I. Introduction
Sometime in 1709, an English country gentleman by the name of William Freke sat down at his desk in the library of his family's manor house in the sleepy village of Hinton Saint Mary in Dorset to write a book. In that book, Elijah's First Appearance to the Several Churches and Nations of the Earth, he announced that “the Spirit has given me at least forty dark Monitions, and ten clear ones, to declare me his Elijah.”Footnote 1 He then proceeded to declare that, as the second coming of Elijah, he was commanded to “proclaim Christ's New Jerusalem, and as by the Sound of a Trumpet to proclaim his Reign upon Earth commencing.”Footnote 2 The response to Freke's bold pronouncement that the long awaited millennium had finally arrived and that he was the new Elijah was one of deafening silence. Although in Elijah's First Appearance Freke issued instructions on several occasions to his “followers,” it would seem that these disciples were purely hypothetical. There is no evidence to suggest that he had any disciples, and despite his exhortation to his followers to print and translate his books, none of them were ever published in second editions or translated into other languages. Given that Freke failed to inspire any discernable religious following, it is tempting to dismiss him as just another eccentric English gentleman with an overactive imagination and too much time on his hands. But this would be a mistake. Some sixty years ago, Christopher Hill argued that by the 1690s “the age of reason had arrived” and that only crackpots in England took millenarian prophecy seriously anymore, but research over the past couple of decades has decisively determined this to be untrue.Footnote 3 In fact, the twenty years following 1690 have been shown to be a period of intense religious speculation in England, and as Paul Korshin has noted, expectations of the millennium ran particularly high in these years.Footnote 4 It is worth noting that Freke was merely one of at least four men in England between 1690 and 1710 to proclaim themselves, or be declared by one of their followers, to be the second coming of Elijah and the harbinger of the millennium.Footnote 5 Despite living in the wilds of Dorset, Freke was not as isolated an individual as he might at first appear. Elizabeth Bouldin has argued that, in the Atlantic World of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, there was a network of “radical Protestants” who read the same printed works, corresponded with each other, and deliberately sought out religiously like-minded individuals.Footnote 6 Likewise, Lionel Laborie, in his masterful study of early eighteenth-century prophecy and religious experience, has also demonstrated the existence of a web of “enthusiasts” in England and has specifically identified Freke as a “prominent enthusiast” with connections to the French Prophets in London.Footnote 7 Thus, far from being a lone voice crying in the wilderness, he was in fact part of a much larger phenomenon. As an individual, Freke was not of great significance; however, a study of his career as a prophet, connected in a variety of ways to a much larger network of religious enthusiasts in England and on the Continent, reveals much about the religious milieu of, and the millenarian interconnections that existed during, the last decade of the seventeenth and first decade of the eighteenth century.
II. Early Career and Influences
William Freke was born in 1662 at Hannington Hall, a sizeable estate in Wiltshire owned by his prosperous gentry family. In 1677, he matriculated as a gentleman commoner from Wadham College, Oxford and remained there for two or three years before departing without taking a degree, in the meantime having been admitted to the Middle Temple in London. He was called to the bar in 1685, though he never seems to have practiced law.Footnote 8
In addition to the legal texts that he was poring over in the early 1680s as part of his studies at the Middle Temple, Freke read some of the many works being published in London in the early stages of a Trinitarian controversy. In 1684 or 1685, he became an Arian. Then, in 1687, he jumped into the fray with his first published work, A Vindication of the Unitarians.Footnote 9 He followed this up with a book arguing that revelation and natural reason are equally the law and will of God but that true revelation cannot contradict reason.Footnote 10 He returned to the Trinitarian controversy with a corrected and enlarged second edition of his Vindication of the Unitarians (1690) and The Arrian's Vindication of Himself (1691). His last word on the subject came in 1693 with A Dialogue By Way of Question and Answer, Concerning the Deity in which he asserts that not only is Trinitarianism idolatrous, polytheistic, and anti-Christian, but it is a doctrine that had only been developed about 1300 years ago. That timing, he adds, fits perfectly with the apocalyptic calculations of the best interpreter of biblical prophecies, the great Huguenot theologian Pierre Jurieu, who “places the rise of Antichrist just about the time of the settlement of this mystery.”Footnote 11 According to Anthony Wood, as a publicity stunt, Freke sent copies of his Dialogue By Way of Question and Answer to members of both houses of Parliament in the hope that they would find his anti-Trinitarian views offensive and order it to “be burnt and so sell the better.” The first part of his scheme worked to perfection, for both houses, thinking it was the work of a Quaker, proceeded to vote it an infamous libel (December 13, 1693 and January 3, 1694) and ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman. Whether the second part of this plan, selling more copies of his book, ever came to pass is hard to determine. There was, however, a consequence to this seemingly clever scheme that he failed to predict: once it was discovered that he was the author of this anti-Trinitarian book, Freke was arraigned at the Court of King's Bench on a charge of blasphemy. He was found guilty in May of 1694 and sentenced to pay an enormous fine of £500, to make a recantation in the four courts of Westminster Hall, and to find security for good behavior for three years.Footnote 12
Following his Dialogue, but before his legal troubles had descended upon him, Freke published a very different kind of book. Picking up on Jurieu's idea that Christians should not spend their time focusing on the defeat of the anti-Christ and the coming millennium but rather on entering into the kingdom of God, his A Full Enquiry into the Power of Faith, the Nature of Prophecy, the Translation of Enoch and Elias, and the Resurrection of Christ (1693) is all about how to gain access to God's kingdom. The best guides to lead us on this journey, says Freke, are the three great prophets: Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus. They are not necessarily the only ones, however, for the kingdom of God was open to “the Righteous of all Religions. . . . And thus could Mahomet, or any others therefore teach me this Heavenly Road, I would equally follow them as Christ my Redeemer, for would they not all go the same way?”Footnote 13 Nor were all prophets from the distant past: much could also be learned from recent prophets, such as the English poet George Wither. Wither had died in 1667, but selected passages from his writings were collected and published in 1689.Footnote 14 One thing that Freke liked about Wither was his very Quaker-like notion that knowledge of the kingdom of God lies within, is accessible to all, and that the only way to obtain it is “to retire alone, read the Scriptures, and contemplate.”Footnote 15 But what really convinced Freke that Wither was a true prophet was his belief that Wither had accurately foretold the Glorious Revolution. If he was right about such a significant event in the unfolding of God's plan for humanity, then surely his other predictions must be true as well. These predictions included that the downfall of the beast, foretold in the Book of Revelation, would occur sometime before the current generation passed away and that the Kingdom of God, which had originally been given to the Jews, would now pass to the English nation. “GOD has even designed this Happy Nation for this Blessing . . . and GOD grant to bless us with the Success of it, and which he will certainly do, if we do not obstruct his Mercies, and so let down his new Jerusalem amongst us.”Footnote 16
Appended to his A Full Enquiry is Freke's first account of the “Extraordinary Dream” that he had experienced back in 1681 “just upon my Recovery from the Small-Pox.” The “true meaning and purport of it” he did not know, but God would show it to him in his own time.Footnote 17 Also attached were two discourses. In the first, on the law of nations in matters of religion, Freke declares that it is necessary for all states to have a national church to which all of its citizens must assent and contribute to through taxation. But, he says, not all citizens should be required to attend that national church, for Jews, Turks, heathens, and “our Brother Christians of all sorts” ought to have a full and free enjoyment of their liberty of conscience; it is only atheists, libertines, blasphemers, violent heretics, schismatics, and Jesuits who should be punished by the state.Footnote 18 In the second discourse, on unity in public worship, Freke calls for a change in the Church of England whereby some variation in matters of practice and ceremony that are by their nature indifferent would be permitted and which would allow a greater number of English men and women to be comprehended into the national church.Footnote 19 Yet, while having set forth a case for both a national church and for legitimate dissent from it, from later writings it is clear that Freke, despite his Arian beliefs, chose to remain an active member of the Church of England.Footnote 20
It was in the following year, 1694, that Freke was convicted of blasphemy. If the harsh punishment meted out to Freke as a result of his conviction was meant to browbeat him into renouncing his Arianism, it failed. Yet, his brush with the law did not leave him unaffected. Quite the contrary, writing eight years later, he recalls that the prosecution he experienced and the suffering as a Unitarian that he underwent in May of 1694 would prove “so powerful as greatly to alter my Reasonings.” He goes on to say that, although he did not know it at the time, he would come to see that it had already been foretold to him in his dream that he would “attack the whole Body of the Kingdom, Lords and Commons at one,” and that he would undergo persecution for his Unitarianism just as Jesus had endured pain for his public pronouncements. His dream would also reveal to him that he must not suffer as Jesus and the prophets had, but instead that he must repent and accept the sentence of the government. From here on in there must be “no imagination of Divine Messages, publick Meetings, or being as a Saviour.” Instead, his God-given role was to engage in the “private personal Labour” of interpreting divinely inspired dreams.Footnote 21 Thus, by 1702 at the latest, Freke, partly as a result of his own experience of persecution but probably also based on his own reading in the second half of the 1690s of the works of the French-speaking Flemish prophet Antoinette Bourignon, had adopted an essentially quietist religious stance that held both an absolute submission to God's will but also a submission to human authority in the state and in the church.
A leading figure in the Continental quietist movement, Antoinette Bourignon had died in 1680 but continued to exercise a significant influence in western Europe through the evangelizing efforts of Pierre Poiret, a Huguenot minister resident in the Netherlands. Poiret wrote a biography of Bourignon and edited and published many of her writings. It was through Poiret that two Scotsmen, George Garden and James Keith, became followers of Mme Bourignon, and it was the two of them who introduced Bourignon to England and Scotland by collaborating in translating, or arranging to have translated, into English a number of her works in the 1690s.Footnote 22 These English translations of Bourignon's writings were sufficiently well known in England and Scotland to elicit at least a couple of denunciations in print, which in turn prompted Garden to publish a defense of her in 1699.Footnote 23
III. Move to Dorset and Publication of The New Jerusalem (1702)
Following his legal troubles of 1694, Freke took an eight-year hiatus from publishing, but he was far from idle in those years. He married Elizabeth Harris in 1688, and through the course of the 1690s and into the early years of the eighteenth century the two of them were hard at work producing and caring for twelve children.Footnote 24 In 1696, he moved his wife and young family from the hustle and bustle of the metropolis of London to the pastoral setting of the village of Hinton Saint Mary in Dorset where his family owned an estate and where he would remain, living the life of a country gentleman, for the rest of his days.Footnote 25 There were likely sound financial reasons for Freke to relocate to the countryside: raising a growing family in London was an expensive proposition, especially for a man who had recently been fined £500, and there is evidence to suggest that Freke had money concerns at this time.Footnote 26 However, this move may also have served to give Freke a measure of solitude and relief from financial woes that allowed him the luxury, as George Wither had insisted was necessary, “to retire alone, read the Scriptures, and contemplate.” In fact, he did more than just read the scriptures: around the time that he moved to Dorset, Freke tells us that he threw himself into the study of dreams, visions, and apparitions, although he is silent on the books that he read.Footnote 27 What is also certain is that it was around the time that he took up residence in the manor house of Hinton Saint Mary that Freke finally came to understand the meaning not only of the dream, or monition as he now called it, that he had had back in 1681 but also of the many monitions that he had experienced beginning in the late 1680s and right through the 1690s.Footnote 28 Indeed, by the latter half of the 1690s, Freke was having “boundless Divine monition and Prophecy,”Footnote 29 and what he came to believe from them was that God had given him a special skill in reading dreams and in interpreting the scriptures, particularly the prophecies contained in the Book of Revelation. As a result of his newly acquired skills, Freke turned his attention away from defending his Arian beliefs and focused instead on constructing a vision of the coming millennium.
Freke also came to believe that God wanted him to write and publish books about his skill in interpreting visions and biblical prophecies. In a dream he had on August 25, 1699, it was revealed to him that the books he would publish in the future “will not be very little or few, but so many and big as to be of very considerable Expence in the Publication.” To Freke this was not so much a dream as a nightmare, and he confessed to being in despair “on consideration of the numerous Family of Children I had otherwise to dispose of my Mony in provision for.”Footnote 30 Nevertheless, convinced that God had commanded him to do it, sometime in the course of 1700, Freke sat down to write his most important book yet.
Finished on December 4, 1700, but not published until 1702, The New Jerusalem: or, the Holy Methods of Divine Prediction and Monition seemingly promis'd, And most solemnly assur'd thereby in the Latter Days to the Churches is Freke's exegesis on the final two chapters of the Book of Revelation, in which Saint John, writing about the last days of the world, relates his vision of a new heaven and a new earth with a holy city—the New Jerusalem—descending from heaven. Before embarking on a verse by verse analysis of chapters 21 and 22, however, Freke sets out in his introduction three propositions that provide the foundation for his understanding of the Revelation of Saint John. The first is his belief that the Book of Revelation is allegorical: he insists that God only speaks to humans through allegory and that to read the words of John's prophecies in their literal sense would be absurd.Footnote 31 The second is his view that the anti-Christ is not the pope, or indeed any papist at all, but rather is “an active course that would oppose and confound the purest and clearest courses to Piety shewn by Christ.” Popery may well carry the anti-Christ in her, but Freke insists that he will not dare to “fling him [anti-Christ] at the feet of the Pope, or any ordinary Papist.”Footnote 32 The third is his contention that God has always communicated with humans, “even to the very Heathens themselves,” through dreams and visions. For example, one night while in the midst of laying siege to the city of Tyre, Alexander the Great had a dream of Hercules on the city walls, inviting him to come in. On another occasion, a popish priest had a vision of the Virgin Mary in glory with the Christ child in her arms. In these instances, the dream and the vision had come from God, but in both cases the recipient had “misconstrue[d] the holy Advice given them thereby.”Footnote 33 Yet in spite of humanity's poor track record of interpreting these dreams and visions, God did not “cease of his holy Monitions to his poor and Invincibly Ignorant devout Creatures,” but rather “for all their Abuses he yet still continued on the same Notices to them.” Dreams and visions, then, had always been God's chosen method for communicating with us; only now, in these latter ages of the world, those “who have now surviv'd the main and introductory part of these Prophecies, may justly at present expect of their fullest issue and Conclusion therein.” The “last and the greatest prophecy,” the “acme of Christianity,” and the “utmost glory of Christ's kingdom” was now on the verge of being fulfilled, and Freke was convinced that God had revealed to him through dreams and visions what that millennium would be like. With these three propositions in mind, Freke proceeded to interpret chapters 21 and 22 of the Book of Revelation.Footnote 34
Chapter 21 begins with John's vision of “the holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven.” However, given that this was written as an allegory, Freke argues that the correct way of reading the descent of the New Jerusalem is not that God will be sending us a real city, but rather that God will be bestowing upon us his gift of divine prophecy and monition in order to prepare us for the coming millennium.Footnote 35 This gift will be made available not just to one special prophet but “to all the world, Christians, Jews, Turks and Gentiles,” yet only those who have “duly and truly cultivated the Vineyard of [their] Lives” will acquire it, “for indeed Prophecy requires Fasting, Prayer, Alms, and purity of Life to attain to it, and not to be negligent or sluggish.”Footnote 36 Those who are morally pure will receive the gift of continual monitions and prophecies, and when they do, they will be enlightened by them and will obey almighty God “in the exact example of his son Christ Jesus.”Footnote 37 On the other hand, slanderers, sorcerers, whoremongers, murderers, idolaters, and liars will all be shut out by the spirit from these freely given visions.Footnote 38 Then, at some point:
All the Sovereign Powers, Rulers, and State of the Earth . . . [will] acknowledge all their Sovereignties to be of God alone, and that it is through his especial Providence only, that they continue to be in the least Authority they possess, and withal on this Perswasion and certain Knowledg to conform their Actions according; and so truly to begin that Reign of Christ upon Earth, for his 1000 Years.Footnote 39
Freke does not venture to declare when this millennium will begin, but he does make it clear that humanity is now living in the “latter Ages of the World” and that the thousand year reign of Christ is coming soon.Footnote 40 He concludes his New Jerusalem with the hint that he might be inclined in the future to take a key role in preparing mankind to receive and interpret these divine visions as a prelude to the millennium: “If the Example of my Skill, and the undoubted Evidence of my lawful procedure in this, encourage me to further Essays of this kind, I little doubt, by the Blessing of God, but to give Men near all the Methods of the whole remaining Body of the new Jerusalem among them.”Footnote 41
IV. Millenarianism in England in the Late Seventeenth Century
That Freke had turned his attention in the 1690s to the Book of Revelation and its prophecies of the coming millennium is not surprising, for this was a time that happened to be especially fertile in England for exegetical writing on the Revelation of Saint John with expectations of the millennium particularly high.Footnote 42 The Book of Revelation had long been of interest to English theologians; as far back as the 1540s, the Protestant reformer John Bale had introduced into English religious thought a historicist approach to interpreting it, which, as Paul Christianson has argued, “broke with the medieval past . . . and pulled together a new framework of explanation, one that showed how the history of the Christian church fulfilled the prophecies of St John.”Footnote 43 Drawing on both Saint Augustine's City of God and the Book of Revelation, Bale had argued that Augustine's earthly city and the false church of Revelation were one and the same: they were the Roman Catholic Church, against whom Protestants were battling in the same way as the true Christian church had always struggled against its anti-Christian opposite. For Bale, Revelation's narrative of the war between the forces of God and the forces of the anti-Christ accurately predicted the long conflict between the false and true churches, of which the Reformation was merely the latest chapter.Footnote 44 This was an analytical approach that was carried on in England throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its central feature was its identification of the beast in Revelation as the pope (or the Roman Catholic Church). This was a view also adopted in France by Huguenot theologians such as Pierre du Moulin, who wrote an influential commentary on Revelation in 1611–1612.Footnote 45 During the reign of the Roman Catholic King James II (1685–1688), a torrent of anti-Catholic polemic was unleashed in England, much of it drawing on this identification of the anti-Christ with the papacy that had been a staple of English apocalyptic literature since the middle of the sixteenth century.Footnote 46 In 1686, the Huguenot theologian Pierre Jurieu, minister of the French Church in Rotterdam and the grandson of Pierre du Moulin, published his own historicist exegesis of the Book of Revelation, in which he, more successfully than most of his contemporaries, demonstrated that the typologies of Revelation foreshadowed current European events.Footnote 47 In 1687, as opposition to King James's rule grew, Jurieu's book was published in an English translation, and within a short time, he became one of the most frequently cited apocalyptic authorities in England.Footnote 48
Freke was one of those Englishmen who were profoundly influenced by Jurieu. What particularly struck him was Jurieu's explanation, in keeping with the sixteenth-century English divine Joseph Mede, that the birth of the beast had occurred at the time that the first real pope, Pope Leo I (r. 440–461), made his claims for the universal jurisdiction of the papacy and that, assuming that the beast would reign for 1260 years, the subsequent millennium would commence around 1710.Footnote 49 While unwilling to concede that the pope was the anti-Christ, the Arian Freke was nevertheless happy to associate the rise of the papacy with the arrival of the new and anti-Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Jurieu also connected the issuing of the Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685), which formally revoked the Edict of Nantes, with the death of the two witnesses of the eleventh chapter of Revelation. The two witnesses were to be resurrected after three and a half days, which, accepting Mede's opinion that prophetic days are the equivalent of normal years, would place that crucial event around April of 1689. Being a Frenchman, Jurieu naturally believed that this event would correspond with the triumph of Protestantism in France, but it is not hard to see how Freke, reading this in 1689 or shortly thereafter, would immediately jump to the conclusion that the resurrection of the two witnesses was, in fact, to be equated with the Glorious Revolution in England.Footnote 50 Just like George Wither, Jurieu had successfully predicted the Glorious Revolution, and it was no doubt this, at least in part, that led Freke to view Jurieu as the best interpreter of biblical prophecies. But Jurieu's prophetic accuracy did not just serve the purpose of lending him credibility. It also reinforced the notion, which Freke had already gleaned from Wither, that the English had now replaced the Jews as the chosen people and that the millennium would unfold first on English soil.
Of course, Freke was hardly alone in his belief that the Glorious Revolution was the work of divine providence and part of a grand scheme that had been laid out in the pages of Revelation. Future bishops William Lloyd, Simon Patrick, and William Wake were only the most prominent of many English churchmen to portray the events of 1688/1689 in an apocalyptic light.Footnote 51 It was also essentially the official line that William of Orange was trumpeting shortly after his successful invasion of England. On December 23, 1688, barely a week after he had arrived in London, William's personal chaplain and the future bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, preached a sermon on the twenty-third verse of Psalm 118, “It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes,” before the Prince of Orange in the chapel of the palace of Saint James. In it, he invoked Bale's two-church model of history to explain the events that had just transpired. While clearly anxious to avoid any overt discussion of millenarianism, Burnet's use of obviously apocalyptic imagery nevertheless strongly suggests that he considered the introduction of godly rule and moral reform, which would surely be brought about by the Glorious Revolution, to be in preparation for the coming of the millennium.Footnote 52
In many respects, then, Freke's views on the Book of Revelation and the coming of the millennium contained in his writings of the 1690s and his New Jerusalem of 1702 are utterly conventional for his time. His adoption of an allegorical and historicist approach to Revelation, his insistence that the millennium is imminent, his belief that the Glorious Revolution had been foretold by Saint John, and his acceptance that the Kingdom of God, which had originally been given to the Jews, has now passed to the English nation are all in keeping with opinions widely published in England at the turn of the eighteenth century. However, there are two ideas that Freke introduces in his New Jerusalem that are less conventional. The first is his explicit rejection of the traditional English Protestant identification of the beast in Revelation with the pope. The second is Freke's newfound interest in dreams and visions and his contention that God will be bestowing upon the morally pure his gift of monition and divine prophecy in order to prepare the world for the coming millennium. It is this latter view that was most controversial at the time.
V. Prophetic Dreams and Visions
This is not to say that English men and women of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries denied that dreams and visions could be divine messages; that would have been unthinkable and even heretical since the Bible itself contains many stories of prophetic dreams and visions. Yet, the scriptures were also cautious about dreams and visions, acknowledging that they could be claimed by false prophets wishing to deceive and that, even when they were legitimate, the skill to interpret them correctly was bestowed by God only on a select few. This ambiguity toward dreams and visions was likewise present in early modern Europe. On the one hand, Europeans were fascinated enough by them to translate and print a number of ancient Greek and Roman dream interpretation guides, the most influential being Oneirocritica written in the second century by the Greek author Artemidorus of Daldis. On the other hand, during the turbulent times from the late fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth centuries, religious and political leaders were worried about the myriad challenges to religious, political, and social authority, which included dream sharing, interpretation, and prophecy. One expression of this anxiety was the wave of witch prosecutions that began in the late fifteenth century and reached a fevered pitch between 1550 and 1650. Demonologists determined that one way in which the devil could intervene in human affairs was by taking advantage of the vulnerable sleeping person through dreams. Another expression of this anxiety was the reaction of authorities to dream sharing, interpretation, and prophecy that emerged in some of the more radical sects of the Protestant Reformation. An extreme example of this would have been a sect in the German states called the “Dreamers,” whose leaders were tortured and executed by the Lutheran authorities there. But there were also Anabaptists, Quakers, and other dissenting sects who continued to see dreams as a source of divine guidance.Footnote 53
By the late seventeenth century, there were few English men and women who were concerned about witchcraft anymore, but radical religious figures were another matter altogether. Many would have agreed with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More's assertion that religious visionaries who claimed to interpret dreams and visions and who prophesied the coming millennium were simply “enthusiasts” who suffered from delusions.Footnote 54 They were not possessed by the devil or guilty of heresy: they were lunatics. It is More's analysis that dominated most of the literature of the sceptics throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote 55 Yet, while controversial, Freke's journey into the world of monitions was far from unique at that time. There were two English prophets, Jane Lead and John Mason, who were both active in the 1690s and for whom dreams and visions played a central role in their lives and careers.Footnote 56
VI. The Influence of Jane Lead and John Mason
The first of these prophets, Jane Lead, at the age of sixteen experienced a transformative religious experience in which God communicated directly with her, and from that time onward she was “wholly taken up in the consideration of her interior state,” experiencing many visions and revelations from God.Footnote 57 She married, and sometime after 1657 she and her husband moved to London.Footnote 58 Shortly after her husband's death in 1670, she received her first vision of Sophia. This was the beginning of a spiritual relationship with the female figure of Sophia that continued for the rest of Lead's life.Footnote 59 Probably around 1673, she became part of a religious group led by John Pordage, who introduced her to the works of the Silesian theosopher Jacob Boehme, which drew their inspiration from, among other things, occult philosophy, Gnosticism, the Cabbala, alchemy, and magic. Lead was deeply influenced by Boehme, particularly embracing sophiology, a theology which held that the Virgin Sophia (Wisdom) was the divine feminine companion of God. Lead took over Pordage's religious circle when the latter died in 1681, but the community quickly dispersed, leaving Lead in poverty and obscurity in London. Fortune took a turn for the better in 1694 when her first book, A Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking, originally published in 1681, was translated into German and read by a baron in the service of the Elector of Brandenburg. The baron began a correspondence with her and offered to publish all of her writings in English as well as to have them translated and published in German. In the same year, Lead was approached by a young physician and Hebrew scholar by the name of Francis Lee who was so impressed with A Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking that he showed up at her house in London and offered himself as her disciple. He soon married Lead's daughter and all three of them lived together in a house in London, paid for by the Brandenburg baron. Shortly thereafter they were joined by Lee's friend and former classmate at Oxford, Richard Roach, rector of Saint Augustine's, Hackney. It was at this house, during the years 1694–1696, that Lead began to hold meetings of the Philadelphian Society, so named after the sixth of the seven churches in Asia that are mentioned in Revelation 1:4 and 3:7. Little is known about the origin of this group or how many members it had, but from about 1696 until her death in 1704, Lead, by virtue of her position as author and prophet, was generally regarded as its leader.Footnote 60
The Philadelphians consisted largely of middle and upper rank, well-educated Protestants, although they were open to men and women of any degree and religious affiliation. The Society was keen to stress that they did not “condemn the externals or rituals” of any Christian denomination and that their members were free to maintain their affiliation with other churches. More particularly, they went out of their way to emphasize that they did not separate themselves from the Church of England and that their meeting times did not conflict with regular Anglican services. Indeed, Richard Roach continued to function as an Anglican cleric.Footnote 61
At the core of Lead's theology was a belief that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of a New Jerusalem on earth, particularly in England, was imminent. Lead's view of the apocalypse was premillennialist. Postmillennialists, drawing on the cataclysmic portrayal of the apocalypse presented in Revelation 16, maintained that the millennium would be ushered in by an “abrupt, revolutionary and violent” transition in which “Christ is returned to power first as Judge, then as King after the millennium.” It was an understanding of the apocalypse that stressed discontinuity between the present and the future world. In contrast, Lead, as a premillennialist, insisted that the second coming would precede the millennium, and that the transition would be “smooth, gradual and peaceable” and the future world would look much like the present. Hers was a decidedly nonrevolutionary millenarianism which stressed that the civil and ecclesiastical power structures of the present would continue into the next age.Footnote 62 In her earliest writings on the subject, Lead argued for selective salvation in which only those souls that were pure and holy would be saved. However, in 1697, in a departure from both scriptural sources and Behmenist thought, Lead announced that God had directly revealed to her a new doctrine of apocatastasis, or universal salvation. This view embraced the standard broad church Anglican position that the millennium would usher in the “purification and unification of the Protestant churches through an internal spiritual regeneration” but went far beyond it into a universalism that insisted that all Christian denominations, as well as Turks, Jews, all other faiths, and even nonbelievers, would be saved.Footnote 63 Since the coming of Christ was near at hand, Lead and the Philadelphians maintained that it was their duty to “warn and awaken the World, that they may prepare for the great and Solemn Time, by a good Life, [and] universal charity.”Footnote 64 Lead died in 1704, but the Philadelphian Society continued on under the leadership of Richard Roach, who claimed that Lead had appeared to him in a dream and authorized him to do so.
The second of these prophets, John Mason, was a Cambridge-educated cleric who was the rector of Water Stratford in Buckinghamshire. In 1689, he claimed that a divine messenger appeared to him and declared that “the Lord would have a kingdom in this World, and the time draws near.” From this time onward, Mason was a changed man: he began to hear voices and experience visions of the coming millennium. He eventually came to believe that the thousand year reign of Jesus would begin in 1694, that Water Stratford was “the very Spot of Ground where his Standard was to be set up,” and that he was the return of Elijah chosen to herald the dawn of this new age. Unlike Jane Lead, the Calvinist Mason insisted that most men and women are irredeemable and would be destroyed at the dawn of the millennium; only those on the holy ground of the rectory at Water Stratford would be spared. Mason stopped celebrating the Eucharist and began to preach exclusively on the coming millennium. Hundreds flocked to Water Stratford to camp out there and await the millennium. On Easter Monday of 1694, Mason appeared at an upstairs window of his rectory and announced to the large crowd below that he had just seen Jesus sitting in a chair in his room and that Jesus had said that he would “appear in the Air over Water-Stratford and judge the World on Whitsunday following.” After this, Mason fell ill and shut himself up in his bedroom, communicating with his followers only through his two chosen witnesses. He died in mid-May but not before prophesying his own resurrection. Some of his followers later claimed to have seen him risen while others waited decades for his prophesy to be fulfilled.Footnote 65
Freke likely never met Jane Lead or journeyed to Water Stratford to join with John Mason in awaiting the millennium. He never mentions Lead or Mason in his books. Yet, there is very good reason to think that he was quite familiar with both of them. In the late seventeenth century, there was an explosion in print culture in western Europe in general, but this was especially true in England following the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 that put an end to official government censorship. Radical religious writings flooded onto the market in England.Footnote 66 It is no coincidence that 1695 was also the year that Lead and the Philadelphian Society embarked on a mission to proclaim their message to the world, and the sheer volume of literature produced by the Society between 1695 and 1704 amounts to something like an early modern mass marketing campaign.Footnote 67 Around the same time, contemporary accounts of John Mason's exploits were being published.Footnote 68 It is difficult to believe that a well-educated and voracious reader like Freke, who had thrown himself into the study of dreams, visions, apparitions, and the apocalypse in the latter half of the 1690s, would not have read at least some of Jane Lead's and the Philadelphians' works nor been well acquainted with John Mason's prophecies.
There is also no doubt that his own thinking about visions and the coming millennium had much in common with their ideas. While Freke ignored Lead's sophiology, he could certainly identify with her experience of direct divine communication, her insistence that she was still loyal to the Church of England, her premillennialist vision of the soon-to-come apocalypse, and her call for Englishmen and women to purify themselves in preparation for the thousand year reign of Jesus. And while he was not sympathetic to her apocatastasis, he was certainly open to the salvation of non-Christians. Likewise, Freke could accept John Mason's divine visions, his historicist interpretation of the Book of Revelation, his belief that the millennium was imminent (although not that it was in 1694), his expectation that England would be the site of the coming millennium, his cry for repentance and moral reform, and his insistence that only the morally pure could be saved.
Since moving to Dorset in 1696, Freke tells us that he had thrown himself into the study of dreams, visions, and apparitions, and the product of those years of study came pouring out in a flood of books on the language of visions and prophecy that appeared on the heels of his New Jerusalem. In 1702, he published The General Idea of Allegorick Language, a kind of general theory of holy language, in which he proclaims himself “a great Hieroglyphick Master” who possesses an incredible gift of “boundless Divine Monition and Prophecy” and who burns with zeal to share it with the whole world.Footnote 69 He then proceeds to impart some of the wisdom that he has acquired on the subject of apparitions, visions, and dreams. For example, he points out that second sight is a kind of apparition and that it occurs only in “places and states forlorn, such as deserts and the north of Scotland.” Of dreams, he insists that sleeping on the right side will bring happy monitions, but on the left side will bring unhappy predictions. Furthermore, if an Englishman dreams of King William, it signifies a lawful and moderate power, reflecting England's “just soveraign.”Footnote 70 He concludes with his interpretation of two dreams and two visions of a Spanish merchant in London by the name of Mr. Poree that were transmitted to him by “a Reverend Divine in Wilts,” a gentlewoman's dream, and, for the first time, the initial dream that he had experienced as a young man in 1681.Footnote 71 The next year, Freke published his Lingua Tersancta: Or, a most Sure and Compleat Allegorick Dictionary to the Holy Language of the Spirit (1703), a hefty 568-page tome that, very much like Artemedorus's Oneirocritica, provides definitions for common allegoric terms. He followed this up in the same year with two more dictionaries for use in understanding visions and dreams—The Fountain of Monition and Intercommunication Divine and The Divine Grammar—as well as a third book, a collection of some of his own dreams, entitled The Pool of Bethesda watch'd: Or some of the Various Divine Monitions, Prophecies, and Revelations Of our Author, Fairly and Carefully Expounded, with their fullest Intents and Purposes.
VII. Connections to the Philadelphians and the French Prophets
This flurry of publishing in 1702 and 1703 was followed by five years of silence. Little is known of Freke's activities in this period, though it is clear that the publication of his New Jerusalem and his writings on the language of visions and prophecy had garnered him little in the way of attention or followers.Footnote 72 In 1708, however, he resurfaced, this time in connection with a group of Huguenot visionaries in London known as the French Prophets.
The phenomenon that would come to be known in England as the French Prophets began with Isabeau Vincent, a sixteen-year-old Huguenot shepherdess from the southern French region of Dauphine, who one night in 1688 is reported to have sung, preached, and prayed while asleep. Her fame spread far and wide in the beleaguered Huguenot community of Dauphine that was already suffering under government persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and within a short time, her family home had become a temple where many of the faithful gathered to worship and to witness her miraculous prophesying. Her actions caused such consternation for local government officials that Vincent was arrested and imprisoned. But this did not quell the prophesying, for by this time many other inspires, mostly children, had emerged in Dauphine and in neighbouring Languedoc to carry on what Vincent had started.Footnote 73
Throughout the 1690s, the French authorities hunted down and imprisoned or executed these inspires, but those that were lost were always replaced by others. By 1701, there were hundreds of prophets, many of them reputedly experiencing visions, preaching on millennial themes, and performing miracles. Such relentless persecution drove some of the inspires into the mountains of the Cevennes in Languedoc where, under divine inspiration, they took to burning down Catholic churches and killing hostile priests. This revolt of the Camisards, which lasted to the end of 1704, was fought not so much for political, economic, or social reasons but rather with the goal of cleansing the world in preparation for the coming millennium.Footnote 74
In the summer of 1706, three refugees from the Camisard revolt—Elias Marion, Durand Fage, and Jean Cavalier—quietly slipped away from the Continent and headed for London. Not surprisingly, their earliest contacts in the city were fellow Huguenots who sheltered them and provided them with venues in which to hold their prophetic meetings. It was not long, however, before the Huguenot community turned on them, and in the early months of 1707, the consistory of the Savoy church published an Acte Noir condemning the “pretended Prophets,” barred the three leading prophets from receiving Holy Communion, and presented a complaint against them to the Court of Queen's Bench. Marion, along with two of his secretaries, Nicolas Fatio and Jean Daude, was eventually formally charged with blasphemy and sedition. If this were not bad enough, in April of 1707, a riot broke out against the Prophets, forcing them to flee London for a short time.Footnote 75
Yet, in spite of these early trials, the Prophets still managed to acquire some twenty or so English followers by early 1707. These new English disciples were a diverse bunch—respectable Anglicans and moderate Presbyterians mixed in with not so respectable Quakers, Baptists, and Philadelphians—who, despite their substantial confessional differences, could all agree with the Prophets' vision of an imminent millennium. Among these early converts was Richard Roach, the Anglican clergyman who had taken over leadership of the English Philadelphians. In March of 1707, Roach and some of the Philadelphians met with the French Prophets. They made such a favorable impression that it was not long before the Philadelphians agreed to host the first public assembly of the Prophets in London in the same rooms where the Philadelphians gathered.Footnote 76 Roach kept a diary that has survived and in it notes his special interest in Elias Marion. In fact, in 1707, Roach was so taken with Marion that he began to write about him in his diary as the new Elijah whom the Philadelphians had been expecting ever since Jane Lead had prophesied his return to usher in the millennium in her Elias, or the Trumpet Sounding to Judgment.Footnote 77
As it happens, in the following year (1708), Freke appeared on a list of English “members” of the French Prophets.Footnote 78 From their earliest days in London, the Prophets had been careful to keep a record of who attended their meetings, but this membership list, while invaluable, is also frustratingly vague on where, when, how often, and why people attended. Since the Prophets were only meeting in London at this time, it is safe to assume that Freke made a special journey to the capital to see them at some point in that year, but, given that Freke did not live in London and that Roach never mentions him in his diary, it is probable that he attended only a handful of their gatherings. As for why, while it is possible that Freke was drawn to London to meet with the French Prophets merely out of curiosity at their sudden notoriety, it is more likely that he was already familiar with the publications of the Philadelphians and may well have even been acquainted with key Philadelphian figures like Roach, the Presbyterian merchant John Lacy, or, more likely, Lacy's London physician James Keith, who was a pivotal figure in the temporary merge between the Philadelphians and the Prophets. Later, in 1716, Freke would enter into correspondence with Keith and was part of his circle of acquaintances who were influenced by the writings of the continental quietists Antoinette Bourignon and Jeanne Guyon.Footnote 79 In 1721, he also corresponded with Roach about his millenarian beliefs.Footnote 80 It is almost certain that Freke met both Keith and Roach in London in 1708, but he may well have known them earlier.
If Freke shared much in common with the Philadelphians and the French Prophets and was interested enough in them to travel to London to attend one or more of their meetings, then why did he not join with them? The answer may lie in the tension that often existed amongst millenarians between the desire to seek out a gathered community of like-minded people and the desire to focus on their own unique connection with God.Footnote 81 There seems to be no doubt that Freke was eager to study the works of other visionaries and millenarians, and in the case of the Philadelphians and French Prophets, to meet with them in person, but at the same time it was clear from his writings of 1702–1703 that he saw himself as a leader with unique, divinely bestowed skills and not a follower. This was a point that Freke would make abundantly clear in his next book.
VIII. Publication of Elijah's First Appearance to the Several Churches (1709)
In 1709, Freke published Elijah's First Appearance to the Several Churches and Nations of the Earth, in which he unexpectedly announces that the spirit has ordered him to declare himself free from Arianism and that “the Spirit has given me at least forty dark Monitions, and ten clear ones, to declare me his Elijah.”Footnote 82 As the great Elijah, he is commanded to “proclaim Christ's New Jerusalem, and as by the Sound of a Trumpet to proclaim his Reign upon Earth commencing.”Footnote 83 As in his earlier book New Jerusalem, Freke maintains that the millennium will consist of God sending to humanity his gift of divine prophecy and monition. But whereas before Freke had only suggested that he might have a key role to play in ushering in the millennium, in Elijah's First Appearance, he states in no uncertain terms that he is the one true prophet who will proclaim the New Jerusalem and reveal to the world the secrets of God's monitions and that none of this could happen without him.
But alas, for all this, all must come round to me at last. I now am become the solid Rule for all the true Followers of GOD, and there can be no other expected. You Jews, I am your Moses reviv'd. Ye Romanists, I am your only true Ambition. Ye Reformers, I am your only Standard of Truth; and ye Infidels, ‘tis I am your Reconciliation to GOD and Christ, you can have no other but thro his New Jerusalem reveal'd by me, and only unlock'd by my Grammar, Dictionary, and Revelations.Footnote 84
The timing of Freke's remarkable declaration that he is the new Elijah and that the millennium has begun is revealing. On the one hand, it fit nicely with Jurieu's prediction that the millennium would commence sometime around 1710. On the other hand, it is probably no mere coincidence that Freke rushed to print this revelation only a few short months after his encounter with the French Prophets in London. He had almost certainly met Roach in London and had probably heard him privately talk about Elias Marion as the new Elijah. By publishing in 1709, he may well have wanted to preempt Roach, or anyone else, from publicly declaring Marion to be Elijah. Once again, it seems clear that Freke wanted to be a leader, not a follower.
As to what this millennium will look like, Freke adopts a premillennialist position that fits both with the stance of Jane Lead and the Philadelphians and with the quietist views he had expressed in his New Jerusalem of 1702. He presents a picture of the world in the era of the new millennium that is in many respects unchanged from the present world. For example, regarding the political nature of the new millennium, Freke notes that Jesus Christ's thousand year reign is not to be taken in literal terms. In fact, he is at pains to point out to current rulers that the New Jerusalem is no threat to them. Although he exhorts emperors, kings, and states—whom he calls “ye earthly Gods”—to return “to your true Allegiance and Sovereignty, and proclaim anew and aloud the Lord of Hosts and his anointed Christ,” he is quick to reassure them that he is no political radical. “I have not one Monition or Thought that strikes at public Peace: human Laws are shewn most sacred among my Monitions. . . . GOD I see will never rob you of your Power of decent Order and Government, that he hath committed to your Hands.”Footnote 85 As for the various Christian churches, he also presents a vision that is little changed from the current state. Unusually for an English Protestant, Freke does not equate the Roman Catholic Church with the anti-Christ, nor does he suggest that Popery will be destroyed in the New Jerusalem: “Let the Protestants criticize and wrangle their brains out, GOD has not yet unchurch'd Rome, nor touches he the Papal Power.”Footnote 86 In effect, the Roman Catholic Church will continue to exist. He acknowledges, though, that the Spirit is thoroughly offended with the papists, and he calls on Rome to repent, to reform, and to recognize all of the Christian churches as equals, “making all the Reformation Churches as thy Sisters.”Footnote 87 The Protestant churches, if they err essentially, must also reform. In line with his earlier pronouncements, Freke declares that the Church of England will be the recipient of God's greatest blessings but only on the condition that that they “embrace the great Benefits offer'd to them by my Monitions.”Footnote 88 All the churches will remain intact as they are, but only those that follow Freke's lead will be able to enter the New Jerusalem. As he states: “I am the Standard now set up by the Spirit for his Conduct of all his Churches for the future; whatsoever Person or Church therefore refuses to enter the holy New Jerusalem of Christ as now open'd . . . they will at last find themselves unconsecrated, and GOD ceasing their religious Protection.”Footnote 89 So, in effect, the millennium will exist only for those who choose to embrace it, or more accurately, for those who choose to embrace William Freke as the new Elijah.
To whom does Freke address his message, and what would be their reward? As in previous works, he is inclusive in his message and extends an invitation to everyone to follow him: “High or Low, Men or Women, Rich or Poor, I hereby, and by virtue of my Divine Power, impress thee as a Soldier to the Lord of Hosts.”Footnote 90 As reward, these holy soldiers would gain restoration to “the New Jerusalem Paradise, lost by Adam and redeem'd again by Christ, with all the Glorys of GOD and his Tree of Life in't.”Footnote 91 While this description conjures up poetic images of a literal return to the Garden of Eden, the reality is far more prosaic. Freke says that the Spirit has, through divine visions, given him “all necessary Advices for Health, Wealth, Friends and Enemys, etc,” and he suggests that those who accept his leadership and receive their own visions will be given the same “advices.”Footnote 92 In other words, life in the New Jerusalem is an intensely personal experience that has the power to transform an individual's life but has little impact on the world around them. Indeed, Freke expressly commands any who follow him to do so as inconspicuously and as inoffensively as possible. If they are Christians, he counsels them “to remain quietly and peaceably in the several Christian Churches they are bred in.” If they are Jews, Turks, or infidels, they must “forbear Presence at a Worship that GOD can in no way bear with, and in their Hearts become Christians,” but if this is not something that they are at liberty to do, “they are to remember that if possible they are rather to fly than martyr, this my new Elijan Dispensation demanding of all, that they be exactly faithful to GOD, but of none that they voluntarily sacrifice themselves for it.” Likewise, he instructs his followers “to oppose no Laws or State, but modestly as possible, only by gentle Representations to move the several Nations and Churches upon Earth.” He calls on them to spread the message but insists that they only communicate “by Writing and not Speech.” To this end, he extends permission to all to “print and translate my Books.”Footnote 93
The response to Freke's pronouncement that the long awaited millennium has finally arrived and that he is the new Elijah was disheartening: although he had issued instructions to his followers, it would seem that he had few if any disciples; and despite his exhortation to his followers to print and translate his books, there is no evidence that any of them were ever published in second editions or translated into other languages. The smattering of his books held in academic libraries in Europe today suggests that perhaps some of his works circulated amongst millenarian groups on the Continent thanks to his connections with James Keith and Pierre Poiret, but given that they are in English, it is difficult to know what, if any, impact they had there.Footnote 94 Despite the lack of enthusiasm that greeted Elijah's First Appearance, its publication can nevertheless be seen as the high point of Freke's career as a prophet. Millenarian expectations were high, and he sensed that the time was right to declare boldly that he was the new Elijah sent to usher in the thousand-year reign of Jesus. This all-or-nothing attitude is surely the reason for his insistence that the “explanatory Introduction” to the millennium that he provides in his Elijah's First Appearance would be his last: afterward, he declares, “I am dumb for ever, the Divine Monition it self only shall speak, I interpreting.”Footnote 95 The arrival of the millennium and his role as the new Elijah was so obvious, or so Freke thought, that further explanation was unnecessary. Within a year, however, Freke's confidence appeared to wane, and he published two more books in a desperate effort to shore up his prophetic credentials: the first was an interpretation of his “several dreams” between 1695 and 1710 to prove that his commission was divine; and the second was an exposition of the universality of his commission as the “Great Elijah.”Footnote 96
After 1710, Freke lapsed into a prolonged silence. In a much later work, he alludes to a book that he published sometime around 1716, but if such a volume ever did exist, it has since sunk without a trace.Footnote 97 By 1716, he was in correspondence with James Keith in London, and as such, could be seen as part of Keith's network of quietist acquaintances. Keith clearly admired Freke and wrote of him to a friend: “There are but few of Mr. Freke's disengaged spirit left in the world.”Footnote 98 Keith's characterization of him as a “disengaged spirit” is interesting but hard to interpret. No doubt he was paying Freke a compliment, but if he meant to imply that Freke had either removed himself from the secular world around him or had abandoned his claim to be a prophetic visionary, he was mistaken. Freke was an active member of his community: in 1723, he was appointed a justice of the peace for the County of Dorset and regularly sat as a justice at the Quarter Sessions from April 1723 to April 1742.Footnote 99 As for his prophetic role, the visions continued. In 1718, he wrote two letters to King George I: the first to inform His Majesty that he has received hundreds of communications from the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and that anyone who aids him in his publications will also “receive him thus” and the other to acquaint His Majesty with a vision of his that “a fate of Assassination [is] speedily menacing you,” and that if His Majesty cares to know the details, he must contact Freke.Footnote 100 In 1736, he published his final book, in which he continues to claim that he is the great Elijah sent by God to usher in his kingdom, pleads for assistance in his transcriptions and publications, and sketches out a scheme for all the books that he sees as “necessary to be Published” in the future.Footnote 101 The necessary books, however, never materialized, and the prophet crying in the wilderness of Dorset was never heard from again. He died at Hinton Saint Mary in 1744.Footnote 102
IX. Conclusion
As a prophet, William Freke remained obscure during his lifetime, and he has been largely ignored by historians ever since.Footnote 103 On the one hand, this is understandable: he lacked the sophisticated Behemist theology of a Jane Lead and the hundreds of enthusiastic disciples of a charismatic John Mason. Yet on the other hand, his career is far from insignificant, for it provides us with a window into the network of enthusiasm, prophecy, and millenarian speculation that existed in England and the Atlantic world around the turn of the eighteenth century.
As a pious, well-educated gentleman, Freke was perfectly positioned to consume some of the enormous number of religious books and pamphlets that poured onto the English market in the 1680s and early 1690s and which escalated into a flood following the lapsing of the Licencing Act in 1695. While a young law student in London, he immersed himself in the vast literature of the Trinitarian Controversy and became such an ardent Arian that he wrote four anti-Trinitarian tracts, the last of which resulted in him being convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to pay a fine of £500.
As was so often the case with anti-Trinitarians at the time, it was through his Arianism that Freke became acquainted with contemporary apocalyptic thought. His fascination with the apocalypse was further fuelled by a belief that the Huguenot theologian Pierre Jurieu, along with the English poet and prophet George Wither, had successfully interpreted the Book of Revelation to accurately predict the Glorious Revolution. And if the Glorious Revolution had indeed been foretold by Saint John, then for Freke it validated an allegorical and historicist approach to Revelation, proving that the millennium was imminent and that the Kingdom of God, which had originally been given to the Jews, had now passed to the English nation. These apocalyptic speculations were typical of Protestant Englishmen and women at the time.
In 1696, following his conviction for blasphemy, Freke moved his wife and children from London to his family's estate at Hinton Saint Mary in Dorset and, in an effort to make sense of a vivid dream that he had experienced as a young man and the many monitions that followed, threw himself into the study of dreams, visions, and apparitions. It was at this point that he was drawn into the vast network of millenarian, prophetic, and enthusiastic writings that had emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in the Atlantic world. While he neglects to reveal most of the sources of his thought, it is clear that he had likely read the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus of Daldis and other interpreters of visions and dreams, at least some of the numerous works published by the visionary Jane Lead and other members of the Philadelphian Society, and some of the writings of the Continental quietists Antoinette Bourignon and Jeanne Guyon that were being published in English translations in the second half of the 1690s. And while there is no evidence that he had ever met John Mason, it is hard to imagine that Freke would have been unaware of Mason's well-publicized apocalyptic prophecies and his claim to be the new Elijah.
Freke's connection with the world of enthusiasm, prophecy, and millenarian speculation, however, went beyond simply reading their published works. In 1708, he travelled to London to attend one or more meetings of the French Prophets. There he almost certainly would have met James Keith and Richard Roach, two key figures in the Philadelphian Society after the death of Jane Lead, both of whom Freke would later correspond with. At the time, Roach was convinced that Elias Marion, one of the leading French Prophets, was the new Elijah that Jane Lead had predicted just before her death in 1704. Freke, however, did not become a follower of either the Philadelphians or the French Prophets. Instead, the next year he took the bold step of publishing Elijah's First Appearance to the Several Churches and Nations of the Earth (1709) in which he announced that the Spirit had ordered him to declare himself free from Arianism, that the thousand-year reign of Jesus had now begun, and that he was Elijah, the one true prophet who will proclaim the New Jerusalem and reveal to the world the secrets of God's monitions. The timing of this announcement is crucial. Pierre Jurieu had predicted that the millennium would begin around 1710, and it must have seemed to Freke that the moment that he and so many others had been anticipating had really come to pass. Everything that he had read and experienced over the past twenty years was coming to fruition: the thousand-year reign of Jesus had arrived and he, not Marion, Mason, or Moor, was the true Elijah. It was an extraordinary claim to make, but it was entirely the product of an extraordinary period of millenarian speculation in English history.
