Everard, John

Abstract

John Everard is not an obscure figure. He has been seen as an important Quaker forerunner, as an anticipator of the Leveller Richard Overton’s unadorned prose style, and as a possible influence on the Digger Gerrard Winstanley. This Cambridge-educated, multilingual Doctor of Divinity was a politically radical preacher who objected to the Spanish Match and also had a deep interest in alchemical, mystical, Hermetic, philosophic, and Rosicrucian texts – several of which he copied and translated from Latin into English. Besides having powerful aristocratic patrons, it is noteworthy that Everard also appealed to his poorest auditors – “beggarly fellows” “despised by the world.” He was, moreover, a heretic and charged in the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission with propagating Familism and Antinomianism. Indeed, his entire career followed a recognizable pattern: preaching incendiary sermons and disseminating heterodox doctrines, subsequent imprisonment, pleading for clemency, submission, release and re-offence. If that is not enough, Everard was also engaged in alchemical experimentation. He thus offers in miniature an opportunity to explore two important questions: the sources of radical social and religious ideas during the English Revolution and the possible connections between that radicalism and what is now considered to come under the umbrella of “Western Esotericism.”