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 among 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.The Acts of the Witnesses was edited by Thomas Tomkinson, first published in 1699 and further reprinted in 1764. The text is reproduced in T. L. Underwood The Acts of the Witnesses New York: Oxford University Press (1999). The autobiography is self-consciously styled after The Acts of the Apostles to be found in the Christian New Testament. It may be wise to bear a doctrinal purpose in mind and not to treat the work as the chatty reminiscences of an old man.
Childhood and apprenticeship Lodowicke MuggletonWilliam Lamont Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History 1652–1979 Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing (2006) plates 1 & 2 reproduce the christening entry of 30 July 1609 in the parish register of St Botolph, Bishopsgate where his name is recorded "Lodowicke". The present-day church is later: built 1729 was born in a house called Walnut Tree YardBraun & Hogenberg's map of 1572 (Museum of London) shows the east side of Bishopsgate as having a ribbon of houses with fields behind. Following researches into the Cheapside Hoard (also Museum of London) relating to roughly the same date as Muggleton's birth, such houses were where many families lived and worked but, unlike modern flats or tenements, one family's rooms were often scattered throughout the building. Martin Holmes Elizabethan London London: Cassell (1969) p. 1 to 13 for map. In 1884 Augustus Jessopp published a popular article entitled The Prophet of Walnut Tree Yard the tone of which caused great offence among the faith on Bishopsgate Street (now Bishopsgate) in the City of London.The site was cleared in the 1790s to make way for New Street and the enlargement of the Old Bengal Warehouse of the East India Company. 5 to 7 New Street were merchants' houses built at that time. N. Pevsner & B. Cherry The Buildings of England London vol 1 Harmondswoth: Penguin (1972 3rd edition) p. 273. 7 New Street was leased as the Muggletonian Reading rooms between 1869 – 1918 because it was believed to be on the site of Muggleton's birthplace. The house, as it was, is illustrated in George Williamson's Lodowick Muggleton London: Chiswick Press (1919) The photos by Hallett Hyatt are reproduced, uncredited, in Lamont Last Witnesses.
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.Despite the social acceptability of the practice, he seems to have felt the estrangement very keenly. "I was a stranger to my father's house after my mother was dead," he writes. He repeated the practice with his own daughters when their mother died leaving him a young widower. He does not say when his daughters returned to his household, which they clearly did. 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."Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1971) p. 9 says that one sixth of Londoners died of the plague in that year
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,"T. L. Underwood Acts of the Witnesses p. 37. 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."T. L. Underwood Acts of the Witnesses p. 40. 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's 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".T. L. Underwood Acts of the Witnesses p. 41
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."T. L. Underwood Acts of the Witnesses p. 51 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."Christopher Hill "Change and continuity in 17th century England" London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1974) p. 59
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."quoted in Lamont Last Witnesses p. 1 Subsequent historiansfor example, George Charles Williamson in his Lodowick Muggleton London: Chiswick Press 1919 p. 17 says "Almost every piece of information in this statement is entirely inaccurate." 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."T. L. Underwood Acts of the Witnesses p. 59
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