Signs and Wonders and the English Civil War
Chris Durston records how the monstrous and the supernatural were seized on by political and religious factions in seventeenth century England as signs of judgment.
By their very nature, such incidents could take a wide variety of forms, but in the many published reports, they fall into several distinct categories. The most common 'celestial wonders', or unusual sights in the air, involved apparitions of pitched battles, church steeples, swords and balls of fire; there were also frequent reports of irregular planetary occurrences, such as duplicate suns and moons, rainbows at night, and the appearance of comets, meteors and blazing stars. Terrestrial or earthly wonders included freak weather conditions, such as rain turning to blood. Accounts of the births of deformed nr 'monstrous' animals and children were popular, and often luridly detailed, and a further category concerned the 'strange and remarkable accidents', usually involving sudden or painful illness and death, which were visited upon individuals as punishments from God.
Most seventeenth-century observers were agreed as to the meaning of these occurrences. They were seen as dramatic visual signs of divine displeasure and warnings of imminent disaster, or, as the Parliamentary supporter John Vicars explained, 'most apparent prints and even visible footsteps of God's highly conceived indignation and provoked patience'. Inevitably, therefore, the unprecedented and turbulent events of the 1640s and 1650s led to a particularly intense interest in prodigies. As English men and women sought explanations for the revolutionary sequence of civil war and regicide, and the overturning of cherished traditional beliefs and customs, reports of wonders proliferated, and the urge to interpret them became more intense. Writers referred to England as 'the land of wonders', and to the revolutionary decades as 'the age of wonders'. In '1645, the author of an account relating the appearance of blood in a pool in Leicestershire declared:
... in these sad days when the voice of God's wrath are poured forth on the face of the whole Earth, wonders were never more frequent. Every day bringeth forth some new miracle... sad and monstrous times must labour still with sad and monstrous births.Wonders were also of great fascination to those who lived in expectation of the imminent end of the world. Such millenarian aspirations were extremely widespread in seventeenth-century England, Christ's return being anticipated not only by many of the lower orders, but also by statesmen like Oliver Cromwell, and intellectuals like John Milton. Considerable academic speculation had pin-pointed the mid-1650s as the most likely date for the Second Coming, even before the climatic events of the 1640s had begun to unfold and confirm this belief. Prodigy stories were both a product of, and further fuel to this apocalyptic state of mind. As the author of the Leicestershire report commented:
Whosoever shall consider these sad times, wherein... such prodigious and wonderful things have appeared as no age before have ever seen or heard of, he must confess that he liveth now in the evening of time and in the last age of the world, wherein all things do begin to suffer a change.The audience for reports of wonders was undoubtedly large and credulous. When the noise of a battle was heard in the air in the vicinity of Hull in 1658, it 'struck such a deep terror among the people there, as the country people gave over their labour in the fields, and ran home with fear, as thinking they were all undone', and in his Discourse Concerning Prodigies, published in 1665, John Spencer commented:
... as for the common sort of people, Prodigy hath always appeared to them a word clothed about with death, and a comet creates in them more solem thoughts than Hell doth.Nor was this credulity confined to the lower orders. During Christmas 1642, reports reached Charles I that two armies had been seen fighting in the skies over the site of the battle of Edgehill, which had taken place the previous autumn. The king sent down two of his courtiers to investigate, and they reported back that they had observed the apparition and recognised amongst the ghostly combat- ants, Sir Edmund Verney, the Royalist standard-bearer, killed in the actual battle. When the opportunity arose, many were eager to witness prodigies at first hand. Reports that the devil had appeared in an inn in the Strand in 1641, led to it being visited by 'multitudes of people'. When the Leicestershire pool turned to blood in 1645, it became the 'object of all eyes thereabouts', and in the same year hundreds, including 'many ministers, gentlemen and great scholars', witnessed the activities of a poltergeist in the house of a silk-weaver in Plaistow. Monstrous babies u ere also frequently exposed to public view before burial.
Those who failed to witness such wondrous events for themselves, were kept informed of them by the many cheap and accessible accounts which poured from the printing presses. Works like the Annus Mirabilis tracts, published in the early 1660s by groups opposed to Charlies Il's restoration, were specifically aimed at a popular readership, and appeared in instalments to keep their price as low as possible. Their popularity was attested by the king's surveyor of printing presses, Sir Roger L'Estrange, who was involved in efforts to suppress them. L'Estrange claimed that several hundred thousand copies of these tracts had been printed between 1660 and 1662 by disaffected publishers, and that:
... those stationers and printers that would be honest are forced either to play the knave for company or to break; for there's scarce any other trading for them, but in that trash. Their customers will be supplied, and if they ask for any of these treasonous books, they must either furnish them, or lose their custom.Given this widespread fascination with prodigies, and the ability of reports to, as one contemporary put it, 'amaze the poor ignorant people of the land, nay put men of more settled judgement at a stand', prodigy stories clearly had enormous potential as propaganda. This fact was quickly appreciated by those involved in the civil conflicts in England after 1642, and, increasingly, wonders began to be employed by the warring factions as evidence of God's support for their cause, and disapprobation of their enemies.
Royalist supporters of Charles I and of the established Anglican Church, began to recruit wonders to their cause from the first few weeks of the civil war. August 1642, the month in which Charles raised his standard at Nottingham, saw the appearance of an account of a monstrous birth at Mears Ashby in Northamptonshire, written by a minister, John Locke. Locke described how the child's mother, Mary Gilmore, had declared when pregnant that she would prefer her child to be born without a head than for it to receive the sign of the cross at its baptism, and how, a month later, she had duly given birth to a headless baby. He attributed her misfortune to 'her weakness, or too much confiding in conventicling sectaries', and counselled his readers to avoid, 'contentious heresies, seditious, needless and unprofitable questions which tend to rebellion and discord'. A year later, with the war being fought fiercely on both sides, the satirical talents of the Royalist poet, John Taylor, were employed to publicise a wondrous occurrence at a book- sellers in Oxford, the king's head- quarters. Taylor informed his readers that a group of remarkably discriminating mice had attacked the bookseller's stock, leaving the Royalist titles untouched, but eating their way through the Parliamentary material. He claimed that they had nearly choked upon some of the insulting Parliamentarian labels for the king's supporters, such as 'cavalier', 'malignant' and 'delinquent', and that they had finally been poisoned by some speeches of the Parliamentary leader, John Pym, which 'though they were delicious in the palate, it was found by woeful experience that no ratsbane could be more poisonous, nor any venom more baneful in operation'. At the end of 1643, the Royalist news- book, Mercurius Rusticus, reported that the Parliamentary army officer, Colonel Sandys, who was responsible for the desecration of a number of churches, had died from strange, incurable gangrenous sores, and threatened a similar fate to those who 'forgetting all religion and loyalty shall lift up their hands against their God in sacrilege, and against their sovereign in rebellion'.
The most potent reports of Royalist wonders and miracles, however, began to circulate in the months following the trial and execution of the defeated king in 1649. Most English men and women in the seventeenth century believed that kingship was hedged with divinity. Only at the very end of the century, after the revolution of 1688, did monarchs cease the practice of attempting to cure scrofula, or the 'king's evil', by touching those suffering from the disease. An enormously popular cult of Charles I's martydrom spread throughout the country in the 1650s, fuelled both by the publication of the Eikon Basilike, a Royalist propaganda work which fabricated details of the king's last prayers and devotions, and by reports of wonders involving the dead monarch. It was widely reported that Charles' headless body had been seen hovering in the air over his place of execution at Whitehall for some months after January 1649. In July 1649 appeared the Royalist tract, A Miracle of Miracles, which was published 'to the comfort of the king's friends, and astonishment of his enemies'. It claimed that a young girl from Deptford, who had been blinded by scrofula, had been cured when her eyes were rubbed with a handkerchief which had been dipped in the king's blood at his execution. The author claimed that the hundreds who had subsequently visited the girl could verify the miracle, and the London bookseller, George Thomason, annotated his copy of the account, 'this is very true'. The writer drew an explicit moral, commenting:
And now, beloved Christians, let us consider what a precious jewel we have lost when we parted from our King's life, whose blood after his death was of such valuable virtue that it made the blind to see.Charles I's Parliamentarian opponents, however, appear to have made more extensive use of prodigy stories for propaganda purposes. Tracts published in 1641, before the outbreak of the war, reported how the devil had appeared to a group of Catholic worshippers, and how a man who had supported the mutilation of the Puritan writer, William Prynne, in 1637, had subsequently suffered profuse bleeding from his ears. In 1642, as hostilities commenced, John Vicars informed readers of his Prodigies and Apparitions, of a series of wonders which had occurred during the 1630s, as signs of divine displeasure at the activities of the conservative Arch- bishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The same year, a report from Cornwall described how the devil had appeared to a company of Royalist soldiers billetted at Lostwithiel. In '1645, the account of the pool of blood in Leicestershire explained the miracle as evidence of God's anger with the Royalist commander, Henry Hastings, Lord Loughborough, 'who being there the great agent for the king, hath robbed many housekeepers in those parts of their goods and their treasure, and, which is far more dear to them, many of their children's lives'. In November of the same year, another tract related how some sailors in the Channel had witnessed the pursuit of a whale by a host of smaller fishes; when the whale was eventually beached and its stomach cut open, it was found to harbour a Catholic priest and a casket containing papal pardons for prominent English recusants.
One of the most blatantly propagandist of the Parliamentary wonders concerned the adventures of a young apprentice, Joseph Buxford, of Bow in Devon. The story appeared in print at the end of 1645, when the Parliamentary New Model Army, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, was attempting to reduce the Royalist forces in the south-west, led by Lord Goring and Sir Richard Grenville. It described how Buxford, who had been apprenticed by his father to a Crediton weaver, had run au ay and enlisted in the Royalist army, and fought in their defeat by the New Model at Langport in Somerset in July 1645. Having returned home penniless and in rags, he was being escorted back to Crediton by his angry father, when the pair encountered a carrier on the road, and Joseph's father agreed that his son should accompany him for some days. The carrier subsequently revealed himself to be the devil and took Joseph on a guided tour of hell to:
... take a view of diverse man who thou hast formerly seen or known in the malignant army, whose base course of life have occasioned their sudden and unexpected deaths, and are now sent to me to receive their due recompense for the same.The boy was told by one of his fellow Royalists at Langport, 'Woe unto us that ever we undertook the defence of such an unjust cause'; he recognised Sir Peter Hall, a former Royalist commissioner for Exeter, who was being roasted on a spit, and was shown the preparations for the arrival of Goring and Grenville. The author clearly expected many to take the report seriously, for he claimed it was corroborated both by the father and a local minister, and that Buxford had related the details of his exploits to a local justice of the peace.
In March 1646, the Parliamentarians produced their own monstrous birth story. The malformed child was allegedly born to a Catholic gentlewoman from Kirkham in Lancashire, a notorious opponent of Parliament, who kept a cat named Prynne whose ears she had cut off. She was reported to have declared while pregnant that she would rather give birth to a headless child than 'beget a Roundhead', and to have, accordingly, been delivered of a baby with no head and its face in its chest. Copies of the story were sent to Parliament, which ordered that the details should be publicised throughout the country. In order to provide further verification, the corpse was later disinterred on the instructions of the local parliamentary committee. The story of the Kirkham monster was retold several months later in the pamphlet Five Wonders Seen in England; this work also included details of an incident in Barnstaple in Devon, where some of the townspeople, who had been harassing the radical, Independent congregation, and who had accused them of bringing plague into the town, had themselves become ill, while the 'honest party had not any sickness upon them'.
During the' early 1650s, largely as a result of the re-imposition of press censorship, the stream of prodigy reports began to dry up. However, while Royalist wonders disappeared altogether, supporters of the new regimes of the Interregnum still occasionally made use of prodigies to warn against the activities of some of the radical religious sects, particularly the Ranters. In 1652, the pamphlet, The Ranter's Monster, described how Mary Adams of Tillingham in Essex, who had claimed to be the Virgin Mary, had given birth to 'the most ugliest ill-shapen monster that ever eyes beheld', the author warning his readers '... not to offend their Heavenly Maker in such a high degree'. In April 1658, the tract The Snare of the Devil Discovered claimed that Lydia Rogers of Wapping, a member of an 'anabaptistical church', had made a pact with the devil; the writer again condemned such 'heretic schismatics and seducers, who derive their heresies, doctrines, practices from the very devil himself...'
At the end of the 1650s, however, in the confusing and uncertain political climate of the months before and after Charles II's restoration, partisan reports of wonders were again frequently employed as propaganda, both by supporters and opponents of the king's return. Those working for the Restoration began to harness wonders to their cause in the spring of 1660. In March, The Age of Wonders or Miracles are not Ceased claimed that, during the previous twelve years, three infants, all under nine months old, had uttered the words 'a king' from their cradles. The following month, amid fears of uprising and assassination, another Royalist work outlined a series of accidents which had befallen some of the monarchy's most conspicuous opponents during the 1650s; these included the execution of the radical army mutineer, Robert Lockyer, who was alleged to have spat in Charles I's face during his trial, and the suicide of the MP Thomas Hoyle on the first anniversary of Charles' execution.
Probably also written before the Restoration, but not published until November 1660, was The Visions and Prophecies... of Ezekiel Grebner. The author claimed to be the grandson of the sixteenth-century astrologer, Paul Grebner, but was in fact the Royalist poet, Abraham Cowley. 'Grebner' described how, on the day of Oliver Cromwell's funeral in September 1658, he had been visited in a dream by a giant, who claimed to be an angel with special responsibility for the safety of England, Scotland and Ireland. After berating the giant for neglecting his duties over the previous twenty years, Grebner became involved in a fierce argument about Cromwell. The giant praised him, using arguments which closely resemble the Earl of Clarendon's later assessment of 'a brave, bad man'; he accused Grebner of subscribing to an out-dated morality, and advised him to follow the teachings of Machiavelli rather than Aristotle. This last comment convinced Grebner that the vision was in tact a devil, and at that moment the giant was sent packing by another angel. The Royalist moral of the story was clearly drawn, Cowley concluding the story with the comment:
...when the indisposed and long tormented Commonwealth has wearied and spent itself almost to nothing with the chargeable, various and dangerous experiments of several Mountebanks, it is to be supposed it will have the wit at last to send for a true Physician.Once Charles II had been reinstated in May 1660, Royalist propaganda began to assert that the speed and case with which the Restoration had been achieved was in itself miraculous, and, in July, John Gadbury dedicated the first edition of this treatise on prodigies, Natura Prodigiorum, to the chief architect of the recent political developments, George Monck.
Royalist propaganda was now focused upon the radical religious groups which had resisted Charles II's return, and were now working to undermine the restored monarchy. Perhaps the strongest condemnation of these groups to appear at this time, was contained in the tract, Two Most Strange Wonders, published in 1662. The work described several visions experienced by James Wise, minister of Greenway in Yorkshire. Wise had seen apparitions of men and animals in the sky, which were clearly meant as thinly disguised representations of the political factions of his day. One group who 'were walking up and down the street and whispering "Treason" ', corresponded to the Parliamentarians. With them, were others in scarlet, representing Parliamentary soldiers; they 'looked very superciliously, as if they would give laws to those men who themselves would observe no laws but their own'. Wise's Royalists appeared as 'many choice and gallant bodies of azure colour and some of perfect white, all differing in their stature but resembling one another in their degrees, as well in their Honour and Innocence'. He commented that 'there was nowhere any true Harmony to be found, but in these only'. The powerful Royalist moral was delivered to Wise by an angel, who told him:
Thou hast seen many things unrevealed to other men and it will be thy happiness to see a great part of them fulfilled. Dost not thou see so many crawling and obnoxious things that are returning to curl themselves in their own beds again. They are the many seditious factions and heresies which have been permitted to come out of the monstrous wombs of Ignorance, Rebellion and confusion and are now returning to their own centre. They left Hell empty to people this Nation and, to speak truth, there was more order in Hell without them than there was lately in your nation with them.... The world was made in order and it is order only that will preserve it.These Royalist wonders in favour of the Restoration were countered during the early 1660s by an extensive literature of prodigy stories, directed against the restored monarchy and Anglican Church. They were the work of a small group of non- conformist activities, which included several radical clergymen, and a number of individuals involved in the London book trade. Among the earliest contributions to their campaign were two titles which appeared in August 1660. Strange and True News from Gloucester described how, after a group of non-conformists at Fairford in Gloucestershire had been disturbed during their worship by a crowd of youths and the authorities had failed to take any action, large numbers of frogs had marched to the houses of the local landowner and justice of the peace, and forced them to act. The Lord's Loud Call to England, written by the Baptist minister Henry Jessey, reported how sudden death had befallen two actors taking part in a satire against Puritans, and several others who had begun saying prayers according to the Anglican rite. Both works mentioned the fate of the daughter of the town clerk of Brockington in Gloucestershire, who was struck dead as she watched her father break up a non-conformist service.
The government clearly saw these reports as a serious threat, for the following month, a royal proclamation banned the publication of all unlicensed 'almanacs and prognostications'. September also saw the appearance of several titles which contained detailed denials of Jessey's assertions, and several months later John Gadbury accused him of attempting 'to infatuate men's minds and set their brains once more amadding, that they may be the more apt to kindle into combustion and break forth into another horrid Rebellion'. However, despite government efforts to suppress or discredit these stories, the campaign continued into 1661 and 1662, with the appearance of the Annus Mirabilis tracts. The first of the series, Eniastos Terastios or Mirabilis Annus, was published in August 1661. It contained reports from all over the country of over a hundred wonders and judgements, all of which revealed God's support for the beleaguered non-conformists, and anger at their persecutors. The following year saw the appearance of two further instalments, Mirabilis Annus Secundus and The Second Part of a Second Year's Prodigies. These gave details of several hundred more wonders which, it was claimed, had occurred since the publication of the first title, and concluded:
God's warnings, we see, do crowd in very fast upon us, and the throes of Province come extreme thick. Certainly there is some great thing at birth and the Lord is rising from his place to do his work, even his strange work.The third instalment, in particular, concerned itself with describing the unpleasant fates which had overtaken those 'apostates' or 'backsliders' who had submitted to the restored Church and government, or, as the authors put it, had returned 'with the Dog to their vomit, and with the Sow that was washed to their wallowing in the mire again'. It urged its readers to shun their example and to 'avoid the Rock upon which these men were split, and so have made shipwreck of Faith and good conscience'.
Thousands of copies of these works, probably written by Jessey and George Cockayne, another radical minister, were printed, stored in secret London warehouses and subsequently distributed as far afield as Bristol and Leicestershire. Roger L'Estrange was in no doubt that, 'to overthrow the Government by king and bishops is that they aim at, and this by the influence of the pretended signs from Heaven upon the people's minds'; and he admitted in 1661 that many were 'startled' by the stories, which encouraged them to 'rebel and cast off the Yoke'. This non- conformist campaign was eventually destroyed by the king's Secretary of State, Sir Edward Nicholas, who conducted an extensive investigation, interrogating all the booksellers, printers and stationers he suspected of involvement. A number of these were imprisoned, and subsequently tried at the Old Bailey for distributing seditious books. The restored monarchy survived, but for several years its position had been threatened by these men, who had both recognised and effectively harnessed the vast propaganda potential of miracles and wonders.
Those living in the late twentieth- century environment of rationalist scepticism, may find it hard to take prodigies seriously; nevertheless, their impact in the seventeenth century was profound. We have seen that, between 1640 and 1662, political and religious factions utilised reports of wonders to justify their own beliefs and heap condemnation on their enemies; and they invested too much money and effort, and often subjected themselves to too much danger, to be satisfied in producing merely amusing diversions. Those who reported wonders may often have believed in their propaganda themselves, and could certainly rely on a high level of credulity among their readership. However, by blatantly harnassing wonders to their partisan positions, did they help fundamentally to undermine that credulity?
The first work to mount a full-scale assault on belief in prodigies and their significance as divine admonitions, was John Spencer's Discourse Concerning Prodigies, which was published in 1665. Clearly influenced by the uses made of wonders during the previous twenty-five years, Spencer commented:
Men's minds, disturbed with love or hatred, (as it often falls out in religious differences), each party superstitiously interprets all accidents in favour of itself...He described prodigies as 'mercenary soldiers', which 'may be easily brought to fight on either side in any case', and counselled his readers to:
... leave off... the entailing salvation solely upon their own Party, and not to go about to hedge in the Holy Dove by appropriating the graces and influences thereof to themselves. For then they would not be so prone to believe God's judgements design no higher than the service of their sorry passions, parties and persuasions.In Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas addressed the question of why the widespread belief in magic, witchcraft, astrology and portents began to diminish in England from the mid-seventeenth century. Among the developments he identified as contributing to this changing mentality were the rise of mechanistic science, technological advance, and the presentation of new explanations by mainstream religious writers. In the light of Spencer's comments, perhaps we should add to Thomas' list, the enlistment of prodigies and wonders by political and religious propagandists. For the warring factions of the revolutionary crisis in mid-seventeenth century England may also have played a part in initiating the intellectual and psychological changes which would eventually consign these 'signs and wonders from heaven' to the status of entertaining relics of a lost culture.
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