English tailor and Protestant thinker (1609-1698)
Lodowicke Muggleton (1609–1698) was an English religious thinker who gave his name to Muggletonianism, a Protestant sect which was always small, but survived until the death of its last follower in 1979. He spent his working life as a journeyman tailor in the City of London and was imprisoned twice for his beliefs. He held opinions hostile to all forms of philosophical reason, and had received only a basic education. He encouraged quietism and free-thought amongst his followers whose beliefs were predestinarian in a manner that was distinct from Calvinism. Near the close of his long life, Muggleton wrote his spiritual autobiography which was published posthumously.
Childhood and apprenticeship.
Lodowicke Muggleton was born in a house called Walnut Tree Yard on Bishopsgate Street (now Bishopsgate) in the City of London.
His father, John, was a farrier and a post office contractor. Lodowicke was the youngest of three children when his mother, Mary, died in 1612. On his father's remarriage, Lodowicke was put out to nurse in the country, the common practice in such family restructuring at the time. In 1624 he returned to Walnut Tree Yard as an apprentice to a tailor, John Quick. Quick seems to have been well-connected, making ceremonial gowns for Liverymen and Common Councilmen. Muggleton describes him as "a quiet peaceable man, not cruel to servants, which liked me very well". In 1625 Muggleton contracted the plague but, he says, "it was not extreme tedious to me. I recovered quickly, and hath not had half a day's sickness since."
As his apprenticeship drew to a close he began to disdain tailoring as poorly paid. He was offered a stake in a pawnbroker's business by a Mrs Richardson if he would marry her daughter which he seemed keen to do. But he became worried that usury would damn his soul so he remained unmarried, working as a tailor for William Reeve who was John Reeve's elder brother and, at that time, a staunch Puritan. Yet his soul was still troubled "for fear God had made me a reprobate before I was born, because He did not answer my prayers."
His first marriage, in 1635, was to Sarah and they had two surviving daughters, Sarah and Elizabeth. After his wife's death he married again, but both his second wife and the children that she bore soon died. Muggleton fell away from the Puritan faith, "for all the zeal we formerly had was quite worn out," and this cost his business dearly in terms of lost customers from that congregation.
It may be possible to recognise some subsequent Muggletonian beliefs as being solutions to the perplexities he felt while he was still a Puritan. Then again, the episodes he chooses to tell of in his autobiography may be selected with such a didactic purpose in mind. The ideas that conscience is God's watchman within every person, that the conflict between two natures is at work within everyone, and that there is a need to banish the fear of being prey to external spirits all seem to stem from personal exigencies of this period in his life.
1650: Ranters and prophecy.
"It came to pass in the year 1650, I heard of several prophets and prophetess that were about the streets and declared the Day of the Lord, and many other wonderful things." Notable were John Robins and Thomas Tany (Muggleton calls him John Tannye). Muggleton says of Robins that he regarded himself as God come to judge the quick and the dead and, as such, had resurrected and redeemed Cain and Judas Iscariot as well as resurrecting Jeremiah and many of the Old Testament prophets. "I have had nine or ten of them at my house at a time," Muggleton reported. The prophets claimed power to damn any that opposed them. Robins displayed considerable talents as a magus; presenting the appearance of angels, burning shining lights, half-moons and stars in chambers, thick darkness with his head in a flame of fire and his person riding on the wings of the wind. Understandably, such experiences left a lasting impression on Muggleton. "I do not speak this from hearsay of others," Muggleton wrote in his autobiography, "but from a perfect knowledge which I have seen and heard." Yet he asserted that he was never an active follower of either man: "Yet was I quiet and still and heard what was said and done and spake against nothing."
Muggleton makes it clear that he believed Robins was guilty of self-deification and of indulging in dangerous powers when he had no grounds to consider them of divine origin. Thus Robins was a false prophet with lying signs. Yet, writing in old age, Muggleton still appreciated Robins'd efficacy. Robins's curses were true for all eternity because his opponents, when they jeered at him, had no idea whether he was sent from God or not and "would have said as much to the true Christ as they did to him". Muggleton concluded that more sober persons, in whom faith predominated, "would have been preserved from speaking evil of things they knew not".
1651: Revelation.
By April 1651 Muggleton had begun to feel that he lacked the power to reason his way out of his perplexities about resurrection and hellfire. He concluded that he must leave it all to God: "even as the potter doth what he will with the dead clay." He began to experience revelations concerning the meaning of scripture. The following January his cousin John Reeve underwent similar experiences. Both men thought such things for their private peace of mind alone and they resolved to make nothing public. "But contrary to the resolutions of them both, a little while after, were made the greatest medlers of religion in all the world." On 3 February 1651 (1652 in the new style or Gregorian calendar) John Reeve was addressed by the voice of God giving him the Third Commission. Lodowicke Muggleton was to be his mouth, as Aaron was to Moses. They were the two witnesses mentioned in Revelation 11:3. Thus began the sect to be known as Muggletonians. John Reeve was 42, Lodowicke Muggleton 41.
Sarah Muggleton (14 years old at the time) was the first person to be blessed under the new commission. The next task of Reeve, Muggleton and Thomas Turner (the latter presumably taken along for verification) was to pronounce sentence of eternal damnation on Thomas Tany for disobedience to the Third Commission. The following day Reeve, Muggleton and Dorcas Booth went to curse John Robins in prison. His offence, in Reeve's view, was deceiving the people. What "thou has measured to others must be measured again to thee."
1652–1658: Muggleton's role in the Third Commission.
It may seem incredible to modern readers that two ordinary tailors could walk around London considering themselves to be transcendental characters out of the Book of Revelation. Christopher Hill supplies the answer when he quotes a Royalist prophet, Arise Evans, as saying (1629) that before he came to London he "looked upon the Scripture as a history of things that passed in other countries, pertaining to other persons; but now I looked upon it as a mystery to be opened at this time, belonging also to us."
Thomas Macaulay in his "History of England" (1849), describes Lodowicke Muggleton as "a mad tailor who wandered from pothouse to pothouse, tippling ale and denouncing eternal torments against all who refused to believe." Subsequent historians have treated this as slanderous (as it may be for the subsequent history of the faith) but it is not so different from Muggleton's own description of his early, lively adventures as a prophet. "For God's sake, Lodowick, let us be gone, else we shall be killed: so he paid for the drink and we departed out of the house and went to another a little distance off."
Throughout the period until the death of John Reeve in 1658, Muggleton seems to have acted only as Reeve's ever-present sidekick. There is no record of him writing any works of his own nor of him acting independently of Reeve. The pair were tried for blasphemy and jailed for six months in 1653/4.
1658–1669: A prophet alone.
It is said that, on the death of John Reeve, there was a power-struggle between Lodowicke Muggleton and Laurence Clarkson (or Claxton) for leadership. However, it is unclear if Muggleton saw there as being a "movement" of which to be leader. William Lamont remarks that it is strange that he took three years to bestir himself in his own cause. The issue may be more a misunderstanding on Clarkson's part. In temperament and talent, he seemed much more the natural successor to Reeve than Muggleton was – or cared to be. But he wasn't a commissioned prophet. Muggleton seems only slowly to have grasped that if he wanted to be taken seriously as an individual prophet, he had to write, to publish and to show himself outside his immediate neighbourhood.
"The first thing I did after Claxton was put down, I caused A Divine Looking-Glass to be printed anew in 1661."
Secondly, he wrote his first book, "The Interpretation of the Eleventh Chapter of the Revelation of St. John" in 1662.
Thirdly, he began his reluctant travels to distant parts of England to meet believers who knew him only through correspondence. He did no preaching although he records acrimonious discussions with followers of Jacob Böhme. His first journey was to see Ellen Sudbury in Nottingham and Dorothy Carter in Chesterfield. This was followed by visits to believers in Cambridgeshire and Kent. Although these visits were made troublesome by local opponents (mainly Quakers) and resulted in Muggleton spending nine days in Derby gaol, the visit to Kent had a happy outcome because Muggleton married his third wife, Mary Martin, the daughter of a wealthy tanner. The marriage seems to have been an exceptionally happy one and she brought with her sufficient wealth to allow her husband to retire from tailoring, if not from prophecy. Muggleton made a further journey to these areas, and to Leicestershire, in 1669.
It was during these years that Muggleton began his polemic against the Quakers with a book "The Neck of the Quakers broken" (1663) and correspondence with individual Quakers, much of it published by one party or the other.
Muggleton and the Quakers.
Muggleton's opposition to the Quakers, and to all things Quaker, was uncharacteristically bitter for three reasons. Firstly, he believed them guilty of "spiritual witchcraft" which he saw as a manipulation of that fear from which faith should be free. Secondly, he regarded them as unreconstructed Ranters and the Ranter legacy was a delicate personal issue. Thirdly, they were the seventh, and last, anti-church of the latter days and thus their mere existence was seen as holding up everyone else's journey to paradise.
By and large, the charges Muggleton brings against the Quakers are the same as those the Quakers lay against Muggleton. As a result, the exchange of letters and pamphlets rarely rises above contradiction, quibbling and name-calling; the latter Muggleton employs with great verve.
Richard Farnesworth (1662) brusquely tells Muggleton that his commission has been faked and that he is trying to act as judge in the stead of Christ. What, he asks, has happened to the pardoning power of Christ? In turn, Muggleton asks what Quakers would have said to St. Peter after he had been given the keys to the kingdom, the power to bind and to loose, the power to remit or to retain sin, all whilst still a man? He jeers at Quaker "out-sputterings" so that, "Christ hath never a body of his own but is forced to make use of every Quaker's body for his spirit to dwell in."
One of Muggleton's more telling criticisms of the Quakers is that they try too hard to entice God to move in their direction, thus falling into the trap of seeing their own lights and fancies as coming to them from without. Muggleton does not allow that the Quakers themselves may have been well aware of the dangers. As a result, Muggleton dismisses Quakers as warmed-over Ranters, "for you have got your Christ all within you."
Edward Bourne asks Muggleton if the two seeds theology does not make God the harbinger of evil in the world? He does not receive a straight answer although Muggleton says that faith in a time of innocence is one thing, but