Martyrs
Mystics

DEDICATION

For John Nicholson, Cecilia Boggis, and Dave and Pauline Hammonds

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 London

CHAPTER 2 East Anglia

CHAPTER 3 The Home Counties

CHAPTER 4 The Midlands

CHAPTER 5 The North-East and Yorkshire

CHAPTER 6 The North-West

CHAPTER 7 Wessex and The South-West

CHAPTER 8 Scotland

CHAPTER 9 Wales

CHAPTER 10 Northern Ireland

CHAPTER 11 Republic of Ireland

Plates section

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

It all started to get confusing when God handed Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The commandments began: ‘I am the Lord thy God . . . Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’

Did people generally concur with this? Not quite. John Wroe announced in 1825 in the grim mill town of Ashton-under-Lyne, to the east of Manchester, that he was god. Ashton would duly become a holy city, the New Jerusalem, and Wroe built four ‘holy’ gateways while awaiting the imminent return of Jesus Christ, God’s chosen one, presumably through one of them. He was still waiting when he died in 1863. It is not known whether Jesus did ever appear in Ashton.

Then there was the Revd John Hugh Smyth-Pigott. He was a charming Dubliner who in 1902 proclaimed his own divinity from the Ark of the Covenant, an extravagant temple he built in Lower Clapton, London. The Church of England defrocked Smyth-Pigott but he retorted: ‘I am God. It does not matter what they do.’ He probably wasn’t and it probably did.

But let’s go back to the story of Moses, receiver of the Ten Commandments in biblical times. Barely had he received the tablets than he took them down from the mountain to the Children of Israel, only to find that while he was gone they had made themselves a new god – a Golden Calf no less – and were dancing about ecstatically in front of it.

He broke the tablets and had to go back up the mountain to receive a new set. Two tablets of stone, or possibly not. According to Kabbalah legend, the Ten Commandments were not presented on two gravestone-like slabs, as depicted in countless paintings and book illustrations, but on two tiny jewels, possibly sapphires, more likely diamonds, which glowed when placed on the Breastplate of Judgment. If so, how did Moses break them? Diamonds are the hardest substance known to man, and even sapphires are not easy to destroy. And what happened to those sapphires?

So where does reality triumph over myth here? Martyrs and Mystics offers no definite explanation but it does attempt to recount such bizarre stories and legends – in Britain if not the Holy Land. Not that Britain hasn’t been seen as being holy in its own right down the ages – by William Blake, Christopher Wren, George Fox, John Wroe – but you’ll have to dip inside to find out how and why.

* Buildings or sites which no longer exist are denoted by bold italics..

CHAPTER 1
LONDON

The capital has been host to all the major disputes and upheavals in the nation’s religious past. Here the shifts and schisms that have changed the history of England have been played out: from the break with Rome in the 1530s to the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s, and from the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.

Here too a myriad of sects and cults have taken shape – the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Peculiar People of Plumstead – driven by a succession of mavericks and mystics, as colourful as they were obscure. There was Thomas Tany, who in 1654 claimed to be Theauraujohn, High Priest of the Jews, about to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem with himself in charge. And John Robins, a mid-seventeenth-century mystic from Moorfields, who failed in his plan to take nearly 150,000 followers to the Holy Land, feeding them solely on dry bread, raw vegetables and water. In 1814, more farcically, there was Joanna Southcott, who claimed she would give birth to Shiloh, the biblical child who, according to the Book of Revelation, was to ‘rule all the nations with a rod of iron’.

Such drama continues to take place in the capital. As recently as 1985 the world’s press gathered at a Brick Lane curry house to meet the Lord Maitreya (or Christ, the Imam Mahdi or Krishna according to the different religions), who may or may not have appeared – depending as always on one’s faith. In 2008, when a member of the congregation at St Mary’s church, Putney, disrupted the service shouting out his views on the controversy over gay clergy, he was simply another manifestation of the ageold unsolvable conundrum of what to do when one’s own views differ from those of the next person.

Key events

616 | A fisherman has a vision of St Peter on Thorney Island and founds what becomes Westminster Abbey.
1382 | The Archbishop of Canterbury’s council meets at Blackfriars monastery to denounce John Wycliffe’s religious doctrines and his pioneering translation of the Bible into English.
1401 | The first of many martyrs to meet his death at Smithfield is William Sawtrey, priest and follower of the Bible translator John Wycliffe.
1534 | Henry VIII declares himself supreme head of the English Church and orders that all references to the Pope be removed from prayer books.
1535 | Thomas More, one of Henry VIII’s leading aides, is executed at Tower Hill for opposing the king’s decision to make himself head of the Church.
1604 | From the Hampton Court Conference comes the greatest of all Bible translations – the King James or Authorised Version.
1666 | The Fire of London destroys the City. Catholics are blamed, and a Frenchman, supposedly an agent of the Pope, is hanged (wrongly) for starting the blaze.
1678 | One of the most infamous religious conspiracies in London history, the Popish Plot, unfolds after the body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a well-known Protestant, is found on Primrose Hill impaled on his own sword.
1688–9 | The Bill of Rights ends the Stuart notion of the ‘Divine Right’ of kings to rule. From now on no monarch can be or marry a Catholic.
1738 | John Wesley experiences an epiphany in Aldersgate that leads to the birth of a new creed: Methodism.
1780 | The worst mob violence ever to hit London – the Gordon Riots – erupts on 2 June as the capital demonstrates against parliamentary attempts to grant Catholics further civil rights.
1791 | The latest Catholic Relief Act gives Catholics the right to worship in public again.
1865 | William Booth founds the Salvation Army after hearing two missionaries preach at an open-air meeting in the East End.
1858 | The Jewish Relief Act allows Jews full civil rights, including being able to sit as MPs without having to take the Christian oath.
1976 | The Jamme Masjid opens in Spitalfields – the only building in the West to have been church, synagogue and mosque.

The Gordon Riots

London’s most violent religious disturbance was a week of mayhem in June 1780 which resulted in hundreds of deaths and the burning and looting of much of the capital in the wake of government plans to allow Catholics greater civil rights. The protest became known as the Gordon Riots because the mob was whipped into a frenzy by Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association.

Two years previously, the Catholic Relief Act had been passed, banning any further persecution of Catholic priests. This followed negotiations by the government with a group of Catholic gentry who agreed to drop Stuart claims to the throne and to deny the civil jurisdiction of the Pope. Catholics were still, however, banned from holding important public posts in teaching and the army, though by 1780 the government, concerned at the depleted number of troops available to fight in the American War of Independence, considered changing the law to allow Catholics to join the army.

On Friday 2 June 1780 Parliament met to debate the proposals. When Lord Gordon failed to win approval for his anti-Catholic petition by 192 votes to 6, the mob went on the rampage. Spoiling for a fight, they headed for the only places in London where Catholics could worship openly – two chapels in Soho and Holborn. They ransacked the buildings, smashed the doors and windows, and burnt prayer books and religious artefacts in the street.

By noon the next day it appeared the disturbance was over, but at three in the afternoon soldiers escorting a group of thirteen men to Bow Street Magistrates Court were pelted with mud. In the slum district of Moorfields the houses of Irish immigrants (mostly Catholic) were attacked. As the violence continued on the Sunday, householders chalked up the warning ‘No Popery’ on their doors. The Italian parents of the clown Joseph Grimaldi daubed on their door ‘No religion’, while in the Jewish ghetto around Houndsditch houses were chalked with the words: ‘This is the home of a true Protestant.’

The following day riot leaders marched on Lord Gordon’s house in Welbeck Street, Marylebone, to bring him trophies of relics ransacked from the looted chapels. Tuesday 6 June was the worst day of mayhem. A hugh mob swarmed through Seven Dials heading for Newgate Prison. One who joined it en route was the painter-poet William Blake, who had seen the crowd from his studio window and had joined it out of curiosity. The rioters attacked the gaol with sledgehammers and pickaxes, and prisoners poured out, though some stayed put, at a loss of where to go, until the rioters set fire to the building.

Trouble continued for the rest of the week, at the end of which 285 people were dead and 200 wounded. Although Lord Gordon was charged with high treason and sent to the Tower, where he languished for eight months, he was cleared of blame. Remarkably he later forsook the Anglican Church for Judaism, changed his name to Israel Abraham George Gordon, and died at the age of forty-two in Newgate Prison where, ironically, he had been incarcerated for libelling Marie Antoinette.

Bermondsey

ST THOMAS A WATERING, Old Kent Road at Albany Road

John Penry was publicly hanged in 1593 at this ancient site, where streams cross the ancient London to Dover road, and which was mentioned by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, for campaigning too vigorously for Welsh religious independence and a Welsh Bible. When Penry acquired a printing press John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was most vexed and had Penry arrested and imprisoned. He escaped to Scotland but eventually chose to return to London to continue campaigning for religious teaching in Wales to be conducted in Welsh. He was arrested in Islington in March 1593 and sentenced to death, without being allowed to see his wife or four daughters – Deliverance, Comfort, Safety and Sure-Hope.

→ Canterbury Cathedral, p. 142

Blackheath

During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 John Ball preached a sermon here on the main route from Kent into London in which he thundered:

What right do they have to rule over us? Why do they deserve to be in authority? If we all came from Adam and Eve what proof do they have that they are better than we? Therefore why should we labour for them while they live in luxury?

From his preaching came the rhyme that was soon upon the lips of many: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was the gentle man?’ However, in the rampage which followed, the mob dragged Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, from the Tower of London and killed him.

Bloomsbury

JAMES PIERREPONT GREAVESS ADDRESS, 49 Burton Street

Greaves was an early nineteenth-century educationalist and theologian who promoted piety among his followers while urging them to embrace the latest fashionable dietary and sexual fads such as vegetarianism, water-drinking and celibacy. Greaves was later described by G. J. Holyoake, pioneer of the co-operative movement, as ‘the most accomplished, pleasant and inscrutable mystic this country has produced’. In the 1830s he opened a school on Ham Common near Richmond, Surrey, based on the healthy notion that ‘Pure air, simple food, exercise and cold water are more beneficial to man than any churches, chapels, or cathedrals.’ Thomas Carlyle, the great essayist and historian, was not convinced and denounced Greaves as a ‘humbug . . . few greater blockheads broke the world’s breads in my day’.

TEMPLE OF THE OCCULT, 99 Gower Street

Frank Dutton Jackson, a fake cleric, and his wife, Editha, set up a Temple of the Occult in the heart of Georgian Bloomsbury in the early years of the twentieth century. Here Jackson, describing himself as Theo Horos, debauched hundreds of young girls in mock religious ceremonies conducted under low lights in a haze of incense smoke. He told one girl, Daisy Adams, he was Jesus Christ and that she would give birth to a divine child. He and Editha, who claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Ludwig I of Bavaria, were eventually prosecuted. They were tried at the Old Bailey where Jackson pleaded: ‘Did Solomon not have 300 legal wives and 600 others?’ He was nevertheless convicted of raping and procuring girls for immoral purposes.

The Spectator magazine occupied the building from the 1920s to 1975, and it now belongs to the Catholic chaplaincy.

→ The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, p. 71

UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF CHRIST THE KING, Byng Place

This superb Gothic revival church was built in 1851–4 in the medieval Early English architectural style for the Catholic Apostolic sect. Its first preacher, Edward Irving, was expelled from a nearby Presbyterian church for encouraging the congregation to ‘speak in tongues’ – talk spontaneously in ancient biblical languages. In the church basement is a room filled with ceremonial cloaks, including one reserved for the return of Jesus Christ.

Canonbury

CANONBURY TOWER, Canonbury Place

This ancient and unusual-looking brick tower, north London’s oldest building, was where Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister and vicar-general, organised the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.

In April 1535 the authorities ordered ‘all supporters of the Pope’s jurisdiction’ were to be arrested. On 20 April they arrested the priors of Charterhouse, Beauvale and Axholme, and Dr Richard Reynolds of the Bridgettine monastery of Syon near Brentford. One of Cromwell’s agents discovered that the abbot there had persuaded a nun, to whom he was confessor, to submit her body to his pleasure ‘and thus persuaded her in confession, making her believe that whensoever and as oft as they should meddle together, if she were immediately after confessed by him, and took of him absolution, she should be clear forgiven of God’.

Those arrested were charged with denying that the king was the supreme head of the English Church and were sentenced to death. A month later they were hanged at Tyburn. Later that year came the more infamous executions of Bishop Fisher and Thomas More (→ p. 52) for refusing to accept the Oath of Supremacy. At the end of the decade, with the dissolution of the religious houses practically complete, the king handed the Canonbury Manor to Cromwell. Unfortunately, the vicar-general had only a year to live: he was executed on trumped-up charges of treason in 1540.

In the eighteenth century Canonbury Tower and the surrounding estate were rebuilt in a restrained but elegant Palladian style to the exact dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, for reasons unknown but possibly connected with the earlier sojourn of polymath Francis Bacon – philosopher, science pioneer, Lord Chancellor and Rosicrucian – who worked there at the end of the sixteenth century.

In 1795 Richard Brothers, the false messiah who prophesied that he would lead the Israelites back to Palestine from across the world, was imprisoned in the tower for eleven years for sedition.

Canonbury Tower is now a Masonic research centre.

→ Richard Brothers, Prince of the Hebrews, p. 75.

The Rosicrucians

An ultra-secret, international, quasi-religious body, the Rosicrucians claim to possess mystical wisdom handed down through the generations. They have strong connections with Canonbury Tower, which some believe to be the location of their secret international headquarters. The group may have been founded by Christian Rosenkreutz, a fifteenth-century mystic who supposedly travelled extensively in the East before returning to Europe armed with the entire body of knowledge that would be useful to the world, the knowledge handed by God to Noah before the Flood and then to Moses on Mount Sinai – ‘the knowledge that was, the knowledge that is, the knowledge that will be’.

Rosenkreutz then handed this information to German alchemists based in Kassel, choosing that city as it was the most scientifically advanced in the world at that time, and they in turn cryptically outlined their findings in a series of pamphlets published early in the seventeenth century which spoke of a secret brotherhood working for the good of mankind.

In 1622 the Rosicrucians announced themselves to the world, when one morning the citizens of Paris awoke to find the walls of their city covered with posters bearing the following message:

We, the deputies of the principal College of the Brethren of the Rose Cross (Rosicrucians) are among you in this town, visibly and invisibly, through the grace of the Most High to whom the hearts of all just men are turned, in order to save our fellow-men from the error of death.

In England Francis Bacon, James I’s Lord Chancellor and the foremost scholar of his day, worked on the sect’s findings at Canonbury Tower, while all over Europe leading philosophers, scientists, mystics and scholars waited for an invitation to join the organisation. When none came – officially – they formed their own Rosicrucian societies, which have continued to the present day. But which are the real Rosicrucians and which are imposters no one is willing to assert.

The City

The ancient heart of London, just one square mile in size, is the setting for the country’s main cathedral, St Paul’s. During the 1666 Fire of London eighty-six churches were destroyed here. Although over the subsequent centuries the City’s population has withered away the area still has the greatest concentration of religious buildings in England – thirty-nine churches and one synagogue, Bevis Marks, Britain’s oldest. In 1847 Lionel de Rothschild was elected MP for the City of London but was unable to take his seat as new MPs were required to take the Christian oath, something which as a Jew he refused to do. A compromise wasn’t reached until 1858.

ALDERSGATE, Aldersgate Street at Gresham Street

Aldersgate was one of twelve traditional gates of the City of London (along with Aldgate, Moorgate, Newgate and others). Each represented one of the tribes of Israel, as medieval leaders thought this would give the city divine legitimacy. In 1603 when James VI of Scotland journeyed to London for the first time to take the throne as James I of England he entered through Aldersgate. The king later had the structure rebuilt with statues of Old Testament prophets Samuel and Jeremiah, and accompanying biblical texts. These told his subjects he was God’s anointed monarch, a direct descendant of King David, and that the British were the chosen people, descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and now holders of Christianity’s mantle, who at the Lord’s second appearance would gather together as one family from whom ‘the elect’ would be chosen.

→ Creation of the King James Bible, p. 59

Sacred City

As with many ancient cities, London’s early town planners were guided by the ‘sacred’ measurements of the Bible, which supposedly give cities divine protection. They are based on the Old Testament unit of the cubit, the length from the tip of the fingers to the elbow, set, inevitably, by the individual in charge of the measuring and thus differing from person to person.

The key ‘sacred’ lengths are 1,600 cubits, as used in building Solomon’s Temple, and 2,000 cubits. The latter distance features prominently in the Old Testament Book of Numbers, chapter 35 which instructs builders: ‘Ye shall measure from without the city on the east side two thousand cubits, and on the south side two thousand cubits, and on the west side two thousand cubits, and on the north side two thousand cubits, and the city shall be in the midst.’

This measurement has special significance. In Hebrew 1,000 is denoted by the letter aleph (). Two thousand is therefore two alephs, and these letters spliced together form the Star of David, the great icon of Jewish lore. Two thousand cubits is the distance from Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives. In the City of London the distance from Temple Bar, the historic boundary between the cities of London and Westminster to St Paul’s is 2,000 cubits. Similarly, the ancient church of St Dunstan-in-the-East stands 2,000 cubits from St Paul’s as the City’s eastern boundary.

Those in charge of rebuilding London after the 1666 Fire – Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Nicholas Hawksmoor and his team – were in thrall to the idea of sacred geometry. Although they were scientists and men of reason, their agenda was rich with religious arcana. They were influenced by the notion that Christianity had arrived in England as early as the first century AD, long before it had reached Rome. They were inspired by the story in the Book of Zechariah of how the Israelite prophet of the same name meets the Lord Himself, who is disguised as an architect:

I lifted up mine eyes again, and looked, and behold there was a man with a measuring line in his hand. Then said I, ‘Whither goest thou?’ And he said unto me, ‘To measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof, and what is the length thereof.’

Consequently they wanted to reshape London as the New Jerusalem – the leading city of Christendom in a world free of papist rule. The idea of London as the New Jerusalem had long been envisaged by the enlightened. Even Charles I had promised it in a 1620 sermon: ‘For Here hath the Lord ordained the thrones of David, for judgement: and the charre of Moyses, for instruction, this Church, your Son indeed, others are but Synagogues, this your Jerusalem, the mother to them all.’ It was a theme later adopted by William Blake, among others, whose epic poem Jerusalem casts London as the holy city: ‘We builded Jerusalem as a City & a Temple’.

Wren, Hawksmoor and the other architects created a chain of buildings and features set apart by ‘sacred’ measurements. Two thousand cubits east of Wren’s favourite church, St Dunstan-in-the-East, they created a haven for intellectuals and free-thinkers on the site of an ancient well. This became Wellclose Square (→ p. 55), for centuries the most prosperous location in east London but now almost derelict. In the centre of the square was a Hawksmoor church which stood 2,000 cubits from his better-known (and still standing) Christ Church Spitalfields. And Christ Church is itself 2,000 cubits north-east of Hawksmoor’s St Mary Woolnoth by what is now Bank station.

The pattern continues with other well-known buildings from that period. Hawksmoor’s church of St George-in-the-East stands 2,000 cubits from the Roman wall. The site of the now partly demolished St Luke’s on Old Street is 2,000 cubits north of St Paul’s, and the site of another now demolished Hawksmoor church, St John Horselydown, just south of Tower Bridge, lies 2,000 cubits from the Monument, whose own setting is a masterpiece of maths and astronomy (→ p. 22).

ALL HALLOWS THE GREAT, 90 Upper Thames Street

One of England’s most extreme millennial sects, the Fifth Monarchy Men, was founded at this now demolished church in 1651. Exploiting the political and religious turmoil in the aftermath of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, the Fifth Monarchy Men believed the days of earthly kings were over and sought to prepare the country for the imminent appearance of Jesus Christ himself as king.

Christ would rule the fifth kingdom outlined in the Old Testament Book of Daniel. (The first four, so they claimed, were those of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires.) But before he could do so a godly kingdom on earth – the Rule of the Saints – would violently replace the old order. The Fifth Monarchists consequently lauded the execution of King Charles and urged similar attacks on the rich as they stood in the way of the saintly kingdom.

In 1653 the Fifth Monarchists attained some influence in Oliver Cromwell’s new parliamentary assembly, so when he dissolved it that December and appointed himself Lord Protector – de facto king – the group felt betrayed. Three Fifth Monarchy Men were imprisoned for denouncing Cromwell, and their leader Thomas Harrison was expelled from the army. A Fifth Monarchist plot to overthrow the Lord Protector was uncovered in 1657 when its instigator, Thomas Venner, previously a minister at a church on Coleman Street in the City, was briefly imprisoned for planning to blow up the Tower of London.

On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 Thomas Harrison was arrested and put to death for participating in Charles I’s execution. Now Venner took over. He led the Fifth Monarchy Men along a distinctly militant path. Infuriated by the torture and execution of Harrison and the popish leanings of the Church reformed around the new king, Charles II, Venner planned insurrection before Charles could be crowned. On New Year’s Day 1661 he and around fifty Fifth Monarchy rebels staged a violent but unsuccessful uprising in London. Shouting their war cry of ‘King Jesus and the heads upon the gates’, they attacked the major buildings of the City, as Samuel Pepys noted in his diary:

A great rising in the city of the Fifth-monarchy men, which did very much disturb the peace and liberty of the people, so that all the train-bands arose in arms, both in London and Westminster, as likewise all the king’s guards; and most of the noblemen mounted, and put all their servants on coach horses, for the defence of His Majesty, and the peace of his kingdom.

Around forty soldiers and civilians were killed. Venner was captured and executed outside his Coleman Street church. The Fifth Monarchy movement carried on briefly but then declined.

All Hallows the Great was demolished in the late nineteenth century for road widening.

→ Cromwell in Ireland, p. 297

BLACKFRIARS MONASTERY, Ireland Yard

It was in Blackfriars that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s council met in May 1382 to denounce John Wycliffe’s religious doctrines and his pioneering translation of the Bible into English.

As the hearing began, an earthquake, rare for London, rocked the City. Wycliffe, understandably, claimed the event as a sign of God’s discontent with the council’s hostile attitude to his reformist teachings. The council, with equal confidence, took the quake as proof of the Lord’s displeasure with Wycliffe.

As William Courtenay, the Archbishop of Canterbury, explained:

This earthquake foretells the purging of this kingdom from heresies, for as there are shut up in the bowels of the earth many noxious spirits which are expelled in an earthquake, and so the earth is cleansed but not without great violence, so there are many heresies shut up in the hearts of reprobate men, but by the condemnation of them, the kingdom is to be cleansed; but not without trouble and great commotion.

The synod then found against Wycliffe on twenty-four counts of heresy.

A 1529 court held at Blackfriars heard the divorce proceedings between Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII. The king had become increasingly frustrated at his wife’s inability to provide him with a male heir, despite seven pregnancies, so he sought permission from the Pope, Clement VII, to annul the marriage. Henry made a number of ingenious claims. First he said that he had committed incest by marrying Catherine as she had been the wife of his late brother, Arthur. There was much confusion over the Bible’s position on such a matter, but as Catherine swore that her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated the point was dropped. Henry then asked the Pope for an annulment on the grounds that the original papal dispensation to marry his late brother’s widow was invalid. Clement may well have wanted to help the king but was in the unfortunate position of being a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the time and was unwilling to jeopardise his position any further.

Catherine was consequently brought before the court at Blackfriars on 18 June 1529. The king, the cardinals, the Archbishop of Canterbury and several other bishops attended the proceedings which ended inconclusively. Henry now exacted revenge on Wolsey, Archbishop of York and his leading minister, whom he blamed for the fiasco. Four years later Henry married Anne Boleyn and the Pope excommunicated him. Henry then broke England’s ties with Rome, declared himself head of the English Church and dissolved the monasteries. Blackfriars closed in 1538. Excavations conducted in 1890 and 1925 uncovered some remnants of the building but only a tiny portion of stone remains above ground.

→ Wycliffe in Oxford, p. 171

BRIDEWELL PRISON, Bridewell Place

The false messiah Elizeus Hall was sent to Bridewell Prison in 1562 after claiming to be a messenger from God who had been taken on a two-day visit to heaven and hell. In 1589 it was to Bridewell that one George Nichols was sent for being a Catholic priest. He and his associates, who had been arrested in Oxford (→ p. 174), were hung by their hands to make them betray their faith, but they refused to recant. They were all eventually hanged, drawn and quartered. The two founders of the Muggletonian sect, Lodowick Muggleton and John Reeve, were sent to Bridewell Prison in 1653 in an attempt to convince them to renounce their beliefs.

→ The Muggletonians, p. 23

CHEAPSIDE

In 1591 William Hacket paraded up and down Cheapside in a cart, claiming to be the messiah. His supporters believed Hacket was both the king of Europe and the angel who would appear at the Last Judgment. Hacket threatened to bring down a plague on England unless he was rightfully acknowledged, but when he announced that Queen Elizabeth had no right to the crown he was arrested for treason and executed. Hacket’s followers expected that divine intervention would save him, and were most vexed when none was forthcoming.

CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE-WITHOUT-NEWGATE, Holborn Viaduct

The largest parish church in the City of London, designed in a style similar to that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, was founded in 1137. Indeed the distance from the church to the now demolished north-west gate of the City corresponded almost exactly with the distance inside its Jerusalem namesake from the Holy Sepulchre to the Calvary on which Jesus’ cross was placed. The London church became an appropriate starting point for the Crusaders on their journey to the Holy Land to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG’S VISION, Salisbury Court

While lodging in Salisbury Court in 1745 Emanuel Swedenborg, the major Swedish scientist-turned-mystic in whose name the New Church was founded after his death, had a religious vision. He described it to Thomas Hartley, rector of Winwick, as ‘the opening of his spiritual sight, the manifestation of the Lord to him in person’, and to his friend Robsahm as a vision of the Lord appearing before him announcing: ‘I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold the spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. I will Myself dictate to thee what thou shalt write.’

In the vision Swedenborg met Jesus Christ who told him that humanity needed someone to explain the Scriptures properly and that he, Swedenborg, had been chosen for the task. He devoted the remaining twenty-eight years of his life to religion and wrote eighteen theological works, which were a major influence on William Blake. The New Church which his followers founded after his death continues to thrive.

→ Emanuel Swedenborg in the East End, p. 46

FIRE OF LONDON, Pudding Lane

The fire that destroyed much of the City in 1666 was connected to many of the religious controversies of the day. Indeed, to a number of religious commentators its outbreak on 2 September that year was no surprise. At the beginning of the year doom-mongers noted the worrying numerical conjunction of 1,000 (Christ’s millennium) with 666, the number of the Beast of the Book of Revelation. They predicted that London would turn into the fiery lake which according to the same book ‘burneth the fearful and unbelieving, the abominable, the murderers, the whoremongers, sorcerers, idolaters and liars’.

London would burn for being a city of sin, and two books published at the beginning of that year contained ominous predictions about the blaze. Daniel Baker in A Certaine Warning for a Naked Heart explained how London would be destroyed by a ‘consuming fire’, while Walter Gostelo in The Coming of God in Mercy, in Vengeance, Beginning with Fire, to Convert or Consume all this so Sinful City boasted: ‘If fire make not ashes of the City, and thy bones also, conclude me a liar for ever.’

Sure enough, on 2 September 1666, exactly a year after the Lord Mayor had ordered Londoners to light fires to burn out the Plague, the Great Fire of London broke out. Although at first many thought there was no reason for concern and that it would soon be contained, the Fire spread fast and eventually destroyed much of the capital, including eighty-six churches such as St Benet Sherhog and St Mary Magdalen Milk Street.

Immediately after the Fire the recriminations started. A local Catholic priest called Carpenter told his congregation that the flames ‘were come upon this land and people for the forsaking of the true Catholic religion’. Catholics pointed to at least a hundred years’ worth of transgressions by Londoners dating back to Henry VIII, whose defiance of the Pope in 1530 over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon broke the ties that bound the English Church to Rome, and led to the dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys. They pointed to the sins of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, who had ordered the execution of the ‘holy’ king, Charles I, he who had lived a life of devotion and had ‘suffered martyrdom in defence of the most holy religion’. They also drew up a list of current sins – ‘the prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives’, as John Evelyn detailed in his diary – in which the mostly Protestant population had indulged.

And for Protestants there was an alternative list of sins that a presumably different God had punished in the Fire of London, namely those of the corrupt Romish monasteries and abbeys which had perverted the ancient religion and accumulated excessive wealth while indulging in simony, fecundity and hypocrisy. They remembered the sins of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, who had sent some 300 Protestants to a violent death for heresy in the 1550s and blamed Catholic agitators for starting the Fire. Yet others believed that the Fire had been started by a Jew distraught that the supposed messiah, Shabbatai Zevi, who had claimed he would be crowned that month, had backed down when faced with the wrath of the Turkish Sultan (→ p. 69).

Soon after the Fire, rumours spread that Robert Hubert, a French silversmith, allegedly an agent of the French king, had started the blaze on the Pope’s orders. Hubert was arrested in east London. He admitted that he had left Sweden for the English capital and gone to Pudding Lane where he had used a long pole to lob a fireball through the window of Farriner’s bakery. Hubert boasted of twenty-three co-conspirators, but his confession was probably false: there was no window at Farriner’s bakery and no ship had sailed into east London from Sweden on the day he claimed to have arrived. Nevertheless he was a convenient scapegoat and was hanged at Tyburn (→ p. 79).

GREAT SYNAGOGUE (1690–1941), Duke’s Place

Used by Jews of north European descent (Ashkenazis) until it was destroyed in the Second World War, the Great Synagogue was the traditional seat of the chief rabbi, a post and office which do not exist in Jewish law. Consequently, some religious Jews claimed that the office of the Chief Rabbi had been created only to make Judaism more acceptable to the Church of England, and would mock the incumbent as the heimische Archbishop of Canterbury.

When a fire broke out in the Great Synagogue in the 1750s, Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk, the eighteenth-century mystic known as the Ba’al Shem of London (master of the secret names of God), is alleged to have extinguished it by inscribing on the jamb of the entrance the four Hebrew letters of God’s most-used name (Yahweh in English), supposedly causing the wind to change direction and the blaze to die down.

→ Falk in the East End, p. 55

HOLY TRINITY PRIORY ALDGATE, Mitre Square

The priory which opened in 1109 and soon became the grandest religious house in London, was the scene of one of the first recorded murders in London history. In 1530 Brother Martin, a priory monk, stabbed to death a woman praying at the high altar and then killed himself. The body of Catherine Eddowes, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, was found on the same site more than 350 years later. Some Ripper experts believe Eddowes was killed elsewhere and the corpse placed there as part of a still unexplained ritualistic agenda.

After Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 declaring himself head of the Church of England, he closed down establishments such as Holy Trinity. The priory surrendered its authority to the Crown by ‘mutual agreement’ and its incumbents were forced to embark on secular life. The buildings lay in ruins for some years and, even when the owners offered the stone free to any man who would take it down, there were no takers.

JEWRY STREET

The street was home in the sixteenth century to the first Jewish community allowed to live in the capital since Edward I expelled the Jews from Britain in 1291. Its number included Rodrigo Lopez, physician to Elizabeth I, who was once accused of participating in a plot to poison the queen and on whom Shakespeare partly based Shylock. Most of the new immigrant Jews came from Spain and Portugal, where they had been forced to convert to Christianity and were known by the insulting name marranos (Spanish for ‘swine’) due to their practice of hanging pigs outside their homes to show they had converted to Catholicism. After Oliver Cromwell officially allowed the Jews to return to the capital in 1656, this eastern edge of the City became the main centre of Jewish immigration into London. Their first new synagogue, on Creechurch Lane, has long been demolished.

JOHN WESLEY’S CONVERSION, Aldersgate Street by Ironmongers’ Hall

John Wesley, the early eighteenth-century preacher who founded Methodism, experienced an epiphany at Hall House, Nettleton Court on 24 May 1738. He later wrote that:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.

→ Wesley in Bolton, p. 220

THE MONUMENT, Fish Street Hill

The tall Doric column just north of London Bridge was built as a memorial to the 1666 Great Fire of London but has many religious connections. It was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke in 1671–7, and decorated by the artist Caius Gabriel Cibber during his daytime parole from debtors’ prison. He designed a relief depicting a female figure (London) grieving in front of burning buildings to recall the fallen Jerusalem from the Book of Lamentations ‘sitting solitary as a widow [that] weepeth sore in the night, her tears on her cheeks’.

Because so many people believed Catholics were responsible for the Fire, the Monument was given an inscription in 1681 (not removed until 1831) which blamed the disaster on the ‘treachery and malice of the Popish faction, in order to the effecting their horrid plot for the extirpating the Protestant religion and English liberties, and to introduce Popery and Heresy’. And just in case there was anyone who hadn’t fully received the message, another inscription by Farriner’s bakery, where the blaze began, stated that ‘here by permission of heaven hell broke loose upon this Protestant City from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists . . .’

A best-selling pamphlet published at that time urged Protestants to go to the top of the tower and imagine the consequences of popish rule: ‘The whole town in flames, and amongst the distracted crowd, troops of Papists ravishing their [the Protestants’] wives and daughters, dashing out the brains of their little children against the walls, plundering their houses and cutting their throats in the name of heretic dogs.’

The Monument is the tallest stone column in the world, its height, 202 foot, being the same as the distance between it and the baker’s shop on nearby Pudding Lane where the Fire started. The 202-foot measurement was not randomly chosen. The Monument is positioned so that an observer looking east in the morning and west in the afternoon on the day of the summer solstice can see the sun sitting directly on top of the flaming urn of gilt bronze that crowns its top. Ingeniously the Monument also stands a distance of 2,000 cubits (a biblical measurement often used by architects wanting to imbue their buildings with ‘divine protection’) from Christ Church Spitalfields, designed by Christopher Wren’s assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor, and 2,000 cubits from the western end of Wren’s own St Paul’s Cathedral.

MUGGLETONIANS’ BIRTHPLACE, Bishopsgate

A seventeenth-century sect of radical puritans now practically extinct, the Muggletonians were established by Lodowick Muggleton, a Bishopsgate-born tailor, in 1651. That year he claimed that God had appointed him and his cousin, John Reeve, the Two Last Witnesses, as foretold in the verse in the Book of Revelation: ‘I will give power unto my two witnesses and they shall prophesy one thousand two hundred and threescore days clothed in sackcloth.’

The main tenets of the Muggletonians’ creed were:

1. God and the man Jesus Christ are synonymous expressions.

2. The devil and human reason are synonymous.

3. The soul dies and rises again with the body.

4. Heaven is a place above the stars.

5. At present hell is nowhere, but this earth, darkened after the last judgement, will be hell.

6. Angels are the only beings of pure reason.

Reeve was obsessed with the notion of mankind’s impending doom, and claimed he knew whom God had chosen to be saved. He and Muggleton were sent to Bridewell Prison for cursing a vicar, Mr Goffin, who subsequently died. The teachings of the two founders were handed down from generation to generation, but as the Muggletonians did not believe in proselytising, the sect slowly died out. For instance, in 1697 some 250 supporters attended Muggleton’s funeral, but by 1803 they were down to just over a hundred members, and a hundred years later only seventeen attended the monthly meeting. According to an article in the Times Literary Supplement, in 1974 a handful of believers were left in Kent. By the end of the decade there were only two remaining Muggletonians who by now may have verified tenet Number 4.

→ The Quakers, p. 226

OLD JEWRY

Now a nondescript City street of company offices, this was the centre of medieval Jewish life in London, when the street was known as Jewry. A Jewish community began to take shape here after William the Conqueror invited Jews from Normandy to London in the 1070s to help him improve Britain’s primitive trading practices. The king needed an advanced monetary system – payments made in coin not through barter – and such knowledge was the preserve of Jews, barred from most professions and public office throughout the continent but experts in money, commerce and finance because the Church forbade Christians from practising usury.

According to most modern histories there were no Jews in London, or even England, before the Norman Conquest. However, Jews had been coming to Britain since King Solomon sent tin traders from the Holy Land to negotiate with the miners of Cornwall some time around the year 960 BC. There were almost certainly Jews in London in Roman times: a brick recovered from the excavation of some Roman ruins on Mark Lane near the Tower in 1650 contained a relief of the story of Samson driving foxes into a field of corn – something which could not have been known to pagan, pre-Christian Romans.

Hostility to the Jews increased over the years, especially on anniversaries and celebrations that were particularly English in character. For instance, Jews were barred from attending the coronation of Richard I in 1189, but they sent a delegation to Westminster Hall nonetheless bearing gifts for the king, and a few sneaked into the hall to have a look at the proceedings. The palace guards threw them out, whereupon some onlookers started throwing stones. A rumour began circulating that the king had ordered the destruction of the Jews. In Jewry a mob set fire to Jewish houses and thirty people were killed. One Jew, Benedict of York, saved his life by converting to Christianity on the spot; he was rushed to St Margaret’s church and baptised (although he recanted his new views the next day). When the king learned what had happened he ordered the hanging of three of the ringleaders and announced that the Jews must not be so treated.

From that time the Jews were sent to the Tower for their own safety on such days. But soon excuses were being made to send the Jews to the Tower as a punishment for what were mostly fabricated accusations, usually involving coin clipping (chipping away at coins to use the metal), and allegations of murdering children to use their blood in religious sacrificial rituals.

King John treated the Jewish moneylenders well. He even granted them a charter and allowed them to choose a chief rabbi. But this détente didn’t last long. In 1210 the king levied a penalty of 66,000 marks on the Jews, and imprisoned, blinded and tortured those who would not pay.

Henry III compelled the Jews to wear two white tablets of linen or parchment on their breasts. Wherever Jews lived, burgesses were chosen to protect them from pilgrims’ insults about infidels. But in 1220 the Crown seized the Old Jewry synagogue and handed it to the brothers of St Anthony of Vienna for use as a church. In 1232 more pressure was put on the Jews to reject their religion when Henry built a House for Converted Jews on what is now Chancery Lane.

Jews were then expelled from Newcastle and Southampton. In London the status of the community began to deteriorate sharply after a dead Christian child was found in 1244, its arms and legs embroidered with Hebrew letters – a botched crucifixion, evidently. After a number of further tribulations the Jews asked King Henry if they could leave England officially. The king was outraged. Soon after, eighty-six of London’s richest Jews were hanged for supposedly crucifying a Christian child in Lincoln and there was a riot against London’s Jews. Five hundred were killed and the synagogue was burnt down. Only those who took refuge in the Tower survived.

Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272, forced the Jews to wear yellow badges so that everyone knew who they were (a symbol Hitler adopted nearly 700 years later). He also levied a tax of threepence on them every Easter. In 1288 all England’s Jews were imprisoned and held until they paid a £20,000 ransom, a handy sum to help finance the castles he was building in Wales. It came as no surprise when in 1290 Edward announced on 18 July – the anniversary of the sacking of the Temple in AD 70 – that he was expelling the Jews from England. All Jews (some 15,000) ‘with their wives, children and chattels’ had to leave the country, and they were given until 1 November, the feast of All Saints, to comply. Any Jew who remained behind after that date would face execution. Ships carrying Jews left St Katharine’s Dock near the Tower. When one vessel ran into a sandbank off Queensborough, Kent, the captain invited passengers to stretch their legs. But once they had disembarked he made off, leaving the party to drown as the tide rose.

The Crown seized all the Jews’ property and none of their buildings survive locally . . . above ground. Recent excavations of nearby sites during the building of the huge corporate blocks that dominate the area have unearthed well-preserved ritual baths and artefacts.

→ The Jews massacred in York, p. 207

ST DUNSTAN-IN-THE-WEST, Fleet Street at Hen and Chickens Court

Founded c. 1185 as St Dunstan’s Over Against the Temple, the church was known as St Dunstan-in-the-West from 1278 to differentiate it from St Dunstan-in-the-East in Stepney. It was here that William Tyndale, whose translations of the New Testament from the Greek provided the basis for the later King James Bible, preached in the 1520s. In the seventeenth century St Dunstan’s was a centre of Puritanism where Praise-God Barebones, the divinely named Roundhead leader, preached.

The church’s unusual-looking clock, the first in London to be marked with minutes, was erected in 1671 as a thanksgiving from parishioners relieved that a sudden burst of wind sent the Fire of London away from the building. The clock features two burly figures, Gog and Magog, biblical characters who appear cryptically in the Book of Revelation: ‘And ye shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.’ However, an ancient London legend tells of a character called Gogmagog – an Ancient Briton beaten in battle around the year 1000 BC by Brutus the Trojan, founder of London.

Today the church unites all major churches of Christendom: ‘Old Catholics, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, the Oriental churches, the Lutheran and Reformed Churches and the Holy Roman and Catholic Church’.

ST LAWRENCE JEWRY

John Wilkins, mid-seventeenth-century vicar of this exquisitely designed Christopher Wren church, devised a new system of measurement in the 1660s based on biblical ‘sacred geometry’. He wanted the main unit length to be equal to the 2,000 cubits cited as holy in the Book of Numbers. To make calculations easier the length would be divided not into 2,000 parts but into 1,000 equal divisions, what in the nineteenth century was renamed the metre, now a standard measurement, used extensively throughout the world, but, ironically, not universally in London.

→ London, Sacred City, p. 11

ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, St Paul’s Churchyard

Britain’s major cathedral, the setting for state occasions as well as one of the capital’s leading tourist attractions, was founded in 604 by Ethelbert, King of Kent, and Mellitus, Bishop of the East Saxons. The church was destroyed by the Vikings in the ninth century and burnt down in 1087, but at the end of the eleventh century William I granted St Paul’s privileges: ‘Some lands I give to God and the church of St Paul’s, in London, and special franchises, because I wish that this church may be free in all things, as I wish my soul to be on the day of judgment.’

In the thirteenth century Maurice, Bishop of London, decided to build a new grand cathedral on a larger scale than anything witnessed outside central Europe. It was this building, completed in 1240, that is now known as Old St Paul’s, to differentiate it from the post-Fire of London cathedral.

Not all clerics have been hospitably received here. In 1093 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, came to St Paul’s demanding his tithe of the fruit harvest, only to find the doors closed in his face. In 1259 a mob killed two canons in the papal party. In 1385 Robert Braybroke, Bishop of London, banned various frivolous activities from taking place at St Paul’s on Sundays, including barbers shaving customers, worshippers shooting arrows at the pigeons and children playing ball. Nine years later the Lollard reformers nailed a paper listing twelve complaints about the Catholic clergy on the door of the old church – a hundred years before Martin Luther famously posted his ninety-six theses on popish indulgences on the door of the church in Wittenberg.

During the Reformation of the 1530s the high altar was pulled down and replaced by a plain table. Many of the tombs were also destroyed, the reredos was smashed to pieces and St Paul’s became more of a social centre than a church. The nave, Paul’s Walk, was even used by prostitutes touting for business, and as a market for selling groceries and animals. In 1553 the Common Council of London passed an act forbidding people from carrying beer barrels, baskets of bread, fish, flesh or fruit into St Paul’s and from leading mules or horses through the cathedral. Evidently the law didn’t go far enough, for in 1558 Elizabeth had to issue a proclamation forbidding the drawing of swords in the church and the shooting of guns inside it or in the churchyard, under pain of two months’ imprisonment.

St Paul’s collection of holy relics was sold off during the Cromwellian Commonwealth of 1649–60, but there appeared to be an inexhaustible stock of these. The authorities were still selling portions of the Virgin Mary’s milk, the hair of Mary Magdalen, the hand of St John, pieces of Thomas à Becket’s skull and the blood of St Paul himself – all preserved in jewelled cases – 150 years later.

The Fire of London destroyed Old St Paul’s in 1666, but the building was spectacularly redesigned by Christopher Wren, who created what many believe to be the finest example of Renaissance architecture in Britain. Somehow St Paul’s escaped destruction during the Second World War Blitz.

PAUL’S CROSS

An open-air pulpit erected by the south wall of the pre-Fire of London St Paul’s was known as Paul’s Cross. Here papal bulls were broadcast, excommunications pronounced, royal proclamations made and heresies denounced at what was a kind of medieval Speakers’ Corner. It was also where the earliest English Bibles were burnt before the authorities decided to allow the people to hear the Scriptures in their native tongue.

In 1422 Richard Walker, a Worcester chaplain, appeared at Paul’s Cross on charges of sorcery. Two books on magic which he had been caught reading were then burnt before his eyes. In 1447 Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, was made to kneel here before the Archbishop of Canterbury and around 20,000 onlookers to make a full confession of his ‘errors’. That was how his captors described his writings, which were then cast into the fire as a warning of the fate that might soon befall him.

Preacher Beal stirred up the crowd so passionately on May Day 1517 that riots broke out across London as the mob attacked foreign merchants on what came to be called Evil May Day. Troops managed to restore order and took 400 rioters as prisoners. The leaders of the riots were hanged, drawn and quartered.

On 12 May 1521 an unusual book, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (The Defence of the Seven Sacraments), setting out Catholic arguments against the new Protestant creed being propounded by Martin Luther in Germany, was unveiled at Paul’s Cross. The author was supposedly none other than Henry VIII, the jousting, hunting, non-bookish king. Though few believed that Henry was capable of such writing, evidence shows that the king was indeed the author of the work, which he dedicated to the Pope and which earned him the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.

Copies of William Tyndale’s pioneering English translation of the Bible were burnt here in 1526, shortly after they had been smuggled into the country. They were selling in London for three shillings, but those found with such a Bible were made to ride backward on a donkey and wear a pasteboard mitre emblazoned with some of the offending passages. Tied to their backs were symbolic faggots of wood which they had to hurl into a bonfire as a warning of what would happen to them soon at Smithfield if they continued with their heretical reading.

The Rood of Grace (→ p. 132), a wooden cross bearing an image that could supposedly move and speak if approached by one who had lived a pure life, was smashed to pieces under the king’s orders at Paul’s Cross in 1538. Two years later it was here that William Jerome, the vicar of St Dunstan and All Saints, was burnt alive for preaching an Anabaptist sermon (belittling infant baptism).

Crowds would gather at Paul’s Cross to hear contentious sermons, which often resulted in trouble. For instance in 1549 preachers incited the onlookers to sack the cathedral itself, and a mob tore inside, destroyed the altar and smashed several tombs. At the first sermon preached here following the death of the Protestant king, Edward VI, on 6 July 1553 Bishop Bourne provoked the crowd by denouncing the Protestant Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. A group of spectators began shouting: ‘He preaches damnation! Pull him down! Pull him down!’ Someone threw a dagger at Bourne. It stuck in one of the wooden side posts and the bishop was rushed into St Paul’s school for his own safety. In their desperation to exact revenge, the authorities arrested several people and imprisoned them in the Tower, while a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at Paul’s Cross.

Ridley himself soon made his stand here. On 16 July he denounced both royal princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, daughters of Henry VIII, as illegitimate and singled out Mary for special abuse as she was a papist. Ridley believed that Lady Jane Grey, great-granddaughter of Henry VII, should take the throne as the best way of preserving a Protestant succession – which she did but for only nine days.

In April 1584 the Bishop of London preached here against astrologers who were predicting the end of the world owing to an imminent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. On 7 February 1601 the Earl of Essex, at the conclusion of the sermon at Paul’s Cross, led a group of 300 rebels through the City shouting: ‘Murder, murder, God save the Queen!’ in protest at how England was supposedly about to be handed to the Spanish when Queen Elizabeth died. He was arrested and executed on Tower Hill a month later.

The Puritans pulled down Paul’s Cross in 1643.

ST PAUL’S CHURCHYARD

When Pope Pius V became pontiff in February 1570 he issued a papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, urging Catholics to overthrow Elizabeth, ‘pretended Queen of England’. The Catholics believed Elizabeth was technically illegitimate as they did not recognise her mother, Anne Boleyn, the Protestant who had replaced the Catholic Catherine of Aragon in Henry’s favours, as being legitimately married to the king.

Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth, freeing her subjects from their allegiance to her. It was an absurd move as no Catholic European power was in a position to enforce his wishes. It also meant that from now on the queen would treat all Catholics as the enemy. A Catholic called John Felton pinned the papal bull to the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace and was duly hanged in St Paul’s Churchyard. Cut down while still alive, he supposedly shouted out the holy name of Jesus as the hangman held his heart in his hand.

George Williams was one of a dozen men who established the Young Men’s Christian Association above a draper’s shop in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1844. Their aim was to unite and direct ‘the efforts of Christian young men for the spiritual welfare of their fellows in the various departments of commercial life’. Soon other branches were formed, first in London, and then throughout the world.

SMITHFIELD EXECUTION SITE, West Smithfield

Originally the Smooth Field, this was Britain’s major execution site for Protestant martyrs in medieval times, where hundreds lost their lives.

The method of execution used at Smithfield was nearly always burning at the stake before a large crowd. Though gruesome, it was carried out in a far more humane manner than on the continent, where heretics often had their tongues cut off before the pyre was lit. In England burning occurred only after a series of rigorous trials had taken place and the condemned had been given the chance of recanting their views.

A dramatic preamble to the grim fate was the ceremony known as ‘carrying the faggot’. The alleged heretic, carrying a faggot of wood, would be taken to the place of execution. There a fire had been lit, and the accused would throw the faggot on to the fire and watch it burn as a warning that if they remained steadfast in their views they would be next for the flames. Before the pyre was lit, the victim’s friends and family would try to bribe the executioner to place a bag of gunpowder by the body. That way, when the flames rose, the gunpowder would explode and kill the poor wretch quickly, sparing them the slow torture of burning. This could not happen of course if it had been raining.

The first martyr to meet his death here was William Sawtrey, a priest and follower of the Bible translator John Wycliffe, who went to the stake in 1401. Sawtrey’s card was marked when he announced ‘instead of adoring the cross on which Christ suffered, I adore Christ who suffered on it’. In 1399 the Bishop of Norwich questioned Sawtrey over his beliefs, and had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of heresy. Sawtrey recanted his views and was released but felt that he had betrayed Christ. Two years later Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, had Sawtrey arrested again. After questioning Sawtrey, the Church authorities deemed ‘unacceptable’ his views on transubstantiation and the adoration of the cross and declared him indeed a heretic, which meant only one thing – he had to be put to death by burning.

The list of Smithfield martyrs includes:

• John Badby, 1410

Badby, a Worcester tailor, got into trouble in 1410 after telling the local diocesan court that when Christ sat at the Last Supper with his disciples he did not have his body in his hand to distribute and that ‘if every host consecrated at the altar were the Lord’s body, then there be 20,000 Gods in England’. A court at St Paul’s sentenced him to be burnt to death. Just before Badby met his fate the watching Prince of Wales (the future Henry V) offered him his life and a pension if he would recant, but Badby would not do so. As the flames began to rise he cried out: ‘It is consecrated bread and not the body of God.’

• John Frith, 1533

A colleague of the Bible translator William Tyndale, Frith fled to the continent when the persecution of Protestants began in the 1520s. He later returned to England, travelling from congregation to congregation where Catholicism had been ousted following the Reformation. Frith was arrested in 1532 and sent to the Tower of London, where he was chained to a post. Things improved, though, and for a while Frith was allowed to have friends visit his cell. But the authorities soon decided to bring Frith before the bishops to repent his ‘heresies’, such as denying that the bread and wine at consecration actually turn into Jesus’ flesh and blood. When he refused to do so, he was taken to a dungeon under Newgate Prison and, according to Andersen, his biographer, ‘laden with irons, as many as he could bear, neither stand upright, nor stoop down’.

At least Frith had only one night of these horrors, for the next day he and a fellow sufferer, Hewett, were taken to Smithfield and bound to the stake to be burnt. ‘The wind made his death somewhat longer, as it bore away the flame from him to his fellow,’ Andersen explained, ‘but Frith’s mind was established with such patience, that, as though he had felt no pain, he seemed rather to rejoice for his fellow than to be careful for himself.’

• John Lambert, 1537

Lambert was summoned before a religious court on suspicion of having converted to Protestantism. He remained silent, like Jesus before his accusers, and in doing so was instrumental in bringing about a change in the law whereby it was decreed no man can accuse himself – nemo tenetur edere contra se. It didn’t save his life, and he was burnt at Smithfield in 1537. When Lambert’s legs had been charred to stumps, he was taken from the fire, but he cried out, ‘None but Christ, none but Christ,’ and was dropped into the flames again.

• John Forest, 1538

Forest, a preacher who opposed Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, was the only Catholic to be burnt at the stake at Smithfield for heresy. With Forest on a bed of chains suspended over the pyre, the executioner added a huge wooden holy relic as the martyr slowly roasted. When the flames reached his feet he lifted them up before lowering them again into the fire.

Another who lost his life that year was a man, recorded only as ‘Collins’, who was executed for mocking the Mass in church by lifting a dog above his head.

• Edward Powell and others, 1540

30 July 1540 was a busy day for the Smithfield executioners: that day three Catholics, Edward Powell, Thomas Abel and Richard Featherstone, went to their doom alongside three Protestants, Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerard and William Jerome.

Powell was that rarity, a Welsh Catholic. He was a rector in Somerset and a preacher favoured by Henry VIII. He was one of four clerics selected to defend the legality of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the validity of which was questioned as she had been married to Henry’s late brother, Arthur. Powell later criticised Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn (Catherine’s replacement) and this resulted in his arraignment for high treason.

Abel had been a chaplain to Catherine of Aragon and continued to support the queen when Henry began divorce proceedings. The king had Abel thrown into the Beauchamp Tower, where he spent six years before being taken to Smithfield and executed for denying royal supremacy over the Church.

Featherstone was also a chaplain to Catherine of Aragon and a tutor to Mary Tudor, her daughter. In 1534 he was asked to take the Oath of Supremacy but refused to do so and was imprisoned in the Tower. After Powell, Abel and Featherstone’s execution their limbs were fixed to the gates of the city and their heads displayed on poles on London Bridge.

Barnes, Gerard and Jerome, the Protestants, were prosecuted for supporting the doctrines of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli. Of the three, Barnes was the most interesting character. Henry VIII sent him to Germany in 1535 to encourage disciples of Martin Luther to give their approval to the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. By the year of Barnes’s execution Henry had decided to oppose Luther’s reforms vehemently. Barnes had made a speech at Paul’s Cross attacking a rival cleric, which caused turmoil within the different factions of the king’s council. Barnes was forced to apologise but it wasn’t enough to save him.

• John Rogers, 1555

A Bible translator, Rogers became the first Protestant martyr to be executed during the reign of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, when he was burnt at Smithfield on 4 February 1555. Rogers had produced only the second complete English Bible (published 1537), the first to be translated into English from the original Hebrew and Greek. He printed it under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew, but much of it was the work of William Tyndale, whose pioneering English translation had caused the Church such distress.

Prior to his execution, Rogers was asked by Woodroofe, the Newgate Prison sheriff, if he would revoke his ‘evil opinion of the Sacrament of the altar’. Rogers replied: ‘That which I have preached I will seal with my blood.’ When Woodroofe responded, ‘Thou art an heretic,’ Rogers retorted, ‘That shall be known at the Day of Judgment’.

On the way to Smithfield Rogers saw his wife and eleven children in the crowd, but was not allowed to talk to them. He died quickly for the flames soon raged. Nevertheless he was courageous enough to pretend to be washing his hands in the fire as if it had been cold water. He then lifted them in the air and prayed. As he died a flock of doves flew above, leading one supporter to claim that one of the birds was the Holy Ghost himself.

• Roger Holland, 1556

Holland was one of forty men and women convicted for staging prayers and Bible study in a walled garden in Islington. With the Catholic Mary Tudor on the throne, such practices were no longer considered acceptable, for the ruling Catholic ideology wanted only priests to read the Bible and even then only in Latin (not its original language). Holland and others believed they were safe from hostile prying eyes, but they were spotted and arrested by the Constable of Islington, who demanded they hand over their books. The Bible readers were taken to Newgate Prison where they were informed they would be released as long as they agreed to hear Mass. Most of them refused to do so.

When Holland was taken to the stake he embraced the bundles of reeds placed there to fuel the fire and announced: ‘Lord, I most humbly thank Thy Majesty that Thou hast called me from the state of death, unto the Light of Thy Heavenly Word, and now unto the fellowship of Thy saints that I may sing and say, “Holy holy holy, Lord God of hosts!” Lord, into Thy hands I commit my spirit. Lord bless these Thy people, and save them from idolatry.’

• Edward Arden, 1583

A Catholic from the same Warwickshire family as Shakespeare’s mother, Arden was probably the innocent victim of a Catholic plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth. He died protesting his innocence, claiming that his only crime was to be a Catholic. His son-in-law John Somerville, who was implicated alongside him, was tortured on the rack, after which he implicated others. Somerville was found strangled in his cell before he could be executed.

• Edward Wightman, 1612

Wightman was the last man burnt alive in England for his religious views – he was a Baptist. At the time, James I, not a particularly bloodthirsty zealot in the Mary manner, was on the throne and the burnings had almost ceased. As the historian Thomas Fuller once noted: ‘James preferred heretics should silently and privately waste themselves away in the prison, rather than to grace them, and amuse others, with the solemnity of a public execution.’

→ Hangings at Tyburn, p. 51

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE, Bevis Marks and Heneage Lane

What is now Britain’s oldest synagogue was built in 1701 on the site of the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds’s town house with its entrance on the side of the building as the City authorities were worried about the reaction of non-Jews walking past a synagogue door. Bevis Marks was opened for Iberian Jews whom Oliver Cromwell had officially allowed to return to England in 1656. (The community’s first synagogue, on nearby Creechurch Lane, no longer exists.)

Bevis Marks’s register of births includes that of Benjamin D’Israeli (later Disraeli) in 1804. Despite his Jewish conception, the future Tory prime minister was baptised at St Andrew’s, Holborn, after his father rowed with the synagogue authorities. The baptism allowed Disraeli to become a Member of Parliament and later prime minister. Services are still held in Portuguese, as well as Hebrew.

THE TEMPLE

The Inner and Middle Temple, two of London’s four Inns of Court where lawyers live and work, takes its name from the Knights Templar, a body of French warrior monks, founded in 1129, who protected pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. Gradually the Knights Templar became ever more powerful until Pope Clement V disbanded them in 1312 and handed their assets to their rivals, the Knights Hospitaller (the Order of St John of Jerusalem). They now became wealthy landowners, buying this estate in London which they leased to lawyers. The Knights Hospitaller themselves had their possessions seized by the English Crown in 1539.

Unofficially the Templars still exist, controlling affairs through their semi-secret offspring organisation, the Freemasons. In recent years various individuals and esoteric groups claiming to represent the Templars have emerged, mostly because of the publicity given to them by the success of the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code. It remains to be seen whether they will try to claim ownership of Temple Church, especially now that a body calling itself the Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ has launched a court case in Spain, demanding that the Pope ‘recognise’ the seizure of their assets worth some €100 bn.

→ The Knights Templars in Warwickshire, p. 188

TEMPLE BAR

The historical boundary between the ancient cities of London and Westminster, marked by a statue where the Strand meets Fleet Street, was the site of the Pope-burning ceremonies of the late seventeenth century. Every year on 17 November, the anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I, an effigy of the Pope, seated in his chair of state, would be carried through the local streets in mockery of the papal coronation ceremony, by people dressed as Catholic clergymen. When the train reached Temple Bar bonfires were lit and the ‘Pope’ was cremated.

TEMPLE CHURCH, Inner Temple Lane

Since the early twenty-first-century publication of Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code, much public interest has centred on Temple Church, London’s oldest Gothic building, which features in the novel. The church was built from 1160–85 in the style of the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A door in the north-west corner of the choir leads to the penitential cell where knights who had broken Temple rules were imprisoned and in some cases starved to death. One such wrongdoer was the deserter Adam de Valaincourt, who was sentenced to eat meat with the dogs for a whole year, to fast four days each week, and to appear naked every Monday at the high altar, where the priest would publicly reprimand him.

→ Rosslyn Chapel, p. 274

TEMPLE OF MITHRAS, 11 Queen Victoria Street

A Roman temple 60 foot long and 26 foot wide built by the Walbrook stream and dedicated to the light god, Mithras, was discovered in 1954 when the ground was dug up for the construction of an office block. The worship of Mithras, which began in Persia in the first century BC and was open only to men, was carried out in caves, Mithraea, one of which was excavated in London near the site now occupied by Mansion House. The artefacts are housed in the Museum of London.

The East End

The East End has long been the most impoverished part of London, where residents have often turned to religion to ease their predicament. In medieval times the land bordering the East End and the City of London was marked with a line of monasteries, priories and nunneries – Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate, St Katharine’s, Minories and Eastminster – all of which vanished with the dissolution of the religious houses in the mid-sixteenth century.

The Bubonic Plague that hit this part of London especially hard in 1665 was seen by locals as a religious punishment foretold by a comet which had passed over the capital the previous December to signify that God was unhappy with London’s behaviour. During the Plague clerics explained that it was the punishment outlined in the Old Testament Book of Chronicles in which the Lord smote ‘the people, children, wives and all goods [causing] great sickness by disease’. Plague victims often didn’t wait to die but threw themselves into pits like the one in St Botolph’s churchyard, Aldgate, as noted by Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year.

At the height of the epidemic a Stepney man, Solomon Eagle, one of a group of Quakers known for holding fasting matches with Anglican priests and stripping in churchyards to prove their true piety, strode through the area naked, a pan of burning charcoal on his head, proclaiming awful Bible-inspired warnings. Another man paced the streets of Whitechapel crying out like Jonah: ‘Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’, likening London to the immoral city threatened with destruction in the Book of Jonah. A man wearing nothing other than a pair of underpants wrapped around his head was seen throughout the East End wailing: ‘O! the Great and the Dreadful God!’ Outside a house in Mile End a crowd gathered as a woman pointed to the sky, claiming she could see a white angel brandishing a fiery sword, warning those who could not see the vision that God’s anger had been aroused and that ‘dreadful judgments were approaching’.

For centuries the East End was the place where refugees fleeing religious persecution arrived in London, disembarking from boats that moored near the Tower. In the seventeenth century Huguenots (French Protestants) escaping a Catholic backlash settled in the East End’s Spitalfields and soon seamlessly assimilated into the local community. In the early nineteenth century Irish (mostly Catholics) turned up in large numbers and, after facing initial hostility, took root in parts of the East End near the Thames, where they eventually assumed control of who worked at the docks. Later that century came a large number of Jews fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe. They met hostility not just from gentiles but from the Jewish establishment which had partly anglicised itself to win acceptance and was now embarrassed by the influx of chassidic Jews dressed in ritual garb and speaking Yiddish.

Gradually during the twentieth century the Jews moved away from the East End, where now barely a synagogue remains. Since the 1970s the area has become increasingly colonised by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, mostly Muslims from Bangladesh, who have changed the religious face of the area.

Jacob the Ripper?

When a number of East End prostitutes were murdered in 1888 by an unknown assailant, who later claimed to be ‘Jack the Ripper’, blame fell on the Jews who had begun to move into the area in large numbers that decade. No gentile could have perpetrated so awful a crime, many locals mused, ignoring the fact that only two Jews had been hanged for murder since the return of the Jews to England in the 1650s. Even the police blamed the Jews. Sir Robert Anderson, the assistant commissioner of police at the time of the murders, once claimed that they had been ‘certain that the murderer was a low-class foreign Jew. It is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile Justice.’ Or as the Jewish commentator Chaim Bermant put it in the 1960s: ‘If Jack the Ripper was a Jew, then one can be fairly certain that his fellows would have kept quiet about it, for the simple reason that the whole community could have been held culpable for his deeds.’

During the spate of murders and attacks Jewish community leaders noticed that the violence occurred on dates significant in the Hebrew calendar. For instance, the first attack on a prostitute that year, when Emma Smith was left for dead at the corner of Wentworth Street and Osborn Street, took place not only on Easter Monday, 3 April 1888, but on the last day of Passover, a Jewish festival rich in associations with slaughter. Jewish leaders hoped that this wasn’t a replay of the medieval blood libels in which Jews were accused of ritualistically killing Christians to reenact Christ’s Passion and of using the victims’ blood to make the unleavened bread eaten during Passover.

The next attack came on 7 August. The body of Martha Tabram, another prostitute, was discovered on the landing of flats at George Yard Buildings on Aldgate’s Gunthorpe Street. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times. Suspicion fell on the Jews, convenient scapegoats, as religious leaders noted that the murder had occurred at the start of the Jewish month of Elul, a time of contrition and repentance in the Jewish calendar. Two more prostitutes were killed on dates significant to Jews over the next few months, including Annie Chapman, who was murdered on 8 September 1888, only a few hours after the ending of the Jewish New Year, the Jewish ‘Day of Judgment’.

Some Jewish leaders feared that the slayings might be the work of a deranged Jew enacting some arcane chronological biblical ritual to rid the East End of sin. The community braced itself for another murder on 15 September. For this day was not only the Jewish Sabbath but the Day of Atonement, the most important date in the Jewish calendar, when worshippers beg forgiveness for all their sins. In biblical times the high priest conducted a special Temple ceremony on the Day of Atonement to clean the shrine, slaying a bull and two goats as a special offering. Perhaps there would be a human slaying this time?

Meanwhile, locals poured over the latest edition of the East London Observer. The paper contained a bizarre letter on the murders sprinkled with biblical references to ‘Pharisees’, ‘the marriage feast of the Lord’ and ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’, suggesting setting up a national fund to find ‘honourable employment for some of the daughters of Eve [prostitutes], which would greatly lessen immorality’. It was signed ‘Josephus’. He was a first-century Jewish historian and scholar who, during the war against the Romans, hid in a cave near the fortress of Jotapata with forty others. With dwindling supplies, they realised few could escape, so they drew lots to determine the order of their demise. Whoever drew the first lot was to be killed by the drawer of the second, who in turn would be killed by the drawer of the third, and so on. Only the last one would survive. Josephus was lucky enough to draw one of the last lots. However, he and the penultimate participant chose not to complete their pact but to surrender to the Romans. Many suspected that Josephus had ‘fixed’ the lots, sending scores to their deaths, a view reinforced when he swiftly moved from the Jewish priesthood to the role of adviser to the Roman emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.

No murder occurred on 15 September 1888. But perhaps the Ripper had been interrupted before he could commit a fresh atrocity? At the start of the Jewish holy day Aldgate police arrested a slightly built shabbily dressed Jewish man, Edward McKenna, of 15 Brick Lane, who had been seen acting suspiciously in the neighbourhood. He had come out of the Tower Subway and asked the attendant: ‘Have you caught any of the Whitechapel murderers yet?’ He then produced a foot-long knife with a curved blade and jeered, ‘This will do for them’ before running away. A search of McKenna’s pockets at Commercial Street police station yielded what the newspaper described as an ‘extraordinary accumulation of articles’. It included a heap of rags, two women’s purses and a small leather strap, but no evidence that he might have been responsible for the still unsolved murders.

At the end of the month came the strangest Jewish connection yet. On 30 September the Ripper killed two women, Liz Stride and Catharine Eddowes. Part of Eddowes’s white apron was torn during the attack and dropped, presumably by the Ripper, outside Wentworth Model Buildings on Goulston Street. A policeman found it in the early hours of the morning and looking up saw a strange piece of graffiti which read:

‘The Juwes are not the men That will be Blamed for nothing’

Fearful of a pogrom, the officer wiped the message – without photographing it – before it could be spotted by the early-morning market traders. Word spread that the graffiti had fingered the Jews, but the word was spelt ‘Juwes’ as in the Masonic legend of the Three Juwes.

The Three Juwes – Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum – were apprentices involved with the building of Solomon’s Temple. They murdered Hiram Abiff, the Temple architect, in the year 959 BC after he refused to reveal to them the deepest secrets of the Torah. When Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum were found they were in turn put to death, their throats cut from ear to ear, ‘their breasts torn open’, and their entrails thrown over the shoulder. All the five ‘canonical’ Ripper victims were mutilated in this manner.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG’S BURIAL SITE, Swedenborg Gardens, St George’s

Swedenborg Gardens, a now desolate spot in an unlovely part of the East End, was once home to a Swedish church that contained Emanuel Swedenborg’s tomb. Swedenborg was a Swedish mystic and one of the eighteenth-century’s greatest theologians, who believed that the spirit of the dead rose from the body and assumed a different physical shape in another world.

When the church was demolished in 1908 his corpse was taken to Sweden so that it could be placed in a marble sarcophagus in Uppsala Cathedral. By that time the skull was missing. It had been removed by a Swedish sailor who hoped to sell it as a relic. The skull was later recovered and returned to London, but was then lost again while being exhibited with other skulls in a phrenological collection. In a bizarre mix-up the wrong skull was later returned to Swedenborg’s body while the genuine one went on sale in an antique shop and was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 1978 for £2,500.

HOLY TRINITY MINORIES, Minories, Aldgate

Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster and brother of Edward I, established the Abbey of the Grace of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Francis to the north of St Katharine’s in 1293 for women belonging to the Franciscan Order. The institution soon had a string of names: the Covenant of the Order of St Clare, the Little Sisters, Sorores Minores, the House of Minoresses without Aldgate and Holy Trinity Minories, the latter name surviving in that of the modern-day street that connects Aldgate and Tower Hill.

From the privacy of their rooms the sisters had clear views of the executions on the Tower Hill gallows. They also enjoyed special privileges, for the abbey’s status as a Papal Peculiar rendered it beyond the powers of the Bishop of London. But Minories turned out to be even beyond the powers of the Bishop of Rome, for most of the inhabitants were wiped out during a plague in 1515.

By this time the nunnery, despite the sisters’ original vow of poverty, had become the richest religious house in England. Fifteen years later the Archbishop of Canterbury brought an end to the sisters’ pledge of chastity, declaring that ‘no person may make a vowe or promyse to lyve chaste and single; And that none is bounde to keep any suche vowes, but rather to breke them’. Henry VIII dissolved the nunnery soon after and the buildings were used as an armoury and workhouse until demolition in 1810.

→ Glastonbury Abbey, p. 255

JAMME MASJID MOSQUE, 59 Brick Lane, Spitalfields

The only building outside the Holy Land to have housed the world’s three major monotheistic faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – was built in 1742 as a Huguenot chapel, the Neuve Eglise. It was one of a number of local places where John Wesley, founder of Methodism, hosted the earliest Methodist services, in 1755. Later it became a Methodist chapel and was also the headquarters of the Christian Evangelical Society for promoting Christianity among Jews, a body which opened a school in Bethnal Green and whose governors offered to pay the fees of any Jew that wished to be Christianised.

In 1892 the Brick Lane building reopened as the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. It was now run by the Jewish sect Machzikei Hadas V’Shomrei Shabbas (‘strengtheners of the law and guardians of the Sabbath’). So extreme were they in their worship of the Sabbath, followers even refused to carry handkerchiefs on the day of rest, tying them around their waists instead, and for vital tasks that needed doing on that day they would employ a flunkey known by the quasi-insulting Yiddish term ‘Shobbos Goy’, who could not be directly ordered but had to guess the nature of his or her tasks by suggestions and inferences.

Ironically, the Machzikei found harassment not so much from gentiles but from non-religious Jews. In 1904 on the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting when a Jew must do no manual work, worshippers taking a break from the service were pelted with bacon sandwiches hurled by members of a Jewish anarchist group driving a food van up and down the street outside. The orthodox Jews in turn pelted the anarchists with stones and broken bottles. The synagogue closed in 1965 and in 1976 was converted into a mosque.

PRITHI CURRY HOUSE, 126 Brick Lane, Spitalfields

The Lord Maitreya, a Bodhisattva or enlightened being intent on saving souls, was expected to appear at this curry house – of all places – on 31 July 1985. Adverts had been printed in the papers for the previous few months explaining that as Christians await the return of Christ, Muslims the Imam Mahdi, Hindus a reincarnation of Krishna, and the Jews the Messiah, those knowledgeable in mysticism would recognise that all those names refer to the same being – the Lord Maitreya – who manifested himself 2,000 years ago in Palestine by overshadowing his disciple Jesus.

Behind the event was the artist Benjamin Crème. When asked how the public would recognise the Maitreya, he responded: ‘When Lord Maitreya appears, it will be as different beings to different people. He will appear as a man to a man, as a woman to a woman. He will appear as a white to a white, as a black to a black, as an Indian to an Indian.’

Crème invited a number of Fleet Street journalists to meet the Maitreya at what was then the Clifton curry house that July day. The journalists waiting for the Maitreya drank lager after lager to pass the time, but no Maitreya appeared. They left, disappointed and drunk. ‘Once again, I am afraid God did not show,’ read the Guardian.

• No. 126 already had an interesting religious history. Here just over 200 years previously the silk weaver Samuel Best, a pauper who lived on bread, cheese and gin tinctured with rhubarb, had announced himself as a prophet, chosen to lead the children of Israel back to Jerusalem.

ST GEORGE-IN-THE-EAST, Cannon Street Road, St George’s

This Nicholas Hawksmoor church by Cable Street was the setting for the ‘No Popery’ riots of 1859 and 1860. Trouble broke out after parishioners discovered that the vicar, Bryan King, had co-founded a secret brotherhood for priests, the Society of the Holy Cross. So angry were they at King for indulging in Romish practices, they pelted the altar with bread and butter, and orange peel, brought in barking dogs to disrupt services, seized the choir stalls, tore down the altar cross and spat on and kicked the clergy. They even urinated on the pews.

The mob would have thrown the Revd King into the docks had his friends not made a cordon across a bridge, enabling him to get to the Mission House safely. The church was forced to close and allowed to reopen only when King promised not to wear ceremonial vestments during Mass. Even when services began again there were often as many as fifty police officers stationed in the wings ready in case of trouble.

→ Riots at St Giles Cathedral, p. 262

SALVATION ARMY BIRTHPLACE, outside the Blind Beggar pub, 337 Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel

One evening in June 1865 William Booth, a tall, fierce-looking revivalist preacher sporting a long black beard down to his chest, heard two missionaries preaching at an open-air meeting outside the Blind Beggar pub. When they invited any Christian bystander to join them, Booth exclaimed: ‘There is heaven in East London for everyone who will stop to think and look to Christ as a personal saviour.’ He told them of the love of God in offering salvation through Jesus Christ in such clear terms that they invited him to take charge of a special mission tent they were holding nearby.

This was the beginning of what became the Salvation Army. Within a year Booth’s mission had more than sixty converts and he was returning home ‘night after night haggard with fatigue’, as his wife Catherine later explained, ‘his clothes torn and bloody, bandages swathing his head where a stone had struck’.

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

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

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

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

TOWER HILL EXECUTION SITE

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

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

• John Fisher, 1535

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

• Thomas More, 1535

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

• Margaret Pole, 1541

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

• William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1645

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

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

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

• Christopher Love, 1651

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

• Simon, Lord Lovat, 1747

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

→ Smithfield execution site, p. 33

TOWER OF LONDON, Tower Hill

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

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

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

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

WELLCLOSE SQUARE, St George’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ Little Gidding, p. 106

Hampton

HAMPTON COURT PALACE, Hampton Court Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ The Gunpowder Plot, p. 81

Islington

ALEXANDER CRUDEN’S ADDRESS, Camden Passage

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

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

Lambeth

LAMBETH PALACE, Lambeth Palace Road

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

1. The Pope of Rome has no political authority.

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

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

4. Priests have no power to forgive sins.

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

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

7. No tithes should be paid to Rome.

8. The Mass is blasphemous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ Prophet John Wroe, p. 200

Moorfields

THOMAS EAMES RESURRECTION SITE, Bunhill Fields Cemetery, City Road

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

JOHN ROBINS’S ADDRESS, Ling Alley

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

Peckham

WILLIAM BLAKE’S VISION, Goose Green

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

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

Blake’s own views were idiosyncratic. He designed a mythology based upon the Bible and the Greek classics, and rejected what he called ‘arid atheism and tepid deism’. He was wary of conventional religion, and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) wrote: ‘Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion . . . as the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys,’ a line borrowed from the Book of Proverbs.

In his epic poem Jerusalem (1804–20) Blake posed the ancient queries of the Christian Kabbalists that James I had revived when he moved to London from Scotland in 1603 to take the throne: was Britain the primitive seat of the patriarchal religion? Was Britain home of a purer Christianity than Rome? Was London the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, the centre of a world of one God, one religion, one nation?

If it is true, my title-page is also True, that Jerusalem was & is the Emanation of the Giant Albion. It is True, and cannot be controverted. Ye are united O ye Inhabitants of Earth in One Religion. The Religion of Jesus: the most Ancient, the Eternal: & the Everlasting Gospel – The Wicked will turn it to Wickedness, the Righteous to Righteousness. Amen! Huzza! Selah! All things Begin & End in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.

Plumstead

The south-east London suburb beyond Woolwich was home in the mid-nineteenth century to one of the capital’s most esoteric and strictest religious cults, the Peculiar People of Plumstead. They took their name from the verse in the Book of Deuteronomy which runs: ‘And the Lord hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people.’ Although the Peculiar People merited an entry in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, they soon died out as their religion forbade them from seeking medical help, a stance that presaged their doom during a typhoid epidemic.

Primrose Hill

William Blake, walking here early in the nineteenth century, had a vision of the ‘spiritual sun, not like a golden disc the size of a guinea but like an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy, holy, holy” ’.

According to the fifteenth-century soothsayer Mother Shipton, if Primrose Hill were ever surrounded, the streets of London would become rivers of blood.

→ Intrigue involving James II at St James’s Palace, p. 94

The Popish Plot

One of the most infamous religious conspiracies in London history, the Popish Plot unfolded after the body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, MP, JP and well-known Protestant, was found on Primrose Hill in October 1678, impaled on his own sword.

As speculation mounted about who could have murdered Godfrey, the conspiracy theories began to emerge. Perhaps the murder was connected with an anonymous pamphlet, believed to have been written by the poet Andrew Marvell, which suggested that the Catholics were plotting to take control of London, and make their religion that of England?

Back in August the king, Charles II, had been told by his chemist, Christopher Kirkby, while walking in St James’s Park, that the Catholics were planning to massacre Protestants, burn down the staunchly Protestant City of London (as the papists had been accused of doing after the 1666 Fire), overthrow the government, and replace Charles with his brother, the Catholic Duke of York (later James II).

Kirkby told the king he knew the names of assassins who planned to shoot him. If that failed, the queen’s physician would poison him. Now Godfrey was dead, so perhaps the putsch had begun. The House of Commons was searched in case another Gunpowder Plot was imminent. The grapevine buzzed with talk of how the letters of Godfrey’s name could be rearranged into the anagram ‘Died by Rome’s revenged fury’. A cutler made a special ‘Godfrey’ dagger. On one side were the words ‘Remember the murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey’, on the other, ‘Remember Religion’. He sold 3,000 in one day.

A cleric called Titus Oates told the authorities that there definitely was a Popish Plot to take over the country. He made more than forty allegations against various Catholics, and even accused the queen’s physician and the secretary to the Duchess of York of planning to assassinate Charles II. Soldiers were seconded to help Oates root out these saboteurs, and on 3 December 1678 the Duke of York’s former secretary, Edward Colman, was sentenced to death.

Parliament passed a bill barring Catholics from membership of both Houses (a law not repealed until 1829), while Oates received a state apartment in Whitehall and an annual allowance of £1,200. Far from being sated with his illicitly gained power, Oates succumbed to megalomania. He claimed assassins would soon shoot the king with silver bullets causing wounds that would not heal. But public opinion began to turn against him after he had fifteen mostly innocent men executed. Oates was eventually arrested for sedition (accusing the Duke of York of treason) and fined £100,000.

When the Catholic Duke of York took the throne in 1685 as James II he sought revenge. Oates was sentenced for perjury and given a life term. He was removed from his cell wearing a hat emblazoned with the slogan ‘Titus Oates, convicted upon full evidence of two horrid perjuries’ and put into the pillory in Westminster so that passers-by could pelt him with unwanted food. William of Orange pardoned him in 1688.

It later transpired that Godfrey had been murdered not on Primrose Hill but at Somerset House, by a silversmith called Prance, hired by Titus Oates and his associate Israel Tongue, and that the body was then taken to Primrose Hill.

Putney

ST MARY’S, Putney High Street

The church where Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army debated notions of political freedom in 1647 was the setting for one of the most dramatic incidents in London’s recent religious history. On Sunday 13 July 2008 the Right Revd Gene Robinson, the world’s first openly gay Anglican bishop, was preaching, remarking how sad it was that the Anglican Communion was ‘tearing itself apart’ over the issue of gay priests, when a heckler rose and interrupted with the taunt ‘because of heretics like you’.

The congregation turned to stare at the source of the cry. It was a long-haired man clutching a motorcycle helmet, who continued: ‘Go back, go back. Repent, repent, repent.’ Some began to boo and slow handclap until the vicar, Dr Giles Fraser, stepped in to calm down proceedings, urging everyone to open their hymn sheets. The singing drowned out the barracking, and when Bishop Robinson resumed his sermon he urged the congregation to ‘pray for that man’, who by that time had been escorted outside back to his bike.

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