‘Strange and terrible news from Essex’, being a ‘true relation’ of Mary Adams and a monstrous birth
In 1652 one Mary Adams of Tillingham, Essex apparently died by her own hand. 1 According to an eight-page pamphlet entitled The Ranters Monster printed for George Horton at London in early March that year, Adams claimed that she had been made pregnant by the Holy Ghost. She also reportedly denied the Gospels’ teachings, wickedly declaring that Christ had not yet appeared in the flesh but that she was to give birth to the true Messiah. Indeed, anyone that did not believe in this new ‘Saviour of the world’ was damned. For these supposed blasphemies Adams was apprehended and imprisoned by order of the local minister. After a protracted labour of eight days, she gave birth on the ninth day to a stillborn, ugly, misshapen monster. This loathsome creature was said to have neither hands nor feet, but claws like a toad. Adams herself became consumed by disease, rotting away; her body disfigured by blotches, boils and putrid scabs. To compound her sins she refused to repent and then committed the terrible crime of suicide by ripping open her bowels with a knife.
To make the story of Mary Adams more believable the anonymous author used some common contemporary strategies. Thus the pamphlet purported to be a ‘true relation’ or narrative of events. Its contents were also apparently confirmed by a group of ten village notables (all men), that acted as witnesses. Among them was the local minister Mr Hadley, two churchwardens, the parish constable, three collectors and three headboroughs.
Shortly after its publication, the account in The Ranters Monster was partly reproduced or summarised in several newsbooks (weekly booklets that were the ancestor of daily newspapers). These had titles such as The Faithful Scout, The French Intelligencer and The Dutch Spy. Thus the sixtieth number of The Faithful Scout, reporting on events for 10 March 1652, remarked upon a paper containing the ‘blasphemous actions, opinion, and judgment, of one Mary Adams’, while in near identical reports both the nineteenth number of The French Intelligencer and second number of The Dutch Spy said that Adams, ‘who named herself the Virgin Mary’, was a ‘sad example’. In addition, The Faithful Scout number 61, which in its previous issue had provided a ‘relation of the strange death, and blasphemous opinion’ of Mary Adams, recounted two more ‘choice examples’, suitable for both ‘rich and poor’. These had been used to fill the remaining couple of pages or so of The Ranters Monster and were embellished in the Scout. One of these ‘sad’ precedents was about a Sabbath-breaking carpenter named John Rogers, seemingly of Lostwithiel, Cornwall, who maintained that ‘he that was born to be drowned should never be hanged’. Rogers supposedly injured himself with an axe and then committed suicide by stabbing himself in multiple places with a knife. The other ‘mirror’ of the times concerned a Mr Clark of Ripon, Yorkshire who had cruelly ejected a poor tenant, the tenant’s wife and three children on a ‘bitter cold snowy day’ for being unable to pay their rent. Clark supposedly died in a riding accident, raving and raging ‘like a madman’ at the last, crying out that his sins were ‘so great’ and ‘so many’ that they ‘could never be forgotten’. Afterwards the sixty-fifth number of The Weekly Intelligencer, reporting on events for 17 and 18 March 1652, provided an abbreviated version of ‘God’s judgment’ upon Rogers, who held the ‘damned opinion of Predestination’, and Clark, another ‘cursed’ opinionated man.
It is interesting to note that while The Weekly Intelligencer was printed by Francis Neile in Aldersgate Street, London, The Faithful Scout, French Intelligencer and short-lived Dutch Spy were all printed by Robert Wood, who had been made a freeman of the Stationers’ Company some fifteen years before and then had a house near ‘The Flying Horse’ in Grub Street. Extracts from The Ranters Monster, moreover, were copied on 5 July 1652 in a manuscript miscellany mainly compiled during the 1650s and originally associated with certain Catholic yeoman families in the parish of Wootton Wawen, Warwickshire. Indexed as ‘of Mary Adams her blasphemy’ and occupying the lower half of a page, the unknown transcriber indicated that they had copied verbatim from ‘a printed book these sad things that follow / viz. / the horrid blasphemies, & the Judgments of God upon the blasphemer’. Mary Adams also featured in a broadside (a large single sheet of paper) published at London by Robert Ibbitson about March 1654 entitled A List of some of the Grand Blasphemers and Blasphemies. This was apparently presented to a Parliamentary Committee for Religion upon the occasion of a day of public fasting and humiliation. It included:
XVI. Mary Adams, living about Tillingham in Essex, said about 1652. That she was conceived with childe by the Holy Ghost, and that all the Gospel that had been taught heretofore, was false; and that which was within her, was the true Messiah.
Furthermore, the tale seems to have come to the attention of John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton. This pair of London-based tailors claimed to be the two witnesses foretold in Revelation 11 and in a pamphlet of 1653 Reeve denounced ‘all the false Christs, and false Prophets, and Prophetesses, and counterfeit Virgin Marys’ of the world. Similarly, in A True Interpretation of the Eleventh Chapter of the Revelation of St. John (1662), Muggleton rebuked all ‘false Christs, false Prophets’, ‘false virgin Maries, Ranters, and Quakers’.
Evidently quite a few contemporaries were taken in by the contents of The Ranters Monster. Regrettably, quite a few modern scholars have been too. All the same, the pamphlet was fictitious. No one by the name Adams, nor any of the ten witnesses named in The Ranters Monster, occur in a single surviving record concerning Tillingham, Essex. There is no corroborating evidence in either the parish register or probate records. Nor is there corroborating evidence in Parliamentary surveys conducted in 1649 and 1650, which valued the vicarage at £101 per annum and named Mr Robert Fuller as ‘an able godly minister’ of the parish. Robert Fuller (d.1661), it should be added, was probably the person of that name who had been admitted pensioner at Emmanuel College, Cambridge on 24 May 1639, graduated BA in 1643, MA in 1646 and afterwards became vicar of Chignall St James, Essex. He was succeeded at Tillingham about 1652 by Mr William Guthrie, who had previously served as curate and preacher at nearby Asheldham.
So how did the story arise? Well, there was genuine contemporary anxiety about people allegedly claiming to be Christ or the Virgin Mary. And the narrative created about Mary Adams bears a strong resemblance to a real case involving a woman called Joan Robins. She had been accused of witchcraft and became pregnant by one of her sexual partners, John Robins – a man revered as God and the father of Jesus Christ by his disciples. For her part, it was said of Joan that she would give birth to ‘a man child that shall be the Saviour of all that shall be saved in this world’. Or at least that is what Robins’s followers purportedly claimed during legal proceedings against them in June 1651. In the same vein, one Mary Gadbury reportedly declared that:
she was the bride & the spouse the lamb’s wife and at other times she said she was the Virgin Mary that bare Christ & that she was delivered at such a time & such a place of a fiery flying serpent and of the old dragon which she had sent unto the place of perdition.
Gadbury had been abandoned by her husband about 1643 and some six years later took up with William Franklin, who apparently convinced her that he was the Son of God come to earth in ‘a new body’.
The Ranters Monster, moreover, formed part of the genre of monstrous births. These tended to be interpreted as providential signs warning against private and public sin, and their appearance was chronicled with great care. There are a number of examples of this type of literature, especially from France, Italy, German-speaking lands and England. Hence Michel de Montaigne (who invented the essay as a form of writing) described how the father, uncle and aunt of fourteen-month old conjoined twins charged a small fee to see them:
This double body and these several limbs, connected with a single head, might well furnish a favourable prognostic to the king that he will maintain under the union of his laws these various parts and factions of our state.
There was also News from New England (1642), based upon a letter sent by the governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop. The first of six examples in this pamphlet concerned another Mary, the wife of a milliner named William Dyer, whom she had probably married at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Middlesex on 27 October 1633. Like the alleged antinomian Anne Hutchinson, who supposedly birthed thirty monsters, Mrs Dyer, ‘another of the same crew’, reportedly gave birth to a ‘monster’ at Boston on 17 October 1637. Accordingly, the heresiographer Ephraim Pagett exulted: ‘thus God punished those monstrous wretches with as monstrous fruit, sprung from their womb, as had before sprung from their brains’.
Further examples include A Strange and Lamentable accident (1642) and A Declaration, of a strange and Wonderful Monster (1646). The former, written by a clergyman, concerned the birth of a headless child at Mears Ashby, Northamptonshire. In this instance it was ‘credibly reported’ that this shameful, monstrous birth was a divine judgment upon the mother Mary Wilmore who, either through weakness or ‘confiding in the conventicling sectaries’, had insisted that she had rather bear a child without a head than one whose head should, in a ‘pernicious, popish and idolatrous ceremony’, be signed with the sign of the Cross.
The latter, also written by a clergyman, concerned another headless child begotten at Kirkham, Lancashire by a Catholic woman called Mrs Houghton. In this ‘wonderful manifestation of God’s anger’ against the wicked and profane this ‘notorious’ Popish lady, who had wanted to bear a child without a head rather than a Roundhead and had also cursed Parliament, was granted her wish. In both cases the pamphleteers’ message was clear: women who held monstrous beliefs and provoked divine displeasure would themselves be punished for their sins by bringing stillborn monsters into the world.
As can be seen, the woodcut used in the title-page of Strange and Wonderful Monster was recycled for The Ranters Monster. The main difference is that the Catholic symbols (rosary beads, a crucifix) visible in the earlier pamphlet were obliterated. Evidently the publisher of The Ranters Monster, George Horton, had acquired the woodblock from the publisher of Strange and Wonderful Monster, Jane Coe. Indeed, the author of The Ranters Monster recalled a Strange and Wonderful Monster since the concluding paragraph recounted how, while imprisoned, Mary Adams had used ‘many imprecations against the Independents; saying, that rather than she would bring forth the Holy Ghost, to be a Roundhead, or Independent, she desired that he might have no head at all’.
In April 1655 Robert Wood printed number 222 of The Faithful Scout for Horton. Here a journalist described the child that Mary Dyer had given birth to at Boston by reworking and updating the account presented in News from New England, which in turn ultimately derived from Winthrop’s letter. What is significant for our purposes is that the version of events given in The Faithful Scout could also partly be read as a depiction of the creature shown on the title-pages of Strange and Wonderful Monster and The Ranters Monster:
From New England we have received intelligence, That many there are who hold sundry heretical Opinions; amongst the rest, one Mrs. Dyer, held a monstrous opinion, uttering several blasphemous expressions against the Nativity of Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary; and being big with child, was brought to bed of a Monster, which had no head, the face stood low upon the breast, the ears like an Ape’s grew upon the shoulders, the eyes stood far out, and so did the mouth, the Navel, belly, and distinction of the Sex, were where the hips should have been, and those back parts were on the same side with the face, the arms, thighs, and legs, were as other children’s; but instead of toes it had on each foot three claws, with Talons like a Fowl: upon the back above the belly, it had two great holes like mouths, and in each of them stood out two pieces of flesh: it had no forehead, but in the place above the eyes it had 4 horns, two of which above an inch long, hard and sharp, and the other two somewhat less: it was of the Female Sex; both the Father and Mother of it were great Familists, but now reported to be turned Quakers.
Mary Dyer had indeed become a Quaker. She would die a martyr to her faith, hanged from the gallows at Boston on 1 June 1660.
As for Mary Adams and The Ranters Monster, the pamphlet served an additional function: as an admonition against the licentiousness of the Ranters and an affirmation of the dreadful divine punishments that awaited all such reprobates. Represented as a devout, godly woman of good parentage, Adams became victim to what attentive readers would have recognised as a lamentable falling away from the Church of England and zealous observance of ordinances into membership of various heretical sects; becoming successively a Baptist, Familist and Ranter. It was as a Ranter that she was said to have maintained diabolical beliefs: the denial of God, Heaven and Hell, and the opinion that a woman may have sexual relations with any man – regardless of his marital status.
The Ranters Monster is therefore instructive both for its fictional yet evidently believable account of a woman claiming to be the new Virgin Mary, soon to be delivered of a Christ child, and its construction of assumed Ranter beliefs. It also epitomises the difficulties scholars have faced in distinguishing between polemical stereotypes and evidence of actual principles and practices. Indeed, since much of the extant printed literature derives from hostile sources or recantations, one historian took the extreme position of arguing that there was ‘no Ranter movement, no Ranter sect, no Ranter theology’. This goes too far. But that will be the subject for another post
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This is an updated and slightly more detailed version of an earlier post. I’m considering delivering it as a paper at a conference on The World Turned Upside Down, so feedback would be greatly appreciated!