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Ed Glinert - Martyrs and Mystics

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Book:
Martyrs and Mystics
Author:
Ed Glinert
Publisher:
Collins
Genre:
Books / Religion
Year:
2009
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For John Nicholson, Cecilia Boggis, and Dave and Pauline Hammonds

CONTENTS

It all started to get confusing when God handed Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The commandments began: I am the Lord thy God... Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Did people generally concur with this? Not quite. John Wroe announced in 1825 in the grim mill town of Ashton-under-Lyne, to the east of Manchester, that he was god. Ashton would duly become a holy city, the New Jerusalem, and Wroe built four holy gateways while awaiting the imminent return of Jesus Christ, Gods chosen one, presumably through one of them. He was still waiting when he died in 1863. It is not known whether Jesus did ever appear in Ashton.

Then there was the Revd John Hugh Smyth-Pigott. He was a charming Dubliner who in 1902 proclaimed his own divinity from the Ark of the Covenant, an extravagant temple he built in Lower Clapton, London. The Church of England defrocked Smyth-Pigott but he retorted: I am God. It does not matter what they do. He probably wasnt and it probably did.

But lets go back to the story of Moses, receiver of the Ten Commandments in biblical times. Barely had he received the tablets than he took them down from the mountain to the Children of Israel, only to find that while he was gone they had made themselves a new god a Golden Calf no less and were dancing about ecstatically in front of it.

He broke the tablets and had to go back up the mountain to receive a new set. Two tablets of stone, or possibly not. According to Kabbalah legend, the Ten Commandments were not presented on two gravestone-like slabs, as depicted in countless paintings and book illustrations, but on two tiny jewels, possibly sapphires, more likely diamonds, which glowed when placed on the Breastplate of Judgment. If so, how did Moses break them? Diamonds are the hardest substance known to man, and even sapphires are not easy to destroy. And what happened to those sapphires?

So where does reality triumph over myth here? Martyrs and Mystics offers no definite explanation but it does attempt to recount such bizarre stories and legends in Britain if not the Holy Land. Not that Britain hasnt been seen as being holy in its own right down the ages by William Blake, Christopher Wren, George Fox, John Wroe but youll have to dip inside to find out how and why.

* Buildings or sites which no longer exist are denoted by bold italics..

The capital has been host to all the major disputes and upheavals in the nations religious past. Here the shifts and schisms that have changed the history of England have been played out: from the break with Rome in the 1530s to the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s, and from the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.

Here too a myriad of sects and cults have taken shape the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Peculiar People of Plumstead driven by a succession of mavericks and mystics, as colourful as they were obscure. There was Thomas Tany, who in 1654 claimed to be Theauraujohn, High Priest of the Jews, about to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem with himself in charge. And John Robins, a mid-seventeenth-century mystic from Moorfields, who failed in his plan to take nearly 150,000 followers to the Holy Land, feeding them solely on dry bread, raw vegetables and water. In 1814, more farcically, there was Joanna Southcott, who claimed she would give birth to Shiloh, the biblical child who, according to the Book of Revelation, was to rule all the nations with a rod of iron.

Such drama continues to take place in the capital. As recently as 1985 the worlds press gathered at a Brick Lane curry house to meet the Lord Maitreya (or Christ, the Imam Mahdi or Krishna according to the different religions), who may or may not have appeared depending as always on ones faith. In 2008, when a member of the congregation at St Marys church, Putney, disrupted the service shouting out his views on the controversy over gay clergy, he was simply another manifestation of the ageold unsolvable conundrum of what to do when ones own views differ from those of the next person.

Key events

	A fisherman has a vision of St Peter on Thorney Island and founds what becomes Westminster Abbey.
1382	The Archbishop of Canterburys council meets at Blackfriars monastery to denounce John Wycliffes religious doctrines and his pioneering translation of the Bible into English.
1401	The first of many martyrs to meet his death at Smithfield is William Sawtrey, priest and follower of the Bible translator John Wycliffe.
1534	Henry VIII declares himself supreme head of the English Church and orders that all references to the Pope be removed from prayer books.
1535	Thomas More, one of Henry VIIIs leading aides, is executed at Tower Hill for opposing the kings decision to make himself head of the Church.
1604	From the Hampton Court Conference comes the greatest of all Bible translations the King James or Authorised Version.
1666	The Fire of London destroys the City. Catholics are blamed, and a Frenchman, supposedly an agent of the Pope, is hanged (wrongly) for starting the blaze.
1678	One of the most infamous religious conspiracies in London history, the Popish Plot, unfolds after the body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a well-known Protestant, is found on Primrose Hill impaled on his own sword.
16889	The Bill of Rights ends the Stuart notion of the Divine Right of kings to rule. From now on no monarch can be or marry a Catholic.
1738	John Wesley experiences an epiphany in Aldersgate that leads to the birth of a new creed: Methodism.
1780	The worst mob violence ever to hit London the Gordon Riots erupts on 2 June as the capital demonstrates against parliamentary attempts to grant Catholics further civil rights.
1791	The latest Catholic Relief Act gives Catholics the right to worship in public again.
1865	William Booth founds the Salvation Army after hearing two missionaries preach at an open-air meeting in the East End.
1858	The Jewish Relief Act allows Jews full civil rights, including being able to sit as MPs without having to take the Christian oath.
1976	The Jamme Masjid opens in Spitalfields the only building in the West to have been church, synagogue and mosque.

The Gordon Riots

Londons most violent religious disturbance was a week of mayhem in June 1780 which resulted in hundreds of deaths and the burning and looting of much of the capital in the wake of government plans to allow Catholics greater civil rights. The protest became known as the Gordon Riots because the mob was whipped into a frenzy by Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association.

Two years previously, the Catholic Relief Act had been passed, banning any further persecution of Catholic priests. This followed negotiations by the government with a group of Catholic gentry who agreed to drop Stuart claims to the throne and to deny the civil jurisdiction of the Pope. Catholics were still, however, banned from holding important public posts in teaching and the army, though by 1780 the government, concerned at the depleted number of troops available to fight in the American War of Independence, considered changing the law to allow Catholics to join the army.

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