Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  He clasps his hands on his chest and leaves, the company parting to let him through. Most of those present, especially the ladies, are left in a state of whispering confusion.

  Since Henry, as always, used the language of King James’ authorized bible nobody is sure how far his speech is metaphorical. Though four of the women present are legally married and all but one are middle-aged, all are or claim to be virgins. This is too delicate a matter to discuss so Fanny Mayber says, “Sister Julia, what does Belovéd mean when he tells us to adorn ourselves? I have some jewellery, of course, but . . .” She falls silent, confused. Three years before all Princeite women were told to sell their jewellery and give the money to Henry. Most did. Julia says kindly, “None of us, I am sure, should try to outshine the rest. Any personal adornment that has been accidentally retained should be shared equally with all of us, but it will be easier if we wear nothing that is not ordered new for the occasion. And whatever we wear, let it be white.” A kind of thrill goes through the ladies as Annie Mayber murmurs, “Belovéd seemed to suggest His final manifestation would be a kind of wedding.”

  “Bridal veils?”, suggests someone.

  “With chaplets of white roses?”, breathes another.

  Julia is the only one among them who can sometimes ask Henry direct questions. She brings them word that bridal attire will be appropriate for all and no expense need be spared. White silks and satins, white velvets, laces and gauze are ordered from London, also the latest pattern of bridal gown. In less than a month the Agapemone dressmakers make nine gowns for women of several ages, shapes and sizes. Mrs Starky and Fanny Mayber have the finest dress sense and unselfishly suggest adjustments that show their sisters’ figures to the best advantage. When all are satisfied with their bridal gowns Henry announces the day of the final manifestation, which takes place before the congregated faithful on the sofa in the Agapemone church.

  The ceremony is described in a pamphlet called The Little Book Open – The Testimony of Br. Prince concerning what Jesus Christ has done by His Spirit to Redeem the Earth: In Voices from Heaven. Henry published it in 1856, five years after the his Manifestation. A long preamble explains why God required it, then says. “Thus the Holy Ghost took flesh in the presence of those whom He called as flesh. Out of this one lump of clay – dust of the ground, living earth – flesh – He, the Great Potter took one piece to make it new. He took flesh – a woman – in their presence, and told them it was his intention to make it one with him, even as a man is one flesh with his wife. He consulted nobody’s pleasure in doing this but his own. He was not influenced by what others might think or say. And he took it with power and authority as flesh that belonged to God, and was at his absolute disposal. In taking it he left it no choice of its own. He did not take it because it loved him, for it did not – but because it pleased him to set his love upon it. Yet he took it in love; for having taken it his manner in it was such as flesh could know and appreciate as love. He kept it with him continually day and night. He took it openly with him wherever he went, not being ashamed of it. He made its life happy and agreeable by affording it the enjoyment of every simple and innocent gratification. Thus he made it one with him, and made it new flesh. He created it a new consciousness”.

  Which means he began by raping the youngest virgin in the presence of the others (including his legal wife) and the Agapemone gentlemen. She was the daughter of the widow Paterson, a girl of fifteen. Her mother, as devoted to Henry as any other Princeite, had died a few months earlier of what doctors called consumption but Henry called doubt. He told the others, “She erred, so God took her”, which explained the matter. Female fashions in 1851 make his rape hard to imagine. Paris dominated these fashions more than nowadays, and French fashion was ruled by the wife of Napoleon’s nephew. She was a handsome Spaniard who loved ballroom dancing so popularized the crinoline to hide her pregnancies, for it covered women’s bodies from waist to feet in a circular whalebone cage a yard or more across at knee level, under a skirt descending to the ground. This fashion was denounced from pulpits, mocked by caricaturists and heartily complained of by most men, especially those who travelled in railway carriages and small horse-drawn buses, yet it triumphed for nearly two decades. Fashionable women liked it for the same reason as the French Empress; poorer women because, in days when Britain’s overcrowded industrial cities had no public lavatories for women, it let them urinate in streets and parks without noticeably doing so. Unless the Agapemone bridal gowns were unfashionably designed only an expert in historic costume can perhaps explain how Henry got through Miss Paterson’s crinoline. If his pamphlet is true he treated her afterwards with as much kindness and consideration as any devoted Victorian husband. There is now no way of knowing his wife Julia’s feelings. Neither she, he or anyone left word of them.

  Not doubting he had done as God commanded, Henry wrote a description of his Great Manifestation in the third person (like Caesar describing his Gallic Wars) and published it, and sent Starky and Thomas out to preach it in Bridgwater and London. He must have changed his mind about God finally closing the gates of the Abode to everyone else, and was ready to let in new believers and (if they came in sufficient numbers with sufficient money) perhaps greatly enlarge the Abode of Love. That did not happen. The Bridgwater meeting was a failure and the best account of the London meeting is in a September 1856 edition of The Times:

  On Friday evening two members of the “Agapemone” near Bridgwater appeared at the Hanover Square rooms according to their advertizement. The large room was densely crowded. Two respectably dressed men spoke to the meeting, urging the claims of their leader, “Brother Prince.” According to the speakers Brother Prince was “a child of wrath who had been made by grace into a vessel of mercy.” Some eleven years ago the Holy Ghost had fulfilled in Brother Prince all that He meant to be and do. The audience evinced much disapprobation and disgust, and cried out that this was gross blasphemy, and worse than Mormonism. The speaker, who seemed quite imperturbable and who calmly surveyed the meeting though a single glass stuck jauntily in one eye proceeded to allude to a second spiritual manifestation which had, he said, occurred at the Agapemone about five years ago, in which the phenomenon was exhibited in the person of a woman – a prophetess – “Not privately, but in the presence of us all.” Some of the expressions used in describing this transaction were perhaps mis-understood by many of his hearers, for they interrupted him indignantly, and at last stopped him with a general howl of execration. The two strangers then retired from the room; upon which Mr Newman, apparently a working man, arose and announced the doctrines of the Agapemone as impious. He moved as a resolution, “That the statements made by the two persons on the platform were contrary to common sense, degrading to humanity, and blasphemous toward God.” The resolution was carried with acclamation amid vociferous cheers. A sergeant of police stepped forward and said good-humouredly, “Now gentlemen, the meeting is over.”

  After that only occasional newspaper reports brought the Agapemone to public notice. There was first the Rev. George Thomas’ unsuccessful attempt to remove his small son from Agnes, his wife, which ended with her divorcing Thomas and gaining legal custody of the child. The Great Manifestation estranged Rouse the attorney who left the Agapemone and brought a legal action that recovered some of his money. Lewis Price also left but could not persuade Harriet to go with him, nor could he persuade the police that she was kept in the Abode against her will. He therefore invaded it with about twenty local men who thought he had a right to his own wife, but Harriet had fled with Mrs Starky to lodgings in Salisbury. When she returned he obtained a writ claiming she was retained against her will, but she declared this was not true before a judge who dismissed the case. Said The Times, “As may be expected, Mr Price has obtained the sympathy of all right-minded people in the neighbourhood.” Then came the death of Mary Mayber, whose body was found in a sheep-dip pond. At the inquest Harriet Price (formerly Nottidge) declared that Mary had not been kept in
the Agapemone against her will. Fanny Mayber declared that her sister Mary had been depressed for many months because she could not be as happy as others in the Agapemone, so felt Christ had abandoned her. A surgeon who conducted an autopsy on the deceased said she had died of drowning, not poisoning, and an adhesion of her brain to the skull indicated a tumour that explained her depression. The coroner’s verdict was suicide while of unsound mind.

  It would be depressing to chart how all the original members of the Abode left or died away leaving Henry who outlasted them all. It is pleasanter to end with an account of the Agapemone by a friendly but critical reporter who went there in 1866 when most of its troubles seemed overcome.

  27: HEPWORTH DIXON’S REPORT

  Hepworth Dixon was a journalist, novelist, editor and one of those busy, worldly, free-thinking yet discreet men who, in a phrase fashionable in late 19th century England, were said to have gone everywhere and done everything. In the Baltic provinces of East Prussia – in Salt Lake City and Oneida Creek, U.S.A. – in England at Spaxton Bottom he noticed communities who had scandalized public opinion by practising new kinds of marriage. He investigated these communities and, in a two volume study called Spiritual Wives showed how they differed from highly sensational accounts in the popular press. His book was published in 1867. Here is his description of a visit to the Agapemone:

  “No stranger is admitted into the Agapemone,” says Murray’s Handbook.

  “The Abode of Love,” said Sir Frederick Thesiger, speaking as a prosecuting council, “is a family consisting of four apostate clergymen, an engineer, a medical man, an attorney, and two bloodhounds.”

  “The Agapemone”, says Boyd Dawkins, the latest lay writer who has paid attention to this subject, “is surrounded by a wall from twelve to fifteen feet high.”

  These statements are untrue. The Saints who are gathered at Spaxton have audacities and heresies enough without being charged with these idle tales.

  As your carriage rolls from the quaint old streets of Bridgwater into the green country lanes, you seem to pass from the age of Victoria into the age of King Alfred. Saxon Somerset was, I fancy, as green and bright, with corn-sheaves on these slopes; stone homesteads, snug with thatch, upon these knolls; with village towers and spires among the trees; and with a slow but sturdy population, like those of Spaxton and Charlinch. The road is bad, the mire is deep, the descents are sharp. The lanes are sunk below hedges of thorns and briars, so that an unfriendly invasion would find it no easy task to push their way from town to town. Pull up the horses on the brow of this hill. The scene is beautiful with the beauty of western England. In front springs a dome of corn-field, crowned with the picturesque nave and tower of Charlinch church. At the base of this hillock flows the soft wooded valley towards Over Stowy, a place renowned in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But what, in this valley at our feet in the winding lane on our left, is that fanciful group of buildings; a church to which the spire has not yet been built; a garden, cooled by shrubs and trees; a greenhouse thronged with plants; an ample sward of grass cut through by winding walks; a row of picturesque cottages on the road, a second row in the garden; high gates by the church; a tangle of buildings in the front and rear; farms, granaries, stables, all of the crimson with creeping autumnal plants? That group of buildings is the Agapemone; the home of our male and female saints.48

  In a few seconds we alight in front of the Abode of Love. The large gates are closed, but a side door stands ajar. The man who drives me seems surprized – he too had been told that no one is admitted into the Abode of Love. Once in his life, however, he had been taken into the stables by a groom who was proud of his horses, as he might very well be, since they had come from the royal stud. My driver tells me with a shudder that the strange people in the Abode play billiards on a Sunday in their church. He does not mind a game of nine-pins in the ale-house yard with other poor fellows on Sunday afternoons; but that is very different from gentlefolks hitting ivory balls in a church. As I entered by the open door a gentleman in black came from the house and shook my hand. This was the Rev. George Robinson Thomas, once a student of St David’s College, Lampeter, afterwards a curate at Charlinch, then a witness for Brother Prince and now First of the Agapemone’s Two Anointed Ones. His figure was tall, spare and well made, crowned with an intellectual head and pair of sharp blue eyes in a face no longer youthful, but whose every line showed he had been a scholar and preacher. Such was the gentleman known to me from report as the husband of Agnes Nottidge, the hero of an ale-house comedy, and defeated party in a scandalous court case.

  Thomas led me into the chief room, which I saw at once was a church. Three ladies were seated near a piano at which one of them was playing. My name was mentioned to them; they curtseyed and left, their own names not having been pronounced. One of them, as I afterwards found by a lucky guess, had once been Julia Starky, daughter of a clergyman with high standing in society and of high repute in the English Church. She was now the second wife of Brother Prince but not, then or afterwards, made known to me by her married name.

  After the usual remarks had been made about the fine morning and pleasant drive, I mentioned that the Agapemone farm – or farms? – were reputed to be the best managed in Somerset. Thomas said, “Under the old dispensation some of our Brethren were farmers. Would you like to visit Brother Prince’s room?”

  I said I should first like to ask him four or five questions. He bowed, and bent himself to answer; but seemed ill at ease while we remained alone. Our talk was now and then broken by the entrance of some sister who slipped into the room, listened for a moment, then went away. I began to see that it is not the habit of this place to allow any brother or sister to hold private conversations with a guest. Each Saint appears to keep watch upon his fellow. Prince may dwell apart and hold himself accountable to none, but his people only speak in each other’s presence, moving in pairs, trios, and septets. I was soon struck by the fact that I was never left alone with either man or woman, a thing I never experienced in the homes of either German or American Saints. If we lounged in the lovely greenhouse, took a turn in the garden, idled about the stables and offices, either Sister Ellen, Sister Annie, or some other lady would slip in quietly to our side, and take her share in any talk that might be going on. In short, some sister kept me in sight and hearing until I drove away from the Abode of Love.

  I first asked the reason for the high wall that Professor Dawkins says surrounds the estate. Thomas said, “There is no such wall. Dawkins may have got the idea from an equally mistaken local guide book. Soon after coming here we had a short length of wall built on the road-ward side of this church, to stop neighbouring rustics gazing in at us through the windows. They used to do that.” “Why do you keep bloodhounds?”

  “We have none now but once we needed their protection. On several occasions we were physically assaulted by neighbours. In public.”

  “Did you not seek redress through the courts?”

  “Yes. We were awarded a farthing damages. It is now said that anyone can knock down four of us for a penny.”

  Thomas cut short my four or five questions by leaving the room. In a minute he returned to offer me food – a cup of coffee, a biscuit, a glass of wine. Being fresh from my early meal and cigar I was declining his offer with thanks when his way of pressing his little courtesies struck me as like the manner of an Arab sheik, who offers you bread and salt, not simply as food but as a sign of peace. “Let it be a glass of wine.”

  A woman brought in a tray with biscuits and two decanters; one of good dry sherry, the other of a sweet new port. She laid them on a table, bid me help myself and left. For half an hour I was left alone with these two bottles in the church.

  Yes; in the church; lounging on a red sofa, near a bright fire, in the coloured light of a high lancet window filled with rich stained glass; soft cushions beneath my feet; a billiards table on my right; oak panelling round the walls; and above my head the sacred symbol of the Lamb and D
ove, flanked and supported by a rack of billiard cues. This room, I knew, was that in which the Great Manifestation had taken place; that mystic rite through which living flesh is said to have been reconciled to God. Lovely to the eye, calming to the heart, this chamber was, and is. A rich red Persian carpet covered the floor, in contrast with the brown oaken roof. Red curtains draped the windows, the glass in which was painted a mystical device, a lamb, a lion and a dove – the lion standing on a bed of roses, with a banner on which these words are inscribed,

  OH, HAIL, HOLY LOVE!

  The chimneypiece was a fine oak frame of Gothic work, let in with mirrors. A harp stood in one corner of the room; a large euterpean in another.49 A few books, not much used, lay on the tables – Young’s Night Thoughts, a Turner Gallery, Wordsworth’s Greece and a few more. Ivory balls lay on the green baize as if the Sisters had been recently at play. The whole room had in it a hush and splendour which affected the imagination with a kind of awe. How could I help thinking of that mystic drama in which Brother Prince had played the part of hero, “Madonna” Paterson the part of heroine? I was suddenly surprized by the feeling of being closely watched from very near. Yes! A face was pressed against the lowest part of a window opposite, the face of a small child with large, sad, questioning eyes. It disappeared as the First Anointed One returned.

  “Do you work and play on Sundays?” I enquired.

  “We have no Sundays,” he replied; “all days with us are Sabbaths, and everything we do is consecrated to the Lord. Will you now come in to see Brother Prince?”

  “Oh, yes,” I answered softly; and the keeper of the Seven Stars and the Seven Golden Candlesticks led the way.

  “Good day sir; I am glad to see you; take this chair,” said a gentleman in black, with sweet, grave face, a broad white neckcloth, and shining leather shoes. He had come to meet me at the door; he led me quietly into a luxurious parlour, and seated me in an easy chair beside the fire. The room was like a lady’s boudoir; the furniture was rich and good; the chairs were cosy; and the ornaments were of the usual kind. I had come to Spaxton from a country house; and nothing in the room appeared to be much unlike what I had left behind, except the men and women.