“What it is for one who was the Member of Christ, to make himself the Member of a Harlot?” Robert Foulkes, cleric and murderer, 1679.

http://reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=sat:3105#page/1/mode/1up

“A deep measure of Repentance, a greater proportion of Sorrow is certainly required of Consecrated persons…”

Following on from my interest in Nathanial Butler, I here pursue another ‘dying penitent’ whose story came to be bracketed with his in publications like William Turner’s A compleat history of the most remarkable providences both of judgment and mercy (1697) and George Meriton’s Immorality, debauchery, and profaneness, exposed to the reproof of Scripture (1698). This was the appalling case of Robert Foulkes, minister of Stanton Lacy in Shropshire. Foulkes’ story has been told repeatedly, both in contemporary pamphlets and slightly later 18^th century publications, by David Turner (who also wrote the brief ODNB life) in English Masculinities, 1660-1800, in Peter Klein’s The Temptation & Downfall of the Vicar of Stanton Lacy, and by Elizabeth Round, aka the blogger ‘History Geek’ https://historygeek.co.uk/2016/05/19/the-penitential-sermon-of-robert-foulkes/ .

Foulkes was a Restoration era clergyman, arriving in Stanton Lacy in 1660. There, he seems to have litigated aggressively for prompt and full tithe payments, been excessively given to drink (he would later claim that his sessions at taverns at least began with necessary meetings with parties to his litigation), and he fornicated round his parish as opportunity offered, while (it was said) beating his wife on suspicion that she had acted on a personal conclusion that what was sauce for the gander was also sauce for the goose.

Fatally, his Anglican predecessor in the parish, Thomas Atkinson, had in 1657 left his unmarried daughter Anne in some kind of guardianship to his successor as minister. So in 1660 she came under Foulkes’ control. Foulkes said with some disingenuousness that “Her Father was a Gentleman whom I never saw, or had the least Intercourse with”. This was probably in a narrow sense true, but it omits the fact that the victim of his seduction was herself a daughter of the parish’s previous minister.

Foulkes later wrote this about the daughter of the Reverend Atkinson: “The Devil had prepared for me a sad companion and partner in my debaucheries; she was easily tempted by me, and proved afterward a constant temptation to me, and has been the great occasion of this dismal conclusion of our wretched course of life.” It seems then that part of Foulkes’ successful efforts towards a posthumous rehabilitation involved putting the blame on the young woman.

From a different point of view, the author of A true and perfect relation of the tryal and condemnation, execution and last speech of that unfortunate gentleman Mr. Robert Foulks late minister of a parish near Ludlow in Shropshire (anonymous, but by style and type of reference probably by the Patrick Kilborne who wrote The execution of Mr. Rob. Foulks, late minister of Stanton-Lacy in Shropshire with some account of his most penitent behaviour, confession, last speech &c.) had this to say about the seduction of Anne:

“it was prov’d that Mr Foulks was left Guardian to the Gentlewoman Arraign’d with him, and making use of some Authority might be challenged from that trust, he with that, and urgent intreaties, gaind so far on her, as at last to debauch her to his bed, and had used that familiarity so often that at last she prov’d with Child.”

Foulkes vehemently denied that he had attempted to ‘vitiate’ Anne when she was just nine. But he does not indicate what age she was when their relationship began. Maybe Anne was nine when her father died, twelve when Foulkes became her guardian in 1660.

The extra-marital affair was notorious by 1673, and continued even though the Bishop of Hereford intervened in 1676 to try to forbid Foulkes from spending any time alone with Anne Atkinson. But, as Foulkes said of himself, he was “a very slave to my lust, and in absolute vassalage to my flesh.” Attempts to prove that she had already given birth to a child by Foulkes, the baby farmed out to somewhere in Wales, could not be proven, with the embattled cleric denying the charges. Foulkes rather believably asserts that with his reputation under such strain, he actually became a far better clergyman – he had previously been negligent in the official part of his duties, now he tried to face down his critics by a display of proper clerical behaviour (yes, as he admits, apart from the continued adultery):

“to palliate and hide my sin the more, I studied to be more elaborate and zealous in my Preaching, to the great satisfaction of my Hearers; only I seldom medled with, or but very tenderly touched my own beloved sin; I went about all the parts of my Ministerial duty so carefully, and discharged them with such approbation, that the judgments of many charitable and well-meaning persons not only acquitted me of the vices I stood charged with, but I deluded their good opinion into some thoughts of my innocency and virtue.”

By 1678 Anne was pregnant (possibly for the second time). As she approached term, Foulkes took her to London. He would admit that he was seeking a late abortion. Anne came to term, however. Foulkes refused to let her have any midwife’s help. She delivered a baby daughter. Foulkes cut the baby’s throat, and disposed of the body in the ‘house of office’, shoving it down the privy apparently in the belief that the drain would carry the corpse away into the nearby river. Foulkes then returned to Shropshire. According to Kilborne (if he is the author of A true and perfect relation), Anne had to confess to an attendant of her that she had given birth to a child, and one is left to presume that questions as to the baby’s whereabouts led to her confessing what Foulkes had done.

We cannot know to what extent he acted on his own initiative, or what level of consent she gave. Foulkes had vehemently denied the relationship, which he had always tried to keep as “an Arcanum between my partner and myself”. The baby was evidence that he could not allow to exist. In a perverse way, preserving the reputation of the cloth perhaps helped steel him to his brutality. Later, he would award himself repentance points for grieving that he had killed an unbaptised child, noting that nobody else had pointed this out. I would not like to try to imagine more despicable conduct. Foulkes and Atkinson had clearly engaged in a long-lasting affair, and nothing could keep them apart. But he took her new-born baby and murdered it.

Foulkes himself can account for what happened by facile and predictable recourse to a discourse of Satan and the sinner hardening in sin: “Having by many former repeated acts, arrived at last to a habit in sinning, my Conscience became so seared and past feeling … [the murder of the baby] required a conscience of full proof in Satans service to attempt it.”

Kilborne’s account (if it is him) of their exposure, trial and judgement is succinct:

“the indisposition of the green woman, gave her attendant sufficient evidence she had been Delivered of a Child, which at last she confest; and it being thus positively prov’d against him, he was Condemned, and she not in the least consenting to the murder, was both pittied and acquitted.”

‘Green woman’ is not in the OED in this sense, but it was a 17^th century idiom for a woman who had recently given birth.

Foulkes, though strenuously repentant, and accepted as penitent, was in fact rancorous to the end. He would assert that Anne was party to the ‘Fact’, the murder, and exploited the courtroom’s propriety to get herself freed:

“There is some offence taken, as I hear, at my Charging her with what she denied at our Trial, she did indeed say, That she knew Nothing of the Fact, for which we were Questioned, which she demonstrated by Arguments that could not modestly be spoken in that place, without such unsavoury and noisom demonstrations: I affirm, Upon the word of a dying Man, That both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did Act in all that was done: I am dead in Law, and I know my sayings are no Evidence against her; but the next time we meet at the Bar, which we shall infallibly do, and two thousand Witnesses shall be produced against us, that is, Her Conscience and Mine, these things will be found to be true; and as such I assert them, as I shall suddenly answer it before the All-seeing and Heart-searching God.”

So, the man who cut the throat of the baby and shoved the body down a privy objects that she maintained her innocence (convincing the court) by “unsavoury and noisom demonstrations” and “Arguments that could not modestly be spoken in that place”.

Anne went back to Stanton Lacy after this shattering experience. The ODNB life explains that the Church of England finally found a way to punish her: “She was eventually excommunicated in 1682 after William Lloyd, now bishop of St Asaph, wrote to Archbishop William Sancroft to complain that her evasion of punishment stood as a disgrace to the church.”

I should hope or imagine that Anne did not distress herself too much about excommunication from an institution that had brought such disaster to her life.

But William Lloyd was the interesting figure in Foulkes’ last days. Gilbert Burnet was also involved in this intense process - Burnet was going to be busier with John Wilmot, Lord Rochester’s death bed conversion (or madness, or mockery) in 1679-80.

For Lloyd, Foulkes was a public relations disaster for the Church of England. How could the Church reprehend what Foulkes terms “the too too fashionable sin of Uncleanness” in court libertines, scoffers and atheists, when a clergyman has committed depravities beyond the worst rake in a Wycherley play? Fornication, infanticide, rumours that the cleric had argued Anne into bed with him using instances of Old Testament polygamy, hard drinking – and all this in a minister who had litigated ferociously for payment of tithes. Foulkes had to be (as we would say), ‘spun’, and who better to do the spinning than Foulkes himself?

After his sentence, Foulkes had just a few days before stepping onto the gallows, so influence was exerted to get him a nine day stay of execution, and during this time Foulkes had to repent, floridly. I am sure that repentance was in Foulkes too, but this was a self-interested man, bullying, devious and self-pitying. He does not seem to have realised until told by Dr Lloyd that his mission was to exonerate the church. The church, in return, would forgive his sins, and send him off to face judgement with a reasonable hope of joining King David (the chosen biblical model) in heaven:

“Thus ended this unfortunate Gentleman, who by the temptations of Satan was brought like Holy David into the horrid sin of Adultery, but as his sin resembled his so did his Repentance, and we hope they are both now singing Hallelujahs in the glorious Region of Eternal joy” - even Kilborne (if it is him writing a pamphlet that is relatively sympathetic to Anne Atkinson) ends with this thought.

By any normal view, Foulkes should have kept quiet till death, annihilated by his own hypocrisy, exposure and ignominy. There was nothing he could say for himself. But Lloyd pushed him in a direction he was all too willing to go, towards an attempt to exonerate the church and, at a personal level, manifest the required exemplary penitence. Foulkes obliged by fasting, and trying to forgo sleeping – so as to make the fullest use of his repentance time. What was predictable, and something his clerical advisers seem to have given encouragement to, was that Foulkes would palliate his own crimes by blaming Anne.

Foulkes had acquired a team of minders, who would keep him ‘on message’, managing both his oral and written confessions (different versions of what he said on the gallows appear in different pamphlets, it is very obvious that material was scripted as appropriate to him). They kept on the job too, eminent clergymen riding in a coach with him to the gallows, and presiding over the burial his body - nocturnally - after it was over.

Foulkes’ repellent pamphlet is the main production. An alarme for sinners containing the confession, prayers, letters, and last words of Robert Foulkes, late minister of Stanton-Lacy in the County of Salop, who was tryed, convicted and sentenced at the sessions in the Old Bayly, London, January 16th, 1678/9, and executed the 31st following: with an account of his life / published from the original written with his own hand, during his reprieve, and sent by him at his death to Doctor Lloyd. He is minded to, or has been prompted to apologise to everyone except the person on whom he’d inflicted most damage, Anne Atkinson. The Bishop of London, his successor in the parish, his wife, his children, his parishioners (he forgives them!).

Foulkes makes a bold appeal to God: he hopes the Almighty will be happy to have so penitent a true believer in heaven. He also seems to insinuate that God will want to assure Foulkes of his salvation by way of helping the Church of England clear itself of disgrace:

“I humbly submit to thy Justice in my Death; but I most Earnestly pray that I may be delivered from Eternal Death and Everlasting Burnings; and when my Soul is departed from this vile Body, Let it be brought into thy Presence, that I may Bless and Glorifie thy Name Eternally; for the Riches of thy Grace and Mercy which has so Abounded towards me. And for thy Names sake role away the Reproach from thine Heritage, and thine own Tribe, which I have brought upon it.”

Anne is right in his firing line. He pretends to some reluctance, but says that he has been encouraged to believe that it is right to give his response to things that were said in court, so giving “Satisfaction to those who were at my Tryal, and may have their belief warpt to uncharitableness, by the Confidence of my fellow Criminal’s Accusations, and the Moderation of My Answers.”

He impugns Anne without shame or check; and when he turns to his readership to generalise, his facile warnings about whores and whoredom are just too obvious instances of blame-shuffling:

“Open your eyes therefore, and not only look, but contemplate upon these dreadful and tragick instances, oh Adulterers and Adulteresses, and be not ensnared with a Whores charms”

Men must all “avoid the Snares of a whorish woman”.

He feels entitled by his repentance to address his eldest daughter:

“Betty, remember Modesty and Chastity are great Ornaments of a Woman, I charge thee on my blessing to preserve them; Thou art old enough to observe what ruine and destruction Whoredom makes in the world”.

As I mentioned, he addresses his former parishioners, arguing quite openly that if they had paid their tithes when due, there would not have been so much bad blood in the parish, and he might not have come to such disgrace. He asks their forgiveness, and magnanimously gives them his own:

“I hope to obtain my pardon of God, and I believe you will not deny me yours, as I do freely and heartily grant you mine.”

The abhorrent cynicism, the manipulation, the victim-blaming in this stage-managed repentance seem not to have been noticed. The Church acquired a notable penitent, and excommunicated his primary victim. Nobody argued that Foulkes might be in a state of attrition rather than contrition. Foulkes exploited fully a rhetoric that was left unexamined and unchallenged: “Let the Circumstances of my Condition add weight to my Words; Dying men have no Temptation to warp them from Sincerity”. 

He’d had every inducement and encouragement:

“I was indeed at a great Contest with my Self, whether I should by my Silence submit, and so Consent to some untrue Reflections that were cast upon me in a Place so Publick, in a Concern so Great, and to my Prejudice so Fatal; about this I had great tossings in my thoughts for three or four days since my Sentence. Loth I was to lye under a greater Load of Ignominy than belonged to me; my Burden was big Enough of it Self without any such Additions. Whilst I was thus Irresolute I received the Credit as well as the Comfort of a Visit from a Reverend Person: to him I Communicated my doubts, and from him receiv'd this Resolution, that I may Lawfully Acquit myself of any unjust Aspersions.”

All this was predicated on Foulkes’ willingness to die, having said the right things. Two versions of his scaffold speech exist: he is made to say what his clerical minders wanted him to say. Those who accompanied him in the coach were keeping up the pressure; I suppose they did not trust him, if left alone in a cart, not to backslide into tears, denials, mutenessor resistance.

This is the account of Foulkes’ speech on the scaffold in A true and perfect relation of the tryal and condemnation, execution and last speech of that unfortunate gentleman Mr. Robert Foulks late minister of a parish near Ludlow in Shropshire, who received sentence of death in London, for murder and adultery.

The EEBO copy of this pamphlet is a faint grey one, and this page in particular almost impossible to read accurately. I did my best with it:

“My Friends and Brethren

I am deservedly brought hither this day to suffer Death for a crime which deserves that Punishment by the Law, and I thank my great God I am too conscious of my own guilt in the least to deny but that both by the Laws of God and man, I have thereby forfeited that Life which I am now going to lay down the horrid sin that I was sentenced for was its true very great in itself, but yet is much aggravated being done by one of my Function or Calling, and it is one of the greatest fears I have now left me in the world, least my Example should contract any contemplation the Renowned Clergy-men of England. Ah, Sirs, it was not the Church, but one of her unworthy members that committed this heinous offence; and therefore whatsoever you think me, for God’s sake let her remain pure and unblemisht, as indeed she is, in your hearts and minds: Had I followed the wholesome Principles she enjoyns, both me and all men too, I had not been in this place upon this occasion; but here are  several Learned and pious Ministers that can in part manifest my cordial and    unfeigned sorrow, for having thus shamefully offended both God and her; and I hope the great God, whose face I trust I shall in a few minutes behold, doth both see my contrition, and will through the benefits of the blood of Jesus accept me for it. O therefore I beseech you, if my ill Example has disrepresented her, let my late Penitence and dying hatred and abhorrency of so black a sin recommend her again to your practice and obedience, without which you must never expect to be happy.

His speech was much longer, but the greatness of the crowd hindered us from hearing all, but the substance we have here related. After he had done he pray’d very earnestly, and then freely submitted to the execution of the Sentence.

His corps was privately brought back in a Coach that Evening and decently buried at St Giles in the Fields.”

During his trial, Foulkes had lapsed into his old ways. He mentions a particular rebuke, and in the shock of its acuity, goes some way to admitting its justice. But he then tries to cover his behaviour with a flimsy excuse: “The day after my Sentence there came to visit the Prisoners one Mr. Smith the Ordinary of Newgate. He was pleased to tell me (but in Private) that he observed me at my Tryal Gazing about the Court and the Galleries, where Sate several Gentlewomen. I confess I was formerly too apt to delight in such sights, and let in abundance of Sin at those windows of my Soul; but at that time I had other thoughts and Apprehensions: the cause of that diversion was to spy out some Witnesses I thought Material.”

A party of strong-minded women should have been allowed to tumble Foulkes’ body into a shallow grave at a remote crossroads.

"The beasts may teach the Atheist": Godfrey Goodman's 'The Creatures Praysing God', 1622

What was Godfrey Goodman’s The Creatures Praysing God: or, The religion of dumbe creatures. An example and argument for the stirring up of our devotion and for the confusion of atheism, G. G. (1622)? 

The ODNB life of the author, by Nicholas Cranfield, says that it was published as “an anonymous satire on the irreligion of his day”, which Goodman “used as a vehicle for dissemination of his sacramentalist understanding of the church.” This is probably the most sensible line one could take on a very odd little book. It’s not quite anonymous, being signed G.G. on the title page. The dedication to the reader (and I’m sure it’s Goodman himself writing) explains that “The Authour himselfe not vouchsafing his name, title, or preface to this his worke, and very unwilling that it should be published, I thought fit to let thee understand, that the booke it selfe containes no paradox, notwithstanding the title …” So the title we have read is not authorial, ‘G.G.’ is somehow fully anonymous, and it isn’t written as a prose paradox.

So, we are alerted to the chance that it might be a paradox, something to be read as not written sincerely.

The Creatures Praysing God might be bundled up with other early examples of failed irony (The Knight of the Burning Pestle; The Shortest Way with the Dissenters). The argument would go that Goodman means to incite more fervent devotion to God by shaming his Christian readers with an account of how pious the animals are. The animals he talks about (and they remain a very generalised concept, though he does mention a few species of birds) are like the citizens of Utopia, fictional beings designed to shame us into doing better.

The trouble is, though, that Goodman, like a 17th century Boris Johnson, gets drawn into an ardent advocacy of a point of view he doesn’t necessarily hold. Instead of establishing a satiric distance – ‘these are just animals: while this is how we humans behave’ – he gets drawn into making his case as though the general notion of animal piety has become both plausible and pleasing to him.

Here, he considers ‘The use of the creatures’:

   “Thus as they were ordained for [man's] naturall use, for his food, clothing, labour: so it should seeme, they were appointed for his spirituall use, to serve him in the nature of   Chaplaines, that they should honour and praise God, while their master, sinfull and wretched man, dishonours him, yet their service might seeme to be done by his appointment.”

The satire wavers into view: just as a wealthy man delegates piety to a chaplain, so animals can be imagined to taking up the slack on worship on behalf of us all. This is a step towards Douglas Adams’ ‘robot monk’. The necessary satiric outrage, though, doesn’t appear, for Goodman seems (to me at least) to be pleased by this fancy of mute worship because that’s actually how he’d like people to be. In theory, he’s all for active and intellectual faith, but his politics are very monarchical, and his faith was really drawn towards a borderline ceremonial-Catholic display of the divine mysteries to a trusting lay congregation. So his animals (however he pictures them, for he never specifies any particular quadruped) actually are his ideal believers.

Now, Goodman can’t have been unaware that creatures engaged in worship was a motif in earlier art in this country, and contemporary Catholic art abroad, especially in images of St Francis preaching to the birds. Therefore the thought that the animals might actually be crypto-catholics crosses his mind, and he hastens to assure us that animals are perfectly orthodox, if a little more reticent than good Church of England Protestants should be:

“Let us then enquire of the Creatures, whether they acknowledge one God, or will admit a plurality of gods in their service. And here upon the first view and appearance, they seeme unto me to cry and to testifie one God, one God, for all nature is directed to one end …the Creatures do testifie of God, which in effect is their faith; but I will passe this over: yet give me leave to passe my censure upon it … Upon due examination I finde them to be sound and Orthodoxall, I cannot taxe them with Atheisme or Heresie, but what they say or testifie of God, it is most true; onely with this defect, that they say not enough; nature cannot be raised above nature; the mysteries of grace fall not within the compasse of naturall bounds.”

Again, humour almost comes into view, but he can too readily think of human members of the church who are exactly like animals, and require things to be said for them:

“all of them [the animals] testifying the same truth, do in a sort make one common confession of their faith, they say their Creed together, as we do; this is enough, to save and excuse them from the imputation of infidelity: for children do no more in their baptisme, whom notwithstanding we know to be in the number of Gods faithfull people.”

His piety keeps taking off the satiric edge; he adores his dumb animals who can somehow say their creed.

The obvious next step was to decide whether these good but four-legged Anglican believers who happen to be animals will go to heaven. Rather surprisingly, he decides they will, if not necessarily in the same nature. 

It was a very long debate, the one about whether animals had souls. One thinks of John Wesley playing his flute to the lions in the Tower of London, or Boswell trying to argue that “when we see a very sensible dog, we know not what to think” (and Dr Johnson’s howl of derision, which I recall as being along the lines of “and when we see a very silly fellow…”).

What Goodman says is this, in a vein of pious witticism:

“If this seeme a strange doctrine then, let this reason confirme it: Creatures were first created in Paradise. Then surely they were not so much ordained for slaughter, and mans use, as for the setting forth of Gods glory. Now since our fall, they groane and travell in paine together with us under the burthen of our sinnes, and our miseries, the punishments of sinne, Rom. 8.22. yet still they continue innocent in themselves, they are often imployed in Gods service, alwaies praysing God in their owne kinde, and never incurre the breach of his law, but are patient, notwithstanding our immoderate and inordinat abuse. Then surely by a course of justice, according to their manner, and the capacity of their owne nature, though not in themselves, (that is) in the fiercenesse, malignity and corruption of their nature, yet in their owne first elements and principles, or as they have now entred into mans body, and are become parts of mans flesh, all the Creatures in generall shall partake with us, in our future intended renovation.”

This is just a proof from "reason", not from faith (and he has the Bible text at Revelations 22: 15 directly against him regarding dogs). Maybe animals get into the Holy City as they were first created, or, as we have eaten some of them, our reincarnation will involve something of them being mixed up with us in heaven,

The purportedly satirical work sounds in places very much like neo-platonically influenced writing of the Vaughan / Thomas Traherne kind:

“Thus the stocks and the stones in their silence, and in their naturall properties; the beasts in their sounds and their cries, in their sence and in their motions, all serue to praise him: for God requires no more then he hath first giuen, the right imployment of his gifts is indeed to praise him.”

That reminds me of Vaughan’s assertion that even stones “are deep in contemplation” of God, and that ecstatic brushing aside of anything as petty as facts is like Traherne.


This odd work can perhaps be thought of as a kind of pendant to his earlier and better-known work, The fall of man, or the corruption of nature, proved by the light of our naturall reason, 1616, That work involved Goodman in a long contemplation of the fallen state of God's creation, and he has much to say about 'the creatures'. In fact, an incredible amount: he can't think about humankind without triangulating between the angels (sketchy data) and the animals (a point of reference on almost every page). In this earlier text, there's no fanciful imagining of the animals as worshiping God in some silent fashion. They are simply the lower creation, and the decayed state of humankind means that we are falling closer to them, and that they are in many ways better off than us. "It should seeme wee live upon the borders, betweene God and the creatures", reflects Goodman, in thinking about why mankind is more susceptible to illness than animals are. That's because God's plagues light first on us, as is just.

And suddenly, it bursts out of Goodman:

"I have often seene and observed in the streets, an ould blinde decrepit man full of sores, and inward griefe; hungry, naked, cold, comfortlesse & harbourlesse, without patience to sustaine his griefe, without any helpe to releive him, without any counsell to comfort him, without feare of Gods justice, without hope of Gods mercy, which as at all times, so most especially in such distresse should be the sole comfort of a christian man. I protest before God that were it not, for the hope of my happines, and that I did truly beleeue the miseries of this life, to be the just punishments of sinne, I should much prefer the condition of dumbe creatures, before the state of man."

The human condition he sees as wretched. This destitute old man is damned in both worlds, this and the next ("without hope of Gods mercy"). Doctrinally, Goodman accepts that there is justice in God's having it so, it is the punishment we deserve. But otherwise, he'd prefer to be an animal. This seems to me to go beyond mere rhetoric. Can you really accept such a punitive God as being just? Goodman suddenly sounds like Faustus:

     O, no end is limited to damned souls!
     Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
     Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
     Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,
     This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
     Unto some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,
     For, when they die,
     Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;

     But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.

Or like John Donne:
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

     Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be?

The condition of the animals really is enviable. And it's because they prompt such disturbing reflections that Goodman goes on to reinvent the animal creation into perfect four-legged Christians, always worshipful, never questioning because unable to question.

'To heaven on a gibbet': the repentance of Nathaniel Butler, murderer, 1657

Because of Frank Thorney in The Witch of Edmonton, I have been thinking about exemplary penitence in early modern culture, and the way the felon who, accepting their punishment as just, and making all the right noises about contrition, is rehabilitated by a communal forgiveness (where ‘forgiveness’ means not remission of punishment, but assurances from the spiritual leaders of the community that they can die with some certainty of not being damned).

The case I’ve found as a historical parallel is that of Nathaniel Butler, who in 1657 perpetrated a brutal murder, attacking his sleeping bedfellow, a nineteen year old apprentice named John Knight. The motive was nothing to do with sex, or shame: nobody in any of the pamphlets about the case finds anything unusual about two young men sharing a bed. Rather, John Knight had been left in charge of his master’s business, a silk mercery, and Butler had seen just how much money was in the till. Knight had invited Butler to stay with him because he didn’t want to be alone with the responsibility of holding the keys to the till.

Only Knight knew that Butler was in the premises: Butler been leaving his own master’s house on the quiet, and had come and gone late and early to spend the nights with Knight. Again, this surreptitious aspect to his behaviour sprang, as far as you can tell, from not being under his own master’s roof at night.

It should also be said that Butler may have had a reputation as a bad sort, exactly the wrong sort of companion for a trusted apprentice. He had twice been moved on (‘turned over’ is the expression used), master to master. For a young male inhabitant of Oliver Cromwell’s London, Butler was managing to live a surprisingly rakish life, drinking and visiting brothels: “He lived in Fornication, frequenting the company and the Houses of Harlots”, asserted Samuel Ward in a later work, A Warning-piece to all drunkards and health-drinkers. He financed this way of carrying on by befriending other apprentices (who, in their trammelled lives, might have found a wicked friend intensely stimulating). Soon his friends or victims would be robbing the shop to fund their interesting new life with young Nathaniel.

I do recognise that part of the way Butler could tell his story was as a journey from what John Ford had Frank Thorney call the 'abyss' back to salvation, Butler might well have played up his vices as part of that narrative, as when he "condemned himself in his general ill led life, as having been addicted to gaming, drinking, and abusing himself with women, and other vices whereto the Devil had inured him, in order to this his black or rather bloody sin of Murder. He hath been often heard to cry out of his too licentious course of life, And as oft hath he cried out of the sight of the money, which led him into the snare of temptation to this vile Act." (A Full and the truest narrative of the most horrid, barbarous and unparalled murder, p.9. A word or two may have dropped from the text, the devil inuring him to vice in order to lead to his black or rather bloody sin of murder.)

The murder was most foul. Butler had seen two bags of full of money (there was £110) in the till on Tuesday, and had been brooding about getting his hands on it. During the daylight hours of Wednesday, August 5th, Knight and he had a ‘morning draught’ together at The Black Swan, and agreed to spend the afternoon fishing. Knight bought Butler a rod. They went fishing, having bought bread bait at a tavern called The Sun, from 2pm till 5pm. Then, “We appointed to meet together at eight of the clock that night, which we did at Honey-lane end, and thence went into Fish-street to the Maiden-head, and drunk three half pints of Sack, and eat a piece of Salmon of twelve pence.”

After briefly going back to his own lodgings, Butler was hiding in the warehouse when the silk merchant’s premises were locked up at 10pm. In Knight’s bed, Butler could not sleep: “I made proffer many a time with my knife to the intent to cut John's throat, and once put my knife up again: And between three and four of the clock, on Thursday morning, I took my knife and cut his Mouth to his Ear, at which he shrieked out and cried Murder. Then I put my right hand into his Mouth, and so lay struggling together for about half an hour, and at length I strangled him: after which I looked about the Chamber, and the Devil instigated me to cut his Throat, which I did with my right hand, we being both naked.

Then I slipped off my bloody Shirt, and wiped the blood off me, and put on my clothes, and having taken the Keys of the Till, where the money lay, out of John's pocket: I brought down my bloody shirt, and laid it on the Counter in the shop, and opened the Till and took out two Bags of money, and went away with them, leaving the Keys in the Till, and the shop door open standing a char.”

The murderous assault did not leave Butler unscathed: when the normal business of Thursday morning started: “A sad spectacle is discovered by a bloody shirt found (lying on the Counter in the Shop in the morning,) by the maid servant of the house, who presently called in some of the neighbours, who going to the chamber where the Apprentice lay, they found him lying with his feet on a corner of the bolster, and his head towards the lower end of the bed, in gore blood, and with a lock of hair in his right hand, and some scattering hairs were found in his left-hand also; they were all struck with amazement! The house is raised! The neighbourhood called in! A tumult about the door! The murder visible! The Murderer unknown and escaped in the morning, presently after the fact.”(A Full and the truest narrative, p.3.)

The various approved narratives of the killing stress that Butler was then incapacitated by guilt, conscience-stricken by what he has done. He did, despite this assertion, buy himself a new trunk, and had locked the two bags of money in it, but he stayed under his master’s roof. Back at Mr Worth’s shop, everybody in the neighbourhood queued up the stairs to view the victim’s body. A young man volunteered that he saw Knight fishing with another youth, not known to him, the day before. Asked to describe this person’s clothing, the witness unluckily described clothes exactly as worn by a young man who happened to be peeping round the door, who was seized and questioned.

Then a neighbour’s servant named Butler as an acquaintance of Knight, not as a suspect, but as someone who might know more about other acquaintances of the dead apprentice. Those sent to find Butler found him in a shop in Bread Street, and “asking him whether he knew one John Knight, he being as it seems smitten in his own heart, faltered in his speech, & made out of the shop with a dejected Countenance; at first denying that he knew him, but presently after confessed that he did know him; whereupon they asked him to accompany them to Milk-street? but he pretended businesse and said he could not go then, and went his way: In this discourse with him, having perceived his hands to be scratched, they began to be suspicious of him, so that they followed him at a distance, till they saw him in his Masters house in Carter lane.”

When this was reported back, one of the marshal’s men was sent to detain Butler at his master’s house in Carter Lane. He was brought to the scene of his crime without him making any resistance “where he was caused to be stripped, and in searching him, his Leather Drawers were found to be bloody, and some blood about his Clothes; also stains of blood on his Stockings, which with the scratches on his Face and Hands, were strong presumptions, that he had a hand in this Murder, with which he being charged, several times denied. During the time of this search of him, the Marshal of this City with another Gentleman went down to his Masters house, and enquiring for Butler's Trunk, a new Trunk was shewed them, which being instantly broke open, they therein found two Bags of money, one of which Bags had Mr. Worth’s Mark on it, which being brought by the Marshal to Mr. Worth’s house, and being thrown down upon a Table with acclamation! that they had not only found out the Murderer, but the money also: The Marshal’s man then called for a Cord, wherewith he bound his Hands; Some of his Hair being plucked off to be compared with the Hair which was found in the young man’s hand that was Murdered; and being ready to carry him away: He then began in a crying manner to Confess; the Coroner and some of the Jury with two Constables being present, he began by degrees to acknowledge one thing after another; and at last confessed the whole Murder, and the manner thereof before them.”

So much for the murder: Butler’s trial was a formality, his death sentence inevitable.
This is the entry in the newsletter, Mercurius Politicus for the week of August 13th-20th:

As you see, two men and three women received death sentences in the same week, with 14 branded and 7 set to be whipped. Why Butler jumped to prominence among this company of felons and unfortunates stems from (obviously) the awfulness of his crime, a discovery of his guilt that was seen as under providential direction, and, most importantly, the elaborate thoroughness of his repentance.

At his trial, Butler confessed everything: his only plea to the court was that he be given more time to repent. It was objected by the Lord Mayor himself that he had given poor Knight no chance to die having purged his soul of sins. Nevertheless, Butler’s plea was upheld. One by one, divine by divine, then in numbers, clerics and chaplains came to his cell in Newgate. This mobilisation apparently stemmed from moral alarm at the bloodiness of this crime in Oliver Cromwell’s God-fearing London. In 1657, they were near enough in time to earlier habits of discourse to be shocked by a crime against friendship, but there’s also a real sense that they felt a money-motivated murder just ought not to be happening. Butler had revealed to them a worrying vision of apparently integrated and virtuous young men, London apprentices stealing from their masters to finance a range of urban debaucheries that ought not to be there. Butler represents a malaise: so he had to be turned into a figure of reclaimed godliness. One of the pamphlets says that "he hath declared some of his Complices, and what an ill instrument he had been for them, with their wicked practices in wronging of their Masters, and many other things tending to their Masters wrong, and their own ruins; which in time will be further enquired into." But that sounds like a vague assurance, half-expressive of a reluctance to find more trouble than is necessary. The main aim was getting Butler's life told to proper and instructive effect.

The Puritans set to work on him. Randolph Yearwood, the Lord Mayor’s chaplain, recounts how Butler needed to move beyond simply acknowledging his sins, to a full understanding of his sinful nature:

“At my first Conference with him which was about five or six days after his Condemnation, I found him very ready to acknowledge his actual sins, and to charge himself with them and the aggravations that did accompany them, and this with sad tears of complaint, and indignation against himself and his sins; but did take no notice of his sinful Nature; Which myself and a Friend with me (Mr Griffith of the Charter house) perceiving, We endeavoured by Scripture to shew him his sinful Nature, as the Root of all his sinful actions.”

This seems curious, or unexpected. 'Actual sin' is a technical theological term, and in the OED ("after post-classical Latin peccatum actuale ...Theol. sin committed through a person's own actions; opposed to original sin"). But it makes me see that Frank Thorney in the play, who talks so thoroughly about his accumulated sin from his earliest years, while barely saying anything in the way of pertinent regret and contrition for the dreadful killing he perpetrated, is conforming to the same type of idea: your larger and innate sinfulness is as important a priority as the specific sin in your specific crime, or maybe even more important. Once you acknowledge your 'sinful nature', then you can realise your utter dependence on divine grace, and so proceed towards salvation.

The Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Titchbourne, himself visited Butler’s cell four days after the murder, to instruct him.  The Lord Mayor contributed to one of the pamphlets describing the case and its outcome: part of Yearwood's The Penitent Murderer is "under his Lordships own hand."

This mobilisation, born of a desire to control ad manage this piece of news, explains is why there is such an emphasis within the surviving pamphlets on how London readers must not pay attention to sensational, lying, slanderous pamphlets and ballads that have been published. (A Full and the truest narrative of the most horrid, barbarous and unparalled murder, committed on the person of John Knight was “Published after many Lying and false Relations both before and since his Death, with a detection of many lies and absurdities; and that the truth may be known.”) The story has to be a victory for faith, a re-assertion of civic order, not a fictionalised and sensationalised tale of gore. Of the pamphlets vilified by the various chaplains and Puritan divines dealing with the good outcome of this murder, I can only find Heavens cry against murder. Or, a true relation of the the bloudy & unparallel'd murder of John Knight. This would seem to be a plausible account of events, but was vehemently accused of various inaccuracies, such as impugning the probity of Butler’s father, asserting that the two young men had been baptised in the same font, and even alleging that Butler paid his master Mr Goodday half a crown a day to employ a journeyman to work in his place so that “he might have the more freedom of excess and riot”, adding “('Tis the more pity and misery, that such base gifts should blind a Master’s eyes and judgement too)”. I think this pamphleteer went too far in spreading blame to the senior adult generation. The convincing details in the pamphlet are probably novelistic in nature (the writer imagines that Butler turned up at Knight's funeral, and gave himself away). The author certainly spins out his sketchy knowledge of the events with not very illuminating moralisations about the evil of murder, which fill most of the little book.

Meanwhile, in the newsletter, Mercurius Politicus, a series of adverts announced the forthcoming approved version:

In his last fortnight, Butler became more and more the exemplary instance of the sinner reclaimed. His various counsellors express extraordinary confidence about his chance of salvation. Randolph Yearwood told the Lord Mayor, his patron, that “I verily believe you will see him yet once more; not as a Malefactor in an obscure disparaging Goal, but as an Angel of God in the Kingdom of Christ, whither (I am confident) he is gone, and you are going.” J.D. began his Blood washed away by tears of repentence with a letter to Butler, which he then took to the prison, paid his fee to enter, and delivered to the malefactor

In this febrile atmosphere, heady with repentance and a sense of the sinner reclaimed, the young man himself appears hysterically joyful, eager for the scaffold. This is the account of his last night, from Yearwood's The penitent murderer - "Evangelical joy" was an expression of approval used from 1617 onwards.

"About five a clock he fell into such a rapture and extasie of consolation as I never saw, nor (I believe) any of my fellow-Spectators; for he would shout for joy that the Lord should look on such a poor vile creature as he was: He often cried out, and made a noise, and indeed did not know how to express, and signifie fully enough his inward sense of Gods favour, saying, Must he be an heir, an heir of God, and a joint-heir with Jesus Christ, a fellow Citizen with the Saints, &c.He could not bear such a glorious discovery. Now that his joy was right Evangelical joy, appeareth thus, in that mourning and bitterness went before it; yea, he rejoiced with trembling, and could exceedingly often say that he would yet have a deeper, and a more thorough sense of sin; he could never be sufficiently abased before the Lord.Now the time was at hand that he should be carried forth to Execution, but he thought it was not near enough; for he asked several times, What a clock is it? I demanded why he enquired so concerning the time of the day? Would you gladly die? said I. Yes, yes, saith he, I desire to be dissolved, and to be with Christ which is best of all." 

One can note that the forgiveness is determined and led by the Puritan divines, in charge of community response. In the present day, perpetrators of awful crimes are expected to exhibit remorse, and the reactions to that remorse by friends or family of the victim is faithfully reported. Among all these pamphlets, I have not seen any indication of what poor Knight’s family thought about the murderer. Their opinion was not sought, not important.

In that bible-addled age, it only needed a platform for almost any person to set up as amateur preacher: the scaffold was one, the demonically possessed also tend to embark on emulations of the sermonising to which they had always been exposed. Butler did his best, trying to address the vast crowd that gathered to see him hanged from papers, and going on in sweaty terror and exultation for over an hour, before being asked to abbreviate and cease reading out from his papers what was anyway inaudible to most. Butler found further favour by officiously denouncing ‘papists’ who had visited him in prison, which he alleges they did to put the argument to him that only the true Catholic church could absolve his crime. Butler further asserted that among such visitors were ‘papist’ ladies. Anyone who paid the fee to the gaoler was admitted, and the thought of such a propaganda coup, executed right under Cromwell’s nose, as Butler’s late conversion and embrace of Rome may indeed have induced such an attempt, whatever its risks.

This is the first report of the murder I have discussed, from the newsletter (Mercurius Politicus) of the same week:

That is the bare report, unadorned, un-spun. There's little about it to suggest what an outpouring would follow:

One of the famous books of the age was John Reynolds' big anthology of stories in The triumphs of Gods revenge against the crying and execrable sin of murther. There had been an edition in 1656, but a new one appeared in 1657. The title page seems to have been augmented from a relatively plain 

to one that didn't simply point to murders abroad, but acknowledged trouble at home: "histories which contain great variety of mournful and memorable accidents, historical, moral, and divine, very necessary to restrain and deter us from the bloody sin, which in these our days makes so ample, and large a progression". That would, I think, be Butler.

The quarto of The Witch of Edmonton was printed in 1658. I've often wondered why then, in that particular year, and very tentatively wonder now whether Frank Thorney didn't come into somebody's memory, triggering the thought that there had been a play with a very penitent murderer in it (and that type of person sold well).

Jenner's Stages of Sin, 1635

These admonitory images are from Thomas Jenner's The ages of sin, or Sinnes birth & groweth With the stepps, and degrees of sin, from thought to finall impenitencie.  

The book appeared in 1635, and seems to have been popular enough for two further editions to appear in 1655, and what appears on EEBO to be a single sheet version in 1675, suitable for pasting up to edify the godly members of your godly household while they are in your godly privy.

It looks as if the woodcuts were local versions of a continental emblem book. The final image is signed with 'Ja. v. L. fecit'. Jan van Leyden came to mind, though 1635 seems to be rather early for the marine artist. A Dutch name anyway.

The book takes a seven ages of man format, and re-applies it to illustrate seven ages, or rather steps of sin, progressing from sinful thoughts to the sinful act, and so onwards to the latter stages of decline into a permanent sinful state.

My interest was fired by a student, who is going to be working on personifications of Thought in Shakespeare. Taking the subject quite literally, I reflected that the poet often writes about his or her thoughts in Petrachistic poetry, thoughts being apostrophised as unquiet, restless, etc. Then Sidney's pastoral lyric "My sheep are thoughts, which I both guide and serve" came to mind, and so to this set of images, where sinful thoughts are personified, or embodied, as various kinds of animals.

1 Suggestion.

Original-Concupiscence doth make 

Our Nature like a foul great-Bellied Snake: 

For, were not Sathan apt to tempt to Sin; 

Yet, Lustful-Thoughts would breed & brood, within: 

But, happy he, that takes these Little-Ones, 

To dash their Brains (Soon) 'gainst repentant-Stones. 

So, in this cheering opening image and verse about 'Suggestion' (we'd use 'Temptation'), original sin makes us like a pregnant viper, a snake of the non-oviparous kind. We hardly need Satan tempting us,because we breed sins within, like baby snakes (not the tinned pasta kind). Well, we must dash their brains out, before they grow up to be dangerous.

2. Rumination.

When Lust hath (thus) conceived, it brings forth Sin, 

And ruminating-thoughts its Shape begin. 

Like as the Bears oft-licking of her whelps. 

That foul deformed Creatures shape much helps. 

The dangers great, our Sinful thoughts to Cherish, 

Stop their growth, or thy poor Soul will perish.

Here we are like mother bears,in the Plinian natural history of the day, licking our newly arrived sinful thought into shape, maybe planning how we will not just covet our neighbour's ass, or his wife, but actually carry out some theft or abduction.

Here's a picture of me in the former church at Castle Richard in Shropshire, thinking penitently about how often I have indeed coveted my neighbour's ass, and trying to resolve to do better:

DELECTATION. 3

If Sinful Thoughts (once) nestle in man’s heart, 

The Sluice is ope, Delight (then) plays its part: 

Then, like the old-Ape hugging in his arms, 

His apish-young-ones, sin the Soul becharms: 

And, when our apish impious-thoughts delight us, 

Oh, then, (alas) most mortally they bite us. 

Here we are, then, our sin resolved upon, our scheme to carry it out fully formed. Now we are like an old ape hugging its offspring, delighted with it. (But we will get bitten.)

CONSENT. 4

For, where Sin works Content, Consent will follow; 

And, this, the Soul, into Sin’s Gulf, doth swallow. 

For, as two rav'ning Wolves (for, tis their kind) 

To suck Lambs-blood, do hunt with equal-mind: 

Even so, the Soul & Sin Consent, in One, 

Till, Soul & Body be quite overthrown. 

Pleased with the sin we contemplate, we give in to it. Content and Consent are two wolves ravening a lamb. Jenner does concede that to do such a thing is only natural to wolves. This whole publication does quite ruthlessly treat animals as merely present to be moral examples to human beings, making them embody sinful human thoughts which of course, as Jenner concedes here, they simply do not have.

5 Act.

Sin and the Soul (thus) having stricken Hands, 

The Sinner (now) for Action ready stands; 

And Tyger-like swallows-up, at one-bit, 

Whatever impious Prey his Heart doth fit: 

Committing Sin, with eager greediness, 

Selling his Soul to work all wickedness. 

Sin in action is this splendid 'Tyger' (I suppose Blake scholars might have put the point that Blake might have seen this engraving), gobbling down its prey, boots, spurs and all.

Iteration. 6

From eager-acting Sin, comes Iteration, 

Or, frequent Custom of Sins perpetration; 

Which, like great Flesh-Flies' lighting on raw-Flesh, 

Though oft beat-off, (if not killed) come afresh: 

Hence, Be'lzebub is termed Prince of flesh-flies, 

'Cause Sin, still Acts, until (by Grace) It Dies. 

This unsavoury image of a menace to public health is a butcher trying to keep flies off his meat with a fly-flap. Our sins are now like flies, they will not go away, but, chased off, come buzzing right back.

GLORIATION. 7

Custom in Sin takes Sense of Sin away, 

This makes All-Sin seem but a Sport, a play: 

Yea, like a rampant-Lyon, proud and Stout, 

Insulting  o're his Prey, stalking about, 

The Saucy-Sinner boasts & brags of Sin. 

As One (oh woe) that doth a City win. 

'Gloriation', rare or obsolete says the OED, a splendid word meaning, or course, boasting of our actions, proud as a lion over what we have done.

8 Obduration.

When Sin brings Sinners to this fearful pass, 

What follows, but a hard heart, brow of brass· 

A Heart (I say) more hard then Tortoise-back; 

Which, nether Sword nor Axe can hew or hack; 

Judgements nor mercies, treats nor threats can cause 

To leave-off Sin, to love or fear Gods Laws. 

Oh dear, now we are hardened in sin. Like a tortoise, nothing can get through to us, we are obdurated in it (OED says 'obdurate' was a word to express hardening of the soul before it had anything to do with anything merely material in nature simply being made harder).

9 FINAL IMPENITENCY.

And (now, alas) what is Sins last Extent? 

A hard-Heart makes a Heart impenitent. 

For, can a Leopard change his Spotted Skin? 

No, nor a Heart accustomed (thus), his Sin. 

Then, Conscience, headlong, casts impenitence, 

With horrid frights of Hellish Recompense.

Can a leopard change his spots? Neither can a sinner. The leopard/sinner is I think meant to be committing suicide, driven by conscience into a final sin.

Setting off with original sin, and ending with conscience leading us to kill ourselves, 'The stages of sin' has little space for positives (but it does manage to mention repentance and grace). The animals are, however, quite jolly in some of the illustrations, and are generally doing what's natural to them