Odd this day
This was the day Louisa Nottidge — who had been abducted by her brother, a male cousin, and her brother-in-law — was placed in an asylum, becoming one of the most famous women in the Victorian era to be declared a ‘lunatic’ for the benefit of male family members.
It was all to do with the Reverend Henry Prince, and our story begins earlier in the decade, in Somerset, when he began attracting large congregations with his charismatic preaching. Already an unconventional sort, he had married his mother’s elderly Catholic lodger in order to fund becoming a priest — and, while studying, had denounced his theological college’s hierarchy for submitting to “the insinuations of carnal desire”. When his first wife, being much older, died in 1842, he promptly married the a colleague’s sister (who also just happened to have money of her own). He was, then, already acquiring both attention and money, which seemed to be his principal aims in life. Unfortunately, the Bishop of Bath and Wells barred him from preaching the same year.
So, he did what any honest man would, moved to Suffolk, started calling himself Elijah and declaring privately that he was
Soon, the Bishop of Ely had also banned him from preaching, and off he went to
the south coast resorts of Brighton and Weymouth. Here amongst the elderly spinsters and young unmarried ladies of Victorian society, Prince found his true congregation. In a large house in Belfield Terrace, Weymouth, he set up an embryonic ‘Agapemone’ (Greek for ‘Abode of Love’).
On the entirely reasonable grounds that “in the day of wrath all property would be dirt”, he began persuading his followers to sell their possessions and give it to his church. One day, they all gathered in the Royal Hotel Weymouth to see the son of God revealed unto them. By an extraordinary coincidence, the messiah turned out to be called Henry. Henry Prince. Remarkable.
In 1843, the Nottidge family re-enter our tale when Prince preaches in Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk, near their family home. Their father has — well, good heavens, this is a surprise — been very successful in business, and is loaded. I can’t think of a reason why anyone would want to preach there.
Louisa had an astonishing six sisters and four brothers, and on their father’s death the following year, the five unmarried daughters each inherited £6,000 (over £640,000 today). The year after that, having apparently been impressed by Prince’s preaching, three of them — Harriet, Agnes and Clara — took themselves off to his new Agapemone in Somerset. By astounding great fortune, on the way there (apparently), Henry convinced them to marry three of his ministers, and it was surely a complete coincidence that joining in holy matrimony at the time involved handing over all your cash to your husband.
One of my sources, Utopia Britannica, says some of the sisters were happier about this than others.
Agnes the oldest, and most spirited of the three, was appalled by the whole set-up, especially when she discovered that on top of it all she was expected to remain celibate. When Prince (now referred to by the faithful as ‘Beloved’) set his sights on the fourth and youngest Nottidge sister, Louisa, and a further £6,000, Agnes tried to write a letter of warning to her sister. On the discovery of her betrayal of the Beloved, and the further discovery that she was pregnant and not by her ‘husband’ she was cast out as a fallen woman.
Yes, indeed: how very unlike any sort of religious cult to want to control women and their sexuality. Anyway, Louisa went off to Somerset regardless, and the rescue operation was put in motion. Some years later, Dr Marshall Hall at the Moorcroft asylum wrote to the Lancet about her
most excitable and tender nature
…and how she arrived on 12 November 1846,
a certificate of her unsoundness of mind having been previously signed by a physician and a surgeon … At first Miss Nottidge was melancholy, and much depressed in spirits. She refused to wear a bonnet … She daily expressed her surprise that “God did not send for her” … and that she could not be detained unless it was his will. Every night, on going to bed, she packed all her clothes up, expecting God would send for her during the night, and this she continued to do as long as she remained at Moorcroft.
Well, look: it was clearly wrong for Victorian men to have women locked up in order to get their hands on their money (or, in the case of novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose estranged wife Rosina heckled him at a parliamentary hustings, essentially to avoid embarrassment). But clearly, Louisa was — to employ medical terminology — off her bonce. She “never read the Bible, declaring it all completed now, and therefore it was quite useless so to do”, and “intimated that she and all the Agapemone party were saved, and that the world would soon be at an end”.
On one occasion she told me “that she should not die like other people, and be buried in a coffin, but be carried up to heaven in the twinkling of an eye”. I use her exact words ... She repeatedly told me Mr. Prince was “God Almighty”, “God manifest in the flesh”, that the spirit of our Lord had entered into him … and that he could render her immortal.
Mind you, maybe she was of sound mind, because on
the 6th of January, 1848 … she went out under the pretence of calling on my wife, and made her escape to London.
Sadly for her, she was detained again two days later, and only finally released in May that year when her physical health seemed to be declining. She immediately (of course) returned to Agapemone.
The result was, that in a few days she gave the whole of her fortune, more than £6000, to the very man she believed to be God, and went to reside in the Abode of Love.
Even if she was clearly deluded, though, it was still wrong to prevent her doing what she wanted with her own money. This was a point she made herself when, in 1849, she sued her brother, cousin, and brother-in-law for abduction and false imprisonment, and won. She took her damages back to the Agapemone, presumably handed them straight to Prince, and remained there until her death in 1858. At which point, her brother and executor, Ralph, contributed enormously to the annals of silly history by suing Prince for the return of the money — and won it back, with costs.
By this time, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Prince had “spiritually married”
a young member of the community, Anne Willet (or Zoë) Paterson. He sought to justify his action in one of his characteristically tortuous books, The Little Book Open (1856), but several of his scandalized followers abandoned him when Paterson gave birth to a daughter, Eve, whose father was almost certainly Prince.
…which undid his ludicrous cult entirely, causing it to fizzle out? Er, no. It had been troubled all along by tales of Prince’s indulgent living and… close interest in the female members of his flock, let’s say, and still they had kept flocking. In his advancing years, Prince approved a (well, well) “lapsed Anglican curate, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott” to take his place, and things pretty much carried on as ‘normal’. They built
an ornate church in Clapton in North London complete with a 155ft tower of Portland stone, intricate oak hammer-beam roof and stained glass windows depicting the submission of womankind to man. The church was dedicated to the Ark of the Covenant.
It’s still there (although now used by others), and was much admired by John Betjeman, apparently. After Prince’s death, Historic England says:
Things came to a head in 1902, when at a quiet service on 7 September, Smyth-Pigott declared himself to be Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, the Second Coming. When he repeated his claim a day later, an excitable mob of several thousand taunted the congregation and chased Smyth-Pigott’s brougham across Clapton Common to shouts of ‘hypocrite’.
According to legend, he had promised to walk on the water of Clapton pond, and failed to deliver. Even so, the Agapemonites cult only finally died out in 1956, 29 years after his death.
Still, at least charismatic charlatans who make wild claims, babble incoherently, and defraud their supporters are a thing of the past and can no longer achieve high office and enrich themselves at the expense of the gullible and never face the consequences.
Eh, readers?
