England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

ENGLAND’S LOST EDEN

Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

PHILIP HOARE

DEDICATION

For Mark

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Prologue: A place of royal death

PART I: Green and Pleasant Land

1 A Voice in the Wilderness

Into the forest; Mary Ann’s life & visions in Suffolk; the Girlingites’ debut

2 Turning the World Upside-Down

Bunhill Fields & the Camisards; Ann Lee & the Shakers; American utopias

3 Human Nature

Elder Evans & James Burns; Human Nature & spirit photography; the mission to Mount Lebanon

PART II O Clouds Unfold!

4 The Walworth Jumpers

Sects, spiritualism, & Swedenborg; Mary Ann at the Elephant & Castle

5 The New Forest Shakers

Hordle, the Girlingites’ heyday; Peterson & his mesmeric experiments

6 The Dark and Trying Hour

Eviction & despair; Mary Ann examined on the condition of her mind

PART III Arrows of Desire

7 The Sphere of Love

Broadlands & the Cowpers; Rossetti & Beata Beatrix; Myers & Gurney; the Broadlands Conferences

8 The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

Ruskin & the Spiritualists, the Guild of St George & Fors Clavigera; Brantwood

9 The Names of Butterflies

Rose La Touche, Broadlands & the spirits

PART IV The Countenance Divine

10 This Muddy Eden

Isaac Batho’s mission; Auberon Herbert & naked dancing; Julia Wood interned; Girlingites on tour

11 Mr Peterson’s Tower

A.T.T.P. & Wm Lawrence, pet medium; the tower rises

12 The Close of the Dispensation

The Census; the rival ‘Mother’; Mary Ann’s stigmata

PART V A New Jerusalem

13 In Borderland

Laurence Housman & ‘Jump-to-Glory Jane’; Herbert & Theosophy; Ruskin’s last days; Georgiana & the Wildes; The Sheepfold

14 Resurgam

The quest for Mary Ann & her followers; Peterson’s transition

Epilogue: The forest once more

Source and Bibliographical Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAP

PROLOGUE

Early in May 1100 – the exact date is uncertain – the king’s bastard nephew was hunting deer in the New Forest when he was killed by an arrow loosed by one of his own party. Thirty years before, his uncle, the king’s brother, had been gored to death by a stag in the same forest. Both deaths were seen as a judgement on the Norman invaders who had imposed their rule on the land, sweeping aside entire villages to create a vast hunting ground, a kind of royal Eden. An elderly victim of that enclosure cursed the reigning family, predicting their demise within its woods; and so when, later that fateful year, a stray arrow claimed the life of the king himself, it was seen as a death foretold, an ironic end for a man whose father had claimed to love deer more than his own flesh and blood.

William Rufus, forty-year-old son of the Conqueror, was named after his florid complexion rather than his hair, which was flaxen like that of his Viking ancestors. Rufus had ruled England for thirteen years: a fair-minded king to many, but to others, especially the Church, his rival in temporal power, a godless man of pagan leanings. Some called him a warlock; others accused Rufus of the more worldly vice of sodomy. In that last year, the Devil appeared to men ‘in the woods and secret places, whispering to them as they passed’. One bishop exiled by the king saw him in a vision, condemned to the fires of Hell.

In his final hours, these stories began to accelerate around Rufus, as though the forest itself were closing in upon him. As day broke on the morning of 2 August 1100, a monk appeared before the hunting party, relating a dream in which the king had swaggered into a church and seized the crucifix from its altar, tearing its arms and legs ‘like a beast … with his bare teeth’. The cross had hurled its assailant to the ground, and ‘great tongues of flame, reminiscent of the stream of blood, spurted from his mouth and reached towards the sky’. Later that day, the Earl of Cranborne went out hunting and met a black goat with the body of a naked, wounded man on its back. The animal said it was the Devil, crying, ‘I bear to judgement your King, or rather your tyrant, William Rufus. For I am a malevolent spirit and the avenger of his wickedness which raged against the Church of Christ and so I have procured his death.’

Disconcerted by these portents, Rufus delayed his sport until the evening. Riding with the king’s hunting party was his brother Henry, Walter Tirel of Poix, and other powerful men, jangling arrogantly through a forest they regarded as their private domain. The deer were to be driven towards them and, accordingly, a stag entered the clearing in which the king waited, the long shadows of the summer’s evening cast before him. It was as if the entire affair were choreographed and lit to give it theatricality; shielding his eyes from the rays of the setting sun, Rufus loosed his arrow. As he watched the animal stagger, another appeared, distracting the king’s attention, and ‘at this instant Walter … unknowingly, and without power to prevent it, Oh gracious God! pierced his breast with a fatal arrow. On receiving the wound, the king uttered not a word; but breaking off the shaft of the weapon where it projected from his body, fell upon the wound, by which he accelerated his death.’

The horror of the scene – played out in slow-motion, as it were – was counterpointed by its setting: the silent beauty of the glade, the swift arrow seeking its pre-ordained target, the venal king falling to the forest floor. It was a death given transcendence by its victim’s sovereignty, and by the reaction of the royal body to the arrow’s penetration, by which he accelerated his death. And in the multiple perspective of historical record, the act acquired other meanings, as though filmed by another camera. It was claimed that the arrow was aimed away from the king, but was deflected by an oak tree, while others discerned conspiracy at work among those with rival claims to the throne. Over the next millennium, myth and legend gathered round this royal assassination. Some saw Rufus as ‘the Divine Victim, giver of fertility to his kingdom’, killed on the morrow of the pagan feast of Lammas in order to propitiate the gods. The notion of ritual sacrifice linked William Rufus’s murder with that of Thomas à Becket; with witchcraft, Cathar heresy and Uranianism – ‘the persistence of “unnatural love” as a mark of the heresy’. To others, however, the king’s demise was just ‘a stupid and an accidental death’.

The oaks still stand that witnessed these deeds, although their hearts have been eaten away by fungus as old as the wood itself, leaving hollow crowns, shadows of their living selves. In the eighteenth century, a stone was erected where Rufus fell, although even this site, near Minstead, was disputed, as if elusive myth rejected hard fact. Here, it was said, a ghostly hart would appear at times of national crises and, like King Arthur sleeping in Avalon, Rufus would wake and fight for his country. The spectral animal was sighted during the Crimean War, again in 1914, and on the eve of the deaths of George IV and Edward VII. It has yet to be seen again.

Leaving Southampton, westwards, monstrous cranes straddle the estuary’s upper reaches, where mudflats meet the industrial port on land reclaimed from the sea. The dock wharves are strewn with tank-like containers and row after row of brand new cars awaiting export, shiny from the production line. Electric pylons stalk across this confluence of water and land, while herons pick their way gracefully through the mud and ponies perch on the grassy bank of the dual carriageway, their bodies improbably tilted at right angles to the busy road. In high summer, daredevil lads balance on the old stone bridge beneath the flyover, yanking off their shirts and jumping into the water, the brief arch of their leap caught in freeze-frame by the cars speeding overhead.

I once flew over this interzone in a balloon, rising noiselessly from the city’s common at dawn, borne up by a raw flame roaring under the neon nylon tent which billowed between us and infinity. Our wickerwork cradle creaked as we were lifted into the sky and over the park, its green carpet falling away as we sailed silently into the air, bumping with the unseen thermals. We drifted over the Civic Centre and its needle tower, built to emulate an Italian campanile, and over the port in whose great dry docks ocean liners were once prised out of their element like stranded cetaceans while workers examined their barnacled hulls. Southampton Water opened out ahead, and in the distance, on an horizon below rather than level with the eye, the Solent and its fluttering yachts held the Isle of Wight in a silvery embrace.

For a brief moment, in the hour after dawn, we were caught out of time and space, suspended above the world and the suburban plots whose tenants were just beginning to surface that Saturday morning, waking to see our airy leviathan floating noiselessly over their heads. In that moment ordinary life stopped: all that was below had been disconnected as the lines between us and the earth snapped as we had tugged away from the field and pulled up the anchor. Now we were left to nothingness, in limbo, supported by no more than a thin layer of fabric as we hung in mid-air, dangling like puppets.

Then, just as imperceptibly as we had gained this strangely unvertiginous height, the great sphere above us began to lose its tautness. The crimson licking flame diminished, and slowly, with pathetic gasps, the heat and air began to go out of our inflated world. The wind caught us, and we went with it, gliding past the military port at Marchwood and its ordered terrain, then dipping over the wetlands as the ground rushed up to meet us faster and faster until, ordered into landing positions, we crouched down in the basket, backs braced, knees drawn up to our chests like parachutists ready to return to earth. Through the willow-woven cracks, the bright light was dimmed by approaching land. Suddenly we hit the grass, ripping up clods and biting into the field before dragging to a violent halt, our bodies tossed about in the basket like so much fruit. We climbed out on uncertain legs, as though we’d experienced zero gravity and had to reaccustom ourselves to firm ground. But we really were in another world, for we had flown free of the city and into the forest itself.

Walking into the woods is like entering a rainforest. In the stillness, which isn’t still at all, birds sing and boughs sigh, unseen in the translucent green canopy above, which filters a subaqueous light. The world is dampened here, muffled by brilliant green moss and held in by sinuous roots, as though the earth were bursting with its own fertility. The forest floor clings to the feet, the senses heightened by the silence; intensely aware of cracking twigs and rustling leaves and rotting vegetation dragged down into the soil by worms and beetles, adding another layer to this fecund, decaying, self-regenerating organism. You must tread carefully here, for you are walking on the living and the dead.

Once all of England looked like this; even a thousand years after its enclosure, the New Forest still feels medieval: an ancient domain which ought not to exist at all, and which, ironically, owes its preservation to an invader. It has no physical boundaries to mark its beginning or its end, and yet it encompasses a third of Hampshire. It is barely an hour and a half’s drive from London, but it is a liminal region, for all its apparent accessibility. In the Dark Ages, this was one of the last parts of the country to remain pagan; in the Second World War, witches gathered here to ward off an invasion force invested with its own occult beliefs. This place of purity has ever been suffused with the alien: from the Romans and the Vikings, to whom I owe the kink in my little finger, to the gypsies who first came here from Europe five hundred years ago, and who until recently sent their children to school wearing rabbit-skins under their clothes.

Even its name is deceptive – ‘forest’ was the word for a hunting ground, rather than woods – and modern visitors wonder where all the trees are. For mile after mile, the eye sees nothing but great stretches of heathland flattened by the sky: the spaces where the woods once were. Calluna vulgaris and Ulex europaeus – the pink-belled heather and the coconut-scented gorse – colonise these gravelly expanses with relentless efficiency. These are tough, hard-bitten plants used to the hooves of the ponies that congregate idly on the verges, their thick hides, shaggy manes and round bellies stolid and unmoving as their big black eyes reflect the cars which occasionally cull one of their number, each sweet stupid victim awaiting its turn.

Yet for all its contradictions, or perhaps because of them, the forest is a compendium of myth. It reaches back to an age before the cruel Norman laws which would amputate the fingers of poachers and mutilate their dogs’ feet, to dark woods peopled by Herne the Hunter, a man in stag’s guise, his antlers ‘spreading like mantling in the breeze’; and to the wise wild men, strange figures part way between animal, vegetable and human who had their Victorian counterpart in Brusher Mills, the snake-catcher who allowed his reptiles to slither through his beard.

A place where the pagan worship of trees conflated with the verdant cross of Christian immortality, ever subject to the immemorial cycle of life, death and resurrection, this new-old forest stands for all threatened wildernesses. It promises a sylvan idyll, the greenwood of all our imaginings, invested with certainty and superstition, hope and fear; a place of sanctuary, mystery and magical transformation, here in the heart of England, our lost and ancient Eden.

PART ONE

Green and Pleasant Land

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone

Dante, The Divine Comedy

ONE

A Voice in the Wilderness

I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,

‘Make straight the way of the Lord’

John 1:23

When I was a boy, we’d often drive into the forest. With my father at the wheel of our Wolseley and my mother at his side, the world seemed as secure and bound and polished as the big old car itself. I would lie back and look up through the rear window at the trees passing hypnotically overhead. They seemed both remote and near as I looked out for a particular row of pines which reminded me of the day I lost my toy koala bear – his rabbit fur and shiny snout the source of deep solace – on scrubby cliffs above a Dorset beach where, for all the hours of searching, he was not to be found.

Now, forty years later, the westbound train crawls through Southampton’s outer suburbs, as if the city’s gravity were reluctant to let it go. This is the rear view, where England turns its back on itself, as if ashamed of its own history. Here the houses look into their few square yards, denying their communality with leylandii and larch-lap; here where subtopian dreams meet suburban reality. Then, gradually, the tarmac gives way to gravel, concrete to grass, allotments to wide heaths where pole-straight silver birch stake out new territory, screening the sky with their filigree bronze branches, standing guard over rutted ground riven with stony rills like frozen waterfalls. This land is open and limitless, laid bare in a way we have forgotten; we know contours only through gear changes, as our towns and cities gather together, seeking safety in numbers for fear of nature and its unpredictable ways.

At Brockenhurst, I haul my bike onto the empty platform. The forest station still seems rural, with its two-stop line to Lymington and a waiting room decorated with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, given in memory of her son and intended to beautify this connexion between London and her home on the Isle of Wight. But now visitors are greeted by letters spelt out in ballast on the side of the track Welcome to Brock. Beyond the village, with its butcher selling venison and its stockbroker-belt guarded by expensive cars, the B-road races the railway to the coast, while on the horizon the Island hovers where clouds should be, a lowering landmass separated by the unseen sea.

The wind is against me as I cycle over the open heath, and I’m grateful for the descent into the village of Sway, its outskirts marked by a tall stone cross. Remembrance wreaths still lie on the war memorial, their scarlet paper poppies faded by the sun and spotted by rain; propped up on the railing is a discarded hubcap. Dipping into the valley beyond, the lane darkens with tall trees. I turn off into Barrows Lane, where a hand-painted sign announces Arnewood Turkeys, but this is no ordinary farm building. Concrete where the rest of the forest buildings are brick, its classical proportions, domed roof and pillars resemble some strange escape from the Italian countryside. Beside it, in an overgrown field, is a stubby campanile, a plastic bag flapping from its unglazed window. Seemingly unfinished – as if its creator intended to return to his handiwork – this fairytale towerlet labours under an ivy burden. But it is dwarfed by the structure in whose shadow it lies, an eminence impossible to ignore, yet so unexpected that you could pass by without raising your eyes and miss it entirely. Reaching up out of the forest is an immense grey column, rising two hundred feet into the sky. Its very shape seems to change with the clouds – a sun-lit gnomon from one angle, a mad church steeple from another.

It is so bizarre that it seems completely detached from its surroundings. Over the road, a hard-hatted engineer perches at the top of a telegraph pole, barely aware of the tower that looms over him, just as I cannot remember it from my childhood visits to the forest. Perhaps it is a mirage, appearing only fitfully. Or perhaps it is part of some vast underground complex, some covert scientific experiment. The stillness of this unnamed country lane invites conspiracy: there is no sign of life, no one to acknowledge or explain this extraordinary structure. Omnipresent but forgotten, it refutes the curiosity of the modern world, as though gagged by its own mystery.

As I cycle on, past hedgerows which billow up like green pillows on either side, the tower’s shadow seems to follow me. The houses and cottages multiply as I approach Hordle. Here the roads have names, oddly evocative – Silver Street and Sky End Lane – but it is a disparate place, this arbitrary settlement rescued from the suburbs of nearby New Milton only by the proximity of the forest, whose presence is ever obvious and yet remote. These houses stand just outside its invisible boundaries, yet they cannot but be a part of it, as if its greenness were drawing them in, ineluctably.

I cross the busy east – west road, with its traffic hurtling towards Bournemouth, and ride up Vaggs Lane. Here the land is palpably higher, blown by secondhand gusts from the sea. Behind an orchard of exhausted apple trees is a petrified pine stripped of its bark, skeletal, as if lightning-struck. I knock at the door of a nearby house. A young teenage boy in combat trousers appears, restraining a dog.

‘Alright mate,’ he says, his chummy tone undermined by hesitancy and poshness.

I explain my mission. He points me back in the direction from which I came.

‘Are they friendly?’ I ask.

The boy shrugs: it was an old people’s home before the new owners took over. I retrace my tracks and pull up outside the gates. Opposite is a metal-barred entrance on which a notice has been pasted: NO DUMPING OUTSIDE THESE GATES BY ORDER OF THE DEPT OF THE ENVIRONMENT. Below it is a rusty white van, bits of old car engine, and an assortment of scrap metal and tin cans.

The gravel crunches as I walk up to the door. No-one answers the bell, but a pair of dogs growl at the side gate. The house is bigger than it appears from the road, the land around it lush pasture. I peer through the windows and try to imagine what this place was like a century and a half ago, when its inhabitants sought heaven on earth and this country lane erupted to scandal and sensation. Back down the lane I wander into the village churchyard, where gravestones stand shoulder to shoulder, many decorated with artificial flowers. Screwed to a buttress of the building, overlooking an oddly empty part of the churchyard, is a plaque of the kind made by shoe repairers in shopping malls.

Yet no trace of Mrs Girling’s grave remains. It is an absence which is doubly appropriate, for her followers claimed that three days after her interment, their leader rose from the dead.