Martyrs and Mystics
This measurement has special significance. In Hebrew 1,000 is denoted by the letter aleph (
Those in charge of rebuilding London after the 1666 Fire – Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Nicholas Hawksmoor and his team – were in thrall to the idea of sacred geometry. Although they were scientists and men of reason, their agenda was rich with religious arcana. They were influenced by the notion that Christianity had arrived in England as early as the first century AD, long before it had reached Rome. They were inspired by the story in the Book of Zechariah of how the Israelite prophet of the same name meets the Lord Himself, who is disguised as an architect:
I lifted up mine eyes again, and looked, and behold there was a man with a measuring line in his hand. Then said I, ‘Whither goest thou?’ And he said unto me, ‘To measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof, and what is the length thereof.’
Consequently they wanted to reshape London as the New Jerusalem – the leading city of Christendom in a world free of papist rule. The idea of London as the New Jerusalem had long been envisaged by the enlightened. Even Charles I had promised it in a 1620 sermon: ‘For Here hath the Lord ordained the thrones of David, for judgement: and the charre of Moyses, for instruction, this Church, your Son indeed, others are but Synagogues, this your Jerusalem, the mother to them all.’ It was a theme later adopted by William Blake, among others, whose epic poem Jerusalem casts London as the holy city: ‘We builded Jerusalem as a City & a Temple’.
Wren, Hawksmoor and the other architects created a chain of buildings and features set apart by ‘sacred’ measurements. Two thousand cubits east of Wren’s favourite church, St Dunstan-in-the-East, they created a haven for intellectuals and free-thinkers on the site of an ancient well. This became Wellclose Square (→ p. 55), for centuries the most prosperous location in east London but now almost derelict. In the centre of the square was a Hawksmoor church which stood 2,000 cubits from his better-known (and still standing) Christ Church Spitalfields. And Christ Church is itself 2,000 cubits north-east of Hawksmoor’s St Mary Woolnoth by what is now Bank station.
The pattern continues with other well-known buildings from that period. Hawksmoor’s church of St George-in-the-East stands 2,000 cubits from the Roman wall. The site of the now partly demolished St Luke’s on Old Street is 2,000 cubits north of St Paul’s, and the site of another now demolished Hawksmoor church, St John Horselydown, just south of Tower Bridge, lies 2,000 cubits from the Monument, whose own setting is a masterpiece of maths and astronomy (→ p. 22).
ALL HALLOWS THE GREAT, 90 Upper Thames Street
One of England’s most extreme millennial sects, the Fifth Monarchy Men, was founded at this now demolished church in 1651. Exploiting the political and religious turmoil in the aftermath of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, the Fifth Monarchy Men believed the days of earthly kings were over and sought to prepare the country for the imminent appearance of Jesus Christ himself as king.
Christ would rule the fifth kingdom outlined in the Old Testament Book of Daniel. (The first four, so they claimed, were those of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires.) But before he could do so a godly kingdom on earth – the Rule of the Saints – would violently replace the old order. The Fifth Monarchists consequently lauded the execution of King Charles and urged similar attacks on the rich as they stood in the way of the saintly kingdom.
In 1653 the Fifth Monarchists attained some influence in Oliver Cromwell’s new parliamentary assembly, so when he dissolved it that December and appointed himself Lord Protector – de facto king – the group felt betrayed. Three Fifth Monarchy Men were imprisoned for denouncing Cromwell, and their leader Thomas Harrison was expelled from the army. A Fifth Monarchist plot to overthrow the Lord Protector was uncovered in 1657 when its instigator, Thomas Venner, previously a minister at a church on Coleman Street in the City, was briefly imprisoned for planning to blow up the Tower of London.
On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 Thomas Harrison was arrested and put to death for participating in Charles I’s execution. Now Venner took over. He led the Fifth Monarchy Men along a distinctly militant path. Infuriated by the torture and execution of Harrison and the popish leanings of the Church reformed around the new king, Charles II, Venner planned insurrection before Charles could be crowned. On New Year’s Day 1661 he and around fifty Fifth Monarchy rebels staged a violent but unsuccessful uprising in London. Shouting their war cry of ‘King Jesus and the heads upon the gates’, they attacked the major buildings of the City, as Samuel Pepys noted in his diary:
A great rising in the city of the Fifth-monarchy men, which did very much disturb the peace and liberty of the people, so that all the train-bands arose in arms, both in London and Westminster, as likewise all the king’s guards; and most of the noblemen mounted, and put all their servants on coach horses, for the defence of His Majesty, and the peace of his kingdom.
Around forty soldiers and civilians were killed. Venner was captured and executed outside his Coleman Street church. The Fifth Monarchy movement carried on briefly but then declined.
All Hallows the Great was demolished in the late nineteenth century for road widening.
→ Cromwell in Ireland, p. 297
BLACKFRIARS MONASTERY, Ireland Yard
It was in Blackfriars that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s council met in May 1382 to denounce John Wycliffe’s religious doctrines and his pioneering translation of the Bible into English.
As the hearing began, an earthquake, rare for London, rocked the City. Wycliffe, understandably, claimed the event as a sign of God’s discontent with the council’s hostile attitude to his reformist teachings. The council, with equal confidence, took the quake as proof of the Lord’s displeasure with Wycliffe.
As William Courtenay, the Archbishop of Canterbury, explained:
This earthquake foretells the purging of this kingdom from heresies, for as there are shut up in the bowels of the earth many noxious spirits which are expelled in an earthquake, and so the earth is cleansed but not without great violence, so there are many heresies shut up in the hearts of reprobate men, but by the condemnation of them, the kingdom is to be cleansed; but not without trouble and great commotion.
The synod then found against Wycliffe on twenty-four counts of heresy.
A 1529 court held at Blackfriars heard the divorce proceedings between Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII. The king had become increasingly frustrated at his wife’s inability to provide him with a male heir, despite seven pregnancies, so he sought permission from the Pope, Clement VII, to annul the marriage. Henry made a number of ingenious claims. First he said that he had committed incest by marrying Catherine as she had been the wife of his late brother, Arthur. There was much confusion over the Bible’s position on such a matter, but as Catherine swore that her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated the point was dropped. Henry then asked the Pope for an annulment on the grounds that the original papal dispensation to marry his late brother’s widow was invalid. Clement may well have wanted to help the king but was in the unfortunate position of being a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the time and was unwilling to jeopardise his position any further.
Catherine was consequently brought before the court at Blackfriars on 18 June 1529. The king, the cardinals, the Archbishop of Canterbury and several other bishops attended the proceedings which ended inconclusively. Henry now exacted revenge on Wolsey, Archbishop of York and his leading minister, whom he blamed for the fiasco. Four years later Henry married Anne Boleyn and the Pope excommunicated him. Henry then broke England’s ties with Rome, declared himself head of the English Church and dissolved the monasteries. Blackfriars closed in 1538. Excavations conducted in 1890 and 1925 uncovered some remnants of the building but only a tiny portion of stone remains above ground.
→ Wycliffe in Oxford, p. 171
BRIDEWELL PRISON, Bridewell Place
The false messiah Elizeus Hall was sent to Bridewell Prison in 1562 after claiming to be a messenger from God who had been taken on a two-day visit to heaven and hell. In 1589 it was to Bridewell that one George Nichols was sent for being a Catholic priest. He and his associates, who had been arrested in Oxford (→ p. 174), were hung by their hands to make them betray their faith, but they refused to recant. They were all eventually hanged, drawn and quartered. The two founders of the Muggletonian sect, Lodowick Muggleton and John Reeve, were sent to Bridewell Prison in 1653 in an attempt to convince them to renounce their beliefs.
→ The Muggletonians, p. 23
CHEAPSIDE
In 1591 William Hacket paraded up and down Cheapside in a cart, claiming to be the messiah. His supporters believed Hacket was both the king of Europe and the angel who would appear at the Last Judgment. Hacket threatened to bring down a plague on England unless he was rightfully acknowledged, but when he announced that Queen Elizabeth had no right to the crown he was arrested for treason and executed. Hacket’s followers expected that divine intervention would save him, and were most vexed when none was forthcoming.
CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE-WITHOUT-NEWGATE, Holborn Viaduct
The largest parish church in the City of London, designed in a style similar to that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, was founded in 1137. Indeed the distance from the church to the now demolished north-west gate of the City corresponded almost exactly with the distance inside its Jerusalem namesake from the Holy Sepulchre to the Calvary on which Jesus’ cross was placed. The London church became an appropriate starting point for the Crusaders on their journey to the Holy Land to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens.
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG’S VISION, Salisbury Court
While lodging in Salisbury Court in 1745 Emanuel Swedenborg, the major Swedish scientist-turned-mystic in whose name the New Church was founded after his death, had a religious vision. He described it to Thomas Hartley, rector of Winwick, as ‘the opening of his spiritual sight, the manifestation of the Lord to him in person’, and to his friend Robsahm as a vision of the Lord appearing before him announcing: ‘I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold the spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. I will Myself dictate to thee what thou shalt write.’
In the vision Swedenborg met Jesus Christ who told him that humanity needed someone to explain the Scriptures properly and that he, Swedenborg, had been chosen for the task. He devoted the remaining twenty-eight years of his life to religion and wrote eighteen theological works, which were a major influence on William Blake. The New Church which his followers founded after his death continues to thrive.
→ Emanuel Swedenborg in the East End, p. 46
FIRE OF LONDON, Pudding Lane
The fire that destroyed much of the City in 1666 was connected to many of the religious controversies of the day. Indeed, to a number of religious commentators its outbreak on 2 September that year was no surprise. At the beginning of the year doom-mongers noted the worrying numerical conjunction of 1,000 (Christ’s millennium) with 666, the number of the Beast of the Book of Revelation. They predicted that London would turn into the fiery lake which according to the same book ‘burneth the fearful and unbelieving, the abominable, the murderers, the whoremongers, sorcerers, idolaters and liars’.
London would burn for being a city of sin, and two books published at the beginning of that year contained ominous predictions about the blaze. Daniel Baker in A Certaine Warning for a Naked Heart explained how London would be destroyed by a ‘consuming fire’, while Walter Gostelo in The Coming of God in Mercy, in Vengeance, Beginning with Fire, to Convert or Consume all this so Sinful City boasted: ‘If fire make not ashes of the City, and thy bones also, conclude me a liar for ever.’
Sure enough, on 2 September 1666, exactly a year after the Lord Mayor had ordered Londoners to light fires to burn out the Plague, the Great Fire of London broke out. Although at first many thought there was no reason for concern and that it would soon be contained, the Fire spread fast and eventually destroyed much of the capital, including eighty-six churches such as St Benet Sherhog and St Mary Magdalen Milk Street.
Immediately after the Fire the recriminations started. A local Catholic priest called Carpenter told his congregation that the flames ‘were come upon this land and people for the forsaking of the true Catholic religion’. Catholics pointed to at least a hundred years’ worth of transgressions by Londoners dating back to Henry VIII, whose defiance of the Pope in 1530 over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon broke the ties that bound the English Church to Rome, and led to the dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys. They pointed to the sins of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, who had ordered the execution of the ‘holy’ king, Charles I, he who had lived a life of devotion and had ‘suffered martyrdom in defence of the most holy religion’. They also drew up a list of current sins – ‘the prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives’, as John Evelyn detailed in his diary – in which the mostly Protestant population had indulged.
And for Protestants there was an alternative list of sins that a presumably different God had punished in the Fire of London, namely those of the corrupt Romish monasteries and abbeys which had perverted the ancient religion and accumulated excessive wealth while indulging in simony, fecundity and hypocrisy. They remembered the sins of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, who had sent some 300 Protestants to a violent death for heresy in the 1550s and blamed Catholic agitators for starting the Fire. Yet others believed that the Fire had been started by a Jew distraught that the supposed messiah, Shabbatai Zevi, who had claimed he would be crowned that month, had backed down when faced with the wrath of the Turkish Sultan (→ p. 69).
Soon after the Fire, rumours spread that Robert Hubert, a French silversmith, allegedly an agent of the French king, had started the blaze on the Pope’s orders. Hubert was arrested in east London. He admitted that he had left Sweden for the English capital and gone to Pudding Lane where he had used a long pole to lob a fireball through the window of Farriner’s bakery. Hubert boasted of twenty-three co-conspirators, but his confession was probably false: there was no window at Farriner’s bakery and no ship had sailed into east London from Sweden on the day he claimed to have arrived. Nevertheless he was a convenient scapegoat and was hanged at Tyburn (→ p. 79).
GREAT SYNAGOGUE (1690–1941), Duke’s Place
Used by Jews of north European descent (Ashkenazis) until it was destroyed in the Second World War, the Great Synagogue was the traditional seat of the chief rabbi, a post and office which do not exist in Jewish law. Consequently, some religious Jews claimed that the office of the Chief Rabbi had been created only to make Judaism more acceptable to the Church of England, and would mock the incumbent as the heimische Archbishop of Canterbury.
When a fire broke out in the Great Synagogue in the 1750s, Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk, the eighteenth-century mystic known as the Ba’al Shem of London (master of the secret names of God), is alleged to have extinguished it by inscribing on the jamb of the entrance the four Hebrew letters of God’s most-used name (Yahweh in English), supposedly causing the wind to change direction and the blaze to die down.
→ Falk in the East End, p. 55
HOLY TRINITY PRIORY ALDGATE, Mitre Square
The priory which opened in 1109 and soon became the grandest religious house in London, was the scene of one of the first recorded murders in London history. In 1530 Brother Martin, a priory monk, stabbed to death a woman praying at the high altar and then killed himself. The body of Catherine Eddowes, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, was found on the same site more than 350 years later. Some Ripper experts believe Eddowes was killed elsewhere and the corpse placed there as part of a still unexplained ritualistic agenda.
After Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 declaring himself head of the Church of England, he closed down establishments such as Holy Trinity. The priory surrendered its authority to the Crown by ‘mutual agreement’ and its incumbents were forced to embark on secular life. The buildings lay in ruins for some years and, even when the owners offered the stone free to any man who would take it down, there were no takers.
JEWRY STREET
The street was home in the sixteenth century to the first Jewish community allowed to live in the capital since Edward I expelled the Jews from Britain in 1291. Its number included Rodrigo Lopez, physician to Elizabeth I, who was once accused of participating in a plot to poison the queen and on whom Shakespeare partly based Shylock. Most of the new immigrant Jews came from Spain and Portugal, where they had been forced to convert to Christianity and were known by the insulting name marranos (Spanish for ‘swine’) due to their practice of hanging pigs outside their homes to show they had converted to Catholicism. After Oliver Cromwell officially allowed the Jews to return to the capital in 1656, this eastern edge of the City became the main centre of Jewish immigration into London. Their first new synagogue, on Creechurch Lane, has long been demolished.
JOHN WESLEY’S CONVERSION, Aldersgate Street by Ironmongers’ Hall
John Wesley, the early eighteenth-century preacher who founded Methodism, experienced an epiphany at Hall House, Nettleton Court on 24 May 1738. He later wrote that:
In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.
→ Wesley in Bolton, p. 220
THE MONUMENT, Fish Street Hill
The tall Doric column just north of London Bridge was built as a memorial to the 1666 Great Fire of London but has many religious connections. It was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke in 1671–7, and decorated by the artist Caius Gabriel Cibber during his daytime parole from debtors’ prison. He designed a relief depicting a female figure (London) grieving in front of burning buildings to recall the fallen Jerusalem from the Book of Lamentations ‘sitting solitary as a widow [that] weepeth sore in the night, her tears on her cheeks’.
Because so many people believed Catholics were responsible for the Fire, the Monument was given an inscription in 1681 (not removed until 1831) which blamed the disaster on the ‘treachery and malice of the Popish faction, in order to the effecting their horrid plot for the extirpating the Protestant religion and English liberties, and to introduce Popery and Heresy’. And just in case there was anyone who hadn’t fully received the message, another inscription by Farriner’s bakery, where the blaze began, stated that ‘here by permission of heaven hell broke loose upon this Protestant City from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists . . .’
A best-selling pamphlet published at that time urged Protestants to go to the top of the tower and imagine the consequences of popish rule: ‘The whole town in flames, and amongst the distracted crowd, troops of Papists ravishing their [the Protestants’] wives and daughters, dashing out the brains of their little children against the walls, plundering their houses and cutting their throats in the name of heretic dogs.’
The Monument is the tallest stone column in the world, its height, 202 foot, being the same as the distance between it and the baker’s shop on nearby Pudding Lane where the Fire started. The 202-foot measurement was not randomly chosen. The Monument is positioned so that an observer looking east in the morning and west in the afternoon on the day of the summer solstice can see the sun sitting directly on top of the flaming urn of gilt bronze that crowns its top. Ingeniously the Monument also stands a distance of 2,000 cubits (a biblical measurement often used by architects wanting to imbue their buildings with ‘divine protection’) from Christ Church Spitalfields, designed by Christopher Wren’s assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor, and 2,000 cubits from the western end of Wren’s own St Paul’s Cathedral.
MUGGLETONIANS’ BIRTHPLACE, Bishopsgate
A seventeenth-century sect of radical puritans now practically extinct, the Muggletonians were established by Lodowick Muggleton, a Bishopsgate-born tailor, in 1651. That year he claimed that God had appointed him and his cousin, John Reeve, the Two Last Witnesses, as foretold in the verse in the Book of Revelation: ‘I will give power unto my two witnesses and they shall prophesy one thousand two hundred and threescore days clothed in sackcloth.’
The main tenets of the Muggletonians’ creed were:
1. God and the man Jesus Christ are synonymous expressions.
2. The devil and human reason are synonymous.
3. The soul dies and rises again with the body.
4. Heaven is a place above the stars.
5. At present hell is nowhere, but this earth, darkened after the last judgement, will be hell.
6. Angels are the only beings of pure reason.
Reeve was obsessed with the notion of mankind’s impending doom, and claimed he knew whom God had chosen to be saved. He and Muggleton were sent to Bridewell Prison for cursing a vicar, Mr Goffin, who subsequently died. The teachings of the two founders were handed down from generation to generation, but as the Muggletonians did not believe in proselytising, the sect slowly died out. For instance, in 1697 some 250 supporters attended Muggleton’s funeral, but by 1803 they were down to just over a hundred members, and a hundred years later only seventeen attended the monthly meeting. According to an article in the Times Literary Supplement, in 1974 a handful of believers were left in Kent. By the end of the decade there were only two remaining Muggletonians who by now may have verified tenet Number 4.
→ The Quakers, p. 226
OLD JEWRY
Now a nondescript City street of company offices, this was the centre of medieval Jewish life in London, when the street was known as Jewry. A Jewish community began to take shape here after William the Conqueror invited Jews from Normandy to London in the 1070s to help him improve Britain’s primitive trading practices. The king needed an advanced monetary system – payments made in coin not through barter – and such knowledge was the preserve of Jews, barred from most professions and public office throughout the continent but experts in money, commerce and finance because the Church forbade Christians from practising usury.