ENGLAND’S LOST EDEN

Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

PHILIP HOARE

DEDICATION

For Mark

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Prologue: A place of royal death

PART I: Green and Pleasant Land

1 A Voice in the Wilderness

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

2 Turning the World Upside-Down

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

3 Human Nature

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

PART II O Clouds Unfold!

4 The Walworth Jumpers

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

5 The New Forest Shakers

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

6 The Dark and Trying Hour

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

PART III Arrows of Desire

7 The Sphere of Love

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

8 The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

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

9 The Names of Butterflies

Rose La Touche, Broadlands & the spirits

PART IV The Countenance Divine

10 This Muddy Eden

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

11 Mr Peterson’s Tower

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

12 The Close of the Dispensation

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

PART V A New Jerusalem

13 In Borderland

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

14 Resurgam

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

Epilogue: The forest once more

Source and Bibliographical Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAP

PROLOGUE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART ONE

Green and Pleasant Land

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

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone

Dante, The Divine Comedy

ONE

A Voice in the Wilderness

I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,

‘Make straight the way of the Lord’

John 1:23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are they friendly?’ I ask.

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

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

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

Once these fields echoed to one hundred and sixty-four men, women and children speaking in tongues and dancing in ecstatic rites, living celibate, communal lives as they awaited the millennium. Now there is nothing left to show for their utopian aspirations: no buildings, no books, no artefacts; nothing more than this small plastic sign. How could the memory of Mary Ann Girling and her Shakers have vanished so completely? Surely it is no coincidence that just a few fields away, that conspiratorial tower rises over the trees, wreathed in its own dumb mystery. But as I look around me, the bare grass of the quiet Hampshire churchyard gives nothing away.

The facts of Mary Ann’s early life are equally unrevealing. She was born on 27 April 1827 in a cottage at Little Glemham, a village in rural Suffolk, between Woodbridge and Aldeburgh. It is a faintly threatening landscape of corn fields and black crows, often over-lowered by rain clouds which sweep in from the east, streaking downwards as if to suck water from the sea and unload it over the unsuspecting countryside. Mary Ann’s family, the Cloutings, lived in a cottage on Tinkerbrook Lane, an undulating country road now empty of the slate-roofed cottages which once lined it, long since consumed by the expanding fields of modern farming. But it is still bounded on one side by the estate and substantial brick mansion of Glemham Hall, and on the other by the river Alde, which widens into marshland before it reaches the sea at Aldeburgh. There, on a shingle spit, stands a pillbox-like Martello tower – the northernmost link in a chain to defend against Napoleonic invasion which stretched along the shape-changing Orford Ness and down the English coast as far as Hampshire. In Mary Ann’s time, the houses of the fishing village of Slaughden clustered round the tower; but like its outer defences, they were long ago lost to the grey-brown waters of the German Sea.

Both Constable and Turner painted this watery landscape, but in the early nineteenth century the lives of Suffolk’s ‘wild amphibious race’ were also recorded by the ‘poet of the poor’, George Crabbe, whose verse discerned the grimness as well as the beauty of this countryside and its people. Crabbe practised as a surgeon in Aldeburgh, and was addicted to opium, but later became a curate and preached in Little Glemham’s parish church, St Andrew’s, its characteristic Suffolk flint-knapped square tower rising over the land and its porch painted in gothic letters, enjoining worshippers, ‘This is the Gate of the Lord’. Inside, a neo-classical chapel and a white marble statue still bear testament to the master of Glemham Hall, Dudley North, Crabbe’s patron. Crabbe made his name in London with the help of friends such as Edmund Burke and Charles Fox; but in 1810 he wrote The Borough, and its tale of ‘an old fisherman of Aldborough, while Mr Crabbe was practising there as a surgeon. He had a succession of apprentices from London, and a certain sum with each. As the boys all disappeared under circumstances of strong suspicion, the man was warned by some of the principal inhabitants, that if another followed in like manner, he should certainly be charged with murder’. The story of Peter Grimes – who, it was implied, violated his charges – would provide Benjamin Britten with his opera. Its author – whom the Cloutings may well have heard preach in St Andrew’s – died in 1832, leaving his son, John, to become vicar of Little Glemham in 1840.

Like the New Forest, this corner of England has its own peculiarities. Its bleak, rattling coast stretches from Lowestoft to Felixstowe, passing the drowned churches of Dunwich and the ominous concrete bulk of Sizewell’s nuclear reactor which towers over black clapboard cottages that look as though they were painted with pitch. In Mary Ann’s day, the landscape was studded with windmills and church towers, a scene described by M. R. James in ‘A Warning to the Curious’: ‘Marshes intersected by dykes to the south, recalling the early chapters of Great Expectations; flat fields to the north, merging into heath; heath, fire woods, and above all, gorse, inland’. James’ eerie story, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to you, My Lad’ – with its ghastly pursuer on the beach, ‘a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined’ – was set on this coastline; Dickens’ collaborator, Wilkie Collins, another writer of mysteries, used Aldeburgh for his novel, No Name. And up the river Deben at Woodbridge, Edward FitzGerald, translator of The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyám, lived as an eccentric recluse, sailing his yacht in a white feather boa, eating a vegetarian diet, and mourning the death of his young friend, William Browne.

Parts of the Suffolk coast remain the least populated in southern England, yet its emptiness is as deceptive as the New Forest’s heath. In 1827, the year in which Mary Ann was born, ‘seven or eight gentlemen from London’ descended on the burial mounds at Snape, taking ‘quantities of gold rings, brooches, chains, etc’ away after their excavations; a century later, in the 1930s, a Saxon treasure trove would be discovered at Sutton Hoo, on the outskirts of Woodbridge. More recently, a mysterious circle of upturned oaks, reaching down to the watery otherworld of the ancient Britons, was found on the shore. Later, medieval Christianity produced its prophets: Julian of Norwich, the mystic and anchoress who endured ‘showings’ in 1370; and Margery Kempe of Kings Lynn who, thirty years later, was inspired by visions to renounce the marital bed, fine clothes and meat for communion with Christ. Modern science would discern other symptoms in these phenomena, but to the faithful of the fourteenth century, they were signs of a metaphysical universe.

They may have been lowly, but the Cloutings could trace their Suffolk roots back to the age of Julian of Norwich, when Wilmo Clouting was born, in 1327. In the five hundred years since, the family had barely moved fifteen miles, from the villages of Laxfield, Stradbroke and Saxmundham, to Orford – where Mary Ann’s grandfather, William, was born in 1760 – then inland to Little Glemham, where her father, also named William, was born in 1804.

Born before Victoria ascended the throne, Mary Ann came into a very different world to the one she would leave six decades later. ‘It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then’, wrote William Makepeace Thackeray in 1860, looking back on his childhood. ‘Then was the old world. Stage-coaches … highwaymen, Druids, Ancient Britons … all these belong to the old period … We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.’ This often flooded corner of England was a remote, self-sufficient community in which lives were lived within themselves, as the reiteration of Suffolk surnames entered in the census and carved on village tombstones – Benham and Folkard, Todd and Barham, Girling and Clouting – suggest.

The Cloutings’ was certainly a crowded household. The first modern census, taken in 1841 when Mary Ann was fourteen, records that her father, William, and mother Emma (née Gibbs, and born in nearby Benhall), were then both thirty-five. Mary Ann had five younger brothers: John, aged twelve, Robert, ten, William, eight, Henry, six, and Charles, one; her only sister, Emma, was four. Later two more girls, Jane and Susan, would be born, along with another boy, Mark. They lived in a village of some sixty houses with a population of about three hundred, most of whose men were farm labourers like William Clouting, or blacksmiths, coachmen or wheelwrights. Like many such settlements, it had grown up in a haphazard fashion along the road, and its life centred around the parish church and its vicar, John Crabbe, the Red Lion Inn and its patrons, and the Norths of Glemham Hall; a semi-feudal existence which depended on a good harvest and the ability to pay the rent.

Yet even this rural backwater was moving into the modern world. In the ‘Hungry Forties’ of bad harvests and poverty, the People’s Charter for universal sufferage became an emblem of the stirring power of the working class. In 1845 the Chartists’ champion, Feargus O’Connor, set up small-holdings in which Shelley’s ‘helots of luxury’ could escape industrial tyranny and unemployment in a bid for self-sufficiency; at the same time, railways and new roads spread across the country and provided another network for social change. Meanwhile the Anglican church, despite a similar boom in construction, was threatened by an equivalent growth in nonconformism and a decline in belief. In March 1851, the first religious census held in Britain found that of a population of 17,927,609, fewer than half, 7,261,032, attended at Divine Service in chapels and churches; it was estimated that 5,288,294 people who could have gone to worship did not. While evangelism had touched the entire country in the 1830s, science would weaken orthodox religion. ‘It is said that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing,’ wrote W. H. Mallock in 1877. ‘One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying’.

Suffolk’s own Woodbridge Reporter noted, on the occasion of the laying of a foundation stone for a new Wesleyan chapel, that the town hardly lacked the ‘means for spiritual instruction. More than a century ago there dwelt in it Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and Sabbattarians, but whether these sects had any public accommodation for performing their religious duties … does not appear.’ Other eclectic beliefs had sprung up in East Anglia, such as the New Lights and the Old Lights, still there in the twentieth century, their black-bonneted adherents walking miles from outlying villages to spend the entire Sabbath day worshipping in their chapels. There were secular sects, too, such as the vegetarian colony which flourished in Stratford St Mary, near Ipswich, from 1848 to 1851, where cultivation of the land was combined with cultural pursuits and an interest in shorthand writing. But family memory indicates that the Cloutings were being drawn to Primitive Methodism, whose itinerant ministers were particularly active here; Mary Ann’s own younger brother Mark, a wheelwright, would become a preacher.

His sister, however – now a striking young woman, ‘impetuous, strong-willing and passionate, somewhat tall, and in figure well made’ – had had little education, and was said never to have read the Bible. She spent her early adolescence in domestic service to local families, and at a house on Woodbridge Road in Ipswich; later she learned the skills of a milliner and dressmaker, working for farmers’ wives and more well-to-do inhabitants of the district. Then, sometime in the 1850s, Mary Ann met – but apparently did not yet marry – George Stanton Girling.

Three years older than Mary Ann, George Girling was born in nearby Theberton, another small village, closer to the coast at Dunwich. His parents were menial, but if a photograph of his own son is any indication, he was a handsome man, and like others in the district, probably a ‘half and halfer’ – that is, he spent part of his time working on land, and part of it as a sailor. Perhaps that is one reason why they did not wed; or perhaps their union was recognised in some other, nonconformist fashion. While George was away at sea, Mary Ann continued to earn a living by dressmaking, but she seemed restless with her half-neglected married life, and ‘went forth in search of fresh and more congenial scenes’. Some reports claim that she made a living selling brandy and other spirits, ‘which she conveyed about surreptitiously, and of which she disposed as opportunity favoured’. Perhaps because of such less reputable interludes, there are great gaps in Mary Ann’s story – not least as self-told, or relayed second- or third-hand. What happened to her in the years between her meeting George and the beginning of her mission? Did she go to sea with him – perhaps even visit America, as some have suggested? Whatever course her life took until then, it was soon to alter in the most dramatic manner possible.

By now George Girling had become a fitter in an iron foundry in Ipswich, where the family name was and is well known: a 1920s edition of the Michelin Guide to Great Britain recommends the services of Girling & Dolan’s garage, and notes that the town was renowned for its agricultural implements. The company which employed George made ploughs, while traces of local history reveal other Girlings with occupations as disparate as farm labourers, police detectives and mariners. George and Mary Ann lived close to the docks in a terraced house on Arthur Street, with other iron fitters and mariners as neighbours; their daughter Mary Jane was born there on 6 September 1853. Two years later, at nearby Fore Street – one of Ipswich’s oldest thoroughfares, still partly lined with Tudor houses and then home to dressmakers, carpenters, pawnbrokers and makers of straw bonnets – Mary Ann had a son, William, on 27 December 1855. It was only on 2 May 1863 that the couple would be married, according to the rites of the Church of England, in Lowestoft – significantly not in their home town.

But these bare facts hide another story. It was claimed that Mary Ann had lost or miscarried several other children – one account puts the figure at as many as eight. Even in an age of high infant mortality this was unusual; and for some reason Mary Ann felt she was to blame. The bitter toll of dead infants turned her against religion, and for years she avoided any place of worship as melancholy overcame her. Then one day she went to a church – evidence suggests the great docklands parish church of St Clement’s, which towered over Fore Street and the river Orwell – and there heard words which comforted her soul. Convinced that her violent temper had brought judgement upon her, she joined the congregation and became a ‘female missionary’ – although she still yielded to her sin of rage. ‘It was after one of these outbursts that the climax came.’ For Mary Ann the dressmaker, the real and the imagined were about to be sewn together in a fantastic way, and in the process her body itself would be changed.

Years later Mary Ann would describe the precise moment at which the vision came to her, at the age of thirty-two (although some accounts put her age at twenty-one, others at thirty-seven). That night she lay restless in bed – perhaps in guilt for her ‘unsubdued temper’ – and after hours of misery, rose feeling wretched and began to pray for delivery from her sin. Suddenly the room filled with ‘a flash of light, brighter than the sun’, and she heard a voice say, ‘Daughter! thy sins are all forgiven thee’.

As she watched, Mary Ann saw its source coalesce before her: a luminous figure which she identified as her Saviour by the nail-marks in His hands and feet. As she came face to face with this shimmering apparition in her Ipswich bedroom, ‘his body became more glorious and beautifully translucent, and he looked young and of a benign countenance’. Now he spoke: if she loved him, would she give up something for him?

‘What is it, Lord?’ she asked.

‘Leave the world’s ways, and give up earthly and all carnal usages, and live for me.’

‘I don’t know that I can,’ said Mary Ann.

‘Do you not love me?’ replied the Lord.

‘And as he spoke, the divine love in his countenance came from his face into her, and the rapid communication of his thoughts to her was such, that her will became his, and she said, “I will do anything for thee, my Lord.”’

And with that, the vision vanished.

Mary Ann had never felt such ecstasy before; it sent ‘a thrill throughout her organism’, filling her with love for the whole human race. Yet she kept her vision to herself, as if there was something shameful about what she had experienced alone in her bedroom. The modern world might diagnose sleep paralysis, a vivid hallucinatory state with sexual overtones, said to account for dæmonic possession from the evil spirits of the Bible to Henry Fuseli’s eighteenth-century painting, The Nightmare, and contemporary claims of alien abduction. Or perhaps, like Fuseli’s friend William Blake, she was able to produce eidetic images of what has previously been seen – in some religious tract or biblical illustration, for example – and which she saw ‘in the literal sense … not memories, or afterimages, or daydreams, but real sensory perceptions’. Or maybe hers was an epileptic fit, during which the sufferer may sense a presence in an otherwise empty room, and afterwards assert absolute moral certainty and religiosity, as Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus has been explained. Was Mary Ann’s vision a short circuit in her brain, or was this itself a gift? Whatever the truth, for an uneducated woman of a pre-Freudian age there was only one explanation for what she saw, and what came after it.

Mary Ann returned to her duties, fired with an undeclared determination; her heart must have been bursting to speak of it, but she told her fellow chapel goers only that they must observe holy lives. Five hundred years previously, Julian of Norwich had written of her own revelation:

When I was 30 years old and a half, God sent me a sickness, in which I lay three days and three nights … my sight began to fail, and it was all dark about me, save in the image of the Cross, whereupon I beheld a common light … Suddenly my pain was taken from me, and I was as whole as ever I was. Then came … to my mind that I should desire the second wound of our Lord’s gracious gift. In this moment I saw the red blood trickle down hot and freshly and right plenteous, as it were in the time of His Passion when the Garland of Thorns was pressed on His blessed head. And suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy.

Now Mary Ann received a second vision, although, just as the gospels diversify in their accounts, so her story relies on different writers and her own fluctuating pronouncements; and where one claims six years between her visions, another records just days before the Spirit appeared in the form of a fiery dove commanding her,

I have called thee to declare my immediate coming, and it is now the close of this dispensation; a new era is opening on the world, and thou art to be the Messenger.

From this point, it seemed, Mary Ann’s life was determined as parable, to be replayed in situations which would reflect biblical events. The heaven-borne message echoed John’s baptism of Christ, when ‘the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased”’. Yet still she said nothing: Mary Ann lost herself in her work, afraid that a public declaration would subject her to ‘odium and opposition’. But the visions continued, more potent than ever. She was taken ‘into a realm far above the earth; and she ascended out of it, and beheld a vista of ages; and then she looked at Christ, whose glory illuminated her, and she discovered that she was in a glorified ethereal body’. In this astral experience, the Lord appeared ‘in the form of a man’. This was no dream: like Moses and Elijah appearing to Jesus, the vision was as real as she could say. Now the Bible was opened to her, and its written word revealed ‘all its truth concerning the life of the spirit within the tabernacle of the body’.

Mary Ann’s eyes had been opened, just as the scales had fallen from St Paul’s eyes. And as with millenarian prophets of the past, her discovery resulted in a literal interpretation of St John’s Revelations and its apocalyptic predictions for the end of time. Her visions told her that the Second Coming would happen in her lifetime, and that she was its Messenger, ‘to declare an end of sin, and a judgement; and, further, that if she yielded and obeyed, she should not see death … and that as a witness to her call and work, the outpouring of the Holy Ghost should be to those who believed; that they should speak with tongues, and do marvellous works; which would be the seal of her messengership’. It was a mirror of St Paul’s mission, and in order to fulfil her duty, she must leave her home and family ‘and go forth into the streets, declaring the message; and … all who believed must be prepared to do the same’.

The cumulative weight of these supernatural events proved too much for a woman’s body already weakened by miscarriage. For six weeks Mary Ann was stricken by a paralysis which twisted her mouth, as if in punishment for her ill-tempered tongue, a God-sent witch’s scold. This physical ultimatum, in her own account, also caused blindness in one eye and seized her body – perhaps the result of a minor stroke. She was faced with a choice: she could either disregard the visions and remain in this helpless state, or obey her holy orders. And so she told the Lord that He must do with her as He would. As a result of this epiphany – in its original meaning, the manifestation of a god – she immediately recovered. But later, Mary Ann would claim that the last of her visions left her with a yet more extraordinary legacy. At Christmas 1864 she received the sign for which Julian had prayed. The stigmata appeared on her hands, feet and side, erupting in imitation of Christ’s crucified body. Like some sacred statue brought to life, Mary Ann’s flesh itself bore testament to her Saviour’s sufferings. It was as if these wounds were symptoms of her death, as though she had died and been reborn without sin.

Was she a sinful woman, this sometime purveyor of illicit liquor, as yet unmarried in the eyes of the Church, now an evangelist? Records do not tell us, although the guilt Mary Ann may have felt for her children – born dead and out of wedlock – may indicate something for which she needed to atone: a recovered memory, perhaps of abuse within the crowded childhood home. Nor was she beautiful; her face was no lure to lust, and what was interbred emerged in sharp features set awry by harsh experience. Yet she was tall and imposing, with a magnetic stare; as if, in compensation for her lack of beauty, she relied on other means to command attention. There was a sensuality in the way her hair curled in dark locks over her shoulders, although her physical stance spoke against desire and her wide, thin lips bore the memory of paralysis. Her gaunt frame rejected consumption and sexuality in favour of asceticism and spirituality; a visionary aspiration in retreat from the world and its demands. In retrospect, it seems Mary Ann may have suffered some kind of dietary disorder; certainly her body was unnaturally slender. ‘The only emaciated being we saw was the prophetess herself’, one witness would note, ‘and her desperate enthusiasm would burn the flesh from any flame.’

Perhaps her passion fed on her body, exchanging the one for the other. In the process, her resolve was stiffened, as if that heaven-sent rictus were a physical reaction to or a prevention of sin, tensing her body against evil. And if she had been a sinful woman, then her sins were forgiven. Her manner, once inflexible and intolerant, was now gentle and generous. Seeing this, her newly married husband gave up his initial opposition – an acquiescence he would maintain throughout all that was to come. Mary Ann explained that having experienced the ‘perfect presence of Jesus’, it was impossible to remain with him, ‘for her spirit being once set free to enter the paradisiacal state, it was not lawful to enter the state of matrimony again’. Instead she became a bride of Christ, and returned to her chapel – only to find that the congregation refused to listen.

It is easy to imagine their reaction, faced with this woman whose duty lay at home with her children, yet who chose to lecture them on their sins. Mary Ann burned to communicate the wonder of what she had seen, and rejection merely made the fire glow brighter. Shortly after, she saw a crowd listening to a male preacher on a street corner. Someone asked her to speak, and soon, like Wesley, she had her own audience in the open air. But for Mary Ann there was something more to her commission than human history, and she was reminded of it every day by her hidden, holy scars, as if God’s words were written on her skin.

We all reinvent ourselves. We conflate memory and fact, and reinterpret the pleasure and pain of the past to suit the present and form our future. Mary Ann too was convinced of her story, and felt the need to share it – a desire only heightened by the obstacles placed in its way, not least that of her sex. Yet being born a woman was not necessarily a bar to her calling: not only were there precedents for female preachers among the Methodists and the Quakers, but her experience – the loss of her children, her lowly origins – made her message more immediate. It was said that her ‘thrilling, and often overpowering speeches had a vivid effect on sympathetic lady hearers, for she observed proprieties of behaviour, and there was nothing coarse or vulgar about her’. And like other female mystics, from Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, to Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila and Joan of Arc, she cited higher authority; like the Maid of Orleans’ armour, her visions were a defence against male prejudice. Who could doubt the Word of God, even if it came from a farm labourer’s daughter?

The world had always been reluctant to give women a voice; yet more so when their prophecies crossed the barrier between Christian and pagan, between witch and saint. In Yorkshire, Mother Shipton had seen the future from her Knaresborough cave and its dripping well, where I was taken as a boy to see strange objects dangling from a rock ledge, the pale brown mineral-rich water turning soft toys into modern fossils. Around the same time as Shipton made her predictions of telegrams and aeroplanes, the Holy Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Burton, was hanged for prophesying Henry VIII’s death. In Mary Ann’s native East Anglia, the power of magic lingered long after it had faded elsewhere. The eastern counties became home to the Family of Love, a heretical cult imported across the sea from the mirror-lowlands of Holland, which preached that heaven and hell were to be found on earth and that it was possible to recreate Eden through communal living; Ely was declared an ‘island of errors and sectaries’, and parts of this countryside were said to be heathen until the draining of the fens in the 1630s – as if the act of reclamation deprived the land of its ancient aquatic spirits.

Perhaps devils took hold instead. In 1645, Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, instituted his campaign in Suffolk, when neighbour denounced neighbour and women were walked to keep them awake until their demonic familiars came to betray them. Those who miscarried or whose children were stillborn were accused of sacrificing their offspring. At Aldeburgh, seven women were hanged as witches, and the Borough paid Hopkins £2 for his work. Had she been born two centuries earlier, Mary Ann too might have been stripped and searched for the devil’s marks – although her searchers would have found Christ’s.

Two hundred years after Matthew Hopkins’ reign of terror, Mary Ann left Ipswich to travel the villages around Woodbridge and Saxmundham, the land she knew so well from her childhood and where she thought her words would be heard. As she preached in the open air at Little Glemham, it must have been odd for her young children to witness the change in their mother, leaving the family home for the fields of rural Suffolk. Mary Jane, then in her teens, would assist at the services by teaching and playing the piano, although she was soon to marry; William, however, just six years old when Mary Ann’s mission began, would find himself caught up in her cause.

The Primitive Methodists were well represented in these places, and Mary Ann was invited to preach at their chapel at Stratford St Andrew’s. But her unorthodox ideas offended them, and many of those who had listened now refused to hear her increasingly radical ideas. So Mary Ann sermonised in market squares, a soapbox orator in shirtwaist and curls. Unconfined by marriage or maternal duties, she took her message to the disenfranchised and the dispossessed – just as the first British Christians had been lowly peasants who found a new sense of community in their faith, and just as the same common people had been identified as God’s chosen ones during the religious revolutions of the seventeenth century, with its own dreams of ‘utopia and infinite liberty’ and a theocracy led by another East Anglian prophet, Oliver Cromwell. In her version of Christ’s elegantly paradoxical beatitudes, which called for the poor to be rich and the downtrodden to be free, Mary Ann promised social justice and heaven on earth. Those who had failed to find a place in the world could find a home with her, by choosing a new family. And in questioning the morality of marriage, she offered women the right to choose God over slavery; to be freed from the shackles of sexual demands and the dangerous burden of child-bearing. Mary Ann had issued a challenge to the nineteenth-century family, even as she sundered her own: it seemed she really was set to turn the world upside down.

Girlingism, as it became known, embraced those over whom industrialisation had ridden rough-shod. It offered an alternative way of life almost revolutionary in its aims, although its communist ideas were rooted in Scripture. Consciously or not, Mary Ann appeared to be influenced by sects such as the Family of Love and the Diggers and the Ranters of the Interregnum who took the Acts of the Apostles – ‘And all who believe were together and had all things in common’ – as precedent for their communality. In 1649, the Diggers had staked out their allotments on St George’s Hill in Surrey, and although their attempt at Eden, seeing the Second Coming as an earthly return to paradise, lasted little more than a year, the visionary William Everard, whose followers spoke with angels, went on to found other rural Digger communes. These provided patterns for what Mary Ann would attempt. And while she would admit a spiritual kinship with the early Quakers – more extreme in their early expression than in their later quietude – there was another echo to be detected, in the newly emancipated Catholic Church. In 1858, as Christ appeared in Mary Ann’s Ipswich bedroom, another young peasant girl saw the Virgin Mary in a French cave, as if her solemn, beautiful statue had come to life, her robe as blue as the sky from which she had fallen in augury of her Son’s return. Bernadette knelt on the ground and seemed to eat the earth: to some, a symptom of psychological disturbance; to others, an indication of the passion of her visions. In an increasingly secular century, it was no coincidence that the visitations at Lourdes and the agitations of the Girlingites registered simultaneously on the spiritual scale.

Back in Suffolk, Mary Ann’s mission had a direct and intensely personal effect on another young woman. Eliza Folkard, a carpenter’s daughter from Parham, sang in the Methodist choir, but one day she attended a Girlingite meeting and suddenly got up and began to dance. She then spoke for an hour, describing ‘how she had been convinced of sin at the age of 17, but did not give her heart to God until after a long illness’. In a further reflection of Mary Ann’s conversion, she declared that Mrs Girling was truly the herald of the Second Coming, and as she emerged from her trance she embraced her new mother. To others, however, Eliza’s closeness to Mary Ann would lead to the notion that she was in fact her daughter, and perhaps an indication of sin. And where Mary Ann was dark, Eliza had blonde hair, a race memory of Viking invaders: she would become the pulchritudinous face of Girlingism, the angelic obverse to Mary Ann’s darker power.

Eliza’s conversion was followed by that of Henry, or Harry Osborne, described as a ‘rough, uncouth and illiterate farm-labourer, of pugilistic tendencies’ – a useful person when danger threatened. In fact, Harry was a thirty-one-year-old widower and shoemaker; but in this gallery of types, he became Mary Ann’s right-hand man, completing the trinity that she presented to the world – and introducing new rumours about their own relationship.

Within eighteen months Girlingism had fifty adherents, for whom it was compulsory to receive ‘the Spirit, or the baptism of the New Life’ and to practise celibacy, without which they could not be accepted by the Saviour on His return, ‘which was expected to be sudden as the lightning’s flash’. Anyone joining the group had to give up all their worldly goods; from there on ‘the old ties of husband, wife and lover were to be lost in a fraternal bond’; they were now all brothers and sisters, living ‘a pure and holy life’. Mary Ann was known as Sister: her sororial title was levelling and egalitarian, but it also gave her a sense of pre-ordained mission. As a universal relative, she cast off her wedded status and assumed a new role, that of a secular nun or religious nurse.

This was neither an unusual self-discovery, nor a disreputable one: the most famous sister of the age, the high-born Florence Nightingale, had recently entered imperial iconography as the Lady with the Lamp, inspired by her own three visions of Christ; while the empire itself was ruled over by a matriarch queen from her seaside home on the Isle of Wight. But it was also the coming era of the New Woman, and Mary Ann would be seen as part of these powerful moves towards a new female identity: ‘She stands forth, in this age of “woman’s mission”, fearlessly to lead and encourage a pure society based upon the inward law of her nature’, claimed one new age magazine; although a more hostile account saw her as ‘a curious growth of the “Women’s Right” genus, from a theological point of view; and when she stretches her bony arms, in all the warmth of native eloquence, she reminds one of a pious scarecrow tossed in the winds of fanaticism and superstition and set up as a terror to evil doers in the way of religious enthusiasm.’

A woman’s power was still to be feared; and like those new women, this universal sister’s tenets, intended to create an alternative clan, were not entirely welcome as they sundered families and married couples and separated children from parents. When a later visitor asked Mary Ann, ‘Why not procreate?’, she replied that the earth was already too full. Such sentiments echoed those of Reverend Malthus, who believed mankind was doomed if it continued to reproduce without check. But they also threatened the defining unit of an age which relied on reproduction. The family yoked the workers of the industrial revolution to the demands of capitalism; Mary Ann directly opposed that economic adhesion. For such a person of such a background and of such a sex to set up such a challenge was unacceptable. Mrs Girling made a travesty of her married name, and in the process became an anti-woman.

There were other reasons to fear Girlingism: it created tensions not just between families, but between communities. In an era of insecurity and high unemployment – exemplified by the agricultural strikes which hit East Suffolk in the early 1870s as the newly formed Agricultural Labourers’ Union clashed with the Farmers’ Association – men lost their jobs because of Mary Ann. In the market and barrack town of Woodbridge, her teachings began to concern clergy and upset landowners, anxious at her effect on their flocks and labour force: ‘Many of the males were discharged from their situations, and others suffered loss in a variety of ways’. To some it seemed they had lost their senses to religious mania, and were suitable subjects for the local lunatic asylum at Melton – an establishment of more than four hundred disturbed souls, their occupations, listed next to their initials in the 1871 census, representative of Mary Ann’s constituency: farm labourers and their wives; factory girls and seamen’s wives; soldiers and needlewomen; chimney sweeps and policemen’s wives; brush makers and lime burners; or simply, in the case of ‘V. F.’, a ‘loose character’.

They were the psychiatric casualties of an industrial era, the kind of minds susceptible to a woman who might have found herself similarly incarcerated. Or perhaps Mary Ann evoked an older belief, when people had laid votive offerings in the lakes and rivers, reaching down to that elemental world beneath their feet. Whatever the source of her power, it seemed there was a primal force gathering around this prophetess, one which would invoke spirits and provoke opposition. One man bet his friends that he would shoot Mary Ann on a certain night – although in the event the would-be assassin himself converted and became a Girlingite, a miracle taken by her followers as proof that their leader was protected by God. That which did not kill her made Mary Ann stronger, and in this sensational narrative – something between penny dreadful and missionary tract – she had become a symbolic, almost revolutionary figure.

A later image of Mary Ann depicts her as an androgynous angel from some Renaissance woodcut, wearing indeterminate, anachronistic dress, her head encircled by a band in simple recognition of her sacred mission. Her stare challenges the viewer and imbues the portrait with the air of an icon. This idealised Mary Ann is far from what we know of her true features; more Joan of Arc as seen in a Victorian picturebook than the face of a farm labourer’s daughter. But equally, it could be an advertisement for the latest nostrum, lacking only the caption, Mother Girling Saves.

Girlingite meetings took a set form. Bible verses were read and debated, followed by prayer. But then came the strange dancing and trance-like speaking in tongues which Eliza Folkard had exhibited, and which were already attracting crowds. These shaking fits earned the sect the nickname Convulsionists, although they preferred to call themselves Children of God, from St John’s gospel, ‘… to all those who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of flesh nor of the will of man, but of God’. Like the Corinthians in the wake of St Paul’s mission, they would ‘jabber and quake’ when in the spirit, led by Mary Ann herself, leaping from foot to foot while waving her arms as if beckoning while she exhorted the Lord’s name. To some these antics resembled the dance of a savage; others watching the ‘springy, elastic movements and considerable waving of her arms … could hardly resist the comic aspect of the scene’.

Soon enough these rites attracted the attention of the press, and on 20 April 1871 a headline appeared in the Woodbridge Reporter & Aldeburgh Times:

MOBBING A FEMALE PREACHER.

The accompanying story may have been the first occasion on which Mary Ann’s name appeared in print; it was certainly not the last.

Reporting on a case heard at the Framlingham Petty Sessions by F. S. Corrance, the local Member of Parliament, and two clergymen – the Reverends G. F. Pooley and G. H. Porter – the newspaper gave details of five young men, William Goldsmith, James George, Samuel Crane, James Nichols and John Barham, who were charged by a farmer with ‘riotous behaviour in his dwelling, which is registered as a place for religious worship’.

At first it seemed a matter of mere youthful high spirits. The farmer, forty-eight-year-old Leonard Benham of Stratford St Andrew, worked 138 acres – belonging to the Earl of Guildford – where he employed three men and a boy, as well as two household servants (one of them being twenty-year-old William Folkard, a kinsman of Eliza’s). But Benham was also a member of the Children of God, and had resolved to support Mary Ann ‘at any cost’. He would pledge his entire family – his wife Martha, forty; his daughters Ellen, twenty, Emma, thirteen, and Mary Ann, then four years old; together with his sons Arthur, then aged sixteen, William, fifteen, and George, just five – to the cause.

That Sunday afternoon, a meeting had been held in Benham’s house which was attended by the five defendants – not by invitation. As the Girlingites prayed, one of the young men, John Barham, began to talk and laugh. When asked to be quiet, he replied by singing and hallooing, with his friends joining in.

‘I went to the door and stood near them,’ Leonard Benham told the court. ‘They said, “Take your sins off your own back, we won’t believe you, you’re a liar.” I told them mine was a registered house. They told me not to daubt them up with untempered mortar’ – an obscure metaphor which would pursue the Girlingites, along with mobs hurling slack, or slaked lime.

The hooligans then began pulling off his wallpaper, and declared that ‘they would be d—if they wouldn’t kiss Mrs Girling before they left’. Failing in this, they tried to kiss another member of the congregation, Robert Spall. ‘Not being able to do that, they said they would kiss Mrs Spall, but did not attempt to do it.’

That night the gang came back to finish what they’d started. ‘What a pity it is you young men come here and make a disturbance,’ Benham told them. ‘The law is very stringent about this, and you’ll hear something from me about it.’ But Nichols strode into the room and began shouting and stamping, while Goldsmith mockingly held up a stick to which he’d attached a red handkerchief, saying, ‘This is a flag of distress.’ He then began to declaim a text of his own, and sat down to light his pipe. Crane, also smoking, cried, ‘Pinpatches and sprats at three pence a quarter.’ The scene turned violent as the gang began to break up the furniture, with Barham sitting on the window-sill shouting, ‘My wife has run away with a man that has three children, and when she comes back I’ll be d—if I have her again.’

The mob had tailored their insults to the Girlingites, and their actions had the air of a concerted assault rather than the casual vandalism of bored young men with nothing better to do on a Sunday night in a small country village. The explanation became clear when Benham told the court that such meetings were held every three weeks at his house.

‘We have two or three places where we worship under the head of Mrs Girling. Singing hymns is part of the services, which were usually well attended. I have never seen anyone on the floor fainting. Mrs Girling has a husband and two children at Ipswich. The rooms will hold one hundred people.’

Mr Jewesson, acting for the defence, asked, ‘You’re one of the disciples, ain’t you?’, his biblical overtones somewhat undermined by his grammar.

‘Yes, and thank God for it,’ replied Benham, who proceeded to give intriguing details of the sect and the power of their leader. ‘There is silence generally when Mrs Girling reads the word of God … It is customary for any person to pray who likes. I never saw two or three praying at once – one stopped till another had finished. Mrs Girling was the only one that read and expounded.’ He admitted, modestly, ‘I am not sufficiently high to read and expound the Word of God; I wish I was.’

It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to his stature or his spiritual status. Mary Ann had first come to his house eighteen months ago – ‘Eliza Folkard sometimes expounded, but not publicly’ – and although he had never seen anyone faint at any of these services, ‘I have seen them fall under the power of God.’ As an elder of the Children of God, Benham sought to counter some of the more extraordinary rumours already gathering around them. He told the court that their services differed little from those of other dissenting chapels:

‘It is just the same with the exception that other people give out a text while Mrs Girling only expounds the word of God.’

Yet there was the sense of something other at work, not least in the shape of Mary Ann herself and the transcendence to which she aspired.

‘By our people I mean the people who follow Mrs Girling. We subscribe money amongst ourselves. We only provide Mrs Girling with clothes and boots. We pay nothing for the rooms; I give mine gratis.’

‘You speak of falling down,’ remarked Mr Corrance, ‘when does that occur?’

‘Very often, sir,’ replied Benham. ‘We see people fall down by the power of God.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Corrance.

‘They go into a trance, sir, and can see all things that are going on around them. We allow them to remain till they come to themselves.’ Benham insisted that they never disturbed anyone: ‘We have never recognised these roughs as part of our congregation … They are the Devil’s congregation, and ours are the children of God.’

This testimony was supported by key figures in the movement: Alfred Folkard, Eliza’s father; Cornelius Chase, a twenty-seven-year-old coachmaker, and Isaac Batho, postmaster and shoemaker, both of Benhall; and Sally Spall, wife of Robert, a machinist from Hascheston, with whom Mary Ann had been staying during her missionary work. Sally Spall bore witness to the ‘kiss of charity’ which had prompted the gang’s sarcastic amorousness.

‘It is usual to kiss each other indiscriminately?’ Mr Jewesson asked Mrs Spall.

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied.

‘Both males and females?’ inquired Mr Corrance.

‘Both, sir.’

‘Men, women and children, I suppose?’ prompted Jewesson.

‘Yes, sir.’

This sounded decidedly immoral, so Mr Hill stepped in, acting on behalf of the Girlingites: ‘I suppose it was only a brotherly and sisterly expression of affection?’

‘That’s all,’ said Mrs Spall.

‘You don’t rush into just anyone’s arms – it is only the members of the congregation?’

‘It’s a salutation, I suppose,’ remarked the Reverend Pooley.

‘Just so, sir,’ said Mr Hill.

Mary Ann was as much on trial here as any of her potential assailants. ‘The members of this sect were led by a woman,’ Jewesson was reported as saying, ‘of whom, without imputing anything wrong to her, he might say that it was to be regretted she should leave her husband and children, and put herself forward in the way she did, creating as she must necessarily do so, a disturbance wherever she went.’ Thus Mary Ann was portrayed as a troublemaker, a woman who, by her very sex, sought to disturb the status quo. Jewesson went on to claim that his clients had gone to the service as potential converts, ‘and the confusion which took place was not caused by them or anyone connected with them’. It was a lame excuse. Hill said his client was willing to drop the charges if his expenses – and the fine – were paid there and then; and in an extraordinary intervention which to some seemed to compromise the impartiality of the Bench, Mr Corrance himself advanced the required sum for the defendants.

A legal resolution had been reached, but the wider question of the Girlingites and their freedom to worship remained. The Woodbridge Reporter may have been a local paper, but it reported on national issues: ‘the Rights of Women’; ‘Spirit Rapping Extraordinary in Woodbridge’ (which turned out to be a skit advertising alcohol); Primitive Methodism; the vaccination debate; and emigration, ‘a subject uppermost in men’s minds now’. Disturbing events across the Channel – the ‘Literary, Scientific, and Artistic Communists’ in the Paris Commune – sat alongside reports of riots in Dublin and an apocalyptic editorial on cholera, ‘the most destructive of human diseases’, whose invasion no ‘“streak of silver sea”’ could prevent. Amid such signs and wonders – as if plague and famine might yet sweep the land, just as the sea could break its defences – the appearance of a local prophetess was of more than a little interest; especially when her crusade provoked a riot at the Mechanics’ Institute in Woodbridge.

Mechanics’ institutes were established in the 1820s as educational centres for artisans. Often used for lectures on sectarian beliefs and spiritualism, they provided the working man with ‘an opportunity to ride the wave of the new pseudo-sciences’. On 2 May 1871, the Reporter noted that ‘some printed handbills circulated in the town announced that Mrs Girling would preach the Gospel in the Lecture Hall, on Tuesday evening, at half-past seven’. Such advance publicity ensured that the hall was packed, with a crowd of one hundred clamouring for admission, and ‘a great number who went were not prompted with the desire of hearing the Gospel preached …’ Mr Joseph Cullingford attempted to address the crowd, ‘but was frequently interrupted. Mrs Girling stood on the centre of the platform, and by her side was … a Miss Folkard from Parham.’ While many were still trying to get in – some by forcing the door – others were trying to get out, overcome by the heat and noise inside. It was the first indication of a mass reaction to the Girlingite gospel: a frightening spectacle to some; to others, rather farcical. Mr Cullingford tried to leave the hall, but as he did so the door was suddenly locked, leaving his coat tails trapped and the unfortunate man ‘subject to the rude remarks of the roughs for some time’ while he banged on the door unheard, such was the furore within.

Meanwhile, Mary Ann had begun to speak. She told the audience that she lived at 58 Victoria Street, London Road, Ipswich, at which point a voice piped up, ‘Where is your husband?’, to roars of laughter. Mary Ann replied that she had his permission to speak the Word of God. Indeed, on the night of that year’s census, Mrs Girling was not at home with her husband, her seventeen-year-old daughter Mary Jane, now a dressmaker, and her son William, just fifteen but, like his father, already employed in the iron works. Instead she was roaming Suffolk – not preaching, but practising, as she declared. She was about to read from the Book of Revelations when a loud noise was heard outside and the door burst open, releasing Mr Cullingford’s coat. ‘Outsiders rushed in, insiders rushed out, jostling with each other, and a little fresh air was obtained by this indecorous breach. With some difficulty the door was shut and locked, but the interruption continued.’ Mary Ann said she’d been in worse places in Ipswich, but had never experienced such a disturbance. This merely made matters worse.

‘Where’s Osborne?’ went up another shout.

‘Are you going to mesmerise us?’

‘Sit down!’

‘Go home!’

‘Look out, Osborne! no harm sleeping with a saint.’

The hall-keeper tried to eject some of the troublemakers, but his efforts only resulted in an increase in the riot, ‘and the noise and disturbance that ensued were indescribable. A stone was thrown through one of the back windows and nearly hit a person on the head.’

At this point it was decided that it would be better to call off the entire service. The gas was turned out, and in the darkness Mary Ann made her escape through a rear exit, running across the fields towards Bredfield. In the meantime the police finally arrived, in the shape of Superintendent Fitzgerald and three or four officers. They cleared out the remaining roughs, who then went to the nearby Sun Inn where they thought the Girlingites had sought refuge, and where they ‘saluted Mr Banyard with a handful of slush, which they threw into his face, and the doors were kept shut two hours’. Mr Phillips, the local magistrate, was sent for, and the Reporter concluded that ‘Such a disgraceful riot has not occurred in Woodbridge for a very long time. We are informed that proceedings will be taken against some of the parties concerned in it.’

It seemed Suffolk had joined battle with Mary Ann’s blasphemy; but what appeared to be a popular uprising was more likely organised by disgruntled squires determined to rid the county of such unsettling influences. While Phillips blamed Mrs Girling for the uproar and called for police intervention, Superintendent Fitzgerald said that as he understood the meeting ‘was for religious controversy, he did not think he had any right to interfere nor to send any of his men so long as personal violence was not resorted to, nor any injury to property done’. Girlingism was to become the focus for contemporary concerns about religious freedom, pursued with a ferocity which was a legacy of the English Revolution. In the Reporter, ‘A Lover of Fair Play’ bemoaned ‘a lot of blackguards being encouraged to injure our property and howl down free discussion’, and thought it ‘very unseemly, to say the least [that] a Magistrate could … advance the money to pay the fine of one of those worthies to prevent him from going to prison. I can only hope he is in the habit of showing the same sympathy when a poor wretch is about to be sent to gaol for killing a partridge or a hare … Mrs Girling and her friends will not be silenced by mud and riot and brawling’; rational debate was the only way to ‘expose her folly and delusions’. And while a ‘Lover of Civil and Religious Liberty’ asked, ‘Will you tell me which is the worst of the two – heathenism in Madagascar, or heathenism in (so-called) Christian England?’, another ‘Layman’ declared that Mary Ann had been ‘misrepresented and ought to be heard’.

As she was. On 1 June at Dallinghoo, Mary Ann preached at Mr Cooper’s cottage: the congregation numbered twenty, five of whom were police constables, and two females fainted during the service. Landowners complained that the police ‘would have been better employed in their own parishes looking to the public-houses … rather than being in a labourer’s cottage with this fanatic, who, with her disciples, declares she can never die, and, therefore, requires not mortal protection’. The Reporter meanwhile ‘deplored that such opinions as Mrs Girling enunciates should “delude” even a Suffolk labourer; but orthodoxy is not the test of citizenship, and her success in these parts shows that they must be included amongst the dark regions of the earth’. The imperial sway represented justice, whether in the remoteness of Madagascar, or in East Anglia.

Just when the readers thought they’d heard the last of the Children of God, came the headline:

MRS. GIRLING AGAIN!

William Brooks, a labourer, and William Leggatt, a cobbler, both from Charsfield, were charged with having assaulted John Cooper of Dallinghoo, a gardener. Around 9.30 pm on a summer evening, in the meadow next to his cottage, Cooper confronted some men throwing stones and rotten eggs at his door, and then proceeded to throw them at him.

Leggatt, standing behind a tree, hit the gardener over the head with a stick, and when Cooper said, ‘I know who you are’, Brooks struck out with a bigger stick, shouting, ‘You old b—, I’ll split your head.’ ‘My head was tender several days from the blow,’ said Cooper. He said he couldn’t understand why the gang were there, but his testimony showed precisely the reason: Mary Ann had been conducting services at his cottage for the past two months.

His evidence was a further insight into the sect’s practices:

‘We only sing, pray, and read the Bible,’ Cooper told the court. ‘It lasts one and a half hours, we sometimes stay as late as eleven, we have been as late as three or four o’clock in the morning at other places. I call myself a child of God; I belong to Christ. Mrs Girling has no particular name for the sect. We greet each other with a kiss. Mrs Girling kisses them all; she did on that occasion. My wife was present; she was kissed. I kissed Mrs Girling, and the men as well; that is our general salutation – kissing each other.’

This was decidedly unEnglish behaviour – men kissing men and persons to whom they were unrelated. Cross-questioned, Cooper painted an even stranger picture.

‘We never had any seized with hysteria or fits, or carried out at mine. Some persons do see visions and are overcome by the Word of God, but that is not hysterics. I never saw any person in hysterics. When they are taken up we let them remain the Lord’s time; we set them up; we use no hartsthorn …; we give them no brandy and water; we never tried what effect a pail of cold water would have by throwing it on them.’

Hartsthorn was a solution of ammonia, used as smelling salts, and originally made from the shavings of antlers. Cooper’s description evoked pagan rites and folk magic, as well as scenes of possession unseen in Suffolk for two centuries, and the magistrates decided it was time to put a stop to this nonsense: ‘If these services were met with silent public contempt and disgust they would drop, but while they were opposed in the manner they have been, the leaders of them would endeavour to claim sympathy as being the subjects of religious persecution.’ Leggatt and Brooks were each fined 1s and 12s 8d costs.

But a curious sidelight is revealed by the census: Leggatt was the nineteen-year-old stepson of a David Spall. Not only was he related to the Spalls, who had converted to Girlingism, but in the same village, Charsfield, his forty-six-year-old uncle, also a shoemaker, was a minister at the Baptist chapel. Meanwhile, Henry Osborne would marry Eliza Barham, his second wife, whose kinsman had harried Leonard Benham. This was a close-knit, internecine society whose families had been divided by faith, and it is not hard to see, in this light, why the reaction was so extreme in rural Suffolk: Girlingism pitted brother against brother, sister against sister, and Mary Ann had exhausted the temper of the county. She would claim that a new vision prompted her departure, but the threat of violence was a forceful factor, while an invitation from an elder of the Bible Christians, who had asked her to preach in London, provided a good excuse to leave. Or perhaps, as the sea ate away at the Suffolk coast, she too was in retreat from its depredations, seeking a new life and a new communion in the ever-growing metropolis. Whatever her reasons, that summer of 1871 – which would prove to be a heady season for Victorian utopians – Mary Ann, her flaxen-haired chorister Eliza and her pugilistic cobbler Harry, left Suffolk to take on the capital itself.

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