The Muggletonians, 1652–1979?
It was on the mornings of 3, 4 and 5 February 1652 that the ‘Lord Jesus, the only wise God’ spoke to a man named John Reeve (1608–1658), revealing to him that he had been chosen as the Lord’s ‘last messenger’. Together with his cousin Lodowick Muggleton (1609–1698), who acted as Reeve’s mouthpiece – much as Aaron had served his brother Moses – the pair proceeded to claim that they were the ‘two Witnesses of the Spirit’ foretold in the Revelation of Saint John.
Both had humble origins. Reeve was most likely the son of a clothier from Clack, Wiltshire who had been apprenticed to a London haberdasher, although Reeve learned the trade of a tailor. Muggleton was the son of a farrier and had been born at the corner house in Walnut Tree Yard within the parish of St Botolph without Bishopsgate. He was apprenticed to a Merchant Taylor, gaining his freedom in February 1633 before wedding a young woman named Sarah (the first of Muggleton’s three marriages).
Lodowick Muggleton (c.1674), by or after William Wood
Shortly before the outbreak of the English Civil War both Reeve and Muggleton were living in the parish of Holy Trinity the Less where, on 30 May 1641, they signed the Protestation Oath. But besides some details about Muggleton’s personal life – he remarried following the premature death of his first wife – little more is known about them during the course of the following decade. On 4 February 1652, however, Reeve and Muggleton denounced TheaurauJohn Tany as a ‘counterfeit high Priest’ and pretended prophet, marking him as a Ranter, the spawn of Cain. The next day they denounced one John Robins, whom they accounted ‘that last great Antichrist, or man of sin, or son of perdition’ (Robins will be the subject of my next post).
Despite, by their own accounts, successfully cowing and silencing their two great rivals, Tany and Robins – ‘Head of all false Christs, false Prophets, and false Prophetesses, that were in the world at that day’ – Reeve and Muggleton were themselves charged with blasphemously denying the Trinity. Accordingly, they were brought by warrant before the Lord Mayor of London and, following their examination, committed to Newgate gaol on 15 September 1653. There they remained for about a month before being removed to the Old Bailey ahead of a hearing at the London Sessions of the Peace. Accused of ‘despising’ and ‘railing’ against the ministry as well as blasphemously declaring that the man called Jesus who died at Jerusalem was ‘the only God and everlasting Father’, they were sentenced to six months imprisonment each in Bridewell. Having endured this punishment they were released on bail in mid-April 1654.
Afterwards the Scottish biblical scholar Alexander Ross dismissed Reeve’s first published treatise as ‘full of transcendent nonsense and blasphemies’ which threatened the ‘very root of Christianity’. Indeed, Reeve and Muggleton were frequently abused and derided by their contemporaries. The earliest accounts portray them as impudently holding ‘ridiculous’ beliefs – notably that God died and by his own power raised himself from death to life – and of being ‘very high in their ranting principles’. They also wrote a ‘strange’ letter to several eminent ministers in London and Westminster that was variously described as ‘ranting’, ‘canting and blaspheming’. Moreover, a journalist was pronounced ‘cursed and damned both [in] soul and body unto all eternity’ for publishing their ‘wild paper’ and complaining of the dangers of religious toleration. He responded by confronting these ‘mad fellows’ only to hear them utter ‘many strange senseless blasphemies’, ‘extravagancies’ and ‘damnable doctrines’.
The Quakers were equally scathing, as is evident from their bitter and protracted pamphlet war against the Muggletonians. Although numerically far superior – there were perhaps as many as 60,000 Quakers by the early 1660s and probably never more than several hundred Muggletonians during the seventeenth century – a succession of prominent Quaker authors considered it necessary to refute Muggletonian calumnies, pretensions and doctrines in print. Thus in 1654 Quaker Edward Burrough responded to an epistle from Reeve by emphasising Reeve’s ignorance, confusion, self-deception, fallibility and mendacity. Similarly, Richard Farnworth maintained that Muggleton was an ‘unwise’, ‘unjust’ and ‘unmerciful’ judge disseminating ‘erroneous and false’ notions. George Fox too thought Muggleton a false prophet and blasphemous ‘heathen’ moved by a ‘rash, erring, lying, deceitful’ and diabolic spirit. While William Penn denounced Reeve and Muggleton as ‘horrible’ impostors whose beliefs were inconsistent with Scripture, contradictory and against reason.
By this time Reeve was dead. But Muggleton responded with The Neck of the Quakers Broken (1663), a work published in London despite bearing a false Amsterdam imprint. So vitriolic was this rebuttal and so blasphemous its contents, that Muggleton was indicted in January 1677. He was found guilty, sentenced to stand upon the pillory in three prominent places in London; duly pelted with clay, rotten eggs, oranges, bottles and stones; had his books burned before his face by the common hangman; and fined the enormous sum of £500. Once more contemporary reaction was overwhelmingly hostile. Hence accounts of his trial and punishment depicted Muggleton as a low-born, ignorant, nonsensical, obstinate, impudent and ‘factious’ fellow. This notorious ‘grand impostor’ and ‘superlative monster of wickedness’ was, in the opinion of pamphleteers, either the ‘boldest wretch that ever the earth made known’ or nothing but ‘a poor silly despicable creature’; a bold enthusiast who had ‘easily seduced’ several weak and unstable people (‘especially of the Female Sex’) with his nauseous dunghill of ‘horrid blasphemies’. Seventeen years later Muggleton’s ‘absurd, false, and precarious’ doctrines were again reviled as the ‘fruits of ignorance, confidence, and imagination’. His pretensions to divine illumination, along with those of his co-heresiarch Reeve, were also scorned:
If confusion and self-contradiction, may pass for Exposition; if confidence and self-assuming may pass for Inspiration; if nonsense and obscurity may pass for Illumination; if cursing and damning others may pass for Charity; if Blasphemy may pass for Religion; then these two may be allowed to be what they pretend.
By the time of Muggleton’s death in March 1698 followers such as Thomas Tomkinson had taken on his mantle, defending the sect’s reputation in print. Yet rather than diminishing, the criticism took a fresh turn: Muggleton was now likened to his enemies the Quakers, all upheld as examples of subtle, hypocritical enthusiasm. The tone remained the same through much of the eighteenth century: Muggletonian principles of faith were derided as a mad medley of impudent, ignorant blasphemous nonsense. At the beginning of the nineteenth century few except the similarly abused Swedenborgians with whom Muggletonians shared some doctrinal affinities, notably their common rejection of orthodox Trinitarianism, had proved attentive. During the Victorian period mockery gradually gave way to amused curiosity. Eventually, following a fortuitous encounter with a Muggletonian, the Unitarian minister Alexander Gordon sympathetically set about rescuing this dwindling faith – erroneously assumed extinct by some – from obscurity. Further impetus for research was provided when the historian Edward Thompson (1924–1993) dramatically recovered the sect’s archive. The story is well-known and has been told before. Yet there is more to add.[1]
Following the publication in November 1974 of an article by Christopher Hill (1912–2003) on ‘Milton the radical’ in the Times Literary Supplement a correspondence about Muggletonian doctrine ensued, enabling Thompson to publicise his research and ask readers for information. Within days a friend informed him that she had been contacted by Mr Martin Johnson, a schoolteacher and son-in-law of the so-called ‘last Muggletonian’ – Mr Philip Noakes (c.1905–1979).
Philip Noakes
A fruit farmer of Matfield, Kent, Noakes is said to have rarely attended church and then only for social functions like weddings and funerals. In keeping with Muggletonian practice he appears not to have discussed his faith with family members (non-believers ignorant of the Muggletonian Commission could still be saved, but not if they were exposed to and rejected it). His daughter Carole does not recall him ‘ever condemning anybody for what he may have considered to be wrong’ and thinks he was tolerant of other people’s religious beliefs. Although he did not fight in the Second World War Noakes was no conscientious objector and had ‘great respect’ for Winston Churchill. Politically a Conservative he held Edward Heath in low regard and did not benefit from the United Kingdom’s 1973 entry into the Common Market. Noakes also had ‘a bookcase full of books’ and seems to have read ‘a lot’, though in private. Significantly, as a surviving trustee of the Muggletonian Church he was in possession of the sect’s archive having transported it to safety after their meeting room at 74 Worship Street, London had been fire-bombed about 1940. At an unknown date Charles James Crundwell (c.1873–1959), a fellow Muggletonian who lived the last years of his life at Christchurch, Dorset entrusted Noakes with custodianship of this archive and may also have discussed its eventual disposal.
Martin Johnson
About 1976 Martin Johnson and his wife Gail arranged a meeting between Noakes (Gail’s father) and Edward Thompson at their home in Leicestershire. Overcoming his initial caution, Noakes grew to trust Thompson, inviting him to Matfield before finally taking him along with Johnson to a furniture depository in Tunbridge Wells where the Muggletonian archive was stored in some eighty-odd apple boxes (the original containers Noakes had used to carry them back to his farm). Thompson was understandably keen to deposit this material in a national library, but Noakes would only agree on condition that the library accept both the manuscripts and printed texts. The latter consisted of some seventeenth-century editions of Reeve’s and Muggleton’s works as well as numerous copies of eighteenth- and nineteenth century reprints, multiple copies of Muggletonian writings by John Saddington and Thomas Tomkinson and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of Muggletonian texts. In 1977 Thompson learned that Noakes had been seriously ill with angina and was willing to ‘forego his previous conditions’. After some hesitation the British Library agreed to purchase the manuscripts together with examples of the more important printed texts on 23 January 1978. Deposited and arranged in eighty-nine volumes (Add. MSS 60168–60256), the collection has since been supplemented with nineteenth-century copies of Muggletonian prose and verse (Add. MS 61950) and copies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muggletonian correspondence (Add. MSS 79756–79759). Noakes died on 26 February 1979. Apparently it was ‘a source of great satisfaction’ that Thompson had befriended him and that the archive had been ‘appropriately recognised and made available to future historians’.
As far as I know the fate of the archival material rejected by the British Library is discussed here for the first time. Initially the ‘surplus books’ were stored at Martin and Gail Johnson’s new home in Somerset, occupying an entire room. It seems that Thompson had advised the Noakes family ‘to dispose of the printed volumes as being of little interest’ and ‘value’ – an opinion shared by representatives of the British Library. So following Noakes death it was decided to sell the remainder of the archive, retaining only ‘a sample set of material’ for each of his five grandchildren (Gail’s three sons and Carole’s two daughters). About 1979 Martin Johnson’s colleague Emmeline Garnett put Gail in touch with her brother Anthony Garnett, an antiquarian bookseller in the United States. Garnett acquired a ‘stockpile’ containing ‘a great many’ duplicate copies of a ‘relatively small number’ of titles from which he was able to put together ‘several small collections’. The ‘first and most complete selection’ was purchased by the University of South Carolina Library. This collection included several annotated copies of Divine Songs of the Muggletonians (1829) and some titles inscribed with the owner’s signature, among them a copy of John Reeve’s Sacred Remains (1751?) signed Mr and Mrs F.E. Noakes. A ‘secondary’ and substantially ‘smaller’ collection was probably bought by Princeton University Library, though Garnett cannot remember where the remaining ‘small’ collections went. The unsold stock was returned to Noakes’s heirs.
About 1982 Michael Cole, an antiquarian bookseller based in York, received a telephone call from Noakes’s widow Jean. According to Cole, Mrs Noakes informed him that she had ‘a few thousand early-mid 19th century copies’ of Muggletonian writings and wanted to know if he was willing to purchase the entire collection. From previous experience Cole reckoned that there were twenty-seven different printed Muggletonian titles. He therefore gently suggested to Mrs Noakes that she must be mistaken in her assessment of ‘a few thousand’ only to be patiently corrected when she replied ‘yes, but I have several hundred copies of each’. Cole then travelled to a rural setting in a transit van – probably Martin and Gail Johnson’s house in Somerset; though he thinks Mrs Noakes’s property in Kent (it is unlikely to have been the family farm since the Noakes had vacated it in 1972). There Cole viewed the residue of the archive stored in what he identified as ‘the original wooden crates from the 19th century printers’. Mrs Noakes and her daughter Gail were pleased to find someone willing to take the volumes off their hands and agreed a price with Cole.
Mrs Jean Noakes (afterwards Barsley)
On examining the collection with his business partner John Morris, Cole found that they owned between ten and twenty complete sets of the published writings (consisting primarily of early nineteenth-century reprints) as well as some thirty or forty almost complete sets. These generally lacked Nathaniel Powell’s eyewitness A true account of the trial and sufferings of Lodowick Muggleton (1808). For commercial reasons Cole reprinted this pamphlet in facsimile (York, 1983) to fill gaps in otherwise complete sets. There remained perhaps ‘another 100 or 200 copies’ of titles individually saleable on the antiquarian book market. Yet the most valuable items were approximately twenty copies of Isaac Frost’s Two Systems of Astronomy (1846), which includes eleven large oil coloured prints by George Baxter made from engravings based on Frost’s drawings. Sets of six of these coloured prints measuring 19.5 x 27 cm appear to have circulated privately among Muggletonians and are worth around £1500 at today’s prices.
Isaac Frost, Two Systems of Astronomy (London: George Baxter, 1846)
The extraordinary recovery of the Muggletonian archive was considered suitably dramatic for television. So in March 1983 the BBC ran a twenty-five minute Timewatch programme featuring a ‘deathless exchange’ between Noakes’s widow (afterwards Mrs Jean Barsley) and William Lamont (1934–2018), as well as shots of Muggletonian books and pamphlets in their original nineteenth-century printers’ boxes at Cole’s shop on 41 Fossgate, York.
The only items from the Muggletonian archive still in Cole’s possession in 2005, however, were a few sets of Baxter’s coloured prints. Over a period of about two years he had sold the full and partly complete sets of published writings to a number of university libraries, including Stanford and Yale. The bulk of the remaining archive consisted of ‘between 1000 and 2000 copies each’ of about four ‘minor’ titles. Since these volumes had ‘absolutely no market value whatsoever’ they were for the most part ‘selectively pulped’. The final remnants of the collection – twenty-two items – were sold by Cole to Gage Postal Books of Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex in the mid-1980s. Fortunately, I was able to purchase fourteen of these works in 2005. Among them is Signification of the Proper names, etc., occurring in The Book of Enoch (1852), which I intend to discuss elsewhere.
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[1] The remainder of this account is based on email exchanges more than fifteen years ago. I am most grateful to Michael Cole, Anthony Garnett, Emmeline Garnett, Martin Johnson, William Johnson, Carole Noakes, Kevin Repp and Simon Routh for their generous help in answering my research enquiries.