INVISIBLE HELPERS:
ANGELIC INTERVENTION IN
POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND
Over the past twenty-five years historians have been engaged in a
major enterprise of rediscovery. Beneath the surface of an early
modern world ruptured by military conflict, political upheaval
and religious turmoil they have revealed a parallel universe teeming with supernatural forces and magical creatures. Far from
being a passive spectator on the workings of his Creation, God
continued to intervene in temporal affairs frequently and unpredictably, to warn, try, punish and reward. He displayed his prescience and power in the guise of miracles, providences and
prodigious signs. No less busy were Satan and his band of minions
— witches, familiars and demons. Ever eager to wreak havoc on
earth, the devil was particularly aggressive and restless in the last
days, and was believed to be feverishly gathering his forces for
the final apocalyptic battle that would herald the end of civilization in its current form. Alongside this, unruly spirits such as
ghosts and fairies persisted in carrying out all sorts of mischief,
to the perpetual irritation and annoyance of human beings.1
1
Only a few examples of this substantial body of literature can be cited here. On the
devil and demons, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in
Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997); Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Early Modern
England (Stroud, 2000); Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe,
3rd edn (Harlow, 2006); Nathan Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern
England (Cambridge, 2006). On apocalypticism, see Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy
and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, 1988);
Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2000), esp. ch.
1. On providentialism, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England
(Oxford, 1999); William E. Burns, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence
in England, 1657–1727 (Manchester, 2002). On miracles and prodigies, see Lorraine
Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York,
1998); Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’, in Kate Cooper
and Jeremy Gregory (eds.), Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in
the Life of the Church (Studies in Church Hist., xli, Woodbridge, 2005); Jane Shaw,
Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, 2006). On ghosts, see Peter Marshall,
Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), ch. 6; Sasha Handley,
Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England
(London, 2007). On fairies, see Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies
(cont. on p. 78)
Past and Present, no. 208 (August 2010)
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtq002
ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2010
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In the midst of this spate of scholarly activity the beneficent
operations of angels have been strangely neglected, at least until
very recently. But that surprising omission is rapidly being corrected by a surge of current research on these celestial beings. It is
now clear that they were an integral part of the outlook of individuals from all sections of the religious spectrum. Like their
medieval predecessors, Roman Catholics continued to emphasize the multifarious roles of angels: as the ambassadors and messengers of God in the temporal world, as the special patrons and
guardians of the faithful, as the Lord’s most powerful battalion
in the fierce and ongoing war against Lucifer and his accomplices. Angels were also a constituent feature of Protestant mentalities: densely populating the pages of both the Old and New
Testaments, they could hardly be discarded as one of the nonscriptural, ‘superstitious’ accretions Christianity had gathered
during the long centuries of papal corruption. Despite their
close connection with the tainted cult of saints, their presence
in the Bible protected them from becoming casualties of the
iconoclastic purge launched by Luther, Calvin and other reformers, though this process did not leave them entirely unscathed.
Protestants dismissed some of the more dubious aspects of medieval angelology, including the complex hierarchy of ranks formalized by pseudo-Dionysius in the first century. Anxious to combat
tendencies that smacked of idolatry, they were also at pains to
insist that people should neither venerate nor pray directly to
angels. Indeed, the logic of the Reformed doctrine of an omnipotent providence rendered these heavenly creatures more than a
little superfluous: if there was no need for an all-powerful deity to
employ inferior instruments and act by proxy, why then did he do
so? This testing question did not, however, prevent Protestant
writers from stressing the ubiquity of angels and the constancy
of their benevolent ministry. The central place they occupied in
(n. 1 cont.)
and Fairy Stories (Harmondsworth, 2001); Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan,
Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton, 2001); Peter Marshall, ‘Protestants and
Fairies in Early-Modern England’, in C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist and Mark
Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe (Farnham,
2009). A prevailing influence over much of this literature is Keith Thomas, Religion
and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
England (Harmondsworth, 1973).
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implementing God’s inscrutable plan for both the elect and
humanity at large was indisputable.2
Yet while Protestants readily acknowledged the fact of angelic
agency, the precise nature of the intrusions of these elusive creatures into the earthly world prompted more delicate debate and
discussion. In particular, there was uncertainty about whether or
not angels now appeared in visible form. Did they manifest themselves in ways that were perceptible to human beings? Did they, in
short, still allow themselves to be seen? This essay explores responses to this intellectual problem as they evolved in postReformation England. By comparing the precepts of formal
theology with the realities of lived experience, it highlights a significant pocket of ideological ambivalence within English Protestantism. The story that unravels from a study of the sources, it is
argued, requires as much sensitivity to silences as presences. It
requires an ear carefully tuned to detect sounds of the complex
processes of censorship, selective editing and subconscious reinterpretation that shaped early modern reports of the appearance of angels. Close attention to these areas of hermeneutic
tension and ambiguity casts fresh light on the character and
impact of England’s long and contested Reformation. It illuminates how Reformed tenets were absorbed and internalized by lay
and clerical members of this society, as well as the subtle and
organic transformations that took place within Protestant thinking about the supernatural between the mid sixteenth century and
the end of the seventeenth. These transformations were both a
product of and a response to various religious and cultural developments, but they also occurred against the backdrop of philosophical and scientific changes which were modifying older views
2
See Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), Angels in the Early Modern
World (Cambridge, 2006), esp. editors’ intro. (‘Migrations of Angels in the Early
Modern World’). For Calvin’s theology of angels, see Susan E. Schreiner, The
Theater of his Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin
(Grand Rapids, 1991), ch. 2. A further volume is: Joad Raymond (ed.), Conversations
with Angels: Essays towards a History of Spiritual Communication, Macmillan, forthcoming. Feisal G. Mohamed, In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels
from Colet to Milton (Toronto, 2008), and Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The EarlyModern Imagination (Oxford, 2010), appeared while this essay was in press. Two recent
Ph.D. theses also tackle this subject: Kate Harvey, ‘The Role of Angels in English
Protestant Thought, 1580–1660’ (Univ. of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 2005); Laura
Sangha, ‘Angels in English Religious Cultures, c.1480–1700’ (Univ. of Warwick Ph.D.
thesis, 2009).
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about the nature of optical phenomena in general, and reconfiguring the conventional boundaries between truth and illusion.3
I
Following in the footsteps of patristic and medieval churchmen,
sixteenth-century Protestants stressed that angels were a species
of celestial being which defied the feeble comprehension of
mortal man and into which he should refrain from prying too
curiously.4 Angels were spirits: free of the bulky encumbrances
of bones, blood and flesh, they were nevertheless ‘swift’ and
‘uncorruptible substaunces’ which moved and behaved in ways
that could not be discerned by the ‘externall sences’. As the
German Lutheran pastor Urbanus Rhegius declared in a
sermon preached in 1537 and translated into English in 1583,
angels ‘cannot eyther bee felt, handled, or holden with handes, or
seene with carnall eyes’.5 Closely echoed by Henry Bullinger,
John Calvin, and many other Reformed writers, this precept
was superficially hard to reconcile with the many physical appearances of angels recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures: from the angel
which prevented Abraham from carrying out the sacrifice of Isaac
to those that wrestled with Jacob, fed Hagar and her child in the
wilderness, sustained the prophet Elijah on his way to Mount
Horeb, and entrusted Gideon with the task of delivering Israel
out of the hands of the Midianites. It was equally difficult to
square with the content of the Gospels and Epistles, with
Gabriel’s annunciation to the Virgin Mary that she would bear
the son of God, with the hosts of heavenly angels that told the
3
See Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture
(Oxford, 2007).
4
For medieval angelology, see David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages
(New York and Oxford, 1998).
5
Urbanus Rhegius, An Homely or Sermon of Good and Evill Angels: Preached . . .
Anno. 1537, trans. Richard Robinson (London, 1590 edn, STC 20845), fo. 2r–v;
Zacharius Ursinus, The Summe of Christian Religion, trans. Henrie Parrie (London,
1611, STC 24537), 316–17; William Alley, Ptochomuseion: The Poore Mans Librarie
(London, [1565], STC 374), fos. 163v–164r. For other sixteenth-century Protestant
discussions, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. in 1 (1947; Grand Rapids, 1989), bk 1, ch. 14, xx3–12 (i, 143–50);
Henry Bullinger, The Decades, ed. Thomas Harding, trans. H.I., 4 vols. (Cambridge,
1849–52), iv, 327–65 (sermon 9, ‘Of Good and Evil Spirits’), esp. 328–9; William
Perkins, Workes, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1631 edn, STC 19653b.5), iii, 526.
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shepherds of Christ’s nativity, and with the role they played in
releasing the apostles from prison and freeing Peter from chains.6
These occurrences were both waking and sleeping experiences:
they took the form of visions beheld in broad daylight as well as in
nocturnal dreams.
They did not, however, contradict the tenet of angelic invisibility. Passages in which angels were described in the likeness of old
or young men clothed in white garments or in the shape of winged
cherubim or seraphim were made by way of concession to human
infirmity.7 Where they had assumed bodies, declared Bullinger,
these were not their own ‘but taken upon them and as it were
borrowed from elsewhere for a time and for the weakness of our
imbecility and capacity’.8 The palpable forms in which angels
were said to have manifested themselves in Scripture were no
more than disguises donned to comfort the frightened and
reveal the glory of the Almighty. According to Peter Martyr
Vermigli, they were merely ‘certaine similitudes’, ‘signes and
tokens’ of the presence of a merciful but mysterious deity.9 In
his treatise on the topic, the Jacobean Protestant convert John
Salkeld provided a more detailed explanation of the way in
which these (and other) optical illusions were contrived by celestial creatures skilled in the manipulation of the forces of nature:
by the forming of a body of ayre, so condensing and tempering both the
quantitie, qualities, and substance, that it may be apt to receive all manner
of colours, formes, and figures, like as in the clouds by the diverse raritie
and densitie of them, doe often appeare divers kindes of colours; yea, most
strange representations of men and beasts; yea of whole armies one fighting against another.10
Like demons, angels were adept ‘inventors of virtual worlds’.11
Reformed writers were by no means the first to be troubled by the
paradox of an apparition of an invisible creature. This theological
6
Gen. 22; Gen. 32; Gen. 21; 1 Kings 19; Judges 6; Luke 1; Luke 2; Acts 5; Acts 12;
Acts 16.
7
Calvin: Commentaries, ed. Joseph Haroutunian with Louise Pettibone Smith
(London, 1958), 168–9; Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, i, 147.
8
Bullinger, Decades, ed. Harding, iv, 331; Alley, Ptochomuseion, fo. 164r.
9
Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Common Places of the Most Famous and Renowned
Divine Orator Peter Martyr (London, 1583, STC 24669), 25.
10
John Salkeld, A Treatise of Angels: Of the Nature, Essence, Place, Power, Science,
Will, Apparitions, Grace, Sinne, and All Other Proprieties of Angels (London, 1613, STC
21621), 40. Salkeld’s thinking was strongly influenced by the neo-scholasticism of his
former academic mentor the Jesuit Franciscus Suarez.
11
Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 123, ch. 4 passim.
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and epistemological riddle had long since exercised the intellects
of Augustine and Aquinas and it also cut across contemporary
confessional divisions. But while the exact nature and status of
such visions was difficult to fathom, no one dared deny the axiom
that angels had appeared in the biblical and early Christian era.
It was widely asserted in Protestant circles, however, that angelic apparitions had largely ceased after Christianity had taken
firm root. Such spectacles had been necessary to succour the
persecuted Israelites, to convert the Jews and Gentiles, and to
sow the seeds of the Gospel. As Zacharius Ursinus, author of
the Heidelberg catechism, commented: at the first ‘gathering
and establishing of the Church, the doctrine of God being not
as yet plainly delivered, and the prophecies not fulfilled’, people
had ‘needed more extraordinary and miraculous revelations than
now’.12 But once the future of the infant faith was secure these
props had been gradually removed. In ‘ages past’, averred the
exiled puritan divine Henry Ainsworth in 1607, God had ‘employed [angels] outwardly in revealing his will unto men’, but in
latter times, ‘since he hath opened unto us the whole mysterie of
his counsel, by his Son’, their operations had become more secret
and subliminal. Now they were to be ‘discerned by faith, not by
ey-sight’.13 Other godly ministers like William Perkins and John
Rogers were equally emphatic: ‘at this day, the Angels appeare not
unto us’.14 In his Dæmonologie of 1597 King James VI declared
no less definitively that ‘since the comming of Christ in the flesh,
and establishing of his Church by the Apostles, all miracles,
visions, prophecies, & appearances of Angels or good spirites
are ceased’.15
The argument that the Lord had stopped feeding his people
‘with mylke like babes’ and watering them as ‘tender plantes’ with
‘droppes of extraordinarie grace’ became a hallmark of Protestantism in the first half-century after the Reformation.16 This was
12
Ursinus, Summe of Christian Religion, 317.
Henry Ainsworth, The Communion of Saincts: A Treatise of the Fellowship that the
Faithful have with God, and his Angels, and One with Another, in this Present Life
(Amsterdam, 1607, STC 228), 305–6.
14
Perkins, Workes, ii, quotation at p. 85; John Rogers, A Godly & Fruitful Exposition
upon All the First Epistle of Peter (London, 1650 edn), 538.
15
James VI, Dæmonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh, 1597, STC 14364),
65–6.
16
Quotation from John Harvey, A Discoursive Problem Concerning Prophesies
(London, 1588, STC 12908), sigs. Ee2r, M2r; see also Reginald Scot, The
13
(cont. on p. 83)
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closely linked with an insistence that all non-scriptural or patristic
instances of angelic apparition were either tricks wrought by
human cunning and guile, hallucinations resulting from mental
or physical illness, or cases of demonic deception. If they could
not be explained as the work of greedy and manipulative priests or
the delusions of the sick then they were compelling examples of
the devil’s ability to masquerade as an angel of light. Fervent belief
that they were living in the final age of the world preconditioned
Protestants to expect that Satan would be particularly assiduous
in his efforts to seduce mankind in their own times. An expert
magician, scientist and optician, he could all too easily corrupt the
unwary by infecting their senses and thereby ‘bring them to
greater inconveniencies and absurdities in matters of greater
moment . . . and so . . . to utter perdition’. This explained why
‘so many wise women, extasies and rapts of people, who given to
too much imagination, thinke verily they see visions of God,
Angels, Saints, Divels, or other infinite strange things, according
to the humour then predominering in them, which indeede they
never saw’.17
Such suggestions drew their potency and urgency from the intense anxiety about idolatry that animated Calvinists in particular. The precept that angels no longer appeared to human beings
was not unconnected with Reformed Protestantism’s profound
distrust of the eye as a medium of divine communication and
spiritual insight.18 Ministers like George Hakewill regarded this
organ as the ‘chiefe occasion of originall sinne’ and the ‘immediate instrument’ of ‘spirituall fornication’.19 Obsessed by the
natural propensity of human beings to venerate visible things,
(n. 16 cont.)
Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584, STC 21864), bk 8, ch. 2; D. P. Walker, ‘The
Cessation of Miracles’, in Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (eds.), Hermeticism and
the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (Washington
and London, 1988); Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’; Shaw,
Miracles in Enlightenment England, 21–33.
17
Salkeld, Treatise of Angels, 53, 50, 54. On the devil as a natural scientist and
magician, see Clark, Thinking with Demons, pt 2, esp. ch. 11; Clark, Vanities of the
Eye, ch. 4.
18
See Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, i, Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988),
esp. ch. 7; Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in EarlyModern England (Oxford, 2000); Clark, Vanities of the Eye, ch. 5.
19
George Hakewill, The Vanitie of the Eye (Oxford, 1633 edn, STC 12623), 43, 17,
and see ch. 2 passim.
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they cited the example of the angel that had manifested itself to
St John and castigated him for falling into an instinctive posture
of worship before it, admonishing him ‘See thou do it not’
(Rev. 22:8–9).20 Many believed that artistic depictions of these
incorporeal creatures were themselves prohibited by the second
commandment, images which human beings were liable to turn
into abominable idols.21 It is tempting to interpret Protestant
claims about the cessation of such sightings as a kind of selfdenying ordinance, a theological and pastoral convenience that
provided a degree of insurance against this most heinous of
crimes.
It was also a by-product of the bitter polemical struggle in
which Protestant controversialists were engaged with their
Roman Catholic adversaries. It provided them with a devastating
weapon against the tales of angelical apparition that percolated
through medieval hagiography and the fresh reports of their visible intercession that accompanied the enthusiastic resurgence
and promotion of the miraculous by the Counter Reformation
Church. In England, as elsewhere in Tridentine Europe, apparitions of angels were harnessed to express Catholic defiance towards the new heretical religion and to celebrate and sanctify the
sacrifice made by the community’s martyrs.22 Thomas Cranmer
expressed his contempt for such ‘devilish devices’ in 1547, and
suggestions that stories of celestial visions were blatant popish
fabrications continued to be articulated by Protestant propagandists throughout the Tudor and Stuart era.23 It is hardly
surprising that Reformed theologians adopted the expedient
20
See, for example, Perkins, Workes, ii, 85; Rogers, Godly & Fruitful Exposition, 538;
Rhegius, Homely or Sermon of Good and Evill Angels, fo. 34r.
21
See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Angels and Idols in England’s Long Reformation’, in
Marshall and Walsham (eds.), Angels in the Early Modern World.
22
See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in PostReformation England’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels. See also Trevor
Johnson, ‘Guardian Angels and the Society of Jesus’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds.),
Angels in the Early Modern World. For the revival of the miraculous in Tridentine
Europe, see Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: Counter-Reformation
Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, 1993); Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles and the
Counter-Reformation Mission to England’, Hist. Jl, xlvi (2003).
23
Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury,
Martyr, 1556, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge, 1846), 64–5. See also Joseph Hall,
The Great Mysterie of Godliness Laid Forth by Way of Affectuous and Feeling Meditation.
Also, the Invisible World, Discovered to Spirituall Eyes, and Reduced to Usefull Meditation
(London, 1651 [1652]), 154–9.
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polemical strategy of insisting that all supernatural revelations
had long since evaporated.
However, in arguing that the apparition of angels was a thing of
the past, Protestants were not saying that the intervention of these
heavenly creatures had been called to a halt at the same time. On
the contrary, they went to some lengths to stress that their ministrations to human beings continued in perpetuity. The difference was that their modus operandi had changed. ‘Although now a
dayes they appear not visibly, nor afford us such outward help’,
declared Henry Ainsworth, ‘yet are these heavenly messengers,
stil secretly imployed for the safeguard and benefit of the
Saincts’.24 The holy angels ‘assigned the guardianship of the
human race’ always hovered protectively around the faithful,
emphasized Calvin and others; it was just that they ‘do not deal
with us in a way which makes us familiar with their nearness and
reveals it to our senses’.25 Rather, they operated silently and
imperceptibly behind the scenes. Their watchfulness, warned
Perkins and Ainsworth, should ‘make us circumspect to all our
wayes’: ‘we ought holily, righteously, & soberly to carry our selves,
in al our actions, seing we ar a spectacle to those heavenly
Flames’.26 Equally, the self-effacement of post-apostolic angels
should not be an excuse for failing to acknowledge their mediations, without which, Hugh Latimer had commented in 1552,
‘we should all perish both soul and body’.27 Even though, as
Bishop Joseph Hall of Exeter was still affirming a century later,
there were now no ‘ocular witnesses to these happy convoys’,
Christians should never forget the debt of obligation they owed
to these ‘invisible helpers’.28
Yet most Protestant writers felt it necessary to insert a caveat.
Few were prepared to rule out completely the possibility that
angels might still appear to people. This would have been to tie
the hands of God, whose ability to intervene arbitrarily and
24
Ainsworth, Communion of Saincts, 309.
Calvin: Commentaries, ed. Haroutunian and Pettibone Smith, 147. See also
Rhegius, Homely or Sermon of Good and Evill Angels, fo. 27r–v.
26
Perkins, Workes, iii, 408; Ainsworth, Communion of Saincts, 312–13. See also John
Bayly, Two Sermons: The Angell Guardian; The Light Enlightening (Oxford, 1630, STC
1601), 17, on angels as witnesses to our ‘most secrete actions’.
27
Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555,
ed. George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge, 1845), 86.
28
Hall, Great Mysterie of Godliness, 171–2.
25
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to effect prodigious events with the aid of any deputies or intermediaries he pleased could hardly be constrained by rules and
regulations formulated by mere human beings. Room had to be
left for the Lord to act on whim if and when it suited him. The
Cambridgeshire puritan Richard Greenham carefully hedged his
bets when asked by a parishioner to explain the nature of angelic
activity:
This is sure, if we be Gods children and walke in his waies, the Angels of
God doe watch over us, and yet all see it not, and when they see it, it is by
the effect of their ministrie: for though their ministrie be certain: yet the
manifestation of it is extraordinary.
‘Good angels’, he advised another member of his flock, ‘have
not been seen but extraordinarily’.29 The Swiss pastor Ludwig
Lavater was no less cautious in his treatise Of Ghostes and
Spirites Walking by Nyght. He ascribed most phenomena of this
kind to the counterfeiting of Satan, but had to concede that, although benign apparitions of divine origin were an extreme rarity,
they did occur occasionally. He was even prepared to admit that,
where they had appeared ‘unto honest and godly men’, some
medieval visions of saints might themselves have been authentic
instances of the intervention of seraphic beings.30 A passing comment in John Deacon and John Walker’s Dialogicall Discourses
(1601) also hints at the reluctance of most late sixteenth- and
early seventeenth-century Protestants to state that angelic apparitions were wholly extinguished: ‘good angels doe sometimes
assume to themselves essential bodies . . . by the provident
power and appointment of God’.31 A tiny sliver of space thus
remained within Reformed theology for visual manifestations of
these celestial creatures. Nevertheless, the proviso that angels
might still appear to the naked eye was essentially a technicality:
it was heavily overshadowed by the assertion that early modern
Christians should no longer expect to be guided or assisted by
heavenly visions.
29
Richard Greenham, Workes, 3rd edn, ed. H[enry] H[olland] (London, 1601,
STC 12315), 3; Kenneth L. Parker and Eric J. Carlson, ‘Practical Divinity’: The
Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot, 1998), 217.
30
Lewes Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght (1572), ed. J. Dover
Wilson and May Yardley (Oxford, 1929), 159–62, quotation at p. 161.
31
John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels
(London, 1601, STC 6439), 105–6.
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II
In this environment, the persistence in Protestant discourse of
reports of angelic appearances seems more than a little anomalous. Stories of sightings of these heavenly messengers are not only
to be found in the ephemeral cheap print of the period. They were
also incorporated into anthologies compiled by learned Protestant divines like Stephen Batman, Simon Goulart, Thomas Beard
and Samuel Clarke, who were intent upon recording the interventions of divine providence for the edification of posterity. Such
examples do not, it is true, leap from the page: by comparison
with tales of divine punishment and diabolical malice they are
sporadic and unusual. Their quality and origin is also variable.
Some were imported from Catholic countries on the Continent
and edited only imperfectly as they crossed into Protestant territories; others were collected from local and indigenous sources.
It is misguided to try to disentangle ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in these
accounts. Neither the doubts about their veracity sometimes expressed by their own reporters and publishers, nor the difficulty
of determining whether they were read as literal truths or titillating curiosities, detract from their capacity to yield insight into
the nature of contemporary perception. We should resist the
temptation to explain them away scientifically or dismiss them
as personal or collective delusions for similar reasons. The content of the early modern imagination is a no less legitimate and
interesting quarry than whatever we may choose to label ‘reality’.
Misapprehension and fantasy are themselves culturally constructed. Nor does it matter that many stories which have survived are several steps removed from the original experiences
from which they emerged. The distorting filters of emotion,
memory and ideology through which they were sieved are extremely revealing.
These tales of angels appearing to human beings can be divided
into five categories. The first consists of aerial apparitions of avenging angels witnessed by towns, villages, neighbourhoods and
smaller groups of people. These featured frequently in early
modern accounts of spectral phenomena, alongside clashing
armies, bloody suns, cannons, spears and deformed creatures.
Linked with moments of military crisis, religious strife and political conflict, most were interpreted as the precursors of war and
1. An avenging angel and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, sighted in the sky above Flanders, 1598: True Newes from Mecare and Also out of
Worcestershire (London, [1598], STC 17764). By permission of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn. 7.59.84.
Please note that this image cannot be reproduced due to restrictions from the rights holder and
will be displayed in print only.
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signs of divine wrath against sin.32 Thus in Lutheran Württemberg in 1562 an angel of God appeared warning thousands of
onlookers to abstain from godless behaviour or face severe punishment; at Gneissen in Poland in 1571 a winged seraph accompanied a vision of fighting cavalry; two years later several such
messengers were seen near Riga in conjunction with a triple sun,
rainbow and images of swords and scourges.33 News of these
‘sermons in the sky’ reached the British Isles with surprising
speed. A pamphlet dated 1598 described how the four horsemen
of the Apocalypse had hovered over various towns in Flanders,
together with a sword-wielding angel which wept grievously as a
‘sodain token’ of the Lord’s ‘heavy displeasure’ against the oppression of the southern Netherlands by the ‘Pharao of Spaine’.
This was prefaced by a crude, recycled woodcut from which other
images that were anathema to Protestant iconophobes have been
hastily removed (see Plate 1).34 Good Newes to Christendome
(1620) printed a letter from an Italian merchant in Alexandria
about an Arabian apparition of an angel surrounded by rays of
light and bearing a Bible, which was regarded as a portent of
the conquest and mass conversion of the Ottoman Turks
(see Plate 2).35
England’s own troubles in the mid seventeenth century engendered some no less ominous incidents involving angels. At
Aldeburgh in Suffolk in August 1642, for instance, people were
astonished by ‘an uncouth noise of war’ (beating drums, firing
muskets and discharging ordnance) followed by melodious music
played on various instruments and bell-ringing as if in triumph of
a signal victory.36 Interestingly, the iconographical ‘emblem’ of
the event John Vicars incorporated in his compilation of this and
32
See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Sermons in the Sky: Apparitions in Early Modern
Europe’, History Today, li (Apr. 2001).
33
Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2003), 154; Walter L. Strauss, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1550–1600: A
Pictorial Catalogue, 3 vols. (New York, 1975), ii, 766, 570. See also Dorothy Alexander with Walter L. Strauss, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1600–1700: A Pictorial
Catalogue, 2 vols. (New York, 1977), i, 337; ii, 442, 712.
34
True Newes from Mecare and Also out of Worcestershire (London, [1598], STC
17764), sigs. A1v–A3r.
35
Good Newes to Christendome: Sent to a Venetian in Ligorne, from a Merchant in
Alexandria (London, 1620, STC 5796.2).
36
A Signe from Heaven: or, A Fearefull and Terrible Noise Heard in the Ayre at Alborow
in the County of Suffolk (London, 1642); J[ohn] V[icars], Prodigies & Apparitions: or,
Englands Warning Pieces (London, [1643]), quotation at p. 51.
2. An apparition of an angel in Arabia, 1620: Good Newes to Christendome: Sent to a
Venetian in Ligorne, from a Merchant in Alexandria (London, 1620, STC 5796.2), title
page. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Shelfmark STC 5796.2.
INVISIBLE HELPERS
91
other ‘warning pieces’ depicted an orchestra of angels perched on
a bolster of cloud: this was not a ‘representation’ of what local
people had seen so much as an attempt to give visual shape to what
they had heard (see Plate 3).37 During the Commonwealth apparitions observed in the air between Madeley and Whitmore in
Cheshire by a godly lady and her maid included two armies in
battle array and birds with sanguine-coloured feathers, faces like
owls with humanoid features, and ‘wings such as an Angel is usually portraicted with’. In the account written up by the local minister, William Radmore, the precise meaning of this strange vision
remains shrouded in mystery, but it is clear that eyewitnesses
believed they had been visited by celestial creatures.38 In all
these cases, angels appeared to give advance warning of catastrophe and judgement.
The second category comprises cases in which angels deliver
a sentence against flagrant sinners. A widely circulated ballad
entitled Strange News from Westmoreland dating from the second
half of the seventeenth century, for example, relates how Gabriel
Harding killed his wife after coming home in a drunken stupor
and then publicly denied his vicious deed. But the murder and
perjury he had committed caught up with him when a stranger
knocked at the door: clothed in bright green and with crimson-red
cheeks, this was a man of ‘such comely grace’ that the hearts of
those present ‘were all a ravished / With the sweet complexion of
his face’. Declaring that there was no need to send for a coroner,
since he himself would act as both ‘Judge and Jury’, he confronted
the husband with his terrible offences and then summoned the
devil to put him to death by breaking his neck. The drama over,
the sound of sweet music was heard in the room, soon after which
the ‘gallant man in green’ took his leave. Those who beheld this
‘mighty wonder’ returned home convinced that an envoy from
heaven had been within their midst.39 Here we see an angel in the
role of the dispenser of divine justice, disclosing hidden crimes
37
V[icars], Prodigies & Apparitions, 49–56.
Wi[lliam] Radmore, Wonderful News, from the North: Being a True and Perfect
Relation, of Severall Strange and Wonderful Apparitions Seen in the Ayr, between Madely
and Whitmore, in the County Palatine of Chester (London, 1651), 5.
39
Strange News from Westmoreland: Being a True Relation of One Gabriel Harding, who
Coming Home Drunk, Struck his Wife a Blow on the Breast and Killed Her Out Right
(London, [1663?]).
38
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PAST AND PRESENT
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and handing over the transgressor to Satan, who is given special
permission to act as his executioner.
In the third genre of stories celestial figures manifest themselves
to obscure individuals and entrust them with the task of admonishing their wicked communities. Jürgen Beyer has collected
more than two hundred cases of such incidents from Lutheran
Germany and Scandinavia, in which seers see visions of angels
dressed in white robes or sometimes old men with doves perched
on their shoulders. Typically the percipients are encouraged to
inform their pastors of impending punishments or to preach repentance themselves.40 In 1648 a pious vintner by the name of
Hans Keil claimed that an angel had appeared while he was at
work, inveighed against swearing, cursing, covetousness and
pride, told him to tell the duke of Württemberg that God was
aggrieved, and cut six vines with a pruning knife. The blood
that flowed from them was a visible token of the catastrophes
that Keil was to declare would soon ensue. Keil subsequently
confessed to having fabricated the tale, but the character and
content of his fake vision closely matched those experienced by
other popular prophets who became the subject of contemporary
pamphlets and broadsides. An avid consumer of news about wonders and signs, he had quite consciously modelled it on the case of
a gardener who had been greeted by an angel and charged with
denouncing the impiety of the German people.41 Incidents of this
kind seem to have been rarer in Calvinist England, but those that
were recorded exhibit similarities with the Lutheran pattern. In
1662, for instance, the Yorkshire parson James Wise had a strange
encounter with an angel on his way to visit a friend. A vision appeared to him several times by the roadside, ‘as dazeling to
behold, as impossible to express’, touched him with a white
wand and informed him that he had been chosen to foresee
40
Jürgen Beyer, ‘A Lübeck Prophet in Local and Lutheran Context’, in Bob
Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds.), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe,
1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996); Jürgen Beyer, ‘On the Transformation of Apparition
Stories in Scandinavia and Germany, c.1350–1700’, Folklore, cx (1999). For a Dutch
example dating from 1622, see Willem Frijhoff, ‘Identity Achievement, Education
and Social Legitimation in Early Modern Dutch Society: The Case of Evert Willemsz
(1622–1623)’, in his Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History
(Hilversum, 2002).
41
David Warren Sabean, ‘A Prophet in the Thirty Years’ War: Penance as a Social
Metaphor’, in his Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early
Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984); Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005), 147–9.
3. Angelic music heard at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, August 1642: J[ohn] V[icars],
Prodigies & Apparitions: or, Englands Warning Pieces (London, [1643]).
By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Shelfmark 154-117q.
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PAST AND PRESENT
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events undisclosed to other men. The creature gently brushed
him with its silver wings before departing, after which he heard
a voice commanding him to declare a prophecy about the defeat
of the Presbyterian rebels who resisted the restoration of King
Charles II, together with earthquakes, plagues and periods of
dearth. Published at a juncture of political and ecclesiastical uncertainty and rupture, Wise’s revelations were printed ‘for the
better settlement of many discontented spirits in this Kingdom’.42 Sightings of this kind were also connected with radical
sectarians in the 1640s and 1650s. The Fifth Monarchist and
prophetess Anna Trapnel saw visions of a bright white creature
in the course of many millenarian trances that foretold the downfall of priests, lawyers and landlords, and the Cromwellian
regime.43 The angel with which the Boehmenist Samuel Pordage
had conversations was literally his mirror image and double,
dressed, disconcertingly, in his own clothes.44 The ecstatic spirituality of ‘enthusiasts’ like the Ranters and Muggletonians was
especially conducive to encounters with angels, which tested the
boundaries between dreams and waking experiences and between the body and soul.45
In the fourth category of occurrences, angels are agents of benevolent deliverance. The most famous case of this kind which
circulated in Protestant circles was that of the early German reformer Simon Grynaeus, who was saved from arrest by his
Catholic enemies in Speyer by the timely intervention of ‘a certaine grave man of a venerable countenance and habit’, who,
before vanishing mysteriously, recommended he flee beyond
the jurisdiction of the bishop of Vienna. Reported by his companion Philipp Melanchthon, this subsequently entered into
the annals of Reformed folklore.46 The persecution to which
42
Two Most Strange Wonders: The One Is a True Relation of an Angel Appearing to Mr
James Wise Minister in York-shire . . . (London, 1662), 6.
43
Anna Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints (London, 1654), 14. See also Nigel Smith,
Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660
(Oxford, 1989), 45–53.
44
See Joad Raymond, ‘Conversations with Angels: The Pordages and the Angelical
World in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels;
M. Brod, ‘A Radical Network in the English Revolution: John Pordage and his Circle,
1646–54’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cix (2004).
45
See Harvey, ‘Role of Angels in English Protestant Thought’, chs. 6–7; Smith,
Perfection Proclaimed, 209, 213, 217, 221, 249, 273.
46
Philipp Melanchthon, Corpus Reformatorum, ed. K. G. Bretschneider, xiii (Halle,
1846), 906–7; Stephen Batman, The Doome Warning All Men to the Judgemente
(cont. on p. 95)
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95
English Protestants were subjected in the 1550s also provided a
context for angelic interventions. Robert Samuel, a godly minister who was chained to a post in his prison cell by the order of
Bishop Edmund Bonner during the reign of Mary I, saw a figure
‘clad all in white’ standing before him in his sleep telling him that
he would neither hunger nor thirst.47 In a similar way, centuries
before, a celestial youth had wiped away the sweat shed by the
early Christian martyr Theodorus while he was tortured.48 Also
enrolled in the pages of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments was
the story of Thomas Rede of Lewes, who was stiffened in his
determination to stand fast to the truth by ‘a company of talle
younge men in white, very pleasaunt to behold’.49 Incarcerated in
Bonner’s coalhouse in London, the half-slumbering Cuthbert
Simpson heard someone come into his chamber and glimpsed
‘a brightnes, and lyghte most comfortable and joyfull to his
hart’.50
The theme of the consolation and preservation of the innocent
can also be discerned in stories in which people are miraculously
snatched to safety in the midst of a calamity.51 A boy caught in a
blizzard is discovered alive and well three days later having been
fed by an unknown man who brought him bread and cheese; a
newborn infant in a cradle is carried out of danger after a ‘fearefull
indundation of waters’ in Thuringia by angelic intervention; children trapped in a house that collapsed during a tempest are found
fast asleep or sitting cheerfully on pieces of timber in ‘a visible
(n. 46 cont.)
(London, 1581, STC 1582), 422; Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Judgements
(1597), 3rd edn (London, 1631, STC 1661.5), 588; Simon Goulart, Admirable and
Memorable Histories Containing the Wonders of our Time, trans. Edward Grimeston
(London, 1607, STC 12135), 148–50; Isaac Ambrose, Ministration of, and
Communion with, Angels (1661), in The Compleat Works (London, 1674), 133–4;
William Turner, A Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, both of
Judgment and Mercy, which Have Hapned in This Present Age (London, [1697]), 1st
pagination, 13.
47
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1576, STC 11224), 1609. Repeated
in Ambrose, Ministration of, and Communion with, Angels, 134–5.
48
Cited by Samuel Clarke, A Mirrour or Looking-Glasse both for Saints, and Sinners,
Held Forth in Some Thousands of Examples, 3rd edn (London, 1657), 19; and by
Ambrose, Ministration of, and Communion with, Angels, 137.
49
Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1576 edn), 1896.
50
Ibid. (1563 edn, STC 11222), 1751; (1570 edn, STC 11223), 2230; (1583 edn,
STC 11225), 2033.
51
Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Miracles within Catastrophes: Some Examples from Early
Modern Germany’, in Cooper and Gregory (eds.), Signs, Wonders, Miracles.
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signe of Gods protection by his holy Angels’.52 Other tales are
reminiscent of the biblical matron Hagar, including the case of
the Reverend Teate and his family, who fled for their lives during
the Irish rebellion of 1641. Lost in a winter landscape without
food or drink, Teate’s wife and her suckling child lay down to die,
only to find a bottle of milk on the brow of a bank nearby, ‘no
footsteps appearing in the snow of any that should bring it
thither’.53 This too was regarded as the work of an angel,
though here the creature was not actually seen by the grateful
recipients of its merciful aid.
The prominence of children in these cases reminds us that it
was widely believed that God appointed angels to guard those of
tender years. The puritan minister Ralph Josselin attributed the
safe deliverance of his daughter Mary after being struck by the
hooves of a horse to the fact that God deputed these heavenly
creatures ‘to keep his from hurt’, and the same assumption underpinned Alice Thornton’s account of the accidents her offspring
had survived in the course of their childhoods.54 Again, though,
neither made mention of having actually observed these celestial
benefactors in action. One last theme deserves attention under
this heading: the evolving idea that angels made strenuous efforts
to protect and guide the elect in general and godly ministers in
particular. William Perkins cited instances of preachers and pastors who had escaped plots and dangers in ‘profane and popish
places’, and the early eighteenth-century Scottish ecclesiastical
historian Robert Wodrow recorded that the Presbyterian Samuel
Rutherford had been rescued from drowning in a well at the age of
four by ‘a bonny young man’, who his parents were convinced was
an angel.55
In the last group of stories angels assume a medical vocation.
The alter ego of their role as destroying angels who inflicted
52
Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, 587–8, 589, 591. For other examples, see
Goulart, Admirable and Memorable Histories, 147–8.
53
Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (London, 1691), 159–60. On
this story and its transmutation over time, see Raymond Gillespie, ‘Imagining Angels
in Early Modern Ireland’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds.), Angels in the Early Modern
World, 225–32.
54
The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Oxford, 1976), 23–
4; The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, of East Newton, Co. York, ed. Charles
Jackson (Surtees Soc., lxii, Durham, 1875), 3–4.
55
Perkins, Workes, iii, 452–4; Robert Wodrow, Analecta: or, Materials for a History of
Remarkable Providences. Mostly Relating to Scotch Ministers and Christians, [ed.
Matthew Leishman], 4 vols. ([Edinburgh], 1842–3), iii, 88–9.
INVISIBLE HELPERS
97
plague (according to some leaving a blue handprint on the skin of
their victims),56 the cure of illness was widely recognized as an
area in which they had special expertise. This belief had impeccable biblical roots: in the Apocrypha the Archangel Raphael restores the ageing Tobit to health and in St John’s Gospel an angel
stirs the miraculous healing waters of the Pool of Bethesda.57 The
title page of James Primrose’s Popular Errours: or, The Errours of
the People in Matter of Physick (1651) enshrines iconographically
the notion that they had a particular responsibility to look after
the sick, showing an angel holding back an unqualified female
practitioner from meddling with a patient and guiding the hand
of an educated doctor (see Plate 4).58 A news pamphlet about the
lifelong cripple Elisabeth Goossens Taets from a village near
Utrecht told how she recovered her health in 1619 after a brilliant
light illuminated her chamber and a young man in a long white
robe appeared by her bed and said ‘Arise in the name of God’.59
The pattern was replicated later in the century in another
Dutch case in which a golden-haired youth came to Jesch Claes
of Amsterdam and miraculously imbued her with the strength to
stand for the first time in fourteen years.60 Closely akin is the story
of ‘the good angel of Stamford’, an incident dating from 1659
in which a bedridden Lincolnshire shoemaker called Samuel
Wallace received an unexpected knock on the door by a stranger,
whom he politely invited to come in for a cup of small beer.
Perceiving his host was unwell, the visitor proceeded to give
him a detailed prescription for a herbal remedy for his consumption, which had a wondrous effect when duly prepared and
applied. Unseen by his neighbours, the tall, dignified figure had
curly white hair and a beard, wore a fashionable hat, purple coat
and hose, and had hands as unsullied as snow. Too poor to be able
56
Henoch Clapham, An Epistle Discoursing upon the Present Pestilence, 2nd edn
(London, 1603, STC 5339), sig. B1v. On Clapham, whose views were somewhat
unorthodox, see Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, 159–62. For other
connections between the plague and angels, see Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in
Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1990), 26, 41, 236, 243, 247, 253.
57
Tobit 11:7–17; John 5:2–4.
58
James Primrose, Popular Errours: or, The Errours of the People in Matter of Physick,
trans. Robert Wittie (London, 1651), title page.
59
Two Remarkable and True Histories, which Hapned This Present Yeare, 1619: The One
Relating How God Most Miraculously Restored to Health Elizabeth Goossens Taets . . .
(London, 1620, STC 13525), sigs. A4v–B2r.
60
Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning
Witches and Apparitions (London, 1681), 251–4.
4. An angel holds back an unlicensed practitioner as guardian of the sick: James
Primrose, Popular Errours: or, The Errours of the People in Matter of Physick, trans. Robert
Wittie (London, 1651), from the title page. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare
Library. Shelfmark P3476.
INVISIBLE HELPERS
99
to pay for the services of a normal physician, local ministers concluded that God had sent an angel to care for this pious artisan.61
Ever present at the deathbed,62 angels also had remarkable
powers of resuscitation. Wrongly hanged for theft in 1605, John
Johnson of Antwerp was said to have been preserved from strangulation by an angel who placed an invisible stool beneath his feet
on the gallows and fed him for the space of five days (see
Plate 5).63 This finds a parallel in the case of the servant Anne
Green who was unjustly condemned to death for infanticide at
Oxford in December 1650. Taken down from the scaffold and
carried away for dissection by the university physician, she was
discovered to be alive by the surgeons and fully revived. Some
accounts of her resurrection mentioned that in the course of her
near-death experience she had seen four little boys with wings in
‘a Garden of Paradice’, who cried ‘Woe unto them that decree
unrighteous Decrees’. Other writers omitted all reference to the
quartet of cherubs and the celestial music she was said to have
heard, which were probably fallacious embellishments. Their insertion nevertheless attests to the contemporary assumption that
such visions were likely to occur in the liminal moments between
life and death.64
61
The Good Angel of Stamford: or, An Extraordinary Cure of an Extraordinary Consumption, in a True and Faithful Narrative of Samuel Wallas Recovered, by the Power of
God, and Prescription of an Angel (London, 1659).
62
See Peter Marshall, ‘Angels around the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in the
English Art of Dying’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds.), Angels in the Early Modern
World.
63
A True Relation of Gods Wonderfull Mercies, in Preserving One Alive, which Hanged
Five Dayes, who Was Falsely Accused (London, [1605?], STC 14668).
64
Quotations from A Declaration from Oxford, of Anne Green (London, 1651), 4;
[Richard Watkins], Newes from the Dead: or, A True and Exact Narration of the
Miraculous Deliverance of Anne Greene (Oxford, 1651), 10. Other accounts also
make no mention of angels or express scepticism about the visions: see [W. Burdet],
A Wonder of Wonders (London, 1651); Mercurius Politicus, in Making the News: An
Anthology of Newsbooks of Revolutionary England, 1641–1660, ed. Joad Raymond
(Moreton-in-Marsh, 1993), 170–3, 182–4. On the relationship between the various
pamphlets, see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain
(Cambridge, 2003), 113–15. For the complex medical and political context of this
episode, see Scott Mandelbrote, ‘William Petty and Anne Greene: Medical and
Political Reform in Commonwealth Oxford’, in Margaret Pelling and Scott
Mandelbrote (eds.), The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500–
2000: Essays for Charles Webster (Aldershot, 2005).
Please note that this image cannot be reproduced due to restrictions
from the rights holder and will be displayed in print only.
5. An angel preserves the life of an innocent man on the gallows: ATrue Relation of Gods
Wonderfull Mercies, in Preserving One Alive, which Hanged Five Dayes, who Was Falsely
Accused (London, [1605?], STC 14668), title page. ß The British Library Board.
Shelfmark C.143.b.19.
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III
Adopting both benevolent and punitive functions, angels were
creatures who performed a wide portfolio of roles and who
more than occasionally assumed palpable physical shapes in the
process. How are we to interpret this eclectic collection of apparitions and interventions? How can they be squared with a theological climate that was extremely hostile to the idea that angels
still manifested themselves visibly to human beings?
One solution is to interpret them as evidence of the defiant
survival and stubborn vitality of traditional patterns of piety
frowned upon by the Protestant authorities. This derives strength
from the striking continuities that can be observed between
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stories of angelic apparition and tales that filled the pages of the hagiographical and
homiletic literature of the late Middle Ages, such as Jacobus de
Voragine’s Golden Legend and Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles. Anticipating the deliverance of John Johnson of
Antwerp, for instance, one exemplum from Caesarius’ text tells
how an angel supports an innocent girl on the gibbet so that the
noose does not twist round her neck and refreshes her with ‘the
wonderful sweet fragrance of his presence’.65 The visual appearance of angels also closely resembles that of their medieval forebears: dressed in white, bearing powerful wings, and surrounded
by haloes, these sublimely beautiful, androgynous creatures highlight the tenacity of a visual stereotype that emerged as early as the
fifth century AD.66 The ease with which foreign Catholic reports of
angelic apparitions seeped into English discourse might also be seen
as a symptom of the resilience of a religious culture upon which
Reformed theology left no more than a superficial imprint.
There is, on the face of it, much to recommend Bob Scribner’s
suggestion that such phenomena reveal the limits of the
Protestant quest to transform collective mentalities, and demonstrate that often ‘official belief could do no more than exercise a
65
Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and
C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols. (London, 1929), i, 51–7; Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden
Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1993).
66
On the iconography of angels, see S. G. F. Brandon, ‘Angels: The History of an
Idea’, History Today, xiii (Oct. 1963); Allison Coudert, ‘Angels’, in Mircea Eliade and
Charles J. Adams (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vols. (New York and London,
1987), i, 285.
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passive tolerance of what it could not eradicate’.67 This is implicit
in Jürgen Beyer’s studies of the celestial messengers that appeared
to Lutheran seers and of the processes of metamorphosis that
enabled the medieval paradigm of the living prophet and visionary to outface the Reformation. Angels may have superseded the
Virgin Mary and other heavenly patrons in these inherited narratives but many residues of their pre-Reformation origins remained.68 The same idea underpins Bruce Gordon’s persuasive
discussion of the way in which angels supplanted departed souls
after the Protestant denial of the doctrine of purgatory rendered
their return to the world of the living an impossibility. Consciously and unconsciously, Swiss reformers ‘incorporated aspects of medieval death culture into their own theological
perspective’ in a manner that sustained, even as it recast, older
assumptions about the role of revenants. The amalgam that resulted from the pastoral accommodations made by the clergy was
‘a marriage which was not without its contradictions’, and which
revealed just how far sixteenth-century Protestants ‘still occupied
the houses of their fathers’.69 Diarmaid MacCulloch has likewise
found a thesis of clever substitution compelling. He has emphasized how easily angels ‘could step into the shoes of the evicted
Catholic saints as ideologically appropriate friends of humanity’,
in a reversal of the earlier ‘drift in Christian sensibility’ traced by
Peter Brown, whereby they were displaced as the cult of the hallowed dead emerged and gathered momentum in the late fourth
century.70
Some of the cases described above certainly invite this kind of
analysis. It should not pass notice, for example, that the topos of
the ‘hanged man saved’ had long been employed to emphasize the
intercessory powers of the saints. In medieval miracle tales it was
67
Bob Scribner, ‘Introduction’, in Scribner and Johnson (eds.), Popular Religion in
Germany and Central Europe, 10.
68
Beyer, ‘Lübeck Prophet in Local and Lutheran Context’; Beyer, ‘On the
Transformation of Apparition Stories in Scandinavia and Germany’. For Catholic
apparition stories, see William A. Christian Jr, Apparitions in Late Medieval and
Renaissance Spain (Princeton, 1981).
69
Bruce Gordon, ‘Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and
Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation’, in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall
(eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), 94, 108.
70
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700
(London, 2003), 581; Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin
Christianity (Chicago, 1981), 50–5, 61.
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conventionally the Virgin, St James and other popular patrons
who assumed the role of saving criminals from their fate. Their
replacement by angels in the early modern versions I have discussed is suggestive of how they helped to fill the vacuum left by
Protestantism’s purge of ‘popish’ superstition and idolatry, and
of how a favourite story about supernatural intervention was
successfully rehabilitated in a Reformed guise.71 Yet while this
approach greatly helps to illuminate the ways in which people
absorbed the series of disruptive changes brought by the Reformation, it may simultaneously carry some conceptual dangers. To
interpret angelic apparitions as evidence of a species of dissimulation by which ingrained beliefs and practices were reproduced
in an ingeniously camouflaged form may be to assume the superior vitality of Catholicism as a popular faith.72 It may also be to
perpetuate a rather functionalist view of religion as a means of
fulfilling social and psychological needs that could not be resolved
by the limited technology at the disposal of medieval and early
modern communities. Peter Marshall’s comments about the
potential perils of pursuing the question of what beliefs were for at
the expense of what they were like deserve attention here.73 Even
as we underline the continuities with medieval piety that may have
facilitated the transition to an alien theology, we must be careful to
avoid reinforcing the impression that Protestantism achieved little
more than a hollow victory. Emphasizing the concessions which
Reformed ministers made to the ‘weaker brethren’ corrects the
tendency to stress conflict over co-operation or collaboration as
the keynote of relations between the clergy and laity.74 However, it
may itself run the risk of perpetuating a negative view of the impact
of the Reformation on English society, as well as underestimating
the spiritual and psychological need of the clergy themselves for
tangible manifestations of the supernatural.
71
Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’, 295–9. See also Roger
Chartier, ‘The Hanged Woman Miraculously Saved: An occasionnel ’, in Roger
Chartier (ed.), The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge, 1989), on the transformations of this story in CounterReformation France.
72
This may also be implicit in C. Scott Dixon’s highly nuanced account of postReformation adaptations in Lutheran Germany: see his The Reformation and Rural
Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–1603 (Cambridge,
1996), esp. ch. 5.
73
Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 313–14.
74
See also Peter Marshall’s subtle reading of similar continuities in his ‘Angels
around the Deathbed’, esp. 103.
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This impression has inadvertently been fed by the recognition
that many stories of angelic apparition bear the traces of subtle or
heavy-handed editing by the educated pastors who recorded
them. There are certainly many episodes in which it is possible
to detect the hesitations of Reformed ministers about incidents
recounted to them and in which remembered events have patently
been reshaped to bring them into conformity with Protestant
theology and to suppress their more overtly Catholic elements.
One of the reasons why John Foxe declared that ‘he stood in
no litle doubt whether to report abrode or not’ the story of the
celestial apparition that comforted the soon-to-be martyred
Cuthbert Simpson was his concern that ‘the common error of
beleving rashe miracles, phantasied visions, dreames, and apparitions therby may be confirmed’. He anticipated that there were
those who would think it ‘more expediente . . . were the same to
be unsetforth’. Nor was he
ignorant that the papistes in their bokes & legends of saincts have their
prodigious visions and apparitions of angels, of our Ladi, of Christ, &
other saincts: which as I wil not admit to be beleved for true, so will
they aske me againe, why should I then more require these to bee credited
of them, then theires of us?
Not only was there the danger that he could be accused of hypocrisy for including it, but more significantly that it might be
misinterpreted by a populace that had yet to be completely
weaned from popery and convinced of the truth of the Gospel.75
No less telling is a narrative about the circumstances surrounding his own conception in 1561 which Sir William Wentworth
incorporated into his manuscript autobiography in 1607. This
related how during a desperate illness his father had opened his
eyes to find ‘a wellfavoured gentlwoman of a mydle age in apparell
and countenance decentt and verie demure’ by his bedside. She
took out of her pocket a box of ointment and then, although he
initially resisted ‘bashfullie’, proceeded to put her hand into the
bed and apply the salve to his ‘privities’. The ‘heavenlie spiritt’
also told him to travel to St Anne’s Well at Buxton and wash
himself in it, thanking the Lord for his delivery, and went on to
reveal ‘some perticuler prosperities of his house and posterity’.
Relating to events just two years after the Elizabethan settlement,
it looks as if a story that had once borne telling traces of traditional
75
Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563 edn), 1652. The passage is retained in the 1570
and 1583 editions.
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respect for the saints had been quietly amended over the course of
a generation. His father and mother may well have identified the
vision as St Anne herself (hence the encouragement to visit her
spring); by the early seventeenth century, however, such references would have seemed decidedly backward and embarrassing
to a godly gentleman.76 Memory had been transmuted to fit the
contours of a new theological environment.
It is possible, though, to interpret at least some episodes of
angelic intervention more optimistically: less as an index of the
resistance and failure of Protestantism than of its long-term success in altering popular outlooks. The extent to which Reformed
priorities are often interwoven into the very fibre of these narratives can be striking. For example, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury apparition stories often have a close affinity with biblical
prototypes like those involving Hagar and Tobit. Visual experience was instinctively filtered through the prism of Scripture. No
less revealing are the echoes they frequently carry of accounts of
the primitive persecutions of the Church, an era the reformers
revered as pure and uncorrupted by the dross introduced by the
later medieval papacy. Attention may also be directed to those
that reflect the awe in which godly preachers were held by the
Protestant laity, a trend indicative of the neo-clericalism that
grew increasingly pronounced as the Reformation became institutionalized. The visible forms in which angels appear in these
episodes do not simply show that people retained in their minds
old idols that had been whitewashed from the walls of their
churches. They were in keeping with the modified imagery that
was developing in a Protestant culture that it is no longer possible
to describe as wholly iconophobic. The feathery wings and mysterious owl-like faces of the hybrid creatures seen by the pious
lady and her servant in the incident in Cheshire in 1651, for instance, conform with a picture of Ezekiel’s vision of four cherubim which was incorporated in that bibliographical badge of
ardent Calvinists, the Geneva Bible. Justified on the grounds
76
Wentworth Papers, 1597–1628, ed. J. P. Cooper (Camden Soc., 4th ser., xii,
London, 1973), 28–9. See also Norman Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and
Cultural Adaptation (Oxford, 2002), 42. This is not to say that such scenarios did not
involve angels in the Middle Ages: see Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early
Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1991), 163, for a very similar case of a healing angel
recounted in Sulpicius Severus’ early fifth-century Life of Martin of Tours.
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that this and other passages were ‘so darke that by no description
thei colde be made easie to the simple reader’, this image illustrates the ambiguities that surrounded the representation of
angels, and, more especially, scripturally attested visions of
angels, in English Protestant thinking (see Plate 6).77 Excused
as allegorical emblems, the latter were free to infiltrate the imagination of the laity.
Furthermore, the corpus of colourful examples discussed earlier should not be allowed to eclipse those cases of supernatural
intercession from which corporeal or anthropomorphic manifestations of angels are conspicuous by their absence. They must be
set alongside an even larger number of stories in which these
creatures did not make their presence known to human beings
through the untrustworthy medium of sight. Some involve the
sense of hearing and touch instead: mysterious blows or pricks
to the skin or, as in the episode at Aldeburgh in 1642, melodious
sounds or disembodied voices. But many of the examples which
Batman, Goulart, Clarke and others collected bore out the theologians’ precept that angels were for the most part known only ‘by
the effect of their ministrie’.78 In the anecdotes of angelic intervention from Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire that Beard
incorporated in his Theatre of Gods Judgements, they remain studiously veiled from view when a woman and child escape being
crushed to death by a steeple which falls on their cottage and
when lightning strikes the oak tree under which a man shelters
during a storm.79 The ministering spirits which assist Reverend
Teate’s family in Ireland do not leave so much as the faintest impression of their presence in the snow. Nor is there any reference
to an apparition in the story of John Trelille, the Cornish cripple
cured by washing in St Madron’s well ‘upon three monitions in his
dream’, an incident personally investigated by Bishop Joseph Hall
in the 1640s and found to involve ‘neither art nor collusion, the
thing done, the Author invisible’. ‘Here hath been an Angell’,
he declared confidently, ‘though we saw him not’.80 The same
77
The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva, 1560, STC 2093), ‘To the Reader’, and fo.
333v. See Margaret Aston, ‘The Bishops’ Bible Illustrations’, in Diana Wood (ed.), The
Church and the Arts (Studies in Church Hist., xxviii, Oxford, 1992), 280–2. See also
Walsham, ‘Angels and Idols in England’s Long Reformation’.
78
See p. 86 above; Greenham, Workes, ed. Holland, 3.
79
Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, 590–1.
80
Hall, Great Mysterie of Godliness, 169–71. A Catholic account by Francis
Coventry [Christopher Davenport], in his Paralipomena philosophica de mundo
(cont. on p. 108)
6. The angelic vision of Ezekiel illustrated in the Geneva Bible: The Bible and Holy
Scriptures (Geneva, 1560, STC 2093), fo. 333v. By permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library. Shelfmark STC 2093.
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applied to the Scottish minister Mr James McDougal, who
miraculously evaded injury after falling from his horse in Paisley
high street onto the crown of his head: this ‘wonderfull step of
preservation’ could not be accounted for but by the ministry of
the ever-present but unseen heavenly patrons who constantly
watched over the elect.81 Most angels in early modern England
were elusive and retiring creatures who preferred to remain concealed in the shadows. They were indeed ‘invisible guardians’ and
‘helpers’. How far their reticence in these episodes was itself the
result of clerical repression and erasure remains unclear, but it
would be wrong to rule out the possibility that it attests to the
internalization of Protestant ideology by ordinary laypeople, and
to the ways in which over time the Reformation altered modes
of mental and visual perception. It modified the cultural lens
through which they viewed their world, correcting some distortions but simultaneously creating a new set of blind spots.
Ultimately it is vital to stress that angelic intervention was entirely compatible with Reformed providentialism, and to emphasize once more the escape clause which the theologians built into
their theory that visible apparitions of angels had ceased more
than a millennium before. When confronted by the messy realities
of belief as it manifested itself outside their textbooks, Protestants
were obliged to carve out a place for the possibility that instances
of the appearance of these celestial creatures that came to their
ears might just be phenomena that did indeed come from God.
The trouble was it was equally, indeed even more, probable that
they were of satanic origin. And it is to the uncertain status of
visions and the frictions and tensions they engendered in postReformation society that we must turn in the next section.
IV
One of the most important lessons to have emerged from Stuart
Clark’s pioneering work on the ‘Reformation of the eyes’ and
the ‘de-rationalisation of vision’ in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Europe is the insight that Protestants were not sceptical
(n. 80 cont.)
peripatetico (Antwerp, 1652), 68–9, predictably places more emphasis on the fact that
the place was sacred to St Madern (Madron).
81
Wodrow, Analecta, [ed. Leishman], i, 57.
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about the reality of apparitions per se; rather they were deeply
suspicious of what exactly they were seeing and experiencing. The
difficulty of distinguishing between divine and diabolical illusions
and separating out those that were simply the side effects of disease and illness was acute. This was a context in which the boundaries between nature and supernature were both porous and fluid
as a consequence of increasingly sophisticated philosophical and
empirical scrutiny. A clear trend is nevertheless evident:
‘Protestants continued to pay lip service to the possibility that
apparitions might be of good angels but, in effect, they had narrowed spectral visual phenomena almost entirely to the realm of
the demonic’.82
The ‘discernment of spirits’ was a problem that had long
troubled medieval churchmen. Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264)
had addressed the question in the thirteenth century; in the fifteenth, as Nancy Caciola, Dyan Elliott, Moshe Sluhovsky and
others have shown, apprehension about the source of revelations
vouchsafed to the laity reached a peak of intensity against the
backdrop of the Great Schism and Babylonian Captivity of the
papacy, and the rise of mystical spiritualities. Pierre d’Ailly,
Henry of Langstein and Jean Gerson all concerned themselves
with providing guidance about how to differentiate divine from
demonic possession and angelic communication from satanic delusion. Gerson wrote several treatises on the subject, the most
famous of which, On the Proving of Spirits, was composed to challenge the recent canonization of St Bridget of Sweden and presented to the fathers of the Council of Constance in 1415.83 The
Tridentine Church was, if anything, more preoccupied with the
issue, and cases of aspiring saints who claimed to have been
privileged with apparitions of angels litter the records of the
Venetian, Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. Jeanne des Anges,
superior of the Ursuline convent at Loudon in the 1630s, for
instance, had regular interaction with a guardian angel who provided her with intimate advice on matters of faith.84 In Italy
82
Stuart Clark, ‘The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century Europe’, Jl Religious Hist., xxvii (2003), 155; and see Clark,
Vanities of the Eye, esp. ch. 6.
83
Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca and London, 2003); Dyan Elliott, ‘Seeing Double: John Gerson, the
Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc’, Amer. Hist. Rev., cvii (2002).
84
Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London
and New York, 2004), 135–6, 139–43. See also Ottavia Niccoli, ‘The End of
(cont. on p. 110)
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Cecilia Ferrazzi, whose determination to pursue a religious vocation was thwarted by the Holy Office, also experienced angelic
visits, as did the tertiary Suor Giglia di Fino to whom a benevolent
spirit brought miraculous relics and a ‘celestial liquor’ to nurture
her soul. In Spain many similar self-professed beatas came under
investigation in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the ecstasies of English nuns in religious houses in the
Low Countries likewise attracted the suspicion of their male confessors.85 Only occasionally were the visions seen by such women
accepted as heavenly emanations; far more frequently they were
attributed to human weakness or artifice or the malice of the devil.
Their raptures were dismissed as feigned and they themselves
denounced as spiritual impostors acting with or without the collusion of Lucifer. The line between those who were the unwitting
victims of his wiles and those who acted in conscious alliance with
him as witches was very fine indeed.
The intertwined strands of misogyny and resentment of lay
pretension apparent in much of the discourse surrounding
these Catholic visionaries find a close echo within the Protestant
camp. To assert that one had been selected as the recipient of an
angelic apparition and as an emissary of divine messages was to
offer a tacit challenge to clerical authority. The claim to have had
direct communication with supernatural beings gave individuals
a spiritual charisma that conflicted with a settled ecclesiastical
and social hierarchy in which the laity owed deference to ministers, women to men, servants to masters, and children to their
parents. It provided humble people with an opportunity to make
(n. 84 cont.)
Prophecy’, Jl Mod. Hist., lxi (1989); Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit:
Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago and
London, 2007).
85
Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and
Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore, 2001), 13–15, and see 51–2,
67, 89–90, 162, 193–4, for other examples; Cecilia Ferrazzi, Autobiography of an
Aspiring Saint, ed. and trans. Anne Jacobson Schutte (Chicago, 1996); David
Gentilcore, ‘The Church, the Devil and Living Saints’, in his Healers and Healing in
Early Modern Italy (Manchester, 1998), 168–9; Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘Beatas and the
Inquisition in Early Modern Seville’, in Stephen Haliczer (ed.), Inquisition and Society
in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987), 147–68; Andrew W. Keitt, Inventing the
Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age
Spain (Leiden, 2005), esp. ch. 3; Walsham, ‘Catholic Reformation and the Cult of
Angels’.
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themselves heard in a world in which their inferior and subordinate status required them to remain silent. It facilitated what
Henry Mayr-Harting, writing of the Middle Ages, has called
‘the speaking of invidious truths’.86 Contact with angels gave a
divine imprimatur to the utterances of those who normally had no
right to comment on the manner in which they were governed.
Implicitly, it also represented a threat to the all-sufficiency of
Scripture. This explains why Protestant theologians typically insisted that the doctrinal ministry of angels was not, ‘ordinarily,
now to be expected’. As the late seventeenth-century Leicestershire rector Benjamin Camfield avowed, ‘God hath now thought
good to substitute other Legats for the publishing of his Mind and
Will to Men’. The Bible showed that it was not the place of
celestial creatures ‘to usurp the Ministerial Office in the Church
of Christ, but to preserve and countenance it in the hands of such,
as our Lord and Saviour hath appointed thereunto’. They had no
‘Sacred Mission or Function’ to take upon themselves the solemn
tasks of preaching and teaching, declared the Independent minister Christopher Ness.87 The tendency of writers like William
Perkins to compare angels with ministers (and conflate prophets
with preachers) emanated from the same desire to monopolize
the sources of extraordinary spiritual guidance in the hands of the
designated representatives of the institutional Church.88 Since
angels only occasionally revealed new doctrine to the living, anything unorthodox which came from their mouths (or those of
their human deputies) was a clear indicator that they were not
God’s ambassadors but cleverly disguised envoys of the devil. It
follows that angelic apparitions were most credible when they
were experienced by the clergy themselves or where the message
they conveyed to the laity accorded with official theological and
moral priorities. When they broke out of the mould of conservative exhortations against personal sins and ventured into the
region of politics or controversial tenets of dogma, they were
likely to be dismissed as deceptive impressions created by Satan
to bring the souls of the unwary to eternal destruction. Perkins
made this plain in the section on judging the marks of true and
86
Henry Mayr-Harting, Perceptions of Angels in History (Oxford, 1998), 8.
Benjamin Camfield, A Theological Discourse of Angels, and their Ministries
(London, 1678), 81–2; C[hristopher] N[ess], The Signs of the Times: or, Wonderful
Signs of Wonderful Times (London, 1681), 68.
88
Perkins, Workes, iii, 452–4.
87
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false prophets incorporated in his Fruitfull Dialogue Concerning the
End of the World. As well as ruling out those who were ‘rash’,
‘inconstant’, ‘babling’, or affected by ‘some disease which hindereth the reasonable part’ like ‘phrensie’, he peremptorily
rejected all revelations which contradicted the word of God,
maintained heresies, or promoted ‘disquietnesse in the Church
and Common-wealth’.89
This selective scepticism can be seen at work in particular examples. Lord Burghley was unimpressed by the pretensions of a
certain Miles Fry, who wrote to him in June 1587, calling himself
Emmanuel Plantagenet and claiming to be the son of God and
Queen Elizabeth I. He said that he had been taken from her at
birth by the Archangel Gabriel, whom he now exceeded in authority. His request to present to the monarch an ‘embassage’
from his Father in heaven was evidently declined, despite Fry’s
accompanying threat of providential punishment if he was turned
away from court. Burghley scribbled on the letter that its author
‘semes to be distempred in his wytts’, and filed it with a collection
of other correspondence from pious lunatics.90 The notorious
pseudo-messiah William Hacket and his accomplices Arthington
and Coppinger likewise believed themselves to be imbued with
angelic spirits, but their claims to divine inspiration were given
short shrift by the Elizabethan regime, which executed Hacket for
treason and denounced the threesome as agents of Satan; in this
case a verdict of insanity was deliberately avoided for political
reasons.91 The case of Elizabeth Freeman, a 31-year-old spinster
from Bishops Hatfield in Hertfordshire, who alleged she had seen
repeated visions of a woman in white in January 1681, is also
revealing. In the midst of the Exclusion Crisis, her insistence that
the spirit had disclosed details of a plot to poison Charles II could
hardly be ignored and she was initially taken seriously by the
authorities. The king himself questioned her at some length
before dismissing her, satisfied that she was merely a harmless
female crank with a colourful imagination. Christopher Ness,
however, thought the apparition was a providential sign of the
times, though on balance he inclined to the view that Freeman’s
89
William Perkins, A Fruitfull Dialogue Concerning the End of the World, in his Workes,
iii, 468. See also Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, 203–18.
90
British Library, London, Lansdowne MS 99, fo. 13r–v.
91
On this episode, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Frantick Hacket: Prophecy, Sorcery,
Insanity and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, Hist. Jl, xli (1998).
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vision was probably demonic rather than angelic in character.
Reiterating the precept that the ministry of angels to mankind was
now invisible, he commented that Satan often chose the weaker
sex (‘whose credulity is sooner imposed upon, and easilyer
abused’) to be the vassals of his dastardly plan to subvert the
world.92 By contrast the ‘strange predictions’ made by a man
from Catterick who saw a terrifying sword-wielding vision in
1648 were suspected by one learned gentleman whose amused
letter on the subject was printed as a satire on Cavalier culture to
have sprung from an ‘excesse of liquor’. The percipient (whose
‘veines [were] as full of wine, as his brain was empty of wit’) was
one of ‘a consort of Good-fellows’ who had engaged in an alcoholic binge. He anticipated that his experience would be put
down to his inebriated condition (‘the distempers of an unsettled
braine’), but he nevertheless described it in detail, convinced that
this was a supernatural visitation to admonish both him and the
town to mend their ways. Another witness might well have attributed the event to the devil, which the dissolute party probably
invoked as they drank their impious healths.93
Moreover, clerical opinion was itself often divided on how to
interpret such occurrences, as revealed by a strange incident near
Launceston in Cornwall dating from around 1600. When a
‘walking spirit’ donned in a smock frightened his serving maids
the master of the household Sir Thomas Wise initially put this
down to ‘some distemper or vaine fancy of a womanish feare’. But
after it appeared in his own chamber the following night and stood
at the end of the bed for half an hour he too was terrified. He
consulted the local archdeacon, who concluded that the spectre
was an ‘angelicall apparition’ rather than ‘a diabolicall illusion’ on
the grounds that it wore a white and shining raiment and had
inflicted no harm. However, when Wise later recounted the
92
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, September 1, 1680 to December 31, 1681, 151;
Richard Wilkinson, Strange News from Bishop-Hatfield in Hertford-shire, January the 25,
1680 (London, 1681); A True and Perfect Relation of Elizabeth Freeman of BishopsHatfield in the County of Hertford of a Strange and Wonderful Apparition which
Appeared to Her Several Times, and Commanded Her to Declare a Message to his Most
Sacred Majesty, January 27, 1680 (London, 1680); N[ess], Signs of the Times, 59–74,
quotation at p. 73.
93
Strange Predictions Related at Catericke in the North of England: By One who Saw a
Vision, and Told It Himself to the Company with whom He Was Drinking Healths; How He
Was Struck, and an Angel Appeared to Him with a Sword (London, 1648), 1–2 and
passim. He noted how the apparition had later assumed ‘a more cheerful and pleasing
presence’ (p. 6).
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story to the puritan divine Daniel Featley he was advised that it
was almost certainly ‘an evill spirit’, since ‘miraculous revelations’ from heavenly messengers had ceased. In any case it was
‘a thing unheard of’ for an angel to appear in the ‘perfect likeness’
of a woman. Featley encouraged him to examine his conscience,
give thanks for his deliverance, and ‘sinne no more lest a worse
thing befell him’.94 In other circumstances, or in the hands of a
hostile reporter, the elder Wentworth’s encounter with the healing angel who touched his genitals might likewise have been
interpreted as evidence of the devil’s determination to inflame
sexual temptation.95 Several German examples which found
their way into providential anthologies also highlight the ambiguity that surrounded such sightings. Neighbours and friends of a
poor woman visited by a personage in white that carried her to
strange places, and charged her with preaching vengeance to the
sinful populace, interrogated her closely about its identity: was it a
benevolent emissary from heaven or was it Lucifer pretending to
be an angel of light? On this occasion, the former interpretation
prevailed, in large part because the pastor of her village testified to
her ‘singular piety and humble devotion’, ‘adding that she was wel
instructed, and could yeeld very good reason for her religion’.96
On others, where the seer lacked unimpeachable godly credentials, a diabolical or medical explanation was more likely to triumph. When an angel appeared three times to a woman living
near Dürrmenz in Württemberg, for instance, it was decided that
she was either a dupe of Satan or suffering from some form of
mental disease.97 Sometimes the process of sifting and interpreting visual experiences went on inside the percipient’s own mind.
A Scotsman named Robert Dunlop who saw a great company of
people singing sweetly in the loft above his bed as he lay half awake
one August night in 1704 was tormented by fear that this might be
94
Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson MS D47, fos. 42v–43v; Marshall, Beliefs
and the Dead in Reformation England, 251–2. For another statement of the opinion that
angels invariably appeared in the guise of men, see ‘Randall Hutchins’ Of Specters (ca.
1593)’, ed. and trans. Virgil B. Heltzel and Clyde Murley, Huntington Lib. Quart., xi
(1947–8), 419.
95
See pp. 104–5 above.
96
Goulart, Admirable and Memorable Histories, 154–5.
97
R. W. Scribner, ‘Perceptions of the Sacred in Germany at the End of the Middle
Ages’, in his Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800), ed. Lyndal Roper (Leiden,
2001), 103. His comment ‘there was no longer any room for theophany here’ may
underestimate the complexities of Protestant thought.
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a demonic delusion. Troubled long afterwards by the strange apparition, like many early modern Protestants, he could not be
certain that his eyes were not deceiving him.98
The difficulties connected with the discernment of spirits in
Protestant England are also illuminated by reference to some of
the many episodes of alleged demonic possession reported in the
post-Reformation period. Noticing the paradox of possessions
which produced ‘revival sermons and angelic visions’ alongside
blasphemous utterances, Erik Midelfort has highlighted the ‘independent wilfulness and indocility of popular culture at certain
points’.99 David Harley has carried these insights further, emphasizing how frequently the diagnosis of invasion by demons represented a defeat for rival interpretations preferred by the afflicted.
It counteracted claims that their bizarre behaviour was the result
of the evil machinations of witches or, alternatively, derived from
divine inspiration. Spiritual charisma was displaced by stigma in a
strategy that disempowered the victims and undercut their conviction that they were the conduits of supernatural grace.100 In his
Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1629), Richard Bernard went on to
dismiss the possibility that angels and demons could coexist
within a single person, adding that only the latter used the
tricks of a sly ventriloquist.101 Patients and spectators struggled
to wrest control of the meaning of the puzzling and contradictory
symptoms of the possessed.
Faint but telling traces of these conflicting readings can be detected in various incidents. During his terrible fits in 1596, the
godly demoniac Thomas Darling, for example, shouted, ‘Looke
where greene Angels stand in the window’, and he also saw one as
a milky-white dove sent to comfort him.102 Almost a century later
98
Wodrow, Analecta [ed. Leishman], i, 53.
H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘The Devil and the German People: Reflections on the
Popularity of Demon Possession in Sixteenth-Century Germany’, in Steven Ozment
(ed.), Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation (Kirksville, 1989), 117.
100
David Harley, ‘Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of
Possession’, Amer. Hist. Rev., ci (1996). See also the comments of D. P. Walker,
Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth
and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1981), 16–17.
101
Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jury Men: Divided into Two Books (London,
1629, STC 1944), 67.
102
I.D., The Most Wonderfull and True Storie, of a Certaine Witch . . . As Also a True
Report of the Strange Torments of Thomas Darling (London, 1597, STC 6170.7), repr. in
Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England:
Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts (Cambridge, 2004), 157, 182, 184.
99
(cont. on p. 116)
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John Tonken had a vision of a woman dressed in blue, red, yellow
and green clothes who told him he would not be well until he had
vomited walnut shells, pins and nails.103 Her technicolor dreamcoat matches the exotic garments worn by several other celestial
creatures we have already encountered, while her kindly advice
recalls angelic physicians like the one that visited Samuel Wallace
in Stamford. The tug of war between different outcomes is even
more explicit in the case of Helen Fairfax, daughter of a pious
Yorkshire gentleman, who experienced a series of strange visions
in 1621: ‘a man of incomparable beauty’ attired in shining white
apparel from which streamed glorious beams of light appeared to
her. She challenged it to depart from her if it were an evil spirit,
but when it said that it had come to comfort her she was convinced. ‘With some difficulty’ she was persuaded away from this
opinion the following morning and the next time it manifested
itself she reproached it for deceiving her, whereupon it threatened
to kill her. ‘Presently she saw many horns begin to grow out of his
head’ and its countenance change ‘into a most terrible shape’.104
Equally striking is the story of Margaret Muschamp, an 11year-old girl from Northumberland whose ‘sad and grievous torments’ in the late 1640s were described in a pamphlet reputedly
penned by her mother. This confusing and fragmentary narrative has many layers, but one prominent thread is the touching
relationship the young girl developed with two apparitions she
believed to be angels. These were ‘bodyed like Birds, as big as
Turkies’ and had ‘faces like Christians, but the sweetest creatures
that ever eyes beheld’; at other times they assumed the likeness of
a partridge and dove. Her experiences began with a trance in
which she saw ‘a happy sight, and heard a blessed sound’, a
‘Heavenly Rapture’ which convinced Mr Huet, the local minister,
that she had been specially selected by God. Soon, though, she
descended into a more violent illness, during which she refused to
partake of any sustenance, saying that the Lord fed her with
(n. 102 cont.)
The Denham demoniac Richard Mainy, exorcized by the Jesuit William Weston, also
saw visions of angels in conjunction with Christ and Mary (ibid., 18).
103
A True Account of a Strange and Wonderful Relation of John Tonken, of Pensans in
Cornwall (London, 1686), 2.
104
William Grainge (ed.), Dæmonologia: A Discourse on Witchcraft as It Was Acted in
the Family of Mr. Edward Fairfax, of Fuyston, in the County of York, in the Year 1621
(Harrogate, 1882), 61–4.
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celestial food. She oscillated between desperate spasms and
moments of lucidity in which she recited psalms and spoke profoundly. The battle between good and evil inside her intensified,
and to her immense distress her angels, prevented from coming
to her by a wicked spirit, departed for the space of twelve
weeks. Gradually her sickness took on more typical demoniacal
symptoms, culminating in accusations of witchcraft against three
women, one of whom, a widow called Dorothy Swinow, was convicted in April 1650.105 The way in which Margaret Muschamp’s
good possession was diabolized reveals with unusual clarity the
multiple tensions which shaped the construction of such narratives. In most cases, we see only the much tidier end-product of
the prolonged tussles between and within lay and clerical minds
that surrounded angelic visions — tussles in which Protestant
anxiety about the devil’s hyperactivity in the last days often overwhelmed the small glimmer of hope that they might indeed be
benevolent creatures sent to guide and instruct them.
The assimilation of Margaret Muschamp’s encounter with
angels into a demonic framework may be compared with the insidious processes which transformed fairies into satanic familiars.
English and Scottish witch trials yield evidence of struggles over
the significance of experiences which the defendants believed
involved meetings with these capricious and morally ambivalent
spirits.106 Just as the physical forms in which both fairies and
familiars manifested themselves to human beings frequently converge, so too do they overlap with the guises in which angels are
reported to have appeared in this period. The colour of the clothes
these celestial creatures usually wear, green, was inextricably
linked with the fairy in folk tradition. These points of contact
are further cemented by the case of Ann Jeffries, a 19-year-old
105
Mary Moore, Wonderfull News from the North: or, A True Relation of the Sad and
Grievous Torments, Inflicted upon the Bodies of Three Children of Mr. G. Muschamp, Late of
the County of Northumberland, by Witchcraft (London, 1650), 12, 1–2, 3, 6. See Diane
Purkiss, ‘Invasions: Prophecy and Bewitchment in the Case of Margaret Muschamp’,
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, xvii (1998), for a psychoanalytical reading of this
episode. It is also discussed more briefly by David Harley, in his ‘Mental Illness,
Magical Medicine and the Devil in Northern England, 1650–1700’, in Roger
French and Andrew Wear (eds.), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, 1989), 127–8.
106
Emma Wilby, ‘The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England
and Scotland’, Folklore, cxi (2000); Purkiss, Troublesome Things, ch. 3; Henderson and
Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, esp. ch. 4. See also Thomas, Religion and the Decline of
Magic, 724–34.
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Cornishwoman who was thrown into fits when six small fairies
leapt over a hedge into the garden where she was knitting in 1645.
Forsaking food for six months, she claimed to have been fed by
these sprites with ethereal bread and was credited with performing marvellous cures with various salves and medicines she had
received from them.107 The similarities between this case and
several of the stories of angelic intervention investigated here
raise the intriguing possibility that some of the latter attest to
popular belief in a class of spirits which Protestantism sought to
eradicate as a ‘popish’ and ‘pagan’ hangover, but with which it
continued to coexist eclectically.108 Confronted by such experiences in the course of their pastoral ministry, many churchmen
instinctively dismissed them as hallucinations or delusions of the
devil, but at least some suspected that they might be emissaries
from heaven rather than hell.109
Distinguishing angels from ghosts was no less tricky. Reformed
repudiation of the notion that the souls of the dead could return to
haunt and instruct the living was accompanied by a concerted
campaign to redefine continued sightings of departed relatives
as diabolical illusions.110 But uncertainty about the status of
such spectres remained in some cases, not least because of their
visual similarities with traditional pictorial stereotypes of celestial
messengers. The ghost which appeared to Isabel Billington of
Great Driffield in Yorkshire in 1662, for instance, took the form
107
Moses Pitt, An Account of one Ann Jefferies, Now Living in the County of Cornwall,
who Was Fed for Six Months by a Small Sort of Airy People Call’d Fairies (London, 1696);
also printed in Turner, Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, 2nd pagination, 116–20. Turner included the case in a chapter on miraculous cures of diseases.
In addition, see Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries, xiii (1924), 312–14. She also
made prophetic pronouncements in defence of the abolished Book of Common
Prayer: see Peter Marshall, ‘Ann Jeffries and the Fairies: Folk Belief and the War on
Scepticism in Later Stuart England’, in Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (eds.),
The Everyday and the Extraordinary in Early Modern England: Essays in Celebration of the
Work of Bernard Capp (Basingstoke, 2010).
108
See Marshall, ‘Protestants and Fairies in Early-Modern England’; Margo Todd,
‘Fairies, Egyptians and Elders: Multiple Cosmologies in Post-Reformation Scotland’,
in Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (eds.), The Impact of the European Reformation:
Princes, Clergy and People (Aldershot, 2008).
109
Greenham, Workes, ed. Holland, 42, thought of fairies as good spirits.
110
See Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, ch. 6; Peter Marshall,
‘Deceptive Appearances: Ghosts and Reformers in Elizabethan and Jacobean
England’, in Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (eds.), Religion and Superstition in
Reformation Europe (Manchester, 2002). See also Gillian Bennett, ‘Ghost and Witch in
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Folklore, xcvii (1986).
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first of a child of eight dressed in white and later of a barefooted
and flaxen-haired youth in a green doublet, breeches and coat.
Bewildered but bold, she bade it identify itself, upon which it
confessed that it was the spirit of a murdered man called Robert
Elliot intent upon bringing to book the trio of witches who had
contrived to kill him. It claimed to have wandered the nether
regions of the earth for the space of fourteen years, to live off
‘the fruite of the aire’, and to be governed in all its movements
by the Lord. Later it told of a popish conspiracy against the king,
which it said could be found written upon ‘the backside of a pack
[of ] plaine [ playing] Cards’, and asked for prayers to be said for it
in the local church.111 Reflecting a significant retreat from the
high-water mark of early Protestant insistence that ghosts did
not exist, the episode highlights how hazy the metaphysical distinction between angels and departed souls could be, and increasingly became as the early modern period progressed.112 As
post-Reformation society found ways of absorbing ghosts into
an ideological framework from which the doctrine of purgatory
had been successfully evacuated, the potential for confusing the
various categories of ethereal spirits by which the Protestant
world was inhabited surely intensified.
The foregoing observations both help to account for the relative scarcity of apparitions of angels in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture, and suggest that their relatively
rare intrusions into the historical record should be read as moments in which a more upbeat assessment managed to displace an
ingrained reluctance, a reluctance that was not just theological in
origin but also, in the broadest sense of the word, political. Events
that were more commonly viewed through the spectacles of
witchcraft and diabolism were instead seen as visible instances
of angelic intercession. Often we simply do not know the circumstances in which the impulse to censor and reinterpret such
episodes was overcome by a particular conjunction of social,
cultural and ecclesiastical factors. Just as there were junctures
at which Reformed divines and laypeople recognized that the
world might temporarily be turned upside down and prophets
111
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, MS X.d.442.
See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 705–6; Marshall, Beliefs and the
Dead in Reformation England, 263. For the further blurring of these distinctions in the
eighteenth century, see Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, 158.
112
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raised up ‘extraordinarilie to restore things into order’,113 so
too were there occasions when they were willing to accept that
angels did, exceptionally, assume bodily shapes to communicate
with human beings on earth.
V
One final feature of early modern stories of angelic apparition
deserves discussion in this essay: their chronological distribution
and patterning. It cannot escape notice that contemporary receptivity to the visible intervention of celestial spirits appears to increase the further we advance into the seventeenth century. The
years between 1640 and 1700 were permeated by growing unease
about the rising tide of ‘Sadduceeism’, scepticism and ‘atheism’
that seemed to be sweeping English society. Whether imagined or
real, the threat presented by Hobbesian materialism, mechanical
philosophy and articulated doubt about the existence of an invisible spirit world prompted a renewed determination to defend
traditional Protestant assumptions about the supernatural
within Christian ranks.114 Close to the heart of this enterprise
was vociferous rejection of any suggestion that angels (both
good and evil) were merely metaphors and thus had no physical
reality. This had long been an undercurrent in theological discussions of the subject: Calvin, Bullinger, Ursinus and Perkins had
all made a point of criticizing the opinions of the ancient
Sadducees who dismissed angels as mere ‘qualities’, ‘cogitations’
or mental ‘inspirations’.115 But the theme became increasingly
strident in the later Stuart period. The perception that belief in
113
Vermigli, Common Places, 22.
For the prehistory of this anxiety, see Michael Hunter, ‘The Problem of
‘‘Atheism’’ in Early Modern England’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xxxv (1985).
And see Michael Hunter and David Wootton (eds.), Atheism from the Reformation to the
Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992).
115
See Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, i, 147–8; Bullinger, Decades, ed.
Harding, iv, 328; Ursinus, Summe of Christian Religion, 317; Perkins, Workes, iii, 526.
Under the influence of the Renaissance, ancient Greek sceptical ideas underwent a
revival in this period. One prominent exponent of the view that the spirits spoken
of in the Bible were merely metaphors and had no corporeal reality was Reginald
Scot, whose ‘Discourse upon Divels and Spirits’ appended to his Discoverie of Witchcraft provoked many refutations. For divergent readings of the influences on Scot,
see Sydney Anglo, ‘Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft: Scepticism and Sadduceeism’, in Sydney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft
(London, 1977); David Wootton, ‘Reginald Scot / Abraham Fleming / The Family of
Love’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning
114
(cont. on p. 121)
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the presence and agency of angels (and indeed demons) was being
widely questioned served to focus fresh Protestant attention on
this class of otherworldly creatures. In this context, it is possible to
discern a subtle but distinct change of tone in clerical discourse
about both the tendency of angels to appear to human beings in
corporeal forms, and the frequency with which they did so in the
post-apostolic era.
The Civil War and Interregnum coincided with a stream of new
treatises about angels and their interactions with human beings.
Some of these echoed sixteenth-century Reformed commonplaces. In Of our Communion and Warre with Angels (1646), the
puritan exile Henry Lawrence reiterated the claim that early
modern Christians should not expect to see apparitions of these
celestial messengers in their own age: ‘as God would be worshipped in spirit and truth, so . . . hee would have us converse
with the spirit, and these spirits, in a more invisible way . . .’. This
did not mean that they were now absent or idle: ‘Their ministery
ceaseth not though the way of their administration be changed’.116 In The Deputation of Angels (1654), the Isle of Wight clergyman Robert Dingley restated the orthodoxy that angels no
longer appeared to mankind because under the Gospel ‘the
Church needeth not now those visible and sensible confirmations’ upon which it had relied in its infancy.117 The precept
that angelic apparition had been terminated was also echoed by
John Gumbleden, chaplain to the earl of Leicester, in a sermon
preached at Oxford which appeared in print three years later, and
by the Presbyterian divine Isaac Ambrose in his Ministration of,
and Communion with, Angels (1661): in the days of Christ angels
had revealed mysteries and taught hidden truths (‘sometimes by
dreams in the night, and sometimes by conference in the day’),
but in modern times they chose to ‘admonish our minds, and, in a
secret unperceivable way’.118
(n. 115 cont.)
in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke, 2001). On Pyrrhonian scepticism, see Clark,
Vanities of the Eye, ch. 8.
116
Henry Lawrence, An History of Angells: Being a Theologicall Treatise of our
Communion and Warre with Them (London, 1650 edn), 17–19, 43.
117
Robert Dingley, The Deputation of Angels: or, The Angell-Guardian (London,
1654), 18.
118
John Gumbleden, Two Sermons: First, an Angel, in a Vision, Appeareth to a
Souldier (London, 1657), 4–7; Isaac Ambrose, Ministration of, and Communion with,
Angels (Berwick, 1797 edn), 21; Ambrose, Ministration of, and Communion with, Angels
(cont. on p. 122)
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Joseph Hall’s Invisible World of 1652, however, begins to index
an incremental shift in Protestant opinion. Published the year after
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan reinterpreted key scriptural passages
describing angels and demons in allegorical terms and reduced
apparitions themselves to merely optical phenomena,119 its aim
was to delineate the workings of the unseen universe to counter
the errors of a new breed of Sadducees. In addressing the question of whether or not angels manifested themselves in bodily
form, Hall adhered to the view that
the Elder the Church grew, the more rare was the use of these apparitions,
as of other miraculous actions and events: not that the arme of our God is
shortned, or his care and love to his beloved ones, any whit abated: but for
that his Church is now in this long processe of time settled, through his
gracious providence, in an ordinary way . . . Now then in these latter ages
of the Church, to have the visible apparition of a good Angell, it is a thing
so geason [scarce] and uncouth, that it is enough for all the world to
wonder at.
Yet, while stressing that ‘the trade we have with good spirits is not
now driven by the eye’, Hall was nevertheless anxious to underline the infinite occasions on which believers experienced their
‘unfelt hands’ in the course of their lives, and to advise taking ‘the
mid-way betwixt distrust, and credulity’ in the case of medieval
accounts of angelic visions.120 Hall’s personal investigation of the
cure of the Cornish cripple John Trelille hints at the more proactive and empirical approach to proving the existence of the
spiritual realm that was beginning to emerge in both clerical
and scholarly circles in response to the alleged irreligious tendencies of these decades.
In this regard the Cambridge Platonist Henry More’s Antidote
against Atheisme (1653) was a further straw in the wind: employing the language and techniques of the naturalist, he examined the
history of the supernatural to prove to unbelievers that there was
indeed a God and an immortal soul. Even as he conceded that
celestial messengers now only seldom appeared, he dedicated the
third book of his work to descriptions of these and other occult
(n. 118 cont.)
(1674 edn), 136. Samuel Clarke also included examples in his Mirrour or LookingGlasse both for Saints, and Sinners, 17–19.
119
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (London, 1651), pt 4, ch. 45, pp. 352–66. See also
Clark, ‘Reformation of the Eyes’, 156–7; Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 333–7.
120
Hall, Great Mysterie of Godliness, 162–3, 143.
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phenomena, invoking them to show that even the most ostensibly
mechanical operations in ‘the great Automaton of the Universe’
were shaped by a transcendental deity and the hierarchy of spirits
he had at his command.121 In the face of the suggestions of
‘Sadducean’ sceptics that angels had no physical substance, the
doctrine of the post-apostolic cessation of heavenly apparitions
began to lose its former emphasis and force. This is apparent in a
French treatise on the subject annexed to Thomas Bromhall’s
History of Apparitions (1658). Asserting that ‘not onely the imaginary Vision of Angels is necessary for our instruction, but that
also which is corporal and bodily’, this explained in technical
detail how such creatures could be said to manifest themselves
in anthropomorphic forms, with the aim of stopping the mouths
of those who esteemed these spectres ‘meer fables’: ‘the figure
which the Angells take, is in very truth a form which is made by the
abscision and dismembring . . . of the thickning of the Ayre, or by
the putrefaction of it, or by the similitude and motion which may
be taken of the same matter’.122 Against the backdrop of a philosophical climate challenged by Cartesian rationalism, there was
now an intellectual and epistemological need not just for angelic
intervention but also for continued angelic apparitions. Paradoxically, proving the existence of the invisible realm depended on
acquiring experimental evidence of those relatively rare occasions
on which it impinged on human vision. Along with accounts of
witchcraft, wonders and prodigies, the appearance of angels was
now a principal weapon in the battle against the mass infidelity
into which it was feared England would soon descend.
Clerical writers of the period thus found themselves torn
between two competing tendencies: their desire to defend
Christianity against the onslaughts of Hobbists and Sadducees;
and their deference to the Reformed theological legacy of the
sixteenth century. This is particularly evident in Benjamin
Camfield’s Theological Discourse of Angels, and their Ministries
(1678), a subject he declared was ‘but too suitable to that
121
Henry More, An Antidote against Atheisme: or, An Appeal to the Natural Faculties
of the Minde of Man, whether There Be not a God (London, 1653). The quotation is taken
from Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness: or, A True and
Faithfull Representation of the Everlasting Gospel of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ
(London, 1660), 35.
122
T[homas] B[romhall], An History of Apparitions, Oracles, Prophecies, and
Predictions, with Dreams, Visions, and Revelations (London, 1658), 343–67, quotations
at pp. 360, 346, 365.
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Atheistical and degenerate Age we live in, wherein the general
disbelief of Spirits (Divine and Humane, Angelical and Diabolical) may well be thought . . . the ground and introduction of all
that irreligion and profaneness, which naturally enough follows
upon it’. Directing his efforts against a generation of men who
dismissed tales of angels as ‘Old-Wives stories, or at best the
waking dreams of persons idly disposed’ (notably John Webster’s
radical tract of 1677, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft),
Camfield was concerned to uphold the persistence of angelic
intercession on behalf of the faithful against those who defined
them as chimeras and fancies of the brain. But he also paid lip
service to the axiom that, since the Gospel had already settled the
way of salvation, corporeal manifestations of these holy creatures
which communicated new revelations to the populace should
be treated with extreme suspicion as probable ‘Diabolical
delusions’.123
In the work of Webster’s most vociferous opponent, the
Anglican clergyman Joseph Glanvill, however, we find that the
hesitation about angelic apparitions that was a hallmark of
Protestant discourse in the earlier period has all but disappeared.
Closely connected with the Cambridge Platonists, he too sought
to marshal an advanced form of natural philosophy in order to
demonstrate the real existence and active interference of all kinds
of spirits, demonic and benevolent, in the temporal realm. In his
posthumously published Saducismus Triumphatus (1681) and its
precursors, Glanvill sought to offer ‘a very considerable and seasonable service to Religion against the stupid Saducism and
Infidelity of the Age’ in the form of a series of impeccably attested
accounts of supernatural intervention. ‘Since the Intercourses of
Angels were so frequent in former days’, he asked, ‘why should we
be averse to the belief that Spirits sometimes transact with Men
123
Camfield, Theological Discourse of Angels, and their Ministries, sig. A3v; unpaginated epistle ‘To the Reader’; 83–4 and passim; John Webster, The Displaying of
Supposed Witchcraft: Wherein Is Affirmed that There Are Many Sorts of Deceivers and
Imposters, and Divers Persons under a Passive Delusion of Melancholy and Fancy, but that
There Is a Corporeal League Made betwixt the Devil and the Witch . . . Is Utterly Denied
and Disproved (London, 1677). Reports of fraudulent Catholic apparitions of angels
also continued to appear at this time: see, for example, ATrue Relation from Germany, of
a Protestant Shepherd’s Killing a Counterfeit Devil, that Would Have Perverted Him to
Popery (London, 1676), which tells how a monk dressed up as an angel ‘very gay
and beautiful, with a brave pair of Wings, and other Accoutrements’ ( p. 2).
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now?’ ‘The Gospel was ushered in by the Apparitions of Angels,
and many things done by them in the carrying of it on. And why
we should think they may not be sent, and should not appear on
occasion now, I do not see’. There was still room for speculation
about the precise nature of the bodies they assumed in their interactions with human beings: the very criteria for judging the visual
status and ontological truth of apparitions were themselves under
strain and in the process of change. But Glanvill strategically set
to one side the conservatism dictated by the anti-Catholic agenda
of Tudor controversialists. Depicted on the engraved title page of
his book, one of the key instances he cited was the case (‘credibly’
reported in letters sent to Ralph Cudworth and Henry More by
various Dutch scholars) of the Amsterdam cripple Jesch Claes,
cured after a beautiful youth clothed in white appeared to her one
night in October 1676 (see Plate 7).124
The Gloucestershire student of physic Thomas Tryon’s Treatise
of Dreams & Visions (1689) devoted a whole chapter to refuting
the proposition that visible transactions between angels and
people were more or less extinct. Interestingly the suggestion
that ‘although they were so usual and frequent in former Ages,
yet now they are wholely ceased’ was branded a ‘vulgar opinion’:
Protestant orthodoxy had apparently ingrained itself within
popular culture. Celestial visions that preached doctrine derogatory to Christ should be distrusted, but it was wrong to suppose
that angelic apparitions had occurred only ‘under the Mosaicall
Dispensation’. ‘’Tis against the Principles of God in nature, to
suppose any such Chasm or interruption of communication between superiors and inferiours’. Twisting Reformed tradition on
this topic in a novel direction, he insisted that, if angels only very
occasionally appeared to men and women in the present age, this
was less a function of the fact that God had withdrawn such spectacles than of the ‘frowardness, intemperance and incredulity’ of
124
Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, sig. R2r, pp. 276, 280, 251–4. For the
Glanvill–Webster debate, see Thomas Harmon Jobe, ‘The Devil in Restoration
Science: The Glanvill–Webster Witchcraft Debate’, Isis, lxxii (1981). The extent to
which Glanvill and other defenders of the ‘invisible world’ embraced and engaged with
developments in experimental natural philosophy is described in Simon Schaffer,
‘Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural
Philosophy’, Science in Context, i (1987). The complexities surrounding one key episode included in Glanvill’s book are discussed in Michael Hunter, ‘New Light on the
‘‘Drummer of Tedworth’’: Conflicting Narratives of Witchcraft in Restoration
England’, Hist. Research, lxxviii (2005).
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English society: intellectual ‘infidelity’ and moral ‘disobedience’
were the real reasons why good spirits had estranged themselves
from the view of contemporaries.125 In his Certainty of the World of
Spirits (1691), the Presbyterian Richard Baxter reverted to the
more conventional explanation that the Lord preferred to communicate by ‘Spiritual’ rather than ‘Visible means’ to those firmly
convinced of the truth of the Gospel. Yet, even as he emphasized
the rarity of such physical manifestations, he too sought to use
angels as part of his campaign against impiety and irreligion and
to foster due gratitude to God for their diligent ministrations.126
This was an enterprise that united divines from across the ecclesiastical spectrum and, to a surprising degree, cut across the divisions that pitted Anglicans against Dissenters. By the end of the
seventeenth century, it also transcended the deep-seated fear of a
repeat of the radical explosion of sectarian enthusiasm that was
one of the legacies of the Civil War and Interregnum.127 It partially counterbalanced the corrosive effects of the fact that witchcraft and the supernatural had become the prey of political faction
in the course of these decades, precipitating a ‘process of linguistic deconstruction’ and a decisive ‘intellectual realignment’ of
educated belief.128
The project to harness angels to combat irreligion and impiety
perhaps reached its peak in the Sussex minister William Turner’s
famous Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, both
125
Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams & Visions: Wherein the Causes, Natures, and
Uses, of Nocturnal Representations, and the Communications Both of Good and Evil Angels,
as Also Departed Souls, to Mankind Are Theosophically Unfolded (London, 1689), 202,
207, 210, and see also p. 78.
126
Baxter, Certainty of the World of Spirits, 159–64, 221–36, quotations at p. 229.
See Ambrose, Ministration of, and Communion with, Angels, 167, for a letter written by
Baxter to Ambrose in 1661 asserting that ‘there is an extraordinary Ministration of
Angels in cases of extraordinary revelations, visions, dreams, deliverances, preservations, and other wonders, which all Christians do acknowledge’. This enterprise
was echoed at a less sophisticated level by popular publications like those issued
by Nathaniel Crouch under the pseudonym Richard Burton, such as R[ichard]
B[urton], Admirable Curiosities, Rarities, & Wonders in England, Scotland and Ireland
(London, 1682), and R[ichard] B[urton], Wonderful Prodigies of Judgment and Mercy:
Discovered in Above Three Hundred Memorable Histories (London, 1682).
127
See also Sasha Handley’s similar observations about ghosts: Visions of an Unseen
World, 26–30, 36–41.
128
Peter Elmer, ‘‘‘Saints or Sorcerers’’: Quakerism, Demonology and the Decline
of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester
and Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and
Belief (Cambridge, 1996), 173, 177.
7. Bottom right: the cure of the Amsterdam cripple Jesch Claes, after an angel
appeared to her one night in October 1676: Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus:
or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (London, 1681), title
page. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Shelfmark G823.
128
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of Judgment and Mercy (1697), a vast exercise in compilation he
regarded as ‘one of the best Methods that can be pursued, against
the abounding Atheism of this Age’. Jostling for space with stories
of providential punishments, miraculous deliverances and portentous wonders, many of the classic tales of angelic intervention
analysed above were repeated to support his spirited assertion
that ‘Angels may appear visibly to the Eye of the mind, as well
as to the Eye of sense’ and to ‘humour the Infirmity of this
Unbelieving Club’ which denied their very existence. Augmented
by further instances in the expanded Dutch translation of Turner’s work published in 1737, they were harnessed to refute Balthasar Bekker’s subversive attack on ‘superstitious’ beliefs about
the agency of good and evil spirits in Betoverde Weereld (The
Enchanted World) and to fight a rearguard reaction against the
profound early Enlightenment challenge to traditional ideas
about the supernatural he launched in this four-volume work.129
It cannot be ignored that Turner and his forerunners relied on a
small corpus of frequently recycled episodes to support their
claims, on a sample whose modest size reflected the complex
web of anxiety and inhibition about otherworldly apparitions
explored in the preceding section. Ultimately, the increased
prominence of discussion of angelic visions in Protestant literature may be as much a consequence of a declining tendency on the
part of the clergy to suppress them as of a growing proclivity to
witness them. The confessional tensions that had animated the
first generation of reformers had dissipated and been replaced by
disturbing new intellectual tendencies which tangible manifestations of angelic power could help to neutralize. The trends I have
identified may also symptomize the wider shift in the character
of post-Reformation providentialism itself described by Blair
Worden: a developing impulse to stress the merciful rather than
judgemental traits of the deity, to dwell less on his wrathful than
on his benevolent and fatherly qualities.130 Coinciding with a
129
Turner, Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, 1st pagination, sig.
b1v, ch. 2, pp. 7 and 7–16 passim. For the Dutch translation, see Fred van Lieburg,
‘Remarkable Providences: The Dutch Reception of an English Collection of
Protestant Wonder Stories’, in Arie-Jan Gelderblom, Jan L. de Jong and Marc van
Vaeck (eds.), The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs (Leiden, 2004). See
also Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity,
1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), ch. 21.
130
See Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils
(ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Studies in Church Hist., xxi, Oxford, 1984), 223.
INVISIBLE HELPERS
129
broader mellowing of Protestant soteriology that afforded individuals more scope for shaping their own fate in the afterlife than
the Calvinist doctrine of the double predestination, this too may
be credited with helping to create a less punitive preter- and
supernaturalism and with fostering a new openness to angelic
apparitions.
*
*
*
This examination of beliefs about the intercession and apparition
of angels in early modern England yields insights relevant to ongoing debates about the religious and cultural impact of the
Reformation and the long-term transformation of assumptions
about the sacred. It has underlined the fundamental ambivalence
that characterized Protestant thinking on this subject. While
angels had impeccable scriptural credentials, the human tendency to revere them raised the disturbing problem of superstition and idolatry. Determined to purge away popish accretions
and refute the polemical claims of Catholic controversialists,
early reformers played down the possibility that such celestial
creatures now made themselves visible to human beings, even
as they insisted upon the ubiquity of their operations on behalf
of the faithful. Emphasis on their constant intervention was
matched by the claim that, like miracles, apparitions of angels
had largely ceased when the Church came of age. Yet by conceding that God might still reveal these heavenly messengers to men
and women at critical moments, the theologians created a small
but significant loophole within which optical experiences of angelic intervention could find space to exist within a Protestant
mindset. Such spectral phenomena were to be interpreted
warily, however, because they might be deceptive illusions fabricated by Satan to seduce humanity to sin and damnation rather
than evidence of divine benevolence.
The persistence of reports of angelic apparitions should not,
then, be seen simply as a measure of the failure of the magisterial
Reformation. In some respects, it can instead be read as testimony
to its enduring and dynamic, if sometimes unforeseen, effects.
Those examples that have entered the historical record are emblematic of the tensions that surrounded claims about the physical appearance of angels, as of demons, ghosts, fairies and other
classes of spirit. They represent temporary suspensions of the
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NUMBER 208
caution and circumspection that marked Protestant attitudes to
the supernatural in general. They also allow us to delineate the
shape and colour of the spectacles through which the visual experiences of early modern Englishmen and women were refracted
and filtered.
Finally, the tangled story I have traced has something to tell us
about the way in which Reformed theology and culture reacted
and adapted to the ever-changing intellectual and cultural climate
in which it found itself. This was a climate in which strong convictions about the unpredictable intrusion of otherworldly forces
retained their vitality alongside increasingly vocal articulations of
the notion that incorporeal spirits were incapable of interacting
physically with mortal beings. The propensity of Protestants to
see angels waned and waxed throughout the early modern period,
in keeping with alterations in the wider environment. Belief and
scepticism coexisted, and responses to such phenomena were
shaped by the particular political, ecclesiastical and social circumstances in which they arose. As the confessional struggles
that had dominated the first generations after the Reformation
became partially eclipsed by the battle to defend Christianity
against the threat of irreligion, a shift in priorities took place.
The rise of ‘Sadduceeism’, ‘atheism’ and materialist philosophies
in the latter half of the seventeenth century not only had the effect
of provoking renewed attention to the activities of angels; it also
compelled an alliance of godly scientists and Protestant ministers
to suppress or subtly modify the claim that they no longer
assumed tangible forms. Ironically, angels were obliged to cast
aside their magical cloak of invisibility in order to reveal the reality
of the unseen world.131
University of Exeter
Alexandra Walsham
131
For recent work complicating claims about the progressive ‘disenchantment of
the world’ in this era, see Robert W. Scribner, ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic and
the ‘‘Disenchantment of the World’’’, Jl Interdisciplinary Hist., xxiii (1993); Rublack,
Reformation Europe, 10–11, 155–7; Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation and ‘‘The
Disenchantment of the World’’ Reassessed’, Hist. Jl, li (2008); Owen Davies,
Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester, 1999); Owen Davies and
Willem de Blécourt (eds.), Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in
Enlightenment Europe (Manchester, 2004); Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England;
Handley, Visions of an Unseen World.