Odd this day

8 December marks the 166th anniversary of Joseph C. Gayetty marketing the first toilet paper. Before this, as Robert Hendrickson’s The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms puts it,

The Ward and Sears mail order catalogs were indispensable in the outhouses of America

That advert, incidentally, is not his first one, but is important enough to be preserved in the Library of Congress:

The greatest necessity of the age! Gayetty's medicated paper for the water-closet. Read and learn…

…and also tells you why you shouldn’t use catalogues:

Printed paper, everybody knows is rank poison to tender portions of the body.

But the big news today

…is that it’s the 397th anniversary of the death of former Attorney General for Ireland John Davies, found dead in his bed of an apoplexy the year after his wife Eleanor had prophesied that he would die in the next three years.

This may not seem like big news, but it is, mainly because of Eleanor, whose occupation is given in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as ‘prophetess’, and who was the author of this clearly rational tome (in 1625, the year before her first husband popped off):

She’d had a vision, you see, telling her she was now a messenger for the biblical prophet Daniel, who wanted her to let the king and Parliament know that — well, obviously — the Day of Judgment was on its way. It could be expected in 1645, in fact.

Given that the king in question was Charles I, and 1645 was when the Battle of Naseby happened, you could argue that she wasn’t entirely wrong, but the basis of her assertion was that her father was Lord Audley, and that an anagram of her name was…

Er, yes… apparently, the letters of her name also spell REVEALE O DANIEL

As the National Archives note, though, only calling herself ‘Audeley’ after her father (ahem, Audley), and

helped by the interchangeable use of ‘v’ and ‘u’ at that date

made it an anagram. (Shoving an ‘e’ on the end of ‘reveal’ is fine, because no bugger could spell back then. Yes, you would, in fact, have to spell her name ‘Avdelie’ for it to work, but… see the point above about nobody in that era ever spelling the same word the same way twice. Anyway…)

She had already had an eventful life, getting into several legal tussles, one of which led her opponent, Christopher Brooke, to write her a “page and a half of non-stop insults”, including “abominable, stinking, greasy, simnel-faced excrement of honour”.

Prophet, prisoner and pretend prelate: Lady Eleanor Davies (1590-1652) - The National Archives blog

In 1633, she was fined £3,000 (about £360,000 now) by the Commissioners of Ecclesiastical Causes for printing her prophecies in Amsterdam and smuggling them into England — and shoved in the slammer for non-payment, which was presumably the thinking behind the high fine.

In 1636, she committed “insufferable profanations” in Lichfield:

Davies entered the cathedral, sat on the bishop’s throne, and declared that she was primate and metropolitan. This gesture was followed by one equally shocking: she poured tar over the altar, telling worshippers that she was sprinkling it with holy water as preparation for their next communion. In her 1652 tract Bethlehem Signifying the House of Bread, Davies explained that she had been driven to her act by the erection of a giant crucifix in the cathedral and by the installation of a purple woollen altar hanging which obscured the ten commandments on the wall. She saw her spectacular attack on these profane objects as the fulfilment in the Last Age of Exodus 32:20, in which Moses destroyed the golden calf worshipped by the Israelites.

These, the Privy Council Register said, were deeds

of so foul and strange a nature that we cannot conceive them to proceed from any person but one wholly distracted of understanding

…so she went to Bethlem Hospital.

150-ish years later (and maybe if she hadn’t done the whole tar on the altar thing), she might simply have been treated the way fellow prophetess Joanna Southcott was…

Odd this day

…but predicting the death of the Duke of Buckingham

raiſed her to the reputation of a Cunning Woman amongſt the ignorant people

…and her prediction about her first husband came after he burnt her prophecies:

…so she came to be seen as the sort of woman who wouldn’t have survived if her path had crossed with that of Matthew Hopkins.

Her second husband also burnt her work, but perhaps none of that was as painful as when Sir John Lambe, Dean of Arches,

ſhot her through and through with an arrow borrowed from her own quiver

by reading out in court his own anagram:

That’s from 1752’s Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain, who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences, whose author doesn’t seem to have spotted that it, too, is not a true anagram.

There’s more about her and her writings here:

Rare Book of the Month: June 2017 | Middle Temple

(with a little, too, about her dubious brother Mervin Touchet, second earl of Castlehaven, who, the Privy Council said, committed “crimes too horrid for a Christian man to mention”).