Bradstreet and Trans-Atlantic Non-Conformism in the American-Prophetic Mode

Abstract

In the spring of 1654 a woman named Anna Trapnel found herself arrested and jailed at Bridewell by parliamentary forces. Months before she had held a trance-like vigil for just under two weeks, with followers recording her prophecies related to the new Commonwealth government and especially regarding the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. At turns ecstatic and mystical, gnomic, and revelatory, Trapnel concerned herself with issues of eschatology, politics, government, and apocalypse.¹ Trapnel functioned as a popular female prophet, indeed she was so popular that she was released from imprisonment by virtue of her own defence only a few months after her arrest.² Over the course of her life she promulgated her visionary theology in works like Strange and Wonderful News from White-Hall, A Report and Plea, The Cry of a Stone, and A Legacy for Saints. ³ It is a testament to both her power and attitudes towards the prophetic in the period that she was able to avoid long-term imprisonment, prosecution, and punishment, especially as she enthusiastically spoke out against the state.⁴ In a prose style not uncharacteristic of the vibrant non-conformists and dissenters that wrote and published during the Interregnum, Trapnel commented on the key political and religious controversies of her day.⁵ Central to her vision was her association with the Fifth Monarchy Men. The group were a perhaps surprisingly strategically successful millenarian party; they subscribed to a teleological view of history based upon their own readings of Daniel and Revelation.⁶ They awaited the arrival of ‘King Jesus’, and, contrary to the conservative Augustinianism of normative Christianity (be it Catholic or Protestant), they saw the enactment of this millennial goal as being the responsibility of humans living within and participating in history. For them apocalypse was an explicitly political goal, and society was to be redrawn according to it.⁷ Increasingly mutually distrustful of Cromwell, the Fifth Monarchy Men would eventually see him as a pseudo-monarchical replacement for kingly tyranny, no better than Charles whose regicide they had championed. It is in this chaotic and fractured context that Anna Trapnel preached her utopian gospel of the coming fall of Cromwell, the return of Christ, and the mystical equivalence of men and women. For Trapnel it was a new and future England that was to be the site of this future Fifth Monarchy, the final and godly kingdom to rule for Christ’s return.⁸