Constructing the Political Prophet in 1640s England

Abstract

'Prophecy,' wrote the anonymous author of Ignatius, His Prophecie, 'is the key to heaven ... the tower of humane knowledge that defends mortality and preserved Kingdomes from destructive ruine.'1 While this quote might suggest a straight-forward defence of scriptural foresight, the prophecy the author of Ignatius discussed was not that found in the Bible. Instead, he referred to the many extra-biblical texts which had remained hidden or lost until God providentially revealed them once again to his people.2 Texts, which like Ignatius's prophecy, were 'found in the Abby [sic] of St. Benedict neere the city of Norwich. Containing the praedivination concerning the various distempers and divisions of this kingdom'.3 In the author's view, the aim of prophecy was to act as a clarion call to the nation. Yet the correct interpretation of these predictions was not a simple matter. Prophecies were 'very mysterious... They seeme so aenigmaticall [sic], as Sphynk [i.e the Sphinx] his hidden riddle'. The way in which pamphlets such as Ignatius dealt with problems of interpretation was straightforward. While prophecies were often transparently applicable to contemporary political events (and there could have been few readers who would have been left confused by Ignatius's claim that 'If Eighty Eight be past, then thrive/ Thou mayst, till thirty four or five'), pamphlets were often at pains to spell out the implications of more obscure predictions for readers. So the author of 'Ignatius's' prophecy takes his readers through the prediction line by line, each time applying the text specifically to contemporary events.The use of prophecy in this manner can be labelled as 'self-authenticating'. The prophecy itself, through its links to a distinguished early Christian figure, claims both authority and reliability. The same could be said for predictions by those prophets inhabiting a distant, mythical British past, of whom Merlin was the most well known.4 The prophecies of such figures appeared so selfevidently authoritative that no further support was seen to be needed - the prophecy was allowed to stand on its own. Yet while these sorts of prophetic pamphlets were certainly popular, they were by no means accepted uncriti- cally, being increasingly viewed by more educated readers as unsophisticated frauds. As Francis Bacon noted, almost all prophecies credited to great figures of the past 'have been impostures, and by idle and crafty brains merely contrived and feigned, after the event past'.5With this in mind, a new form of political prophecy began to emerge in the early 1640s. Instead of using the great figures of the past, these prophecies aimed to construct new, more relevant prophets to act as examples for the nation. A number of pamphlets emerged which used the predictions of those within living memory. Instead of finding prophecies hidden in abbeys and on walls, these pamphlets drew on print culture, extracting hidden prophecies from extant texts. Instead of providing a self-authenticating argument, in which the stature of the prophet was the only argument for the prophecy's reliability, they aimed to construct a new standard of proof - an inter-textual matrix of works which served to authenticate one another. These pamphlets used several standard tropes to convince the reader of the prophet's skill. Usually, this led pamphlets to emphasise the prophet's resilience in the face of persecution and to picture the prophet as the latest in a long line of Christian martyrs.In this article I explore the emergence of this tradition of 'prophetic construction' through a collection of similarly themed pamphlets - those focused on the puritan curate and biblical commentator Thomas Brightman (1562-1607). Brightman's weighty commentary on Revelation, written between 1600 and 1604, was reduced to the level of short pamphlet popularisations. His inaccessible prose became pithy popular verse, of the style familiar to the public from ballads and almanacs. …