To us it is difficult to imagine that sermons could be exciting or radical, and comparisons with political meetings or public lectures do little to convey the mixture of shivering tent-revival rapture and sharp thought which they produced. But to the average Protestant, and especially to the godly, all individuals – and the nation itself – were always understood to be trembling on the brink of an abyss, the pit of hell, from which they could be snatched to safety at the eleventh hour by the strong words of an heroic preacher. This was just the sort of drama – a kind of endless, high-emotion soap – likely to attract an adolescent girl whose circumstances were otherwise obscure. Anna herself describes her eager response:
When I was about fourteen years of age, I began to be very eager and forward to hear and pray, though in a very formal manner; Thus I went on some years, and then I rose to a higher pitch, to a more spiritual condition, as I thought, and I followed after that Ministry that was most pressed after by the strictest Professors, and I ran with great violence, having a great zeal, though not according to knowledge, and I appeared a very high-grown Christian in the thoughts of man; … providence ordered that I should hear Mr Peters speak … though I thought myself in a very good condition before, yet now it seized upon my spirit, that surely I was not in the covenant … I then went home full of horror, concluding myself to be the stony ground Christ spoke of in the parable of the sower; I apprehended divine displeasure against me … I ran from minister to minister, from sermon to sermon.
Anna Trapnel’s religious background supported her notion that she was worthless, while feeding her longing for compensation through being specially chosen by God. This drama had its dark side. During a prolonged spiritual depression, Anna contemplated murder and suicide, but on New Year’s Day 1642 she heard John Simpson preaching at All Hallows the Great, and there was an immediate (and joyful) conversion. The godly typically went through these periods of joy and misery; they were an intrinsic part of Calvinist salvation.
Simpson was relatively young, in his thirties, and another of the St Dunstan’s lecturers. A man of passionately independent views, he was removed from his lectureship in St Aldgate in 1643, and banned from preaching. He was soon in trouble again for asserting, allegedly, that Christ was to be found even ‘in hogs, and dogs, or sheep’. In 1647 Simpson became pastor of the gathered congregation at All Hallows the Great. He was also to fight against Prince Charles at Worcester in 1650. Unlike many radicals, Simpson placed no trust in Oliver Cromwell as the instrument of God. He reported visions in which God had revealed to him Cromwell’s lust for power and his impending ruin. He became a leader of the Fifth Monarchists, a group who believed themselves the elect and the end of the world near. Many contemporaries were bewildered by Simpson’s volatile and passionate nature and thought him mad. But everyone recognized his power as a preacher. In the heady atmosphere of freedom from guild restraints, immigrants bringing novel ideas, the wildness of the East End, and the religious adventure of St Dunstan’s, the unthinkable was soon being thought, and not only by Trapnel. Joan Sherrard, of Anna Trapnel’s parish, said in 1644 that the king was ‘a stuttering fool’ and asked passionately ‘is there never a Fel[t]on yet living? [Felton was the man who had assassinated the Duke of Buckingham.] If I were a man, as I am a woman, I would help to pull him to pieces.’ It was the kind of thing one housewife might shout at another in a noisy high street. It was unimaginable at court, only a few miles distant.
The world was an altogether different place for noblewoman Lucy Hay. West End, not East End; magnificent houses, not wooden terraces; shopping, not working; the court, not the pulpit – though Lucy was religious, and militantly Protestant at that. Lucy Hay was England’s salonnière, a beautiful woman who enjoyed politics, intrigue, plots, but also intellectual games, poetry, love affairs (intellectual, and probably occasionally physical), fashion, clothes and admiration. She was one of Henrietta Maria’s closest and most trusted friends, but also her competitor and sometime political enemy. Her world was more introverted than Trapnel’s, with the obsessive cliquishness of an exclusive girls’ school. But like many a pupil, Lucy struggled not only to dominate it, but also to find ways to widen it.
Her success was founded on her face. She was such a beauty that when she contracted smallpox, the whole court joined forces to write reassuring letters to her husband, telling him that she was not in danger of losing her looks. She asked for and received permission to wear a mask on her return to court, until her sores were entirely healed; when she removed it, people said that she was not only unblemished, but lovelier than ever.
Lucy Hay came from an extraordinary family, the Percys, Earls of Northumberland, a family of nobles always powerful in dissent. Her great-uncle was a leader in the Northern Earls rebellion, beheaded for it in 1572, and her father was imprisoned in the Tower for suspected involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. The Percys were a noble family inclined to see the monarch of the day as only primus inter pares, and to act accordingly. Lucy’s father was known as ‘the wizard earl’ because of his interest in magic, astronomy and mathematics – he was so interested in numbers that he kept three private mathematicians at his side. Hard of hearing, remote of bearing, and often shy, he was also a passionate gambler, and his contemporaries found him difficult to understand. His wife, Dorothy Devereux, was the sister of the Earl of Essex who was Elizabeth’s favourite late in her life, and Dorothy, too, was loved by the queen. But like the Percys, the Devereux found it difficult to accept the absolute sovereignty of the monarch. They had their own power and they wanted it respected.
Within the marriage this mutual strong-mindedness did not make for harmony. The couple separated, and after Elizabeth had brought about a reconciliation which produced a male heir, fell out again. There was no divorce, but they lived apart. Henry Percy did not take to James I. He disliked in particular the many Scots James had brought with him and may have seen their promotion to the nobility as a threat to established families like his own. In the autumn of 1605, he retired to Syon House to think more about numbers and less about politics. His choice of retreat points to the way the Percys had come to see themselves as a southern family; there was no question of a retreat to the north, to the family seat at Alnwick.
This mathematical pastoral was, however, threatened in two ways. First, the Gunpowder Plot exploded, and Northumberland’s kinsman Thomas Percy, four years his elder and one of the chief conspirators, had dined on 4 November with Northumberland at Syon House. Though not a papist, Northumberland was a known Catholic sympathizer, who had tried to secure the position of Catholics with James when he became king. Although he had few arms, horses or followers at Syon, and had known none of the conspirators excepting Percy, he was sent to the Tower on 27 November. He tried to excuse himself in a manner which reveals the Percy attitude to affairs of state: ‘Examine’, he said, ‘but my humours in buildings, gardenings, and private expenses these two years past.’ He was not believed. On 27 June 1606 he was tried in the Court of Star Chamber for contempt and misprision of treason. At his trial, he was accused of seeking to become chief of the papists in England; of failing to administer the Oath of Supremacy to Thomas Percy. He pleaded guilty to some of the facts set forth in the indictment, but indignantly repudiated the inferences placed upon them by his prosecutors. He was sentenced to pay a fine of 30,000 pounds, to be removed from all offices and places, to be rendered incapable of holding any of them hereafter, and to be kept a prisoner in the Tower for life. Voluntary exile had become forced imprisonment. The hand of royalty was heavy.
Northumberland protested to the king against the severity of this sentence, but his cries went unheard. Much more significantly, and perhaps more effectively, his wife Dorothy appealed to the queen, Anne