People
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Richard Brothers (1757-1824),
originally from Newfoundland, was a half-pay naval officer who moved
to London in 1787, where, by the early 1790s, he was admitted to the
workhouse for paupers, having refused to draw his pay because it
required him to swear an oath (taking oaths being an act that the
Quakers and other dissenters regarded as sacreligious). In 1791 and
1792, Brothers had a series of visions and began to prophesy that God
was about to bring about the destruction of London and the downfall of
monarchs. By 1793 he was announcing himself as the prophet called to
lead the lost tribes of Israel back to Palestine, an event which would
be precipitated by God’s judgement wreaked upon London and by George III
ceding his throne to Brothers himself. Over the next two years, his
mission was recognised by William Bryan and John Wright, whose sojourn
at Avignon had led them to expect the imminent arrival of a millennial
leader. Brothers published A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies
and Times in 1794; Bryan, Wright and other admirers with
whom Southey was acquainted also published pamphlets declaring their
belief in his prophecy. The success of this work, and the advocacy of
Brothers’ mission by the MP Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, drew Brothers to
the attention of a government that was already afraid, in face of unrest
caused by food prices and scarcity, of a revolutionary uprising.
Brothers was arrested on 4 March 1795, examined before a committee of
the Privy Council, and confined to a madhouse, where he wrote A
Description of Jerusalem (published by a supporter in 1801).
He remained there until 1806, when he was released, and subsequently
lived with supporters. By 1802, however, most of his supporters had
fallen away, many becoming followers of Joanna Southcott, whose
prophetic claims he rejected in his Dissertation on the Fall of
Eve (1802). Southey planned to visit him in March 1806,
having known his supporters William Bryan, Samuel Whitchurch and James
Crease in the 1790s.
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William Bryan (dates unknown),
in a [letter of October 1794](http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_One/HTML/letterEEd.26.111.html) Southey wrote that he was to be
introduced to a prophet. The prophet was most likely Bryan, by this time
a follower of Richard Brothers, and the location of the meeting either
Bristol or Bath. Southey knew two other followers of Brothers in Bath,
Samuel Whitchurch and James Crease; Bryan was at this time a prophetic
healer in Bristol. Later, Southey recalled ‘Bryan I knew personally,
& heard from his own lips his history, & his explanation of the
system of Brothers’. In Letters from England Southey
gives in detail Bryan’s story. A copperplate printer and engraver, and a
Quaker, Bryan, after experiencing a vision, went in 1789 with John
Wright to join the Society of Illuminés at Avignon where, in that
post-Swedenborgian, semi-Masonic group, he received spiritual
communications informing him of the coming of a prophet and the imminent
millennium. Returning later in the year, Bryan lived in London. In 1793
he was at first suspicious of Brothers’ claims to be a prophet but by
1795 had accepted their legitimacy and become one of his advocates, as
he revealed in his A Testimony of the Spirit of Truth concerning
Richard Brothers ... in an address to the people of Israel, &c.,
to the gentiles called Christians, and all other gentiles. With some
account of the manner of the Lord’s gracious dealing with his
servant W. Bryan (London, 1795). Scholars have recently
begun to uncover more details of Bryan’s prophetic career. In his
article ‘William Bryan, Another Anti-Swedenborg Visionary Engraver of
1789’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 34 (2000), 14-22,
David Worrall has shown that in the mid 1780s, Bryan acted with two or
three other vendors to sell Robert Hindmarsh’s printings of Swedenborg’s
A Summary View of the Heavenly Doctrines of the New Jerusalem
Church (1785), The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem
concerning the Sacred Scripture (1786), The Doctrine
of the New Jerusalem concerning the Lord (1786) and
The Doctrine of Life for the New Jerusalem (1786).
Like William Blake, Bryan interested himself in Swedenborgianism, only
to become dissatisfied with the conventionality of its church practice:
his trip to Avignon was encouraged by other onetime Swedenborgians. On
his return he lived at 51 Upper Mary-le-bone Street, to the north of
Oxford St—a ‘minor center of contemporary progressive religious and
political activity’ (Worrall, 14). Thomas Clio Rickman, friend and
publisher of Thomas Paine, lived at no. 7; by late 1790 the
Swedenborgian Carl Bernhard Wadstrom lived at no. 45. Worrall also shows
that at this time Bryan came to the attention of the authorities who
were monitoring potentially seditious radicals. A letter of Bryan’s,
written on 13 December 1789, was intercepted and kept in the records of
the Privy Council (PRO, Kew PC 1/18/19). Bryan writes there of the
errors of Swedenborg, as ‘revealed to our society by an immediate
communication with Heaven’. He also records ‘the following words’
communicated to him by ‘the Angell Gabriell’: ‘Nations the Eternal calls
the times, & the time that walks in the shadow over days of
darkness, without light, & without strength is coming to change the
face of the world & to begin his new reign, the time is near wherein
the promises will be accomplished, the Human Blood will flow in large
streams, that the enemies of God may subsist no longer & that the
true religion may be known all over the world, prepare yourselves, do
not cease to pray and do not fear any thing from the calamities which
are to happen for you will not experience them provided you continue
united & faithful’ (quoted Worrall 21). In 1795, Brothers was to
employ very similar prophetic rhetoric: it may be that his understanding
of his mission was shaped by Bryan, and by the expectations Bryan had
formed at Avignon. Southey’s acquaintance the Welsh poet and scholar
Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) (1747-1826) offers another contemporary
portrait of Bryan, as does Williams’ biographer Elijah Waring (c.
1788-1857), who knew Bryan in later years. Waring’s report of Williams’
conversation, and account of his own acquaintance, is worth giving in
full:
[Williams:] I also knew William Bryan, and in his days of credulity,
when he was living near Bristol, in the winter of 1794-5. After
Espriella’s letters were published, he found me out in London, (I think
it was in 1808,) and I instantly recognised him, though he was then in
the complete garb of a Quaker, and apparently of one with whom the world
went smoothly.
The extraordinary part of the Avignon confederacy, is in the
arrangement of a scheme which extended so widely, and in the means which
the conspirators had at command. They had agents in London to find out
such men as Bryan and Wright, and send them on their pilgrimage: and it
appears also that they had agents to receive them at certain points upon
the way, and to supply them with money. If the whole scheme could be
traced, it would form a very singular chapter in the history of those
times.
I will renew my endeavours to get P. Pani’s book from Italy. It is an
official report drawn up by him, as acting for the Inquisition, and
printed in 1791: so that the society must have been broken up soon after
Bryan’s journey.
[Waring:] William Bryan became an adherent of Richard Brothers, and
consequently was deceived by the same cunning mechanism that imposed
upon the pseudo prophet: but he certainly had nothing of the conspirator
in his nature ; being one of the mildest and most gentle of men, and
unfeignedly religious, though imaginative and eccentric. I knew him
well, and ever found him full of intelligence, benevolence, and piety.
When he related to me, in 1812, his adventures in the Avignon affair, he
did it with great simplicity and candour, acknowledging himself dubious
as to the real origin of what he had supposed to be a divine intimation,
though many public events throughout Europe had fallen out in accordance
with the prophetic utterances he had there heard. I was then a young
man, and Bryan advanced in years, but still retaining a fine set of
features, and a general expression of head, which had often been
compared to the best paintings of our Saviour; whilst his speech was
peculiarly melifluous. The account of the Avignon prophets given by
Southey, in Espriella’s Letters, accords substantially with the personal
details communicated to me. William Bryan afterwards emigrated to
America, where he had several sons respectably settled, and where he
died at a great age, only a few years ago, honoured and lamented by all
who knew him. I saw a letter of his, written shortly before his death,
which indicated the most sublime Christian hopes and anticipations,
blended with a clear intellect. It is remarkable that all the
unconscious agents in what appears to have been a deeply concerted
political plot, for subverting the governments of Europe, should have
been selected from the same class of harmless, devout, and unsuspicious
men; such being not only least liable to be suspected, but best adapted
to recommend the opinions which were intended.
Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams,
the Bard of Glamorgan (London, 1850), p. 92.
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William Owen Pughe (1759-1835),
lexicographer, grammarian, editor, antiquarian and poet. The son of
John Owen, he adopted the surname Pughe in 1806 after inheriting
property from a relative. A leading member of the Society of
Gwyneddigion and the Society of the Cymmrodorion, his publications
included: The Heroic Elegies of Llywarch Hen (1792),
The Myvyrian Archaiology (1801, 1807) and The
Cambrian Biography (1803). In 1796-1797, Southey and Pughe
engaged in a (pseudonymous) debate about the Welsh language in the pages
of the Monthly Magazine. Southey consulted Pughe about
bardic poetry and Welsh history when composing his Welsh-American poem
Madoc (1805). Southey also received from Pughe Welsh
Arthurian stories from the Mabinogion, some of which Pugh translated in
his journal The Cambrian Register (1795-99). Owen’s
enthusiastic belief in Joanna Southcott dates from about 1803; one of
her Elders, he often acted as the amanuensis of the poetic prophecies
she recited.
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Joanna Southcott (1750-1814),
a Devon maidservant and upholsterer who in 1801 began to publish
accounts of the prophetic visions she had been experiencing since 1792.
Although the Devon clergy proved uninterested in her experiences, her
publication The Strange Effects of Faith; with Remarkable
Prophecies (Made in 1792) (1801-2) brought her to the
attention of followers of Richard Brothers, including Southey’s
acquaintance William Sharp. Transferring their allegiance to Southcott,
these Brotherites brought her to London, where they and a number of
women converts enabled Southcott to publish her prophecies of a coming
millennium in England, in numerous pamphlets—many of them bought and
collated by Southey in the course of his work on Letters from
England, then the best-researched and most-detailed account
to have been published. Southcott also embarked on a preaching tour and
attracted many thousands of followers, whom she confirmed as adherents
by issuing with seals, bearing her symbol and signature and the
believer’s. Many of her followers were women, for Southcott empowered
the female, suggesting that she herself fulfilled the predictions in
Genesis 3, that the woman’s seed shall bruise the serpent’s head, and
Revelation 12, that the Woman clothed in the Sun will precipitate a
millennium. Southey’s sceptical distrust of Southcott and her movement
came to a head in 1814, when she announced that she, a virgin of
sixty-four, was pregnant with Shiloh, the returning saviour. She died,
without issue, on 27 December, although William Sharp believed that her
body might only be in a trance and be resuscitated and the Shiloh
discovered. She left behind her a ‘great box’, made by Sharp, containing
sealed prophecies and to be opened by the bishops of the Church of
England. [The Panacea Society](http://www.panacea-society.org/more%20on%20box.htm) announces on its website that the box is
today in its safekeeping.
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John Wright (dates unknown),
a Leeds carpenter who was evangelised by the Swedenborgian field
preachers Ralph Mather and Joseph Salmon. Wright went to London but was
disappointed with the New Jerusalem Church there, finding it too
conventional. At Avignon, Wright was told to expect the millennial
deliverer prophesied to appear in England by the seventeenth-century
Presbyterian Christopher Love. Returning from Avignon, Wright later
identified Brothers as this promised deliverer, hailing him as such in
A Revealed Knowledge of Some Things That Will Speedily be
Fulfilled in the World (1794), which included a ‘Copy of a
Letter received from Richard Brothers’.