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By Root 1487 0

raging and crying most fearfully with the extreme anguish and pain she did endure, that she could not rest till such time as the violence thereof brought her to her last end’. Stichberry himself suffered an agonizing death shortly afterwards, ‘raving’ in such a way that five or six men could not control him, ‘howling and making a noise until he died’. Stichberry’s sister, Anne, had made scorn of the Prayer Book for the previous ‘two years’: in other words, more or less since the failure of the Short Parliament. She too was punished when she tore her Prayer Book out of a volume in which it was bound up with her Bible. God dealt harshly with this ‘poor silly creature’. Her hands began to rot ‘in a most strange manner… the flesh flying from the bones: and so continues to this present, rotting in a most fearful and loathsome manner’. Something of a local attraction, large crowds of onlookers came to see her, and ‘being so extreme loathsome’ she had been moved a mile out of town by her neighbours. The lesson was clear, that it was rash to attempt anything against sacred places, or to ‘vilify those things which have any part of holy Writ in them’. It was clearly unwise to attempt to alter anything in church, or about the Prayer Book established by ‘Authority’ until Parliament should determine otherwise. To that end the pamphlet reproduced the Lords order of 16 January 1641 calling for worship to be performed according to the statutes currently in force.56

This pamphlet invested a local event with cosmic significance and used it to underline the importance of order in worship, and of legitimate authority in achieving religious change. It also offered God’s special providence as a source of authority in uncertain times.57 Another, published by Richard Harper later in the summer, told of the punishment of those who resisted harmless ceremonies on the basis of ignorant zeal.58 Mary Wilmore, wife of John Wilmore, a rough mason in Mears Ashby (Northants.), had become concerned about the religious rituals that attended a birth while expecting a baby. In particular, she was concerned about the use of the sign of the cross during baptism, a ritual moment subject to some criticism in these months. In Essex, attacks on the practice, like attacks on the Prayer Book and the use of surplices, had been justified with reference to the Protestation and the obligation it imposed on people to resist popery.59 Mary persuaded her husband to visit one Master Barnard, a ‘reverend Divine’ in the village of Hardwick, not far away. Barnard’s answer was a learned and moderate one: the use of the sign of the cross ‘was in no ways necessary to salvation, but an ancient, laudable and decent ceremony of the Church of England’. On hearing this verdict Mary apparently declared that ‘I had rather my child should be born without a head than to have a head to be signed with the sign of the Cross’. Tragically, this wish was granted, and she gave birth to a child with no head and a sign of the cross on its chest.60

According to the author, John Locke, cleric, the responsibility for this tragedy lay either in Mary’s ‘weakness’ or in her ‘too much confiding in the conventicling Sectaries’, whose claims that the practice was a ‘pernicious, popish and idolatrous ceremony’ were refuted with scriptural citations. The judgement was set in the context of the fate of Julian the apostate, who pissed on the altar in Antioch to demonstrate his belief that ‘Divine providence took no care of outward ceremonies’. His punishment was ‘a disease that rotted his bowels [so that] his excrements leaving their wonted course, ran through his throat and blasphemous mouth in as stinking a manner as the poisoned trash and beggarly rudiments are fomented nowadays from the impudent mouths of unlearned and ignorant Teachers’. The fruits of their ‘pernicious and illiterate doctrine’ were exemplified in the terrible fate of Mary’s child, which reflected ‘God’s wrath and judgments to over curious and nice zealots of our times’. Locke’s own learning was evident not just in his command of scripture,