Odd this day
The splendidly named Solomon Eccles (although he’s sometimes referred to as Solomon Eagle, which isn’t as good) walked through Westminster Hall, naked, with a chafing dish of burning coals on his head, shouting “Repent! Repent!”
Solomon, you may not be entirely surprised to hear, was a zealous sort, but hadn’t always been. He’d made an estimated £130 a year being a musician and music teacher. Unfortunately for him, he got religion, and by a circuitous route (Anglican, then Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, and Antinomian) became a Quaker, by which point he felt music
was nothing but vanity, and vexed the good spirit of God … [who] did thunder grievously against this practise
…so he sold his instruments and became a tailor instead, but then — according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — God told him to buy them back and burn them on Tower Hill, which he tried to do, but people stopped him, so he “was forced to stamp upon them, and break them to pieces”. Obviously.
He started to preach in public, often interrupting church services to do so, which got him into trouble. the Quakers Act of 1662 had been passed to bring these dangerous subversives (with their wicked ideas of an ascetic, quiet lifestyle) into line. He was arrested and imprisoned several times. This, as you can imagine of someone with fervent beliefs, did not stop him.
There were quite a few Quakers carrying out direct action at the time. Going about in sackcloth and with ashes on one’s face or head was popular, and some took it a step further. Solomon wasn’t even the first to get his kit off in Westminster.
On 17 July 1652, in the chapel of Whitehall Palace in Westminster, while Peter Sterry was preaching a sermon on the resurrection in front of a congregation composed of Oliver Cromwell (whose chaplain Sterry was) and various republican dignitaries and soldiers, a woman appeared “stark naked”. According to several witnesses, she called out, “Resurrection, I am ready for thee”, before being removed by the guards and causing considerable disturbance.
Sadly, we don’t know her name, but her story is recounted in an academic paper with the splendid subtitle, ‘How the Quakers invented nudity as a protest’. Because the idea soon spread, as another paper — Early Quakers and “Going Naked as a Sign” — testifies. In his tract, Signes are from the Lord to a People or Nation, Solomon said he felt the call to set out “with Fire and Brimstone on my head Naked” saying:
Repent speedily, for God will not be mocked. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah who are your Examples; they do endure the vengeance of Eternal Fire.
So, presumably, the fire on his bonce (which seems to have been a unique touch of his) was just to remind them what fire was. Whether Londoners in the 1660s needed such a thing is debatable. Indeed, according to the Journal of the Friends Historical Society, (PDF) just a few days before the Great Fire broke out in 1666, Solomon
had been moved to pass, almost naked, through Bartholomew Fair (24th August) bearing upon his head a pan full of fire and brimstone, warning the pleasure-loving city of God’s impending judgment
Given that the fire apparently began on 2 September, and forensic analysis wasn’t then what it is now, are we absolutely sure that baker in Pudding Lane was to blame…?
Anyway, Daniel Defoe described Eccles as an “Enthusiast”, which seems to be putting it rather mildly — and also suggested Eccles’ wife was a plague victim, although Quaker history says dropsy. Whether it was that which spurred him to further lengths, or whether he was already pretty far gone, who can say? Either way, this day in 1667 saw him immortalised by Samuel Pepys:
One thing extraordinary was, this day a man, a Quaker, came naked through the Hall, only very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal, and with a chafing-dish of fire and brimstone burning upon his head, did pass through the Hall, crying, “Repent! repent!”
Yes, it is, indeed, a good job he kept his ‘privities’ to himself. Not that that helped his reputation much. His other major contemporary entry in the historical record comes from the equally finely named Lodowicke Muggleton, whose 1673 tome The Answer to William Penn calls poor Solomon
a wild boar, his bristles were all off his back, and he was so besmeared and daubed with his own dung that his flesh could hardly be seen; also he stank that a man might have smelt him at a great distance before he came near: he was very giddy in the head, as if he were frenzy in the brain; for he could live with less food than any of the wild beasts in the wilderness, being much given to fasting, which made his head to totter or joggle, and his eyes dazzle and his brains to hang loose
Muggleton was himself a nonconformist, who “encouraged quietism and free-thought”, according to Wikipedia (and who started a sect, Muggletonianism, which “survived until the death of its last follower in 1979”). So, he might have been expected to be forgiving of Quakers, but apparently hated them. Maybe it was Solomon smearing himself in his own excrement that did it (or maybe Lodowicke, already hostile, made that up).
Solomon went on to preach Quakerism in Barbados (where he was arrested) and Jamaica, and Boston (where he was arrested), and eventually died in Spitalfields, where he had spent most of his life, in 1682. Then, when you look at this painting of him by Paul Falconer Poole in 1843:
…it seems clear that he was reincarnated in the 20th century.
