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“Our Lot is Fallen Into an Age of Wonders”: John Spencer and the Controversy Over Prodigies in the Early Restoration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

William E. Burns
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Extract

England during the early Restoration is a fascinating case of the cultural fertility of counterrevolution. The problem of the reimposition of authority following the destruction and revival of such traditional institutions as monarchy, bishops, and nobility led to a variety of new expedients, rather than simply the return to old verities that one might expect from the somewhat misleading term “Restoration.” Historians such as Jonathan Scott and Richard Greaves have remarked upon the continuing challenge posed by oppositional ideologies dating back to the Revolution, republican and/or radical Protestant, in the England of the Restoration. Historians such as James Jacob, Margaret Jacob, Patrick Curry, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, have traced the ways in which the new science and Baconian ideology participated in the effort to find new bases for authority in the still unstable England of the time following the Civil War and Interregnum. John Gascoigne, in his recent history of Cambridge University in the eighteenth century, refers to the nexus of establishment politics, rational religion, and natural philosophy that originated in the Restoration and dominated the eighteenth century in England as the “holy alliance.”

This article will examine two important, and largely neglected, documents of the early Restoration, the Discourse Concerning Prodigies (1663) and the Discourse on Vulgar Prophecies (1665), both by the Anglican clergyman and scholar John Spencer. These works, produced in response to a specific challenge to the Restoration state, contributed to the creation of a Baconian scientific ideology in the 1660s, and its “holy alliance” with Latitudinarian religion. This article also examines, in turn, Spencer's political, religious, and natural-philosophical arguments. By demonstrating the connections between them it demonstrates that the “holy alliance” predated the development of Newtonian physics, and that Spencer, neither a natural philosopher nor one of the well known Latitudinarian divines, contributed to it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Summer 1995 , pp. 237 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1995

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References

1 See Greaves, Richard, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain 1660–1663 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Enemies Under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain 1664–1677 (Stanford, 1990)Google Scholar; and Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford, 1992)Google Scholar, and Scott, Jonathan, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Jacob, J. R., Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Jacob, Margaret, The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689–1720 (Ithaca, 1976)Google Scholar; Curry, Patrick, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (London, 1989)Google Scholar; and Schaffer, Simon and Shapin, Steven, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985)Google Scholar.

3 Gascoigne, John, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989) p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The second edition of the Discourse Concerning Prodigies appeared in 1665, in a more reader-friendly octavo, as opposed to the small-print 1663 quarto. Textual differences between the two editions are minor. References in this article will be to the 1663 edition. When the Discourse Concerning Vulgar Prophecies was published in 1665, it was bound with the second edition of the Discourse Concerning Prodigies, and Spencer explicitly presented the two works as part of the same project. Spencer, John, Discourse Concerning Vulgar Prophecies (Cambridge, 1665), p. 7Google Scholar. There are brief discussions of the Discourse Concerning Prodigies in Daston, Lorraine, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Enquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): pp. 112, 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hooker, Edward N., “The Purpose of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis,” Huntington Library Quarterly 10 (1946): 128–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gascoigne, John, “‘The Wisdom of the Egyptians' and the Secularization of History in the Age of Newton,” in Gaukroger, Stephen ed., The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition (Dordrecht, 1991), pp. 176–78Google Scholar; and Harris, Victor, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949), pp. 166–68Google Scholar. Both Harris and Daston ignore the immediate political context of Spencer's work.

5 The two principal studies of the cultural roles of prodigies in Early Modern Europe are Céard, Jean, La Nature et les prodiges: l'insolite au 16e siècle, en France, Travaux d'humanisme et Renaissance, no. 158 (Geneva, 1977)Google Scholar and Park, Katherine and Daston, Lorraine, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Early Modern France and England,” Past & Present 92 (August, 1981): 20–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Both largely ignore the political dimensions of prodigies after the Reformation.

6 For the importance of providentialism in seventeenth-century English culture see Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), pp. 78–112Google Scholar; Donagan, Barbara, “Godly Choice: Puritan Decision Making in Seventeenth-Century England,” Harvard Theological Review 76 (1983): 307–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Worden, Blair, “Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,” Past & Present 109 (November, 1985): 55–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 See The Continuation of the Weekely Newes no. 36 (Oct. 5, 1624) pp. 1–3Google Scholar; the ballad “A List of Hideous Signs” (1638) Wood Collection 402 (67), reprinted in Rollins, Hyder, ed., The Pack of Autolycus; or, Strange and Terrible News of Ghosts, Apparitions, Monstrous Births, Showers of Wheat, Judgments of God, and other Prodigious and Fearful Happenings as told in Broadside Ballads of the Years 1624–1693 (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 21–25Google Scholar; and Brinckmair, Captain L., The Warnings of Germany By Wonderfiill Signes and strange Prodigies seene in divers parts of that Countrey of Germany, between the Yeare 1618 and 1638 (London, 1638)Google Scholar. Hibbard, Caroline, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, 1983) p. 274 n111Google Scholar, identifies The Warnings of Germany as part of a burst of English propaganda writings in the late 1630s supporting the German Protestant cause connected with the Prince Palatine's visit to England.

9 Among many other examples, see Bradshaw, Ellis, A True Relation of the Strange Apparition seen in the air, on Monday, 25 February, in and about the Town of Bolton in the Mores in the County of Lancaster at mid-day (London, 1650)Google Scholar; and Vicars, John, Prodigies and Apparitions (London, 1642)Google Scholar. The prodigy literature of the Civil War is discussed in Durston, Chris, “Signs and Wonders in the English Civil War,” History Today 37 (1987): 22–28Google Scholar; Friedman, Jerome, The Battle of Frogs and Fairford's Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution (New York, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rusche, Harry, “Prophecies and Propaganda, 1641–1651,” English Historical Review 84 (1969): 752–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Short discussions of these tracts and the reaction they provoked can be found in Friedman, , The Battle of Frogs, pp. 248–53Google Scholar; Greaves, , Deliver Us from Evil, pp. 213–16Google Scholar; Thomas, , Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 95–96Google Scholar; Muddiman, J. G., The King's Journalist 1659–1689: Studies in the Reign of Charles II (London, 1923), pp. 132–33, 153–59Google Scholar; Hooker, “Dryden's Purpose,” pp. 52–57Google Scholar; Ball, Bryan, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 (Leiden, 1975), pp. 111–14Google Scholar; and Whiting, C. E., Studies in English Puritanism from the Restoration to the Revolution 1660–1688 (London, 1931), pp. 546–51Google Scholar.

11 For the “Confederacy Press,” see Greaves, , Deliver Us From Evil, pp. 207–25Google Scholar.

12 For testimony as to the prodigy tracts' circulation from an eminent Churchman and an eminent Dissenter, see Parker, Samuel, History of His Own Time (London, 1730), p. 18Google Scholar; and Baxter, Richard, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed., Sylvester, Matthew (London, 1696), pp. 163–64Google Scholar.

13 HMC Hastings MS. iv, p. 121.

14 Strange and True Newes from Gloucester (London, 1660)Google Scholar.

15 Eniantios Terastios, Mirabilis Annus, or The Year of Prodigies and Wonders (London, 1661)Google Scholar, Preface.

16 Royalist responses to specific alleged prodigies included the ballad The Phanaticke's Plot Discovered (London, 1660)Google Scholar; Clarke, Robert, The Lying Wonders, or rather the Wonderful Lyes (London, 1660)Google Scholar; and A Perfect Narrative of the Phanatick Wonders Seen in the West of England (London, 1660)Google Scholar.

17 Gascoigne identifies Spencer as the only head of a Cambridge college appointed in the 1660s without a strong record of Interregnum royalism (Cambridge, pp. 29, 34). For Newton's regard for Spencer, whom he referred to once as “Spencerus Noster” see The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. Turnbull, H. W., 8 vols. (Cambridge, 1961), 3: 185, 291Google Scholar.

18 Spencer preached a sermon of thanksgiving for the Restoration that was published as The Righteous Ruler (Cambridge, 1660)Google Scholar.

19 Biographical information on Spencer is from the Dictionary of National Biography and Masters, R., Master's History of the College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary in the University of Cambridge with additional Matter and a continuation to the Present Time by John Lamb D.D. Master of the College (Cambridge, 1831), pp. 193–201Google Scholar. The reference to Spencer's connection with Tenison is in ibid., pp. 197–98.

20 Spencer, John, Discourse Concerning Prodigies (Cambridge, 1663)Google Scholar, Preface. Since Classical antiquity, Africa had been associated for Europeans with the monstrous and strange. See Jones, Eldred, The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville, 1971), pp. 2–5Google Scholar.

21 Although not so firmly rooted in current events as the Discourse Concerning Prodigies, the Discourse Concerning Vulgar Prophecies was also presented as a response to recent events, in this case the prophecies of Drabicius and others recounted in the pamphlet Lux in Tenebris, by Comenius, John Amos (Vulgar Prophecies, p. 21)Google Scholar. For Lux in Tenebris and Comenius, see Trevor-Roper, Hugh, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (2nd ed.; London, 1972) p. 286nGoogle Scholar.

22 Spencer, Discourse Concerning Prodigies, Preface.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., pp. 83–84. Spencer regarded women prophets as particularly characteristic of Catholicism, Roman (Vulgar Prophecies, p. 15)Google Scholar.

25 Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, p. 84Google Scholar; Vulgar Prophecies, pp. 36, 47–48. Frank Manuel attributes Spencer's and Newton's belief in the prophet as educated man to the influence of Maimonides. This may well be true, as Spencer often referred to Maimonides, but the reaction to the often unlearned and sometimes female prophets of the Interregnum was probably more significant (Manuel, , The Religion of Isaac Newton [Oxford, 1974], p. 87)Google Scholar.

26 Spencer, , Vulgar Prophecies, pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

27 Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, pp. 73–74Google Scholar. Spencer handled the embarassing case of Thomas Jackson, the pre-Civil War Laudian and author of A Treatise Concerning the Signes of the Times, which had endorsed the providential interpretation of prodigies, by asserting that Jackson had suffered from melancholia. This required some delicacy, as Jackson was now a minor hero of the Established Church (see Discourse Concerning Prodigies, p. 32).

28 “Ignes fatui” were swamp lights that were reputed to lead travelers astray (Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, p. 84)Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., pp. 2–3. For a discussion of this classification and the fate of the preternatural in the seventeenth century, see Daston, “Marvelous Facts.”

30 Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, p. 10Google Scholar.

31 Spencer, , Vulgar Prophecies, p. 20Google Scholar.

32 See Dictionary of National Biography article “John Spencer” and Gascoigne, “Wisdom of the Egyptians,” pp. 175–76.

33 Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, pp. 3–4Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., p. 60.

35 Ibid., Preface.

36 Ibid., p. 9.

37 Despite his frequently proclaimed belief in rational religion, historians of Latitudinarianism have ignored Spencer. He does not appear in two recent important studies of the Restoration Church of England, Spurr, John, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar or Spellman, W. M., The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens, 1993)Google Scholar.

38 Spencer, Discourse Concerning Prodigies, Preface.

39 Ibid., p. 17.

40 Ibid., p. 34.

41 Ibid, p. 7.

42 Ibid., p. 10.

43 Ibid., p. 60.

44 ibid., pp. 61–62. The tendency to treat the Devil as a force who could be held responsible for the residue of natural phenomena not explainable by mechanism is discussed in Jobe, Thomas, “The Devil in Restoration Science: The Glanvill-Webster Witchcraft Debate,” Isis 72 (1981): 343–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jobe argues that use of the devil as an explanans was an alternative to the acceptance of occult forces. I would add that it was also an alternative to “particular providences.”

45 Despite his belief in an active Devil, Spencer's one reference to witchcraft in either of the works discussed here was skeptical (Discourse Concerning Prodigies, p. 21).

46 Another context in which it was claimed that the number of prodigies had been increasing was that of the decay of nature. This idea had lost much of its power by the Restoration, however (see Harris, , All Coherence Gone, pp. 148–72Google Scholar).

47 Mirabilis Annus Secuiidus or the Second Part of the Second Years Prodigies (London, 1662)Google Scholar, Preface.

48 Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

49 Ibid., p. 11.

50 Ibid., p. 9.

51 Ibid., Preface.

52 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; and Ashworth, William, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Lindberg, David and Westman, Robert, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 303–32Google Scholar.

53 See Vickers, Brian, “On the Function of Analogy in the Occult,” in Merkel, I. and Debus, A. G., eds., Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (Cranfield, N.J., 1988) pp 265–90Google Scholar.

54 Ashworth, , “Emblematic World View,” p. 306Google Scholar.

55 Mirabilis Annus, Preface. Note that the examples in this passage are all related to war and civil discord.

56 Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, p. 26Google Scholar. But Spencer did not always reject analogical and emblematic thought; see p. 91 where he accepted the doctrine of signatures, medicinal herbs that resemble the part of the body whose ills they cure.

57 Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680,” in idem., ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 95–163.

58 Spencer, , Vulgar Prophecies, pp. 31–32Google Scholar.

59 Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, p. 27Google Scholar. Again, the examples given are related to politics, particularly civil war and the death of monarchs.

60 Ibid., p. 61.

61 Ibid., pp. 40–1.

62 Ibid, p. 37.

63 Ibid., p. 103.

64 Ibid., pp. 8–9.

65 Ibid., Preface.

66 Ibid., p. 10.

67 Spencer followed closely the propagandists of the New Philosophy in claiming that in his time “Nature begins now to be studied more than Aristotle, and men are resolved upon a Philosophy that bottoms not upon pliancy but experience, a Philosophy that they can prove and use, not that which commenceth in faith and concludes in talk” (Vulgar Prophecies, p. 5).

68 Bacon, Francis, Novum Organum, in Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, James, Ellis, R. L., and Heath, D. D., 14 vols. (London, 1858–1874), 6: 207Google Scholar; Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, pp. 66–67Google Scholar.

69 Spencer, , Vulgar Prophecies, pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

70 Bacon, , The Advancement of Learning, in Works, ed. Spedding, , Ellis, , and Heath, , 3: 330Google Scholar.

71 Spencer, , Discourse Concerning Prodigies, p. 45Google Scholar.

72 Bacon, , The Advancement of Learning, in Works, ed. Spedding, , Ellis, , and Heath, , 3: 331Google Scholar.

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74 Ibid., pp. 17–8.

75 Ibid., p. 80.

76 Ibid., p. 104.

77 Sprat, Thomas, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), p. 358Google Scholar.

79 The other conservative writer who wrote extensively on prodigies in the early 1660s was the astrologer John Gadbury, who responded to The Lord's Loud Call to England in A Brief Examination of that Nest of Sedition and Phanatick Forgeries (London, 1661)Google Scholar and the Mirabilis Annus tracts in Dies Novissima, or Doomsday not so Near as Dreaded (London, 1664)Google Scholar. Gadbury's more theoretical approach to prodigies, in Natura Prodigiorum (London, 1660; 2nd ed., 1665)Google Scholar treated them as holding political meaning but deemphasized providentialism and suggested that the proper people to evaluate their meaning were astrologers. Richard Baxter also treated the failure of the Mirabilis Annus tracts, arguing that they showed that the providential interpretation of prodigies, while valid in itself, should not be applied to current politics (Reliquiae Baxterianae, pp. 432–33). See also Baxter, , The Certainty of the World of Spirits (London, 1691), pp. 163–64Google Scholar.

79 An English work that defended the providential interpretation of prodigies against Spencer, although without explicitly naming him, was “A Reverend Divine,” A Practical Discourse on the late Earthquakes, with An Historical Account of Prodigies and their Various Effects (London, 1692), p. 25Google Scholar.

80 Glanvill, Joseph, Essays upon Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676)Google Scholar “The Usefulness of Real Philosophy to Religion,” pp. 15–16. The diarist and future President of the Royal Society Samuel Pepys was also an admirer; he spoke of “reading Mr. Spencer's Book of Prodigys, which is most ingeniously writ, both for matter and style” and later of “discoursing and admiring of the learning of Dr. Spencer” with Henry Moore, the earl of Sandwich's man of business (Pepys, , The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Latham, R. C. and Matthews, W., eds., 11 vols. [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970–1983] 5: 165 and 7: 133Google Scholar).

81 Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 4th ser. 8 (1868): 354Google Scholar.

82 Mather, Increase, Angelographia (Boston in New England, 1696)Google Scholar, To the Reader. Winship, Michael P., “Prodigies, Puritanism, and the Perils of Natural Philosophy: The Example of Cotton Mather,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 51, 1 (1994): 98–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses the influence of Spencer upon Increase and Cotton Mather.