The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  FROM PROPHETESSES TO PROLETARIANS

  By telling the story of Francis, and by telling it in the way he does, Terrill at first notes and then undermines the role of women’s spirituality within the community, within the governance of the church, and within its emerging doctrines. The women of the gathered congregations were notoriously outspoken in the 1640s, and Francis, “one of the Sisters of ye Congregation,” was among them. Terrill responds with an assertion of male authority, male governance, and doctrine as enunciated by male ministers, stressing that upon her death Francis “was Honourably Interred being carryed by ye Elders, & ye chiefest of note of ye Brethren in ye Congregation (Devout men bearing her) to ye grave” (emphasis added). Why was this necessary?

  The millenarian Fifth Monarchist Mary Cary wrote in 1651, “The time is coming when not only men but women shall prophesy; not only aged men but young men, not only superiors but inferiors; not only those who have university learning but those who have it not, even servants and handmaids.” Every saint, declared Cary, “may be said to be a prophet . . . for when the Lord hath revealed himself unto the soul and discovered his secrets to it . . . the soul cannot choose but declare them to others.” Phyllis Mack writes that even more than the male “mechaniek preacher,” the female prophet “represented a kind of authority that was inappropriate, even monstrous, by conventional standards, but conforming to a more radical vision of human equality, on earth and in heaven.”35 Women who prophesied before Francis included the “Woman of Ely,” an itinerant minister often denounced by heresy-hunters of the 1640s, and the poor woman whose prophecy converted the reprobate young soldier John Bunyan. Three others merit further discussion here: Sarah Wight, Dinah (a maid and “a Moor not born in England”), and the antinomian controversialist of Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson. The meeting of Sarah and Dinah indicated the association between the end of slavery and the “new covenant,” while the case of Anne Hutchinson shows how female prophets of this era might be branded as heretics, witches, or monsters.

  When Dinah (“the Moor,” as she was later described) came to visit Sarah Wight in London at the end of May 1647, “in affliction both in soul and body,” Henry Jessey, a Baptist leader of a separatist congregation in Southwark, was in the room and recorded their dialogue.36 Sarah had been fasting for two months and was confined to bed and in considerable turmoil herself. Her immediate companion and maid was Hannah Guy, an Irish Baptist of Traleigh and an associate of Craddock. Also in Sarah’s circle were Richard Saltonstall, who registered the first formal protest against the slave trade in anglophone America; the future regicide Hugh Peter, who would be praised by Richard Price in 1789 and condemned by Edmund Burke; and the seeker John Saltmarsh, chaplain to the revolutionary army, a “strange genius, part poet, part whirling dervish,” who advocated “the brotherhood of man.”37 It was thus a meeting of Irish, African, Welsh, English, and American.

  MAID [DINAH]: I am oft tempted against my life.

  MRS. SARAH: Why, what causeth it?

  MAID: Sometimes this, because I am not as others are: I do not look so, as others doe.

  Sarah goes on to expound on the power of Christian redemption and the equality of believers before enunciating the antinomian axiom, “This is my covenant, I will be mercifull to their iniquities; and, Ile give you a new heart, Ile put my fear in your heart, Ile write my Lawes there.” But Dinah remains in doubt: “He may do this for some few, but not to me.” And Sarah replies, “He doth not this to one onely, nor to one Nation onely; for, many Nations must be blessed in him. He came to give his life for a ransome for many, to give himselfe for the life of the world. He is a free agent; and why should you exclude your selfe?”

  Sarah saw the deliverance from internal and external bondage as simultaneous; she affirmed the unity between the Kingdom Within and the Kingdom Without, the new Heaven and the new Earth. John Saltmarsh wrote an introduction to the printed version of this extraordinary dialogue. Saltmarsh, a Yorkshire countryman of Jessey’s, was, as we have said, chaplain to Fairfax’s army, whose triumphs had just put an end to the first civil war. “There is no church,” he noted in 1646, “nor ordinances yet.” People were seeking, he explained, “yet they are to begin as in primitive times with gifts and miracles.”38 He, too, was confused about blackness, ethnicity, and slavery. Saltmarsh wrote of Sarah, under her legal condition, “She is in bondage, in blackness, and darkness and tempest,” while asserting that under her Gospel condition, God was “making known his glory in the dark.” Saltmarsh’s Smoke in the Temple argued that Christ’s kingdom was a realm not of “compliancy and obedience and submission, but of consultation, of debating, counselling, prophesying, voting, &c.”39 He believed that Sara Wight could help fulfill God’s “new covenant”; the “poore, low, and humble” were its instruments, and “more and more is to be revealed,” he wrote with revolutionary expectation. The question was, would the abolition of the slave trades be included in the “approaching reformation,” as Milton expressed the unfolding of the revolutionary program?

  To help build the new Earth, Anne Hutchinson had in 1634 sailed to Massachusetts Bay, where she worked as a midwife, a healer, and, like Sarah Wight, a spiritual counselor. She prophesied and expressed her antinomian ideas as she gathered with women, drawers of water like Francis and Dinah, at the town spring on High Street. Jane Hawkins (who would later be banished from the colony for heresy) and Mary Dyer (who would later be hanged for sedition) met daily at the wellspring on High Street in Boston.40 From these humble beginnings grew ever larger conventicles to discuss the sermons of the orthodox Puritan ministers, who began to see the meetings—and Hutchinson in particular—as affronts to their own power. To them, the reproduction of antinomian ideas was closely linked to the broader reproduction of the population of the Bay colony. Hutchinson’s allies in the militia also objected to the appointment of an army chaplain, threatening to refuse to go to war against the Pequots and weakening the military power of the colony.41 The ensuing Antinomian Controversy resulted in a major challenge to the ruling authority of Governor John Winthrop and the Puritan elders in Massachusetts Bay.

  Winthrop and the Puritan elders never formally charged Anne Hutchinson with witchcraft, but the whole affair, as Carol Karlsen has noted, trembled through innuendo and insinuation on the edge of such accusations.42 Winthrop and others considered Hutchinson’s miscarriage in 1638 to be “strange to amazement”: she had given “30 monstrous births or thereabouts, at once; some of them bigger, some lesser, some of one shape, some of another; few of any perfect shape, none at all of them (as farre as I could ever learne) of humane shape.” Mary Dyer, for her part, was said to have given birth to a baby that had “horns like a Beast, and ears, scales on a rough skin like a fish called a Thornback, legs and claws like a Hawke.” To some it seemed clearly the work of the Devil upon typically porous and vulnerable women. Here was female power in reproduction at its most nightmarish to the puritanical patriarchs: monstrous, threatening, unregulated. With Bacon’s theory of monsters behind them, and with their own notion of Satan foremost in their minds, the first reaction of the Puritans was murderous. The second was only slightly less extreme: Anne Hutchinson was banished from the colony to Rhode Island (“island of errors”). Her defeat removed opposition to the Pequot War and cleared the way for slavery. Many surviving Pequots were enslaved and shipped off to the other Puritan colony in the New World, Providence Island; the return cargo to Massachusetts was African slaves.43 In writing about the Antinomian Controversy, Edward Johnson considered it “no Marvell then if so many Errours arise, like those fained heads of Hidra, as fast as one is cut off two stand up in the roome.”44 Cotton Mather’s chapter on the same subject in his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) was entitled “Hydra Decapita.”

  A “monstrous birth” as a many-headed hydra. The Miracle of Miracles (n.d., but likely early eighteenth century).

  Indeed, it was during the time of Francis and the female prophets that Matthew Hopkins, in his officia
l capacity as the English Witch-Finder General, led a terrorist hunt against so-called witches. As the authorities used witchcraft statutes to prosecute religious radicals, an estimated one thousand women lost their lives between 1645 and 1647. Hopkins, a specialist in maritime law and insurance, worried that witches interfered with trade by cursing ships; he was advised in this matter by the royal astrologer, Lilly. Inquiries came to him from Naples and Barbados. Supported not only by Parliament but by the leading “rationalists” of the day (Hobbes, Boyle, Bodin, Harvey), this misogynist obsessed about diabolical sex, “pricking” female bodies for the Devil’s mark. His assistant wrote that Satan bound his witches “to imitate Christ in many things, as his Assemblies, and Sabbaths, Baptism and Covenants,” implying a connection between Satan and the radical religious movements led by women in the 1640s.

  Female prophecy must be situated in the crisis of reproduction in the middle of the seventeenth century. This was the peak period for the criminalization of women in England and throughout Europe, as prosecutions for infanticide, abortion, and witchcraft reached their highest rate. It was also the period in which men began to wrest control of reproduction from women (male midwives appeared in 1625 and the forceps soon thereafter); previously, “childbirth and the lying-in period were a kind of ritual collectively staged and controlled by women, from which men were usually excluded.” Since the ruling class had begun to recognize its interest in increased fecundity, “attention was focussed on the ‘population’ as a fundamental category for economic and political analysis.”45 The simultaneous births of modern obstetrics and modern demography were responses to the crisis. Both, like the witchcraft prosecutions, sought to rationalize social reproduction in a capitalist context—that is, as the breeding of labor power.46 A recurring motif in the ruling-class imagination was intercourse between the English witch and the “black man”—a devil or imp. The terror was not limited to an imaginary chamber of horrors; it was an actuality of counterrevolution.

  By 1650, “the age of independent female prophecy was over.”47 But not without complaint. When the prophetess Anna Trapnel was arrested in Cornwall in 1654, the “justices . . . came to fetch me out of my bed,” she wrote, “and some came upstairs, crying, A witch, a witch.” When the authorities requested that Anna’s neighbors assist them in capturing her, “one of my friends told them, that they must fetch their silk gowns to do it then, for the poor would not do it.” Women had largely been silenced; the openings of the previous decade had closed. The Leveller women had petitioned in 1649, “Considering that we have an equal share and interest with men in the commonwealth, and it cannot be laid waste, (as now it is) and not we be the greatest and most helpless sufferers therein; and considering that poverty, misery, and famine, like a mighty torrent, is breaking in upon us . . . and we are not able to see our children hang upon us, and cry out for bread, and not have where with all to feed them, we had rather die than see that day.”48 In Bristol, Sarah Latchett railed against Pastor Ewins at Broadmead and was imprisoned for her pains, and Mrs. Prince, who interrupted the same congregation by humming, was thrown out as a Ranter.

  The fifty-second heresy described by Thomas Edwards illuminated a central contradiction of the age, “For by naturall birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty, and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a naturall innate freedom and propriety, even so are we to live, every one equally and alike to enjoy his birth-right and priviledge.” Freedom for the “free-born Englishman” was based on birth, but parturition was regarded as at once monstrous, liminal, and diabolical. It was during this period that the term proletariat entered the English vocabulary; it made a learned entrance in the sense that classical scholars borrowed it from the Servian Constitution of ancient Rome. Its pejorative meaning has lasted—referring to a member of the poorest class, the lowest and most vile—but its original sense had a more exact reference, namely, “subjects to multiplie and beget issue” (1609), “reserved only to beget children” (1610), or, as James Harrington explained in Oceana (1658), “such as thro their poverty contributed nothing to the Commonwealth but children.” It thus reflects the devalorization of women’s labor of reproduction. The currency of the term belongs to the epoch of witch-burning. The nascency of capitalism, based as it was on exploited unpaid labor, thus required control even over human parturition.

  QUIETISM IN WORD AND DEED

  For the male side of the movement, the repression of the counterrevolution descended more slowly, aided by squabbling among the defeated, whose growing sectarianism must be seen in the context of jockeying for power within the Cromwellian regime and competition for riches in the wars for the slave trade. Formerly, Dennis Hollister (a grocer), Thomas Ewins (a tailor), and Robert Purnel (a carpet weaver) had been elders of the Broadmead Church, the pallbearers who carried Francis to her grave. But in the new world of the Cromwellian Republic, with its Western Design, guerre de course, Dutch War, and African trade, the devout fell out with each other. In this way, once-common seekers and notionists became different denominations, Baptists and Quakers. It is not difficult to read their polemics in the scarcely veiled terms of antinomianism and the slave trade. As the Irish prisoners were being transported in 1652, Purnel accused his enemies of “notionism” and “anabaptism,” prophesying, “You shall speedily receive a total Rout: You have gathered your selves together, but you shall be scattered, yea, you shall be broken in pieces.” Hollister added ranterism to the charge of notionism and significantly charged, “You are running to the Assyrians for help, and into Ægypts land a place of darkness are ye gone, seeking to recover a vail to hide your selves from the face of the Lamb.” He concluded, “Ye are the many-headed Beast in divers forms, sects, and opinions, under the name of Papist, Atheists, Independents, Anabaptist &c.” Bristol, the epicenter for the movement that produced both Baptists and Quakers, ironically provided the scene for the most horrific act of repressive quietism of the counterrevolution, for it was there that “radical antinomianism made a last-ditch bid for expression before Puritan conservatism drove it underground”—or overseas. “Some of our way have shouted, and cryed Hossannah, holy, holy, King of Israel to James Nayler, &c.”, upon whom was visited the most odious terror.49

  In October 1656 James Nayler rode through the gates of Bristol, his horse guided by three women: Martha Simmonds, Hannah Stranger, and Dorcas Erbery. They trudged knee-deep in mud, sang psalms of praise, and cast flowers across the way. Nayler was a Yorkshireman who was, at the time, a more successful evangelist even than George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. He wandered the countryside appealing to putting-out workers; he was thrown in prison and shared the straw on the ground with pirates. His class consciousness was well developed. Nayler wrote, “For your scoffing at the plow, I am of it, knowing it to be a lawful employment, much better than the hireling that works not at all, but lives on other man’s labours, taking by violence what’s other men’s labours; but seeing the plow is a reproach with you, why should not the tithes be so also, which are a fruit of the plow?”50 In 1653 he explained why he did not take off his hat or bow his knee: “The Scripture saith he that respects persons commits sin.” He was a powerful preacher. He preached jubilee—the acceptable year of the lord, the liberty of the captive. He preached revolution, quoting Ezekiel, “Is not the Lord overturning, overturning, overturning?”51 He inveighed against the oppressors for taking the commons, “getting great estates in the world, laying house to house and land to land, till there be no place for the poor. And when they are become poor through your deceits then you despise them and exalt yourselves above them and forget that you are all made of one mold, and one blood, and must all appear before one judge, who is no respecter of persons.”52 He spoke out against the slave trade: “Where can the innocent go out and not a trap laid to bring him into bondage and slavery to some of these spirits?”53 He proclaimed, “I have fellowship with them who live in Dens, and desolate
places in the Earth.”

  James Nayler. Alte und neue Schwarm-Geister-Bruth, und Quäcker-Gruel, part 6 of Anabaptisticum et enthusiasticum Pantheon (1702).

  To the authorities, Nayler’s entry into Bristol seemed a blasphemous imitation of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem. A frightened Parliament, wanting to “send a decisive political message to insubordinate sectarians,” tried him for violation of the Blasphemy Act, which indeed had been enacted against him. He answered the charges without removing his hat, which prompted a long and unprecedented debate about how to punish him. Only a narrow vote spared his life, though George Downing argued solemnly, “We are God’s executioners, and ought to be tender of His honour.” Nayler was taken from Newgate to the Black Boy Inn near the Royal Exchange, where his agony began. He suffered 310 lashes at the cart’s tail, across London. On Tower Hill, he embraced the executioner, who branded his forehead and then with a red-hot iron bored a hole through his tongue.54