Jean Allut’ (16 July 1728)   fols 144–7. ‘To the King and Queen’s most Excellent Majesties’   fol. 163. ‘Nicolas Fatio à Charles Portales’ (1 March 1730)   fol. 164. ‘Memorandum’ (4 May 1734)   fol. 166. ‘To Corbyn Morris, Esq.’ (1736)   fol. 178. ‘To Charles Portales and Mr. Cave’ (1 March 1738)   fols 186–98. ‘Papiers relatifs à une société formé entre Nicolas Fatio et les frères de Beaufre pour travailler et vendre les pierres précieuses’ (1704)   fols 199–210. ‘Notes sur les Songes de Nicolas Fatio’ (1715–32)   fol. 242. ‘Papiers rel. à l’hoirie de J.-B. Fatio’   fols 245–65. ‘Papiers relatifs à l’acquisition par Georges-Louis Le Sage des manuscrits de Nicolas Fatio’ (1761–73) Ms. fr. 603. ‘Ecrits scientifiques de Nicolas Fatio’

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Ms. fr. 605. ‘Documents concernant les inspirés, par Nicolas Fatio’   1. ‘Correspondance et méditations de Jean Allut’   2. Incomplete draft of Plan de la justice de Dieu sur la Terre   4. Benjamin Furly, ‘Lettre écrite de Hollande le 30 octobre 1710’   6. ‘Documents concernant quelques “inspirés”:  Jean Michaut, Simon, Misson, etc.’   7a–b. ‘Notes sur les assemblées des “inspirés” ’ (1706–13). Includes Fatio’s calendar. Ms. fr. 609. ‘Papers divers de Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’   fols 17–30. ‘Notes sur l’astronomie’   fols 31–56. ‘Extraits de divers auteurs’ Ms. fr. 2039–43. ‘Papiers Le Sage’ 2039/39/1. ‘Passages de divers auteurs sur la décadence des sciences, sur la charlatanerie, les Cabales et les autres abus qui se sont introduits parmi les savants’ 2040/40/1. ‘Papiers de Médecine’ 2041a/B. ‘Sur la Famille Fatio’ 2043. Unfoliated letters and notes   2. ‘Papiers divers sur Nicolas Fatio et la pesanteur’ 2043a. Notes written on playing cards   26. ‘Traits epars. Pour servir à l’Eloge historique de Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’   27. ‘Sur Jean Christophe Fatio’   28. ‘Sur les Inspirés auxquels Nicolas Fatio de Duillier etoit ­attaché’   29. ‘Citations & Reflexions etrangères à Fatio, Propres à justifier sa Credulité aux Inspirations modernes’   30. ‘Autre Conjecture. Pour expliquer le Silence de Newton sur l’Hypothèse de Fatio. Savoir: La Crainte du Ridicule’   32. ‘Caractère & Tour-d’esprit de Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’   34. ‘Vuës philosophiques de Monsieur Nicolas Fatio de Duillier sur d’autres objets que la Pesanteur’   35. ‘Sur Nicolas Fatio en particulier:  Abstraction faite de ses travaux en Physique’ 2043b. Unfoliated cards Staatsarchiv des Kantons Bern (StAB) AII 631, no.  45. ‘Raths=Manual Der Stadt Bern’ (10 December 1710–18 February 1711)

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Printed primary sources Newspapers The British Journal The Daily Courant The Daily Post The Flying Post: or, The Post Master Hallische Zeitungen (Halle, Germany) Le Journal des sçavans The London Evening Post The London Gazette The London Packet; or, New Lloyd’s Evening Post Nouvelles de la République des lettres The Observator The Post Boy The Post Man and the Historical Account A Review of the State of the British Nation ­ The Spectator The Tatler Unschuldige Nachrichten von alten und neuen theologischen Sachen, Büchern, Uhrkunden, Controversien, Anmerckungen und Vorschlägen (Leipzig, Germany) The Weekly Journal Wöchentliche Relation der merckwürdigsten und zur Conservation der neuen Historie hauptsächlich dienenden Sachen (Halle, Germany)

Other works Allut, Jean, Discernement des ténèbres d’avec la lumière; Afin d’inciter les hommes à chercher la lumière, l’Esprit de l’Eternel, pour les instruire & les enseigner dans les droites voies ­(Rotterdam, 1710).   Eclair de lumière descendant des cieux, pour découvrir, sur la nuit des peuples de la terre, la corruption qui se trouve dans leurs ­ténèbres; afin de les inciter à la repentance, avant que la tonnere [sic] gronde de la justice de l’agneau (Rotterdam, 1711).   Quand vous aurez saccagé, vous serez saccagés: Car la lumière est apparue dans les ténèbres, pour les détruire (1714). Anon., An Account of the Lives and Behaviour of the Three French Prophets, Lately Come out of the Cevennes and Languedoc ­ ­(London, 1708).

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  An Account of the Theater of war in France. Being a geographical and historical description of Languedoc in general; and of the Lower Languedoc, the Cevennes, and the Principality of Orange in Particular (London, 1703).   An Account of the Tryal, Examination & Conviction of the Pretended French Prophets (London, 1707).   An Account of the Tryal, Examination and Conviction, of Elias ­Marion, and Other the French Prophets, at the Queen’s-Bench Bar, the 4th of July, 1707. At Guild-Hall, before the Right Honourable the Lord Chief Justice HOLT; for Publishing ­ False and Scandalous Pamphlets; and Gathering Tumultuous ­Assemblies ­(London, 1707).   The Age of Wonders: or, A Farther and Particular Discriptton [sic] of the Remarkable, and Fiery Appartion [sic] that Was Seen in the Air, on Thursday … May the 11th 1710. Also the Figure of a Man in the Clouds with a Drawn Sword (London, 1710).   An Alarm to the Christian Church:  A  Discourse Concerning the Great and Wonderful Events Now Approaching (London, 1712).   An Appeal from the Prophets to Their Prophecies. Evidencing the New Dispensation They Pretend, to Be of the Same Stamp and Authority with Their Predictions (London, 1708).   Arrest de la cour de parlement. Rendu a  l’encontre de Simon Morin:  natif de Richemont proche Aumale, portant condamnation de faire amende honorable d’estre bruslé vif pour avoir pris la qualité de fils de l’homme, entendu fils de Dieu, ensemble la ­condamnation de ses complices (Paris, 1663).   Arrest du Conseil d’Etat, portant défenses à tous chirurgiens & apothicaires faisant profession de la R. P. R. de faire aucun exercice de leur art (Paris, 1685).   Avis de saison à tous les François, tant catholiques romains que ceux qu’on appelle nouveaux réunis, au sujet des mouvemens des ­Sevennes, et des tremblemens de terre survenus a  Rome & aux environs, en la présente année 1703 (Adrianople, 1703).   The Case of William Jackson, Richard Fowler, and Charles ­Portales, Three of the Assistants of the York-Buildings Company ­(London?: 1734?).   Clavis prophetica; or, a Key to the Prophecies of Mons. Marion, and the Other Camisards, 2 vols (London, 1707).   A Collection of Advertisements Respecting the Regulation of Assemblies, and Containing the Rules of Discipline: Wherein Are Comprehended Several Orders and Commands; Exhortations

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and Admonitions; and Instructions. And Some Examples of the Lord’s Jealousie (London, 1715).   A Collection of Papers, Printed by Order of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Viz. The Charter. The Request, &c. The Qualifications of Missionaries. Instructions for the Clergy. Directions for the Catechist, &c. Instructions for School-Masters. Prayers for the Charity Schools. Standing Orders of the Society. List of Members. Missionary’s Library, &c. ­(London, 1715).   A Collection of Prophetical Warnings of the Eternal Spirit, Pronounc’d by the following Persons, viz. Mary Aspinal, Mary Beer, aged 13. Thom. Dutton, Thom. Emes, John Glover, Ann Good, aged 11. Elizab. Grey, Mary Keemer, Anna Maria King, aged 13. John Lacy, John Moor, John Moult, aged 15. John Potter, Mary Turner, Ann Watts (London, 1708).   A Complete Guide to All Persons who Have Any Trade or ­Concern with the City of London, and Parts Adjacent, 2nd edn ­(London, 1740).   The Devil of Delphos, or, The Prophets of Baal Containing an Account of a Notorious Impostor, Call’d Sabatai Sevi, Pretended Messiah of the Jews, in 1666. Who Afterwards Turn’d Turk: And of Many Other Impostors in Church and State; as False Christs, and False Prophets from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Times. To which Is Added, a Proof that the Present Pretended Prophets are the Prophets of the Devil, and Not of God (London, 1708).   Dialogue entre deux freres, touchant les prophetes Cevenois (London, 1707).   Second dialogue entre deux freres, touchant les prophetes ­Cevenois (London, 1707).   Troisieme dialogue entre deux freres, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Du XXX May (London, 1707).   Quatrieme dialogue entre deux freres, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Extrait du procez qui a été intenté contre les pretendus profetes, dans la Maison de Ville, au banc de la seine, le 4 Juillet 1707 (London, 1707).   Cinquieme dialogue entre deux freres, & Timante leur ami qui survient pendant leur entretien, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Du 23. Juin 1707 (London, 1707).   Sixième dialogue entre deux freres et leur ami Timante, touchant les prophetes Cevenois. Du 8. Juillet 1707 (London, 1707).   Septieme et dernier dialogue entre deux freres et leur ami Timante (London, 1707).

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  The Dispensatory of the Royal College of Physicians in London (London, 1727).   A Dissuasive against Enthusiasm:  wherein the pretensions of the modern prophets to divine inspiration, and the power of working miracles, are examin’d and confuted by scripture and matter of fact. In a letter to a person of quality (London, 1708).   The English and French Prophets mad or Bewitcht [sic], at their Assemblies in Baldwins-Gardens, on Wednesday the 12th, of November, at Four of the Clock in the Afternoon, and Thursday the 13th, and on Saturday the 16th, at Barbican, with an Account of their Tryal (London, 1707).   Enthusiasm No Novelty or, The Spirit of the Methodists in the Year 1641 and 1642 (London, 1739).   ‘Estat des cens Camisards partis avec Cavalier’ (1704), Bulletin ­historique et littéraire, 33 (1884), 235–40.   Etat et description des Sevennes par rapport à ce qui s’y passe aujourd’huy (London, 1703).   Examen du Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, traduit en anglois sous le tître de Cry from the desart (London, 1708).   The French Prophetess Turn’d Adamite Being a True and ­Comical Account of a Pretended French Prophetess, who on Sunday the 16th of November, Did in a Very Immodest and Indecent M ­ anner (Being Inspired with a Pretended Spirit) Undress Her Self Stark Naked at the Popish Chapel in Lincoln’s-Inn Fields ­(London, 1707).   The French Prophets Confounded:  or, The Dead Man’s Speech to the Presumptious Miracle-Workers. Deliver’d under the Similitude of a Dream (London, 1708).   The French Prophets’ Mad Sermon, as Preacht since Their Sufferings at Their Several Assemblies Held in Baldwin’s Gardens, at Barbican, Pancras-Wells, and Several Other Places in and about London (London, 1708).   The French Prophets New Catechism; Compiled for the Use of All Those Disciples, who Are Willing to Know the Grounds of Their Religion (London, 1708).   The French Prophet’s Resurrection:  With His Speech to the ­Multitude that Behold the Miracle (London, 1708).   A Full and True Account of the Apprehending and Taking Six French Prophets, near Hog-Lane in Soho, who Pretended to Prophecy that the World Should Be at an End within This Three Weeks (London, 1707).

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  Histoire des Camisards, ou l’on voit par quelles fausses maximes de politique: Et de religion, la France a risqué sa ruïne, sous le regne de Louis XIV (London, 1744).   The Honest Quaker: or the Forgeries and Impostures of the P ­ retended French Prophets and their Abettors Expos’d; in a Letter from a Quaker to His Friend, Giving an Account of a Sham-Miracle Perform’d by John L-y Esq; on the Body of ­Elizabeth Gray, on the 17th of August Last (London, 1707).   Manifeste des peuples des Sevennes sur leurs prise d’armes ­(Berlin, 1703).   A New Dialogue between the Ghost of Dr Emes, Lately Deceas’d, and the Prophet of Aldermanbury (London, 1708).   Le Nouvel hosanna des petits enfans:  ou relation des assemblées saintes & admirables que sont presque tous les enfans dans la Silésie pour adorer Dieu, translated by Richard Bulkeley (London, 1708).   Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des trois Camisars, où l’on voit les déclarations de Monsieur le Colonel Cavallier ­(London, 1708).   Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 2nd edn, 45 vols (Amsterdam, 1720).   The Ordinary of Newgate, His Account of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words, of the Malefactors who Were Executed at Tyburn (London, 1738).   Pillory Disapointed, or, The False Prophets Advancement ­(London, 1707).   A Plain and Succinct Discourse on Convulsions in General; but More Particularly in Children. In which the Causes and Cures of Them Are Methodically and Fully Explain’d. And a True and Successful Specifick, against That Direful Disease, Communicated to the Publick (London, 1721).   The Present Pope’s (Clement XI) Plenary Indulgence to All that Shall Take Arms against the Distressed Protestants from the Cevenennes (London, 1703).   De Propheten in Engeland, na de raad onses heeren, geoordeeld aan hare vrugten: In een brief, geschreven aan een vriend ­(Rotterdam, 1708).   The Prophets: An Heroic Poem. In Three Cantos. Humbly Inscrib’d to the Illumin’d Assembly at Barbican (London, 1708).   Proposals for Redressing Some Grievances which Greatly Affect the Whole Nation. With a Seasonable Warning to Beautiful Young

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­ eligion: At the Time of Their Cruel and Inhumane Persecution R … By the French King: Credliby [sic] Attested (London, 1706).   A Wonderful New Prophecy:  Giving a Certain and True Account when the Church Ills Will Be Great Again (London, 1711). Astell, Mary, Bart’lemy Fair or, an Enquiry after Wit; in which Due Respect Is Had to a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, to My Lord ***. By Mr. Wotton (London, 1709). Basville, Nicolas Lamoignon de, Mémoires secrets de Lamoignon de Basville, intendant du Languedoc, pour faire connaître à Louis de Bernage, son successeur, l’esprit de la province et l’art de la gouverner (Montpellier:  Bureaux d’abonnement des chroniques de Languedoc, 1877). Beer, Mary, A Collection of Prophetical Warnings, Pronounc’d under the Operation of the Holy Eternal Spirit, to the Inhabitants in and about the City of Bristol &c. By the Following Persons, viz. Mary Beer, Mary Keemer, Ann Watts (Bristol, 1709). Berkeley, George, The Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols (London: Nelson, 1949–64). Beverley, Thomas, The Kingdom of Jesus Christ Entering Its Succession at 1697 (London, 1689). Bèze, Théodore de, Histoire ecclesiastique des Eglises réformées au royaume de France, 3 vols (Anvers, 1580). Blackall, Offspring, The Way of Trying Prophets: A Sermon Preach’d before the Queen, at St James’s, November 9. 1707 ­(London, 1707). Blackmore, Richard, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: Or Hypocondriacal and Hysterical Affections (London, 1725). Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England:  A  ­ Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769, 4 vols ­(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Blanc, John, The Anathema of the False Prophets. In a sermon preach’d in several French churches in and about London (London, 1708). Block, Magnus Gabriel von, Åtskillige Anmärkningar Öfwer Thesza Tiders Falske Astrologiska, Phantastiska Och Enthusiastiska Prognostiker, Spådomar Och Prophetier, Beträffande M ­ enniskjans Wäsende Och Wandel I Gemen; Men I Synnerhet Religions- Och Statz Saker, Förnemligast: I the Nordiska Länder. Såsom Ock Then Andra Christi Tilkommelse, Jämwäl Sidsta Wärldenes Ända (Linköping, 1708).   Betänckiande Öfwer Ester Jöns-dotters Långwariga Fastande &c. &c. I  Skåne, Yttrat Uti Ett Swar Uppå Kongl. Götha Hoffrättz Bref Af Den 29. April An. 1714 (Stockholm, 1719).

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And of the Peace Concluded between Him and the Mareschal D. of Villars. Of His Conference with the King of France (Dublin, 1726).   Mémoires sur la guerre des Camisards, ed. Frank Puaux (Paris: Payot, 1987). Chastelain, Matthieu, Traité des convulsions et des mouvemens ­convulsifs, qu’on appelle à présent vapeurs (Paris, 1691). Chauncy, Charles, Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against: A Sermon Preach’d at the Old Brick Meeting-House in Boston, the Lord’s Day after the Commencement, 1742 (Boston, MA, 1742).   The Wonderful Narrative:  or, a Faithful Account of the French Prophets, Their Agitations, Extasies, and Inspirations: To which Are Added, Several Other Remarkable Instances of Persons under the Influence of the Like Spirit … (Glasgow, 1742). Cheyne, George, An Essay of Health and Long Life (London, 1724).   The English Malady, or a Treatise of Nervous Disease of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers (London, 1733).   The English Malady, ed. Roy Porter (London: Tavistock and Routledge, 1991). Chishull, Edmund, The great danger and mistakes of all new uninspir’d prophecies, relating to the end of the world:  Being a sermon preach’d on November. 23d, 1707 (London, 1708). Comité François, Estat de la distribution de la somme de douze mille livres sterling, accordée par la reine aux pauvres Protestants françois refugiez en 1705 (London, 1707).   Estats de la distribution de la somme de douze mille livres sterling, accordée par la reine aux pauvres Protestants françois refugiez en 1706 (London, 1708).   Estats de la distribution du reliqua de la beneficence de 1707, et de la beneficence de 1708, accordée par la reine aux pauvres Protestants (London, 1709). Conneand, S., New Prophets: Their Historical and True Picture London, 1708). Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, to My Lord ***** (London, 1708).   ‘A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to my Lord *****’, in Lawrence E. Klein (ed.), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 4–28. Corbett, G., Enthusiasm Display’d or the Moor-Fields Congregation ([London]: 1739).

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Fitzgerald, Thomas, Poems on Several Occasions, 2nd edn ­(London, 1736). Flamsteed, John, ‘Observations of the Solar Eclipse, May 1/12 1706 at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, etc.’, Philosophical Transactions, 25 (1706), 2237–41.   The Correspondence of John Flamsteed, the First Astronomer Royal: 1703–1719, ed. Eric G. Forbes, Lesley Murdin and­­Frances Willmoth (Bristol: Institute of Physics, 2002). Fowler, Edward, Reflections upon a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord ***** (London, 1709). Freke, William, Elijah’s First Appearance to the Several Churches and Nations of the Earth:  Containing, First, a Full Account of His Prophetick Mission from the Most High. And after, as Exact a Relation of the Several Particulars of His Great Office for the Benefit of Men. The Whole Consisting, First, in His Personal Brief Introduction to the World. And Secondly, in His Several Revelations Manifested to Him from God and Christ, for the Reconciling of the Christians among Themselves; the Jews, Turks, and Infidels to Christ; Peace, Unity, and Brotherly Love to All Men; and All to God. By a Light Divine and Irresistible to All, but Who Will Wilfully Perish Self-Condemn’d, and That by Their Own Consciences. Who Declines to Follow Me in Imitation, Is Inexcusable; if at Least He Follow Not God thro Me in Obedience. By William Freke Esq. (London, 1709). Gailhard, Jean, ‘A Discourse about Prophets and Inspirations’, in Discourses on Several Useful Subjects London, 1708), pp. 175–208. Gilman, Caleb, Veritas Exultans, Truth Exalted and Self Abased or, A Call to Come out of Babylon, Both in Its Gross and More Refin’d Appearance, in, and amongst All Professors. Suitable to These Times Wherein So Many Voices Are Gone Forth. Shewing, That All Men Out of the Life and Power of Religion, Are in Superstition and Idolatry; And That No Worship Is Acceptable to God, but What Flows From, and Is Performed by His Own Spirit. From Whence Is Set Forth the Excellency of the Power Above the Form, of the Spirit Above the Letter; And Truth Above Shadows. Written by An Impartial Lover of Truth and Sincerity in All, but An Utter Enemy to Deceit and Hypocrisy Under What Notion Soever (London, 1708). Graverol, Jean, Réflexions désintéressées sur certains prétendus Inspirez, qui, depuis quelques temps, se mêlent de prophétiser dans Londres (London, 1707).

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Index Page numbers in italic refer to the entry’s prosopographical record in appendix. Aailion, H￸akham Solomon (Rabbi) 83 Aberdeen 57, 223, 228, 230 adultery 61, 106, 148 agitations see convulsions alchemy 6, 86, 230 Allemonde (Admiral) 30 Allut, Henriette 58, 60, 65, 90, 101, 126, 254 Allut, Jean, 32–3, 41 n114, 44, 62–3, 66, 90, 95, 120 n204, 122, 124, 126, 171, 174, 185, 233, 252 America 4, 6–7, 100, 140, 150, 226, 243 Anabaptists 3, 108 n3, 137 Anglican Church 4–5, 9–10, 67, 73 n72, 79–81, 83–5, 88, 92, 104, 107, 126–7, 135, 137–8, 141, 148, 150, 152–3, 167, 175, 189, 191–3, 206, 222, 231, 244, 246, 250 Anne (Queen) 30, 59, 92, 127, 143, 185–8, 191 see also Stuarts Antichrist 3, 22–3, 63, 78, 81–2, 85, 93, 124 antinomianism 85, 90, 163 n151, 183 Apocalypse 80–2, 123 apokatastasis 59, 86, 228 Apostles 64, 81, 92, 98, 139 apothecaries 48, 50, 64, 104, 222–5 Arianism 148 Astell, Mary 142, 144 astrology 4, 6, 102, 134, 206 asylums 219–20, 222, 226, 228, 231 Atheism 80, 90, 138, 183 Avignon 69 n13, 223

Babylon 60, 102, 123–4, 147, 188 Baldwin’s Gardens 44–5, 96 baptism 88–9 Baptists 54, 59, 66, 76 n121, 79, 83–4, 89, 100, 149, 168, 182, 217, 224, 250 Barbican 44, 122, 144, 166, 188 Basville, Nicolas Lamoignon de 22, 24–5, 27–9, 31, 204 Battie, William 232 beast 25, 80, 82, 100, 102–3, 124 Beaufre, Pierre and Jacob de 45, 52 Bedlam 183, 208–9, 214, 219, 228–9 Beer, Mary 58, 60, 97, 123, 128, 162 n146, 188, 255 Behmenism 45, 59, 86, 89, 241 n149 see also Boehme, Jacob Benezet family 87 Beverley, Thomas 8, 80, 86 Beza, Theodore 20, 47 Bickerstaff, Isaac 141 bigamy 229 see also adultery Birmingham 66, 244 Blackmore, Richard (Sir) 209, 211, 224, 227 blasphemy 6, 10, 166, 169, 177, 180–3, 191–2 Blasphemy Act (1650) 182 Blasphemy Act (1698) 169, 198 n69 blood 24, 49, 89, 102, 175, 179, 205, 212, 214, 216, 223, 227 Boehme, Jacob 47, 59, 80, 86, 228 see also Behmenism Bourignon, Antoinette 60, 228

346

Index

Boyle, Robert 83, 227 Brandenburg-Prussia 24, 33 bread 226 see also Communion Bristol 64, 66, 130, 137, 244, 276 Britain 60, 65, 67 see also England Britishness 246 Brothers, Richard 193 Brousson, Claude 20, 23–4, 33, 82 Bulkeley, Richard (Sir) 5, 43–7, 52, 63–4, 66, 76 n113, 83, 85, 90, 93, 97, 123, 128, 132, 136, 144, 146, 171, 186–9, 222, 229, 243, 252 Bunhill Fields cemetery 105, 129, 172 Burnet, Gilbert 80, 134, 168 Burton, Robert 206–7, 210, 216 Byfield, Timothy 128, 223–4, 238 n107, 239 n121, 256 Cadell, Barbara 80 Calamy, Edmund 83, 87, 99, 134, 144, 186–7, 189, 230 Calverley, Mary (Lady) 57, 74 n82, 271 Calvin, Jean 20, 27, 33, 86, 89, 100, 140, 145, 150, 244 Cambridge 64, 192, 207 Cameronians 189 Camisards beliefs 81–3, 91, 98, 103–4, 106, 121–2, 130, 141, 145 vs Huguenots 8, 18–20, 28, 175–6, 208, 244 rebellion 5, 24–30, 33, 87, 131, 191 in the Refuge 30–3, 43–8, 132, 134–5, 172, 185 Casaubon, Meric 138–9, 206–7 Cathars 20, 33, 244 Catholicism 16–18, 20–9, 67, 79, 81, 83–4, 89–92, 103, 107, 147, 150–1, 167–8, 171, 173, 175, 188, 190, 193, 207, 217, 223, 250 Cavalier (of Ribaute), Jean (Col.) 20–1, 25–6, 28–31, 131, 145, 271 Cavalier (of Sauve), Jean (prophet) 5, 26, 30–2, 66, 84, 100, 104,

121–2, 131, 136, 145, 171, 174, 176, 179, 185, 201 n118, 252 celibacy 86 censorship 121, 152 cessationism 92–3, 103–4, 126, 139–40, 206 Cévennes 17–33, 82–3, 87, 91, 94, 130, 148, 191, 204, 226 Chaila, François de Langlade du 25 Chamillart, Michel 28–9 Charles II (King) 79, 166, 172–3 see also Stuarts charity 48–9, 63, 85, 89, 188, 247 Charras, Isabeau 58, 73, 131, 253 Chastelain, Matthieu 216 Chauncy, Charles 150 chemists see apothecaries Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope (Earl of) 46 Cheyne, George 57, 118 n177, 212–15, 228 children 17, 21–2, 25–8, 33, 49, 57, 204, 213, 221, 224, 226 see also French Prophets Civil War 6, 67, 122, 150, 167, 191, 207 Clarendon Code 166–7 Clerc, Jean le 47, 121 Clerkenwell 66, 220 climate 170, 215–16 clubs 190–1 coffee houses 122, 133, 135, 190, 228 Communion 66, 84, 90–1, 146, 192, 225–6 Constantinople 243 contagion 8, 48, 207, 217–19, 231 conversion 17, 20, 64, 79, 83–4, 89–90, 92, 98, 104, 173, 186 convulsions 3, 5, 21–2, 25–6, 33, 49, 66–7, 86–8, 91, 93–9, 100–1, 107, 124, 140, 143, 145, 151, 176–7, 188, 204, 209, 217–19, 224–8, 231, 246 Cotton, Thomas 43, 45, 85, 252 Coughen, John 45, 238 n107, 271 Critchlow, Daniel 223–4, 238 n107, 254 Critchlow, Rebecca 45, 74 n82, 83, 179, 253

Index

Cromarty, George Mackenzie (1st Earl of) 190 Cruden, Alexander 230–1 Cuninghame, James 47, 62–3, 86–7, 99, 118 n177, 189, 212, 276 Daudé, Jean 32, 43, 57, 64, 69, 76, 90, 104, 120–2, 131, 171, 176–80, 183–5, 252 Davies, Eleanor (Lady) 229 Defoe, Daniel 7, 119 n196, 139, 141, 156 n41, 183, 186, 220 Deism 2, 143, 149, 151–3 demons see Devil; possession denizenship 174 Descartes 47, 205, 212, 216, 248 Désert 21–3, 25–6, 30–3, 54, 82, 93–4, 97–8, 102–3, 130, 145, 244 Devil 15, 59, 85, 99, 123, 135, 137, 139, 169, 177, 182, 206 Diggers 4, 62, 85 dissenters 4–6, 54–6, 67, 79–80, 84–5, 107, 119 n196, 122, 129, 133–4, 139–41, 148–9, 166–9, 172, 175, 186–93, 223, 244–6 dragonnades 17–18, 20 dreams 64, 101–3, 212, 214 Dublin 64, 137, 218, 223, 243 Dubourdieu, Jean 46, 176 Dutton, Thomas 44, 46–7, 65, 76 n121, 88, 96, 145, 148, 257 Eaton, Robert 69 n13, 84, 117 n152, 223, 238 n107, 266 ecumenism 9–10, 56, 61–3, 67, 84, 89–92, 107, 123, 137, 188–9 Edict of Nantes 16–17, 167–8 revocation of 18, 27, 33, 79, 82, 145, 244 Edinburgh 62, 137, 243 Elias/Elijah (prophet) 64, 80, 93, 94, 108 n14, 123, 184 Emes, Thomas 6, 45, 62–3, 85, 104–6, 127, 129, 138, 143–4, 150, 153, 172–3, 185, 187, 223–4, 238 n107, 243, 257 England 5, 10, 23–4, 30, 33, 48–9, 54–6, 59, 78–81, 93, 100–1,

347

107, 121, 134, 144, 150, 166–75, 192, 205–9, 214–16, 219–20, 231 ‘English Malady’ see Cheyne, George; melancholy Enlightenment 1–2, 4, 7, 47, 125, 127, 137, 140, 142, 149–50, 152–3, 215–16, 228, 247–9 enthusiasm definition 3–5, 107 diagnosis 140, 206, 208–19 as a disease see madness vs dissent 4, 6, 8–10, 54–6, 79, 107, 138, 140, 166–8, 186–9, 244–6 vs Enlightenment 3–5, 7, 47, 126–7, 137–40, 142, 148–53, 222, 230, 246–9 see also reason and gender 56–61, 80, 91, 133, 180, 247 manifestations 93–106 see also dreams; glossolalia; miracles; music; prophecies; visions as a social threat 4, 48–56, 67, 146, 149, 153, 172, 186–7, 204, 208, 222–3, 231, 245 see also blasphemy treatment 219–22, 226–31 Epsom salts 52, 65, 224 ergotism 226 esotericism 6, 86 excommunication 6, 28, 59, 84, 90, 107, 128, 172, 176 among the French Prophets 6, 59, 76 n122, 85, 147 exorcism 59, 92, 104–5, 139–40 Ezekiel (prophet) 102 Fage, Durand 5, 26, 30–3, 43, 62, 64, 66, 78, 82, 84, 86, 94, 97–8, 103, 121, 130–2, 136, 145–6, 148, 171–2, 176, 185, 188, 217, 252 Fallowes, Thomas 216, 227 Family of Love 3, 85 Farnham, Richard 105, 229 fasting 93, 105, 222, 225

348

Index

Fatio de Duillier, Nicolas 5, 10, 32, 41 n114, 43–9, 62–4, 66, 84, 86, 90, 98, 101–4, 121–2, 127, 131, 133, 136, 144, 146, 148, 150, 171, 176–85, 217, 230, 248, 252 Fifth Monarchists 4, 62, 85 flagellation as a medical treatment 228 as a religious practice 147, 163 n151 as a sentence 61, 182 Fleetwood, William 104, 127 Flotard, David 30, 32, 41 n114, 185, 253 Fowler, Edward 46, 81, 134, 139, 142–4, 272 Fox, George 62, 166, 217, 223 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 102 France 1, 16–30, 64, 66, 78–9, 81, 87, 100, 144–6, 167, 168, 170–1, 173–4, 176, 188, 193, 215, 244 freethinkers 2 Freke, William 8, 47, 123, 183, 272 French Prophets see appendix assemblies 43–8, 59–66, 84–5, 88, 96–7, 100–1, 106, 122–30, 146–8, 166, 169, 172, 176–7, 180, 187, 190, 225 beliefs 81–93 British followers 44, 49, 54, 83, 96, 179, 184, 190, 223 children 56, 65, 88, 94, 97–8, 148, 217, 245 education 47, 222 inspirations 26, 30, 32, 63–4, 82, 87–9, 93–107 legacy 66–7, 152–3, 193, 243–4 see also Shakers missions 6, 8, 62–6, 87, 102, 106, 129–30, 133, 189–90, 243 networks among them 44–5, 106, 122, 243–5 origins see Camisards social profile 47–56 tribes 6, 62–5, 106, 123, 190, 243, 250–1 women 49, 56–61, 65–7, 87, 94, 147–8, 188, 217, 230 widows 57–9, 64–5, 86, 148, 225

Fronde 17 Furly, Benjamin 47, 56, 87, 268 Gabriel (Angel) 60, 123 Geneva 30–2, 43, 73 n79, 136, 195 n24 gentlemen 46–8, 50, 53, 55, 132, 166, 171, 245 Germany 6, 18, 23, 31, 33, 59, 64, 133, 136, 146, 170 Gilman, Caleb 45, 47, 256 Glanvill, Joseph 207 Glasgow 137 Glorious Revolution 2, 79–80, 168, 173, 191 glossolalia 3, 8, 26–7, 33, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97–9, 101, 126, 131, 134, 179, 186 Glover, John 49, 97, 123, 125, 148, 260 Godolphin, Sidney (1st Earl of) 186 Graverol, Jean 46, 158 n79, 176 Gray, Elizabeth (‘Betty’) 46, 53, 58, 60, 63, 76 n121–2, 77 n127, 90, 96–7, 125–8, 147–8, 223, 230, 241 n156, 253 Great Budworth 148, 189 Grotesthe de la Mothe, Claude 176 Guyon, Jeanne 60 Hackney Marsh 45, 123, 129, 172, 190 Hale, Matthew (Chief Justice) 180, 182 Halhed, Nathaniel 193 hallucinations 22, 25–6 see also visions Harling, Dorothy 60, 74 n81, 147, 278 Harvey, William 205 Hecquet, Philippe 216 Heinsius, Anthonie 30 Henley, John 134, 151 heresy 4, 6, 20, 28, 92, 247 see also dissenters Hermitage, René Saunière de l’ 46 hermits 28 Hickes, George 139–40, 207 Hippocrates 216, 218 Hogarth, William 150

Index

Holland, 22–4, 30–2, 49, 65, 168, 217 Hollis, Isaac 100, 283 Holt, John (Chief Justice) 176–7, 179–80, 184, 230 homosexuality 85, 146, 148, 184 Hooke, John 45, 85, 177–8, 188, 255 hospitals 27, 143, 219–20, 229 see also asylums Hoxton 44, 220 Huber family 41 n114, 102–3 Hughes, Isabel 57, 65, 84, 128, 264 Huguenots 5, 9, 16–18, 22–4, 27, 30–3, 43, 45–6, 48–52, 64, 79, 82–4, 88, 122, 130–2, 143–5, 167–8, 171–80, 184, 190–1, 193, 244–6, 250 Hume, David 152, 248 Humfrey, John 49, 87, 139, 144 humoralism 206–7, 211, 214, 228 hypochondria 211, 215, 224, 227 hysteria 147, 211 idiocy 211–12, 214, 220 idleness 207, 210, 214, 217 imagination 118 n175, 139–41, 150, 152, 206–7, 210–13, 218 Interregnum 3, 64, 79, 86, 93, 133, 182, 188, 206–7 Ireland 33, 64, 132, 167 irenicism 188, 245, 247 Irvine, Margaret 58, 278 Irving, Edward 99, 153 Italy 18, 64, 130 Jackson, Benjamin 96, 257 Jackson, James 84, 123, 128, 258 Jacobites 101, 189, 192–3, 236 n73 James II (King) 8, 23, 80, 173 see also Stuarts Jews 2, 23, 64, 80, 82–3, 89, 91–3, 98, 142, 168, 249, 250 Johnson, George 188, 273 Joineau, Louis 61, 66, 279 Judgement Day 81, 85, 102, 106, 108, 147, 170, 177, 179, 182, 190 Jurieu, Hélène 57, 276 Jurieu, Pierre 21, 23, 66, 82–3, 91, 276

349

Kabbalah 86, 230 Keach, Benjamin 183 Keimer, Mary 57–8, 60, 65, 97, 128, 147–8, 229, 257 Keimer, Samuel 46, 57, 64–5, 88, 100, 116 n138, 123, 133, 136, 139, 144, 146, 160 n108, 162 n146, 172, 185, 217, 225, 229, 257 Keith, James 44–5, 57, 68 n11, 83, 118 n177, 171, 212, 223, 254 Kingston, Richard 125, 139, 144, 147 Lacy, John 5–6, 43–7, 52, 61–4, 66, 76 n121–2, 83, 85–8, 90, 92, 95–9, 101, 104–5, 107, 122, 124, 126–33, 137–8, 142, 144, 148, 171–2, 175–6, 179, 184–9, 217, 222–3, 225–6, 230, 243, 253 Lancashire 62, 66, 76 n122 Languedoc 5, 16–31, 58, 88, 100, 131, 145, 168, 204 Laporte, Pierre (aka ‘Roland’) 25, 28–31 Latitudinarians 79 Lavington, George (Bishop) 151, 153 Lavington, Mary 66, 284 lawyers 23, 32, 46, 48, 50, 57, 96, 245 Lazarus 105 Lead, Jane 44, 54, 59–60, 62, 80, 92 Lee, Ann 6 Lee, Francis 56, 92 Levellers 62, 133, 152, 190 ‘levellism’ 63, 76 n122, 85, 188 levitation 127–8 Licensing Act 9, 121, 134, 136, 185 literacy 18, 27, 47, 57, 67, 135, 215 Liverpool 220 Lloyd, William (Bishop) 81 Locke, John 47, 139–40, 168, 205, 212, 247 London 43–8, 172–6 Passim Louis XIV 5, 16, 18, 24, 29, 33, 168, 188, 204 love feasts 90, 146, 226 Ludolf, Heinrich Wilhelm 129 lunacy 207–8, 211, 214, 216, 219–21, 227, 229, 231 Luther, Martin 3, 86, 138

350

Index

madness 10, 150, 172, 205, 210–11, 215, 218–20, 232 diagnosis 208–10, 216–17 legislation 220–2 madhouses 210, 220–1, 229–31 treatments 226–8 Manchester 6, 66, 220, 244 mania 210–11, 214, 216–17, 227–9, 231 Marion, Elie 5–6, 10, 26, 29–33, 43, 47, 62–6, 78, 82–4, 86, 88, 90, 93–4, 97, 100, 102, 104, 106, 121–2, 127, 129–33, 136–7, 145, 147, 171–2, 174–8, 185–6, 188, 191, 217, 225, 252 trial of 176–87, 193, 246 marriage 57–8, 74 n79, 85–6, 162 n146, 175, 188, 191, 197 n55, 231 see also celibacy Marsin, M. 80, 83, 86 Martignargues, battle of 29 martyrdom 9, 23, 38 n61, 82, 91, 102–3, 131, 141, 179, 184, 187, 191, 244 Mary II (Queen) 59, 127, 173 Mary (Virgin) 59 Mason, John 8, 45, 63, 80, 83, 86, 100, 150, 244 masquerade 125–6, 144 see also theatre Mazel, Abraham 25, 29–30, 156 n47, 191, 264 Mead, Richard 220, 228 medicine 2, 7–8, 10, 17, 48, 137, 140, 182, 193, 204–32, 246 meeting houses 44, 77 n140, 122, 149, 168, 179 see also dissenters; French Prophets melancholy 139, 141–2, 150, 205–7, 209–11, 214–16, 222, 227–9, 231 Methodism 6, 8, 54, 62, 66, 100–1, 107, 130, 149–52, 231, 250 see also Wesley, Charles and John miasma 218 Middleton, Margaret 57, 278

millenarianism 3, 5–10, 24, 33, 44, 46, 53–4, 59–60, 62–3, 67, 78–85, 87, 89, 91–3, 105–6, 123, 126, 134, 168, 188–9, 191, 231–2, 243–5 ethe 81–3 miracles 3–4, 6, 8, 21, 26–7, 46, 63, 79, 83, 91–2, 103–7, 126–9, 137–40, 152, 179–80, 186, 192, 222–3, 247 Miremont, Armand de BourbonMalauze (Marquis de) 30, 32, 44, 185, 252 Misson, François-Maximillien 42 n115, 64, 86, 97–8, 130–3, 135, 171–8, 243, 253 moderation 80, 141, 151, 192, 207–8, 210, 214, 228 Monmouth’s rebellion 191 Monro, James (Dr) 210, 220, 231 Montanists 9, 91–3, 95, 97, 100, 105, 107, 150–1 Montesquieu 215–16 Montpellier 17–18, 22, 204 Montrevel, Marshal de 27–8 Moor(e), Thomas 8, 80, 83, 86, 89, 123, 183–4 Moore, John 102, 265 Moore, John (Bishop) 207, 209, 213 Moravians 60, 66, 250 Morgan, Thomas 149 Morphew, John 136 Moult, Francis 44–5, 52, 64–6, 86, 156 n57, 223–4, 226, 258 Moult, Mary 57, 119 n196, 162 n146, 197 n55, 266 Muggletonians 4, 45, 62, 66, 85, 89–90, 123, 137, 182, 217, 223 music 27, 50–1, 100–1, 125, 134, 142–3, 218 nakedness 87, 147, 170, 221 naturalisation 174, 191 see also denizenship Nayler, James 123, 182, 217 nerves 205, 211–12, 215, 217–18, 227 Newgate prison 208

Index

newspapers 121, 135–6 Newton, Isaac 5, 7, 81, 83, 134, 189, 216, 230, 248 Nicholson, Henry 98, 132, 144, 218, 223, 225, 265 Nîmes 18, 28–9, 32, 100 nobility 17, 28, 33, 56 Noble, Samuel 133, 259 nonconformism see dissenters Norwich 163 n151, 207, 209, 219 Nutt, Guy 64, 85–6, 147, 259 Oates, Titus 191 orality 9, 21, 32–3, 95, 130, 134–5, 244 Origen 80, 89, 108 n14, 184, 192 Ormonde, Duke of 180 Ouvreleul, Jean-Bapiste l’ 21–2 Oxford 64, 248 pamphlets, battle of 135–148 Papists see Catholicism passions 207, 209, 212–13, 217 Paul (apostle) 64, 95, 97–8, 105, 107, 247 Penn, William 46, 87 Pepys, Samuel 43 Philadelphian Society 8, 44–5, 54, 56, 59, 61–3, 66, 80, 83–4, 86, 88–9, 91, 100, 107, 123, 168, 189, 218, 244, 248, 250 physicians 10, 57, 127, 135, 204–5, 208–16, 218, 220–2, 226–8, 231–2, 246 among the French Prophets 45, 48, 50–1, 222–4, 230 Pietism, 6, 102, 129 pillory 141, 180–3 Plato 82, 90, 150, 207, 218 Poiret, Pierre 83 Popish Plot 79, 166, 172, 175, 190–1 Pordage, John 45, 59, 86 Portalès, Charles 30, 32, 43, 46, 47, 52, 57, 62, 64–5, 101, 121, 131, 171, 178, 185, 252 possession 92, 105, 136, 138–40, 204–5, 215 see also enthusiasm

351

posset 225–6 Potter, John 63, 65–6, 89, 97, 105, 123, 129, 137, 162 n146, 172, 179, 188, 255 Powell, John 178, 180, 184, 199 n80 Powell, Martin 143–4 predestination 89 see also salvation Presbyterians 32, 54–5, 67, 79, 83–4, 87, 99, 149, 167–8, 186, 189, 217, 230, 250 ‘Pretender’, James Edward the 171 primogeniture 85, 249 printers 48, 50, 64, 84, 99, 123, 133, 136, 139, 178, 185–6, 217, 245 prophecies 6, 21–3, 25, 61, 66, 78–83, 92, 105–6, 128–9, 134, 137, 178–9, 187–8, 222 prostitution 21, 56, 85, 221 providence 26, 103, 137, 140, 247 puppet shows see masquerade; Powell, Martin; theatre Puritanism 103, 206 quacks 216, 222, 224, 227, 231 Quakers 6, 9, 45–7, 54–5, 57, 60–2, 66, 79, 83–91, 94–5, 100, 103, 105, 107, 123, 127–8, 133, 137, 150, 152, 166–9, 182, 189, 193, 207, 218, 225, 250 Quietism 6, 83, 87, 118 n177, 189, 228 radicalism 6, 64, 67, 78, 86, 107, 137, 166, 190, 244–5 Ramsay, Andrew (Chevalier) 118 n177, 212, 275 Ranters 4, 56, 84–5, 182, 223, 226 Raoux, Jeanne 45, 49, 57–8, 64–5, 84, 257 reason 1, 3–4, 138, 140, 149, 204, 207, 209, 210, 212, 217, 221–2, 247, 249 Reformation (the), 3–4, 20, 59, 92, 107, 134, 138, 141–2, 247

352

Index

resurrection 6, 45, 62–3, 85, 88, 104–6, 108 n14, 127, 129, 137–8, 172, 185, 187, 223 ribbons 190–1 Rijswijk, Treaty of (1697) 24 riots 7, 171–2, 179, 186, 190–1 Roach, Richard 45, 56, 60, 83, 178, 253, see Philadelphian Society Robinson, Nicholas 209, 213, 216, 227–8 Rocayrol, Tobie 29 Rome 80, 92, 106, 145, 223, 243 Royal Bounty 48–9, 58, 173, 176 Rye House Plot 79, 166, 190–1 Sacheverell, Henry 191–2 Salters’ Hall 148 salvation 80, 88–9, 207, 210, 226, 229 Satan see Devil satire 126, 129, 141–4, 150, 187, 189, 224, 246 Savoy (French Church of) 84–5, 172, 175–6, 180, 184, 208 Schism Act 148, 192 Scotland 1, 6, 64, 98, 102, 136, 171, 189, 212, 226 Scottish Quietists see Quietism scrofula 92, 127 sedition 10, 17, 166–7, 172, 177, 179–80, 184, 192–3, 208 senses 93, 101, 211–13, 218, 228 separatism 67, 80, 83–4 sermons 47, 59, 134–5, 143, 191–2, 207 Serre, Guillaume du 21–2, 26 sex 85–7, 146–8 see also homosexuality Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper (3rd Earl of) 7, 46–7, 121, 135, 141–3, 152, 187, 245, 248 Shakers 6, 66, 86, 99, 101, 107, 243–4 see also Wardley, James and Jane Sheppard, Nathaniel 65, 104, 119 n196, 260 Shovell, Cloudesley (Admiral) 30, 58 Sidney, Algernon 47, 168 Silesia 93

sin 59, 85, 89, 101, 206 Smalbroke, Richard (Bishop) 46 Smallpox 219, 223 Smart, Christopher 229 Societies for the Reformation of Manners 45, 85, 90, 189 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 177, 188, 250 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) 45, 85, 90, 188, 250 sodomy 184 see also homosexuality Socinianism 84, 90, 146, 168, 224 soul 82, 95, 134, 140, 204–6, 209–13, 218, 229 Southwark 45, 123 Spanish Succession (War of the) 24, 169 Spinoza 47, 84, 146, 230 Spitalfields 32, 41 n114, 49, 174–5, 190, 209 Stanhope, 1st Earl of 192 Starkey, George 227 Steed, Anne 58, 84, 87, 128, 137, 147, 263 Stillingfleet, Edward 80, 134 Stockholm 243 Stoddart, Dinah 60, 258 Stonehenge 130 Stuarts 79, 127 see also Anne (Queen); Charles II; James II students 48, 50–1, 223, 230 suicide 215–16, 221, 229 Sunderland, 3rd Earl of 192 surgeons 27, 58, 222 Swammerdam, Jan 248 Sweden 23, 64, 93, 102, 136 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 248 Swift, Jonathan 7, 136, 141, 219 Switzerland 21, 23, 29, 31–3, 64–5, 136, 145, 174 swords 46, 172, 190 Sydenham, Thomas 205, 211, 220 taverns 122, 125, 135, 172, 190 taxation 28, 174, 219

Index

Taylor, John 8, 182–3, 229 teachers 21, 24, 41 n114, 50–1, 177, 180, 229 Tellier, Daniel le 84, 88, 101, 254 Tertullian 91 Testas, Aaron 176 theatre 123–5, 135, 143–4 Threadneedle Street (French Church of) 45, 175–6 Tiley, Joseph 190, 258 Tillotson, John (Archbishop) 81, 134 tithes 85, 169 tobacco 56, 226 Toft, Mary 213 Toland, John 47 tolerance 166–9 see also Edict of Nantes Toleration Act (1689) 2, 9, 67, 78–9, 134, 136, 149, 166–9, 179, 184, 187, 192–3, 244 Topham, Ann 58, 61, 74 n84, 147, 263 Tories 136, 140–2, 167, 169, 172–3, 187, 192–3 torture 25, 28, 182 Toulouse 18, 23, 31, 145, 188 Tryon, Thomas 214, 219 Turner, Mary 58, 61, 84, 128, 259 Tutchin, John 208 Unitarians 168–9 universities 56, 169, 204, 220, 222–3, 227, 238 n103 Urfey, Thomas d’ 143–4 Urquhart, Patrick 223, 226, 264 utopianism 83, 106, 247 Vagrancy Act 221–2 Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre de 24 vegetarianism 214, 228 Venner, Thomas 62 Verduron family 45, 162 n146, 253, 258 Versailles 27, 29, 188 Vienna 243 Villars, Claude-Louis-Hector (Marshal de) 29–31 Vincent, Isabeau 21, 23

353

visions 4–5, 25, 80, 85, 87, 92–3, 101–2, 150, 189, 214, 225 Vivens, François 22–3, 33 Voltaire 78, 153, 192, 248 Voutron, Louis-Henri de Mazières de 45, 260 Walpole, Robert (Sir) 192 Wardley, James and Jane 6, 45, 66 watchmakers 45, 52–3, 56 weavers 18, 31–2, 48–9, 174, 190, 229 Wenham, Jane 180 Wesley, Charles 100, 151 Wesley, John 60, 66, 107, 140, 151, 153, 210 Wesley, Susannah 210 Weyer, Johann 205–6 Wharton, Hannah 63, 66, 106, 275 Whigs 140–2, 167–9, 189–93, 208 Whiston, William 81, 189, 248 Whitefield, George 150–1, 153 Whitrow, Abraham 44, 61, 63, 85, 97, 104, 120 n203, 188, 256 Whitrow, Mary 57, 61, 276 widows 80, 173, 231 see also French Prophets William III (King) 23–4, 30, 59, 80, 127, 168, 173 Willis, Thomas 205, 211–12, 227 Wiltshire, Sarah 61, 63, 257 Winstanley, Gerrard 62 witchcraft 139–40, 152, 180, 205, 226 women see enthusiasm; French Prophets Woodward, Josiah 53, 59, 100, 216 wool-combers 25, 28, 52 Woolston, Thomas 183, 192 Worcester 64, 66, 81, 244 writers 43, 50–1, 64, 93, 130, 139, 142 Wynantz, Francis 56, 283 York 66, 220, 232 Yverdon 102–3 Zevi, Sabbatai 80 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus von (Count) 60