Five Feet Tall in His Socks

Patrick Collinson

Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652-1979 by William Lamont
Ashgate, 267 pp, £55.00, August 2006, ISBN 0 7546 5532 6

It is said that when representatives of the Society of Friends came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. ‘Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t know that there were any of them left.’ According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers are a sect, rather than a denomination, and perhaps after three centuries there shouldn’t have been any left. But of course there were, and are, plenty of them. The late Bryan Wilson, a taxonomist of sects, was reduced to inventing a special category for the Quakers, a sect which should have turned into a denomination but obstinately refused to do so. Endogamy had something to do with that. Among my many Quaker relations I recall a cousin, orphaned at the age of 54, who said that he supposed that he should now get married. ‘But it will have to be to a Quaker, and the trouble is they’re all so plain.’ (He married a rather attractive Quaker of about his own age.)

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Vol. 30 No. 11 · 5 June 2008 » Patrick Collinson » Five Feet Tall in His Socks (print version)
Pages 32-34 | 3832 words

Letters

From Paul Brassley

Patrick Collinson wonders whether Philip Noakes was the last Muggletonian (LRB, 5 June). Wade Muggleton, whom I taught about twenty years ago when he was in his early twenties, claimed membership of the sect, along with (as far as I remember) other members of his family. He was surprised I had heard of them, and seemed unaware of Christopher Hill’s and E.P. Thompson’s work.

Paul Brassley
Ilsington, Devon

From Mike Harding

Patrick Collinson mentions that the Muggletonian sect of 17th-century Christians believed that ‘God was not some insubstantial thing, certainly not some spirit within every man, but a being shaped like a man (man a being shaped like God), and living not so far above our heads – six miles up in fact’ (LRB, 5 June). I am told they also believed that, once women reached heaven, they became men. This seems just about as reasonable as most religions I’ve come across. Anyway, the thought inspired this poem, ‘A Muggletonian Prays to His God’:

Lord let me meet her there, full six miles high,
Beyond the manufactory sky, with its veil
Of smoke and clouds, where us, all a welter in the dale
Below, labour righteous in the tangled alleys of Thy

Will. Allow I beg, my lass to stay a lass, and not be turned,
Once in thy paradisal room, into a bristle-chinned
Chap. I know Lord I have grievously sinned,
But, happily, my poor soul, weak as it is, yet burns

To see Thee face to face in Thy bright heaven. It’s just –
Dus’t see – I love my lass right as she is, and dunnat want
(Once our earthly husks are gone to dust)
To meet her there in Thy great room, and

Find her Charlie, not Charlotte;
Adams rib now standing, a second Adam,
Knowing all the secrets of our bed.
Yet I must not seek, I know, to understand my lot,
But take what I am given, and hope to find
safe haven In Thy room six miles above the earth. Amen.

Mike Harding
Settle, Yorkshire