The Victorian sex cult that predicted the end of the world

In the 1840s, a rogue Anglican priest claimed to be the second coming of Christ – and set up The Abode of Love to prepare for the Apocalypse

Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email
Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email
One of the funniest episodes of The Simpsons begins with Homer Simpson watching a film called The Rapture and persuading a busload of other Springfield residents that the end of the world is indeed nigh. Soon they are all standing on a rocky outcrop outside town holding balloons, while Homer checks his watch and confidently performs a countdown. Nothing happens. “My watch must be running fast”, he reassures everyone. “Wait for it… wait for it…” Several hours pass, rain starts to fall, and Homer’s voice becomes a plaintive croak. “Wait for it… wait for it…”
It’s tempting to view this scene as a contemporary satire. After all, there’s no shortage of modern doomsday cults, from The Children of God – which relocated from California to Thailand in preparation for an apocalypse that was predicted to take place in 1993 – to the notorious Heaven’s Gate commune, 39 members of which committed suicide in 1997 in the expectation that they would be picked up by an alien spacecraft and whisked off to eternal happiness in outer space.
That’s in addition to the more recent phenomenon of wealthy survivalists who are currently building sophisticated bunkers – Mark Zuckerberg’s compound is reported to cost up to $270 million – as part of their preparations for any future breakdown of social order.
Yet predictions that civilisation is coming to an end are nearly as old as civilisation itself, and religious leaders in particular have long enjoyed darkening the present with shadows cast by the future. The nineteenth century was certainly no exception. In Germany, one archdeacon announced that the world would end in 1823, and settled with his followers in Konigsberg, where they were accused of promoting sex as the only way to sanctify the body, while in New York State a group known as The Brotherhood of the New Life was hailed by its founder as “The New Eden of the West”.
Meanwhile, in Britain, more mainstream evangelical worshippers were convinced that, in the words of historian Thomas Macaulay, “the Messiah will shortly establish a kingdom on the earth, and visibly reign over all its inhabitants”.
In addition to organised religious communities, there were also many amateur saviours trying to attract a handful of followers, like the shoe black in Kentish Town who insisted that he was a reincarnation of Jesus, and a rival in India who wrote a pamphlet in which he claimed “I am the true Messiah come to declare the glory of God on earth.” It was like a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian brought to life – minus the comedy and satirical self-awareness.
One of the strangest of these figures was a rogue Anglican priest named Henry James Prince, who was known to his followers as “Beloved” and in the 1840s announced himself as the voice of God on earth or the “Holy Ghost personified”. Before meetings he liked to be compared to Christ’s second coming, so that his arrival could be announced with “Behold, He cometh! He cometh!”
He quickly gathered around himself a loyal band of followers through a mixture of preaching and personal contacts, most of them women, who believed his promise that the world was coming to an end and the saved would be carried off to heaven without first having to undergo the indignity of dying.
Like many charismatic religious leaders, he managed to persuade his acolytes that the first step to preparing themselves for the afterlife was to rid themselves of all earthly attachments, particularly their money, which he was generously willing to take off their hands. Before long he had collected enough to build a luxurious new mansion and chapel in the sleepy Somerset village of Spaxton. Completed in 1848, it was hidden behind thick wooden gates topped with iron spikes and protected by ten-foot high brick walls. As Stuart Flinders describes in his new book A Very British Cult, this was to be the home of a commune Prince named the Agapemone: the Abode of Love.
In 1851 a reporter from the Illustrated London News was allowed to look around, and seemed disappointed to discover that life in the Abode of Love was admirably wholesome and even a little dull. Male and female residents alike cut their hair short and wore simple, comfortable clothes. The presence of paid servants meant that most days could be spent enjoying middle-class leisure activities such as hockey, billiards and hunting, while afternoon tea was served daily at 4pm.
Rumours of sexual antics made the place sound like a Victorian version of the Playboy mansion. And then there was the well-publicised case of a female resident named Louisa Nottidge who was spirited away by her family and locked up in a mental asylum, a scandal that later influenced Wilkie Collins in his writing of The Woman in White a decade later. The man to whom he dedicated that novel, Bryan Procter, was the Commissioner for Lunacy who had investigated Louisa Nottidge’s case, and had determined that although she was deluded in her religious beliefs she was no danger to the community and should be released. The scandal continued to echo through Victorian Britain.
None of this seems to have greatly affected those who chose to pass through the Abode’s thick wooden gates. Living there seems to have been like a cross between a religious cloister and a holiday camp. Its appeal was especially strong among Prince’s female followers, some of whom were given new names such as Sweet Mercy and The Cheerful One. Whereas in the outside world they would have been expected to marry and raise children, within the Abode of Love’s high walls they were free to live more or less how they pleased. What did they do while waiting for the call from heaven? A journalist asked. The happy response was “Not much”.
Prince died in 1899, and was rumoured to have been buried upright to make his ascension slightly easier on the day of judgement. One would have thought that the death of the man who had promised that he could not die would also have destroyed the Abode of Love – but that wasn’t the case.
In due course, a new leader emerged called John Smyth-Pigott, a stick-thin former priest with dark, piercing eyes who stood up in the middle of a church service one day and declared that he was Jesus Christ, despite one of his friends pointing out that “he had not enough religious sentiment to cover a postage stamp”.
By this time, the Abode of Love was becoming less the centre of a cult than a retirement home for what one witness described as “a number of quite frowzy old ladies, wrapped in woollies and wearing caps, and some moth-eaten old gentleman”. In 1927 Smyth-Pigott also died (one newspaper carried the headline ‘MESSIAH’ DEAD), and his grave was left open for a whole day, as if his followers really were expecting a resurrection.
A couple of decades later only a handful of survivors remained. Their world had indeed ended – not all of it, but certainly the Victorian world that had given birth to this socially conservative “No sects please, we’re British” cult. A hundred years earlier, Matthew Arnold had written in his poem ‘Dover Beach’ of the “Sea of Faith” slowly retreating with a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”, and it turned out that those ladies in woollies and moth-eaten gentlemen had been left stranded in the twentieth century.
Eventually the buildings were sold off, and the chapel where Prince would sometimes “take flesh” by choosing lovers from his assembled congregation was turned into a TV studio where popular children’s programmes including Trumpton and Camberwick Green were made. In one sense it was a comic descent from the days when the Abode of Love was filled with cult followers eagerly listening to their leaders’ promises of future bliss. But it was also the nearest these promises ever came to being realised, as dreams of a perfect world were transformed into the brightly coloured townscape of Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb.
A Very British Cult (Icon, £20.00) by Stuart Flinders is out now
Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email

4/5

1/5

3/5

5/5