“The red Florence wine is most commended for a table wine of any in Italy; and doubtless it is most wholesome, and, to them who are used to it, also most gustful and pleasant. It is of a deeper colour than ordinary claret, which is caused by letting it stand longer upon the husks or vinacea before it be pressed. For it is the skin only which gives the tincture, the interior pulp of the grape being white.” -- Travels Through the Low Countries. J. Ray, 1738.
'Also the meeting house that was pulled down: "Probably Venner's meeting-house in Swan Alley, off Coleman St.; but there appears to be no trace of this order in the city records."'
The lack of city records may be because it did not happen -- if you just read my recommendation above, you will have seen a SPOILER: "Thomas Venner was hanged, drawn, and quartered outside of his own meetinghouse on 19 January."
Fanatiques -- yes, Phil has linked this to our Encyclopedia, but in case you skipped reading through the information, I recommend reading a fairly lengthy entry which explains the on-going background paranoia about the Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Millennialists, and pretty much everyone who had different beliefs from the CofE. It which makes special mention of Venner's Rising which is what we are dealing with today. The knowledge will increase your appreciation of events and comments for the next 8-1/2 years. https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
I've spent about an hour trying to find anything about a recent colonels' revolt, and so far nothing. Which doesn't mean it didn't happen, but just that it was squashed before it amounted to anything worth recording. Perhaps legal hearings or executions will be mentioned later.
"... they had got young Davis and some other neighbours with them to be merry, but no harm."
How smart of Pall, Jane and Wayneman -- I suspect friendly outreach like this will do more to keep the door to the leads open than anything the Navy Board can do.
A possibly unintended consequence of the name of this Act -- which expressed Charles II's desire to consign to oblivion the Civil Wars and Interregnum -- was that people had to find another way of expressing on-going concerns about the violence, fear and unruliness of those times. They did it by referring to the Munster Rising of 1534-35.
Of course, if you're told to forget something, it immediately brings to mind exactly what you are supposed to be forgetting. And this is what happened in 1661: https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
Münster provided an analogy of royalist critiques of their enemies in the 1640s and 1650s. Including rebellion against the established authorities, millenarian excitement, radical sectaries, and violent attacks on religious orthodoxy, it linked to ongoing concerns about ‘radical’ groups such as Quakers and Fifth Monarchists.
Finally, being linked specifically to Anabaptist violence already condemned by the magisterial reformers, allusions to Münster allowed Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from the ‘radicals’, and to profess loyalty to both the English authorities and to established reformed tradition. In other words, Münster served as a healing ritual through which to process the chaos of the 1640s and 1650s.
It remains important that we have a healthy skepticism when reading 16th-century accounts of the Münster siege written by the Anabaptists’ enemies.
The infamous Anabaptist rising in 1534 led by Jan van Leiden/John of Leiden, the German city of Münster was a place with powerful implications for the Protestant psyche. [LASTING] into the 18th century, the Münster affair was repeatedly invoked as shorthand for political chaos and the dangers of religious dissent.
The Münster Rising's application to English events is an example of what historians Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider label ‘cosmopolitan memory’, in which memories of international events connect individuals into a broad memory-structure while adapting to local traditions. This process transposed events in 16th-century Germany onto 17th-century England, transforming English Baptists into violent rebels.
... In 1533, Münster underwent a shift from Catholicism to Lutheran Protestantism under minister Bernhard Rothman. Falling increasingly under the influence of Anabaptist preachers like Jan Matthys, Münster became a haven for the group, as they elected an Anabaptist council -- subsequently facing armed opposition from the prince-bishop Franz von Waldeck, who besieged it from Feb. 1534 - June 1535. As the siege took its toll, rhetoric from within Münster became more violent. In December 1534, minister Bernhard Rothmann published 'Van der Wrake' (‘Consoling Message of Vengeance’) calling for the godly to execute judgement on sinners on earth in order to usher in the millennial period.
On Jan Matthys' death, his position was taken by the tailor-prophet Jan Bockelson, better known as Jan van Leiden/John of Leiden, who proclaimed himself the apocalyptic king and instituted a community of shared goods and polygamy.
As Münster suffered the effects of starvation its new ‘king’ became increasingly paranoid. Münster was betrayed to the besiegers in June, 1535. Prince-bishop Franz von Waldeck's forces slaughtered most male Anabaptists.
In Jan. 1536, Jan van Leiden's Münster key ally Bernd Knipperdollink, and another leader, Bernd Kretchtink, were brutally executed. The authorities placed their bodies in cages hung on the tower of St. Lambert's Church, where the (now empty) cages remain in place today.
Propaganda about the atrocities and excesses in Münster began to circulate while the city was under siege. Later historians, both in the early modern and modern periods, often used these stories uncritically. This pathologized early modern Anabaptists, imposing an inappropriate link between apocalypticism and violence.
Similarly, Thomas Grantham's "Christianismus primitivus" reprinted Rev. Symon Patrick's 1661 "An humble apology for non-conformists as evidence of both Baptists’ continuing loyalty", and the unjust accusation that continued to claim their involvement in Venner's Rising.
The Münster comparison received a new lease of life between the aftermath of the Popish Plot and the death of Charles II. Tory apologists were keen to point out similarities between the anti-Catholic hysteria, Münsterites, and Civil Wars-era chaos. The 1683 "True loyalist", for example, made suggestive links between the Cromwellian protectorate and the Anabaptist rising in an echo of Calvinist conformist Simon Ford's post-Vennerite lament: ‘When was there ever more slavery and bondage in the State? And when more Anarchy and confusion in the Church? Munster itself saw but the Prologue to our Tragedy.’
Memories of Münster remained contested by Baptists. But this does not challenge their role as a form of cosmopolitan memory in post-Civil Wars England. The widespread nature of the popular interpretation of Münster, and its links to English political violence, made it necessary for such contestation to take place. While Munster's history was used as a form of the ‘public remembering’ of the Civil Wars, its longer provenance in 16th-century anti-Anabaptist works allowed it to be accessed and applied by Presbyterians and Congregationalists as much as by establishment Anglicans. In doing so, they could make use of the cosmopolitan memory of Münster in order to simultaneously deny their own connections to the chaos of the 1640s and 1650s, and to position themselves as being within mainstream Reformation orthodoxy.
The writer of the descriptively titled "Munster paralleld in the late massacres committed by the Fifth Monarchists" offered descriptions of events at Münster in regular Roman type, with italicized paragraphs directly comparing them to Venner's rebellion. Like the earlier anti-Quaker work, this made its parallels explicit – for example, descriptions of evangelists departing from Münster were immediately followed by an account of Fifth Monarchists sending letters to Ireland and Scotland.
Quakers did not escape censure through these connections. As in the 1650s and 1660s, the Friends were linked with Münster. Paedo-Baptists used a ‘slippery slope’ argument to connect Baptist belief to an inevitable turn towards Quakerism.
As William Penn's response suggests, while conformist authors maintained the connections between the Civil Wars, Thomas Venner, and Münster, dissenters unsurprisingly denied them. Although the government and Church of England may have shaped this narrative as a form of ‘public remembering’, there were ways to contest this. This could be through patterns of ‘seditious speech’, or the construction of subversive material.
Print could also construct counter-narratives. This was a pattern already set out in the 1661 declarations disowning any connection to Thomas Venner. A common tactic of dissenters was to argue that Catholics used the specter of Münster to challenge all Protestants. This also worked against the supposed similarities opponents drew between Baptists and Jesuits. The signatories of "the Humble apology", for example, reminded the authorities that linking all who were called ‘Anabaptist’ with Jan van Leiden/John of Leiden's extremist views made no more sense than claiming that all Protestants believed in consubstantiation simply because Luther had held to it.
As the author of the 1669 response to Symon Patrick's "Friendly debate between a conformist and a non-conformist" noted in "An humble apology for non-conformists": 'In the beginning of the Reformation, there were a sort of Anabaptists rose up in Germany, and did horrid things at Munster and elsewhere; was the fault therefore in the Reformation? Although the Papists use to charge it upon the Protestant Religion, that it is the Spring and Fountain of Sedition and Rebellion where it is received; Yet both We, and our Brethren Conformists, are able to wipe off that foul aspersion.'
In a 1662 sermon preached before Gray's Inn on the anniversary of Charles II's restoration, Richard Meggott condemned those who looked back to the ecclesiastical chaos of the 1640s and 1650s, ‘some to New-England for an Independent Anarchy, some to Munster for an Anabapstisticall Frenzy’.
References to Münster served as a way for English writers to tie nonconformists to acts of religious violence in England, including the Civil Wars and Venner's 1661 Rising, without directly recalling these events. Discussions of the Münster Rising often directly transformed German Anabaptists into Quakers or Fifth Monarchists
Condemnations of the violence in Münster were also used by Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from Baptists and Quakers and to emphasize their orthodoxy. Some Baptist responded by disclaiming their links to continental Anabaptists, while others moved to question the established historiography around the Münster Rising
Complaining about the treatment of Baptists by the Restoration press in 1660, the author (“S. T.”) of "Moderation: or arguments and motives tending thereunto turned to the abuses of history by their enemies." Condemning the ‘grand impeachment’ of those called ‘Anabaptists’, S. T. bemoaned that his fellow believers were accused of opposing the magistrate ‘upon which account the Munster Tragedy is so much and so often in all places (by Prints, and otherwise) laid to their charge, as indeed it could not lightly be more, if those bearing that name in England had been the very individual actors thereof at Munster’
This was not an exaggerated claim.
Although unfair in many ways, the connection between Fifth Monarchists and violence was pressed home to contemporaries in January 1661 when Thomas Venner led an abortive uprising in London against the crown.
Preacher to a Fifth Monarchist congregation in Coleman Street, Venner was a cooper and returned New England emigre who had been imprisoned for his involvement in a planned rising against Cromwell in 1657.
From 6 to 8 January, the rebels briefly captured St. Paul's, fought the trained bands, and killed around 20 soldiers before their eventual defeat. Thomas Venner was hanged, drawn, and quartered outside of his own meetinghouse on 19 January.
Although only small in scale, for many Venner's Rising confirmed their worst fears about those outside of the national church. As early as 10 January, under the urging of the bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon, ‘unlawful meetings and conventicles’ were banned.
During the next 10 days, the government rounded up Quakers and other ‘suspicious’ nonconformists, while in Edinburgh the Scottish government banned meetings of Quakers, Baptists, and Fifth Monarchists as enemies of authority.
Preaching on the anniversary of King Charles' death, just days after Thomas Venner's execution, the Calvinist conformist Simon Ford described Münster as the ‘prologue to our tragedy’.
The Fifth Monarchists persisted until the 18th century. As I looked for more info on Venner's 1661 Rising, I found:
The Münster Rising, Memories of Violence, and Perceptions of Dissent in Restoration England -- by Andrew Crome Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2021 https://www.cambridge.org/core/jo…
(Edited excerpts only, as they reflect events in the Diary:)
The 1660 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion discouraged direct references to the tensions of the period. An official order to both forgive and forget, it was always hamstrung by the fact that any command to forget inevitably results in memories of the thing which is supposed to be forgotten.
Where detailed recollection of the recent past was discouraged, references to symbolic individuals could fill in – e.g., you could invoke ‘fanaticism’ in the 1680s simply by mentioning the regicide preacher Hugh Peter.
Similarly, rather than naming supposedly seditious dissenting groups and their actions, a reference to Münster [SEE A HISTORY AT THE END] quickly implied the violence inherent within dissent. This also avoided any direct reference to the Civil War period, while recalling its chaos.
Münster, the Civil Wars, and Venner's Rising became part of the unified narrative which can be traced in Restoration histories of the Civil Wars, whose authors claimed that dissent always led towards political radicalism and subversion of the magistrate.
This endured long after 1661. Some of this was occasioned by plots -- real and imagined -- linked to groups of dissenters following the ejection of nonconforming ministers in August 1662.
The Farnley Wood Plot in 1663 appears to have attracted the support of some Fifth Monarchist, Baptist, and even Quaker congregations (although the latter refused to carry ‘carnall’ weapons).
The image of the Anabaptist kingdom, which first reared its head in Münster, was certainly in the authorities’ minds. Sir Thomas Gower, deputy lieutenant of the North Riding, wrote to the King's General, George Monck, Duke of Albemarle in August 1663 warning that although the plots seemed to have little hope of success, they demonstrated the danger of nonconformists.
Arguments from reason had little effect on fanatics: ‘this sort of people, who follow ye fancyes of Anabaptism and ye dreams of those who presently expect to be sharers in a fifth monarchy, doe not govern themselves by such considerations, but earnestly believe what they vehemintly [sic] desire’. In some respects, the plotters seemed to have deliberately recalled Venner's Rising.
Following 1660, Münster remained an example of the dangers of Civil War:
"Mechanical clocks were invented in Germany in the early 14th century. As they increased in popularity throughout Europe, people began to replace previous forms of timekeeping that relied on tracking the sun, such as sundials. "Before long, a term originated in the English language to distinguish between these different ways of telling time. People would say it was, for example, four “of the clock” when referring to a mechanical timepiece. This eventually became shortened to just “four o’clock.” "According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of the term “o’clock” dates back to 1535."
Yes, Jim -- Adm. Montagu had been awarded a large apartment at Whitehall by Cromwell, and by the time he was plotting Charles' return, Richard was gone and no one had the power or necessity to take it away, so Montagtu left his servants there to maintain his residency. Charles returns, and Montagu / Sandwich is still there.
Sandwich is also rennovating an apartment for Lady Jemima at the Wardrobe, but we haven't been told she has moved there yet. Plus the workmen are improving Hinchingbrooke at this time, so it is fit for an Earl's family.
The surviving rebels were tried for high treason on 17 January at the Old Bailey. Venner was one of two men hanged, drawn and quartered; the others were hanged and then beheaded.
Unfortunately for Charles II, the Fifth Monarchist cause didn’t die with Venner. In fact, the king’s secret service spent much of the following decade trying to defeat numerous conspiracies hatched by the Saints and their nonconformist allies. In 1662 there was "... a plot to kidnap the king and his brother in an attack on Whitehall Palace on All Hallows’ Eve. The Tower was to be seized and a sergeant and a gunner at Windsor Castle were suborned as a first step to capturing that too. Three years later, there was another Fifth Monarchist plan to kill Charles II and set London ablaze."
But by the end of Charles II’s reign, the imprisonment of their leaders had weakened the Saints’ threat. Their movement was also dying, mainly because the apocalypse had not come.
Many Fifth Monarchists fought for the Duke of Monmouth in his uprising against England’s new king, James II, in 1685. Venner’s eldest son, Thomas Jr., a cashiered army officer, was lieutenant colonel in Monmouth’s regiment and was wounded in a skirmish at Bridport, Dorset on 14 June. After Monmouth’s defeat at Sedgemoor, many Fifth Monarchists were hanged or transported. Venner junior escaped retribution having gone to the Netherlands to buy munitions.
The last popular manifestation of belief in the imminent apocalypse was in the unlikely surroundings of Water Stratford in Buckinghamshire. The Reverend John Mason, rector of St. Giles’ Church, had accused Charles II of surrendering to the Beast and warned of the Second Coming. In 1694, he had a vision of Christ, who revealed that ‘New Jerusalem’ was to be his parish. The revelation galvanised the neighborhood. Scores of people gathered in the village, many camping out in tents on a field across the river Ouse, renamed ‘Mount Pleasant’. Henry Maurice, rector of Tyringham, found Mason’s home full of disciples “running up and down”, their prayers “as loud as their throats gave them leave, till they were quite spent and black in the face”. Mason predicted that after his death, he would be resurrected on the third day and his body carried up into heaven. He died the following month, and was buried on 22 May 1694. His followers refused to believe that he had not risen again: some claimed they had spoken to him after his death. The new rector was forced to exhume Mason’s remains as grisly proof that he really was dead. This did not persuade his followers and they continued to squat on the ‘Holy Ground’ until they were dispersed by militia 15 years later.
After repulsing 72 musketeers who had been dispatched to quell the affray, the Fifth Monarchists marched onto Aldersgate and, in St. Giles’ Cripplegate, killed a constable. They then hid in Kenwood, near Hampstead Heath, but were driven out of the woods by troops.
Samuel Pepys heard of the insurrection the next morning: “A great stir in the city by the fanatics, who killed six or seven men, but all are fled. My lord mayor and the whole City had been in arms, above 40,000.” London was now in lockdown. Returning from Twelfth Night celebrations, Pepys was “strictly examined” at “many places … there being great fears of these fanatics”.
The Saints returned to the City at dawn on Wednesday, 9 January. Venner repeated his pledge that “No weapons employed against them would prosper, nor a hair on their heads be touched”. (Government troops also believed the Saints had magic or poisoned bullets as “It was observed that all they shot, though ever so slightly wounded, died”.)
Venner, wearing a steel morion helmet, and carrying a halberd, took some Fifth Monarchists to the Comptor gaol in Wood Street and demanded that its prisoners be freed “or else [the gaolers] were dead men”. With all available forces in London now mobilised –- including 700 Life Guard cavalry and Albemarle’s infantry regiment –- the net was tightening around the Fifth Monarchists. And when a cavalry detachment charged at them, Venner fell badly wounded and his two lieutenants were killed.
Ten Saints then broke into the Blue Anchor ale house near the city walls for a last stand. Musketeers fought their way up the stairs, broke through a barricaded door and shot six, as soldiers sniped through holes in the roof tiles. Twenty-two Saints died in the street fighting, and another 20 were taken prisoner. Venner killed three soldiers and sustained 19 wounds before his capture. A woman was detained dressed “all in armour”.
Pepys was astonished at how so few desperate men could bring London to a standstill. “These fanatics that have done all this –- routed all the Trained Bands; put the king’s Life Guards to the run, broke through the city gates twice – are … in all about 31.”
Their political influence peaked in the Nominated Assembly of 1653 (a ‘parliament’ dominated by army officers), but when this was dissolved and Cromwell was declared ‘lord protector’ of England, Ireland and Scotland, the Saints found themselves increasingly marginalised. Cromwell’s new government was anathema to them, and the erstwhile ‘Second Moses’ was suddenly top of their hitlist. John Thurloe, Cromwell’s spymaster, warned that Saints held five clandestine meetings in London to organise Cromwell’s overthrow in April 1657. Their leader was a Devon-born cooper named Thomas Venner.
The Fifth Monarchists planned to attack a troop of cavalry, then march on East Anglia, where they hoped rebels would rally to their flag. A bomb was also to be detonated in the cellar of a London house. The crusade was to start at Mile End Green on the evening of 9 April, 1657, but it turned into a fiasco.
Cavalry troopers attacked as the Saints mustered, arrested 20 and seized a substantial cache of arms, hundreds of copies of their manifesto and almost £6,000 in cash. The rebels, it was discovered, had enough weapons for 25,000 men, planned to cut Cromwell’s throat and slaughter the entire nobility. Their leader was immediately thrown into prison.
Such a body blow would have proved fatal for many revolutionary movements. Not the Fifth Monarchists. By 1661 their numbers had swollen to an estimated 30,000 in England and Wales. The extremists among them needed a leader, and the charismatic Thomas Venner –- who had been freed in 1659 –- again fitted the bill.
On Sunday, 6 January, 1661, 50 Saints gathered at Venner’s meeting house to collect weapons and armour for the coup d’état: blunderbusses, muskets, swords and halberds.
Thomas Venner promised they would be invulnerable to bullets as they were to strike the final blow for ‘King Jesus’. Those opposing them should be killed. Their objective was to destroy “the powers of the Earth” in England: Charles II, his brother James, Duke of York, and Gen. George Monck, Duke of Albermarle. The first strike would be against that symbol of the Anglican church: St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Bizarrely, the heavily armed party called at the home of a bookseller called Johnson in St. Paul’s churchyard to ask for the cathedral’s keys. When they were refused, they broke in.
The rebels then challenged a passerby: “Who are you for?” When he replied “God and King Charles”, he was shot through the heart and fell dead on the cobbles.
For 4 bloody days in January 1661, London was terrorised by a suicidal band of Christian zealots attempting to seize England’s capital city in the name of King Jesus. Samuel Pepys was awakened at 6am on Wednesday, 9 January, by panic-stricken shouts “that the fanatics were up in arms in the city… I found everybody [with] arms at their doors. So I returned (though with no good courage and that I might not look afraid) and got my sword and pistol [for] which I had no [gun] powder.” He decided to remain indoors that day.
Pepys was prudent: a terrifying slaughter was going on in the heart of the city. A group of armed religious insurgents were rampaging through the narrow streets, defeating efforts by hastily summoned troops to eliminate them. Their fanaticism was bolstered by their belief that bullets could not harm them.
The insurrectionists called themselves ‘Fifth Monarchists’ or ‘visible Saints’, and combined religious and political objectives with radical fundamentalism, derived from narrow interpretations of religious texts.
Their confidence in an imminent apocalyptic ‘Fifth Monarchy’ came from prophecies in the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. Four empires (the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman) would precede the ‘Fifth Kingdom’, the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, lasting from his Second Coming till the Last Trump. This would be heralded by the establishment of a worldwide godly government, the ‘Rule of the Saints’.
The year 1666 held special significance for Fifth Monarchists because of its similarity to Revelation’s ‘Number of the Beast’ (666), which indicated the end of earthly rule by carnal human beings. But first, existing corrupt governments must be overthrown by violence, which is why Samuel Pepys and his fellow Londoners found themselves under attack on 9 January 1661.
Having flickered into life London in the 1650s, Fifth Monarchism spread like wildfire through southern England into north Wales, East Anglia, Devon and Cornwall. Many Civil War veterans were adherents, including Major Gen. Thomas Harrison, parliamentarian hero of the battles of Knutsford and Worcester in 1651. Several were in Oliver Cromwell’s own Ironsides regiment; another was one of his personal life guard. Cromwell’s navy was also a hotbed.
These men’s political manifesto demanded the destruction of the monarchy and nobility and the privileged classes, especially lawyers. Once the old order had been swept away, the Saints’ theocracy would rule a society where godliness determined status. The judicial system would use the Bible’s Mosaic Code, with offences against God rather than the community. Property belonging to the ‘ungodly’ would be confiscated and distributed to the poor.
Following his victory over royalist forces and the execution of King Charles, many Fifth Monarchists hailed Oliver Cromwell as a second Moses, who would lead God’s people to their promised land.
Comments
Third Reading
About Saturday 29 December 1660
San Diego Sarah • Link
“The red Florence wine is most commended for a table wine of any in Italy; and doubtless it is most wholesome, and, to them who are used to it, also most gustful and pleasant. It is of a deeper colour than ordinary claret, which is caused by letting it stand longer upon the husks or vinacea before it be pressed. For it is the skin only which gives the tincture, the interior pulp of the grape being white.” -- Travels Through the Low Countries. J. Ray, 1738.
About Tuesday 8 January 1660/61
San Diego Sarah • Link
'Also the meeting house that was pulled down: "Probably Venner's meeting-house in Swan Alley, off Coleman St.; but there appears to be no trace of this order in the city records."'
The lack of city records may be because it did not happen -- if you just read my recommendation above, you will have seen a SPOILER:
"Thomas Venner was hanged, drawn, and quartered outside of his own meetinghouse on 19 January."
About Tuesday 8 January 1660/61
San Diego Sarah • Link
Fanatiques -- yes, Phil has linked this to our Encyclopedia, but in case you skipped reading through the information, I recommend reading a fairly lengthy entry which explains the on-going background paranoia about the Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Millennialists, and pretty much everyone who had different beliefs from the CofE.
It which makes special mention of Venner's Rising which is what we are dealing with today.
The knowledge will increase your appreciation of events and comments for the next 8-1/2 years.
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
About Monday 7 January 1660/61
San Diego Sarah • Link
I've spent about an hour trying to find anything about a recent colonels' revolt, and so far nothing. Which doesn't mean it didn't happen, but just that it was squashed before it amounted to anything worth recording. Perhaps legal hearings or executions will be mentioned later.
About Monday 7 January 1660/61
San Diego Sarah • Link
"... they had got young Davis and some other neighbours with them to be merry, but no harm."
How smart of Pall, Jane and Wayneman -- I suspect friendly outreach like this will do more to keep the door to the leads open than anything the Navy Board can do.
About Monday 7 January 1660/61
San Diego Sarah • Link
The way of making "chewed bullets" came up later on, Stephane:
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
About Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660
San Diego Sarah • Link
A possibly unintended consequence of the name of this Act -- which expressed Charles II's desire to consign to oblivion the Civil Wars and Interregnum -- was that people had to find another way of expressing on-going concerns about the violence, fear and unruliness of those times. They did it by referring to the Munster Rising of 1534-35.
Of course, if you're told to forget something, it immediately brings to mind exactly what you are supposed to be forgetting. And this is what happened in 1661:
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
About Thomas Venner
San Diego Sarah • Link
Another post about the Fifth Monarchy movement, and specifically Venner's 1660s role in it, is at
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
About Fanatics / Nonconformists
San Diego Sarah • Link
THE MEANING OF THE MUNSTER RISING, CONCLUSION:
Münster provided an analogy of royalist critiques of their enemies in the 1640s and 1650s. Including rebellion against the established authorities, millenarian excitement, radical sectaries, and violent attacks on religious orthodoxy, it linked to ongoing concerns about ‘radical’ groups such as Quakers and Fifth Monarchists.
Finally, being linked specifically to Anabaptist violence already condemned by the magisterial reformers, allusions to Münster allowed Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from the ‘radicals’, and to profess loyalty to both the English authorities and to established reformed tradition.
In other words, Münster served as a healing ritual through which to process the chaos of the 1640s and 1650s.
It remains important that we have a healthy skepticism when reading 16th-century accounts of the Münster siege written by the Anabaptists’ enemies.
About Fanatics / Nonconformists
San Diego Sarah • Link
THE MUNSTER RISING 1534 - 1535:
The infamous Anabaptist rising in 1534 led by Jan van Leiden/John of Leiden, the German city of Münster was a place with powerful implications for the Protestant psyche. [LASTING] into the 18th century, the Münster affair was repeatedly invoked as shorthand for political chaos and the dangers of religious dissent.
The Münster Rising's application to English events is an example of what historians Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider label ‘cosmopolitan memory’, in which memories of international events connect individuals into a broad memory-structure while adapting to local traditions.
This process transposed events in 16th-century Germany onto 17th-century England, transforming English Baptists into violent rebels.
... In 1533, Münster underwent a shift from Catholicism to Lutheran Protestantism under minister Bernhard Rothman.
Falling increasingly under the influence of Anabaptist preachers like Jan Matthys, Münster became a haven for the group, as they elected an Anabaptist council -- subsequently facing armed opposition from the prince-bishop Franz von Waldeck, who besieged it from Feb. 1534 - June 1535.
As the siege took its toll, rhetoric from within Münster became more violent.
In December 1534, minister Bernhard Rothmann published 'Van der Wrake' (‘Consoling Message of Vengeance’) calling for the godly to execute judgement on sinners on earth in order to usher in the millennial period.
On Jan Matthys' death, his position was taken by the tailor-prophet Jan Bockelson, better known as Jan van Leiden/John of Leiden, who proclaimed himself the apocalyptic king and instituted a community of shared goods and polygamy.
As Münster suffered the effects of starvation its new ‘king’ became increasingly paranoid.
Münster was betrayed to the besiegers in June, 1535. Prince-bishop Franz von Waldeck's forces slaughtered most male Anabaptists.
In Jan. 1536, Jan van Leiden's Münster key ally Bernd Knipperdollink, and another leader, Bernd Kretchtink, were brutally executed. The authorities placed their bodies in cages hung on the tower of St. Lambert's Church, where the (now empty) cages remain in place today.
Propaganda about the atrocities and excesses in Münster began to circulate while the city was under siege. Later historians, both in the early modern and modern periods, often used these stories uncritically. This pathologized early modern Anabaptists, imposing an inappropriate link between apocalypticism and violence.
About Fanatics / Nonconformists
San Diego Sarah • Link
PART 4
Similarly, Thomas Grantham's "Christianismus primitivus" reprinted Rev. Symon Patrick's 1661 "An humble apology for non-conformists as evidence of both Baptists’ continuing loyalty", and the unjust accusation that continued to claim their involvement in Venner's Rising.
The Münster comparison received a new lease of life between the aftermath of the Popish Plot and the death of Charles II. Tory apologists were keen to point out similarities between the anti-Catholic hysteria, Münsterites, and Civil Wars-era chaos. The 1683 "True loyalist", for example, made suggestive links between the Cromwellian protectorate and the Anabaptist rising in an echo of Calvinist conformist Simon Ford's post-Vennerite lament: ‘When was there ever more slavery and bondage in the State? And when more Anarchy and confusion in the Church? Munster itself saw but the Prologue to our Tragedy.’
Memories of Münster remained contested by Baptists. But this does not challenge their role as a form of cosmopolitan memory in post-Civil Wars England. The widespread nature of the popular interpretation of Münster, and its links to English political violence, made it necessary for such contestation to take place.
While Munster's history was used as a form of the ‘public remembering’ of the Civil Wars, its longer provenance in 16th-century anti-Anabaptist works allowed it to be accessed and applied by Presbyterians and Congregationalists as much as by establishment Anglicans.
In doing so, they could make use of the cosmopolitan memory of Münster in order to simultaneously deny their own connections to the chaos of the 1640s and 1650s, and to position themselves as being within mainstream Reformation orthodoxy.
About Fanatics / Nonconformists
San Diego Sarah • Link
PART 3
The writer of the descriptively titled "Munster paralleld in the late massacres committed by the Fifth Monarchists" offered descriptions of events at Münster in regular Roman type, with italicized paragraphs directly comparing them to Venner's rebellion.
Like the earlier anti-Quaker work, this made its parallels explicit – for example, descriptions of evangelists departing from Münster were immediately followed by an account of Fifth Monarchists sending letters to Ireland and Scotland.
Quakers did not escape censure through these connections. As in the 1650s and 1660s, the Friends were linked with Münster. Paedo-Baptists used a ‘slippery slope’ argument to connect Baptist belief to an inevitable turn towards Quakerism.
As William Penn's response suggests, while conformist authors maintained the connections between the Civil Wars, Thomas Venner, and Münster, dissenters unsurprisingly denied them. Although the government and Church of England may have shaped this narrative as a form of ‘public remembering’, there were ways to contest this. This could be through patterns of ‘seditious speech’, or the construction of subversive material.
Print could also construct counter-narratives. This was a pattern already set out in the 1661 declarations disowning any connection to Thomas Venner. A common tactic of dissenters was to argue that Catholics used the specter of Münster to challenge all Protestants. This also worked against the supposed similarities opponents drew between Baptists and Jesuits. The signatories of "the Humble apology", for example, reminded the authorities that linking all who were called ‘Anabaptist’ with Jan van Leiden/John of Leiden's extremist views made no more sense than claiming that all Protestants believed in consubstantiation simply because Luther had held to it.
As the author of the 1669 response to Symon Patrick's "Friendly debate between a conformist and a non-conformist" noted in "An humble apology for non-conformists": 'In the beginning of the Reformation, there were a sort of Anabaptists rose up in Germany, and did horrid things at Munster and elsewhere; was the fault therefore in the Reformation? Although the Papists use to charge it upon the Protestant Religion, that it is the Spring and Fountain of Sedition and Rebellion where it is received; Yet both We, and our Brethren Conformists, are able to wipe off that foul aspersion.'
About Fanatics / Nonconformists
San Diego Sarah • Link
PART 2
In a 1662 sermon preached before Gray's Inn on the anniversary of Charles II's restoration, Richard Meggott condemned those who looked back to the ecclesiastical chaos of the 1640s and 1650s, ‘some to New-England for an Independent Anarchy, some to Munster for an Anabapstisticall Frenzy’.
References to Münster served as a way for English writers to tie nonconformists to acts of religious violence in England, including the Civil Wars and Venner's 1661 Rising, without directly recalling these events. Discussions of the Münster Rising often directly transformed German Anabaptists into Quakers or Fifth Monarchists
Condemnations of the violence in Münster were also used by Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from Baptists and Quakers and to emphasize their orthodoxy. Some Baptist responded by disclaiming their links to continental Anabaptists, while others moved to question the established historiography around the Münster Rising
Complaining about the treatment of Baptists by the Restoration press in 1660, the author (“S. T.”) of "Moderation: or arguments and motives tending thereunto turned to the abuses of history by their enemies." Condemning the ‘grand impeachment’ of those called ‘Anabaptists’, S. T. bemoaned that his fellow believers were accused of opposing the magistrate ‘upon which account the Munster Tragedy is so much and so often in all places (by Prints, and otherwise) laid to their charge, as indeed it could not lightly be more, if those bearing that name in England had been the very individual actors thereof at Munster’
This was not an exaggerated claim.
Although unfair in many ways, the connection between Fifth Monarchists and violence was pressed home to contemporaries in January 1661 when Thomas Venner led an abortive uprising in London against the crown.
Preacher to a Fifth Monarchist congregation in Coleman Street, Venner was a cooper and returned New England emigre who had been imprisoned for his involvement in a planned rising against Cromwell in 1657.
From 6 to 8 January, the rebels briefly captured St. Paul's, fought the trained bands, and killed around 20 soldiers before their eventual defeat.
Thomas Venner was hanged, drawn, and quartered outside of his own meetinghouse on 19 January.
Although only small in scale, for many Venner's Rising confirmed their worst fears about those outside of the national church.
As early as 10 January, under the urging of the bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon, ‘unlawful meetings and conventicles’ were banned.
During the next 10 days, the government rounded up Quakers and other ‘suspicious’ nonconformists, while in Edinburgh the Scottish government banned meetings of Quakers, Baptists, and Fifth Monarchists as enemies of authority.
Preaching on the anniversary of King Charles' death, just days after Thomas Venner's execution, the Calvinist conformist Simon Ford described Münster as the ‘prologue to our tragedy’.
About Fanatics / Nonconformists
San Diego Sarah • Link
The Fifth Monarchists persisted until the 18th century. As I looked for more info on Venner's 1661 Rising, I found:
The Münster Rising, Memories of Violence, and Perceptions of Dissent in Restoration England -- by Andrew Crome
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2021
https://www.cambridge.org/core/jo…
(Edited excerpts only, as they reflect events in the Diary:)
The 1660 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion discouraged direct references to the tensions of the period. An official order to both forgive and forget, it was always hamstrung by the fact that any command to forget inevitably results in memories of the thing which is supposed to be forgotten.
Where detailed recollection of the recent past was discouraged, references to symbolic individuals could fill in – e.g., you could invoke ‘fanaticism’ in the 1680s simply by mentioning the regicide preacher Hugh Peter.
Similarly, rather than naming supposedly seditious dissenting groups and their actions, a reference to Münster [SEE A HISTORY AT THE END] quickly implied the violence inherent within dissent. This also avoided any direct reference to the Civil War period, while recalling its chaos.
Münster, the Civil Wars, and Venner's Rising became part of the unified narrative which can be traced in Restoration histories of the Civil Wars, whose authors claimed that dissent always led towards political radicalism and subversion of the magistrate.
This endured long after 1661. Some of this was occasioned by plots -- real and imagined -- linked to groups of dissenters following the ejection of nonconforming ministers in August 1662.
The Farnley Wood Plot in 1663 appears to have attracted the support of some Fifth Monarchist, Baptist, and even Quaker congregations (although the latter refused to carry ‘carnall’ weapons).
The image of the Anabaptist kingdom, which first reared its head in Münster, was certainly in the authorities’ minds. Sir Thomas Gower, deputy lieutenant of the North Riding, wrote to the King's General, George Monck, Duke of Albemarle in August 1663 warning that although the plots seemed to have little hope of success, they demonstrated the danger of nonconformists.
Arguments from reason had little effect on fanatics: ‘this sort of people, who follow ye fancyes of Anabaptism and ye dreams of those who presently expect to be sharers in a fifth monarchy, doe not govern themselves by such considerations, but earnestly believe what they vehemintly [sic] desire’.
In some respects, the plotters seemed to have deliberately recalled Venner's Rising.
Following 1660, Münster remained an example of the dangers of Civil War:
About Clocks and watches
San Diego Sarah • Link
"Mechanical clocks were invented in Germany in the early 14th century. As they increased in popularity throughout Europe, people began to replace previous forms of timekeeping that relied on tracking the sun, such as sundials.
"Before long, a term originated in the English language to distinguish between these different ways of telling time. People would say it was, for example, four “of the clock” when referring to a mechanical timepiece. This eventually became shortened to just “four o’clock.”
"According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of the term “o’clock” dates back to 1535."
https://historyfacts.com/science-…
About Saturday 5 January 1660/61
San Diego Sarah • Link
Yes, Jim -- Adm. Montagu had been awarded a large apartment at Whitehall by Cromwell, and by the time he was plotting Charles' return, Richard was gone and no one had the power or necessity to take it away, so Montagtu left his servants there to maintain his residency. Charles returns, and Montagu / Sandwich is still there.
Sandwich is also rennovating an apartment for Lady Jemima at the Wardrobe, but we haven't been told she has moved there yet. Plus the workmen are improving Hinchingbrooke at this time, so it is fit for an Earl's family.
About Thomas Venner
San Diego Sarah • Link
CONCLUSION:
The surviving rebels were tried for high treason on 17 January at the Old Bailey. Venner was one of two men hanged, drawn and quartered; the others were hanged and then beheaded.
Unfortunately for Charles II, the Fifth Monarchist cause didn’t die with Venner. In fact, the king’s secret service spent much of the following decade trying to defeat numerous conspiracies hatched by the Saints and their nonconformist allies.
In 1662 there was "... a plot to kidnap the king and his brother in an attack on Whitehall Palace on All Hallows’ Eve. The Tower was to be seized and a sergeant and a gunner at Windsor Castle were suborned as a first step to capturing that too. Three years later, there was another Fifth Monarchist plan to kill Charles II and set London ablaze."
But by the end of Charles II’s reign, the imprisonment of their leaders had weakened the Saints’ threat. Their movement was also dying, mainly because the apocalypse had not come.
Many Fifth Monarchists fought for the Duke of Monmouth in his uprising against England’s new king, James II, in 1685.
Venner’s eldest son, Thomas Jr., a cashiered army officer, was lieutenant colonel in Monmouth’s regiment and was wounded in a skirmish at Bridport, Dorset on 14 June.
After Monmouth’s defeat at Sedgemoor, many Fifth Monarchists were hanged or transported. Venner junior escaped retribution having gone to the Netherlands to buy munitions.
The last popular manifestation of belief in the imminent apocalypse was in the unlikely surroundings of Water Stratford in Buckinghamshire. The Reverend John Mason, rector of St. Giles’ Church, had accused Charles II of surrendering to the Beast and warned of the Second Coming.
In 1694, he had a vision of Christ, who revealed that ‘New Jerusalem’ was to be his parish. The revelation galvanised the neighborhood. Scores of people gathered in the village, many camping out in tents on a field across the river Ouse, renamed ‘Mount Pleasant’. Henry Maurice, rector of Tyringham, found Mason’s home full of disciples “running up and down”, their prayers “as loud as their throats gave them leave, till they were quite spent and black in the face”.
Mason predicted that after his death, he would be resurrected on the third day and his body carried up into heaven.
He died the following month, and was buried on 22 May 1694. His followers refused to believe that he had not risen again: some claimed they had spoken to him after his death. The new rector was forced to exhume Mason’s remains as grisly proof that he really was dead.
This did not persuade his followers and they continued to squat on the ‘Holy Ground’ until they were dispersed by militia 15 years later.
Extracted from https://www.historyextra.com/peri…
This contains biographies of the leading Fifth Monarchists
About Thomas Venner
San Diego Sarah • Link
PART 3
After repulsing 72 musketeers who had been dispatched to quell the affray, the Fifth Monarchists marched onto Aldersgate and, in St. Giles’ Cripplegate, killed a constable.
They then hid in Kenwood, near Hampstead Heath, but were driven out of the woods by troops.
Samuel Pepys heard of the insurrection the next morning: “A great stir in the city by the fanatics, who killed six or seven men, but all are fled. My lord mayor and the whole City had been in arms, above 40,000.”
London was now in lockdown. Returning from Twelfth Night celebrations, Pepys was “strictly examined” at “many places … there being great fears of these fanatics”.
The Saints returned to the City at dawn on Wednesday, 9 January. Venner repeated his pledge that “No weapons employed against them would prosper, nor a hair on their heads be touched”. (Government troops also believed the Saints had magic or poisoned bullets as “It was observed that all they shot, though ever so slightly wounded, died”.)
Venner, wearing a steel morion helmet, and carrying a halberd, took some Fifth Monarchists to the Comptor gaol in Wood Street and demanded that its prisoners be freed “or else [the gaolers] were dead men”.
With all available forces in London now mobilised –- including 700 Life Guard cavalry and Albemarle’s infantry regiment –- the net was tightening around the Fifth Monarchists. And when a cavalry detachment charged at them, Venner fell badly wounded and his two lieutenants were killed.
Ten Saints then broke into the Blue Anchor ale house near the city walls for a last stand. Musketeers fought their way up the stairs, broke through a barricaded door and shot six, as soldiers sniped through holes in the roof tiles.
Twenty-two Saints died in the street fighting, and another 20 were taken prisoner.
Venner killed three soldiers and sustained 19 wounds before his capture.
A woman was detained dressed “all in armour”.
Pepys was astonished at how so few desperate men could bring London to a standstill. “These fanatics that have done all this –- routed all the Trained Bands; put the king’s Life Guards to the run, broke through the city gates twice – are … in all about 31.”
About Thomas Venner
San Diego Sarah • Link
PART 2
Their political influence peaked in the Nominated Assembly of 1653 (a ‘parliament’ dominated by army officers), but when this was dissolved and Cromwell was declared ‘lord protector’ of England, Ireland and Scotland, the Saints found themselves increasingly marginalised.
Cromwell’s new government was anathema to them, and the erstwhile ‘Second Moses’ was suddenly top of their hitlist.
John Thurloe, Cromwell’s spymaster, warned that Saints held five clandestine meetings in London to organise Cromwell’s overthrow in April 1657. Their leader was a Devon-born cooper named Thomas Venner.
The Fifth Monarchists planned to attack a troop of cavalry, then march on East Anglia, where they hoped rebels would rally to their flag. A bomb was also to be detonated in the cellar of a London house. The crusade was to start at Mile End Green on the evening of 9 April, 1657, but it turned into a fiasco.
Cavalry troopers attacked as the Saints mustered, arrested 20 and seized a substantial cache of arms, hundreds of copies of their manifesto and almost £6,000 in cash. The rebels, it was discovered, had enough weapons for 25,000 men, planned to cut Cromwell’s throat and slaughter the entire nobility. Their leader was immediately thrown into prison.
Such a body blow would have proved fatal for many revolutionary movements. Not the Fifth Monarchists.
By 1661 their numbers had swollen to an estimated 30,000 in England and Wales. The extremists among them needed a leader, and the charismatic Thomas Venner –- who had been freed in 1659 –- again fitted the bill.
On Sunday, 6 January, 1661, 50 Saints gathered at Venner’s meeting house to collect weapons and armour for the coup d’état: blunderbusses, muskets, swords and halberds.
Thomas Venner promised they would be invulnerable to bullets as they were to strike the final blow for ‘King Jesus’. Those opposing them should be killed. Their objective was to destroy “the powers of the Earth” in England: Charles II, his brother James, Duke of York, and Gen. George Monck, Duke of Albermarle. The first strike would be against that symbol of the Anglican church: St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Bizarrely, the heavily armed party called at the home of a bookseller called Johnson in St. Paul’s churchyard to ask for the cathedral’s keys. When they were refused, they broke in.
The rebels then challenged a passerby: “Who are you for?” When he replied “God and King Charles”, he was shot through the heart and fell dead on the cobbles.
About Thomas Venner
San Diego Sarah • Link
For 4 bloody days in January 1661, London was terrorised by a suicidal band of Christian zealots attempting to seize England’s capital city in the name of King Jesus.
Samuel Pepys was awakened at 6am on Wednesday, 9 January, by panic-stricken shouts “that the fanatics were up in arms in the city… I found everybody [with] arms at their doors. So I returned (though with no good courage and that I might not look afraid) and got my sword and pistol [for] which I had no [gun] powder.” He decided to remain indoors that day.
Pepys was prudent: a terrifying slaughter was going on in the heart of the city. A group of armed religious insurgents were rampaging through the narrow streets, defeating efforts by hastily summoned troops to eliminate them. Their fanaticism was bolstered by their belief that bullets could not harm them.
The insurrectionists called themselves ‘Fifth Monarchists’ or ‘visible Saints’, and combined religious and political objectives with radical fundamentalism, derived from narrow interpretations of religious texts.
Their confidence in an imminent apocalyptic ‘Fifth Monarchy’ came from prophecies in the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. Four empires (the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman) would precede the ‘Fifth Kingdom’, the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, lasting from his Second Coming till the Last Trump. This would be heralded by the establishment of a worldwide godly government, the ‘Rule of the Saints’.
The year 1666 held special significance for Fifth Monarchists because of its similarity to Revelation’s ‘Number of the Beast’ (666), which indicated the end of earthly rule by carnal human beings. But first, existing corrupt governments must be overthrown by violence, which is why Samuel Pepys and his fellow Londoners found themselves under attack on 9 January 1661.
Having flickered into life London in the 1650s, Fifth Monarchism spread like wildfire through southern England into north Wales, East Anglia, Devon and Cornwall. Many Civil War veterans were adherents, including Major Gen. Thomas Harrison, parliamentarian hero of the battles of Knutsford and Worcester in 1651.
Several were in Oliver Cromwell’s own Ironsides regiment; another was one of his personal life guard. Cromwell’s navy was also a hotbed.
These men’s political manifesto demanded the destruction of the monarchy and nobility and the privileged classes, especially lawyers. Once the old order had been swept away, the Saints’ theocracy would rule a society where godliness determined status. The judicial system would use the Bible’s Mosaic Code, with offences against God rather than the community. Property belonging to the ‘ungodly’ would be confiscated and distributed to the poor.
Following his victory over royalist forces and the execution of King Charles, many Fifth Monarchists hailed Oliver Cromwell as a second Moses, who would lead God’s people to their promised land.