God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [246]
Let your women keep silence in the Churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak, but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the Law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the Church.76
A common theme in stories about the corrosive effects of sectarianism was how virtuous women were led astray from the patriarchal authority of the godly household by false prophets, and this fear resonated widely. Alarmed by what he saw around him in Lincolnshire in 1646, Colonel King demanded that the Grand Jury in Lincolnshire present all ‘Papists, Anabaptists, Brownists, Separatists, Antinomians and Heretics, who take upon them boldness to creep into houses, and lead captive silly women to sins’.77
These fears about female independence were not groundless; but neither were they proportionate. Women were prominent in the sects during the 1640s – the dependence on direct revelation cancelling contemporary assumptions about the inferiority of female reason and learning. The reformation of the spirit, with its relative distrust of the scripture and learned divinity, was easily satirized as a licence for ignorant women to preach, and it did certainly give a voice to some women. During the 1640s there was a steady flow of prophetic pamphlets. Some of them retold apparently ancient prophecies: the publisher Richard Harper fought something of a paper war, with a constantly escalating number of visions offering to give meaning and direction to the current confusion. But the 1640s also boasted an unusual number of living prophets, many of them women. John Thomas, founder of the newsbook and ally of Pym’s in the world of print, had spent time and money in November 1641 printing a pamphlet retailing the visions of a maidservant from Worksop.78 Sarah Wight was to become briefly famous in 1647, when despair and illness drove her to suicide attempts and fasting. In the midst of these travails she began to experience trances in which she spoke from scriptures, and ministers came to take down notes. By September she had recovered, but she had achieved celebrity. She entered into print, too, her story one of rebirth which was of more general relevance to Puritan piety, but this presence in print was mediated by male divines and authors. Little is known about her besides this: female prophecy was a fleeting, mediated, kind of power.79
This filled a role rather like astrology, but was a distinctively feminine realm, or at least a sphere in which women had easier access to public authority. But, for that very reason, sects were regarded with suspicion, as potentially subversive of stable patriarchal order. Prophecy was dangerously subversive in other ways – an authentic personal revelation overrode the claims of law, custom, status and tradition. As a licence for change it was very alluring; but it was an authority to be urged with caution. The validation and interpretation of visions were highly problematic.80
There were others too – Elizabeth Poole, who prophesied to the General Council of the Army, and Mary Cary. And women wrote theology as well as uttering prophecy. One of Thomas Edwards’s chief interlocutors in his role as hammer of the sects was Katherine Chidley; in fact she was one of the only writers to respond to Edwards in 1641 – a source of irritation to him in itself. She had a long career as proselytizer in the Independent churches in London, as a pamphleteer and, later, Leveller petitioner. Lady Eleanor Davies, for further example, published at least thirty-seven tracts between 1641 and 1652.81
But while these women found a voice, and some of them