Elizabeth Maber was born into a wealthy family in Wales in 1801. Her family had embraced the charismatic young Reverend Prince in 1845, when he and his Lampeter Brethren, plus the ever-loyal Reverend Starky, packed the halls and churches of Swansea with their hellfire and brimstone Christianity. Elizabeth, along with her younger sisters Frances and Mary and brother Arthur, was captivated by Prince’s vision of an earthly Abode of Love, where the chosen would live out their days safe from the predicted apocalypse – and where she could indulge her love of sketching and perhaps no longer face a drab future as a spinster, dependent on family charity.
Soon Elizabeth had convinced her parents and siblings that their future lay with the handsome young Reverend Prince. Arrangements were speedily made, whereby they would donate their worldly wealth to the brave experiment being attempted in Spaxton, Somerset.
Prince believed he was inspired by the Holy Ghost and that, as its messenger, he was sent to warn of the doom approaching the world. It was heady stuff to impressionable women like the Maber sisters. Through sheer personality and oratory, he persuaded his increasing numbers of followers to believe that because man was not only sinful but also weak, God had to punish him from time to time with a judgment; hence the floods and plagues contained in the Old Testament.
But, he explained, God was also merciful and always warned humanity of what was to come by sending a messenger in human form. These dispensations had been Adam (the first dispensation), Noah (the second), Abraham (the third) and Christ (the fourth).
He, Henry James Prince, was the embodiment of a fifth dispensation. God had told him that the day of judgment was approaching when Christ would return, this time as the Son of Man as well as the Son of God. But, only those willing to set themselves apart from the world would be saved.
Prince had also captivated the five unmarried daughters of retired wool merchant Josias Nottridge while unsuccessfully attempting to get a permanent Church of England living in Suffolk in East Anglia. His excess of orthodoxy had so concerned the local bishop that Prince had been told he wasn’t welcome. Perhaps his rejection fuelled the Nottridge girls’ faith, as a year after their father’s death, Louisa, 43, Harriet, 41, Cornelia, 36, Clara, 34 – the same age as Prince – and Agnes, 28, took to the road, following wherever Prince and his band of loyal young disciples led.
In their bonnets and furbelows, these five groupies trailed after Prince and his ‘brethren’om their home in Suffolk to Weymouth and Brighton on the south coast, and from Swansea in Wales to Spaxton in Somerset, travelling unchaperoned in hired carriages, staying in hotels and lodging houses – often paying Prince’s bills as well as their own – and appearing as members of the inner circle surrounding the man whose arrival was heralded by advertisements proclaiming:
‘The Lord is at hand’
‘The Servant of the Lord will declare the Testimony of Jesus’
‘Behold! He Cometh’
What an adventure for these rich, sheltered women! What a defiant gesture!
On 9 June 1845, the cavalcade arrived in Taunton. The sisters put up in the Giles Hotel while Prince and his group stayed at the nearby Castle Hotel. The following morning, Harriet and her sisters had barely finished breakfast when a servant arrived, requesting the 41-year-old spinster’s presence before Prince and Starky.
‘God is about to confer upon you a special blessing which the spirit has directed us to make known to you,’ began Prince on her arrival. ‘Before I do that, you must make a solemn promise you will do what is required of you.’
Intrigued, Harriet eagerly agreed.
‘You are commanded to marry Reverend Price,’ said Prince, explaining that this marriage to one of his most devout followers would be ‘in spirit’ only and that there would be no carnal relations.
Perhaps, to certain of Prince’s sheltered female followers, a marriage ‘in spirit’ might have seemed the answer to a maiden’s prayer. It wasn’t a new idea but one based on a passage from St Luke 20:35 in which Jesus says: ‘But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage.’
Prince wasn’t alone in advocating unusual marital relationships. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Christian sects with strange sexual observances were also flourishing. They included the Shakers, who practised celibacy, with men and women living together as brothers and sisters; the Oneida Community, which believed in free love; and the Mormons, who practised polygamy. At the core of Prince’s teaching was his belief that Christ was about to return to earth and pass judgment on fallible man. He preached fiercely that this imminent arrival of the Second Coming (millenarianism) called for the setting up on earth of a place where the righteous might await the glorious event.
The next sister to be summoned was Agnes, the youngest. She reluctantly agreed to marry another of the brethren, George Thomas, who was just three years her junior. Two days later, their sister Clara was persuaded to marry 29-year-old William Cobbe, who was at that time overseeing the building of the Abode of Love in Spaxton.
The three surprised brides-to-be pleaded to visit their widowed mother in Suffolk before their nuptials. Prince was having none of it. If their mother or brothers dissuaded them, their fortunes would be lost to the cause. Instead, Mrs Nottridge and one of her sons journeyed to Swansea, where they were unsuccessful in dissuading the three from such a mad enterprise.
On 9 July, the sisters married and their individual fortunes of £6,000 each passed into the hands of their husbands, thus effectively under Prince’s control. The remaining two unmarried sisters returned to their Suffolk home.
Word of the triple wedding spread. Now, as well as the charismatic Reverend Prince, the curious had three heiresses to gawp at. Once again, the crowds began to swell. But many potential middle-class followers must also have stayed away, rattled by the discontent that continued to sweep the land as a result of the sweeping changes caused by the continued industrialisation of England. And just across the Bristol Channel in rural Wales, memories of the Rebecca Riots a few years earlier were still fresh. Gangs of attackers wearing women’s clothing had smashed tollgates in protest against the increasing tolls on turnpike roads. There was enough hellfire and damnation around already without worrying about the afterlife.
So, Prince upped the ante. In Weymouth he roared that only a few were to be chosen and the rest would ‘perish in penal fires’. The polite coastal town erupted as those who had been rejected by Prince railed against his arbitrary selection of the ‘chosen’. Even the Home Secretary was asked to intervene. Eventually, tiring of the constant battle with the sinners he had discarded, Prince and the few dozen of his well-heeled followers set off for Spaxton to join more faithful gathering there, including the Maber family.
The community hadn’t been in Spaxton long before it became obvious that Harriet and Agnes were pregnant. Prince was furious they had been defiant of his command that the marriages must not be consummated. Did they not appreciate that marital relations were forbidden, he railed; that they were nothing more than fornication? The pregnancies were proof of their disobedience. Only Clara was to escape retribution, either because she and her husband could not have children or they had remained chaste. Agnes and Harriet had to go. Even their husbands, still firmly under Prince’s spell, agreed. Agnes fought back.
‘If ever you dare to attempt to influence your husband again in acting contrary to my commands,’ roared Prince, ‘God will crush you out of the way.’
Agnes returned to Suffolk, where she gave birth to a son. Her estranged husband threatened to take the child, but her family swiftly made the boy a ward of court, giving Agnes sole custody. Her unhappy experience wasn’t enough to deter her sister Louisa, who, Agnes found out to her horror, also longed to join the Abode of Love. She tried to dissuade her, but failed. Harriet’s child died in infancy and, some years later, her young husband was to leave the Agapemone in disgust.
The impressive mansion and attendant buildings weren’t ready by the time Louisa arrived in Spaxton. Most of the faithful were housed temporarily in a farm recently purchased by Prince, by now flush with funds thanks to his followers. Since leaving home, she had been bombarded with letters from her family, entreating her to return to Suffolk. Perhaps for this reason – after all, £6,000 was at stake – Prince invited her to stay with him and his wife Julia, where he could keep an eye on her, until the mansion was ready.
* * *
Prince wasn’t home on the evening of 10 November 1846. His wife and Louisa had just said goodnight and gone to their rooms when someone entered the house. Louisa assumed it was Prince and took no notice. The next minute, her bedroom door burst open. One of her brothers stood there, accompanied by her brother-in-law and a police officer. She was to come with them, they urged. Her mother was deathly ill. If she dallied, it might be too late.
When Louisa refused to believe them, or go with them, the three men seized her and carried her out. As her unheeded screams rang out over the huge, dark estate, they dragged her, without a bonnet or shawl and wearing only her carpet slippers, to a waiting carriage in which she cowered in a corner despairing. The carriage sped away, the horses galloping through the dark winter night until they pulled up at Moorcroft House, a private sanatorium in Middlesex, where Louisa was admitted, supposedly suffering from delusions.
It took her more than a year to escape. She was swiftly recaptured but not before making contact with the faithful William Cobbe, who persuaded the Commissioners of Lunacy to investigate her case. They found that she was suffering from religious delusion, but her detention was resulting in physical deterioration. The commissioners ordered her release.
Louisa happily returned to the Agapemone and immediately transferred her £6,000 worth of stocks to Prince. She then won a civil suit alleging false imprisonment by her brother. The judge ruled that deviant religious beliefs were not grounds for committal to an asylum.
Her family was to have the last laugh, though: after her death in 1858, the Nottridges successfully sued Prince for the return of her fortune.