THE INVASION OF ENGLAND: FRANCE.
After Hogarth.
This was, in all probability, the effigy of Our Lady of Chatham, who, in pre-Reformation times, was famous for her miracles; and of whom Lambarde gives the following amusing story in his Perambulations: “It seems,” says he, “that the corps of a man (lost through shipwracke belike) was cast on land in the parishe of Chatham, and being there taken up, was by some charitable persones committed to honest burial within their church-yard; which thing was no sooner done, but Our Lady of Chatham, finding herselfe offended therewith, arose by night and went in person to the house of the parishe clearke, whiche then was in the streete, a good distance from the church, and making a noyse at his window, awaked him. The man, at the first, as commonly it fareth with men disturbed in their rest, demanded, somewhat roughly, ‘who was there?’ But when he understoode, by her owne answer, that it was the Lady of Chatham, he changed his note, and moste mildeley asked ye cause of her comming; she tolde him, that there was lately buryed (neere to the place where she was honoured) a sinful person, which so offended her eye with his gastly grinning, that, unless he were removed, she could not but (to the great griefe of good people) withdrawe herselfe from that place, and cease her wonted miraculous working amongst them: and therefore, she willed him to go with her, to the ende that, by his helpe, she might take him up, and caste him again into the river. The clearke obeyed, arose, and waited on her towarde the churche; but the goode ladie (not wonted to walk) waxed wearie of the labour, and therefore was enforced, for very want of breath, to sit downe in a bushe by the way, and there to rest her: and this place (forsooth) as also the whole track of their journey, remaining ever after a greene pathe, the towne dwellers were wont to shew. Now, after a while, they go forward againe, and coming to the churcheyarde, digged up the body, and conveyed it to the waterside, where it was first found. This done, Our Lady shrancke againe into her shryne; and the clearke peaked home, to patche up his broken sleepe; but the corps now eftsoones floted up and down the river, as it did before; which thing being espyed by them of Gillingham, it was once more taken up, and buryed in their churcheyarde. But see what followed upon it: not only the roode of Gillingham (say they), that a while before was busie in bestowing myracles, was now deprived of all that his former virtue; but also ye very earth and place where this carckase was laid, did continually, for ever after, settle and sinke downewarde.”
Barham has made good use of this story, you who have read the legend of Grey Dolphin in the Ingoldsby Legends will remember. He narrates, with a joyous irreverence, how, in consequence of the miraculous interposition of the Lady of Chatham (Saint Bridget, forsooth! “who, after leading but a so-so-life, had died in the odour of sanctity”) masses were sung, tapers kindled, bells tolled, and how everything thenceforward was wonderment and devotion; the monks of Saint Romwold in solemn procession, the abbot at their head, the sacristan at their tail, and the holy breeches of Saint Thomas à Becket in the centre. “Father Fothergill brewed a XXX puncheon of holy water,” continues Tom Ingoldsby, clerk in holy orders and minor canon of the Cathedral of Saint Paul, indulging at once his exuberant humour and his contempt of the Church of Rome, with its relics, miracles, bone-chests, and sanctified aqua pura. Meanwhile, the grinning sailor, “grinning more than ever,” had drifted down the river, off Gillingham, and lay on the shore in all the majesty of mud, presently to be discovered by the minions of Sir Robert de Shurland, who bade them “turn out his pockets.” But it was ill gleaning after the double scrutiny of Father Fothergill and the parish clerk; and, as Ingoldsby observes, “there was not a single maravedi.”
PAID OFF AT CHATHAM.
After a Painting by R. Deighton, R.A.
“JEZREEL”
From Saint Bridget to a weird, but yet not altogether unworldly, fanatic of recent years the transition would not be easy, were it not for the fact that the said fanatic’s hideous temple still crowns Chatham Hill for all men to see, as a monument of the unfathomed and unfathomable credulity of mankind. The stranger who walks or cycles his way to Dover is told that this barrack-like building is “Jezreel’s Temple,” and that is about the extent of the information forthcoming. The unredeemed ugliness of the unfinished temple is at once repellant and exciting to curiosity, and the name of “Jezreel” wears such an Old Testament air that most people who pass by want very much to know who and what he was.
He was, as a matter of fact, a private soldier of the 16th Regiment, named James White, who, having been bought out of the Army by the members of a fanatical sect before whom he posed as a prophet, took the extraordinary names of “James Jershom Jezreel,” and, with seventeen followers, founded a new sect, the New House of Israel, known by scoffers as the “Joannas.” They were, in fact, mad enthusiasts like those whom Joanna Southcott had fooled, years before, and it is supposed that White took the name of “Jezreel” from the Book of Hosea, adding the other names to make a trinity of initial “J’s,” allusive to the Prophetess Joanna and her minor prophet, John Wroe.
Not that “Jezreel” was mad. Not at all. To him as Prophet and Patriarch of these New Israelites was given up the whole property of those who entered the House, to be held in common; and he made a very good thing of the infatuation of the hundreds of wealthy middle-class converts who had a fancy for this singular kind of communistic religion. It was an article of his followers’ creed that they were the first portion of the 144,000, twice told, who will receive Christ when he comes again to reign a thousand years on earth. To support his character as leader of this House, “Jezreel” pretended to have received a communication from a messenger of God, who inspired him to write an extraordinary farrago of Biblical balderdash, without argument, beginning, or end, called the “Flying Roll.” The curious may obtain three volumes of this nonsense, but the only preternatural thing in these books of Extracts from the Flying Roll is their gross and unapproachable stupidity which completely addles the brain of him who reads them, hoping thereby to discover the tenets of the sect or any single thread of argument that may be followed for more than a consecutive paragraph or two. The effect upon one reading those pages is the same as that which Mark Twain tells us was produced on him when Artemus Ward, having plied him with strong drink, began purposely to enter upon a preposterous conversation, having a specious air of a grave and lucid argument, but which was merely an idiotic string of meaningless sentences. Mark Twain thought himself had gone daft, and felt his few remaining senses going; and that is just what happens to any one who sits down and seriously tries to understand what “Jezreel’s” Extracts are all about.