Inconvenient People (22 page)

Prince, now forty-five, had decided upon a new doctrine. This was his decree: a virgin was required, to purge man of sin, to receive man into grace and to fuse with the Holy One for ever. Out of a mystic moment of union a series of beautiful phenomena would flow. Flesh would be liberated from sin and made perfect. Whoever was chosen would not be entitled to refuse. Many Agapemonites would have expected her to be one of the Patterson girls – Anne and Sarah Patterson were the daughters of a widow who had joined the Agapemone. The humbly born Pattersons had been among the domestic staff at the Abode, but Prince’s favour saw them enter his inner circle, and one of the girls, probably Anne, was said to have been given the title ‘Queen of the Terrace’ and was to be addressed as ‘Milady’. It was to this inversion of social norms that Coroner Munckton had alluded during his inquiry and such a situation may have left Mary Maber and other female sect members with feelings of deracination and alienation.

There was great excitement in the Abode on the day of the Great Manifestation: everyone knew that something important was about to happen. One female Agapemonite would later say, ‘I have never felt so strange a joy and wonder as I felt in that hour.’ In the chapel/drawing room twelve Agapemonite men dressed in black, and twelve of the women, dressed in white, sang:

Prince entered, dressed in red velvet, and sat upon an elevated seat that was doing duty as a throne. A large ‘altar’ (possibly the billiard table) had been draped in scarlet. The chosen virgin entered wearing a white Honiton lace dress with a train. Within this get-up was either Anne or Sarah Patterson – a fact never established for the outside
world. The most lurid accounts of what happened next state that Prince and the maiden had intercourse on the altar while the Agapemonites watched. Others report that some kind of marriage ceremony took place (as Julia, the legal Mrs Prince, looked on in approval) and that the pair consummated their union later. (It is possible that consummation had already taken place, and so this public ‘marriage’ was required to cover up the fact.) Among the twenty-four watchers it is likely there stood Louisa Nottidge.

Whatever the case, nine months later, or thereabouts, the chosen one gave birth to a baby girl. Prince was astonished that a child should materialise from a union of the flesh. He now declared that the Great Manifestation had been a trick played upon him by the Devil. The child was Satan’s, he said. But the rejected little girl grew up to be Eva Willett Patterson, who would be a revered member of the Agapemone later in the century. The chosen Patterson girl attempted suicide in September 1856 – after Coroner Munckton had concluded his inquiry into the death of Mary Maber. The attempt failed, and she returned to the Agapemone, where she stayed for the rest of her life.

The Great Manifestation and the denunciation of the baby as Satan’s may have played a role in the suicides of Maber, Thomas Wilshire and the female sect member at Weymouth and in the attempted suicide of Farmer Scutt. It certainly brought a rush for the exit by certain Agapemonites, who were now having serious doubts about the meaning of the term ‘spiritual love’. The most senior defection was that of Harriet Nottidge’s husband, Reverend Lewis Price – a co-founder, with Prince, of the Lampeter Brethren in the 1830s. Those who stayed loyal to Prince, however, were rewarded with grandiose new titles. Arthur Maber was now the ‘Angel of the Last Trumpet’; while William Priest, Samuel Trickey, Cornelius Voss, William Gulliford, John Brown, Josias Croad and William Puddy became the ‘Seven Witnesses’. Agnes’s husband, Brother Thomas, was henceforth to be referred to as ‘The First of the Two Anointed Ones’ and ‘Keeper of the Seven Stars and the Seven Golden Candlesticks’ – windy names that were inspired by the Book of Revelations.

Harriet, now in her early fifties, did not leave with her husband, preferring to stay with her beloved sister Louisa, who had gone through so much to be at the Abode. And so Lewis Price returned one night with a mob to demand that she come to live with him. His gang, which included a bailiff and a local newspaper reporter, searched the
Agapemone complex. When they crowbarred down the door of the Abode’s main building, they found themselves facing the sect, who were barricaded behind furniture and brandishing firearms. The invaders did not find Harriet. Later she admitted that she had been secreted in a water cistern within the house.

So, for the third time, the Nottidge family became notable in a court of law, when in 1860 Reverend Lewis Price sued for a writ of habeas corpus for Harriet. He failed; but when Prince subsequently attempted his own habeas corpus for Harriet, the judge found for Lewis Price, stating that if a husband believes that his wife ‘intends to leave him to reside in an improper place, he has a right to restrain her. She must, therefore, return to her husband.’ Harriet was forced to live with her husband for the rest of her life, as the law demanded of an English spouse unless persistent or extreme physical cruelty could be proved.

During the habeas corpus hearings, Lewis Price explained that Prince’s word was law at the Abode and that he had put words in people’s mouths when it came to affidavits; he had pressured Lewis Price to give false testimony during Louisa’s 1849 suit for false imprisonment in the asylum.

Louisa died at the Abode in July 1858 and her ‘distressing’ death, Lewis Price said, was a large factor in his decision to quit Prince and
his through-the-looking-glass world. Prince had little sympathy for Louisa and her sufferings, reiterating that those Agapemonites who had died, ‘have erred and they are gone. The Lord has done His will upon them.’

The
Bridgwater Times
of 4 August 1858 reported that Louisa had died insane, but since that newspaper had always detested the Agapemone and was aware of the Moorcroft House incarceration case, this claim must be viewed with scepticism; there is no evidence to corroborate it. Frederick and Maria Ripley and Louisa’s other brother Ralph (Edmund had died in 1853) saw that she was buried in the graveyard of Spaxton parish church. She was on no account to go under the lawn of the Agapemone with the rest of the ‘unsaved’.

The Nottidge family rallied and in a fourth noteworthy legal tussle, in the summer of 1860 – three years before Emily’s own death – Ripley and Ralph challenged the gift of her entire property that Louisa had made back in 1848. They claimed that ‘undue influence’ and ‘religious delusion’ had prompted Louisa to transfer her £6,000 in Three Per Cent consols to Prince as soon as she had got out of Moorcroft House. Prince for his part stressed that all contributions made to him and the Agapemone were purely voluntary; he also denied tales that he had repeatedly visited Louisa on her sickbed in an attempt to dictate her last will and testament. Louisa had in fact died intestate.

The court found that the £6,000 had been ‘improperly obtained’ and must be handed to the Nottidge family, with costs.

Things began to quieten down for the Agapemone from the mid-1860s, though they would never be liked by their neighbours. The loss of the Nottidge money was not, in the event, a significant blow. Life continued in comfort for those deemed most loyal.

The only interview ever granted by Prince took place in 1867, when the preacher was fifty-six. Author and journalist William Hepworth Dixon described him as spare of build, of medium height, pale, and with ‘the traces of much pain and weariness in his wan cheek. His face is very sweet, his manner very smooth. He has about him something of a woman’s grace and charm. His smile is very soft; and the key of his voice is low. He has the look of one who has never yet been vexed into rage and strife. In his eyes . . . [you see] a light from some other sphere.’ Dixon was unnerved by the oddly paranoid nature of the Abode of Love: ‘Each Saint appears to keep watch and ward upon his fellow. Prince may dwell apart and hold himself accountable to none. But the rest of his people lie under bonds and only act and speak in each other’s presence. They move in pairs, and trines, and septetts.’ Of the women, only one appeared to be in perfect health; they all had a ‘hush about them’, Dixon noted, and had waiting eyes and silent lips. What perplexed him most, though, was that whatever horror had taken place during the Great Manifestation was accepted by these otherwise thoroughly respectable folks as perfectly normal.

Most of the Agapemonites whom Dixon met in 1867 were already well over the hill; in the next two decades they proved themselves all too mortal, and the lawns began to fill up with their bodies. Clara, the only remaining Nottidge woman left at the compound after 1860, and her husband William Cobbe made it into their late eighties, and Prince lived on and on, spending most of his time on a chaise longue, ministered to by fresh recruits. Having abandoned his once strong opposition to alcohol, he now drank with lunch and dinner from an expensively stocked cellar. He had chosen as his successor Reverend John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, who had become an Agapemonite in 1887;
Prince seems to have become aware that his own immortality had been an erroneous belief.

Prince nearly made it into the twentieth century and did not go under the garden until 1899, aged eighty-eight. Smyth-Pigott had his work cut out to convince the sect that this physical death had not called into question Prince’s claim that Agapemonites were immortal. He somehow managed it, and the Abode’s rackety life continued. A senior elderly member would be tarred and feathered in the Edwardian years, sustaining injuries that led to his early death; the attackers had believed that they were attacking Smyth-Pigott. Shock at this violence, together with the increasing charitable role the Abode had adopted, made the sect more tolerated in the neighbourhood. Yet as late as the 1960s, Spaxton residents would from time to time be doorstepped by reporters seeking tales of geriatric wife-swapping involving an altar and a revolving stage.

The money ran out at last, and the complex was sold in 1962 and converted into private housing, the Agapemone bodies having been exhumed and re-interred at the parish church. The chapel was used as a film studio for a while, and between 1966 and 1969 the BBC’s
Watch With Mother
children’s shows
Camberwick Green
and
Trumpton
were filmed in a room in which events more suited to the
oeuvre
of Roger Corman or Hammer films had taken place over a century before.

METROPOLITAN POLICE CONSTABLES
James Richards and Arthur Parsons were patrolling their beat on the St John’s Wood–Maida Vale border in the early hours of Friday 1 February 1851, when they heard screams of ‘Murder!’ coming from a house in Howley Place. Rushing towards the source of the cries they discovered an elderly woman with her head thrust out of a first-floor window, shouting that her servant was about to murder her. When the PCs gained entry to Herbert Villa, servant Mary Rainey explained that her mistress, Mrs Catherine Cumming, was insane. The officers rushed upstairs and PC Richards knocked at Mrs Cumming’s bedroom door.