“After this they fell all to dancing the Hays, about three flower-pots”: welcoming the apocalypse in Berkshire, 1650.

My text is a Thomason tract. Only ‘…ber’ for the month appears in his title page dating, it was perhaps September, certainly the 20^th of the relevant month.

A most faithful relation of two wonderful passages which happened very lately (to wit, on the first and eighth days of this present September, being Lords days) in the parish of Bradfield in Berk-shire 1650.

The London writer has a preamble, in which the millenarian hopes entertained by Dr John Pordage and his wife are represented as (inevitably) the devil’s work prospering in Berkshire, just as they are prospering everywhere as never before:

“This is an Age of wonders: for I dare affirme, that since the deplorable Fall of our first Parents, at which time Sin was first ushered into the World, the ill spirit was never so busie, he never made such a harvest, or had such a latitude of power given him to ramble up and down in any part of the earth, as he hath had lately in this island; witness else in what various forms he hath appeared, and what sundry feats he hath played in Essex, Suffolk, Cambridge-shire, and other places, especially in Scotland, where thousands have been possest by him, and so brought to the Gallows: And now it seems he hath taken footing in Berk-shire, as appears by these two uncouth Examples following.”

The writer renders Pordage’s name as ‘Doctor Pordich’ (making me wonder how often you would give, in those spelling-permissive days, a subtly denigratory spelling to a person’s name – ‘poor ditch’). John Pordage, as his ODNB life makes clear, was only just holding on in the regular church. The ‘Commissioners for ejecting of Scandalous Ministers’ would finally oust him in 1655. Pordage seems to have been involved or interested in the Family of Love, was prone to denunciations of marriage, was accused of denying the Trinity, was a Behmenist; while the ‘Everet’ named here as the likely ‘conjurer’ who has directed the devil to make these possessions in Berkshire, was actually John Everard - Leveller, Grindletonian, alchemist, etc, etc.

So, what would be represented as diabolic intrusion into parish life in Berkshire was really product of Pordage’s earnest and ecstatic belief that the heavens were about to open. Marvellously, he was in his pulpit preaching when it became somehow apparent to him that the big moment had come, and he exited his church then and there, anxious to get back to where the real action was going to be:

“Doctor Pordich being preaching in the Parish-Church of Bradfield (on the eighth of this instant September, being Lords day) within a quarter of an hour he fell into a Trance, running out of the Church, and bellowing like a Bull, saying that he was called, and must be gone.”

In its small way, it is a moment with something of the significance of the famous time when Mohammed turned his followers round during worship, away from Jerusalem, and towards Mecca. The Vicar of Bradfield exits his church, to be translated into heaven from home, along with his true followers - his wife, and some of their female friends. In his case, it proved not to be so epochal.

Understandably, when he left his church at such a moment in such a state, Pordage was pursued and questioned, but only replied that he must be gone ‘home to his house’. Fortunately, William Foster (a local gentleman rich enough to own a coach) followed Pordage home and witnessed what happened when the vicar got home:

“Where being come, he going up the Stairs, found his Wife, (Mistress Pordich) Clothed all in White Lawne, from the crown of the head, to the sole of the foot, with a White Rod in her hand.”

What’s pleasing about all this is that the apocalypse seems to be egalitarian in regards to gender. Now Pordage had heterodox views about marriage, and ambiguous relations with a number of women. He probably regarded his women followers as being in a state higher than marriage anyway. But at this moment, his wife (in the eyes of the normal world) Mistress Pordage, is garbed as a prophetess, and will soon call for ‘Elijah’s mantle’. Female followers gather: “Mistress Chevill coming in fell on her knees, saying, That she was to meet with her Spouse, and her Prophetess. After this comes in Mistress Tracie, holding of her head, and making of strange noyses, that were heard within her, in a very hideous passion. After this they fell all to dancing the Hays, about three flower-pots…”

Mr Foster, who has followed from church, asks Pordage what is meant by the dancing, and learns that “It was a rejoicing, because they had overcome the Devil.” Of course, joy that you have vanquished Satan in Berkshire can easily be represented in London as Satan’s victory over you. Perhaps there is a Familist touch in Mistress Chevill arriving to meet ‘her Spouse’ – Christ? Pordage? Though being the man he was, Pordage was inclined to deny that there was very much significant difference.

“With that his Wife cries out for Elijah’s Mantle, and then comes up Mistress Chevill, and Mistress Pordich fell of adoring her; and then in came one Goodwife Pukerig, and bended her body, and kissed her knee; Mistress Pordich assuring her that there was a place prepared for her in heaven, to sit at the right hand of the Virgin Mary.”

‘Elijah’s mantle’ because of the second book of Kings, verse 11: “And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Mistress Pordage is ready to ascend to heaven without death, as happened to Elijah. (“Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head to day?”)

But, as usual with these moments when the rapture is about to commence, there’s a snag – someone is missing, and it seems that this someone, who perhaps was important in making up the right numbers, was Foster’s own wife. Foster, having seen enough, leaves, but is urgently sent after and asked to return, bringing his wife with him. With her husband very much awake to strange goings-on, Foster’s wife gets cold feet, and simply refuses to go. In his 1655 publication, Innocencie appearing, through the dark mists of pretended guilt, Pordage over-confidently (and very conveniently) cites all the charges that were made against him, and in that work, it sounds as though Mistress Foster was rather frightened by the thought of seeing the heavens opened, as had been promised. As for Foster himself, he was probably involved at some lesser level himself. His wife having refused to answer the summons to be present at this Pang Valley ascension into heaven, Foster “tooke his Coach, and went alone: so coming into the Doctors house, he found the Doctor sitting in a Chaire all in black Velvet.” Costumes, as ever with early modern culture, were important for the show – as prophetess, Mistress Pordage has head to foot white linen, and her husband, black velvet (costly material and dye!). The mantle of Elijah itself was probably still in a wardrobe waiting to be deployed.

Asked where his wife is, Foster says she is not well, and therefore she cannot come: “Then said the Doctor, there is nothing can be done without her.” Crisis indeed! Mistress Pordage also asks the coachman, and hears confirmation that it is all going wrong. But they seem to have endeavoured to prolong the celestial window of opportunity, perhaps in hope that Mistress Foster would relent and show up just in time: “So there they keep dancing of the Hayes, and Trenchmore, and expecting when they shall be taken up to heaven every hour.”

The writer concludes with a dark imputation – Everard, as witch, was directing all this from far away: “By what means this Distraction came, is not as yet certainly known; but it is thought it was done by one Everet (a man suspected to be a Sorcerer or Witch) who much-frequented the Doctors house, and would often play with the children; and he was seen at London in a frantick posture, much about the time that these things happened.”

The little tract has ‘two wonderful passages’, however. Out of a sense of social status, the London  writer has told the story of Doctor Pordage’s folly first. He then moves on to detail what had happened the week before in the very same parish church. As this had happened to a thirteen year old youth, an illiterate member of a poor man’s large family (well, illiterate for the moment, but that all would change), it became the secondary story. The writer has relegated the one of the local signs that probably triggered Pordage to announce the apocalypse from its proper chronological place. Something of this sort would happen in Pordage’s church: on Sept 1^st, a youth of 13, “son to one Goodman Snelling”, “being in the Parish-Church of Bradfield, fell into a very strange Fit, foaming at the mouth for the space of two hours.”

Now to fall into a fit and foam at the mouth seems to me a very likely reaction to one of John Pordage’s sermons – he seems to have been a preacher worth hearing, wildly unpredictable, charismatic, full of novel doctrines, and easily misunderstood. The youth, whose sanity has probably been affected by listening to Pordage preach every Sunday,  finally emerges from his fit, and announces that he must go to London, taking his father with him. In London, they will find an old man there “living without Temple-bar, and said to be a Gold-smith”) who was “possest with two devils, and had the Root of Corruption in him.”

Exactly what you’d want to visit London to do – to locate the root of corruption. One can perhaps sense Pordage’s influence here, and a touching willingness on behalf of his young parishioner to come up with some marvel to interest his raving vicar. Exactly as foretold, they do indeed find the old man, who has been lying in a trance, from which he revives at the very instant that they arrive. This mysterious personage gives them yet more bewildering instructions: they are to go to Beacon Hill (it is just south of Newbury, close to Highclere house, aka Downton Abbey), “and there he should finde, at such a place, a crooked stick lying on the ground, and in it there should be an Inkhorn and a pen, and directions how to write and read, and to speak several Languages, and by the stick should be lying a lamb.”

The eagerness to attain literacy, by hook or by crook, is commendable. Off they trudge out to the west. Arrived at the hill, first of all they see the lamb, then they find the crooked stick, and “therein an Inkhorn and pen: and the boy taking up the stick, the Lamb vanished.” Then the visionary experiences start: they hear “strange voices in the air; and they saw the King with his head off, and then again they saw him with his head on, and a Crown upon it: also they saw Wallingford on fire, and the Governours head off.”

Emotional perturbation indeed, a perfect 17^th century mixture of political and religious anxieties: the King, a troubling beheaded phantom, and then re-headed. Heaven’s anger striking Wallingford (which had been the last royalist stronghold to hold out in 1646, but finally failed the king’s cause) and its Parliamentarian governor (Colonel Arthur Evelyn, it would have been). The father and son take the bad news to Wallingford, and seem to have been received in a level-headed way: “Whereupon, this Goodman Snelling and his son went to the Governour of Wallingford, and told him of it; who answered, that he hoped no such thing would come to pass.”

No great outcome at Wallingford, which would not burn down till 1675, and they are left with the suddenly literate younger Snelling, who also does his best to manifest the languages he has supernaturally acquired:

“This Goodman Snelling hath a great family, and they are all in a very strange frantick condition. he is a pot-ash-maker; and when his Fit is over, he is as sensible as any one; and he hath told his neighbours that he would give all that he has in the world, so that he were free of this business. And he saith that his son did bring him to such a hill, as right as though he had been there a thousand times before. And the boy can now write very well, which before he could not. Also, there are strange confused sound of Languages heard within him, but he does not speak them distinctly.”

Our writer concludes: “These things are certainly true, and avouched by a cloud of witnesses, young and old, who are the people of the best reputation in that County. My Conclusion shall be with this short prayer, which never was more seasonable then now: God deliver us from the Devil and all his shifts.”

As I said, Pordage somehow kept his job in the church until he was ejected in 1655 after hearings in1654. There’s nothing at the church in Bradfield that remains from his time: the Victorians made a thoroughgoing and very heavy-handed restoration of the building in 1848.

Pordage himself features pricelessly in A Collection of modern relations of matter of fact concerning witches & witchcraft upon the persons of people (1693), which has an account of the quite staggering manifestations taking place in the Pordage’s house in 1649. The fun here is that it starts as Pordage’s defence of himself from charges of conjuration. He too takes the line that Satan is empowered as never before:

“How then can Bradfield, or any other Place, be exempted from his Appearing when God permits? And may not all this be for the manifesting of his Glory, Goodness and Power? And who can tell whose Family may be next exposed by God’s permission, to be tryed and proved by the Representation of Satan? And I desire you seriously to consider how any such Apparitions raised by the Devil, and permitted by God for his own Glory, argue me either Ignorant, Scandalous, or Insufficient …”

But, whenever he was in a hole, which (unsurprisingly in view of his beliefs), was often, and seriously, Pordage could not resist enlarging and improving the hole to suit his own fancy. He can’t hold back from telling how, yes, the spirit of Everard appeared nocturnally in his bedchamber in August 1649, how then he saw a terrifying giant, then a dragon.

Pordage sounds off (as was his wont) largely about the different spiritual worlds, and then produces this undeniably striking witness to the activities of the evil side of the spirit world: “the Spirits made some wonderful Impressions upon visible Bodies without, as Figures of Men and Beasts upon the Glass Windows and the Ceilings of the House, some of which yet remain. But what was most remarkable was the whole visible World represented by the Spirits upon the Bricks of a Chimney, in the form of two half Globes, as in the Maps. After which, upon other Bricks of the same Chimney, was Figured a Coach and four Horses, with Persons in it, and a Footman attending, all seeming to be in Motion, with many other such Images, which were wonderful exactly done. Now, fearing lest there might be any Danger in these Images, through unknown Conjuration and false Magic, we endeavoured to wash them out with wet Cloths, but could not, finding them engraven in the substance of the Bricks, which indeed might have continued till this day, had not our fear and suspicion of Witch-craft, and some evil design of the Devil against us in it, caused us to deface and obliterate them with Hammers. Now, what the Devil’s End in the former Apparitions, and those figurative Representations was, the Lord knows: But it was certainly Evil.”

In Innocencie appearing, through the dark mists of pretended guilt, Pordage obligingly lists all the charges made against him locally, and something of the same kind of optical hallucination appears: “in Dr Pordage’s house in Bradfield, lately the new Jerusalem hath been seen to come down from heaven, all of precious stones; and in the new Jerusalem was a Globe, which Globe was eternity”.

I wonder what was going off. Were these things products of Pordage’s heated imagination? He was capable of seeing a lot, indeed, seeing infinity, in almost anything, as his wild commentary on very basic images of circles and dots in Theologia mystica shows. But his house seems to have become notorious, and to have had all kinds of people turning up there. Everard was an experimenter: could he have done devised some method of projecting or etching the pictures?

I cycled over to what had been his church earlier today. The church as an institution expelled Pordage, and the over-sized and frowsty Victorian pile, which seems in part to have been used for services attended by boys from Bradfield College, testifies to the enduring dull power of that church. Pordage is listed in a manuscript list of previous incumbents as one who ‘intruded’ on the proper pastoral succession: Elias Ashmole is down as his patron to the living. The Victorians in their re-build obliterated any chance of finding a church with a furtive alchemical emblem or Rosicrucian enigma.

Executing all the enemies of a Utopian England: John Dunton's 'The Informer's Doom', 1683

These curious woodcuts derive from and expand on the familiar woodcut frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches. I found them - among many others - in The informer’s doom, or, An unseasonable letter from Utopia directed to the man in the moon giving a full and pleasant account of the arraignment, tryal, and condemnation of all those grand and bitter enemies that disturb and molest all kingdoms and states throughout the Christian world (1683),which John Dunton probably both wrote and published, or maybe just put into print as bookseller (the former seems more likely). As publisher, Dunton is keen to let his potential purchasers know what a good deal they are getting: “I have comprized this Treatise in an Eighteen Penny Book, (though considering the Cuts, it cannot be well afforded so) that as it is of real use and publick concern, so it might be the better disperst throughout this English Nation.” The sixty plus woodcuts – as they are small, derivative, and crude - in a book priced at eighteen pence might not have been all that much of a bargain.

Whoever wrote The informer’s doom, he was a keen reader of John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s Progress had appeared five years before. The work closely copies Bunyan’s very direct allegory, even down to that reluctance some of Bunyan’s allegorical characters understandably show about disclosing their all too revelatory names. It is a fantasy of a Utopian England, where “all those grand and bitter Enemies, that disturb all Kingdoms and States, throughout the Christian World” (‘the Christian world’ actually means England) can be brought to trial, found guilty, and (surprise, surprise!) executed. Pope Innocent XI, supreme pontiff when Dunton was writing, is depicted being burned at the stake, Justice Implacable (part of Dunton’s long campaign against Judge Jeffreys) gets hanged himself, Mrs Bad Wife ends up “Carted to the Great Ducking-stool that is in this Town, and there shall you sit (in the presence of all the women in Utopia for a warning to them) till you expire out your poysonous and infectious breath.” A long denunciation of Sir John Fraud, as he appears in all professions, rounds out the work.

In each allegorical trial, suitable witnesses appear to testify to the guilt of the accused: “there came into the Court Mr. Witch-finder General, Mr. Hate-device, and Mr. Spy-Imp, and said, They could prove all the Prisoners at the Bar guilty of hainous Crimes and Offences, and that they were real Witches.”

This witchcraft material is part of the final resistance to the middle to late 17th century movement to deny the existence of witches and their pacts. I have already shown Dunton retailing a witch yarn in his most successful venture, The Athenian Mercury:
http://roy25booth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/witch-detected-en-route-for-america.html
Dunton is lining up beside the recently dead Joseph Glanvill, whose Saducismus triumphatus had appeared in 1681, with a flurry of reprints. But to turn back to Matthew Hopkins as late as 1683 suggests that Dunton was either a witchcraft die-hard, shrilly insisting that it all had to be believed, at whatever cost in hangings, or (perhaps just as likely) that a page-covering motive impelled this part of the text. No specific witchcraft case is in view, witches in general are the subject. There are some signs of confusion between the demonic familiar and the witch. When, finally, a witch named ‘Holt’ is singled out, it seems confusingly derived from ‘Holt’, a familiar spirit in the form of a ‘white kitling’ in Hopkins’ Discovery of Witches. There’s a similar suggestion of confusion in this extract from the allegorical trial: “Mr. Witch-finder General, ‘My Lord, then first as to Vinegar-Tom, He is a Witch in grain …’

Dunton has his presiding man of law ask an intelligent question about why spirits should want to suck blood from a witch:

Mr. Attorney General,

Pray Mr Witch-finder, How comes it to pass, that the Devil being a Spirit (and so consequentially wanting no Nutriment or Sustentation, should desire to suck any blood; and indeed as he is a Spirit he cannot draw any excresences, having neither flesh nor bone, and cannot be felt.

Mr. Witchfinder,

He seeks not their blood, as if he could not subsist without that Nourishment, but he often repairs to them and gets it, the more to aggravate the Witches Damnation, and to put her in mind of her Covenant

As so often happened in the ruthless speed of a real 17^th century court, a weak-minded accused person is harried into confession: “The old Hag stands up and answers for her self, confessing her Imps Names to the Judge, and the reason how she come to turn Witch.”

Hag. My Lord, I must confess I am a Witch, and have several Imps, whose Names are Illemauzer, Pye-wacket, Peck in the Crown, Griezel Greedigut; but I hope your Lordship will spare my life.

But Dunton goes on in a more considered fashion, with his ‘Hag’ explaining why she made her pact with the devil:

The reason why some become Witches.
“Because I had never been a Witch had not Poverty come upon me like an armed man, and that continuing, filled my mind with discontent; and in that discontented humuor, the Devil striking in, told me, if I would give up my self to him, I should not want as long as I lived. Oh, pray my Lord, therefore spare me, spare me, for I had never been a Witch had it not been for Poverty! Poverty! Poverty! and a discontented mind.”

And likewise beg’d of the Judge that her Life might be spar’d, adding withal, that if the Judge would forgive her, she would confess to his Lordship, The Cheats and Delusions the Devil imposeth upon Witches, and many other remarkable things. When she had done speaking, the Judge told her, He could not save her life, but if she would make any Confession, he would not put her to so severe Death as she deserv’d both by the Law of God and Man.”

Using the invented ‘Holt’ as his mouthpiece, Dunton addresses the much-discussed issue of the limits of a devil’s power. His version isn’t unprecedented, but he does at least go into the detail of the devil’s deceptive pretence to power, he has thought through the whole process. The devil has no power to kill; rather, thousands of years of observation have made him an excellent physician. When he infers that a person is about to die, the devil actually promotes an enmity between the person who will soon die, and the witch he wishes to delude. Once a quarrel, or fear, has been provoked, the purely natural death of the newly created opponent is represented to the witch as the devil carrying out her malefice. By this means the devil simultaneously convinces the witch, and damns her through a metaphysical version of the legal mens rea.
Here is the whole bizarre edifice of argument, in Dunton’s own invented exchange:

Holt makes large Confessions of the Wiles of the Devil.

Holt, “My Lord, (to begin then) The Devil doth (as I now can tell by dreadful experience) often play the Deluder and Impostor with Witches, in perswading them that they are the cause of such and such a Murther, and that he hope them in the effecting of it, when indeed neither he nor they had any hand in it: And he being of long standing, above six thousand years, must needs be a great Scholar in all knowledges of Arts and Tongues, and so have the best skill in Physick, judgment in Physiognomy, and knowledge of what Disease is reigning or predominant in this or that mans body, (and so for Cattel too) by reason of his long experience. This subtile Tempter knowing such a man liable to some sudden disease, (as by experience I have found) As Plurisie, Imposthume, &c. he resorts to divers Witches; If they know the man, he seeks to make a difference between the Witches and the party, it may be by telling them he hath threatned to have them very shortly searched, and so hanged for Witches; then they all consult with Satan to save themselves, and Satan stands ready prepared.”

The Devil’s Speech to the Witches. “What will you have me to do for you, my dear and nearest children, covenanted and compacted with me in my hellish league, and sealed with your blood, my delicate firebrand-darlings.”

“Oh thou (say they) that at the first didst promise to save us thy Servants from any of our deadly Enemies discovery, and didst promise to avenge and slay all those, we pleased, that did offend us; Murther that Wretch suddenly who threatens the downfall of your loyal Subjects. He then promiseth to effect it: Next news is heard, the party is dead; he comes to the Witch, and gets a world of reverence, credence, and respect for his power and activeness, when and indeed the Disease kills the party, not the Witch, nor the Devil, (only the Devil knew that such a Disease was predominant) and the Witch aggravates her damnation by her familiarity and consent to the Devil, and so comes likewise in compass of the Laws. This is Satans usual impostring and deluding, but not his constant course of proceeding, for He and the Witch do mischief too much.”

Dunton’s judge has no hesitation in passing sentence; and Dunton (who earlier in the same work denounced 'Judge Implacable' so resoundingly, seems to invent a new mode of appropriate execution for convicted witches
“The Judge passes Sentence upon the Witches.
And so the Judge past Sentence upon them all, which Sentence was this: Viz. You Vinegar-Tom, Holt, old Hag, with your four Imps, &c. shall return from the place whence you came, and from thence he dragged upon an Hurlde to the chiefest Street in Utopia, there to be buried alive in the mid-day, that all may see your sin and folly, and fly for ever, the first thought that ever shall dare to enter into their minds of making Contracts with a deceitful Devil.”

"I pray you, remember the porter"

My image comes from the church at Wing in Buckinghamshire. This church is famous for the Dormer tombs, which are indeed spectacular. But the gentry commemorated themselves in more or less every parish church: this wall brass commemorates Thomas Cotes, whose life was spent as porter at the nearby Ascott House: ‘Set up at the apoyntment and charges of his frend Geo Houghton’. He died on November 20th, 1648.

Cotes is depicted at the moment of leaving his life-long office behind: he extends his hands towards heaven, and we can imagine that he is seeing the divine light. Falling from him are the markers of his purely temporal role: his beaver hat (which gave him status and warmth), the great key to Ascott Hall, and his staff. At Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, the false genius as porter holds a staff ‘in hand for more formalitee’. But that’s at a place without any proper restraints; it’s always a bad sign in Spenser if simply anyone can get past the porter, as is the case with ‘Malvenu’, the porter at the House of Pride ‘who entrance none denied’. A proper porter’s duties obviously involved regulating entry into the house, but he would also have been in charge of throwing people out – the drunk, the unruly, anyone who had been or threatened to be offensive – so the porter’s staff is sturdy and long, a super-truncheon. There is a faint piquancy about an image of a man who regulated entry depicted at the instant of admission into the most exclusive premises of all.

I will transcribe the verses:

Honest old Thomas Cotes, that sometime was

Porter at Ascott=Hall, hath now (alas)

Left his key, lodg, fyre, friends and all to have

A roome in heaven, This is that good mans grave

Reader, prepare for thine, for none can tell

But that you two may meete to night, Farewell.

Two further possible nuances strike me: is there perhaps a suggestion that Cotes, so excellent a porter, might simply slip into his old role in his new heavenly mansion? The reader is enjoined to think that their end might come suddenly, and that they might meet Cotes in charge of ingress at the gate of heaven.

And the whole plaque says, in a different sense, what Cotes may well  have spent his life saying: ‘I pray you, remember the porter’.

I sought another early modern text about porters (this little project rapidly turning into another unwritten monograph, ‘The Porter in early modern society and literature’), and soon found Ianitor animae: the soules porter to cast out sinne, and to keepe out sinne. A treatise of the feare of God. Written by William Price, Batchelour of Divinitie, and vicar of Brigstocke in Northamptonshire (1638).

This little treatise took its inspiration from St Bernard: “The feare of God is the porter of the soul, that casts out sinne, and keepeth out sinne, so Bernard”, with a side note: Ianitor animae, Bern. Thomas Watson liked the same figure: “St Bernard calls Holy Fear Ianitor Animae, The Door-keeper of the soul’. Spenser does not directly allegorise the Porter at the House of Temperance in the Faerie Queene II ix, who has an alarm bell. He is of course the tongue, with his rows of warders as his assistants the teeth, but there may be a sense that this well-regulated tongue that excludes ‘utterers of secrets’, ‘babblers of folly’ and ‘blazers of crime’ may in part be ‘the fear of God’, Janitor Animae.

William Price’s treatise about the fear of God is a typical early 17^th century performance, with masses of carefully made distinctions strenuously fighting against the essential repetitiousness of the theme. I was pleased to see an early version of the academic gambit that says piteously that ‘hardly anyone has written about this topic’: “though many have brief essays, yet few, or none, have done this Royal Grace the honour, or right to allot unto it a Compleat full treatise”.

Price wrote in a carefully sustained plain style: “Wherein I have studied plainness to leave the lowest capacities without excuse”, and some of the most expressive parts of his work come when he uses a simple analogy: a Christian between flesh and spirit “is like a peece of iron between two lode-stones”. A good person may be shaken by a sudden terror, but should recover: Price uses the analogies of oil gradually separating out if it has been shaken with water, and then the needle of a shaken compass settling back on its north. The Soul standing on Grace, Love, Joy and Hope is like “a four square stone, whichever way soever you cast it, it falls upright”.

Only rarely does he forget simplicity: the poor Christian might “oscitantly demeane himself”: from the Latin for yawning, and this adverbial use is narrowly an OED antedating over a line cited from Henry More: “Which those drowsie Nodders over the Letter of the Scripture have very oscitantly collected.” A delightful word, expressive of a very 17^th century disapprobation (“was not Ruffinus, as learned men observe, a very careless and oscitant Historian?” – from a EEBO keyword search).

Price dedicated his work to a later William Cecil. Whoever introduced Nathaniel Tucker’s Theophosoi [as EEBO adds – ‘sic’] theophiloi: God's fearers are God's favourites, or, An encouragement to fear God in the worst times delivered in several sermons in 1662 had clearly looked at it, but Tucker himself seems free of plagiary.

Back in Price (to conclude), isn’t “the filiall feare of oGd” (as the heading for Chapter 7) one of the better 17^th century misprints - and not even corrected in the corrections? The type-setter must have been ‘oscitant’.

'Stranger things in the world, than are to be seen between London and Staines': in America with John Josselyn

Page from 'New England's Rarities' showing the "beautiful leaved pirola"

I recently had to mark some student papers, and one favoured question among them was a chance to write about Defoe’s use of the journal form in Robinson Crusoe. This, if not interesting in itself, made me interested to find a non fictional journal of two voyages across the Atlantic, John Josselyn’s An account of two voyages to New-England (1674). It gives details of two trips to New England and back, for lengthy stays in the country, in 1638-39 and 1663-71.

Josselyn’s publication was intended to win him an invitation to join the Royal Society. That august body could have fanciful and credulous moments, but even they had to draw a line somewhere, and Josselyn was disappointed. The interest of his book is, in the end, that it is a record of average sentiments, middling insight, the small bulwarks an average nature erects against the overwhelming nature of new experiences. Yes, he does try to order his observations, with sections given over to the natural history of New England, to the native inhabitants, to key dates in the colony’s existence. But a truer record of confusion, incomprehension, alarm, and rough-and-ready strategies for coping emerges.

The book is in many, many places, deplorable. Josselyn’s responses to what he witnessed, heard, and did, are so limited, and often brutal, that the book becomes, in its deplorable way, funny. I was recurrently reminded of Michael Green’s half-forgotten classic of prose comedy, Squire Haggard’s Journal http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/19/1000-novels-comedy-part-two ,

as secure prejudices and a very strong stomach enable Josselyn to cope complacently with his fellow creatures being horribly treated (“they speed not so well as the waggish lad at Cape-porpus, who baited his hooks with the drown'd Negro's buttocks”), and an insalubrious or alarming extistence in early New England.

The colonists arriving are, to be frank, a poxy lot:

3^rd May “and now a Servant of one of the passengers sickned of the small pox.”

day 14 “Now was Scilly 50 leagues off, and now many of the passengers fall sick of the small Pox and Calenture.”

“The Two and twentieth, another passenger dyed of a Consumption”

The voyage they are on is mediated through literature. Here’s whale in a battle with a swordfish and a ‘Flailfish’:

“the other was further off, about a league from the Ship, fighting with the Sword-fish, and the Flailfish, whose stroakes with a fin that growes upon her back like a flail, upon the back of the Whale, we heard with amazement.”

This is surely a yarn derived from whatever source it was that Donne used for the same unlikely encounter in his Metempsycosis.

They see an ‘enchanted island’: “June the first day in the afternoon, very thick foggie weather, we sailed by an inchanted Island, saw a great deal of filth and rubbish floating by the Ship, heard Cawdimawdies, Sea-gulls and Crowes, (Birds that alwayes frequent the shoar) but could see nothing by reason of the mist: towards Sunset, when we were past the Island, it cleared up.”

Icebergs, when they see them, could with equal likeliness have foxes or devils moving on them. Notice that even as he reports a possible sighting of devils, Josselyn also records how cold the air was while they were in proximity to the berg. What he undoubtedly experienced gets mixed up with things he may or may not have seen:

“The Fourteenth day of June, very foggie weather, we sailed by an Island of Ice (which lay on the Star-board side) three leagues in length, mountain high, in form of land, with Bayes and Capes like high clift land, and a River pouring off it into the Sea. We saw likewise two or three Foxes, or Devils skipping upon it. These Islands of Ice are congealed in the North, and brought down in the spring-time with the Current to the banks on this side New-found-land, and there stopt, where they dissolve at last to water … Here it was as cold as in the middle of January in England, and so continued till we were some leagues beyond it.”

Once he arrives for the first time in new England, the local news immediately imparted to him is of the birth of a monstrous child to a Quaker woman. Josselyn is interested in examples of inter-breeding and miscegenation. Mrs Dyer’s malformed baby makes him think of a story he heard, and the explanation he credited about the piglet with some apparently human features. One can see what he thought of the poor Quaker woman; Josselyn, a man who thinks of himself as having some medical expertise, imagines that bestiality can lead to offspring:

“The Thirtieth day of September, I went ashore upon Noddles-Island … the next day a grave and sober person described the Monster to me, that was born at Boston of one Mrs. Dyer a great Sectarie, the Nine and twentieth of June, it was (it should seem) without a head, but having horns like a Beast, and ears, scales on a rough skin like a fish  called a Thornback, legs and claws like a Hawke, and in other respects as a Woman-child.

I have read that at Bruxels, Anno 1564, a sow brought forth six pigs, the first whereof (for the last in generating is alwayes in bruit beasts the first brought forth) had the head, face, arms and legs of a man, but the whole trunck of the body from the neck, was of a swine, a sodomitical monster is more like the mother than the father in the organs of the vegetative soul.”

As for sexual relations between different human races, Josselyn gives us a moment of pure Nathanial Hawthorne:

“An English woman suffering an Indian to have carnal knowledge of her, had an Indian cut out exactly in red cloth sewed upon her right Arm, and enjoined to wear it twelve months.”
She was relatively lucky. Josselyn reports the 1646 codes of laws:
“For being drunk, they either whip or impose a fine of Five shillings; so for swearing and cursing, or boring through the tongue with a hot Iron.
For kissing a woman in the street, though in way of civil salute, whipping or a fine.
For Single fornication, whipping or a fine.
For Adultery, put to death, and so for Witchcraft.”
Because he rejects no story that came his way, Josselyn tells us what happened if absconding lovers arrived in New England. Rank was no refuge:

“Sir Christopher Gardiner descended of the house of Gardiner Bishop of Winchester, Knighted at Jerusalem of the Sepulcher, arrived in New-England with a comely young woman his Concubine, settled himself in the Bay of Massachusets, was rigidly used by the Magistrates, and by the Magistrates of New-Plimouth to which place he retired.”

Even though he spent long periods in New England, Josselyn clearly continued to regard the established settlers as ‘they’ and ‘them’, a different people.

Among these early Americans, Josselyn is always ready to try his hand at a cure. Snakes plague this American Eden, but all things were, naturally, created for use, and so here’s a possible first example of the virtues of snake oil: “The fat of a Rattle-snake is very Soveraign for frozen limbs, bruises, lameness by falls, Aches, Sprains. The heart of a Rattle-snake dried and pulverized and drunk with wine or beer is an approved remedy against the biting and venom of a Rattle-snake.” The snake’s heart as remedy for its own poison: that’s such a typical piece of early modern thinking!

The sea and the rivers swarmed with fish. When his first voyage arrived off the Grand Banks, it happened to be a Sunday. The sailors fish for the voracious and easily-taken cod, but the Puritans on board, though hungry, will not partake of the fish they have just seen taken on the Sabbath:

“The Sixteenth day we sounded, and found 35 fathom water, upon the bank of New-found-land, we cast our our hooks for Cod-fish, thick foggie weather, the Cod being taken on a Sunday morning, the Sectaries aboard threw those their servants took into the Sea again, although they wanted fresh victuals, but the Sailers were not so nice.”

Huge lobsters abound, salmon swarm. Josselyn has a typical note about what to do with trout: “Trouts there be good store in every brook, ordinarily two and twenty inches long, their grease is good for the Piles and clifts.” The OED says that ‘clefts’ were chapped skin: just rub some trout fat on your face!

New England also swarmed with insect life, and Josselyn is good on these details of how it was to live there in the early days: “Likewise there be infinite numbers of Tikes hanging upon the bushes in summer time that will cleave to a mans garments and creep into his Breeches eating themselves in a short time into the very flesh of a man. I have seen the stockins of those that have gone through the woods covered with them.

The Countrey is strangely incommodated with flyes, which the English call Musketaes, they are like our gnats, they will sting so fiercely in summer as to make the faces of the English swell'd and scabby, as if the small pox for the first year.”

I have read somewhere – was it in Peter Watson’s The Great Divide? -  that European settlers took the earth worm with them to America, not deliberately, but mixed in the soil of seedlings. I found this astonishing, but Josselyn does seem to report that the familiar worm was not among the native fauna: “The Earth-worm, these are very rare and as small as a horse hair.”

Josselyn also published an account of the wildlife of New England, New-England's rarities discovered in birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, and plants of that country (1672). Here in this work, he repudiates those who had scoffed at his reports of the size of the moose, that “Monster of superfluity.” He speaks of a tamed beaver, that would run up and down the streets of Boston, before returning to its new home.

So, John Josselyn’s America, so full of hazards, so full of living things, peopled by devil-worshippers and cannibals, but still a kind of Eden: “ 'Tis true, the Countrie hath no Bonerets, or Tartarlambs, no glittering coloured Tulips; but here you have the American Mary Gold, the Earth-nut bearing a princely Flower, the beautiful leaved Pirola, the honied Colibry, &c. They are generally of (somewhat) a more masculine virtue, than any of the same species in England, but not in so terrible a degree, as to be mischievous or ineffectual to our English bodies.”

But, above all, it’s a land where anything might be true. I will leave off with the haunting anecdote he picked up from a Mr Foxwell. Now, the context here is definitely one in which men are trying to top one another’s stories. ‘Mr Mitten’ has just been telling a yard about a ‘Triton or Merman’. After this, “The next story was told by Mr. Foxwell, now living in the province of Main, who having been to the Eastward in a Shallop, as far as Cape-Ann … in his return was overtaken by the night, and fearing to land upon the barbarous shore, he put off a little further to Sea; about midnight they were wakened with a loud voice from the shore, calling upon “Foxwell!  Foxwell! come ashore”, two or three times: upon the Sands they saw a great fire, and Men and Women hand-in-hand dancing round about it in a ring, after an hour or two they vanished, and as soon as the day appeared, Foxwell puts into a small Cove, it being about three quarters floud, and traces along the shore, where he found the footing of Men, Women and Children shod with shoes; and an infinite number of brands-ends thrown up by the water, but neither Indian nor English could he meet with on the shore, nor in the woods; these with many other stories they told me, the credit whereof I will neither impeach nor enforce, but shall satisfie my self, and I hope the Reader hereof, with the saying of a wise, learned and honourable Knight, that there are many stranger things in the world, than are to be seen between London and Staines.”

(It’s Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, of course, that he refers to.)

Notre Dame, Paris, 1625 - a devout special effect goes wrong

“The King of Canadaes Son, by meanes of the intercourse of traffique between the French and that Savage Nation, having, at the suite of these holy compassers of Sea and Land, beene sent by his Father into France, and there entertained at their Colledge in Paris, with the quintessence of Jesuiticall discipline, for the space of two yeares, was at length presented a learned Catechumenist in the Cathedrall Church of our Lady to be baptized; where in the presence of a Congregation, as great as the Church was capable of, the King himself was his Godfather, and gave him his owne name [the king was Louis III], but when the sacrament was administered, such a cracke was heard from a secret Scaffold provided for the nonce, that the whole multitude was much astonished, fearing least the Church would have fallen on their heads, wherof the holy fathers being well apayed [gratified] to see their plot had taken effect, one of them catching his cue, and beckning with the finger for audience, began to tell them, that they had no cause to feare at all, but rather to rejoice, and glorifie God, who had honoured the baptisme of this Savage Prince with a miracle, in token of the conversion of that whole Nation, wherof himselfe was now the first fruits: But while he was yet speaking, the paper wherein the miracle was wrought came smoking downe among the company, and brought such a stinke of Gunpowder with it, that every one with his nose in his hand began to leave the place, and get him away, some smiling, others blushing, and last of all the new Christian also, leaving his religion where he had found his baptisme. For being not long after brought into England with the French ships, taken by some of our merchants in their Canada voyage, he himselfe related the story, protesting it to be true, with many more of the like nature, for which, he said, he did much abominate the Romish religion, and thereupon became conformable to the Church of England.”

If this incident occurred, the ‘King of Canada’s son’ must have been a Huron Indian whose status back in his own country had been inflated for the sake of some pious propaganda. The Huron tribes were at this time willing to accept Jesuit missions; these were very much ‘embedded’ in nature, as the Jesuit missionaries tried first to understand the people they were converting by living with them, and to some extent adopting their ways. But ‘Canada’ of course did not exist as a nation, the Iroquois were unappeasable in their war against the Huron, nor could the European settlers help them. This article from the Catholic Encyclopedia is a long record of disaster:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07565a.htm

Anyway, the relation has it that at the formal baptism in Notre Dame of this purported Prince, a charge of gunpowder had been set somewhere high in the building, so fused that it exploded noisily during the administration of the sacrament. Consternation followed this ‘miracle’, as well it might. Whether the explosion was meant to signify the devil (say, ‘Okee’) departing the scene, or a clap of divine thunder by way of heavenly approval isn’t clear. But the artificers had not thought it all the way through: down drifted the smoking remnants of their firework, and the fraud became apparent even as one of the devoutly inspired contrivers was trying to capitalize upon it.

I half incline to accept the story as genuine, even though the context is solid English anti-catholicism. Baptisms were moments of ideological triumph. The implacable Iroquois themselves recognized as much, in their sadistic use of scalding baptisms in killing missionary priests

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_missions_in_North_America ).

But the notion that the ‘prince’ of the Huron witnessed such a fraud perpetrated by Catholic Christians, but then was subsequently willing to join the Church of England is just too incredible.

My source for this dubious anecdote is, as I say, not a neutral one. It is thrown in at the end of this pamphlet: A relation of the deuill Balams departure out of the body of the Mother-Prioresse of the Ursuline nuns of Loudun Her fearefull motions and contorsions during the exorcisme …Or the first part of the play acted at Loudun by two divels, a frier, and a nun. Faithfully translated out of the French copie, with some observations for the better illustration of the pageant (1636).

The pamphlet consists of, first, a translation from a French source of a Catholic account of this exorcism of Balam from the famous Jean des Anges, then the English author’s own debunking commentary. Finally, the anonymous author presents the anecdote I have transcribed as a comic ‘jig’ or afterpiece to his main drama. Whoever the author was, he was strongly influenced by Samuel Harsnett’s attacks on the ‘devil theatre’ of earlier Catholic exorcists (this can be seen in the theatrical figure already developed in the title).

The pamphlet itself is an indication that there was some perturbation about the effect of the ‘miracles’ going off in Loudon. Walter Montagu had been present at this exorcism, and converted, the dramatist Thomas Killigrew was there, and put his name down among those who testified to the inexplicable nature of what they had seen. Killigrew’s own description for a correspondent has been found and published. Put simply, Jean des Anges was undergoing the slow process of exorcism by the Jesuit Father Surin, and others. She had multiple devils in her, so the departure of Balam was just a part of the process. As this pamphleteer sourly remarks, the timing of this exorcism fell very conveniently for the English gentlemen who had traveled to Loudon to be ‘edified’.

One reads in Greenblatt about the connections Harsnett saw between these devout actions and the ‘action’ of the theatre. This pamphlet really brings it home just what levels of impersonation were reached. The devils possessing Jean des Anges are said quite simply to appear. Then you realize the obvious: that they are ‘appearing’ by taking over the body and face of the prioress. Surin interprets the appearance of the different possessing devils as they show in her facial expressions that signify their manifestations: “he appeared againe in the same shape of Iscaran … as he was in the midst of his action, he suddenly stopped, and the forme of Balam appeared in his countenance, but with an aspect sad and affrighted, yet but smiling withal, by which marke he was knowne. Then the Father told the behoulders that it was Balam, which the devil also averred, and as his face was noted to wax very pale and discoloured, the said Father said unto him: thy paleness argues thee guilty.” Jean des Anges can, with the collaboration of Father Surin, manifest individually distinct devils. In case we don’t get it, the pamphleteer explains: “for the devil are no where else to be seene or heard, but in the actions of the maid, and the tongue of the priest”.

The devil Balam, who seems to have been a very amenable sort of devil, whose arrival is signaled by Jean assuming rueful smiles, had previously said that he would soon depart, but proposed to leave a token of his departure: his name would appear on the Prioress’ arm. He remarks - with some poignancy for a devil - that by this means his name, at least, will finally get into heaven. (Balam also willingly testifies that, unlike the human observers, he can see the real presence in the sacrament.) Surin had objected to having his holy demoniac polluted in this way, and dictated that, instead, the name of St Joseph should appear. Balam had willingly divulged that St Joseph was his ‘chief enemy’ in heaven.

At the climax of this particular exorcism, Jean des Anges manifested the devil within her gnawing at her left hand, and then the name of ‘Joseph’ appeared on her right arm ‘in bloody characters’, before the witnesses.

Killigrew, a man of the theatre, had no idea of how it was done; Walter Montagu simply converted. The pamphleteer can’t really produce any clear explanation either, so (reasonably enough) he just pours scorn by way of refutation. His most rational suggestion is “if you please to write with the juice of a Limon upon a peece of paper, and afterwards hold it to the fire” you can reproduce the type of trick. But even if you can write in lemon juice on your arm, there was no obvious source of heat for Jean des Anges to hold her arm up to, to bring out the letters.

But the pamphleteer then says something fascinating, which I cannot explain, and am sure that I have seen no further references to: “or learne how the characters are made upon the armes of many that have beene at Hierusalem.”

What could that mean? He makes it sound as if Jerusalem pilgrims could return with a heat sensitive tattoo. Could you rub vigorously on your arm, and make a mysterious authentication of your pilgrimage appear? And was it ‘I ♥ Jerusalem’?

My illustration is a Canadian brave, on the title page of A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, (1698).

Swimming again!

A long pause for me from 'Early Modern Whale'. Over this last year, my right eye has been sore, preventing me from reading at night (hot tears would just flow). More and more floaters appeared in my vision, intensely dark, or sometimes I had bright spots of light, or brilliant zig-zag lines in crescents. All this, I manfully (read, 'stupidly') ignored, regarding it as just one of those things that happen as you get older. Then, one Saturday morning, after a particularly massive reticulation suddenly floated into my vision, I began to see millions of grey snowflakes if I looked up into a bright sky. Finally I was encouraged to get along to the eye unit at the hospital.

After this (the 'snowflakes' were blood cells), I was rapidly scheduled for a vitrectomy for a retinal detachment that was occuring. My consultant surgeon, Mr Vincent Tanner, made no fuss about it: "It's what I do", he said. Those operations are his normal Friday afternoon, and the routine is that they work. I do not know how the operation was ever devised, and I have restrained myself from all Googling or Wikipedia consultings about the process. But a gas bubble is injected into the eye, and then you undertake 'posturing' for five days, lying prone while the gas bubble, floating upwards, gently presses the retinal tear back into place. The bubble gradually re-absorbs, a process that finished for me a couple of Tuesdays ago.

The bubble in your vision starts off by filling the field of view. Then it's down to sloshing about in what you perceive as the lower half of your field of vision, then it's as though you are holding an opened umbrella down at waist level, then a quart tankard of ink. One irritating day, it split, and a tiny bubble travelled round the outside of its parent bubble, like a futile video game installed in your head, for you could not control its progress. Finally, deliverance comes, and you no longer have a continuous distracting reminder of the mechanics of vision, of the processes of your body, and things revert to one seeing just what is out there to see.

Anyway, part of the recovery is gentle exercise only, just to be on the safe side. So it has been steady riding when out on the bike cycling, and you are advised not to swim. Until yesterday, when I rejoined the regulars at Friday 'Senior Swim' during a break from marking assessed essays. It was a pleasure to be back in the swim, compounded when the pool guard tried to throw me out for being under age - they haven't seen me there for a while.

This reminded me that back in March (with a still quite big bubble in my eye), I was driven to Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. The National Trust seem in this age of the mobile phone camera to be far more relaxed about people taking photographs of things. I had always wanted pictures of the Mortlake tapestries of 'Hero and Leander' that decorate the main stair, and have never been able to find very much on the web, so at the top of this post is Leander arriving at Hero's Tower. Hero's expression is beautifully caught, the tapestry makers have her exactly trying not to look knowing.

This, says the NT guide, is Leander departing on his swim across the Hellespont, with his sister wringing her hands in anxiety. I recall a heavy father in Marlowe's poem, it's ages since I read Musaeus. In fact, I can't recall a literary version with a sister. Perhaps Dr Cleyn thought his designs would look more attractive with an extra young woman. I like the Cupid with the guiding light. To conclude, here's the same Cupid, his torch extinguished, after the final tragedy. But that's over-ambitious swimming for you, I will hold back on the Bosphorus for now.

Stroked by Valentine: shamanistic healing in London, 1666

Valentine Greatrakes was born on St Valentine’s Day, 1629 (and hence his name). He was Irish, a Protestant, served as a lieutenant in the Cromwellian army in Ireland for six years, then ‘betook my self to a Country life, and lived at Affane the habitation of my Ancestors, where I have continued ever since, and got by my Industry a livelihood out of the bowels of the Earth’.

Then a message from heaven changed his life, and propelled him into short blaze of fame: “About four years since I had an Impulse, or a strange persuasion in my own mind (of which I am not able to give any rational account to another) which did very frequently suggest to me that there was bestowed on me the gift of curing the Kings-Evil: which, for the extraordinariness of it, I thought fit to conceal for some time, but at length I communicated this to my Wife”.

In scrofula he had chosen an illness which, from what one has read about cures or amelioration after ‘the royal touch’, could see some patients respond well to a charismatic healer. It was also a condition that, because of its main recognized form of treatment, made his act latently political, an encroachment upon a special preserve of those who were absolutely his social superiors. Greatrakes would be reviled because he was perceived to have infringed, to have intervened repeatedly in matters that were, properly, far beyond him. Peter Elmer’s ODNB life of Greatrakes endorses a political motive, either in Greatrakes or his backers, suggesting (to paraphrase loosely) that there was an implicit rebuke to King Charles II in Greatrakes so conspicuously surpassing the monarch in this role of ‘touching’, alongside his carefully advertised piety and moderation.

The ODNB life covers the biography (obviously), but this emphasis leaves one far short of appreciating what Greatrakes did, the hysteria and squalor around the hard-pressed, sometimes revolted, but heroic and sincere thaumaturge. This is my emphasis here: in late 17^th century London – a society that considered itself Christian through-and-through - a reappearance of Shamanism.

As soon as Greatrakes was persuaded that he could also touch for the King’s-Evil, a potential patient, in a desperate condition, was found him (he reamrks elsewhere that God always found him patients promptly after his latest healing power had been imparted): “Margaret Macshane of Ballinecly … who had the Evil 7 years and upwards, which had spread it self from the bottom of her stomach upwards, all over to her throat, neck, and nose, and so all over her back, shoulders and arm-pits, so that I could not see one place free from the Evil, where you might put a sixpence, and to speak the truth she looked so dreadfully, and stunk so exceedingly.”

What he was up against is partly caught in the photograph of a sufferer here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculous_cervical_lymphadenitis

Greatrakes says he was (understandably) squeamish about many of his clients. But he was astonishingly successful: “My hand suppurated the Nodes, and drew and healed the Sores, which formerly I could not have endured the sight of, nor smell, nor touched them without vomiting; so great an aversion had I naturally to all wounds and sores: so that the poor woman (i.e., Macshane) about six weeks afterwards came perfectly well to my house.”

A year later further divine assurance came to Greatrakes that he must use the same cure-by-touching for the ague (there was a large local outbreak, and Greatrakes was always sincere in his sense of mission). Now the ague is an intermittent disease (malaria), and, like the successes Greatrakes would soon have with people suffering from falling sickness (epilepsy), the natural course of the condition would favour him with the appearance of success. Both Greatrakes and his supporters acknowledged that some of his clients did relapse, though this usually happened after a longer remission than was normal for them. Finally, word came to him from heaven that he could cure all most ailments. A correspondent of Joseph Granvill’s explains that Greatrakes doubted this, until one night when one of his hands was “struck dead”. But stroking this hand with his other returned it to “its former liveliness”. This experience was repeated over several nights, until Greatrakes was finally convinced of his general gift. He treated people without personally taking any money (his opponent David Lloyd asserts that his minders did take money for access to him), and the greater part of those he touched early in his career trudged back off into obscurity. Follow-up care after a miracle cure is hardly to be expected.

Large numbers flocked to Greatrakes as his fame spread. People – including the young John Flamsteed - were crossing the Irish Sea to get to him, and he was soon brought to England to attempt a cure for the migraines and general debilitating pain suffered by Lady Conway (Anne Finch, the thinker). The attempted cure failed, but with other local English clients, Greatrakes continued to have miraculous successes. He did cures in Warwickshire, and through Berkshire. Anthony a Wood says that he was finally summoned to Whitehall by the King. Now Greatrakes does not mention this himself, nor did his supporter in print, Henry Stubbe. According to Elmer (ODNB), Charles was not impressed by his emulator, so perhaps this was an aspect of his career Greatrakes wanted to pass over. Charles apparently had Sir John Denham seek a cure for his lameness, but the stroking cure failed.

In London, Greatrakes published, or there was published about him, a single sheet flier, The great cures and strange miracles performed by Mr. Valentine Gertrux who restoreth the blind to sight, the deaf to hearing, the lame to strength, and cripples to walk without crutches: as also, he cureth all manner of diseases, with a stroak of his hand and prayer.

It sounds very good: “He takes away all sorts of pain and old Aches, though of twelve, sixteen or twenty years continuance, or longer, only with stroking and smoothing the party grieved with his Hand: for immediately upon laying his Hand upon the part grieved, the pain removes; and if at any time they feel it sensibly in another part of the body; as, from the back to the breast, from thence into the Legs and Arms, or other extreme parts, and when the party telleth him where it is removed, he followeth it with his hand, which driveth it out, sometimes at the fingers ends, sometimes at the Toes, other times at the Crown of the Head, and sometimes at the Mouth; and when the person saith, it is gone, and he feeleth no more pain, He biddeth him be gone, and glorifie GOD, and forsake his sins.”

One can understand the appeal. A qualified 17^th century doctor would want high fees for a painful regime of phlebotomy and brutal purges. But even in this brief account of Greatrakes with a patient undergoing treatment, one can see that both are sharing a view of pain that is conceptually based on demonic possession. The pain is chased by Greatrakes from one part of the body to another (he explains that he relies on the patient to tell him where the pain has shifted to, he cannot drive it, only follow it). Once the pain has no retreat to the torso, Greatrakes can get it to leave via an extremity. Rather original in him are recurrent cures where the pain finally leaves by the tongue of the patient, and the tongue is discovered to be left as cold as ice.

Greatrakes is quite candid about this, he clearly regards demonic possession as a valid diagnosis for some of the afflictions he has treated: “my Experience inclines me to believe, in saying that I have met with several Instances which seemed to me to be Possessions by dumb Devils, deaf Devils, and talking Devils … many, when they have but heard my voice, and have been tormented in so strange a manner that no one that has been present could conceive it less then a Possession”.

Look how in these sentences an initial ‘somewhat within her’ becomes an ‘it’ that seems to have its own volition and malignity: “as I will instance in one at York-house … who had somewhat within her which would swell her Body to that excessive degree on a sudden as if it would burst her; and then as soon as I put my hand on that part of her Body where it did rise up, it would fly up to her Throat (or some other place), and then it would cause her neck to swell half so big again, and then almost choke her, then blind her, and make her dumb and foam … I oftentimes brought it up into her Tongue … which it has swollen in an instant nigh as big again, and has been seen plainly to play from place to place, and at length with great violence of belching … it went forth, and so the Woman went away well. Whether this were a natural Distemper, let any one judge that is either a Divine, a Philosopher, or Physician.”

He even has the same motive as the John Darrel type of renegade protestant exorcist: “God may, to abate the pride of the Papists (that make Miracles the undeniable Manifesto of the truth of their Church) make use of a Protestant to do such strange things in the face of the Sun, which they pretend to do in Cells.” Greatrakes was only an ordinary man of his time. The afflictions are as mysterious to him as his power to cure. These are essentially supernatural encounters, the power that came to him from heaven against the afflicting force.

Greatrakes does not mention any other local or family traditions of healing that might have provided other models. He presents his career as simply following the divine inspirations that came to him, but as he progressed, he become more confident, and more experienced at what had to be done. He then seems to have been more willing to undertake what must have been standard procedures of incisions and lancings. He was always going to collide with the medical profession, and he duly did, both in Ireland and in England: “Then the Judge asked me, where is your Licence for practising, as all Physitians and Chirurgeons ought to have from the Ordinary of the Diocese? my answer was, that I knew no reason I had to take a Licence, since I took no Reward from any one, and that I knew no Law of the Nation, which prohibited any person from doing what good he could to his Neighbours.”

This was in Ireland; I have possibly made a small discovery about Greatrakes in associating with his London career with a set of verses published as RUB for RUB: OR, AN ANSWER TO A PHYSICIANS PAMPHLET, STYLED, The Stroker stroked. The author here, a supporter, is writing to answer a (lost) verse attack on Greatrakes penned by a qualified physician. Now Greatrakes’ modus operandi obviously involved a lot of touching. His opponent could not resist making imputations about this (the italicized lines are clearly quotations), but was effectively answered by having this represented as products of his own lechery (a bawdy anecdote is told about the doctor administering ‘oil of man’ to a female client):

What if he clip’d and clap’d, what’s that to you?
You’ve clip’d and clap’d, and have been clap’d too …
Your foul report betrays you, and in truth,
I fear the Doctor hath a liquorish Tooth.
Her Stocking off, he strokes her Lilly-foot,
What then? The Doctor had a mind to do’t.
Her Legs, her Knees, her Thighs, a little higher.
And there’s the Doctors Center of Desire…

The sense of Greatrakes as an exorcist appears here too:

His hand is truly powerful whose stroke
Twice dispossessed and made the Devil smoke.

Greatrakes had many supporters: his ‘Brief Account’ of himself and his blameless activities is bulked out by many testimonials and witnesses, some of them gentry, some clerics. He was also susceptible to being recruited to other people’s agendas. Joseph Glanvill could use him to vapour on about latter-day apparent miracles. The unpredictable Henry Stubbe wrote the longest defence: The miraculous conformist, or, An account of severall marvailous cures performed by the stroking of the hands of Mr. Valentine Greatarick with a physicall discourse thereupon.

The title is telling. Stubbe set out to defend Greatrakes’ orthodoxy: “It may seeme equitable that I tell you why I call the Gentleman the Miraculous Conformist: many strange reports have and do run of him; but he is reclaimed from all that is fanatique; and this gift of Healing was bestowed on him, since the Restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and the restitution of the Doctrine and Discipline of the English Church”. The sensitivity concerns Greatrakes as a throw-back to the ‘fanatic’ times of the interregnum. But even as Stubbe defends by citing gentry and clerics who endorsing the cures as valid, he strays into making Greatrakes sound too Christ-like: “An infinite number of the Nobility, Gentry, and Clergy of Warwick-shire and Worcestershire, persons too understanding to be deceived, and too Honourable and Worthy to deceive, will avow, that they have seen him publicly cure the lame, the blind, the deaf, the perhaps not unjustly supposed Daemoniacks, and Lepers.”

The ‘physical discourse’ in Stubbe is just that, an attempt to apply some Royal Society-style investigative rigour in place of the possession model. Robert Boyle was interested enough to be the addressee of both Stubbe and Greatrakes, the former angling his speculations about how the cures were effected towards further investigation by the Royal Society, and though Boyle actually had objections to Stubbe’s rationalizing conclusions, he apparently attended sixty stroking sessions. Glanvill’s correspondent does the same, ingeniously speculating that what Greatrakes did was transmit a “sanative contagion” – instead of catching a disease off him, you could catch health (in A philosophical endeavor in the defence of the being of witches and apparitions, 1668). Glanvill also warmly recommends Greatrakes to scrutiny by the Royal Society.

Stubbe gave a lot of attention to Greatrakes’ own body. He was closely observed: that he was not putting some undisclosed and highly effective ointment on his hands is sagely noted, he did his cures absolutely bare handed. He had a distinctive personal odour, not unpleasant, but, again, his hands did not smell. The attempt to account for it all rationally led Stubbe into speculations about the ‘crasis’ of Greatrake’s body, in his case a perfect humoral balance and temperament. It’s not very far from seeing him as a living, breathing philosophers’ stone. “It seems to me very imaginable that there may be given by God such a Natural Crasis and Effluvia consequential thereunto, that the stroking with his Hand for some space so as to communicate the Virtue may restore the Blood and Spirits to that vigour and strength which is natural to them, and resuscitate the contracted imbecility of any part.”

Meanwhile, at his over-crowded places of practice, the curative power of Greatrake’s body was eagerly believed. We lurch backwards into the abyss of time: the Royal Society competes with diabolism for an explanation, but rearing up from the dim and distant past comes Shamanism. He imparted his touch. His saliva was used by way of finishing touch to any minor surgery he had performed. Whether his gloves had the same power, through their close contact with the wonder-working hands was investigated, and they did. But a napkin that had merely been rubbed on his chest, or his shirt, did not transmit his ‘crasis’ to the sufferer.

Either in his desperation to cope with the crowds seeking contact with him, or in his growing belief in his own powers, Greatrakes started taking along his own bottled urine for distribution as some kind of lotion (it was noted to smell like violets). This too was eagerly consumed, and was equally effective: “Eleanor Dickinson, aged 45 years, had a Dropsy 12 years in her belly … was stroked by Mr. Greatrakes about 16 days since, at 7. a clock at night, and drank at the same time about 6 spoonfuls of his water, and rubbed some of it on her body, which she did of her own accord: the same night she felt a queasiness in her stomach”. Her own testimonial brings us closer to the chaos around Greatrakes: “not being able to come near him by reason of the throng, she snatched some of his urine and drank it, some of which she also put into her ears, which were so stopped she could not hear, and immediately she heard the noise of the people all round about her: Then going home, some hours after the same urine began to work in her belly…”

This is Shamanistic healing: the body fluids of the healer being consumed, a belief that the healer is a conduit for a supernatural force that he allows you to access, his body processing the occult power into something that you can use for a cure.

With chaotic scenes like these taking place in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Greatrakes was attracting so much attention that attacks on his methods and character was inevitable. We have seen that there was a verse attack by a jealous doctor. David Lloyd’s Wonders no miracles overflows with indignation and paranoia. Lloyd was a chaplain at the Charter House, where Greatrakes had both performed cures and had a bad failure. Lloyd sees that Greatrakes has a popular following for what people think he can do, and professes alarm that soon he might start being followed for what he tells people. For Lloyd, it’s an imperative that Greatrakes be disbelieved, as he represents “An opportunity in distracted and divided Times, to broach strange and dangerous Opinions. For if a man can but prevail with the People, to believe that God assists him, to Effect new and extraordinary things; he may easily persuade them, that the same God inspires him to speak new and extraordinary Opinions; when they see God in what he doth, they will easily believe he is in what he saith; and where they observe omnipotence, there they will believe infallibility: and if the man saith now, I received a voice from Heaven, bidding me Cure all Diseases; he may if this take, say anon, I am Commissioned by a Voice from Heaven, to reduce the World to the unity of the Roman Church, to teach the infallibility of the Pope, to reveal a Messiah to come, a fifth Monarchy, and what not?”

Lloyd is either not interested in, or incapable of a reasoned or balanced response. Greatrakes was obviously hurt by the imputations made about his character, and, well accustomed to getting testimonials, produced witnesses to attest otherwise (and they seem convincing). Henry Stubbe’s work was also prompted by Lloyd’s vitriolic hatred. Lloyd, for instance, was willing to see Greatrakes as under diabolical guidance: “In a word, should a man have familiarity and make a compact with Satan, and should the Lord permit Satan to work some strange things, not that Satan can do any thing above nature; but that he may do many things that seem to us above nature, because above our understanding, it might exercise and try our Faith” and a harbinger to a diabolic attempt to overthrow the Church of England.

Probably the overtures made by Greatrakes and Stubbe to Robert Boyle were an attempt to find shelter and, ideally, legitimization. Boyle’s brother has been an early patron of Greatrakes over in Ireland. But protection does not seem to have come quickly enough. London gave just too much publicity, and no chance to control the nature of the stories getting out. Anthony a Wood said Greatrakes went to “Whitehall by command from his Majesty and performing several cures there and in London, but more mistakes”. And David Lloyd scores a shrewd hit about Greatrakes’ star waning: “they follow him not in any place so eagerly at first, as they leave him discontentedly at last: He is not so much cried up in the places where he comes, as he is cried down in the places where he hath been”.

Greatrakes, Elmer says, had gone back to Ireland by May 1666. He continued to stroke away ailments, but without publicity.

The staggering name to see as testifying to two of his cures is Andrew Marvell. The shrewd, cautious Marvell, attending Shamanistic séances!

(Greatrakes’ story is also told in the biographical dictionary issued by the subject of my previous post, James Granger, who ends by saying that Greatrakes stroked his female patients in a rather different way to his male patients, though it’s hard to tell whether this is exoneration or insinuation.)