We all knew our new home was ‘different’ – the world beyond those high stone walls never let us forget it – but just how different and the reasons why would take many years to unearth. I first learned the genesis of the Agapemone from The Abode of Love, a novel based on my childhood home by English satirist Aubrey Menen. I was 17, and the family who had employed me briefly as their au pair lent it to me. Neither the job nor the book were enjoyable experiences, but the revelations contained in that slim volume did contribute to my quest at the time.
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It all began in the 1840s. England was emerging from 70 turbulent years of sweeping change, moving from an agrarian society to an intensely industrial one. The Industrial Revolution had loosened the shackles of feudalism expressed in Cecil Frances Alexander’s famous hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful’, written in 1848:
The rich man at his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and mighty,
He ordered their estate.
Wealth, once the domain of the noble born, was becoming more accessible to the merchant class. But, at the other end of the economic scale, a whole new level of poverty was emerging as country folk abandoned their villages in increasing numbers to work in urban factories. The resulting dislocation, economic change and appalling working conditions produced waves of protest and began to strain the already shaky moral and religious fibres of this island nation.
It must have seemed a bewildering new world. The abolition of slavery was being talked about at a conference in London. The kingdom’s new young queen, Victoria, was marrying a foreigner. The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, ‘sympathizer to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed’, was about to be published on the heels of Oliver Twist, the masterpiece that had drawn attention to an endemic cruelty to children. And, unremarked upon by the great chroniclers of the day, a charismatic young Anglican curate, fresh from his examinations and a turbulent college career, set off for Somerset to take up a curacy in the tiny village of Charlinch, next door to Spaxton.
Agapemone founder Reverend Henry James Prince had originally set his sights on the medical profession and held down a post in a Bath hospital before illness forced him to give up his career in favour of the Church. His widowed mother had been appalled at his career change, not because she had anything against clergymen – they were very necessary, in their way, and far more socially acceptable than mere physicians – but because she disapproved of what she considered her young son’s unhealthy relationship with her lodger. Martha Freeman, the daughter of a West Indian planter, was a wealthy spinster, a devout Roman Catholic and more than twice Henry’s age.
The besotted Martha paid for young Henry’s theological training at St David’s College in Lampeter, Wales. This new foundation, set up to stem the turbulent waters of religious nonconformity threatening the established Church at the time, sent its graduates forth to win back dissenters. Mainstream Christianity was no longer as satisfying as it had once been; people from all walks of life were questioning their beliefs and searching for a more meaningful spiritual path. Christian evangelism was becoming more popular in England and the United States, where utopian sects such as the Mormons, Adventists and the Christadelphians were all soon to establish themselves. But the principal and faculty of St David’s College were strictly old school, drawn from the ranks of noble younger sons, witty with an easy superiority and a decidedly Georgian view of religion. Most had a taste for riding to hounds and vintage claret, fine sherry and old port. These worldly clergymen disliked – maybe even feared – any movement that could upset their pleasant social order.
Twenty-six-year-old Henry was appalled by his superiors. He was also disgusted by the laissez-faire attitude of most of his fellow students to their calling. He decided to show them the error of their ways and formed a group of like-minded zealots. These ‘Lampeter Brethren’ set about their self-appointed task with a will, interrupting services with their abrasive fervour – on one occasion he and his followers angrily stalked out of the vice-principal’s cocktail party to hoots of derision from their more worldly fellow students, who saw nothing wrong in the pleasant social life of a country vicar.
Yet the college authorities could do little about these troublesome Lampeter Brethren. Prince and his followers continued to excel in their studies, making it impossible to send them down. And when he wasn’t fighting the faculty, Prince was writing long, rambling letters to his beloved Martha back in Bath. During his holidays the two closeted themselves in her room where Henry would woo her with verses from the Bible’s erotic Song of Solomon. To the devout young student, the book’s language, especially when recited aloud, must surely have appealed to his awakening sensuality, as well as his love of the written word – he would prove a gifted writer and eventually produce a huge volume of religious tracts and pamphlets. On a deeper level still, Henry’s belief that the book’s underlying message was that the Church was the bride of Christ appealed to his growing religious obsession and would form the basis of his strange beliefs.
But as she anxiously paced the floor downstairs, his mother was only concerned with what she believed was her son’s obsession with this much older woman.
In July 1838, the ill-matched pair married. But Martha’s young husband insisted their marriage be ‘in spirit’ only; there could be no carnal relations. Prince then returned to St David’s to complete his studies. Two long years later – no doubt for Martha as well as the college faculty – Henry graduated and was given a curacy in Charlinch. When the young curate and his adoring wife arrived in this bucolic corner of England, they found the congregation anything but God-fearing, and the parish’s wealthy and well-born incumbent absent. The Reverend Samuel Starky had taken himself off to die on the Isle of Wight.
Prince set about reclaiming the lost souls of Charlinch, preaching long and fiery sermons filled with hellfire and damnation. A year later his proselytising still hadn’t cut any ice with his congregation, who continued to choose the local public house over church pews, perhaps wary of this new religious call to arms.
Prince’s elderly wife returned to Bath, very probably disillusioned with her ‘spiritual’ marriage and no doubt worn out with the struggle to claim the hearts and minds of an obdurate congregation. Memories are long in the countryside, and perhaps in Prince’s fiery promises of paradise these farmers, farriers and labourers heard echoes of what had happened a century and a half before, when they flocked to the Protestant losing side in the Duke of Monmouth’s disastrous insurrection against the Catholic King James.
Far away on the Isle of Wight the parish incumbent, still reclining on what he had convinced himself was to be his deathbed, received a printed copy of one of his curate’s sermons. He would later claim the words jolted him back to health. As soon as he was well enough, Starky returned to Charlinch and, unlike his congregation, fell under Prince’s spell, believing his curate’s prediction that the end of history was nigh and only those who believed would find salvation in an earthly paradise.
One Sunday in October 1841, Starky, so consumed by his curate’s predictions, mounted the pulpit to deliver his customary sermon. Silence! He tried again. He waved his arms. He groaned. He muttered. His tiny congregation looked on in concern. Was their parson ill? After several more minutes of inexplicable gesticulating Starky stepped down from the pulpit, leaving his curate to explain that the Holy Ghost had deserted his religious superior. The following Sunday several dozen curious worshippers showed up at the church door. Once again, Starky appeared to be struck dumb.
Within a month the place was packed, as news of the ‘mad parson’ spread across the county. So was the local public house. After each increasingly bizarre service the congregation would dash down the steep hill to the Lamb Inn in the neighbouring village of Spaxton, where they would quench their thirst on draughts of powerful scrumpy cider and fight with the pub’s resentful regulars.
It took a month for the Holy Ghost to return to the Reverend Starky – a month in which Prince and a small coterie of followers prayed daily that the parson’s voice be restored. And then one Sunday in November, as an expectant hush had fallen over the packed pews, Starky mounted the steps to the pulpit and began to preach, miraculously in full voice. Prince was later to claim the sermon Starky delivered that evening was ‘searching as fire, heavy as a hammer, sharper than a two-edged sword’, and that the return of his superior’s voice was a miracle, implying, of course, that he’d had a hand in it.
It was just what was needed. Soon Charlinch had become the centre of a noisy religious revival. People flocked to the church in ever-increasing numbers. Prayer groups and ladies’ groups were formed. Children attending Sunday School wailed in distress at their own wickedness. Chaos reigned. Members of the Lampeter Brethren were called on to help trumpet Prince’s message that the end of history would be marked by an earthly paradise for the saved. He went one step further and decided to separate the wheat – those he deemed truly possessed of the spirit – from the chaff – those he suspected attended out of curiosity. This ‘chaff ’ did not like their label, especially as many of them were prosperous farmers and considered themselves important in village life. When these ‘sinners’ discovered that their vicar intended to literally bar them from attending church services – as well as entering the gates of paradise – they were scandalised.
Once again, the countryside erupted in such turmoil that even the elderly and indolent Bishop of Bath and Wells could no longer ignore the effect Starky and Prince were having on the locals. Starky was summoned to the bishop’s palace in the tranquil cathedral city of Wells and told to get rid of his mad curate.
Starky told Prince about the bishop’s edict, and Prince ignored it. But an unusual calm did descend on the parish for a couple of weeks, mainly because Prince had been summoned to Bath following his wife’s death. He didn’t mourn for long and within weeks had married Reverend Starky’s sister Julia. She too was much older than him and was also told the marriage would be a spiritual one.
Prince returned to saving souls in Charlinch, especially female ones, the younger and prettier the better, it seemed. Soon husbands and fathers grew uneasy. The bishop was approached again and decided to revoke Prince’s licence to preach in the diocese.
The young curate appeared unconcerned, but the reason for his behaviour was soon evident: William Cobbe, a wealthy engineer who had worked with famous Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, had given Prince a parcel of land in nearby Spaxton and would design and build Prince’s earthly paradise.
One hundred years later, this earthly paradise would become my childhood home.