When the prophet Mary Cary cited the twenty-first chapter of the book of Revelation in 1648, and Jacob Bauthumley did the same in 1650, and William Aspinwall did so again in 1653, each was describing and looking toward what John the Revelator had described as ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, a final time of peace and godliness on earth, and one that seemed surely imminent.Footnote 1 An apocalyptic mood hovered over England during the late 1640s and early 1650s, leading to much creative speculation about political, spiritual and eschatological possibilities and provoking radical responses from sectarian groupings. However, how that impulse manifested for each group was often dramatically different. For just as the book of Revelation promised the more militant-minded Fifth Monarchists like Cary or Aspinwall a new political design and godly rule, it also promised liberty-oriented Ranters like Bauthumley a new society unburdened by Puritanical social mores and institutional authority.
It is the goal of this article to return to the theological foundations of the sectarian Ranters and Fifth Monarchists to illuminate the unique eschatologies that each group developed. To do so, this article examines the hermeneutical underpinnings of their millenarianism and how their reading practices informed their understanding of the apocalypse and their own political participation during the end times.Footnote 2 It fashions a new narrative of sectarian political participation, arguing that sectarian biblical scholarship became intimately tied up in political practice by unearthing the intentional decisions writers made about the verses they cited and how they interpreted them. By delineating their unique ‘imagined apocalypses’, this article also further defines the groups’ sectarian boundaries and identities which were crafted using targeted rhetoric, imagery and exegesis.Footnote 3
Examining the foundational theologies of these religious radicals is an underexamined yet essential step in providing a clear and accurate picture of their debates, theology and political plans. Finding where millenarianism brought two disparate sectarian groups together and where it accentuated their differences demonstrates the vast spectrum of sectarianism and sectarian goals during the English Revolution and illuminates how two groups emerging at the same time in the same circumstances with similar views of external change came to view their world in such radically different ways. In doing so, this article seeks not only to contribute to the growing body of work on sectarian groupings in the English Revolution but also add to the ever-growing scholarship on Bible usage and reading practices as well as political practice and participation in the early modern period.
The vivid accounts of Fifth Monarchist doomsday sermons and Ranter lewdness have rightfully attracted scholarly attention to English religious radicalism.Footnote 4 The Fifth Monarchists’ ties to Baptist communities and their prominent role in English Interregnum politics left a considerable print and archival record. Bernard Capp’s seminal study further illuminated their political vision and eschatological zeal, portraying a diverse movement united in the belief in an imminent apocalypse. By contrast, the Ranters have proved a greater challenge to scholars: few sources survive, and most are hostile polemics. The result was a scholarly emphasis on the Ranters’ commitment to social reform and political activism which – as Christopher Hill had previously observed – they shared with other sectarian groups; in doing so, however, scholars blurred distinctions between Ranters and other sectarians to the point of near erasure. Indeed, this fluidity invited the steep criticism of J. C. Davis who argued that scholars had been misled by early modern hostile sources and that they, being too comfortable with flexible definitions of sects, had thus created a sect that had never existed. Ultimately, he argued, there had been ‘no Ranter movement, no Ranter sect, no Ranter theology’.Footnote 5 Any so-called Ranter was only created so post mortem, a product of wishful thinking.
Since Davis, scholars have had to reevaluate their approaches to sectarianism; notably, Nigel Smith and Ariel Hessayon have reasserted the Ranters’ existence and importance through new archival finds that help authenticate the characteristics and solidity of this ‘mad ranting crew’.Footnote 6 Just as Hessayon and Smith moved toward new sources and archives, this article uses a new methodology by which to examine sectarianism: the study of these groups’ scriptural citations and exegesis. Scholars studying sectarians have sidelined scriptural references as an essential avenue of analysis in favour of social and political theories. But, as this article shows, an analysis of sectarians’ theologies provides fundamental support for the existence and delineation of sectarian groups, essential insights about their presence, their religious priorities, political plans and inter-sectarian connections, and demonstrates their dynamic yet distinct boundaries and qualities. Such analysis provides essential proof with which to rebuff the claims of those like Davis who have sought to dismantle radical groups’ existences altogether. The verses these groups consistently returned to underpin their identities, their rhetoric, their proselytisation. It is only right that scholars should investigate what those verses said, and how they were used. As such, this article examines printed theological works, manuscript sermon notes and contemporary outsider reports about these individuals; such breadth allows for a greater source base from which to investigate the use of biblical language by Ranter and Fifth Monarchist sectarians from the late 1640s until the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660.
This article also seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on the history of the Bible, scriptural scholarship and lay reading practices in the early modern period. As Lori Anne Ferrell has reminded us, the Bible is not simply a holy book, but an ‘intersecting, material link uniting writers with readers’; as such, the number of possibilities of meaning has been matched by the breadth of scholarship.Footnote 7 Scholars often examine the potent rhetorical force of Scripture as a ‘rag-bag of quotations’ or the bolstering effect that Scripture may have in moments of religious controversy and institutional strife.Footnote 8 New studies about Reformation and post-Reformation exegesis are also becoming more common, following in the footsteps of scholars like John S. Coolidge.Footnote 9 This article seeks to combine these approaches: the rag-bag collection of scriptural references they looked to, the variety of exegetical approaches they developed during the period and the legitimacy that could be derived from both the passages and exegeses.
The importance of combining scriptural studies and political participation becomes clear when examining the Ranters and Fifth Monarchists: political practice went hand-in-hand with the word and the Word.Footnote 10 Assigning Charles i the label of Antichrist was as much the fulfilment of biblical prophecy as it was an act of treason; quoting Zephaniah i.12–18 to stir up believers against Oliver Cromwell was as much a rhetorical flourish as it was a reminder of divine punishment against their enemies.Footnote 11 They knew this when they wrote their treatises; officials knew this when they burned those same treatises.
Both Fifth Monarchists and Ranters remained tethered to a common understanding that the end was near. Those studying the Ranters have rarely categorised them primarily as a millenarian group; however, it becomes clear when examining their direct and indirect scriptural citations that they were deeply interested in how the end would arrive. It is likewise no coincidence that there were apocalypticists who moved between Ranter and Fifth Monarchist circles in the Revolution as one Tabitha Kelsall did, a tribute to the shared apocalypticism that coursed through these circles.Footnote 12
Like many in the broader Puritan milieu and especially in English Baptist communities from whom these groups’ sectarians frequently emerged, Ranters and Fifth Monarchists shared a similar distaste for certain forms and ordinances found in the Church of England. Indeed, as J. C. Davis has rightfully pointed out, ‘[a]ll shades of the godly had a particular detestation of formality’.Footnote 13 This antiformalism was essential to their ethos and millenarian projects as they attempted to shatter people’s reliance on forms and, in doing so, bring them back into a real communion with God. A deeply personal relationship with Christ and connection to antinomianism would remain essential for both Ranters and Fifth Monarchists. For Ranters, that relationship was felt internally; for Fifth Monarchists, it would transform from an internal relationship to an external one when Christ returned to rule on earth.
This prioritisation of communion with God touched on another important influence for these groups: antinomianism. Ranter spiritual perfectionism may have been intimately connected to a radical strand of antinomianism in the search for divine ecstasy with the Spirit that many Fifth Monarchists would not subscribe to; still, some Fifth Monarchists claimed a type of antiformalism in their profound ‘experiences of grace’, testified by those like John Rogers and Anna Trapnel.Footnote 14 So even though not all Ranters and Fifth Monarchists had experiences with the same level of antinomianism or over-wrought forms of spiritual communion, they found their beginnings within the milieu of antinomianism, antiformalism and Baptist theology. The shared subcultures from which they emerged, compounded by the apocalyptic mood that hovered over England during the late 1640s and early 1650s, provided an important foundation for the development of these two groups.
Ranters and Fifth Monarchists found signs of the apocalypse confirmed for them in the strife they identified in the world around them and within Scripture: their belief in an imminent apocalypse was confirmed by their external world. Clear signs harangued them: the persecution of the Saints and the obvious presence of Christ among them were only two of the many events in the end-time calendar. Joseph Salmon commented that ‘Suffering is our Conquest … debasing is our exalting’.Footnote 15 Christopher Feake echoed this, arguing that it was the honour of the Saints ‘to suffer in the power and spirit of the Messiah’.Footnote 16 The arrests of sectarians did not silence their fellow believers, but instead fuelled righteous anger against English officials and greater enthusiasm for their vision; similarly, the imprisonment of sectarian leaders and the persecution of the true believers confirmed that the end times were finally at hand. Just as Daniel vii and Revelation xii foretold the wrath of the devil against true believers as he hunted them down and decimated their ranks, so their fellow Englishmen were now persecuting the Saints in one last attempt during the end times to keep them from following Christ.
Luckily for the souls of all the English, being in the last days meant that God was more present than ever. There was no clearer example than the numerous prophets cropping up in England during the Revolution, to whom God spoke ‘more purely, gloriously, powerfully, and immediately’ than ever before.Footnote 17 At the height of apocalyptic fervour in 1650, Thomas Scott reported that in Andover, a man declared that ‘he was the Christ crucified … There was also with him a gentlewoman who declared [that] she was the bride & the Spouse, the lamb’s wife and at other times she was the virgin Mary … There was also John the Baptist, a swearing & cursing Angel, and a blessing Angel, besides many disciples more’.Footnote 18 Andover became one of countless examples of the Holy Spirit’s tangible presence in England.
Even as they suffered ostracisation at the hands of their neighbours and persecution at the hands of their leaders, the Saints drew ever closer to their Lord. The Fifth Monarchist prophet Anna Trapnel was sure she would witness ‘the coming of King Jesus … to throw down Babylon’ during her lifetime.Footnote 19 The Ranter Joseph Salmon agreed that ‘doom and judgement … is at hand upon the world’.Footnote 20 Abiezer Coppe likewise stated that ‘Doomes Day come already upon some flesh, and it is falling upon all flesh’.Footnote 21 But while both millenarian groups agreed that there would be an apocalypse, they imagined it in their own unique ways.
Fifth Monarchists took the prophecies and visions of the Bible as truth and believed that Christ would come back in physical form to rule the world. He would be ‘the absolute soveraigne in this Kingdom’, reigning ‘upon earth 1000 years’.Footnote 22 The imperfect – indeed, tyrannous – form of monarchy that the Saints had experienced would be made perfect in Christ. But before this could happen, there would be ‘Invasions, Insurrections, and Machinations of Antichrist against Christ’, although Feake hoped that Antichrist’s councils would ‘never perform in the field’.Footnote 23 The instruments of state power were essential to Fifth Monarchists in the conflict between good and evil. The apocalypse did not rely solely on religious warfare, but political manoeuvres as well. This in turn fed into the Fifth Monarchists’ penchant for interpreting antiChristian opponents as external figures, and particularly as political opponents.
Ranter eschatology pointed towards a more internalised apocalypse; it would never include actual brimstone and earthly destruction. Christ would return but in Spirit only, which would be ‘poured out’ upon the people from Heaven.Footnote 24 Heaven would be made manifest on earth. Just as the Spirit and believer could be made one and the same, so too could the Kingdom of God be created internally during the apocalypse:
For when God raigns in the Spirit, he brings all into subjection under him, and so he is King and Kingdom himself; and Christ went to prepare and to make out himself in Spirit, and so he left the flesh to live in the Spirit, and his spirituall coming, was much more glorious then his carnall and visible presence with them. And the truth is, the one was but a preparative, and fore-runner, of the other.Footnote 25
Just as heaven was not a physical place in the sky, so the kingdom of heaven would not be established on earth.Footnote 26 It was the transformation of the believer, not the physical return of Christ that would make that kingdom. In certain ways, then, Ranters held more responsibility than Fifth Monarchists to create the new millennium: if Christ was not present as ‘the Monarch, or absolute King and Soveraigne’ as the Fifth Monarchist Aspinwall believed he would be, it would be up to Ranters to tune into the Spirit and manifest heaven on earth for themselves.Footnote 27 But what could one expect when Christ’s presence was established with(in) the Saints? Ranters and Fifth Monarchists turned to the Bible for answers.
Scripture and sectarian eschatologies
All sectarians looked toward the same source to feed into their millenarian aspirations; what goals and beliefs they drew from the Bible, however, could vary dramatically depending on their interpretational approaches, scriptural selections and exegetical traditions. Ranters and Fifth Monarchists shared an obsession with scriptural justifications for their plans; their quintessence was theological, their politico-religious aspirations scripturally-based. Ranter and Fifth Monarchist writings and sermons were infused in sectarian ‘cultures of bible-reading’, finding their religious and political concerns reflected back to them in Scripture.Footnote 28 Both groups gravitated to scriptural materials that complemented their visions of the apocalypse. And, as they solidified the sorts of scriptural passages to which to refer, they further cemented their exegetical practices. Together, these three sets of decisions helped each group create their own distinctive system of reading from which they could reinforce their eschatological visions for England and fashion their own sectarian boundaries.
The fervent apocalypticism of Ranters and Fifth Monarchists is evident in their clear preference for the texts of Revelation and Isaiah, both books featuring heavily in the groups’ writings.Footnote 29 Yet, despite their shared love for these particular books, the hermeneutical priorities of these two groups delineate the different approaches each took in their efforts to understand the apocalypse; their distinct eschatologies took shape around scriptural interpretation and passage selections.
For the Ranters, the Bible was best conceived as a tool to unite God and man and a further example of their antiformalism. Like other Puritans, their works were inundated with scriptural references: ‘Here is Scripture language throughout these lines’, Abiezer Coppe wrote, ‘yet Book, Chapter, and Verse seldome quoted.’Footnote 30 They even deconstructed the form of the Bible itself, refusing to conform to scriptural arrangements. Still, they considered all biblical Scripture holy: the parables, the histories, the prophecies, the Epistles – each way by which ‘the eternall God may be seene, felt, heard, and understood’.Footnote 31 After all it was Scripture itself, Clarkson argued, that had taught him that all things were pure.Footnote 32
Divine tools lay waiting in Scripture, ready to assist a Saint hoping to unite with the Spirit. These could be found in the allegories and prophecies, the dreams and parables. The mystical passages stood on their own without external application. Indeed, it was ‘far better to know Christ in mysterie, then in hystorie’, for it was by mystery that readers could be drawn closer to God.Footnote 33 The histories of the Bible belonged to the past, a ‘map of truth … of the dealings of God with his people in former times and ages of the world’.Footnote 34 As a result, a third of the books in the Old Testament were never cited, and with them, many of the Old Testament prophecies. Ranters’ aversion to the Old Testament histories of the prophets resulted in a distinct flavour of millenarianism: by rejecting any application of Old Testament passages to their present times, they rejected Scripture’s ability to foretell the future.Footnote 35 The periodisation of the world recounted by Daniel was not taken literally; in fact, the book of Daniel was all but irrelevant to Ranters. What was important to find in Scripture was not a future timeline of England, but a spiritual threat potent enough to inspire believers to self-reflect and connect more deeply with the Spirit.
As such, it was Revelation’s depictions of hellfire and judgement that carried Ranter apocalypticism. Revelation was to be interpreted metaphorically, the apocalyptic nightmares of ‘fire and brimstone and the worme dying not’ turned into horrifying fables that would inspire the reader to draw closer to God.Footnote 36 Such descriptions of eternal damnation, Jacob Bauthumley argued, were used because they were the worst things man could imagine: only a gruesome description of hellfire such as that could convey just how horrific the separation between Spirit and believer was.Footnote 37 Ultimately, though, there would be no ‘such visible and material formes of punishment’.Footnote 38 Mystical readings of Scripture were identified as calls for inward, rather than earthly, transformations.
The Fifth Monarchists agreed with Ranters that there would be an internal impact of the apocalypse; however, significantly, they relied on biblical prophecy and believed these prophecies would be manifested not only inwardly but materially as well. To uncover the mysteries of the future, they relied on a combination of biblical mystery and history. Feake reminded his readers that ‘history and Prophecy are the Alpha and Omega of the holy scripture’ and that it was only by attaining ‘Knowledge of things past … and the foreknowledge of things to come, until the ending of time (et adhuc) and beyond’ that they could achieve ‘a true Gospel reformation’.Footnote 39 Understanding what believers had endured in the past allowed the godly to understand their future. Combining the different genres of Scripture into a singular narrative would uncover earth’s entire chronology from Eden to Apocalypse and believers would be able to finally calculate the commencement of the millennium. Its imminence was affirmed in Scripture: Cary believed the end time persecution of the Saints began in 1645; Canne believed God would overthrow the Antichristian kingdoms in 1655; Aspinwall believed the Antichrist’s dominion would end in 1673.Footnote 40
The Fifth Monarchists’ reverence for Scripture’s chronological narrative of earth encouraged a preoccupation with a literalist interpretation of Scripture and an outward application of eschatological ideas. Like the Ranters, Fifth Monarchists were interested in mystical applications of Scripture, but some, like Cary and Aspinwall, warned against viewing the coming Fifth Kingdom as ‘onely a Spirituall Kingdom’.Footnote 41 After all, Aspinwall argued, if God had wanted his believers to look for a purely spiritual transformation, ‘he could have expressed himself in proper phrases and words’.Footnote 42 They were sure that all powers would be overhauled when Christ returned. Fifth Monarchists sought out and referenced verses that would help them navigate God’s interventions in their external world, applying the prophecies and metaphors from Scripture onto tangible targets. They accepted that just as hell was indeed fire and brimstone, the antagonists in Scripture such as the Whore of Babylon, Dragon and horns scattered throughout the apocalyptic content existed in physical form represented by opponents in the politico-religious conflicts across Europe.Footnote 43
Significant eschatological consequences arose because of the Ranters’ and Fifth Monarchists’ interpretational methods. When the Ranters prioritised mystery and the Fifth Monarchists prioritised prophecy, they made crucial decisions about the type of scriptural material they gravitated toward. As a result, each sectarian group sought different books that better matched their individual apocalyptic visions. This is not to explicitly accuse either group of ‘cherry-picking’ Scripture; instead, this article suggests that they participated in a more subtle – perhaps at times even subconscious – reading practice that had them returning to the scriptural passages that they felt best illustrated what they sought to understand about the world around them. In this way, including scriptural quotations and biblical citations was not simply a presentation of biblical proof for an eschatological platform but an iterative process of Bible-reading.
Ranters refused to cite the book of Daniel, deviating from the most basic millenarian exegetical traditions, and instead relied almost solely on Ezekiel, Isaiah and Revelation in their search for the apocalypse; they cited the latter two books more than any other.Footnote 44 Ranters made other unique choices: despite their low number of writings, they still cited the books of Genesis, Exodus, the Canticles, James, and 1 John more often than the prolific Fifth Monarchists writers. James’s reminder to his readers in the first chapter that all things given from God were perfect was repeated by Ranters who wanted to emphasise the perfection of sin.Footnote 45 The discussion of sin and godly light in 1 John was important in almost every Ranter work but mostly overlooked by Fifth Monarchists, who focused heavily on the early church history of Acts. And, unsurprisingly, the sensual Canticles received more attention from allegedly lascivious Ranters than it did from the more traditionally Puritanical Fifth Monarchists.
Even when these groups looked to the same books of the Bible for their eschatological ideas, their verse selections rarely overlapped. This could happen even when referencing the same chapter: when Cary picked out verses in the Acts of the Apostles that reinforced God’s approval of saintly prophecy (Acts ii.17), Ranters looked instead to a verse that buttressed their affection for shared property (Acts ii.44).Footnote 46 Feake cited Judges v.9 as proof of a possible future alliance between the government and Saints and Simpson cited the song of Deborah and Barak (Judges v) which praised God for avenging Israel, but Coppe cited the chapter as an example of the divine inspiration and unity Ranters received as God’s chosen ones.Footnote 47 Jacob Bauthumley cited Luke xiii.24 as a warning to unbelievers that they would be unable to reach ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, while Trapnel used Luke xiii.30 to demonstrate the future overturning of the social order.Footnote 48 One of the most extreme examples of close-quarter differences can be found in the groups’ unique selections from Isaiah ii:
12 For the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought low: 13 And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan, 14 And upon all the high mountains, and upon all the hills that are lifted up, 15 And upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall, 16 And upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures. 17 And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low: and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. 18 And the idols he shall utterly abolish. 19 And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. 20 In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats; 21 To go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.Footnote 49
In Some sweet sips of spiritual wine, Abiezer Coppe cited verses 12–14, 19 and 21.Footnote 50 Each of these verses focuses on the raising up of the holy and the fleeing of God’s enemies into the wilderness. Meanwhile, the Fifth Monarchist author N. S. cited verses 16 and 18, and Aspinwall cited verse 20.Footnote 51 These verses spoke to destruction rather than fleeing: pagan idols were to be struck down, unbelievers’ ships sunk. So, even while in close quarters textually speaking, Fifth Monarchists and Ranters gravitated toward different passages. Simply by alternating which verses they picked, sectarians created dramatically different futures for England.
Finally, on the rare occasion when Fifth Monarchists and Ranters discussed the same passage, their interpretational approaches further entrenched their different eschatologies. The internal-external debate was especially clear in discussions of Christ’s resurrection and second coming, an encapsulation of the ultimate issue of physical manifestations of spiritual forces. John Simpson and Jacob Bauthumley both spilled ink over Job xix.25, but for opposite purposes.Footnote 52 Fifth Monarchist John Simpson found comfort in the confirmation of Christ’s resurrection. The suffering of Job – and thus the Saints – was endured only because it would be followed by the elation of the resurrection of Christ and the second coming. The Saints would see Christ come back in the flesh both with ‘bodily eyes … and with that spirituall eye’, allowing Simpson to take full advantage of both metaphorical and literalist interpretations of the resurrection.Footnote 53 It was this literal interpretation that was so off-putting to Bauthumley, who argued that God was ‘a Spirit & invisible, and that no created fleshly things was able to see him’.Footnote 54 In fact, the whole verse was useless to Bauthumley, who was offended that anyone could be ‘so carnall [as] to conceive, that his fleshly eyes should see a spirituall God’.Footnote 55 It was impossible to view the Lord with fleshly eyes – he was within each person, divinely united with one’s spirit.
Similarly, Laurence Clarkson and Christopher Feake both referenced Acts iv.26 (‘The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ’), but used it in dramatically different ways.Footnote 56 Clarkson used the verse to prove that sin was a human construct; since God had predetermined that Christ should be crucified, the works of Pontius Pilate, the Roman soldiers and the secular government were not only not at fault, but godly for following through with God’s plans. Feake instead cited the verse to support his argument that verses about Christ’s persecution were actually about the persecution of Christ’s ‘anointed’.Footnote 57 So even when Ranter and Fifth Monarchist writings cited the same passages of Scripture, there was no guarantee they would see eye to eye; more often than not they moved to opposite conclusions.
The passages that the groups chose to include and interpret informed what symbols and rhetoric they used in their writings. The Ranters’ penchant for mystical and allegorical verses meant more abstraction, while the Fifth Monarchists’ obsession with situating themselves within biblical chronologies proved ample motivation to connect the main characters of the apocalypse to the main players in Europe. More importantly, the threat of the apocalypse and the persecution that the Saints would endure in the Fourth Monarchy or before the final judgement had different consequences based on biblical interpretations. The stakes and the breadth of the apocalypse therefore looked different for each group.
Eschatological enemies and allies
Thanks to a careful reading of Scripture, it was clear to Ranters and Fifth Monarchists that there would be a final showdown, the Saints up against numerous Antichristian obstacles. Where the Ranters and Fifth Monarchists parted was not in their reliance on apocalypse-tinted Scripture but how they conceptualised the forces at work during the apocalypse. Their understanding of the actors in the end times helped further differentiate their millenarianism: having a system to identify Saints was just as essential as that for the Antichrist and Antichristian foes. The divine struggle of the end times determined spiritual armies: the Saints and the Antichrist. Both terms, however, invited conflict over who, or what, would be included. Who would be godly enough to enjoy God’s kingdom in the end times? What would they be up against?
The Ranters found their answers to this question by remaining ever constant in their dedication to an antiformalist and antinomian spiritual life. There was solace in their doctrinal flexibility. For Salmon, it was simple: a true Saint was any for whom ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is within’.Footnote 58 Coppe appreciated a slimmer definition of those who ‘are caught up, out of Self, Flesh, Forme, and Type’.Footnote 59 The combined requirement of divine unity and antiformalism ultimately connected their internalisation of the Spirit to their apocalypticism.
Inherent in the Ranter-Saint identity was a heavy criticism of the outward structures of political society, social mores and religious order. Their derision for institutional restrictions influenced their discussions of the Antichrist and his demonic roster. Joseph Salmon believed that monarchy represented the Beast of Revelation, while Coppe looked to the ‘Ministers, fat parsons, Vicars, Lecturers, &c. who … have been the chiefe instruments of all those horrid abominations, hellish cruell, devilish persecutions’.Footnote 60 For Salmon, his antiformalism led him to understand that the Antichrist was ‘an airy fashionist, that can assume any form: That can form, conform, reform, and deform at his pleasure’.Footnote 61 The Church’s obsession with established religion and formalism was encouraged by the Antichrist, poisoning true spirituality. George Foster, an alleged Ranter, argued that ‘all form of governments and wayes of worships which men have set up, and all Lawes which men have made to keep their fellow creatures in bondage and slaverie’ were represented by Babylon, the seat of the Whore.Footnote 62 Formalism was destroying true faith, tricking people into confining their faith to ceremonies and objects and distracting them from the Spirit.
These complaints about formalism were compounded by the hypocrisy and pride of the Church, whom Ranters personified as the Whore of Babylon. The Whore scorned all sins that believers ‘called prophanesse, wickednesse, looseness, or libertinisme, and yet her self is the mother of witchcrafts’.Footnote 63 Rather than putting the onus of corruption on the individual, Ranters looked to the feeling of hypocrisy itself. It was the extreme hypocrisy of the institution rather than ministers. It was one’s beliefs and actions that led them to the Antichrist, not any inherent sinfulness. The Antichrist could also be the ‘false apprehension’ of good and evil.Footnote 64 Constantly, believers called ‘light darkness, and darkness light … calling that evill which indeed is good’.Footnote 65 People continually strayed from the divine by refusing to reconceptualise all – either holy or sinful – as godly. So, the Antichrist was less a physical figure than a spiritual obstacle keeping people from achieving that divine unity for which Ranters so yearned.
Of course, there was a certain level of dissonance in Ranter theology when describing the Antichrist. If the ‘Devil is God’, ‘Christ a Devil’, or Satan at least ‘part of God’s back sides’, discussing the Antichrist as a formidable foe that represented all that was wrong with the ungodly became complicated if not outright impossible.Footnote 66 If Ranters disassociated themselves from Antichrist as a physical presence, they were never quite able to extricate themselves from using Antichrist as the symbol of evil. Abiezer Coppe and Jacob Bauthumley both believed that the Antichrist was like God: something to be discovered internally.Footnote 67 Men were so preoccupied with fearing the Devil bedecked with horned tail and claws, tricking people in dark forests and appearing in the darkness, they imagined him as such a horrific creature, that they ‘never consider[ed] that he is in them’.Footnote 68 And yet, there was the possibility that the Antichrist could be expelled. Coppe encouraged his readers to pray ‘that Antichrist in you (for he hath been, and is in us when we knew it not) may be dispossessed … and the Man of Sin, in every one of you, may be destroyed’.Footnote 69 Perhaps only with the apocalypse could godliness finally be extricated.
Ranters understood the apocalyptic actors as internal forces and, in doing so, crafted a type of internal apocalypse, one in which individuals would have to face their own spiritual practices and beliefs in the final showdown if not in person. Still, in their own way, this final conflict of Antichrist and the Spirit could still emerge as an external event. Even if Revelation’s apocalyptic figures represented abstractions, enemies that could be found in ceremonies rather than in Whitehall, it was equally important that Saints attack and reverse the corruption of the true faith to hasten the millennium. Jacob Bauthumley described this internalised final showdown between God and Satan:
When I read of Michael and his Angels, and the Dragon and his Angels, fighting against one another; I see nothing there but the fleshly and dark apprehensions of God against the pure and spirituall: and as Michael overcame the Dragon; so the more pure and spiritual dispensations of God shall overpower the dark and carnall, and so those Angels of darkness shall be cast into their lake, and there be reserved to the great judgement day of the Lord within us.Footnote 70
Once the Antichrist was fully destroyed they would finally enjoy true bliss in communion with the divine. Salvation was a personal choice – each person would have to choose that ‘pure and spirituall’ side of God over the carnal – but they would also have to fight against the outward manifestations of Antichrist: spiritual and institutional corruption, hypocrisy and the false teachings about the nature of God.Footnote 71 The battlefield was in the soul rather than on the fields, the stakes one’s salvation rather than England’s rule.
The Fifth Monarchists’ particular eschatology demanded both Saints and Antichristian forces be physically manifested. The rosters of the Saintly and Antichristian powers changed with the political and religious transformations during the Revolution, their membership as malleable as Parliament’s. When Cary wrote about the Saints in 1647, she accepted that, despite the fracturing of the Puritan coalition, the godly could be found among all reformers; to be a Saint did not mean they were ‘confin’d to any particular society of men … as Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Independents, Seekers, &c’.Footnote 72 The Saints included not only Fifth Monarchists and fellow millenarian Independents, but those from other Puritan groupings so long as they were godly. Likewise, in 1650, it was clear to Feake that only true Christians had ‘Laws and Ordinances, ways of Worship differing from all other’, the points of disagreement unnecessary for access to the godly community.Footnote 73 However, after four years of working tirelessly to no avail to make major changes in the Commonwealth, Fifth Monarchists’ tune had changed. Writing from his prison cell in Windsor Castle, Feake’s updated definition was one that was a ‘reserved remnant call’d out of their several holes and caves … to make a standing Army for the King of Saints’.Footnote 74 Aspinwall took it a step further, explaining that there would be leaders of the ‘Militia, or supream power of his Kingdome’, a statement that would have raised brows when published in 1653.Footnote 75 As it became increasingly clear that the political and religious reforms the Fifth Monarchists had pushed for were not being properly enacted by the Commonwealth officials, the more exclusive – and political – the list of Saints became.
The targets of the Fifth Monarchists’ godly vitriol also became increasingly particular as the Revolution continued. In the early years of Fifth Monarchist activity, they played into the traditional Protestant eschatology that stoutly professed the Roman Catholic Church to be the Antichrist, pinning the pope as ‘the Man of sin, the Son of Perdition’.Footnote 76 From this attribution, Fifth Monarchists could identify other apocalyptic Antichristian roles associated with the evils of Catholicism. Not only was the Antichrist encouraging Catholicism, but ‘those that act & walk in the power & spirit of Antichrist’ – the Dragon, the Beast and the ‘false-Prophet’ were all associated with Rome.Footnote 77 Even before Feake and Cary became pioneers of the Fifth Monarchy movement, they drew upon traditional Protestant eschatology that professed that the Beast of Revelation was the pope, and the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon.Footnote 78 The apocalypse was therefore inherently political because the Antichrist was interfering in politics and political regimes himself. In fact, according to John Canne, all great powers of the seventeenth century sprang from fifth-century Rome.Footnote 79
The Fifth Monarchists did not limit their targets to continental political figures; most dangerously, it was their very own leaders whom they accused of being in league with the devil. When William Aspinwall described his plan to demolish the remnants of ‘royal power’, he praised Parliament for beheading ‘the Beast or chief Soveraign’, Charles i.Footnote 80 Cary too associated Charles i with the camp of the Antichrist, bestowing upon him the title of the Little Horn from the book of Daniel, which had been prophesied to be the one that would be ‘desperately wicked and maliciously cruell against the Saints’.Footnote 81 The persecution of the godly under Charles was unforgivable, and his hypocrisy in claiming to be one of the godly when he was so clearly Catholic (by Fifth Monarchist standards) demonstrated how wrapped up he was with the devil.
The regicide did not rid the Fifth Monarchists of the Antichrist, however. As Fifth Monarchists became increasingly disillusioned with the Commonwealth during the 1650s, they began to identify their own political leaders as aids to the Antichrist. But even as the Antichrist’s appearance transformed, the sectarians’ eschatological exegesis remained the same, their system of Bible-reading reinforcing the developments at Whitehall: the same verses they had cited to identify the pope and Charles i as Antichrist now pointed them towards Oliver Cromwell, their new target during the Interregnum.
Cromwell had been a righteous and promising figure, rising through the godly ranks of the English army, a friend to fellow millenarians. These allies even compared him to Gideon and Moses.Footnote 82 However, by the peak of Cromwell’s Protectorate, Fifth Monarchists had become disillusioned with him, not in small part due to him imprisoning many of their leaders: Anna Trapnel in the London Bridewell, John Canne in Newgate, John Simpson and Christopher Feake in Windsor Castle, John Spittlehouse and John Rogers in Lambeth Palace, Thomas Harrison and Hugh Courtney in Carisbrook Castle, and John Carew in Pendennis Castle. Trapnel alluded to Cromwell’s Antichristian allegiance by describing Cromwell and the bishops as two of the final four horns, matching those from Zechariah i.18–19.Footnote 83 Feake described England under Cromwell as ‘the Kingdom of the Beast’, and Rogers piled on, describing the state as ‘this Serpent power (now up) in England (the Out-Street of the Beast)’.Footnote 84 It was clear that the Antichrist had infiltrated their nation’s councils, parishes, parliaments. The more disillusioned with the Commonwealth regime the Fifth Monarchists became, the more closely their government aligned with the Antichrist. And even imprisonment did not stop them from preaching: Feake had to be dragged from the Windsor chapel pulpit while preaching there as a prisoner; reports stated that he held so tightly to it that ‘the pul[pit] cracked very much’ as the guards pulled him down.Footnote 85 Such an interaction only fuelled the apocalyptic fires: Cromwell’s servants had literally destroyed the place from which God’s servants spoke. There was no clearer indication of the government’s culpability.
The Antichrist’s changing appearances did not bring into question Ranters’ and Fifth Monarchists’ understandings of what the apocalypse would be since their exegetical work had already confirmed for them that the end times were nigh. The move from assigning scriptural passages and figures to their own world had confirmed for each, in their own ways, what the Saints were up against in the end times. Whether internal or external, the presence of corruption confirmed for each group that the apocalypse called them to action.
A call to action
Ranters and Fifth Monarchists may have opposed the other’s manner of exegesis and its application to the world around them; however, both agreed that whether the apocalypse was internal or external, the effects of the apocalypse on the English would be physically manifested, transforming their society as much as themselves. In other words, although they pictured different versions of earth’s final battle between Christ and Anti-christ, the result of that conflict would still be visible for both.
At first glance, the effects of the apocalypse looked the same for each group. This was due to the fact that at the core of their millenarian aspirations were the two same major projects: a reformation of English institutions and a social levelling. Both wanted to create a new society built on community and godliness: the poor needed to be taken care of and supported, the powerful needed to be toppled. This ‘extreme millenarianism’ required utter godliness.Footnote 86 But, as can be seen already, their differences emphasised the variant means by which to achieve these goals.
Both groups felt the pull to reform their religious and political institutions by fighting the tyranny of the powerful. Each bemoaned the state of poverty they saw in London as well as the fiscal oppression of heavy taxation and tithing. And, just as taxes and tithes seemed two sides of the same coin, political and religious institutions were both subjected to Ranter and Fifth Monarchist apocalyptic dreams of restructuring. Sectarians’ most consistent complaint was that the rich wasted money that they could have used to alleviate the condition of the hordes of impoverished Englishmen. Coppe pointedly recalled the luxurious celebratory banquet for Commonwealth officials when ‘hundreds of poore wretches dyed with hunger’.Footnote 87 Cary and Salmon decried the selfishness of the rich and the military commanders, accusing them of being motivated solely by self-preservation rather than the spirit of reformation.Footnote 88 Ranters found comfort in the face of such destitution by looking to communal ownership to subsidise the disparities in English society. As the Ranter manifesto Justification of the mad crew went, ‘Come give me your mony, your land, your wives and children, let it be their land, mony, wives and children as well as yours, and yours as well as theirs.’Footnote 89 Land and wealth were to be redistributed and shared, free love enjoyed. This ‘primitive bible communism’ determined that in the case that all things and people already belonged to Christ, and all people were united with Christ, that surely the redistribution of spouses, lands and belongings was not only acceptable, but divinely ordained.Footnote 90 For the Fifth Monarchists, who cared far more for traditional mores but were also more comfortable with external strictures, they looked to punish and reform the proliferation of ‘drunkards, whore-mongers, adulterers, and swearers’ wasting away on the streetcorners, physical manifestations of the spiritual rot that state officials refused to cut out.Footnote 91 England may have been the elect nation, but that did not stop millenarians from also comparing it to Babylon when given the opportunity – a nation led by corrupt officials would itself become equally corrupt and selfish if not corrected.Footnote 92
So, while the abolition of the monarchy had certainly been a step in the right direction, it did not preclude England from corruption and tyranny among state officials. Salmon described Parliament in early 1649 as ‘making themselves as absolute and tyrannical as ever the King in his reign’.Footnote 93 Feake complained that godly men had been pushed out, the ‘real disciples of Jesus Christ in Common-Councel, in the City … [were] no more, not one more’.Footnote 94 A Fifth Monarchist abortive uprising in 1654 saw Thomas Saunders, John Okey and Matthew Alured warning Cromwell that they would fight tyranny in the Commonwealth ‘with the price of our blood’, just as they had four years earlier – a conflict that ended with the execution of the ‘tyrant’ King Charles i.Footnote 95 Feake and Rogers both prayed aloud to God to ‘throw downe the three grand tyrants of this Nation: the Army, the Law, and the Clergy’.Footnote 96 Each would have to be dismantled and rebuilt. As they watched England’s political world reshape itself, they became increasingly aware that England’s leaders were no longer aligned with their priorities. During the Protectorate, Marchamont Needham reported back to Oliver Cromwell that he had found Christopher Feake and Vavasor Powell sounding the alarm at Blackfriars against Cromwell and that Feake had described Cromwell as ‘the most dissembling and perjured villain in the world’.Footnote 97 At a spirited congregation meeting, General Thomas Harrison and John Carew allegedly accused Cromwell of taking ‘the Crowne off from the heade of Christ, and put[ting] it upon his owne’.Footnote 98 Cromwell had become ‘the worst’, corrupted by the wealth and power he took for himself as Lord Protector.Footnote 99 Cromwell was their Gideon no longer, now a ‘backsliden’ man, to be ‘laid aside, as to any great matters’.Footnote 100 Once a stalwart symbol of Puritan reform and millenarian fervour, Cromwell had become yet another enemy, someone for the Saints to vanquish in preparation for the Fifth Kingdom.
The corruption was deep-seated in the ecclesiastical world as well. Laurence Clarkson bemoaned the state of belief in a Church, that ‘never was there more superstition, more darkness in the Churches than now’, and the writer of Justification of the mad crew believed that the corruption in the Church was so rampant that anyone who associated with it was ‘a worshipper of many Gods’.Footnote 101 Anna Trapnel pointed out the ‘malice and envie uttered and acted by the Clergie and Rulers’ against her.Footnote 102 Each group was faulty but combined they were even worse, ‘one depend[ing] upon another, Rulers upon Clergie, and Clergie upon Rulers’.Footnote 103 Because the two groups supported each other, both were culpable for any transgressions committed by the other and the sins of one amplified the sins of the other.
For Ranters, restructuring religious power and institutions took the main stage. Ranters may have prioritised inward transformation, the internalisation of the Spirit and its effects on the individual, but the apocalypse could be internal and still have external ramifications because of the ‘two-fold recovery of two sorts of things, inward, and outward, or civil, and religious’.Footnote 104 If the apocalypse was internal, even the transformation of the individual would lead to the transformation of the institutions. With the Second Coming, ‘(formall Prayer, formal Baptism, formall Supper--&c.) shall melt away, with fervent heate, into God; and all Forms, appearances, Types, Signes, Shadows, Flesh, do, and shall melt away (with fervent heate) into power, reallity, Truth, the thing signified, Substance, Spirit’.Footnote 105 All that the Church dictated would be thrown out, left to the individual to decide for himself. While Ranters’ inclination may have been to approach Scripture in mystery rather than history, Coppe warned against levelling being taken on a mere allegorical level. Ministers who remained loyal to the established Church consistently encouraged such an approach, arguing that passages about the reformation to come ‘are to be taken in the Mystery only … a spirituall, inward levelling’.Footnote 106 It was clear to Coppe that such authorities were striving to tamp down the revolutionary sentiment of the Saints and to keep them in the darkness. Only by dismissing the authoritative interpretation from the Church could the Saints truly achieve God’s plan for the millennium.
For Fifth Monarchists, religious and political restructuring went hand in hand thanks to their aspirations for a new Saintly government. John Canne clarified multiple times in A voice from the temple to the higher powers (1653) that ‘the Kingdome, and dominion, and greatnesse, possessed first by the Beast and little horne … must needs be civill and temporall’ and therefore that Christ’s overthrowing of the Antichristian kingdom would be a civil and temporal overthrowing as well.Footnote 107 When Aspinwall published his plan for the millennium, it was clear that Jesus would be the ‘absolute soveraigne’ of ‘Church power, but also in reference to Civil and Military power’.Footnote 108 He hoped that they would create a theocratic regime, led by a council and administrators led by Saints, who would be Jesus’ viceregents. All legislative power would be given to Christ, and judicial power would be handed to the Saints, named ‘Ministers of Justice’.Footnote 109 These ministers would have to be chosen, tested and affirmed by ‘true churches’ in order to lead their nation and there would be a ‘thorow purgation’ of the government at the beginning of the Fifth Monarchy that would ensure that only the truly godly would be running things from then on. Feake focused on returning England to a state that resembled the early Church, and the reformation would mean a simplification of religion, indeed, ‘a Reduction of persons and things, and names, to their original causes, in their first constitution’.Footnote 110 In this way, the Church and State would be one and the same, a theocracy led by Christ and his Saints, utterly reformed and utterly allergic to the corruption they all saw in their contemporary leaders and institutions.
Ranters’ and Fifth Monarchists’ apocalyptic changes could thus look on the surface very similar: a reformation of spiritual and social equality, a victory over tyranny and corruption, and the recognition that a type of social levelling was necessary. It is there, however, that their apocalypses’ similarities began and ended. For their visions of how to accomplish this levelling – and thus usher on their reforming and restructuring – looked drastically different.
The call for a social levelling was a call to change society in a tangibly external sense, and the implications were threatening if not outright violent. Again, there were interpretational differences for the two groups. Ranters stayed ambiguous about who would be inflicting this violence but tended to put the onus on God himself; they chose not to brandish the sword of levelling themselves. Foster believed that the rich and powerful would be levelled after God ‘destroy[ed] some, and burne[d] and consume[d]’ all the other earthly powers.Footnote 111 Coppe believed that the Lord was ‘come down to whip and burn’.Footnote 112 Ranters slyly hinted at the divine destruction coming for their oppressors, removing themselves from immediate blame. They could continue gallivanting through the streets and in the alehouses in their wickedly impish ways, espousing the merits of free love and community without needing to take up the sword themselves. For it was not coercion and violence that would bring their fellow tavern-goers to the Spirit, but the social disruption, the inversion of acceptable mores, and, indeed, that itineracy which would liberate them from the oppressiveness of society’s strictures. These acts of liberty were in fact central to their evangelising efforts: to shock was to proselytise.
Their aversion to personally instigating violence may have been strategic, allowing them to avoid accusations of rebellion and sedition. Abiezer Coppe believed too much blood had been shed already; England must ‘dip not thy little finger in blood any more, thou art up to the elbowes already’, and so there could be no ‘materiall sword, or Mattock’, but only ‘the Sword of the Spirit’.Footnote 113 There was also the added ambiguity of whether end-time destruction was real or mystical; Ranters themselves did not seem to know. Coppe wavered in his warning: ‘the Lord of the Vineyard will miserably destroy (at least mystically, and that suddenly)’ the ungodly.Footnote 114 Only Joseph Salmon seemed willing to offer an alternative to the Ranters’ own absence on the battlefield; as a former New Model Army soldier and army chaplain, he believed God had chosen the Army as a vessel of godly levelling. It was the ‘Commanding Power in the Army … [that is] the Rod of the Lord’s anger in his own Hand’.Footnote 115 While the army took charge, the Ranters could focus on other changes in society.
Divine retribution was promised – it was only how it would be manifested that Ranters remained unsure of. In this way, they abstained from the most immediately threatening aspect of a violent millenarian vision. Ranters’ focus on the power of the internal and the overthrow of coercive external forms meant that they remained vague about the outward mechanisms of social and political change. In doing so, they could inadvertently suggest that the revolution of the spirit, led by Ranting prophets, would produce a cosmic transformation regardless of whether more violent measures were taken.
The Fifth Monarchists were far less ambivalent about fighting the Antichrist and thus willingly embraced a future that required external coercion. As they realised that neither the Rump nor the Barebones Parliament would support their millenarian vision or match their fervour for end-time activism, it became clear that they would need to take a more militant, action-oriented Saintly plan.Footnote 116 By 1655, Feake was teaching children new tunes about the fall of Cromwell, tearing down pulpits, and encouraging his guards to forcefully dismantle the government by ‘instruct[ing] the Garrison towards mutiny & disobedience’, ordering them to ‘turne again & resist and not obey’ their commanders.Footnote 117 Unlike Salmon, who notably acknowledged the New Model Army’s participation only after he had exited their ranks, plenty of Fifth Monarchists took up the Lord’s rod of anger as active soldiers in the New Model Army. Five major Fifth Monarchist leaders – Thomas Harrison, Robert Overton, Nathaniel Rich, John Jones and Henry Danvers – all held titles of colonel or higher in the army, but there were at least ninety soldiers who publicly proclaimed their affiliation with Fifth Monarchists, not to mention the teaming number of Fifth Monarchist ‘preaching-men’ who accompanied the armies across the British Isles.Footnote 118 So when Feake later asked that the remnant Saints be called together ‘to make a standing Army for the King of Saints’, it was not hard to imagine just how willingly Fifth Monarchists would heed the call to use the military to level the aristocracy.Footnote 119
The Fifth Monarchists’ aggressive stance became increasingly threatening to the Commonwealth. For centuries, theologians had discussed millenarianism without bringing any radical or bellicose conclusions into the mix; Fifth Monarchists had changed that. The martyrdom they espoused did not prevent them from fighting back. There would be no turning the other cheek; instead, the Fifth Monarchist N. S. determined that that verse’s command was only for when Christ and his Apostles were upon the earth; now was the time that ‘the Saints must be called to Action for Christ’, rather than peacefully accepting their punishment by the ungodly.Footnote 120 Indeed, it appears that despite the numerous Bible passages which discussed not taking revenge, the Fifth Monarchists managed to avoid citing any verses of encouragement for long-suffering.
The two groups’ contrasting opinions about using violence cannot be fully explained by temporal context alone. While the Ranters, emerging in the late 1640s and early 1650s, may have been responsive to the exhaustion of the people after years of civil war and thus favoured a cessation of violence, the Fifth Monarchists, who were most active in the mid-1650s, demonstrate that weariness of war alone did not dictate political or eschatological behaviour. After all, they faced even more warfare, in addition to widespread criticism of a standing army during the Interregnum. Even still, they resisted calls to demobilise and instead envisioned a ‘standing Army for the King of Saints’ to enforce Christ’s imminent reign.Footnote 121 The groups’ positions were shaped as much by theological and millenarian convictions as by their immediate circumstances: for the Fifth Monarchists, apocalyptic urgency demanded continued political and military action, whereas the Ranters’ spiritualised vision of the end allowed them to embrace a more internalised and pacific approach.
Ranters and Fifth Monarchists alike had criticisms of their world and dreams of reformation. They continued to approach the millennium and their place in it from different angles; naturally, both groups dreamed of ‘great and glorious things to come’.Footnote 122 Once the Spirit had been invited in by all Saints, the Ranters believed that the perfect world would be ‘true Communion amongst men … all things common … calling nothing one hath, one’s own’.Footnote 123 If the Kingdom of God was within each believer, then there would be true unity among all people and with God. Fifth Monarchists would finally achieve the utter transformation of civil, ecclesiastical and social institutions and powers and come out on top. They would finally be sure of their place in Christ’s ranks, leading the people side-by-side with their saviour. The Second Coming for both Ranters and Fifth Monarchists could hardly come sooner.
As Joseph Salmon put it, ‘The summe of all briefly, is this … that all darknesse and confusion shall be destroyed by that consuming violence of divine burning.’Footnote 124 The apocalyptic futures Ranters and Fifth Monarchists crafted were not mere curiosities of sectarian flair, they were forged in the crucible of Scripture itself: a promise of ecstatic union with the divine and magnificent changes for institutions and society alike. Their readings of Scripture shaped radically different answers to the same questions: Where is God? Who are the Saints? What fates await the powerful? By tracing the hermeneutical choices behind their writings, we see how Scripture became both lens and blueprint for radical action, shaping identities, spiritual practice and political action alike.
The two groups’ distinctive apocalypses underscore the centrality of scriptural exegesis in the formation of sectarian identity. The Ranters and Fifth Monarchists were not simply responding to political or social pressures; they were interrogating Scripture, making interpretational choices and seeking confirmation in their unique selections. The passages they cited, the books they privileged and the theological arguments they constructed are as important as any pamphlet, sermon or political act in delineating the boundaries of these groups and their apocalypses. When Ranters abstracted the moral dimensions of sin or envisioned the Spirit descending upon the believer, and Fifth Monarchists charted the fulfillment of prophecy in tangible political terms, they were actively shaping their communities, defining their obligations, and articulating the consequences of divine justice. These were deliberate, interpretive acts that demand careful attention if we are to understand the lived experience of Scripture in the early modern era.
By returning to the hermeneutical practices of these sectarians, scholars can recover the questions radicals asked of Scripture and, in turn, the world they sought to remake. Apocalyptic fervour was not a generalised mood but a deep engagement with Scripture, a dialogue between divine Word and human expectation. Understanding early modern radicalism thus requires taking these interpretive choices seriously: the content of the Bible mattered, but so did the act of choosing what mattered. It was through this engagement that sectarian groups defined themselves, navigated political upheaval and made sense of suffering and persecution. Exegesis was not ancillary; it was constitutive of their beliefs, their politics and their visions of the end.
More broadly, this approach has implications for the study of any community whose worldview is inseparable from Scripture. Whether in radical Protestant England or elsewhere, historians cannot fully apprehend the logic, identity or action of such groups without interrogating the texts they revered and the interpretive frameworks they deployed. To overlook these sources is to miss the fundamental tools of meaning-making that drive their behaviour and imagination. In recovering the questions sectarians posed of Scripture we illuminate not only the apocalyptic visions of a turbulent period in English history but also the broader dynamics of belief, authority and human aspiration. The end times were never just about the future; they were about how humans read, understood and acted in the present. It is in the careful study of those readings that the apocalyptic imagination of the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchists and their contemporaries comes fully into view.
Open access
