Martyrs and Mystics

Booth had moved to London in 1849 and drawn up a personal code of conduct which read:

I do promise – my God helping – that I will rise every morning sufficiently early (say 20 minutes before seven o’clock) to wash, dress, and have a few minutes, not less than five, in private prayer. That I will as much as possible avoid all that babbling and idle talking in which I have lately so sinfully indulged. That I will endeavour in my conduct and deportment before the world and my fellow servants especially to conduct myself as a humble, meek, and zealous follower of the bleeding Lamb.

Booth preached regularly across the East End, condemning the usual vices: drinking, gambling, watching cricket and football – anything that people enjoyed but which could lead to unchristian behaviour – surrounded by what a supporter called ‘blaspheming infidels and boisterous drunkards’. In 1878 he reorganised the mission along quasi-military lines and began using the name Salvation Army. His preachers were given military-style ranks such as major and captain, with Booth himself as the general. The Salvation Army’s banner in red, blue and gold sported a sun symbol and the motto ‘Blood and Fire’, the blood that of Christ and the fire that of the Holy Spirit.

Salvation Army bands would march into town ‘to do battle with the Devil and his Hosts and make a special attack on his territory’. Their services provided the model for what became known disparagingly the following century as ‘happy clappy’ – joyous singing, Hallelujahs, beseeching for repentance, hand-clapping. Evil-doers and lost souls flocked to repent, even when the organisation’s enemies, the so-called ‘Skeleton Army’, marching under a skull and crossbones banner, attempted to drive the Salvation Army off the streets. Within ten years Booth had 10,000 officers, and had opened branches in Iceland, Argentina and Germany. By the time he died the Salvation Army had spread to fifty-eight countries worldwide.

TOWER HILL EXECUTION SITE

The hill to the north of the Tower of London was one of the capital’s main sites for religiously motivated executions, along with Smithfield and Tyburn. Its victims include perhaps the most famous of all British martyrs, Thomas More, who has since been canonised by the Catholic Church.

Ancient British tribes treated Tower Hill at the edge of the East End as holy and buried the head of Bran, a Celtic god king, under the ground there. Bran’s head supposedly had magical powers and was interred facing France to ward off invaders. Nevertheless it failed to repel the Romans, who came to London shortly after the death of Christ. It also failed to repel the Saxons, the Danes and the Normans, who took over London at the end of the eleventh century and built what is still the capital’s greatest landmark – the Tower – by the ancient tribes’ sacred hill. Those executed here include:

• John Fisher, 1535

John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, made a famous speech at Paul’s Cross in 1526 denouncing Martin Luther. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 22 June 1535 after opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the king’s wish to make himself head of the English Church. Originally Fisher was supposed to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, but Henry magnanimously commuted the sentence to beheading. The corpse was stripped naked and hung on the scaffold till evening when it was thrown into a pit at the nearby church of All Hallows, Barking. Fisher’s head was later stuck on a pole on London Bridge where it remained for a fortnight before being thrown into the Thames.

• Thomas More, 1535

Lawyer, MP and fêted author, More was one of Henry VIII’s leading aides, who resigned the chancellorship when the king declared himself supreme head of the Church in England after the Pope refused to support his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. More continued to argue against Henry’s divorce and the split with Rome, and was arrested for treason in 1534. Before going to the scaffold on Tower Hill on 6 July 1535 More urged the governor of the Tower: ‘I pray you, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’ He then joked with the executioner: ‘Pluck up thy spirits, man. My neck is very short!’ On the block More moved his beard away with the quip: ‘It were a pity it should be cut off, it has done no treason.’ He was later canonised by the Pope, but has been singled out for criticism by anti-Catholic commentators. They condemn his persecution of the Bible translator William Tyndale, whom he allegedly had arrested and burnt alive for translating the Book of Matthew.

• Margaret Pole, 1541

When Margaret Pole was taken for execution in 1541 after refusing to support Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Church, she would not agree that she was a traitor and had to have her head forcibly secured to the block. Pole struggled free and ran off closely pursued by the axe-wielding executioner, who killed her by hacking away at her.

• William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1645

One of the major religious figures of the seventeenth century, Laud was a chaplain to James I and became Charles I’s main religious adviser. He was influenced by the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, who championed free will over predestination and loved ceremony at his services, what he called the ‘beauty of holiness’.

The Puritans became increasingly powerful during Charles’s reign and they hated such ceremonies, which they saw as being dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. In November 1640 the Long Parliament instituted proceedings against what it called King Charles’s ‘evil councillors’, including Laud, who was impeached for high treason. He was accused of subverting the true religion with popish superstition, such as reintroducing stained glass into churches, and of causing the recent disastrous wars against the Scots.

Laud was sent to the Tower in 1641 and tried before the House of Lords in 1644. He defended himself admirably and the peers adjourned without voting. However, the Commons passed a Bill condemning him and he was beheaded on 10 January 1645. Laud was buried at the nearby church of All Hallows Barking, and after the Restoration was reburied in the vault under the altar at the chapel of St John’s College, Oxford.

• Christopher Love, 1651

Love was a Puritan who was condemned for plotting to put Charles II on the throne during Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. In his final speech on 22 August 1651 he announced: ‘I am exchanging a pulpit for a scaffold and a scaffold for a throne. I am exchanging a guard of soldiers for a guard of angels to carry me to Abraham’s bosom.’ An onlooker watching Love go to the scaffold repented and claimed to be born again as the martyr died.

• Simon, Lord Lovat, 1747

The last Tower Hill execution took place in 1747 when Simon, Lord Lovat, was beheaded for supporting the Jacobite attempt to seize the throne of England.

→ Smithfield execution site, p. 33

TOWER OF LONDON, Tower Hill

Britain’s major tourist attraction has been palace, mint, menagerie and most notably a prison, especially to London’s medieval Jewish population who endured much misery here in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (→ Old Jewry, p. 24).

Sir John Oldcastle, the most famous of the Lollard Bible reformers, escaped from the Tower in October 1413 after being imprisoned here for heresy. With a group of followers he had made a botched attempt to seize the capital, planning to kidnap the royal family from Eltham Palace. The plot failed when one of the group betrayed them. Oldcastle was eventually executed at St Giles, central London.

John Gerard, a Jesuit priest during a period of severe restrictions on Catholics, escaped from the Salt Tower, one of the wings of the complex, in 1589. He had been arrested soon after landing in England after a spell on the continent. In the Tower he was tortured by being suspended from chains on the dungeon wall, but managed to escape using a rope strung across the moat, which he somehow managed to negotiate despite his ravaged hands. Gerard fled to Morecrofts, a house in Uxbridge that was home to Robert Catesby, the Gunpowder Plotter of 1605. Thanks to his daring escape Gerard managed to avoid execution and died in Rome aged seventy-three.

William Penn, one of the first Quakers, was imprisoned in the Tower in 1668–9 for publishing controversial religious pamphlets. Here he wrote another, No Cross No Crown, ‘to show the nature and discipline of the Holy Cross of Christ; and that the denial of self . . . is the alone way to the Rest and Kingdom of God’.

WELLCLOSE SQUARE, St George’s

Now a ravaged location overlooked by fearsome tower blocks and slum estates, Wellclose Square has an extraordinary religious history. It was built as Marine Square, the first planned residential estate in east London, and was aimed at intellectuals and free-thinkers. Indeed it was the apex of the new London devised by the team around Christopher Wren that reshaped London after the 1666 Fire. Using biblical measurements connected with the ancient notion of ‘sacred geometry’ (→ p. 38), Wren and his assistants created the square 2,000 cubits (a biblical measurement, around ⅔ of a mile) from St Dunstan-in-the-East, his favourite church, which itself stands the same distance from St Paul’s. Smart houses lined the square around a railed-off grassed area at the centre of which stood a church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Danish architect Caius Gabriel Cibber, the designer of the relief on the Monument based on the Book of Lamentations.

In the eighteenth century two illustrious religious figures – the Kabbalist extraordinaire Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk and the scientist-cum-theologian Emanuel Swedenborg – lived on Wellclose Square. Falk was known as the Ba’al Shem of London, a master of the secret names of God which in biblical times the high priest used to invoke special powers.

Over the years a succession of legends arose regarding Falk’s stay here. He could work miracles, such as saving the Great Synagogue from fire (→ p. 20). He could re-enact the ancient Kabbalistic experiment in which the essence of God, containing the ten stages of primal divine light, appears from holy vessels. As Falk’s reputation grew, so did the invitations to impart Kabbalistic advice. In London he was visited by the lothario Giacomo Casanova, who wanted to gain insights into Kabbalistic sexual techniques. He met the great occultist Cagliostro with whom he discussed the idea of founding a new Freemasonry that would restore the religion of Adam, Noah, Seth and Abraham. But he also had many detractors.

A feature in the Gentleman’s Magazine of September 1762 lampooned Falk as a ‘Christened Jew and the biggest rogue and villain in all the world, who had been imprisoned everywhere and banished out of all countries in Germany’. The anonymous writer explained that when he asked the Kabbalist to reveal one of his ‘mysteries’ Falk told him to avoid all churches and places of worship, steal a Hebrew Bible and obtain ‘one pound of blood out of the veins of an honest Protestant’.

Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish visionary, scientist, philosopher and Christian theologian whose work was a major influence on William Blake, moved to Wellclose Square in 1766 at the age of seventy-eight. Twenty-one years earlier Swedenborg had given up science after experiencing an epiphany, and from then on he devoted himself to God. He wrote voluminous works interpreting the Scriptures and warned that ‘no flesh could be saved’, according to Christ’s words in Matthew 24, unless a New Church was founded. It was, in London, after his death.

Swedenborg and Falk met to discuss the history of knowledge – the earliest knowledge saved by Noah before the Flood, which, according to ancient myth, was recorded on two indestructible pillars: one of marble, which could not be destroyed by fire, the other of brick, which could not be dissolved by water.

In 1845 St Saviour, the Wellclose Square church, was let to the Anglo-Catholic movement, led locally by the charismatic Revd Charles Lowder. He converted the church into a mission hall, which imposed a strict ascetic regime, and co-founded a secret brotherhood for priests, the Society of the Holy Cross. Its members worshipped the True Cross – the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified – fragments of which had come into Lowder’s possession by a circuitous route.

One night in 1862 a woman knocked at the mission in some distress. Her daughter had died. Two missionaries, Joseph Redman and Father Ignatius of Llanthony, left for the woman’s house with a fragment of the True Cross. Father Ignatius laid the relic on the dead girl’s breast and proclaimed: ‘In the name of Jesus Christ I say unto thee, “Arise!” ’ Remarkably the girl’s right hand moved slowly, tracing a cross in the air. The shocked Redman quietly breathed: ‘Father, what have you done?’, to which Father Ignatius replied: ‘I have done nothing, but our Lord has done a great thing indeed.’ Doctors soon explained away the ‘miracle’. Evidently the girl had been unconscious, not dead, and the clerics’ arrival had merely catalysed her revival. Those involved with the mission and Lowder’s society believed otherwise.

Father Ignatius made a name for himself locally when he burst into Wilton’s Music Hall one night and oblivious to the intoxicating atmosphere of mild ale and shag tobacco, gingerly made his way to the centre of the dance floor and announced to the startled crowd: ‘We must all appear before the Judgment Seat of Christ,’ before stealing away.

→ Little Gidding, p. 106

Hampton

HAMPTON COURT PALACE, Hampton Court Road

The palace was built in the twelfth century for the Knights Hospitallers, religious warriors who took over from the Knights Templars as protectors of pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. It became a royal palace under Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor 400 years later, and was where in 1604 a conference led to the production of the greatest English Bible – the King James.

The Hampton conference was organised not to produce a new Bible but to seek a settlement between the Puritan and Anglican wings of the Church. The Puritans expected James to be sympathetic to their cause. But John Reynolds, one of their leaders, made a tactical error during the conference by using the word ‘presbytery’. James was sensitive about the way the Presbyterians had restricted his power as a monarch in Scotland and felt he had to assert his role as head of the Church by supporting bishops. Viewing the Puritans’ motion as a move to limit his power, he voiced the infamous threat: ‘No bishop, no king!’ and won the day.

As the conference proceeded, Reynolds suggested delegates discuss producing a new translation of the Bible. It was a timely move, for even though the Geneva version was popular, the clergy didn’t like its marginal notes which proclaimed the Pope as the Antichrist. Reynolds explained that ‘Those which were allowed in the reigns of Henry the eighth, and Edward the sixth, were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original.’

James was keen that ‘some special pains were taken for a uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned men in both Universities’. The conference agreed that a translation be made of the whole Bible ‘as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek; and this to be set out and printed, without any marginal notes, and only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service’.

The king appointed fifty-four ‘learned men’, including Reynolds, Lancelot Andrewes and William Barlow (though, oddly, not Hugh Broughton, the foremost English Hebrew scholar of the time), to work on the new translation, dividing them in six groups at Westminster, Cambridge and Oxford. They based their new edition on the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, but also consulted previous milestone works by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale. The task took four years, including nine months of refining carried out in London. Thomas Bilson and Myles Smith, who wrote the preface, conducted the final revision, which was then printed in London by Robert Barker, printer to the king.

The King James Bible or Authorised Version (it was authorised by the king) stands as a masterpiece, but more for its literary content than its religious validity. Phrases that are now a rich part of English vocabulary – ‘coat of many colours’, ‘fight the good fight’ – were first found within, alongside passages of unmatchable quality and clarity: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal . . .’ and ‘His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude’, for instance.

In the eighteenth century the King James replaced the Latin Vulgate as the standard version for English-speaking scholars. But disingenuously it also came to be seen as the divine text, refutation of which was a cardinal sin. Subsequent versions, while trying to jazz up the translation to make it more ‘relevant’, have come little nearer to capturing the original intention of the Scriptures and have fallen well short of the King James version in literary qualities.

→ The Gunpowder Plot, p. 81

Islington

ALEXANDER CRUDEN’S ADDRESS, Camden Passage

The alleyway near Angel tube station, which contains one of the greatest concentration of antique shops in Britain, was home in the early eighteenth century to the biblical expert Alexander Cruden. In 1737 he completed the first English concordance to the Bible, a monumental production, longer than the complete works of Shakespeare. It lists alphabetically every significant word in the Scriptures and indicates where in the Old and New Testaments it can be found.

Cruden was something of an eccentric. He would stride through the streets of Islington removing all traces of the number 45 to show his contempt for the radical orator and pamphleteer John Wilkes, whose issue No. 45 of the North Briton magazine had criticised George III. The king must have been pleased, for in 1758, the year the second edition of the Concordance appeared, he gave Cruden £100.

Lambeth

LAMBETH PALACE, Lambeth Palace Road

The London residence and offices of the Archbishop of Canterbury date back to the thirteenth century. It was here in April 1378 that John Wycliffe, the first man to translate the Bible into English, was ordered to appear before William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, accused of heresy after rejecting the idea of transubstantiation – that the Communion wafer actually becomes the body of Christ during the service. As the trial began a message came to the judges from the Queen Mother, Joan of Kent, forbidding the council to pass sentence upon Wycliffe, which left them dumbfounded. This gave him some time to resubmit his case. He also handed the judges a statement of his principles:

1. The Pope of Rome has no political authority.

2. All popes are sinners just as other men and need to be reproved.

3. The Pope has no right to the national resources of England.

4. Priests have no power to forgive sins.

5. Neither the Pope nor his priests have the power of excommunication.

6. The Church is a plunderer of the world’s goods.

7. No tithes should be paid to Rome.

8. The Mass is blasphemous.

The archbishop reprimanded Wycliffe for his teachings, but the trial ended inconclusively.

Wycliffe’s followers, the Lollards, were imprisoned here in 1434–5 in what was known as the Lollard’s Tower, destroyed by Second World War bombs but since rebuilt.

→ William Tyndale translates the Bible into English, p. 250

THOMAS TANY BIBLE BURNING SITE, St George’s Fields, Lambeth Road

Thomas Tany, a London silversmith, was found in St George’s Fields in December 1654 burning the Bible, armed with a sword and pistols. He had rowed over the Thames towards the Houses of Parliament earlier that day, trying to deliver a petition which backed his claim that he was directly descended from Aaron, Moses’ brother, High Priest of the Israelite, when God gave the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The petition also alleged that Tany was now Theauraujohn, High Priest of the Jews, who would soon rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem with himself as High Priest.

By a remarkable coincidence, the same day that Tany was jailed John Reeve, a local tailor, supposedly received a divine visitor who told him he had been chosen as the Lord’s ‘last messenger’. With his cousin, Lodowick Muggleton, Reeve formed the Muggletonian sect (→ p. 16), which later condemned Tany as a ‘counterfeit high priest and pretend prophet, the spawn of Cain’.

Tany was sent to jail, but while he was inside a series of fires began to blaze in the City. Tany claimed that these were a sign of the imminent destruction of the world. A more likely explanation came with the arrest of an arsonist who may have been in his pay. The self-styled ‘High Priest’ later perished at sea while journeying to the Holy Land ‘to recover Jerusalem for the true Jews’.

→ Prophet John Wroe, p. 200

Moorfields

THOMAS EAMES RESURRECTION SITE, Bunhill Fields Cemetery, City Road

When Dr Thomas Emes, a self-styled prophet, died in December 1707 his supporters claimed that he would be resurrected five months later. Huge crowds turned up at Bunhill Fields Cemetery the next May. When there was no sign of Emes his followers explained that the miracle had been cancelled because of fears that the sizeable crowd would have endangered the safety of the risen prophet.

JOHN ROBINS’S ADDRESS, Ling Alley

Robins, a mid-seventeenth-century Moorfields mystic, failed in his plan to take nearly 150,000 followers to the Holy Land, and feed them solely on dry bread, raw vegetables and water. Robins explained that he had previously spent time on earth both as Adam and Melchizedek (an Old Testament high priest), but when he claimed in 1651 that his wife, Joan, would give birth to Jesus Christ, the authorities committed her to the Clerkenwell House of Correction and his scheme withered away.

Peckham

WILLIAM BLAKE’S VISION, Goose Green

At the age of nine in 1766 William Blake, who went on to become England’s greatest religiously inspired painter, claimed that he saw a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, then in the countryside at the south-eastern fringe of London. He went home and told his father, who thrashed him until his mother intervened. Blake also once described seeing the face of God pressed against the window of his parents’ Soho shop. Blake later discovered, to his great pleasure, that his birth year – 1757 – had already been marked down by his mentor, the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, as a special one when the last judgment would come to pass in the spiritual world.

Although many of Blake’s paintings and poems were inspired by biblical imagery, confusion has long surrounded the identity of the Nonconformist sect he was born into. That his parents were Nonconformists was certain, for they were buried in Bunhill Fields, Moorgate, like Blake himself. Peter Ackroyd, Blake’s most extensive biographer, has debated whether William’s father, James, was a Baptist on Grafton Street, a Moravian on Fetter Lane, a Muggletonian, Sandemanian, Hutchinsonian, Thraskite or Salmonist, such were the bewildering number of non-establishment Protestant groups present in London in the mid-eighteenth century.