Joanna Southcott, the Prophetess of Devon

Joanna Southcott was born in April 1750 in the hamlet of Taleford, near Ottery St Mary in Devon, the daughter of a small farmer. She grew up in a devout household, reading the Bible closely, and as a young woman went into domestic service. For years she worked in Exeter, partly in the shop of an upholsterer, and attended the local Methodist meetings while remaining a member of the Church of England. Nothing in these years marked her out, except a strong will and a habit of noticing signs in everyday events.

In 1792, when she was in her early forties, she began to hear a voice that she believed was the Spirit of God. It foretold events both small and great: the weather, local deaths, the course of the war with revolutionary France. She wrote down what she heard in rhyming verse and prose, and had some of the prophecies sealed and dated so they could later be checked. Her handwriting was famously hard to read, and much of her work was copied out by others.

In 1801 she paid for the printing of her first book, The Strange Effects of Faith. It attracted the attention of a group of educated readers in London, including the celebrated engraver William Sharp and several clergymen. They visited her in Exeter, and in 1802 she moved to London at their invitation. Scholars often prefer the neutral term “new religious movement” for followings of this kind, since “cult” is a contested label; Southcott’s believers saw themselves as faithful Christians awaiting the Second Coming.

Southcott identified herself with the Woman Clothed with the Sun in chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation, who gives birth to a male child destined to rule the nations. She taught that the millennium, Christ’s thousand-year reign on earth, was close, and that Satan’s power was about to be broken. As a woman, she saw herself as undoing the fall brought about by Eve. Her message was popular rather than learned, full of homely images, and it spoke to people living through war, high prices and fear of invasion.

Her most distinctive practice was sealing. Believers signed their names on a list and received a folded paper, inscribed with a promise and signed and sealed by Southcott, that marked them among the 144,000 elect of Revelation. She gave out many thousands of these seals; estimates vary widely, and contemporary claims ran higher than historians can confirm. The practice suffered when it emerged that Mary Bateman, a Leeds fortune teller hanged for murder in 1809, had been among those sealed, a scandal that critics used against the movement.

Her followers, many of them craftsmen, labourers and their wives, met in chapels and homes in London, the West Country, the Midlands and the north. They read her communications aloud, sang hymns and debated their meaning. To answer critics, her supporters held formal “trials” of her writings, in which selected men examined the prophecies and her claims as if in a court. These gatherings show a movement that valued evidence in its own terms, even if outsiders were rarely convinced.

Southcott was also a prolific and determined author. Between 1801 and her death she published around sixty books and pamphlets, many of them answering critics point by point, and she wrote letters to bishops and clergy challenging them to examine her claims. Some clergymen joined her; most ignored or ridiculed her. Cartoonists and satirists of the day mocked her as a deluded old woman, and newspapers printed scornful reports. Her supporters, in turn, saw such hostility as a sign that the world was about to be judged. The vigour of these exchanges shows how seriously prophecy was still argued over in early nineteenth-century England.

In 1814 Southcott, then 64, announced that she was pregnant and would give birth to Shiloh, a name from Genesis 49:10 that she took to mean the promised ruler. The news caused a sensation. Several doctors examined her, and some, including the physician Richard Reece, said she showed signs of pregnancy. Believers sent gifts, among them an elaborate cradle, and newspapers and caricaturists followed the story closely.

The expected birth did not come. Through the autumn of 1814 Southcott’s health declined, and she told her followers that if she died, her body should be kept warm for four days in case she revived. She died at her house in London at the end of December 1814, officially on the 27th. After the four days had passed, a group of doctors examined her body and found no pregnancy. She was buried in January 1815 in the burial ground of the chapel of ease at St John’s Wood.

Many followers concluded that the child had been born spiritually and taken up to heaven, as the child is in Revelation 12. Others drifted away.

The movement fragmented after her death but did not vanish. A series of men claimed to be her successor. John Wroe founded the Christian Israelite Church, whose members kept their hair and beards uncut, and James Jershom Jezreel later built a movement in Kent. From 1919 a vicar’s widow in Bedford, Mabel Barltrop, gathered the group that became the Panacea Society; members regarded her as a daughter of God and called her Octavia.

Southcott had left a box of sealed writings, which she said must be opened only in a time of national crisis and in the presence of twenty-four bishops of the Church of England. In 1927 the psychical researcher Harry Price opened a box he said was hers before a single bishop. It contained a few oddments and papers, including a lottery ticket and a horse pistol, but Southcottians denied it was the real one. The Panacea Society placed newspaper advertisements for decades urging the bishops to open the true box, which it said it held. The Society’s last members died in the early 2010s, and its property, including the box, passed to the Panacea Charitable Trust, which runs a museum in Bedford.

Historians have treated Southcott with growing respect. E. P. Thompson saw her following as part of the culture of the English working class, and later scholars have studied her as one of the most remarkable female religious leaders of her age. Her writings, her sealed papers and the unopened box remain a record of the hopes of ordinary people in a revolutionary era.