Jane Lead (1624–1704) and the Philadelphians – part one

 Jane Lead (pronounced Leed or Leeds by contemporaries) and sometimes written with a final ‘e’ (especially in printed German translations of her works) was among the most prolific published female authors of the long eighteenth century.  More than a dozen different printed titles bearing Lead’s name, with one consisting of multiple volumes, were originally issued in English between 1681 and 1702.  Her final work ‘The Resurrection of Life’ (1703) was issued posthumously in German translation and has recently been re-translated into English.  Moreover, during Lead’s lifetime four of her works appeared in a second edition, while from 1694 several writings were also published in translation at Amsterdam – primarily in German, with two rendered into Dutch as well.  In addition to these languages one tract was translated into Swedish, most likely from the German version, although this remained in manuscript.

 Besides being the author of extensive spiritual diaries, theological treatises, epistles and some verse, during the last decade of her eighty-year life Lead became the centre of an extensive correspondence network stretching from Pennsylvania to the Electorate of Saxony.  Yet as her son-in-law and amanuensis Francis Lee (1661–1719) conceded, outside a small community of believers Lead’s writings were largely ignored in her own country.  Instead they enjoyed a widespread if mixed continental reception among an audience of assorted Pietists, Spiritualists and Behmenists, that is followers of the German Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme (c.1575–1624) – not to mention occasional curious readers, such as the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

 During the eighteenth century Lead initially attracted readers generally interested either in Boehme or the doctrine of universal salvation.  Afterwards she was read by several people drawn to the teachings of the Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and subsequently by certain followers of the Devonian prophetess Joanna Southcott (1750–1814).  All the same, outside these small circles her prophetic pretensions and obscure style tended to be judged harshly.  Thus the jeweller and goldsmith Christopher Walton (1809–1877), a humourless Methodist who owned copies of several printed titles by Lead together with important manuscript accounts, complained that the ‘chief heroine’ of the Philadelphian Society had buried her profound spiritual experiences in ‘a huge mass of parabolicalism and idiocratic deformity’.

 A few nineteenth-century commentators were more charitable.  One reckoned Lead a woman of ‘elevated and enthusiastic piety’ while others suggested that the visions and spiritual experiences of this ‘most singular’ if then lesser-known English disciple of Boehme had influenced Swedenborg’s theological system.  Nonetheless, Lead’s prophetic pretensions and obscure style were derided as a ‘lamentable example of bad English’ and ‘confusion of thought’, amounting to nothing more than a ‘wonderful concatenation of folly’ and ‘strange farrago of nonsense’.  This unflattering verdict brings to mind the Quaker historian Rufus Jones (1863–1948) who felt Lead was too emotional, criticizing her ‘ungrammatical’ language and ‘involved style’, which was ‘full of overwrought and fanciful imagination’.  Similarly, the English peace activist Stephen Hobhouse (1881–1961) dismissed Lead as a Christian of ‘a dangerously psychic type’ whose ‘visionary eccentricities and speculations’ resulted in ‘confused writings’.  Even the Anglo-Catholic writer Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) thought Lead and the Philadelphians exhibited mysticism ‘in its least balanced aspect mingled with mediumistic phenomena, wild symbolic visions, and apocalyptic prophecies’.

 Such criticism was not new.  It went back to an early eighteenth-century life of Lead in Latin by Johann Wolfgang Jaeger (1647–1720), a German professor of theology hostile to mysticism and chiliasm.  But it meant that there was greater interest in Lead’s writings among German rather than English speakers – at least until the mid-1970s.  Since then, in the wake of Second-wave feminism Lead’s reputation has undergone a remarkable ascent from the depths of disdain to the peaks of veneration.  So much so, that she is now lauded as an example of ‘female genius’ and regarded – at least by one of her recent biographers – as the most important female religious leader in late seventeenth-century England.

I. Jane Lead (1624–1704)

 Jane was baptized on 9 March 1624 in the parish of Letheringsett, Norfolk.  She was a younger daughter of Hamond Ward (c.1577–1651) and his wife Mary (1582–1657).  According to Jane, her father was called ‘the squire Ward’.  He was styled a gentleman, bore a coat of arms, possessed land and had regular dealings with prominent members of the Norfolk county community.  Moreover, by her own account Jane’s parents were ‘esteemed for their honesty around the Norfolk countryside’, led ‘honourable and modest lives’ and adhered to the customs and doctrines of the Church of England.  Altogether, they had sixteen children: twelve sons and four daughters.  Only eleven, however, are named in the herald’s visitation of London of 1633, indicating that five doubtless died young.  There were eight surviving sons and three surviving daughters – including Jane, who in 1644 would marry a ‘god-fearing’ and devout merchant named William Lead (1620–1670) of King’s Lynn, Norfolk.

Norfolk Record Office (Norwich), PD 547, Archdeacon’s transcripts of Letheringsett parish register; baptism of ‘Jane Warde the daughter of Hamon Warde esqr the 9 of Marche’ 1624.

The Ward coat of arms (granted 1408/9) and blazoned azure, a stag statant and an orle flory, counter flory or.

Essentially Jane’s life can be divided into three phases: (1) the period from her birth until she became a widow in 1670; (2) the period from 1670 to 1695, the year when she went blind; (3) the period from 1696 to 1704, which spans the public emergence of the Philadelphian Society to her death.

 Unfortunately far too little is known about Lead’s life before widowhood.  Had she predeceased her husband – for example as a victim of the Great Plague of 1665 – her spiritual development would not merit detailed investigation.  Thus prior to widowhood Jane’s only known words were taken down by a clerk in the court of Chancery.  At best her piety might have been memorialised through an account of her godly life and character.  Alternatively, her virtues and sufferings might have been honoured through a funeral sermon.  Nonetheless, I have suggested elsewhere that she was far more radical than has been supposed.  Indeed, her religious beliefs were largely moulded by a militant puritanism that she may have shared with an elder brother but which conflicted with her parents’ more moderate attitude, reflected in their outward adherence to the Church of England.  Making use of a great many archival discoveries, which formed the cornerstone of a painstaking reconstruction, I provided mainly circumstantial but nonetheless cumulatively overwhelming evidence that Lead’s relatively well-known autobiography ‘Lebenslauff Der AVTORIN’ (Amsterdam, 1696) conceals almost as much as it reveals.

Jane Lead, ‘Lebenslauff der Autorin’, in Sechs Unschätzbare Durch Göttliche Offenbarung und Befehl ans Liecht gebrachte Mystische Tractätlein (Amsterdam, 1696), p. 413

 Constructed to reassure its intended audience of continental Spiritualists, Behmenists and Pietists of Lead’s upright character, respectable social status and divinely bestowed gifts this so-called ‘Life of the Author’ adopted a similar strategy to that observable in a number of Philadelphian publications which masked private heterodox beliefs and rituals with public professions of irenic conformity.  Thus some key names have been omitted, while the activities and teachings of others have been passed over silently or treated superficially.  Doubtless this was because some of these individuals, including one of Lead’s older brothers and several relations by marriage, had been Parliamentarian stalwarts and functionaries during the English Civil Wars.  This suggests that in the aftermath of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), William III’s campaign in Ireland, Jacobite risings in Scotland, and a resurgence of apocalyptic exegesis more generally, the spectre of revolutionary radicalism still engendered fear within the British Isles and continental Europe at a moment when the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) had yet to be concluded.  Consequently, detailing past associations would have damaged Lead’s reputation among her heterogeneous readership.

Signature of Jane Lead and William Lead; The National Archives, London, C 5/41/70

 The period from 1670 to 1695 – that is from the beginning of Lead’s widowhood until she went blind – is much better documented than the preceding phase of her life because Lead now began keeping extensive spiritual diaries.  Even so, Lead’s memory began to deteriorate with age with the result that her recollection of certain dates is not always reliable.  Added to this are some stylistic interventions introduced by Lead’s first amanuensis to his manuscript transcripts of her earliest writings, not to mention subsequent minor editorial intervention on their publication.  All of which means that when reading Lead’s printed works we should not assume that every sentence is an exact copy of the original, even if we can be relatively confident that the text accurately conveys her sense.

 Here additional discoveries enabled me to reinforce my suggestion that Lead was more radical than has been supposed.  My argument again relied somewhat on association, with the focus on extensive and overlapping domestic and continental networks.  These consisted of assorted millenarians, prophets, theosophists and devotees of mystic and spiritualist authors generally.  What we see in this period is an evolution of Lead’s thought as she came under successive influences and began to develop her own distinctive beliefs.  It was a religious journey with staging posts: an initial Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination wedded to a conventional Protestant understanding of the coming apocalypse; then the introduction of Boehme’s teachings and accompanying visions of a female personification of divine wisdom; finally the adoption, albeit with inconsistencies, of the doctrine of the universal restoration of all humanity.  It was the last, together with Lead’s apparent dependence upon visions and revelations, that repulsed certain former admirers of her writings, turning them into some of Lead’s most vehment critics.

 The concluding phase from 1696 to 1704 spans the period from Lead’s first published message to the Philadelphian Society until her death and burial.  Taking their name from Philadelphia (‘brotherly love’), the sixth of the seven churches in Asia Minor to whom John sent a book containing his revelation (Revelation 1:11, 3:7–13), these seven historical churches were understood by Lead as types.  Thus the first and eldest church was a prefiguration of the Church of England; the second foreshadowed a ‘more refined Order’, Presbyterianism; the third Independency; the fourth Anabaptism; the fifth, the Fifth Monarchists; and the sixth most likely the Quakers.  Each of these churches had in turn been ‘refused’, ‘excluded’, ‘dismissed’, ‘passed away’ and ‘disowned’.  Consequently, they were now to be superseded by a visible church in which God himself would be manifest.

Jane Lead, A message to the Philadelphian Society (1696)

 Moreover, just as Christ had been born of a virgin mother, so another virgin – identified as John’s prophesied woman clothed with the sun (Revelation 12:1) – would with her ‘pure Spirit’ and ‘bright Sun-like’ body ‘all impregnated with the Holy Ghost’ bring forth her first-born: the Philadelphian church.  Accordingly, Lead’s little band of supporters intended to warn and prepare prospective believers of the coming Philadelphian age through a flurry of publications.  Or to quote from a poem entitled ‘Solomon’s Porch’ by Richard Roach (1662–1730), a fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford and rector of St. Augustine, Hackney:

When the fair Virgin Pilgrims Stage is done,

Her Travails ended, and her Garland won;

A Temple-Glory of Living Stones to rise;

Whose Base shall fill the Earth; whose Head the Skies,

Love yet can’t triumph here, without its Mate,

Till Light and Beauty too become Incorporate.

 Yet this co-ordinated publicity campaign abruptly fractured the Philadelphians’ precursor society, which hitherto had negotiated a path between secrecy and openness, combining private prayer meetings and selective circulation of members’ spiritual diaries through scribal publication with public preaching and print publication.  Consequently only the minority who favoured a public testimony owned the Philadelphian name, with some clandestine ‘waiters for the kingdom’ even accusing the Philadelphians of schism.  Wanting to expose her visions and teachings to public view, Lead was given the opportunity to do so through a succession of mainly male patrons and amanuenses – including Baron Dodo von Knyphausen (1641–1698), a privy councillor at the Brandenburg-Prussia court in Berlin who financed several publications.  Consequently when the first instalment of Lead’s spiritual diaries appeared as A Fountain of Gardens together with Francis Lee’s lengthy editorial preface dated 1 January 1697 Lead became synonymous with the Philadelphian Society.  Lee and Roach, on the other hand, remained guarded: their printed contributions appeared anonymously or pseudonymously under the names Timotheus and Onesimus respectively.

William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, c. 1805; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

In the next part of this series we will take a closer look at the Philadelphian Society.