Two generations later, in 1850, the architect, artist and aerialist Philip Brannon displayed the remarkable properties of the hot-air balloon above Southampton. He produced an image of the town from ‘a framed point about 400 feet above Hill Farm’, the same site from which my own flight would begin. Brannon’s painting, made from a photograph, was part chart, part panorama; in other images he would envisage a utopian Southampton laid out in imperial avenues, while his guide to the town described an urban Eden in which antediluvian monsters had become a kind of sideshow:
The Whale and Grampus have been captured in Southampton Water, and on such rare occasions there have been of course the usual arrangements for sightseers. Small shoals of Porpoises often visit the estuary; and the visitor from inland counties may be pleasingly surprised, as he walks the Quays and Platform, to see at a short distance from the shore many of these singular fish rolling and springing on the surface of the water, then disappearing, and rising again at another point to renew their awkward gambols.
But back in the London graveyard over which Lunardi had floated, events born of yet more fantastical dreams had taken place.
The dissenters buried in Bunhill Fields were heirs of the Interregnum, when it seemed ‘that the world might be permanently turned upside down’. Among them was one Jane Leade, a widow and prophetess whose followers, the Philadelphians – named after the future city cited in Revelations – expected the millennium. In communion with the spirit world, Mrs Leade issued tracts such as The Sign of the Times, Forerunning the Kingdom of Christ and Evidencing what is to come, but she died, still waiting, in 1704, by which time new prophets had arrived in London with their own eschatological gospel. Just as Bunhill lived in the memory of the years of the Beast, of famine, plague and fire, so forty years later, the French Prophets seemed to augur a new apocalypse.
The Camisards were Protestant insurgents from southern France who took their name from the black shirts they wore in their nocturnal raids. They were heirs of the Cathars and their Gnostic heresies – rejecting organised religion, seeing men and women as equal before God, believing in mystical knowledge attained through divine revelation – and since the 1680s they had conducted a guerilla war directed by visions. Attended by a strange ‘aerial psalmody’ when hymns were heard in the heavens, ‘many fell down as if dead … affected with sobs, sighs, groans, and tears’. Eyewitnesses said that they looked like ‘persons moved by a power outside or above themselves’. To others they resembled victims of St Anthony’s Fire, a nervous disorder caused by ergot, a fungus on wheat, which in medieval times had its own relationship to the apocalyptic Dance of Death.
One Camisard experienced nine months of ‘sobs and mental agitation’ before falling ‘into an ecstacy, and God opened my mouth. For those three days and nights I was continually under the influence of the spirit, and neither ate, drank, nor slept’. Some claimed the ability to exorcise and heal, ‘passing unharmed through the fire, and practising clairvoyance’. At their secret rites, held at night to avoid detection, young recruits ‘learned to perform the strangest contortions, and generally wrought themselves in a sort of trance’. They were then breathed upon to receive four degrees of divine afflatus: L’Avertissement, Le Souffle, La prophétie and Le dons, a refinement of the holy fire of Pentecost – although others ascribed these ecstatic states to the excessive fasting practised by the Camisards.
In their battles they were led by a former shepherd, Jean Cavalier, guided by God and punished by the Beast. Apprehended Camisards were tortured by being broken on the wheel, their limbs smashed until they could be made to fit its circumference, just as the orthodox world demanded that they should conform their beliefs. Fleeing from persecution, some were exiled to New Orleans (where, in a later civil war, black troops would call themselves Camisards, as rebels within a rebellion), while in 1704 another group, led by Cavalier, escaped to London. They settled in Spitalfields where ‘they ranted profusely, and made converts of many English people, chiefly of the devouter sex … Miracles, too, were performed in abundance.’ Their ‘mystical phalanx’ was promulgated in tracts such as An Account of a Dream at Harwich, In a Letter to a Member of Parliament about the Camisars, a portentfilled reverie to rival Revelations and haunted by two figures: a horseman in golden armour, and a monstrous female, ‘her Eyes glaring like Lightning’:
Out of her Nostrils came a sulphurous Smoke, and out of her Mouth Flames of Fire. Her Hair was frizled, and adorn’d with Spoils of ruin’d people; her Neck bare, with Chains about it of Dice, mix’d with Pieces of Gold; which rattling, made a horrid Noise, for her Motions were all fierce and violent, her garment was all stain’d with Tears and Blood: There hung about her several Pieces of Parchment, with Bits of Wax at the end, with Figures engraved on them. She cast her Eyes often with Rage and Fury at that bright appearance I have describ’d [the golden horseman] over whom having no force, she toss’d her Head with Disdain, and glared about on her Votarys, till we saw several possess with her …
This nightmare, experienced on the Suffolk coast close to Mary Ann’s own birthplace, seemed to engulf all England; another pamphlet, Clavis Prophetica, feared that these French Prophets had imported anarchy, and would cover ‘the whole Face of our Heaven with Darkness’.
At Christmas 1707, an English Camisard convert, Dr Thomas Emes, died on the eve of the millennium he had predicted. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, but it was foretold that God ‘wou’d attest this Publication of our Lord’s Approach as Bridegroom, and Return as a King, by raising Dr Emes from the Grave on the 25th of next Month, above 5 Months after his Interment …’ Accordingly, on 25 May 1708, a crowd estimated at between twenty and sixty thousand gathered in Bunhill Fields to await the doctor’s resurrection. Their disappointment was blamed on ‘the fact of some unfaithful person looking on’; denied their miracle, the mob managed to do great damage both to Emes’s resting place and other graves as they rioted through the cemetery. Yet the French Prophets’ fire still burned fiercely: four hundred converts spread out through the country, bearing their pentecostal message like Shelley’s miniature balloons, and holding nocturnal meetings at which crowds gathered to see prophetesses sigh and quake. By the 1740s, their influence had reached the north of England, where it was claimed to have inspired James and Jane Wardley of Bolton-le-Moors, with that ‘further degree of light and power’ which would define their own and yet stranger sect.
They called themselves the United Society of Believers, to differentiate from the Quakers’ Society of Friends, founded by George Fox on his Mount of Vision, Pendle Hill. But just as the latter were so called because they quaked at the word of the Lord, so the Wardleys earned the nickname of Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, a term of abuse which they turned and took upon themselves. The same soubriquet had been given to the Ranters in 1648: it was as if Shakerism was a delayed reaction to those revolutionary sects – the Familists, the Grindletons, the Seekers, the Diggers, the Ranters and the Levellers – who were themselves influenced by foreign heresies.
The early Quakers had interrupted church sermons to castigate the preachers, and had stripped naked as a protest. In the 1650s, John Gilpin wanted to cut a hole in his throat to let out the spirit’s tongue. Local lads were encouraged to throw stones at itinerant Quakers, and in their stronghold at Bristol, Wakefield’s James Nayler re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, with his long hair, riding on a donkey with women strewing palms before him – a blasphemy for which he had his tongue bored and his forehead branded. But with the Restoration, Quakerism