Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England

PROPHECY, POLITICS AND THE PEOPLE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The influence of the non-biblical vernacular prophetic tradi...

Author: Tim Thornton

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PROPHECY, POLITICS AND THE PEOPLE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

The influence of the non-biblical vernacular prophetic traditions in early modern England was considerable; they had both a mass appeal, and a specific relevance to the conduct of politics by elites. Focusing particularly on Mother Shipton, the Cheshire prophet Nixon, and Merlin, this book considers the origins of these prophetic traditions, their growth and means of transmission, and the way various groups in society responded to them and in turn tried to control them. Dr Thornton also sheds light on areas where popular culture and politics were uneasily interlinked: the powerful political influence of those outside elite groups; the variations in political culture across the country; and the considerable continuing power of mystical, supernatural, and ‘non-rational’ ideas in British social and political life into the nineteenth century. Dr TIM THORNTON teaches at the University of Huddersfield, where he is head of department, History, English, Languages and Media.

PROPHECY, POLITICS AND THE PEOPLE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Tim Thornton

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Tim Thornton 2006 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Tim Thornton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2006 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 1 84383 259 3 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library

This publication is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton Printed in Great Britain by Cambridge University Press

Contents Preface Abbreviations Introduction: prophecy, politics and the people in late medieval and early modern England

vii ix

1

1

Ancient prophecy in the sixteenth century

14

2

Prophetic creation and audience in civil war England

53

3

Prophecy and the Revolution settlement

99

4

The re-rooting and survival of ancient prophecy

145

5

Conclusions

194

Bibliography Index

198 249

Preface This book has had a long gestation. Its foundations were laid while I was still working primarily on early modern Cheshire and its palatinate. In that sense it owes something to those influences at school and college which inspired and provoked me to explore the centralist assumptions of English and British history: teaching such as that of Nick Henshall, and the chance to work with Penry Williams, Chris Haigh, Cliff Davies and Steve Gunn in particular. It has, however, largely been researched and written while I have had the good fortune to work for the University of Huddersfield, where I have been stimulated by teaching and administration in an institution committed to widening opportunities in education to think further not just about the mechanics of power and influence, and of the relationships of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, but those of past and future, and of elite and non-elite. The majority of the later research and writing up was achieved only thanks to a sabbatical granted by the University and made possible by the generosity of my colleagues in History there, supplemented by a Research Leave award from the then Arts and Humanities Research Board. Coming after an intense period of work as Head of History, that sabbatical was an opportunity I seized on with particular relish. During the earlier part of that period my former colleague Bertrand Taithe was a particularly stimulating influence on the development of my ideas; Professors Keith Laybourn, Bill Stafford and David Taylor have all been consistent in their support for this element of my work as an integral part of my role. Since my sabbatical, colleagues not just in History, but in the wider department of History, English, Languages and Media, and most recently at the University Centre Barnsley, have been more than tolerant of my occasional ramblings about Mother Shipton and her fellow prophets. The extent of the practical assistance provided by many librarians and archivists, for all of which I am very grateful, is reflected in my bibliography; particular thanks go to the staff in Inter-Library Loans at the University of Huddersfield, and to those in Special Collections in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and the John Rylands University Library in Manchester. Boydell have been a particularly helpful publisher, and Peter Sowden deserves special thanks for his work on the project over several years. I am grateful to the following for permission to cite their unpublished theses: Stephen W. Baskerville, Timothy Crist, Christopher Randall Duggan, D. T. Etheridge, Frances M. Gladwin, M. L. Holford, C. M. Keen, Jennifer Isobel Kermode, Deborah Marsh, Susan Aileen Newman, Susan Elizabeth Ellen Pitts, David Stuart Robinson, and R. S. Thomson. vii

PROPHECY, POLITICS AND THE PEOPLE

My parents, Jenny and David Thornton, have helped me in so many ways over the years – it is to them, especially in this, the year of my father’s seventieth birthday, that this book is dedicated. The support and inspiration of my wife, Sue Johns, and of our children, Carys and Gwyn (despite the lack of any mention here of ballet, swimming, trains or Thunderbirds), has been most important of all in ensuring that this book was written.

viii

Abbreviations APC BIHR BJRL BL Bodl. BRUO BRUO, 1501–40 CCR CCRO CChR CFR CJ CP CPR CSPD DKR EETS EHR HBC HJ HMC JRUL LJ

Acts of the Privy Council of England, n.s., ed. John Roche Dasent and others (London 1890–) Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester/Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester British Library Oxford, Bodleian Library A. B. Emden (ed.), A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (Oxford 1957–9) A. B. Emden (ed.), A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, A.D. 1501–1540 (Oxford, 1974) Calendar of Close Rolls (London, 1898–) Cheshire County Record Office, Duke St, Chester Calendar of Charter Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 6 vols (London, 1903–20) Calendar of the Fine Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 22 vols (London, 1911–62) The Journals of the House of Commons (London, 1803) G. E. C. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd edn (London, 1910–59) Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office (London, 1901– ) Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (London, 1852– ) Annual Reports of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (London, 1840– ) Early English Text Society English Historical Review E. B. Fryde, D. E. Greenway, S. Porter and I. Roy (eds) Handbook of British Chronology, 3rd edn (London, 1986) Historical Journal Historical Manuscripts Commission Manchester, John Rylands University Library The Journals of the House of Lords (London, 1771– ) ix


LP

J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47 (London, 1862–1910); Addenda, I (London, 1929–32) NLW Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales n.s. new series ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004), sub nomine Ormerod, Chester George Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, 2nd edn by Thomas Helsby (London, 1882) o.s. original series PRO London, The National Archives: Public Record Office RP J. Strachey and others (eds), Rotuli parliamentorum (London, 1767–77) RS Rolls Series RSLC Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire ser. series Sheaf Cheshire Sheaf SR The Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810–28) STC (according Daniel Goddard Wing, A Short-Title Catalogue of the to publication Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and date) British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 2nd edn, revised, ed. John J. Morrison et al. (New York, 1972–98) Alfred W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of the Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, 2nd edn, ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and K. F. Pantzer, 3 vols (London, 1976–91) THSLC Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society VCH The Victoria History of the Counties of England YAJ Yorkshire Archaeological Journal YAS Leeds, Yorkshire Archaeological Society

x

Introduction Prophecy, politics and the people in late medieval and early modern England This is a study of non-biblical prophetic traditions current in England from the sixteenth century to the present day, especially Mother Shipton, Merlin and Nixon the Cheshire prophet. The term ‘prophecy’ covers a wide variety of phenomena in the early modern period. These overlap far more than is sometimes allowed, but it is nonetheless necessary and legitimate to focus for the moment on one element of ‘prophecy’, in this case ‘ancient prophecy’ (to use a term of Keith Thomas’s), that is prophecy allegedly uttered or written by figures in the past, who might or might not be religious figures but who were not formally part of the biblical tradition and apocrypha.1 Its influence on events, through both its mass appeal and its specific relevance to the conduct of politics by elites, and on a day-to-day level and in specific crises, makes it as significant as many of the economic, social, cultural and ideological factors familiar to political historians. Yet, for example, neither Shipton nor Nixon has been subjected to proper study in the present century, and Merlin is usually treated as part of the Arthur myth. This is in spite of their appearance in many of the major and more of the minor works of literature produced in the last few centuries, and in the writings of men as humble as John Clare and as prominent and educated as Samuel Pepys, Horace Walpole and Henry Fielding. The prime purpose of this investigation is therefore to describe and account for this powerful influence, considering the origins of these prophetic traditions, their growth and means of transmission, the way various groups in society responded to them and in turn tried to control them, and ultimately the way their influence, in some cases such as that of Nixon, has waned. More generally, I came to write this book because its subject matter seemed to stand at the intersection of three problematic areas of late medieval and 1 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971), ch. 13; cf. the extended discussion of definition in Frances M. Gladwin, ‘Popular Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century England: By Mouth and Pen in the Alehouse and from the Pulpit’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Adelaide, 1997), pp. 23–44. D. T. Etheridge, ‘Political Prophecy in Tudor England’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales (Swansea), 1979), p. 9, prefers the term ‘traditional prophecy’.

1


early modern popular culture and politics. First it illustrated the powerful influence on politics and political discourse of those outside the rural and urban elites; second, it demonstrated the importance of regional, as opposed to national, political culture, and variation in that culture; and third, it was suggestive of the considerable and continuing power of mystical, supernatural and ‘non-rational’ ideas in British social and political life through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first of these problematic areas was concerned with the extent of involvement in politics of groups outside the political elite. Discussion of politics, especially away from crises, tended to down-play the role of those outside the gentry. The Whig perspective allowed for the expression of a national will, but although this incorporated the wishes of the people, those wishes were represented and enacted by politicians drawn from the elite.2 Marxists such as Christopher Hill considered this period to be dominated by processes culminating in bourgeois revolution in the form of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution. The competitors on the political stage were therefore the crown and nobility on one hand, and the capitalist gentry and townsmen on the other. Men and women from the strata of society below this level were involved only as dependants of the paternalism of the old feudal order, or as dimly understanding followers of bourgeois ideals, antipathetic though these might ultimately be to their interests.3 The revisionists who challenged both Whig and Marxist orthodoxies tended to remove the lower orders even more positively from the political stage – no longer did the Tudors represent the national will, but, if anything, worked against it, manipulated by the moneygrabbing courtiers and administrators who dominated their governments.4 The stock of all revisionist historians working within the period became the county study, focused on the gentry. Yet writers from diverse perspectives, such as Steve Gunn on the early sixteenth century and Tim Harris on the late seventeenth, have over the last 2

For a classic example, see the manner in which Pollard described Henry VIII’s ruthless pursuit of the national will in the Reformation: A. F. Pollard, Henry VIII (London, Paris and New York, 1902), esp. pp. 288–97: ‘He directed the storm of the Reformation, which was doomed to come. . . . Without him, the storm of the Reformation would still have burst over England; without him, it might have been far more terrible’ (pp. 295–6). 3 The English Revolution 1640: Three Essays, ed. Christopher Hill (London, 1940). 4 Christopher Haigh, ‘Anticlericalism and the English Reformation’, History 68 (1983), pp. 391–407; and the work collected in The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987); cf. the more directly political approach of E. W. Ives, seen in e.g. Faction in Tudor England (London, 1979; revised edition 1986); ‘Faction at the Court of Henry VIII: The Fall of Anne Boleyn’, History 57 (1972), pp. 169–88; The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: ‘The Most Happy’ (Malden, Mass., Oxford, 2004); ‘The Fall of Wolsey’, in Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art, ed. S. J. Gunn and P. G. Lindley (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 286–315; and that of David Starkey, e.g. ‘The Age of the Household: Politics, Society and the Arts, c. 1350– c. 1550’, in The Later Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Medcalf (London, 1981), pp. 225–90; The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London, 1985). 2

INTRODUCTION

two decades increasingly argued that those below the ranks of the county gentry might be involved in a politics which was more than the simple operation of ties of lordship, tenancy and interest. If the revolt of 1381 was dominated by ideas of peasant autonomy and millenarianism, the plebeian authors of Jack Cade’s revolt of 1450 seemed to engage more directly with the political agendas of members of conventional political elites.5 The grievances of the south-eastern yeomen and clothworkers who stood behind Cade were seen as springing from failures of royal policy at court and in France; they were expressed in proclamations, bills and through spokesmen dressed as heralds; and they were to be resolved by the appointment of royal councillors and the prosecution of courtiers. By the early sixteenth century, the senior yeomanry, artisans and minor gentry were clearly able to play a major role in, and possibly even drive, a rebellion like the Pilgrimage of Grace which addressed details of royal policy from religious, social and economic spheres.6 It was partly in opposition to this determination to write the lower orders out of the political story that counter-revisionists began to reassert the importance of political processes and ideologies in which they might be involved. The political process of elections to the House of Commons was discussed by Derek Hirst who argued that the franchise was effectively widened in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by the effects of inflation on the 40 shilling freehold qualification set down for shire elections by the act of 1429–30. This, Hirst argued, combined with varied and sometimes relatively open borough franchises to mean that possibly as much as 40 per cent of the

5

Rosamund Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (London, 1997); Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley and London, 1994); The Peasants Revolt of 1381, ed. R. B. Dobson, 2nd edn (London, 1983). I. M. W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion (Oxford, 1991); R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422–1461 (London, 1981), ch. 21; B. P. Wolffe, Henry VI, paperback edn (London, 1983), pp. 231–8; John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996). 6 Interpretations emphasizing noble, court and senior gentry involvement are now heavily criticized. For this perspective, see G. R. Elton, ‘Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Manchester, 1980), pp. 25–56 (reprinted in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1974–92), vol. 3, Papers and Reviews, 1973–1981 (1983), pp. 183–215); M. R. James, ‘Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England’, Past and Present xlviii (August 1970), pp. 3–78 (reprinted in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England, paperback edn (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 188–269). Criticism: S. J. Gunn, ‘Peers, Commons and Gentry in the Lincolnshire Revolt of 1536’, Past and Present 123 (May 1989), pp. 52–79; R. W. Hoyle, ‘Thomas Master’s Narrative of the Pilgrimage of Grace’, Northern History XXI (1985), pp. 53–79; M. L. Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536 (Manchester, 1996), e.g. p. 408 (the rebel armies ‘presented themselves, and were perceived as acting, in the name and cause of the commonalty’). 3


adult male population was qualified to vote in the early 1600s. 7 Although revisionists such as Mark Kishlansky argued that it was only with the Civil War that standing for election, a process usually agreed in advance by meetings of county gentry, representing consensus and avoiding contests, was replaced by running for election, with the full panoply of the contested poll, he has been criticized. Many constituencies already exhibited a tendency towards frequent and polarizing contests as early as the 1620s.8 This complemented earlier work on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in which Bill Speck and others showed that the party conflict of the period reflected ferocious contests within constituencies.9 Recent work has therefore tended to move away from models of society riven by horizontal divisions, between upper and middle classes, between town elites and urban masses. Instead, vertical divisions have been given greater prominence. Tim Harris’s late Stuart London is dominated by religious and ideological divisions; the sexual politics of Martin Ingram’s rural South are given stability by the ‘respectable’ at all levels of society; Tessa Watt’s religious chapbook caters for an inclusive market for Protestant ideology.10 Trends in the study both of rebellion and crisis, and of the more normal rhythm of social and political life, are therefore pointing to the more extensive involvement of the lower orders in politics in the late medieval and early modern periods. Discussion of this involvement has therefore thrown up the problem of the way in which plebeian action was organized and articulated. The study of rebellions and similar crises has often led historians to reflect on the way that demands were expressed, and the mechanism for organizing men and resources, such as the East Anglian predilection for ‘camping’ during major demonstrations in the sixteenth century.11 Naturally, these reconstructions

7

D. Hirst, The Representative of the People? (Cambridge, 1975). Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986); Richard Cust, ‘Politics and the Electorate in the 1620s’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (Harlow, 1989), pp. 134–67. 9 W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies, 1701–1715 (London, 1970). 10 Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration to the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987); Tim Harris, ‘The Problem of Popular Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century London’, History of European Ideas 10 (1989), pp. 43–58; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991). A good impression of the differing sides in the debate can be found in the differing approaches of Popular Culture in England, c. 1550–1800, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 1995), and Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay, new edn (London, 1988); although it has to be said that the essays in the former do not necessarily address the same agenda as is set out by the editor in his introduction. 11 Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Kett’s Rebellion in Context’, Past and Present 84 (August 1979), pp. 36–59; cf. Bush, Pilgrimage of Grace. 8

4

INTRODUCTION

of the dramatic events in which popular influence was most obviously displayed have tended to focus on crises; unfortunately the very atypicality of the crisis raises questions about the general applicability of models of popular political action and language developed in these studies. The attempts that have been made to assess the ideas of those below the gentry and urban elite outside times of crisis have focused essentially on the ideas of that elite and the media controlled by them. One of the most influential assumptions here is that elite ideas were mediated to the people, a move from a great tradition to a little tradition.12 The most obvious example of this is the role of religion. For the period of the later Reformation and later seventeenth century, religion has been cited as something which might motivate crowd activity; yet this is a religion which draws fundamentally on the thinking of ‘leading’ theologians and politicians, albeit in a popularized form and made available in simplified and cheaply priced texts or ballads. The same is true of the recent reassertion of the importance of ideas in the politics of the fifteenth century. Christine Carpenter, Ted Powell and John Watts acknowledge the role of those below the gentry in political debate, but the ideas that move Cade’s rebels in their work are those of thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, albeit communicated to them in a simplified form by preachers and propaganda texts.13 This assumption seems to be in need of questioning: the implication of giving the people back a role in the affairs of their locality and wider world might be to give them not just control over physical resources and the political initiative during a crisis which divided their betters, but a stronger grip on the key ideas of politics themselves. Ethan Shagan’s avowedly ‘post-revisionist’ account of the English Reformation describes it as a process done not for or to the people, but with them.14 As Watt has argued in her work on print culture, there are real problems with the model of a great and a little tradition, with ideas ‘trickling down’ from the elite to the masses. Drawing on the work of French historians of printing such as Roger Chartier, she argued that there was general participation in a pool of ideas, which were accessible to and used by all elements in society in the same language and vocabulary.15 She even suggested that it might be the consumer of the chapbook who dictated the emergence of the particular form and content of the late sixteenth-century religious chapbook. The problem here is that, in this emphasis on inclusion, there is still a focus on the importance of the printed medium as a means allowing the control of the traditions and ideas expressed. This largely springs 12

Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978). Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992); eadem, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437–1509 (Cambridge, 1997); E. Powell, Kingship, Law and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V (Oxford, 1989); Watts, Henry VI. 14 Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003). 15 Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia C. Cochrane (Princeton, 1987). Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 257–332. 13

5


from the work of Watt’s predecessors Thomson and Spufford, who tended to view the pre-print oral culture of the people as starkly more autonomous of elite control than the print-derived oral culture which was simply learned by rote.16 Although there are many signs that she had doubts about her own analysis, Spufford quoted examples of folk-singers dependent on the press for their repertoire, such as ‘all [the] milkmaids that are in love’, who received a bequest from the satirical ‘Mistress Money’, ‘to buy the next new ballet of Love, so that they may sing it over their milking pails’ (1674). Even more extreme were the examples she cited of this leading to traditions becoming meaningless in terms of the original intention of their content, as with the garbled songs collected from the Scottish servant girl Bell Robertson in the nineteenth century, or the singers in Sussex who sang to ‘“you Gentlemen of hiring hounds” ’ when the words intended were ‘ “you gentlemen of high renown”’.17 In a similar way, Shagan’s re-emphasis on the role of the non-elite remains limited, at least in part through his use of conceptual models explaining collaboration or complicity with totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.18 Adam Fox has further developed this trend in the historiography, to emphasize the limits to an oral culture independent of a literary one. Including manuscript in his analysis, he has successfully argued that even at the start of the early modern period it is hard to find many areas of oral culture not dependent on writing or print, and those remaining, such as local manorial custom, were soon eroded. The implication is that this subjection to literary

16

R. S. Thomson, ‘The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1974); Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1981), esp. pp. 14–15 (e.g. at p. 13 quoting D. Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London, 1972), ‘the spread of printed songs in a newly literate society [leaves] people with an awed respect for the authority of the printed word, [who] come to believe that the printed text is the text; they lose their acceptance of the textual multiformity of the oral ballad story’). J. A. Sharpe, ‘The People and the Law’, Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (London, 1985), pp. 244–70, provides a stark vision of the entry of the great tradition into the little tradition, leading to the enlistment of the people in an elite-controlled legal culture. 17 Spufford, Small Books, pp. 13–15. One sign of her eagerness to qualify the picture is her recognition that because children of elite families, citing James Boswell, Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, read chivalric romances, the ‘gap between the culture of the elite and popular culture was not complete’: pp. 73–5. For a slightly different emphasis, on the pervasive but trivial nature of chapbook material, see Victor E. Neuburg, ‘The Diceys and the Chapbook Trade’, The Library 5th ser. 24 (1969), pp. 219–31, at pp. 227–8; he acknowledges that the chapbooks ‘fostered working-class literacy’ which made possible the working-class politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (pp. 229–30); this, however, represents the thesis that the politics of the masses could only develop any autonomy after the industrial revolution. 18 Shagan, Popular Politics. 6

INTRODUCTION

culture was similarly controlling and restrictive. While opposition to the crown or court might in some senses be facilitated and become more coherent, it was also limited by its dependence on a fundamentally literary medium.19 In all this work the ability of the masses to achieve any significant participation in the content and uses of the tradition is therefore minimized. My argument will be that printed prophecy represented a close and creative dialogue with a continuing vigorous and highly political oral and manuscript tradition which, although it (at least) compelled the elite’s attention, was not exclusively under elite control. Seeing chapbook literature, especially prophetic material, as escapist, almost as much as seeing it as nonsensical, denies the political and social messages even the most apparently trivial or fanciful tract conveyed. More importantly, however, the directness of the political message conveyed by prophecies such as those of Shipton, Merlin and Nixon, and the invitation they offered to think hard about past and future events, has never been properly acknowledged. These hugely popular prophecy traditions suggest there were strands to the political culture which did not simply trickle down to the people but were more fundamentally of their making and under their control. Further, prophecy prompts us to re-emphasize the importance of the interpretation and reception of texts and traditions in a historiography which has become too conscious of textual consistencies as against meaning and understanding. If, as Keith Wrightson has argued in ‘The Politics of the Parish’, there existed a range of political discourses at the most local level – a local politics of patriarchy, of neighbourhood, of custom, of reformation, of ‘state formation’, and of subordination and meaning20 – these were not conducted in terms derived simply from the realm of social elites. This book is an attempt to consider prophecy as a specific political language or grammar which might articulate those discourses – a language accessible to and current among the people across three hundred and more years without being stifled by elite 19

Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000). Cf. Adam Fox, ‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing’, in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (Basingstoke and London, 1996), pp. 89–116, and in the same volume, Andy Wood, ‘Custom, Identity and Resistance: English Free Miners and their Law, c.1550–1800’, pp. 249–85; although the latter in particular sees customary law as a potentially enduring discourse controlled by its participants among the lower orders, both make a case for the interaction of customary law with writing and printing which worked in the end to constrain it and place it under elite control through the formal legal system. 20 Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, pp. 11–46; cf. attempts to establish the nature of the politics of the village in the fifteenth century, e.g. Robert Goheen, ‘Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England’, American Historical Review 96 (1991), pp. 42–62; Francesca Bumpus, ‘The “Middling Sort” in the Lordship of Blakemere, Shropshire, c. 1380–1420’, in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, The Fifteenth Century 7, ed. Tim Thornton (Stroud, 2000), pp. 202–19. 7


control. Equally, it is an attempt to suggest how elite discourses in these areas remained open to ideas from below. The second issue which ancient prophecy opens up is the role and importance of regional and local political cultures. A major problem with much of the work on both popular and elite politics already discussed is that it tends to assume the unity and coherence of the national community by the sixteenth century, and therefore the coherence of political discourses and languages within that national space. The geographical spaces within which politics has been imagined as taking place have been those of the county and the nation, and the former has almost without exception been seen as a building block from which the latter was constructed. Not only that, but the political cultures of counties have generally been seen as uniform and therefore typical of national society as a whole. This has led, on the most obvious level, to a tendency to present county studies as studies of particular phenomena in England as a whole. This has had two consequences. The first is that counties, even when presented as effectively autonomous, have not been seen as capable of developing distinct characteristics. The classic example of this is Cheshire, especially given the importance John Morrill’s work on the county has assumed. In a book on the county extending to over two hundred pages, only two are devoted to the special circumstances and history resulting from the county’s distinctive palatine status.21 The second is that other geographical spaces have hardly received any treatment at all. This is particularly true of the region. In spite of the importance of regional variation in much writing on agricultural and economic histories of the British Isles, regional approaches to political history have been unfashionable.22 Although there are honourable exceptions,23 even those counter-revisionists who have challenged the dominance of the county study over the last thirty years have done little to develop study of alternative sub-national entities, largely because their agenda has been dominated by a determination to re-emphasize the national.24 A late-

21

J. S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (London, 1974). 22 A regional perspective is the fundamental underpinning of The Agrarian History of England and Wales, e.g. vol. 3, 1348–1500, ed. Edward Miller (Cambridge, 1991), vol. 4, 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967); and vol. 5, 1640–1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1984), for example. 23 E.g. Michael Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983); R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century, reissue (Cambridge, 1983); Carpenter’s Locality and Polity, although expressly a study of Warwickshire, is clearly intended as a study of the North Midlands, especially given her further thoughts on the subject in ‘Gentry and Community in Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 33(4) (October 1995), pp. 340–80. 24 Ann Hughes, for example, in pointing out the problems of a study of Warwickshire before and during the English Civil War, because of internal divisions and external ties, did not develop this into a regionalist perspective, but emphasized the national: Ann L. Hughes, 8

INTRODUCTION

modern fascination with the existence of a North–South divide has resulted in a continuing flow of studies of the ‘North’ or, as often, of the divide and the tensions it has created.25 Even so, the North was something which was clearer to those living elsewhere than to those who were allegedly primarily northerners, because of the stark differences between the constituent parts of their region. There is therefore a need to assess the importance of political spaces and communities which are neither the conventional English county, nor the conventional English nation. Both the Nixon and Shipton prophetic traditions discussed here had a distinctly regional base, and, in their different ways, the continuing vitality of each depended on local and regional political cultures. The third issue raised by ancient prophecy is of course the history of prophecy and associated ‘non-rational’ ideas as systems of belief in late medieval and early modern England. It is now thirty-five years since Keith Thomas provided us with a forceful modernization narrative which described how the ending of faith in prophecy was one aspect of our rejection of magic, superstition and the suffocating power of the past, and our assumption of the trappings of modernity and rationality.26 Some more evanescent prophetic traditions appear on first examination to support Thomas’s case. Soon after his work appeared, Bernard Capp produced a detailed account of the production of almanacs and popular astrology in the three hundred years after 1500, which adopted much the same approach. Patrick Curry’s Prophecy and Power later provided a vision of a bourgeois rationalist hegemony defeating and destroying first the practitioners of astrology and then the credulity of their plebeian following.27 There have always been voices which have pronounced Thomas’s account too categorical, overemphasizing the power of prophecy in the medieval period and its weakness today.28 Neither is it adequate, however,

‘Warwickshire on the Eve of the Civil War: A “County Community”?’, Midland History VII (1982), pp. 42–72; cf. Clive Holmes, ‘The County Community in Stuart Historiography’, Journal of British Studies XIX (1980), pp. 54–73, which develops from his work on a county study of Lincolnshire: Clive Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980). 25 Helen M. Jewell, The North–South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester, 1994); A. J. Pollard, ‘The Tyranny of Richard III’, Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977), pp. 147–65; Frank Musgrave, The North of England: A History from Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1990); Richard Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 41–52. 26 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. 27 Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London and Boston, 1979); Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1989). 28 E.g. criticism of Thomas’s use of Blagden’s figures for the production of almanacs (Cyprian Blagden, ‘The Distribution of Almanacs’, Studies in Bibliography XI (1958), pp. 107–16) as an indication of the power of the astrological and other ideas they conveyed: C. John Sommerville, ‘On the Distribution of Religious and Occult Literature in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Library 5th ser. 29 (1974), pp. 221–5. Cf. Michael 9


simply to emphasize the role of credulity in the twentieth century, as Peter Laslett did (or even today, as Jerome Friedman chose to do).29 An increasing awareness of the complexity of the way people understand and represent the world makes it hard to accept simple ideas of in/credulity or ir/rationality. Work on the alleged decline of belief in other ‘irrational’ systems, such as witchcraft, has begun both to question the nature and inevitability of the decline and to emphasize the degree to which this was contingent on a complex interplay of cultural, social and political changes, rather than being part of an uncomplicated march of modernity.30 Further, there has been a tendency in the historiography to seek to identify and describe internally coherent sets of ideas and attitudes. Rather as the recent Anglo-Saxon preoccupation in literary studies has been with establishing an authoritative text, so in the history of popular political and social ideas change tends to be understood as movement from one coherent set of views to other coherent sets of views, whether abruptly or by a process of evolution. The proposition examined here will be that multiple and perhaps contradictory understandings of future ‘reality’ in its relationship to the present and the past might be found in one individual, even at the same time. Prophecy offers us the chance to consider the history of ‘non-rational’ political beliefs other than in stark terms of eradication through modernization, or of straightforward unchanging continuities, to consider them in terms of the processes and structures which might support them (or not), and to assess their interaction with other, sometimes contradictory, sets of beliefs. The last few years have seen several important publications on the history of prophecy during the period covered by this study. Sharon Jansen’s work on prophecy in the reign of Henry VIII has made available the evidence to show how prophecy helped to articulate the concerns of English men and women concerned by the policies of his government.31 There has also been a flowering of work on the phenomenon, produced by radical Protestantism,

Harris’s review of Capp’s work in Publishing History 8 (1980), pp. 87–104, which draws particular attention to the effects of the cut-off date of 1800, just as a tremendous revival in astrology was occurring. 29 Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age, 2nd edn (London, 1971); Jerome Friedman, Miracles and Pulp Press: The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies (London, 1993), conclusion. 30 E.g. witchcraft: Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations c. 1650–c. 1750 (Oxford, 1997); Owen Davies, Witchcraft Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester and New York, 1999); cf. Alexandra Walsham, ‘“Frantick Hacket”: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, Historical Journal 41 (1998), pp. 27–66. 31 Sharon Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991). Cf. also A. Fox, ‘Prophecies and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550, ed. A. Fox and J. Guy (Oxford, 1989), pp. 77–94; C. S. L. Davies, ‘Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 58–91; Gunn, ‘Peers, Commons and Gentry’, pp. 52–79. 10

INTRODUCTION

of prophesying, in the sense of speaking and interpreting the word of God.32 Much fruitful work has been done, in particular, on the voice these doctrines gave women in seventeenth-century England.33 The doctrine of the prophet as marginal figure, speaking from the liminal spaces of society and temporal world alike, had tremendous potential to empower the disempowered. The Reformation still stands, however, as a major barrier within this historiography; from 1600, most attention is focused on prophecy in its biblical sense, and words inspired by forces other than God are played down. For the Pilgrims of 1536, Thomas of Erceldoun and Bede spoke the words that explained their future; the prophets and prophecies which played a role in shaping society and politics in the seventeenth century came more or less directly from God. In that sense, Keith Thomas’s narrative still holds sway, if with the qualification that inspired speech, from more restricted, more regulated and more theologically respectable sources, possessed tremendous power into the nineteenth century. Ancient prophecy such as Shipton, Merlin and Nixon, however, non-Christian as it usually is and with its popularity spread across precisely the centuries which Thomas sees as crucial, offers the chance to present a more nuanced view of change in this system of belief. Something needs to be said about the methodology adopted here, and some of the underlying assumptions behind the work. First, it should be noted that the assumption throughout is that there was, for example, almost certainly never an individual named Nixon active in Delamere Forest who uttered a set of prophecies, nor an old woman named Ursula Shipton in York or Knaresborough with astonishing powers of foresight; and if there was an original for Merlin, then he is effectively inaccessible in early medieval times. The search for the person of the prophet has too often meant that past studies of these prophecies became bogged down in suppositions and speculations. Such people may have existed, but since it is beyond the existing evidence to establish this with any degree of certainty, there is little point in trying to do so. In rather the same way that recent study of Robin Hood has benefited from an acceptance that there may not be one individual who lies behind the

32 E.g. G. Games, ‘“To Justify the Ways of God to Men”: The Prophetic Role of Ministers in Early New England’, in Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History 1300–2000, ed. Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (Stroud, 1997), pp. 85–100. 33 Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1992); Diane Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century’, in Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740, ed. I. Grundy and S. Wiseman (London, 1992), pp. 139–58; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 125; Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), passim, esp. ch. 1. A psycho-historical approach is attempted in A. Cohen, ‘Prophecy and Madness: Women Visionaries during the Puritan Revolution’, Journal of Psychohistory 11 (1984), pp. 411–30.

11


myth, either as subject or as author,34 concentration on the tradition itself, rather than on the supposed person of the prophet, is more likely to be rewarding.35 My second assumption is that the prophetic tradition was not in fact prophetic, at least in so far as its more specific ‘predictions’ go. The Shipton prophecy did not foretell the death of Thomas Percy, or the failure of Cardinal Wolsey to reach York in 1529–30, and Nixon did not predict the outcome of the battle of Bosworth Field or the miraculous birth of an heir to the Cholmondeley family. In fact, the assumption will be that prophecies must post-date the events described.36 Many political historians, and others who are primarily literary scholars, have tended to read the evidence for this ancient prophetic culture in early modern England at face value. The latter group have taken the words recorded as texts to be analysed and deconstructed.37 The former have seen the evidence as a direct record of prophetic activity, whether by makers or audience.38 Both tendencies have been rightly criticized by students of popular culture, who have pointed out the inherently hostile attitude of those who recorded the bulk of the evidence for the phenomenon.39 The creation of many of the surviving records of ancient prophecy was stimulated by an atmosphere of fear and persecution, at times when authorities felt threatened. Historians of popular culture have therefore described the need to ‘decode’ the evidence, to allow the extraction of as close an approximation as possible of the culture itself. The danger with this approach is that the process of ‘decoding’ requires very considerable input from the interpreter – with all the dangers this poses for adding to potential distortion according to the assumptions of the historian. While in no sense underestimating the inevitable input of the reader, it is still possible to arrive at a more convincing interpretation of ancient prophecy.

34

Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, 1994), is particularly hostile to attempts to link ‘Robin Hood’ to a particular individual; cf. also R. B. Dobson and John Taylor, Rymes of Robin Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw, revised edn (Stroud, 1997); J. C. Holt, Robin Hood, revised edn (London, 1990); J. R. Maddicott, ‘The Birth and Setting of the Ballads of Robin Hood’, English Historical Review 93 (1978), pp. 276–99. 35 It should therefore be understood that here the words ‘Nixon’ and ‘Shipton’ represent traditions and not people. This might have been conveyed by the use of quotation marks, but this would have reduced the clarity of the text itself. 36 In a similar way to the terms ‘Shipton’ and ‘Nixon’, ‘prediction’ might have been rendered throughout in quotation marks; it is assumed that the reader makes this assumption silently. 37 E.g. Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2000); Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford, Calif., 1990); Jansen, Political Protest. 38 E.g. G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (London, 1972). 39 In general, this critique was advanced by Burke, Popular Culture; it was applied specifically to prophecy by Gladwin, ‘Popular Prophecy’. 12

INTRODUCTION

This should be done through a process of close reading, not just of the specific evidences for prophetic traditions, but of the deeper and wider context for those who created, interpreted and consumed ancient prophecy. This will allow us to discount, as far as possible, the impact of the pathological nature of the source material generally used. My approach has been to assess the publication histories of prophecies, in both manuscript and printed form, and the texts themselves, to obtain clues about the attitudes and intentions of those who wrote, printed and published works about the prophecies. Those who patronized, wrote, circulated – and attempted to control – the prophecies are examined. I have also been concerned to understand as far as possible something of the reception of the prophecies, their readership and the reactions of that readership.40 Inferences are drawn from the approach adopted in the texts and their frequency and pattern of reprinting and adaptation, an assumption that relies upon the production of these texts being at least to a degree responsive to those who ultimately read them.

40 Marginal annotations on the texts themselves are, however, rare; mentions of this kind of material in narrative biographical or autobiographical writings or in diaries are even rarer; and even the most thorough of business and testamentary records are systematically unspecific about such books: cf. the comments of Spufford, Small Books, pp. 45–9.

13

1

Ancient prophecy in the sixteenth century

In 1539 John Davy, described as a Welsh prophet, was sent up to the capital by an anxious courtier, Sir John Gresham. Davy was very desirous to see the king, and content to face prison and death if what he foretold did not prove true. Gresham opined: ‘he is but a “werysh” [that is insipid or, perhaps, weak and unimaginative] person to have any such learning of prophecy’.1 The incident seems to encapsulate the state of ancient prophecy in the sixteenth century: espoused by the marginal or deranged, a threat to order and stability, and either benignly dismissed or savagely punished by an ever more incomprehending elite. Yet if this was the case, why did Gresham not deal with the issue summarily on the spot? Why inform the king’s chief minister and send Davy to London? And read closely, Gresham’s comments might imply that some, weightier and more worthy people properly understood prophecy and might thereby be useful and not necessarily dangerous. It is therefore necessary in this chapter to ask further questions. Who was involved in the culture of ancient prophecy in the sixteenth century? Was it a minority, and an increasingly marginalized one at that, as the historiography might lead us to expect? What influence, in practical terms, did ancient prophecy have on political life? What political agendas did prophecy traditions serve? And if, as will be argued here, ancient prophecy retained a wide currency, influencing the political agenda in many areas, to what extent did its circulation begin to be influenced, and even controlled, by the means of its circulation, possibly in manuscript, certainly in print? Given his reputation as a pragmatic, hard-working and modernizing ruler, Henry VII might be thought an inauspicious subject with which to open this chapter. Yet Henry’s reign, it can be argued, saw the influence of the allied

1

Henry Ellis, Original Letters, Illustrative of English History; From Autographs in the British Museum, the State Paper Office, &c., with Notes and Illustrations, 3rd ser., 4 vols (London, 1846), iii. pp. 101–3 (LP, xiv/2. 124; Ellis sees Davy’s confidence as a sign of the (to him dubious) familiarity of Tudor monarchy under Henry). Sherman M. Kuhn et al. (eds), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, 1954–), W, p. 340. 14

ANCIENT PROPHECY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

ideas of ancient prophetic tradition and astrological prediction of the future in medieval England reach a high point at court and amongst the political elite. This predominance of astrology and prophecy had several causes. One was Henry himself, and in particular his origins and experience before ascending the throne. Henry placed considerable emphasis on his Welsh and British heritage in defining his understanding of his place in history. The influence of the ‘British history’ under Henry VII and in particular the pervasiveness of Arthurian myth was challenged many years ago by Sydney Anglo.2 Without overemphasizing one aspect of Henry’s heritage, however, it is possible to reassert the power of the British history in early Tudor England.3 Even if the naming of Henry’s first-born son, Arthur, is not in itself conclusive, the conjunction of the name with his birthplace in Winchester is heavy with ‘British’ connotations.4 The official historian of the reign, Bernard André, emphasized Henry’s sense of himself as a descendant of Cadwaladr, the wars of the fifteenth century as an expression of the savagery of the Saxons, and his own prophetic mission to quell this savagery. Henry’s exile, in Brittany, mirrored Cadwaladr’s.5 An important source for Henry’s interest in prophecy was

2

Sydney Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda – with an Appendix of Manuscript Pedigrees of the Kings of England, Henry VI to Henry VIII’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester 44 (1961–2), pp. 17–48. 3 Cf. in general David Starkey, ‘King Henry and King Arthur’, in Arthurian Literature XVI, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 171–96; and Antonia Gransden, ‘Antiquarian Studies in Fifteenth-Century England’, The Antiquaries’ Journal 60 (1980), pp. 75–97. 4 Further to Anglo, see Richard K. Morris, ‘The Architecture of Arthurian Enthusiasm: Castle Symbolism in the Reigns of Edward I and his Successors’, in Armies, Chivalry and Warfare in Medieval Britain and France: Proceedings of the 1995 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Matthew Strickland (Stamford, 1998), pp. 63–81: Arthur’s plain marble tomb at Worcester echoes the legendary king’s. 5 Bernard André, ‘De vita atque gestis Henrici Septimi, Angliæ ac Franciæ regum potentissimi sapientissimique, historia’, in Historia Regis Henrici Septimi a Bernardo Andrea tholosate conscripta; necnon alia quædam ad eundum regem spectantia, ed. James Gairdner, RS 10 (London, 1858), pp. 1–75, at pp. 9–10 (a return to the rule of Cadwaladr’s family after an interlude of ‘Anglorum saevitia’ (savagery of the English)). André also has Margaret of Burgundy stirring up Perkin Warbeck in conspiracy, reminding him of Saxon victories over the Britons, and of Henry’s British blood: p. 68. It should also be noted that André recorded a prophecy of Henry VI about Henry Tudor: p. 14. André also makes prophecy the motivation for Edward IV’s actions regarding Henry Tudor during his second reign: ‘Propheticis quorumdam testimoniis exterritus, apud Franciscum Britanniae ducem pretio precibusque saepe contendit magnis pollicitationibus ut Richemundiae comitem in patriam revocaret’ (p. 23). Cf. the prognostication by Henry VI on seeing Henry Tudor during his readeption, recorded by Polydore Vergil: Anglicae historiae libri xxvi (Basileae, 1534) (Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III, ed. Henry Ellis, Camden Society o.s. 29 (London, 1844), p. 135). Anthony Goodman, ‘Henry VII and Christian Renewal’, in Religion and Humanism, ed. Keith Robbins, Studies in Church History 17 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 115–25, at p. 121. 15


therefore Welsh prophetic tradition, in which Henry had been greeted as the promised heir, the mab darogan, as early as 1458.6 Direct evidence for Henry’s interest in prophecy is apparent from a manuscript produced for him in 1490. This includes a considerable body of prophetic material, concluding with the prophecies of John of Bridlington, the visions of St Brigitta, the prophecies of Merlin Ambrosius, prefaced by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s epistle to Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, and those of Merlin Silvester. These were followed by four short prophecies, a grouping which is usually described by the collective name of the ‘Prophecy of the Eagle’.7 Henry was not alone in this interest. Prophecy continued to encourage dissidents and pretenders, such as those involved in the final plots concerning Perkin Warbeck.8 It also involved men with connections to the heart of the regime, such as Sir Hugh Conway, who had shared Henry’s exile and occupied the highly sensitive post of Treasurer of Calais,9 and Reginald Andrew, who was in the service of William Uvedale of Wickham, a squire for the king’s body.10 The prevalence of ancient prophecy was a significant reason for, amongst other things, potential dynastic change in or immediately after Henry’s reign.

6 Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan, ‘Prophecy and Welsh Nationhood in the Fifteenth Century’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1985), pp. 9–26. 7 BL, Arundel 66, fols 267–291b: summarized in H. D. Ward and J. A. Herbert, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols (London, 1883–1910), vol. I, pp. 301–2. Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, 2 vols (London, 1996), II, pp. 365–6. Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books: Ideal and Reality in the Life of a Medieval Prince (Stroud, 1997), pp. 195–202. Cf. Excerpta Historica, or, Illustrations of English History (London, 1833), p. 95 (reward to [William?] Cornysshe in return for a prophecy, November 1493). 8 53rd Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (1892), App. II, ‘Conspiracy against Henry VII’, pp. 30–6, pp. 32–3; Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491–1499 (Stroud, 1994), pp. 196, 198, 203, 207, 209–10, 213, 215; Margaret Condon, ‘The Kaleidoscope of Treason: Fragments from the Bosworth Story’, The Ricardian VII (1986), pp. 208–12. Such involvement was no doubt the reason for the attempt to outlaw it in Henry’s first parliament, although this seems to have come to nothing: Plumpton Letters and Papers, Camden Society 5th ser. 8 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 64. Previous legislation had been in the context of anti-heresy/reform campaigns: RP, III, p. 583 (1406); Kathryn KerbyFulton, ‘Prophecy and Suspicion: Closet Radicalism, Reformist Politics, and the Vogue for Hildegardiana in Ricardian England’, Speculum 75 (2000), pp. 318–41, esp. pp. 338–9. 9 J. Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, RS 24 (London, 1861–3), I, pp. 231–40; A. F. Pollard (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources, 3 vols (London, 1913–14), I, pp. 240–50; for the dating of this document, see Dominic A. Luckett, ‘Crown Patronage and Political Morality in Early Tudor England: The Case of Giles, Lord Daubeney’, EHR 110 (1995), pp. 578–95, at p. 589 (placing it between June 1504 and early 1506). 10 Uvedale served the Woodvilles; his father Sir Thomas’s second wife, Elizabeth, was one of the four ladies-in-waiting to the queen. Bodl., Lyell MS 35, esp. fols 1–23v, 35–37v; Rosemary Horrox, Richard III: A Study in Service, paperback edn (Cambridge, 1991),

16


We can go further, however, to suggest that ancient prophecy had a continuing influence on the king himself, giving him a sense of the destiny which was successfully worked out on the field of Bosworth and addressing themes which were central preoccupations of the reign. It is likely that Henry’s interests in the French throne, in the conquest of Ireland, and ultimately in crusading sprang in part from his belief in prophecy and his own destiny.11 Shortly after his accession he ordered prayers for the expedition against Granada. 12 Subsequently, European interests in the crusade tended to switch eastwards, not least onto the territory of Italy itself. In 1504 Henry sent 20,000 gold crowns to the Pope to support crusading, the only prince personally to contribute.13 Henry’s commitment to crusade made sense in the context of prophetic expectations of a ‘last world emperor’ who would conquer the Holy Land in a confrontation with antichrist, ushering in the millennium. Further, it was believed that the first action of the man destined for the role of last world emperor would be to re-establish dominance over the whole of Britain and Ireland,14 and then achieve the conquest of France. Henry’s understanding

pp. 102, 103, 157, 274, 294; Josiah C. Wedgewood, History of Parliament 1439–1509, 2 vols (London, 1936–8), vol. 1: Biographies of the Members of the Commons House 1439–1509, p. 901; John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, 3rd edn, ed. William Shipp and James Whitworth Hodson, 4 vols (Westminster, 1861–70 [1874]), III, p. 144. It may even be that Andrew was associated with the Richard Andrew who was Reginald Bray’s nephew and was bequeathed the Hampshire manor of Freefolk by Bray in 1503: VCH Hampshire, IV, pp. 208, 283. A Reginald Andrew, late of St Mary’s parish, Strand, Middlesex, alias of parish of Melksham (Wiltshire), gent, was pardoned for nonappearance, 28 May 1462: CPR, 1461–1467, p. 174. 11 Goodman, ‘Henry VII and Christian Renewal’, pp. 117–19. S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (London, 1972; 2nd edn, London, 1977), pp. 304–5 (he doubts the sincerity of Henry’s desires; but the evidence cited, Henry’s insistence that the Pope should join in the crusade, seems less decisively evasive when it is remembered that campaigning against the Turk was already taking place on Italian soil in 1494: James Orchard Halliwell, Letters of the Kings of England, 2 vols (London, 1846), I, pp. 185–94 (Henry VII to the Pope, 1502, 17 Henry VII), reprinted in Pollard (ed.), Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources, III, pp. 165–72. Goodman has pointed out the Breton interest in crusading which Henry must have observed during his time there: ‘Henry VII and Christian Renewal’, p. 119. 12 Henry probably received a prognostication in 1492 which included elements related to Spanish crusading, discussed in more detail below regarding the abbot of Burton, p. 18. 13 Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago, 1988), pp. 350–1. Henry VIII: 1511 expedition and title given that year; enthusiasm 1519–20: pp. 351–3. Generally Tyerman sees English interest, including that of the monarchs, as sincere and finds the real break with the past in the Elizabethan regime’s negotiations with the Ottomans in the 1580s: p. 349. 14 State Papers, Henry VIII, part iii [vol. II], pp. 1–31 (the summary in LP, ii/2. 1366 (1515, p. 371) omits all mention of this aspect of the document). This reflected a Lancastrian heritage: see the letters left at Chirk (supporting the claims of Edward, son of Henry VI) and found by John Edwards: BL, Add. MS 46,846 (Letters of Queen Margaret of Anjou and Bishop Beckington and others, Written in the reigns of Henry V. and Henry VI. From a MS. 17


of his Boulogne expedition of 1492 had a prophetic context which may have been actively promoted by the king and certainly had a widespread audience.15 Perhaps understandably, there seems to have been something of a reaction against some elements of prediction, and political astrology in particular, towards the end of Henry’s reign. The general sense of disillusion, especially with the death of Arthur and Queen Elizabeth, and as the king’s health failed, was palpable. Yet this eventual disenchantment should not be considered as all-embracing. To read back the scepticism of Francis Bacon about prophecy into the reign of Henry VII is to impose an unhelpful and anachronistic interpretation on the first Tudor – as do so many other elements of Bacon’s portrait of the king.16 The influence of ancient prophecy at the heart of Henry VIII’s regime is evident in the person of Thomas Cromwell. The best evidence comes from the testimony of Anthony Budgegood, who was for a long time closely associated with Cromwell, in the service of the marquis of Dorset, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey17 and the king. Cromwell had borrowed money from Budgegood, and when Leonard Grey was looking to confirm his hoped-for marriage with Elizabeth, Lady Tailboys in 1532 – a not unimportant matter given her role as mother of the king’s son and possible heir Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond – he left it to Cromwell or Budgegood indifferently to devise a letter on his behalf to the duke of Norfolk.18 Budgegood later recalled a prophecy concern-

found at Emral in Flintshire, ed. Cecil Monro, Camden Society o.s. 86 (Westminster, 1863), pp. 166–7); also BL, Cotton MS Vespasian B XVI, fol. 5r (from 1458/9). 15 Register of Thomas Felde, abbot of Burton on Trent, c. 1431–92: University of Nottingham, Hallward Library, Mi. Dc. 7, fols 41r–41v (HMC Middleton, pp. 263–6). This may be the prognostication brought to Henry in January 1492: Excerpta Historica, p. 88. The prophecies in Henry’s presentation MS, BL, Arundel MS 66, fols 267–91b, all focus on the relationship between England and France: cf. the comments of Lesley M. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 235–6. John M. Currin, ‘“To Traffic with War”? Henry VII and the French Campaign of 1492’, in The English Experience in France c. 1450–1558: War, Diplomacy, and Cultural Exchange, ed. David Grummitt (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 106–31. 16 Francis Bacon, The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (London, 1622) – but note that even he includes the Henry VI prophecy about Henry, at the very end. 17 We have some important hints as to Thomas Wolsey’s interest in ancient prophecy. Richard Britnell pointed out the intensely prophetic context of George Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey: if Cavendish is to be believed, Wolsey had a strong sense of his own future, but it is not always clear whether this was grounded in the work of his astrologers or in ancient prophetic texts: ‘Penitence and Prophecy: George Cavendish on the Last State of Cardinal Wolsey’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (1997), pp. 263–81. Cf. the prophetic taunting of the cardinal in Jerome Barlowe and William Roy, Rede Me and be Nott Wrothe ([J. Schott, 1528]), Aiv; Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, ed. J. G. Evans, 3 vols (London, 1898–1910), vol. I, pp. v–vi; LP, xiii/1. 1383; G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (London, 1972), p. 52. 18 Borrowings: LP, iv. 5330; cf. v. 1285. Grey: LP, v. 1049; Beverley A. Murphy, Bastard 18


ing Wolsey, allegedly current at the time of Dorset’s expedition to France in the summer of 1512, ‘[w]hich prophecy the lord Cromwell well knoweth and many and often times he and I have reasoned the matter’.19 Later in his life, Cromwell supported prophetic interpreters. This chapter began with an account of how John Davy, a Welsh prophet, was in 1539 sent up by Sir John Gresham with an apparently dismissive judgement on his powers.20 There the story usually ends, with Davy most likely ruthlessly condemned or benignly discounted depending on the perspective of the historian. Yet he can potentially be traced further. On 4 March 1538, Richard Pollard had reported to Cromwell the flight from Exeter of one John Davy, who had previously been accused of treason. Davy had allegedly gone to Westminster, to the house of one Lewis ap Richard.21 Shortly afterwards, another report reached Cromwell, this time from Lewes, from Gregory Cromwell and Sir John Gage. They had met a John Davy, whom at first they took for a vagabond; but it transpired that he had been a monk and priest of the monastery in Lewes. He claimed that he had since Christmas been with Thomas Cromwell, who had promised him protection from his enemies in Sussex.22 The strong connections between Lewes and the marquis of Exeter’s family

Prince: Henry VIII’s Lost Son (Stroud, 2001), p. 23, and cf. LP, vi. 299ii, vii. 923xx, xl; x. 567; xiii/1. 653. 19 LP, xiv/1. 186iii (the text is mutilated and sections missing). Budgegood made this allegation in 1539 as an old and impoverished exile after a precipitate flight from London that ended in Italy: LP, x. 567; xiii/2. 416, 433, 694, 846, 847; xiv/1. 1, 186; xv. 498. It may have been in Budgegood’s interest to exaggerate the weaknesses of the English nobility (LP, xiv/1. 186(?); Bernard’s opinion noted in T. B. Pugh, ‘Henry VII and the English Nobility’, in The Tudor Nobility, ed. G. W. Bernard (Manchester, 1992), pp. 49–110, at p. 97), but it is not clear that it was in his interests to fabricate a Cromwellian interest in prophecy. Sharon L. Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991), p. 26, says Cromwell ‘took careful note’ of the prophecy, although her overall argument prevents her from seeing Cromwell as a full participant in the discussion. 20 See above, p. 14. 21 LP, xiii/1. 416. One individual at least can be excluded from the difficulties of identifying this prophet: the Lisles’ servant John Davy appears never to have been suspected or otherwise involved in these events. 22 LP, xiii/1. 549. The house was surrendered 16 November 1537 (LP, xii/2. 1101), many months after a report of extensive corruption and treason made by Richard Layton in autumn 1535 (LP, ix. 632). This may not be the same man, since Pollard’s notes from around this time on earlier charges against the marquis of Exeter include some on a John Davy, clothier, who in 1531 allegedly said that four or five years hence Exeter would succeed Henry as king, and who is therefore likely to be his fugitive of March 1538: LP, xiii/2. 961. 1531 charges v. Exeter: LP, v. 340, 416 (where he is called Dorset in error; Chapuys’s reports, 17 July and 10 September 1531); Nicholas Harris Nicolas, ‘Instructions given by King Henry the Eighth to John Becket the Usher, and John Wrothe the Sewer of his Chamber, Relative to their Journey into Cornwall, for the Purpose of Inquiring into the Conduct of William Kendall’, Archaeologia xxii (1829), pp. 20–5, from BL, Harleian MS 296, fol. 35v. 19


provide a possible association between the two incidents.23 Intriguingly, too, in September 1540, John Davy, specifically described as a Welshman, received a reward from the king, and recompense for a horse which had died at court, amounting to the substantial sum of £4.24 Around this time, a John Davy also appears in the royal household, receiving a fee of 50s., probably as a messenger of the chamber.25 Even in the face of Gresham’s evident scepticism in 1539, Davy’s confidence that he must speak with the king almost certainly proved well placed, as did his claimed association with Cromwell.26 In fact he reappears, some years later, now in the service of the duke of Somerset, when he was described as ‘a prophesier, and a great teller of thinges lost’.27 Anne Boleyn too seems to have knowingly operated in a courtly environment in which prophecy was common currency. George Wyatt’s account of the final months before Anne Boleyn’s marriage to Henry VIII suggests that prophecies were employed by all sides to help delay the king’s purpose in the hope that ‘something might fall between the cup and the lip’. One was delivered to Anne in her chamber, a prophecy of H, A and K, which ‘an expounder’ interpreted as indicating ‘great destruction if she married the king’. Wyatt says Anne pronounced the book ‘a bauble’, but her maid, Anne Gainsford, commented, ‘If I thought it true, though he were an emperor, I would not myself marry him with that condition.’ In Wyatt’s text the incident serves the purpose of showing Anne’s selfless willingness to sacrifice herself for the realm: ‘I am resolved to have him whatsoever might become of me.’ This therefore implies some level of belief in prophecy, if only in the lowerstatus but still gentle maid, and demands a belief in the reader’s mind that the general climate of opinion at court, if not Anne’s own beliefs, was receptive to the idea that prophecy might genuinely predict her fate.28 The account

23 W. H. Godfrey, The Priory of St Pancras, Lewes: A Short Historical Guide to the Ruins at Southover (Lewes, 1927). 24 LP, xvi. 380. 25 LP, xiii/2. 1280; xiv/2. 781. 26 We certainly see no signs of a more unfortunate end for Gresham’s prophet. John Davy of the household seems to have survived until at least 1544: LP, xix/1. 275 (at p. 163). A John Davy acted as a trusted servant of Sir John Wallop in France in 1540–1: LP, xvi. 476, 492, 525. 27 ‘Autobiography of Edward Underhill’, in Narratives of the Days of the Reformation: Chiefly from the Manuscripts of John Foxe the Martyrologist: with Two Contemporary Biographies of Archbishop Cranmer, ed. John Gough Nichols, Camden Society o.s. 77 (Westminster, 1859), p. 334, from BL, Lansdowne MS 2, art. 26 (examination by Sir Thomas Smith of William Wicherly). We may also catch a glimpse of Davy and through him Cromwell’s interest in prophecy in words alleged against George Poulett during his time in Ireland: that Cromwell had sent a Welshman to St Patrick’s purgatory in Ireland to enquire of a prophecy ‘that a pelican should come out of Ireland and should do many strange marvellous things in England’. LP, xiii/1. 470–1. Cf. Jansen, Political Protest, p. 51. 28 George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Samuel Weller Singer, 2nd edn (London, 1827), p. 429; Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: ‘The Most Happy’

20


is corroborated by the report of the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, in May 1536, that Anne had discussed prophecy with the king before her marriage. Anne, he said, had told the king that there was a prophecy that about this time a queen of England would be burned, but that, to please the king, she did not care. After her marriage, Chapuys went on, she boasted that although part of the prophecy had been fulfilled, she had not been condemned – but, Chapuys added, they might have said to her, as to Caesar, that the Ides have come, but not yet gone. Chapuys’s report implies some of the scepticism of Wyatt’s, since he makes Anne report the prophecy to the king as a ploy to increase his love, yet her subsequent boasting at having escaped the consequences of the prophecy implies some element of belief.29 What is beyond doubt, however, is that Anne and her brother George, Lord Rochford, were interested in the prophetic interpretations of François Lambert.30 Anne’s involvement begins to intersect more clearly with Cromwell’s as we turn to consider another noted collector and interpreter of prophecy, Thomas Gybson. Gybson wrote to Thomas Cromwell in 1538 saying he had gathered prophecies of a king who would win the Holy Cross and also divers realms. Such things had been done to advance the glory of the emperor Charles, so Gybson intended to do the same for Henry, showing he was the king intended. He provided thirteen prophecies, of St Thomas, Merlin and others.31 Gybson combined the highly successful practice of medicine with a role as one of the most radical Protestant printers in the London of the 1530s, and he had been recommended by Latimer, Edward Crone and others to Cromwell as the man who should print the Institution of a Christian Man in

(Oxford and Malden, Mass., 2004), p. 145. Cf. Chapuys’s report in December 1530 of general belief in a prophecy that the kingdom would be destroyed by a woman, which led some merchants to approach him with a view to transferring their stock to Flanders or Spain: Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, preserved in the archives at Vienna, Simancas, Besancon and Brussels, ed. Royall Tyler, 13 vols (London, 1904–54), 1529–1530, p. 547. 29 LP, x. 909 (Chapuys to Granvelle, 19 May 1536). An earlier case seems to confirm the existence of such a prophecy in the early 1530s: see below, p. 27. Starkey, ‘King Henry and King Arthur’, p. 196, speculates that this might be a reference to the parallelism between Anne’s alleged behaviour and potential fate and that of Guinevere. 30 Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, p. 283; cf. Jennifer Britnell and Derek Stubbs, ‘The Mirabilis Liber: its Compilation and Influence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986), pp. 126–49; Jennifer Britnell, ‘Jean Lemaire de Belges and Prophecy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979), pp. 144–66; eadem, ‘John Gough and the Traité de la différence des schismes et des conciles of Jean Lemaire de Belges: Translation as Propaganda in the Henrician Reformation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 16 (1995), pp. 62–74; Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Appleford and Abingdon, 1978), pp. 258–68. 31 BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra E. vi., fol. 386 (LP, xiii/2. 1242). 21


1537.32 Given this background it is unsurprising that Gybson’s account of ancient prophecy emphasizes Cromwell’s godliness and membership of the elect. Gybson’s role as printer to the city of London in at least 1538 suggests his interest in prophecy did not exclude him from ministerial support.33 He therefore provides us with detailed evidence for the way radical Protestants in the 1530s with powerful connections could find hope in ancient prophecy. Gybson’s work included printing The Pilgrim’s Tale, probably in 1537–9, a Protestant text heavily founded on prophecies attributed to Merlin – and whose likely author, Robert Singleton, was Anne Boleyn’s chaplain.34 From an opposition perspective, too, people around the court found an understanding of the future in prophecy. This was true of the nobility. Rhys ap Gruffydd was executed for treason in 1531, when amongst his motivations was listed the currency in Wales of the prophecy ‘that king Jamys with the red hand and the ravens should conquere all England’. In spite of the Welsh origins of the prophecy, it nonetheless formed part of the everyday

32

LP, xii/2. 295; John Hodgson, A History of Northumberland, 3 vols in 7 (Newcastle-uponTyne, 1820–58), vol. II, part ii (1832), p. 438. His outspoken Protestantism is evident from [Thomas Gybson], The Sum of the Actes and Decrees made by Diverse Bishops of Rome ([London], [1540?]). Neither Elton nor Jansen seem to have identified him correctly: G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (London, 1977), pp. 158–9 (the prophecies as ‘peculiarly vapid’, and Thomas as possibly the son of Richard, a commonwealth man); idem, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (London, 1973), pp. 20–1, 63; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971), p. 402; Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 58–9. 33 STC, iii. pp. 68–9. 34 [The Court of Venus. With the Pilgrim’s Tale. In Verse] ([T. Gybson, 1538?]) (STC 24650); The Court of Venus, ed. Russell A. Fraser (Durham, NC, 1955), pp. 4–5, 12–20, 31–3; Index Britanniae Scriptorum: John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, ed. Reginald Lane Poole and Mary Bateson, with an introduction by Caroline Brett and James P. Carley (Cambridge, 1990), p. 389; John Bale, Illustrium Maioris Britanniæ scriptorum, hoc est, Angliæ, Cambriæ, ac Scotiæ summariu, in quasdam centurias diuisum, cum diuersitate doctrinaru atq; annoru recta supputatione per omnes ætates a Iapheto sanctissimi Noah filio, ad annum domini M.D.XLVIII. (Additio . . . pro sexta centuria.) (Basileae, 1557, 1559), vol. I, p. 719 (Gybson); vol. II, p. 105 (Singleton); Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some Imperfections of Impressiones of Chaucers Workes: (Sett Downe before Tyme, and Nowe) Reprinted in the Yere of Oure Lorde 1598 / Sett Downe by Francis Thynne . . . Now Newly Edited from the MS. in the Bridgewater Library, with Fresh Collections for the Lives of William Thynne, the Chaucer Editor, and Francis Thynne, his Son, and a Reprint of the Only Known Fragment of “The Pilgrim’s Tale”, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society 2nd ser. 13 (London, 1875), pp. xlvi, 6–7; Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, p. 310; Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation, corrected edn (Oxford, 1991), pp. 221, 259, 349–52; BRUO 1501–1540, pp. 516–17; Andrew Wawn, ‘Chaucer, “The Plowman’s Tale” and Reformation Propaganda: The Testimonies of Thomas Godfray and “I Playne Piers”’, BJRL 56 (1973–4), pp. 174–92; Joseph A. Dane, ‘Bibliographical History versus Bibliographical Evidence: The Plowman’s Tale and Early Chaucer Editions’, BJRL 78 (1996), pp. 47–61, at pp. 47–51. 22


conversation of the household of Rhys at Islington (Middlesex), in close proximity to the court and connected to English elites through Rhys’s marriage to Lady Katherine Howard, daughter of the second duke of Norfolk and sister of the third.35 Under investigation in 1538, Gertrude, marchioness of Exeter, described how, when her husband the marquess went north at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Sir Edward Neville, Lord Montague’s brother-in-law, came to her and said ‘Madam, how do you? Be you merry’, to which she replied that she could not be, as her husband would be one of the foremost in any battle. Edward responded in prophetic terms, ‘Madame, be not afeared of this, nor of the second, but beware of the third.’ She countered, ‘Mr. Nevell you will never leave your Welsh prophecies, but one day this will turn you to displeasure.’36 It was also true of another group opposed to Reformation and with an interest in prophecy, centred on the family of Sir Thomas More: William Daunce, of Cassiobury (Hertfordshire), husband of Elizabeth, second daughter of More, was pardoned for treasonable words and for certain prophecies in 1544.37

35 W. Llewelyn Williams, ‘A Welsh Insurrection’, Y Cymmrodor XVI (1903), pp. 1–93, the indictment being at pp. 33–9. James: king of Scots; Red Hand: Llawgoch; Ravens: house of Dynevor. A copy of the record was kept at Dynevor: NLW, Dynevor MS 884(1). The Reports of Sir John Spelman, ed. J. H. Baker, 2 vols, Selden Society 93–4 (London, 1977), I, p. 47. 36 PRO, SP 1/138, fol. 158v (LP, xiii/2. 765); Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–1537 and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1915), ii. pp. 289–90, 310, 312, 314–15, 320. Cf. Jansen, Political Protest, p. 52. 37 LP, xix/1. 444(5). A similar formula was used in 1545 for one of his co-accused, Roger Ireland, clerk, late of Wandsworth (‘Wanneswoorth’, Surrey): LP, xx/1. 282(25). John Griffith, vicar of Wandsworth (a Westminster Abbey benefice), his chaplain and servant, were hanged in 1539 for denying the royal supremacy: VCH Surrey, iv. p. 117. The most prominent victim actually to suffer in this group was Germaine Gardiner, executed for denying the royal supremacy early in 1544. The grounds for this seem to have been related to his contacts with Reginald Pole while in France with Stephen Gardiner in the late 1530s. The formal verdict is singularly unspecific: James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England: An Historical Survey, 4 vols (London, 1908–13), ii. pp. 411–12. Also accused, and again for contacts with Pole, were John Beckinsall of (‘Borowclere’, Hampshire) and Henry Cole of New College, Oxford, and St Paul’s Cathedral. Cole: LP, xix/1. 444(11); BRUO 1501–40, pp. 128–9; ODNB. Bekinsall: LP, xix/1. 610(62); BRUO 1501–40, p. 37; ODNB. Others involved were part of the More connection: John Heywood, husband of Joan, daughter of John Rastell, John Larke, More’s vicar at Chelsea, and John and Roger Ireland. Larke and John Ireland died with Gardiner, and Heywood was reprieved at the last minute: Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford, 1990), pp. 205–6; James Arthur Muller, Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction (London, 1926), pp. 113, 361; Gairdner, Lollardy, ii. p. 412; William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knighte, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS o.s. 197 (London, 1935), pp. 115–17. John Heron, bastard brother of Giles, was investigated for astrological activities in 1540: ibid., p. 121. For prophecy MSS from the More circle, cf. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, Loseley MS L. b. 546; London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 527.

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The Henrician court in England would, in fact, have been very unusual if it had not been pervaded by a belief in prophecy, given the Western European context.38 The extent to which this impacted on policy towards England was great; as powerful a figure as Mercurin de Gattinara, chancellor of Charles V, was influenced in major diplomatic decisions by his belief in prophecy. When discussing the possible abandonment of Princess Mary as prospective wife for the emperor, he observed in a matter-of-fact way that according to prophecy Charles would become king of England by marriage, and so a new alliance (to Isabella of Portugal) could not be more than a short-lived first marriage.39 Not unnaturally, such views impinged on the English court through ambassadors sent abroad and the correspondence they had with their masters at home. A Spanish report of the manner of the executions of Anne Boleyn and her co-accused ended, ‘Thus, he who wrote this billet says that, according to old writings, he has seen the prophecy of Merlin fulfilled.’40 Of course, there was opposition to ancient prophecy on some occasions by some members of the elite. The danger in the way this evidence has been treated in the past rests in the underlying assumption that the elite were thereby expressing either uncomplicated opposition to or contempt for ancient prophecy. Read in specific context, we see that condemnation tends to have more specific causes. Sometimes this was because the prophecies’ use was politically unacceptable – and not because prophecy in itself was beyond the pale. Partly because it was so extensively tolerated, we catch only glimpses of ancient prophecy in the assize records. Remarkably few cases of sedition under Henry VII or his son, or Elizabeth and James I, seem to have concerned prophecy;41 we only get more direct indication of the continuing influence of ancient prophecy in the highly controversial circumstances of rebellion, especially in the North, because it was then that it was most rigorously persecuted. Late in 1568, one Dr Marshall, a papist, was arrested near Bolton (presumably Castle Bolton, in the North Riding of Yorkshire), and was found to possess a book including Merlinic prophecies.42 William Warton, of Ripon, reported that he had passed to John Molineux, JP, a book of prophecies, to

38

Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969), part III, chs VI–VII. 39 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collection of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, ed. Rawdon Brown (London, 1864–), 1520–1526, p. 852. 40 LP, x. 911. 41 These cases are surveyed by Christopher Randall Duggan, ‘The Advent of Political Thought-Control in England: Seditious and Treasonable Speech, 1485–1547’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1993), and Frances M. Gladwin, ‘Popular Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century England: By Mouth and Pen in the Alehouse and from the Pulpit’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Adelaide, 1997), pp. 228–54; cf. her emphasis on the relatively limited use of the potentially draconian penalties available to the authorities. 42 Calendar of Scottish Papers, 1563–1569, p. 821. 24


the discredit of the queen and treating of the actions of the nobility of the realm, and persons beyond the seas.43 This may have been the same as the set of prophecies which were discussed by a group centred on one Banister, including reference to the hound (Leonard Dacre) which should chase the white lion (the duke of Norfolk) to Berwick.44 The period 1569–70 may itself have been the highpoint of rebellion in part because of prophecy relating to Elizabeth’s twelfth year.45 In 1575–6, Dr Morys Clynnog’s invasion projects were based in part on the faith placed by the Welsh in ancient prophecy of deliverance from Rome,46 and later, in 1582, Richard Kirkbride, of Ellerton (Yorkshire, North Riding), brother-in-law to Richard Cliburne, who was wanted by the privy council for his association with a Scots seminary priest, kept prophecies in his chamber, along with news from Scotland. The book of prophecies seems to have dated from 1563 and centred on the idea of universal redemption through the means of ‘Philip’s blood’, resulting in the conversion of the Turk and the overthrow of princely powers in Germany, France and England.47 The period of uncertainty in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign also prompted worries about prophetic activity, and in 1592 it was reported that the Catholics, especially in Lancashire, had prophecies of the queen’s death that year.48 Further, it is worth noting signs that it might be particular prophetic interpreters, rather than prophets in general, who were doubted. For example, Cromwell noted of two well-known prophets that William Hurlok was a blind ‘profeser’ and that Laynam was a ‘madd prophet’.49 This is evidence of disbelief in particular prophecies or, more specifically, particular prophetic interpreters. On Laynam, Cromwell added, ‘no part of the spirit of true prophet can be found in hym’, indicating his judgement was not against prophecy in general as ‘madd’, but in terms of discriminating between the ‘true’ and the ‘madd’.50 Another attack on prophecy which on consideration appears less

43 CSPD, Addenda, 1566–1579, pp. 456–8. Warton later begged pardon from the queen for being unable to get possession of a book of prophecies: CSPD, 1547–1580, p. 430 (83.28; ?Nov. 1571). 44 CSPD, Addenda, 1566–1579, pp. 420–1. 45 William Camden, Annales rerum Anglicarum, et Hibernicarum, regnante Elizabetha, ad annum salutis M. D. LXXXIX (London, 1615), pp. 186–7, explains the growth in celebration of 17 November from 1570 as due to exultation over the non-fulfilment of this prophecy; cf. Richard Bannatyne, Memorials of Transactions in Scotland, A.D. MDLXIX – A.D. MDLXXIII (Edinburgh, 1836), p. 62. 46 J. M. Cleary, ‘Dr. Morys Clynnog’s Invasion Projects of 1575–1576’, Recusant History 8 (1965–6), pp. 300–22, esp. p. 307. 47 CSPD, Addenda, 1580–1625, pp. 105–11 (28:58, esp. 58V). 48 CSPD, 1591–1594, p. 184 (241.45). 49 LP, vii. 923xxi (which also includes a reference to Richard Jones, a false ‘profetour’, associated with William Neville, son of John, Lord Latimer: Elton, Policy and Police, pp. 50–6); BL, Cotton MS Titus B.i, fol. 271 (LP, xiv/1. 806). 50 BL, Cotton MS Titus B.i, fol. 271 (LP, xiv/1. 806).

25


comprehensively damning came in parliament in 1541–2. The statute of 1542 regarding prophecies ‘uppon Declaracon of Names Armes Badges, &c.’ noted the threat posed by such prophecies to noblemen, and it proposed a severe penalty: the offence was to be a felony without benefit of clergy.51 It is perhaps significant that it was introduced via the Lords, and its emphasis on the mercy of the prince towards noblemen suggests it might have originated outside the inner circle of the regime. It is generally read as a piece of ‘government’ legislation, but the evidence fits better with it as a piece of self-defence by some lords outside the inner circles of power seeking to ensure that their names (and arms and badges) were not so lightly taken in vain.52 It is suggestive that it does not dwell on prophecy concerning the fate of the throne and life of the king, which would be a more likely target for ‘official’ legislation.53 Broadly, contemporary theology and ideas did little to undermine, and often much to support, ancient prophecy. The biblical condemnation of diabolical divination was more easily applied to astrology than ancient prophecy, and aside from a rather limited tradition which interpreted this condemnation very strictly, it was rationalized away by many.54 Probably the most fundamental critique of ancient prophecy, as of astrology, at this time came from sceptics who questioned not its fundamental credibility but its practical success – as seen in mockery such as that of a spoof almanac of 1544.55 The evidence for the serious engagement in prophecy of so many of the key elite political figures of the reign of Henry VIII suggests the need to challenge some of the interpretations of the way they dealt with others, their social inferiors, who recounted or discussed prophecy. Often such accounts are founded on the assumption that the elite found prophecy bizarre and incomprehensible, which, as has now been established, is clearly baseless.

51

Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London, 1810–28), iii. 850 (LP, xvii. 28ii); this was one of the acts printed in proclamations by the king’s printer, Thomas Berthelet: LP, xviii. 211ii. 52 Journals of the House of Lords ([London, 1771?–]), i. pp. 185, 186, 191 (14–15, 24 March 1542). Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 60–1, who provides the full text of the act, tends to see this as the culmination of draconian controls on prophecy by the regime. 53 Journals of the House of Lords, i. pp. 185, 189. Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 156–7, suggested the Lords might have been interested in prophecy because some had paid out money in vain to fortune-tellers or, more plausibly, they were afraid the people might believe the prophecies about them. The same period saw the introduction in the Commons of a bill against sorcery, suggesting slightly different priorities operated amongst MPs. 54 D. T. Etheridge, ‘Political Prophecy in Tudor England’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales (Swansea), 1979), pp. 25–51; Theodore Otto Wedel, The Mediaeval Attitude toward Astrology Particularly in England, Yale Studies in English 60 (New Haven and London, 1920), pp. 60–89. 55 A Mery P[ro]nosticacion for the Yere of Chrystes Incarnacyon a Thousande Fyue Hundreth Fortye [and] Foure (London, 1544). 26


Some historians have been concerned to demonstrate the efficiency but also the rational scepticism of a Cromwellian regime that could not understand but showed some tolerance to the delusions of prophets. It is, of course, right to note the ulterior motives and complicating rivalries entangled in allegations involving prophecy on some occasions. For example, in 1532, Thomas Cromwell oversaw an investigation into alleged treason and an attempt to break out of Ilchester gaol. Cromwell was, it is true, able to establish that those involved were fabricating stories of treasonable attempts to poison the king purely to escape their imprisonment, but the case also produced a deposition by one Thomas Cheeselade of a prophecy he had heard originating with the well-attested prophet Hurlok.56 Similarly, Cromwell showed caution when, late in 1533, Lawrence Elviden accused William Barton, priest, and Richard Smyth of London, ‘called mere surgeon’, of treason. Smyth allegedly told Barton, by a book of prophecy, ‘that the king’s most honorable person should be torn in pieces with his own mule’.57 Elviden was a former servant of John Stokesley, bishop of London, and made the allegations after being imprisoned in King’s Bench for the theft of £100 from his master; and Barton was the most ‘troublesome and unworthy’ priest in London. 58 Yet this emphasis on rationality in the face of plebeian credulity can mislead us as to the importance of prophecy. Thomas Gebons accused Ralph Wendon of having said in April 1533 that Anne Boleyn was a whore, harlot and heretic, and that she would be burned at Smithfield, as a prophecy said a queen would be burned there. Geoffrey Elton’s main emphasis in his discussion of the case was that Thomas Bedyll, clerk of the council, who investigated, established Gebons was unsound as a witness, and so Elton sees the investigation as thorough but cautious, with Cromwell accepting the difficulty of dealing with an offence eighteen months old.59 Yet in reality the case had wider implications, involving John Veysey, bishop of Exeter and President of the Council in the Marches of Wales. The scene of the alleged events was Sutton Coldfield, where Veysey continued to live in considerable state even

56

PRO, SP 1/237, fols 121–7 (LP Add. i/1. 768iii (8 Feb. 23 HVIII)). A slightly different version, putting the encounter nine or ten years previously, appears in LP Add. i/1. 768vi. Elton, Policy and Police, pp. 110–12, typifies such an interpretation of the case. LP, v. 759, 793, 830. Cf. Jansen, Political Protest, p. 28. 57 LP, xv. 1029(21). 58 LP, vi. 1554, 1555; Brigden, London and the Reformation, pp. 279–81. 59 Elton, Policy and Police, p. 347; PRO, SP 1/77, fol. 112 (LP, vi. 733). Wendon does seem to have survived, since the next presentation to his benefice was not until 1563: William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated: From Records, Leiger-books, Manuscripts, Charters, Evidences, Tombes, and Armes, 2nd edn, ed. William Thomas, 2 vols (London, 1730), ii. p. 915. Jansen’s contradictory interpretation is implicit in her discussion, Political Protest, p. 35, emphasizing that prophecy was seen as treasonable. It is striking that this confirms Chapuys’s account of Anne’s own knowledge of such a prophecy before her marriage: see above, p. 21. 27


after his translation to the see of Exeter60 and where Wendon was rector.61 The events should be read in the context of the problems affecting Veysey at this point, not least the challenge to his presidency: by the latter half of 1533 the decision had been taken to replace him with Rowland Lee.62 The Gebons family were Veysey’s kin by marriage, since the bishop’s younger sister, Agnes, had married William Gebons. They had two sons, one being John, who became chancellor of Exeter (1522–37), acting as vicar general to his uncle the bishop in 1530, the other Thomas, who inherited.63 Elton is right that the charges caused problems because the alleged offence occurred eighteen months previously, but Gebons countered this by saying that he had declared the offence to Bishop Veysey on 15 June last. Veysey therefore had to swear an affidavit that he had never received such a declaration. Gebons further testified that Thomas Gebons junior, almost certainly his son, and Christopher Veysey, had been present. The questions to be put to Christopher seem to show that Bishop Veysey feared prison over the issue. In one sense Elton is right, for the case shows that allegations relating to prophecy were investigated seriously and in a measured way. But Elton’s belief is that this sprang from a healthy scepticism on the part of the investigators regarding the nature of the alleged offence and the lowliness of those involved. In reality, the investigators’ actions betray a measured approach to a phenomenon they took very seriously but which they did not consider inevitably fatally unacceptable – or bizarre – in itself. Gebons’s initial attack on Wendon was therefore rapidly turned round into a challenge to Gebons’s own kinsman, Veysey, for concealment of the alleged offence. When we come to the better documented case of John Hale, vicar of Isleworth, a superficial reading might once again light on the absurdity of the prophecy and those who repeated it, and the relative restraint displayed by the authorities. It was objected against Hale that he had called the king the ‘moldewarpe’ (mole) of Merlin’s prophecy, that turned all up, and said the king was accursed of God’s own mouth, and his marriage unlawful.64 Yet although 60

In More Hall: ODNB; VCH Warwickshire, iv. pp. 231–5; Dugdale, Warwickshire, ii. pp. 913–14. 61 Valor Ecclesiasticus temp. Henr. VIII, 6 vols (London, 1810–34), iii. p. 80 (appointment had been in the hands of the Beauchamps, passing by this date to the crown; worth £33 9s.). Wendon had been appointed in 1527, the patron being the crown: Dugdale, Warwickshire, ii. p. 915. 62 LP, vi. 946 (Thomas Croft to Cromwell, 6 August 1533: over 100 had been slain since Veysey’s appointment, and not one culprit had been brought to justice). 63 Dugdale, Warwickshire, ii. pp. 915, 917. Agnes died in 1570. John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1300–1541, vol. 9: Exeter Diocese, compiled by J. M. Horn (London, 1964), pp. 10, 63; BRUO 1501–40, p. 254. John Gebons’s will is PCC, 14 Dyngeley (d. 20 December 1537). Cf. the problems at Exeter involving Gebons around this time: LP, vi. 1786. The first warden of the newly incorporated town of Sutton Coldfield was William Gybons: LP, iv/2. 5083(16) (Dec. 1528). 64 PRO, SP 1/92, fols 34–42 (LP, viii. 565iii). Cf. Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 37–8. 28


Hale cut a rather pathetic figure in his appearances in 1535, complaining of his weak memory and falls from his horse, he was a university graduate with an impressive career behind him. He had gone to All Souls and by 1498 was a Bachelor of Canon and Civil Law; once ordained, he served as vicar first of Sutton Valence and then of Northfleet in Kent. He became rector of Cranford in Middlesex in 1505 and vicar of Isleworth, at the presentation of Winchester College, in 1521. He was also rector of Northmoor in Oxfordshire, resigning this at about the time he became canon and prebendary of Wingham, Kent, in spring 1531.65 Nor was he isolated in his interest in prophecy. About two years previously, Hale confessed, the ‘fellow of Bristow’ showed him and others of the monastery of Syon the prophecies of Merlin. Master Thomas Skydmore, also of Syon, also showed him similar material (and they conversed regarding the king’s lusts and marriage). Again about two years before, it was the prior of Hounslow, during a discussion of acts against churchmen, who had offered to show him a prophecy.66 The standing of the Syon community is well established, in terms of its learning and prestige, with a rich library that included several prophecy texts; 67 Hounslow was a Trinitarian house and also of considerable repute.68 Hale was not an isolated madman but well connected in his interest in prophecy. Hale’s case suggests too the caution of the regime. It might be argued that this sprang not from an indulgence towards those dabbling in prophecy, but from respect for and wariness about the prophecy itself. At Hale’s trial his interest in prophecy was not directly alleged against him. The trial proceedings do not mention it, and Eustace Chapuys, reporting the executions of Hale and his associates, mentions him as having spoken and written concerning the life and government of the king – without mentioning prophecy.69 His prophetic activity was clearly of interest to the authorities, but it was not part of the

65

Hale’s origins lay in Worcester diocese, and he was also, from 1506, master of St Oswald’s Hospital in Worcester: BRUO, ii. p. 849; VCH Worcestershire, ii. pp. 177–9. For his time in the Tower: LP, xii/2. 181. After his arrest, Geoffrey Bagotte talked of a vacancy at King’s Hall, Cambridge: LP, viii. 615. In later life at least he owned land and was possessed of some means: LP, ix. 171 (this letter also appears misdated and out of order in vii. 1085); x. 392(37). 66 LP, viii. 567. 67 Vincent Gillespie and A. I. Doyle (eds), Syon Abbey, with the Libraries of the Carthusians, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 9 (London, 2001), pp. xxix–lxxi, 1–606, esp. items SS1.977ee, SS1.227o, SS1.*621b, SS1.738aa. 68 George James Aungier, The History and Antiquities of Syon Monastery, the Parish of Isleworth, and the Chapelry of Hounslow: Compiled from Public Records, Ancient Manuscripts, Ecclesiastical and Other Authentic Documents ([London], 1840), pp. 488, 490; VCH Middlesex, i. pp. 191–3. 69 DKR (1842), III, App. II, part vi: ‘The First Part of the Inventory and Calendar of the Contents of the Baga de Secretis’, pp. 213–68, at pp. 237–9; LP, viii. 609, 666; John Hussee incorrectly reported to Lord Lisle that Hale was pardoned – this was in fact Robert Feron alias Ferne: LP, viii. 663, 802(5). Cf. Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sr Thomas 29


formal case against him. This is likely to be because prophecy was not in itself incredible – and perhaps because the regime was only too aware of the power of the prophetic case against it.70 We might also consider the case of Elizabeth Amadas,71 who said she had been studying prophecy for twenty years. Henry VIII, she claimed, was the ‘moldewarpe’ and would be expelled from his realm like Cadwaladr, the realm being conquered by the Scots before midsummer. The ‘clobbes’ of Essex would expel the Scots, and a bush in Essex be worth a castle in Kent. A religious man living on an island was identified as the deadman, and he would come and hold a parliament of peace in the Tower. One Silvestre (Silvester Darius, papal ambassador) came ambassador to the king, and she knew his answer. The king was counselled to stir the Scots to war. The whitening of the Tower delighted her, for she associated this with the imminent burning of Anne Boleyn. The blazing star was towards the island whence the deadman should come.72 In a battle of priests the king would die, and then there would be no more kings in England, but the realm would be divided in four and called the land of conquest. Fundamentally, Amadas was hostile to the king and especially to Anne Boleyn, and seemed to identify herself with the plight of other long-suffering wives, Catherine of Aragon and the duchess of Norfolk. The case is generally considered to be one of outright insanity, perhaps induced by ill-treatment at the hands of her husband, or of that liminal element to a woman’s gendered persona, especially a widowed woman, in early modern England, which gave her access to prophetic knowledge. 73 Yet the evidence does not fit well with either interpretation. Elizabeth was the widow of Robert Amadas, keeper of the king’s jewels, who died early in 1532.74 The case almost certainly dates from around the time of his death: the

Moore, Knight, Sometimes Lord High Chancellor of England, Written in the Tyme of Queene Marie, EETS o.s. 186 (London, 1932), pp. 179, 229. 70 Note the judges’ earlier opinion, in the case of Elizabeth Barton, that her prophecies did not constitute treason because they were spoken openly before the king; the new treason statute had removed this potential problem, whatever the level of openness in Hale’s discussions: John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction (London, Toronto and Buffalo, 1979), p. 23. 71 BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra E.iv.84** (LP, vi. 923). 72 For this whitening of the Tower, cf. the prophecy retold by the abbot of Garendon: LP, vi. Add. 10. 73 The former is Elton’s view (Policy and Police, pp. 59–61), the latter Jansen’s (Political Protest, p. 32); eadem, Dangerous Talk and Strange Behaviour: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms of Henry VIII (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 69–70 (although note her unwillingness to endorse a thoroughly gendered analysis, pp. 143–4), building on such work as Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972), and others (see above, p. 11). 74 He was dead by 14 April 1532; Elizabeth played a responsible part in the winding up of his affairs in connection with his keepership of the king’s jewels: LP, v. 939, 1799. He was a London goldsmith (LP, iv. 464(23)). Robert appears to have fallen out with Sir John 30


information against her seems to be that referred to on an endorsement of the return of commissioners charged with establishing the state of his affairs in the immediate aftermath of his death.75 On 28 August 1532, Elizabeth remarried, with significant speed, Sir Thomas Neville, fifth son of George Neville, Lord Bergavenny (d. 1492), a successful lawyer who had been prominent in the council and parliament for many years, serving as speaker in 1515. His cousins included Sir Thomas Willoughby, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Sir John Baker, chancellor of the exchequer. In 1535, after an attempt to match his daughter with Gregory, son of Thomas Cromwell, she was married to Sir Robert Southwell, master of the rolls. Neville received dedications from Thomas Becon, suggesting a possible radical religious outlook.76 Elizabeth and Robert Amadas’s daughter made a prestigious marriage.77 It also seems that she escaped any serious consequences from her prophecies, as she later wrote to Cromwell asking him to be good master to her cousin, offering a reward of £40.78 A case from Kent in 1536–7 again shows how discussion of prophecy involved figures who on further examination prove to be far from marginalized. In April 1536 John Whalley, comptroller of the Mint and paymaster of the works at Dover, reported to Cromwell that the parson of Woodnesborough, near Sandwich (‘Wednysborowe’) (who was said to be a Scot), had a book

Neville of the Chevet, Yorkshire, but was (in association with his predecessor in the post of keeper) a feoffee of Sir Brian Stapleton in relation to lands in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire: LP, iv. 643, vi. 10. 3452, v. 278(16), 909(36); otherwise their interests were southern and south-western – see below, n. 78. 75 Elton places this case in 1533 – with her then uttering a string of pronouncements; but he says the comet referred to by Amadas is the 1534 comet, which surely poses problems for his dating? LP places the case in 1533 by reference to Bonner’s letter about a comet in 1533 (LP, vi. 888, Bonner to Cromwell, 24 July 1533). 76 The House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. S. T. Bindoff, 3 vols (London, 1982), vol. II, pp. 10–11; ODNB, Sir Martin Bowes, Sir Thomas Neville. 77 To Richard Scrope of Castlecombe (Wiltshire), great-grandson of Stephen, deputy of Ireland (d. 1409); and their friends and acquaintances, including the Whetnalls, William and George, and (probably) George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, were from Kent: Wiltshire Visitation Pedigrees 1623, with Additional Pedigrees and Arms Collected by Thomas Lyte of Lyte’s Cary, Co. Somerset 1628, ed. G. D. Squibb, Harleian Society 105–6 (London, 1954), p. 173; LP, iv. 464(2), 1459, 1795, 2002(11). She feared ‘Mr. Nevyle’ would call her a witch. 78 LP, vi. 1626 (placed by the editors in 1533). There is a strong chance this cousin was the son of John Amadas, serjeant-at-arms, who on 28 January 1534 requested Cromwell take his highly educated son into his service (LP, vii. 117); John’s interests were mainly south-western: LP, x. 1221, 1256(53); xi. 580(2), 670; xiii/1. 1519(30); xiii/2. 961, 1280 (fol. 10); cf. J. P. D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the West Country (Oxford, 2003), pp. 246–7. Could it be that the investigation was prompted not simply by the content of the prophecies but by an attempt to weaken the position of Elizabeth Amadas at the point at which Cromwell was taking on the mastership of the jewel house, combined with a genuine interest in her sayings? 31


of treasons.79 The parson was well connected, being very familiar with John Tompson, superintendent of the new Dover harbour works and master of the Maisondieu there.80 And even though Tompson was under suspicion, one of those informing on him was none other than Anne Boleyn’s chaplain Robert Singleton, whom we have already come across as interested in ancient prophecy.81 There is further evidence for the way prophecy was integrated into the political culture of communities to be found in accounts of discussions at Furness Abbey in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace. This example allows us to consider the alternative interpretation of prophecy: that it represented the language of the excluded and oppressed, whether the poorest peasant or the least educated and most marginalized clergyman, hence (as before) being largely incomprehensible to the elite, but that it carried some radical force as a way of envisioning or resisting change and therefore was treated seriously, even ruthlessly, by the authorities.82 The Furness case might, on first reading, seem to show the interaction of monks with the most marginal and dispossessed peasants. John Broughton, monk of Furness, confessed83 that in conversation with Robert Legate, friar, he said that if the changes to the church and religion stood for four years they would last for ever.84 He had shown his master, the abbot, Roger Pele, certain prophecies, and had bills from two laymen, William Dicson of Windermere and William Rawlinson

79 PRO, SP 1/103, fol. 76 (LP, x. 614); Jansen, Political Protest, p. 40 (who calls the place ‘Wednesbury’); Gladwin, ‘Popular Prophecy’, p. 217 (tentatively locating to Kent). At the time of the Valor Ecclesiasticus the vicar was one Richard Slanye, Woodnesborough being worth £10 6d. net and appropriated to Leeds Priory: i. 62. Sandwich had seen, in 1534, a critic of the queen have their right ear nailed to the pillory and then be banished: William Boys, Collections for an History of Sandwich in Kent, with Notices of the Other Cinque Ports and Members and of Richborough (Canterbury, 1792), p. 684. 80 Tompson succeeded to the position in either late December 1534 or early January of the following year (VCH Kent, ii. pp. 217–19), in spite of Christopher Hales’s highly critical comments about him in 1533: LP, vi. 1148. 81 LP, x. 612, 640 (2, 9 April 1536). 82 E.g. Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford, Calif., 1990); Jansen, Political Protest, passim, and pp. 43–4 for the Furness case; Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in The Politics of the Excluded, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 30–66. 83 LP, vii. Add. 43 (misplaced in 1534). 84 Cf. LP, xii/1. 841(3). A note by Thomas Derby indicates that Legate had been put into Furness to read and preach to the brethren: LP, xii/1. 841(3) (and probably, more or less explicitly, to spy and inform on them: LP, xii/1. 652, 842, 849, 1089). He was shunned by most of the house: LP, xii/1. 841(2). After the dissolution he had a dispensation to hold a benefice with change of habit (10 May 1537): Faculty Office Registers 1534–1549: A Calendar of the First Two Registers of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Faculty Office, ed. D. S. Chambers (Oxford, 1966), p. 97.

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of Colton, containing prophecies.85 An exploration of the origins of the laymen involved indicates that, far from being poor and marginalized, they were from the ranks of the more senior servants of the abbey. Rawlinson was Furness’s bailiff of Colton at the time, while Dicson held a tenement and eight acres from the abbey in Graythwaite.86 Some of this evidence might be said to fit with elements of the recent trend in writing about, for example, the Pilgrimage of Grace, in seeing the driving force behind resistance to Tudor policy as neither the most dispossessed of the commons, nor the senior gentry and nobility, but the leaders of village society, whether yeomen or parish gentry and their allies, from similar social backgrounds, in the clergy.87 Alternatively, it might fit with a so-called ‘postrevisionist’ explanation of the Henrician Reformation as successful by dint of being done not by, or to, such people, but with them.88 Such groups were evidently influential in the circulation of prophetic texts in early Tudor England. Yet this picture is qualified a little through examination of perhaps the most complex and extensive set of allegations involving prophecy from this period. These linked cases relating to Yorkshire and Durham around the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace provide sufficient evidence for us to begin to piece together the connections between the participants and those who stood behind them, and to draw out further implications for the attitude of the authorities. One of the key figures in the case was William Todde, prior of the house of Gilbertine canons at Malton.89 In Westmorland, fourteen or sixteen years previously, he had seen in Geoffrey Lancaster’s hands a parchment roll on

85 It was further alleged that he had told the abbot about the prophecy that a rose should die in its mother’s belly. Legate alleged that John Harrington with Broughton had this prophecy of the rose, which Legate explained as relating to Henry himself dying at the hands of the church. The abbot himself alleged that John Broughton showed him the rose prophecy and another ‘that a .b. c. and iij ttt should set all in one seat and should work great marvels’: LP, xii/1. 841(3). Wriothesley’s notes include that the abbot knew of the prophecies, as Broughton’s deposition shows: LP, xii/1. 841(4). The prophecy was that of the ‘marvels of Merlin’: Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 91–7. 86 The Coucher Book of Furness Abbey, ed. J. Brownbill, 2 vols, Chetham Society n.s. 9, 11; 74, 76, 78 (Manchester, 1886–7, 1915–16, 1919), ii. pp. 622, 635. 87 S. J. Gunn, ‘Peers, Commons and Gentry in the Lincolnshire Revolt of 1536’, Past and Present 123 (May 1989), pp. 52–79; and see the references above, p. 3, n. 6. 88 Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003). 89 Malton, a house of Gilbertine canons, was relatively strong financially; in 1535 it was assessed at £197, and only four other Gilbertine houses were more wealthy: Rose Graham, ‘The Finance of Malton Priory, 1244–1257’, English Ecclesiastical Studies: Being Some Essays in Research in Medieval History (London, 1929), pp. 247–70, and her S. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertines: A History of the Only English Monastic Order (London, 1901), p. 188; Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130 – c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 220–1, 397. On this case, cf. Jansen, Political Protest, p. 43.

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which the moon (symbolic of the Percy family) was painted growing, with a number of years growing as the moon did. Where the moon was full, a Cardinal was painted and beneath him the moon waned, and there were two monks, headless, one under the other, and so on and so forth. He had spoken of this to Sir Francis Bigod and others. Todde admitted he had a printed book called Methodius (the text generally now known as pseudo-Methodius), which Sir Ralph Eure had given him,90 and which he kept open in his chamber.91 Bigod’s version of this was that the prior had sent him the details of the pilgrims’ demands, which Bigod had not previously seen. The prior showed him a prophecy, which the prior said he had not understood before then, although now he knew that it was this year it spoke of. Malton was evidently already a centre for the discussion of prophecy at least a year before the Pilgrimage began, as is apparent in the case of William Thwaytes, parson of Londesborough (Yorkshire; just east of Pocklington), who apparently predicted, after having been to Malton where he heard news from London in April or May 1535, that the king would be forced to flee the realm.92 By 1536 Todde had been prior of the house for some time, succeeding his predecessor Richard Felton in 1525 or 1526,93 but he was not yet prior when he originally saw the prophecies of Geoffrey Lancaster. Yet he was evidently relatively well connected at that point, for Lancaster was one of the most significant figures in the administration of the North West of England, serving as JP in both Cumberland and Westmorland, one of the quorum in both, and custos rotulorum in Cumberland, retained by the earl of Northumberland for his legal advice, and associated with the Dacres in their feuding with the Cliffords.94 More important than Geoffrey Lancaster in Todde’s more recent interest in prophecy, however, was the Eure family, from whom, as we have

90

LP, xii/1. 534. LP, xii/1.1023i. 92 In a further examination Thwaytes is reported speaking of a prophecy of fields (i.e. battles) to come. Christopher Jenny early the following year sent depositions to Cromwell regarding Thwaytes, who had been taken by the earl of Cumberland and brought before Cromwell for words spoken against the king. Jenny argued that the allegation was based on malice alone. PRO, SP 1/99, fols 20–20v (LP, ix. 791), /91, fol. 161v (LP, viii. 457 (misdated)); Elton, Policy and Police, p. 59; Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 38–9, 43. Thwaytes was then due to appear before Cromwell in the following term. Londesborough was part of a network of Clifford estates in the area, including Market Weighton, Brompton, Weaverthorpe, ‘Wellome’ and Barlby, a group that was used in 1543 under the first earl’s will to support marriage portions for his daughters and the payment of debts: Testamenta Eboracensia, 6 vols, Surtees Society 4, 30, 45, 53, 79, 106 (London and Durham, 1836–1902), vi. pp. 127–30. 93 VCH Yorkshire, iii. p. 254. 94 LP, iv. 137(10), 297, 1610, 2052, 3380(4), 4134(2ii), 4790, 4835, 4855, 6803(6); v. 166(16), 1694ii; he appears to have died in or after 24 Henry VIII, this being the last year in which he appears on the commission. Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Oxford, 1995), pp. 53, 104, 245, sees him as part of a stronger 91

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seen, he had received a copy of the pseudo-Methodius prophecy. Malton was closely associated with the Eures, who counted it as one of their main residences.95 Sir Ralph (d. 1545) was apparently deputy constable of Scarborough Castle at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, during which he played an equivocal role.96 The connections evident here become clearer when we turn to a related case, that of John Dobson, vicar of Muston in the East Riding of Yorkshire in December 1537. The charges involved a range of prophecies, apparently delivered in the church porch and in the alehouse. 97 In response, Dobson petitioned98 that he was in Scarborough with Friar Chapman, warden of the town’s Franciscan friary,99 and Friar Boroby, prior of its Carmelite house,100 when Chapman said there was a prophecy going about, and Boroby brought out a paper roll, which he read. Boroby lent it to Dobson for fourteen days, returning it by his nephew and servant, William Bentley. This prophecy was of Merlin and Thomas of Erceldoun. Dobson said that he told this only to Stephen Rosse, Thomas Beforth, the pynder, and one or two bylaw men, indicating only the more senior villagers.101 When Prior Boroby was examined,102 he said he had met a priest in Beverley in May 1536, who showed him certain prophecies, beginning ‘Fra[nce] and Flanders shall arise’. Afterwards he met Dobson, whom he invited into his chamber with the warden of Grey Friars and showed them the prophecy. When Boroby was at Weaverthorpe, about 12 miles east of Malton (‘Werthrope’) around 30 June 1536, the vicar103 showed him prophecies beginning with material relating to the Cock of the Dacre interest in Westmorland than suggested by Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 112, 143. 95 New Malton manor descended to the three heiresses of William de Ayton, who died in 1387, one of whom, Katherine, married Sir Ralph Eure. Old Malton manor passed entirely to the Eures: VCH Yorkshire, North Riding, i. pp. 533–4, 537. 96 He allegedly criticized Cromwell, Norfolk and the council, although he defended himself by alleging that this was a forgery by his rival, Sir Roger Cholmley. Commons, 1509–1558, ii. pp. 109–10; R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2001), pp. 219, 221, 329, 367, 382–3, 398, 421. 97 PRO, SP 1/127, fols 63–63v (LP, xii/2.1212i). Cf. Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 48–9. 98 PRO, SP 1/127, fol. 64 (LP, xii/2.1212ii, iii). 99 This was a very poor house: L. M. Goldthorp, ‘The Franciscans and Dominicans in Yorkshire. Part I: The Grey Friars’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 32 (1934–6), pp. 264–320, ‘chapter VI: The Grey Friars of Scarborough’, pp. 310–19; VCH Yorkshire, iii. pp. 274–6. 100 VCH Yorkshire, iii. pp. 279–80: Boroby surrendered the house in March 1539. The Dominican friary, the most prestigious of the three mendicant houses in Scarborough, does not seem to have become involved: VCH Yorkshire, iii. pp. 277–9. 101 William Layng recalled the vicar talking of the cock of the north: LP, xii/2.1212iv. 102 LP, xii/2.1212v. 103 Presumably the vicar of Muston; if it was the vicar of Weaverthorpe, then at the time the church was one of those in the East Riding belonging to the chapter of York: VCH Yorkshire, iii. pp. 35, 84. 35


North; this he borrowed and did not return. At the time of his examination, he said, it lay in his chamber with the tale of Cromme and Christ Cross row, which he had transcribed from a copy owned by a gentleman in Scarborough, William Langdale. Two years ago, one of his brothers had brought a scroll which told of the black fleet of Norway and the child with the chaplet. When Boroby enquired where he got it, he answered that it belonged to a priest of Rudston (‘Rudstone’), Sir John Paicock, to whom he supposed it was returned, though his brother gave a copy to William Langdale.104 William Langdale himself testified that the prior of White Friars had seen in his house a little roll of paper containing a prophecy in rhyme, otherwise called a ‘gargonne’, which spoke of the learning of A, B, C, and K, L, M, and borrowed it from him for a few days. On his returning it, the prior lent him a long paper roll of prophecies, which, when he went into the castle of Scarborough at the time of the Pilgrimage, he left behind him in his house, only for it to be stolen along with other books by the commons. He had obtained the ‘gargonne’ from Sir Thomas Bradley, priest, at Ayton (‘Aton’), who told him he had it from Sir Richard Stapleton, priest, at Sockburn (‘Sokburne’, Co. Durham). Thomas Bradley admitted taking a copy of prophecies relating to Merlin, Bede, A, B, C, and a ‘crumme’ in a man’s throat, read to him by Sir Richard Stapleton, in the buttery at Ayton, about Michaelmas 1536, of which book he took a copy and gave it to William Langdale. Richard Stapleton deposed that he had met William Langley, parish clerk of Croft-on-Tees ‘in enloaning’ between Croft and Hawnby, in Richmondshire, when the latter said he had a little prophecy, which was not then with him. Langley promised to send it to Sockburn, and did so by a servant of Stapleton’s master named John Yoye. There were certain letters in it, and ‘crummes’; it was not longer than twelve lines, and went in metre. Stapleton afterwards gave a copy of it to Bradley. Later, when he came by the Augustinian priory of Guisborough on his master’s business, he showed it to the kitchener there. Although Dobson’s connections are hard to discern,105 some of the others involved here were more prominent. William Langdale was a well-connected townsman of Scarborough,106 and behind the lesser men investigated stood 104

At the time of the Valor Ecclesiasticus, the rector at Rudston was one Christopher Ven: Valor Ecclesiasticus, v. p. 123. There were several Paicocks serving churches in this area around this time, e.g. Michael, vicar of Skipsea (Valor Ecclesiasticus, v. p. 116). 105 The manor of Muston was held by the Beckwiths throughout the early sixteenth century, but the family do not seem to play any role in the case. The church had been a dependent chapel of Hunmanby, and the patrons at Hunmanby, Bardney Abbey, presented at Muston even after the vicarage was ordained, in 1269. The vicarage was relatively poor, worth just £6 10s. in 1535. Hunmanby’s connections were with the Percies, who held twothirds of the manor, the other third being held by the Pauletts in the early sixteenth century. The rectory, belonging to Bardney, was worth £64 in 1535. VCH Yorkshire, East Riding, ii. pp. 231, 233, 236, 279–81. 106 Jack Binns, ‘Scarborough and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, Transactions of the Scarborough Archaeological and Historical Society 33 (1997), pp. 23–39, esp. p. 30. 36


the Eures, whose involvement, already seen in the gift of a copy of pseudoMethodius to William Todde of Malton, was very extensive.107 Langdale had acquired the ‘gargonne’ from Sir Thomas Bradley at Ayton – and Ayton, with Malton, was one of the main seats of Sir Ralph Eure before his death in 1539. Bradley himself said the discussion between Richard Stapleton and Bradley had taken place in the buttery at Ayton, that is, the buttery of Ralph Eure’s house. Bradley was one of the witnesses to Sir Ralph’s will in 1533, so he is likely to have been his personal chaplain.108 The Eures’ household was therefore a key point in the dissemination of these prophecies.109 The Conyers of Sockburn were probably as important in feeding this prophetic culture as the Eures. Stapleton at least was associated with them, and the survival of a major sixteenth-century collection of prophetic texts which can be confidently assigned to the circle of the family further enriches the sense of the culture of this gentry family.110

107 There does not seem to have been an English edition of pseudo-Methodius by this date. The most recent publication on the continent was that of 1515 by Michael Furter in Basel: John Trevisa, Dialogus inter Militem et Clericum; Richard fitzRalph’s Sermon: ‘Defensio Curatorum; and Methodius: þe Bygynnyng of þe World and þe Ende of Worldes’, ed. Aaron Jentiers Perry, EETS o.s. 167 (London, 1925). This does sit slightly oddly with Sir Ralph Eure’s successful defence against a charge of inappropriate words written in a letter against Cromwell and Norfolk – which was that he could read and write no more than his own name: LP, xii/2. 248, 291, 356, 519, 583, 733. 108 Testamenta Eboracensia, vi. pp. 183–5. Ayton also fulfilled the important role of providing support for William, Lord Eure’s surviving sons Ralph and Thomas, and his sonin-law, William Buckton, in the former’s will of 1548/9: Testamenta Eboracensia, vi. pp. 185–7. Since Ayton was appropriated to Whitby, the church was not served by perpetual vicars: Valor Ecclesiasticus, v. p. 91. 109 Even if Sir Ralph Eure did not choose to remember Malton in his will, despite his good relationship with its abbot, he did remember all three friaries in Scarborough: Testamenta Eboracensia, vi. p. 184: each received 6s. 8d., as did the Augustinians of York; most favoured of all the friars were the Newcastle Observants, receiving 13s. 4d. Given the Eures’ interest in prophecy, it is important to note their prominent role in campaigns against the Scots in the 1540s, when amongst some people thoughts of the prophetic destiny of Scottish conquest were prominent: The Late Expedicion in Scotlande: Made by the Kynges Hyghnys Armye, Vnder the Conduit of the Ryght Honorable the Erle of Hertforde, the Yere of our Lorde God 1544 (London, 1544), reprinted as ‘The Late Expedition in Scotland, Made by the King’s Highness’ army, under the Conduct of the Right Honourable the Earl of Hertford, the Year of Our Lord God 1544’, in Tudor Tracts, 1532–1588, ed. A. F. Pollard (Westminster, 1903), pp. 37–51, esp. pp. 48–51 (after 20 June). This report to Lord Russell from an anonymous friend ended with the hope that Henry would long reign ‘in themperial seate of the monarchie of all Bretayne’ ([Ciiiv]). The Eures led a smaller expedition later that year: D-[Diiiv]. It should be noted that on 18 May 1544 a proclamation ordered the burning of ‘certain news of the prosperous success of the king’s majesty’s army’, presumably an earlier publication that year: Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols (New Haven, 1964–9), I, no. 229. 110 NLW, MS 441C; the association is suggested by the signature of James Raine, indicating a north-eastern provenance, the property transaction recorded at the end of the collection,

37


Far from demonstrating a connection to a disreputable and marginal prophetic culture of riot and rebellion, or even one with which elites had to negotiate from some cultural distance, therefore, Todde’s examinations regarding Malton seem to have shown his membership of a group of senior gentry (favoured by the king and closely associated with northern noblemen both oppositionist and loyal in 1536), greater and lesser churchmen, townsmen and villagers. It is perhaps less surprising than initially might appear, therefore, that Todde escaped any serious consequences from these revelations. His house at Malton survived until December 1539, so it is highly unlikely that he was found guilty of high treason, for in such cases houses were declared forfeit; but he was no longer at the head of the priory when it was surrendered.111 Strikingly, too, the heads of the two Scarborough friaries involved seemed to have escaped any consequences from these events: at Grey Friars, Richard Chapman was still in post into 1539, as was Boroby at White Friars.112 This is, of course, not a simple question of the control of prophecy traditions. As this case suggests, prophecies were not simply written, read, told and listened to in an uncomplicated sense. Any attempt to argue that printing or reliance on manuscript transmission imposed firm control on the interpretations possible for a reader is, in the light of recent advances in the understanding of reception, implausible. Still more, where texts were intrinsically opaque, individual and collective interpretation was positively demanded even by a printed version like pseudo-Methodius. There was no single, simple, uncomplicated ‘reader’; William Langley seems to have been the ultimate origin of one of the texts just discussed, but Richard Stapleton also played a prominent role in its dissemination. Some listened, some passed on texts, some copied them. This wide involvement in prophetic culture suggests we should look more closely at those who played a more creative role in generating prophecies and novel interpretations of older material. Of course writing is important here, but active interpretation of and debate over texts were just as, if not more, significant.113 This requires us to locate individuals who

which resulted in the passage of Castle-Carlton in Lincolnshire to the Conyers family (pp. 60–9, 71–2), and the recording in Dalton’s visitation of a summary of a similar transaction in association with his notes on the family of 1558: The Visitation of Yorkshire, Made in the Years 1584/5, by Robert Glover, Somerset Herald; to which is added the Subsequent Visitation by Richard St George, Norroy King of Arms, with Several Additional Pedigrees, ed. Joseph Foster (London, 1875), p. 164; Visitations of the North, or, Some Early Heraldic Visitations of, and Collections of Pedigrees Relating to, the North of England, ed. F. W. Dendy and C. H. Hunter Blair, 4 vols, Surtees Society 122, 133, 144, 146 (1912–32), i. p. 141. 111 VCH Yorkshire, iii. pp. 253–4. 112 VCH Yorkshire, iii. pp. 276, 279–80. William Langdale died in 1570, comfortably off, with his son ensconced as vicar of St Mary’s church in Scarborough: Binns, ‘Scarborough and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, p. 30. 113 In this emphasis on reception, interpretation and variability my interpretation is closer to that of Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples, than to that of Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in 38


were generally ascribed prophetic authority, the texts with which they were associated, and the contexts in which they operated. Fortunately it is possible in a few cases to do this. The prophetic ability of the Hogan family was already established in the 1470s. The Pastons knew the family well, since they had been involved in a disagreement with William Hogan, as part of a larger dispute with William Jenney in 1464–65.114 When, in March 1473, French ships off the East Anglian coast caused an invasion scare, Hogan predicted a descent on English shores or an attempt to create internal discontent in May. Hogan was taken to the Tower, but the actual if brief landing by the earl of Oxford at St Osyth (Essex) appeared to confirm his prediction and ensured his release. The king, it was reported, had refused to see him, on the grounds that a meeting would enhance Hogan’s reputation: the whole episode suggests the way such words could gain wide currency and trust.115 This association with prophetic interpretation does not seem to have hindered the family’s rise among the ranks of county and wider society. The branches of the Hogan family were well established amongst the prosperous yeomanry, townsmen and lesser gentry of Norfolk.116 Most significant for us, however, are the Hogans of East Bradenham. Robert of that family, gentleman, was a client of the Howard family and also had connections with Thomas Cromwell.117 Robert was yeoman, then cook, for the king’s mouth in the royal kitchen from at least July 1521 to his death late in 1532; in 1529 he also

England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000); see especially his discussions of prophecy at pp. 364–7 (though my differences from Dobin should already be clear: his emphasis on elite determination to counter what it recognized as an inherently unstable discourse does not square with the evidence advanced above at pp. 14–24). 114 The Paston Letters, ed. James Gairdner, 6 vols in 1 (Gloucester, 1983, reprinted from the 1904 Library edn), iii. p. 309; iv. pp. 88, 116–17, 151; v. pp. 120–1. 115 Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, v. pp. 178–9, 181, 188. The identification with William Hogan is inferred here: the Pastons refer to both individuals simply by the surname, and the prophet is only once distinguished with the epithet ‘the prophet’. Sharon L. Jansen, ‘The Paston Family, “Hogan the Prophet,” and Sixteenth-Century Political Prophecy’, Manuscripta 39 (1995), pp. 137–47, discusses the case without attempting to identify ‘Hogan’. 116 Timothy Hawes (ed.), An Index to Norwich City Officers, 1453–1835, Norfolk Record Society lii (Norwich, 1989 for 1986), p. 83. Cf., for later appearances of the family, The Muster Returns for Divers Hundreds in the County of Norfolk, 1569, 1572, 1574 and 1577, transcribed by M. A. Farrow and edited by H. L. Bradfer-Lawrence and Percy Millican, Norfolk Record Society vi–vii (Fakenham and Reading, 1935–6), pp. 8, 44, 66, 145, 157; M. A. Farrow, Index of Wills Proved in the Consistory Court of Norwich and now Preserved in the District Probate Registry at Norwich, 1550–1603, Norfolk Record Society xxi (Norwich, 1950), pp. 89, 90, 93, 94; Norwich Consistory Court Depositions, 1499–1512 and 1518–1530, calendared by E. D. Stone, revised and arranged by B. Cozens-Hardy, Norfolk Record Society x ([London], 1938), items 141, 266. 117 Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, 2 vols (Oxford, 1971–[7]). Connections with the Howards are evident, for example, in Robert senior’s 39


became custodian of the palace of Westminster.118 In the last year of Hogan’s life his connections with Cromwell, and his activity in his native East Anglia, grew significantly.119 He seems to have been succeeded in the king’s kitchens by Ralph Hogan, who was listed as a ‘child’ there at Anne Boleyn’s coronation, and had progressed to cook by 15 March 1537.120 Robert the elder’s heir, however, was another Robert, who was acting as a commissioner for tenths of spiritualities in Norwich and Norfolk in 1535, and active in Cromwell’s service and otherwise in Norfolk from then through 1536 and into early 1537.121 It may be significant that at this point the chief clerk of the royal kitchen was none other than William Thynne, friend of Skelton and editor of Chaucer.122 In the latter role, Thynne was responsible for adding ‘Chaucer’s prophecy’ to the printed apocryphal canon.123 Unlikely though it might initially seem, therefore, a place in the royal kitchen was conducive to the continuing involvement of the Hogan family in potentially controversial

interest in offices in the forest of Galtresse and lordship of Sheriff Hutton: LP, iv. 297(7); v. 318(29), 457(3); cf. his association with the duchess of Norfolk in LP, iv. 4710, and an early appointment as bailiff of Long Newton, York, LP, iii. 1451(16). 118 LP, iii. 1451(16); iv. 297(7), 3563, 4402, 5406(1), 5748(9), 318(29), 457(3). Death: LP, v. 1598(20) (grant of one of his offices, 15 November 1532). 119 LP, v. 1184; vi. 129, 244–5, 256, 709 (all these letters in vol. vi are misdated to 1533); The Register of Thetford Priory, ed. David Dymond, 2 vols, Norfolk Record Society lix–lx (Oxford, 1995–6), p. 588. 120 LP, vi. 562 (at p. 249); xiv/2. 782 (at p. 329). Robert junior remained closely associated with Thetford Priory: Register of Thetford Priory, pp. 600, 611, 618, 631, 649, 667, 686, 706, 709. Other members of the family in the king’s service included Henry, in the stable (1540–1: LP, xvi. 287; xvii. 258) and possibly John (although he is associated with activities in South Wales and usually has his surname spelled ‘Ogan’, which is not common in the case of the East Bradenham family and suggests an identification with Sir John Wogan (d. 1557): LP, vii. 923iv; xvi. p. 723; W. R. B. Robinson, ‘The Marriages of Knighted Welsh Landowners, 1485–1558’, National Library of Wales Journal 25 (1987–8), pp. 387–98, at pp. 396–7; W. R. B. Robinson, ‘Knighted Welsh Landowners, 1485–1558: A Provisional List’, Welsh History Review 13 (1987), pp. 282–98, at p. 297; Commons, 1509–1558, III, p. 651. 121 LP, viii. 149(43), ix. 478, 721, 978, 1042; x. 79, 173, 189, 563; xi. 518; xii/2. 487; xiv/2. 782 (at p. 319). Register of Thetford Priory, p. 653. According to the visitation of 1664, Robert’s third son, Anthony, was the founder of the Hogans of Great Dunham (Norfolk), dying in 1585: The Visitation of Norfolk anno domini 1664 made by Sir Edward Bysshe, Knt., Clarenceux King of Arms, ed. A. W. Hughes Clarke and Arthur Campling, 2 vols, Norfolk Record Society iv–v (London, 1933–4), i. p. 102. 122 Robert Costomiris, ‘Some New Light on the Early Career of William Thynne, Chief Clerk of the Kitchen of Henry VIII and Editor of Chaucer’, The Library 7th ser. 4 (2003), pp. 3–15. 123 Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville, 2001), pp. xvii, 36, 52; Julia Boffey, ‘Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon’, Readings from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature (Huntington Library Quarterly 58:1 (1996)), ed. Seth Lerer, pp. 37–47, at pp. 39–40. 40


interpretation. In February 1537, however, it was alleged that one John Hogan had sung ‘the hunt is up’ (a version of one of Cromwell’s own political ballads) before the earl of Surrey at Thetford,124 so closely associated with the Hogans of East Bradenham, and from about that time the family seems to have entered a temporary eclipse.125 Although he seems to have made a good marriage for his eldest son, Thomas, to Susan, eldest daughter and heiress of Sir Edward Echingham (‘Ichyngham’) of Barsham (Suffolk), Robert Hogan’s name was crossed out of the list of those appointed to greet Anne of Cleves, and while it appeared in the schedule of men to serve in France in 1544, it did so without any indication of any company to follow him. 126 John Bale was soon to record ‘Huggonus Nordouolcius’ or Robert ‘Huggonus’ as an impostor whose ‘prophecias vanas’ were the cause of many evils, including the rebellions of 1549.127 Yet the considerable wealth acquired by the family in the previous thirty years is indicated by Robert junior’s ability to lay out £1142 8s. 6d. on the purchase of ex-monastic land around the family’s home at East Bradenham in 1543.128 Aspirations to consolidate gentry status also led to a grant of arms in May 1546.129 The Hogans therefore represent a tradition of gentlemen prophets with direct links to the heart of the regime and to the upper ranks of county society.130

124

PRO, SP 1/116, fol. 30 (LP, xii/1. 424). He had also sung it before the earl of Surrey at Cambridge. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, p. 385. 125 Robert Hogan senior was a corrodian of Thetford Priory from 1524/5: Register of Thetford Priory, pp. 388, 407, 465, 481, 506, 521, 522, 540, 557, 568, 570, 582, 584, 588. 126 LP, xiv/1. 693; xiv/2. 572; xix/1. 274 (at p. 159); PCC 28 Porch (will of Echingham, 1527); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County 1500–1600 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 360–1. Limited exceptions are provided by Robert’s presence at the delivery of seisin of West Acre Priory in January 1538, and his presence on a commission of oyer and terminer for treasons on 4 July 1538: xiii/1. 85, 1519(20). Robert’s own wife was Bridget, daughter of Sir Richard Fowler of Hambledon (Buckinghamshire) and Rycote (Oxon): The House of Commons, 1558–1603, ed. P. W. Hasler, 3 vols (London, 1981), ii. p. 326. 127 Bale, Index Britanniae Scriptorum, p. 170. Bale, Illustrium Maioris Britanniæ scriptorum, ii. p. 66. 128 LP, xviii. 449(4). Given the almost immediate alienation of some of this land to Sir Richard Southwell, Hogan may have been in part acting as his agent: LP, xix/1. 1035(159). It is perhaps significant that both were near the top of the list of targets for anti-gentry rebels around Swaffham in 1540: LP, xv. 748. 129 Visitation of Norfolk 1664, ii. p. 274. 130 Robert junior died on 4 March 1547. His eldest son Thomas survived through most of Elizabeth’s reign, but his grandson, another Robert, died young: A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 32, 37–8, 353 (noting his connection with the Howards); Commons, 1558–1603, ii. p. 326; Francis Blomefield, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 5 vols (Fersfield, 1739–75), ii. p. 354; vi. pp. 16, 136, 108, 236; one lasting presence in the area was Anthony, rector of East Bradenham itself briefly in the 1540s and of Necton from at least 1550 to at least 1580: Blomefield, Norfolk, vi. pp. 53, 55, 141. 41


Another family closely associated with prophecy texts and their interpretation was the Laynams of Wimborne Minster.131 In this case the prophets seem to have come from a more humble background, but once again it is the varied and impressive connections with associates in the aristocracy and gentry, and in other influential circles, which are striking. Skydmore referred to Laynam during the investigations of Hale and the Carthusians in 1535, 132 and Cromwell informed the king in April 1539 of an examination of a prophet Laynam.133 Then, in 1546, we have extremely detailed information on the prophet and his associations, the result of privy council investigations of William Weston, a lute-player.134 Laynam explained that one young Hurlok, dwelling about Warminster (‘Wormyster’; Wiltshire), used to have books of prophecies and to commune with him. This is almost certainly the William Hurlok, a blind ‘profeser’ whose depositions Cromwell had in the mid-1530s, who was referred to by the prisoners of Ilchester with whom we began this account of popular prophecy under Henry VIII, and who had in 1530 been examined, probably in connection with Wolsey’s dealings with prophets, or a close relative.135 This is suggestive of the connections between prophetic interpreters in Henrician England, and of the relatively small pool from which such interpretation came. Weston had met Laynam for the first time at Mompesson’s (‘Mountepeson’s’) house in Wiltshire, probably in 1530 or 1531. Walking on the plain beside the house, Laynam had recounted prophecies on themes such as the rise of a dead man, at which time the hot baths would be cold; and further that the king should have six or seven wives. The Mompessons of Bathampton (in Langford) were a prominent family of Wiltshire gentry who had a place on the commission of the peace in the person of Edmund Mompesson from 1532.136

131

Association with Wimborne Minster: Bodl., Bodley MS 623, fol. 100. LP, viii. 565(2v). 133 LP, xiv/1. 806. Cf. Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 27–9, 37–8, on Laynam. 134 APC, 1542–1547, p. 449 (7 June 1546). 135 LP, vii. 923ii. Ilchester; iv/3. 6652; cf. Jansen, ‘Paston Family’, pp. 144–5. 136 He was then about 21 and remained on the bench until his death in 1553; also appearing, briefly in 1539, was Thomas (probably Edmund’s uncle). Edward appeared on the sheriff roll for the county, without actually being pricked, in 1535, 1536, 1537 and 1539, and then served as sheriff in 1540–1: LP, v. 838(18), 1694ii; viii. 149(60); ix. 914(22); xi. 311, 1217(23); xii/1. 311; xii/2. 1150(18, 20); xiii/1. 384(20, 65); xiv/1. 1354(27); xiv/2. 619(38); xvi. 305(80); xviii/1. 226(29); xx/1. 622 (pp. 314, 316); xxi/1. 302(62). Edmund appeared in 1539 in musters and at the reception of Anne of Cleves: LP, xiv/1. 652(M24); xiv/2. 572(2). He served in the 1544 expedition to France, and was the sole Wiltshire representative in greeting the French embassy of 1546: LP, xix/1. 273, 274; xxi/1. 1384. Edmund was the son of John, inheriting as an infant in 1511: VCH Wiltshire, v. p. 53; viii. pp. 40, 243; xiv. pp. 189, 198, 200; Wiltshire Visitation Pedigrees, 1623, pp. 132–3. Wills: Edmund (PCC 5 Tashe), his mother Alice (33 Alyoffe), father John (25 Holder) and uncle 132

42


The diversity of the group involved with Laynam is striking. It included John Lascelles, who prospered in Cromwell’s service and developed extreme Protestant views, for which he was executed on 16 July 1546. 137 Gilbert Latham had Jane Seymour to thank for the position of Master of St Katherine’s Hospital by the Tower, which he still held when the hospital was surveyed on 2 March 1546.138 Edmund, Lord Bray’s involvement is interesting, given his interest in a Flemish prognostication, noted by Chapuys in 1535, presumably shortly before the time he was in communication with Laynam.139 Although he was a courtier and presumably a friend of Henry VIII, acting as cupbearer, he never held any high office.140 Percivall’s wife is much harder to identify with confidence, but the time of her correspondence with Laynam is suggestive, for in 1536–7 there was a woman known in this way who seems to have had a prominent role in some of the manoeuvrings of the Pilgrimage of Grace and its aftermath. Percivall Cresswell, usually known as Percivall or Mr Percivall, who appears to have moved from being a connection of both Lords Darcy and Hussey to being a servant of the duke of Norfolk, acted as messenger in the exchanges between the duke and Lord Darcy, and then further carried messages to court.141 Cresswell’s wife, Catherine, seems not just to have been privy to the obviously sensitive messages carried by her husband, but also to have discussed matters with Lady Hussey in London, including the extremely delicate details of exactly what Darcy had said to Cromwell when he was examined.142 Given the fate which befell the Lancaster herald in 1538, executed for his concessions to Aske’s position during the pilgrimage, it is obvious that Cresswell was in a very difficult position, but an identification of Laynam’s ‘Percivalls wife’ with Catherine implies something more. Another case, from 1539, directly implicated another herald,

Thomas (d. 1561; 7 Loftes). For Thomas, see VCH Wiltshire, xiii. p. 218; LP, xx/2. 576, 577, 581. Bathampton is just to the east of Bath and a little to the north-west of Trowbridge and Bradford-upon-Avon. 137 Derek Wilson, A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England (London, 1972), pp. 90–108, 124–5, 133, 199–200, 228–34. 138 LP, xii/1. 795(45); xx/1. 309. He had been a canon of the college at Stoke by Clare (Suffolk) when Cromwell had written on his behalf in August 1535, seeking a restoration of his position there, in the face of accusations that he had broken the college statutes: LP, ix. 92; Stoke was Matthew Parker’s re-foundation under Anne Boleyn’s patronage (Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, pp. 286–7; John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, the First Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 4 vols (Oxford, 1821), vol. I, pp. 16–18). 139 LP, viii. 327 (Chapuys to Charles V, 4 March 1535). 140 Helen Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility (Oxford, 1986), pp. 23, 25, 96, 98. He died in 1539. 141 Association with Darcy and Hussey: LP, xii/2. 186(56), 187(2), 567. Messenger: LP, xi. 1014, 1035, 1045, 1046, 1049, 1050, 1058, 1064(2), 1065; xii/2. 1089. Hoyle, Pilgrimage, pp. 318–20. 142 LP, xii/1. 976, 981, 1013, 1120. 43


this time Robert Fayery, Portcullis pursuivant, in promoting an alleged Merlin prophecy about the murder and treason to be expected in Edward VI’s reign.143 Fayery was well placed to understand the situations he talked of, for as a herald he had been involved in political and diplomatic events, acting as a diplomatic messenger since his appointment in 1516 and officiating at events such as the creation of Anne Boleyn as marquess of Pembroke and the interment of Jane Seymour.144 It is also easy to see why he was considered a great ‘cronacler’, for his work as a pursuivant involved him in the research associated with heraldic visitations, as when he toured St Paul’s and other London churches with Carlisle herald Thomas Hawley in July–September 1530.145 There was clearly a group of individuals with impressive connections and responsible roles, such as that of the king’s pursuivants and the trusted messengers of the nobility, who had an extensive interest in and knowledge of ancient prophecy. On the other hand, some were not so well connected. Robert Barker, whose confession helps elucidate the Laynam connection, was eventually released from the Fleet on 6 August 1546 when his mother, the ‘wife’ of the Rose tavern by Newgate, brought sufficient sureties to the Lord Chancellor.146 The stock of ideas on which such prophetic interpreters drew therefore mattered in setting the tone for a discussion of past and future which might involve an exceptionally wide cross-section of the population. As the sixteenth century passed, these developed through a range of traditions. On the one hand there was the Welsh and Galfridian tradition usually associated with Merlin, which tended to focus on the conflict between Briton and Saxon, but also on crusade, Rome, France and Ireland, with a strong dose of dynastic instability and internal strife.147 Yet this set of traditions also related to

143

Mark Noble, A History of the College of Arms: And the Lives of all the Kings, Heralds, and Pursuivants from the Reign of Richard III, Founder of the College, until the Present Time (London, 1804), pp. 130, 147. 144 LP, ii. 2397, 4174, pp. 875, 1464, 1478; iv. 1939(9); v. 245, 1274(3), pp. 322, 324–5; vi. 558; xii/2. 1060. Cf. the account of the activities of Thomas Wall, Windsor herald, in Robert J. Knecht, ‘Sir Nicholas Carew’s Journey through France in 1529’, in The English Experience in France c. 1450–1558: War, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange, ed. David Grummitt (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 160–81; The Voyage of Sir Nicholas Carewe to the Emperor Charles V in the Year 1529, ed. R. J. Knecht, Roxburghe Club (Cambridge, 1959); and that of Roger Machado, Richmond herald, in Historia Regis Henrici Septimi a Bernardo Andrea tholosate conscripta; necnon alia quædam ad eundum regem spectantia, ed. James Gairdner, RS 10 (London, 1858), pp. xxxvii–xlviii, 157–222. 145 LP, xiv/2. 73; Anthony Richard Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages: An Inquiry into the Growth of the Armorial Function of Heralds, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1956), pp. 118, 139–46. 146 LP, xxi/1. 1424. 147 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs; Jansen, Political Protest, esp. pp. 62–146. The appeal of one of the late medieval Merlin texts was demonstrated by its printing in 1510 and 1529 (Here Begynneth a Lytel Treatyse of ye Byrth & Prophecye of Marlyn (London, 1510; another edition, 1529)). 44


Scotland, and the Tudor period saw this meld with the prophetic focus on the dynasty, given great stimulus by Henry VII’s decision to marry his daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland, and subsequent problems with the English succession. References to a Scottish alliance with the Welsh in the Rhys ap Gruffydd case have already been noted, and in several other cases questions were raised about connections with Scotland. In particular, these questions focused on the idea of a potential Scottish succession to the English throne. In the 1530s, Robert Dalyvell of Royston (Hertfordshire) was repeating prophecies he had heard from Scots that their king should be crowned king of England in London before Midsummer Day three years or a month after, in spite of the loss of his ears for it.148 Some at least believed these prophecies of a Scottish succession had highly placed sponsors, including (though he denied it) James V himself.149 James may or may not have been being disingenuous, but there is no doubt that prophetic debate was thriving in Scotland by this time. The key foundation to this was the prophecy tradition associated with Thomas of Erceldoun, the second of the two major ‘ancient’ prophetic bodies of ideas in early sixteenth-century Britain. This provided a constant reminder that the Scottish fate was bound up with that of the English; the most pronounced element of this was the development of the prophecy to the effect that ultimately, through a future king with a French mother and of the kin of Bruce, the Scots would conquer England. This was originally intended for Alexander, duke of Albany, in 1513–15 in expectation of his return to Scotland,150 but it then, from his birth, became associated with James VI. We have our first distinct reference to Erceldoun as a prophet of Scottish history in John Barbour’s Bruce. According to Barbour, writing at some point from about 1372 onwards, when William Lamberton, archbishop of St Andrews was told of the murder of Comyn and his associates by Bruce on 29 January 1306, he responded by saying that he hoped Erceldoun’s prophecy would be verified in Bruce, and that he would be king.151 This reliance on Erceldoun

148

LP, xxi/2. 74, 80; xiii/2. 1090. Cf. Jansen, Political Protest, pp. 46–7. Other cases where Scottish links were suspected are those of the parson of Woodnesborough (see above, pp. 31–2) and Richard Oversole of Northallerton (LP, xiii/2. 996). 149 LP, xiv/1. 178, 232, 275. Cf. Jansen, Political Protest, p. 53. 150 ‘Berlington’s’ prophecy, from the Whole Prophecies collection of 1603; established by David Dalrymple, Remarks on the History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1773), esp. pp. 89–91, 96–102, 110. 151 Barbour’s Bruce: A Fredome is a Noble Thing!, ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid and James A. C. Stevenson, 3 vols, Scottish Text Society 4th ser. 12–13, 15 (Edinburgh, 1980–5), vol. 1, pp. 27–8; John Barbour, The Bruce, ed. A. A. M. Duncan (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 82–3. Note that Higden had referred to Edward Balliol’s victory over Scots at Gledesmore, echoing Thomas, and translators followed: Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, ed. C. Babington and Joseph Rawson Lumby, 9 vols, RS 41 (London, 1865–86), VIII, pp. 328–9. 45


as a prophet was taken up by Andrew Wyntoun,152 but the best known prophecy attributed to Erceldoun, and the one on which the credibility of his subsequent tradition was mainly built, is described first by Walter Bower, c. 1440, in the tenth book of his Scotichronicon. He followed a lament on the death of Alexander III with a call to remember the prophecy of Erceldoun. According to Bower, the ‘earl of March’153 had asked Erceldoun at Dunbar what the following day would bring: Erceldoun replied that it would be a ‘day of calamity and misery’. Bower concluded by observing that they discovered by experience that Thomas’s prophecies were to ‘become all too credible’.154 Underlying these mentions in the chronicles was a tradition associated with Thomas which provided an account of the history of England and Scotland from the time of Robert the Bruce, probably taking its first form in pro-Scottish hands on the eve of the battle of Halidon Hill, almost certainly in ‘ballad’ form, only recorded in written form in 1800.155 This tradition was revised to produce a romance version, more favourable to the English, completed no later than 1402, of which the earliest survival appears in the Thornton manuscript of c. 1430–40.156 Further prophecies associated with Thomas, either directly in the tradition first represented by the Thornton MS or otherwise, then survive from the 1450s onwards.157 The prophecy was well known in Scottish court circles in the early sixteenth century. Sir David Lyndesey, in his poem ‘The Dreme’, recalled his relationship with the young James V, to whom he was appointed usher or chief page almost immediately on his birth in April 1512. 158 He described how

152 Andrew of Wyntoun, The Original Chronicle, ed. F. J. Amours, 6 vols, Scottish Text Society 1st ser. 50, 53–4, 56–7, 63 (Edinburgh, 1903–14), vol. VI, p. 71 (lines 4718–22) (book VIII, ch. 27); written c. 1400 (Duncan’s date). 153 Patrick, earl of Dunbar, rather than of March at this point: Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, general editor D. E. R. Watt, vol. 5, Books 9 and 10, ed. Simon Taylor and D. E. R. Watt, with Brian Scott (Aberdeen, 1990), p. 510. 154 Bower, Scotichronicon, vol. 5, ed. Taylor and Watt, pp. 426–9: ‘dicti Thome experti sunt credibilia nimis facta fore vaticinia’. 155 E. B. Lyle, ‘The Relationship between Thomas the Rhymer and Thomas of Erceldoun’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 4 (1970), pp. 23–30. 156 The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. James A. H. Murray, EETS o.s. 61 (London, 1875), pp. xxiv–xxvi; The Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91), ed. D. S. Brewer and A. E. B. Owen (London, 1977). 157 BL, MS Cotton Rolls ii. 23; Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell H. Robbins (New York, 1959), pp. 115–17; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 198–200. Cambridge University Library, MS Ff. 5. 48, which is from the middle of the century, and BL, Cotton MS Vitellius E. x, which is slightly later. 158 Of about 1526: ‘Heir followis he dreme of Shir Daid Lindsay of the mont knyt, alias Lion Kyng of armes derecket onto our souerane Lord kyng James the fyft’ (Paris, 1558), part of Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteor. Off the Miserabill Estait of the Warld . . . ([Rouen?], 1558), lines 43–4. David Lindsay, The Poetical Works, ed. David Laing, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1879), I, pp. xii–xiii; Janet Hadley Williams, ‘David Lyndsay and the Making

46


he had told the king various stories, including material from Erceldoun. Although the context for the prophecies here might be dismissed as associated with the fairy stories with which it appears, it should be noted that many of these apparently fanciful tales of monsters and witches could easily be read as metaphors for the struggles Scotland and its new king would have to face.159 Although in 1521, in his history, John Mair expressed scorn for the Erceldoun prophecies,160 this scepticism was quickly countered by the more influential Hector Boece,161 which was proudly translated into Scots by John Bellenden, so promoting the tradition of Erceldoun, as ‘ane man of gret admiration to the peple, . . . [who] schew sundry thingis as thay fell. Howbeit [p]ai wer ay hyd vnder obscure wourdis.’162 The broader collection of prophecies originally associated with Erceldoun therefore had considerable influence on the way contemporaries saw events developing. In particular, uncertainty about the future, fertile ground for ancient prophecy, was evident in the dynastic crises on both sides of the border. Then, and to an extent as a result, there was the renewal of large-scale military hostilities in the 1540s. Erceldoun’s alleged prophecies of battles and bloodshed, and of the heir of Bruce ascending the English throne, became highly apposite.163 John Elder, who had studied at St Andrews, Aberdeen and Glasgow universities and came to England in 1542, enthusiastically used prophecy as the context for his report of the destruction wrought by the earl

of King James V’, in Stewart Style, 1513–1542: Essays on the Court of James V, ed. Janet Hadley Williams (East Linton, 1996), pp. 201–26. 159 J. E. H. Williams, ‘James V, David Lyndsay, and the Bannatyne Manuscript Poem of the Gyre Carling’, Studies in Scottish Literature XXVI (1991), pp. 164–71. 160 Historia majoris Britanniae: tam Angliae quam Scotiae ([Paris, 1521]), fol. lxviii; ‘[o]ur writers assure us that Thomas often foretold this thing and the other, and the common people throughout Britain give no little credence to such stories, which for the most part – and indeed they merit nothing else – I smile at (translation: John Major, A History of Greater Britain as well England as Scotland, ed. A. Constable, Scottish History Society o.s. 10 (Edinburgh, 1892), pp. 190–1). 161 Hector Boece, Scotorum historiæ a prima gentis origine ([Paris], [1527]), fol. 302 (cf. (Paris, 1574), fol. 291r). 162 Hector Boece, Heir Beginnis the Hystory and Croniklis of Scotland, trans. John Bellenden (Edinburgh, [1540?]), fol. cciii. This likely influenced subsequent chroniclers, such as Adam Abell: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 1746, fol. 91. Alasdair M. Stewart, ‘The Final Folios of Adam Abell’s “Roit or Quheill of Tyme”: An Observantine Friar’s Reflections on the 1520s and 30s’, in Stewart Style, 1513–1542, ed. Williams, pp. 227–53. 163 The ‘British’ context for English actions is evident from the tracts reprinted in The Complaynt of Scotlande wyth ane Exortatione to the Thre Estaits to be Vigilante in the Deffens of their Public Veil. 1549, with an Appendix of Contemporary English Tracts, viz. The Just Declaration of Henry VIII (1542), The Exhortacion of James Harrysone, Scottisheman (1547), The Epistle of the Lord Protector Somerset (1548), The Epitome of Nicholas Bodrugan alias Adams (1548), ed. James A. H. Murray, EETS extra ser. 17, 18 (London, 1872–3). The powerful Protestant ideology behind many of these publications affected their treatment of ancient prophecy; the author of the 1548 Epistle denied that the providential inheritance 47


of Hertford in Scotland in 1545.164 Expectations of a bloody conflict no doubt heightened the destructiveness of both sides in the conflict. William Patten, for example (although a radical Protestant sceptic), describing Protector Somerset’s expedition to Scotland, noted that some Scots referred to the battle of Pinkie/Musselburgh field as ‘Seton felde’ ‘by means of a blynd prophecie of theirs, whiche is this or sum suche toy, Betwene Seton & the sey, many a man shall dye that dey’.165 After James V’s death in 1542, his daughter Mary became the subject of the prophetic speculation as to the future of the English throne. Scottish sources, and indeed those of their French allies, saw the significance of the marriage of Mary and the dauphin Francis of 1548.166 It may have been prophetic expectation surrounding a French marriage which made the union so widely accepted in a country which until then had been extensively divided over the way to deal with the death of James and the minority of his heir. In 1561, in his poem greeting Mary on her return to Scotland, Alexander Scott praised her as the foretold mother of the country’s saviour. Giffe sawis be suth to schaw thy celsitude, Quhat berne sould bruke all bretane be [th]e see? The prophecie expreslie dois conclude – ‘The frensch wyfe of the brucis blude suld be’: Thow art be lyne, fra him the nynte degre,

of Edward and Mary, as potential marriage partners, could be interpreted as a miracle or through prophecy, since ‘present Prophesies nowe a daies, bee but either not certain, or els not playne’: p. 240. 164 Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland, Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, vol. I: A.D. 1509–1589, ed. M. J. Thorpe (London, 1858), p. 57. Marcus Merriman, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad: National Consciousness and Scottish Exiles in the MidSixteenth Century’, in Social and Political Identities in Western History, ed. Claus Bjørn, Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (Copenhagen, 1994), pp. 90–117, esp. pp. 93–9; ODNB. Later, in 1555, he converted to Catholicism while with Lennox at Temple Newsam, his statement on this occasion being reprinted in The Chronicle of Queen Jane, and of Two Years of Queen Mary, and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir T. Wyat, written by a resident in the Tower of London, ed. J. G. Nichols, Camden Society o.s. 48 (London, 1850), pp. 136–66. 165 William Patten, The Expedicion into Scotlande of the most Woorthely Fortunate Prince Edward, Duke of Somerset (London, 1548), fols aviir–aviiv. William Patten: Brian O’Kill, ‘The Printed Works of William Patten (c. 1510–c.1600)’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 7 (1977–80), pp. 28–45; Betty Hill, ‘Trinity College Cambridge Ms. B.14.52, and William Patten’, ibid. 4 (1964–8), pp. 192–200. 166 Thomas Bulkeley, writing to Sir William Maurice after the accession of James to the English throne, reported a prophecy in Scots which he said had been printed when Mary was married to the French king: NLW, Brogyntyn MS 3349 (supplemented, where damaged, from the nineteenth-century transcript in NLW, Peniarth MS 414, fol. 83). Cf. Paula E. Ritchie, Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560: A Political Career (East Linton, 2002), pp. 66–70. 48


And wes king frances pairty, maik, and peir; So be discente, [th]e same sowld spring of [th]e, By grace of god agane this gude new [y]eir.167

A prophetic agenda in part adapted from contemporary French models helped shape the celebrations at Stirling of the baptism of Mary’s son James in December 1566. No less a figure than James’s tutor George Buchanan celebrated Mary as Arthur and Astraea; Patrick Adamson, a Protestant minister and client of the Hamiltons, recited the prophecy that Mary would reunite the island of Britain.168 As in England, so in Scotland some radical Protestant authorities were ferocious in their condemnation of all forms of prophecy and astrology. George Buchanan in particular called Merlin an ‘egregious impostor’ and paid no attention to Erceldoun.169 The contempt felt by some Protestants for Merlin was heightened, for Scots and their associates at least, by the Scottish reaction against Arthurianism of all kinds as an instrument of English imperialism, a mistrust which was only slowly broken down during the sixteenth century.170 Yet this does not seem to have stemmed the flow of prophecy on the subjects of the English succession and possible war between the two countries.171 Work such as that by John Lesley, bishop of Ross, in exile in England from 1568, who presented his history of Scotland to Mary, queen of Scots in 1570, demonstrated the continuing currency of Erceldoun’s prophecy.172

167

The Poems of Alexander Scott, ed. Alexander Karley Donald, EETS extra ser. 85 (London, 1902), pp. viii, 3–9, at p. 8, lines 193–200. 168 Patrick Adamson, Serenissimi ac nobilissimi Scotiae Angliae Hybernie Henrici Stuardi et Mariae Reginae (Paris, 1566); George Buchanan, Opera (Edinburgh, 1715), II, pp. 404–5; Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland, of the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, vol. 1: 1509–1573, ed. Hans Claude Hamilton (London, 1860), p. 321; Michael Lynch, ‘Queen Mary’s Triumph: The Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in December 1566’, Scottish Historical Review lxix (1990), pp. 1–21. 169 George Buchanan, Rerum Scoticarum Historia (Edinburgh, 1582), fols 51–3 (George Buchanan, The History of Scotland, trans. James Aikman, 4 vols (Glasgow, 1827), I, p. 233, and cf. pp. 236–44). On the context for Buchanan’s hostility to Merlin, which may have been a reason for his distrust of other prophets, see David Allen, ‘“Arthur Redivivus”: Politics and Patriotism in Reformation Scotland’, in Arthurian Literature XV, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 185–204. 170 Allen, ‘“Arthur Redivivus”‘, pp. 196–8. Allen’s argument, which initially is essentially about Merlin and Arthurianism, becomes a little blurred in his coverage of the seventeenth century and after, as he too easily equates acceptance of Merlin with acceptance of Thomas, ‘Merlin’s Scottish alter ego’ (p. 201), when Thomas was a far more palatable prospect than Merlin for a Scottish audience. 171 The author of the Complaynt of Scotland combined condemnation of English reliance on Merlin to justify their ‘ardant desire . . . to be violent dominatours of oure cuntray’ with hope that his prophecies would come true in the sense found in Polychronicon, in the accession of a Scottish prince to the English throne: pp. 82–5. 172 John Lesley, The Historie of Scotland, trans. James Dalrymple (1596), ed. E. G. Cody and 49


By the middle of the sixteenth century, therefore, ancient prophetic tradition, centred loosely on the themes and tone of Geoffrey’s Merlin and Thomas of Erceldoun, had produced a powerful set of ideas about the destinies of England, Wales and Scotland which involved a wide spectrum of the population there. The events of the reigns of Edward VI and Mary were seen by many as reflecting these ideas. Existing dynastic themes had clear relevance, but the novel circumstances of a minority followed by a female monarch demonstrated ancient prophecy’s capacity for flexibility and development. It should be recalled here that from relatively early in Henry VIII’s reign prophetic expectation had shifted away from the king onto a hoped-for heir – and, in his youth, a protector who might guide him, leading the crusade that would recover the True Cross (and ultimately wear the crown himself).173 Somerset, who as we know employed Cromwell’s prophet John Davy,174 may have seen his campaigning in Scotland, and actions in Ireland, in this light. If he did see himself, at least in part, as a messianic figure in this way, it might help to explain his pursuit of goals from the early 1540s which to modern eyes seem unachievable or pointlessly destructive. Equally, if he was perceived at least in part in this light by Englishmen, this might be one way in which he became so burdened with expectations of social transformation. 175 More specifically, the rebels of 1549 in East Anglia appear to have had a sense of the importance of Moushold Heath, where they made their camp, and Dussindale, where they chose, against all logic, to make their final disastrous stand;176 and those in Yorkshire allegedly looked to a prophecy of the division of England William Murison, 2 vols, Scottish Text Society o.s. 5, 14, 19, 34 (Edinburgh, 1888–95), vol. 1, pp. 340–1. Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, ed. Æ. J. G. Mackay (c. 1579), 3 vols, Scottish Text Society o.s. 42, 43, 60 (Edinburgh, 1899–1911), does not seem to mention Erceldoun. 173 Bodl., Rawlinson MS C 813, fols 84v–7r. 174 See above, pp. 19–20. 175 Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives’, EHR 114 (1999), pp. 34–63; Michael L. Bush, ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: A Post-Revision Questioned’, EHR 115 (2000), pp. 103–12; George W. Bernard, ‘New Perspectives or Old Complexities?’ EHR 115 (2000), pp. 113–20. There is, of course, no sign of an acknowledgement of the prophecy in William Forrest’s advice to the king and duke, ‘The Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise’, in Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, vol. 1: Text, EETS o.s. 276 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 392–534; and many Protestants associated with the regime (e.g. William Patten) distrusted prophecy: see above, p. 48. 176 Alexander Neville, De furoribus Norfolciensium Ketto duce, liber unus (London, 1575), I4v–K1r; Nicholas Sotherton, in BL, Harleian MS 1576, fol. 258v (edited as Barrett L. Beer, ‘“The Commoyson in Norfolk, 1549”: A Narrative of Popular Rebellion in SixteenthCentury England’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976), pp. 73–99, at pp. 97–8; and as The Commoyson in Norfolk 1549, ed. Susan Yaxley (Stibbard, 1987)), pp. 41–2); Frederic William Russell, Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk; Being a History of the Great Civil Commotion that Occurred at the Time of the Reformation, in the Reign of Edward VI. Founded on the ‘Commoyson in Norfolk, 1549,’ by N. Sotherton; and the ‘De Furoribus Norfolciensium’ 50


between ‘4 gouernours to be elected and appointed by the Commons’.177 The ‘deadman’ prophecies, predicting a miraculous return from the grave, enjoyed popularity in the aftermath of Edward’s early death, and there are several manuscript collections of prophecy which provide a commentary on Mary’s reign, some from a strongly Protestant perspective, hostile to the Spanish marriage, others with a calmer more loyalist tone. One of those spreading these abroad was a canon of Peterborough.178 In the sixteenth century, therefore, ancient prophecy appealed to a wide spectrum of society from the elite downwards. Although they might differ as to its specific worth, virtually everyone from the king and his ministers to the poorest of the poor still gave credence to the prophetic traditions which they believed had been handed down to them. Although there are signs of some interest in printed prophecies, as the Eures’ ownership of pseudo-Methodius suggests, England is chiefly notable for a continued resort to native traditions which had not been printed.179 As a result, therefore, this powerful political language and the ideas it carried with it could not be simply brought under anyone’s control.180 Nor was the regular use of manuscript, important though it undoubtedly was, as constraining and systematizing as might be thought. The development of tradition and its interpretation remained vibrant.

of Nevylle; and Corroborated by Extracts from the Privy Council Register, Documents Preserved in the State Paper and Other Record Offices, the Harleian and other MSS. . . . With Illustrations (London, 1859), pp. 4–6; Barrett L. Beer, Rebellion and Riot: Popular Disorder in England during the Reign of Edward VI (Kent, Ohio, 1982), pp. 135–6. John Hornyold, observing from Warwick’s army, could not understand the move: Longleat, Thynne MS 2, fol. 148, cited in Beer, Rebellion and Riot, p. 136. The prophecy may well be associated with Robert Hogan (see above, pp. 39–41) and certainly existed in 1536: ‘The Confessions of Richard Bishop and Robert Seyman’, Norfolk Archaeology I (1847), pp. 209–23, at pp. 217–19. An appeal to remain true to the cause of reform in October 1549 attacked the council and repeated a Merlinic prophecy that twenty-three London aldermen would lose their heads: Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553, Preserved in the Public Record Office, ed. C. S. Knighton (London, 1992), p. 378. 177 John Foxe, The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contayning the Actes and Monuments of Thynges Passed in Euery Kynges Tyme in this Realme, Especially in the Church of England / Newly . . . Inlarged by the Author (London, 1570); The Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contayning the Actes and Monuments (London, 1570) (STC 1223), p. 1500; this is discounted by A. G. Dickens, ‘Some Popular Reactions to the Edwardian Reformation in Yorkshire’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 34 (1939), pp. 151–69, at p. 160. 178 Sharon L. Jansen Jaech, ‘British Library MS Sloane 2578 and Popular Unrest in England, 1554–1556’, Manuscripta XXIX (1985), pp. 30–41; APC, 1554–1556, pp. 17, 76. 179 As noted in a review of Jansen, Political Protest, by C. S. L. Davies in EHR cx (1995), pp. 722–3. 180 Cf. that subjection to the print tradition so ably observed of popular ballads by Margaret Spufford (Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in SeventeenthCentury England (London, 1981), esp. pp. 14–15) and R. S. Thomson (‘The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1974)); Fox, Oral and Literate Culture. 51


Prophecy’s interpreters continued to come from nearly as wide a spectrum of society as its consumers. Credibility as a prophetic interpreter, once obtained, might allow an otherwise ‘worthless’ individual access to and influence with even the king’s chief minister. Yet it should be stressed that the interpreters of ancient prophecy, unlike, for example, the divinely inspired speakers of prophecy so well known from the seventeenth century, did not predominantly occupy liminal spaces in society. They often had the resources to give them access to considerable bodies of learning. Men and women like the Hogans, Laynams, Fayery and Amadas, and the ideas they interpreted, were central to the way people in the sixteenth century understood the future, and to events both dramatic, as in 1536, 1549 and 1569, and mundane.

52

2

Prophetic creation and audience in civil war England

The conditions prevalent during the latter part of the sixteenth century in England might have spelt the end for ancient prophecy as an influential political language and set of traditions. There were some attacks upon it, and especially upon some of the broader ideas which helped to support it. There were also potentially significant challenges from other ways of understanding the future and its relationship to the past such as astrology and biblical prophecy. These challenges to ancient prophecy, and the alternatives that became increasingly attractive, did not in fact destroy ancient prophecy; in some ways, in fact, a synergy emerged from which ancient prophecy benefited. But they did change the way it was viewed, and they undermined some of the most important of the traditions of the previous century. This chapter analyses these challenges, especially as they affected Merlin, and changes, in particular the rise of the Mother Shipton tradition. The main challenge to ancient prophecy was not explicitly a challenge to prophecy but to the historical context which was so often its foundation. This was, specifically, the challenge to the British history, the historiography which explained Arthur and Merlin and their importance in the European past. Since prophecies attributed to Merlin had been so important to the whole of ancient prophecy until at least the middle of the century, his declining credibility as an historical figure might be expected to have had an impact. Scepticism was already apparent in the early sixteenth century, as we have seen for example in John Mair, or might find in Polydore Vergil in England. Opinion remains divided on how quickly this scepticism became more generalized.1 Yet it is clear that there was no rapid disappearance of Arthurian themes. Arthur and his milieu remained important under the early Stuarts, whether in Harbert’s Prophesie of Cadwallader of 1604 or in the masque ‘Britannia Triumphans’ of 1638, both significant of different aspects of the historical

1

See above, pp. 15, 18, 47; Antonia Gransden, ‘Antiquarian Studies in Fifteenth-Century England’, The Antiquaries’ Journal 60 (1980), pp. 75–97; Humphrey Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, ed. Ieuan M. Williams (Cardiff, 2002), p. 63. 53


consciousness of the period.2 There was, still, the potential discontinuity between the Arthur/ Merlin tradition represented by Malory, in company with Lovelich’s Merlin and the prose Merlin of the same period, and Ariosto’s Merlin in Orlando Furioso, heavy with classical allusions. Yet the signs are that in England this potential transformation of the understanding of heavily prophetic tradition did not have much effect. Spenser’s Merlin in The Faerie Queene, while drawing heavily on Ariosto, retains an individuality and in particular an importance as a prophet and one who can detect truth and falsehood.3 Whatever the scepticism towards Arthur and the ‘British’ history of some historiographical traditions by the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, Merlin as prophet remained important.4 There was, in fact, only a slight reduction in the amount of ancient prophecy under his name in print and in other forms of circulation; if there was a decline, it was relative. Possibly because of his continuing employment by the court and by loyalist commentators, the outburst of prophetic publication produced by the civil war, although it featured Merlin, including some new appearances in print of earlier texts, saw him losing the pre-eminence he had formerly enjoyed, as other prophetic figures appeared.5

2

William Harbert, A Prophesie of Cadwallader, Last King of the Britaines (London, 1604); William Davenant and Inigo Jones, Britannia Triumphans (London, 1638); Arthur H. Williamson, ‘Number and National Consciousness: The Edinburgh Mathematicians and Scottish Political Culture at the Union of the Crowns’, in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 187–212; A. H. Williamson, ‘Britain and the Beast: The Apocalypse and the Seventeenth-Century Debate about the Creation of the British State’, in Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, vol. III, The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, Boston and London, 2001), pp. 15–27; Roberta Florence Brinkley, Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, Md., 1932). Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. 184–206, discerns in these years ‘textual collapse’, yet he bases this on little more than an unwillingness to believe Jonson was serious in the ambitious prophecies he put in Merlin’s mouth in his 1610 ‘Barriers’ (p. 186), and on Drayton’s unwillingness to accept the manner of Merlin’s conception (p. 192). 3 William Blackburn, ‘Spenser’s Merlin’, Renaissance and Reformation 16 (n.s. 4) (1980), pp. 179–98. 4 Note the passage of a MS of the ‘prophecy of the Eagle’ through the hands of James I, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell: Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘Richard III’s Books, 7 and 8: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae with The Prophecy of the Eagle and Commentary: The Interest of these Books to Richard III and Later Owners’, The Ricardian 8 (no. 109) (1990), pp. 403–13; and the possession by Thomas, Lord Fairfax, of what he called ‘A Irish Chronology with a Prophecy [of Merlin] in the Conclusion’: Bodl., Rawlinson MS B 475, esp. pp. 126–7. 5 Given the continuing loyalism of Thomas Heywood’s The Life of Merlin, Sirnamed Ambrosius (London, 1641), it is hard to share David Carlson’s view that Arthurian material 54

PROPHETIC CREATION IN CIVIL WAR ENGLAND

In this period, too, astrology emerged from earlier restraints and become a major element in the predictive armoury of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. From the perspective of Protestant theology, it was primarily the influence of John Calvin that acted as restraint, and this influence declined, especially after his death. The portentous astrological conjunction of 1583 and the eclipses of 1588 seem to have been a high point of interest: both critics and enthusiasts drew strength from the debate.6 Certainly, the boom in printing of almanacs and prognostications suggests at least the end of earlier more practical limitations to circulation, interacting with continuing underlying belief.7 Additionally, the sixteenth century had seen a transformation of one important set of ideas about the future, in the shape of divine prophecy. Augustine’s interpretation of the biblical prophecies as essentially metaphysical remained overwhelmingly influential during the later Middle Ages, and initially Luther retained this element of traditional Catholicism.8 The excesses of Thomas Müntzer further acted as a temporary check,9 but during the late 1520s Luther began to see the prophecies as genuinely historical, if very obscure.10 Heinrich Bullinger, Andreas Osiander and Philipp Melancthon tended to follow

had taken on an inherently oppositionist tone, while accepting that Malory’s version of the tale had lost its appeal in the seventeenth century (David R. Carlson, ‘Arthur Before and After the Revolution: The Blome-Stansby Edition of Malory (1634) and Brittains Glory (1684)’, in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend: Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany, NY, 1994), pp. 234–53). It could be that Merlin’s late adoption by anti-court writers reflects the degree of his association with Charles. The same is true of Eckhardt’s observations on the scarcity of vernacular material from the prophetia merlini, and the way that much of what she charts departs significantly from the original, especially as we enter the seventeenth century. Heywood’s Merlin does so more and more as it moves into later reigns; this is less true of Philip Kynder’s book, Bodl., MS Ashmole 788, fols 83–96, though much of the preface echoes Heywood, and which is based on the 1603 or 1608 Frankfurt printing. Ashmole’s work seems to have been the basis for Lilly’s publication in World’s Catastrophe, and Ashmole again is partly reliant on the Frankfurt text, but also on a Welsh edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Bodl., MS Ashmole 1835, fols 94–101. Caroline D. Eckhardt, ‘The First English Translations of the Prophetia Merlini’, The Library 6th ser. IV (1984), pp. 25–34. 6 Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel about Astrology and its Influence in England (London, 1966), esp. chs III–V. 7 Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London and Boston, 1979). 8 Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Appleford and Abingdon, 1978), esp. pp. 41–2; Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford, 1979), p. 9. 9 Walter Klaasen, Living at the End of Ages: Apocalyptic Expectation in the Radical Reformation (Lanham, NY and London, 1992). 10 Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, p. 43; Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 9–11. 55


Luther’s lead in this; Calvin, an exception, did not, although he did accept the equation of the beast of Revelation with the papacy.11 There were parallel trends in English Protestant thinking. Some were derivative of continental European theologians: works on biblical prophecy by Osiander, Melancthon and Oeclampadius were published in English translation by George Joye in exile in the 1540s, and printed for him in London once the accession of Edward VI allowed his return.12 Others were more independent: John Bale’s work in this area, seen in, for example, The Image of Bothe Churches,13 drew on Lollard tradition as well as Lutheran – and in fact Lollardy was one of Luther’s inspirations here – and John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments and elsewhere, increasingly followed Bale’s lead.14 All these developments were apocalyptic in emphasis, focused on the imminence of the end of the world. The greatest impact of biblical prophecy on the world of ancient prophecy, however, was to come in the seventeenth century, as interpretation was transformed with the emergence of millenarianism. It was Thomas Brightman and Joseph Mede who applied the lessons of biblical prophecy less to the past, present and imminent future, and rather shifted the balance more clearly into the future, presenting a compelling account of the approaching millennium, with an age of universal harmony which would precede doomsday.15 Neither astrology nor biblical prophecy was necessarily a cuckoo in the predictive nest. John Foxe’s increasing commitment to an apocalyptic history based firmly in scripture existed alongside his interest in ancient prophecy; and if 1588 was a promised annus mirabilis in the heavens, its explanation in the prophecy of Regiomontanus was only one way in which astrology shaded into ancient prophecy.16 Some astrologers became more prominent as prophets in their own right, with an obscure understanding of the future which was not exclusively about reading the heavens. Nostradamus is a prime case in point. After an initial explosion of interest in his later years, his profile diminished, but he reappeared in English in 1672, in a folio edition, edited by

11

Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, pp. 42–5; Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 15–18, 32–7. George Joye, The Exposicion of Daniel the Prophete / Gathered oute of Philip Melanchton / Iohan Ecolampadius / Chonrade Pellicane & out of Iohan Draconite. &c. By George Ioye: A Prophecye Diligently to be Noted of al Emprowrs & Kinges in these Laste Dayes . . . (Geneue, 1545); The Conjectures of the Ende of the Worlde (gathered out of Scripture by A. Oseander, and) Translated by G. Joye ([Geneva?], 1548); Andreas Osiander, The Exposicio[n] of Daniell the Prophete / Gathered out of Philip Melanchton , Iho[n] Ecolampadius, Chonrade Pellicane, and oute of Ihon Draconite &c. By George Ioye: A Prophecie Diligentlye to bee Noted of al Emperoures and Kinges, in these Last Daies . . . (London, 1550). Joye’s interest in prophecy was clear early: George Joye, The Prophete Isaye, Translated into Englysshe (Straszburg [i.e. Antwerp], 1531). Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, pp. 277–87. 13 John Bale, The Image of Bothe Churches: After Reulacion of Saynt Iohan the Euangelyst ([Antwerp, 1545?]), and subsequent editions. 14 Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, ch. 4; Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 38–110. 15 Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, pp. 208–27; Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 209–11. 16 Allen, Star-Crossed Renaissance; Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, pp. 162–76. 12

56


a French physician, Theophilus Garencières (1610–80): an ‘ancient prophet’ in his own right.17 The most common sceptical response to ancient prophecy was, therefore, neither outright disbelief nor a preference for astrology or biblical prophecy, but a practical mockery of its de facto limitations. Just as in the 1540s the newly popular printed prognostications were mocked for their failings and generalizations, so Shakespeare himself may have added mockery to the fool’s reaction to Merlin in King Lear, probably in 1609–10, and in the 1620s William Rowley’s Birth of Merlin, while maintaining the gravity of his prophecy, made humour of his conception and birth.18 So ancient prophecy remained a vigorous tradition from the late sixteenth century through the following century. The ever-growing likelihood of the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne was both supported by the tradition of existing ancient prophecy on this theme 19 and a major stimulus to its further development. Sir John Harington recorded some of the wide range of possibilities framed in prophetic interpretation, from the re-division of England along the lines of the Saxon Heptarchy, to the appearance of governance through States, as in the Low Countries, to the rule of a Spanish viceroy.20 The birth of a male heir to James in 1594 helped to confirm prophetic hopes, and itself was the cause for a further outburst of Scottish enthusiasm. For Andrew Melville, the birth of the prince seemed to herald the time of the destruction of the papacy and of Spain which he saw in divine prophecy.21 Scottish opinion was, however, preoccupied with both Scottish and English ancient prophecy traditions that related to dynastic union.22 Most importantly, the Whole Prophesie of Scotland, England, & Somepart of France

17

The True Prophecies or Prognostications of M. Nostradamus . . . translated and commented by T. de Garencières (London, 1672; reissued: London, 1685). Leslie Smith, ‘Notes on the Garencières Family’, Notes and Queries 197 (1952), pp. 4–9. 18 See above, p. 26; John Kerrigan, ‘Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear’, in The Division of Kingdoms, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford, 1983), pp. 195–239; Gary Taylor, ‘King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Edition’, in ibid., pp. 351–451; ‘William Shakespeare and William Rowley’, in The Birth of Merlin; Or, The Childe hath Found his Father (London, 1662); cf. Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples, pp. 194–201. 19 See above, pp. 45–9. 20 Sir John Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown (A.D. 1602), ed. Clements R. Markham, Roxburghe Club (London, 1880), pp. 17–18. 21 Andrew Melville, Principis Scoti-Britannorum natalia (Edinburgh, 1594), reprinted in George Buchanan, The Political Poetry, ed. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish History Society 5th ser. 8 (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 276–81. 22 ‘The Diary of Robert Birrel’, in Fragments of Scotish History, ed. J. G. Dalyell (Edinburgh, 1798), p. 59: ‘at þis tyme [1603], all the haill comons of Scotland þat had red or understanding, wer daylie speiking and exponeing of Thomas Rymer hes prophesie, and of uþr prophesies qlk wer prophesied in auld tymes’. These included the HEMPE prophecy, which Birrel said originated in Henry VIII’s time, the Scottish prophecy of a French wife bearing a son ‘shall bruik all Britaine be the sie’, and a garbled version of the prophecy of 57


was printed amidst the frenzy of interest generated by the imminent accession of James VI to the throne of England. The only copies we have of the 1603 edition are evidently pirated, but the evidence suggests that the text originated with Robert Waldegrave, the Scottish king’s printer, amongst whose other work at the time was the king’s own Basilikon Doron.23 Also, although the pirated editions are almost certainly from London, the original is likely to have been an Edinburgh product, implying that it was produced in the first few months of the year as Elizabeth’s death was awaited – for Waldegrave almost certainly moved to London in James’s train.24 Official sources in Scotland therefore found one way to prepare for James’s succession in the production of a new edition of the Scottish prophecies which foretold eventual Scottish dominance over the English. This was soon reinforced as Scottish prophecies were promoted to an English audience, for example through John Monipennie’s Abridgement or Summarie of the Scots Chronicles, which first appeared in 1612 and went through many editions.25 It was therefore from the Rhymer tradition, with its roots in Scotland and northern England, that the most important ancient prophecies of the early seventeenth century sprang. Once James was on the English throne, they fed the idea of a Protestant crusade, led by either James himself or his son Prince Henry.26 Even in 1613, with Henry dead and the chances of James himself proving the conqueror of Europe and restorer of Jerusalem growing slim, the new heir, Prince Charles, however unpromising in reality, was adopted as the new prophetic hope. Patrick Gordon’s Famous Historie of the

the sixth James who would rule both kingdoms. Cf. John Colville, Oratio funebris exequiis Elizabethæ nuperæ Angliæ, Hiberniæ &c. Reginæ destinata (Paris, 1604). 23 The Whole Prophesie of Scotland, England, & Somepart of France, and Denmark, Prophesied bee Meruellous Merling, Beid, Bertlingtoun, Thomas Rymour, Waldhaue, Eltraine, Banester, and Sibbilla, all According in one: Containing Many Strange and Meruelous Things ([London?], 1603). 24 William A. Jackson, ‘Robert Waldegrave and the Books He Printed or Published in 1603’, The Library 5th ser. XIII (1958), pp. 224–33. Waldegrave provides evidence of continuities from sixteenth-century divine prophecy, as printer some years before of the Marprelate tracts: ODNB. 25 John Monipennie, The Abridgement or Summarie of the Scots Chronicles (London, 1612, and many subsequent editions). Although Monipennie had indeed abridged the chronicle accounts, he found space for the following account of Thomas’s prediction of the death of Alexander. ‘The day before the Kings death, the Earle of March demaunded of one Thomas Rymour, what wether should be the morrow? Thomas answered, that on the morrow before noone there shal blow the greatest winde that euer was heard in Scotland: on the morrow being almost noone (the ayre appearing calme) the Earle sent for the said Thomas, and reprouing him, said, There was no appearance. Thomas answering, yet noone is not past, immediately cometh a Post, and sheweth that the King was falne and killed. Then Thomas said to the Earle, that is the winde that shall blow, to the great calamity of all Scotland.’ 26 William Alexander, The Monarchick Tragedies (London, 1604). 58


Renouned and Valiant Prince Robert Surnamed the Bruce supported the tradition of Thomas the Rhymer’s significance, although appropriating it far more directly to the story of the Bruce. For Gordon’s Bruce, Thomas offers a glorious vision in which Bruce’s own future is linked to subsequent Scottish history and in particular to predictions of James VI and I as the man who will join the northern and southern kingdoms, and to Charles his son, who will be a great general. In Gordon’s account, Thomas predicts the conquest of the Turk will occur at this time.27 James’s long awaited return visit to Scotland in 1617 generated a further outburst of interest in the Erceldoun prophecy, for example in William Drummond of Hawthornden’s ‘Forth Feasting’.28 If Pict, Dane, Norman, Thy smooth Yoke had seene, Pict, Dane, and Norman, had thy Subjects beene: If Brutus knew the Blisse Thy Rule doth give, Even Brutus joye would under Thee to live.

On entering Glasgow on 22 July, James was duly welcomed as the king prophesied by Rhymer, Bede and Merlin, ‘the end of al your prophecies’.29 The receptive audience for ancient prophecy ranged from the king down to those far lower on the social scale. We can see the way this entered a more general tradition in England in the Bishop Percy Folio Manuscript. This includes a version of the ‘last world emperor’ prophecy, applied to James VI and I. This seems to date from after 1614, and perhaps no later than 1620, when James still seemed potentially a Protestant crusader in continental Europe. The prophecy retains the conventional crowning as Western Emperor, a siege of Rome and two confrontations in the East, after the second of which the Emperor dies in the ‘valley of Iehosaphatt’.30

27

Patrick Gordon, The Famous Historie of the Renouned and Valiant Prince Robert Surnamed the Bruce King of Scotland (Dort, 1615), fols Fiiir–Hiir, esp. fols Giir–Giiiir; cf. the ideas of James Maxwell: Admirable and Notable Prophecies, Uttered in Former Times by 24 Famous Romain Cathoickes, Concerning the Church of Romes Defection, Tribulation, and Reformation (London, 1615). 28 ‘Forth Feasting: A Panegyricke to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty’, in William Drummond of Hawthornden, Poems and Prose, ed. Robert H. Macdonald (Edinburgh and London, 1976), pp. 83–7, and note at p. 197 (quotation lines 295–8, at p. 85). 29 [Greek – Ta ton mouson eisodia]: The Muses Welcome to the High and Mightie Prince James, by the Grace of God King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith &c.: at his M. Happie Returne to his Old and Native Kingdome of Scotland, after XIII. Yeers Absence, in anno 1617, ed. John Adamson (Edinburgh, 1618), p. 238 (although it is notable that other towns and cities did not follow suit, in the cases of Stirling and Perth preferring to see James as a new Constantine (pp. 124, 138)). 30 Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, 3 vols (London, 1867–8), III, pp. 371–3. 59


So, in spite of the potential threats, ancient prophecy was still an important way of interpreting politics in the early seventeenth century, and with the breakdown of order and imminent strife of the early 1640s a further major impetus was added to the ancient prophecy tradition. Once again, it was the North of England, and prophecies associated with Scotland, which were to the fore. Both Scots and English had a predictive framework which included Scottish invasion, thanks to the prophecy tradition. Sir Henry Slingsby of Scriven, near Knaresborough, recalled the prophecy of the conquest of England by Danes, Saxons, Normans and finally Scots already in the late 1630s.31 In Suffolk, John Rous too turned to this and another prophecy, which he found readily accessible in Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, to help him understand the events of 1640: But among all Englishmen medled together is so great changing and diversity of clothing and array, and so many maner and diversity of shapes, that well nigh is there any man knowne by his clothing and his array of whatsoever degree that he be; thereof prophesied an holy anker in king Egelred’s time in this manner.32

The Scots around Newcastle in September 1640 were confident of victory, thanks to ‘several old prophecies they produce’.33 In December 1641, amidst a welter of news of political and supernatural wonders, the prophecy of Mother Shipton was first published. Shipton is worthy of particular study: not only was her prophecy one of the most frequently republished in the coming decades, it was new to national prominence. It allows a consideration of ancient prophecy in the seventeenth century in terms of the medium, the message, and its relationship to developing ways of understanding the past and future. Richard Lowndes, a bookseller with only a matter of months’ experience in the London book trade, issued the short quarto volume, which ran to little more than 1,600 words. The overall purpose of the work seems clear. The text describes the visit of three noblemen to York, where they intended to see Mother Shipton, who had foretold that Cardinal 31 The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, of Scriven, Bart: Now First Published Entire from the MS. A Reprint of Sir Henry Slingsby’s Trial, his Rare Tract, “A Father’s Legacy.” Written in the Tower Immediately Before his Death, and Extracts from Family Correspondence and Papers, with Notices, and a Genealogical Memoir, ed. Daniel Parsons (London, 1836), p. 11; Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, ed. C. Babington and Joseph Rawson Lumby, 9 vols, RS 41 (London, 1865–86), vol. VIII, pp. 286–7 (Danes, French and Scots). 32 Diary of John Rous, Incumbent of Santon Downham, Suffolk, from 1625 to 1642, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green, Camden Society o.s. 66 ([London], 1856), pp. 103–4 (from Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon (London, 1482), fol. 70v). 33 CSPD, 1640–1641, pp. 28–9; cf. Patrick Gordon of Ruthven, A Short Abridgement of Britane’s Distemper, from the Yeare of God M.DC.XXXIX. to M.DC.XLIX., ed. [John Dunn], Spalding Club 10 (Aberdeen, 1844), p. 5; James Howell, Bella Scot-Anglica: A Brief of all the Battells, and Martiall Encounters which have Happened ‘twixt England and Scotland, from all Times to this Present (London, 1648), pp. 16–19.

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Wolsey, then journeying towards York, would never reach the city. Their guide led them to the old woman, who mysteriously knew of their coming in advance; she then predicted not her own punishment, threatened by the Cardinal, but the doom of the three noblemen. This done, she proceeded to utter a series of more general prophecies. These conclude quite suddenly with the couplet ‘Unhappy he that lives to see these dayes, But happy are the dead Shiptons wife sayes’. At first glance, this general prophecy of doom seems to sum up the prophecy: sensational predictions of catastrophe, blended with predictions whose obscurity only thinly disguises their ultimate meaninglessness. The vogue for this prophecy tends to be explained as, at best, a sign of the degeneration of a once semi-respectable ancient prophetic culture into a childish, irrational and almost exclusively plebeian fascination with wonders and prodigies.34 A further reason for its study, therefore, is that it is perhaps the best example of this perceived shift to debasement and absurdity. Yet far from being a random collection of nonsense, carelessly and hurriedly assembled35 to appeal to a population willing to believe anything in the fevered atmosphere of political crisis, or an unthinking plagiarism of the 1603 Whole Prophesie of Scotland, England, & Somepart of France, it is possible to establish a clear sense of a prophecy emerging from an evolving tradition at least one hundred years old. Its context was the regional political culture centred on York, encompassing gentry and senior townsmen, and the lower orders in the city and the country. At first sight located around a group of nonsensical or generic place names, the earliest version of Shipton’s prophecy, when studied, reveals an intimate relationship with particular localities heavily concentrated on the city of York and its environs. Shipton’s prophecy concerns a visit by three Tudor noblemen to York to question her, guided by the important York figure, the lawyer Reginald Beasley.36 This leads to mentions of the King’s House near York and of Cawood. After this, the text becomes a more general recitation of prophecies; most are centred on York:

34 E.g. Jerome Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press: The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies (London, 1993), pp. 64, 65–7, 70, 73, 75, and passim. 35 There are several typographical or textual errors, such as the transformation of Sheriff Hutton Castle into ‘Sheriff Nuttons Castle’; and the mis-setting of letters such as the inverted ‘a’ two lines up on p. 4. Friedman suggested that the general statements in the prophecy ‘seemed to describe England’s experiences well’, with striking congruences with the events and issues of the 1650s (Friedman, Miracles and Pulp Press, pp. 65–7); yet since the prophecy appeared in print in 1641, this relevance to national events cannot have been the framework around which the prophecy was constructed. 36 The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (London, 1641), pp. 1–3; The House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. S. T. Bindoff, 3 vols (London, 1982), I, pp. 425–6.

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before that Owes Bridge and Trintie Church meet, they shall build on the day, and it shall fall in the night, untill they get the highest stone of Trinitie Church, to be the lowest stone of Owes bridge, then the day will come when the North shall rue it wondrous sore, but the South shall rue it for evermore.37

The king of Scots is then described as coming to Holgate Town but being unable to pass through the Bar. Apparently more general geographical locations are then raised, with the king of the North having his tail in Edinburgh while he himself was at London Bridge; but the locality returns to York with a prediction that water shall flow over Ouse Bridge, and a warning that ‘when there is a Lord Major at Yorke let him beware of a stab’.38 Then there is a reference to the castle yard, not specified as that of York, but implied, and to ‘Colton Hagge’ bearing corn, and to two judges passing through ‘Mungate barre’. A great war is predicted between the rivers ‘Cadron’ and Aire; and a battle at Bosworth Field ‘where Crookbackt Richard made his fray’. London appears again in a prophecy relating to a bull and a dragon, but the next passage talks of battles at ‘Brammammore’, ‘Knavesmore’ and ‘Stoknmore’. There follows a prediction of three knights in Petergate in York, and the birth of a child with three thumbs in Pomfret who will be carried after a battle to Sheriff Hutton (‘Nuttons’) castle. The same location, after the child’s death, would be the place where an earl would be chosen. The predictions then return to York, with mentions of the town walls and of ‘Crouch Church’. Finally, two prophecies relate to the capital: there is a mention of a man on St James’s church hill weeping (i.e. St James Garlick Hithe, on the east side of Garlick Hill),39 before the last passage of the prophecy foretells the inability of the master of a ship, sailing up the Thames, to obtain a drink in London. Although at first glance obscure, these were virtually all locations in and around York. In the city itself, there is mention of Trinity Church, meaning Holy Trinity, Micklegate, and Crouch Church, meaning St Crux, Pavement; of Ouse Bridge; of Petergate; and of the town walls 40 and of the two most important gates, one unnamed but associated with Holgate town, and Monk (‘Mungate’) Bar.41 Less than a mile to the west of the city walls, Holgate township was within the liberties of the city and the parish of St Mary

37

The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, p. 3. The title Lord Mayor came into use in York in the 1480s: D. M. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, 1979), p. 65. 39 A Survey of London by John Stow Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford, 1908), vol. 2, pp. 249–50; A. E. Daniel, London City Churches, 2nd edn ([n. p.], 1907), pp. 183–8. 40 For the importance of the walls, see Palliser, Tudor York, p. 25. 41 A silent emendation to specify this, the bar through which two judges would pass, as Walmgate Bar is made in Lilly’s edition of the prophecy in 1643: Mercurius Propheticus, or, A Collection of Some Old Predictions ([London], 1643), p. 4. This was then followed in later editions. 38

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Bishophill Junior; it sat astride an important route in and out of the city.42 Slightly further afield, but still closely connected to the city, was Cawood, the archbishop of York’s palace; and then there are the three moors, each closely connected with the city. The furthest afield was Bramham Moor (‘Brammammore’), between York and Leeds, just south of Wetherby; Bramham was the site of quarries that had supplied the building of the Minster.43 Knavesmire (‘Knavesmore’) and Stokton Moor (‘Stoknmore’) were much closer to the city, both being areas of common grazing, the former to the south of the city, partly within its boundaries and the place of execution for condemned criminals, and the latter lying to the north-east and providing all year pasturage.44 Colton Hagge lay around Colton, just south of York, near the confluence of the Wharfe and the Ouse.45 The rivers of the region are represented by the Aire and the ‘Cadron’ or Calder. Further afield still, but yet within the orbit of York, are Sheriff Hutton, described in the prophecy as six miles from the city, and Pontefract. Aside from London and Edinburgh, the only other place mentioned, although not by name, is Bosworth Field. In general, the key events foretold either relate directly to York and its immediate vicinity, or, when they relate to the kingdom as a whole, have some connection there. Once these identifications have been made, it is possible in some cases to see the events ‘foretold’, and this in turn provides clues as to the dating, authorship and audience of this version of the prophecy. The mayor who should ‘beware of a stab’ was Thomas Agar, a tanner, Lord Mayor of York in 1618, who was stabbed by Christopher Coelson, a tailor.46 The prophecy of Ouse Bridge and Holy Trinity, Micklegate relates to events in the 1550s and 1560s. The central tower of Holy Trinity was brought down by a gale on 15 February 1552, probably reducing the choir of the church to ruins and damaging the clerestory and triforium of the nave.47 Ouse Bridge was also subject to collapse, several years later, in a flood in 1564–5. Work began on restoring the bridge in 1565; the work was finally finished in October 1566. Stone was taken for the rebuilding from several ruined ecclesiastical buildings in the

42

VCH, County of York: The City of York, p. 313. VCH City of York, p. 97. 44 VCH City of York, pp. 498–501; Palliser, Tudor York, pp. 29, 88. 45 Colton was very much within the orbit of the city community: in the thirteenth century Gace de Chaumont, mayor in 1255, founded a county family there: VCH City of York, p. 45; The Survey of the County of York, Taken by John de Kirkby, Commonly Called Kirkby’s Inquest. Also Inquisitions of Knights’ Fees, the Nomina Villarum for Yorkshire, and an Appendix of Illustrative Documents, Surtees Society 49 (Durham, 1867 for 1866), pp. 217, 434. 46 William Hargrove, History and Description of the Ancient City of York, Comprising all the Most Interesting Information, Already Published in Drake’s Eboracum, 2 vols (York, 1818), I, p. 344. 47 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments in England, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York, vol. III, South-West of the Ouse (London, 1972), p. 12. The tower had been rebuilt by the parishioners in 1453: VCH City of York, pp. 374–6. 43

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city, including the ‘defaced walls’ of Holy Trinity.48 The old two-arched bridge was replaced by a single span of 81 feet, one of the largest in Europe. Pride in this new bridge, the only major civic project of the century, combined with unease about its safety, made it a good subject for the prophecy.49 The detailed knowledge of the topography of York displayed here is significant in two ways. First, the authorship of the prophecy as published in 1641 is associated with very great familiarity with the city of York and its vicinity. Second, the intended audience had to understand these geographical references for the prophecy to make sense. To the extent that the printed version of the prophecy was created in London in 1641, this may be explained by the political context in which the publication took place, with Charles I’s visit to York on his progress north,50 but it is probable that the relationship with York goes deeper than that. Almost certainly both author and audience were very familiar with the region around York. This goes to confirm that the publication in 1641 was not the moment at which the Mother Shipton tradition was created. Locality strongly suggests that what Richard Lowndes produced in 1641 had an origin some time before in York, either in the city itself or its immediate vicinity: a local tradition for a local audience. This was an audience which wanted to hear prophecies about local events, such as the fall of Ouse Bridge, and about places such as Stokton Moor and Colton Hagge; yet it also wanted to see national events prophesied in these local terms. The sense of place conveyed here, being intensely localized and related strongly to a major city, shows considerable similarities to that in other literature of the late medieval period and sixteenth century. This sense of place was not regional – there is no sense of the ‘northern-ness’ of the prophecy in its first appearance – nor was it county-based, since there is no identification

48

Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York, III, p. 12; York Civic Records, 8 vols, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series XCVIII, CIII, CVI, CX, CXII, CXV, CXIX (1939–52), vol. VI, pp. 73, 116. VCH City of York, p. 516, citing York House Book 24, fols 45, 47–9, 56; Chamberlain, 1565–6, p. 120. 49 Palliser, Tudor York, p. 82; VCH City of York, pp. 516–17. Note the city’s decline from being the largest provincial city in terms of population in 1377 to perhaps sixth place in 1520, behind Norwich, Bristol, Exeter, Salisbury and possibly Newcastle; and from wealthiest in 1377 to fourteenth in 1524: Palliser, Tudor York, pp. 202, 208. The bridge was the site of an oration to James I during his progress of 1617: Francis Drake, Eboracum: Or the History and Antiquities of the City of York, from its Original to the Present Times (London, 1736), pp. 133–4. In 1777, a sailor, William Cock, leapt the 37 feet from the parapet into the river on two successive days, receiving a liberal subscription for his pains: Hargrove, History of York, I, p. 256. 50 As suggested by W. H. Harrison, Mother Shipton Investigated: The Result of Investigation in the British Museum Library, of the Literature Pertaining to the Yorkshire Sybil (London, 1881), p. 47 (from Notes and Queries, 25 July 1868), and by me in ‘Reshaping the Local Future: The Development and Uses of Provincial Political Prophecy, 1300–1900’, in Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History, 1300–2000, ed. Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (Stroud, 1997), pp. 51–67, at p. 58. 64


with Yorkshire.51 Its focus was the city. In the same way, the Towneley cycle of plays makes topical references to nowhere further from the centre of Wakefield than Horbury; and the Chester mysteries are focused on the immediate vicinity of that city.52 If the locality of the 1641 Shipton prophecy is clearly based on York, the personalities identified there further confirm and develop our speculations regarding authorship and audience. The 1641 edition of Shipton is striking in the appearance there of five major identifiable figures. This is not a prophecy which surveys a century or more of history, listing kings, queens and major nobles and churchmen. The five figures who participate in and are the subject of the story and the prophecies contained within it all lived during the same decades at the end of the fifteenth century and the first seventy years of the sixteenth century. Shipton’s prophecy is introduced in the context of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s final journey northwards during 1530 just before his death. ‘Lord Darcy’, ‘the Lord Piercy’, and ‘the Duke of Suffolke’ are described visiting Shipton at the instance of the Cardinal when Wolsey heard Shipton’s prophecy that he would never enter York in company with the king. None is described in any detail, but their fates are foretold by Shipton. Suffolk is told by Shipton that ‘the time will come when you will be as low as I am, and that’s a low one indeed’. Darcy is informed, ‘you have made a great Gun, shoot it off, for it will doe you no good, you are going to warre, you will paine many a man, but you will kill none’. Percy is told, ‘shooe what say your Horse in the quicke, and you shall doe well, but your body will bee buried in Yorke pavement, your head shall be stolne from the barre and carried into France’. These are fairly specific prophecies, and they are interesting in that they invite from the reader some recognition of the key events of the middle fifty years of the sixteenth century in the North of England. Percy’s prophecy is the most specific: it refers to Thomas Percy, who was executed in York in 1572 for his role in the rebellion of 1569;53 he was buried in the church of St Crux, Pavement, York, and his head was displayed on the gates of the city before being stolen and taken to France two years later.54 Darcy’s prophecy was slightly less direct, but nonetheless clearly relates to his rebellion in 1536. Thomas, Lord Darcy, was a professional soldier, with experience in France in 1512, as well as on crusade previously; most famously, however, he

51 M. L. Holford, ‘Locality, Culture and Identity in Late Medieval Yorkshire, c. 1270– c. 1540’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of York, 2001). 52 The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Crawley, 2 vols, EETS supplementary ser. 13 (Oxford, 1994); The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols, EETS supplementary ser. 3, 9 (Oxford, 1974, 1986). 53 On the rebellion, see Mervyn James, ‘The Concept of Order and the Rising of 1569’, Past and Present lx (August 1973), pp. 49–83 (reprinted in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England, paperback edn (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 270–307). 54 VCH City of York, p. 378; Charles Brunton Knight, A History of the City of York, 2nd edn (York and London, 1944), p. 399.

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was involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace. The prophecy that he was going to war, in which he would ‘paine many a man, but . . . kill none’ would seem to apply to this rebellion, in which the casualties suffered by either side were negligible, although many died in the aftermath as royal forces wreaked their revenge.55 The prophecy regarding the duke of Suffolk is the hardest to interpret. The meteoric rise of Charles Brandon, including the grant of the duchy of Suffolk and marriage to the king’s sister Mary, made him one of the richest and most influential noblemen in England.56 If he suffered some eclipse, it seems to have occurred in the 1530s, when the new queen Anne Boleyn and her then ally Thomas Cromwell relegated him from primacy at court, partly due to Mary’s support for Catherine of Aragon, and used him as a pawn in the settlement of Lincolnshire after the rebellion there in late 1536. The idea of his being as low as Shipton seems odd, unless it refers in a general way to the duke’s mortality or perhaps to the ultimate failure of his dynasty in the death of both his sons from sweating sickness in 1551. Even if this passage did not belong to the inherently unreal world of prophecy, it would immediately raise problems. For example, Thomas Percy, the man whose flight and execution in the Northern Rebellion is described, was not born when Wolsey’s journey towards York was made. He appears to have been confused with his uncle, Henry Percy. Equally, it is clear that towards the end of 1530 Suffolk and Darcy were elsewhere and did not accompany the Cardinal as he made his way north.57 This was, therefore, not accurate historical description; it was either a blurred memory or a deliberate stylization. Why choose these three noblemen for a role in a fictitious expedition to the North in 1530? Their relationship with Wolsey does not seem to provide the answer. Brandon’s58 and Percy’s (if we take this to be Henry Percy, who

55 There are now many works on the Pilgrimage; the one that places most emphasis on Darcy’s role is G. R. Elton, ‘Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J.H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Manchester, 1980), pp. 25–56; cf. also M. L. Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536 (Manchester, 1996); Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–1537 and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1915). Far from possessing guns, Darcy seems to have been primarily concerned about his lack of ordnance, and the dangers of the pilgrims obtaining some: LP, xi. 692, 739, 1045, 1115, 1128. James calculated that fifty-seven men were executed for their role in the Lincolnshire Rebellion: ‘Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England’, Past and Present xlviii (August 1970), p. 269n. G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (London, 1972), pp. 387–9, has 120 tried for treason in Lincolnshire and 167 in the Pilgrimage; in total 178 were executed. 56 S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, 1484–1545 (Oxford, 1988). 57 Suffolk was in London in November 1530: LP, iv/3. 6720. Darcy’s whereabouts are less clear – he suffered a recovery of Temple Newsam, Rothwell and other properties by trustees including Edward, earl of Derby and Robert, earl of Sussex on 28 November 1530, but need not have been present in person: LP, iv/3. 6740. 58 Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp. 106–14; criticized by E. W. Ives, ‘The Fall of Wolsey’, in

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succeeded to the title in 1527) relationships with the Cardinal were not good. Percy came to Wolsey at Cawood as, with Sir Walter Walsh, one of the commissioners empowered to arrest the Cardinal.59 In Darcy’s case, relations were distinctly hostile.60 Darcy had been working against Wolsey for several years before his fall; all three were signatories to the petition against him of 1 December 1529.61 So their supposed role as Wolsey’s agents is inaccurate or stylized; it cannot have been the prime reason for constructing this scenario. Their interest in the North and in Yorkshire in particular seems a more likely reason for their inclusion. In 1530 Percy and Darcy were major figures in society there, and although at that point Brandon’s interests were primarily in East Anglia, he still had a notable connection in Yorkshire.62 This association with Yorkshire becomes even clearer if it is taken out of the immediate context of 1530. Darcy’s estates were concentrated in the area of the West Riding of Yorkshire and further afield in the region of York. His main seats were at Temple Hirst and Temple Newsam; his landholding was predominantly in Pontefract Honour and in Snaith; in both, his power was reinforced by the control of the stewardships there, and he also held the Duchy stewardship in Knaresborough from 1509.63 Percy’s landholding, though extensive and widely scattered, also included a major interest in the northern part of the West Riding around Spofforth, and in the East Riding, centred on Wressle.64 Brandon’s role after 1536 concentrated in Lincolnshire, but his northern interests in general also multiplied. They were particularly augmented by his appointment as king’s lieutenant in the North in 1543 and early 1544.65 Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art, ed. S. J. Gunn and P. G. Lindley (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 286–315, esp. pp. 304–5. 59 George Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Richard S. Sylvester, EETS o.s. 243 (London, 1959 for 1957), pp. 150, 152–5; Cavendish, however, describes Percy’s ‘tremlyng’ and evident reluctance to carry out his commission (p. 155). 60 Ives, ‘Fall of Wolsey’, pp. 294–300. 61 Twelve lay peers signed the petition. The text survives in two transcriptions: Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: Concerning the Jurisdiction of Courts (London, 1797), pp. 85–95; and Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The History of England under Henry VIII (London, 1870), pp. 408–17. This document is discussed in Ives, ‘Fall of Wolsey’, pp. 307–10; G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (London, 1977), pp. 112–13; A. F. Pollard, Wolsey (London, New York (etc.), 1929), pp. 258, 261–2; Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (London, 1970), pp. 102–3. 62 Already in the 1510s his chief household officers were Sir Thomas Wentworth and Sir John Burton, both from Staincross wapentake: Gunn, Charles Brandon, p. 64. 63 R. B. Smith, Land and Politics in the England of Henry VIII: The West Riding of Yorkshire, 1530–1546 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 77, 134. This and the following page provide a table of the major landholders in West Yorkshire at the time. 64 J. M. W. Bean, The Estates of the Percy Family, 1416–1537 (London, 1958); Smith, Land and Politics, pp. 77, 135. 65 Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp. 183–91, 205–6 (note especially his connection with Sir Arthur Darcy and other Yorkshire gentlemen; ‘for a peer with Yorkshire estates worth less 67


The connection of all three men with the city of York itself was also very strong.66 The other key factor behind the selection is more obvious: a dramatic fall from prosperity and grace. Other nobles wielded influence in the area, such as the Cliffords, given their power around Skipton,67 or the Talbots, given theirs around Hallamshire and in York itself,68 but their recent histories did not convey the required sense of the fickleness of fate, as foretold by the prophetess. The men in question were written into the prophecy as the major tragic noblemen of the area around York in the mid-sixteenth century. The role of Wolsey also demands a comment. He appears indirectly in the 1641 version of the prophecy: journeying towards York and hearing of Shipton’s prophecy, he sends the three noblemen to visit her.69 The threat they convey, that she will be burned, comes from Wolsey. The Cardinal reaches Cawood and can see the city of York eight miles away; but he is then recalled to London by the king, and dies of ‘a laske’ (i.e. dysentery) in Leicester.70 This is a portrait lacking in the detail which would surely have been apparent in any account constructed by someone familiar with the Cardinal’s actions, or the reputation of those actions. There is nothing here of Wolsey’s reputation as a haughty churchman, or a royal minister who at times seemed the second king, whatever the limitations of his grasp of the law, or the niceties of relationships with members of the nobility.71 Instead Wolsey appears simply

than £110 a year they were an impressive selection’). The maps on pp. 155, 173 starkly illustrate the creation of Brandon’s concentrated Lincolnshire interest. York Civic Records, IV, pp. 90–1, 97–8, 99–100, 102–3, 103–4, 131–2. 66 Darcy had recruited in York for his campaign in 1511: York Civic Records, III, p. 35. York relied heavily on the Percies, sometimes giving them presents in the hope of continued favour: ibid., pp. 30, 119, 142 (1509, 1529, 1532). 67 And of course Henry Clifford, the first earl, succeeded Darcy in the stewardship of Knaresborough in 1537: Smith, Land and Politics, p. 135. 68 George Bernard, The Power of the Early Tudor Nobility: A Study of the Fourth and Fifth Earls of Shrewsbury (Brighton, 1985), pp. 139–70, esp. pp. 148–9. 69 It may be significant that there is strong evidence for Wolsey’s interest in just this sort of prophecy. According to George Cavendish, he was aware of the ‘dun cow’ prophecy, even if he could not know its import, and recognized in the role of William Kingston, constable of the Tower, after his arrest a prophecy that he would ‘have his end at Kingston’: Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Sylvester, pp. 127–9, 151–2, 170, 243, 252–3. Cf. also Richard Britnell’s examination of the prophetic element in Cavendish’s Life itself: ‘Penitence and Prophecy: George Cavendish on the Last State of Cardinal Wolsey’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (1997), pp. 263–81. 70 On the cause of Wolsey’s death, see Cavendish, Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Sylvester, p. 178 and note (probably related to purgations and vomiting). 71 Pollard, Wolsey; J. A. Guy, The Cardinal’s Court: The Impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (Hassocks, Sussex, 1977); J. A. Guy, ‘Wolsey and the Parliament of 1523’, in Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton, ed. Claire Cross, David Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 1–18; J. A. Guy, ‘Wolsey and the Tudor Polity’, in Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art, ed. S. J. Gunn and P. G. Lindley (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 54–75; Peter Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas 68


as a man journeying to York, with power over three important noblemen, and with the implacable determination to burn the woman who foretold his doom. Interestingly, the only sign of Wolsey’s famous magnificence and splendour to appear in the prophecy is a reference to ‘a fine stall built for the Cardinall in the Minster, of Gold, Pearle, and precious stone’, which Shipton points out to Reginald Beasley, instructing him, ‘goe and present one of the pillers to King Henry, and hee did so’.72 Wolsey’s impact on York was in fact in some ways beneficial, and he represented a powerful patron for his archiepiscopal city.73 On the other hand, Wolsey was probably behind the reorganization of the common council on a less popular basis following trouble in the 1510s, and signs of an opposition to his influence even among the most senior merchants are to be found in the very rapid replacement as MP for the city of its recorder, Richard Page, a Wolsey man, on the Cardinal’s fall in 1529.74 Once again, the overwhelming impression provided by the prophecy is of a world perceived from the perspective of York, a city in which Wolsey never set foot as archbishop, and where he left an impression simply through his architectural commissions and impatient orders. Study of the personalities present in the prophecy therefore gives us further clues as to the authorship and readership of the prophecy. Those elements which refer to the theft of Percy’s skull from the gates of York are certainly after 1574, and the context in which the prophecy was created was one in which a memory of the most powerful men in the York region had blurred together personalities from the 1520s through to the 1560s.75 On the other hand, it is hard to see an author or audience outside the immediate vicinity, perhaps in the Midlands or East Anglia, choosing to associate these particular men in this particular role. This impression is decisively confirmed when we come to ‘Master Besley’, their chosen guide and the other important figure to appear. Reginald Beasley is first noticed in 1530, when he was the tenant of a house and lands

Wolsey (London, 1990). Nor is there sign of the popularity and acclaim described by (the very partial) George Cavendish: Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Sylvester, e.g. p. 144. 72 For Wolsey’s patronage of renaissance sculpture, see P. G. Lindley, ‘Playing Check-mate with Royal Majesty? Wolsey’s Patronage of Italian Renaissance Sculpture’, in Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Gunn and Lindley, pp. 261–85. Note that Wolsey’s tomb was intended for York Minster or the chapel intended for Cardinal College, Oxford; the design included four pillars, each nine feet high, which were only partly finished at his death (ibid., pp. 266, 270, 279). 73 Palliser, Tudor York, pp. 46–7, sees him in this light, citing as evidence the patent of 1523 which allowed the citizens the right to ship overseas wool and fells from most of Yorkshire. 74 York Civic Records, III, pp. 119, 127; Commons, 1509–1558, I, p. 253. 75 Cf. the judgement of J. S. Fletcher, Harrogate and Knaresborough (London and New York, 1920), p. 54, that the 1641 edition probably reflected the popular tradition of the previous eighty years. 69


belonging to Furness Abbey in the suburbs of York.76 From this point he began a rapid rise to be one of the most important lawyers in the North of England. He acted as a commissioner in a Star Chamber case in 1533, taking depositions in York, and was advising Lady Anne Salvan on a case in the court of the archdeacon of Durham in about 1534.77 In 1543, he appears to have been acting as clerk of York, and executed writs on behalf of the corporation. By 1547 he was already Recorder of Scarborough, and may have been appointed to that post shortly before being elected for the borough in 1545. His service as an MP for Thirsk and Knaresborough in the parliaments of 1553 and the April parliament of 1554 suggests a close relationship with the Council in the North, and in particular with the fifth earl of Shrewsbury, then its president. The degree to which Beasley acted as an important agent for Shrewsbury, albeit not as a formal member of the council, is suggested by his handling of the returns for the elections in Ripon, Knaresborough and Boroughbridge in October 1555.78 York itself chose him as one of its MPs in 1555. At that point, Beasley was a power to reckoned with among the nobility, gentry and most important towns in the North of England, and the chief agents of the central government there. Who better to be given responsibility for guiding three nobles to Shipton? Although he soon afterwards became ill, gave up his post of solicitor for the city of York, and sat, uneventfully, only once more in parliament (for Scarborough in 1559), Beasley’s influence is clearly betrayed by his ability to pass on the York solicitorship to his son-in-law Edward Beasley. Reginald Beasley was therefore one of the most influential lawyers working in York in the middle of the sixteenth century. Once again, therefore, the issue of the locality of the prophecy is confirmed, for this prominence, indeed notoriety, in the North and in York79 does not seem to have given Beasley much of a profile in the South, although he and Edward Beasley had chambers

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There is a short biography of Reginald in Commons, 1509–1558, I, pp. 425–6. Harrison suggested a John Beasley, sheriff of York in 1488, as a likely candidate (Mother Shipton Investigated, p. 51); the association with Wolsey makes this less likely than the identification with (the far better known) Reginald. 77 LP, vii. 125; Yorkshire Star Chamber Proceedings, II, ed. H. B. McCall, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series xlv (Leeds, 1911 for 1910), pp. 23–36 (including writ of 11 December 1533 to four including Beasley); York Civic Records, IV, pp. 91–2 (the city reports its lobbying of Beasley over the execution of writs regarding fishgarths, 11 April 1543). 78 HMC, A Calendar of the Shrewsbury and Talbot Papers in Lambeth Palace Library and the College of Arms, ed. Catharine Jamison, Gordon Richard Batho and E. G. W. Bill, 2 vols, Historic Manuscripts Commission, joint publications 6–7 (London, 1966–71), II, p. 349. The emphasis of the House of Commons article at this point, on Beasley’s dependence on Shrewsbury, seems to underestimate his importance and influence as one of the leading legal counsels in the North during these years. 79 Cf. the complaints that he abused his position in PRO, STAC 4/2/4. 70


in the Middle Temple in 1555.80 If we turn again to the question of the date of the prophecy, there is also the issue of the longevity of his reputation. Important though he may have been, Reginald Beasley’s powers were clearly waning from the mid-1550s, and he died some time during 1563.81 His sonin-law Edward may have continued his name and to an extent his reputation in the succeeding decades, dying as late as 1613 or shortly after, but he was not as prominent as Reginald had been.82 As a Catholic, he suffered periods of imprisonment from 1572 onwards, and between 1589 and 1591 was removed from the clerkship of York, which he held in succession to Reginald.83 What remained of their estate, in the manor of Skelton in Overton, passed to Edward’s son William, but it is hard to imagine that Reginald’s name was still prominent in the Yorkshire of the early seventeenth century. The use of Beasley as a figure of such authority in the presentation of the Shipton story strongly suggests an origin in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and probably in the generation after the death of the earl of Northumberland, which provides such a clear terminus post quem for this part of the prophecy. It is hard to resist the conclusion that these elements of the tradition would have prophesied the Beasleys’ fate if it had been initially formed much after 1572, and especially after Edward’s fall after 1591. On the other hand, the reference to the stabbing of Lord Mayor Agar in 1618 cannot date from before that time; and this was a celebrated crime, and the punishment inflicted on Coelson served to perpetuate its memory. Although Agar recovered, Coelson was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, fettered with heavy chains, and a large fine. He was also to be carried through the city at every quarter sessions on a horse, facing its tail and with a paper on his forehead denoting his crime. He was further obliged to stand in the pillory for certain hours at every return of the quarter sessions. Given that this took the direct experience of the punishment into the 1620s, this element of the prophecy was still directly relevant at that time. To draw together some preliminary conclusions, therefore, we can say that what appears a random collection of nonsensical and non-specific prophecies, which might have been cobbled together at any time and in any location, on closer examination emerges as a coherent developing tradition

80

A Calendar of the Middle Temple Records, ed. Charles Henry Hopwood (London, 1903), I, p. 104. 81 His will was made on 20 November 1562, and proved on 26 January 1564: Index of Wills in the York Registry A.D. 1554 to 1568, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series XIV ([Worksop], 1893), p. 13; York, Borthwick Institute for Historical Research, York Wills, Reginald ‘Beesley’. 82 Biography in Commons, 1509–1558, I, pp. 424–5. 83 Interestingly, in view of the Knaresborough connection, it was members of the Slingsby family who took the post from him: Commons, 1509–1558, I, p. 425, APC, n.s., XVII, A.D. 1588–1589 (London, 1898), p. 139; XXI, A.D. 1591 (London, 1900), pp. 161–2 (William, Gylford and Francis Slingsby are mentioned). 71


taking shape during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in York or its immediate vicinity. The personalities described were either local, as in the case of Reginald Beasley, with little interest or profile in the South of England, or national figures portrayed in their local context. That some elements were composed in the last thirty years of the sixteenth century is indicated by the references to Beasley and Northumberland and confirmed by the mention of the rebuilding of Ouse Bridge. The relationship to the local topography was strong, guaranteeing the prophecy survival in its locality until particular national circumstances thrust it into the national limelight in the 1640s. What does this show about the political culture which produced and sustained the prophecy tradition in the half-century before 1640? The location of the prophecy in York is significant in another way. The milieu from which it emerged was one of the most educated in the North of England. York’s educational tradition was strong. The provision of schooling during the late Middle Ages in the villages around the city, and in the city itself, meant that elementary reading was accessible to many.84 York, and especially the Minster and the merchant class of the city, also provided a focus for an educated elite. There was a long tradition, for example, of government clerks being drawn from Yorkshire; book ownership among merchants in the city was surprisingly extensive.85 This showed itself in an active trade among stationers, printers and bookbinders, who were more numerous in York before 1557 than in any provincial city except Oxford.86 While there are few signs that theological and intellectual debate in the city employed material as advanced as it

84 Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, Education and Learning in the City of York, 1300–1500, Borthwick Papers 55 (York, 1979); eadem, The Growth of Schooling, 1340–1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton, 1985). 85 Jennifer Isobel Kermode, ‘The Merchants of York, Beverley, and Hull in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, 2 vols (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sheffield, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 383–4; Jenny Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 111–12, 140; P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Lay Book Ownership in Late Medieval York: The Evidence of Wills’, The Library 6th ser. xvi (1994), pp. 181–9; M. G. A. Vale, Piety, Charity, and Literacy among the Yorkshire Gentry, 1370–1480, Borthwick Papers 50 (York, 1976). J. B. Friedman, ‘Books, Owners and Makers in Fifteenth-Century Yorkshire: The Evidence of Some Wills and Extant Manuscripts’, in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge and Wolfeboro, NH, 1989), pp. 111–27, is limited by its reliance on printed sources. 86 E. Gordon Duff, The English Provincial Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders to 1557 (Cambridge, 1912), pp. 42–65, 133f. (York had 27; Oxford had 44); A Memoir of the York Press with Notices of Authors, Printers, and Stationers, in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Robert Davies (Westminster, 1868); this includes the inventory of the York bookseller, John Foster, 1616. Cf. D. M. Palliser and D. G. Selwyn, ‘The Stock of a York Stationer, 1538’, The Library 5th ser. XXVII (1972), pp. 207–19.

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did in the South East of England, there was nonetheless a vigorous tradition of intellectual activity in York.87 In particular, there was a long history of prophetic activity in the North and in Yorkshire in particular.88 Yet no manuscript or printed version of the Shipton prophecy is known before 1641. Such a tradition as the prophecy of Mother Shipton could exist without passing into printed form, or even a significant presence in manuscript. Alongside the vigorous print and manuscript culture of York, therefore, there existed a vigorous continuity of the culture of prophetic transmission and interpretation examined in Chapter 1. We have therefore to consider a popular politics in the region of York in the early seventeenth century which involved prophecy traditions outside the print culture conventionally linked to it. The concerns of this popular politics, even at times when the country was at peace and there were few signs of internal strife, centred around four key themes. One of these was the crown and its ministers, seen as anonymous and rather threatening figures: epitomized by Wolsey in the prophecy. The second was the aristocracy of the region: it is significant that Percy, Darcy and Brandon are the only figures of power mentioned at length, not senior gentlemen or townsmen. The third key theme is the prosperity of the city of York, clearly so important to the well-being of all who lived in its hinterland; this has several aspects, including the physical structures of the city, such as the walls, bars and the Ouse bridge; the government of the city, with mentions of the mayor; and the impact of external intervention in the city, especially the arrival of the two judges. This was especially important given York’s difficult economic experience of the sixteenth century. Fourth, the threat from the Scots is prominent, and it is this which draws out the clearest links between the local and the national (or, perhaps, more broadly northern) perspective in the prophecy: three battles between the English and the Scots will be fought in the locality. There are, perhaps, some interesting omissions. There is little mention in the prophecy, for example, of the fate of religion and the church, even in the most general terms: religion, this suggests, was not a prime concern of York people in their understanding of the nature of past and future. In assessing the popular political traditions represented by the Shipton prophecy, it is finally worth considering the prophetic figure of Mother

87 Palliser (Tudor York, p. 229) noted that the vicar of All Saints, North Street, possessed Erasmus’s Adages and two works of Cicero in 1535, but that Mores, the York bookseller, had nothing comparable in his stock in 1538. Cf. the debate over the apparent lack of Lollardy in the North: A. G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509–1558 (Oxford, 1959), argued that this represents skilful concealment; J. A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414–1520 (London, 1965), preferred to see persecutions from 1528 as the result of a late infusion of Protestantism from across the North Sea, a view with which Palliser agreed: Tudor York, p. 233. 88 See above, pp. 24–5, 33–8; cf. Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse, ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS o.s. 293 (Oxford, 1988).

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Shipton herself. The earliest versions of the prophecy do not provide us with any specific passages of description about her, which was more usually a feature of sixteenth-century accounts than of later seventeenth-century ones. There is no attempt to lay down the reasons for her credibility as a prophet, this being entirely left to the proof represented by the fulfilment of her Wolsey prophecies and other predictions. There are, however, clear implications in the text as to her character and social position. The first thing to note is that she is a woman; her very title, Mother Shipton, does not give her a Christian name, but emphasizes her female gender. ‘Mother’ in this context implies not directly the bearing of children, but age and seniority. Shipton is an old woman, although the point is not directly made. Nothing whatsoever is stated or implied about her personal appearance; the only hint provided is the woodcut on the title-page, and this is probably simply a generic picture of a woman, age unclear, dressed slightly archaically for 1641; this is likely to have been the choice of the printer, and may reflect more on the stock available to him at the time than on the intended portrayal of the prophetess in the prophecy. Shipton’s relationship with a husband is also left unspecified; the strong implication is that she lives alone, perhaps suggesting she is a widow. Her social position is also unspoken in any direct sense; her house is not commented upon, although the implication of her coming to the door to greet the visiting noblemen is that it is not large and that she does not have servants. There is a danger, given her later reputation as a hag-faced witch, of assuming that characteristics of great age, ugliness and social marginalization were already attributed to her. They were not. In that sense, there is little apparent grounding of her credibility in the liminality of her position in society, and therefore access to hidden information. This differs from many of the other female prophets of the period.89 Perhaps Shipton was a marginal figure, as a single woman, although it is not clear if she is old; perhaps she was poor, although again this was not emphasized. What is far more important in the text is the contrast struck between Shipton’s social position and that of her visitors. This is conveyed in the prophecy itself, for example in the suggestion that the duke of Suffolk would be ‘as low as I am, and that’s a low one indeed’; it is also conveyed in some of the action, for example her calling Beasley into her cottage first, when he had intended to give his social superiors precedence. Indeed, this contrast is dramatized by the subtext of the whole Wolsey prophecy incident: the power of the mightiest subject in the land, set against one single woman in York. If anything, therefore, the text is far more about empowerment than it is about marginalization. Shipton’s lowly position is left unspoken, while the

89 Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992); Diane Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century’, in Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens, GA and London, 1992), pp. 139–58.

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power of the lords and Cardinal is emphasized. That power is set at nought: the handkerchief that fails to burn in the fire acts as a metaphor for Shipton’s body untouched by the mighty power of the king’s minister. The text is also empowering of Shipton in another way, in that it represents her as being able to get on with her visitors, in spite of their elevated social position and the terrible news they bring her. Before they deliver their message, Shipton makes them welcome with cakes and ale, and they ‘drunke and were very merry’. In this sense, the text occupies the world familiar to the reader of the ballads and early chapbooks, in which kings and queens fraternize with the lowliest of their subjects, such as ‘the King and the Cobbler’, in which Henry VIII and the cobbler ended up drinking together in Whitehall.90 The Mother Shipton tradition, in its earliest forms, therefore demonstrates the vitality of prophetic tradition as part of an oral political culture, autonomous from written and printed forms, in the York region. The main themes of this tradition concerned kings and noblemen, civic prosperity and the threat from the Scots. This oral culture could be shaped by developments; it could also potentially shape them in turn. It was a culture which treated national themes but from a specifically local perspective. And it was spoken from the perspective of the powerless about the powerful. Such a use of a local tradition for a more national market as was seen in the case of Shipton was not unusual during these years. Several other prophecies which first appeared during these months were also explicitly local, at least in their origins.91 Mother Shipton’s prophecy therefore gives us the chance to look at reasons for the print publication of particular prophecies, considering political circumstances and the attitudes of publishers and readers. The success of the Shipton prophecy depended on the relevance of a York tradition to the politics of the whole nation during a period of civil war, when the fate of the nation might turn on local events and the implications of a local political culture. This relevance guaranteed a wide audience and the sustained interest of several publishers. This audience and these publishers spanned the whole of society, from the urban and rural poor to the gentry, merchant elites and the royal family. The most prominent interpreter of her words, William Lilly, fitted Shipton’s prophecy into a narrative of the inevitable downfall of Charles I, the ‘White King’. Yet this was not a conclusive appropriation: others, including royalists, found relevance in Shipton’s words, and a resonance in the popular imagination which made participation in the

90

Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1981), pp. 221–4; there is also the story of the king and the tanner, in which the king concerned is Edward IV (pp. 251–2). 91 One example of this was Otwell Binns, associated with Huddersfield: ‘The Prophecy of Old Otwell Binns kept by Mr. Smith, Vicar of Huddersfield Forty Years’, which appeared in Sixe Strange Prophesies ([London], 1642), sig. A4 (STC S3923). Joshua Smith was vicar 1598–1619: D. F. E. Sykes, The History of Huddersfield and its Vicinity (Huddersfield, 1898), p. 143. 75


debate imperative. Belief in the words of Mother Shipton therefore allowed her tradition to be refurbished when the reasons for its original popularity faded; as the threat of civil war diminished, Richard Head reworked Shipton as the prophecy of Restoration monarchy and Anglican conformity, only for others to add to his version in the cause of Exclusion and, eventually, Revolution once more. The first question to consider is the identity of those who published and sold the Shipton prophecy in seventeenth-century England. The format of the prophecies is not that of the single-sheet ballads, nor that of longer quarto or octavo publications, so it is not immediately obvious which groups of publishers would choose to publish Shipton. Establishing the people who promoted Shipton may help establish the intended market of the work. Indications are that the first publishers of the prophecy were not long-standing members of the trade. Richard Lowndes, responsible for the first edition of Mother Shipton in London in 1641, The prophesie of Mother Shipton,92 had only emerged as a London bookseller in the previous two years. The first works sold by him to survive are religious, such as a third edition of Lancelot Andrewes’s Institutiones Piae.93 In the same year as he produced the account of Mother Shipton, his work included a challenge to the destruction of altar rails and an account of the speech of John Pym to the Lords in November 1641. 94 Although Andrewes had been one of the first authors he had sold, Lowndes seems to have moved to cater to the market for anti-Arminian texts among many of London’s population. The links between York and London are also important in this connection.95 In 1637, the carriers of York left from the sign of the Bell outside Ludgate on Saturdays or Mondays, and returned on Fridays. York then acted as a major staging post for all points north as far as Berwick.96 Since Richard Lowndes’s shop adjoined Ludgate, it may well be that he had a view to selling a large proportion of the production of his edition of the prophecies through these carriers. At the very least, we can see significance in the production of the text by a bookseller well placed for the trade along the great north road, rather than, for example, by one whose obvious markets

92

STC S3445; BL E. 181. (15.). First published 1630 (STC 601); also a Bible (2814) and Anthony Stafford’s Honour and Vertue, Triumphing over the Grave (23126). STC, vol. 3, Katherine F. Pantzer, A Printers’ and Publishers’ Index. Other Indexes & Appendices. Cumulative Addenda & Corrigenda (London, 1991). 94 I. W., Certaine Affirmations in Defence of the Pulling Down of Communion Rails, by Divers Rash and Misguided People, Judiciously and Religiously Answered, by a Gentleman of Worth (September 1641); John Pym, The Substance of Mr. Pymms Speach to the Lords in Parliament (noted by Thomason on 9 November 1641). 95 By the sixteenth century at least York’s most important trade outside its own region was with London: Palliser, Tudor York, pp. 193, 272. 96 John Taylor, The Carriers Cosmographie; Or a Briefe Relation of the Innes in and Neere London (London, 1637), sig. C3, A2v. 93

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lay to the south of the Thames. Lowndes was a bookseller with an eye to the market for topical works, and one who might look to market his work in the North.97 Even if Lowndes expected a large proportion of his market for the Shipton prophecy to be in the North of England, it clearly made a rapid and powerful impression in London. G. Smith, who took up the prophecy and included it in his Two Strange Prophecies, was also a relatively new arrival on the London publishing scene, not having been active before 1641. It took several months for better established figures to take on the publication of the Shipton prophecy. Richard Harper, who produced Foure Severall Strange Prophesies in 1642, had been selling books in London since 1633.98 His involvement is interesting, for the work he had tended to promote in his early years consisted mainly of ballads. Even in 1640, although a political tone had appeared in work such as Wye Saltonstall’s Complaint of Time against the Tumultuous and Rebellious Scots (1639),99 Harper’s work was overwhelmingly of the variety of Humfrey Crouch’s A Pleasant New Song that Plainely doth Show, that al are Beggars, both High and Low, or the anonymous Discontented Married Man. Or, a Merry New Song.100 The prophecy was clearly entering the tradition of publication of ballads, and would have appeared alongside Harper’s stock of apolitical ditties. Yet the fact that Harper was the man who took it into this tradition is important, for it was the North and the Scots who represented the vast majority of his more topical publications. The year 1640 had also seen the promotion by Harper of Late Newes from the North: Being, a Relation of the Skirmish betwixt the English and Scots, Neere the River of Tine, a similar work entitled A Briefe Relation of the Scots Hostile Entrance into this Kingdome of England, over the River of Tweed, and another edition of Saltonstall’s Complaint of Time.101 The prophecy is another indication that a publisher with a prior record almost exclusively in the ballad market wished to move into the market for more directly politically relevant material.102 The trend towards the publication of Shipton by ballad specialists became very clear when Francis Coles, who

97 We have the inventory of a Hull bookseller, J. Awdeley, from 1644, which might have given an indication of whether editions of the Shipton prophecy were sold in Yorkshire: C. W. Chillon, ‘The Inventory of a Provincial Bookseller’s Stock of 1644’, The Library 6th ser. I (1979), pp. 126–43. Unfortunately, the inventory is too unspecific on such cheap productions. 98 STC, vol. 3, Pantzer, Printers’ and Publishers’ Index, p. 76. 99 STC 21643.5. 100 Respectively STC 6074, 17232. 101 Respectively STC 18501.5, 22007.5, 21644. 102 Thomas Harper was in fact arrested on 5 June 1641, in the face of allegations that he intended to produce a collected edition of parliamentary speeches: Sheila Lambert, ‘The Beginning of Printing for the House of Commons, 1640–42’, The Library 6th ser. III (1981), pp. 43–61, at p. 51.

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had been one of the ballad partners from 1629,103 took up the work in 1648. Through the 1640s, Coles had been one of the major promoters of works by Richard Climsell104 and Martin Parker.105 If these publishers were moving in the direction of more serious political works – and Francis Coles also produced many political pamphlets and proclamations – then Shipton and other prophecies represented an excellent way of doing so while continuing to draw on the strengths, in terms of distribution and marketing, which they had developed as ballad producers. The other approach we can take when assessing the implications of the initial editions of Shipton’s prophecy is to consider the political context of the time. Lowndes’s edition was noted by Thomason as appearing in December 1641. This was a time of serious crisis and, significantly, shortly after the king’s return from Scotland, which of course brought him through Yorkshire. As has already been noted, the adoption of the prophecy by Harper was one sign of his interest in anti-Scottish literature. The king returned to London on 25 November, but the crisis returned and worsened: on 21 December radicals were successful in the Common Council elections in London, and the next day the convicted murderer and papist Colonel Lunsford was appointed Lieutenant of the Tower of London.106 It may well be, as Harrison suggested, that the king’s journeys through York provided the opportunity for the prophecy to be introduced to men with contacts in London publishing;107 just as important, however, was the immediacy of the prophecy’s apparent relevance at a time when the king was visiting Scotland and Yorkshire, and when rumour, well founded in reality, suggested that he might use Scottish or papist arms against his opponents. Yorkshire was seen as a potential threat due to the numbers of Catholics there: it was one of six counties singled out by the Lords on 18 August 1641 (in the course of Charles’s journey north) as being worthy of special attention in the disarming of recusants.108 The year 1642 saw the production of several editions of the prophecy against the background of deepening crisis. After the abortive attempt on the five members, Charles again went north, arriving back in York on 18 March 1642. Although the response he received was now relatively low-key,

103

STC, vol. 3, Pantzer, Printers’ and Publishers’ Index, p. 43. E.g. The Kind Hearted Creature: or the Prettest [sic] Jest that Er’e You Know, STC 5425; and The Praise of London: Or, a Delicate New Ditty, STC 5428.5. 105 E.g. Robin Conscience, or, Conscionable Robin, STC 19266; The Distressed Virgin: Or, the False Young Man and the Constant Maid, STC 19228; and No Naturall Mother, but a Monster, STC 19261. On Martin Parker, cf. Susan Aileen Newman, ‘The Broadside Ballads of Martin Parker: A Bibliographical and Critical Study’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1975). 106 Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, corrected paperback edn (London, 1985), pp. 169, 171–7. 107 Harrison, Mother Shipton Investigated. 108 LJ, IV, pp. 369–70. 104

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the king stayed there until he moved to Nottingham to raise his standard on 22 August.109 Another edition of Lowndes’s version followed in 1642 hard on the heels of the first;110 Thomason noted Two Strange Prophesies in March 1642, precisely as the king returned to the city.111 Harper’s Foure Severall Strange Prophesies must be after 2 July, but not long after, because of the ‘strange newes from Oundle in Northamptonshire’ of that date appended to it;112 in the last few months of the year came Sixe Strange Prophecies, 1642.113 A True Coppy of Mother Shiptons Last Prophecies, printed for one T.V., also appeared in 1642.114 No volume of prophecy was complete without Shipton’s words, including for example, also from 1642 (June), A True Coppie of a Prophesie which was found in [an] old ancient house of one Master Truswell . . . Whereunto is added Mother Shipton’s Prophesies.115 By this stage, Shipton’s prophecies were virtually canonical among the populace at large, and one (unfortunately unidentified) ‘great statesman’ referred to them at every opportunity.116 Seven Severall Strange Prophecies followed in 1642, with a further edition in August 1643; Nine Notable Prophecies appeared in 1644.117

109 Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, p. 231. CSPD, 1641–1643, pp. 300 (Nicolas to Sir Thomas Rowe, 23 March 1642), 307 (duke of York welcomed to York on Saturday last, same to same, 20 April). 110 STC S3446. 111 ‘The second prophesie of Mother Shipton’, in Two Strange Prophesies, predicting wonderfull events to betide this yeere of danger; named Mother Shipton (London, 1642) (STC T3537; BL E. 141. (2.)). There seems to be no record of Three Strange Prophecies, if it ever existed. Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, p. 244. 112 (London, 1642); STC S3443; BL C. 40. f. 12. 113 STC S3923. 114 STC S3454. 115 (London, 1642) (STC T2633): BL E. 149. (16.) (June); BL, 718. g. 47. 116 The phrase is Thomas’s: Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971), p. 413; Christopher Syms, The Swords Apology, and Necessity in the Act of Reformation (London, 1644), sig. C4v (‘how frequent a great statesman there was about six years since in evry meeting in breaching and inculcating mother Shiptons prophecy. I confes, I then suspected (and his unmerciful proceedings against men trading from the Western Ilands with tobacco to their utter ruine gave mee good caus) that he was a pensioner to Rome and Spain, and a greater friend, and more faithful servant to them in overthrowing the English plantation in the Western Ilands, than he was to his king & country. His own cariage hath since that time betrayed him to shame, and in good time may [reading hard] to punishment’; Nuncius Propheticus. Or, A Collection of Some Old Predictions (London, 1642), sig. A2: ‘have all of them been of longer standing in mans memory then my great Grandfather, in whose dayes they were frequent’. We know that one correspondent of Lord Digby’s on 13 September 1645 was ‘deeply struck’ by Lilly’s predictions of disaster for the nobility in England’s Merlin: CSPD, 1645–1647, p. 135; Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, p. 76. 117 Seven . . . (London, 1642) (STC S2739); (another edition, London, 1643 – noted by Thomason on 16 August: BL, E. 250. (3.); for Richard Harper) (S2740). Nine Notable Prophecies (London, 1644) (STC N1160).

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It was in 1644 that a major reinterpretation of the Shipton prophecy took place. Up to this point there is no clear sign that its publication was seen as propaganda for any personality or side in the civil war, aside from its clarity on the threat from the Scots. The reinterpretation was the work of William Lilly.118 In 1644, Lilly published his A Prophecy of the White King; and Dreadfull Dead-man Explaned, and in 1645 he included Shipton in his Collection of Ancient and Modern Prophecies.119 This made little alteration to the previous versions of the text itself, although it added a few short passages, such as the intended humour of the words, following the prediction that Percy’s head would end in France and his body in York, ‘they all laughed, saying that would be a great lap between the Head and the Body’.120 Lilly’s main contribution to the Shipton tradition was to associate her with the corpus, we might even say canon, of prophecy which Lilly created. His rigorous approach and excellent marketing meant that those prophecies he included were guaranteed an enormous exposure to the public.121 Ever since the appearance of his Prophecy of the White King, Lilly had been developing for the public an analysis of the civil war based on prophecy, especially that of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey’s account included references to events under a White King, whom Lilly identified with Charles I, crowned in 1625, against the advice of at least one of his courtiers, in robes of white. Lilly’s interpretation depended on identifying the White King with the Dreadful Deadman, a feature of the Erceldoun tradition who had appeared in John Harvey’s A Discoursive Probleme Concerning Prophecies of 1588; the deadman had been added by Lilly to

118

Most work on Lilly focuses on his astrology rather than his treatment of prophecy: Derek Parker, Familiar to All: William Lilly and Astrology in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1975); Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, pp. 35–6, 54–9, 76–7, 182–90; Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1989). 119 A Prophesy of the White King; and Dreadfull Dead-man Explaned: To Which is Added the Prophecie of Sibylla Tiburtina, and Prediction of John Kepler: All of Especial Concernment for these Times (London, 1644) (STC L2240); A Collection of Ancient and Moderne Prophesies concerning these present times . . . The nativities of T. Earle of Strafford and W. Laud . . . Archbishop of Canterbury . . . And the Speech Intended by the Earle of Strafford to have been Spoken at his Death (London, 1645) (STC L2217). 120 These few changes are discussed in the Heywood edition of 1881, p. xiii; more important typographical changes are noticed in the discussion of the location of the Shipton prophecy, above, p. 62. The lack of variation is made rather too absolute in Friedman, Miracles and Pulp Press, p. 275, n. 6. 121 One of Lilly’s prophecies sold over 1,800 copies in three days; several editions later, it had sold over 4,500 copies: Friedman, Miracles and Pulp Press, p. 74; H. R. Plomer, ‘A Printer’s Bill in the Seventeenth Century’, The Library n.s. 7 (1906), pp. 32–45. Lilly was criticized by astrologers such as John Gadbury for his credulity in publishing Shipton and similar prophecies ‘so slighted and contemned by many’ (Prophesy of the White King, p. 2). Their anger, however, underlines the tremendous influence they knew his imprimatur gave to a prophecy, and vice versa. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, p. 211. 80


Shipton, which meant that Shipton’s prophetic tradition could be recruited to Lilly’s arguments.122 From 1644, therefore, much of the publication of the Shipton prophecy, and much of its audience, assumed it foretold the fall of Charles I. There was then, interestingly, an almost complete pause in the flood of Shipton publications, a pause that can be explained in relation to the shift in the emphasis of the conflict away from the Scots and their possible threat, expressed through Shipton’s prophecy about York. Shipton only reappeared regularly with the crisis surrounding the second civil war, the disbanding of the army and the execution of the king. Twelve strange proehesies, besides Mother Shiptons, newly printed for Francis Coles, was noted by Thomason in May 1648, following Charles’s signature of the Engagement with the Scots in the December of the previous year, and soon after the outbreak of the second civil war.123 Thirteen . . . and Foureteene Strange Prophesies, besides Mother Shipton’s, followed in 1648 and early in the following year.124 Crucially, the Scots had re-entered the political stage as a threat to England. There were then three editions of the prophecy in 1651, as the Scots were defeated by Cromwell,125 and as the collapse of the protectorate approached, another edition of Shiptons Prophesie in 1659.126 Friedman has argued that this association of Shipton with the parliamentarian interpretation of Lilly rendered her words less relevant in the 1660s.127 The death of Charles I demonstrated the fulfilment of one element of the White King prophecy, and Cromwell seemed to fit the persona of the Eagle’s chick, the great statesman who would succeed him. Yet, Friedman argued, royalists who wished to find legitimacy for the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in ancient prophecy had some difficulty with the Shiptonian imagery left them by Lilly. Royalists like Christopher Syms had even in the

122

John Harvey, A Discoursive Probleme Concerning Prophecies (London, 1588). STC S3455. 124 13: BL E. 525. (14.); STC S3453. 14: for Richard Harper, London. BL E. 527. (7.) [STC S3444]. 125 Shiptons Prophesie, by T.H. for Francis Coles and Richard Harper, 1651: STC S3447; Five Strange and Wonderfull Prophesies and Predictions of Severall Men Foretold Long Since: All which are likely to Come to Passe in these our Distracted Times, s.l., 1651 (which includes ‘Mother Shipton’s Prophesies, more fuller and larger than ever before was printed’): STC F1123; and The Second Part of Mother Shipton’s Prophecies (London, 1651?): STC S3451. 126 A new edition of that by T.H. for Francis Coles and Richard Harper, 1651, produced by A.B. for Francis Coles: STC S3447A. The pattern of editions in the late 1640s, 1650s and 1660s suggests an answer to one possible criticism of this approach. At these times, the frequency of publication of Shipton seems to run counter to overall levels of publication. For example, only about 1,000 titles p.a. appeared in 1650–8; and the total for 1663, below 1,000, was part of another decline after the boom stimulated by the Restoration. Wilmer G. Mason, ‘The Annual Output of Wing-Listed Titles, 1649–1684’, The Library 5th ser. 29 (1974), pp. 219–20. 127 Friedman, Miracles and Pulp Press, pp. 231–6. 123

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1640s been at pains to point out that Shipton as expounded by Lilly did not necessarily provide an answer to the problematic issues of the later 1640s and 1650s. Friedman therefore argued that the Restoration had to be interpreted through a different stock of prophecies. Yet such prophetic traditions as Shipton’s could not be fossilized through their inclusion in printed texts and commentaries, because they remained vibrant oral traditions firmly founded in popular political debate. Lilly’s interpretation may have palled; some royalists may have preferred to reject Shipton outright; yet she lived on and continued to be published even when Lilly’s words seemed most misplaced. In 1663, another version of Mother Shipton’s Prophesies was produced, differing little if at all from the editions of the civil war years.128 Yet the potential for continuing topicality is indicated by the coincidence of imagery first used in 1649 with events of that year. The woodcut, of Cardinal Wolsey sighting York from Cawood, included a nude representation of John Saltmarsh, chaplain to Sir Thomas Fairfax, who shortly before the general’s death had criticized him for persecuting the saints and prophesied the army’s ruin.129 In 1663, Saltmarsh’s one-time patron Sir John Hotham was suspected of involvement in the Farnley Wood conspiracy. Once again, but probably for the last time in Charles’s reign, the possibility of civil war resulting from plotting and rebellion in the North had raised its head, pointing up the prophecy’s relevance.130 Far from being a period in which it was rendered irrelevant by events, therefore, the 1660s was a crucially important decade in the development of the prophecy tradition.131 The end of civil strife, especially involving Scotland and the North of England, might have made the prophecy less immediately relevant after about 1663. What appears to have dramatically revitalized the prophecy was the traumatic year 1666. The precondition for

128

By T.P. for Francis Coles: STC S3448. He resigned the rectory of Heslerton (Yorkshire) in autumn 1643, on account of his scruples over tithe, being put into the sequestered living of Brasted (Kent) before January 1645: ODNB; Bulstrode Whitelock, Memorials of the English Affairs from the Beginning of the Reign of Charles the First to the Happy Restoration of King Charles the Second, 4 vols (Oxford, 1853), II, pp. 252–3. John Saltmarsh, A Letter from the Army (London, 1647) (STC S490); Sparkles of Glory (London, 1647) (STC S504) – his two works of 1647, the year of his death. First appearance of his prophecy: Wonderfull Predictions Declared in a Message . . . to . . . Sir Thomas Fairfax (London, 1648) (STC S507). It was then linked to Shipton in Twelve Strange Proehecies, noted by Thomason in May 1648. The image of Saltmarsh had first appeared in Foureteen Strange Prophesies (1649). One of Lady Denbigh’s correspondents had heard of the ‘profisies and visions’, and thought Saltmarsh affected by ‘mellincoly’: HMC, Denbigh, pp. 80–1 (23 January 1647). 130 Memoirs of Sir John Reresby: The Complete Text and a Selection from his Letters, ed. Andrew Browning; 2nd edn, ed. Mary K. Geiter and W. A. Speck (London, 1991), pp. 46–8. Farnley Wood plot: Thomas D. Whitaker, Loidis and Elmete (Leeds, 1816–[20]); Depositions in York Castle, Surtees Society 40 (Durham, 1861), pp. 11–12, 115–17, 119 (cf. pp. 102–10, on the associated ‘Kaber-rig Plot’ in Westmorland). 131 Pace what I have written elsewhere. 129

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this revitalization was the continuing currency of the prophecy. As soon as the scale of the damage caused by the Great Fire of London became clear, even as the city was still burning, it appears to have been assumed that Shipton’s prophecy had accurately foretold the disaster.132 Pepys famously reported what he had been told by Colonel Thomas Middleton, a Navy Commissioner, who had been on the Prince with Prince Rupert when confronted by news of the fire: ‘all the Prince said was that now Shipton’s prophecy was out’.133 The scale and depth of this belief is indicated by a letter of 6 September 1666, from Windsor Sandys to Viscount Scudamore. Sandys stated that thousands believed Shipton’s prophecy foretold the fire and he implied that this belief among the population led to a fatalistic unwillingness to attack the fire with determination.134 The implication is an almost universal penetration of the words of the earliest versions of the Shipton tradition, and a belief in them of sufficient strength to convince the majority that resistance to the conflagration was impossible. Given this level of awareness of and belief in the Shipton prophecy, it is not surprising that the work should be republished at about this time. It is, in fact, very likely that the following year saw the publication of the first version of Richard Head’s reworking of the prophecy, The Life and Death of Mother Shipton, for although no editions produced before that of 1677 survive,135 the title-page describes the work as collected until this present Year 1667, and this seems to correspond to an entry in the Stationers’ Register.136 This revised version of the story of Mother Shipton was soon also given theatrical form. The play The Life of Mother Shipton, by T[homas] T[hompson], which probably dates from the years 1668–71,137 is, at the very least, heavily

132

The scepticism of Walter George Bell, The Great Fire of London in 1666, popular edition (London, 1923), pp. 20, 316, 341, is correct only in so far as the highly specific prediction, that London in ’sixty-six would be burnt to ashes, appeared after the event. Stephen Porter, The Great Fire of London (Stroud, 1996), p. 30, simply cites Bell to support a similar scepticism. 133 The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 10 vols (London, 1970–83), vol. VII, 1666 (1972), p. 333 (20 October). The clear descriptions of the fire in Head’s edition of the prophecies post-date the event itself; yet this does not undermine the point that Shipton’s general warnings about London’s fate were seen immediately as being fulfilled. Note the presence of Shipton in Pepys’s own library: Spufford, Small Books, pp. 145–6. 134 Bell, Great Fire, p. 316. 135 (London, 1677) (STC H1257). 136 The Stationers’ Register includes an entry for 30 August 1667, to Mrs Ann Maxwell, ‘The life and death of Mother Shipton, or true Relacon of what she did and spakt’: J. G. McManaway, ‘Philip Massinger and the Restoration Journal’, ELH: A Journal of English Literary History I (1934), pp. 276–304, at p. 294. Donald Wing, A Gallery of Ghosts: Books Published Between 1641–1700 Not Found in the Short-Title Catalogue ([New York], 1967), p. 118 (O H1256A); A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers; from 1640–1708 A.D., 3 vols (London, 1913), vol. II, p. 381. 137 Pierre Danchin, The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration, 1660–1700, 4 parts in 7 83


derived from Head’s work.138 In the very next year another new production sprang from the tradition, Mother Shiptons Christmas Carrols of 1668.139 The crucial individual in this reworking was Richard Head. Ruined twice as a bookseller through gambling losses, Head took to ‘scribbling’ for the booksellers at 20s. a sheet.140 His most famous work was The English Rogue Described, an account of a professional thief which is in some ways autobiographical. This was eventually published, after being refused a licence on grounds of its indecency, in 1665.141 Head’s other works fall into two categories: further writing on the theme of criminality and lewd stories, and populist accounts of war and exploration. In the former category, he produced the Canting Academy, or the Devil’s Cabinet opened, which was largely borrowed from Thomas Harman’s A Caueat for Commen Cursetors Vvlgarely Called Uagabones (first known edition 1567) or from his own English Rogue.142 In the latter is the work with which he followed the English Rogue, The Red Sea, a Description of the Sea-fight between the English and Dutch, with an Elegy on Sir

vols (Nancy, 1981–8), I (1981), pp. 295–6: 1668–9 (?); McManaway, ‘Massinger’, pp. 293–6: 1668–71. The BL catalogue and STC give the date [1660?], but this is rendered unlikely by the period of activity of the bookseller involved, T. Passenger, from c. 1667. Thompson’s work: T[homas] T[hompson], The Life of Mother Shipton: A New Comedy (London, 1668–9?); The English Rouge a Nevv Comedy (London, 1668); Midsummer-moon; or, the Livery Man’s Complaint (London, 1682). 138 There is the possibility that the plays ascribed to Thompson are in fact by Head: Ann Maxwell, the recipient of the licence for Shipton in 1667 was the widow of David Maxwell, whose business was taken up on his death in c. 1665 by Peter Lillicrap, who printed Thompson’s Mother Shipton and was also the printer of Head’s The Red Sea, a Description of the Sea-fight between the English and Dutch, with an Elegy on Sir C. Minnes (London, 1666). In addition, the subject matter of both The English Rouge and The Life of Mother Shipton echoes Head publications, and in the case of The Life of Mother Shipton the similarity of language, for example in the charms Shipton repeats, is great. McManaway, ‘Massinger’, p. 294n, rejects these speculations, largely because of the existence of the poem, Midsummermoon, published under Thompson’s name in 1682. The ascription to Thompson is confirmed by the signed dedication to Mrs Alice Barret in The English Rouge of 1668: McManaway, ‘Massinger’, p. 292. The Thompson plays coincide with a suspicious gap in Head’s publications list, however; there is nothing new in print after 1679. 139 By P. Lillicrap for William Harris: STC S3442. This revival of interest in Shipton in 1667 also resulted in a Dutch version: Moeder Schiptons Prophecyen van Engelandt: Ofte de Prophecyen van Schiptons Vrouw, gepropheteert in het Jaer 1509, ten tijden van Koningh Henricus den Achtsten Koning van Engelandt (The Hague, 1667). 140 ODNB. 141 STC H1246 (for Henry Marsh); subsequent editions in 1666, 1667, 1668, 1669, 1672 and 1680 are STC H1247–48cA. A reprint of the work, and of three subsequent parts written by others, was issued in 1874, 4 vols, 8vo. For debate on the authorship of the third part of the work, cf. C. W. R. D. Moseley, ‘Richard Head’s “The English Rogue”: A Modern Mandeville?’ Yearbook of English Studies 1 (1971), pp. 102–7; Paul Salzman, ‘Alterations to The English Rogue’, The Library 6th ser. IV (1982), pp. 49–52. 142 (London, [1567]) (STC 12787). 84


C. Minnes.143 In a lighter vein is The Floating Island, or a New Discovery, relating the Strange Adventure on a late Voyage from Lambethana to Villa Franca,144 or Western Wonder, or O, Brazile, an Inchanted Island discovered.145 Head also dabbled in astrology, with Nevvs from the Stars . . . by Meriton Latroon in 1673.146 It is perhaps then not surprising that from 1667 onward, Head appears to have been heavily involved with the production of work on Mother Shipton. Richard Head’s transformation of the prophecy of Mother Shipton was so fundamental that it requires systematic treatment. After 1667, there were two quite different versions of the tradition available. It is therefore important to establish how Head changed Shipton’s prophecy. It is first important to recognize that the work is heavily plagiarized.147 The early sections depend heavily on stock sensationalized accounts of witchcraft, the supernatural and the life of the vagabond and the marginalized poor which were Head’s speciality. The latter sections, describing the prophetic history of the previous two hundred years, are mainly taken from the major chroniclers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The intersection between the two worlds was provided by the episodes in which Shipton divined the future for two heirs, placed loosely under Henry VIII at a time of war with the French. This was a period very familiar to the readers of chapbook literature. Few such stories were placed in a clearly defined historical past, but two at least located themselves at such a time. Long Meg of Westminster, which appeared in print for the first time in 1582, described a Lancashire woman coming to Henry VIII’s London, meeting Sir Thomas More, and going to Boulogne to fight 143 STC H1275 (London, 1666). Sir Christopher Minnes (more usually Myngs; d. 1666) died heroically after attacking the Dutch vice-admiral de Liefde at the battle of North Foreland: Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews, vol. 6, p. 278; vol. 7, pp. 150, 155, 160, 165–6, 180; ODNB. 144 STC H1253 ([London], 1673). This is a scurrilous account of London; cf. Edward Godfrey Cox, A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel, 3 vols (Seattle, 1938), II, pp. 472–3. 145 STC H1277 (for N.C., 1674). In the style of the Isle of Pines, Gulliver’s Travels, etc. Cox suggests that the Irish Hy Brasil, the land of the ever-young, situated far out in the Western Sea, might be the inspiration for Brazile: Cox, Literature of Travel, II, p. 473. Al-man-sir, or Rhodomontados of the most Horrible, Terrible, and Invincible Captain, Sir Frederick Fightall, by [Jaques Gaultier] (London, 1672) (STC G381) has been wrongly ascribed to Head. 146 STC H1265A (n.p., 1673). Also: Hic et Ubique: or, the Humors of Dublin (London, 1663) (STC H1255); Jackson’s Recantation (London, 1674) (STC H1256); Nugae Venales, 2nd edn (London, 1675) (STC H1266); Proteus Redivivus: Or the Art of Wheedling (London, 1675) (STC H1272); The Miss Displayed (London, 1675) (STC H1264); The Life and Death of the English Rogue (London, 1679) (STC H1262). 147 Allan H. Lanner, ‘Richard Head’s Theophrastan Characters, Notes and Queries 215 (1970), p. 259; Margaret C. Katanka, ‘Goodman’s “Holland’s Leaguer” (1632) – Further Examples of the Plagiarism of Richard Head’, Notes and Queries 219 (1974), pp. 415–17; as well as being, without doubt, ‘palpable invention’: Fletcher, Harrogate and Knaresborough, p. 54. The play of 1668–71 is also plagiarized from Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside: McManaway, ‘Massinger’, p. 296.

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the French. More famously, Jack of Newbury described a wealthy Berkshire clothier who impressed his queen, Catherine of Aragon, when he provided well-clad mounted and foot soldiers for the Flodden campaign.148 That said, the process of selection and adaptation is itself suggestive of Head’s attitudes and those of his audience. One aspect of this change is seen in the approach to Shipton herself. A possibly old and single woman, seen in the editions of the 1640s, was transformed in the Head edition into a witch: the daughter of the devil, ugly, malevolent, marginalized yet imbued with a power that wins her the respect of her neighbours. Immediately on her birth, those present were struck by ‘the strange and unparalleled Physiognomy of the Child, which was so misshapen, that it is altogether impossible to express it fully in words, or the most ingenious to Limn her in colours, though many persons of eminent qualifications in that Art have often attempted it, but without success’. Head goes into depth in describing Shipton’s face: very great goggling, but sharp and fiery eyes, her nose of an incredible and unproportionable length, having in it many crooks and turnings, adorned with many strange Pimples of divers colours, as red, blew, and mixt, which like Vapours of Brimston gave such a lustre to her affrighted spectators in the dead time of the Night, that one of them confest several times in my hearing, that her Nurse needed no other light to assist her in the performance of her duty: Her Cheeks were of a black swarthy Complexion, much like a mixture of the Black and yellow juandies; wrinkled, shrivelled and very hollow, insomuch, that as the Ribs of her Body, so the impression of her teeth were easily to be discerned, through both sides of her face, answering one side to the other, like the notches in a Valley, excepting only two of them which stood quite out of her mouth, in imitation of the Tushes of a wild Bore, or the Tooth of an Elephant, a thing so strange in an Infant that no age can parallel: Her Chin was of the same complexion as her Face, turning up towards her mouth . . .

Her neck was malformed, causing her body to be twisted, and ‘her left side was quite turned the contrary way, as if her body had been screw’d together piece after piece ; and not rightly placed: her left shoulder hanging just Perpendicular to her Fundament’ (pp. 10–13).149 Shipton appeared to be associated with cats, possibly as familiars: even as a baby, she frightened her neighbours when they entered the house and a ‘very strange noise [was] heard in the next Room to them, as if it had been a consort of Catts’.150 At other times, the animals

148

Spufford, Small Books, pp. 238–45, discusses the small numbers of realistic historical novels and analyses these two examples. 149 Shipton also had the ability to alter her shape, as when as a baby she might be found ‘stretcht out to a prodigious length, taller than the tallest living, and at other times as much decreased or shortned’. 150 Cf. the ‘two great black Catts’ which appear later in the same incident. 86


associated with Shipton were definitely her father, who visited ‘sometimes visibly in the form of a Cat, Dog, or Hog; at other times invisibly by noises’. Shipton also had imps, who joined in the torment of her neighbours, as when they were forced to dance round a pair of Yarwingles, ‘carrying upon every one of their shoulders an Imp in the likeness of a Monkey or Ape, which hung close upon them; and when ever they slackened their pace, these Sprits pricked them forward’. Shipton was also able to summon up unearthly sounds and music, such as the ‘noise like the treading of people upon stones . . . [and] very sweet musical harmony of several notes’ which signalled the conclusion of this incident. She could make inanimate objects move, as when ‘the Chairs and Stools would frequently march upstairs and down, and they usually plaid below at Bowles with the Trenchers and dishes’ (pp. 13–14). Shipton combined extraordinary ability at school, learning to read remarkably rapidly, with eccentric behaviour, talking and laughing to herself,151 and it was this that drew others into conversation which revealed her powers of foresight (pp. 14–15). This transformation of the figure of Mother Shipton herself is interesting given seventeenth-century attitudes to both prophecy and witchcraft. Head appears to have deliberately subverted the conventions of radical Protestant prophesying in his portrayal of Shipton. She is in many way similar to the marginal figures, old, single, poor women, whose very marginalization gave them access to other-worldly inspiration. Yet this inspiration is here clearly linked to the trappings of witchcraft, carried to levels of burlesque. The ability to foretell the future had always been something which the godly ‘prophet’ and the witch had shared. The previous absence of any explanation for the source of Shipton’s inspiration was now decisively replaced by a definitive categorization as witchcraft and the work of the devil. This is a clear attack on those who spoke inspired words, which fits with Head’s attitude to radical Protestant sects. It does set up a potentially uneasy tension over the validity of the words Shipton speaks, however. Now clearly identified as a witch, she nonetheless prophesies the victory of monarchy and conformist Anglicanism. The reader is left to trust the daughter of Satan as an authority on which to base the triumph of God’s design for church and state.152 Another important change occurred in the approach to Shipton’s locality. The Head version of the prophecies, and its successors, became far less specific about the geographical location of the prophecies themselves. While Head recounted the story of Wolsey’s visit to Yorkshire, he abandoned many of the other York-oriented prophecies153 and added texts which were far more clearly 151

‘She hath been often seen when alone, to laugh heartily; at other times to talk by her self, uttering very strange riddles, which occasioned some of the more sober sort to converse with her, receiving such strange things from her, as required a long study to find out the meaning.’ 152 Margery A. Kingsley, Transforming the Word: Prophecy, Poetry, and Politics in England, 1650–1742 (Newark and London, 2001). 153 The 1686 edition, in chs 6 and 7, retains the Wolsey visit and its associated prophecy 87


national in their location. Head’s acute understanding of the markets for which he wrote told him that mentions of Colton Hagge and Bramham Moor were likely to be incomprehensible to the majority of his readers in England in the 1660s. The uprooting of the prophecy from its local origins in the Restoration period is therefore one of the most important contributions of Head to the tradition. It might well be argued, however, that in doing so he did it a great disservice, for although Shipton was now more clearly nationally relevant, her loss of a local base meant she had forfeited the ability to find new vigour in that locality. In this sense, Shipton’s relative decline in the eighteenth century stands in sharp contrast to the success of Nixon, born from intensely local origins at just the time that Shipton was being generalized. As in its treatment of the York location, the Richard Head edition of the prophecy changed dramatically the personalities it presented. Head removed the specific detail of the Wolsey visit to York, with his three noble messengers. Instead, Head adopted the device of using a fictional ‘Abbot of Beverley’154 to replace Reginald Beasley as the man who, having seen the power of Shipton’s foresight, invited her to speak at greater length about things to come. The only other local characters in the prophecy are the villagers and justices tormented by Shipton and her mother during the prophetess’s youth, and generic petitioners seeking her advice: ‘a young Heir’ hoping to divine the time of his father’s death, and another ‘young Heir’ desirous of knowing whether it would be safe to join an expedition to France early in Henry VIII’s time (pp. 15–17). The prophecies that the ‘Abbot of Beverley’ elicits are general ones regarding the political and religious experience of the country from the reign of Henry VIII to the late seventeenth century. They can be characterized briefly as being Protestant, especially in the sense of being virulently anti-papal and anti-Jesuit, but faultlessly conformist. They are also faultlessly royalist, praising monarchs and monarchy and violently denouncing the opponents of Charles I and his son during the English civil war. The anti-Catholicism of Head’s work is clearest in its commentary on the reigns of Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth (pp. 23–37). Mary, ‘by restoring Popery, and the Persecutions that the professors of the Gospel suffered in her time, is said to bring the Kingdom to annoy’. Specific reference is made to the persecution of Protestants in her reign, and their death is described as martyrdom: ‘Great was the number of Martyrs burned in Smithfield in this Queens Reign, under the Bloody hands of Bonner Bishop of London, and Dr. Story Dean of St. Pauls.’ Elizabeth, treated to a paean of unqualified praise, is credited with seeing ‘Popery banished, and reformation established ; the Ministers of the Gospel advanced, and the Shaveling Priests, Monks and Fryers, depressed’. On a more positively Protestant note, there is little beyond

of Wolsey’s failure to reach York; it also retains the prophecy of Ouse Bridge and Trinity Church, but nothing else of York. 154 Beverley was the site of two friaries, one Dominican and the other Franciscan. 88


a positive reference to ‘Romes trash’ being ‘swept away’. This is explained in relation to ‘The People in each place beating down Superstitious Pictures and Images, which blind and misguided zeal had set up.’ The religion of the prophecy is therefore icono-phobic; but positive mentions of ‘Bells [that] rang such Changes in Religion, that the Mass was put down, and the Common Prayer set up’ suggest this Protestantism was firmly anti-Puritan. The civil war is portrayed as a struggle, in part, against ‘the Dragon of Presbytery’. The Scottish church is mocked for self-righteousness, and in particular for rejecting ‘the Common-prayer’ and bishops. The Long Parliament is condemned for its actions, in church and state, with some significant oppositions: by them was Episcopacy voted down and Presbytery voted up, by them was the Common-prayer denyed, and the Directory exalted ; they were the first that brought that strange Riddle into the World, that a man may fight for and against his King; by them was the Oath Ex Officio condemned, and the Covenant (far worse) applauded ; in sum, by them was the Church and State turned topsey turvey.

The religious outlook of the Head edition of the Shipton prophecy was therefore that of the Anglicanism of the 1660s: based on the Book of Common Prayer and enthusiastic about practices such as bell-ringing which radical Protestants considered to be reminiscent of popish and superstitious practices; scornful of Presbytery (pp. 34–48). The religion expressed by Head is also intensely monarchical: there is virtually no difference between his attitude to resistance to the Protestant religion and to the Protestant monarchy. Indeed, the prophecy that ‘The Locusts sent from the seven hills, The English Rose shall seek to kill’ causes Head to detail several attempts to assassinate Elizabeth before and during her reign. The pro-royal attitude adopted by Head in his interpretation of the prophecies even extended to Queen Mary. If anything, his commentary on an ultimately hostile prophetic account is an attempt to exculpate her for the persecutions of her reign. The blame is put at the door of her advisers, especially the Catholic clergy: ‘take her in her self, secluded from bloody Councillors, and she was a most Merciful, Pious, Just Prince’. The same attitude emerges in Head’s discussion of Cardinal Pole. Otherwise an enemy of Protestantism, Pole is described by Head in terms of his royal descent, with suggestions that he was sympathetic to the Protestant cause. Positive comments about Protestant monarchs are even more unrestrained. Edward VI is the only exception: the events of his reign are described, but he receives no specific comment as to his character. Jane Grey was, however, a ‘woman of most rare and incomparable perfections’, ‘the mirror of her time, for her Religion and Education’. The praise of Elizabeth is even more generous: she was the Mirrour of her Sex and Age, who for above forty years, to the admiration of envy it self, managed the affairs of this Kingdom; having when she began, few 89


friends that durst help, and leaving no Foes when she died that could hurt her; acting her part so well whilst here she Reigned that History can scarcely afford us one Prince to be matched to her Fame, in all considerable particulars.

James I is less extravagantly lauded, although his reign is described as a time when ‘War shall give place to Peace’. Praise is reserved for two of his children: Elizabeth, who married ‘the illustrious’ Frederick, elector palatine, and possessed ‘all the endowments both of Body and mind, which make to the compleating of a Princess’; and Henry, his heir, a pious prince ‘of most excellent parts’. If anything, however, the most fulsome praise is reserved for Charles I: ‘of all his contemporary Princes throughout the whole World; of whom when all is said that can be spoken, yet doth all come farr short of his deserved praises’. Charles II is, interestingly, not discussed at any length; praise is restricted to a mention of his ‘happy Restoration’. Royal servants are also lavishly praised. This is particularly clear for the reign of Charles I. George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, is described as ‘the greatest man in favour of those times’; Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, as ‘wise Strafford’; and Laud as ‘Reverend Laud’. This is chiefly because the complement of Head’s extravagant praise for the monarchy is condemnation of plots against the crown and its servants, which form a major part of the commentary on the prophecies relating to the century before the English civil war. The comments on the conspiracies against Elizabeth have already been mentioned; there is also a detailed account of the Gunpowder Plot. These plots are ascribed to Catholic malcontents; from the start of Charles I’s reign, however, the enemy of monarchy is defined as popular or democratic forces. Buckingham is described as favoured by the king and ‘thereupon (as it is most commonly seen) most hated of the People’. Cromwell represented tyranny: he is described as a ‘Bloody’ or a ‘Blood-thirsty’ tyrant. The Restoration is seen to have ended ‘Oligarchical Confusions’ during which the land ‘groaned under the pressures of a Company of Mechanical (and therein the worst sort of) Tyrants’. This religious and political outlook provides clues to the attitudes of both the author and his audience. The views expressed in his other works are consistent enough with those of the 1667 edition of the prophecy to allow us to accept that Head’s outlook, formed perhaps through the death of his parents at the hands of Catholic rebels in Ireland, and then by the experience of growing up in the England of the civil war and Commonwealth, was a major influence on the text. On the other hand, Head’s dependence on his publishers and their market meant that it is unlikely that he would have written what is perhaps his most overtly political work without a view to his audience.155

155

Ann Maxwell, who entered for it at the Stationers’ Company, was the widow of David Maxwell, whose business was taken up by Peter Lillicrap on David’s death, c. 1665. Although Lillicrap suffered imprisonment for alleged seditious printing in 1663, he seems 90


This was a text that would find an appreciative audience only among those who shared its extremely positive view of monarchy and church. In any consideration of the readership of the Head edition of the prophecy, it should also be noted that he provides a very large amount of detail in the explanation of Shipton’s words. For example, in order to explain the prophecy of Wolsey’s dissolution of monastic houses, and the inspiration this gave for the later systematic dissolution pursued under Henry VIII, Head provides the following detail: Cardinal Wolsey (who is here intended by the Miter’d Peacock), in the height of his Pride, and vastness of his undertakings to erect two fair Colledges, one at Ipswich where he was born, the other at Oxford where he was bred; and finding himself unable to endow them at his own Charges; he obtained License of Pope Clement the Seventh, Anno 1525, to suppress forty small Monasteries in England, and to Lay their old Lands to his new Foundations, which was done accordingly ; and the poor people that lived in them, turned out of doors; many of the Clergy were very much against this action of Wolseys, especially, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, alleging for the same an Apologue out of Æsop, that the Iron Head of the Axe, craved a Handle of the Wood of Oaks, only to cut off the seere boughs of the tree; but when it was a compleat instrumental Axe, it felled down all the Wood; applying it That the suppressing of those smaller Houses, would in fine prove destructive to all the rest; which came to pass accordingly; for King Henry seeing the Cardinals Power to extend so far, as to suppress these lower Shrubs, he thought his prerogative might stretch so far as to fell down the Great Trees; and soon after dissolved the Priory of Christs Church nigh Aldgate in London, now known by the Name of Dukes-place, and which was the richest in Lands, and Ornaments, of all the Priories in London, or Middlesex; and which was a forerunner of the Dissolution of all the rest; and which not long after came to pass.

The provision of the information that Wolsey dissolved monastic houses in order to endow his collegiate foundations is in some way demanded by the words of the prophecy explained here. There is also the possibility that the inspiration given to Henry by this action might need explanation. Yet the supporting evidence here, especially the information about the dissolution in 1532 of the house of Augustinian canons at Aldgate, known as Christ Church, one of the richest houses of the order in England, suggests an expectation from the audience that the prophecy should be backed by the provision of very detailed evidence.156 A similar case occurs in discussion of to have effectively made a case for his long-standing royalism and support for the regime, and gained his release: CSPD, 1663–1664, pp. 179, 180, 213–14, 230, 267, 268. Ann entered a recognizance of £200 not to print any unlicensed books or pamphlets on 15 August 1667, that is just a fortnight before her entry for Mother Shipton: CSPD, 1667, p. 390. 156 Founded by Queen Maud in 1107, with the assistance of Anselm, the house shared with Merton an ascendancy over the order in England; Henry A. Harben, A Dictionary of London: 91


Edward VI’s reign. Explaining the phrase, ‘Then shall Commons rise in Armes’, the commentary details the counties in which the revolt took place, identifies Robert Kett and Henry Arundel as the leaders of the rebellions in East Anglia and the West Country respectively; and explains the means by which they were defeated. At other times, this provision of detailed evidence takes the form of listing names, as for example with the bishops of Edward VI’s reign, and those who replaced them in Mary’s time. Thirteen of the former and fourteen of the latter are named. There is even, in the account of the execution of Mary, queen of Scots, a quotation from a primary source, the ‘Burial Register of the Cathedral at Peterborough’. All of this adds to our picture of the audience for the 1667 text: it was aimed at people who shared Head’s view of monarchy and church, and who possessed an appetite for, and the contextual knowledge to help them assimilate, fairly detailed historical knowledge. In confirmation of the same point, Head’s use of Latin phrases such as in fine and his reference to authors such as Æsop suggest an educated audience was intended.157 This appreciation of the potentially educated nature of the audience for Head’s edition is added to by the realization that he intended it not simply for reading, but as an aide-mémoire for the learning of history. In some ways the description of recent history provided by prophecies such as Shipton’s provided a catechism of recent events – to help the populace remember the key events of their history. This was assisted by the fact that many elements were rhymed, and that their deliberately allusive nature gave them an attractive mystery. Nonetheless, they were able to carry a heavy weight of interpretation with them. Richard Head argued in the preface to his edition of the prophecies that they might: serve to them whose leisure will not permit to read, or want of money forbid to buy more Voluminous Authors; this (I say) may serve to them instead of a Chronicle, wherein they may find related the chiefest matters performed in each King and Queens Reign since the time wherein she flourished.

Head’s version of the prophecy did not achieve a monopoly. The Coles edition, first produced by Francis Coles and later by W. Thackeray, and the direct successor of the 1641 publication, continued to be reproduced until the end of the century. Another edition of the 1663 Mother Shipton’s Prophesies appeared in 1678.158 The same period also produced Fore-warn’d, Fore-arm’d; By a Collection of Five Prophetical Predictions, Published by Mr William Lilly

Being Notes Topographical and Historical Relating to the Streets and Principal Buildings in the City of London (London, 1918). 157 It should also be noted that as soon as versions of this work survive, i.e. from the 1677 edition, black letter is not used in the typography, an indication that the readership was not intended to be mainly those of low rank. 158 By T.P. for Francis Coles, 1663, new edition printed by A.P. and T.H. for Francis Coles: STC S3448A. 92


Forty Years Ago . . . and One of Mother Shipton’s, in 1682,159 and two editions of Mother Shipton’s Prophesies, in 1685, one in London and the other in Edinburgh.160 Finally, at the start of the next century, another edition of Mother Shipton’s Prophesies appeared, in 1700.161 Given this frequency and variety, it is not surprising that Shipton became part of the common currency of conversation. Theatrical prologues, for example, referred to Shipton in passing or to illustrate points. In 1683, ‘A Prologue for a Company of Players leaving London for York, upon their first appearance’ concluded ‘Tho London the Metropolis be known; York has the grandeur in reversion. And Shipton’s Prophecies may now prove true; Since we have London left to wait on you.’162 In January 1689/90, The Treacherous Brothers, a play by George Powell, made reference in its prologue to the Shipton prophecy that so many men would die that there would be left just one man for every seven women.163 Another version, which appeared for the first time in 1686 as sold by J. Conyers, illustrates well how Shipton might be presented in ways which contrasted with Head’s account.164 There is an immediate difference of length between the two editions. The edition of 1686 is considerably shorter, running to only nine chapters, as opposed to fifteen. If length and therefore price are allowed to stand as a major indicator of the market intended for the work, this edition seems to have been an attempt to make prophecy more accessible to the chapbook-buying public. And, although the work is heavily based on Head’s edition, it exhibits considerable differences. The first difference is one of emphasis. Although the 1686 edition represents a considerable reduction in the space devoted to Shipton’s birth and early years, these still represent a far larger proportion of the whole work than they

159

STC F1556A (BL 8610. bb. 32). Previously for Francis Coles, printed for W. Thackeray: STC S3449. There was also an edition in 1685 produced in Edinburgh: STC S3456. 161 Previously for Francis Coles, for W. Thackeray, 1685, London, 1700: STC S3450. 162 Danchin, Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration, I, pp. 340–1. 163 Danchin, Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration, II, pp. 791–3. 164 The Strange and Wonderful History of Mother Shipton ([London], [1686]) (STC S5848; BL, C.40.g.21). Other work Conyers produced in the period: J. G., Strange News from Plymouth (London, 1684) (STC G41); Murther upon Murther: Or a True and Faithful Relation (London, 1684) (STC M3090); The Catalogue of Contented Cuckolds (London, 1685?) (STC C1307, 1307A); Thomas D’Urfey, The Constant Lover (London, 1685–8) (STC D2717); An Excellent New Play-House Song, Called, Love for Money (London, 1688) (STC E3809); The Garland of Mirth (London, 1688) (STC G260). Also for W. H.: The Time-Servers: Or a Touch of the Times (London, 1681) (STC T1278); N. N., Vox Clamantis, or a Cry (London, 1683) (STC N63); The Speech of Sir William Wentworth (London, 1685) (STC W1363); William Nicholson, A Plain, but Full Exposition of the Catechisme (London, 1686; another edn 1689) (STC N1120); The Quakers Address to the House of Commons (London, 1690) (STC Q10); John Tanner, Angelus Britannicus: An Ephemeris for . . . 1689 (33rd impression, London, 1689) (STC A2526); (34th impression, London, 1690) (STC A2527); John Whalley, England’s Mercury: or an Emphemeris for . . . 1690 (London, 1690) (STC A2644). 160

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did in the 1667 edition.165 Since the main content of these sections is a nearslapstick rendition of amusing anecdotes about her supernatural power to humiliate her neighbours, this adaptation would suggest an intended audience which was less concerned with acquiring serious knowledge of the country’s past and future. The edition of 1686 is closer to the 1641 text and therefore retains more references to the personalities and locations of York. For example, Master Beasley is still there, acting as the guide to the three lords sent by Cardinal Wolsey, although they are not named.166 In fact, one small detail is added: Shipton’s dwelling is located at Dringhouses (‘Ring-houses’), a crown manor near York which the corporation had attempted to buy in 1566 and 1571.167 Between Dringhouses and the city was Hob Moor, and it was on Hob Moor that the effigy of a knight came to be erected. The man commemorated was apparently of the Ross/Roos family, the monument no doubt taken from one of the dissolved monastic houses of the area. At some point not long before 1736, the pasture-masters of Micklegate ward had set it up and inscribed it with the verse, ‘This statue long Hob’s name has bore, / Who was a knight in days of yore, / And gave this common to the poor.’ It seems that the statue soon became associated with Mother Shipton. This would seem to imply that the location of Shipton’s dwelling at Dringhouses, first made in print in 1686, later resulted in the reattribution of the monument formerly associated with Hob – this happening presumably some time after 1736 when Drake was so clear that it belonged to Hob.168 The prophecy of Trinity Church and Ouse Bridge is retained. On the other hand, as in Head, the other York-centred prophecies were abandoned in favour of a rapid transition to a general prophecy expressing the history of England in the period from the Reformation to the Restoration. Also as in Head’s version, the ‘Abbot of Beverley’ is used as a device to introduce these more general prophecies. The 1686 version represents, in its passages of these general prophecies (and therefore in its account of the recent history of the country), a considerable condensation of Head’s account. Many of its elements are simple transcriptions of the prophecies recorded by Head; its commentary, however, differs significantly, even if it is so much shorter. It is if anything more positively Protestant. Edward VI, largely unpraised in the 1667 edition, is described as a ‘sweet Pious Prince’, ‘in whose time the Protestant Religion was established, and the Popish Superstitions swept out’. The abbreviation of this version leaves Mary as ‘called Alecto (a name of one of the Furies) for her cruelty to the Protestants’, without any of the equivocation Head entered. Elizabeth’s

165

Fletcher, Harrogate and Knaresborough, p. 55, argues that the reduction of detail on Shipton’s supernatural parentage is significant. 166 The lords’ specific prophecies are also simplified, to a catch-all ‘your Grace will be as low as I am, and that is a low one indeed. Which proved true, for shortly after he was beheaded.’ 167 Palliser, Tudor York, p. 266. 168 Drake, Eboracum, p. 398. 94


Protestantism is not mentioned, and she is simply ‘extreamly beloved by her Subjects, and dreaded by her Enemies’. Much of the force of the interpretation of events after 1603 is removed in the 1686 version: James’s reign is still characterized as ‘peaceful’; but the description of Charles’s reign focuses on his ‘Execrable murther’ and makes no comment about his enemies or the reasons for their actions. In particular, there is no attack on Presbytery, although trouble is seen as originating in the North. The aftermath of Charles’s execution is summed up briefly as ‘Cromwells Usurpations, The Committee of Safetys Confusions, and our Gracious Soveraigns Miraculous Restauration’. An even clearer sign, however, of the continuing openness of the tradition to competing interpretations is the way Head’s The Life and Death of Mother Shipton was republished after 1667. It reappeared in 1677, and had further editions in 1684 (both from Benjamin Harris),169 1687, when the publisher was W. Harris,170 and in 1694 and 1697, when it was J. Back who had taken on the work.171 What gave the reworking of the tradition sustained vigour was the intensification of political crisis from 1672–4 onwards, because of the war with the Dutch and the growing concern over religious issues which eventually focused on the Catholicism of the duke of York. In 1677 and 1684,172 the publisher of Head’s work, Benjamin Harris, was an Anabaptist who published the Domestick Intelligence and was notorious in the 1670s for his violent antiCatholicism and close connection with the supporters of Exclusion. 173 He was said to be ‘frequent’ with Slingsby Bethel, leading member of the Green Ribbon Club, and to have been present at the Southwark election when Bethel stood as a candidate. Harris was successfully prosecuted in February 1680.174 After Harris was arrested in 1681, Bethel visited him in Newgate.175 Suffering the pillory for printing a Protestant Petition in 1681, he managed to continue

169

(London, 1684) (BL, 8631.aaa.12). STC H1259 (BL, 8610. d. 26.): for W. Harris. Harris was a bookseller active in London in the years around 1690: Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 ([Oxford], 1922), p. 147. 171 STC H1260–61 (for J. Back, and by W. Onley for J. Back respectively). 172 1684: STC H1258 (BL, 8631. aaa. 12.): for Benj. Harris. 173 CSPD, 1679–1680, pp. 391–2, 396–7; Knights found his name on seven opposition tracts in the period 1678–81 (Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 160, 162, 163, 176, 263, 300); cf. James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and its Development (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 186–93; Timothy Crist, ‘Francis Smith and the Opposition Press in England, 1660–1688’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1977), pp. 112–21; Plomer, Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers 1668 to 1725, pp. 144–6; CSPD, 1680–1681, p. 489 (4 October 1681, Thomas Watson to Lord Alington; Thomas Percival, associate of Shaftesbury, goes to him for printing); thirtysix titles as a whole according to Wing Index. 174 Knights, Politics and Opinion, p. 263. 175 Mercurius Bifrons, no. 2; 24 February 1681; Heraclitus Ridens, no. 17, 24 May 1681. 170

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his business even from prison; the accession of James II drove him to leave England for America, and set up a book shop in Boston in 1686.176 The format of the 1677 edition suggests that the additions at that time related to the second Dutch War, the great fire of Southwark, and the situation in 1677 itself, when England was presented as being the lone bastion of peace and relatively free trading in Europe.177 After explicit references to these events was added a sequence of six prophecies without commentary. These seemed to relate to war between the empire and France, and to the promise offered by the marriage between Orange and Stuart, along with less specific prophecies relating to a meteor and northern star, associated with the year 1683.178 The 1684 edition retained the first two of the additional prophecies of 1677, those relating to the empire and house of Orange, but abandoned the rest. In their place it presented further prophecies, relating to the Popish Plot, a recent plot against the king and his brother, the freezing of the Thames in the winter of 1683–4, and the siege of Vienna in 1683. Although overtly loyalist in the commentary on the plot, the author directly refused to comment on the Popish Plot and was clearly anti-Catholic in one passage where he refused to be explicit about the probable meaning.179 Four completely new prophecies were then added, and they were overwhelmingly anti-Catholic in their tone.180 Another major addition in 1684 was an account of John Holwell’s ferociously anti-Catholic astrological predictions.181 Holwell had produced a prediction based on the comet of 1677, and had made a significant impact with his Catastrophe mundi of 1682; by 1684, when the new edition of Shipton appeared, he had provoked a vigorous Catholic response from John Merrifield.182 Shipton therefore gave Harris an oppositionist voice even after his prosecution.183 And this ideologically committed opponent of the regime produced, even more clearly than his predecessor, a juxtaposition of the obscene absurdities of Head’s Shipton with the gravity of his anti-Catholicism. 176

Plomer, Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers 1668 to 1725, p. 145; Sutherland, Restoration Newspaper, pp. 186–93. Towards the end of 1695 he returned to England and began printing again; he probably ceased printing in 1701 and died about 1708 (p. 146). 177 The Life and Death of Mother Shipton (London, 1677), p. 49. 178 Life and Death of Mother Shipton (London, 1677), p. 50. 179 The Life and Death of Mother Shipton (London, 1684), pp. 47–8. 180 Life and Death of Mother Shipton (London, 1684), p. 49. 181 Life and Death of Mother Shipton (London, 1684), pp. 50–4. 182 A New Prophecy; or, a Prophetical Discourse of the Blazing-Star, that appeared April the 23d, 1677. Being a Full Account of the Events . . . which Threaten . . . England, Scotland . . . as likewise . . . France, Holland, &c. (London, 1679); Catastrophe mundi: or, Europe’s Many Mutations until the Year 1701 (London, [1682]); An Appendix to Holvvel’s Catastrophe mundi: Being an Astrological Discourse of the Rise, Growth and Continuation of the Othoman Family, with the Nativities of the present French king, Emperors of Germany and Turky (London, 1683); John Merrifield, Catastasis Mundi: Or the True State, Vigor and Growing Greatness of Christendom, under the Influences of the Last Triple Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. . . . Also Holwell’s . . . Falsehoods Discovered, etc. (London, 1684). 183 Pace Crist, ‘Francis Smith’, p. 121. 96


Given the political circumstances at its publication in 1687, it is unsurprising that all of this additional material was omitted from the next edition of Head’s Life and Death of Mother Shipton. This edition concludes the Head prophecies abruptly with that beginning ‘And men on tops of houses go’, for 1666, adding only three deliberately obscure generic prophecies of disaster, ‘seas of blood’ and ‘[g]reat noise’.184 Its publisher almost certainly carried forward Benjamin Harris’s political outlook, if without the freedom to express it. Many of the characteristics of the 1684 edition were continued in that of 1694, although with an augmented title-page that introduced a reference to the Dropping Well at Knaresborough as the site of Shipton’s birth. In a very crude addition, however, after the word ‘FINIS’ which had concluded the Holwell section in 1684, were placed six pages of prophecies, essentially relating to events from the Revolution, such as the reduction of Irish rebellion, and then moving on to predict success for the empire and England against France.185 When the text was issued again, in 1697, these six pages of prophecies were dropped, but the account of Holwell’s predictions was amended.186 The major versions of the Shipton prophecy of the seventeenth century therefore exhibit a transition from an intensely locally based tradition, used during a civil war in which its locality fortuitously proved highly significant; taken up first by some of the less prominent London booksellers, and then adopted by some of the bigger marketers of ballads, in whose stock the prophecy benefited from an excellent distribution network while not being trivialized to the level of the more frivolous ballads. It was then seized on by the expert publicist, in the person of Head, capitalizing on a coincidental relationship with the Great Fire of London. He made the prophecy a mock heroic hymn to monarchy and Anglican orthodoxy, and found a market for it as such in the period before 1688. Yet there was also scope for a simplified and shortened version, drawing on Head’s original, but aimed at a broader market, and which accentuated the Protestantism of the text and down-played its monarchism, and for republications of Head’s work with additions from a more radical Protestant and Exclusionist perspective. In Head’s version, and even more clearly in these, we see the creative tension between the absurdity of the characterization of the prophetess on the one hand, and the gravity of her predictions on the other. As in the Birth of Merlin, scepticism can sit alongside belief, mockery alongside serious engagement, without this resulting for the audience in weakness or collapse. The boom in publication, experienced from 1641 to about 1700, however, subsided thereafter. Importantly, although republished through the reigns of James II and William and Mary,

184

The Life and Death of Mother Shipton (London, 1687), p. 30. The Life and Death of Mother Shipton (London, 1694), pp. 55–60. 186 The explanations of Holwell’s words were drawn from other astrologers, identified by initials: CD, JP, JC, JG, PS, JP, DS and BC: The Life and Death of Mother Shipton (London, 1697), pp. 58–60. 185

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the text was not internally revised to take account of the crucial events of this period; nor did it fortuitously seem relevant to them, either in its locality (now so thoroughly obliterated) or the events described. The eighteenth century was not kind to the Shipton prophecy; its politics and locality, in the form provided by Head, were no longer appropriate to the conditions of the time. Its place would be taken by another prophecy which dealt more directly with the concerns of the time, that of Nixon, the Cheshire prophet.

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3

Prophecy and the Revolution settlement

The century after the Restoration has been seen as conclusively fatal for so many of the ‘predictive’ cultures of the early modern period. It undoubtedly saw a rising tide of scepticism about astrology, challenged by changing understandings of the heavens. Patrick Curry and Keith Thomas, for example, both found in these years a growing pattern of scepticism and disbelief which made astrologers like John Partridge laughing stocks for many.1 In addition, although latitudinarianism expressed a continuing faith in the biblical pattern of history well into the eighteenth century, it also saw the beginnings of a more effective challenge to biblical prophecy. Some have gone so far as to find in these years nothing less than ‘reason’s’ victory.2 It is possible to find evidence which provides some support for this in growing scepticism about aspects of ancient prophecy, especially of Arthurianism and Merlin. Compared to the period before 1660, there was far less interest in, for example, Merlin; even when he did appear, as in The Morning-star, it might be with a commentary critical of most of the texts associated with his name.3 Some even went so far as to mock ancient prophecies associated with his name. In his Famous Prediction of Merlin, published in half-sheet in 1709 and in the Miscellany in 1711, Jonathan Swift moved from his earlier attack on the partisan astrology of John Partridge (1708–9) into mockery of ancient prophecy.4 He believed it had made such an impression that it guaranteed the success of his 1711 ‘Windsor prophecy’ – an attack on the duchess of Somerset,

1

Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1989); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Sudies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971). 2 John Spurr, ‘“Rational Religion” in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988), pp. 563–85. 3 The Morning-star out of the North (London, 1680). 4 A Famous Prediction of Merlin, the British Wizard, written above a Thousand Years Ago, and Relating to this Present Year (London, 1708; reprinted in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols (Oxford, 1939–68), vol. II, Bickerstaff Papers and Pamphlets on the Church (1957), pp. xxiii–iv, 165–70). This is notable for adopting some characteristics of a scholarly edition: reproducing the black letter of the supposed original, providing details 99


a Whig noblewoman who was close to the queen – and recognition for its author, in spite of its anonymous form.5 We should not exaggerate the speed of this change, however. For example, William E. Burns has recently demonstrated that the tendency in discussion of the Exclusion Crisis to focus on Lockean contractualism and civic republicanism has led to the omission of an important strand of prophetic ideas influencing many participants. Many Whigs, seeking the exclusion of the Catholic James, duke of York, from the succession, continued to see the world in terms of a struggle between the true church and antichrist in the form of Rome, and to see this in apocalyptic and millenarian terms. Sometimes this had astrological foundations, encouraged by the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Leo in 1682–3. Other manifestations were related to ancient prophecy.6 Notable amongst these were the works of Ezerel Tonge7 and the anonymous author of The Morning-star out of the North. The latter text included a wide range of material supportive of Protestantism and predictive of the fall of Rome, including for example Paul Grebner, James Usher and Fabian Withers.8 After the Tory victory of 1681, there was a recognition that perhaps there might come an initial period of papal triumph before the final defeat of Rome, seen for example in a 1682 prophecy concerning the return of popery into England.9 This link between astrological material and ancient prophecy was also seen in the work of Benjamin Keach which responded to the Revolution of 1688.10

of the publication in 1530 by John Haukyns, and adding explanatory notes. Dr Johnson apparently believed in the prophecy (p. xxiv). See note 151 below on this. 5 [Jonathan Swift], The W[in]ds[o]r Prophecy (‘London’ [sic, for Edinburgh], 1711); Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols paginated through (Oxford, 1974; Prose Works, vol. 15), pp. 444–7, 454. 6 William E. Burns, ‘A Whig Apocalypse: Astrology, Millenarianism, and Politics in England during the Restoration Crisis, 1678–1683’, in Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, vol. III, The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, Boston and London, 2001), pp. 29–41. 7 Ezerel Tonge, The Northern Star: The British Monarchy: Or, the Northern the Fourth Universal Monarchy; Charles II, and his Successors, the Founders of the Northern, Last, Fourth, and Most Happy Monarchy. Being a Collection of Many Choice Ancient and Modern Prophecies: Wherein also the Fates of the Roman, French, and Spanish Monarchies are Occasionally Set Out (London, 1680). 8 Morning-star. 9 The Mystery of Ambras Merlins, Standardbearer Wolf, and Last Boar of Cornwal, with Sundry other Misterious Prophecys, . . . Unfolded in the Following Treatise on the Signification . . . of that Prodigious Comet seen . . . anno 1680, with the Blazing Star, 1682 . . . Written by a Lover of his Country’s Peace. Prophecyes Concerning the Return of Popery (London, 1682) (STC P3675). 10 Benjamin Keach, Antichrist Stormed; or Mystery, Babylon, the Great Whore, and Great City, Proved to be the Present Church of Rome; . . . Also an Examination and Confutation of 100

PROPHECY AND THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT

The treatment of astrologically inspired text as ancient prophecy tradition, as seen in the case of Nostradamus, also flourished in this period. In 1678, appended to a lengthier account of the long-established prophecy attributed to Truswell, Nostradamus was used rather sparingly to emphasize French tyranny.11 It was only in 1681 that Nostradamus’s words at some length reached a wider audience, when his predictions were seized on by an opponent of the duke of York. Nostradamus emerged as a prophet of the succession of a legitimate son of Charles II, indeed the succession of this son to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, but also to that of France, and further of a European conquest.12 A similarly crude, but less specific, ambition underlay the narrative of future events extracted by the anonymous author of A Collection of Twenty-Three Prophecies, in response to the Revolution.13 But the same events had some months earlier produced a more subtle work. In this case, Nostradamus’s interpreters exemplify a shift to a multilayered interpretation. William Atwood, writing in 1689, seems at first to dismiss those who acted on the basis of prophecy, contrasting them to the earl of Macclesfield, his dedicatee, who acted on principle. The work includes a dense discussion of the legitimacy of the Revolution, requiring complex analysis of historical and legal sources. Yet very soon Atwood’s commitment to the prophecy emerges – not only is this not simply a device to manipulate the credulous, it seems to carry more weight.14 Indeed Swift badly miscalculated in thinking that mockery of ancient prophecy as seen in the ‘Windsor prophecy’ would undermine the duchess’s place in Queen Anne’s affections. In fact, so strong was the reliance of the queen on Somerset that she reacted violently against Swift’s writing, and it almost certainly cost him the deanery of Wells and a bishopric.15 If the prophecy was intended to make the queen’s relationship untenable because of the inherent absurdity of the medium, it failed. Even Swift was therefore brought

what Mr. Jurien hath Lately Written Concerning the Effusion of the Vials, . . . Likewise a Brief Review of D. T. Goodwin’s Exposition of the 11th Chapter of the Revelations, etc. (London, 1689). 11 The Fortune of France, from the Prophectical Predictions of Mr. Truswell, the Recorder of Lincoln, and Michael Nostradamus (London, 1678). 12 J. B. Philalelos, Good and Joyful News for England: Or, The Prophecy of the Renowned Michael Nostradamus (London, 1681); includes: ‘A second sheet, further blazoning upon the blazing-star’, signed at end: C. N., i.e. Christopher Ness (1621–1705), and with a colophon which reads: ‘Published by L. Curtiss, on Ludgate-hill, 1681’. 13 Michel de Notredame, A Collection of Twenty-Three Prophecies (London, 1690). 14 William Atwood, Wonderful Predictions of Nostredamus, Grebner, David Pareaus, and Antonius Torquatus (London, 1689), e.g. a. The work is closely associated, through an advertisement and references (e.g. at [A1v]), with Sir Robert Atkyns, a central figure in Whig ideology and politics. 15 Philip Roberts, ‘Swift, Queen Anne and “The Windsor Prophecy”‘, Philological Quarterly 49 (1970), pp. 254–8; The Diary of Sir David Hamilton, 1709–1714, ed. Philip Roberts (Oxford, 1975), pp. 40–1 (26–9 January, 15 February 1712). 101


to an appreciation that mockery of ancient prophecy might be dangerous. Indeed it has recently been argued that Alexander Pope, who himself participated in the mockery of Whig astrology and prophecy, used prophetic themes in his Windsor-Forest directly to counter Partridge and his fellows.16 It is therefore worth considering another ancient prophecy current in this key period, in an attempt to determine the scope and nature of continued belief and the limits of scepticism. Although to an English man or woman of the early eighteenth century the name of the prophet Nixon would have been familiar, memories of this Cheshire prophet have now almost completely faded. Those eighteenth-century English people, and their children and grandchildren, would have known that Nixon lived either during the reigns of Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII, or under James I. They would have known his prophetic foreknowledge of the outcome of the battle of Bosworth, of the Dissolution of the monasteries, and of events in Cheshire, in particular his prophecy of the miraculous birth of an heir to the Cholmondeley of Vale Royal family in 1685. More directly relevant to their own experience, however, was Nixon’s forecast that England was shortly to suffer invasion and dynastic overthrow. These momentous predictions first drew national attention in printed form at the end of the reign of Queen Anne, yet like Shipton’s they betray earlier, local, roots. This chapter therefore allows us to examine the way in which a prophetic tradition might be created and developed within a region over two hundred years, and the reasons and manner of its promotion to national celebrity at a time when many would assume such a success to have become impossible. We will never know when Nixon’s prophecy was composed. We can be fairly sure that there never was a man called Nixon who uttered these predictions in advance of the events they purported to foretell. But whether the core prophecy was put together at one time by one man or woman, or whether it was a slow emergence from a variety of sources, is unclear. The earliest surviving record of the prophecy attributed to Nixon is in a manuscript formerly preserved at Vale Royal.17 On folio 23r., the final prophecy of the volume, which seems to be have been added in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, is introduced as follows: ‘William Nickson propesi and hee was borne in the Reane Edward the 4 and in henre 7 hee for tould strange things that Came to pass both in and after his dayes.’18

16 (London, 1713); Pat Rogers, The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work (Newark, 2004), esp. pp. 210–16. Mockery: e.g. The Dunciad: An Heroic Poem ([London], 1728). 17 The volume was deposited at the county record office by Lord Delamere in 1943 having been kept in the library at Vale Royal: note in list, CCRO. CCRO, DDX 123. 18 Tim Thornton, ‘Reshaping the Local Future: The Development and Uses of Provincial Political Prophecy, 1300–1900’, in Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History, 1300–2000, ed. Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (Stroud, 1997), pp. 51–67, esp. pp. 55, 63.

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Like Yorkshire, Cheshire possessed a vigorous local prophetic culture. This particularly showed itself in the county’s tradition of alliterative verse. This included by the early sixteenth century a group of poems which described the county’s history, in particular its role in the Tudor victory at Bosworth and in subsequent military campaigns, especially that of Flodden. One particularly well-documented Cheshire gentleman, Humphrey Newton of Pownall, provides a good example of the way these alliterative traditions of the county, old and new, were blended with myth and prophecy. In a memorandum, probably no later than the mid-1520s, he recorded that ‘Thomas Perkynson sang a song of Thomas Ersholedon & the quene of ffeiree Rehersyng the batell of Stoke fild & the batell at Branston of deth of the kynges of Scotts’. 19 Newton’s visitor went on, & also rehersyn that a lion shuld come out of walys & also a dragon & lond in werall that eny woman shuld have rowme to milke her cowe w[i]t[h] mony thousands & on a wennysday after to drive don Chester walls & after to feght in the fforest delamar w[i]t[h] a kyng of the southe which shuld have hundreds of m l & that shu[ld] feght ii or iii days & then ther shuld come a plogh of yew w[i]t[h] clubbez & clot chone & take parte & wyn alle & ther the kyng shuld be kylled w[i]t[h] many an other to the nowmber of lxi ml & never kyng after bot iiii wardens unto domysday.

It is almost certain therefore that Delamere Forest was already home to the prophet Nixon. William Webb, in his account of the forest in his ‘Vale-Royall of England’, written in the early 1620s, refers to an author of ‘old prophecies’, suggesting that the prophecies retailed in the 1520s were now taking shape under one author’s name, perhaps Nixon’s, and were then current in the area of Delamere Forest.20 A few years earlier, Michael Drayton had made allusion to prophecy in his account of the shire. Drayton’s Poly-Olbion is constructed around rivers, but when he wrote of the Weaver and the Dee, commenting ‘[m]uch strife there hath arose in their prophetick skill’, the location seems telling of a connection with Delamere and therefore Nixon.21 19

Bodl., MS. Lat. misc. c.66, fol. 104. Deborah Marsh, ‘Humphrey Newton of Newton and Pownall (1466–1536): A Gentleman of Cheshire and his Commonplace Book’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Keele, 1995). 20 William Webb, ‘The Vale-Royall of England’, in The Vale-Royall of England, or the County Palatine of Chester Illustrated (London, 1656), p. 118. According to Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 183, he ‘obviously rejects the story if he does allude to it’; this reads too much into Webb’s admittedly slightly flippant tone. ‘I also let passe some old Prophecies, some conceited names of Trees, of Mosse-pits, Pools, long shots of old Archers, as also the Horserace one or two, & the latter new found Well, which I hope I may take leave to leave untouched, because I suppose my long Journey in this little Hundred, hath well nigh tired my Reader already.’ The well, for example, is a well-attested phenomenon: Phyllis M. Hembry, The English Spa 1560–1815: A Social History (London, 1990), pp. 19–20. 21 Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (4th volume of his Works), ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford, 1933), p. 221. 103


The immediately striking thing about Nixon’s prophecy is its identification, even more strongly than in the case of Shipton, with one locality. In the titles of so many editions, Nixon’s is the Cheshire prophecy, and its links with Cheshire were strong in its origin and remained so in spite of the later more widespread fame of the prophecy. Its content frequently refers to localities in the county. This was in part possible because Cheshire was a county where identities were strong and pronounced: the county palatine of Chester, the hundred of Eddisbury, the forest of Delamere and the immediate locality of Vale Royal Abbey, Over township and Whitegate parish. The places named in the earliest manuscript version of the Nixon prophecy are concentrated in a small area of northern Cheshire, very close to Vale Royal. The first part of the prophecy relates to the dissolution of two abbeys: Vale Royal and Norton. Together, they were the most important monastic houses in central and northern Cheshire.22 The next location to be mentioned is Darnall Park, which was to be ‘hacked and hewed’, and soon after Darnall Pool. The connection between Vale Royal and Darnhall was very strong. It was the original proposed site for the monastery, and remained a manor of Vale Royal Abbey. Even in 1538, in the last desperate days before the dissolution of their house, the monks were unwilling to release the manor when faced by a demand from Thomas Cromwell, the abbot claiming it was vital for the monastery’s survival.23 Then ‘Windle Pool’ – sometimes identified as Ridley Pool, in the south of the county – is mentioned as being fated to dry out and be grassed over.24 The prophecy moves on to deal with the most important urban centre in north-central Cheshire, Northwich, which Nixon said would be destroyed ‘by riveres’. By the sixteenth century, Northwich was already well established as a centre of the salt industry. There are then mentions of England and London, the latter the conventional reference to the city’s three gates. The prophecy returns to Cheshire with a reference to a time of troubles in which safety might be sought in God’s Croft. Although this place is sometimes said

22 For Vale Royal, see below, pp. 107–14; Norton is described in VCH Cheshire, III, pp. 165–71; Patrick Greene, Norton Priory: The Archaeology of a Medieval Religious House (Cambridge, 1989). Their relatively compact spheres of influence, contrasting with Chester’s generalized spread across the county, are well illustrated by the map of the appropriated churches and granges of the Cheshire monasteries, B. M. C. Husain, Cheshire under the Norman Earls, 1066–1237 (Chester, 1973), p. 126; cf. the map of Norton’s properties in Greene, Norton Priory, p. 4. The only real exceptions to this pattern are provided by the appropriated Birkenhead Priory churches at Davenham and Bowden. 23 Cf. below, pp. 113–14, where the impact of the dissolution of Vale Royal is dealt with in detail. 24 Both the Kendrick and Cowper MSS make this Ridley Pool: [W. E. A. Axon], Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecies Reprinted and Edited from the Best Sources, and Including a Copy of the Prophecy from an Unpublished Manuscript, with an Introductory Essay on Popular Prophecies (Manchester and London, 1878), p. 66.

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to be in the precise centre of the county of Cheshire,25 in the earliest version of the prophecy Nixon is said to have denied that the place of safety was between ‘marse and morres’;26 rather it was ‘betwixt moris and dee’, presumably Mersey and Dee. On this interpretation, God’s Croft is the Wirral. The peculiar status of the Wirral peninsula implied here is perhaps partly due to its isolation and its role as a forest.27 Within the immediate Cheshire context of the prophecy discussed so far, this is the farthest departure from the Vale Royal–Norton axis; yet the Wirral is only about twenty miles from Vale Royal, and appears to occupy a position in the text as both local yet distant and strange enough to hold a mystical reputation as a place of safety. The next set of locations dealt with by the prophecy provides the context for Nixon’s delivery of some of his most famous predictions. They show that not only the predictions but the prophecy itself were placed in the vicinity of Vale Royal. Over is mentioned next, because it was allegedly in the town field there that Nixon was working when he saw the vision that foretold the outcome of the battle of Bosworth.28 Over manor was one of the most important holdings of the abbot of Vale Royal, and the site of an important market. In the early seventeenth century, therefore, the prophecy was extremely localized, and it remained so in other early versions. It is at this point that the earliest version of the Nixon prophecy breaks off, but later versions continue to locate themselves in a very similar area. This sense of place is a significant indicator of the sources for Nixon’s prophecy, its initial audience and its authorship. What is more important, however, is that this focus on Cheshire, and indeed a small area of Cheshire, was retained when the prophecy achieved national renown and even when

25 Cf. the other God’s crofts, places of safety in the centre of the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire: Cheshire Sheaf 3rd ser. 5 (1903), p. 20. 26 The Kendrick MS makes this ‘Mold and Mersey’, the Cowper MS ‘moule & Morrice’. 27 Cf. its fourteenth-century characterization, by someone writing in south-west Cheshire not many miles from Vale Royal, as ‘the wyldrenesse of Wyrale’: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1967), line 696; A. C. Spearing, The ‘Gawain’-Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1970), p. 2; A. McIntosh, ‘A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology’, English Studies 44 (1953), pp. 1–11; M. J. Bennett, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Literary Achievement of the North West Midlands: The Historical Background’, Journal of Medieval History 5 (1979), pp. 63–88; Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class, and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 231–5; R. W. V. Elliott, ‘Staffordshire and Cheshire Landscapes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies 17 (1977), pp. 20–49; cf. the treatment of Wirral in Drayton, Poly-Olbion. 28 Aubrey mentions a man in Warminster using two sheaves to foretell the outcome of Bosworth: ‘Miscellanies’, in John Aubrey, Three Prose Works: Miscellanies, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, Observations, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (Fontwell, Sussex, 1972), pp. 1–125, at p. 70; this is noticed in W. E. A. Axon, Cheshire Gleanings (Manchester and London, 1884), p. 236.

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it was published. At that point, the Cheshire location could no longer be dismissed as the product of the limited horizons of those who created and sustained the tradition; it reflected the perceptions of the national audience for Nixon’s work. Unlike the Shipton prophecy, the impact of this change did not destroy the relationship to the original locality. This suggests strongly that Richard Head’s decision to remove the Yorkshire elements from the Shipton tradition was not necessitated by the expectations of his audience. Readers in London, in Edinburgh, or in Cumbria or the West Midlands were willing in the early eighteenth century to ponder the fate of their country through prophecies centred on a few square miles in northern Cheshire. Another major reason for the continuing importance of Cheshire localities for the Nixon prophecies was the political culture of the county itself. It was natural for those in the county who created and sustained the prophecy to conceive of the world in these terms. The county, and communities and localities within it, were proud of their identity and possessed the cultural and institutional mechanisms to promote and defend that identity. In the medieval and early modern period, the palatinate of Chester was a semi-autonomous part of the territories of the English king. It had its own administrative and judicial system and its political structure was distinct from that of the rest of England.29 This was supported by a strong local culture of independence, including a set of local historical traditions, such as those ones relating to Chester’s foundation by giants and the British king Leil, and to the grant of the earldom of Chester to Hugh Lupus by William the Conqueror.30 Cheshire culture was therefore strong and exclusive in asserting the county’s autonomy in the early modern period. The identity of the seven hundreds of Cheshire, the main administrative subdivisions below the county itself, was less strong. But even so, they had a clear identity and history. The home of the Nixon prophecy was Eddisbury hundred in the north-west of the county. The core of the hundred, and the meeting place for its inhabitants, was the fort of Eddisbury. This Iron Age hill fort had been refortified by the Saxons against the Vikings: it was one of a string of forts across the North West built by the lady of the Mercians, Æthelflæd, to protect the midlands from the Danes and Norsemen.31 The work of Æthelflæd was celebrated in local

29

General introductions to this administrative system can be found in VCH Cheshire, II, pp. 1–55; Dorothy J. Clayton, The Administration of the County Palatine of Chester, 1442–1485, Chetham Society 3rd ser. 35 (Manchester, 1990), chs IV–VI; P. H. W. Booth, The Financial Administration of the Lordship and County of Chester, 1272–1377, Chetham Society 3rd ser. XXVIII (Manchester, 1981); Tim Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2000). 30 Tim Thornton, ‘Opposition Drama and the Resolution of Disputes in Early Tudor England: Cardinal Wolsey and the Abbot of Chester’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 81 (1999), pp. 25–47. 31 On Æthelflæd, Pauline Stafford, The East Midlands in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester, 1985), pp. 111–14, 136–7. 106


tradition and appeared, for example, in the chronicle of the Chester monk Ranulph Higden and the work of Henry Bradshaw, who saw her as a countess of Chester.32 Eddisbury hundred was dominated by the forest of Delamere and Mondrem: the old hill fort of Eddisbury itself was located at the heart of the forest of Delamere. These forests, and the other Cheshire forests of Macclesfield and Wirral, were created after the Norman conquest to be hunting reserves for the earl of Chester. They had their own administrative system which operated in parallel with the normal administration of the shire. The major offices of the forest were prestigious and tended to be held by great families.33 One of the most influential landowners in the area covered by the forest of Mara and Mondrem and the hundred of Eddisbury was the abbey of Vale Royal. This abbey, its estate and successor gentry house form another major focus of identity in the area. Vale Royal was a house of Cistercian monks founded by Edward I, probably as thanksgiving for his safety from shipwreck returning from France in 1263–4.34 The buildings were planned on a grandiose scale, and intended as the greatest foundation of its kind in England. The abbey became a major landlord in the area and, under increasingly stable leadership in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it exerted considerable influence over its locality. That locality included Over, the township that forms the stage for the Nixon story. There was a particular character to Over that made it famous across Cheshire. Despite its small size, it had the trappings of a much larger town. Daniel King included it in his survey of Cheshire ‘because of the prerogatives it hath’, and in 1774 Dr Johnson commented on Over as a ‘mean old town, without any manufacture, but I think, a corporation’. Over’s mayor became a proverbial figure of fun in Cheshire. As the Cheshire proverb ran, For honours great and profits small The Mayor of Over beats them all.35

The dissolution proved little threat to the continuing focus of its neighbourhood on Vale Royal. The parochial system, organized around the tenants

32

Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, vol. VI, ed. J. R. Lumby (London, 1876), p. 442; Henry Bradshaw, The Life of Saint Werburge of Chester, ed. Carl Horstmann, EETS o.s. 88 (London, 1887), pp. 152–3, lines 639–52. 33 Clayton, Administration of Chester, p. 225. 34 VCH Cheshire, III, p. 156. 35 Joseph C. Bridge, Cheshire Proverbs and Other Sayings and Rhymes Connected with the City and County Palatine of Chester (Chester and London, 1917), p. 57. This was not quite true. Each year two juries were impanelled in the court of the lord of Over, one for Over known as the grand jury. The grand jury returned a list of twelve names, from which the abbot of Vale Royal, who controlled the borough, nominated a mayor, who had some small powers: Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 182. 107


of the abbey, was sustained in the new parish of Whitegate.36 There was physical continuity too: the property was purchased by Sir Thomas Holcroft, and with the majority of the estates of the abbey he obtained the immediate site and monastic buildings, making them the core of his new house.37 The owners of Vale Royal made vigorous efforts to identify themselves with the tradition of authority represented by the abbey through the medium of the architecture of the new house. In the Oak Bedroom at the house, four inscriptions referred to great moments in the life of Vale Royal. There was a mention of the foundation of the monastery by Edward I, and Henry VII’s visit in 1495 was recalled. From the more recent past came the hunting expedition of James I in 1617: ‘King James was royally received by the Lady Mary Cholmondeley at Vale-Royal, August 1st, 1617, and held his court here for four dayes during which time he slept in this chamber.’38 The stained glass of the house adopted a gothick style to present images of the foundation and other key events in Vale Royal’s history.39 The strength of identity of all these entities is reflected in Nixon’s prophecy. The abbey and house of Vale Royal, the township of Over, the parishes of Over and Whitegate, the forest of Delamere, the hundred of Eddisbury and the county palatine of Chester were unusually self-confident and assertive of their own traditions and identity. This local political culture provided the basis on which Nixon’s popularity was built. Its continuing success depended on a more general acceptance among its audience that locality mattered in the fate of their country. The same intense sense of context and locality is evident in the personalities represented in the prophecy. The Nixon tradition has two elements. There are the various introductions to the prophecy, describing the life of the prophet and the circumstances in which it was delivered. And there are the various versions of the prophecy itself. In each element people appear. Some are historical figures, others are mythical. Considering first the real people who are used in the introduction to provide a context to the prophecy, the most important figure is undoubtedly Henry VII. Henry hears about the incident in which Nixon saw the battle

36 The parish was created by statute, 33 Henry VIII, c. 32. This was the result of disputes caused by the attempts of Ralph Donne, vicar of Over, to force the tenants of the abbey to attend Over church; the papal bulls which had granted to the tenants and inhabitants of the abbey’s lands the privilege of using their church had been destroyed by the king’s ‘surveiors’: SR, III, 871; Cheshire Sheaf 3rd ser. 24 (1929), item 5493 (p. 27). 37 VCH Cheshire, III, p. 164. 38 Tunstall, ‘The Story of Vale Royal – II’, p. 23. 39 Cheshire Sheaf 3rd ser. 18 (1923), item 4473 (p. 105); J. P. Rylands and R. Stewart-Brown, ‘Armorial Glass at Vale Royal, Spurstow Hall, Uckington Hall and Tarporley Rectory, in the County of Chester’, The Genealogist xxxviii (1922), pp. 1–14, 61–70; William Wells, Stained and Painted Glass: Burrell Collection: The Corporation of the City of Glasgow, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum (Glasgow, 1965).

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of Bosworth and summons him to court. There he tests Nixon’s powers of vision by hiding his ring. And there one of Henry’s noblemen is offended by Nixon’s predictions of his death and has him locked in a room where he meets his death. Henry VII is a shadowy and little understood figure, as controversy among historians as to the character of his reign testifies, but in the early modern period his memory resonated in the memories of English people.40 It was, for example, to the economic conditions of Henry’s reign that the rebels of East Anglia referred in the demands made by Robert Kett in 1549. Inflation, population increase and changes to agricultural practice disorientated the rebels; they referred back to the remembered stability of Henry VII’s reign.41 Henry’s reign, and especially its start at the battle of Bosworth, therefore represented a crucial starting point in the English past. The authors of Nixon’s prophecy, in choosing Henry’s reign as a context, demonstrated how this liminal quality had been acquired by it in the field of popular culture.42 Another factor helps explain the prominence of the king in the Cheshire prophecy of Nixon. This is the importance of Cheshire men in the victory of Bosworth and therefore in putting Henry Tudor on the English throne. Cheshire men were in contact with Henry during his exile in Brittany and France. Most importantly, the decision of the Stanley family, whose sphere of influence included Cheshire, to throw their weight behind Henry’s attempt on the throne placed Cheshire men in the forefront of the Bosworth campaign and its preliminaries. The Cheshireman Humphrey Brereton of Malpas, sent to Henry in Brittany with money by Thomas, Lord Stanley, during the reign of Richard III, should perhaps not have been as surprised as he was to be greeted, on approaching the town where Henry was staying, by a man who came from very near Brereton’s own home.43 At Bosworth, the Stanleys’ intervention may have been crucial; one of Sir John Savage the younger’s men,

40

S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII, 2nd edn (London, 1977); Alexander Grant, Henry VII: The Importance of his Reign in English History (London, 1985); G. R. Elton, ‘Henry VII: Rapacity and Remorse’, Cambridge Historical Journal 1 (1958), pp. 21–39, reprinted in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1974–92), vol. I, pp. 45–65; T. B. Pugh, ‘Henry VII and the English Nobility’, in The Tudor Nobility, ed. G. W. Bernard (Manchester, 1992), pp. 49–101. 41 Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 4th edn (Harlow and New York, 1997), pp. 144–6 (from BL, Harleian MS 304, fol. 75). 42 Cf. Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England, The Creighton Trust Lecture 1983 (London, 1983), pp. 11–15; note the absence of the alternative view of medieval corruption noted by Thomas. 43 Michael Jones, ‘Richard III and the Stanleys’, in Richard III and the North, ed. Rosemary Horrox, University of Hull, Centre for Regional and Local History, Studies in Regional and Local History 6 (Hull, 1986), pp. 27–50, esp. pp. 35–41; Rosemary Horrox, Richard III: A Study in Service, paperback edn (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 206–7; Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester, 1985), pp. 91–6; Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, ed. J. W. Hales and F. J. Furnivall, 3 vols (London, 1867–8), III, p. 347, lines 670–6. 109


Thomas Woodshawe, was by some accounts the man who killed Richard himself.44 The people of Cheshire remembered well their importance in giving Henry Tudor the crown. Henry showed his gratitude to them, individually 45 and collectively, as when in 1486, negotiating over the Cheshire tax called the mise, county representatives won an immediate concession from the royal commissioners ‘in consideracon of the greet costes & expenses that they haue late made at the filde [of Bosworth] with the kyngez grace’.46 As the battle itself receded into the past, it remained an important element in the culture of the shire. Much of the poetry composed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Cheshire celebrates events surrounding Bosworth Field. Works such as The Song of the Lady Bessy and Bosworth Field centre on the exploits of Cheshire people in 1485 and appropriate the victory to the valour of the county. This development in Cheshire culture was partly sponsored by the Stanley family, and partly by some of the major families of Cheshire; but became part of the culture of the shire beyond a small group of the county elite.47 Henry VII is also significant in connection with one of the central locations of the prophecy, Vale Royal Abbey, because the king visited the monastery on his trip to Cheshire in 1495.48 The visit to the county was remembered in Cheshire at large and at Vale Royal.49 In the later versions of the prophecy recorded by John Oldmixon and his successors, the role of Henry VII is filled by James I. This substitution reflects the importance of the link between James I, Cheshire and Vale Royal.50 James was notable for being the first monarch since Henry VII to actually set foot in the county. This occurred in 1617, when

44 Charles Ross, Richard III (London, 1981), pp. 220–5; Michael Jones, Bosworth 1485: Psychology of a Battle (Stroud, 2002), pp. 167–70; Raymond J. Skinner, ‘Thomas Woodshawe, “Grasiour” and Regicide’, The Ricardian IX (no. 121) (June 1993), pp. 417–25; cf. the alternative identification, Ralph Rudyard, ‘Notes and Queries’, The Ricardian V (no. 73) (June 1981), pp. 366–7. 45 E.g. Sir John Savage, junior, 7 March 1486: CPR, 1485–1494, pp. 101–2. 46 PRO, CHES 2/158, m.3. This contrasted with the experience of Flintshire and the Welsh principality, where the first collection was set for Michaelmas 1486: Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning Wales, ed. J. Goronwy Edwards, Board of Celtic Studies, University of Wales, History and Law Series 2 (Cardiff, 1935), pp. 223–4. 47 David A. Lawton, ‘Scottish Field: Alliterative Verse and Stanley Encomium in the Percy Folio’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. X (1978), pp. 42–57. 48 Samuel Bentley, Excerpta Historica: Or, Illustrations of English History (London, 1831), pp. 103–4; Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, pp. 174–9. 49 E.g. in the Chester annals, ‘This Year King Hen. 7. and Queen, with many Lords with them, came to Chester’: William Smith, ‘The Vale-Royall of England’, in The Vale-Royall of England (London, 1656). 50 It is notable that James was also substituted for another Tudor monarch in another poem from the region, that on Henry VIII in the Percy folio MS: ‘Listen Jolly Gentlemen’, Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, I, pp. 130–1.

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the king was returning from a visit to Scotland.51 As the representative of a new dynasty who was not wholly appreciated in his new English kingdom, James found support from the other territories he came to rule. He made his son Henry prince of Wales and earl of Chester in a ceremony that prominently featured speeches in the Welsh language, and leeks were worn at his court on St David’s Day.52 Many aspects of the palatinate of Chester which had been neglected during the reign of Elizabeth when there was no recognized heir to the throne were revived for the new earl Henry and continued to develop after his death once his brother Charles had been granted the title.53 During James’s journey through Cheshire in 1617, it was Vale Royal that acted as the base for his activities. He arrived there on 21 August and did not ultimately depart until the following Monday.54 It was from Vale Royal on 23 August that James made a trip to Chester. The city laid on a splendid welcome for him.55 James’s order of priorities is clear, however. He spent only five hours in Chester and soon returned to Vale Royal.56 There on Sunday he heard a sermon, in Whitegate church, preached by the dean of Chester, Thomas Mallory,57 and on Monday enjoyed good hunting around the house – which, for a king who spent perhaps half of his period on the English throne on progress and hunting, was high praise.58 James also appreciated the qualities of the mistress of Vale Royal. Lady Mary Cholmondeley was described by the king as the ‘Bold Lady

51 Cf. his visit to Carlisle, the first by an English king since 1355: R. T. Spence, ‘A Royal Progress in the North: James I at Carlisle Castle and the Feast of Brougham, August 1617’, Northern History 27 (1991), pp. 41–89. 52 Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales: and England’s Lost Renaissance (London, 1986), pp. 141–2, 152–3; Pauline Croft, ‘The Parliamentary Installation of Henry, Prince of Wales’, Historical Research LXV (1992), pp. 177–93; Witty Apophthegms Delivered at Severall Times, and upon Severall Occasions, by King James, King Charls, the Marquess of Worcester, Francis Lord Bacon, and Sir Thomas Moore, ed. [Thomas Bayly] (London, 1658): ‘a good and commendable fashion’. 53 Tim Thornton, ‘Dynasty and Territory in the Early Modern Period: The Princes of Wales and their Western British Inheritance’, Welsh History Review 20 (2000), pp. 1–33. 54 John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities, of King James the First, his Royal Consort, Family, and Court, 4 vols (London, 1828), III, pp. 406–10. His visit was important enough to receive a special record in the Whitegate parish register – ‘The same daye, the 21st daye of Auguste, being Thursdaye, King James came to Vale Royall, and there kept his court untill Monday after’: Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 153. 55 The council agreed to spend £100 on the reception, and later recompensed Kendricke Eaton, who had prepared the banquet: Margaret Groombridge, A Calendar of Chester City Council Minutes, 1603–1642, RSLC CVI (Blackpool, 1966), pp. 84, 94. Nichols, Progresses of James the First, III, pp. 408–9. 56 Nichols, Progresses of James the First, III, pp. 406–10. 57 Nichols, Progresses of James the First, III, pp. 406–10. 58 He knighted John Done at Utkinton shortly after leaving Vale Royal in gratitude for his arranging the hunting at Vale Royal: Nichols, Progresses of James the First, III, p. 410.

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of Cheshire’.59 The Cholmondeleys were very proud of this royal visit: it was celebrated in an inscription in one of the main rooms in the house as one of the major episodes in the history of Vale Royal.60 It is significant that the prophecy in all its forms uses an English king as a central locating figure. Nixon’s may have been a Cheshire prophecy but it was placed in context by reference to English kings. Yet it is also significant that both the monarchs concerned were men with strong Cheshire links. There was no role for Henry VIII or Elizabeth, in spite of their prominence in the history of the period, but instead for the less widely celebrated Henry VII and James I, men with greater relevance for Cheshire itself and for the locality of the prophecy. The other point of significance to be noted here is that Henry and James stand alone. Their noble courtier is not named and seems to be little more than a symbol. In addition, he plays a malevolent role, being responsible for the death of Nixon. No other national ‘English’ figures are used to help locate the prophecy. In some later versions of the prophecy, one of the men involved in the predictions themselves from the very beginning is also given a role in the context of Nixon’s life. This is Abbot John Hareware of Vale Royal, who allegedly took Nixon into his house: as abbot he was the most important figure in the society of the area. Hareware is referred to in the prophecy under the name of the ‘Harrow’: when the Harrow came to the high altar, Nixon allegedly foretold, the monastery of Vale Royal would be dissolved. After a period of relative peace and good government, Hareware’s accession as abbot in 1535 resulted in considerable disruption.61 His importance in the prophecy reflects a troubled abbacy culminating in the controversial dissolution of the house. He was in origin probably a local man, having begun his monastic career at the abbey of Combermere.62 He had then become abbot of Hulton in Staffordshire, where his career had been marked by allegations of corruption

59

John T. Hopkins, ‘“Such a Twin Likeness there was in the Pair”: An Investigation into the Painting of the Cholmondeley Sisters’, THSLC 141 (1992 for 1991), pp. 1–37, esp. pp. 7–14. 60 The visit lingered too in the memory of the people of the city of Chester, although slightly more grudgingly: in 1630, one annalist recorded that the crowd of knights, esquires and gentlemen drawn by a visit from the countess of Derby exceeded even the number present for King James: Nichols, Progresses of James the First, III, p. 408, citing BL, Harleian MS 2125. 61 The exception in the years immediately before 1535 was a dispute over the valuable living of Llanbadarn Vawr: PRO, C 1/480/1; /493/49 (writ dated 5 June 1527); The Ledger Book of Vale Royal Abbey, ed. John Brownbill, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, LXVIII (Manchester, 1914), p. 90. 62 John Hareware made this claim when faced with a privy seal letter demanding payment of 200 marks. He said he had paid the money to Thomas Averey (Cromwell’s servant) by the hands of Geoffrey Chamber; this he said had discharged the obligation: PRO, E 321/41/40. 112


and violence.63 His election at Vale Royal was controversial: no less a figure than Anne Boleyn intervened.64 There are clear signs that Hareware’s election meant the rejection of some of the past alliances of the community at Vale Royal: Hareware’s prosecution over his alleged refusal to pay Robert Dutton, the bastard son of the powerful Cheshire gentleman Laurence Dutton, £110 for two obligations given to Laurence by a previous abbot in 1515 and 1517 suggests an alliance of twenty years’ standing had been broken.65 The arrival of Hareware as abbot produced a rash of cases in Westminster and local courts.66 In the late 1530s, however, Hareware faced a sterner test of his powers, in the form of Henry VIII’s intensifying campaign against the monasteries, and in particular the attentions of Henry’s minister, Thomas Cromwell. In 1536 Cromwell was appointed steward of the monastery, in place of the earl of Shrewsbury, in an attempt to win his support and favour, but this was not enough: in 1538 Cromwell put pressure on Hareware to grant him a lease of Darnhall, pressure which Hareware was not in the event able to resist. 67 Hareware realized that his best policy now lay in leasing the lands of his abbey. His caution proved right, for on 7 September 1538, Vale Royal Abbey was surrendered to the royal commissioner, Thomas Holcroft. Hareware showed his determined character by attempting, ineffectively, to resist this surrender.68 Hareware’s possible continuing obstruction may be the reason for charges made against him before the court of the abbey itself, in the name if not the presence of its steward, Thomas Cromwell himself, on 31 March 1539. The offences alleged suggest the ruthlessness of the abbot’s rule, and their topicality and mentions of the Pilgrimage of Grace ensured his fall.69 It was alleged that he agreed to the murder of one of his monks, Hugh Chalenor, and that Hugh had said to his nephew the day before his death that he feared his life was in danger at the monastery. Hareware was said to have threatened Richard Nightingale, a tenant of the monastery, that if he went to serve the king during the Pilgrimage, he would be put out of his house. A more general contempt for the king’s proceedings was apparent from the alleged actions and words of one of Hareware’s associates, his brother Nicholas, the vicar of

63

Previous violence at Hulton: PRO, STAC 2/21/230; ‘Star Chamber Proceedings. Henry VIII. and Edward VI.’, Collections for a History of Staffordshire (1912), pp. 1–207, at pp. 25–6. Apart from this, he does not seem to have used or been prosecuted in Star Chamber. 64 A. J. Kettle, ‘The Abbey of Vale Royal’, VCH Cheshire, III, p. 162. PRO, SP 1/84, fol. 197 (LP, vii. 868 (misdated to 1534), viii. 1056 (which locates the episode in 1535)). 65 PRO, C 1/772/41. 66 PRO, C 1/732/23, /752/53; PRO, CHES 15/1/174–6. 67 Darnhall was worth £44 6s. 8d.: Valor ecclesiasticus temp. Henr. VIII, 6 vols (London, 1810–34), V, pp. 208–9. 68 BL, Harleian MS 604, fol. 62 (Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries, ed. Thomas Wright, Camden Society o.s. 26 (London, 1843), pp. 244–5). 69 Bodl., Tanner MS 343, fol. 17 (Ormerod, Chester, II, pp. 152–3). 113


Weaverham.70 It was alleged by the jury that the vicar of Weaverham had thrown away a licence concurring a marriage issued in the name of the king’s officers in his role as head of the Church of England, saying that it was not lawful, and that the king was not lawfully married. The source of these allegations is suggested by the endorsement to the indictments, ‘To my brother, Thomas Holcrofte, be thes d[elivere]d with speede’. This suggests that John Holcroft or another close relative of Thomas’s was actually present during the court proceedings, no doubt to ensure that the correct indictments were recorded. The fate of Hareware is unclear, but it is likely that he suffered for his resistance to the dissolution, since he does not appear in the pension rolls for the reigns of Henry VIII or Mary.71 Hareware is significant, however, in terms of the nature of the prophecy. He was clearly a larger than life figure, and his memory lived on. Not least, it lived on in the prophecy. The question must be, whether the abbot’s reputation independent of the prophecy was what ensured its inclusion, or whether it was the oral tradition of the prophecy alone, springing from near the abbey and proximate to the time of Hareware’s abbacy, that ensured the immortality of Hareware’s name. The most likely explanation is that the subsequent owners of the site of Vale Royal saw the value both of the link to its pre-dissolution history and the validation for the dissolution represented by Hareware’s name in the prophecy. Thomas Holcroft also features prominently in the prophecy. Nixon allegedly prophesied that the eagle would build its nest in the abbey of Vale Royal, and since the eagle was the badge of Thomas Holcroft, this was interpreted as anticipating Holcroft’s acquisition of the site. Holcroft initially leased the site and then eventually in 1544 bought it, along with many of its granges. Its new owner intended to make Vale Royal his home, and the abbey did not completely disappear. While he demolished the abbey church, Holcroft retained many of the recently rebuilt conventual buildings as the core of the house he built on the site.72 Holcroft had risen in the service of Henry VIII. He was the second son of John Holcroft of Holcroft Hall near Leigh in Lancashire; he and his brother John served in a variety of capacities,

70 Nicholas, described as vicar of Weaverham, was one of the creditors of Robert Bostock, of Moulton in the parish of Davenham, who made his will on 31 March 1537: Cheshire Sheaf 3rd ser. 26 (1934), item 5830 (p. 35). In 1523 the vicar was William Brereton; however, on 11 April in that year a caveat was entered at Lichfield showing the next vacancy had been granted to Roger Wygston, esq., Robert Harware, merchant, Richard Hassall, gent., William Harware and Roger Harware. Nicholas appears again as vicar in 1542; by September 1554 Thomas Runcorn appears. The first appointment under the stated patronage of Thomas Holcroft was that of William Holcroft on 6 April 1557: Ormerod, Chester, I, p. 117. 71 Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 153. 72 VCH Cheshire, III, p. 164; G. D. Halland, ‘Preliminary Notes on the History and Development of the Building’, in Vale Royal Abbey and House (Winsford, 1977), pp. 26–33.

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Thomas being in particular a specialist in Scottish affairs, knighted at Leith in 1544.73 The rationale for the appearance of Thomas Holcroft in the prophecy depends on the date of its composition. Holcroft enjoyed a long and successful life, only dying in 1595. He was succeeded at Vale Royal by his son, also Sir Thomas, who became a member of the privy chamber.74 In spite of this long tenure, and the secure succession of an adult son and heir, the prophecy served a useful purpose for the Holcrofts. At this period, a prophecy of the dissolution of the monastery and its purchase by the Holcrofts helped counter the possibility of Catholic restoration and the re-establishment of the monasteries, a not-impossible scenario. The inclusion of predictions about Holcroft may have been particularly useful to a newcomer to the county. Although the dissolution provided opportunities for outsiders to obtain land in the county, their experience of trying to enter Cheshire society, even at this time, was not a happy one. There were few significant entries to Cheshire gentry society at this time, yet Holcroft was able to integrate relatively quickly, for example being elected to the two parliaments of 1553 and that of April 1554, for Cheshire.75 This ease of integration is represented by the appearance in the prophecy, and it is possible that the acceptance of the Holcrofts was facilitated by this entry into the prophecy traditions of the county. It seems clear that the initial core of the Nixon prophecy tradition had developed before a recognition of the Cholmondeley ownership of the site became relevant or necessary. In 1615/16 the second Sir Thomas Holcroft of Vale Royal sold the abbey to Lady Mary Cholmondeley, widow of Sir Hugh Cholmondeley of Cholmondeley and daughter and sole heir of Christopher Holford of Holford.76 This may serve as a useful terminus ante quem for the prophecy, since a date in the 1590s or 1610s has already been suggested. Born in 1552, MP and sheriff, Sir Hugh Cholmondeley of Cholmondeley was a remarkably influential figure, later being referred to by another Cheshire gentleman as ‘justly esteemed the father of his country for fifty years’.77 Sir Hugh and Lady Mary’s fourth son was Thomas, born on 2 March 1594/5 at Holford, his mother’s home. This Thomas married Elizabeth, sole daughter and heiress of John Minshull of Minshull, thereby obtaining an inheritance which Mary Cholmondeley’s purchase of Vale Royal was intended to augment.78

73

The House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. S. T. Bindoff, 3 vols (London, 1982), II, pp. 373–5; Ormerod, Chester, II, pp. 153–4. 74 Commons, 1509–1558, II, pp. 372–3 (Sir John, d. 1560), 373–5 (Sir Thomas, d. 1558); The House of Commons, 1558–1603, ed. P. W. Hasler (London, 1981), II, pp. 326–7 (Sir Thomas II, d. 1620); Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 154. 75 Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, pp. 33–4. 76 Commons, 1558–1603, II, pp. 326–7 (Sir Thomas disposed of all his property, 1611–16, and retired to London where he died, after falling downstairs, in 1620). 77 Sir John Crewe of Utkinton, 1701/2, cited by Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 156. 78 Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 157. 115


It is to a particularly traumatic period in the history of the Cholmondeley family that their direct contribution to the prophecy belongs. This was the threatened extinction of the male line of the family in the later seventeenth century. Thomas Cholmondeley of Vale Royal, the son of Sir Hugh, had died in January 1652/3. His marriage produced three daughters and no fewer than seven sons, of whom the first two died young, leaving Thomas II to inherit. Like Thomas I, he fathered many children, but all the five sons of the first marriage of Thomas Cholmondeley II, to Jane Tollemache, were dead by the end of 1679.79 His first wife having died in childbirth in 1666, on 20 May 1684, a few months short of his fifty-seventh birthday, Thomas married Anne, the daughter of Sir Walter St John. And though she had by then reached the age of 34, on 12 January 1684/5 an heir, Charles, was finally born.80 It is worth recalling that this is precisely the period when, traditionally, it has been assumed that a rise in rationalism and scepticism was doing most damage to the influence of ancient prophecy. This was the period of a declining belief in Arthur and Merlin, and we have already seen how it saw a dilution of the Shipton tradition. Yet these years saw the rapid development of the Nixon tradition and its emergence from a strictly local milieu to national prominence. Whatever the supposed rise in ‘rationalism’, and especially if it was driven by essentially political forces, the reality was that locally, in Cheshire, and nationally in the 1680s, the pattern of the development of events seemed harder than ever to understand rationally. The coincidence of these events with the momentous period of the reign of James II and, to an extent, the parallels with national events they exhibited, 81 provided the circumstances to take a local family prophecy onto the national stage. In many minds, rationalism had made little impact; in many others, its adoption did not exclude a recognition of the apparent predictive power of prophetic tradition. This ambiguity and inconsistency was accommodated through the filters of humour and self-deprecation. A similar filter existed in the ambiguity and inconsistency of centre–locality relationships in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The central

79 Robert, first son, b. 1651, d. 1679 (leaving a daughter Elizabeth, who married John Atherton of Atherton and left issue); Thomas, second son, b. 1658, d. 1659; John, third son, b. 1660, d. 1661; Hugh, fourth son, b. 1662, d. 1664; Francis, fifth son, b. 1663, d. 1664. Of seven daughters, three died within two years of their birth; Jane (b. 1655) died in 1681 without issue; Elizabeth married Sir Thomas Vernon of Hodnet, without issue; Mary became the wife of John Egerton of Egerton and Oulton, again without issue; and Anne alone, married to Thomas Bankes of Winstanley, produced children: Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 158. 80 Ormerod, Chester, II, pp. 157–8. 81 In Jacobite eyes, there can be little doubt that the story of the miraculous birth of a male heir when all hope of the continuation of the line seemed lost struck chords with the experience of James II himself. At the time, in 1685, the Cholmondeleys were one of the leading Tory families in the shire, and their impending demise would have threatened Tory dominance, only recently recovered from the Whigs.

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power of the state, and the overweening size of the metropolis, may have been more evident than ever before, but the discourses of power remained less stark. In fact, it can be argued that the local context of Cheshire was in the period around 1688 a key to politics nationally, so it was natural that a local tradition of ancient prophecy took centre stage, becoming national while remaining intensely local.82 The importance of the Nixon prophecy can only be understood when it is seen in the context of the political society of Cheshire which produced it. The legacy of the civil wars and interregnum in the county was bitterness and hatred which culminated, after twenty years of tension, in the explosive events of the 1680s when local political life interacted, decisively, in the wider events of 1688–9.83 Cheshire, more than any other county, experienced the clash between the supporters of William of Orange and of James Stuart; at least in the eyes of many contemporary observers, Cheshire was cradle both of Revolution and of Jacobite resistance. This understanding facilitated the development from the county’s tradition of the Nixon prophecy as the key prophetic tradition of the eighteenth century, exemplifying the heritage and aspirations of both Jacobites and their opponents. The response of James Scott duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s bastard son, to the defeat of Exclusion in 1681 was to make a progress through the north midland counties in 1682. Support for Monmouth, demonstrated on this occasion by thousands of ordinary Cheshire people, and elsewhere, for example by Robert Cotton, one of Cheshire’s MPs in the parliaments of the Exclusion Crisis,84 gave the Tories the opportunity they needed to counter-attack. Resistance continued, however, and the accession of James to the throne in 1685, and his call for elections to a parliament, produced a ferociously fought parliamentary election campaign.85 Monmouth’s rebellion too seriously disturbed Cheshire. Henry, Lord Delamer, who had recently succeeded his father and who was determined to put the county’s militia (to the number of 20,000 men) in arms for Monmouth, left London after hearing on 27 May 1685 that Monmouth had sailed. Nothing came of the attempt in Cheshire

82 A point made a few years later by a Whig: ‘[A]s there was a greater rising for the Prince of Orange in Cheshire, than in any other county in England, why may we not imagine that Nixon’s Prophecy contributed very much to it?’ Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy at Large. Published from the Lady Cowper’s Correct Copy. With Historical and Political Remarks: and Several Instances wherein it is Fulfilled (London, 1719), pp. 24–5. 83 As will become apparent, this departs from the revisionist tradition (e.g. John Morrill, ‘Parliamentary Representation, 1543–1974’, VCH Cheshire, II, pp. 114–27 (‘The County Seats, 1660–1832’), esp. pp. 115–25; P. J. Challinor, ‘Restoration and Exclusion in the County of Cheshire’, BJRL 64 (1981–2), pp. 360–85); cf. the alternative perspectives in Stephen W. Baskerville, ‘The Management of the Tory Interest in Lancashire and Cheshire, 1714–1747’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1976). 84 E.g. CCRO, DDX 7/1, 2 (Sheaf, 14 November 1969, 21 November 1969, pp. 41–3). 85 The House of Commons, 1660–1690, ed. Basil Duke Henning, 3 vols (London, 1983), I, p. 151.

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because of the prompt action of the supporters of the king there. Delamer was tried in 1686 for treason, but the jury decided his vote in the Lords against the bill attainting Monmouth was not evidence proving complicity in the rebellion.86 The pro-Catholic policies of James II had a catastrophic effect on the Tories of Cheshire. Thomas Cholmondeley of Vale Royal represented very well their dilemma. He had begun to show concern for the fate of the church as he drifted out of the influence of the inner circles of the court in the 1670s, and, although elected for Cheshire in 1685, within a couple of years found himself accused for criticizing James II’s actions against the Church of England.87 Study of the victory of William III has recently shifted toward an emphasis on the attitudes and events on the Dutch side of the North Sea which made his invasion possible.88 Yet William’s invasion succeeded primarily because of the precipitate departure of James from Salisbury and thence from England. It may be that even without this William would have triumphed, but at the very least his success would have taken a different form. One of the major causes of James’s departure was the actions of Lord Delamer. Delamer and Charles Gerard, earl of Macclesfield, were involved in conspiracy from a year before the final demise of James’s reign. Delamer, partly motivated by a desire to pre-empt any similar actions by the earl of Derby, but also by a determination to set forth an agenda more clearly Orangist than any other nobleman in the conspiracy would tolerate, began to move a week before William left Exeter.89 He issued a strident call to arms, marshalled his men at Bowden and marched with his main ally Lord Cholmondeley to Newcastle-under-Lyme.90

86

Howard Hodson, Cheshire, 1660–1780: Restoration to Industrial Revolution (Chester, 1978), p. 15. The only eyewitness against him was proven to have perjured himself: John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1771–88), II, p. 54 (James II to William of Orange, 15 January 1685/6). It was recalled at his funeral that ever after 14 January was a day of prayer in the family: Richard Wroe, A Sermon at the Funeral of the Right Honourable Henry, Earl of Warrington, Baron Delamer of Dunham-Massy, Lord Lieutenant of the County-Palatine of Chester; and one of the Lords of their Majesties Most Honourable Privy Council, Preached at Bowden in Cheshire (London, 1694), pp. 24–5. 87 Commons, 1660–1690, II, p. 65. 88 E.g. Dale Eugene Hoak, ‘The Anglo-Dutch Revolution of 1688–89’, in The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89, ed. Dale Eugene Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (Stanford, Calif., 1996), pp. 1–26, 265–73. 89 News of William’s second, successful, landing reached the north on 7 November 1688: David H. Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North: Aspects of the Revolution of 1688 (Hamden, Conn., 1976), p. 84. See ibid., pp. 85–6, for Delamer’s motivations and an argument that his action should be seen as part of the general plan against James, contradicting A. C. Wood, ‘The Revolution of 1688 in the North of England’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 44 (1941 for 1940), pp. 72–104, esp. p. 82; and Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds, 1632–1712, 3 vols (Glasgow, 1944–51), I, p. 397. 90 Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, pp. 84–9. For Cholmondeley involvement 118


They then moved to Nottingham, where Delamer left Cholmondeley and rode rapidly through the Welsh marches, making contact with William at Bristol.91 Not only was Delamer, the leading Cheshire Whig, the leader of this lightning move, but the majority of his horse were also Cheshiremen, essentially the core of men he brought with him from home,92 including gentry such as Henry Brooke, John Egerton, Thomas Minshull, and Thomas Warburton.93 The king’s notorious nose-bleeds, a key symptom of his psychological collapse, began to trouble him around the time he received news of the Cheshiremen’s march.94 The importance of the actions of Delamer should not overshadow those of the supporters of James in Cheshire. Nixon’s prophecy was not the product in preparation of the plot, CCRO, DCH K/10 (letters from J. Colley to William Adams, 24 November 1688, and [Viscount] C[holmondeley] to same, 25 December 1688). 91 Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, p. 94. 92 BL, Add. MS 41,805, fols 249–50 (C. R[eynolds] to Philip Froude, 21 November 1688, reporting 600 horse in Nottingham), 260–1 (Peter Naylor to same, from Warrington, 21 November 1688, reporting that at Holmes Chapel the force consisted of 400 horse); Hosford, n. 46. Peter Shakerley, writing to Lieut.-Gen. Robert Werden on the same day, put the force which gathered at Bowden at 200–250, but in Chester he was not so well placed as Naylor to comment: BL, Add. MS 38,695, fol. 86. 93 Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, p. 88; he mentions Samuel Finney of Fulshaw and Captain Thomas Latham (CCRO, DFF 38/35, fols 52–3 (MS ‘History of the Parish of Wilmslow’, c. 1785, by Samuel Finney III)); John Egerton, Thomas Warburton, Lord Cholmondeley, Delamer’s brother-in-law Mainwaring (BL, Add. MS 38,695, fol. 86 (Shakerley to Werden, 21 November 1688)); William Lawton, Randolph Holme, Henry Brooke, Thomas Minshull, and (possibly) Sir John Bland: Bodl., MS Don. C39, fol. 11 (newsletter to [Sir Daniel Fleming], ? November 1688); Henry Kirke, ‘Dr. Clegg, Minister and Physician, in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society XXXV (1913), pp. 1–74, at p. 10. William Fleming described the force as ‘gentlemen, and tradesmen of very great fortunes’; he numbered them at 250 horse, ‘well armed’: Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, The Manuscripts of S. H. Le Fleming, Esq., of Rydal Hall (1890), p. 222. Sir Thomas Fotherley told Clarendon that at Hungerford on 7 December the force numbered about 200, ‘very shabby fellows, pitifully mounted, and worse armed’: Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers Preserved in the Bodleian Library, ed. H. O. Coxe et al., 5 vols (Oxford and London, 1869–1970), II, pp. 218–19. It may be significant that Thomas Warburton was a captain of Delamer’s regiment of horse on 31 December 1688; his captains on 2 September 1689 were Robert Broadnax, Thomas Latham, Joseph Stroud, George Bermingham (? Delamer’s nephew), John Wright, and Richard Minshull: C. Dalton (ed.), English Army Lists and Commission Registers, 6 vols (London, 1892–1904), III, p. 25. 94 Peter Shakerley wrote to Lieut.-Gen. Werden to deny a rumour of 5,000 horse: BL, Add. MS 38,695, fol. 86 (Shakerley to Werden, 21 November 1688). Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, p. 95: ‘rumor generated by their movement had contributed to the general confusion and disorganisation on the royalist side’; A. A. Mitchell, ‘The Revolution of 1688 and the Flight of James II’, History Today XV (1965), pp. 496–504, at p. 500; nosebleeds – PRO, SP 44/97, fol. 19 (Earl of Middleton to Lord Preston); [John Oldmixon], The History of England during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (London, 1730), pp. 756–7. Delamer was created earl of Warrington 17 April 1690. 119


of a society entirely committed to the cause of revolution. The earl of Derby’s secret support for the conspiracy meant that any decisive action on behalf of the king was unlikely in Cheshire,95 but there were those among the deputy lieutenants who were willing to try to rally support. Some were clearly likely to be sympathetic to the rebels, men such as Sir Willoughby Aston, who was closely allied to the Mainwarings. Derby’s determination to remain apparently loyal, however, meant that he forwarded commands for the militia to be raised, and collected and sent on reports of rebel actions.96 Francis Cholmondeley of Vale Royal, Charles’s uncle, was therefore able to play a prominent role in attempting to organize some resistance in Cheshire. Immediately following the Revolution, Francis was excluded from parliament, becoming in his own words ‘ye first example of this kind, to be imprison’d for refusing ye oaths’ of allegiance, and, if later information is correct, he was one of five men in Lancashire and Cheshire to have received commissions from James II to raise regiments of horse and foot in 1689.97 His efforts were in vain, but this was not the only sign of royalist activity in the North West. Thanks to companies of volunteers, mainly papists, raised by Viscount Molyneux and in the command of Colonel Gage, Chester was the scene of the only active resistance to the Revolution, and their activities were widely reported throughout the country.98 In 1688–9 Cheshire therefore witnessed some of the most decisive actions on either side of the revolutionary struggle. When the Nixon prophecy foretold the events of the Revolution, centred around Delamere Forest and the newborn nephew of Francis Cholmondeley, the resonances were obvious to the population of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. What more natural than to dramatize visions of the past around continuities in the foretold history of the region? In fact, the first testimony of the prophecy being current nationally comes in 1691, from the author of a translation of elements from Nostradamus’s prophecy, who referred to the ‘famous stories we have of Nickson’s’.99

95

Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, p. 87. When Derby read the order to stop Delamer, he ‘smiled . . . and said the king should have given him his commission sooner, that the men might have been raised and ready’: HMC, Le Fleming, p. 222. 96 Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, p. 87: ‘While Derby technically fulfilled his part of the bargain, he moved so cautiously that at worst the king could have accused him of being dilatory.’ He forwarded a copy of Delamer’s declaration promptly to Viscount Preston. 97 JRUL, Legh of Lyme, Francis Cholmondeley to Peter Legh the elder, 9 January 1689; The Jacobite Trials at Manchester in 1694, ed. William Beamont, Chetham Society XXVIII ([Manchester], 1853), pp. 17, 30 (information of John Lunt and George Wilson, 1694). 98 Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, pp. 104–7. Peter Shakerley attempted to argue that the men of the garrison were well disciplined: BL, Add MS 38,695, fol. 19 (Peter Shakerley to William Blathwaite, 7 July 1688). 99 The Predictions of Nostradamus before the Year 1558 . . . Considered in a Letter to a Friend, etc. (N1398; London, 1691), p. 8; it recurs in the same form in the 1697 edition: The Predictions of Nostradamus, before the Year 1558 . . . ([London], [169[7]]), p. 8. 120


It was in this volatile atmosphere that Nixon’s prophecy was transformed from being simply a Cheshire tradition to a story of national political significance. The custodians of the prophecy, the Cholmondeleys, may have begun after 1696 slowly to shift their position away from opposition to the sitting monarch; yet Francis Cholmondeley of Vale Royal, entrusted with the weighty task of the upbringing of Richard, heir to the increasingly important Grosvenor interest, and of his brothers after the death of Sir Thomas in February 1702, was a Jacobite. He had spent time at the court in exile in 1655 and, although elected to parliament in 1689, he did not participate as he refused to take the oaths.100 By 1700, Thomas Cholmondeley was over 70; Francis was his only surviving brother; and since the miraculous Charles Cholmondeley was barely 17 when his father finally died early in 1702, and had several years of education still ahead of him (he entered the Middle Temple in 1709), Francis had an important role in the family until his death in the summer of 1713.101 In 1715, Charles Cholmondeley was, by some accounts, a possible Jacobite. As late as 1721, his name was included in a list of prominent English Jacobites sent to the court of the Stuarts in Rome, but by this stage it is unlikely that he was so staunch a potential rebel as he had been six years before.102 It should be noted that throughout his subsequent very prominent political career in Cheshire he was known to those to whom he offered himself as a candidate, and his colleagues in parliament, as the subject of one of Nixon’s prophecies. Charles was the long-awaited heir whose birth had been prophesied. This, together with the problems of the Whigs, provided him with the opportunity for an extraordinarily long grasp on political power. To this point, we have been considering a tradition which was oral and manuscript only, and which nonetheless achieved remarkable currency. The transition to print needs explanation and examination. The particular circumstances played a part: the death of Francis Cholmondeley, the approaching death of Queen Anne, and the possibility that Charles Cholmondeley’s 100

Commons, 1660–1690, II, pp. 63–4; Correspondence of the Family of Hatton: Being Chiefly Letters Addressed to Christopher, First Viscount Hatton, 1601–1704, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, Camden Society n.s. 22–3 ([Westminster], 1878), II, p. 140 (Mr Cholmley’s refusal to pay fees to allow the suing of a habeas corpus – glossed as Thomas, but more likely Francis); BL, Add. MS 36,913, fol. 232 (1695). Lettice (d. January 1610/11), the wife of Sir Richard Grosvenor, was the sister of Thomas Cholmondeley (d. 1653) and therefore Francis’s aunt: Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 157. Morrill dates the change much earlier: VCH Cheshire. 101 Ormerod, Chester, II, pp. 157–8; I, pp. 550–1 (Charles only married in July 1714). 102 The House of Commons, 1715–1754, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 3 vols (London, 1970), I, pp. 550–1. His refusal to support a compromise Whig–Tory ticket in 1714–15 cost him a seat in the election of 1715, though he retained much Tory support: Stephen W. Baskerville, Peter Adman and Katharine F. Beedham, ‘“Praefering a Whigg to a Whimsical”: The Cheshire Election of 1715 Reconsidered’, BJRL 74(3) (Autumn 1992), pp. 139–68. 121


political allegiances might be up for grabs. It was, however, also a sign of the determination of the Whigs to control this tradition – but it was fated also to show that attempts to exert control through printing were to be only partially successful.103 The Nixon prophecy was first printed thanks to the main Whig printing house, that of the Baldwins and their successor, James Roberts. The Cheshire Prophecy, with Historical and Political Remarks was printed and sold by Abigail Baldwin, widow of Richard Baldwin, and so the date of the edition must be before her death in the autumn of 1713.104 This was an interpretation of Nixon’s prophecy which emphasized the inevitable failure of a future invasion attempt by the Pretender, attributing this to his defeat at the hands of a Cheshire miller, and the future prosperity of the church, signified by the fall of a wall at Vale Royal. The next edition, The Cheshire Prophesy with Historical and Political Remarks,105 was printed and sold by James Roberts, the Baldwins’ son-in-law, who succeeded to their trade publishing business on Abigail’s death. He soon controlled the largest trade publishing shop in London, producing more books and pamphlets than anyone else in the following twenty years.106 The second edition of the prophecy must therefore date from no earlier than late 1713, and no later than 1715, when our first definite date is provided by Roberts’s third edition, A True Copy of Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy.107 The publication was almost certainly inspired, however, by Edmund Curll. The use of the Roberts trade publishing operation was 103

Jacqueline Simpson, ‘Nixon’s Prophecies in their Historical Setting’, Folklore 86 (1975), pp. 201–7, identified an uncomplicated connection to Hanoverian propaganda; Ian Sellers, ‘Nixon, the Cheshire Prophet and his Interpreters’, Folklore 92 (1981), pp. 30–42, preferred to see publication as an attempt ‘to forestall Nixon’s being utilized by the forces of rebellion’ (p. 31). 104 Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (London, 1922), p. 15 (he misnames her Ann); Leona Rostenberg, ‘Richard and Anne [sic] Baldwin, Whig Patriot Publishers’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 47 (1953), pp. 1–42 (which treats them as publishers in the modern sense of the word). Richard Baldwin (publishing from 1681) was one of the leading figures in the London book market of his day (Michael Treadwell’s ‘Trade Publishers’), and the chief Whig publisher, until his death in 1698: ibid., pp. 15–17; Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers 1675–1750’, The Library 6th ser. IV (1982), pp. 99–134, esp. pp. 108–10. The date 1714 was ascribed to this edition in the Axon bibliography, but the date is almost certainly too late. 105 Dated by the BL catalogue to c. 1713: BL, c. 175 i. 16. (6.). 106 After an unprecedented term of four years (1729–32) as master of the Stationers’ Company he relaxed his efforts somewhat; it is only after this period that others took up the publication of Nixon’s prophecy: J. M. Treadwell, ‘London Printers and Printing Houses in 1705’, Publishing History 7 (1980), pp. 43–4; Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers’, p. 110. 107 Another indication is provided by the length, 20 pages rather than 18, and the price, which was now 4d. where it had been 3d at the first edition. Roberts was advertising Nixon in November 1715: J. P. W. Rogers, ‘Congreve’s First Biographer: The Identity of “Charles 122


accustomed practice for Curll. Roberts would supervise the actual distribution and sale of the book, Curll its promotion. 108 Given Curll’s influence and methods, it may well be that the inspiration for the work came from him well before the work itself was published. This may mean that Curll realized the opportunity, or indeed need, for a Whig interpretation of Nixon as early as 1711 or 1712.109 Curll’s relationship with John Oldmixon (1673–1742) provided him with an editor/author for the text.110 If the publishing house had impeccable Whig credentials, then so did the editor of the prophecy. Oldmixon, a notorious Whig propagandist,111 originated from near Bridgwater in Somerset.112 He made his name among the Whig hierarchy as a poet and playwright from about 1696, and soon switched his attention to historical writing and political pamphleteering. Whig influence is evident, for example, in his History of Addresses of 1709–10, which criticized the professions of loyalty presented to

Wilson”’, Modern Language Quarterly 31 (1970), pp. 330–44, at p. 336n. The Monthly Catalogue, 1714–17, English Bibliographical Sources, ser. 1, no. 1 (London, 1964), III, p. 2, shows an advertisement in May/June 1716, of the Life with the Nantwich letter, at 3d. Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll: Being Some Account of Edmund Curll, Bookseller; to Which is Added a Full List of his Books (London, 1927), pp. 236–7, 307–12. 108 Straus, Curll, esp. pp. 77–97; Pat Rogers, ‘The Conduct of the Earl of Nottingham: Curll, Oldmixon and the Finch Family’, Review of English Studies n.s. XXI (1970), pp. 175–81. Daniel and Samuel Lysons affirmed that the prophecy was actually printed by Curll in 1714: Magna Britannia, vol. II. ii, Cheshire ([London], 1810), p. 815. The first edition definitely directly ascribed to Curll is that of 1740, calling itself the seventh edition (described on the title-page as printed for E. Curll, in Rere-Street, Covent-Garden; and J. Pemberton, in Fleet-Street; and sold by C. Corbett, Bookseller and Publisher, at Addison’s Head, against St Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet-Street. Price 6d.). Baldwin had at least eight Oldmixon books and one journal 1711–13; September 1714 to December 1716, Roberts had at least 14. 109 Straus, Curll, esp. p. 67. 110 The relationship between the two is summarized in Rogers, ‘Congreve’s First Biographer’, pp. 335–6. Rogers found no evidence of contact between the two men after 1717; he did, however, notice the ‘continued interest in Nixon’ on Curll’s part, citing as evidence the edition of 1740. Rogers could find no edition of Nixon before the 7th edition of 1740; given that the previous edition is almost certainly the 6th, by Roberts, of 1719, this production cannot really be allowed to support the idea of continued contact between Curll and Oldmixon between 1717 and 1740. 111 ODNB; The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 2: 1660–1800, new edn, ed. George Watson and Ian Willison (London, 1971), pp. 1708–10; Pat Rogers, ‘Possible Additions to the Oldmixon Canon’, Notes and Queries n.s. 17 (vol. 215 of the continuous series) (1970), pp. 297–300. 112 Pat Rogers, ‘John Oldmixon’s Family’, Notes and Queries n.s. 17 (vol. 215 of the continuous series) (1970), pp. 293–7; J. P. W. Rogers, ‘John Oldmixon in Bridgwater, 1716–30’, Somerset Archaeology and Natural History 113 (1969 for 1968–9), pp. 86–98, emphasizes the connections of Oldmixon with the town of his birth, but also the problems he experienced there as customs official later in life. 123


the sovereign during such crises as that which was then being experienced.113 Oldmixon was a client of the Whig politician Arthur Mainwaring (1668–1712), who had strong Cheshire connections.114 Arthur was the grandson of Sir Arthur Mainwaring of Ightfield in Shropshire and the cousin of Charles Cholmondeley of Vale Royal, through his mother Katherine, one of the sisters of Charles’s father Thomas.115 Mainwaring knew the Cholmondeleys very well, for after study at Oxford and at the Inner Temple (in 1687), he went to stay with Sir Francis Cholmondeley, Charles’s uncle. In company like this, it is no surprise that Mainwaring began his adult life as a staunch Jacobite, in the tradition of his family and that of his mother and Sir Francis. 116 Yet although, on arriving in London to live with his father, Mainwaring at first employed his literary talents in attacks on William and Mary, in a piece called ‘Tarquin and Tullia’ (1689),117 the Cheshire Whig grandee Lord Delamer, in ‘The King of Hearts’ (1689), and probably, in Suum Cuique in the same year,118 the possibility of comprehension in the church, he underwent a conversion.119 Signs of a change of partisanship may be found in his work with John Dryden and Thomas Southerne to help William Congreve prepare The Old Batchelour for the stage in 1693.120 He caught the eye of Lord Cholmondeley, the most important Cheshire Whig at court but a man with many Tory contacts in his home shire, and Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington, and was introduced to Lord Somers.121 In November 1701, he received the post of commissioner of customs, worth £1,200 per annum, and soon after 113

The British Empire in America: Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and Present State of all the British Colonies on the Continent and Islands of America: In Two Volumes: Being an Account of the Country, Soil, Climate, Product and Trade of Them . . . With Curious Maps of the Several Places . . . By Herman Moll, Geographer (London, 1708); The History of Addresses. By One Very Near a Kin to the Author of the Tale of a Tub (London, 1709); ODNB. 114 Swift vs. Mainwaring: The Examiner and The Medley, ed. Frank H. Ellis (Oxford, 1985), pp. xlix–liv; Frank H. Ellis, ‘Arthur Mainwaring as Reader of Swift’s Examiner’, Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981), pp. 49–66; ODNB. 115 Ormerod, Chester, ii. pp. 157–8. 116 Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, ed. George deF. Lord et al., 7 vols (New Haven and London, 1963–75), vol. 5: 1688–1697, ed. William J. Cameron (1971), pp. 46–7. 117 Poems on Affairs of State, V, pp. 46–54. 118 Poems on Affairs of State, V, pp. 83–94, 117–22. 119 Ellis, ‘Mainwaring as Reader of Swift’s Examiner’, pp. 51–2, speculates that the period around 1699 was crucial, citing the mellowed attitude to Burnet displayed in The Brawny Bishop’s Complaint. 120 William Congreve: Letters and Documents, ed. John C. Hodges (London, 1964), p. 151; Pierre Danchin, The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration, 1660–1700, 4 parts in 7 vols (Nancy, 1981–8), iii, p. 94. 121 Robert Cholmondeley was granted an Irish viscounty in 1661; he was made a baron, of Wich Malbank, 10 April 1689, and created earl of Cholmondeley in 1706. He died 18 January 1725. For Cholmondeley’s role in Cheshire politics, cf. above, pp. 118–19. 124


began writing vigorously on behalf of the Whig cause, producing two poems, The History and Fall of the Conformity Bill (January 1704?)122 and An Address to our Sovereign Lady. Most significantly, however, in 1707 he entered the service of the duchess of Marlborough, for whom acted as secretary, accompanist and spokesperson.123 As a man who had first gained the attention of important members of the regime through his abilities with the pen, Mainwaring appreciated the importance of the press to the Whig cause.124 In October 1710, at the suggestion of Mainwaring, Oldmixon began The Medley. Like its short-lived predecessor, the Whig Examiner, the Medley was largely Mainwaring’s work. These newspapers were a response to, and attempt to counter, the Tory Examiner amid the fevered atmosphere generated by the Sacheverell affair.125 Oldmixon’s propagandist work continued in 1712 with The Dutch Barrier Our’s, or, The Interest of England and Holland Inseperable, which responded to the Conduct of the Allies; and The Secret History of Europe, which supported the same general theme, showing the dangers posed by the growing power of France.126 It was amidst this torrent of partisan writing that Oldmixon produced his Nixon. Mainwaring died in February 1713, to initially scornful obituaries from his enemies, many of which focused on his irregular relationship with the actress Mrs Anne Oldfield.127 Oldmixon eventually responded with the far more hagiographic The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Mainwaring, Esq.128 Oldmixon celebrated Mainwaring’s unswerving resistance towards closer relations with France; in acting as his literary executor 122

Poems on Affairs of State, VII: 1704–1714, ed. Frank H. Ellis (New Haven and London, 1975), pp. 3–14. 123 Poems on Affairs of State, VII, p. 307. Mainwaring composed A New Ballad: To the Tune of Fair Rosamund for her February–July 1708, and accompanied her on the harpsichord: Poems on Affairs of State, VII, p. 307; Henry L. Snyder, ‘The Prologues and Epilogues of Arthur Mainwaring’, Philological Quarterly 50 (1971), pp. 610–29, at pp. 615–16; HALS, Cowper MSS, box 12, I, 27. 124 Henry L. Snyder, ‘Arthur Mainwaring and the Whig Press, 1710–1712’, in Literatur als Kritik des Lebens. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Ludwig Borinski, ed. Rudolph Haas et al. (Heidelberg, 1975), pp. 120–36, numbers about thirty-five political pamphlets and broadsides in prose, 1704–12; cf. about twenty-five in verse (Poems on Affairs of State, passim). 125 Swift vs. Mainwaring, passim. 126 The Dutch Barrier Our’s, or, The Interest of England and Holland Inseperable: With Reflections on the Insolent Treatment the Emperor and States-General have Met with from the Author of the Conduct and his Brethren: To Which is Added, an Enquiry into the Causes of the Clamour against the Dutch, Particularly with Reference to the Fishery (London, 1712); The Secret History of Europe . . . The Whole Collected from Authentick Memoirs as well Manuscript as Printed with Editions (London, 1712). 127 ODNB; William Oldys, Memoirs of Mrs. Anne Oldfield (London, 1741). They had met in 1703 in Bath, and lived together until Mainwaring’s death. He wrote many prologues and epilogues for her: Snyder, ‘Prologues and Epilogues of Mainwaring’, p. 612. 128 The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Mainwaring, Esq. (London, 1715). 125


and biographer, he was keeping alight the flame not only of his patron’s reputation but also of his politics. In 1714, Oldmixon produced his Arcana Gallica: or the Secret History of France for the Last Century, which again purported to reveal the threats to liberty posed by France;129 his Memoirs of North-Britain (1715)130 and Memoirs of Ireland from the Restoration to the Present Times (1716) demonstrated the similarly dangerous threats from Jacobites in Scotland and Ireland.131 Whatever Mainwaring and Oldmixon’s understanding of the role of the press, the context of the early editions of Nixon continued to demonstrate the importance of the locality and of local tradition. The most acute immediate test of the Hanoverian succession came in the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and, although Jacobite forces reached no further south than Preston, that test was perceived as possibly focusing on Cheshire. It was soon after claimed that the prophecy had been cheering to the Hanoverian cause in Cheshire as it was feared the route of the anti-government forces lay towards Flintshire and Denbighshire, through Delamere Forest.132 Since this was the site of Nixon’s activities, his prophecies gained particular relevance, especially since (in a Whig account) miller Peter was ready to oppose James Stuart in Delamere, with ‘such a reception, as would have given very great credit to your prophecy’. This relevance was noted in London too, shortly after the Old Pretender had returned to exile: Joseph Addison, in The Freeholder of 12 March 17[16], scornfully dismissed the hopes of the opponents of ‘our present happy settlement’, saying that they were ‘reduced to the poor comfort of prodigies and old womens’ fables. . . . Nay, I have been lately shown a written prophecy that is handed among them with great secrecy, by which it appears their chief reliance at present is upon a Cheshire miller who was born with two thumbs upon one hand.’133 Meanwhile, Oldmixon’s continued production of editions of Nixon went alongside his continued writing of anti-French and pro-Whig propaganda. As well as being fired by a sense of personal injustice, having only received the far from lucrative post of collector of the port of Bridgwater in return for his hard work for the Whig cause, he soon showed concerns over the betrayal of all that the Glorious Revolution stood for. His False Steps of the Ministry after the Revolution (1714) criticized the behaviour of ministers after 1688, and

129

John Oldmixon, Arcana Gallica: or the Secret History of France for the Last Century. Shewing by what Steps the French Ministers Destroy’d the Liberties of that Nation in General, and the Protestant Religion in Particular, etc. (London, 1714). 130 John Oldmixon, Memoirs of North-Britain . . . In which it is Prov’d, that the Scots Nation have always been Zealous in the Defence of the Protestant Religion and Liberty, etc. (London, 1715). 131 Memoirs of Ireland from the Restoration to the Present Times (London, 1716); ODNB. 132 Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy (London, 1719), p. 25. 133 The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, with Notes by Richard Hurd, revised edn by Henry G. Bohn, 6 vols (London and New York, 1892), IV, pp. 485–8, esp. pp. 487–8. 126


by implication contemporary events after the accession of George I.134 Hence his likely acceptance of, and possibly active involvement in, an addition to the Nixon prophecy in 1716, which accentuated the radicalism of the interpretation of the prophecy. This addition, in the form of an account of the prophet written by a W. E., later identified as William Evers, also demonstrates the continuing power of the non-print tradition surrounding Nixon, many months after Oldmixon’s edition had appeared.135 Evers differs from Oldmixon in two ways: he is more aggressively Hanoverian even than Oldmixon and he is keen to correct Oldmixon on several points. The letter suggests in particular fears among those responsible for the initial publication that Oldmixon’s edition was not categorical enough in its interpretation. Its printing in 1713 had not stifled the interpretation of the prophecy tradition; in fact the contrary seems to have been the case. This new account of Nixon is cast in the form of a letter from Evers to Oldmixon. It is dated at Nantwich, allegedly on 24 March 1715. 136 Evers compared Oldmixon’s version of the prophecy with what he described as ‘the original, written in doggrel verse’ and wanted to add ‘some material passages which will serve to make your prophecy compleat’. Evers also added a short account of Nixon’s life, based on the recollections of old people including one, ‘old Woodman’ of ‘Copnal [Coppenhall]’, who could actually personally remember the prophet. These recollections reinforced the picture of Nixon as a physical oddity who spoke rarely and, according to Evers, was particularly hostile to children. Nixon’s initial employment at the plough is attributed by Evers to farmer Crowton of Swanlow. It was while ploughing for Crowton near the river Weaver that he first entered a prophetic trance, Evers alleged; he then entered the Cholmondeley household. Evers’s political position is clear from his interpretation of history. With significant phraseology, Evers stresses that Nixon foretold ‘the abdication of King James II. the Revolution, and glorious war with France, and the flourishing state of this kingdom afterwards’. Evers’s position is also apparent in his concern over what are described as ‘errors’ which had crept into Oldmixon’s version of the prophecy as a result of ‘imperfect copies of his prophecy’. These errors were either Jacobite-inspired or might unconsciously

134

The False Steps of the Ministry after the Revolution, Shewing that the Lenity and Moderation of that Government was the Occasion of all the Factions that have since Endanger’d the Constitution; With Some Reflections on the License of the Pulpit and Press. In a Letter to Lord —- (London, 1714). Although Queen Caroline’s interest was to give him some hopes of further reward in 1730, these were not fulfilled, and when he died in 1742 Oldmixon was a bitter man: ODNB. 135 Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy (London, 1719), pp. 21–32. 136 There are grounds for scepticism about this date: it refers to a piece by Joseph Addison published in The Freeholder in March 1716 (p. 30), and at the very least, therefore, the letter was amended for publication at some point. Cf. n. 133, above. 127


have presented the Jacobites with propaganda opportunities: Evers stressed that the Nixon prophecy was abused ‘when any interpretation is applied to it that has an eye to popery and slavery’. Partly this was a recognition that, in attempting to reshape so thoroughly a Jacobite tradition, Oldmixon had allowed several elements to remain in it which could only continue to give hope to his enemies. A strict reading of the chronology of the events at Vale Royal in 1685, for example, implied that it was James II who was the king who suffered foreign invasion and was then restored; the exiled monarch fitted very well the picture of a king in great trouble, skulking about. Evers did not comment on this, but he was very careful to deal with other possible ‘misreadings’. For example, the fall of the wall at Vale Royal should not have been related to the fate of the church, as Oldmixon’s account had implied, he said, but only to that of the state. On the authority of Woodman, Evers said that the tradition in the area had been that if the wall fell inward in calm weather, then the remarkable change that was to come over government would be ‘advantageous and happy’, while if it fell outwards on a stormy day, the ‘direct contrary’ was signified. The Cholmondeley family, Jacobites at the time, had kept several workmen employed inspecting the wall every month and maintaining it, Evers alleged. Evers gives ‘the particulars of the falling of the wall’ in the form of reported speech, emphasizing that he could ‘get [it] well attested, if it is thought proper’. Since the change of government which followed the incident was in Evers’s eyes highly ‘advantageous and happy’, the testimony he reported emphasized that ‘not so much as one single stone fell outwards’. The final correction which Evers makes to Oldmixon’s version of the prophecy is to stress that he was wrong to make the invaders who will ‘bring fire and famine, plague and murder, in the folds of their garments’ Germans, Dutch, and Danes. For anti-Jacobites, this was a particularly embarrassing passage in the prophecy, given that the Revolution was effected by a Dutch prince, with Danish assistance, and when a north German elector had saved the Protestant cause on the death of Queen Anne and was resisting the Pretender. Instead, Evers insisted (on no good evidence from within the prophecy) that ‘we can understand none but the French by such bloody invaders; none but French Papists would bring such destructions among Protestants’. The complexity of the tradition’s appearance in print is further evident from assessment of other figures influential in the bringing of Nixon to the press. The importance of the Cholmondeley connection is again indicated by the origin of the text used by Oldmixon: ‘Lady Cowper’s correct copy’.137 Oldmixon says that the text of the prophecy was passed in 1670 by Simon

137

On William Cowper, ODNB. The Cowpers of Overlegh near Chester, who were closely connected to the Cholmondeleys of Vale Royal, claimed a connection with William Cowper. Charles Cholmondeley’s third son and eventual heir was Thomas, born on 24 June 1726. His brothers Thomas and Charles had both died within two years of birth, and so he 128


Patrick to Sarah, Lady Cowper, the wife of the prominent Whig politician Sir William Cowper.138 Her son, William, made his name as a barrister while also pursuing a political career. After high-profile and controversial appearances in cases such as the attempted prosecution of Lord Halifax for failure in his duties as auditor of the Exchequer, he was made Lord Keeper in 1705, partly through the influence of the duchess of Marlborough. His partisan Whiggery showed itself strongly when he presided at the trial of Dr Sacheverell in 1710 and voted for his condemnation. When the succeeding election drove the Whigs from office, Cowper insisted on resigning, in spite of the protestations of Robert Harley. He then concentrated his energies on opposition. Both he and his second wife, Mary, whom he married in 1706, were strong supporters of the Hanoverians; Mary is likely to be the ‘Lady Cowper’ to whom Oldmixon refers.139 While William was appointed by George I as one of the ‘lords justices’ in whom supreme power was vested during the interregnum, and became his first Lord Chancellor, Mary became a lady of the bedchamber to Caroline, princess of Wales. She had previously corresponded with Caroline for some years, and shared her husband’s ardently held Whig principles. In 1714 it was she who prepared a French translation of his tract ‘An impartial History of the Parties’, which was designed for the instruction of the new king. Lord Cowper’s support for extreme measures against the Jacobite threat – such as the revival of the Riot Act – is echoed by the forceful sentiments seen in Lady Cowper’s diary.140 Oldmixon admired the Cowpers, at least in part because they shared a Whig outlook mistrusting the corruptions which both felt affected the true cause of 1689 and then the Hanoverian succession. Oldmixon can be found writing in Cowper’s praise as early as 1707 and as late as 1735.141 Oldmixon’s edition can therefore be firmly located to a background in Whig propaganda associated with highly placed figures. Given this, how does he

was from an early age the obvious successor to Vale Royal. He married Dorothy, the second daughter of Edmund Cowper; she was born in February 1746 and they married in 1764. 138 Commons, 1660–1690, ii, pp. 165–6. She copied a text into her commonplace book in about 1703: HALS, Panshanger MSS, D/EP F36 (Commonplace Book of Sarah Cowper, c. 1670– c. 1705), unpag., following letter of instruction dated 19 July 1703. 139 Although she herself denied it: HALS, Panshanger MSS, D/EP F203/50, 51 – ‘ye writer of this letter is mistaken I am not ye prophecy Lady Cowper’. 140 Diary of Mary Countess Cowper, Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714–1720, ed. Spenser Cowper, 2nd edn (London, 1865). 141 Pat Rogers, ‘John Oldmixon and a Translation of Boileau’, Revue de Littérature Comparée xliii (1969), pp. 509–13, at pp. 511–13; Pat Rogers, ‘Daniel Defoe, John Oldmixon and the Bristol Riot of 1714’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 92 (1974 for 1973), pp. 145–56, at p. 152; John Oldmixon, The History of England, during the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I (London, 1735), p. 746. Cowper, although described by some as a Jacobite, went into opposition in 1721 because he held true to the principles of 1689 and the Hanoverian succession, and rejected anything which to him smacked of corruption: Clyve Jones, ‘Jacobitism and the Historian: The Case 129


tackle prophecy at a time seen as one in which scepticism of such phenomena was spreading well beyond the elite? It was clearly an issue for him: his introduction immediately tackles the key question of whether he would treat the prophecy seriously. He explains that the prophecy had been carefully ‘revised, corrected, and improved’. He also establishes that some account of Robert Nixon, whom he describes as a ‘kind of ideot’, would be provided. Oldmixon then sets out clearly his faith in the prophecy. It might be that the phrase ‘I dare say it is as well attested as any of Nostradamus’s or Merlin’s, and come to pass as well as the best of Squire Bickerstaff’s’ (a reference to Swift’s mocking of John Partridge) could imply a certain degree of scepticism.142 This episode has been seen as one of the final nails in the coffin of astrological prediction, but Oldmixon’s reference to Partridge may be more complex: it appears flippant, but Partridge’s politics were akin to Oldmixon’s own, and if he had been made a figure of fun by Swift, that was due to Swift’s anger at the attacks of this former republican on the church. Since Partridge’s fame had been guaranteed by a prophecy, apparently fulfilled, of the fall of James II, the connection between him and Oldmixon’s work on Nixon was especially strong.143 Oldmixon goes further. He says, It is plain enough, that great men in all ages had recourse to prophecy as well as the vulgar. I would not have all grave persons despise the inspiration of Nixon. The late French king gave audience to an inspired Farrier,144 and rewarded him with an hundred pistoles for his prophetical intelligence; though by what I can learn, he did not come near to our Nixon for gifts. The simplicity, the circumstances, and history, of the Cheshire Prophecy, are so remarkable, that I hope the public will be as much delighted as I was myself.

of William, 1st Earl Cowper’, Albion 23 (1991), pp. 681–96; idem, ‘William, first Earl Cowper, Country Whiggery, and the Leadership of the Opposition in the House of Lords, 1720–1723’, in Lords of Parliament: Studies, 1714–1914, ed. R. W. Davis (Stanford, Calif., 1995), pp. 24–43, 191–7; pace Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 1982). Cowper had been involved in a tense struggle with Walpole and Viscount Townshend through the mid-1710s, believing that they were intending to remove him from the post of Lord Chancellor. This had been one of the factors behind the so-called Whig ‘schism’ of 1717: David Lemmings, ‘Lord Chancellor Cowper and the Whigs, 1714–16’, Parliamentary History 9 (1990), pp. 163–74. 142 Jonathan Swift, The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New Haven and London, 1983), pp. 93–6, notes on pp. 627–9. 143 Prose Works of Swift, ed. Davis, vol. II, Bickerstaff Papers and Pamphlets, passim, and esp. p. x on the political background to the exchanges. Curry, Prophecy and Power, pp. 89–91, and B. S. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London, 1979), pp. 244–5, 281, for example, place too much emphasis on the effects of Swift’s ridicule: cf. the comments of Joseph M. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley, Calif., 1977). 144 In the mid-fifteenth century, Jean Trahinier, blacksmith, was the focus for a group which had previously surrounded Jean Carrier: Noël Valois, La France et le Grand Schisme d’Occident, 4 vols (Paris, 1896–1902), iv, pp. 475–7. 130


The introduction also makes clear Oldmixon’s political intention. Stressing the antiquity of the prophecy, he states that ‘there is as little imposture in it as the Jacobites pretend there is in the person it seems to have an eye to’. The Jacobite threat, partly through the prophecy itself, is the main target; and Oldmixon’s loyalty to the Hanoverians is proclaimed from the verse printed on the title-page – ‘NIXON, from ’mongst the dark decrees of Fate, Says, GEORGE the Son of GEORGE shall make us great!’ Oldmixon’s approach is therefore set out early in the work: faced by Jacobite reliance on prophecy, he responds not by rubbishing them for their irrationality and credulity, but by arguing they misused the prophet’s words.145 Historical criticism has been recruited not to undermine a prophecy tradition but to validate it. Oldmixon’s version then moves almost immediately into the prophecy itself. The prefatory paragraph simply places Nixon in the reign of James I, that he was ‘generally reputed a fool’, and that once coming home from ploughing, he said ‘Now I wil prophecy’. His version of the prophecy itself is short and consists of six paragraphs. The first states that when a raven builds in a stone lion’s mouth on the top of a church in Cheshire, a king of England shall be driven from his realm and never return. The second section of the prophecy says that when an eagle sits on the top of the house, an heir shall be born to the Cholmondeley family, who shall live to see England invaded by foreigners; these invaders will reach a town in Cheshire, but a miller, named Peter, with two heels on one foot, and living in a mill owned by Mr Cholmondeley, shall be instrumental in delivering the nation. This is continued in the third section, which states that the ruler of England at that time will be in great trouble and skulk about, but that the invader, who is now called a king, will be killed, laid across a horse’s back, and led away in triumph. The miller will ‘bring forth’ the ruler, who will knight him, and thereafter England ‘will see happy days’. A new group of men, young and virtuous, will come who will create a church, which will flourish for two hundred years. The fourth passage’s prophecy suggests that, as a token of this, a wall belonging to Mr Cholmondeley shall fall. If this wall falls downwards, the church shall be oppressed and never rise again, but if it falls upwards, against the upward slope,

145

Note that Oldmixon chose to sign his edition of Nixon, something he reserved for the publications of which he was proudest. Political hack work for the likes of Curll often went unsigned: e.g. controversy surrounding Harley’s clerk, William Gregg, in 1711: [John Oldmixon?], The Conference; Or, Gregg’s Ghost (London, 1711); [John Oldmixon], A Letter to the Seven Lords of the Committee Appointed to Examine Gregg (London, 1711). Cf. [John Oldmixon], The Catholick Poet; or, Protestant Barnaby’s Sorrowful Lamentation: An Excellent New Ballad (London, 1716): Pope (its target) only seems to have realized this was by Oldmixon when Curll himself revealed the fact in The Curliad: Pat Rogers, ‘The Catholick Poet (1716): John Oldmixon’s Attack on Pope’, Bodleian Library Record VIII (1967–72), pp. 277–84. On the other hand, there is little in Oldmixon’s other work to suggest he was especially proud of the Nixon edition: it is briefly mentioned in his Essay on Criticism: As it Regards Design, Thought, and Expression, in Prose and Verse (London, 1728), p. 15. 131


then the church shall flourish again. Under the wall will be found the bones of a British king. The fifth and sixth paragraphs are not part of this central prediction. The fifth relates to a pond which shall run with blood for three days, and the ‘Cross-stone Pillar in the Forest’, which shall sink into the ground so that a crow sitting upon it can drink ‘the best blood in England’. The sixth paragraph states that a boy will be born with three thumbs who will hold three kings’ horses while England is ‘three times won and lost in a day’. Oldmixon then begins his discussion of the prophecy as he gives it; once again some apparent cynicism is eventually outweighed by belief. He says that the original is to be found in the hands of several Cheshire families, in particular Mr Egerton of Oulton. John Egerton, who was born in 1656 and died in 1732, married two members of the Cholmondeley clan, first Mary, daughter of Thomas Cholmondeley of Vale Royal in 1681, and then in 1686 Elizabeth daughter of Robert, Viscount Cholmondeley. Elizabeth survived until 1727.146 Egerton’s first wife Mary was therefore the half-sister of the Charles Cholmondeley who was the subject of the miraculous birth in the prophecy. Initially, Oldmixon appears to be doubting the validity of such prophecies, for when he says that the originals of the prophecy also discuss other events of local significance, such as the removal of Peckforton mill to Ludington hill, he says that this is enough to prove that Nixon is as great a prophecy as Partridge, and this might have been construed as a sceptical comment. As already stated, however, the congruence between the political outlook of Oldmixon and Partridge may mean outright criticism is not implied here. Oldmixon’s remark, on the prophecy that Oulton mill will be driven by blood, that ‘these soothsayers are great butchers, and every hall is with them a great slaughterhouse’, also suggests an amused detachment at least. He appears to set little store by the fact that the prophecy has been so popular in Cheshire ‘these forty years’, but then notes that ‘there is something very odd in the story, and so pat in the wording of it, that I cannot help giving it as I found it’. It is therefore not surprising that at this point there is a definite change in tone in Oldmixon’s discussion of Nixon, and the account becomes much more serious. Oldmixon goes on to explain the background to the prophecy in some historical detail, a further sign of the extent to which historical method has been recruited to the validation of ancient prophecy. He describes the origins of the Cholmondeleys at the village of Cholmondeston near Nantwich, and the way that the cadet branch came to Vale Royal. This then moves into an assertion by Oldmixon of the accuracy of the prophecy through an account of its fulfilment. He tells how the Cholmondeleys of Vale Royal were close to failing in the male line, since the heir had married the daughter of Sir Walter St John, ‘a lady not esteemed very young’; but she conceived and during the time she was in labour, Oldmixon tells, an eagle sat on the ‘house-top’ and

146

Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 222. 132


flew away when she gave birth to a son. Oldmixon then continues to inform his readers of how other parts of the prophecy had come true: the raven had built in the stone lion’s mouth, the wall had fallen, upwards, the bones of an unusually large man had been discovered, and a pond had run red at around the same time – the period of the abdication of James II. Thus Oldmixon tells his readers, with just a slight variation in terminology and a slight note of scepticism – not saying that the pond ran with blood, but only that it was reddish in colour – that the prophecy has been fulfilled and that this occurred around the year 1688. The effect of this tempering of language, suggesting in itself the application of reason, is in the end to blunt outright scepticism. Oldmixon then moves to describe part of the prophecy which he implies is about to be fulfilled – Headless Cross, to be identified with the ‘Cross-stone Pillar’ of the prophecy, is according to him only half a foot from the ground, although within living memory it had been several feet high. In Budworth parish, Oldmixon says, about eighteen years previously, a boy was born with three thumbs. And a man called Peter lives in Noginshire (i.e. Oulton) mill, with two heels on one foot. The prophecy of the failed invasion is therefore about to come true. Indeed this becomes clearer when he says that Peter ‘intends to make use of them [the two heels] in the interest of King George, for he is a bold Briton, and a loyal service, zealous for the Protestant succession in the illustrious house of Hanover’. As proof of this, Oldmixon says that Peter has a vote in the elections for the knights of the shire, and ‘never fails to give it on the right side’. A note of scepticism appears again, but it is still slight: Lady Egerton, a Jacobite, had urged her husband to evict Peter, but her husband had refused, seeing it all as ‘a whimsy’. Lady Egerton was Catherine, wife of Sir Philip Egerton (d. 1698); she was the daughter and heir of Piers Conway of Hendre in Flintshire and survived her husband, dying in 1707.147 Oldmixon adds that Lady Narcliff of Chelsea and Lady St John of Battersea, ‘together with several other persons of credit and fashion’, believe in the story. After a short digression, describing Nixon’s death at James I’s court, locked in a hole by the cooks, Oldmixon rapidly returns to the subject of the fulfilment of the prophecies.148 This section allows Oldmixon to marshal and display his authorities for the truthfulness of the prophecy. They are an extremely impressive group, socially and politically highly respected and influential. Oldmixon’s sources for the veracity of the prophecy and its fulfilment are mainly taken from connections of the St John family, of which Lady Cholmondeley was a member. Anne Cholmondeley was the eldest daughter of Sir Walter St John of Battersea. His ancestors had held Lydiard Tregoze

147 Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 222. Philip was suspected of Jacobite involvement in 1695: BL, Add. MS 36,913, fol. 232. 148 Most immediately, he recounts the story of how Nixon predicted that the ox he had goaded would soon no longer be the property of his master, only for it to be removed as a heriot.

133


in Wiltshire since the fifteenth century; while three brothers had died for the king in the civil war, Sir Walter had been converted into a strong parliamentarian, marrying Johanna, daughter of the radical Oliver St John. After the Restoration, while a conforming Anglican, he showed himself a defender of Presbyterians and lost office for his actions against the court in the Exclusion Crisis.149 Given this background, the marriage between his daughter and Thomas Cholmondeley of Vale Royal on 20 May 1684 seems in need of explanation. She survived until 1742, and if her religion and politics remained in any sense closer to those of her father than those of her husband, she may have been a force pushing the Cholmondeleys towards loyalism and away from Jacobitism, and may also have represented a channel whereby the Nixon prophecy might be recruited for loyalist or even Whig ends. Johanna St John was reputedly the patroness of the dissenting ministers Daniel Burgess and Thomas Manton.150 But there was another strong political tradition that was manifesting itself in the St John family. Sir Walter and Johanna’s grandson, Henry St John, the flamboyant future earl of Bolingbroke, served as Secretary at War, 1704–8, then Secretary of State, first for the North and then for the South, 1710–14, before fleeing to the service of the Old Pretender on the accession of George I. Since he was probably brought up by his grandparents during the years before Anne’s marriage and at least until 1687, the future Bolingbroke’s association with his aunt Anne and his Cholmondeley kin was strengthened.151 Oldmixon’s reliance on members of Bolingbroke’s immediate family for the reliability of his Whig interpretation of the Nixon prophecy must have achieved a particular resonance in the minds of his readers. Charles Cholmondeley, they would have realized, was the cousin of Bolingbroke, through his mother Anne. Oldmixon says that the account he prints was given to Lady Cowper in 1670 by Dr Simon Patrick, later bishop of Ely, who was then chaplain to Sir Walter St John. Patrick was a staunch Whig churchman, who had begun as a Presbyterian minister but had secretly been ordained in 1654 and in the following year took the post of chaplain to St John.152 The

149

Commons, 1660–1690, III, p. 384; H. T. Dickinson, ‘Henry St. John: A Reappraisal of the Young Bolingbroke’, Journal of British Studies VII/2 (May 1968), pp. 33–55, esp. pp. 33–7; idem, Bolingbroke (London, 1970), pp. 1–3; VCH Wiltshire, IX, p. 79; John George Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey: The Story of Battersea Church and Parish Told from Original Sources (London (Chelsea), 1925), pp. 78–81. 150 Sir Walter died in 1708, Johanna his wife on 17 January 1704: Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, p. 83. 151 Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, p. 88; Dickinson, ‘Henry St. John’, pp. 35–7. 152 ‘The Autobiography of Symon Patrick’, in The Works of Symon Patrick, D.D., Sometime Bishop of Ely. Including his Autobiography, ed. Alexander Taylor, 9 vols (Oxford, 1858), IX, pp. 405–569; for the connection to Sir Walter St John and his wife, pp. 426–8; Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, p. 313; J. H. Overton, Life in the English Church (1600–1714) (London, 1885); Gilbert Burnet, History of his own Time, 2nd edn, 6 vols (Oxford, 1833); T. Chamberlain, ‘Memoir of Bishop Patrick’, in his edition of The Parable of the Pilgrim: 134


latter had him appointed as vicar of Battersea in 1658. In 1662 the patronage of William, earl of Bedford, gave Patrick the living of St Paul’s, Covent Garden; in 1671 he became a royal chaplain and in 1672 received a prebend at Westminster. Patrick’s eminence was an uncomfortable one under James II, for he was one of those chosen to dispute with two Roman Catholic priests when the king was seeking to persuade Lord Treasurer Rochester to convert, and in 1687 he resisted attempts to have the declaration of indulgence read in church. After 1688 he rapidly rose to the episcopal bench, first at Chichester in 1689 and then at Ely in 1691. During sixteen years in Ely he was active, for example, as one of the five founder members of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. This activity, along with prodigious writing, meant that such a witness to the story was extremely valuable; he had only been dead about seven years when Oldmixon’s edition appeared.153 On all these authorities, however plausible the detail, it must be conceded we have essentially only Oldmixon’s word for their belief in the prophecy. Yet at the very heart of his account lies Mary, Lady Cowper, and her involvement can be corroborated by documents in her own hand. This central figure in the new regime investigated the prophecy and its fulfilment and wrote an account which seems to be connected to, even if it is not the direct origin of, Oldmixon’s discussion.154 Further support for the story was given by Johanna, the sister of Lady Cholmondeley, who married George Chute of Stockwell in Surrey.155 Mrs Chute, as Oldmixon calls her, recalled that a crowd of people had gathered to see the eagle that had sat on the roof of the house at Vale Royal. Mrs Chute said that she herself had been one of the crowd, and that a shout had gone up that Nixon’s prophecy was fulfilled and the English would

Written to a Friend, The Englishman’s Library (London, 1839); ODNB. The date of transmission from Patrick to Lady Cowper would make her Sarah, the wife of Sir William Cowper, a Whig MP who sat for Hertford in 1679–81, 1688–90, 1695–9, and who died in 1705. Sarah was the daughter of Samuel Holled, a London merchant. The date is also before the fulfilment of the prophecy of the miraculous birth. The date rules out Mary Cowper, second wife of William, as the recipient of the prophecy from Patrick; she was born in 1685 and married him in 1706. She cannot therefore be the sole ‘Lady Cowper’ with influence over the prophecy, as I have implied elsewhere, although she is the obvious channel of transmission to Oldmixon’s circle. 153 He is described as ‘Dr. Patrick, late Bishop of Ely’. Evidence of Patrick’s close relationship with the St Johns includes his often reprinted work, The Heart’s Ease, or a Remedy against Trouble, written for Lady St. John (e.g. London, 1660; London, 1671; London, 1676; London, 1682). 154 HALS, Panshanger MSS, D/EP, F211, fol. 3. She and her mother-in-law were not alone in their interests: in January 1715 Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, wrote to Lord Cowper on the subject of an alleged prophecy: ibid., F57/3. 155 Sir Walter had five daughters: Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, p. 322. Johanna married Chute in 1675 and a daughter, Johanna, was born the following year (pp. 83, 87, 322). Barbara, who married Sir John Topp of Gloucestershire on 29 March 1684/5, died before 1793; another daughter, Elizabeth, died in 1702. 135


have a foreign king. She had read over the prophecy many times while her sister was pregnant, and people had said that James II, then king, 156 was believed to be the king who would subvert the laws and religion of the realm, for which he would be expelled from the country. Since the birth of Charles Cholmondeley occurred on 12 January 1685, the coincidence with the accession of James II, just before noon on 6 February,157 must have seemed obvious. The eagle, ‘the biggest bird she ever saw’, had sat in one of the windows all the time her sister was in labour, in spite of efforts to drive it away. Once the child had been born, the eagle had flown to a nearby tree and stayed there for three days before disappearing into the night. Mrs Chute confirmed Lady Cowper’s account, saying that the fall of the wall presaged the future invasion of England, and that the heir of Vale Royal, Charles Cholmondeley, would live to fight bravely for his king and country. She then added further details of the prophecies: the miller was alive and expecting to be knighted, and the enemies he would face would come from the west and from the north; the enemy who came from the north would bring with him Swedes, Danes, Germans and Dutch, and ‘in the folds of his garments he would bring fire and famine, plague and murder’. Many great battles would be fought in England, including one on London Bridge so bloody that people would ride up to their horses’ bellies in blood. Many battles would also be fought in Cheshire, and the last ever to be fought in England would occur in Delamere Forest. The heir of Oulton, John Egerton, thinly disguised as E...n, but identified as having married the sister of the earl of Cholmondeley, ‘would be hanged up at his own gate’. This is a reference to John Egerton, who had been married to, as his second wife, the earl’s daughter since 1686; John was still alive at the time of the publication of the prophecy, dying, eventually, at the age of well over 70, in 1733.158 This is an astonishingly bold prophecy of doom for an important Cheshire gentleman who was alive at the time.159 It underlines the sense in which the prophecy related directly to important people who were living at the time of its publication.

156

When the miraculous birth took place, Charles II, not James, was king. The problem with the chronology here may reflect Oldmixon’s forceful treatment of the prophecy to make it fit his own ends, or the memory of his sources. 157 Bodl. MS Eng Hist c 711 (Whitley), fol. 26v; John Miller, Charles II (London, 1991), p. 381. 158 Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 222. His heir, Philip (inherited 1733, d. 1762), was the son of John’s brother Philip, who was the rector of Astbury and died in 1727, because John died without having produced heirs of his own body. 159 This may represent a further Jacobite survival, as John voted for the compromise candidates in 1715 and for the Whigs in 1722, only thereafter returning to the Tories: Baskerville, Adman and Beedham, ‘“Praefering a Whigg to a Whimsical”’, p. 167; or a relic of the non-juring past of Sir Philip Egerton, well known to Arthur Mainwaring during his time with the Cholmondeleys: Oldmixon, Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Mainwaring, p. 4; BL, Add. MS 36,913, fol. 232. 136


These prophecies, as retold by Mrs Chute, then become more general in intent, telling of ‘great glory and prosperity’ for those who ‘stand up in defence of their laws and liberties’, and ruin for those that did not. The year before this, bread would be very dear, and the year after, troubles would begin that would last three years, growing in intensity until in the third year they would be ‘intolerable’. The prophecy was then related back to the present with the prophecy that George, son of George, would bring an end to all, after which the church would flourish and ‘England be the most glorious nation upon earth’. This is a clear reference to George, created prince of Wales on 27 September 1714, son of George I.160 Strenuous efforts were made to win popular affection for George II, especially through his links to his principality, duchy and earldom, Cheshire, Cornwall and Wales;161 the links between his wife, Caroline, and the source for the Nixon MS, Lady Cowper, have already been noticed. To return to Oldmixon’s account, we find him still concerned with the reliability of the prophecies. He tells us that Lady Cowper was not content with the testimony of Mrs Chute alone, and so enquired of Sir Thomas Aston about the prophecy. Sir Thomas Aston was the son of Sir Willoughby Aston and his wife Mary, the daughter of John Offley of Madeley, and the grandson of Sir Thomas, who had died of his wounds fighting for the king in 1645. Sir Thomas was born on 17 January 1666, so he had turned 19 just after New Year 1685, when the miraculous Cholmondeley birth occurred.162 The Astons were the Cholmondeleys’ neighbours, and Thomas was able to support the idea that Nixon had a very great reputation in Cheshire. He was personally able to recall how Mr Cholmondeley, going out to hunt on the day that his wall famously fell, had said that ‘Nixon seldom fails, but now I think he will; for he foretold that this day my garden wall would fall, and I think it looks as if it would stand these forty years’. Not a quarter of an hour after they left, the wall had fallen, and it had fallen upwards, so Aston confirmed the future of a flourishing church.163 During the 1680s, Sir Thomas’s father, proud son

160

CP, III, p. 448. Some editions give as a footnote the original version of this prophecy as relating to Richard son of Richard, an unusually candid admission that the achievement of a flourishing church and a glorious name abroad was not to belong to the house of Hanover, but almost certainly originally to Richard III, son of Richard, duke of York: Lesley Coote and Tim Thornton, ‘Richard, Son of Richard: Richard III and Political Prophecy’, Historical Research 73 (2000), pp. 321–30. 161 Thornton, ‘Dynasty and Territory’, pp. 1–33. 162 Sir Thomas married Catherine, daughter and coheir of William Widdrington, esq.; he died on 16 January 1725. His son, Sir Thomas, married Rebecca, daughter of John Shish of Greenwich. This Thomas died abroad in 1743–4, and the inheritance passed through his eldest sister, Catherine, who married Henry Hervey, fourth son of John, earl of Bristol, in March 1730: Ormerod, Chester, I, p. 725. 163 Sir Willoughby Aston’s diary confirms that hunting was taking place in January 1685, although his piles prevent him from taking part: Liverpool Record Office, MS 920/MD/173. 137


of a royalist martyr, appears to have been pushed unwillingly into support for Exclusion by a fear of the consequences of James’s Catholicism; his views were therefore diverging from those of Thomas and Francis Cholmondeley, yet the families were still close enough for Sir Thomas’s testimony to carry weight.164 Oldmixon had apparently checked other aspects of the prophecy, for he records that the removal of Peckforton mill to Luddington hill had been carried out by Sir John Crewe.165 Sir John had said that he had moved the mill because it had lost its trade in Peckforton; ‘being asked if he did it to fulfil the prophecy, he declared he never thought of it’.166 Crewe was a connection of Sir Thomas Aston, whom Oldmixon had already cited, for Sir John Crewe’s wife Mary Aston was his eldest sister.167 Oldmixon had himself checked with an (unfortunately unnamed) person ‘who knows Mr. Cholmondeley’s pond as well as Rosamond’s in St. James’s park’, and he assured him that the falling of the wall and the running of the pond red with blood are ‘facts which in Cheshire any one would be reckoned mad for making the least question of them’. This is not direct testimony, only another assertion of the general belief in the prophecy and its fulfilment in Cheshire. Oldmixon has now finished his discussion of the trustworthiness of the prophecy. He adds that there are several particulars in the prophecy which remain unfulfilled, but apparently confidently believes that they shortly will be fulfilled. He then moves to suggest that study of the ‘antiquities’ of Cheshire would support the idea that ‘prodigies and prophecies are not unusual things there’. This provides instances of the way in which prophecy and the supernatural were accepted by respectable sources. Once again, he chooses a reliable source, Camden, and a well-known story: the tale that at the mere at Brereton, before the heir to the family of the same name dies, there were seen ‘the bodies of trees swimming upon the water for several days together’.168 Oldmixon says 164

Liverpool Record Office, MS 920/MD/173; he is used as an example of supporters of the High Church fearing tolerance of Catholicism would bring in Nonconformity in Challinor, ‘Restoration and Exclusion’, p. 383. 165 Peckforton Hall and its associated estate had been sold by George Peckforton to Sir John in the late seventeenth century: Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 304. 166 Sir John died in May 1711, leaving as his only heir his sister, Elizabeth Crewe, who herself died in 1715 and whose two children left no heirs. Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 249. The failure to refer to Sir John as deceased may imply he was still alive when Oldmixon wrote, placing at least some of his researches as early as the spring of 1711. 167 Sir John Crewe was the first son of John Crewe of Utkinton, who had married Mary, coheir of Sir John Done of Utkinton, Eddisbury and Flaxyards. He had inherited Utkinton from this alliance, and married Mary, daughter of Thomas Wagstaff of Tachebrook, Warwickshire, who died in 1696, and then Mary, the daughter of Sir Willoughby Aston: Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 249. 168 Camden, Britannia (London, 1600), pp. 543–4; Philip Sidney, ‘The 7 Wonders of England’ (Poems, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr (Oxford, 1962, corrected reprint 1971), 138


that this story was still widely believed in Cheshire in his day. Camden had said that this was ‘attested to him by many persons, and was commonly believed’; and he had provided a parallel case, of the abbey of St Maurice (Vienne, Burgundy), where a fish will die in the fishpond whenever one of the monks is about to pass away.169 In conclusion, Oldmixon, perhaps a little mischievously, suggests that Cheshire has become ‘infected’ by its proximity to Lancashire, a county ‘famous for its witches’. But he then adds that although those who will not believe the prophecy may leave it alone, ‘if hope is a good help to faith, I shall not be long among the incredulous’. The mixture of detailed apparently credulous factual reporting and amused scepticism that runs throughout the piece is therefore eventually resolved in favour of belief. The complex but ultimately positive account of Nixon proved very popular. Editions of Oldmixon’s version of the prophecy came thick and fast after 1714. By 1719 it was in its sixth edition, suggesting that the excitement generated by the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 had supported more than one edition a year.170 There was a lull until the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth editions appeared in 1740, all produced by Edmund Curll; he produced the thirteenth and fourteenth editions in 1742.171 The threat from the Young Pretender then produced another rush of editions, still under Curll’s imprint: fifteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first editions are all recorded in the year 1745, so the text clearly went through at least seven editions that year.172 Given the importance of the Jacobite threat to the development of the prophecy, it is notable that the other early tradition of publication in Britain was in Scotland: from Edinburgh (1730), followed by two from Glasgow (one 1738, another perhaps 1740). This was part of an antiJacobite campaign in Scotland which also drew on (and attempted to counter Jacobite use of) Thomas of Erceldoun, both directly and through Patrick Gordon’s History of Robert the Bruce,173 and Merlin.174

pp. 149–51, at ll. 11–14 (p. 150)). Cf., for this and other death omens, Axon, Cheshire Gleanings, pp. 84–7. 169 Leonardus Vairus, Trois livres des charmes, sorcelages, ou enchantemens (Paris, 1583), pp. 386–7. 170 Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy at Large, 5th edn (London, 1716); Life of Nixon (London, 1716; ESTC N55124); Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy at Large, 6th edn (London, 1719). 171 Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy at Large, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th edns (London, 1740); Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy at Large, 13th, 14th edns (London, 1742). 172 Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy at Large, 15th, 16th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st edns (London, 1745). 173 Patrick Gordon, The Famous History of the Renown’d and Valiant Prince, Robert Sirnamed, the Bruce, King of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1718; Glasgow, 1753); David Allen, ‘ “Arthur Redivivus”: Politics and Patriotism in Reformation Scotland’, Arthurian Literature XV, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (1997), pp. 185–204, p. 202; Francis Douglas, The History of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746, Extracted from the Scots Magazine (Aberdeen, 1755), p. 28; Dougal Graham, The Collected Writings of Dougal Graham: ‘Skellat’ Bellman of Glasgow, ed. George MacGregor, 2 vols (Glasgow, 1883), vol. I, p. 103; William Donaldson, The 139


Yet this flood of Whig versions of the prophecy did not diminish the complexity of the Nixon tradition. The currency of the Nixon prophecy in Ireland no later than 1715 is suggested by the parallels between it and an eighteenth-century Irish prophecy.175 Possibly this was through its recent publication, and possibly through an oral tradition. The publication of Nixon’s prophecy in Liverpool in 1715, however, conclusively illustrates the fact that Oldmixon’s edition was a response to an extremely vigorous local oral tradition that was only gradually and partially moving into the print culture. Bookselling had only emerged in Liverpool very late, around 1690; printing began soon after, through Samuel Terry in about 1712.176 Terry printed Nixon’s Prophesy for Daniel Birchall in 1715, the publisher’s foreword clearly establishing a loyalist agenda. Birchall describes the manner of circulation of the prophecies: The various Accounts that have heretofore been courant in Cheshire, concerning this Famous Prophet, and the particular and surprizing Accomplishment of many of his Predictions, hath inclined some curious Persons, (who by reason of vicinity and Experience, had the greatest advantage for Information) to make a Collection thereof, of which Copies have been transmitted from Hand to Hand, and the particular Stories therein as plentifully dispersed, in conversation, to those who had not the Capacity to acquaint themselves with the M.S. by which means, not only

Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen, 1988), pp. 45–6; James Fraser, Chronicles of the Frasers: The Wardlaw Manuscript Entitled ‘Polichronicon seu policratica temporum, or, The True Genealogy of the Frasers’, 916–1674, ed. William Mackay, Scottish Historical Society o.s. 47 (Edinburgh, 1905), pp. 295–6, 338, 356, 496–7; James Philip of Almerieclose, The Grameid: An Heroic Poem Descriptive of the Campaign of Viscount Dundee in 1689 and Other Poems, ed. Alexander D. Murdoch, Scottish Historical Society o.s. 3 (Edinburgh, 1888), pp. 20–1; cf., for its significance in the early seventeenth century, above, pp. 57–9. 174 Alexander Pennecuik, A Geographical, Historical Description of the Shire of Tweeddale (Edinburgh, 1715), reprinted in The Works of Alexander Pennecuik (Leith, 1815), e.g. p. 253; Allen, ‘“Arthur Redivivus”’, p. 203. 175 The earliest printing of this account must be dated after 4 August 1715 (when the events described took place) and before the end of November 1715, since the story had been brought to England by a Protestant minister ‘in November last, about the time of our greatest trouble and danger’, i.e. during the Old Pretender’s invasion. A Strange and Wonderful Relation of the Sweeming of Stones, and of a Bloody Battel of Three Kings in Ireland ([Edinburgh], [1715?]); reprinted in The Spottiswoode Miscellany: A Collection of Original Papers and Tracts, Illustrative Chiefly of the Civil and Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, ed. James Maidment, II (Edinburgh, 1845), pp. 524–7, and from there, with discussion by William E. A. Axon, ‘An Irish Analogue of Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society VII (1890 for 1889), pp. 130–3. 176 A. H. Arkle, ‘Early Liverpool Printers,’ THSLC 68 (n.s. 32) (1916), pp. 73–84, esp. p. 73; Lancashire Printed Books: A Bibliography of all the Books Printed in Lancashire down to the Year 1800, ed. Arthur John Hawkes (Wigan, 1925), pp. xxiii–xxiv, 147–8; Arkle, ‘Early Liverpool Printers,’ pp. 73–84; The Book Trade in Liverpool to 1805: A Directory, ed. M. R. Perkin (Liverpool, 1981), p. 29. 140


Cheshire, but its neighbouring Counties have, in some measure, had Notices of this so Famed NIXON, by general Reports of such particular Circumstances as have occasionally occurr’d to the Memory of their Informers, which Hints, (as it is reasonable to suppose) did but raise a desire in all, to have more fully made known to them, what tho’ thus in Parcels, and imperfectly related, appear’d to them so extraordinary and entertaining.

Birchall’s response was to seize the opportunity to publish a manuscript, the appearance of which indicated ‘its Antiquity’, which came into his hands ‘some Days since’.177 It was in the 1720s or 1730s, in spite of the lull in publication in England, that the prophecy was first heard by Horace Walpole.178 In the 1730s, at least one government source was sufficiently impressed with Nixon’s words threatening invasion to keep them on record.179 For this reason, and judging by his impression at that time that the prophecy was chiefly associated with the Jacobites, we must assume the predominance of the manuscript or oral tradition distinct from the printed one. Nixon’s popularity in Jacobite circles is clear from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, in which Partridge’s reason for citing the prophecy to Jones at their meeting was that ‘Partridge was in Truth a Jacobite, and had concluded that Jones was of the same Party, and was now proceeding to join the Rebels’.180 For Partridge, reference to the oral tradition of the prophecy and its interpretation was a shibboleth of allegiance.181 The form of continuing Jacobite reworkings of the prophecy can be seen, for example, in a manuscript formerly in the possession of James Kendrick. Drawing on many of the earliest themes of the prophecy, this version gives an account in which the reign of a young knight called George, clearly the Hanoverian king, results in general chaos and strife.182 Some such reworkings

177

Nixon’s Prophesy: Containing Nixon’s Prophesy; Containing Many Strange and Wonderful Predictions: To Which is Added an Account of those Already Fulfilled, and those that yet Remain. With Historical Remarks: Together with a Particular Relation of the Most Noted Passages in the Life and Death of the said Nixon. Extracted from an Ancient Manuscript, Never Publish’d Before (Liverpool, 1715), p. 3. 178 He refers to hearing it at school, i.e. Eton, which he attended 1727–34: Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with the Countess of Upper Ossory, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace, with the assistance of Edwine M. Martz, Volume III (London, 1965) (vol. 34 of The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols (1937–83)), pp. 43–4. 179 BL, Add. MS 19,030, fol. 376. I owe this reference to the kindness of Philip Woodfine. 180 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones A Foundling, introduced by Martin C. Battestin, text edited by Fredson Bowers, 2 vols (Oxford, 1974), I, pp. 440–1 (book VIII, ch. 9). 181 There may be another subtext here: Fielding’s antipathy to Oldmixon and his contempt for his work is clear from a parody, supposedly of the work of Humphrey Newmixon, published in the Covent Garden Journal in 1752: Pat Rogers, ‘Fielding’s Parody of Oldmixon’, Philological Quarterly XLIX (1970), pp. 262–6. 182 Printed by William Axon: Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecies (Manchester and London, 1878). 141


were explicitly Catholic. One, from after 1746, described how the heir of Vale Royal’s first word would be ‘Pope’, and that ‘he shou’d dy for his Religion’.183 Another version some years later talked of the fall of the wall at Vale Royal on the prince of Wales’s birth; had Charles Cholmondeley set to live until England’s troubles were over; and again said his first word was ‘Pope’ and that he would die for religion.184 The revival of editions of the work produced from a Hanoverian perspective in 1740 and 1745, therefore, reflects a belated attempt to use the press to counter the power of the continuing manuscript and oral Jacobite tradition. In fact, although the instance may be unique, it was still possible for the Jacobite perspective to appear in print. In 1747, a letter was sent by Jacobite partisans to the Chester Courant describing how, at the site of a mere which Nixon correctly prophesied would be drained, sown and mown, a great stone had been ploughed up.185 This stone, extracted from the ground with great difficulty, was found to be covered with an inscription which told how scarlet dragons, easily interpreted as meaning British soldiers, would overwhelm the country and crush the peasantry with taxes. Then o’er thy Fields shall scarlet Dragons stray, And Rapine and Pollution make their Way.

The shedding of British blood on foreign soil would be the prelude to fearful days. Following the failure of the 1745, there was something of a lull in London publications of Nixon. While it remained in the Jacobite oral and manuscript tradition, the reduced threat from Jacobitism seems to have allowed the shift of the prophecy into a different frame of reference, that of a loyalist antiFrench position.186 Probably in 1758, the important firm of Dicey reproduced The Jacobite intention of the author of this version of the prophecy was recognized by Sellers, ‘Nixon’, pp. 34–5. 183 Stonyhurst College, MS A III 11(18), p. 19: this manuscript is eighteenth-century in date but must be later than 1746, when it notes that the Ribble ran dry (p. 17). It was said that the Nixon passages were taken from a copy ‘found att Mr Dodds at Sandway Head near Dellamore Forrest’ (p. 20). 184 NLW, Brogyntyn MS 2795, pp. 10–12. 185 Described by those who printed it as ‘the work of some sly Jacobite’: The Chester Miscellany being a Collection of Several Pieces, both in Prose and Verse, which were in the Chester Courant from January 1745, to May 1750 (Chester, 1750), p. 273; reprinted in The Lancashire and Cheshire Historical Collector, ed. T. Worthington Barlow, 2 vols (Manchester and London, 1855), vol. 2, pp. 4–5 (vol. 1 published Manchester, 1853); the letter was published in the Courant of Tuesday 1 December 1747 and dated ‘—- in Cheshire, Nov. 20 1747’; cf. W. E. A. Axon, Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecies: A New and Complete Edition (Manchester, 1873), pp. 55–6. 186 Nixon therefore reinforced, and was reinforced by, the emphasis of some contemporary thinking on Britishness: Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 2nd edn (London, 2003). 142


the prophecy, a likely stimulus for the publication being the victory that year over the French at Krefeld.187 Given the complexity of reactions to the Nixon tradition in the first half of the eighteenth century, we should look again at the fate during this period of Merlin, whom we left earlier in this chapter as the target of Swift’s wit. Some of the contrasts which might explain their contrasting fortunes are now clearer. While Nixon could rely on what seemed recent and credible witnesses, Merlin’s historical contextualization was falling away as ‘British history’ and the Arthur story were more and more widely disbelieved.188 Yet the result was not the complete disappearance of Merlin but an even more pronounced conjunction of the serious with the disreputable, even burlesque, which we have found to be such an important element in the role of ancient prophecy in British political culture in the eighteenth century. Humour was apparent in such works as ‘Merlin the British Enchanter’ (1724)189 or ‘The Enchanter, or, Harlequin Merlin’ of the same decade.190 The complexity of the processes of transmission and interpretation involved even in the eighteenth century is clear in the role of Merlin in Queen Caroline’s redesign of Richmond Palace gardens in 1735. One feature of this scheme was a so-called Hermitage and ‘Merlin’s Cave’. The iconography of this was on one level perfectly clear: the queen was promoting a sense of the excellence of British science and culture, and identifying the Hanoverians with it; but she was also calling to mind an alleged ancient prophecy by Merlin of the accession of the Hanoverians.191 Of course, this was met with scorn by Caroline’s opponents. In particular, the poet Stephen Duck, appointed librarian of the collections at Richmond, was mocked. 192 Yet the queen’s interest in Merlin and, possibly, Mother Shipton, coincided with a burst of less critical treatment on the London stage. The Opera of Operas of 1733,193

187 James Pottinger also produced an edition, in 1759, allegedly his eleventh edition. Pottinger was known for his production of political satires. Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (London, 1968), pp. 201–2. 188 David Allen, ‘Sceptical Medievalism: The Problem of Arthurian Historicity in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Medievalism and the Academy, I, ed. Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin and David D. Metzger, Studies in Medievalism 9 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 98–122. 189 On 2 September 1724 William Rufus Chetwood played Bussle Head in this: ODNB. 190 Lost; Musgrave Heighington, composer: ODNB. 191 Judith Colton, ‘Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political Propaganda’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 10 (1967), pp. 1–20; Howard M. Colvin et al., The History of the King’s Works, 6 vols (London, 1963–82), v, pp. 224–5. 192 ‘S[tephe]n D[uc]k’, The Year of Wonders: Being a Literal and Poetical Translation of an Old Latin Prophecy, Found near Merlin’s Cave (n.p., 1737?); Rose Mary Davis, Stephen Duck, the Thresher-Poet, University of Maine Studies 2nd ser. 8 (Orono, Maine, 1926). 193 William Hatchett, The Opera of Operas, Or, Tom Thumb the Great / Alter’d from The

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a collaborative adaptation of Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies of 1731,194 exploited the queen’s emblems from Merlin’s Cave, and in contrast to Fielding’s play ended with political reconciliation. The Royal Chace, or, Merlin’s Cave of 1736, written by Edward Phillips and John Earnest Gaillard, included visual depictions of Caroline’s Hermitage and Merlin’s Cave and was very successful, with performances continuing until late in the century.195 The designs for Merlin’s Cave became fashionable, to the benefit of the draftsman, and Edmund Curll exploited a demand for a description, along with prophecy texts.196 Jane Brereton’s Merlin: A Poem, dedicated to Caroline, demonstrates the way Merlin, even while set in contrast to Newtonian science, had become a medium for support for the crown.197 Caroline was willing to associate herself with the idea that Merlin had prophesied the accession of the Hanoverians – and clearly believed that such a statement would strike an appropriate chord with the population at large.198 But the meaning of her works at Richmond was more opaque when some of the figures at the very heart of the ensemble came into question. One of the other figures was usually identified as Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII; another, however, is sometimes called a nurse, sometimes a witch, but at other times Mother Shipton.199 We have no categorical confirmation of this, but, whatever Caroline intended it to mean, her confection was interpreted as a grouping including the two most prominent British prophetic figures of the seventeenth century, and in Shipton the one apparently most mocked, as a result of Head’s treatment. So it is with this demonstration of the complexity of interpretation and reception, of the juxtapositon of credulity and scepticism, that we must eventually return to consideration of Mother Shipton. Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great; and Set to Musick after the Italian Manner (London, 1733). 194 The Tragedy of Tragedies, Or, The Liee [sic] and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (London, 1731). 195 A New Dramatic Entertainment Called The Royal Chace, or, Merlin’s Cave: With Several New Comic Scenes of Action Introduced into the Grotesque Performance of Jupiter and Europa (London, 1736). It added to an old pantomime of Rich’s: ODNB; Richard Leveridge sang Merlin: ODNB. 196 Daily Post and Advertiser, 27 January 1736: Giffard’s designs for Merlin’s Cave were well approved of, so Devoto, who made the Draughts, ‘has had several Copies bespoke by the Nobility’. Devoto also did designs for A Hint of the Theatres, or, Merlin in Labour, June 1740 – which includes a view of Merlin’s Cave in Richmond. ODNB. Devoto further prepared scenes for Harlequin Student, or, The Fall of Pantomime, 3 March 1741 – including the Hermitage in Richmond: Harlequin Student, Or, The Fall of Pantomime with the Restoration of the Drama: An Entertainment (London, 1741). Edmund Curll, The Rarities of Richmond: Being Exact Descriptions of the Royal Hermitage and Merlin’s Cave. With his Life and Prophecies (London, 1736). 197 (London, 1725 [i.e. 1735]), esp. pp. 11–12. 198 Frederick Kielmansegge, Diary of a Journey to England in the Years 1761–1762, trans. Countess Kielmansegge (London, 1902), pp. 74–5. 199 Davis, Stephen Duck, pp. 73–9; Colton, ‘Merlin’s Cave’, p. 11. 144

4

The re-rooting and survival of ancient prophecy

This chapter will consider why ancient prophecy was able to survive in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at precisely the time when the modernization narratives of Thomas, Capp and others might suggest it was already effectively dismissed and marginalized, a relic of the past. Even some of those who have urged the continuities in prophetic culture after 1660 have found the later eighteenth century as a period in which it lost its force.1 The traditions of Merlin and Nixon will be examined to assess the thesis that particular factors lay behind their decline. In particular, however, we will address the remarkable revival of interest in Mother Shipton, the circumstances of ancient prophecy’s most severe trial, the scandal surrounding Charles Hindley’s forged prophecy of 1881, and the continuing legacy of political prophecy in the twentieth century. If Nixon was recruited neatly into a new discourse of national identity in the 1750s, then the tradition faced new challenges in the 1770s. Now it was the new ‘philosophical’ and critical historiography of men such as Edward Gibbon which might be applied to Nixon’s words. In 1774 a new version of the life appeared.2 Bearing the publisher’s imprint of R. Snagg, this purported to be a return to the authentic Nixon, and the author’s contempt for Oldmixon and the distortions and inaccuracies of previous historians is evident throughout. He is scornful of Oldmixon’s chronology, urging (wrongly) that the Cholmondeleys only acquired Vale Royal in Charles I’s reign, and therefore arguing that Oldmixon was wrong to identify James I as the king in the prophecy. The third important emphasis in the new Life is its criticism of Oldmixon for being too sensitive to early eighteenth-century political imperatives. If anything, Merlin was more vulnerable still to this challenge.

1 Margery A. Kingsley, Transforming the Word: Prophecy, Poetry, and Politics in England, 1650–1742 (Newark and London, 2001). 2 One precondition for, although not an important determinant of, the revival of the tradition was the failure of the Stationers’ Company’s control in the 1770s. Original Predictions (London, 1774). Ian Sellers, ‘Nixon, the Cheshire Prophet, and his Interpreters’, Folklore 92(1) (1981), pp. 34–5, 35–6.

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Scepticism about Arthur and Merlin themselves interacted with a disdain for the literature which had celebrated them, so that the eighteenth century saw a complete break in publication of the Morte Darthur, for example.3 Even so, this was not a victory for outright scepticism. The author of the new life of Nixon was especially keen to urge that the most socially disruptive of the prophecies, predicting that landlords would stand with hat in hand, related simply to ‘the present migrations from Scotland, Ireland and some parts of England’.4 This of course implies some possible validity in the prophecy; the commentator’s scepticism applies to blatantly political references which he sees as being invented by Oldmixon, not to the prophecy as a whole. Events were to give added force to this continuing germ of credulity. Just as Horace Walpole and others were shaken from their belief in the possibility of apolitical history by the French revolution, so the 1790s saw the interpretation of Nixon’s prophecy taking on a new vigour. Ironically, we have an impression from Walpole of the power of the prophecy and his scepticism towards it written just before the breaking of the storm which destroyed these beliefs. On 24 February 1789, he wrote to Anne, countess of Upper Ossory commenting sceptically on her worries about the possible implications of George III’s madness. Yet I will hope we shall realize no old prophecies. What the one you refer to was, I do not recollect; but it sounds something like Nixon’s, an old Cheshire prediction, that I have lived to see revived and stillborn again two or three times, as often as the Jacobites were meditating or reviving rebellion. I heard it first when I was at school and it frightened me terribly. We were to swim in blood up to our chins in the time of George the son of George; which circumstance looked exceedingly probable; and does again with equal or no more probability. A miller with two thumbs (a wonderfully striking phenomenon, though I do not remember its being specified that both were to be on the same hand, though one devoutly concluded so) was to set all to rights again, and such a marvellous miller was said to exist – but enough of these fooleries. . . .5 3

David R. Carlson, ‘Arthur Before and After the Revolution: The Blome-Stansby Edition of Malory (1634) and Brittains Glory (1684)’, in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend: Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany, NY, 1994), pp. 234–53; Barry Gaines, ‘The Editions of Malory in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 68 (1974), pp. 1–17. Note that the Merlin of Dryden (King Arthur, or The British Worthy (London, 1691)) and Richard Blackmore (Prince Arthur (London, 1695)) has lost connection with the tradition of ancient prophecy. 4 The serious intention of the work is suggested by the fact that its publisher, Snagg, also produced literature such as an edition of Congreve around this time: Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (London, 1968), p. 233. 5 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with the Countess of Upper Ossory, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace, with the assistance of Edwine M. Martz, Volume III (London, 1965) (vol. 34 of The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (48 vols in 47, 1937–83), pp. 43–4. 146

RE-ROOTING AND SURVIVAL OF ANCIENT PROPHECY

The storm did indeed break, and swept away such scepticism. Amidst the invasion scares of the period, Nixon’s warnings of invaders with snow on their helmets suddenly seemed relevant again.6 Nixon texts, as yet unadapted, appeared in many of the collections of prophetic texts published from 1792 to 1796.7 These collections contained many new texts, and the 1790s saw a revival of interest across the whole of society, from the poorest of those who bought the chapbooks to educated thinkers like Mrs Piozzi, and representing a range of sentiments from radical Protestant millenarianism to loyalism.8 It is significant that although Merlin remained relatively insignificant in ancient prophecy in these years,9 and republication of the Nixon prophecy occurred first in London, the first signs of a renovation of the tradition in the 1790s are to be found in its original home, Cheshire. The popularity of the prophecy in educated circles in Cheshire is suggested by the appearance in 1793 of a portrait of Nixon, published along with a short account of the prophet,10 and

6

Hester Lynch Piozzi, concerned at the safety of Bristol from invasion, suggested to the Rev. Robert Gray ‘if they come now, we shall be invaded by men with snow upon their helmets, as Nixon the Cheshire ideot predicted long ago’: The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi 1784–1821 (Formerly Mrs. Thrale), 4 vols, continuing, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, vol. 3, 1799–1804 (Newark, London and Toronto, 1993), p. 499 (Brynbella, 9 January 1804). 7 The Strange and Wonderfulle Predictions of Mr. C. Love. . . . (Dublin, 1792); Miraculous Prophecies, Predictions and Strange Visions of Sundry Eminent Men (London, 1794); Wonderful Prophecies (London, 1794); The Prophetical Mirror: Being a Collection of Prophecies, Chiefly Predictive of the Present Tumultuous Times (London, 1795?); Past, Present and to Come (London, 1795?). Sellers, ‘Nixon’, p. 36. 8 For the encouragement provided by the Revolution for millenarian and other ideas, see Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore and London, 1975); Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s ([Auckland and Oxford], 1978); Sellers, ‘Nixon’, pp. 36–7. 9 Although his name remained a shorthand term for predictive power in almanacs, and his burlesque characterization was familiar on the stage: Charles Dibdin, Plot, Songs, Chorusses, &c. in the Comic Pantomime, Called Wizard’s Wake: Or, Harlequin and Merlin (London, 1803). He was also used as vehicle for political satire: A Prophecy of Merlin (London, 1762). 10 The Biographical Mirrour, Comprising a Series of Ancient and Modern English Portraits, of Eminent and Distinguished Persons, from Original Pictures and Drawings (London, 1795), pp. 58–9. The portrait of Nixon appears opposite p. 58; it is inscribed as published ‘16 Jul. 1793, S. Harding del., E. Harding junr. sc.’ Nixon appears in highly respectable company: the portraits immediately before and after him are those of Gilbert Sheldon, Michael Mohun, the cavalier actor, Henry Brooke, playwright, and Samuel Ogden, Woodwardian professor at Cambridge. The Nixon entry is reproduced in J. Granger, A Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, 5th edn, 6 vols (London, 1824), II, p. 210. According to the article, ‘many traditions relating to him are still current in the neighbourhood of Vale-Royal, where his story is implicitly believed’. 147


allegedly based on an original found outside a cottage in Delamere Forest by Owen Salisbury Brereton.11 Brereton was an active and respected antiquarian who was interested in Cheshire’s past and had published in Archaeologia in 1789.12 Further, two new prophecies appeared in 1795, the first new texts for over twenty years, and again it was from Cheshire and its immediate vicinity that the tradition drew new strength. While the portrait published by Brereton suggests the interest expressed by the gentry in Nixon, the new texts indicate the fascination for the prophet among the whole range of Cheshire people. The new sets of Nixon prophecies appeared in an edition from Chester, published by William Minshull.13 One was entitled ‘Predictions from a Collection of Old Pamphlets’ and was supposed to have once been in the hands of the Cholmondeleys but to have now passed into the hands of a Shropshire gentleman. Without much more than a sentence of introduction, saying that Nixon prophesied on public as well as private affairs, this version launches into a thinly disguised prophetic history of the seventeenth century, many parts of which are explained for the reader in footnotes. Nixon was said to have prophesied the execution of Charles I following the assassination of his favourite Buckingham, for example. Eventually we come, in one of the most crass pieces of symbolism in any Nixon prophecy, to the arrival of William of Orange: ‘the great yellow fruit shall come over to this country, and flourish’. More obscure is the intention of the prediction that the tree shall bear a thousand branches, but that these shall be ‘at strife one with another’. This cannot refer to offspring of William of Orange and Mary, since their marriage produced no children; more probably it is a reference to internal political conflicts and party strife. The wind from the south and west that would shake the tree is presumably the wars with France and the loss of American colonies. But another prediction, of multitudes of people running to and fro, and talking in a strange tongue, seems incomprehensible. In one of the footnotes to the account, a prediction of famine in the midst of great plenty is interpreted as implying the oppression of the poor, but the ending of the prophecy in deliberately obscure and the general nature of the predictions is strongly suggested by the final idea of earthquakes and storms that shall ‘level and purify the earth’. 11

Brereton’s report of the discovery describes how he stopped a mile from Vale Royal on his way to visit Mr Cholmondeley; taking shelter in a cottage by the road-side, he stepped on a piece of canvas, which on examination proved to be an oil painting. The woman who lived in the cottage thereupon said ‘Lord! it is our Nixon’s head, which was thrown out of the Hall-house the other day, and I brought it home.’ Biographical Mirrour, p. 59. The image was reproduced in Anthologia Hibernica: or, Monthly Collections of Science, Belles Lettres, and History (Dublin, [1793–4]), for January 1794. 12 O. S. Brereton, ‘Exhibition of Coloured Drawing of a Window in Brereton Church’, Archaeologia IX (1789), pp. 368–9. 13 The Original Predictions of Robert Nixon, Commonly Called the Cheshire Prophet: In Doggrel Verse (Chester, 179?). 148


Politically, the ‘Predictions from a Collection of Old Pamphlets’ appear to be supportive of both Montrose and Cromwell, but also to favour the Restoration of Charles II. Its endorsement of the Glorious Revolution is oddly qualified by the strange reference to conflict between scions of the house of Orange. The ideological outlook of the author of this new version is therefore accepting of the events of the previous century and focused on forthcoming chaos. Perhaps most significant is the unusually complex gloss to the reference to famine in the midst of plenty, relating it to the oppression of the poor. The circumlocution of the note, ‘This was said in the book from whence these predictions were extracted, to mean oppression of the poor’, suggests either embarrassment at this sentiment, or more likely an attempt to give the gloss additional antiquity and validity. This general relevance to the woes of the poor was the main focus of this new edition, with a relatively pedestrian run-through of political events to ape earlier versions. The second of the new prophecies to appear in 1795 was entitled ‘The original predictions of Robert Nixon, as delivered by himself, in doggrel verse: published from an authentic manuscript, found amongst the papers of a Cheshire gentleman, lately deceased’, and was supposed to have once been in the hands of the Cholmondeleys, like the ‘Predictions from a Collection of Old Pamphlets’. It was, however, only in 1799 that Nixon received a thorough revision in print to take account directly of recent political events. Henry Mozley of Gainsborough issued an edition which included, as well as Oldmixon, the 1774 new version, and the ‘Original Predictions’, a vision seen in Delamere Forest ‘on the 14th of last month’. Two armies rose out of the ground. The army commanded by a figure in royal dress was defeated, but the dead soldiers rose again and their foes retreated towards the sea – a thinly disguised loyalist prophecy of recovery and eventual victory. The vision did not draw on any of the alleged words of Nixon, but its location, in the place where Nixon had prophesied, associated it with him. The third sign of the revived interest in the Nixon prophecy was that it made the transition into the Welsh language. The year 1793 also saw the printing of the prophecy in Welsh, as Prophydoliaeth Nixon. This underlined the importance of Cheshire as a key point in the interaction of three of the elements in the composite kingdom ruled by the English. The prophecy itself had initially probably included reference to Wales, and the prospect of a battle that would decide the kingdom’s fate being fought in Delamere Forest was of direct and local relevance to the people of North Wales at least. In the early nineteenth century, the prophecy continued to be published in Wales, for example as Daroganau a phrophwydoliaeth hynod.14 It is at this point that the publication history of the work diversifies, with different texts of the prophecy being produced by different publishers in different towns across England and Scotland – and for what seem to have

14

(Caernarfon, [1820?]). 149


been diverse markets, from the cheap chapbook to works from the most respectable scientific and learned publisher. We have already mentioned one important series of editions, that from Chester itself (1796-1801) by William Minshull, one of three brothers involved in the book trade.15 John Poole (n.d., but probably 1771-95) and John Tushingham (1812) also produced editions in Chester around this time, and a little later the text was taken up by John Gresty (1868), first when he was publishing alone and later as Gresty and Burghall.16 Just over the border in Lancashire, a Manchester publisher, J. Swindells of Hanging Bridge, published the prophecy. The Swindells family appear to have begun their printing operation in the 1780s working on hymn books and psalms.17 Yet in about 1792 G. Swindells set up a new printing office at Hanging Bridge, and his output suddenly expanded and entered new territories. That year he was responsible for The Manchester Songster and A New Garland containing Three Excellent New Songs.18 By 1795 he had reached the tenth in the series of collections called A New Garland; his output was strongly loyalist in tone.19 He died in 1796, and his widow, Alice, took on the business. Although she continued to produce chapbooks of the kind of Blue Beard; or Female Curiosity, a more practical note is struck by her production of The Experienced English Housekeeper, and a return to religious material is apparent in Nicholas Alain Gilbert’s The Crown and Glory of Christianity, or Young Man’s Guide.20 Also in the North West, several editions were produced in Warrington. These included what was called the fifty-fifth edition, in about 1815, and a further edition in 1866. More interesting, however, is William Eyres, who produced an edition of Nixon at Warrington in 1796. Eyres was the grandson of a bookseller active in Warrington at the very beginning

15 The Book Trade in Cheshire to 1850: A Directory, ed. D. Nuttall (Liverpool, 1992), p. 25; R. Stewart Brown, ‘The Stationers, Booksellers and Printers of Chester to about 1800’, THSLC lxxxiii (1931), pp. 101–52, at pp. 135–8. The third brother, John, died in 1785. For their links in Shropshire, see L. C. Lloyd, ‘The Book Trade in Shropshire . . . to about 1800’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society xlviii (1935–6), pp. 65–142, 145–200. 16 John Poole: The Strange and Wonderful Predictions of Mr. Christopher Love (Chester, [1795?]): Book Trade in Cheshire to 1850, p. 28 (imprints 1771–95; succeeded by widow M. and son Thomas Poole senior, whose imprints 1800–11. Thomas Poole junior c. 1812–1850+: pp. 28–9). John Tushingham: ibid., p. 35 (imprints 1812–15). John Gresty: ibid., p. 18 (imprints either side of 1850; no reference in this book to a Gresty–Burghill partnership). 17 G. Swindells produced Richard Challoner, The Wonders of God in the Wilderness (Manchester, 1786); Cornelius Bagley, Select Hymns from Various Authors (Manchester, 1789); Cornelius Bagley, Select Psalms from the Old and New Versions (Manchester, 1789). 18 The dating of the latter is speculative. 19 This work has on its title-page the legend ‘Death, or speedy exportation to the Jacobins. God save the king.’ 20 All three works dated c. 1796–9 in Lancashire Printed Books: A Bibliography of all the Books Printed in Lancashire down to the Year 1800, ed. Arthur John Hawkes (Wigan, 1925), p. 105.

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of the eighteenth century and began printing about 1756. He differed from the likes of Minshull in Chester or the Swindells in Manchester in that his work included a large number of scientific and other scholarly publications, including Priestley’s History and Present State of Electricity of 1767. The learned associates of the Warrington Academy provided many of his authors and readers, but he was also well known for the quality of his work in Manchester, where the Literary and Philosophical Society chose to print with him,21 and even in London. Alongside the edition of Nixon in 1796 appeared Hints on the Proposed Medical Reform, by a Member of the London Corporation of Surgeons, the author of which was actually John Lewis, secretary of the corporation.22 Then, again just outside Cheshire, there was a Liverpool edition, printed by J. Lang, Water St., for J. Hopper and Son, booksellers, of Castle St. Another important publisher of the text was Thomas Richardson of Derby, about 1850. He also published as of Derby, London and Dublin, and in London with Hurst, Chance, and Company (c. 1850). Further afield, the prophecy was published by Henry Mozley in Gainsborough, as we have already seen, in Birmingham, Aylesbury, Hull, Penrith, Diss (1845?) and Halifax (1850?). The new prophecy texts first came to London in Past, Present and to Come! of 1796.23 Orlando Hodgson, W.S. Johnson, Dean and Munday, D. McDonald junior (1813), and Hodgson and Co. were among the London publishers who produced later editions of the prophecy. The proliferation of these publications suggests the continuing popularity of Nixon in the nineteenth century. This popularity extended from the urban and rural poor, the consumers of cheap chapbooks, through the middle classes and even to educated elites. The prophecy tradition did not ossify but continued to have elements added and interpretations developed to suit contemporary conditions. When John Clare came to list the ‘superstitious tales’ of which his father had been so fond around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘Old Nixon’s Prophesies’ headed the list.24 A continuing awareness of Nixon even in the South of England was noted as late as 1875 by the Rev. Frances Kilvert, who met a Wiltshire countryman who told him how ‘there was once a prophet named Saxon who was born a peasant boy and used to drive plough oxen’ and died by starvation in a

21

Lancashire Printed Books, ed. Hawkes, p. xxiii. For these and other works produced by Eyres, see Lancashire Printed Books, ed. Hawkes, pp. xxiii–xxiv, 147–8. 23 Past, Present and to Come! (London, 1796). 24 John Clare’s ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ describes ‘superstitous tales . . . hawked about the streets for a penny, such as Old Nixon’s Prophecies, Mother Bunches Fairy Tales, and Mother Shipton’s Legacy, etc., etc.’: Sketches in the Life of John Clare, written by himself, ed. Edmund Blunden (London, 1931), p. 46, cited in Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1981), p. 3. 22

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gentleman’s house.25 The prophet also found continuing fame among a middleclass audience. He was occasionally used to help evoke a romanticized view of medieval Cheshire, as for example in Mrs Frances Wilbraham’s novel For and Against (1858), which describes the effects of the Wars of the Roses on the society of fifteenth-century Cheshire.26 Here Nixon, speaking in Cheshire dialect, casts a sudden pall over the happy atmosphere. Wilbraham adapts the prophecy to her purpose, making the prediction of the passage on the winter council foretell the doom of the gallant Cheshire gentry in the allegedly fratricidal battle of Blore Heath. Nixon was also sustained among the associates of the gentry families with whom he had always been associated. H. E. Delamere, writing an account of the coats of arms on the ceiling of the saloon at Vale Royal in 1844, included extracts from Ormerod, Lysons and King on Nixon, framing them with comments which expressed no criticism or scepticism of the prophecy.27 More frequently, however, this audience was presented with images of Nixon expressive of rustic charm, simplicity and even stupidity. The prime example of this is in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–7), where Sam observes to Mr. Weller, ‘. . . you’ve been a prophecyin’ avay wery fine, like a red-faced Nixon, as the sixpenny boks gives picters on.’ ‘Who wos he, Sammy?’ inquired Mr. Weller. ‘Never mind who he wos,’ retorted Sam; ‘he warn’t a coachman; that’s enough for you.’28

Early in the nineteenth century, the frequent publication of the prophecy suggests Nixon’s continuing popularity. From soon after 1850, however, levels of publication declined suddenly and to virtually nothing. Kilvert’s Wiltshireman may in 1875 have recalled an approximation of Nixon’s name, but already in 1849 in Norfolk Nixon’s prophecies were no longer associated with his name.29 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Nixon tradition appears to have been retreating into its regional base. Although there were no new full-length versions of the life or prophecies themselves, new prophecies and interpretations continued to appear there. Two new verses of prophecy are first recorded in 1868, both referring to contemporary events in

25 Francis Kilvert, Diaries, ed. William Plomer, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London, 1960), III, pp. 154–5. 26 Mrs Frances M. Wilbraham, For and Against, or Queen Margaret’s Badge: A Domestic Chronicle of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols (London, 1858): ch. III, ‘Of the Cheshire Prophet Robert Nixon’, I, pp. 48–71. 27 CCRO, DBC 2309/1/11, pp. 40–4. 28 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, ed. J. Kinsley, The Clarendon Dickens (Oxford, 1986), ch. 43, p. 668. 29 John Gunn, ‘Proverbs, Adages and Popular Superstitions, Still Preserved in the Parish of Irstead’, Norfolk Archaeology II (1849), pp. 291–308, at p. 292.

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the North West: to the construction of the railway bridge between Runcorn and Widnes, and the threat of the disestablishment of the Irish church. 30 At the very end of the nineteenth century, the John Murray handbook for Shropshire and Cheshire still referred to Nixon briefly as a prophet ‘whose celebrity was so great that even to this day his prophecies are quoted by the country people’.31 The crisis of 1914 revived memories of Nixon in Cheshire, and it was said that he had prophesied that ‘after the war there shall be no more Germania’.32 In the 1930s the Cheshire Sheaf carried a supposed extract from Nixon predicting the parliamentarian seizure of the civic insignia of Chester following the siege of 1644: Soe longe as Chester huggs its Sword and Mace Soe longe shall Chester never know disgrace: But lett they baubles from her breast be torne, Then shall the Citie straightway be folorne.33

It was even possible for a new version of Nixon to be issued in the 1970s, complete with detailed explanations of the text with relation to contemporary events. R. C. Harper pointed out the parallels between Nixon’s prophecies and, for example, ‘the balance of Parliamentary power being held by the Scots Nats. [The Scots shall rule England one whole year] . . . and I.R.A. bombers [the Dragons out of Ireland shall come and make war with England for their abomination so that London shall run with blood]’.34 In part this retreat was due to a rising tide of scepticism towards Nixon from the early nineteenth century, especially, but not exclusively, from antiquarian writers. Daniel and Samuel Lysons’s volume on Cheshire, published in 1810, pointed out the problems with the story, such as the fact that Nixon was

30

Cheshire Sheaf 3rd ser. 11 (1914), p. 94 – they had both appeared in a number of local papers with accompanying explanation signed by ‘A Cheshire man born’. The latter was reproduced in William Beamont, A History of the Castle of Halton and the Priory or Abbey of Norton (Warrington, 1873). The threat posed by Irish Nationalism and Catholicism was felt to be great, as the reaction to the 1867 Chester ‘raid’ showed: W. J. Lowe, ‘Lancashire Fenianism, 1864–71’, THSLC 126 (1976), pp. 156–85, esp. pp. 171–6. 31 A Handbook for Residents and Travellers in Shropshire and Cheshire, 3rd edn, revised (London, 1897), p. 109. 32 Cheshire Sheaf 3rd ser. 11 (1914), p. 97. It encouraged some resurgence of other prophets, as C. W. C. Oman noted in his presidential address to the Royal Historical Society soon afterwards: TRHS 4th ser. I (1918), pp. 1–27, esp. p. 25: he mentions Nostradamus, Trithemius and Mother Shipton, but not Nixon. 33 Cheshire Sheaf 3rd ser. 33 (1938), p. 58. 34 H. C. Harper, Nixon the Cheshire Prophet, to which is Appended The Original Predictions of Robert Nixon, as Declared by Himself in Doggerel Verse and a Selection of Prophecies Recorded Elsewhere, 2nd edn (Hereford, 1978), unpaginated – there is a copy of this pamphlet in the Chester City Library. The pamphlet concludes with an advertisement for Sangreal, ‘a new quarterly journal of the Mysteries Crafts and Folk Traditions of Britain’. 153


alleged to have lived at two periods, in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that the Cheshire historians William Webb and the several Randle Holmes made no mention of him.35 At this stage, scepticism stood in the face of continuing widespread belief in the prophet: the Lysons call him ‘the celebrated Nixon’, and emphasize that many traditions relating to him were still current in the vicinity of Vale Royal and were ‘implicitly believed’, and that the guide to Hampton Court palace was accustomed to point out two places where Nixon was supposed to have been imprisoned and starved. The Lysons themselves were less condemnatory when they observed that the owners of Vale Royal kept the prophecies strictly secret, ‘on account of the prophecies which they contain relating to the Cholmondeleys, and other Cheshire families’, and that the Nixon prophecy of the birth of the heir to Vale Royal appeared to have been fulfilled, noting that the events occurred definitely after Nixon’s time.36 Ormerod’s History of the City and County Palatine of Cheshire, however, first published in 1819, in its discussion of Over township devotes less than one page to an account of Nixon which concludes with a forceful dismissal of the prophet’s historicity.37 J. O. Halliwell’s Palatine Anthology of 1850 was sceptical too, as was T. Worthington Barlow’s Cheshire: Its Historical and Literary Associations, published five years later.38 Egerton Leigh treats the stories as simply legends in his Ballads and Legends of Cheshire of 1867.39 Perhaps the ultimate example of the sceptical antiquarian study of the prophecy was the work by W. E. A. Axon of 1873, which received a second edition in 1878. Although he attempted to provide a number of editions of Nixon texts and was prepared to consider these as potentially of some antiquity and interest, Axon gave reasons for doubting Nixon’s historicity, such as the fact that there was no printed account of the prophecy before about 1714.40 The advance of such scepticism led to the complete omission of Nixon from some influential books on Cheshire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.41 35

Daniel and Samuel Lysons, Magna Britannia, vol. II. ii, Cheshire ([London], 1810), pp. 814–16. 36 Lysons, Cheshire, pp. 815–16. 37 Ormerod, Chester, II, p. 183: ‘In the compilation of this work there has not occurred any direct or collateral confirmation of the story [of the birth of Charles Cholmondeley], or the previous prophecy, in any authentic document whatsoever.’ 38 Palatine Anthology: A Collection of Poems and Ancient Ballads Relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, ed. J. O. Halliwell-Phillips (London, 1850); T. Worthington Barlow, Cheshire: Its Historical and Literary Associations (Manchester, 1855), p. 108. 39 Egerton Leigh, Ballads and Legends of Cheshire (London, 1867), pp. 175–85. 40 [W. E. A. Axon], Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecies; A New and Complete Edition, Reprinted from the Best Sources, with an Introductory Essay on Popular Prophecies (Manchester, 1873); Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecies Reprinted and Edited from the Best Sources, and Including a Copy of the Prophecy from an Unpublished Manuscript, with an Introductory Essay on Popular Prophecies (Manchester, 1878) – esp. p. xxviii. 41 E.g., in spite of its sub-title, Arthur Mee, The King’s England: Cheshire: The Romantic North-West (London, 1938), pp. 179–80 (on Over). 154


As David Vincent has noted, there was also a self-conscious challenge to ‘superstition’ in the way in which working-class self-identity was written by political radicals in the nineteenth century, and this included a challenge to prophecy.42 Nixon was a target of the growing body of works with a national focus targeted at ‘superstitious’ phenomena, such as G. H. Wilson’s Wonderful Characters of 1842.43 Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions of 1869 noted that ‘a belief in [Nixon’s] power has not been entirely effacted by the light of advancing knowledge’ and the story is held up with those of Mother Shipton and Merlin as a prime example of the credulity of the mass of the population.44 Further, this coincides with what has been seen as the date of the crisis of popular astrology, as almanacs were transformed to omit many of their traditional astrological elements.45 Yet Nixon’s experience contrasts starkly with that of Shipton’s prophecy. Nixon did not suffer from a general revolution towards rationality. Specific factors are more important. Nixon was first printed in a form highly relevant to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; this topicality was initially a reason for the prophecy’s great success, but once this immediate relevance was lost, there was little in the prophecy of a more general nature to attract the reader. It was the prophecy of the Glorious Revolution, and Revolution politics meant increasingly little, while in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries possible invading forces rarely seemed likely to march into England with snow on their helmets. The highly specific nature of the prophecy also told against it once sceptical antiquarian commentators turned to deal with it in the nineteenth century. Nixon could too easily be caught out on detail, and did not possess the readily accessible publication history from the seventeenth century which helped give Mother Shipton some continuing appeal in their eyes. Then again, in the eyes of the popular market for prophecy, Nixon lost out to the competition from Shipton, who by the mid-nineteenth century was offering detailed prognostications on contemporary events. And finally, while Shipton had, as we shall see, a specific locale and site to which devotees could go to celebrate her reputation, sanctioned by the local gentry, Nixon did not and his name was officially ignored by the nineteenth-century Cholmondeleys. While keeping a copy of the prophecy in their library and a cage for prophetic eagles in their grounds, so safeguarding their succession, they did nothing to encourage visitors to the key sites of the

42 David Vincent, ‘The Decline of the Oral Tradition in Popular Culture’, in Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. Robert D. Storch (London, Canberra and New York, 1982), pp. 20–47. 43 G. H. Wilson, Wonderful Characters: Comprising Memoirs and Anecdotes of the Most Remarkable Persons, of Every Age and Nation (London, 1842). 44 Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 3 vols (London, 1841), I, pp. 196–201, esp. p. 196. 45 Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775–1870 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 117–22, sees the crucial years as 1869–70.

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Nixon legend, to the point of denying any knowledge of the prophecy. Nixon was finished; but popular political prophecy was not dead. The continuing influence of the popular belief in Mother Shipton was briefly alluded to at the end of the preceding chapter. Queen Caroline’s figures in her Merlin’s Cave may not have been intended to include Mother Shipton, but that is how they were soon perceived. It is not, perhaps, surprising, therefore, that the London stage at this point was host to ‘Mother Shipton’s Wish; or Harlequin’s Origin’ (24 January 1735).46 In the 1730s, around the time of the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, a writer who may have been Henry Fielding referred obliquely on several occasions to Mother Shipton, for example in his attack on James Pitt, whom he described as Mother Osborne.47 There was also the 1740 edition of Shipton’s prophecies produced by J. Tyrrel, Past, Present, and To Come, with a further edition in 1743.48 George Colman senior wrote a pantomime Mother Shipton (26 December 1770), with music by Samuel Arnold.49 The name ‘Mother Shipton’ for the moth Callistege Mi, in place of its previous name the ‘Mask’, seems to have first appeared in the early 1770s.50 A satire on contemporary parliamentary politics, attributed to Shipton, Saint Stephen’s Tripod, was published in 1782. It was certainly directed at an audience that included members of the elite. It makes no concession to the reader in its language; the allusive style demands considerable understanding of the personalities of the House of Commons. Nor does the text include any extract from a prophecy previously published.51 Mother Shipton Triumphant, or, Harlequin’s Museum was performed in 1792.52 46

Designed by John Devoto: ODNB. Martin C. Battestin, New Essays by Henry Fielding: His Contributions to The Craftsman (1734–1739) and Other Early Journalism (Charlottesville, 1989), pp. 36, 131–2. 48 J. Tyrrel, Past, Present, and To Come: Or, Mother Shipton’s Yorkshire Prophecy (London, 1740); published by Francis Noble, who with his brother John commenced a circulating library in Holburn in about 1739; he operated a separate publishing business until he died in 1792: Plomer, Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers 1726 to 1775, p. 182. Past, Present, and To Come: Or, the Renowned Mother Shipton’s Most Surprizing Yorkshire Prophecies (London, 1743). 49 The Overture, Songs, and Comic Tunes in the Pantomine [i.e. Pantomime] Entertainment Call’d Mother Shipton: As Perform’d at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden (London, [1770]). Charles Lee Lewes appeared as Harlequin in Mother Shipton in the 1770–1 season: ODNB. 50 Moses Harris uses the name ‘Mask’ in the 1760s in The Aurelian (London, 1766; new edn by Robert Mays, Twickenham, 1986), p. 97, but ‘Shipton’ in his The English Lepidoptera: Or, the Aurelian’s Pocket Companion (London, 1775), pp. 43–4. Bernard Skinner, Colour Identification Guide to Moths of the British Isles (Macrolepidoptera), 2nd edn (London, 1998), p. 159. 51 Saint Stephen’s Tripod: or, Mother Shipton in the Lower H**se (London, 1782). The publisher was George Kearsley, a well-known producer of radical texts, including Wilkes’s North Briton: Plomer, Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers 1726 to 1775, pp. 143–4 (active 1758–97); he was the successor and great-nephew of Jacob Robinson, an important publisher in mid-century London: Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers 1675–1750’, The Library 6th ser. IV (1982), pp. 99–134, p. 112n. 52 A Correct Account of the Celebrated Pantomime Entertainment of Harlequin’s Museum; Or, Mother Shipton Triumphant (London, 1793). 47

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Although through the century the easiest access to the Shipton prophecies probably came from the Diceys’ chapbook version,53 by comparison to Nixon the publication history of the Shipton tradition is remarkably thin in the eighteenth century. As J. S. Fletcher pointed out, few new editions appeared until the 1790s; this, however, was the beginning of a dramatic revival, with nearly forty separate editions between 1800 and 1881.54 It has previously been argued that Richard Head’s reworking of the Shipton tradition did it no services in the long run. He recreated Shipton as a commentary on the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he all but eradicated the association with Yorkshire. By making the prophecy national in geographical relevance and highly specific in political significance, he undermined its essential adaptability. These changes led to the lack of interest expressed in the tradition in the eighteenth century; Nixon’s prophecy served the interests of all sides far better. One of the factors which ultimately saved Shipton from oblivion, however, was the one element of re-rooting which Head perpetrated, and this was the location of Shipton’s birthplace, and to a lesser extent the site of her burial. For it was from the locality of Knaresborough that Shipton was to gain much strength in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The place of Shipton’s birth is one locality which is not clearly defined in the 1641 version of the prophecy. The only clues are the implication that she was in or near York, provided by the fact that the king’s noble messengers arrive at the King’s House near York before making their final enquiries after her whereabouts, and that they do so by talking to Master Beasley, a prominent member of the York legal community. Interestingly, there are signs in the later editions of the prophecy that this vagueness permitted something of a controversy to develop over the prophetess’s birthplace. In the 1677 Richard Head edition, the first chapter begins with a statement that in 1486 ‘there lived a Woman called Agatha Shipton, at a place called Naseborough’ and that Knaresborough was the place of Mother Shipton’s birth. By 1686, however, the new version of that year was categorical that Shipton was a Yorkshirewoman, but confessed that ‘the particular place is very much disputed, because several Towns have pretended to the honour of her Birth; But the most credible and received opinion ascribes it to Naseborough’. It is therefore important to establish the nature of Knaresborough’s locality and community in the Middle Ages, and to explain how it suddenly emerged from relative isolation to become one of the most celebrated and visited places in the North of England in the seventeenth century. The continuities between what was in the Middle Ages, despite strong ties to the crown, a relatively closed community and the newly cosmopolitan resort of the early modern

53

For the Diceys: Victor E. Neuburg, ‘The Diceys and the Chapbook Trade’, The Library 5th ser. 24 (1969), pp. 219–31. 54 J. S. Fletcher, Harrogate and Knaresborough (London and New York, 1920), p. 51. 157


period will be stressed to show how Knaresborough retained an identity of its own, even when its population was frequently boosted by large numbers of incomers. In particular, it is important to note the ways that tourism, in its various forms, developed, and was managed and exploited: the ways the locality was ‘supplied’, and the things that visitors and external consumers ‘demanded’ of it. In many ways, Knaresborough was one of the parts of northern England with the strongest and most direct ties to the crown. The honour of Knaresborough emerged in the thirty years after the Domesday survey; a coherent unit emerged when the lands of the area, formerly distributed among five major landholders, were largely retained by the crown after 1069.55 By the middle of the twelfth century crown control of the area had been organized into the honour of Knaresborough and the lordship of Aldborough, the former divided between the Forest and the Liberty.56 Through a mixture of dynastic failure and deliberate planning, the honour remained closely associated with the crown and the wider royal family through the medieval period. There was not simply a long-standing royal connection with Knaresborough; it was one of the few bulwarks of the king’s authority in the North. His position in Yorkshire was almost entirely dependent on his two honours of Knaresborough and Scarborough and their castles, and he spent more on them than any others.57 It was not purely in administrative and defensive terms that Knaresborough played an important local and regional role. Knaresborough also had an active town life; it was first recorded as a borough in 1169. Its market first appears in 1206, its fair in 1304, and these were enshrined in the earliest charter, granted to Piers Gaveston as lord of the honour in 1310.58 Knaresborough’s position was advantageous, between the uplands, rich in cattle and sheep and productive of lead, and the lowland region producing grain. The area also produced iron from the ironstone deposits of the area from Kirkby Overblow to the Washburn valley and upper Nidderdale. In addition, Knaresborough benefited from the development of the textile industry in rural Yorkshire at the expense of towns like York and Beverley, partly through the use of foreign expertise.59 That said, Knaresborough’s economic importance did not extend beyond its regional hinterland. 55 For the period of the conquest and its aftermath, A History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Bernard Jennings (Huddersfield, 1970), chs 2–4. 56 The importance of the forest as late as the seventeenth century is indicated by the dispute over the receiver and collector of the honour, the forestership and the keeping of Bilton Park involving Sir Henry Slingsby in 1615; he estimated the annual profits at £475 6s. 8d.: J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (London, 1969), p. 89. 57 Despite further expenditure under Edward II, the castle was unable, however, to resist its seizure by Thomas of Lancaster’s supporters. 58 CChR, III, 1300–1326, pp. 139–40 (York, 16 August 1310). 59 Among those working in the industry were a group of Flemish weavers, including two men called John Brabanner at Ripley and Spofforth, whose names in the Poll Tax records

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Knaresborough’s importance in its locality also found an expression in the growth of the cult of St Robert of Knaresborough.60 Robert, son of a leading citizen of York, Toki Flos, came to Knaresborough in the late twelfth century to lead the life of a hermit. It seems that initially his relationship with William de Stuteville, lord of the honour, was poor. Terrifying dreams of three men ‘blacker than ynd’ who threatened William with burning rods and iron clubs brought him to change his attitude. Robert’s brother Walter, who followed their father into the mayoralty of York, helped him build a chapel in honour of the Holy Cross. As Robert’s fame spread, Brian de l’Isle, William de Stuteville’s successor as lord of the honour of Knaresborough, allegedly brought King John to visit him, and the king gave Robert half a carucate of land in the wood of Swinesco in February 1216.61 Although Robert’s miracles frequently involved him confronting the rich and powerful,62 this was a conventional saintly history of bringing the proud to a true appreciation of their Christian duty – and especially perhaps an attack on hunting and forest laws.63 In any case, important noblemen and clerics soon became associated with the cult of the hermit. He was regarded as a saint at least by 1252, when Pope Innocent IV granted an indulgence to those who would ‘help in completing the monastery of St. Robert of Knaresborough where that saint’s body is buried’.64 The most prominent lay patron of the cult and of the Trinitarian friars who built their house over the saint’s body at Knaresborough was Richard of Cornwall. He was granted the honour of Knaresborough in 1235, and gave a charter to the friars in 1257.65 The friars also received patronage from Edmund

of 1379 recorded their origin in Brabant: History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, pp. 94–5. 60 The main primary source for the life of St Robert is The Metrical Life of St. Robert of Knaresborough, together with the other Middle English Pieces in British Museum MS. Egerton 3143, ed. J. Bazire, EETS o.s. 228 (London, 1953); the best recent review of the saint’s significance is Brian Golding, ‘The Hermit and the Hunter’, in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford, 1996), pp. 95–117. For the history of the house, ‘The Trinitarian Friars of Knaresborough’, VCH Yorkshire, III, pp. 296–300. 61 Rotuli litterarum clausarum, ed. T. D. Hardy, 2 vols (London, 1824), I, p. 249. 62 Which led History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, to see him as a ‘spiritual Robin Hood’ resisting the ‘Norman ruling class’: pp. 97–8. 63 Golding, ‘Hermit and the Hunter’, esp. pp. 110–17. 64 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers (Regesta Romanorum Pontificum) relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, ed. W. H. Bliss et al., Petitions to the Pope, ed. W. H. Bliss (London, 1893–), I, p. 277; Les Registres d’Innocent IV, ed. Élie Berger, 4 vols (Paris, 1884–1921), III, p. 59, no. 5738. The miraculous reputation of St Robert is apparent in, e.g., The Chronicles of William de Rishanger, of the Barons’ Wars. The Miracles of Simon de Montfort, ed. James Orchard Halliwell, Camden Society o.s. 15 (London, 1840), pp. 92, 108–9. 65 CChR, I, p. 19; N. Denholm-Young, Richard of Cornwall (Oxford, 1947), p. 90; CChR, II, pp. 240–1. A Trinitarian, Ralph, was Richard’s proctor at Rome in 1246; another, 159


earl of Cornwall in the 1280s.66 The friars were members of an order founded in France in 1197 with the purpose of ransoming prisoners from the Holy Land.67 The crusading interests of Richard were therefore among the reasons for it being Trinitarians who took over the original hermitage. In addition, however, the English houses of the order frequently developed from hospitals and hospices, so it was also important that Robert’s foundation may have had such functions from early in its history, connected with the springs of Knaresborough and the surrounding area, as witnessed by its connections with lepers.68 Despite such powerful patrons, the house’s influence was never primarily felt in material terms. The fourteenth century saw a major set-back for the house. The raid by the Scots in 1318 cost the friary dear,69 but recovery eventually came, beginning in the latter part of the century. The number of friars recovered from just six in 1360 to eleven in 1375.70 The direct influence of the monastery as a landlord was limited: the temporalities were valued at only £24 11s. per annum in the Valor Ecclesiasticus; the spiritualities only extended to the five rectories of Hampsthwaite, Pannal, Thorner, Fewston and Whixley.71 This does not seem to have limited the influence of the saint cult:

William de Wolvele, acted as his emissary to the Pope in 1259 and served as his treasurer in the early 1260s: Denholm-Young, Richard of Cornwall, pp. 52, 57n, 100, 120. 66 CChR, I, pp. 240–1; VCH Yorkshire, III, p. 297. 67 It never had a large presence in England, numbering just ten houses with sixty-eight friars in the middle of the fourteenth century: M. Gray, The Trinitarian Order in England: Excavations at Thelsford Priory, ed. Lorna Watts and Philip Rahtz, BAR British Ser. 226 (Oxford, 1993), esp. pp. 10–15; H. F. Chettle, ‘The Trinitarian Friars and Easton Royal’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine li (1945–7), pp. 365–77; P. Deslandres, L’ordre des trinitaires pour la rachat des captifs, 2 vols (Toulouse and Paris, 1903); R. von Kralik, Geschichte des Trinitarieordens (Vienna, 1919); David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, I (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 201–2. 68 Rotuli hundredorum temp. Hen. III & Edw. I. in Turr’ lond’ et in curia receptae scaccarij Westm. asservati, 2 vols ([London], 1812–18), I, p. 133 (the minister and brethren held fifteen oxgangs and two tofts formerly belonging to the lepers); both suggestions are made by Golding, ‘Hermit and the Hunter’, pp. 106–7. Cf. Grainge’s observation that near the Dropping Well is a piece of ground known as Spittlecroft: William Grainge, The History and Topography of Harrogate, and the Forest of Knaresborough (London, 1871), p. 258. 69 W. J. Kaye, Records of Harrogate (Leeds and Harrogate, 1922), p. xvii; The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272–1346, ed. Herbert Maxwell (Glasgow, 1913), p. 235. 70 VCH Yorkshire, III, p. 298; PRO, C 145/82/2; Taxatio ecclesiastica Angliae et Walliae, auctoritate P. Nicholai IV, circa A.D.1291 (London, 1802), pp. 323–37; Historical Papers and Letters from Northern Registers, ed. James Raine, RS 61 (London, 1873), pp. 280–1. 71 Valor ecclesiasticus temp. Henr. VIII, 6 vols (London, 1810–34), V, pp. 254–5. The net value, in total, was only £35 11s. 1d. In the early thirteenth century, Hampsthwaite was regarded as a chapel of Aldborough: CPR, 1225–1232, p. 174; VCH Yorkshire, III, p. 83. The friary was granted the appropriation of four churches, Pannal in the aftermath of its destruction in the Scottish raids, Fewston, which had been given by Edmund of Cornwall, 160


in any case, the direct experience of the rule of the minister of the friary (as the head of houses of Trinitarians was known) could be unpleasant.72 Robert’s importance as a hermit-saint was appreciated in other houses dedicated to such figures, such as Dale Abbey in Derbyshire, where elements from his story were displayed in stained glass.73 In fact, the popularity of the cult of St Robert among the population of the region appears to have grown through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: many pilgrims were visiting the shrine in the early fifteenth century, and wills show frequent gifts from inhabitants of the Knaresborough area and more widely in Yorkshire and the North. Sir John Depeden, lord of Healaugh, left £3 6s. 8d. in 1402, William Bardsay, vicar of Nidd, 3s. 4d. in 1461 and William Lambert, rector of Gainford, 10s. in 1480.74 In the locality, the honour of Knaresborough, bequests were very frequent.75 Henry Tudor, his mother Margaret Beaufort and her then husband Sir Henry Stafford joined the confraternity in 1465, and the earl and countess of Northumberland were brethren of the house at the turn of the sixteenth century; Richard III granted the house remission of ‘an halfendelle of an

in 1349, Whixley in 1361 and Thorner in 1444. CPR, 1317–1321, p. 310; CPR, 1348–1350, p. 254; CPR, 1358–1361, p. 352 (confirmed 1375: Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers, IV, pp. 205–6); CPR, 1441–1446, p. 226. (Licence to appropriate the latter was given in 1394: CPR, 1391–1396, p. 381; the advowson had been granted them by John of Gaunt, who was given the advowson of the house of St Robert by Edward III in 1372: VCH Yorkshire, III, p. 298, citing BL, Cott. Charter XV, 1.) 72 The records of the honour’s courts show fines for obstructing highways and enclosing, and a case of abduction in 1440: History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 106. A case of illegal hunting in 1482: Kaye, Records of Harrogate, p. 179. 73 H. M. Colvin, ‘Medieval Glass from Dale Abbey’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society lx (n.s. xiii) (1939), pp. 129–41, esp. pp. 138–41; W. H. St John Hope, ‘Chronicle of the Abbey of St. Mary de Parco Stanley, or Dale, Derbyshire’, ibid. v (1883), pp. 1–29. 74 Testamenta Eboracensia, 6 vols, Surtees Society 4, 30, 45, 53, 79, 106 (London and Durham, 1836–1902), I, pp. 297 (Depeden), 411 (Sir John Bygod of ‘Steteryngton’, 1426); Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers, V, p. 509 (faculty re. pilgrimages, 1402); VCH Yorkshire, III, p. 299; Acts of the Chapter of the Collegiate Church of SS. Peter and Wilfrid, Ripon, A.D. 1452 to A.D. 1506, ed. J. T. Fowler, Surtees Society lxiv (Durham, 1875 for 1874), pp. 99–100 (Bardsay); Testamenta Eboracensia, III, pp. 254–5. 75 Wills and Administrations in the Knaresborough Court Rolls, ed. Francis Collins, vol. 1, Surtees Society 104 (Durham, 1902), pp. 1–29: 41 pre-1540 wills, with seven making bequests to the house or brethren of St Robert (pp. 2, 5–7, 8–9, 16–17, 19–20, 23–4, 29). Cf. Acts of the Chapter of Ripon: bequests in 1454, 1459, 1461, 1470, 1471, 1476, 1467, 1506 (pp. 29, 87, 101, 148, 169, 175, 230, 326; Ripon liberty adjoined the honour of Knaresborough: ibid., pp. 340–1); and William Brigg, ‘Testamenta Leodiensia’, in Miscellanea, Publications of the Thoresby Society iv (Leeds, 1895), pp. 1–16, 139–47, at p. 1; G. D. Lumb, ‘Testamenta Leodiensia’, in Miscellanea, Publications of the Thoresby Society ix (Leeds, 1899), pp. 81–96, 161–92, 246–77, at pp. 161, 186, 265, 269, 276; Robert Beilby, ‘Wills of Leeds and District’, in Miscellanea, Publications of the Thoresby Society xxii (Leeds, 1915), pp. 85–102, 235–64, at pp. 88, 95, 102, 235, 239, 240, 254, 255. 161


halff of an hoole disme’.76 The relative success of the cult in the late medieval period is also indicated by the composition of a life of the saint early in the fifteenth century by a friar of the house.77 At the start of the sixteenth century, the leadership of the Trinitarian order in England of Oswald, minister of the Knaresborough house, saw him innovatively using the printing presses of de Worde and Pynson to produce letters of confraternity for the order.78 It is, however, striking that Robert’s popularity did not penetrate far beyond the immediate hinterland of Knaresborough. Even in the archdeaconry of Richmond, there is little sign of devotion to his cult, and south of the Trent bequests to the Knaresborough convent were few and far between in the later Middle Ages.79

76 Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 47–8; The Regulations and Establishment of the Household of Henry Algernon Percy, the Fifth Earl of Northumberland: at his Castles of Wressle and Leckonfield in Yorkshire: begun anno domini MDXII, new edn (London, 1905), p. 347; British Library Harleian Manuscript 433, ed. Rosemary Horrox, 4 vols (Gloucester, 1979–82), I, p. 93 (fol. 29). Letters of confraternity exist for Henry and Lady Fitzhugh, 1412, and Robert and Agnes Plumpton, 1480: YAS, DD56/Add. 1987/1A/1–2. A grant of privileges by the minister in 1473, to Thomas Popley: Ecclesiastical Documents, ed. Joseph Hunter, Camden Society o.s. 8 (London, 1840), pp. 78–9. 77 Memorials of the Abbey of St. Mary of Fountains, ed. John Richard Walbran, vol. 1, Surtees Society 42 (Durham, 1863 for 1862); this MS then belonged to the duke of Newcastle, and the English Life had already been printed from it for the Roxburgh Club. Cf. the Egerton MS printed as Metrical Life of St. Robert, ed. Bazire. 78 STC, 2nd edn, II, p. 8; 14077C.121B–C (1526–7). 79 Wills and Inventories from the Registry of the Archdeaconry of Richmond, Extending over Portions of the Counties of York, Westmerland, Cumberland, and Lancaster, ed. James Raine, Surtees Society XXVI (Durham, 1853) (fourteen wills before 1540, none with a relevant bequest). For the South of England, this is based on a survey of the printed wills in Somerset Medieval Wills (2nd Series), 1501–1530, with Some Somerset Wills Preserved at Lambeth, ed. F. W. Weaver, Somerset Record Society 19 (Taunton, 1903); Somerset Medieval Wills (3rd Series), 1531–1558, ed. F. W. Weaver, Somerset Record Society 21 (Taunton, 1905); ‘English Wills, 1498–1526’, ed. A. F. Cirket, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical and Record Society XXXVII (1957), pp. 1–82; Bedfordshire Wills, 1480–1519, ed. Patricia Bell, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical and Record Society XLV (Bedford, 1966); Bedfordshire Wills Proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1383–1548, ed. Margaret McGregor, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical and Record Society LVIII ([Bedford], 1979). Even Lincolnshire people seem to have shown little interest: Lincoln Wills, Volume. I, A.D. 1271–1526, ed. C. W. Foster, Lincoln Record Society 5 (Lincoln, 1914); Lincoln Wills, Volume. II, A.D. 1505–May 1530, ed. C. W. Foster, Lincoln Record Society 10 (Lincoln, 1918 for 1914); and Lincoln Wills, Volume. III, A.D. 1530–1532, ed. C. W. Foster, Lincoln Record Society 24 (Lincoln, 1930), produce only two mentions of St Robert: Richard Clerke of Lincoln, 1528, silver spoon and 40d. to the house of St Robert of Knaresborough; and Robert Brown of Wells, 1531, 4d. to the ‘gylde of St. Robert of Knavesborow’ (II, pp. 89–90; III, p. 118).

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So Knaresborough’s contacts were essentially local and at most regional, strengthening though these may have been in the fifteenth century. What transformed the situation was the development of interest in the springs in the area, which occurred from the end of the sixteenth century. Knaresborough’s Dropping Well had been the subject of fascination for visitors at least since the early sixteenth century. In 1538 John Leland described a welle of a wonderful nature caullid Droping welle. For out of the great rokkes by it distillith water continually into it. This water is so could, and of such a nature, that what thing so ever faullith oute of the rokkes ynto this pitte, or ys caste in, or growith about the rokke and is touchid of this water, growith ynto stone: or els sum sand, or other fine ground that is about the rokkes, cummithe doune with the continualle droping of the springes in the rokkes, and clevith on such thinges as it takith, and so clevith aboute it and givith it by continuance the shape of a stone. There was ons, as I hard say, a conduct of stone made to convey water from this welle over Nid to the priory of Knaresburgh; but this was decayed afore the dissolution of the house.80

Even so, the probable medical use of the spring water in the monastic settlement seems to have declined, as Leland implies, even before Robert’s house was dissolved. Knaresborough was transformed by the discovery nearby, especially in the Harrogate area, of a new mineral spring. The early 1570s saw the first publications of physicians promoting the benefits of drinking water or bathing in it.81 In 1571 William Slingsby, the fourth son of Thomas Slingsby of Scriven, living at that time near the Stray, discovered a spring of chalybeate water (i.e. impregnated with salts of iron). Slingsby had travelled on the continent of Europe and was therefore particularly familiar with health resorts such as Spa in the Ardennes and the potential benefit offered by the spring. It was he who sponsored the paving and walling of the area around the source which was soon to become known as the Tewit Well.82 The news of the well was spread by a small group of physicians based in and around York. Especially

80

The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1536–1539, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 5 vols (London, 1907), I, p. 86. 81 William Turner was the prime exponent of the spa at Bath, writing from an Anglican theological position: The Seconde Parte of William Turners Herball. . . . Here vnto is Ioyned also a Booke of the Bath of Baeth in Englande (Collen, 1562: STC 24366). See John Jones, The Bathes of Bathes Ayde: Wonderful and Most Excellent, Agaynst Very Many Sicknesses . . . (London, 1572) (STC 14724a3); and for the North of England, idem, The Benefit of the Auncient Bathes of Buckstones: Which Cureth most Greeuous Sicknesses: Neuer before Published (London, 1572) (STC 14724a7). 82 Confusion over which member of the Slingsby family discovered the well is resolved in the introductory notes to Edmund Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, or the English Spa Fountain: Being a Briefe Treatise of the Acide, or tart Fountaine in the Forest of Knaresborow, in the WestRiding of Yorkshire. As also a Relation of the other Medicinall Waters in the said Forest (London, 1626; reprinted with an introduction by James Rutherford and biographical notes by 163


prominent among them was Timothy Bright. Born and educated in Cambridge, and with a spell in Paris, Bright took his doctorate of medicine in 1579, and by 1584 he was physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He came to Yorkshire as a result of his presentation in July 1591 to the church of Methley near Leeds.83 It was Bright who probably gave the new-found well its name.84 Bright was a man of considerable ability and some reputation and therefore made a good publicist for Tewit well. Able to read Hebrew and Syriac as well as Greek, Latin and Italian, he also promoted a scheme of shorthand in his book Characterie.85 Beside Bright, the other major exponent of the well’s benefits in the late sixteenth century was Dr Hunton, another physician, of Newark on Trent. Neither Bright nor he published any account of the well at Harrogate; this was left to Edmund Deane. Deane was a generation younger than either Bright or Hunton, being born near Halifax in 1572. He was educated in medicine in Oxford, coming to York to practise in 1614.86 Deane’s acquaintance with Bright was therefore short, but enough to inspire him to publish Spadacrene Anglica; or the English Spaw-Fountaine in 1626.87 In the same year, another work on the well was published, this time by Michael Stanhope, second son of Sir Edward Stanhope of Grimston. Stanhope’s work, News out of Yorkshire, described the wells and was followed by another work of the same kind, Cures without Care, in 1632.88 The Harrogate waters had therefore been commended to the public by a leading physician and by a man with strong family connections to the elite of

Alexander Butler, Bristol and London, 1922), pp. 35–41, 83–6. Cf. the failure of William Harrison to mention Knaresborough in his catalogue of ‘baths and hot welles’ in 1577 in his description of England included in Holinshed’s Chronicles: ch. 23, or ch. 14, book 2, in the 1577 edition. 83 Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, pp. 44–9. 84 This is based on Deane’s statement that Bright began the use of the term ‘Spaw’ about thirty years before the publication of Deane’s book – in other words in about 1596. This would accord with Bright’s interest beginning almost immediately after he arrived in the North: Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, p. 47. 85 Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, pp. 44–9. 86 Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, pp. 19–30. 87 Edmund Deane, Spadacrene Anglica; or, the English Spaw-Fountaine: Being a Briefe Treatise of the Acide, or tart Fountaine in the Forest of Knaresborow, in the West-Riding of Yorkshire. As also a Relation of other medicinall Waters in the said Forest (London, 1626 (STC 6441)). Spadacrene Anglica, the English Spaw, or, the Glory of Knaresborough, Springing from Severall Famous Fountains there Adjacent, Called the Vitrioll, Sulphurous and Dropping Wells; and also other Minerall Waters. Their Nature, Physicall Use, Situation, and Many Admirable Cures being Exactly Exprest in the Subsequent Treatise of the Learned Dr. Dean, and the Sedulous Observations of the Ingenius Michael Stanhope Esquire. Wherein it is Proved by Reason and Experience, that the Vitrioline Fountain is Equall, and not Inferiour, to the German Spaw. Published, with other Additions, by Iohn Taylor, Apothecary in York (York, 1649). 88 Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, pp. 51–6. Cures without Care: Or, A Summons to all Such who Finde Little or no Helpe by the Use of Ordinary Physick, to Repaire to the Northern Spaw (London, 1632). 164


pre-civil war England. Stanhope’s father, Sir Edward Stanhope of Grimston, was himself the second son of Sir Michael Stanhope, executed for treason in 1552 for his links with the Seymours.89 The dedications of Stanhope’s works suggest one of the reasons for and consequences of the growing popularity of the Harrogate spa. News out of Yorkshire was dedicated to Lady Katherine Stanhope, the wife of Lord Philip Stanhope, heir of Sir Michael Stanhope, executed in 1552.90 Cures without Care was addressed to Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, and the increasing eminence of his audience suggests that Stanhope was catering for the upper gentry and nobility of the North of England, who were increasingly drawn to Harrogate for what became a summer season.91 The duchess of Buckingham, Lady Vavasour (wife of Sir Thomas), and the wife of the Lord Mayor of York were among the visitors who benefited from the powers of the well in this period, suggesting a national reputation was being created.92 To this was added the fact that foreign travel to the original medicinal well at Spa in what is now Belgium but was then the bishopric of Liège was being made hazardous by the drift to war on the continent of Europe. As Deane urged, those visiting Knaresborough and Harrogate were at ‘lesse hazard and danger of their lives, spoiling and robbing’ than if they sought a similar cure abroad.93 An additional motivation behind the writing on Harrogate lay in the struggle for control of the water which had important religious connotations. In spite of the indications we have from Leland that the Dropping Well was no longer exploited in the early Tudor period, in the late sixteenth century there clearly remained a strong tradition of pilgrimage to two wells, St Robert’s and St Mungo’s. Deane describes how ‘great concourse of people have daily gathered and flocked to them both neere, and a farre off, as is most commonly seene, when any new thing is first found out’. Its reputation grew, he observed, ‘even unto incredible wonders and miracles, or rather fictions, and lyes. All which commeth to passe as wee may well suppose, through our overmuch

89

Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, pp. 55–6. Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, p. 56. 91 Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, p. 52. The dedication to Wentworth is intriguing when set in the context of Sir William Wentworth’s recollection that his father, unable to produce a son, went to ‘the well att St. Anne of Buxtons’ after seeing a vision, and that Sir William was conceived as a result: Wentworth Papers, 1597–1628, ed. J. P. Cooper, Camden Society 4th ser. 12 (London, 1973), p. 28. 92 Sections from Cures without Care describing cures are reprinted in Grainge, History and Topography of Harrogate, pp. 129–30, 133–4; also cured were Mrs Sadler, daughter of Sir Edward Coke, Lady Hoyh of York and Mrs Fairweather of York. Sir Thomas Vavasour of Skellingthorpe (Lincolnshire.) and Ham (Surrey) (1560–1620) married Mary, daughter and heir of John Dodge of Copes (Suffolk), widow of Peter Houghton, alderman of London; his wealth allowed considerable building works at Ham House: The House of Commons, 1558–1603, ed. P. W. Hasler, 3 vols (London, 1981), III, pp. 553–5. 93 Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, p. 64. 90

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English credulity, or (as I may better say) rather superstition.’94 Deane was keen to point out that these were ‘springs of pure, and simple waters meerely, without any mixture at all of minerals to make them become medicinable’.95 The devotion to these wells was therefore clearly superstitious. Bright, Deane and Stanhope all disapproved of this tradition, and their enthusiasm for the new well and contempt for the old, non-mineral, springs almost certainly represent an attempt to appropriate and supersede a Catholic use of the site.96 Even so, this was appropriation not obliteration, and the overwhelmingly conservative and even recusant gentry of the area, including the Slingsbys who had first promoted the new well, may well have found attractive this limited change of custom.97 St Mungo’s well seems to have continued to be a popular resort, and more likely because of its miraculous than its mineral attributes. In 1652, Dr French in his York-shire spaw wrote that it had ‘of late regained its reputation’ and found it ‘worthy of a place amongst the four famous wells of Knaresborow’.98 In 1661, John Ray noted that ‘a great number of poor people resort to bathe themselves’ at the well, but that it ‘operates (if at all) by its extraordinary coldness and astringency’; the far less sceptical Marmaduke Rawdon in 1664 called it a ‘well of greate virtue, doinge very greate cures uppon thosse that have weake limbs’.99 In the 1680s Ralph Thoresby visited it, and a Lancashire physician, Dr Clayton, published a book on it in 1696. The well was even credited with giving Sir Henry Slingsby back the use of his legs around this time.100 In 1714, Nicholas Blundell bathed several times

94

Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, pp. 72–3. Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, p. 73. Cf. the continuing worship of St Ann associated with the spring at Buxton: Thomas Hobbes, De mirabilibus pecci, Being the Wonders of the Peak in Darby-shire, commonly Called the Devil’s Arse of Peak, written 1626–8, 1st edn 1636, sig. Blv.; reprinted from the edition of 1678, London, William Crook, in Thomæ Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera Quæ Latine Scripsit Omnia, ed. William Molesworth, 5 vols (London, 1839–45), V (1845), pp. 319–40. 96 David Harley, ‘Religious and Professional Interests in Northern Spa Literature, 1625–1775’, Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 35 (December 1984), pp. 14–16. 97 William Slingsby was listed as a recusant in 1604; he was buried in Knaresborough, 8 October 1606: Kaye, Records of Harrogate, pp. xxix, 73. 98 D. H. Atkinson, Ralph Thoresby, the Topographer; His Town and Times, 2 vols (Leeds, 1885), I, notes to follow p. 197. John French, The York-shire spaw; or, A Treatise of Four Famous Medicinal Wells . . . near Knaresborow in York-shire (London, 1652); another edn (London, 1654). 99 Memorials of John Ray, Consisting of his Life by Dr. Derham; Biographical and Critical Notices by Sir J.E. Smith, and Cuvier and Dupetit Thomas. With his Itineraries, etc., ed. Edwin Lankester, Ray Society (London, 1846), p. 142; The Life of Marmaduke Rawdon of York, or, Marmaduke Rawdon the Second of that Name, ed. Robert Davies, Camden Society LXXXV (London, 1863), p. 118 (Rawdon referred to the cure of children with rickets, and found there ‘greate resort of people’). 100 Atkinson, Thoresby, I, notes to follow p. 197: citing Sir John Floyer and Dr Edward 95

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during a visit to the area.101 Even in the seventeenth century, there remained strong links between spa visiting, including that at Harrogate, and religious and political dissidence. Partly this was due to the importance of the continental Spa to the exiled Catholic community: it was at Spa that many of the defeated rebels of 1569 went on reaching continental Europe, and in 1615 it was the community at Spa which was given the right by the Pope to elect a Roman Catholic archbishop of Canterbury.102 One of those who accompanied Mary, queen of Scots, to England, appears to have chosen to settle at Haverah Park near the forest of Knaresborough.103 It is particularly striking that even in the 1680s a high proportion of visitors to the spa might be Catholics: in 1682, Ralph Thoresby complained in his diary that ‘the most of the guests at this house are Papists’, and during the same trip found himself engaged in ‘ineffectual discourses’ with ‘Torycal Papists’.104 In the closing years of the century, Celia Fiennes noted the presence of ‘several Papists there about’ who said their prayers at St Mungo’s well, and told the story of a Catholic woman who lodged in the same house at Knaresborough and made herself a relic by dipping her handkerchief in the ‘blood’ exposed when a body was dug up among some nearby ruins.105 Although the chief interest subsequent writers have found in the work of Deane and Stanhope is their emphasis on the benefits of the Tewit well, both promoted the town of Knaresborough in their writing. In Spadacrene Anglica Deane commented that Knaresborough offered suitable accommodation – the only really suitable accommodation for his middle-class and gentry audience – in the close vicinity. ‘In brief, there is nothing wanting, that may fitly serve for a good and commodious habitation, and the content and entertainment of strangers.’106 The effect of this publicity for Knaresborough was dramatic. Almost immediately after the publication of Deane’s and Stanhope’s works on the waters, a sudden flow of visitors came to the town to take the waters. Their number and quality were such that they were cited in 1642 as a reason

Baynard, Psukhrolousia: The History of Cold Bathing: Both Ancient and Modern (London, 1706). The use of the well is here credited with keeping the North of England free of rickets. 101 The Great Diurnal of Nicolas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire, ed. J. J. Bagley, vol. 2, 1712–1719, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 112 ([Chester], 1970), p. 103 (24–6 June 1714). 102 CSPD, Addenda 1566–1579, pp. 295, 354, 365, 496; CSPD, 1611–1618, pp. 285, 300, 392. 103 As recalled in 1730 by John Hobson when he met Mr Douglas of Leeds, ‘collector of the fraight’: ‘The Journal of Mr. John Hobson, late of Dodworth Green’, ed. Charles Jackson, Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Surtees Society LXV (Durham, 1877 for 1875), p. 297. 104 Atkinson, Thoresby, I, p. 153. 105 The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London, 1949), p. 79. 106 Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, pp. 67–8. 167


for ensuring that the town had a suitable vicar.107 The king’s physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, was among those persuaded by the benefits of the spring, recommending them to one of his Scottish clients, James, Lord Livingstone of Almond, in June 1638.108 In 1641, the officers of the English army which was ineffectively facing the Scots, along with local gentlemen, resorted to the spa at Knaresborough.109 Deane’s book went into a second edition in 1649 and a third in 1654.110 In the latter year, the town and its surroundings were described in glowing terms by John Evelyn,111 and before the century was out he was echoed by other such diarist-visitors as John Ray, Marmaduke Rawdon, Oliver Heywood, Thomas Baskerville and Celia Fiennes.112 Ralph Thoresby’s annual summer visits in the early 1680s show clearly how a season was developing, at least for visitors from Yorkshire.113 By 1688, it was plausible for the earl of Danby to use a visit to the Harrogate spa as an excuse to leave London for Yorkshire as James II’s regime faced its crisis.114 There were other spas with which Knaresborough had to compete, especially for Yorkshire people Scarborough. This coastal resort in many ways outstripped Harrogate

107

The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, of Scriven, Bart: Now First Published Entire from the MS. A Reprint of Sir Henry Slingsby’s Trial, his Rare Tract, ‘A Father’s Legacy.’ Written in the Tower Immediately before his Death, and Extracts from Family Correspondence and Papers, with Notices, and a Genealogical Memoir, ed. Daniel Parsons (London, 1836), pp. 329–31; History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 223. 108 CSPD, 1637–1638, p. 526; he spent a fortnight there, but with little benefit, for the heavy rain had spoiled the spring water (ibid., pp. 599–600). 109 The Fairfax Correspondence: Memoirs of the Reign of Charles the First, ed. George W. Jonson, 2 vols (London, 1848), II, pp. 214–15 (Thomas Stockdale to Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron, 23 July 1641). The earl of Holland reportedly did not like the waters; Lord Fauconberg was among the company at the spa. 110 Spadacrene Anglica (York, 1649); another edition (York, 1654). 111 From the tower of the minster at York on 17 August 1654, Evelyn saw ‘the Spaus of Knarsbrough, & all the invirons of that admirable Country’: The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford, 1955), vol. III, Kalendarium, 1650–1672, pp. 128–9. 112 Memorials of John Ray, pp. 139–42 (1661). Life of Marmaduke Rawdon, pp. 117–18 (1664). Heywood met with friends from Leeds and elsewhere and ‘found comfortable imployment’ (1666): The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A. 1630–1702; His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books; Illustrating the General and Family History of Yorkshire and Lancashire, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 4 vols, vol. 1 (Brighouse, 1882), pp. 229, 256 (another visit, 1668). Thomas Baskerville, ‘A Journey into the North with my Friend Mr. Washborne, Student of Christ Church, Oxford’, HMC Portland, II (1893), p. 314 (1695). Journeys of Celia Fiennes, pp. 79–81 (1697). 113 The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., Author of the Topography of Leeds. (1677–1724.) Now First Published from the Original Manuscript, ed. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols (London, 1830), I, pp. 29, 54, 86; Atkinson, Thoresby, I, p. 69 (June 1679), 88–9 (August 1680), 113–15 (June 1681), 153, 155–6 (July and August 1682), 211 (July 1683). 114 Memoirs of Sir John Reresby: The Complete Text and a Selection from his Letters, ed. Andrew Browning, 2nd edn, with preface and notes by Mary K. Geiter and W. A. Speck (London, 1991), pp. 515–16 (‘pretending . . . to drinke the sulfer water at Knaisbrough’). 168


for popularity and facilities provided, but the fierce pamphlet war between supporters of the two spas115 helped to maintain Knaresborough’s trade and Harrogate sustained an important place among the spas of Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The growth of facilities for visitors in Harrogate itself meant that Knaresborough’s prime role in the tourist trade declined from the end of the seventeenth century. Daniel Defoe in 1717, like most others, stayed in Knaresborough and travelled by coach to take the waters in Harrogate, but a few years later the flow of day-trippers had shifted. Now visitors stayed in Harrogate and made the journey over to Knaresborough.116 The beauty of the locality of the Harrogate spa had always been part of its attraction.117 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an important part

115

Scarborough was preferred by Dr Robert Wittie in 1669; in 1670 Dr George Tonstall replied that, although once a devotee of the Scarborough cure, he now found Knaresborough much superior. Robert Witty, Scarbrough Spaw or a Description of the Nature and Vertues of the Spaw (York, 1660: STC W3231); another edition (York, 1667: STC W3232); W. Simpson, Hydrologia Chymica: or the Chymical Anatomy of the Scarborough and other Spaws in Yorkshire. Wherein are Interspersed, Some Animadversions upon Dr. Wittie’s lately Published Treatise of the Scarborough Spaw. Also, a Short Description of the Spaws at Malton and Knarsbrough (London, 1669: STC S3833); Robert Witty, Pyrologia Mimica, or an Answer to Hydrologia Chymica of William Sympson Pilo-Chymico-Medicus; In defence of Scarbrough-Spaw. Also a vindication of the Rational Method and Practice of Physic called Galenical, and a Reconciliation betwixt that the Chymical (London, 1669: STC W3230); George Tonstall, Scarborough Spaw Spagyrically Anatomized, an. 1670; and a New Year’s Gift for Dr. Witty (London, 1670: STC T1889); (this was accompanied by recommendatory verses by John Thoresby, father of Ralph, who had a manuscript of the work in his collection, and James Illingworth, president of Emmanuel College, Cambridge); Robert Witty, Scarbroughs Spagyrical Anatomizer Dissected, or an Answer to all the Dr. Tonstall hath Objected in his Book against Scarborough Spaw (London, 1672: STC W3233); George Tonstall, A New-years-gift for Doctor Witty; or the Dissector Anatomized (London, 1672: STC T1888); William Simpson, A Discourse of the Sulphur-bath at Knarsbourgh (London, 1675: STC S3830); William Simpson, Zymologia Physica, or a Brief Philisophical Discourse of Fermentation, From a New Hypothesis of Acidum and Sulphur. . . . With an Additional Discourse of the Sulphur Bath at Knaresborough (London, 1675: STC S3840); Robert Witty, Fons Scarburgensis: sive tractatus (London, 1678: STC W3227); William Simpson, The History of the Scarborough Spaw (London, 1679: STC S3832). 116 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, introduced by G. D. H. Cole and D. C. Browning (London, 1974; based on the 1926 edition, with the addition of The Tour through Scotland; formerly two vols, now as one, but with former pagination), II, pp. 211–13. Reginald Lennard, ‘The Watering Places’, in Englishmen at Rest and Play: Some Phases of English Leisure, 1558–1714, ed. Reginald Lennard (Oxford, 1931), pp. 1–78, at p. 45, notes that this first edition of Defoe’s Tour does not mention Harrogate by name, only Knaresborough, while the 1762 edition refers to the ‘small Village’ of Harrogate: [Daniel Defoe], A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 6th edn, 4 vols (London, 1762), vol. III, p. 123. 117 Deane had referred to the fruitful valleys in the area, and its clear water and dry and pure air: Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, p. 68. 169


of that natural beauty was the Nidd gorge at Knaresborough and the Dropping Well. In about 1739 Sir Henry Slingsby improved the walks and planted more trees in the Dropping Well estate by the river; one, called according to spa resort convention Long Walk, led from the High Bridge to the Dropping Well, the other, the Short Walk, from the Low Bridge to the Well. Engravings of the scene in this period conjure up the ideal romantic landscape to which Sir Henry was contributing, with ruined castle, river gorge and dramatic rocks and trees, as well as the Dropping Well itself.118 The association of Mother Shipton with Knaresborough, first seen in Head’s work of 1667, therefore coincided with the expansion of Knaresborough and Harrogate as spa towns and their celebration in published discussions of their resources. It is likely that Knaresborough’s growing popularity as a spa, and the concomitant spread in the reputation of the Dropping Well, contributed to Head’s choice of Shipton’s birthplace. What is striking is that Head’s identification was not prominently reflected on the local level. The Dropping Well, identified by Head as the prophetess’s birthplace, had been a consistent feature of the literature about the Harrogate waters, but no authority writing about Knaresborough and the well at this point mentioned Shipton. Deane had described the four other springs in the area of the Tewit Well. ‘The first is the Dropping-well, knowne almost to all, who have travelled unto this place. The water whereof distilleth and trickleth downe from the hanging Rocke over it, not onley dropping wise, but also falling in many pretty little streames.’ Deane commented on the way the waters rose from the earth before dropping over the crag, and criticized Camden for his failure to observe this correctly. Otherwise, his only comment was that ‘divers inhabitants thereabouts’ said that its waters were ‘very effectual in staying any flux of the body’. This is strangely non-committal – Deane ends his brief observation with the phrase ‘which thing I easily beleeve’. Neither Deane, nor John Ray in 1661, nor Marmaduke Rawdon in 1664, nor Ralph Thoresby in 1681, leaves any mention of Shipton in their accounts of the well; nor in any other writer in the early seventeenth century, although they write about the Dropping Well, is there any indication of a connection with Mother Shipton. 119 Thomas Baskerville in about 1695 did not even mention the Dropping Well.120 Most conclusively of all, two years later, Celia Fiennes described the Dropping Well

118 On 21 February 1769, Savile Slingsby, writing to his brother Charles, described plans to replant trees in ‘dropping well walk’ which had been blown down: YAS, DD 56/M/8. 119 Deane, Spadacrene Anglica, ed. Rutherford and Butler, pp. 77–9; Memorials of John Ray, pp. 140–1. Ray was unimpressed by the Dropping Well: ‘any other running water that falls down a precipice might as well be called a dropping-well’; he was, however, a self-confessed sceptic, admitting on his visit to Holywell that ‘I have learned, that to distrust is nervus sapientiæ’ (p. 128). Life of Marmaduke Rawdon, p. 118; Diary of Ralph Thoresby, I, p. 87 (11 and 12 July); Atkinson, Thoresby, I, p. 115. 120 Baskerville, ‘Journey into the North’, p. 314.

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and its surroundings in detail, noting there was ‘an arbour and the Company used to come and eat a Supper there in an evening, to have the pleaseing prospect, and the murmering shower to divert their eare’. Given this, and Fiennes’s careful description of the petrifying effects of the well, and her collection of moss ‘crisp’d and perfect Stone’, it is hard to believe that anything on the site obviously referred to Shipton.121 The well was on the recognized tourist trail at least from 1705, yet there is still little sign of an accepted association between Mother Shipton and the Dropping Well in the early eighteenth century. In that year Joseph Taylor, on his way to Scotland, passed through Knaresborough – his guide advised ‘by the way to see the dropping well’.122 Defoe, visiting in 1717, mentioned the well briefly, as ‘that in a little cave [where] a petrifying water drops from the roof of the cavity, which, as they say, turns wood into stone’.123 Even in the mid1760s, George Beaumont and Captain Henry Disney described the Dropping Well, but not Mother Shipton.124 The first sign of a connection between Shipton and Knaresborough is to be found in the account by Richard Pococke, bishop of Meath/Ossory, of his visit to Knaresborough in 1750. After describing the Dropping Well and the action of the spring water, he continued:

121

Journeys of Celia Fiennes, pp. 80–1. The petrifying effect was so well known as to be used by William Nicolson to describe the ‘Petrifactions, in the Liver of an Oxe’, which he saw at a Royal Society meeting on 5 December 1705: The London Diaries of William Nicholson, Bishop of Carlisle, 1702–1718, ed. Clyve Jones and Geoffrey Holmes (Oxford, 1985), p. 319. 122 Joseph Taylor, A Journey to Edenborough in Scotland, ed. William Cowan (Edinburgh, 1903), pp. 47–8. The following year, Nicholas Blundell visited, but left no further description: Great Diurnal of Nicolas Blundell, vol. 1, 1702–1711, p. 113 (18 June 1706). 123 Defoe, Tour, p. 212. There is no mention of Shipton, although there is of the Dropping Well, in Herman Moll, A New Description of England and Wales with the Adjacent Islands (London, 1724), p. 289. 124 George Beaumont and Captain Henry Disney, A New Tour Thro’ England, Perform’d the Summers of 1765, 1766, and 1767 (London, n.d.), p. 127. The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, new edn (London and Edinburgh, 1910), pp. 454–64, 473–80, records two visits, in 1763 and 1764, but neither appears to have included a visit to Knaresborough and there is no mention of the Dropping Well. England Illustrated, or, a Compendium of the Natural History, Geography, Topography, and Antiquities Ecclesiastical and Civil, of England and Wales, 2 vols (London, 1764), II, p. 371, mentions the strength of the well, but not Shipton. Amory’s Life and Opinions of John Buncle (1756) includes incidents set in Knaresborough and Harrogate, but does not mention the prophetic connections of the well: Thomas Amory, The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esquire, introduced by Ernest A. Baker (London and New York, 1904), pp. 302–25, esp. pp. 323–5, for a description of the Dropping Well and its properties (‘a delightful scene’ in the context of its riverside setting, p. 324). Smollett’s Humphry Clinker does not apparently set foot in Knaresborough during his visit to Harrogate: Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (London, New York and Toronto, 1966), pp. 157–79. 171


Near the dropping well is the sign of Mother Shipton, who as tradition saies was born here, which is signifyed by these lines, – Near to this petrifying well I first drew breath, as records tell.125

The growing interest in the well is clear in the sixth edition of Defoe’s Tour, of 1762, which expanded the account of Knaresborough to include a description of a walk along the side of the Nidd to the well, the musical sound of the water running over the rock, and the petrified moss. It then stated, ‘Tradition tells us, that, near this Rock, the famous Mother Shipton was born.’126 A poem of 1764 refers to ‘Shipton’s Cot’, and Thomas Pennant, in 1773, confirms that the association with Shipton was firmly promoted at the well.127 By 1792, the Dropping Well could be referred to as situated ‘at the back of the Mother Shipton’s Public House’.128 Even so, the last quarter of the eighteenth century often sees no acknowledgement of the prophetess in connection with the well. 129 The main

125

The Travels through England of Dr. Richard Pococke, Successively Bishop of Meath and of Ossory during 1750, 1751, and Later Years, ed. James Joel Cartwright, 2 vols, Camden Society XLII (Westminster, 1888) (vol. 1); XLIV (Westminster, 1889) (vol. 2), I, p. 54. Pococke was more interested in prehistoric and Roman remains. 126 [Defoe], Tour (1762), III, pp. 124–5 (the fifth edition had appeared in 1753). 127 Trifles from Harrogate ([Harrogate], 1797), p. 22; Thomas Pennant, A Tour from AlstonMoor to Harrogate, and Brimham Crags (London, 1804), pp. 103–4. The visit occurred in the summer of 1773, but the material was updated as late as 1777: Thomas Pennant, The Literary Life of the Late Thomas Pennant, by Himself (London, 1793), pp. 18, 29, 32. 128 The Torrington Diaries: Containing the Tours through England and Wales of the Hon. John Byng . . . Between the years 1781 and 1794, ed. C. Bruyn Andrews, 4 vols (London, 1934–8), iii, p. 43. ‘The woman who shows the well was very foolish, and offensive.’ A further though less direct indication that visitors were aware of the Shipton connection came in Henry Skrine, Three Successive Tours in the North of England, and Great Part of Scotland. Interspersed with Descriptions of the Scenes they Presented, and Occasional Observations on the State of Society, and the Manners and Customs of the People (London, 1795), p. xi: the Nidd ‘receives in its passage a tributary stream from the Dropping Well, famous in ancient legend’. 129 For example, William Bray’s Sketch of a Tour into Derbyshire and Yorkshire, including Part of Buckingham, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham, Northampton, Bedford, and Hertford-Shires (London, 1778), pp. 141–3, describes the ‘famous dropping well’, but without reference to any legendary associations; William MacRitchie, a minister from Clunie in Perthshire, in 1795 made no mention at all of the Dropping Well, in spite of spending some time in Harrogate: Diary of a Tour Through Great Britain in 1795, ed. David MacRitchie (London, 1897), pp. 114–18. Thomas Gray’s The Traveller’s Companion, in a Tour through England and Wales; Containing a Catalogue of the Antiquities, Houses, Parks, Plantations, Scenes, and Situations, in England and Wales, Arranged According to the Alphabetical Order of the Several Counties, a new edition by Thomas Northmore (London, [1800]), does not even list the Nidd gorge as a sight worth seeing, although it does Studley Park (p. 168). William Gilpin, visiting in 1772, described Knaresborough forest as ‘wild, bleak, unornamented’ and Harrogate as ‘a cheerless, unpleasant village’: Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque 172


exception to this pattern came in poetry and travel guides descriptive of the area. The striking thing about this exception is that it is restricted in the location of publication, essentially the locality of Knaresborough, and in the years in which it occurred, essentially the half-century from about 1790. Guides with a more national scope, such as The New British Traveller, simply mentioned the Dropping Well as a petrifying spring.130 The pioneer in the production and marketing of this local genre was Ely Hargrove. He occupied premises called Library House on Regent Parade,131 which mildly impressed even educated visitors;132 and he is best known for his History of Knaresborough which was published by him in 1769 and in later editions.133 He marketed many local works which included references to Shipton. The Beauties of Harrogate and Knaresbro’, published in Ripon for local sale in the two towns, included perhaps the longest description of the well and its connection with Mother Shipton yet to be produced. Mytholigists might, in this case lay odds, That silvan deities, and water gods;

Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England, 2 vols (London, 1786), II, pp. 203–4. Cf. York Minster Library, Additional MS 141, p. 9 (1790s). 130 George Augustus Walpoole, The New British Traveller (London, ?1784 [i.e. ? in catalogue]), p. 435; identical reference in the later version, The New and Complete English Traveller, revised by William Hugh Dalton (London, 1794?), p. 435. Also William Mavor, The British Tourist, Or, Traveller’s Pocket Companion, through England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, Comprehending the Most Celebrated Modern Tours in the British Islands, and Several Originals, 3rd edn, 6 vols (London, 1809), vol. IV, pp. 279–80. 131 A Catalogue of Hargroves’ Circulating Library, at Harrogate; Containing a Valuable Collection of Books, Which are lent out, Agreeable to the Conditions, Specified in the Following Pages (Knaresborough, n.d.), gives an indication of the books available to visitors; strangely it does not include many works of local interest, virtually the only example being Walker’s work on Harrogate water (no. 492). One reason for this may have been Hargrove’s determination to maximize sales of his own publications on the region: the catalogue includes advertisements for the second edition of A Week in Harrogate, Garnett’s Treatise on Harrogate Waters, Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fairfax, Guide to all the Watering and Sea-bathing Places within 112 miles from Harrogate, and Ancient Customs of the Forest of Knaresborough; an appendix concluded with further advertisements, including The Harrogate Guide. Hargrove was therefore in a strong position to be a monopoly purveyor of information about the locality to visitors. 132 George Saville Carey, The Balnea: Or, an Impartial Description of all the Popular Watering Places in England, 3rd edn (London, 1801), p. 194; cf. A Catalogue of Hargrove’s Circulating Library at Harrogate (York, 1801): 1,500 volumes. 133 The History of the Castle and Town of Knaresbrough [sic]; with Remarks on Spofforth, Rippon, Aldborough, Boroughbridge, Ribston, &c. ([Knaresborough], 1769): note that this does not refer to Shipton; [Ely Hargrove], The History of the Castle, Town, and Forest of Knaresborough; with Harrogate, and its Medicinal Waters, the Antiquities and Remarkable Places to be seen in the Neighbourhood, Eminent for their Situation, and Celebrated in Ancient History, [new edition] (York, 1775). 173


As dryads, naiades, rural nymphs, and fawns, Who haunt the fountains, rivers, woods, and lawns; In darken’d days, ere learning did appear, Might be suppos’d to hold their meetings here: From whence arose that legendary tale, Of Mother Shipton dwelling in this vale: Traditions tell, and far the mouth of fame, Hath spread the predicts of the Yorkshire Dame; The bodeing Sibil told what would betide; But Britons hath a true and better guide: As for her facts we cannot truely tell, Therefore adieu unto the Dropping Well.

A footnote is appended to the words ‘Mother Shipton’ stating that she was ‘[b]orn about the year 1488’, followed by verses in the following form: Mark well her Grot don’t miss this Place, Nor startle at her haggard face; As you are come to see the Well, Pray take a peep into her Cell.134

This note and the last couplet of the main verse suggest that the poet recognized that his audience’s prime purpose in coming to the Long Walk was not to visit a shrine to the prophetess, and that they might well be sceptical about the truth of the claims about Shipton. A few years later, in 1812, another poetical account of Harrogate, this time cast in narrative form, referred directly to Shipton. The first edition of Barbara Hoole’s A Season at Harrogate, which is cast in the form of a series of letters from the supposed author, Benjamin Blunderhead, to his mother, included a description of a trip to Knaresborough, in the course of which the author referred to ‘The fam’d Dropping-Well which turns all things to stone’.135 In the closely related A Week at Harrogate, intended as letters not to Blunderhead’s mother but to his friend Simon, there is a more direct reference to Shipton. The Dropping-Well next, we then went to behold, Of which, such a number of stories are told: The top of the rock is ten yards from the ground,

134

The Beauties of Harrogate and Knaresbro’. A Poem (Ripon, 1798); sold by E. Hargrove, Knaresborough and Harrogate, 6d. 135 Barbara Hoole (Mrs Hofland), A Season at Harrogate; In a Series of Poetical Epistles, from Benjamin Blunderhead, Esquire, to his Mother, in Derbyshire: with Useful and Copious Notes, descriptive of the Objects most Worthy of Attention in the Vicinity of Harrogate (Knaresborough, 1812) (reprinted 1904, Harrogate Museum, under a slightly different title), p. 32. For Hoole, a prolific authoress who kept a girls’ school in Harrogate from 1805, see Grainge, History and Topography of Harrogate, p. 185 (he dates A Season to 1811, at p. 148). 174


From which, quick descend, with a musical sound, Small streams, without number, which constantly flow, Turning all into stone, which they fall on below! And, near to this rock, I’d forgotten to tell, Did SHIPTON, the prophetess, formerly dwell.136

Similar themes appeared in another poem in the same tradition that appeared in 1833. Thomas Lister’s Poems Descriptive of Harrogate and its Vicinity, in describing a visit to Knaresborough, made brief mention of ‘scenes, where the charm’d thought may dwell, / The Sybil’s Cave – the wond’rous dropping well’.137 Local histories and guides, following in this poetical tradition, tended to repeat accounts of Shipton in connection with the well.138 Hargrove died in 1818 and his successor in Harrogate was W. Langdale; the Langdale family had a well-established reputation in the publishing and bookselling business for some years previously from their shop in Ripon.139 The Tourist’s Companion, published by T. Langdale in Ripon, which had its second edition in 1818, described the petrifying effect of the ‘celebrated DROPPING WELL’, and then recounted: Beneath these cliffs and near the spring was born, about the year 1487, that celebrated personage, Mother Shipton, the wife of Tobias Shipton. Many wonderful tales are told of her knowledge of future events, which are said to have been delivered to the Abbot of Beverley, the MSS. of which are yet preserved.140

M. Calvert’s History of Knaresborough, published in the town itself in 1844, followed a physical description of the well with a brief account of Shipton, 136 Barbara Hofland, A Week at Harrogate: A Poem: In a Series of Letters, Addresses from Benjamin Blunderhead, Esq., to his Friend Simon (Knaresborough, 1812; 2nd edn, 1814), p. 86 (same in 3rd edn (Knaresborough, 1818), at p. 36). This is attributed to David Lewis in Grainge, History and Topography of Harrogate, p. 259. Cf. his The Landscape, and Other Poems (York, 1815), which included a long poetic description of Knaresborough, dated 1814, mentioning, ‘The petrifying Dropping Well, / Of which such wond’ous tales they tell’ (p. 11). 137 Thomas Lister, Poems Descriptive of Harrogate and its Vicinity, together with Lines on Monk Bretton Observatory, near Barnsley (Leeds, 1833), p. 12. Cf. John Nicholson, The Airedale Poet’s Walk through Knaresbrough, and its Vicinity (Knaresbrough, 1826), p. 7. 138 It should, however, be noted that the earliest account of the region, Thomas Gent, The Antient and Modern History of the Loyal Town of Rippon (York, 1733), did not mention the Dropping Well in its description of Knaresborough (pp. 45–50). 139 Grainge, History and Topography of Harrogate, p. 188, says Library House, Hargrove’s premises, was at the time of publication (1871) occupied by ‘the Misses Langdale’. 140 The Tourist’s Companion; Being a Concise Description and History of Ripon, Studley Park, Fountains Abbey, Hackfall, Brimham Craggs [.]; Intended as a Guide to Persons Visiting those Places (Ripon, 1817), pp. 86–7. The book described how a variety of petrified articles could be viewed at the public house adjoining the site. Almost exactly the same formulae were

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mainly taken from the Life of 1687.141 Men like Calvert, originally a druggist by trade,142 and the Langdales were very important in creating and sustaining traditions surrounding the neighbourhood of the spa, and they were clearly willing to incorporate mention of Shipton. Others with greater aspirations to scholarly reliability also wrote guides, however, and they tended to make little or no mention of either the Dropping Well or Shipton. Hargrove’s own History of Knaresborough did not in 1769 mention her, and in the edition of 1775 simply stated, in the midst of a discussion of the Long Walk, ‘tradition tells us, that near this rock the famous Yorkshire Sybil, Mother Shipton, was born’.143 This work had some pretension to scholarship, as it quoted extensively from primary source material, drawn from, and properly referenced to, Rymer’s Foedera. Such scepticism was particularly apparent in J. R. Walbran’s Pictorial Pocket Guide to Ripon and Harrogate, published in 1844. Walbran, an early student of Fountains Abbey, was a corresponding member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and the local Secretary of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.144 The scepticism appears to have begun to affect even the more credulous tradition of Langdale’s guides,145 and The Illustrated Hand-book for Harrogate, of 1858, described the Dropping

used in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions, respectively 1818 (pp. 83–4), 1822 (pp. 88–9), 1826 (pp. 97–8) and 1828 (pp. 97–8). Hargrove’s The Yorkshire Gazetteer, or, a Dictionary of the Towns, Villages, and Hamlets; Monasteries and Castles; Principal Mountains, Rivers, &c.; in the County of York, and Ainsty, or County of the City of York: Describing the Situation of Each, and the Various Elements by which some of them have been Distinguished, 2nd edn (Knaresborough, 1812), pp. 127–8, 169, makes only the briefest reference to the history of both Knaresborough and Harrogate, with no mention of Shipton, and refers the reader to the author’s History of Knaresborough and Harrogate Guide. 141 M. Calvert, A History of Knaresborough: Comprising an Accurate and Detailed Account of the Castle, the Forest, and the Several Townships included in the said Parish (Knaresborough, 1844). 142 Grainge, History and Topography of Harrogate, p. 261 (d. 3 December 1862, aged 92). 143 History of the Castle and Town of Knaresbrough (1769); [Hargrove], History of the Castle, Town, and Forest of Knaresborough (1775), p. 17. 144 John Richard Walbran, The Pictorial Pocket Guide to Ripon and Harrogate: With Topographical Observations on Studley-Royal, Brimham Rocks, Hackfall and the Monastic Remains of Fountains and Bolton (Ripon, 1844), pp. 89–101: this is a brief description of the history of the spa, followed by a description of the wells, in which the Dropping Well does not feature, the focus being on medicinal water. Cf. his A Guide to Ripon, Harrogate, Fountains Abbey, Bolton Priory, and Several Places of Interest in their Vicinity, 5th edn (Ripon, 1851); title-page for membership of learned societies (7th edn, Ripon, 1859, follows suit). 145 A later version of the guide, William Langdale, Langdale’s New Harrogate Guide: Being an Accurate Description and History of the Most Remarkable Places in the Neighbourhood: With a Variety of Information Useful to Visitors, 8th edn (Harrogate, ?1850), p. 28, borrowed the account almost verbatim, but added the information that the Dropping Well was the property of Sir Charles Slingsby, bart., and that the adjoining public house was kept by Mr 176


Well, but referred only briefly to Shipton: ‘Tradition states that here was born the famous Yorkshire witch known by the name of Mother Shipton.’146 More directly damning was William White’s History, Gazetteer, and Directory of the West-Riding of Yorkshire of 1838: Tradition relates that the famous Yorkshire sibyl, Mother Shipton, was born near this rock, towards the latter end of the 15th century, and that she delivered to the Abbot of Beverley those wonderful prophecies, which in ages of ignorance served to amuse the childish, and impose upon the credulous.147

The scepticism of the authors of most of the guides had a further consequence. Since they were also the publishers of the local newspapers, these newspapers also remained relatively silent on the subject of Mother Shipton.148 By the beginning of the twentieth century, all guides and histories of Knaresborough, Harrogate and Yorkshire in general adopted the most sceptical possible tone towards the Yorkshire prophetess. W. K. Wheater published the influential Knaresborough and its Rulers in 1907, and was clear in his views: ‘Leland’s silence as to Mother Shipton is fatal to her claims’.149 It should also be noted that Shipton’s role in Knaresborough had a powerful competitor, in the attraction possessed by the case of the murderer Eugene Aram in the popular imagination. A. B. Granville, who visited in 1839, noted with some irony that the other attractions, historical and natural, of the place were no longer regarded with any interest: ‘At present, however, one object alone gives an all-absorbing interest to Knaresborough, and attracts thither,

G. Howe, and added a sceptical note by stating that the MSS were ‘said to be preserved [my emphasis]’. The Stranger’s Introduction to Harrogate; containing a Variety of Useful Information, Relating to the Accommodation, the Recreations, and the Different Mineral Waters, of this Celebrated Watering Place, 3rd edn (Leeds, 1830), pp. 23–4, did not even mention Shipton in its account of the Dropping Well. 146 The Illustrated Hand-book for Harrogate, with Excursions in the Neighbourhood; Compiled by the Editors of the ‘Harrogate Advertiser’. Also, Incorporated by Permission, Observations on the Medical Springs of Harrogate, by George Kennion, M.D. (Harrogate, 1858), p. 131. G. Kennion, Observations on the Mineral Springs of Harrogate, was published in 1857. 147 William White, History, Gazetteer, and Directory of the West-Riding of Yorkshire, 2 vols (Leeds, 1838), II, p. 782. Cf. the emphasis on the vulgarity of the well in Handbook for Travellers in Yorkshire (London, 1867), pp. 239–40, although this does still briefly repeat the report of Shipton’s birth there. The fourth edition (London, 1904), p. 288, lessened the disapproving tone and continued to refer to Shipton’s birth. 148 E.g. Harrogate Advertiser, 20 August 1881. 149 W. K. Wheater, Knaresborough and its Rulers (Leeds, 1907), p. 200; he had previously, in his Handbook for Tourists in Yorkshire and Complete History of the County, 2 vols (Leeds, 1891), p. 344, in quotation marks, as if to disassociate himself from the idea, stated ‘“It is distinguished as being the place where the renowned Yorkshire prophetess, Mother Shipton, was born.”’ 177


at some time or other, all the visiters at Harrogate, who care little or nothing for all the natural and artificial wonders just enumerated.’150 Alongside this greater scepticism in this local literature of history and topography, Harrogate and Knaresborough were also described in the many guides to mineral waters in Britain and Europe. This was a far more consistently sceptical tradition. For example, Joshua Walker’s Essay on the Waters of Harrowgate and Thorp-arch of 1784 was willing to pass comment on Knaresborough’s ‘beautiful, romantic situation’, to describe the way the Nidd gorge was ‘beautifully ornamented with hanging foliage’, even to see in the ruins of the castle a ‘lamentable example of the rage of party and the devastations of time’, but the Dropping Well simply called forth a lengthy chemical analysis.151 This meant that just as Harrogate’s fortunes took a dramatic turn for the better, with the increased interest of the duchy of Lancaster and the difficulties of Scarborough, the local topographical and poetic tradition had turned a sceptical eye on the Shipton story.152 Even so, such scepticism at a time of huge growth in Harrogate’s popularity left tremendous scope for the continued development of the Shipton tradition. The year 1781 allegedly saw 1,556 visitors; this number had grown to 2,468 in 1795. This was a considerable growth, but nothing compared to that of the following thirty years: in 1839, during the season alone, 20,586 visitors were recorded. 153 Despite a slight decline in the 1840s, growth resumed and by 1901 visitor numbers stood at around 75,000 a year.154 Harrogate’s role remained regional until relatively late, and the identification and propagation of Shipton as a Yorkshire prophetess was therefore intensified, but once Harrogate’s market broadened (for example thanks to improving communication links by road and rail (from 1848–51)), it meant that by 1910, more than one in eight visitors was from London. Harrogate found a place in the more national pattern of elite leisure, which now included a move from the London season, via a period in Harrogate, to Scotland for the grouse shooting. 155 Growth in visiting 150

A. B. Granville, The Spas of England, and Principal Sea-Bathing Places, 3 vols (London, 1841), vol. I, Northern Spas, p. 93. Cf. the novel by Edward George Earle Lytton, Bulwer Lytton, Eugene Aram: A Tale (London, 1832). 151 Joshua Walker, An Essay on the Waters of Harrowgate and Thorp-arch in Yorkshire, Containing Directions for their Use in Diseases: To which are Prefixed, Observations on Mineral Waters in General and the Method of Analysing them (London, 1784). 152 Frederick Alderson, The Inland Resorts and Spas of Britain (Newton Abbot, 1973), p. 75, argues for the importance of the duchy’s interest. 153 These figures exclude servants in each case. The first two are taken from Hargrove (5th edn, 1798), the third from Robert Mitton, curate of St John’s Chapel (Kaye, Records of Harrogate, pp. 82–95), and the fourth was computed from the visitor lists in the Harrogate Advertiser by Granville (Spas of England, I, p. 62). They are discussed in History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 289. See ibid., pp. 290–9, for an account of the expansion of spa facilities in these years. 154 History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 311. 155 William A. R. Thomson, Spas that Heal (London, 1978), p. 100. 178


continued after the First World War: 96,000 treatments had been provided at the baths in 1901, but this had risen to 110,000–120,000 per annum in the mid- to late 1920s.156 It was only from the late 1920s that the fashion for taking the waters began its decline.157 By the 1940s the number of treatments was half the level of the 1920s, and although the creation of the National Health Service provided a temporary growth in the number of patients dealt with, the end of this contract in 1968 signalled the end of the spa. Nonetheless, the growth of the conference trade from the 1950s still meant that Harrogate remained a major centre for tourism.158 Part of the answer to the problem of the assimilation of Mother Shipton to the location of Knaresborough lies in the continuing importance of Catholic pilgrimage there in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As we have already seen, observers found many papists among their fellow visitors, and these pilgrims had a series of sites to visit and structures of support and explanation. Although we only get the briefest glimpses of it, there was still in the late seventeenth century a site in Knaresborough centred on the cult of St Robert. John Ray, visiting in 1661, gives the fullest indication of the trappings of this cult. He describes a statue of St Robert in his chapel; there was still apparently stained-glass in the church representing scenes from the saint’s life, such as his ploughing with a pair of bucks, and his grant of his last cow to a cripple. Most importantly, he described an old woman, ‘who in a great measure gets her living by showing strangers this chapel’ of St Robert. She recounted ‘many stories out of the legend of St. Robert’, stories which were apparently so vivid that Ray recorded the one relating to the saint’s meeting with King John in some detail.159 Ray does not mention where these stories came from, but other writers suggest that a manuscript Life of the saint was available for visitors to view. Ralph Thoresby transcribed ‘the heads of St. Robert’s life from an old manuscript’ during a visit to Knaresborough in 1681; Celia Fiennes may have seen the same manuscript.160 The presence in the Nidd gorge at Knaresborough of a guide devoted to the shrines of St Robert allowed for a transition to tourism of the Dropping Well under the auspices of the Mother Shipton legend. It can even be argued that what drove the development of Shipton’s cult in Knaresborough was not visitor demand but the pre-existence of these structures to support Catholic visitors and their need to find a new role as Catholic interest declined. The guide appears to have primarily served Shipton’s well, at least for the non-Catholic visitor, 156

History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 441. History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 443. 158 History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, pp. 445–8. 159 Memorials of John Ray, pp. 140–1. 160 Atkinson, Thoresby, I, p. 115; Journeys of Celia Fiennes, p. 79 (‘there was a Manuscript with a long story of this St. Robert’). Francis Drake, Eboracum: Or the History and Antiquities of the City of York, from its Original to the Present Times (London, 1736), pp. 372–4, provides a life copied from ‘an ancient manuscript’; a life was still kept in his cell, but it was imperfect. 157

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at least from 1705. In that year Joseph Taylor was advised by his guide ‘by the way to see the dropping well, whereupon we dismounted and went to it, thro’ an Old Woman’s house, who shows it to Travellers’.161 At the end of the eighteenth century, the manner in which the duke of Rutland was shown Knaresborough appears to differ little from that of a century before, except that its Catholic emphasis on St Robert had gone. Rutland described the visit to the Dropping Well: An old woman, whom age had brought to the last stage of debility, opened the gate. . . . At a cottager’s house hard by, we observed, among other things, wigs, bird-nests, &c. &c. which had been reduced to a consistency sufficiently hard to bear a polish.

An old woman still controlled access; now the relics of the saint had been replaced by the relics of the prophet and her well. St Robert’s cave was still part of the itinerary, but it had become a ‘hermit’s cell’, the attribution to St Robert had to be explained by Rutland to his readers, and the thing which first caught his attention was that the site was shown to visitors by a woman whose son was covered in hair ‘exactly similar to the wool of a sheep’. 162 Pennant, in 1777, was the first witness to another important element, the sale of printed works on Shipton at ‘a neighbouring cottage’.163 It was, however, St Robert’s cave and not the Dropping Well which most clearly had a guardian when Sir Richard Colt Hoare visited in 1800; and a ‘little book is sold by the person who shews these premises, giving an abstract of the life of St. Robert’. It was in fact with a Life of St Robert that printing in Knaresborough began.164 The other necessary precondition for the development of the Shipton cult at the Dropping Well was the acquiescence, at the very least, of the Slingsby family. Once again there is a strong element of continuity with the cult of St Robert. Sir Henry Slingsby, the prominent royalist, was associated directly with the cult of St Robert of Knaresborough when he was buried under what

161

Taylor, Journey to Edenborough, ed. Cowan, pp. 47–8. Journal of a Tour to the Northern Parts of Great Britain (London, 1813), pp. 118–20. It should be noted that Rutland did not actually refer to Mother Shipton in connection with the well. His visit took place on 15 August 1796. Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s ‘Journal’ of 1800 implies a tour along the banks of the Nidd, but there is no mention of either Shipton or a guardian: ‘The dropping well is a singular sport of nature and its waters are of a petrifying quality. The approach both to and from it through a thick grove of trees on the banks of the river, affords a succession of pleasing scenery’: Cardiff Central Library, MS 4.302, vol. 5, fol. 39. 163 Pennant, Tour from Alston-Moor, pp. 103–4. 164 Cardiff Central Library, MS 4.302, vol. 5, fol. 39; Piety Display’d, in the Holy Life and Death of St. Robert, the Hermit at Knaresborough (Knaresborough, 1787); W. H. Allnutt, ‘Notes on the Introduction of Printing Presses into the Smaller Towns of England and Wales, after 1750 to the End of the Century’, The Library n.s. II (1901), pp. 242–59, at p. 253. 162

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was claimed as the same gravestone.165 The Slingsby family may well have been the ones who controlled access to the manuscript Life of the saint seen by late seventeenth-century visitors.166 We have already seen that in about 1739 Sir Henry Slingsby improved the walks along the river. The first clear link between the well and the prophetess appears just ten years later.167 There is no doubt that, if they had wished, the Slingsbys could have prevented access to the Dropping Well and thereby ended the nascent Shipton connection. It is therefore worth exploring the attitudes of the Slingsbys and their neighbours, the gentry who were an important part of the creation of the Shipton story as expressed in Knaresborough. We have already noted the continuing strength of Catholicism in the locality of Knaresborough in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; this strength was equally reflected among the gentry of the area. The area around Pateley Bridge, Ripon, Spofforth and Knaresborough was a noted centre of recusancy.168 Families such as the Knaresboroughs of Ferrensby, the Tankards of Boroughbridge, the Bickerdikes of Farnham and the Plumptons of Plumpton remained committed to the Roman church, and the families of Mallory of Studley, Ingilby of Ripley and Yorke of Gouthwaite conformed only in the years between 1617 and 1638.169 The religion of the Slingsby family, like that of many of the Yorkshire gentry, was complex.170 On the whole, there is little doubt that the heads of the family were Protestants. Francis Slingsby set the pattern: he was described by contemporaries as a Protestant, but he had 165

John Richard Walbran, Memorials of the Abbey of St. Mary of Fountains, Surtees Society XLII (Durham, 1863 for 1862), p. 170. On 7 November 1693, payments were made for ‘pollishing the Tomb stone upon old Sir Henry Slingesby and Cutting the Epitaph’, and for ‘dressing’ the coats of arms and repairing broken monuments in the choir at Knaresborough church: YAS, DD 56/J/1/8, unfol. For Sir Henry as a royalist martyr, see the poem in YAS, DD 56/P, and the tract Sir Henry Slingsby, A Father’s Legacy. Sir H. Slingsbey’s Instructions to his Sonnes. Written a Little before his Death. (His Letter to a Person of Quality, etc.) (London, 1658), which includes his epitaph at pp. 94–6, reprinted as A Father’s Legacy: Sir Henry Slingesbys Instructions to his Sons Written a Little before his Death (York, 1706), which included his epitaph and a representation of his tombstone. 166 If the identification made by Bazire holds good; Metrical Life of St. Robert, ed. Bazire, pp. 8–9. Cf. the reference to the MS made by Nicolas Roscarrock, who saw it by the favour of Mr Francis Slingsby (citing Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 3041, fols 377r–9v). 167 Rutland in the 1790s explained that ‘Sir Thomas Slingsby, its owner [i.e. the owner of the Dropping Well estate along the river], with a laudable intention of forwarding the pleasures of the inhabitants of Knaresborough, has allowed a pathway to be cut through it’: Journal of a Tour to the Northern Parts, p. 118. 168 Cliffe, Yorkshire Gentry, p. 193, citing Richard Huddleston, A Short and Plain Way to the Faith and Church, ed. John Huddleston (1608–98, Richard’s nephew) (London, 1688: STC H3257), fol. 5. 169 History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 121. 170 The religion of the Slingsbys is surveyed in Susan Elizabeth Ellen Pitts, ‘The Slingsbys of Scriven, c. 1600–1688’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, 1994), pp. 144–53. 181


Catholic relatives. His wife Mary’s religion is nowhere directly described, but as the sister of the Percy earls of Northumberland she was clearly exposed to a Catholic milieu.171 Their son, Henry I, has been described as a ‘Puritan’, although this may exaggerate his views; there is no doubt, however, that his wife, Frances, daughter of William Vavasour of Weston, was a Catholic.172 Henry’s uncle William, discoverer of the spa, is likely to have been the William Slingsby, gent., who was listed as a Roman Catholic living at Knaresborough in 1604.173 If the Slingsbys were Protestant, at least in the person of the head of the family, then it is likely that until the early seventeenth century this was a Protestantism largely of convenience, allowing them to bridge the gap between their local sphere of influence, with its largely Catholic environment, and the wider and even metropolitan connections upon which tenure of their local office depended. Henry II, however, was a Protestant: in 1640 he was a supporter of the bill to remove the votes of the bishops in the House of Lords.174 He was, however, unhappy with the abolition of episcopacy as potentially too disruptive.175 Thomas, his son, was supportive of mainstream

171 Pitts, ‘Slingsbys of Scriven’, pp. 144–5; David Stuart Robinson, ‘The Local Office Holders of Elizabethan Yorkshire’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, 1980), pp. 9, 365–6; Joseph Foster, Pedigrees of the County Families of Yorkshire, 3 vols in 2 (London, 1874): West Riding, II; Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, pp. 395–8; CSPD Addenda, 1566–1579, pp. 85, 93, 95, 96, 97. 172 Also, one of his daughters, Alice, married the ‘schismatic’ Thomas Waterton; the couple were convicted for recusancy: Pitts, ‘Slingsbys of Scriven’, pp. 145–6; History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 121; Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, pp. 408–9; G. R. Smith, Without Touch of Dishonour: The Life and Death of Sir Henry Slingsby 1602–1658 (Kineton, 1968), pp. 8, 25–6; Cliffe, Yorkshire Gentry, pp. 184, 276; YAS, DD56/M/2/7; J. W. Walker, ‘The Burghs of Lincolnshire and the Watertons of Yorkshire’, YAJ XXX (1931), pp. 311–419; Hugh Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire, 1558–1790 (London and Dublin, 1966), pp. 203–4. One of Henry’s Percy relatives, Mary, the abbess of a continental nunnery, failed to persuade him to change his religion, and he appears to have tried to convert the wife of one of his fellow prisoners in the Fleet (Lady Jane Englefield) to Protestantism: Slingsby MSS, DD56/M/2 (1 February 1626), DD56/M/2/56, 57 (? September and ? October 1617). There are even signs that one of his daughters was attracted to ‘Brownism’: Slingsby MSS, DD149/23, Anne Slingsby to Sir Henry I, 12 July 1617. 173 A List of the Roman Catholics in the County of York in 1604, ed. E. Peacock (London, 1872), p. 33; History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 121. The identification is made by Pitts, ‘Slingsbys of Scriven’, p. 146. 174 Pitts, ‘Slingsbys of Scriven’, pp. 148–9; Cliffe, Yorkshire Gentry, pp. 71, 267; J. T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict: The Puritan Gentry during and after the Civil Wars (London, 1988), pp. 43–5, 197–202; Irvonwy Morgan, Prince Charles’s Puritan Chaplain (London, 1957), pp. 30–1; David Mathew, The Age of Charles I (London, 1951), pp. 290–5; Smith, Without Touch of Dishonour, pp. 27, 42; Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 273. 175 Pitts, ‘Slingsbys of Scriven’, pp. 149–50; Nottingham UL, Galway MS 12714, fols 4, 28–9 (Diary); Archbishop Neile was unwilling to allow his private chapel at Redhouse to be consecrated for fear of encouraging conventicles: p. 151; cf. his objections in 1638 to

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Anglicanism, and this conformity, at the end of the seventeenth century, went along with good relations with Catholic kin.176 Thomas’s attitudes are significant, for he lived at the beginning of the hundred-year period in which Shipton became firmly attached in the popular imagination to Knaresborough and the Dropping Well. Sir Thomas’s son, Sir Henry, who succeeded his father in 1726 and served in almost all the parliaments from 1714 to 1763 (when he died), was a Tory with strong Jacobite connections.177 Although from this point on the borough’s MPs were controlled by the Devonshire interest for the Whigs, Sir Henry’s successors remained staunch Tories and were in many ways the natural leaders of the strong Tory sentiment of the borough.178 In 1784, for example, Sir Thomas Turner Slingsby attempted to bring long-leaseholders to the polls against the Devonshire candidates.179 Throughout the period in which the Shipton prophecy was becoming attached to the Dropping Well, the Slingsbys were therefore likely to be supportive of a tradition, as set out by Head in 1667 and by Samuel Baker in 1797, which affirmed a conservative support for the Anglican church, a hostility to Catholicism and Nonconformity, and a vigorous loyalism. A third crucial element to the development of the Shipton connection at Knaresborough was the association of visits to the well with a public house. In 1796, Rutland found a cottage housing the petrified wonders produced by the well;180 but the inn soon took on at least part of this purpose. Even in the 1750s, the motto which later appeared on the inn sign, ‘Near to this petrifying well / I first drew breath, as records tell’, was noted by Richard Pococke, the first man to describe directly the Shipton connection with the well.181 Once

the ‘late impos’d ceremonies of bowing & adoring towards ye altar’: Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, p. 8. His wife was the daughter of the Catholic Lord Fauconberg; one of her sisters married Sir Walter Vavasour of Haslewood, and her younger brother was Lord Belasis of Worlaby, an outspoken Catholic: Mathew, Age of Charles I, p. 294. 176 Pitts, ‘Slingsbys of Scriven’, pp. 152–3; she cites The House of Commons, 1660–1690, ed. Basil Duke Henning, 3 vols (London, 1983), III, pp. 440–1; C. M. Keen, ‘Yorkshire Politics, 1658–1688’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sheffield, 1990), pp. 295, 306–9, 323, 358. 177 The House of Commons, 1715–1754, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 3 vols (London, 1970), II, p. 425; The House of Commons, 1754–1790, ed. Lewis Namier and John Brooke, 3 vols (London, 1964), III, pp. 443–4. 178 Sir Henry died childless in 1763, and he had sold fifteen burgages to the duke of Devonshire in 1762: History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, pp. 162–4. In 1705, £5 3s. 9d. was ‘spent on the ffreeholders of Knarsb’, Scotton [etc.] . . . who ingaged their votes for Sir John Kay vpon my masters acc’t (tho they did not go in to vote) [contents of brackets deleted]’: YAS, DD 56/J/1/8, unfol. 179 History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, p. 355. Cf. p. 368 for the later nineteenth century: Scriven described by a Liberal as one of several ‘miserable dependent villages’. 180 Journal of a Tour to the Northern Parts, p. 119. 181 Travels of Pococke, I, p. 54. 183


this connection existed, there was a direct economic incentive on the part of the inn-keeper to promote visits to the well through the Shipton cult. The first sign of a property explicitly called ‘Dropping Well House’ appears in 1761, when it was empty. Shortly afterwards, in 1763–4, money was spent on repairs there, and it was during that period that Samuel Tilson appeared as tenant, paying £2 10s. in annual rent.182 By 1837, George Howe, now the tenant, was paying £18. By comparison, the tenant of another tourist site, Fort Montagu, Richard Hill, was paying just 10s. at that time.183 When the estate was sold by C. H. R. Slingsby in 1916, the inn, well and cave, with three closes of grass land, were leased to J. W. Simpson for £110 per annum. At that point, the inn consisted of a smoke room, bar, two sitting rooms, kitchen, four bedrooms, bathroom and WC, yard, WC, wash house, stabling for four horses, garage and petrol house, and other outbuildings. Adjoining it were gardens sloping to the Nidd and, adjoining them, the ‘“Museum”’.184 The full paraphernalia of the tourism site of the Dropping Well and Mother Shipton’s cave expanded dramatically in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. As well as the sale of lives of the prophetess, there were numerous editions of postcards of her and her cave and well.185 The site’s mass appeal transcended social classes, for the well was visited by Queen Mary; there were visits by Queen Alexandra, Princess Victoria, Empress Marie of Russia, King Manuel of Portugal and his mother Queen Amelie, and Prince Christopher of Greece in 1911.186 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were further sites which were associated with the prophetess, most notably Mother Shipton’s grave, a sculptured stone near Clifton which was seen as her memorial.187 This failed to achieve the popularity of the Dropping Well as a visitor site. It lacked the crucial ingredients which Knaresborough possessed:

182 YAS, DD 56/J/2/6 (rental Michaelmas 1761); /7 (payments 1 October and 1 November 1763 and 12 May 1764; and rental Michaelmas 1763). 183 YAS, DD 56/J/12, p. 27 and passim (rentals, 1835–43). 184 Auction Catalogue, Richardson and Trotter, 4 Lendal, York, 15 August 1916: a copy is to be found at YAS, DD56/Add. 1966/9/A/6. 185 Examples are to be found in Harrogate Public Library, in the Box marked ‘Mother Shipton Pamphlets’. 186 History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed. Jennings, pp. 431, 433. 187 In reality it was a mutilated stone effigy of a knight in armour, probably taken from St Mary’s Abbey in York. It may have originally been set up as a boundary stone, not expressly for the association with the prophetess; it is now in the Yorkshire Museum: Notes and Queries 4th ser. II (1868), p. 84. (Probably the early fourteenth-century effigy of a knight of the Ros family on Hob Moor, it bore the names of the pasture masters who erected it in c. 1717, and also the date 1757, but the inscription was already nearly defaced in 1818, so the reattribution is early nineteenth-century: Palliser, Tudor York, p. 236; Robert Davies, Walks through the City of York (London, 1880), pp. 97–9; Royal Commission on Historical Monuments in England, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York, vol. III, South-West of the Ouse (London, 1972), p. 58; William Hargrove, History and Description of the Ancient City of York, Comprising all the Most Interesting Information, Already Published

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a structure to receive and guide visitors, and the ready demand provided by a large local tourist population. It can therefore be argued that the Shipton prophecy, born from a distinctly local origin, only survived because Head had helped firmly locate the Dropping Well as the birthplace of the prophetess. The further fortuitous development of the spa at Harrogate and its associated tourism facilitated the survival of the prophecy tradition; as the spa reached new heights of popularity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so Shipton returned from relative obscurity. Indeed, it is doubtful if she would have survived to the present day in the popular imagination if she had not achieved this connection with such an evocative and important element in the English landscape. The growth of Harrogate fortuitously coincided with the other essential ingredient of the revival of Mother Shipton. This was the extraordinary political situation of the 1790s, especially the collapse of the French monarchy and its consequences. Therefore, although at Knaresborough Shipton’s Dropping Well was being shown to tourists from at least the middle of the century, and although there was a continuity of interest through the century,188 the major revival in the publication history of the prophecy only began in 1797. The events of the 1780s and 1790s revolutionized the tradition, however. It is important, given the earlier argument of the prominence of the Nixon tradition in the eighteenth century, that it was in conjunction with the Cheshire prophecy that Shipton re-emerged. Samuel Baker’s Mother Shipton and Nixon’s Prophecies Wonders !!! Past, Present, and to Come! Compiled from the Original Editions, a duodecimo of 1797, helped bring Shipton again to a mass audience.189 Once republished, she regained a reputation of her own with tremendous rapidity. In the same year Baker had produced Wonders !!! Past, Present, and to Come! which was limited to the ‘strange Prophecies and Uncommon Predictions of the Famous Mother Shipton, generally known by the Appellation of the Yorkshire Prophetess’. Probably subsequent in the year two further versions appeared: Mother Shipton’s Legacy, or, a Favourite Fortune Book, a York production,190 and The Life and History of the Famous Mother Shipton

in Drake’s Eboracum, 2 vols in 3 (York, 1818), III, p. 513; Drake, Eboracum, p. 398.) Cf. the other supposed memorial to Shipton at Orchard-Wyndham in Somerset, which was in fact a poor copy, from an engraving in Gordon’s Itinerarium Septentrionale, of a Roman memorial stone at Ellenborough. On an Inscribed Stone, at Orchard Wyndham, Somerset, called ‘Old Mother Shipton’s Tomb’ (Bristol, Taunton, Williton and Minehead, 1879), p. 32; ‘The End of the World’ in 1881–2, According to Mother Shipton, The Great Pyramid of Glizeh, and other Ancient Prophecies Relating to Russia and Turkey (London, 1880), p. 114. 188 See above, pp. 171–2. 189 (London, 1797) (BL, 117. d. 44. (1.)). 190 BL, 117. d. 44 (2); BL, 8631.a.1. It appears to have been this edition which John Clare’s father possessed and valued highly, if John’s memory served him right at the time of the writing of his ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’: he talks of ‘superstitous tales . . . hawked about the streets for a penny, such as Old Nixon’s Prophecies, Mother Bunches Fairy Tales, and 185


and her Daughter Peggy, from J. Davenport in London. This represented a considerable innovation in the tradition, for as well as giving Shipton a daughter, it claimed to be Collected from the Antient Caledonian Chronicle in the Scottish Dialect and located its story at ‘Melross’.191 If a contest then ensued as to Shipton’s origins, it seems to have been rapidly resolved again in favour of Knaresborough, however, because the Scottish connection is not invoked again. Editions followed from Newcastle, Hull, Coventry, York and Derby, from around 1800.192 Another sign of this interest in Shipton in the early nineteenth century is the appearance of portraits of the prophetess in 1792–3 and 1804. In 1792, Rackstow’s Museum in Fleet Street included ‘a figure of Mother Shipton’ and what was claimed as her skull.193 In 1793, an engraving of Shipton drawn in a chariot drawn by a reindeer or stag appeared in Wonderful Magazine.194 We have already seen how Nixon’s portrait was a subject of discussion among the elite, at least of the Cheshire gentry. Shipton’s portrait also appears to have been known among the gentry of Yorkshire and further afield, and was now more widely published for such an audience. In 1804, R. S. Kirby and J. Scott in London produced an engraving from an original drawing by the noted scholar Sir William Ouseley showing Shipton with the devil.195 The revival of publication of Shipton did not depend entirely on the recovery of printed texts. The market for her work, and in large part the original impetus for its republication, came from the continuity of the oral and

Mother Shipton’s Legacy, etc., etc.’: Sketches in the Life of John Clare, p. 46, cited in Spufford, Small Books, p. 3. 191 (London, 1797); attributed to Henry Moine. Further edition (Dunbar, [1800?]) (NLS). 192 The Strange and Wonderful History and Prophecies of Mother Shipton ([Newcastle], [c. 1800]) (NLS); The Strange and Wonderful History and Prophecies of Mother Shipton (Hull, [between c. 1803 and 1825?]) (Bodl.); The Strange and Wonderful History and Prophecies of Mother Shipton (York, 1809). 193 Notes and Queries 4th ser. IV (1869), p. 213. There was also a waxwork of Shipton among those on display at Westminster Abbey: W. H. Harrison, Mother Shipton Investigated: The Result of Investigation in the British Museum Library, of the Literature Pertaining to the Yorkshire Sybil (London, 1881), p. 62. An earlier picture, representing Shipton’s prophecy of male deaths leading to a disproportionate ratio of women to men, appears to have hung in the Crown and Woolpack Inn in Stilton, on the Great North Road; it was dated then as c. 1750: Notes and Queries 4th ser. II (1868), p. 117. 194 A brief survey of these magazines is provided by Michael Harris in his review of Bernard Capp’s Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800, Publishing History 8 (1980), pp. 87–104, at pp. 93–4. 195 There is a copy in the Harrogate Public Library, in the Box marked ‘Mother Shipton Pamphlets’. The date of publication is given as 30 April 1804; it is described as being taken from an original oil painting in the possession of Sir William’s father, Ralph Ouseley, esq., of York. The picture was published in Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum, vol. II (1820), p. 145. Cf. a further supposed portrait, of Shipton along with Albertus Magnus, Friar Bacon and Dr Faustus, published in Gentleman’s Magazine CI (November 1831), pp. 401, 486. 186


manuscript tradition. Francis Drake in the 1730s, in his history of York, noted the prophecy connected with Wolsey’s abortive journey to York, and stated that it was ‘fresh in the mouths of our country people at this day’.196 The new texts associated with Shipton were, however, of crucial importance in reviving interest in her tradition. The Head edition and its successors had concluded with the events of 1666 and soon after; no general words relating to future events were appended, and this had been a major problem for the vitality of the tradition once the issues of the late seventeenth century faded from popular concerns. In 1797, however, Shipton appeared with new prophecies, with a distinctly contemporary relevance. First, several couplets brought the prophecy up to date, foretelling the failure of James II’s Catholicizing schemes; the union of Scotland and England; and the English victory over the Spanish, ‘And of the Whiskers clear the Main.’ The contemporary comment was summed up in seven lines, foretelling the end of monarchy and episcopacy due to civil discord. From about 1820, there is a considerable divergence in the pattern and approach of editions of Shipton. It is apparent that many works of the next sixty years presented themselves as, and in some cases actually were, editions of specific previous editions of the prophecy. One of the first examples of this development is the edition of the 1687 edition of Richard Head’s The Life and Death of Mother Shipton, produced by J. Barker, printer, of Great Russell St., Covent Garden, in about 1820. The historiographical trend of the period, which was increasingly concerned to establish and publish accurate texts for important chronicles and other important historical texts, had its counterpart in the Shipton tradition. The foundation of the Camden Society, and the rapid establishment of provincial equivalents, such as the Chetham Society and the Surtees Society, reflected this scholarly activity.197 Shipton therefore might be acceptable in the most learned circles. This reached its apogee in such facsimile reproductions as those of the 1641 edition produced by E. W. Ashbee and John Tuckett in 1869.198 The second strand to this development of the Shipton tradition was the use of her name in connection with cheap books of fortune-telling, by such methods as reading tea leaves or coffee grinds, palmistry and cards. Few of these were concerned to expound Shipton’s prophecies, established or invented, or

196

Drake, Eboracum, p. 450. Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge, 1986). 198 The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (London, 1869), vol. 6 of Ashbee’s ‘Occasional Facsimile Reprints’. There was, therefore, no simple disappearance of ‘light literature’ of this kind from the ‘respectable’ library, but rather its representation, pace T. A. Birrell, ‘Reading as Pastime: The Place of Light Literature in Some Gentlemen’s Libraries of the 17th Century’, in Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library 1620–1920, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris, St Paul’s Bibliographies (Winchester, 1991), pp. 113–31. 197

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even to describe her history; she herself became in them variously a witch and a gypsy. They did, however, ensure that Shipton’s name, and by extension her mainstream prophetic tradition, remained central in the minds of the mass of the population. Mother Shipton’s appearance in fortune-telling and dream books was only one of the ways in which her reputation was capitalized on by the publishers. She also appeared in almanacs; and almanacs were seen as a good place to advertise editions of her prophecies and life. One example, from the height of the fascination with Shipton in 1881, is the advertisement for a six-penny ‘Birth, Life and Death’, produced by R. March and Co.199 Such instances seem logical, but less so is the use of Mother Shipton as an image and trade name for soap. ‘Mother Shipton’s Soap’ was advertised at 3d. per bar, with the slogan ‘No Boiling’.200 The third strand to the nineteenth-century publication history of the prophecy was, unsurprisingly, a continuation of that seen before: the republication, almost unchanged, of the core of her prophecies, especially in the version created by Richard Head, with contemporary additions. These versions lacked any antiquarian sense of the text as an historical object from the past. An example of the way this might follow an agenda outside the English political mainstream is the Liverpool edition of 1878 in which Shipton is associated with prophecies of the liberation of Ireland. 201 In the 1830s and 1840s to the north of Hastings, as in so many places, Mother Shipton was ‘quite a text book that country people quoted’.202 Even then, in this welter of print, the vitality of the Shipton oral tradition, and its strength in local context, is evident. In Irstead, Norfolk, in 1849 it was possible to hear a complex vision of the future, interwoven with the local past and topography, associated with the key themes of the Shipton tradition. The man with three thumbs appeared, at a battle for England, but this time on the Norwich road; the fall of churches was associated with Keswick church and Bromholm Priory.203 In a very different context, too, the openness of educated society to discussion through the medium is illustrated by the anecdote of repartee in the office of The Sun in the aftermath of the Cato St. conspiracy

199

From the 1881 almanac in Harrogate Public Library, in the Box marked ‘Mother Shipton Pamphlets’. Cf. her continuing role on the stage: [Henry Carey], Dragon of Wantley; Or, Harlequin & Old Mother Shipton (pantomime programme, 13–25 February 1871, Theatre Royal Drury Lane). 200 The Manchester and Salford Co-operative Herald (January 1898), p. 12. I owe this reference to Peter Gurney. Cf. an advert card for this product, in Harrogate Public Library, in the Box marked ‘Mother Shipton Pamphlets’. 201 The Life, Death, and Prophecies of Mother Shipton ([Liverpool], [1878]). For the Irish population of Lancashire, the largest in any English county, and its active Fenianism, see Lowe, ‘Lancashire Fenianism’, pp. 156–85. 202 William Tinsley, Random Recollections of an Old Publisher, 2 vols (London, 1900), p. 177. 203 Gunn, ‘Proverbs’, pp. 292–304. 188


in 1820, in which John Taylor, the editor, showed himself willing to believe in a Shipton prophecy of its failure.204 It was the first of the print traditions, that purporting to scholarly accuracy, which ultimately played a major role in disrupting the continuity and coherence of popular prophecy as a political language in Britain. In 1862, Charles Hindley, then a Brighton bookseller, produced what he described as a ‘verbatim’ reprint of the 1687 version of Richard Head’s The Life, Prophecies and Death of the Famous Mother Shipton.205 The reason for the success of the volumes was that they combined an apparent claim to scholarly accuracy (in 1873 he produced in the Old Booksellers’ Miscellany, which he edited, a facsimile edition of The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the Raign of King Henry the Eighth, London, 1641)206 with some startling newly-discovered prophecies. These new prophecies brought Shipton right up to date. Hindley, in 1862, now had Shipton apparently predicting railways, the London underground, the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition. Most excitingly of all, however, Shipton now clearly prophesied the end of the world in 1881. Why Hindley chose to do this is unclear. It may be connected to the fact that 1862 saw a cause célèbre engulfing one of the prime exponents of revived astrology, Zadkiel (alias Richard James Morrison). Having apparently foretold the Prince Consort’s death, for which he was attacked in the Daily Telegraph in January 1862, Zadkiel sued Rear Admiral Sir Edward Belcher for libel – and won, but received only 20s. in damages.207 Hindley’s own account of the Shipton affair, some years later, highlights his interest in pointing up the absurdity of any such predictive claims; yet hindsight colours this view, and at the time there was again an equivocal response to Zadkiel and more particularly to Shipton. Zadkiel’s prophetic accuracy was mentioned in court by one Alderman Humphery.208 Shipton’s apparently new-found prophecy simply raised her profile. Hindley admitted to his fraud in 1873. This seems to have resulted ultimately from a question about the 1881 prophecy from Simeon Rayner in Notes and Queries.209 This prompted incisive critical comments from no lesser figures than the philologist Walter W. Skeat and antiquarian J. Charles Cox.210 Although there was some defence of at least a seventeenth-century

204

‘The End of the World’ in 1881–2, pp. 18–19. ([Brighton], 1862). Publication details from Bodleian copy and listing. 206 Old Book Collector’s Miscellany, vol. 3, ed. Charles Hindley (London, 1873). 207 Ellic Howe, Astrology and the Third Reich (Wellingborough, 1967, revised and expanded trade paperback edition, 1984), pp. 43–6; Patrick Curry, A Confusion of Prophets: Victorian and Edwardian Astrology (London, 1992), pp. 61–106, and passim for the revival of ‘judicial’ astrology. 208 Curry, Confusion of Prophets, p. 77. 209 Notes and Queries 4th ser. 10 (7 December 1872), p. 450. 210 Notes and Queries 4th ser. 10 (21 December 1872), p. 502. 205

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provenance,211 on 26 April 1873 a notice was published that ‘Mr. Charles Hindley, of Brighton, in a letter to us, has made a clean breast of having fabricated the Prophecy quoted at page 450 of our last volume, with some ten others included in his reprint of a chapbook version, published in 1862.’212 This was not, however, a crushing blow to interest in Shipton. Hindley’s text itself appeared again in 1877;213 and, in the same year, Hindley published what he claimed were Mother Shipton’s Prophecies. Copied from the original Manuscript in the British Museum.214 As 1881 approached, the prophecy was still influential enough to stir up controversy. In 1879 it was the subject of a bitter attack on false prophecy, from a biblical perspective, in Who was Mother Shipton?: Will the Old Woman Bring the World to an End in 1881?215 Vigorous scepticism was apparent in ‘The End of the World’ in 1881–2, which denounced Shipton’s prophecies as ‘baseless and devoid of truth’.216 George Sims, mocking fears in 1880 of Anglican collapse should dissenters be allowed burial in consecrated ground, in his poem ‘The Burials Bill’ awarded to Bishop Christopher Wordsworth of Lincoln and Shipton ‘the laurels of the seer’, for Wordsworth’s prediction of the fall of the church.217 On the other hand, William H. Harrison, editor of the Spiritualist, published an investigation which concluded that Shipton was a real historical personality.218 Purchasers of the Illustrated Police News in October 1881 received a large illustrated supplement on the prophetess. The inhabitants of Yeovil were prepared in 1879 for an earthquake as a presage of events two years later. And the prophecy claimed at least one casualty, a girl who allegedly died from the fear it evoked.219 In 1881, however, Shipton’s prophecy failed to be fulfilled. This, combined with Hindley’s earlier revelation, was damaging to the credibility of the prophecy. The Shipton tradition, like that of Nixon, had always rested on a tension between scepticism and belief, which its vagueness fostered and sustained through even the most difficult periods. What had now changed was that the popular imagination had been seized by an extraordinarily specific 211

Notes and Queries 4th ser. 11 (18 January 1873), p. 60, from Edward Rimbault; there was further scepticism, over chronology, in the 8 March number (p. 206). 212 Notes and Queries 4th ser. 11 (26 April 1873), p. 355. 213 ([London, 1877]) (BL, 8630.bbb.1). 214 (London, 1877) (BL, 8632.aaa.8); cf. the huge increases in circulation achieved by Zadkiel’s almanac after 1862: Curry, Confusion of Prophets, pp. 107–8. 215 Who was Mother Shipton?: Will the Old Woman Bring the World to an End in 1881? (London, [1879]). 216 ‘The End of the World’ in 1881–2, pp. 1–20. 217 George Robert Sims, ‘The Burials Bill’, in ‘The Lifeboat and other Poems’, Ballads and Poems (London, [1883]), p. 123. 218 Harrison, Mother Shipton Investigated. 219 Illustrated Police News (8 October 1881); ‘The End of the World’ in 1881–2, p. 5 (quoting Pall Mall Gazette (April 1879)); Somerset County Herald (26 November 1881), cited in Owen Davies, Witchcraft Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester and New York, 1999), p. 142. 190


prophecy which had proved wrong; but more than that, it had been proved wrong having been dressed in the trappings of scholarly respectability and scientific reliability. It would now be much harder for a commentator or editor to take up Shipton’s words, pass over those which seemed inconvenient with an amused smile, and then advocate a new, favourable and intriguing possibility for the future based on the old, previously ‘misunderstood’ text, or a conveniently rediscovered new one. The effect of the Hindley fiasco on the Shipton prophecy is apparent from its publication history. The following year, Heywood’s of Manchester produced what must have seemed the final chapter of the academic treatment of Shipton. A volume probably edited and introduced by W. E. A. Axon catalogued the credulities and crass manipulations of the previous years before presenting the three main seventeenth-century versions, now laid bare as the delusions of a naive age.220 Yet ancient prophecy retained great strengths during the period before 1881, one of the main ones being that as the world changed more rapidly so it had at once more to explain and more to legitimate. It is remarkable how many of the local prophecies connected to Shipton, which only begin to survive from the late nineteenth century, are associated in their fulfilment with the coming of the railways. A useful sample for this purpose is provided by those described by William Grainge in an article in the Palatine Note-book in April 1881.221 After a general reference to citations of prophecies of late or early springs, Grainge referred to Shipton’s general prophecy (created by Hindley) that ‘When carriages without horses run, Old England will be quite undone’, and noted its connection with the spread of the railways. Grainge then followed this with a prophecy from the Harrogate and York areas relating to the fall of the viaduct across the Nidd at Knaresborough; another from Pickhill in the North Riding that the town would not thrive until a certain family died out and a barrow was cut open, as it was by the Leeds Northern Railway in 1851; then later in the piece with another from Ulleskelfe-on-the-Wharfe, just south of Tadcaster, that a public road should run through its barn and its spring should dry up, both of which were effected by the York and North Midland Railway (Leeds–York). Other major engineering works – and their sometimes catastrophic consequences – caused Shipton to be invoked. Fewston, in the Washburn valley to the north of Otley, suffered a serious movement of land possibly connected with the construction there of large reservoirs by the Leeds Corporation, and again Shipton was said to have foreseen the

220

Mother Shipton: A Collection of the Earliest Editions of her Prophecies (Manchester, [1882]). W[illiam] G[rainge], ‘Mother Shipton’, The Palatine Note-book for 1881. For the Intercommunication of Antiquaries, Bibliophiles, and other Investigators into the History and Literature of the Counties of Lancaster, Chester, &c. (Manchester, Chester and Liverpool, 1881), pp. 64–6. There is no sign in the article that he was selecting prophecies for any other reason than to catalogue their variety and wide distribution in the North of England. 221

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events, in this case, dramatically, associating them with the coming of the end of the world. Intriguingly, Fewston had been associated with Knaresborough through the appropriation of its church to the house of St Robert.222 There are also signs that the interest in the Shipton story in the 1860s and 1870s triggered an expansion in the geographical area in which the oral tradition invoked her authority. An example of this appears to be the West Country, where, for example, the attribution of a memorial stone to the prophetess cannot be dated earlier than the nineteenth century.223 None of this fundamentally changed in and after 1881. One of the themes of this book has been the remarkable continuities in prophecy as a popular political language in Britain. The year 1881 was an important blow to this continuity. In particular, it contributed to the erosion of the inclusive tradition, in which elites and mass were both, in their different ways, entwined. There were specific reasons for this: the rise of theosophy, which was at its most influential from about 1884 to the time of the First World War, served to provide a focus for interest in alternatives to conventional beliefs.224 Yet Shipton’s prophecies appeared in print again, in almanacs and in their own right, in 1918 in Leeds.225 In 1905 it was even possible, in the respectable pages of Yorkshire Notes and Queries, to find an enquiry from Herbert Jowett of Bradford answered with an enthusiastic repetition of the prophecies, including that of 1881. Its failure – and forgery – were passed over in silence, the respondent noting ‘her memory is much honoured by those of her own country, especially in Yorkshire’.226 In Yorkshire at least, 1881 was replaced by 1981 or 1991 as the expected year of doom.227 What saved Shipton from oblivion once again was therefore the power of locality. Almost certainly, the main market for the prophecy was now to be found in Yorkshire, with its centre firmly in Knaresborough and Harrogate.228 Tourism to the Dropping Well had not

222

Cf. ‘Cymro’, ‘Ancient Welsh Prophecies Fulfilled’, Archaeologia Cambrensis III (1848), p. 77. 223 On an Inscribed Stone, at Orchard Wyndham; cf. above, pp. 184–5, on this stone. 224 As it did to astrology: Ellic Howe, Urania’s Children (London, 1967), p. 54. 225 E.g. Burdekin’s Old Moore’s Almanack and Advertising Compendium (York, 1887), unpag.; Burdekin’s Old Moore’s Almanack (York, 1899), unpag. A further edition in 1947: The Life and Prophecies of Ursula Sontheil better known as Mother Shipton, ed. J. C. Simpson (Leeds, 1947). 226 Percival Procter, ‘Mother Shipton’, Yorkshire Notes and Queries I (1905), pp. 64–5; cf. Arthur W. Millar, ‘Mother Shipton’, ibid., II (1906), pp. 20–5. But even the sceptical William Tinsley repeated the 1881 prophecy without reference to its forgery: Random Recollections, p. 183. Sir Walter William Strickland, ‘Mother Shipton or the Droppin Well at Knaresboro’ (BL, 011648. ff.62; no later than 1924). 227 Life and Prophecies of Ursula Sontheil, ed. Simpson, p. 27. 228 Some scepticism is of course evident, though it might describe itself as ‘heresy’: ‘Wakeman’, ‘Around the Ridings’, Yorkshire Life Illustrated XI (no. 7) (July 1957), pp. 9–11; cf. the more typically equivocal F. A. Carter, ‘New Light on Mother Shipton?’ Yorkshire Life XXII (no. 9) (September 1968), p. 79. 192


declined even in the worst years of the 1881 scandal. Shipton’s Well even received a visit from royalty, in the person of Queen Mary after the First World War.229 This is not, therefore, in any sense a modernization narrative. For the astonishing power of ancient prophecy re-emerged from the early years of the century. Prophecy still offered an attractive solution in an ever more rapidly changing world, in which so much change seemed inexplicable and unexpected, and in which ties between the past and the present offered consolation and meaning. ‘Superstition’ might be discredited in working-class radicals’ eyes, but even there a tension existed in seeing in tradition and custom some of the values and aspirations which they held dear.230 And it is too easy to give disproportionate weight to the autobiographies of political and religious radicals in assessing general trends in non-elite attitudes.231 In the parallel world of the almanac, the rapid disappearance of astrological content in the 1860s and 1870s may be read as the death of popular astrology – but it is more likely, given the dramatic decline in circulations which resulted, to be a sign of the influence of the highly motivated lobbying of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.232 Almanacs too had tended to trade heavily on weather predictions, which were both easy to find fault in and now open to competition from meteorological science, as forecasts began to be published in national papers in 1862.233 Yet, however ambitious the claims of the new ‘scientists’ of society and politics, they could not offer a similarly powerful competitor in prediction to threaten ancient prophecy. The year 1881 was a serious blow to prophecy as a popular political language, but it was not its final death-knell.

229

Arnold Kellett, Historic Knaresborough (Otley, 1991), p. 85. Vincent, ‘Decline of the Oral Tradition’, pp. 38–9; William Stafford, Socialism, Radicalism and Nostalgia: Social Criticism in Britain, 1775–1830 (Cambridge, 1987). 231 Cf. the tension between the expressions of scepticism and the lengthy account of the prophecy in the radical William Tinsley, Random Recollections, vol. 1, pp. 177–83. 232 The developments are outlined in Perkins, Visions of the Future, pp. 117–22, although she tends to give priority to a change in belief amongst readers. Note the suggestive upturn in sales in the early 1880s at the time of excitement generated by Hindley/Shipton: p. 88. 233 Perkins, Visions of the Future, pp. 215–29. 230

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5

Conclusions

The introduction to this book set out its intention to address three contentious areas of recent historiography. I have argued that ancient prophecy represented a powerful political, religious and social language that was never under complete elite control, and yet which could never be completely ignored by the elite. I have suggested that this was partially to do with the vitality of regional political cultures in the English, and the British, monarchy well into the early modern period. And I have urged that this indicates a strong continuity in non-rational elements to the political culture of this country. Where prophetic traditions waned, they did so because the usefulness of the language they represented declined: Nixon in particular and, to a certain extent, Merlin ceased to offer an approach to the political and social issues of the later nineteenth century. Nixon’s tradition also suffered from the fragmentation of the political, social and economic coherence of the regional culture from which it originated. This did not, of course, mean the end of ancient prophecy, because the continuing and developing relevance of the Shipton tradition demonstrated that continuing relevance was possible, and its regional base in Yorkshire, far from declining, achieved a startling growth in self-identity and confidence. It is worthwhile briefly returning to set this in the context of some major recent work in the field perhaps most closely allied to ancient prophecy, astrology, Curry’s Prophecy and Power.1 The claims of ancient prophecy and of astrology to predict the future were similar, and many men who practised the analysis of the stars also studied ancient prophecy. Both also had an element of decoding within their methods, and took as their ‘texts’ phenomena which were allegedly created by non-human forces. One of the first impressions provided by such a contextualization is that, studied alone, astrology provides a dangerously partial picture. Curry’s account of astrology suggests that its ‘death’ in educated circles in the early eighteenth century could be interpreted as a sign of the victory of a bourgeois rationalist hegemony, which was only broken by a fracturing of the gentry hegemony beginning in the 1790s and

1

Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1989). 194

CONCLUSIONS

developing in the 1820s and 1830s.2 Yet although the astrologer may have become ‘a laughing stock in educated and coffee-house circles’, Swift’s attack on Partridge came only shortly before the massive outburst of interest, from across the social spectrum, in the Nixon prophecy. The same point might be made about the study of individual prophecies: a study simply of Shipton and Merlin might have gone to confirm Curry’s picture of gentry rationalism triumphant in the eighteenth century, given the infrequency of their publication in the ninety years after 1700 and their frequently comedic context. The rise of Nixon, however, suggests the shortcomings of such an interpretation. Part of the reason for Curry’s belief in the failure of ‘prophetic’ elements in English politics lies in his choice of a field of study. Astrology was more vulnerable than ancient prophecy to the attacks of sceptics. The codes it sought to interpret were fixed, as they had been mapped in the constellations thousands of years previously. The methods that were used to interpret them were almost as fixed, seeking as they did to base themselves in scientific mathematical precision. Prophecy on the other hand was far more inherently literary and verbal, and was based on a body of texts that were allusive, not precise, and which, far from being harnessed by those who controlled the print medium, as Adam Fox and his predecessors would argue,3 could be reinvented and added to through the creativeness of oral and manuscript culture and the mendacious imperatives of politics. Further, rather than being universal, or at least international, as astrology was, ancient prophecy was local and regional. In some ways this provides a commentary on the creation of the historical profession, for a precision even remotely similar to that found in astrology and astronomy only came to the study of ancient prophecy with the nineteenthcentury academic obsession with primary texts and the study of diplomatics. Astrology therefore suffered in the eighteenth century, ancient prophecy only in the nineteenth. Men like Ashbee and Hindley, encouraged at least to ape the methods of the new academic history, finally committed Mother Shipton to predictions which were not fulfilled, while historians and philologists like Walter W. Skeat dissected prophecies that had come to pass and showed them to be ‘forgeries’ too. The determination to see the past in its own terms has in this sense been one of the main challenges to the capacity of the past to speak to the future. On the other hand, the continuing vitality of the Shipton tradition indicates the degree to which the methodologies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic history have failed to enter the terms of popular 2

Curry, Prophecy and Power, pp. 166–7. Cf. Carl B. Estabrook’s observation that ‘it is difficult to accept the notion that the appearance of print technology in an English provincial city in the late seventeenth century necessarily placed the hearts and minds of nearby villagers in the hands of urban printers or permitted cities to exert a greater cultural influence over their rural environs as an immediate consequence of the urban renaissance’: Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces 1660–1780 (Stanford, Calif., 1998), p. 186. On p. 171 he summarizes evidence that ‘small books’ were more likely to be found in urban collections. 3

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political and historical discourse – a failure distinct even in comparison to the record of the methodology and assumptions of the physical sciences. The mass education system which attempts to inculcate this historical method (positivist or relativist) at an elementary level may in fact simply arm more complex and deeper rooted perceptions of the relevance of the past.4 Curry’s interpretation therefore springs in large part from his decision to study the narrow field of astrology. Yet Curry’s account, like those of many others who have discussed astrology or prophecy, explicitly seeks a wider context. This context is a modernization narrative based in an analysis of class relations. Curry believed that a hegemony was established in educated circles by the beginning of the eighteenth century which saw, for example, comets as astronomical and eschatological, but not astrological, objects. Plebeian astrology survived the century simply because ‘little need was perceived (and therefore little effort made) to make any concessions in order to hegemonically convince [sic] – as distinct from simply dominate, threaten or contain – those beyond the patrician pale’. That imperative came in the nineteenth century with the need to impose a sense of work time in place of natural time. Yet this determination to endow a modernization narrative with the trappings of Gramscian ideas only thinly conceals the difficulty of showing that astrology was opposed to concepts of work time, or that the ‘hegemony’ which fought against it was anything other than the rhetoric of small groups of often professionally self-interested scientific rationalists, many of whom themselves, on closer examination, fit less comfortably into the mould of pure rationalism than we are led to expect.5 The continuing appeal of the Nixon and Shipton traditions in ‘bourgeois’, ‘rationalist’ circles, albeit in an equivocal context of an amused fascination, suggests the difficulty faced by those attempting to apply a rigidly class analysis here. Curry’s analysis of astrology, because of the nature of the subject matter, more or less directly implies another important argument. The geographical 4

The fundamental unknowability of the future, and the irrelevance to it of the past, as argued by Hume in his Philosophical Essays: Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1748) (no future event can be seen or foretold, everything conceivable is possible – so we cannot find any necessary connections between events, and our assumption of the likeness of past and future is flawed), means we are ‘left adrift with the meaningless, valueless world Hume described’: Richard H. Popkin, ‘Predicting, Divining, Prophecying and Foretelling from Nostradamus to Hume’, History of European Ideas 5 (1984), pp. 117–35, esp. p. 130. An unpalatable message, which still almost inevitably falls on deaf ears. 5 Still less the difficulty of showing that plebeian astrology was in fact successfully ‘hegemonically convinced’: cf. the continuing success of the astrological almanacs (above, pp. 189–90) and the appearance of newspaper astrology (Sunday Express, 24 August 1930, on the occasion of Princess Margaret’s birth): Ellic Howe, Astrology and the Third Reich (Wellingborough, 1967), p. 68. Ignoring this, Curry (in his A Confusion of Prophets: Victorian and Edwardian Astrology (London, 1992)) values the later astrologers as isolated oddities, standing out against the hegemony – and so valued by him as an ideologically committed relativist. 196

CONCLUSIONS

spaces in which astrological theories were advanced and countered were defined in terms of nation states.6 State formation in Britain is therefore central to the analysis: it creates and is created by a unified ideological space. Ancient prophecy, on the other hand, suggests the continuing importance of the local and the regional. The power of the palatine county of Cheshire, until the legal and constitutional reforms and the social and economic changes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provided a political culture which could be drawn upon more widely. Although in the end Cheshire’s coherence declined, and with it the influence of its local prophecy, Yorkshire’s grew. Legal and jurisdictional regionalism meant less, but in popular culture other factors more than compensated for this loss, not simply in the intensified experience of the other, but in the shared experience of work and leisure, production and consumption.7 Ancient prophecy therefore remained a central language for the discussion of political and social affairs in early modern England, and it remained a language which could never be completely controlled by political elites. The infinite variability of the past, and its potential messages for the future, were not captured by print or dulled by scientific rationalism.

6

Curry, Prophecy and Power, pp. 153–4, a contrast drawn between England and France, with the latter’s advanced political and religious centralization emphasized. 7 Owen Davies has argued that the decline in witchcraft was due not to progress of the history of ideas, but to cultural factors. A decline in belief, he suggested, was consequent on a decline in accusations, not vice versa. So while Obelkevitch had argued that there was a decline in witchcraft in the nineteenth century thanks to a depersonalization and belittling of the witch figure, Davies placed more emphasis on changes which created communities where accusations were no longer ‘applicable or expedient’. As a result, no one built a reputation through a pattern of accusations, and belief died: James Obelkevitch, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976); Owen Davies, Witchcraft Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester and New York, 1999), pp. 279–93. 197

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248

Index 1381 peasants’ revolt 3 1549 rebellions 41, 50–1, 92, 109 1569 rebellion 66, 167 1583 astrological conjunction 55 1588 eclipses 55, 56 1715 rebellion 139, 140 1745 rebellion 142 A Briefe Relation of the Scots Hostile Entrance 77 A Collection of Twenty-Three Prophecies 101 ABC, KLM 36 Abell, Adam 47 Aberdeen university 47 acts of parliament 1429–30 (parliamentary elections) 3 1541–2 (prophecies ‘uppon Declaration of Names’) 26 1736 Witchcraft Act 156 Adamson, Patrick 49 Addison, Joseph 126 Aesop 91, 92 Æthelflæd, lady of the Mercians 106–7 Agar, Thomas 63, 71 agriculture 109 Aire, river 62–3 Albany, duke of, see Stewart, Alexander Albert, prince consort 189 Albertus Magnus 186 Aldborough (Yorks., WR) 158, 160 alehouse 35 Alexander, bishop, of Lincoln 16 Alexander III, king of Scotland 46, 58 Alexander IV, pope 160 Alexandra of Denmark, queen, wife of Edward VII 184 All Souls’ College, Oxford 29 almanacs 9, 26, 55, 147, 155, 188, 190, 192, 193 altar rails 76 Amadas, Elizabeth 30–1, 52 Amadas, John 31 Amadas, Robert 30–1

Amelie, queen, of Portugal 184 America 96, 148 Amory, Thomas 171 Anabaptism 95 André, Bernard 15 Andrew, Reginald 16–17 Andrew, Reginald, of Melksham (Wilts.) 17 Andrew, Richard 17 Andrewes, Lancelot Institutiones Piae 76 Anglicanism 76, 87, 97 Anglo, Sydney 15 Anne, queen of England 100, 101, 102, 121, 128 Anne of Cleves, queen of England 41, 42 Anselm 91 Antichrist 17, 100 Aquinas, Thomas 5 Aram, Eugene 177 Archaeologia 148 Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 176 archery 103 Ardennes 163 Ariosto Orlando Furioso 54 Arminianism 76 Arnold, Samuel 156 Arthur 1, 15, 49, 53–4, 99, 116, 143, 146 Arthur Tudor, prince of Wales 15, 18 Arundel, Henry 92 Ashbee, E. W. 187, 195 Ashmole, Elias 55 Aske, Robert 43 assizes 24 Astbury (Ches.) 136 Aston, Catherine, wife of Sir Thomas Aston, daughter of William Widdrington 137 Aston, Mary, wife of Sir Willougby Aston, daughter of John Offley of Madeley 137 249

INDEX Aston, Rebecca, wife of Sir Thomas Aston (d. 1743–4), daughter of John Shish of Greenwich 137 Aston, Sir Thomas (d. 1645) 137–8 Aston, Sir Thomas (d. 1725) 137, 138 Aston, Sir Thomas (d. 1743–4) 137 Aston, Sir Willoughby 120, 137–8 Astraea 49 astrology 9, 15, 18, 23, 26, 53, 55, 56, 57, 80, 85, 96, 99, 100, 101, 130, 155, 189, 192, 193, 194–5, 196, 197 Atherton, Elizabeth, wife of John Atherton, daughter of Robert Cholmondeley 116 Atkyns, Sir Robert 101 Atwood, William 101 Averey, Thomas 112 Awdeley, J. 77 Axon, W. E. A. 154, 191 Aylesbury (Bucks.) 151 Ayton (co. Durham) 36–7 Ayton, William de 35 Back, J. 95 Bacon, Francis 18 Bacon, Friar Roger 186 Bagotte, Geoffrey 29 Baker, Sir John 31 Baker, Samuel 183, 185 Baldwin, Abigail 122 Baldwin, Richard 122 Bale, John 41, 56 The Image of Bothe Churches 56 ballads 5, 51, 75, 76, 77–8, 97 Balliol, Edward, king of Scots 45 Banister (prophet) 25 Bankes, Anne, wife of Thomas Bankes of Winstanley, daughter of Thomas Cholmondeley (II) 116 Bankes, Thomas, of Winstanley 116 Barbour, John 45 Bruce 45 Bardney Abbey (Lincs.) 36 Bardsay, William 161 Barker, J. 186 Barker, Robert 44 Barlby (Yorks., ER) 34 Barlow, T. Worthington 154 Cheshire: Its Historical and Literary Associations 154 Barret, Alice 84 Barton, Elizabeth, ‘The Nun of Kent’ 30 Barton, William 27

Baskerville, Thomas 168, 170 Bath (Som.) 43, 125, 163 Beasley, Edward 70–1 Beasley, John 70 Beasley, Reginald 61, 69–72, 74, 88, 94, 157 Beasley, William 71 Beauchamp family 28 Beaufort, Margaret 161 Beaumont, George 171 Beckinsall, John 23 Beckwith family 36 Becon, Thomas 31 Bede 11, 36, 59 Bedford, earl/duke of, see Russell, William Bedyll, Thomas 27 Beforth, Thomas 35 Belasis, John, Lord Belasis of Worlaby (d. 1689) 183 Belasis, Thomas, Lord Fauconberg (d. 1653) 168, 183 Belcher, Rear Admiral Sir Edward 189 Bellenden, John 47 bells 89 Bentley, William 35 Berkshire 86 Bermingham, George 119 Berthelet, Thomas 26 Berwick 25, 76 Bethel, Slingsby 95 Beverley (Yorks., ER) 35, 158 Beverley, ‘abbot of’ 88, 94, 175, 177 Dominican friary 88 Franciscan friary 88 Bible, biblical prophecy 11, 53, 55–6, 57, 99 Bickerdike family of Farnham 181 Bickerstaff, Squire 130 Bigod, Sir Francis 34 Bilton Park (Yorks., WR) 158 Binns, Otwell 75 Birchall, Daniel 140–1 Birkenhead Priory (Ches.) 104 Birmingham (War.) 151 Birrel, Robert 57 Bishop Percy Folio Manuscript 59, 110 bishops 182 Blackmore, Richard Prince Arthur 146 Bland, Sir John 119 Blore Heath, battle of 152 Blue Beard; or Female Curiosity 150 Blundell, Nicholas 166–7, 171 ‘Blunderhead, Benjamin’ 174 250

INDEX Boece, Hector 47 Boleyn, Anne, queen of England 20–2, 24, 27, 30, 32, 40, 43, 44, 66, 113 Boleyn, George, Lord Rochford 21 Bolingbroke, viscount/earl of, see St John, Henry Bonner, Edmund, bishop of London 31, 88 Book of Common Prayer 89 book ownership 72 bookbinders 72 booksellers 60, 76–7, 84, 97 Booth, Henry, Lord Delamer (d. 1694) 117–20, 124 Boroby, Friar, of Scarborough 35–6, 38 Boroughbridge (Yorks., WR) 70 Bostock, Robert 114 Boston (Lincs.) 96 Boswell, James 6 Bosworth Field 110 Bosworth Field, battle of 12, 17, 62, 63, 102, 103, 105, 109–10 Boulogne 18, 85 Bowden (Ches.) 104, 118, 119 Bower, Walter 46 Scotichronicon 46 Boyle, Richard, earl of Burlington 124 Brabanner, John 158 Brabant 159 Bradford-upon-Avon (Wilts.) 43 Bradley, Thomas 36–7 Bradshaw, Henry 107 Bramham Moor (Yorks., WR) 62–3, 88 Brandon, Charles, duke of Suffolk (d. 1545) 65–8, 73, 74, 75, 88, 94 sons 66 Brandon, Mary, wife of Charles, duke of Suffolk, daughter of Henry VII 66 Brasted (Kent) 82 Bray, Edmund, Lord Bray (d. 1539) 43 Bray, Reginald 17 Brereton (Ches.) 138 Brereton, Humphrey, of Malpas 109 Brereton, Jane Merlin: A Poem 144 Brereton, Owen Salusbury 148 Brereton, William, vicar of Weaverham 114 Brereton family, of Brereton 138 Bridgwater (Som.) 123, 126 Bright, Timothy 164, 166 Characterie 164 Brightman, Thomas 56

Brighton (Sussex) 189 Bristol (Som.) 64, 119, 147 Bristol, earl of, see Hervey, John ‘Britannia Triumphans’ 53 ‘British history’ 15, 47, 53–4, 143 Britishness 142 Brittany 15, 17, 109 Broadnax, Robert 119 Bromholm Priory (Norfolk) 188 Brompton (Yorks., NR) 34 Brooke, Henry 119, 147 Broughton, John 32–3 Brown, Robert 162 Brownism 182 Bruce, Robert 45–6, 59 Bruce family 45 Brutus 59 Buchanan, George 49 Buckingham, duke of, see Villiers, George; duchess of, see Villiers, Katherine Buckton, William 37 Budgegood, Anthony 18–19 Budworth (Ches.) 133 Bulkeley, Thomas 48 Bullinger, Heinrich 55 Burgess, Daniel 134 Burke, Edmund 6 Burlington, earl of, see Boyle, Richard Burnet, Gilbert, bishop of Salisbury 124 Burns, William E. 100 Burton, Sir John 67 Buxton (Derby.) 165–6 St Anne’s Well 165–6 Cade, Jack, rebellion of (1450) 3, 5 Cadwaladr 15, 30 Caesar, Gaius Julius 21 Calais 16 Calder, river (‘Cadron’) 62–3 Calvert, M. 175–6 Calvin, John 55–6 Cambridge 41, 164 Emmanuel College 169 Camden, William 138–9, 170 Camden Society 187 Capp, Bernard 9, 145 Cardinal College, Oxford 69, 91 Carlisle (Cumbria) 111 Carlisle herald, see Hawley, Thomas Caroline, queen 127, 156 as princess of Wales 129, 137 Carpenter, Christine 5 Carrier, Jean 130 Carthusians 42 251

INDEX Castle Bolton (Yorks., NR) 24 Castle-Carlton (Lincs.) 38 Catherine of Aragon, queen of England 30, 66, 86 Catholics, Catholicism 25, 55, 71, 78, 88, 90, 95, 96, 118, 120, 128, 135, 138, 142, 153, 166, 167, 179–83, 187 Cato St conspiracy 188 Cavendish, George 18, 67, 68, 69 Cavendish family, dukes of Devonshire 183 Cawood (Yorks., WR) 61, 63, 67, 68, 82 Chaloner, Hugh 113 Chamber, Geoffrey 112 chapbooks 4, 5, 6, 7, 75, 85, 93, 147, 150, 151, 157, 190 Chapman, Friar Richard, of Scarborough 35, 38 Chapuys, Eustace 21, 29, 43 Charles I, king of Engand 54–5, 64, 75, 78–9, 80–1, 88, 90, 95, 134, 137, 145, 148, 168 as prince of Wales 58–9, 111 Charles II, king of England 81–2, 88, 90, 96, 101, 117, 136, 149 Charles V, emperor 21, 24 Chartier, Roger 5 Chaucer, Geoffrey 40 ‘Chaucer’s prophecy’ 40 Chaumont, Gace de 63 Cheeselade, Thomas 27 Chelsea (London) 23 Cheshire 8, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109–10, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119–22, 124, 126, 130, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152–4, 186, 197 palatinate 8, 104, 106, 108, 111 Cheshire Sheaf 153 Chester 103, 106, 107, 110, 111, 119, 120, 148, 150, 153 council 111 Dean of, see Thomas Mallory mystery cycle 65 Chester, earl/dom of 107, 137 Chester Courant 142 Chetham Society 187 Chirk (Denb.) 17 chivalry 6 Cholmley, Sir Roger 35 Cholmondeley, Anne, wife of Thomas

Cholmondeley (II) of Vale Royal, daughter of Sir Walter St John 116, 132–4, 136 Cholmondeley, Charles 116–22, 124, 128, 132, 134, 136, 137, 142 Cholmondeley, Charles, son of Charles 128 Cholmondeley, Dorothy, wife of Thomas Cholmondeley (b. 1726), daughter of Edmund Cowper 129 Cholmondeley, Elizabeth, daughter of John Minshull of Minshull, wife of Thomas Cholmondeley 115 Cholmondeley, Francis (1663–4) 116 Cholmondeley, Sir Francis 120–1, 124, 138 Cholmondeley, Hugh (1662–4) 116 Cholmondeley, Sir Hugh 115, 116 Cholmondeley, Jane (1655–81) 116 Cholmondeley, Jane, née Tollemache, wife of Thomas Cholmondeley (II) of Vale Royal 116 Cholmondeley, John (1660–1) 116 Cholmondeley, Lady Mary 108, 111–12, 115 Cholmondeley, Robert 116 Cholmondeley, Robert, viscount Cholmondeley, lord Cholmondeley, earl of Cholmondeley (d. 1725) 118–19, 124 Cholmondeley, Thomas (1658–9) 116 Cholmondeley, Thomas (b. 1726) 128–9 Cholmondeley, Thomas (I) (1595–1653) 115–16, 121 Cholmondeley, Thomas (II), son of Thomas (I) of Vale Royal 116, 118, 121, 124, 134, 137, 138 Cholmondeley, Thomas, Lord Delamere 102 Cholmondeley, Thomas, son of Charles (d. young) 128 Cholmondeley family 12 Cholmondeley household 127 Cholmondeley of Vale Royal family 102, 112, 115–16, 121, 128, 131, 132, 134, 136, 145, 148–9, 154, 155–6 Cholmondeston (Ches.) 132 Christ Church nigh Aldgate, London, Augustinian priory 91 Christopher, prince, of Greece 184 Church of England 118, 122, 128, 134, 137, 163, 183 Churchill, Sarah, duchess of Marlborough 125, 129 252

INDEX Chute, Johanna, daughter of George Chute 135 Chute, Johanna, daughter of Sir Walter St John, wife of George Chute of Stockwell 135–7 Cicero 73 civic republicanism 100 Clare, John 1, 151, 185 Clarendon, earl of, see Hyde, Edward Clayton, Dr 166 Clement VII, pope 91 clergy 32–3 Clerke, Richard 162 Cliburne, Richard 25 Clifford, Henry, earl of Cumberland (d. 1542) 68 Clifford family 34, 68 Clifton (York) 184 Climsell, Richard 78 Clunie (Perthshire) 172 Clynnog, Dr Morys 25 Cock, William 64 ‘Cock of the North’ 35–6 Coelson, Christopher 63, 71 coffee grinds 187 coffee-houses 195 Coke, Sir Edward 165 Cole, Henry 23 Coles, Francis 77–8, 81, 92 Colman, George, senior 156 Mother Shipton 156 Colton (Lancs.) 33 Colton (Yorks., WR) 63 Colton Hagge 62–4, 88 Combermere Abbey (Ches.) 112 comets 31, 196 comet of 1677 96 Commons, House of 3–4 Complaynt of Scotland 49 Comprehension (religious) 124 Comyn, Sir John 45 conference trade 179 Congreve, William 124, 146 The Old Batchelour 124 Constantine 59 Conway, Sir Hugh 16 Conyers, J. 93 Conyers family 37, 38 Coppenhall (Ches.) 127 Cornwall, duchy of 137 Cornwall, earl of, see Edmund, earl of Cornwall Cornysshe, [William?] 16 Cotton, Robert 117

council, privy 42, 51 council/councillors, royal 3, 31, 35 Council in the Marches of Wales 27 Council in the North 70 court 118, 134 court, Scottish 46 Courtenay, Gertrude, marchioness of Exeter (d. 1558) 23 Courtenay, Henry, marquis of Exeter (exec. 1539) 19, 23 courtiers 3 Covenant 89 Coventry (War.) 186 Cowper, Mary, lady Cowper 129, 135, 137 Cowper, Sarah, lady Cowper, wife of Sir William Cowper, daughter of Samuel Holled 129, 134, 135, 136 Cowper, Sir William (d. 1705) 128, 135 Cowper, William 129–30 Cox, J. Charles 189 Cranford (Middx.) 29 Cresswell, Catherine 43 Cresswell, Percivall 43 Crewe, Elizabeth 138 Crewe, John, of Utkinton 138 Crewe, Sir John 138 Crewe, Sir John, of Utkinton 115 Crewe, Mary, wife of John Crewe of Utkinton, daughter of Sir John Done of Utkinton 138 Crewe, Mary, wife of Sir John Crewe, daughter of Sir Willoughby Aston 138 Crewe, Mary, wife of Sir John Crewe, daughter of Thomas Wagstaff of Tachebrook (War.) 138 Croft, Thomas 28 Croft-on-Tees (Yorks., NR) 36 ‘Cromme and Christ Cross row’ 36 Cromwell, Gregory 19, 31 Cromwell, Oliver 54, 81, 90, 95, 149 Cromwell, Thomas 18–22, 25, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 50, 66, 104, 112, 113 Crone, Edward 21 Crouch, Humphrey A Pleasant New Song . . . 77 Crowton, farmer 127 ‘crumme’ prophecy 36 crusade 17, 44, 58, 59, 160 Crystal Palace 189 Cumberland 34 Cumberland, earl of, see Clifford Cumbria 106 253

INDEX Cures without Care 164–5 Curll, Edmund 122–3, 139, 144 Curry, Patrick 99 Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England 9, 194–6 custom, manorial 6 customary law 7 Dacre, Leonard 25 Dacre family 34–5 Daily Telegraph 189 Dale Abbey (Derby.) 161 Dalton, Lawrence 38 Dalyvell, Robert 45 Danby, earl of, see Osborne, Thomas Danes 59, 60, 128, 136 Darcy, Sir Arthur 67 Darcy, Thomas, Lord Darcy (exec. 1537) 43, 65–8, 73, 75, 88, 94 Darius, Silvester 30 Darnall Park (Ches.) 104 Darnall Pool (Ches.) 104 Darnhall (Ches.) 113 Daunce, Elizabeth, wife of William Daunce, daughter of Thomas More 23 Daunce, William, of Cassiobury (Herts.) 23 Davenham (Ches.) 104, 114 Davenport, J. 185 Davies, Owen Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951 197 Davy, John 14, 19–20, 50 ‘Deadman’ 30, 42, 51, 80 Dean and Munday 151 Deane, Edmund 164, 165–6, 167, 168, 170 Spadacrene Anglica 164, 168 Dee, river 103, 105 Defoe, Daniel 169, 171, 172 Delamer, lord, see Booth, Henry Delamere, H. E. 152 Delamere, lord, see Cholmondeley, Thomas Delamere forest 11, 103, 104, 107, 108, 120, 126, 136, 142, 147, 149 Denbigh, lady, see Fielding, Elizabeth Denbighshire 126 Depeden, Sir John 161 Derby 151, 186 Derby, earl of, see Stanley, Edward Derby, Thomas 32 devil 86–7

Devonshire, dukes of, see Cavendish family Devoto, John 144, 156 Dicey, firm 142–3, 157 Dickens, Charles 152 Pickwick Papers 152 Dicson, William 32–3 Digby, George, lord Digby (d. 1677) 79 diplomatics 195 Discontented Married Man 77 Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland 153 Disney, Captain Henry 171 Diss (Norfolk) 151 Dissolution of the monasteries 91, 102, 104, 107, 112, 115 Dobson, John, vicar of Muston 35 Dodge, John, of Copes (Suffolk) 165 Domestick Intelligence 95 Done, John, of Utkinton 111 Donne, Ralph 108 Doomsday 56 Douglas, Mr, of Leeds 167 Dover (Kent) 31–2 harbour 32 Maisondieu 32 Drake, Francis 94, 187 Drayton, Michael 54, 103 Poly-Olbion 103 dream-books 188 Dringhouses (York) 94 Dropping Well 97, 160, 163, 165, 170–81, 183–5, 192–3; see also Knaresborough Drummond, William, of Hawthornden 59 Dryden, John 124 King Arthur, or The British Worthy 146 Dublin 151 Duck, Stephen 143 Dudley, John, earl of Warwick, duke of Northumberland (exec. 1553) 51 ‘dun cow’ prophecy 68 Dunbar 46 Dunbar, Patrick de, earl of Dunbar (called earl of March) 46, 58 Durham 33 archdeacon of (c. 1534) 70 Dussindale (Norfolk) 50 Dutch, Holland 95, 118, 128, 136 Dutch War, Second 96 Dutton, Laurence 113 Dutton, Ralph 113 ‘eagle’s chick’ 81 earthquake 190 254

INDEX East Anglia 4, 67, 69, 109 East Bradenham (Norfolk) 41 Eaton, Kendricke 111 eclipses 55 Eddisbury (Ches.) 106–7 Eddisbury hundred 104, 106–7, 108 Edinburgh 57, 62–3, 93, 106, 139 Edmund, earl of Cornwall 159–60 education 72, 196 Edward I, king of England 107, 108 Edward II, king of England 158 Edward III, king of England 161 Edward IV, king of England 15, 39, 75, 102 Edward VI, king of England 44, 48, 50–1, 56, 88, 89, 92, 94 Edward, prince of Wales, son of Henry VI 17 Edwards, John 17 ‘Egelred’, king 60 Egerton, Catherine, wife of Sir Philip Egerton, daughter of Piers Conway of Hendre (Flints.) 133 Egerton, Elizabeth, wife of John Egerton, daughter of Robert, viscount Cholmondeley 132, 136 Egerton, John, of Egerton and Oulton 116, 119, 132, 136 Egerton, Mary, wife of John Egerton of Egerton and Oulton, daughter of Thomas Cholmondeley (II) 116, 131 Egerton, Sir Philip (d. 1698) 133, 136 Egerton, Philip (d. 1727) 136 Egerton, Philip (d. 1762) 136 Elder, John 47 elections 3–4, 117, 121, 129, 133 Elizabeth I, queen of England 17, 24–5, 41, 54, 58, 88, 89–90, 94–5, 111, 112 Elizabeth, daughter of James VI/I 90 Elizabeth of York, queen of England 18, 110, 144 Ellenborough (Cumbria) 185 Elton, Geoffrey 27–8 Elviden, Lawrence 27 Engagement (1647) 80 Englefield, Lady Jane 182 English Civil War 2, 4, 8, 54, 75, 80, 81, 82, 88, 89, 90, 97, 117, 134, 149 Epistle (1548) 47–8 Erasmus Adages 73 Erceldoun, Thomas of, see Thomas Essex 30

Eure, Katherine, wife of Sir Ralph, daughter of William de Ayton (late 14C) 35 Eure, Ralph, son of William lord Eure 37 Eure, Sir Ralph 34–5, 37 Eure, Thomas, son of William lord Eure 37 Eure, William, lord Eure (d. 1548) 37 Eure family 34–7, 51 Evelyn, John 168 Evers, William 127–8 Examiner, The 125 Exclusion 76, 95, 97, 100, 117, 134, 138 Exeter (Devon) 19, 64, 118 Exeter, marquis of, see Courtenay, Henry Exeter, see of 28 Eyres, William 150–1 Fairfax, Sir Thomas 82 Fairfax, Thomas, Lord Fairfax (d. 1671) 54 Fairweather, Mrs, of York 165 Farnley Wood conspiracy 82 Fauconberg, Lord, see Belasis, Thomas Faustus, Dr 186 Fayery, Robert, portcullis pursuivant 43–4, 52 Felde, Thomas, abbot of Burton 17, 18 Felton, Richard, prior of Malton 34 Fenianism 188 Feron, alias Ferne, Robert 29 Fewston (Yorks., WR) 160, 191–2 Fielding, Elizabeth, lady Denbigh (d. 1670) 82 Fielding, Henry 1, 141, 156 Tom Jones 141 The Tragedy of Tragedies 144 Fiennes, Celia 167, 168, 170–1, 179 Finney, Samuel 119 First World War 153, 179, 192, 193 Fisher, John, bishop of Rochester 91 Fitzhugh, Elizabeth, lady Fitzhugh (d. 1427), wife of Henry Fitzhugh 162 Fitzhugh, Henry, lord Fitzhugh (d. 1425) 162 FitzPatrick, Anne FitzRoy, countess of Upper Ossory (d. 1804) 146 Fitzroy, Henry, duke of Richmond 18 Flanders 21, 35, 43 Fleet prison 44 Fleming, William 119 Flemish 158 Fletcher, J. S. 157 Flintshire 110, 126 255

INDEX Flodden Field, battle of 86, 103 Flos, Toki 159 folksingers, folksong 6 Forrest, William 50 fortune-telling 187–8 Foster, John 72 Fotherley, Sir Thomas 119 Fountains Abbey (Yorks., WR) 176 Fox, Adam 6–7, 195 Foxe, John 56 Acts and Monuments 56 France, the French 3, 17, 18, 19, 25, 35, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48–9, 57, 65, 80, 85–6, 88, 96, 97, 101, 107, 109, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 142–3, 148, 160, 185, 196 ‘France and Flanders shall arise’ 35 franchise 3–4 Francis, dauphin/king of France 48–9 Frederick, elector palatine 90 Freefolk by Bray (Hants.) 17 Freeholder, The 126 French, John 166 York-shire spaw 166 French Revolution 146–7 Friedman, Jerome 10, 81–2 Furness Abbey (Lancs.) 32–3, 70 Furter, Michael 37 Gadbury, John 80 Gage, Colonel 120 Gage, Sir John 19 Gaillard, John Earnest with Edward Phillips, The Royal Chace, or, Merlin’s Cave 144 Gainford (co. Durham) 161 Gainsborough (Lincs.) 149 Gainsford, Anne 20 Galtresse, forest of (Yorks.) 40 Gardiner, Germaine 23 Gardiner, Stephen 23 Garencières, Theophilus 57 Garendon, abbot of (Leics.) 30 Gaveston, Piers 158 Gebons, Agnes, wife of William, sister of John Veysey, bishop of Exeter 28 Gebons, John 28 Gebons, Thomas 27–8 Gebons, Thomas, junior 28 gentry 33, 38–9, 41, 75 Geoffrey of Monmouth 16, 44, 50, 55, 80 George I, king of England 127, 129, 133, 134, 137

George II, king of England 136 as prince of Wales 136 George III, king of England 146 Gerard, Charles, earl of Macclesfield (d. 1694) 101, 118 Germany, Germans 25, 128, 136, 153 giants 106 Gibbon, Edward 145 Gilbert, Nicholas Alain 150 The Crown and Glory of Christianity 150 Gilbertines 33 Gilpin, William 172 Glasgow 59, 139 Glasgow university 47 ‘Gledesmore’, battle of 45 Glorious Revolution 2, 76, 97, 101, 117, 119–20, 126, 127, 149, 155 Gordon, Alexander Itinerarium Septentrionale 185 Gordon, Patrick 58–9, 139 Famous Historie of … Robert Surnamed the Bruce 58–9, 139 Graham, James, marquess of Montrose (exec. 1650) 149 Graham, Richard, Viscount Preston (d. 1695) 120 Grainge, William 191 Gramsci, Antonio 196 Granada 17 Granville, A. B. 177 Gray, Robert 147 Graythwaite (Lancs.) 33 Great Exhibition 189 Great Fire of London 83, 97 Great North Road 76, 186 ‘great tradition’ 5 Grebner, Paul 100 Greek language 164 Green Ribbon Club 95 Gregg, William 131 Gresham, Sir John 14, 19, 20 Gresty, John 150 Gresty and Burghall 150 Grey, Jane 89 Grey, Leonard 18 Grey, Thomas, marquis of Dorset (d. 1530) 18–19 Griffith, John 23 Grosvenor, Lettice, wife of Sir Richard Grosvenor 121 Grosvenor, Richard 121 Grosvenor, Sir Thomas 121 Gruffydd, Rhys ap (exec. 1531) 22–3, 45 256

INDEX Guinevere 21 Guisborough Priory (Yorks., NR) 36 Gunn, S. J. 2 Gunpowder Plot 90 Gybson, Thomas 21–2 gypsy 187 Hale, John 28–30, 42 Hales, Chistopher 32 Halidon Hill, battle of 46 Halifax (Yorks., WR) 151, 164 Halifax, Lord, see Montague, Charles Hallamshire 68 Halliwell, J. O. 154 Palatine Anthology 154 Ham House 165 Hamilton family 49 Hampsthwaite (Yorks., WR) 160 Hampton Court 154 Hanoverian dynasty 126, 127, 129, 131, 133, 141, 142, 143–4 Harbert, William A Prophesie of Cadwallader 53 Hareware, John, abbot of Vale Royal 112–14 Hareware, Nicholas 113–14 Hareware, Robert 114 Hareware, Roger 114 Hareware, William 114 Hargrove, Ely 173, 175 The Beauties of Harrogate and Knaresbro’ 173 History of Knaresborough 173, 176 Harington, Sir John 57 Harlequin 156 Harley, Robert 129 Harman, Thomas A Caueat for Commen Cursetors 84 Harper, R. C. 153 Harper, Richard 77, 78, 79 harpsichord 125 Harrington, John 33 Harris, Benjamin 95–7 Harris, Moses 156 Harris, Tim 2, 4 Harris, W. 95 Harrison, William 164 Harrison, William H. 78, 190 Harrogate (Yorks., WR) 163–5, 167, 168–72, 174–9, 185, 191, 192 St Mungo’s Well 165, 166, 167 Stray 163 Tewit Well 163–4, 170

Harvey, John A Discoursive Probleme Concerning Prophecies 80 Hassall, Richard 114 Hastings (Sussex) 188 Haukyns, John 100 Haverah Park (Yorks., WR) 167 Hawley, Thomas 44 Hawnby (Yorks., NR) 36 Head, Richard 76, 83–95, 97, 98, 106, 144, 157, 170, 183, 185, 187, 188, 189 The English Rogue 83–4 The Life and Death of Mother Shipton 83, 91, 95, 187, 189 Headless Cross (Ches.) 133 Healaugh (Yorks., WR) 161 Hebrew 164 HEMPE 57 Henry VI, king of England 3, 15, 18 Henry VII, king of England 14–18, 24, 45, 102, 108–10, 112, 144 as earl of Richmond 161 Henry VIII, king of England 10, 17, 18, 20–1, 24, 26, 27, 28–9, 30, 33, 34, 42, 43, 50, 57, 65, 68, 69, 75, 85, 88, 91, 110, 112, 113, 114 Henry, prince of Wales, son of James VI/I 57, 58, 90, 111 heptarchy 57 heralds 3, 43–4 Hermitage, Richmond Palace Gardens 143–4 Heron, Giles 23 Heron, John 23 Hertford, earl of, see Seymour, Edward Hervey, Catherine, wife of Henry Hervey 137 Hervey, Henry 137 Hervey, John, earl of Bristol 137 Heslerton (Yorks., ER) 82 Heywood, Joan, wife of John, daughter of John Rastell 23 Heywood, John 23 Heywood, Oliver 168 Heywood, Thomas The Life of Merlin 55 Heywood’s of Manchester 191 Higden, Ranulph 45, 107 Polychronicon 49, 60 High Church 138 Hill, Christopher 2 Hill, Richard 184 Hindley, Charles 145, 189–91, 193, 195 257

INDEX Hirst, Derek 3–4 Hoare, Sir Richard Colt 180 Hob Moor (York) 94, 184 Hobson, John 167 Hodgson, Orlando 151 Hodgson and Co. 151 Hogan, Anthony, of Great Dunham (Norfolk) 40 Hogan, Anthony, rector of East Bradenham and Necton 41 Hogan, Bridget, wife of Robert Hogan (d. 1532), daughter of Sir Richard Fowler of Hambledon (Bucks.) and Rycote (Oxon.) 41 Hogan, Henry 40 Hogan, John 41 Hogan, Ralph 40 Hogan, Robert, grandson of Robert (d. 1547) 41 Hogan, Robert, of East Bradenham (d. 1532) 39–40, 41 Hogan, Robert, of East Bradenham (d. 1547) 40–1, 51 Hogan, Susan, wife of Thomas Hogan, daughter of Sir Edward Echingham of Barsham (Suffolk) 41 Hogan, Thomas 41 Hogan, William 39 Hogan, William (1473) 39 Hogan family 39, 52 Hogan of East Bradenham family 39–40 Holcroft, John, junior 114 Holcroft, John, senior 114 Holcroft, Sir Thomas (d. 1620) 115 Holcroft, Thomas 108, 113, 114, 115 Holcroft, William 114 Holford (Ches.) 115 Holford, Christopher, of Holford 115 Holinshed, Raphael Chronicles 164 Holland, see Dutch Holland, earl of, see Rich, Henry Holled, Samuel 135 Holme, Randolph 119 Holmes, Randle 154 Holwell, John 96, 97 Catastrophe mundi 96 Holy Land 17, 160 Holy Roman Empire 96, 97 Holywell (Flints.) 170 Hoole, Barbara 174 A Season at Harrogate 174 A Week at Harrogate 174 Hopper, J. 151

Horbury (Yorks., WR) 65 Hornyold, John 51 horseracing 103 hospitals 160 Hotham, Sir John 82 Houghton, Peter 165 Hounslow, prior of 29 House of Commons 156 House of Lords 26, 76, 78, 182 Howard, Elizabeth, duchess of Norfolk (d. 1558) 30, 40 Howard, Henry, earl of Surrey (exec. 1546) 41 Howard, Lady Katherine 23 Howard, Thomas, 2nd duke of Norfolk (d. 1524) 23 Howard, Thomas, 3rd duke of Norfolk (d. 1554) 18, 23, 35, 37, 43 Howard, Thomas, 4th duke of Norfolk (exec. 1572) 25 Howard family 39, 41 Howe, G. 177, 183 Hoyh, Lady, of York 165 Huddersfield (Yorks., WR) 75 Hugh Lupus 106 Hull (Yorks., ER) 77, 151, 186 Hulton Abbey (Staffs.) 112–13 Humphery, Alderman 189 Hungerford (Berks.) 119 Hunmanby (Yorks., ER) 36 ‘hunt is up, the’ 41 hunting, shooting 111, 137, 159, 161, 178 Hunton, Dr 164 Hurlok, William 25, 27, 42 Hurst, Chance and Company 151 Hussee, John 29 Hussey, John, Lord Hussey (exec. 1537) 43 Hy Brasil 85 Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon (d. 1674) 119 Hyde, Laurence, earl of Rochester (d. 1711) 135 Ilchester (Som.) 27, 42 Illingworth, James 169 Illustrated Police News 190 images 89 inflation 3, 109 Ingilby family of Ripley 181 Ingram, Martin 4 Inner Temple 124 Innocent IV, pope 159 insanity 30

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INDEX Institution of a Christian Man 21 Interregnum 117 Ipswich (Suffolk) 91 IRA 153 Ireland, the Irish 17, 20, 44, 50, 90, 97, 101, 126, 140, 146, 153, 188 Ireland, John 23 Ireland, Roger 23 Irish nationalism 153 Iron Age 106 Irstead (Norfolk) 188 Isabella of Portugal 24 Isleworth (Middx.) 28–9 Islington (Middx.) 23 Italian language 164 Italy 17 Jack of Newbury 86 Jacobites 116, 117, 121, 124, 126, 127–8, 129, 131, 134, 136, 139, 141–2, 146, 183 James I, king of England 24 James II, king of England 96, 97, 116–20, 127, 128, 130, 132, 135, 136, 137, 168, 187 as duke of York 95, 96, 100, 101 James IV, king of Scotland 103 James V, king of Scotland 22, 45–6, 48 James VI/I 45, 48, 49, 54, 57–8, 59, 64, 90, 95, 102, 108, 110, 111–12, 131, 133, 145 Basilikon Doron 58 Jansen, Sharon 10 Jenney, William 39 Jenny, Christopher 34 Jerusalem 58 Jesuits 88 John, king of England 159, 179 John of Bridlington 16 John ‘of Gaunt’, duke of Lancaster 161 Johnson, Samuel 6, 100, 107 Johnson, W. S. 151 Jones, Richard 25 Jonson, Ben 54 Jowett, Herbert 192 Joye, George 56 Julius II, pope 17 Jupiter 100 ‘Kaber-rig plot’ 82 Kay, Sir John 183 Keach, Benjamin 100 Kearsley, George 156 Kendrick, James 141

Kent 30, 31 Keswick (Norfolk) 188 Kett, Robert 92, 109 Kilvert, Francis 151, 152 King, Daniel 107, 152 ‘King and the Cobbler, the’ 75 King’s Bench, court of 27 King’s Hall, Cambridge 29 Kingston, William 68 Kirby, R. S. 186 Kirkbride, Richard 25 Kirkby Overblow (Yorks., WR) 158 Kishlansky, Mark 4 kitchen, royal 39 Knaresborough (Yorks., WR) 11, 60, 67, 68, 70, 71, 157–61, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167–83, 185, 186, 191–2 castle 159–63 Dropping Well House 184 Fort Montagu 184 High Bridge 170 Long Walk 170, 174, 176, 181 Low Bridge 170 Short Walk 170, 181 Spittlecroft 160 Trinitarian friars 178 see also Dropping Well Knaresborough family of Ferrensby 181 Krefeld, battle of (1758) 143 Kynder, Philip 55 Lambert, François 21 Lambert, William 161 Lamberton, William, archbishop of St Andrews 45 Lancashire 25, 85, 105, 120, 139, 150, 166, 188 Lancaster, duchy of 67, 178 Lancaster, duke of, see John ‘of Gaunt’ Lancaster, earl of, see Thomas, earl of Lancaster Lancaster, Geoffrey 33–4 Lancaster herald 43 Lang, J. 151 Langdale, T. 175–6 Langdale, W. 175–6 Langdale, William 36–7, 38 Langley, William 36, 38 Larke, John 23 Lascelles, John 43 Laslett, Peter 10 ‘last world emperor’ 17, 59 Late Newes from the North 77 Latham, Gilbert 43 259

INDEX Latham, Thomas 119 Latimer, Hugh, bishop of Worcester 21 Latin 92, 164 latitudinarianism 99 Laud, William 90 Lawton, William 119 Laynam family 42, 52 Laynam the prophet 25, 43 Layng, William 35 Layton, Richard 19 lead 158 Lee, Rowland, bishop of Lichfield 28 Leeds (Yorks., WR) 63, 164, 168, 191, 192 corporation 191 Leeds Northern Railway 191 Leeds Priory (Kent) 32 leeks 111 Legate, Robert 32–3 legislation against prophecy 16 Leicester 68 Leigh, Egerton 154 Ballads and Legends of Cheshire 154 Leil, king 106 Leith 115 Leland, John 163, 165, 177 Lennox, earl of, see Stewart, Matthew Leo 100 lepers 160 Lesley, John, bishop of Ross 49 Leveridge, Richard 144 Lewes (Sussex) 19 Priory 19 Lewes, Charles Lee 156 Lewis, John 151 Hints on the Proposed Medical Reform 151 Liberal party 183 Lichfield (Staffs.) 114 Liefde, de 85 Liège 165 Lillicrap, Peter 84, 90–1 Lilly, William 55, 75, 79, 80–2, 92 Collection of Ancient and Modern Prophecies 80 Prophecy of the White King 80 World’s Catastrophe 55 Lincolnshire 9, 66, 67–8 Lincolnshire rebellion (1536) 66 Lindsay, Robert, of Pitscottie 50 L’Isle, Brian de 159 Lisle, viscount, see Plantagenet, Arthur Lisle family 19

Lister, Thomas 175 Poems Descriptive of Harrogate 175 ‘little tradition’ 5 Liverpool (Lancs.) 140, 151, 188 Livingstone, James, Lord Livingstone of Almond (d. 1674) 168 Llanbadarn Vawr (Radnors.) 112 Locke, John 100 Lollard 56, 73 Londesborough (Yorks., ER) 34 London 4, 22, 27, 34, 44, 45, 51, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68, 76–7, 78, 83, 85, 91, 93, 97, 104, 106, 117, 122, 126, 143, 147, 151, 153, 156, 164, 168, 177, 186; see also Ludgate; Tower of London London Bridge 62, 136 St James Garlick Hithe 62 underground railway 189 Long Meg of Westminster 85 Long Newton (co. Durham) 40 Long Parliament 89 Lord Chancellor (1546), see Wriothesley, Thomas lordship 3 Lovelich, Henry Merlin 54 Low Countries 57 Lowndes, Richard 60, 64, 76–7, 79 Ludgate 76 Ludington mill (Ches.) 132, 138 Lunsford, Colonel Thomas 78 lute 42 Luther, Martin 55–6 Lydiard Tregoze (Wilts.) 133–4 Lyndesey, Sir David ‘The Dreme’ 46 Lysons, Daniel 152, 153 Lysons, Samuel 152, 153 Lytton, Edward George Earle, Bulwer Lytton 178 Macclesfield, earl of, see Gerard, Charles Macclesfield forest (Ches.) 107 Machado, Roger, Richmond herald 44 Mackay, Charles 155 Extraordinary Popular Delusions 155 MacRitchie, William 172 magic 9 Mainwaring, Arthur 124–6 An Address to our Sovereign Lady 125 The History and Fall of the Conformity Bill 124 260

INDEX ‘The King of Hearts’ 124 A New Ballad: To the Tune of Fair Rosamund 125 Suum Cuique 124 ‘Tarquin and Tullia’ 124 Mainwaring, Sir Arthur 124 Mainwaring, Katherine, mother of Arthur Mainwaring, daughter of Thomas Cholmondeley of Vale Royal (II) 124 Mainwaring family 120 Mair, John 47, 53 Mallory, Thomas 111 Mallory family of Studley 181 Malory, Sir Thomas 54, 55 Malton (Yorks., NR) 34, 35, 38; see also New Malton, Old Malton Malton Priory 33–4, 37; see also Todde, William Manchester 150, 151 Hanging Bridge 150 Literary and Philosophical Society 151 Manners, John Henry, duke of Rutland (d. 1857) 180, 181, 183 Manton, Thomas 134 Manuel, king, of Portugal 184 manuscript culture, transmission 7, 121, 140–2, 187, 195 March, earl of, see Dunbar, Patrick de March, R., and Co. 188 Margaret of Burgundy 15 Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII 45 Marie, empress, of Russia 184 Market Weighton (Yorks., ER) 34 Marlborough, duchess of, see Churchill, Sarah Marprelate tracts 58 Marshall, Dr 24 ‘Marvels of Merlin’ 33 Mary I, queen of England 50–1, 88, 89, 92, 94, 114 marriage to Philip II of Spain 51 Mary II, queen of England 97, 124, 148 Mary, princess, daughter of Henry VIII 24 Mary, queen of Scots 48–9, 92, 167 Mary of Teck, queen, wife of George V 184, 193 mask moth 156 mass 89 Matilda, queen of England 91 Maurice, Sir William 48 Maxwell, Ann 83–4, 90–1 Maxwell, David 84, 90 Mayerne, Sir Theodore 168

McDonald, D., junior 151 Mede, Joseph 56 medicine 21, 27, 164–6 Medley, The 125 Melancthon, Philipp 55–6 Melrose 186 Melville, Andrew 57 Mercians 106 Mercurin de Gattinara 24 Merlin 1, 7, 11, 21–2, 24, 28, 29, 35, 36, 44, 49, 50, 53–5, 57, 59, 99, 116, 130, 139, 143–4, 145–6, 147, 155, 194, 195 Ambrosius 16 Silvester 16 Merlin, prose 54 ‘Merlin’s Cave’, Richmond Palace Gardens 143–4, 156 Merrifield, John 96 Mersey, river 105 Merton Priory (Surrey) 91 meteor 96 meteorology 193 Methley (Yorks., WR) 164 Methodius, pseudo- 34–5, 37, 38, 51 Middle Temple 71, 121 Middlesex 91 Middleton, Colonel Thomas 83 Middleton, Thomas A Chaste Maid in Cheapside 85 milkmaids 6 millenarianism, millennium 3, 17, 56, 100, 147 Minnes, Sir Christopher, see Myngs Minshull, Richard 119 Minshull, Thomas 119 Minshull, William 148, 150–1 mise 110 Mitton, Robert 178 Mohun, Michael 147 Moine, Henry 186 Molineux, John 24 Molyneux, Caryll, Viscount Molyneux (d. 1700) 120 Mompesson, Alice 42 Mompesson, Edmund 42 Mompesson, John 42 Mompesson, Thomas 42, 43 Mompesson of Bathampton family 42 Mondrem forest (Ches.), see Delamere forest Monipennie, John Abridgement or Summarie of the Scots Chronicles 58

261

INDEX Montague, Charles, Lord Halifax (d. 1715) 129 Montague, lord, see Pole, Henry Montrose, marquess of, see Graham, James More, Sir Thomas 23, 85 Mores (York bookseller) 73 Morning-star out of the North, The 99–100 Morrill, John 8 Morrison, Richard James (alias Zadkiel) 189 Morte Darthur 146 ‘Mother Bunch’ 151, 186 ‘Mother Osborne’ 156 Mother Shipton 1, 7, 9, 11, 12, 53, 60–9, 73–83, 85–98, 102, 104, 106, 116, 143–4, 145, 153, 155, 156–7, 170–81, 183–93, 194, 195, 196 Mother Shipton moth (Callistege Mi) 156 Mother Shipton Triumphant 156 ‘Mother Shipton’s Wish’ 156 Moulton (Ches.) 114 Moushold Heath (Norfolk) 50 Mozley, Henry 149 Müntzer, Thomas 55 Murray, John 153 Musselburgh Field, battle of 48 Muston (Yorks., ER) 35 Myngs, Sir Christopher (alias Minnes) 84–5 Nantwich (Ches.) 127, 132 Narcliff, Lady, of Chelsea 133 National Health Service 179 navy 83 Naylor, Peter 119 Neile, Richard, archbishop of York 182 Ness, Christopher 101 Neville, Sir Edward 23 Neville, Sir John, of the Chevet (Yorks., WR) 30–1 Neville, Sir Thomas, son of George, Lord Bergavenny 31 Neville, William, son of John, Lord Latimer 25 New Malton (Yorks., NR) 35 Newark on Trent (Notts.) 164 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 37, 60, 64, 186 Observant Friary 37 Newcastle, duke of, see Pelham, Henry Newcastle-under-Lyme (Staffs.) 118 Newgate prison 95 newspapers 177, 193, 196 Newton, Humphey 103 Newtonian science 144

Nicolson, William 171 Nidd (Yorks., WR) 161 Nidd, river 163, 170, 172, 178, 179, 180–1, 184, 191 Nidderdale 158 Nightingale, Richard 113 Nixon 1, 7, 9, 11, 12, 88, 98, 102–9, 111, 116–17, 119–23, 126–8, 130–5, 137, 139, 140–1, 143, 145–8, 150–6, 157, 186, 190, 194, 195, 196 Noble, Francis 156 Noble, John 156 nonconformity 138, 183 Norfolk 40, 152 Norfolk, duke of, see Howard, Thomas Norman Conquest 107 Normans 59, 60, 159 North Foreland, battle of 85 North Sea 73 Northallerton (Yorks., NR) 45 northern star 96 Northfleet (Kent) 29 Northmoor (Oxon.) 29 Northumberland, countess of, see Percy, Catherine (d. 1542) Northumberland, duke of, see Dudley, John Northumberland, earl of, see Percy, Henry (d. 1527); Percy, Thomas (d. 1537); Percy, Thomas (exec. 1572) Northwich (Ches.) 104 Norton Priory/Abbey (Ches.) 104, 105 Norway 36 Norwich 40, 64, 188 Nostradamus 56, 101, 120, 130, 153 Notes and Queries 189 Nottingham 79, 119 Nottinghamshire 31 nurse 144 Oeclampadius, John 56 Ogden, Samuel 147 Old Malton (Yorks., ER) 35 Oldfield, Anne 125 Oldmixon, John 110, 123–4, 125–8, 129, 130, 131–5, 137–40, 145–6, 149 Arcana Gallica 126 The Dutch Barrier Our’s 125 False Steps of the Ministry 126 History of Addresses 123 The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Mainwaring, Esq. 125 262

INDEX Memoirs of Ireland 126 Memoirs of North-Britain 126 The Secret History of Europe 125 Opera of Operas, The 143–4 oral culture 6, 7, 75, 82, 121, 140, 141–2, 186–8, 191–2, 195 Orange, house of 96, 148–9 Orchard-Wyndham (Som.) 185 Ormerod, George 152, 153 Osborne, Thomas, earl of Danby (d. 1712) 168 Osiander, Andreas 55–6 Oswald, minister of Trinitarians of Knaresborough 162 Otley (Yorks., WR) 191 Ottomans 17 Oulton mill (Ches.) 132, 133 Oundle (Northants.) 79 Ouse, river 63 Ouseley, Ralph 186 Ouseley, Sir William 186 Over (Ches.) 104, 105, 107, 108, 154 Oversole, Richard 45 Oxford 72, 164 Oxford, earl of, see Vere, John de Oxford university 124; see also Cardinal College Page, Richard 69 Paicock, John 36 Paicock, Michael 36 palatinate, see Cheshire palmistry 187 Pannal (Yorks., WR) 160 pantomime 144 papacy 25, 44, 56–7, 59, 79, 88–9, 94, 100 Paris 164 Parker, Martin 78 Parker, Matthew 43 parliament 16, 26, 31, 70, 77, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 153, 182, 183 Partridge (Tom Jones) 141 Partridge, John 99, 102, 130, 132, 195 Passenger, T. 84 Paston family 39 Pateley Bridge (Yorks., NR) 181 patriarchy 7 Patrick, Simon, bishop of Chichester and Ely 128–9, 135 Patten, William 48, 50 Paul V, pope 166 peasantry 3, 32 Peckforton, George 138 Peckforton Hall (Ches.) 138

Peckforton mill (Ches.) 132, 138 Pele, Roger, abbot of Furness 32–3 Pelham, Henry, duke of Newcastle (d. 1864) 162 Pennant, Thomas 172, 180 Penrith (Cumbria) 151 Pepys, Samuel 1, 83 Percy, Catherine, countess of Northumberland (d. 1542), wife of Henry Percy 161 Percy, Henry, earl of Northumberland (d. 1527) 34, 161 Percy, Henry, earl of Northumberland (d. 1537) 66–7 Percy, Mary 182 Percy, Thomas 12 Percy, Thomas, earl of Northumberland (exec. 1572) 12, 65, 66, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 80, 88, 94 Percy family 34, 36, 68, 182 Perkynson, Thomas 103 Perth 59 Peterborough cathedral 50, 92 Phillips, Edward and John Earnest Gaillard, The Royal Chace, or, Merlin’s Cave 144 Pickhill (Yorks., NR) 191 Picts 59 Pilgrimage of Grace 3, 11, 32–4, 35–6, 43, 66, 113 Pilgrim’s Tale, The 22 Pinkie, battle of (1547) 48 Piozzi, Hester Lynch, Mrs 147 Pitt, James 156 Plantagenet, Arthur, Viscount Lisle 29 Plantagenet, Richard, duke of York 137 playing cards 187 Plumpton, Agnes 162 Plumpton, Robert 162 Plumpton family of Plumpton 181 Pocklington (Yorks., ER) 34 Pococke, Richard, bishop of Meath/Ossory 171, 183 poetry 103 Pole, Henry, lord Montague (exec. 1539) 23 Pole, Reginald, Cardinal 23, 89 poll tax 158 Pollard, Richard 19 Pontefract (‘Pomfret’) (Yorks., WR) honour 62–3, 67 Poole, John 150 Poole, M. 150 263

INDEX Poole, Thomas, junior 150 Poole, Thomas, senior 150 poor 85 pope 30; see also Alexander IV, Clement VII, Julius II, Paul V Pope, Alexander Windsor-Forest 102, 131 Popish Plot 96 Popley, Thomas 162 population increase 109 Portcullis pursuivant, see Fayery, Robert 44 postcards 184 Poulett, George 20 Powell, George The Treacherous Brothers 93 Powell, Ted 5 preachers, preaching 5 prehistory 172 Presbyterianism 89, 95, 134 Preston (Lancs.) 126 Preston, viscount, see Graham, Richard ‘Pretender, old’, ‘young’, see Stuart, Charles Edward; Stuart, James Francis Edward Priestley, Joseph History and Present State of Electricity 151 Prince (ship) 83 print, printing 5–6, 21–2, 38, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 122, 125, 140, 150–1, 162, 180, 185–92, 195 proclamation 3, 37, 78 prognostications 43, 55, 57 Prophecy of the eagle 16 prophesying (speaking/interpreting word of God) 10–11 prophesyings 87 Protestant Petition (1681) 95 Protestantism 4, 10, 22, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 73, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95, 97, 100, 128, 132, 140, 147, 181–2 Pym, John 76 Pynson, Richard 162 Rackstow’s Museum, Fleet St 186 Radcliffe, Robert, earl of Sussex (d. 1542) 66 railways 153, 178, 189, 191 Raine, James 37 Ralph, Trinitarian friar 159 Rastell, John 23 rationalism 116, 155, 194–5, 197

Rawdon, Marmaduke 166, 168, 170 Rawlinson, William 32–3 Ray, John 166, 168, 170, 179 Rayner, Simeon 189 recusancy 182 Redhouse (Yorks., WR) 182 Reformation 5, 7, 11, 23, 33, 94 Regiomontanus 56 regionalism 1, 8, 194 reindeer 186 religion 5 reservoirs 191 Restoration 76, 81, 82, 88, 90, 94, 95, 99, 134, 149 Revelation 56 Rhymer, Thomas the, see Thomas Ribble, river 142 Rich, Henry, earl of Holland (exec. 1649) 168 Rich, John 144 Richard, Lewis ap 19 Richard III, king of England 62, 102, 109–10, 137, 161 Richard of Cornwall 159–60 Richardson, Thomas 151 Richmond, archdeaconry of 162 Richmond, duke of, see Fitzroy, Henry Richmond, earl of, see Henry VII Richmond herald, see Machado, Roger Richmond Palace 143–4 rickets 166–7 Ridley Pool (Ches.) 104 Rimbault, Edward 190 Riot Act 129 Ripley 158 Ripon (Yorks., WR) 70, 161, 173, 175, 181 Roberts, James 122–3 Robertson, Bell 6 Robin Hood 11–12, 159 Robinson, Jacob 156 Rochester, earl of, see Hyde, Laurence Roman remains 172, 185 romance 6 Rome 121 Rome, see papacy Ros family 184 ‘Rosamond’s pool’, St James’s Park 138 Roscarrock, Nicolas 181 Rose tavern, Newgate 44 Ross family/Roos family 94 Rosse, Stephen 35 Rothwell (Yorks., WR) 66 Rous, John 60 264

INDEX Rowley, William 57 Birth of Merlin 57, 97 Royal Society 171 Rudston (Yorks., ER) 36 Runcorn (Ches.) 153 Runcorn, Thomas 114 Rupert, prince 83 Russell, John, lord Russell (d. 1555) 37 Russell, William, earl/duke of Bedford (d. 1700) 135 Rutland, duke of, see Manners, John Henry Rymer, Thomas 176 Foedera 176 Sacheverell, Henry 125, 129 Sadler, Mrs, daughter of Sir Edward Coke 165 St Andrews university 47 St Ann 166 St Augustine 55 St Bartholomew’s Hospital 164 St Brigitta 16 St David’s Day 111 St John, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Walter St John 135 St John, Henry, viscount Bolingbroke, earl of Bolingbroke (d. 1751) 134 St John, Johanna, daughter of Oliver St John, wife of Sir Walter St John 134 St John, Lady, of Battersea 133 St John, Sir Walter 116, 132, 133, 134–5 St Katherine’s Hospital by the Tower 43 St Maurice Abbey (Vienne, Burgundy) 139 St Oswald’s Hospital, Worcester 29 St Osyth (Essex) 39 St Patrick’s purgatory 20 St Paul’s cathedral 44, 88 St Paul’s church, Covent Garden 135 St Robert of Knaresborough 159, 161–2, 165, 179, 180–1, 192 Saint Stephen’s Tripod 156 St Thomas a Becket 21 Salisbury (Wilts.) 64, 118 salt 104 Saltmarsh, John 82 Saltonstall, Wye Complaint of Time against the . . . Scots (1639) 77 Salvan, Lady Anne 70 Sandwich (Kent) 32 Sandys, Windsor 83

Sangreal 153 Saturn 100 Savage, Sir John, the younger 109, 110 Saxons 15, 57, 60, 106 Scarborough (Yorks., NR) 35–6, 37, 70, 158, 168–9, 178 Carmelite Friary (Whitefriars) 35, 36, 37, 38 Castle 35–6, 158 Dominican Friary (Blackfriars) 35, 37 Franciscan Friary (Greyfriars) 35, 37, 38 St Mary’s Church 38 scepticism 57, 99, 146–7, 153–5, 170, 176, 177–8, 190, 192 science 143 Scotland, Scots 6, 25, 30, 31, 37, 45–50, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 73, 75, 78, 80, 81, 82, 89, 101, 103, 111, 115, 126, 139, 146, 149, 153, 160, 168, 171, 177, 186 Union with England 187 Scott, Alexander 48 Scott, J. 186 Scott, James, duke of Monmouth 117–18 Scottish Nationalist Party 153 Scriven (Yorks., WR) 183 Scrope, Richard, of Castlecombe (Wilts.) 31 Scrope, Stephen 31 Scudamore, John, viscount Scudamore (d. 1671) 83 sculpture 69 ‘Seton field’ (interpreted at Pinkie, 1547) 48 sexual politics 4 Seymour, Edward, earl of Hertford, duke of Somerset (exec. 1552) 20, 47–8, 50 Seymour, Elizabeth, duchess of Somerset (d. 1722) 99–100, 101 Seymour, Jane, queen of England 43, 44 Seymour family 165 Shagan, Ethan 5, 6 Shakerley, Peter 119, 120 Shakespeare, William 57 King Lear 57 Sheldon, Gilbert 147 Sheriff Hutton, lordship of (Yorks., NR) 40 castle 61–3 Shipton, Mother, see Mother Shipton Shipton, Tobias 175 Shish, John 137 265

INDEX Shrewsbury, duke of, see Talbot, Charles Shrewsbury, earl of, see Talbot, Francis; Talbot, George Shropshire 148, 150, 153 Simpson, J. W. 184 Sims, George 190 Singleton, Robert 22, 32 Skeat, Walter W. 189, 195 Skelton, John 40 Skelton in Overton (Yorks., NR) 71 Skipton (Yorks., WR) 68 Skydmore, Thomas 29, 42 Slanye, Richard 32, 45 Slingsby, Anne, daughter of Henry Slingsby (I) 182 Slingsby, C. H. R. 184 Slingsby, Charles 170 Slingsby, Sir Charles 176 Slingsby, Frances, wife of Henry Slingsby (I), daughter of William Vavasour of Weston 182 Slingsby, Francis 71, 181–2 Slingsby, Gylford 71 Slingsby, Henry (I), son of Francis 158, 182 Slingsby, Henry (II) 60, 180–3 Slingsby, Sir Henry (III), son of Sir Thomas 166, 170, 181, 183 Slingsby, Mary, wife of Francis Slingsby 182 Slingsby, Savile 170 Slingsby, Sir Thomas (d. 1726), son of Henry (II) 182–3 Slingsby, Sir Thomas Turner 181, 183 Slingsby, Thomas 163 Slingsby, William, discoverer of the Tewit Well 71, 163, 166, 182 Slingsby family 71, 166, 180–1 Smith, G. 77 Smith, Joshua 75 Smithfield 27, 88 Smollett, Tobias 171 Smyth, Richard 27 Snagg, R. 145 Snaith (Yorks., WR) 67 soap 188 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 193 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge 135 Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-onTyne 176 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 176 Sockburn (co. Durham) 36

Somers, John, Lord Somers (d. 1716) 124 Somerset, duke of, see Seymour, Edward, duke of Somerset Song of the Lady Bessy, The 110 Southerne, Thomas 124 Southwark (London) 95 Southwark, great fire of 96 Southwell, Sir Richard 41 Southwell, Sir Robert 31 Spa 163, 165, 167 Spain, the Spanish 17, 21, 24, 57, 79, 187 Speck, Bill 4 Spenser, Edmund 54 The Faerie Queene 54 Spiritualist, The 190 Spofforth (Yorks., WR) 67, 158, 181 springs 163 Spufford, Margaret 6 Stafford, Sir Henry 161 stag 186 Staincross wapentake (Yorks.) 67 Stanhope, Sir Edward 164, 165 Stanhope, Lady Katherine 165 Stanhope, Michael 164–5, 166, 167 News out of Yorkshire 164–5 Stanhope, Sir Michael 165 Stanhope, Philip, Lord Stanhope (d. 1656) 165 Stanley, Charlotte, countess of Derby (d. 1664) 112 Stanley, Edward, earl of Derby (d. 1572) 66 Stanley, Thomas, Lord Stanley (d. 1504) 109 Stanley, William, earl of Derby (d. 1702) 118, 120 Stanley family 109 Stapleton, Sir Brian 31 Stapleton, Richard 36–7, 38 Star Chamber 70, 113 stationers 72 Stationers’ Company 122, 145 Stewart, Alexander, duke of Albany (d. 1485) 45 Stewart, Matthew, earl of Lennox (d. 1571) 48 Stilton (Cambs.) 186 Crown and Woolpack Inn 186 Stirling 49, 59 Stoke by Clare College (Suffolk) 43 Stoke Field, battle of 103 Stokesley, John, bishop of London 27 Strafford, earl of, see Wentworth, Thomas Strickland, Sir Walter William 192 266

INDEX Stroud, Joseph 119 Stuart, Charles Edward, the ‘Young Pretender’ 139 Stuart, house of 96, 121 Stuart, James Francis Edward, the ‘Old Pretender’ 122, 126, 134, 140 Studley Park (Yorks., WR) 172 Stuteville, William de 159 succession 45, 48–9 Suffolk 60 Suffolk, duke of, see Brandon, Charles Sun, The 188–9 superstition 9, 155, 165 Surgeons, Corporation of 151 Surrey, earl of, see Howard, Henry Surtees Society 187 Sussex 6, 19 Sussex, earl of, see Radcliffe, Robert, earl of Sussex Sutton Coldfield (War.) 27 Sutton Valence (Kent) 29 Swaffham (Norfolk) 41 sweating sickness 66 Sweden, Swedes 136 Swift, Jonathan 99–100, 101–2, 130, 143, 195 The Conduct of the Allies 125 Famous Prediction of Merlin 99 Miscellany 99 ‘Windsor prophecy’ 99–100, 101 Swindells, Alice 150–1 Swindells, G. 150–1 Swindells, J. 150–1 Swinesco (in Knaresborough; Yorks., WR) 159 Syms, Christopher 81–2 Syon monastery (Middx.) 29 Syriac language 164 Tadcaster (Yorks., WR) 191 Tailboys, Elizabeth Lady 18 Talbot, Charles, duke of Shrewsbury (d. 1718) 135 Talbot, Francis, 5th earl of Shrewsbury (d. 1590) 70 Talbot, George, 4th earl of Shrewsbury (d. 1538) 113 Talbot family 68 Tankard family of Boroughbridge 181 Taylor, J. 189 Taylor, Joseph 171, 180 tea leaves 187 Temple Hirst (Yorks., WR) 67

Temple Newsam (Yorks., WR) 48, 66, 67 Terry, Samuel 140 textiles 158 Thackeray, W. 92 Thames, river 62, 96 theatre 93, 143, 147, 188 theosophy 192 Thetford (Norfolk) 41 Thetford Priory 40 Thirsk (Yorks., NR) 70 Thomas, earl of Lancaster 158 Thomas, Keith 1, 9, 11, 99, 145 Thomas of Erceldoun, alias the Rhymer 11, 35, 45–7, 49–50, 57–8, 59, 80, 103, 139 Thomason, George 78, 79, 81, 82 Thompson, Thomas 83–4 The Life of Mother Shipton 83–4, 85 Thomson, R. S. 6 Thoresby, John 169 Thoresby, Ralph 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 179 Thorner (Yorks., WR) 160–1 Thornton MS (Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91) 46 Thwaytes, William 34 Thynne, William 40 Tilson, Samuel 184 Tinsley, William 192, 193 tobacco 79 Todde, William, prior of Malton 33–4, 37, 38 Toki Flos, see Flos, Toki Tompson, John 32 Tonge, Ezerel 100 Tonstall, George 169 Topp, Barbara, daughter of Sir Walter St John, wife of Sir John Topp 135 Tory party 100, 116, 117–18, 121, 124, 125, 167, 183 tourism 158, 171, 178–9, 184–5 Tower of London 29, 30, 39, 68, 78 Towneley cycle of plays 65 Townshend, Charles, viscount Townshend (d. 1738) 130 townsmen 38–9 Trahinier, Jean 130 treason 23, 27, 30, 32, 44, 165 Trithemius 153 Trowbridge (Wilts.) 43 True Cross 50 Truswell, Mr 101 Tuckett, John 187 Turks 17, 25, 59

267

INDEX Turner, William 163 Tushingham, John 150 Two Strange Prophecies 77, 79 Tyrrel, J. 156 Ulleskelfe-on-the-Wharfe (Yorks., WR) 191 Upper Ossory, countess of, see FitzPatrick, Anne FitzRoy Usher, James 100 Utkinton (Ches.) 138 Uvedale, William, of Wickham 16 V., T. 79 vagabonds 85 Vale Royal 102, 108, 111–12, 114, 115, 120, 122, 128, 129, 134, 136, 142, 145, 147, 148, 152, 154 Abbey 104, 105, 107–8, 110, 112–13, 114 abbot 107 Valor Ecclesiasticus 160 Vavasour, Lady Mary, wife of Sir Thomas, daughter of John Dodge of Copes (Suffolk) 165 Vavasour, Sir Thomas 165 Vavasour, Sir Walter, of Haslewood 183 Ven, Christopher 36 Vere, John de, earl of Oxford (d. 1513) 39 Vergil, Polydore 15, 53 Vernon, Elizabeth, wife of Sir Thomas Vernon of Hodnet, daughter of Thomas Cholmondeley (II) 116 Veysey, Christopher 28 Veysey, John, bishop of Exeter 27–8 Victoria, princess royal 184 Vienna 96 Vikings 106 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham (d. 1628) 90, 148 Villiers, Katherine, duchess of Buckingham (d. 1649) 165 Vincent, David 155 Wakefield (Yorks., WR) 65 Walbran, John Richard 176 Pictorial Guide to Ripon and Harrogate 176 Waldegrave, Robert 57 Wales, the Welsh 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 44, 45, 50, 55, 103, 149 principality 110, 137 Welsh language 111, 149

Walker, Joshua 178 Essay on the Waters of Harrowgate 178 Wall, Thomas, Windsor herald 44 Wallop, Sir John 20 Walpole, Horace 1, 141, 146 Walpole, Robert, earl of Orford (d. 1745) 130 Walsh, Sir Walter 67 Walter, brother of St Robert of Knaresborough 159 Warbeck, Perkin 15, 16 Warburton, John 119 Warburton, Thomas 119 Warminster (Wilts.) 42, 105 Warrington 150 Academy 151 Wars of the Roses 152 Warton, William 24 Warwick, earl of, see Dudley, John Warwickshire 8 Washburn, river/valley 158, 191 Waterton, Alice, wife of Thomas Waterton, daughter of Henry Slingsby (I) 182 Waterton, Thomas 182 Watt, Tessa 4, 5–6 Watts, John 5 waxworks 186 weather prediction 193 Weaver, river 103, 127 Weaverham (Ches.) 113–14 Weaverthorpe (Yorks., ER) 34, 35 Webb, William 103, 154 well 103 ‘Wellome’ (?Yorks., ER) 34 Wells, deanery of 101 Welsh marches 119 Wendon, Ralph 27–8 Wentworth, Thomas, earl of Strafford (exec. 1641) 90, 165 Wentworth, Sir Thomas 67 Wentworth, Sir William 165 Werden, Robert 119 West Acre Priory (Norfolk) 41 West Indies 79 West Midlands 106 Westminster 19, 113 Westminster Abbey 23, 135, 186 Westminster palace 40 Westmorland 33, 34, 35 Weston, William 42 Wetherby (Yorks., WR) 63 Whalley, John 31 Wharfe, river 63 268

INDEX Wheater, W. K. 177 Knaresborough and its Rulers 177 Whetnall, George 31 Whetnall, William 31 Whig Examiner, The 125 Whig history 2 Whig party 100, 101, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124–5, 126, 129, 134, 135, 136, 140, 183 Whitby Abbey (Yorks., NR) 37 White, William 177 ‘white king’ 75, 80–1 Whitegate (Ches.) 104, 108, 111 Whitehall 75 Whixley (Yorks., WR) 160–1 Whole Prophesie of Scotland . . . 57–8, 61 Widdrington, William 137 Widnes (Ches.) 153 Wilbraham, Frances 152 For and Against 152 Wilkes, John North Briton 156 William III, ‘of Orange’, king of England 97, 117, 118–19, 124, 148 William the Conqueror, king of England 106 Willoughby, Sir Thomas CJCP 31 Wilson, G. H. 155 Wonderful Characters 155 Wiltshire 42, 151, 152 Wimborne Minster (Dorset) 42 Winchester (Hants.) 15 Winchester College 29 ‘Windle Pool’ (Ches.) 104 Windsor herald, see Wall, Thomas Wingham (Kent) 29 Wirral (Ches.) 105 Wirral forest (Ches.) 107 Witchcraft Act (1736) 156 witches, witchcraft 10, 74, 85–7, 144, 156, 188 Withers, Fabian 100 Wittie, Robert 169 Wogan, Sir John 40 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal 12, 18–19, 34, 42, 60–1, 65, 66–9, 73, 74, 75, 82, 87, 88, 91, 94, 187 Wolvele, William de 160 women 11 ‘Woodman, old’ 127, 128 Woodnesborough (Kent) 31–2, 45 Woodshawe, Thomas 110 Woodville family 16

Elizabeth, queen of England 16 wool 69 Worcester 15 Worde, Wynkyn de 162 Wordsworth, Christopher, bishop of Lincoln 190 working class 155 Wressle (Yorks., ER) 67 Wright, John 119 Wrightson, Keith 7 Wriothesley, Thomas 33, 44 Wyatt, George 20–1 Wygston, Roger 114 Wyntoun, Andrew 46 yeomen 3, 33, 39 Yeovil (Som.) 190 York 11, 12, 60–6, 68–73, 75–6, 78, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88, 93, 94, 157, 159, 163, 164, 165, 168, 186–7, 191 All Saints’ Church, North St 73 Augustinian Friary 37 Holgate 62–3 Holgate Bar 62, 73 Holy Trinity Church, Micklegate 62–4, 88, 94 King’s House 61, 157 Knavesmire 62–3 mayoralty 159, 165 Micklegate ward 94 Minster 63, 69, 72, 168 Monk Bar 62, 73 Ouse Bridge 62–4, 72, 73, 88, 94 Petergate 62 St Crux Church, Pavement 62, 65 St Mary Bishophill Junior 62–3 St Peter’s Abbey 184 Stokton Moor 62–4 walls 62, 73 Walmgate Bar 62, 73 Yorkshire Museum 184 York, archbishop of 63 York and North Midland Railway 191 Yorke family of Gouthwaite 181 Yorkshire 31, 33, 50, 64, 67, 72, 73, 77, 78, 87, 94, 103, 105, 106, 157, 164, 168, 174, 177, 186, 192, 194, 197 Yorkshire Notes and Queries 192 Yoye, John 36 Zadkiel (alias Richard James Morrison) 189

269

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Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England

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Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

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Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

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Women, Crime And The Courts In Early Modern England

The Idolatrous Eye : Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England

Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England

Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England

Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England

Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England

The politics of courtly dancing in early modern England

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

Women and Property: In Early Modern England

Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England

Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England

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Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Violence, Politics, and Gender in Early Modern England (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England

Women In Early Modern England, 1500-1700

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Documents of Performance in Early Modern England

Plague Writing in Early Modern England

Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period

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