CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When Women Preach

‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak’; it was this verse from St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians which was at the root of the accepted condemnation of female preaching (and participation in church government) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. To conventional Christian ears, the mighty voice of the Apostle still thundered down the centuries with undiminished vigour and there seemed little distinction to be drawn between St Paul’s admonition to the inhabitants of Achaea in the first century AD, and the will of God 1,600 years later.

For women, as a whole, there had to be a more private – and one might add less voluble – way of influencing their contemporaries; or as the epitaph of the pious and charitable Lettice Viscountess Falkland phrased it:

Richard Brathwaite, in The English Gentlewoman of 1631, that mine of advice on the conduct of the modest female, took the argument one stage further. Just as ‘discourse of State-matters’ would not become her, it was equally unsuitable ‘to dispute of high points of Divinity’: since women were forbidden to be speakers in church it was not right that they should discuss theological matters in private either.¹

By October 1650 when Sir Ralph Verney was having his brush with Dr Denton (and Nancy) on the subject of a girl’s rightful education, all this had changed. ‘Had St Paul lived in our Times’, wrote Sir Ralph gloomily, ‘I am confident he would have fixed a Shame upon women for writing (as well as for their speaking) in the Church.’² Preaching among the women sectaries was a phenomenon of the English scene from the 1640s onwards; the shame that St Paul would or would not have felt being a subject of hot debate not only amongst outsiders hostile to the sects, but also within their ranks.

Women probably first began to preach in Holland in the 1630s in the Baptist churches, whose congregations had always included a large number of their sex. (There were said to be more women than men in the large body of English separatists who went to Holland in 1558; thereafter on the Continent women had held numerous church offices and taken some part in lay preaching.) In the New World – Massachusetts – women were known to have preached by 1636. In England in the 1640s women preached weekly at the General Baptist Church in Bell Alley, off Coleman Street, in the City of London. Anne Hempstall was described as preaching to ‘bibbing Gossips’ in her house in Holborn and Mary Bilbrowe, wife of a bricklayer of St Giles-in-the-Fields, preached in her parlour, although the pulpit, which was made of brick, was so high that only her tippet could be seen. As early as 1641 a tract, The Discovery of Women Preachers, referred to their existence in Kent, Cambridge and Salisbury.³

Women were notable among the Brownists, those enthusiasts who led a tumultuous existence on the wing of the so-called Independent Church. (The name derived from one of their spokesmen, Robert Browne.) It was fear of these Independent sectaries which had led in March 1642 to the drawing-up of the Kentish petition, with Sir Roger Twysden as one of its leaders – that move to save the nation from ‘heresy, schism, prophaneness, libertinism, anabaptism, atheism’ which had led to all the subsequent troubles of the Twysden family (see p.256). Later the division between Independents and Presbyterians would give way to a new type of alignment: because Brownists could not accept any form of central authority in religious matters, they now found themselves opposed to many of their previous Independent colleagues, as well as the Presbyterians.

The style of such pioneers could hardly be expected to be self-effacing. In London Mrs Attoway, ‘Mistress of all the She preachers in Coleman Street’, who was capable of preaching for well over an hour, seems to have run off with another woman’s husband and in addition secured contributions to finance a journey to Jerusalem, a project which unlike her elopement remained largely in her imagination. Some of these women displayed undeniably an ‘eerie spirit’; others were less ‘eerie’ than ‘brazen-faced’.⁴ The trouble was that the kind of woman who possessed the audacity to challenge the ruling of St Paul was not likely to combine it with that feminine modesty which would win society’s respect for the cause of the woman preacher.

On the contrary, all the old gibes concerning woman’s talkativeness – ‘the natural volubility of their tongues’ – proved useful yet again in the conflict over the ‘preacheresses’. Prejudice could cause a woman preaching to be condemned first as ‘a prater’ or ‘prattler’, so by implication as a scold, and lastly even as some kind of witch – remembering the connection in the popular mind between scolding and cursing. Additionally, her ‘Bible-thumping’ could be held to demonstrate the perils of any form of education, however rudimentary, for women since they were clearly not capable of making good use of it.⁵

By 1645 the moderate Puritans were criticizing the Brownists for allowing women to take part in church government and to preach. Prynne attacked this implication of Independency, and in 1646 John Vicars, in The Schismatick Sifted: Or, A Picture of Independents Freshly and Fairly Washt over Again, deplored the fact that not only ‘saucy boys, bold botching taylors’ but also ‘bold impudent huswives’ were taking it upon themselves ‘to prate an hour or more’. The principal attack was that mounted by Thomas Edwards in the same year in Gangraena, deploring the fact that these ‘whirligigg spirits’ of the Brownists included smiths, tailors, shoemakers, pedlars, and worst of all women who were giving ‘constant lectures’. He thought this to be against not only the light of Scripture but that of nature.⁶

On 14 January 1646 aldermen and common councillors of the City of London delivered a petition to the House of Commons concerning the multitude of religious schisms in the City which they wanted eliminated. They claimed that in one parish there were ‘eleven private congregations and conventicles who deserted the parish churches and have tradesmen and women preachers’. As a result, later that month several women preachers were committed to custody and others were brought before the Committee of Examinations of the House of Commons. Then in December 1646 the House resolved that no person should expound the Scriptures unless he be ordained in ‘this or some other Reformed Church’.⁷

With due respect to St Paul, why did the question of women preaching arouse such extreme apprehension? A popular rhyme of 1641 entitled ‘Lucifer’s Lackey or The Devil’s New Creation’ ran:

At the bottom, it was woman’s demand for freedom of conscience rather than for freedom to ‘prate’ which caused concern. The crude mockery of ‘Lucifer’s Lackey’ masked a real dread that a woman who placed conscience above husband and family might consider herself outside the former’s control. The question as to whether a woman sectary had the right to leave a husband who was ‘unsanctified’ was never officially settled, though much discussed in the early 1650s. But the fact that some women sectaries such as Mrs Attoway did cast out or abandon ‘unsanctified’ husbands in the 1640s did nothing to relieve such fears.⁸

For this reason those women who were not ‘eerie spirits’ – and thus were in control of what they said – generally took care to emphasize their own weakness in advance of their message. This self-deprecation might be expected to win the sympathy of a masculine audience, or at very least avoid arousing its hostility. Elizabeth Warren, a pamphleteer, declared herself fully conscious of her own ‘mental and sex-deficiency’ in her preface to The Old and Good Way vindicated of 1645, which bewailed the troubles of the times and defended a certain persecuted clergyman. In Spiritual Thrift she even went so far as to acknowledge that ‘we of the weaker sex, have hereditary evil from our grandmother Eve’. Claiming for herself in general a ‘silent Modesty’, she defended her action in having her sentiments printed, aware that she might be accused of having deserted both this silence and this modesty.⁹ As we shall see, even the redoubtable Katherine Chidley was not above pleading the weakness of her sex on occasions when it seemed politic.

Katherine Chidley lived in Soper Lane, off Coleman Street, a centre of Brownist activity, where St Pancras was one of the most famous of the Independent churches. Her son Samuel Chidley was also a leading sectary and later one of the treasurers of the Leveller party, hence Katherine Chidley’s prominence among the women who had tried to secure John Lilburne’s release. In the eighteenth century Ballard described Katherine Chidley as fighting as violently as Penthesilea, the Amazonian Queen, for the cause of Independency. The language in which she was described in her own time was less romantic if equally evocative. Thomas Edwards, a fanatical Presbyterian supporter, called her ‘a brazen-faced audacious old woman’, both ‘talkative and clamorous’, qualities as undesirable in a woman as they were in a witch.¹⁰

There is no reason to doubt the essential features of Edwards’s picture (although it may be pointed out that the language of Edwards’s attacks on the Independents certainly far exceeded in virulence anything the most ‘clamorous’ old woman could achieve). With Samuel, Katherine Chidley journeyed through England in 1641, and founded ‘a small gathered church’ at Bury St Edmunds where eight adults signed the Brownists’ covenant. That took persistence and presumably a certain stridency too. In 1641 also Katherine Chidley wrote The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ, to combat Thomas Edwards’s attack upon Independency.¹¹ It was a sharply worded document. When Edwards argued that Independency would breed divisions within families, setting husband and wife against each other, Katherine Chidley countered that there had been a division in the first family, but that had been caused by Satan, not by toleration.

She wrote: ‘Next you will say: “Oh! How will this take away that power and authority which God hath given to Husbands, Fathers and Mothers, over wives, children and servants.”’ To this Katherine Chidley answered that St Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians had plainly declared that the wife could be a believer in her sense (‘sanctified’), and the husband an unbeliever (‘unsanctified’). Why would he have advised husband or wife not to leave an unbelieving spouse if the Apostle had not at least envisaged the possibility? Furthermore St Paul also envisaged some unbelievers wishing to depart and added: ‘A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases.’

Still, Katherine Chidley was careful to make it clear that an ‘unsanctified’ husband was not robbed of his ordinary rights, only of control of his wife’s beliefs: ‘It is true he hath authority over her in bodily and civil respects, but not to be a Lord over her conscience.’ On the primacy of conscience, Katherine Chidley was unalterably strong, denying utterly the claims of the ‘magistrate’ to rule over it: ‘I know of no true Divinity that teacheth men to be Lords over the Conscience.’ (Although she herself would not tolerate the Catholics – but that, she declared, was because they had attempted by plots and treachery to ‘ruinate the land’.)

At the end of the Justification Katherine Chidley challenged Edwards to a parley on the subject of Independency, each speaker to choose six people who in the presence of a moderator would thrash out the matter in ‘fair discourse’. The sting was in the tail. Katherine Chidley was confident that she would defeat Thomas Edwards, but if by any chance she did not, that would represent no triumph for him: ‘for I am a poor woman and unable to deal with you’. It was perhaps that thought which led Edwards to reject the encounter.

Katherine Chidley’s second pamphlet, A New Yeares Gift, Or A Briefe Exhortation to Mr Thomas Edwards, contended that Independency alone followed the primitive pattern of Christ, and she argued that it should thus be instituted as the State religion, controlled by Parliament (not the Westminster Assembly of Divines) to form ‘one entire government established upon sound principles, unalterable’. Good Counsell to the Petitioners for Presbyterian Government that they may declare their faith before they build their Church, of November 1645, which suggested that ‘there is but one true Religion’, attacked Presbyterianism for not being according to God’s Word. The Chidleys, mother and son, were also said to have written the famous independent tract Launseters Launse together; and Katherine Chidley may have had a hand in the composition of The Petition of Women in 1649.¹²

Unlike the retiring Elizabeth Warren, who said of herself that she disliked controversy (and about whom as a result nothing is known beyond her pamphlets), Katherine Chidley led a robust existence outside the confines of the printed page. In August 1645, for example, she rose up in church in Stepney, preached the tenets of Brownism and attacked various ministers ‘with a great deal of Violence and bitterness’. Her particular grievance was the meeting of people in churches and other places where ‘idolatrous services’ had previously taken place. The incumbent minister, a Mr Greenhill, tried to rebuke her. Was no worship to take place in a church just because it had once been dedicated in the name of saints or angels? Did that imply that this church had been for ever ‘set apart’ for ‘idolatry’? This encompassed the whole of England, which had been ‘set apart’ or dedicated to St George. At this Katherine Chidley’s outburst of indignation was so overriding that Mr Greenhill was obliged to retire.¹³

In 1646 when Thomas Edwards issued his celebrated attack on Independency, Gangraena, he spared time to denounce the whole idea of women preaching, as well as the audacious Katherine Chidley in particular. As for claims of spiritual equality, this would mean that ‘all women at once were exempt from being under government’.¹⁴ In fact, as we have seen, Katherine Chidley had specifically excepted such a claim from her demands; nevertheless the fear remained and Edwards, in voicing it, exercised a more potent influence on public opinion than Katherine Chidley in denying it.

In contrast to the ‘preacheress’, the prophetess had always been treated with a certain nervous respect by society – remember Jane Hawkins, ‘a poor woman (and she but a pedlar)’, who in 1629 had for a period prophesied before 200 people (see p. 187). Claiming direct inspiration from God, the prophetess might challenge accepted notions concerning religion and society but she did not necessarily in her own person challenge the accepted order. What differentiated the Civil War period was the substantial increase in the number of prophetesses and allied female seers. In this time of hopes and dreams and visions, the attitude of authority itself – the new authority: Army, Council, new Parliament, new rulers such as Cromwell – was equally more responsive.

In 1654 an Independent church congregation would debate at length whether the average man had that dominion over prophetesses such as he had over ‘all Widows and Maids that are not Prophetesses’. The eventual conclusion relied upon St Paul’s remark in his First Epistie to the Corinthians that ‘every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head’; from this admonition it was deduced that St Paul, since he did not explicitly forbid them, conceived of and tolerated the existence of prophetesses, so long as their heads were covered. So it was decided that ‘a Woman (Maid, Wife or Widow) being a Prophetess may Speak, Prophesy, Pray with a Veil. Others may not.’¹⁵

It was the good fortune of Lady Eleanor Davies, she whose desperate rambling prophecies concerning the fate of King Charles I had brought her first to the Gatehouse prison and then to Bedlam (see p. 191 ff.), to survive into this more imaginative age. In 1648 she sought out Oliver Cromwell. With her predilection for anagrams, Lady Eleanor was from the first well disposed towards a man whose very name – O. CROMWEL – suggested the words HOWL ROME. The ‘O’ of Oliver she envisaged hopefully as the splendid round sun, in contrast to the sickly crescent moon which was the ‘C’ of Charles I. When the Army was at its headquarters at St Albans in 1648, Lady Eleanor presented to him a book of her prophecies first printed (with dire results) in 1633. She superscribed the book The Armies Commission, adding the verse: ‘Behold he cometh with ten thousand of his Saints to execute judgement on all.’ The splendid sun showed not only more tolerance but more humour than the sickly moon – but then of course Cromwell was not compared to Belshazzar as Charles I had been. Smiling at the superscription, and putting on his ‘specticles’ [sic], Cromwell gently observed: ‘But we are not all Saints.’¹⁶

As a result of this newly permissive atmosphere towards prophetesses, Lady Eleanor was able to spend her last years in a state of happiness and honour she can scarcely have expected in the bad old days of the King’s reign. She also had the sweetness of revenge; her old enemy Archbishop Laud, ‘horned like the lamb’, was executed in 1645. When Charles I was in prison in January 1649, shortly before his own execution, Lady Eleanor took it upon herself to write to him: ‘For King Charles, Prisoner, These’. She reminded him of her sufferings at his behest ‘because [I] took upon me to be a Prophetess’ and suggested that he make public acknowledgement of his ‘high offence’. He should also implore her forgiveness, ‘if so be you expect to find Mercy in this world or the other’.

In August that year, when the King, for better or for worse, had long exchanged worlds, Lady Eleanor’s pamphlet was reprinted. In 1651 appeared The Restitution of Prophecy, restoring all her original revelations, and at her death in 1652 the Anglican divine Peter Du Moulin suggested she had indeed been ‘favoured with some beam of divine knowledge of future things’, while being in general ‘erudita supra Sexum, mitis infra Sortem’: learned above her sex, humble below her fortune. The official epitaph put up by Lady Eleanor’s family congratulated her on having ‘in a woman’s body, a man’s spirit’.¹⁷

What was more, despite these Cromwellian connections, a dutiful daughter saw to it that Lady Eleanor’s reputation was not blackened for ever after the Restoration. Lucy Countess of Huntingdon and her friend Katherine Stanley, Marchioness of Dorchester joined together to protest to Thomas Dugdale over the historical inaccuracies in his 1660 Continuation of Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle.¹⁸ As has been noticed (see p.204), Lady Dorchester succeeded in removing the slur against the courage of her own mother, Charlotte Countess of Derby, based on false Parliamentary reports. Lady Huntingdon’s task was more delicate. Lady Eleanor Davies could hardly be whitewashed entirely but it was a matter of just how she was presented. Dugdale’s statement that she was ‘generally reputed little better than a mad woman’ caused much distress; in particular Lady Huntingdon was anxious to rescue her mother from the charge that in predicting the death of the Duke of Buckingham she had been associated with the notorious popular astrologer of the time, Dr Lambe.

In the end Lady Huntingdon, supported by her young son Theophilus, seventh Earl of Huntingdon, was successful. Lady Eleanor’s name was expunged from the account of the Duke of Buckingham’s death. Even Peter Du Moulin’s eulogy – learned above her sex, humble below her fortune – was removed from the new edition as being presumably distasteful to the Countess. One wonders what Lady Eleanor herself would have thought of that omission. More pleasing to her perhaps would have been her grandson Theophilus’s measured yet tender judgement of her career.

Lord Huntingdon wrote that his grandmother – ‘one not a little enthusasticall’ – had ‘obliged’ his mother to give him his unusual Christian name (this occurred very shortly before Lady Eleanor’s death, for Theophilus, the longed-for male heir to replace three dead sons, was not born until 1650).¹⁹ He showed no signs of holding this against her. On the contrary, he accepted her own account that ‘she heard voices supernatural, [so] that she was endowed with the gift of prophecy’, but for censuring the ecclesiastical government and the Queen’s Catholic practices, ‘and her obstinate refusing any submission’, wrote Lord Huntingdon, she was sentenced in the Court of High Commission ‘as one that was out of her wits’.

Lord Huntingdon’s chief indignation was reserved for the historian Sir William Sanderson, who in his account of the reign of Charles I had passed ‘his own censure on this Lady as if she was either mad or possessed with delusions from the Devil’. This was indeed a ‘Barbarous’ judgement for a historian to deliver to posterity, complained Lord Huntingdon, ‘considering her [Lady Eleanor’s] extraction from a family of Ancient English Nobility …’

Lady Eleanor Davies was an eccentric and an exception. The social standing of the other prophetesses of the period made it at least conceivable – by Lord Huntingdon’s standards, that is – for them to be considered mad or deluded. Yet on the whole respect obtained. At Bodmin in February 1647, for example, a young girl was said to be busy foretelling things to come, most of which were said already to have ‘fallen out true’. (Although one of her prophecies, that Charles I would shortly enjoy his own again, being revenged on his enemies, was less successful). She lived off a diet of sweetmeats, which were brought to her by ‘small people clad in green, and sometimes by birds’. This girl was said to cure most diseases, as well as specializing in broken bones, which she mended with a touch of her hand. Examined by three divines, she gave a good account of herself, having the Scriptures by heart ‘very perfectly’. Now under guard, she was seen to be fasting entirely, except on Christmas Day, when she had a feast of ‘bread and water’.²⁰

The prophetesses who interrupted the councils of Cromwell, the Army and later his colleagues in the new Government of England were an even more remarkable phenomenon. The point has been made that at least half a dozen times between 1647 and 1654 important deliberations were put aside, while some obscure prophetess (or prophet) delivered a message generally relayed by the Almighty via an apocalyptic vision.²¹ Nothing underlines more clearly the weird atmosphere of these times. In the 1630s King Charles I showed first irritation, then outright anger, faced with the revelations of Lady Eleanor Davies. At the end of December 1648 – the most crucial period for the Army Council as the King’s future swayed in the balance – an unknown woman named Elizabeth Poole appeared in front of them to communicate her visions concerning ‘the presence of God with the Army’. She declared that the Army had appeared to her in the shape of a man and the country as a whole as a woman ‘full of imperfection, crooked, weak, sickly’. The man it seemed was destined to heal the woman. This revelation was taken extremely seriously by the Army Council and much discussed. Elizabeth Poole’s visions were described by Colonel Rich as ‘that testimony which God hath manifested here by an unexpected Providence’.²²

On 5 January God instructed Elizabeth Poole to return to the Council. There she handed in a paper arguing against the execution of the King, which was formally debated by the Council’s members in her absence, She was then called back for further discussions. Elizabeth Poole repeated her conviction that the King should not be executed: ‘you may bind his hands and hold him fast under’ she announced, but he should not be put to death. She referred to the Scriptures to enforce her case, quoting the text: ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ She also described the King as the husband or head of the people; as such, citing the precedent of Nabal among the Israelites, he might be restrained but not cut down by his ‘wife’.

Henry Ireton – the most intellectual of the Army leaders – questioned Elizabeth Poole at length about her revelations. If this King was not to die, was no King ever to die? Had she seen an angel or a vision? (The answer was: a vision.) A later Royalist pamphlet accused Cromwell of stage-managing the whole incident, coaching the woman in her answers to the Council; but this is manifestly absurd, especially in view of the King’s fate at the hands of his ‘wife’ less than a month afterwards. The true significance of Elizabeth Poole lay in the exalted audience this humble woman was able to secure without difficulty, by invoking the awesome role of the prophetess.

The most extreme language was used by those prophetesses connected with the Fifth Monarchy movement. This was a millenarian sect so called because it looked forward to the establishment of the ‘Fifth Monarchy’ – that of Christ after his second coming. Among the Fifth Monarchists themselves particular reverence was accorded to any woman who ‘appeared to be endowed with divine grace’ – although no other category of woman other than a prophetess was in the end granted special rights within their church; nor, contrary to popular accusation did the Fifth Monarchists attempt to elevate the status of the woman within the family, asking only for freedom of conscience from the husband’s control.²³

The determination of the Fifth Monarchists that the second coming of Christ would establish His political power brought them into natural conflict with the current rulers of England. The movement got under way after 1651 when it became clear that neither Parliament (nor Cromwell) was likely to set up the ‘Rule of the Saints’, as had once been hoped. In 1653 Cromwell’s elevation as Protector was construed as a further insult to the true dominion of Jesus Christ, since to Him alone belonged the prerogative of single rule. Cromwell, hailed by Lady Eleanor Davies as a splendid sun in the early stages of his leadership, now found himself identified with something far less pleasant called the ‘Little Horn’, an odious excrescence on the head of the Beast. Despite this, and despite the violence of the prophetesses’ invective, for some time the civil powers showed quite remarkable restraint towards them, genuinely hampered by their claims to be reporting the true intentions of God. The treatment of Mary Overton, dragged through the streets of London on ‘cudgels’ with her baby at her breast, and thrown into Bridewell among the vagrants and harlots for helping to sew up her husband’s political pamphlets, contrasts remarkably, as we shall see, with that of the fervent Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel, including the comparative comfort allowed to the prophetess when she finally did reach Bridewell.

Anna Trapnel was the daughter of a shipwright in Poplar, and lived in Hackney.²⁴ By her own account, A Legacy for Saints, being several Experiences of the dealings of God with Anna Trapnel, her piety came to her early, ‘when a child, then the Lord awed my spirit’, and was encouraged by her ‘godly mother’.²⁵ By the time she was fourteen, she was eager to hear the words of the Lord and to pray for herself, and it was while listening to the famous independent preacher Hugh Peter on a text of Isaiah that her eyes were opened to ‘the marriage covenant … between God and his spouse’. Thereafter Anna went from minister to minister, and from sermon to sermon daily, but still did not find further elucidation. She could not sleep or even rest. In her depression she was even tempted to suicide, to which the devil tempted her by showing her a sharp knife. Her spiritual aridity only increased as she wrestled with the doctrine that Christ came not only to the righteous, but to all sinners. Finally she found herself able to accept it.

After this time of protracted perplexity, Anna enjoyed her true moment of revelation on New Year’s Day 1642. It was a Sunday and she was listening to the Baptist minister of St Botolph’s Church in Aldgate, John Simpson (later a prominent Fifth Monarchist), preaching on the text: ‘Now if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.’ Suddenly Anna found herself saying: ‘Lord, I have the spirit.’ Then what joy she felt! ‘Oh what triumphing and songs of Hallelujah were in my spirit.’ Anna felt ‘a clothing of glory’ over her and saw angels, a clear flame without smoke and other ‘christal appearances’. Sometimes ‘the golden trumpet sounded higher, and sometimes lower, yet still it was sounding, and caused an echo to follow it’.

Thereafter there were still moments when Anna felt buffeted by Satan, as when she learnt of her mother’s death. Yet many ‘raptures’ followed: sometimes she would fall down on the ground in public, at other times, alone in her room, she felt grace pouring over her ‘like a fountain’. John Simpson, visiting Anna at home when she was sick, and her ‘earthly tabernacle’ – her body – was shaking with a fever, issued a caution: she might be deluded regarding the presence of God within her, as others in the past had been. But Anna had no such doubts. She knew that the Lord had chosen her so that ‘out of the mouths of babes and sucklings he would perfect his praise’. She had a series of visions which ranged from the sun itself to Jesus taking up Peter and John into the Mount, the Transfiguration, and ‘Revelations concerning the Government of the Nation, the Parliament, Army and Ministry’.

It was important to Anna Trapnel, as it was to an earlier prophetess and pamphleteer, Mary Pope, to point out the divine source of such outpourings. Mary Pope, author of A Treatise of Magistracy, referred to ‘God having made me a Mother in Israel’ and God ‘as it were forcing me on … for helping to settle these unsettled times’. Anna made a similar point. She felt a strong personal identification with ‘that approved Hannah’, the prophetess in the book of Samuel, which sometimes led to her being described as Hannah, not Anna, Trapnel (in fact she herself always signed her name Anna).²⁶

The importance of the connection with the biblical Hannah, whom she declared herself desirous of imitating, was that Hannah too had been judged to be ‘mad, under the administration of evil angels, and a witch’. Even the priest Eli had at first assumed Hannah to be drunk when he saw her lips moving – in prophecy – and no sound coming forth. Hannah had issued a dignified reproach to Eli telling him not to confuse ‘thy handmaid’ with ‘a daughter of Belial’. In an age rich in citation of biblical precedent, all of this was very much to the advantage of any latter-day Hannah, who might expect to encounter several Elis, and even more unsympathetic individuals, in the course of her divinely-ordained career as a prophetess.

Anna Trapnel prided herself on two other aspects of her character, in both of which one can detect a certain feminine defensiveness, as though to meet predictable charges in advance. First, she was concerned to make it clear that she was in no way a whore, being on the contrary, as her friends put it, of ‘beautiful and unblameable conversation’. Second, she prided herself on the fact that she had not received any ordinary education, since ‘Christ’s scholars’, amongst which she included herself, were endowed with a far better type of learning ‘from above’. Consciously or not, this was a smart attitude to adopt for one who could well claim to be one of ‘Christ’s scholars’ but not the duller sort who had merely attended an earthly university. So Anna, in her long rambling verses of prophecy, preempted one accusation commonly made against the women who preached – that they were silly uneducated females:

As for the other common charge – that the rise of women preaching demonstrated the sheer foolishness of giving them an education – Anna Trapnel, being untutored, was not liable to that. She after all had received her education from the great university in the sky.

Anna Trapnel first came into public prominence as part of the violent Fifth Monarchist reaction to the installation of Oliver Cromwell as Protector on 16 December 1653. On the eve of the event, she had had a vision of Cromwell in the shape of a bull amidst a large herd of cattle: ‘and of a sudden there was a great shout of those that followed him, he being singled out alone, and the foremost, and he looking back, they bowed themselves unto him, and leaped up from the earth, and shewed much joy that he had become their Supreme’. However, all did not end happily for the joyful herd, for after mistakenly ‘running at the Saints’, they found themselves scattered, with their horns broken, and finally they fell into their graves.²⁸

Three days later a Welsh preacher named Vavasour Powell announced in a sermon that Cromwell’s Government could only be temporary (in view of the expected coming of Christ) and ‘a small matter should fetch him down with little noise’. It was not the kind of remark calculated to reassure a nervous new regime, and in January Powell was summoned to Whitehall to explain himself before the Council. Along with him went ‘a maid called Hannah’.

Anna Trapnel sat just outside the Council chamber in a little room with a fire, awaiting Powell’s return from his examination. Just as Powell emerged, intending to go home, Anna was ‘as it were seized by the Lord’ and ‘carried forth in a spirit of Prayer and Singing, from noon till night’. When she finally fell into her bed at Mr Roberts’s lodging house near the Palace of Whitehall, at eleven o’clock at night, she lay there for twelve days. For the first five of these Anna remained without eating or drinking; thereafter she took a little toast soaked in small beer every twenty-four hours, sometimes merely to moisten her mouth. During all this period her eyes were shut, while out of her mouth issued a stream of prophecies, for two, three or even four hours at a time, by day or by night, and sometimes both.²⁹

The sensational effect of such a daily performance in the heart of Whitehall, so close to the seat of the Protectoral power, may be imagined. ‘Many hundreds’ were said to be flocking to see her. Although very little of what she was saying could be understood when Anna was singing, her prayers were reported to be ‘in exceeding odd method and order’, and phrased in ‘good language’. The effect of her ‘excellent words and well placed’ was that ‘all that come, do much admire what they hear from her’. In view of some of Anna’s topics for prayer – that the Lord Protector should be ‘delivered from Carnal Councils’ and should not be ‘vain, nor regard earthly pomp and pleasure’ – perhaps the obscurity of her singing was to be preferred, at least from the point of view of the Government. After twelve days of this, Anna rose up from her bed at Mr Roberts’s lodging house and went home ‘speedily and lustily’.³⁰

Of course the sensation did not stop there. Since 1650 Anna Trapnel had belonged to the congregation of John Simpson, the minister of St Botolph’s, now a leading Fifth Monarchist, who was one of the ‘lecturers’ at Allhallows Church. At the end of January Simpson was arrested and sent to prison at Windsor, along with other ministers, for making public a vision which predicted the fall of Cromwell within six months. At Allhallows, however, the new Protectoral regime continued to be denounced. Marchamont Nedham, the Commonwealth journalist, reported on this to Cromwell personally in February, making the point that ‘This meeting much diminishes your reputation among foreigners, who expect changes, because they are proclaimed from the pulpit, and great things are made of it, though it is but a confluence of silly wretches.’ Moreover, there was a plan to print Anna Trapnel’s discourses ‘which are desperate against your person, family, children, friends and the government’, as well as sending her all over England to proclaim them. She is much visited, wrote Nedham, doing ‘a world of mischief’ since ‘the vulgar dote on vain prophecies’ such as she proclaimed daily in a trance.’³¹

Still no action was taken against Anna Trapnel personally despite these subversive sentiments. Not everyone accepted the source of her visions without reservation: ‘some say that what she doth is by a mighty inspiration, others say they suppose her to be a troubled mind’. Yet the general impression given was of some sort of communion with God, as one correspondent wrote who confessed himself baffled by the precise nature of her revelation and ‘under what sort to rank it’.³²

As for the attention Anna Trapnel received, Dorothy Osborne referred, humorously perhaps, but with a wry note beneath it all, to the prophetess’s success in the world compared to her own. In March 1654 she wrote to her lover, William Temple: ‘I am coming into my preaching term again. What think you, were it not a good way of preferment as the times are? If you advise me to do it, I’ll venture.’ After all, the woman (Anna Trapnel) ‘was cried up mightily’. Dorothy Osborne’s father had recently died, which affected the question of her long-delayed marriage (see p.40); now Dorothy had to await her brother’s arrival to know ‘how I shall dispose myself’. Once more, Dorothy advocated patience to William Temple.³³ At the same time, rather more excitingly, Anna Trapnel awaited the arrival of the spirit of God and needed apparently very little other guidance as to how she should dispose herself.

The guidance which arrived from the Lord was that Anna should accept an invitation to tour the West Country.³⁴ When she first received the invitation, Anna exclaimed: ‘There’s a far journey indeed!’ But the Lord over-persuaded Anna. As a preliminary she visited Simpson in his Windsor prison, having a vision of ‘high rocky hills’ at Hillingdon near Uxbridge on the way, and knowing that was how Cornwall would be. Still Satan tempted her not to set out; however, in the nick of time the birds singing outside the window of her chamber in the early morning reminded Anna of God’s care for sparrows and restored her to her purpose.

The journey to the West Country certainly justified Anna’s original reaction. She got a place in a coach at an inn but it took six days for the coach to reach Exeter; fortunately its ‘rattlings’ could not disturb her inner tranquillity. In the West Anna stayed at Tregasow near Truro with Captain Langdon, a Fifth Monarchist who had been a member of the recently defunct Barebones Parliament.

A later report would sum up the purpose of her visit as ‘to asperse the government’. That was certainly too crude a summary from Anna’s point of view, and she wrote back to the congregation at Allhallows denying that she had ever tried to stir up the people. However, her language on the subject of the Protector could hardly be interpreted otherwise. From the Government’s point of view it was equally relevant that Anna, together with other Fifth Monarchists, took the line that the ‘Saints’ were not bound by legal precepts but by the commands of the Gospel ‘and in this sense they are dead to the law, by the life of Christ in them’. People who considered themselves ‘dead to the law’ were not likely long to survive at liberty once they started to break it in any way that outraged the community. Thus when the local Presbyterian clergy showed themselves notably hostile to Anna and her prophecies, they were easily able to secure a warrant against her for subversion.³⁵

On 11 April 1654 an order was given to take Anna Trapnel ‘quickly’ and send her up to the Council in London.³⁶

Anna spent the eve of her apprehension in an all-night session of prayer and singing. She was still in a trance, and still singing the next afternoon when the constable with the justices came for her. Captain Langdon pleaded for her to be allowed to remain one more night, but the response was merely to pull the entranced woman from her pillow, first lifting up her eyelids to see if she was shamming. From the doorway a Presbyterian minister commented grimly: ‘A whip will fetch her out.’ Then at last Anna awoke and saying that she had had ‘a sweet day’, inquired if anyone had visited her.³⁷

According to Anna, the people round about were on her side, telling the justices who came to take her that they would have to fetch their silk gowns and perform the deed themselves ‘for the poor would not do it’. However, on her way to the sessions, a less enlightened mob of men and women, boys and girls, pulled at her as she passed and shouted: ‘How do you now? How is it with you now?’ And in the session house she was, as she put it, ‘a gazing stock’.

One of those who gazed at her steadfastly in the face was the ‘witch-trying woman’. But Anna survived this ordeal and although she heard whispers all round her that she would reveal herself to be a witch by being unable to answer her judges, afterwards it was agreed by this same crowd of whisperers that she could not possibly be a witch, since she had spoken so many ‘good words’. All the same the accusation of witchcraft – at least by the ignorant – was never totally abandoned. Later, at Plymouth, words like ‘witchcraft’ and ‘a white Devil’ were thrown at her.

In the main Anna Trapnel was courteously treated by her judges, despite the fact that she refused to read aloud one of her own passages concerning the Little Horn. A soldier who smiled when Anna related one of her visions was sent out of court. Two women were produced who swore that Anna had been well aware of the people’s presence during her trance. One of her judges termed Anna, not uncharitably, ‘a dreamer. (‘So Joseph was called’, retorted Anna.)

Anna’s true sufferings began in the course of her journey back to London. There was no proper vessel to convey her to Portsmouth so that Anna spent more than fifteen weeks in a ‘man’s prison’ before being shipped along with some prisoners-of-war (although she did have a maid with her). When a storm blew up, Anna was accused by her shipmates of causing the winds through witchcraft ‘and they curst me there’. The same storm caused an injury to her leg. Her company in the coach from Portsmouth was rather more agreeable: a clutch of partridge eggs on its way to the Protector as a present. The sight of the eggs inspired Anna. To her companions in the coach ‘I often told of a present from heaven’, she wrote afterwards, ‘which was much better than the present of partridge eggs, yea, it was costlier than the gold of Ophir, or Rubies and Pearls from a far country’. Another comparison she was inspired to make was between ‘the Great Protector’ in heaven and the inferior man who had assumed the same title in England in the December of the previous year.

On 2 June Anna Trapnel was committed to Bridewell.³⁸ She reached the prison at eleven o’clock at night. The Matron told her sharply that she had dealt with other ‘ranting sluts’, before admitting she had never received one quite like Anna, since she had performed no ‘base actions’. Anna now insisted on sending for her friends, who would collect the maid that she had brought from Cornwall to attend her. Despite the Matron’s protests, the friends arrived at midnight, and inspected Anna’s lodging. They found it large, but with only ‘a hard flock-bed’ and one little window in the corner; the common ‘shore’ (sewer) ran beneath ‘which sink smelt grievously’. The rats ‘that abode much in that room’, running about like cats and dogs, also contributed to the smell. Everyone, including Anna herself, was horrified. The Matron however was inexorable, denied Anna’s right to a maid, and refused to leave her a candle, saying that she did not trust a prisoner to put it out.

To poor Anna, alone in the stinking darkness, Satan now returned. He suggested that everyone would point at her when she went out, saying ‘There goes a Bridewell bird’; decent people would not associate with her ‘because of Bridewell reproach’. The hard cold bed and the damp sheets gave her a fever. It was not until Anna’s friends had clubbed together to buy a copy of the order against her for 16d that the Matron was convinced nothing had been laid to her charge. Thereafter, because Anna was not a criminal, the Matron allowed flowers and herbs to be strewn, to sweeten the room; her friends were now allowed to stay.

On the day Anna was supposed to appear in court, she was too weak to rise. The Matron showed a flash of her old form by threatening to send the man to fetch her who conveyed the harlots and thieves to beat hemp. Under the circumstances Anna’s friends persuaded her to appear. Once again, she was treated courteously in court and allowed to sit down. After that relations between Anna and the Matron never progressed much further than an uneasy truce, the Matron accusing Anna of telling tales ‘to wrong her’, and Anna much resenting the Matron’s suggestion that Anna wanted ‘men to come at her’. Explaining herself, Anna said that her delight was not and never had been in men’s company ‘but in all people as they are godly’.

Yet compared to most criminals – that of course being the very comparison which she detested – Anna Trapnel was well treated. There was no question, as there had been with Mary Overton and Katherine Hadley, of suggesting that she belonged to their number. She was allowed to rent her own chamber at 5s a week – expensive but convenient – and when she was supposed to beat hemp, the other women did it for her. Seven out of the eight weeks she spent in gaol, Anna was accompanied by her sister Ursula Adman. For all that, she could hardly sleep because of ‘such scolding’ among the prisoners, especially when they were brought in at night. It was no ‘pleasant prison’ to those ‘brought up tenderly’, reflected Anna.

Anna Trapnel was released on 26 July after nearly eight weeks in Bridewell.³⁹ She had declared of herself: ‘while I have tongue and breath it shall go forth for the Fifth Monarchy Laws, teaching and practice’. Nor would she give any undertaking about her public pronouncements on her release: on the contrary, she announced she would continue to speak out whenever the spirit moved her. Anna visited the West Country again the following year and with ‘three young fellows’ went to see the Fifth Monarchist John Carew in St Mawes prison. One of these fellows had a sword, and a soldier taxed him with it, saying that he was on the look-out for Cavaliers, and unless it was accounted for, he would remove it. Anna Trapnel and the young fellows together denied his authority: ‘The Lord Protector we own not, thou art of the Army of the Beast.’ But when the Governors of Pendennis Castie and the justices sent for her, Anna went into a convenient trance.

A quantity of her verses, which were probably given extemporaneously, were taken down by a reporter in 1657 or 1658.⁴⁰ Some of the imagery with Anna as the ‘wife’ of Christ recalls that of the Catholic mystics (whom Anna would have sternly condemned):

Some of it, which has been compared to the early hymns of the Methodists, touches with its simplicity:

Anna Trapnel did not however display much spirit of Christian forgiveness to her enemies:

In Voice for the King of Saints of 1658 she developed the theme further:

Nor did she regard the godly and the ungodly as in any way equal in an ideal society: under the ‘Rule of the Saints’, the godly alone would have been constituted ‘earls and potentates’.⁴³

Anna Trapnel was attacked in print as late as 1660, at which point, with the turn-about of the Restoration, she vanishes from history.¹

After 1660 the voices of the prophetesses died away except for a few lonely exclamations; the female clamour of the Commonwealth, both sonorous and serious, gave way to the merry prattle of the ladies of King Charles II’s England. The bells rang out for the restored King on 29 May, the cannons roared, and over 20,000 people jostled to greet him in London, so that the noise of it all was so great that it made Charles ‘prodigiously dazed’.⁴⁵ Women were amongst these 20,000, as there had been women watching the execution of his father eleven years earlier. But the age when the female voice might be listened to with general respect – at least if it claimed to come from God – was over.

Did nothing remain – except memories, painful or otherwise – of this time when women had been ‘stronger grown’?

It has been mentioned that among those women who caused public disturbances some of the wildest had been those ‘eerie spirits’ surrounding the strange Quaker enthusiast and preacher James Naylor. In some ways Quaker women, who were prominent in the sect from the start (giving rise to rumours that the sect was entirely composed of them), coincided in their behaviour with the worst prejudices concerning the uncontrolled female. Disruption of services, for example, by persistent crying out and ‘quaking’ during a minister’s sermon – hence the popular nickname for what was in fact the Society of Friends – whenever moved by the spirit to do so, was not calculated to win the respect of the male authorities.

‘Good Mistress Fell, go into your own pew, or else go your way’, exclaimed a local justice to Margaret Fell concerning her repeated interventions at the local ‘steeplehouse’, in the course of which she called him ‘a caterpillar’ to be swept aside (and she was the sect’s most respectable member).⁴⁶

‘Little Elizabeth’ Fletcher, as she was generally known for her tiny physique, arrived in Oxford in June 1654 at the age of fourteen, on a self-imposed mission to speak to the undergraduates. After some ugly horse-play from her ‘flock’, which led to Little Elizabeth’s being pushed under the pump ‘with other shameful abuses’, this ‘virtuous maid of considerable family’, ‘contrary to her own Will or Inclination. In Obedience to the Lord’ ran naked through the streets of Oxford ‘as a sign of the Hypocritical Profession they made there’. In the end, since she still persisted in speaking, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford had Little Elizabeth whipped for blasphemy.⁴⁷

There was however another aspect to the Quaker religion at its inception which was of more profound importance to the weaker vessel than these manifestations of unrest. George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, was a weaver’s son from Leicestershire, whom William Penn described as ‘an original, being no man’s copy’. One of the marks of his originality was to face up to the uncomfortable implications of Christianity, that sex was not necessarily relevant where religion was concerned. Whereas an individual prophetess such as Anna Trapnel had merely claimed a special position for herself, in 1656 George Fox published the first defence in English of the spiritual equality of women since the Reformation. As for testifying, wrote Fox in 1652, ‘I said that if the power of God and the Seed spoke in man or woman it was Christ.’⁴⁸

Since Quaker testifying was dependent upon the arrival of the spirit of Christ in the breast, this doctrine of Fox’s cast an entirely new light on the whole subject of women speaking in public. We shall meet the heroic if turbulent Quaker women again, their voices at least unstilled, their steps vigorous and defiant in adversity, as they not only travelled their own land but ventured to the New World of Puritan Massachusetts and the old world of the Sultan’s Turkey. These women at least were confident that ‘in the restoration by Christ’ they were equal partners once again: ‘Man and Woman, as they were before the Fall’.⁴⁹ Thus the most enduring claim made for woman during the period when the world was turned upside down proved to concern her soul, but that of course was invisible, as woman herself was sometimes supposed to be.

1Although she is just possibly to be identified with Anna Trapnel who married in Woodbridge in Soffolk in 1661.⁴⁴