Martyrs and Mystics

INTRODUCTION

It all started to get confusing when God handed Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The commandments began: ‘I am the Lord thy God . . . Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’

Did people generally concur with this? Not quite. John Wroe announced in 1825 in the grim mill town of Ashton-under-Lyne, to the east of Manchester, that he was god. Ashton would duly become a holy city, the New Jerusalem, and Wroe built four ‘holy’ gateways while awaiting the imminent return of Jesus Christ, God’s chosen one, presumably through one of them. He was still waiting when he died in 1863. It is not known whether Jesus did ever appear in Ashton.

Then there was the Revd John Hugh Smyth-Pigott. He was a charming Dubliner who in 1902 proclaimed his own divinity from the Ark of the Covenant, an extravagant temple he built in Lower Clapton, London. The Church of England defrocked Smyth-Pigott but he retorted: ‘I am God. It does not matter what they do.’ He probably wasn’t and it probably did.

But let’s go back to the story of Moses, receiver of the Ten Commandments in biblical times. Barely had he received the tablets than he took them down from the mountain to the Children of Israel, only to find that while he was gone they had made themselves a new god – a Golden Calf no less – and were dancing about ecstatically in front of it.

He broke the tablets and had to go back up the mountain to receive a new set. Two tablets of stone, or possibly not. According to Kabbalah legend, the Ten Commandments were not presented on two gravestone-like slabs, as depicted in countless paintings and book illustrations, but on two tiny jewels, possibly sapphires, more likely diamonds, which glowed when placed on the Breastplate of Judgment. If so, how did Moses break them? Diamonds are the hardest substance known to man, and even sapphires are not easy to destroy. And what happened to those sapphires?

So where does reality triumph over myth here? Martyrs and Mystics offers no definite explanation but it does attempt to recount such bizarre stories and legends – in Britain if not the Holy Land. Not that Britain hasn’t been seen as being holy in its own right down the ages – by William Blake, Christopher Wren, George Fox, John Wroe – but you’ll have to dip inside to find out how and why.

* Buildings or sites which no longer exist are denoted by bold italics..

CHAPTER 1

LONDON

The capital has been host to all the major disputes and upheavals in the nation’s religious past. Here the shifts and schisms that have changed the history of England have been played out: from the break with Rome in the 1530s to the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s, and from the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.

Here too a myriad of sects and cults have taken shape – the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Peculiar People of Plumstead – driven by a succession of mavericks and mystics, as colourful as they were obscure. There was Thomas Tany, who in 1654 claimed to be Theauraujohn, High Priest of the Jews, about to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem with himself in charge. And John Robins, a mid-seventeenth-century mystic from Moorfields, who failed in his plan to take nearly 150,000 followers to the Holy Land, feeding them solely on dry bread, raw vegetables and water. In 1814, more farcically, there was Joanna Southcott, who claimed she would give birth to Shiloh, the biblical child who, according to the Book of Revelation, was to ‘rule all the nations with a rod of iron’.

Such drama continues to take place in the capital. As recently as 1985 the world’s press gathered at a Brick Lane curry house to meet the Lord Maitreya (or Christ, the Imam Mahdi or Krishna according to the different religions), who may or may not have appeared – depending as always on one’s faith. In 2008, when a member of the congregation at St Mary’s church, Putney, disrupted the service shouting out his views on the controversy over gay clergy, he was simply another manifestation of the ageold unsolvable conundrum of what to do when one’s own views differ from those of the next person.

Key events

The Gordon Riots

London’s most violent religious disturbance was a week of mayhem in June 1780 which resulted in hundreds of deaths and the burning and looting of much of the capital in the wake of government plans to allow Catholics greater civil rights. The protest became known as the Gordon Riots because the mob was whipped into a frenzy by Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association.

Two years previously, the Catholic Relief Act had been passed, banning any further persecution of Catholic priests. This followed negotiations by the government with a group of Catholic gentry who agreed to drop Stuart claims to the throne and to deny the civil jurisdiction of the Pope. Catholics were still, however, banned from holding important public posts in teaching and the army, though by 1780 the government, concerned at the depleted number of troops available to fight in the American War of Independence, considered changing the law to allow Catholics to join the army.

On Friday 2 June 1780 Parliament met to debate the proposals. When Lord Gordon failed to win approval for his anti-Catholic petition by 192 votes to 6, the mob went on the rampage. Spoiling for a fight, they headed for the only places in London where Catholics could worship openly – two chapels in Soho and Holborn. They ransacked the buildings, smashed the doors and windows, and burnt prayer books and religious artefacts in the street.

By noon the next day it appeared the disturbance was over, but at three in the afternoon soldiers escorting a group of thirteen men to Bow Street Magistrates Court were pelted with mud. In the slum district of Moorfields the houses of Irish immigrants (mostly Catholic) were attacked. As the violence continued on the Sunday, householders chalked up the warning ‘No Popery’ on their doors. The Italian parents of the clown Joseph Grimaldi daubed on their door ‘No religion’, while in the Jewish ghetto around Houndsditch houses were chalked with the words: ‘This is the home of a true Protestant.’

The following day riot leaders marched on Lord Gordon’s house in Welbeck Street, Marylebone, to bring him trophies of relics ransacked from the looted chapels. Tuesday 6 June was the worst day of mayhem. A hugh mob swarmed through Seven Dials heading for Newgate Prison. One who joined it en route was the painter-poet William Blake, who had seen the crowd from his studio window and had joined it out of curiosity. The rioters attacked the gaol with sledgehammers and pickaxes, and prisoners poured out, though some stayed put, at a loss of where to go, until the rioters set fire to the building.

Trouble continued for the rest of the week, at the end of which 285 people were dead and 200 wounded. Although Lord Gordon was charged with high treason and sent to the Tower, where he languished for eight months, he was cleared of blame. Remarkably he later forsook the Anglican Church for Judaism, changed his name to Israel Abraham George Gordon, and died at the age of forty-two in Newgate Prison where, ironically, he had been incarcerated for libelling Marie Antoinette.

Bermondsey

ST THOMAS A WATERING, Old Kent Road at Albany Road

John Penry was publicly hanged in 1593 at this ancient site, where streams cross the ancient London to Dover road, and which was mentioned by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, for campaigning too vigorously for Welsh religious independence and a Welsh Bible. When Penry acquired a printing press John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was most vexed and had Penry arrested and imprisoned. He escaped to Scotland but eventually chose to return to London to continue campaigning for religious teaching in Wales to be conducted in Welsh. He was arrested in Islington in March 1593 and sentenced to death, without being allowed to see his wife or four daughters – Deliverance, Comfort, Safety and Sure-Hope.

→ Canterbury Cathedral, p. 142

Blackheath

During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 John Ball preached a sermon here on the main route from Kent into London in which he thundered:

What right do they have to rule over us? Why do they deserve to be in authority? If we all came from Adam and Eve what proof do they have that they are better than we? Therefore why should we labour for them while they live in luxury?

From his preaching came the rhyme that was soon upon the lips of many: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was the gentle man?’ However, in the rampage which followed, the mob dragged Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, from the Tower of London and killed him.

Bloomsbury

JAMES PIERREPONT GREAVESS ADDRESS, 49 Burton Street

Greaves was an early nineteenth-century educationalist and theologian who promoted piety among his followers while urging them to embrace the latest fashionable dietary and sexual fads such as vegetarianism, water-drinking and celibacy. Greaves was later described by G. J. Holyoake, pioneer of the co-operative movement, as ‘the most accomplished, pleasant and inscrutable mystic this country has produced’. In the 1830s he opened a school on Ham Common near Richmond, Surrey, based on the healthy notion that ‘Pure air, simple food, exercise and cold water are more beneficial to man than any churches, chapels, or cathedrals.’ Thomas Carlyle, the great essayist and historian, was not convinced and denounced Greaves as a ‘humbug . . . few greater blockheads broke the world’s breads in my day’.

TEMPLE OF THE OCCULT, 99 Gower Street

Frank Dutton Jackson, a fake cleric, and his wife, Editha, set up a Temple of the Occult in the heart of Georgian Bloomsbury in the early years of the twentieth century. Here Jackson, describing himself as Theo Horos, debauched hundreds of young girls in mock religious ceremonies conducted under low lights in a haze of incense smoke. He told one girl, Daisy Adams, he was Jesus Christ and that she would give birth to a divine child. He and Editha, who claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Ludwig I of Bavaria, were eventually prosecuted. They were tried at the Old Bailey where Jackson pleaded: ‘Did Solomon not have 300 legal wives and 600 others?’ He was nevertheless convicted of raping and procuring girls for immoral purposes.

The Spectator magazine occupied the building from the 1920s to 1975, and it now belongs to the Catholic chaplaincy.

→ The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, p. 71

UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF CHRIST THE KING, Byng Place

This superb Gothic revival church was built in 1851–4 in the medieval Early English architectural style for the Catholic Apostolic sect. Its first preacher, Edward Irving, was expelled from a nearby Presbyterian church for encouraging the congregation to ‘speak in tongues’ – talk spontaneously in ancient biblical languages. In the church basement is a room filled with ceremonial cloaks, including one reserved for the return of Jesus Christ.

Canonbury

CANONBURY TOWER, Canonbury Place

This ancient and unusual-looking brick tower, north London’s oldest building, was where Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister and vicar-general, organised the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.

In April 1535 the authorities ordered ‘all supporters of the Pope’s jurisdiction’ were to be arrested. On 20 April they arrested the priors of Charterhouse, Beauvale and Axholme, and Dr Richard Reynolds of the Bridgettine monastery of Syon near Brentford. One of Cromwell’s agents discovered that the abbot there had persuaded a nun, to whom he was confessor, to submit her body to his pleasure ‘and thus persuaded her in confession, making her believe that whensoever and as oft as they should meddle together, if she were immediately after confessed by him, and took of him absolution, she should be clear forgiven of God’.

Those arrested were charged with denying that the king was the supreme head of the English Church and were sentenced to death. A month later they were hanged at Tyburn. Later that year came the more infamous executions of Bishop Fisher and Thomas More (→ p. 52) for refusing to accept the Oath of Supremacy. At the end of the decade, with the dissolution of the religious houses practically complete, the king handed the Canonbury Manor to Cromwell. Unfortunately, the vicar-general had only a year to live: he was executed on trumped-up charges of treason in 1540.

In the eighteenth century Canonbury Tower and the surrounding estate were rebuilt in a restrained but elegant Palladian style to the exact dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, for reasons unknown but possibly connected with the earlier sojourn of polymath Francis Bacon – philosopher, science pioneer, Lord Chancellor and Rosicrucian – who worked there at the end of the sixteenth century.

In 1795 Richard Brothers, the false messiah who prophesied that he would lead the Israelites back to Palestine from across the world, was imprisoned in the tower for eleven years for sedition.

Canonbury Tower is now a Masonic research centre.

→ Richard Brothers, Prince of the Hebrews, p. 75.

The Rosicrucians

An ultra-secret, international, quasi-religious body, the Rosicrucians claim to possess mystical wisdom handed down through the generations. They have strong connections with Canonbury Tower, which some believe to be the location of their secret international headquarters. The group may have been founded by Christian Rosenkreutz, a fifteenth-century mystic who supposedly travelled extensively in the East before returning to Europe armed with the entire body of knowledge that would be useful to the world, the knowledge handed by God to Noah before the Flood and then to Moses on Mount Sinai – ‘the knowledge that was, the knowledge that is, the knowledge that will be’.

Rosenkreutz then handed this information to German alchemists based in Kassel, choosing that city as it was the most scientifically advanced in the world at that time, and they in turn cryptically outlined their findings in a series of pamphlets published early in the seventeenth century which spoke of a secret brotherhood working for the good of mankind.

In 1622 the Rosicrucians announced themselves to the world, when one morning the citizens of Paris awoke to find the walls of their city covered with posters bearing the following message:

We, the deputies of the principal College of the Brethren of the Rose Cross (Rosicrucians) are among you in this town, visibly and invisibly, through the grace of the Most High to whom the hearts of all just men are turned, in order to save our fellow-men from the error of death.

In England Francis Bacon, James I’s Lord Chancellor and the foremost scholar of his day, worked on the sect’s findings at Canonbury Tower, while all over Europe leading philosophers, scientists, mystics and scholars waited for an invitation to join the organisation. When none came – officially – they formed their own Rosicrucian societies, which have continued to the present day. But which are the real Rosicrucians and which are imposters no one is willing to assert.

The City

The ancient heart of London, just one square mile in size, is the setting for the country’s main cathedral, St Paul’s. During the 1666 Fire of London eighty-six churches were destroyed here. Although over the subsequent centuries the City’s population has withered away the area still has the greatest concentration of religious buildings in England – thirty-nine churches and one synagogue, Bevis Marks, Britain’s oldest. In 1847 Lionel de Rothschild was elected MP for the City of London but was unable to take his seat as new MPs were required to take the Christian oath, something which as a Jew he refused to do. A compromise wasn’t reached until 1858.

ALDERSGATE, Aldersgate Street at Gresham Street

Aldersgate was one of twelve traditional gates of the City of London (along with Aldgate, Moorgate, Newgate and others). Each represented one of the tribes of Israel, as medieval leaders thought this would give the city divine legitimacy. In 1603 when James VI of Scotland journeyed to London for the first time to take the throne as James I of England he entered through Aldersgate. The king later had the structure rebuilt with statues of Old Testament prophets Samuel and Jeremiah, and accompanying biblical texts. These told his subjects he was God’s anointed monarch, a direct descendant of King David, and that the British were the chosen people, descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and now holders of Christianity’s mantle, who at the Lord’s second appearance would gather together as one family from whom ‘the elect’ would be chosen.

→ Creation of the King James Bible, p. 59

Sacred City

As with many ancient cities, London’s early town planners were guided by the ‘sacred’ measurements of the Bible, which supposedly give cities divine protection. They are based on the Old Testament unit of the cubit, the length from the tip of the fingers to the elbow, set, inevitably, by the individual in charge of the measuring and thus differing from person to person.

The key ‘sacred’ lengths are 1,600 cubits, as used in building Solomon’s Temple, and 2,000 cubits. The latter distance features prominently in the Old Testament Book of Numbers, chapter 35 which instructs builders: ‘Ye shall measure from without the city on the east side two thousand cubits, and on the south side two thousand cubits, and on the west side two thousand cubits, and on the north side two thousand cubits, and the city shall be in the midst.’

This measurement has special significance. In Hebrew 1,000 is denoted by the letter aleph ( ). Two thousand is therefore two alephs, and these letters spliced together form the Star of David, the great icon of Jewish lore. Two thousand cubits is the distance from Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives. In the City of London the distance from Temple Bar, the historic boundary between the cities of London and Westminster to St Paul’s is 2,000 cubits. Similarly, the ancient church of St Dunstan-in-the-East stands 2,000 cubits from St Paul’s as the City’s eastern boundary.

Those in charge of rebuilding London after the 1666 Fire – Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Nicholas Hawksmoor and his team – were in thrall to the idea of sacred geometry. Although they were scientists and men of reason, their agenda was rich with religious arcana. They were influenced by the notion that Christianity had arrived in England as early as the first century AD, long before it had reached Rome. They were inspired by the story in the Book of Zechariah of how the Israelite prophet of the same name meets the Lord Himself, who is disguised as an architect:

I lifted up mine eyes again, and looked, and behold there was a man with a measuring line in his hand. Then said I, ‘Whither goest thou?’ And he said unto me, ‘To measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof, and what is the length thereof.’

Consequently they wanted to reshape London as the New Jerusalem – the leading city of Christendom in a world free of papist rule. The idea of London as the New Jerusalem had long been envisaged by the enlightened. Even Charles I had promised it in a 1620 sermon: ‘For Here hath the Lord ordained the thrones of David, for judgement: and the charre of Moyses, for instruction, this Church, your Son indeed, others are but Synagogues, this your Jerusalem, the mother to them all.’ It was a theme later adopted by William Blake, among others, whose epic poem Jerusalem casts London as the holy city: ‘We builded Jerusalem as a City & a Temple’.

Wren, Hawksmoor and the other architects created a chain of buildings and features set apart by ‘sacred’ measurements. Two thousand cubits east of Wren’s favourite church, St Dunstan-in-the-East, they created a haven for intellectuals and free-thinkers on the site of an ancient well. This became Wellclose Square (→ p. 55), for centuries the most prosperous location in east London but now almost derelict. In the centre of the square was a Hawksmoor church which stood 2,000 cubits from his better-known (and still standing) Christ Church Spitalfields. And Christ Church is itself 2,000 cubits north-east of Hawksmoor’s St Mary Woolnoth by what is now Bank station.

The pattern continues with other well-known buildings from that period. Hawksmoor’s church of St George-in-the-East stands 2,000 cubits from the Roman wall. The site of the now partly demolished St Luke’s on Old Street is 2,000 cubits north of St Paul’s, and the site of another now demolished Hawksmoor church, St John Horselydown, just south of Tower Bridge, lies 2,000 cubits from the Monument, whose own setting is a masterpiece of maths and astronomy (→ p. 22).

ALL HALLOWS THE GREAT, 90 Upper Thames Street

One of England’s most extreme millennial sects, the Fifth Monarchy Men, was founded at this now demolished church in 1651. Exploiting the political and religious turmoil in the aftermath of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, the Fifth Monarchy Men believed the days of earthly kings were over and sought to prepare the country for the imminent appearance of Jesus Christ himself as king.

Christ would rule the fifth kingdom outlined in the Old Testament Book of Daniel. (The first four, so they claimed, were those of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires.) But before he could do so a godly kingdom on earth – the Rule of the Saints – would violently replace the old order. The Fifth Monarchists consequently lauded the execution of King Charles and urged similar attacks on the rich as they stood in the way of the saintly kingdom.

In 1653 the Fifth Monarchists attained some influence in Oliver Cromwell’s new parliamentary assembly, so when he dissolved it that December and appointed himself Lord Protector – de facto king – the group felt betrayed. Three Fifth Monarchy Men were imprisoned for denouncing Cromwell, and their leader Thomas Harrison was expelled from the army. A Fifth Monarchist plot to overthrow the Lord Protector was uncovered in 1657 when its instigator, Thomas Venner, previously a minister at a church on Coleman Street in the City, was briefly imprisoned for planning to blow up the Tower of London.

On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 Thomas Harrison was arrested and put to death for participating in Charles I’s execution. Now Venner took over. He led the Fifth Monarchy Men along a distinctly militant path. Infuriated by the torture and execution of Harrison and the popish leanings of the Church reformed around the new king, Charles II, Venner planned insurrection before Charles could be crowned. On New Year’s Day 1661 he and around fifty Fifth Monarchy rebels staged a violent but unsuccessful uprising in London. Shouting their war cry of ‘King Jesus and the heads upon the gates’, they attacked the major buildings of the City, as Samuel Pepys noted in his diary:

A great rising in the city of the Fifth-monarchy men, which did very much disturb the peace and liberty of the people, so that all the train-bands arose in arms, both in London and Westminster, as likewise all the king’s guards; and most of the noblemen mounted, and put all their servants on coach horses, for the defence of His Majesty, and the peace of his kingdom.

Around forty soldiers and civilians were killed. Venner was captured and executed outside his Coleman Street church. The Fifth Monarchy movement carried on briefly but then declined.

All Hallows the Great was demolished in the late nineteenth century for road widening.

→ Cromwell in Ireland, p. 297

BLACKFRIARS MONASTERY, Ireland Yard

It was in Blackfriars that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s council met in May 1382 to denounce John Wycliffe’s religious doctrines and his pioneering translation of the Bible into English.

As the hearing began, an earthquake, rare for London, rocked the City. Wycliffe, understandably, claimed the event as a sign of God’s discontent with the council’s hostile attitude to his reformist teachings. The council, with equal confidence, took the quake as proof of the Lord’s displeasure with Wycliffe.

As William Courtenay, the Archbishop of Canterbury, explained:

This earthquake foretells the purging of this kingdom from heresies, for as there are shut up in the bowels of the earth many noxious spirits which are expelled in an earthquake, and so the earth is cleansed but not without great violence, so there are many heresies shut up in the hearts of reprobate men, but by the condemnation of them, the kingdom is to be cleansed; but not without trouble and great commotion.

The synod then found against Wycliffe on twenty-four counts of heresy.

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