Bunhill Fields—25 May 1708

Post Boy, January 10, 1708 - January 13, 1708; Issue 1975.

In early 1708, the religious group known as the French Prophets (a millenarian movement active in London from 1706), sensationally announced in the London newspapers that Thomas Emes, one of their number, who had died at the end of December 1707, would rise from his grave at Bunhill Fields on 25 May.

The origins of the French Prophets can be traced back to the Camisard uprising in 1702, in the Cévennes mountains in southern France. The Camisards were a radical minority within the wider Huguenot congregation. They were distinctively poorer than their co-religionists and consisted for the most part of illiterate peasants and shepherds. Unlike mainstream Huguenots, they believed in prophecy and miracles, and claimed to be inhabited by the Holy Spirit. Refusing to abjure, they took up arms in 1702 against the religious persecution instigated by Louis XIV following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Within two years, hundreds had been imprisoned or killed, including most of their leaders, though sporadic fighting continued until 1710.

A small number of Camisards found refuge in London late in 1706. They received support from three prominent Huguenots: the lawyer Jean Daudé, the mathematician and natural philosopher Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and from Charles de Portalès, secretary to Armand de Bourbon, marquis de Miremont—then in charge of Anglo-Dutch military support to the Camisards.

These Cévenole refugees formed links with members of the Philadelphian Society, who were inspired by a prophecy of their leader Jane Lead to celebrate the Act of Union between England and Scotland as a providential sign of reconciliation. (The Act came into effect on 1 May 1707. Jane Lead had died on 19th August 1704, “in the 81st year of her age and the 65th of her vocation to the inward life” and was buried on the 22nd at Bunhill Fields.) About the same time, Philadelphians and Camisards merged into the French Prophets, an ecumenical attempt to reconcile Judaeo-Christian denominations before the millennium. British millenarians believed Christ’s second coming was imminent, while Camisards anticipated the fall of the Roman Catholic Church. The rise of the French Prophets responded to a sense of urgency in both traditions. Millenarianism and prophetic religion had been culturally prominent in the final quarter of the seventeenth-century and the Camisards found London fertile soil.

The French Prophets always presented themselves as a non-sectarian religious movement. They did not introduce any doctrine, but emphasized instead religious experience—prophecy, glossolalia, thaumaturgy—singing, and dancing, over liturgy and rituals. This allowed them to reach out to a very diverse audience, whether theologically, socially, demographically, or politically. Thus their followers included such men as Nicolas Fatio who had been admitted as a fellow of the Royal Society on 2 May 1688 and was a close associate of Isaac Newton. It is indeed possible that Sir Isaac Newton himself may have attended a French Prophets’ assembly, given his friendship with Fatio and his own strong millenarian interests, although hard evidence is lacking.

Although they were referred to as the French Prophets, beside the Philadelphians a number of Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, all manner of dissenters, and even Catholics and Jews, joined the group from summer 1707. It may be appropriate to draw attention here to George Hermitage, whose inclusion in Divine Songs of the Muggletonians (1829) led E.P. Thompson into the realms of biographical fantasy. Hermitage was christened in London, on 21 January 1693, at the church of Saint Peter-Le-Poer, the son of Clement and Dorothy. The names very much suggest a Huguenot origin for the family; the surname perhaps originally L’Hermitage or De l’Hermitage. What links there may have been between the French Prophets and the Muggletonians remain to be investigated.

John Lacy, a London merchant and justice of the peace, was one of several English enthusiasts prominent in the movement. In December 1707, another English member of the sect, Thomas Emes, a medical practitioner, fell sick. He had joined the Prophets earlier in the summer and was playing an increasingly important role among the group. Lacy announced that if Emes died, God would raise him. Emes subsequently died on 22 December 1707 and was buried at six o’clock in the evening on Christmas Day. His death challenged the French Prophets’ confidence in the imminent Second Coming. However, on 23 December, twelve-year-old Anna Maria King prophesied that Emes’s body would be raised from the dead and “that more marvellous Things” should “come to pass in a little Time”. And a few days later the meat-packer John Potter announced that Emes would be raised from the dead by John Lacy between noon and 6 p.m. on 25 May 1708, exactly five months after his burial in Bunhill Fields: “Know ye the Day, the Twenty Fifth Day of May, you shall behold him rise again. One Month above the Number of Days that Lazarus was in his Grave”. (Lazarus was raised from the dead after four days; Lacy said that as unbelievers objected that the time of Lazarus lying in the grave was too short, Dr. Emes would remain five months, at the expiration of which time he, Lacy, would proceed to the grave, and standing thereby, he would then be joined by a great host of angels, who would defend him and his companions, and Emes should be brought again to life.)

Observator, July 31, 1708 - August 4, 1708; Issue 49.

The prophecy was widely publicized and debated over the following months, sparking a virulent battle of pamphlets on religious enthusiasm. At least 150 titles and dozens of newspaper articles were published by or against the Prophets in England between 1707 and 1710. The Prophets advertised the forthcoming miracle both in print and on the streets, and fasted repeatedly for collective purification, whilst Lacy was healing the blind and sick as evidence of the Spirit’s presence. Yet, as the date of the miracle approached, the Prophets became increasingly divided over the prospect of its accomplishment. By 29 April Lacy was acknowledging that several of his earlier predictions had been mistaken and he indicated that he would not be at the graveside on 25 May.

Three days before Thomas Emes’s announced resurrection, the government, fearing disturbances, and to prevent any fraud, placed guards at the grave and about the cemetery. Narcissus Luttrell reported about Emes’s resurrection that “two regiments of our train’d bands are ordered upon the guard during the holydayes, to prevent any disorder which may happen by the mobb on that occasion”. Thus, at Whitsun, 25 May 1708, at Bunhill Fields, before some 20,000 spectators, Thomas Emes failed to rise to life. The crowds who went to Bunhill Fields to witness the event were disappointed, but for the faithful there was an acceptable explanation of the failure. The miracle had been cancelled, said John Lacy, because of the danger that the crowd would cause a disturbance and molest the risen Emes. The scornful incredulity of the unruly onlookers was the hindrance which had prevented the miracle.

The Prophets had actively publicised the miracle in the preceding weeks and months, but the satirical campaign of anti-enthusiasts also contributed to the publicity. The attendance of some 20,000 people for the announced miracle speaks for itself. It meant that about 4 per cent of London’s population were physically present in the Bunhill Fields burying-ground on that day, and at least three or four times more would probably have heard of it. The episode of Dr Emes’s resurrection due at Whitsun 1708 undoubtedly marked the climax of the Prophets’ publicity. When Emes failed to rise from his grave, the Prophets were the object of widespread derision and satire, and opened a period of deep crisis and questioning within the group.

But far from collapsing in the face of such a public embarrassment, from February 1708 the Prophets travelled relentlessly across Britain; in Scotland they found a receptive audience among the Jacobite mystics. There were French Prophets in Edinburgh as well as in London. In November 1708 the Prophets also launched missions to the continent, starting with Holland. Then in 1711, Portalès and others travelled through Germany to Vienna to warn the Holy Roman Emperor of the impending apocalypse. (Charles de Portalès himself long outlived the active group and was buried 7 December 1763 at Bunhill Fields.) Several communities were born on the continent as a result of these missions, especially in Pietist circles. By 1715 they had created an international millenarian network of some 800 followers scattered across Europe. They remained active on the continent until at least the 1730s, but can be traced in England until nearly twenty years later.

The late 1710s had marked a period of deep transformation for the group, following the death or departure of several prominent members. After years of scandal, the Prophets withdrew from the public eye and survived as an underground community. But as a religious force in England for forty years, as a spectre haunting subsequent evangelical efforts, the French Prophets were to be etched in many memories. John and Charles Wesley both met the French Prophets in the 1730s. Wesley’s warning that the Methodists should not be like the French Prophets was not a reference to a historical sect but to a still-active group. Later, the Shakers of Manchester under Mother Ann Lee claimed to have derived their illumination from the remnants of the French Prophets. In 1795, Bulkeley’s favourable “Impartial Account of the Prophets” was reprinted (in Prophetical extracts) in connection with the new English prophet Richard Brothers.

The Prophets also disrupted the Moravians’ meetings at Fetter Lane in the 1740s. Moravian emphasis on the inner workings of the Spirit, their insistence upon a religion of the heart, attracted the French Prophets, who regarded the Moravians as likely converts, believing the Moravian tradition consonant with their own.

A small group of Moravian missionaries had arrived in London in February 1738. They were not in the British Isles to proselytize; for them England was a staging-post on the way to Georgia. But they made contact with a religious fellowship group, the Fetter Lane Society, meeting at the bookshop of James Hutton; and from this there developed a permanent Moravian Congregation in London. By 1742, the Society’s meeting room had become too small for its membership; Hutton therefore leased a Meeting House, also off Fetter Lane. The Brethren’s Chapel, Fetter Lane (as it became known) was to be the Moravians’ London centre for the next two hundred years. The Prophets made repeated attempts to invade Moravian open meetings as Church Diaries reveal.

1741

Aug: 12 … It was spoken of a person who as it were was possessed of the devil and the Brethren agreed to write to her if there were no opportunity of seeing her. This gave occasion to speak of several such instances and that sometimes it was a beguiling—We praised God for preserving our Brethren that many of them had not got the spirit of the French Prophets to which two years ago several had a great inclination and it was said that the best preservative against other Spirits than Jesus was to remain poor in spirit and humbled at the feet of Jesus Christ.

1742

Monday July 19 … The prophetess at Clarke’s house is dead.

1743

Tuesday Aug. 9th … The prophetess has writ a long Epistle to Brother Hutton & Wife (Louise Brandt, Swiss-born wife of the English Moravian James Hutton, was proud that she had resisted the inspired men who attempted her spiritual “seduction” around Yverdon, Vaud, in the 1720s).

1744

June 25 … Yesterday Mrs Sellers and another came to Fetter Lane chapel and made a great disturbance. They are prophetesses. She would have been acquainted with Brother Hutton but he told her he would have no fellowship with her.

Then on July 15, 1744, worshippers in the Moravian chapel heard the muffled voices of inspired women who stood outside, refused entrance. The worshippers paid no heed and preserved themselves in “Stillness and Grace”.

1745

Tuesday 2 April … There was 4 French Prophets at the General Meeting yesterday.

Monday 13th May … Yesterday there was many French Prophets at Fetter Lane & many strangers in ye Afternoon

Tuesday May 28 … Palmer the Carpender who is among the French Prophets has a great Love to Brother Schlicht & wants very much to speak with him & says he could speak all his Heart to him, he says he is much blessed by the Preaching at Fetter Lane.

The Moravians and the French Prophets are the twin poles of eighteenth-century spirituality. The Moravians sought stillness. The French Prophets believed that spiritual experience can take physical form. The prophet John Lacy claimed to effect miraculous cures, all of this accomplished while in a trance state during which he would groan, hiccough, and twitch violently, sometimes hurling his body across the room. The glossolalia, trances, automatic writing and ecstatic convulsions of the French Prophets were not what the Moravians saw as acceptable or authentic of spiritual influx.

Catherine, William Blake’s mother, then married to Thomas Armitage, joined the Moravian Congregation at Fetter Lane in November 1750. Thomas Armitage died in September 1751, and, according to the Church Book of the Brethren, Catherine “became a widow and left the Congregation”. This means that she left the inner circle (“The Congregation of the Lamb”); it does not necessarily imply that she stopped attending all Moravian services. A year later, Catherine Armitage married James Blake.

The discoveries of recent decades in Moravian archives raise all sorts of questions about Blake’s childhood, about the milieu in which he grew up, and alert us to the complexities of Blake’s spiritual journey. William Blake, with his family and friends, would have encountered a range of eighteenth-century spiritual movements—including the French Prophets, the Moravians, the Methodists, the Swedenborgians, and the followers of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott—as they variously rose, transformed themselves, or declined.

If an inheritance from the French Prophets can perhaps be found in Blake’s development of automatic writing, the Moravian stillness was an ideal to which he responded sometimes unexpectedly. Amidst the comedy of An Island in the Moon, the singing of “Holy Thursday” brings stillness to the assembled group:

After this they all sat silent for a quarter of an hour

(There is perhaps a suggestion here of the moment in the Apocalypse of St John where angelic song is followed by silence: “There was Silence in Heaven for about the space of half an hour”.) “Silence” and “silent” are Blakean keywords. Appearing throughout his poetic oeuvre, their usage clusters with deep significance in the late epics: Four Zoas (54 times), Milton (17 times), and Jerusalem (27 times).

The French Prophets gravitated around an urban middle-class nucleus. Laborie (2015) provides us with a list (“Chronological profile of the French Prophets”) of 665 members up to 1746, including lawyers, teachers and merchants as well as working men and women. The list includes two names of Blakean interest: William Davies (no 389 in Laborie’s “profile”; no further information) and Mr Boucher (no 621; first known appearance among the French Prophets: 3 August 1714; religion: Huguenot). In 1782 William Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher at St Mary’s, Battersea. Her surname suggests a French ancestry; her grandfathers were Richard Boucher and William Davis. It may be just coincidence but it’s a very striking coincidence.


Sources and further reading (including a small selection from the many titles published by or against the Prophets)

Daniel Benham.—Memoirs of James Hutton : comprising the annals of his life and connection with the United Brethren.—London : Hamilton, Adams, 1856.

The Christian Pioneer : intended to uphold the great doctrines of the Reformation; the sufficiency of Scripture, the right of individual judgment, and of fearless free inquiry.—Vol. 7 (September 1832-December 1833).

           Page 574 : Lacy’s prophecy.

The Harleian miscellany; a collection of scarce, curious, and entertaining pamphlets and tracts, as well in manuscript as in print. Selected from the library of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford. Interspersed with historical, political, and critical annotations, by the late William Oldys, Esq. and some additional notes, by Thomas Park, F.S.A.—10 v.—London : printed for John White, and John Murray; and John Harding, 1808-13.
          The original, 1744-1753, edition in eight volumes was reprinted in 1808–1811, with supplementary volumes and indexes.

Vol. VII (1811), page 194 : John Lacy promises to raise Dr. Emms from the dead.

Samuel Keimer.—A brand pluck’d from the burning : exemplify’d in the unparallel’d case of Samuel Keimer, offer’d to the perusal of the serious part of mankind, and especially to those who were ever acquainted with, or ever heard of the man.—London : printed and sold by W. Boreham, and by the other booksellers, 1718.

While [Emes] lay ill, he was told, by John Lacy, John Potter, &c. under Agitation, many flattering Stories, that if he dy'd, he should quickly be rais'd again, which the poor Man, as I have reason to think, firmly believ'd. After the Doctor was dead, instead of being laid out, as is usual for a dead Corps, he was kept hot in his Bed, till he stunk so, as there was scarce any enduring it, several imagining he would come to Life again. (12)

Rigby, a Believer, who deals in Canes, of whom 'tis said, that He laid a great Wager on the Resurrection of Dr. Emes, but lost. (65)

Lionel Laborie.—Enlightening enthusiasm : prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England.—Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2015.
          A major reassessment of prophetic experience restoring the French Prophets to their place in the religious culture of eighteenth century Britain

Lionel Laborie.—”French Prophets (act. 1706–c.1750)”.—Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2018.—Published online: 09 May 2018.
          I have drawn heavily on this essential summary.

John Lacy.—The General Delusion of Christians touching the ways of God’s revealing himself, to, and by the Prophets, evinc’d from Scripture and primitive antiquity, etc.—London : S. Noble, 1713.
          A later reprint (London : R.B. Seeley & W. Burnside, 1832) was edited by Edward Irving, preacher and theologian. Irving died on 7 December 1834, and was buried on the 19th in the crypt of Glasgow Cathedral. As the mourners departed, there remained a number of young women dressed in white, confidently expecting Irving to rise again.

John Lacy.—Mr. Lacy’s Letter to the Reverend Dr. Josiah Woodward concerning his Remarks on the Modern Prophets.—London : Printed for Ben. Bragg ..., 1708.


John Lacy.—The prophetical warnings of John Lacy, esq. : pronounced under the operation of the spirit, and faithfully taken in writing, when they were spoken.—3 parts.—London : B. Bragge, 1707.
Parts 2 and 3 have special title-pages : Warnings of the eternal spirit, by the mouth of his servant John, sirnam’d Lacy. The second part. … The third and last part.















John Lacy.—A relation of the dealings of God to his unworthy servant John Lacy, since the time of his believing and professing himself inspir’d.—London : Printed for Ben. Bragg ..., 1708.

François Maximilien Misson.—A Cry from the Desart: or, Testimonials of the miraculous things lately come to pass in the Cevennes, verified upon oath and by other Proofs ... Translated from the originals. With a preface by John Lacy.—London B. Bragg, 1707.
          A translation by John Lacy of Misson’s Le Théâtre sacré des Cevennes. A second edition was issued the same year.

Narcissus Luttrell.—A brief historical relation of state affairs, from September 1678 to April 1714.—6 v.—Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1857.
          On the French Prophets, see vol. VI, page 307.

Colin J. Podmore.—The Moravian Church in England, 1728-1760.—Oxford historical monographs.—Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1998.
          French Prophets: 10, 13, 14, 55, 56, 62. Podmore provides a modern, comprehensive and scholarly account of the early years of Moravianism in England. The older apologetic history by Daniel Benham (1856) is still valuable.

Prophetical extracts.—London : printed for G. Terry, [1794-1795].
          The publisher is Garnet Terry (1746-1817), banknote engraver to the Bank of England. He became a follower of William Huntington S.S. in the 1780s, publishing a number of his works and reprinting earlier apocalyptic texts.
          Contents: [No. I.]. Introduction : containing an impartial account of the prophets of the Cevennes : in a letter to a friend. By Sir Richard Bulkeley ; together with the remarkable vision of Lewis XIV ; for the interpretation of which he offered a reward of 20,000 Louis d’ors, in the Paris Gazette of November 11, 1689 — No. II. Containing a most extraordinary prophecy, delivered near one hundred years ago, before the Senate, at Frankfort in Germany. By J.M. Daut ; concerning the Judgments of God on the whole Roman Empire ; the revolutions of, and the Calamities that are to happen in, the different nations of the world, especially those of Germany, France, Poland, Holland, &c. ; translated from the High Dutch in the year 1711 — No. III. Containing (besides the conclusion of Daut’s prophecies) a very scarce prophetic piece, intitled, A cry from the desart, or, Testimonials of the miraculous things lately come to pass in the Cevennes, or, Southern parts of France, verified upon oath. Translated from the original published in the year 1707 — No. IV & V. Relative to the Revolution in France, and the decline of the papal power in the world : selected from Fleming, Usher, Jerieu, Goodwin, Gill, Love, Daut, Brown, Knox, Willison, More, Newton, Lacey, Owen, Marion, Cavalier, and many more.

Hillel Schwartz.—The French Prophets : the history of a millenarian group in eighteenth-century England.—Berkeley CA : University of California Press, 1980.