Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, Russell Hogg. My guest today is historian Professor Peter Marshall, who specialises in European early modern history. And I first became aware of Peter because Tom Holland was absolutely singing the praises of his latest book, which is Storm's Edge, about the Orkneys. And so I rushed out and I pre-ordered that because it was early. And so when I was waiting for it to arrive, I came across another book by Peter called Mother Leakey and the Bishop. And as you're about to hear, that's an absolute belter of a story out of 1600s England and Ireland. And it's more than just a story. It's an examination of how stories come to be created and remembered and the uses to which they're put. Anyway, welcome, Peter, to the podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Thank you for having me. Great pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_00:So this is quite a difficult podcast to do in a way because your book doesn't just tell the story once. It tells it several times as you've come across different versions that were produced at different times and Maybe the authors had different motives. And one of the joys of the book is seeing how you pick all that and examine it against the background of politics and the background of religion at the time. And what I would say to the listeners is that if you enjoy detective stories, then you would absolutely love this book because there's tons in the way of clues and red herrings as Peter takes us through the story. So I thought maybe, Peter, you could start with just a straightforward telling of the world of Old Mother Leakey as she's on her deathbed back in 1634 and say a bit about the strange events that happened once she should be safely dead and buried.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So as you say, it is a bit of a strange book, and it's not a book that I really ever planned or expected to write. It's a book that I ended up sort of writing by accident, and we might come back to the story of how that happens. But the setting, or at least where the story starts, is in the port town of Minehead on the north coast of Somerset in 1634, with the death of a woman called Susan Leakey, who is a widow and the mother of a shipowner and merchant in the town who's fallen on hard times which turns out to be part of the story and on her deathbed she apparently threatens her daughter-in-law Elizabeth that she will return after her death as a ghost and that's how it indeed turns out or at least that's what people say happens afterwards so um I came across this material when I was interested in the subject of ghosts for perhaps a rather more conventional type of history book. My sort of expertise and background was as a historian of the 16th century and of the British, particularly the English Reformation, and it was in the course of writing about the abolition of purgatory, which is one of the great sort of theological and social consequences of the English Reformation, that I developed this kind of side interest in ghosts. And that took me to what I thought was going to be, you know, a couple of sentences about this little incident in the town of Minehead, and it ended up becoming a whole book.
SPEAKER_00:So you kind of hinted this with purgatory, but back in the 1630s, what do people think ghosts are? Well,
SPEAKER_01:that's a good question without a very clear answer. Ghosts are not really supposed to exist in the 1630s, because by this point, the Protestant Reformation in England is 100 years old, effectively. And one of the sort of central themes of English Protestant theologians and reformers is that there are only two alternatives when you die. you go to heaven or you go to hell. And this third place of purgatory, which had been so important in medieval Catholic religion, a place where the dead are being purged of their sins, being prepared for heaven. And as a result of that, very importantly, the dead maintain a kind of relationship with the living, because one of the things you can do for the souls in purgatory is to pray for them, to speed them on their way. Anyway, Protestant theologians pretty unanimously decide that purgatory is a fraud, a fiction. It's not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. It's a kind of insult to Christ and the idea that Christ has done everything necessary for people's salvation because it implies that people have to sort of chip in with their own efforts and the help of their friends and family to get through into heaven. And it's also widely regarded by Protestant theologians as being a kind of a contract, frankly, because people pay for prayers and masses. And the whole sort of industry of purgatory in the late medieval church is regarded by reformers as being a kind of fraud, really. Purgatory pickpurs is what a number of English Protestant reformers refer to it. So ghosts fit into this. Because in most medieval stories, ghosts are spirits of the dead returning from purgatory either to confess to sins that they committed in their lifetime and to warn people not to do that, or very often to request masses and prayers to be said for them by the living. And it's perhaps not surprising that these occurrences are a little bit seasonal. And in fact, the ghost of Mother Leakey in Minehead is is first reported to have appeared at about All Hallowtide. And All Hallowtide, of course, is the Feast of All Hallows All Saints on the 1st of November, which we still remember as Halloween. The 31st of October is the eve of that Feast of All Saints. And in fact, there's a pair of sort of linked festivals here together because the 2nd of November is the Feast of All Souls. And in a sense, These are kind of all the ordinary people who are not great saints and have their own feast days, but are still remembered in the church's prayer and the church's services at this particular time of year. So not surprisingly, it was thought that spirits from purgatory would be particularly likely to pop up at Halloween in order to request the prayers of the living. But when the Reformation is swept away... all the underlying theology of this, then there's no reason for these ghosts to carry on appearing. And some Protestants optimistically thought that they wouldn't. But people carry on seeing ghosts. And that took a bit of explaining,
SPEAKER_00:to put it mildly. And so Mother Leakey, she says, well, I may come back as a ghost or I will come back as a ghost. And she's as good as her word, doesn't she? She does come back.
SPEAKER_01:Well, she does. And in the first report we have, well, in most of the reports that we have seem to come from the daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Leakey. And when her mother-in-law on her deathbed says, well, I will come back as a ghost, the daughter-in-law snaps back at her. What? Will you be a devil then? showing that she completely understands the new Protestant theology about this. There are no ghosts. The souls of the dead are either prisoners of the devil in hell and they stay there, or they're blessed souls in heaven, venerating God, and they have no reason to return to this earth. So if people see a spirit, there are a kind of limited range of possibilities here. I mean, one, it could just be a delusion. You know, they've drunk too much or they've, you know, hear a strange noise, something rustling in the trees, or if it is some kind of supernatural event, it can only be one of two things. It's either a good spirit or an evil spirit. It's an angel or a demon. And listeners might, of course, be aware that that range of possibilities is that a good spirit or an evil spirit is, of course, put on the stage in the most famous work of English literature. This is Hamlet's Dilemma. is the appearance of his apparent father calling him to take revenge against his uncle Claudius, is that actually his father, spirit of health or goblin damned, is the question Hamlet is asking himself. And while there was a possibility that angels might appear and give messages to people, most Protestant theologians didn't think that was very likely. and would usually want to rule out the idea that these apparitions could be good angels. Because why would angels be coming to do this? Because God's told us everything we need to know already in the Word of Scripture. Protestants, of course, believe that the Bible is the beginning and end of all religious revelation. So very likely that these are deceptive, demonic spirits pretending to be the souls of the dead. So that's the official line. But what becomes very clear is that very few people believe it. And even Protestant clergymen themselves often don't seem to believe it. This cultural acceptance of the possibility of a return of the spirits of the dead is very,
SPEAKER_00:very prevalent. I suppose the other thing about angels is that if you're an angel, you don't come back saying you're Mrs. Leakey because angels aren't supposed to tell fibs, right?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, absolutely, yes. That's one of the arguments, indeed, that reformers use to suggest that this is very, very unlikely to be an angel. And particularly when ghosts are apparently female, like Mother Leakey, angels are sort of asexual, but the idea of angels is that if they appear physically at all, they would always be in the form of beautiful young men, not women.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I'd always thought of angels as being female creatures because I think that's how you see them on Christmas cards and so on. But in the Bible, they're all male, right?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, yes. And the story of how angels eventually kind of become conflated with the souls of the dead, you know, your grandfather is now an angel in heaven, is an interesting but rather separate one. I think that's a much later development, Victorian or
SPEAKER_00:even 20th century. So the ghost comes back. What is the ghost's purpose in coming back? What's it there to achieve? What is the ghost up to?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm sort of pausing before I answer that because the honest answer is after several years of investigating this story, I don't really know. And there are a whole range of possibilities. And in a sense, the book is an attempt to kind of answer that question. And I think ends up answering a series of questions actually rather different questions about why people told ghost stories and a range of possibilities. I mean, to come at that in a slightly less kind of, you know, nomic and annoying way, it might be helpful if I just, you know, talk a little bit about how this ended up being a book rather than just a couple of sentences in an essay about ghosts. So, As I was saying before, I was writing this book about kind of the commemoration of the dead and the collapse of purgatory and what replaces it in Protestant culture in the Reformation in England, and that had a chapter on ghosts in it. And I was doing what historians do, which is you look to see who else has worked on these themes. And the book that listeners may have heard of, because it's an absolute classic of pre-modern English history, is sir keith thomas's religion and decline of magic published 50 years ago now but still absolutely an important work and um thomas has a chapter on ghosts and angels and he went right through the archives and printed material and found lots and lots of examples and he has this one line reference with a footnote to um the appearance of this this ghost in in somerset um Actually, he says it's a master leaky, a male ghost, and a reference to the printed calendar of the state papers, because a report about this had been sent to the Privy Council, the body that advises the sovereign in the 17th century. So I thought, ah, well, I'd better go and look at that. So I found the reference in the calendar of state papers. And that gave a reference to the original manuscripts in the state papers. And they turned out to be very interesting indeed. I mean, first of all, the date was slightly wrong in the calendar. This was an investigation that takes place in the early part of 1637, so a couple of years after the death of, as it turns out, Mistress rather than Master Leakey. And it was a kind of goldmine of material for me because finding evidence about ghosts is really, really hard, particularly for the 16th, 17th century. I mean, the appearance of ghosts wasn't really a kind of major focus of theological controversy compared to the sort of the status of the mass or the veneration of the saints or things like that. And it was something the authorities weren't most of the time tremendously interested in. I mean, I sometimes say to people kind of half in jest, there was a great tragedy that early modern England didn't have a version of the Spanish Inquisition, because say what you like about the Inquisition, it was genuinely really interested in what people believed and what they thought and whether they believed the right things. So, you know, heterodox, unorthodox beliefs about angels and saints and so on. can be written endlessly about early modern Spain. It's fantastic stuff. But the English church courts were pretty much concerned with making sure that people came to church on a Sunday morning and that they paid their tithes to the local vicar. And they weren't beyond that particularly interested in what they may have believed about things like ghosts and fairies. So that sort of material doesn't appear in the judicial records very much at all. But here was a whole set of depositions, statements by witnesses, four of them, The daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Leakey, and another three people within the network in the town who all claim to have seen this ghost and had conversations with it. We might come back to this, but the ghost talks to her daughter-in-law and tells her a number of things she's apparently concerned about. And I was just at this moment preparing, this is 20 years and more ago now, so all of this is entirely fresh in my mind, but I'd been invited to go and speak at a conference, believe it or not, on early modern ghosts at the University of Durham. And I thought, well, this story is a wonderful kind of case study in what people seem to think about ghosts, so I'll do it as a 20-minute conference paper for this event. And then I thought, well, you know, actually, what a proper historian ought to do is fill in the context of it. You know, I've got these wonderful statements of the witnesses, but I could really do with finding out a bit more about them and their lives. And, you know, so what I'll do is I'll go down to the county record office for Somerset in Taunton. And I look at things like the parish registers for Minehead, if they exist, and see if there are any wills or tax records or any other things I can find of that sort. And so I went down for the day. And yes, fairly successfully, I was able to sort of piece a bit more together about these people's lives and thought, well, excellent. I've done the due diligence on this. And in fact, I was just sort of marking time before I left the record office. And I saw on the shelves there was a history of Minehead published right at the start of the 20th century in 1903 by a local vicar. So I'll take a look at that. I wonder if he mentions anything that would be of interest or if he knows about this ghost story. And it turned out he absolutely did know about the ghost story. And I'd spent hours and hours painstakingly transcribing from the 17th century manuscript all these depositions. And this guy got there before me. So that was all wasted effort. It was all sort of uniquely printed out. And he introduced this material by saying, in talking about the history of Minehead in the 17th century, of course, we must not neglect the famous Minehead ghost story immortalized by Sir Walter Scott. So that was a bit of an intake of breath moment for me here, because I thought I'd discovered this kind of unknown little gem in the archives. And it turned out that Everybody in early 20th century Minehead knew about it, and possibly most people in early 19th century Britain knew about it, because Walter Scott was by a long way mid-19th century Britain's most famous novelist and perhaps poet as well. So from that, really, I started putting together all different threads of this story, which turned out to be extremely multifaceted. And it was partly a family drama. around the Leakeys and what was going on with them in this very small town. But it was also a much bigger story that involved quite important political figures and political events, and which was then remembered and retold many times over the succeeding centuries. So this is why what had started off as literally a footnote from Sir Keith Thomas, ended up becoming a 250-page book as I tried to sort of put this material together. And I think the reason why I said right at the start is that it's a slightly strange sort of book, is that although there's quite a lot of material about this, it doesn't really kind of cohere to in a very consistent way. I think in the book itself, I talk about the evidence being made up of fragments and shards. So a real problem, actually, for a historian who wants to have everything fitting together neatly like pieces of a jigsaw. So in a way, rather than shying away from that, I thought, well, I will just embrace the challenge of doing this. And You know, I've now written two or three sort of, you know, sensible, respectable, possibly a bit boring history books. You know, I've got a job. They can't sack me. I've just been promoted to professor. So I'll take a risk and write this rather different sort of book, breaking some of the rules that I was brought up with. You know, you mustn't make the book about yourself and you mustn't. He was the first person all the time and be tremendously self-indulgent. And I thought, well, in a sense, part of the interest of this for me is how a historian encounters their material and tries to make sense out of it. So in some ways, I mean, I actually do try not to do this too much, but in some ways I'm a character in the book and my attempts to kind of put the different elements of this story together and some of the sort of false starts and dead ends and rewinds that I find myself doing in the course of researching it and writing it, having to undertake, I try to build into the narrative of the book
SPEAKER_00:itself. I think that's actually part of the fun of it. It's like watching an excavation take place in a way. But let's go back. Well, I think all the stories have the mother Leakey, the old woman, the ghost, comes back. And there seems to be some business about a gold chain, which I found quite Quite bizarre. I'm not sure why a ghost is interested in a gold chain, but that seemed to be one of her worries. And then a much more mysterious aspect was that she wanted Elizabeth Leakey to take a message over to her daughter in Ireland, Joan Leakey. leaky. I guess at this stage, Joan had now married John Atherton. So I'm not sure if the message in this, maybe we'll come on to this, but I'm sure we'll come on to this very soon, whether the message is for Joan or whether it's for John Atherton. So the message is going to John Atherton in Ireland. And I just wonder, should we talk about John Atherton now? Is now the moment to bring him in?
SPEAKER_01:Well, we absolutely should, I think. So this was my first kind of error, really, I think, in that initially I thought, well, this is a story about probably what a lot of these ghost stories end up being about. They're about family quarrels and the sort of financial and other difficulties that are caused by a death. Actually, going back to Sir Keith Thomas, I mean, he, I think, rather wisely says that, you know, in a society in which many people died much earlier than they do, at least in the developed West these days, ghosts are usually dealing with unfinished business of some kind. So I thought this was unfinished business within the family. The husband was in debt. Perhaps some of his ships had been lost at sea. Old Mother Leakey herself, it appears, had... been a kind of money lender in the vicinity. And her will, which she made on the deathbed, it wasn't written down. It was just dictated and then remembered later. What's technically called a non-cupidive will makes reference to debts that she's owed and bonds that people had signed with her, specifying what they needed to do if they didn't repay the money to her on time. And that's where this gold chain came in, which belonged to another daughter in the town of Barnstable. And it looked like Elizabeth was trying to use the ghost story to get her hands on this kind of family treasure that had been sent back from the Caribbean. I thought, oh, yes, this all makes kind of completed sense. We all know these stories about disputed family inheritances. And there was an absolutely obvious question staring me in the face, which bizarrely I didn't really ask, which is, why is the Privy Council, the highest political body in the land, interested in what is going on in this small, squalid family quarrel about an inheritance? And I'd sort of clocked this thing about a message for the other daughter, the sister, Joan Atherton, in Ireland. But... Elizabeth wouldn't say to the commissioners who are interrogating her what the message was. She says rather grandly, she will only reveal it directly to the king and only if he commands her to do so. So I thought, well, that's all a bit odd, but, you know, I'll just put that on one side. But that absolutely is what the story is about. And John Atherton is, to put it mildly, a rather fascinating figure. I mean, rather forgotten, I think. Yeah. even after my book, probably still not a household name among most people these days. But he was somebody who ends up having quite a reputation in his lifetime and in the centuries afterwards. So he's a clergyman. He is a rector of a nearby parish in Somerset called Whoish Champler. He marries Joan Atherton. And in the 1620s, he does what a number of English clergymen did in the 17th century, which is he sort of transfers teams, if you like, from the Church of England to the Church of Ireland. There are all sorts of opportunities for promotion in Ireland. This is sort of wild west frontier of the Protestant Reformation, as people may know, and the Church of Ireland is the officially established Protestant church. but the great majority of the population are still Catholic. And the church is in an extremely bad way. I mean, kind of institutionally and financially, a lot of its lands have fallen into the hands of laymen of various kinds, landowners of various sorts. And Atherton goes to Ireland, and he does pretty well. He becomes a member of the cathedral staff at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. And he comes to the attention of the royal governor of Ireland, Sir Thomas Wentworth. And a little bit of sort of political explanation is kind of needed here. So we're now in the reign of Charles I. And this is Charles I, who, of course, in the end, has his head removed by rebellious subjects in the Civil War. And in the run-up to that, upsets a great many of his subjects, in England, Scotland, and Ireland with policies, particularly his church policies, enacted through his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Lord. And I mean, without going into too much detail on this, I think possibly the best way of putting it is that to a lot of people, it looks like the advances of the Protestant Reformation are being rolled back. And the style of religious worship that has been promoted by King Charles and Archbishop Lord is a much more ritualistic, ceremonial, smells and bells type of approach to religion. And to many of the king's subjects, this looks like taking the country back to Rome through the back door. And actually, the Church of Ireland was a place where a lot of rather more godly, or as we might call them, Puritan-leaning clergymen ended up. because they were a little less supervised there, and they could also kind of confront the enemy of Rome face to face and at first hand. So Thomas Wentworth is sent to Ireland basically to take the government of the country and the organisation of the church in hand, and to start getting lands and investments back from the lay landowners who have acquired them. And John Atherton is somebody who... Wentworth recognises has the kind of skills to do this. He's a trained lawyer, church lawyer. He's a tough character. And so in 1636, he is promoted to become Bishop of Waterford, or actually, technically, it's the conjoined Bishop of Waterford and Lismore. And his brief is to try and get the church back in a better state, and particularly to get lands back out of the hands of the Earl of Cork, Richard Boyle. who becomes his kind of number one enemy and rival. And both Wentworth and Lorde know that there's something a bit dodgy about Atherton. Archbishop Lorde had actually been Bishop of Bath and Wells, the bishopric in which Somerset is located. So he'd come across Atherton before. So they know he's not really a particularly pious and unworldly figure, but he's got the kind of skills they're looking for, and so they decide to promote him. And to cut straight to the quick on this, Atherton... has his 15 minutes of fame when in 1640, so just before the outbreak of major Catholic rebellion in Ireland and then the civil war in England in 1642, he is spectacularly accused of a terrible crime. That is the crime of sodomy. So sexual relations with another man, which of course is completely illegal in the 17th century, more than that is a capital crime. And he is tried and executed for that crime in 1640. So this really ought to be a huge cause celebre. I think I'm right in saying that Atherton is the only Anglican bishop ever to have been tried and executed for this so-called crime. And it is quite a big event when it happens, but larger kind of political events sweep it away. And so one of the things that then the book tries to do is work out, okay, what's the connection between this and the appearance of the ghost and the message that Elizabeth Diggy is supposed to bring over to Ireland to deliver to her
SPEAKER_00:brother-in-law? I don't think we ever said, you mentioned that the Privy Council was sort of interested in the Somerset ghost, but when the JPs or the grandees of the area, they investigate it, They decide there's nothing in it, don't they?
SPEAKER_01:They do. So, yes, they hear all these witness accounts and they end up deciding that the whole thing is a kind of a deception and a fraud and there never was any apparition. And it's all been invented for reasons that they can't quite fathom. So they think Elizabeth Leakey is a kind of, you know, too clever for her own good. And she's the kind of, you know, mastermind behind all of this. And this is what is fed back to Archbishop Lord. And he sort of breathes a sigh of relief about this. And the story, for the moment, goes a little bit cold until, as I said just now, a couple of years later, it explodes in this extraordinary
SPEAKER_00:way. And then there's another thing. You mentioned this, but I don't think we get to the bottom of it. Well, there's so much we don't quite get to the bottom of in the book because there's incomplete records and there's other reasons not to know. But But Atherton, he's accused by his servant, I think, a guy called John Child. And one of the reasons there's not too many convictions for sodomy is that who's the witness? And the last person who's going to come forward as a witness is your partner in crime, so to speak, because it's suicide, right? John Child, by coming forward and saying, I committed sodomy with Atherton, he's signing his own death warrant, isn't he?
SPEAKER_01:Well, indeed, and so it turns out, and Child is hanged for the same quote-unquote crime a few months later in early 1641. So, yeah, this is one of the things that makes this an extraordinarily unusual case. There are very, very few executions for sodomy in the early modern period. I think partly for the reason you just mentioned is that it's a very, very difficult offence to get reliable evidence about. Partly because I think there is a bit of a disconnect between the absolute severity of the law and something of a kind of don't ask, don't tell culture around this, a certain amount of same-sex relations between men of equivalent social status. is not exactly tolerated, but perhaps quietly blinked at. So in the few cases that do lead to trials and convictions, there is usually something else going on. It's often not just a kind of breach of sexual morality, but a kind of breach of the social order and hierarchy as well. And that seems to be the case here with the elevated Lord Bishop and one of his servants, his steward. So yes, so why exactly this accusation is made is unclear. In later years, and indeed in later centuries, there are several writers who think that Atherton was framed, that he was innocent of this charge. This is an argument that goes on for centuries, really, afterwards. And perhaps even it was this great nobleman, the Earl of Cork, Richard Boyle, Father, in fact, of the famous founder of modern chemistry, Robert Boyle, who had perhaps put him up to it and maybe Child had been promised that he would be let off and then that's reneged on. So it's all a bit murky or perhaps it's something more kind of psychological or a kind of emotional drama. But once this accusation is made, and it's a petition which rather dramatically is introduced into the Parliament in 1640 in Dublin, whereas a bishop, of course, Atherton, sits in the upper house of the Irish Parliament, and this has to be investigated immediately. And at that moment, it's like the floodgates are opened and all sorts of other charges start coming forward about Atherton. And these have been reported in letters going backwards and forwards between England and Ireland that he basically seems to be a kind of serial sexual predator. And he's approached several of his male servants to try and suborn them for sex. But he's also sexually assaulted women. and seduced other women. And I mean, how much of this we should believe is unclear, but certainly these stories seem to have been kind of around. And Atherton's arrest kind of licenses them to be released. And of course, one of the encouragements of this is that Atherton represents a kind of the regime that is at this very moment collapsing. 1640 is when the English Parliament is recalled for the first time in 11 years, the end of the so-called tyranny of Charles I, when the English are humiliated by being defeated not once but twice in small wars with rebellious Presbyterian Scots. And Charles has to start rowing back on all these policies that he has promoted in the past. So there's this mixture of the kind of the personal, the moral, and the political at this very interesting historical moment. And then after Atherton is hanged in Dublin in December 1640, there is a pamphlet which is printed, which recounts a lot more of these accusations. It's in verse. It's an absolutely terrible verse, but it's quite entertaining to read. recounts all these accusations about his terrible sexual misconduct and his use of aphrodisiacs and how he would sort of, when he was collecting taxes from people, he'd send the husband off to count the money in one room while he's adduced the wife in another room and so on. But anyway, this pamphlet brings back in the ghost story, which is clearly known about in England and Ireland, and which says that Elizabeth Leakey does come to Ireland to see her brother-in-law. And that the message that the ghost gives her to carry to him is that he must repent for a specific crime. And that crime is the crime of incest. And that he has had sex when he was a clergyman in Somerset with his wife's sister, another Susan Leakey. So sexual relations with an in-law in the 17th century is regarded as incest. This is not a sort of blood relationship, but it's a strong spiritual relationship. So, you know, it was illegal, banned by the law, the church. And this sounds like a really, you know, like another of these kind of slurs that's been thrown out about Atherton. But this is absolutely certainly true, because I went back to do another of the things that perhaps I should have done earlier on in the process. which is the start meticulously working through the church court records for the diocese of Bath and Wells. And indeed, it turns out that Susan Leakey is convicted for incest with her brother-in-law and that there was a child, the birth of which she tried to conceal, but which came out. And quite what happens to the child is one of the kind of mysteries of this case that I never entirely get to the bottom of, and perhaps it's impossible ever to get to the bottom of. But clearly there is a scandal. Bishop Lord knew about it. He knew about it when he agreed to Atherton becoming a bishop in Ireland. As so often in these cases, it's the woman who gets the worst end of the deal and is punished by the courts and Atherton seems to have been allowed somehow to get away with it or to remove himself to Ireland. So there clearly is a family scandal, a family trauma, and the ghost is involved in that in kind of complicated ways.
SPEAKER_00:They definitely did know that Atherton was a wrong-on. I wrote down a couple of quotes because Wentworth said he's very good at fighting for his rights, but maybe not so fit to be the bishop. And then Lorde says, I confess to you, though since I had speech with him in England, I have no opinion of his honesty nor his worth. I pray to be deceived.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, quite. And it was so much worse even than Lorde thought. So, yes, so I kind of get a warning there that, yeah, the ends don't always justify the means. And, you know, sometimes... promoting bad people to do what you think are good things can come back and bite you. And that's certainly what happens in this case.
SPEAKER_00:There's another great quote. It's not your words, but you're quoting somebody who talks about priests being vomited out of England into Ireland. And do we think that the affair with his relation and the illegitimate child, this is the reason why he is, to use the phrase, vomited forth into Ireland?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, we can't be absolutely certain about this, but I think probably yes is the answer. We do know about other cases, actually, of clergymen involved in sexual scandals in England who then try to make a clean start in Ireland. And the Church of Ireland, as I said earlier, beset by all kinds of problems and desperately short of manpower, can't actually afford to be that choosy about who it takes on. So, yes, he kind of leaves this messy situation behind in his native England and gets an opportunity at a fresh start. So, you know, it looks like a kind of pattern of sexually predatory behaviour, which he carries on indulging in Ireland and is allowed to get away with for another decade and more, you know. So this perhaps is a rather sort of perennial story, really, of, you know, scandal within church institutions, which the institution, you know... in a sense, even though people know it's going on, allows to continue because the harm to the reputation of the institution is seen as more kind of damaging and dangerous. But it all becomes sort of grist to the mill of the church's enemies. So one of the charges against Thomas Wentworth when he is impeached by Parliament, and by this point he's the Earl of Stratford, and is seen as you know, the sort of the public face of Charles I's unpopular policies. And he is in the end executed after trial in Parliament. And he's accused of all kinds of things. But one of the things he's accused of is promoting all kinds of, you know, unsuitable people in the Church of Ireland. And so the whole case of Atherton is dragged up and discussed in front of the Irish Committee of the English Parliament in 1640, 1641.
SPEAKER_00:And then the stories, you know, the story kind of goes underground for a bit and then it resurfaces and then it goes underground a bit. And there's one story that appears where it seems that Atherton, he didn't just engage in sodomy. He actually had a go at one of the local cows.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, absolutely. All kinds of accusations are made. I mean, I think that... That one, I will say with a certain degree of certainty, is not true. But a lot of the writers about Atherton in the 17th century were very, very coy about the exact nature of the crime for which he was convicted and executed. I mean, it's almost the kind of legal phrase that sodomy is the crime which cannot be named. And of course, for Episcopalians, for Anglicans, the fact that one of their number had committed this terrible offence was pretty embarrassing. So there's something of an effort to kind of smooth this over or cover it up, particularly after the royalist forces, the Anglican forces are back in control again with the restoration in 1660. There's also actually a rather interesting text, which I devote a chapter to, whether it deserves a whole chapter is another matter, but it's written by a guy called Nicholas Bernard, who I think was a bit of a chancer as well. So this is another clergyman. who scoots off to Ireland and makes a career out of it there. He's a different kind of Protestant from Atherton. He's much more on the kind of Puritan-leaning wing of the church, much more godly, as they'd have said at the time, strongly anti-Catholic. But when Atherton is convicted, and while Atherton is imprisoned in Dublin Castle awaiting execution... Bernard sees an opportunity to sort of insert himself into the story. So he goes and starts visiting Atherton every day. And by his own account, and he publishes this as a pamphlet, actually converts him away from his sinful past and into the right sort of Protestant. And the pamphlet is called The Penitent Death of a Woeful Sinner. And it's that penitent death, which is the thing that Bernard wants to put forward. Whether it's true, I mean, parts of it, I think, are certainly true-ish. And it's probably right that having been caught and convicted, Atherton does sort of repent. But Bernard very much, this may be me as a historian calling the pot calling kettle black here, but Bernard very much makes the story about himself, that he's the sort of spiritual expert who, through his skills as a pastor... can persuade this terrible inveterate sinner to repent of his ways. So a really bad news story for the church kind of becomes a sort of good news story in that, yes, he did these terrible things, but he's repented. And so this pamphlet becomes a sort of mini classic of the genre, really, of terrible sinner repents and sees the error of their ways. And it's reprinted several times. And By the end of the 17th century, if Atherton is remembered at all, that's kind of the story that people know. He's a model of how you can still be saved. It's not quite too late. And it looks like that's where the story has kind of rested. But then at the beginning of the 18th century, it explodes in print yet again. starting with this extraordinary allegation by a very disreputable London printer and publisher. called Edmund Curl, that he was convicted for the sin of uncleanness with a cow, which a number of other horrified, more sort of respectable Anglican writers start disputing. And so the case kind of flares back into life in print. And once again, it's actually a kind of mirror to things which are politically happening at that moment. The early 18th century... is another sort of flashpoint of dispute and debate between what we might call high Anglicans. Meaning? Meaning, you know, keener on this more kind of ritualistic, ceremonialist, more kind of Lordian style of worship, sacraments, you know, rather than just sermons, that sort of thing. Yeah. politically linked to what we might be, even by this period, starting to call the Tory party, who are in conflict with the other great political force, the Whigs. And this is really all about which side people end up on coming out of the second great political convulsion of the 17th century. The first one, of course, is the Civil War, the Revolution, the execution of Charles I, and the eventual restoration of But Charles II, who comes in at the Restoration, does not have a male heir, so the throne passes in 1685 to his brother James. This is James II. And James II is a Roman Catholic, and that is a problem, to put it mildly, for very many of his subjects. And James's many missteps and his attempts to kind of protect and promote his Catholic co-religionists leads to what is rather euphemistically known as the Glorious Revolution in 1688. but it's actually really a Dutch invasion in which James's own daughter, Protestant daughter, Mary, who's married to the Stadtholder, the ruler in the Netherlands, William of Orange, replaces him as king. And this is rather bloodless in England, but not bloodless in Ireland, where there's that civil war that Irish people still, of course, very remember very keenly the Battle of the Boyne and all that stuff, and the Civil War in Scotland as well. So it's a huge convulsion, and James goes into exile and, of course, carries on claiming the throne, and his son and grandson carry on claiming it as well. And using the Latin term here, supporters of James are the Jacobites who want to restore the Stuarts to the throne. So the Tories and the High Church Party are people who've maybe reconciled themselves to this overthrow of the divinely ordained monarchical order, but have found it really, really difficult and really painful. And some of them, frankly, are Jacobites, whereas their Whig enemies in the church are people who are very comfortable with the revolution of 1688 and with the various things that that leads to, including actually Toleration for Protestant dissenters. So for the people who are, you know, Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, all these groups coming out of the tumult of the middle years of the 17th century and the Civil War. who just can't be contained any longer in a single, completely united Church of England, and who are persecuted under Charles II, but eventually are given, within limits, toleration to practice their preferred version of Protestant Christianity. And these high Anglicans don't like that very much either. And so all of that is the background, really, to why this old story is raked up yet again. And Whigs are using the story of the disreputable Bishop Atherton to beat their Tory high church opponents. And on the other side, there's quite a lot of effort goes into trying to prove that Atherton was framed for purely political reasons because he'd been standing up for the authority of the church. And he certainly wasn't guilty
SPEAKER_00:of, quote-unquote, the main thing. Indeed,
SPEAKER_01:yes.
SPEAKER_00:Which is what I think Bernard is at. He never can bring himself to exactly say what the accusation was, but he wasn't guilty of the main thing. Indeed, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Go on. I was just going to sort of... lead us back to the kind of other side of the story, which is kind of Minehead and Somerset and
SPEAKER_00:the ghost. Well, is it worth us mentioning John Quick's manuscript, or is that sort of just too much information for listeners, do you think?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I was reading it myself again this afternoon, thinking, my God, this is really complicated. I'd forgotten how all this... But, I mean, the idea that there are these other traditions which are remembered in some... I mean, without going into all the kind of twists and turns of it.
SPEAKER_00:Then let's not... go into too much because it's quite a detailed and extraordinary affair. But I think the final manuscript you mentioned is one printed by somebody called Dunton. And I think you think that the author of that turns out to be somebody, a minister who suffered because he's been, you know, sort of persecuted and eventually, you know, is given his freedom under the act of toleration. But the guy called, I think, John Quick, and he has this rather extraordinary story to tell.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's right. So that's another of these kind of sudden turns in the road and alleyways that I was led down. And this is kind of how the two stories, the political story about the bishop and the family story located in Somerset in southwest of England, start kind of coming back together again. So when the Atherton story kind of hits the press again in 1710 for these political reasons, One of the publishers who's involved in this, this guy called John Dunton, somebody gives him a manuscript. And this manuscript is a detailed account of the appearances of the ghost and all sorts of other stories that were not mentioned earlier involving this family and their connections in Minehead and Barnstable in the 1630s and 1640s, which were collected probably in the 1660s by this minister called John Quick. who's dead by this point, 1710, but his manuscript had clearly been kind of preserved and passed on to people who might be interested in it. So there's quite a lot of hearsay here because Quick's manuscript is printed after his death. He writes the story up in 1690. He hears the story in 1660 from people who are trying to remember what they heard locally in the 1640s and even the 1630s. So there's a bit of a game of Chinese whispers. But all sorts of extraordinary elements come out of this, including something which was hinted at in some of the stuff coming out of Ireland in 1640, which is not only was there incest and the birth of an illegitimate child, but that the child was murdered. So this is a case of infanticide. and Atherton was privy to the murder of his illegitimate child. In fact, in one of these accounts, which Quick hears, I mean, it's really horrifying, Atherton baptises the baby, then helps to strangle it, then smokes the body so that it won't stink, and it's buried in the house. And so one of the things that the the ghost does is to come back and reveal this extraordinary set of connected crimes. Now, how much of this is true in any way, it's really hard to say. But what is clear to me, I think, is that, you know, while there is this kind of political story moving in and out of print, there is also a kind of local set of memories about this, which are to some extent developing independently, and to some extent are kind of almost chemically interacting with what is appearing in print. I mean, this in some ways maybe sounds a little story of tragedy and drama. But, you know, one of the things I try to do with it is to talk about how history gets made and about how historical memory works and about, you know, these two, what we see of as rather sort of separate things, separate disciplines, history and folklore and, you know, history, which is academically respectable and, you know, folklore, which is much more kind of popular and much more questionable and In the story I'm telling, I think those very clearly defined categories don't really work. The history and the folklore are constantly kind of interpenetrating each other and informing each other in interesting ways.
SPEAKER_00:All I'll say is I couldn't quite believe how much I was enjoying the book as I read it. I thought, you know, because Tom Holland was sort of, as I say, singing the praises of Storm's Edge. And I don't quite know. I must have been on Amazon or something trying to get it and noticed this. And then I got this, and it's rather unpromising, sort of black. It didn't have a binding, so just sort of a black book. And three pages in, I just thought, this is the best history book I've ever read. It's so interesting. And it gets more and more interesting as we go down, as, you know, layer after layer is sort of peeled back, and you think you've understood something. And, oh, no, there's another angle. And so I just thought it was absolutely fantastic. So thank you very much indeed.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's extremely kind of you. And... I did enjoy writing it, although I found it difficult in some ways. And it probably does raise as many questions as it answers. But, you know, sometimes I think, you know, history can take these slightly more unconventional routes. And as I say, a little bit sort of sarcastically in the introduction of the book, it doesn't all have to be about Hitler and Henry VIII.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, Peter, thank you very much indeed.
SPEAKER_01:Great pleasure. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, that's it for today. I promised you a banger of a story and I think Peter absolutely delivered. As usual, if you enjoyed the episode, feel free to promote it on social media or wherever and or leave a review on iTunes. That's always very much appreciated. So goodbye for now and I hope you'll join me in the next episode. Cheers.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.