00-Petermarshall Prelims 1..26

Mother Leakey and the Bishop Mother Leakey and the Bishop AGhost Story ––––––––––––––– Peter Marshall ––––––––––––––– 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Peter Marshall 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd, St. Lves plc ISBN 978–0–19–927371–3 13579108642 For my Mother –––––- Preface –––––- I know it is a matter of very little credit to be a relator of stories, and I of all men living, have the least reason to be fond of the employment. For I never had any faculty in telling of a story, and have always had a particular indisposition and backwardness to the writing of any such. But of all relations of fact, there are none like to give a man such trouble and disreputation, as those that relate to witchcraft and apparitions . 1 These words were written by the Anglican clergyman Joseph Glan- vill shortly before his death in 1680. As a university-based historian, who has tended in the past to write on large and ‘respectable’ academic themes, I now feel I know exactly where Glanvill was coming from. Historians, like Anglican clergymen, do not usually think of themselves as story-tellers. Yet the book I have spent the last few years researching and writing, the book you now hold in your hands, is an example of that least respectable of narrative forms, the ghost story. It is perhaps more accurate to say that it is a story about stories about ghosts, a study of how a particular English folk legend came into being, of what it meant to the people who told and retold it, and of what it can tell us about the times through which they lived. Though they do not often admit it, all history books contain within them the story of how and why they came to be written. The experienced tracker can usually reconstruct the author’s progress through libraries and archives, as well as make informed guesses about how decisions were reached to arrange and present the resulting material. In my own case, I have thought it best to be more transparent than is customary about the genesis and creation of my text. Mother Leakey is a book that came about by accident, as well as a tale that has grown considerably in the telling. It began like this. In the spring of 2001 I was invited to speak at a conference at viii Preface the University of Durham on the theme of ‘early modern [i.e. sixteenth- and seventeenth-century] ghosts’. This was a recent but keen research interest of mine; I was in the process of writing a book on attitudes towards the memory of the dead in Reformation-era England, in which there was to be a chapter on spectres and spirits.2 A brief footnote in a pioneering study of the topic—a section in Sir Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic—had already alerted me to the existence of an interesting-looking, but apparently little-known document, concerning the reported appearance of a ghost in south-west England in the late 1630s. The supposed haunting took place in the town of Minehead in Somerset, a place I had heard of, but never visited nor knew much about. When I checked out the original manuscript in the Public Record OYce in London (now the National Archives), I discovered that it com- prised a set of depositions, or witness statements, which seemed to me to supply the ideal subject matter for a short conference paper. The depositions brimmed with illuminating period detail, and they contained several vivid accounts of where and when the alleged apparition was reported to have appeared, of what it had said and done, and of what it had looked like. Less than a week before the talk was due to be delivered, I made a snap decision to try to supplement the rich material I already had at my disposal, and set oV on a day-trip to the Somerset Record OYce, situated in the county town of Taunton, about twenty-Wve miles to the south-east of Minehead itself. I hoped that from other records held there it might be possible to Wnd out more details about the lives of some of the people mentioned in the depositions. In the event, I was not disappointed, and some of the fruits of that Wrst research trip are on display in Chapter 1. As I prepared to Wnish up for the day in the book-lined surroundings of the manuscript search room, I chanced upon a useful-looking volume entitled Minehead in the County of Somerset: A History of the Parish, the Manor and the Port. This had been published at Taunton in 1903 by the Reverend Fred- erick Hancock, who was then vicar of the nearby parish of Dunster. His book, a monument to solid Victorian scholarship, provided me with rather more information than I had bargained for. Not only did Preface ix Hancock supply a full printed version of the depositions I had already laboriously transcribed from the seventeenth-century original, but he introduced them with a cheerfully oblivious reference to ‘the famous Minehead ghost story, immortalised by Sir Walter Scott’. As someone who regarded himself as the discoverer of an archival gem virtually unknown to previous scholarship, this came as something of a shock, to put it mildly. It was too late to do much to save the conference paper. But over the next few months I became increasingly obsessed with trying to pin down exactly how it was that the Minehead ghost had come to the attention of Scotland’s greatest romantic novelist, and why the tale was evidently still familiar, three-quarters of a century after his death, to the reading public of Edwardian England. What I began to discover was that the depositions in the Public Record OYce represented only the tip of an iceberg of rumour and scandal, and that the case had ramiWcations far beyond the day-to-day concerns of the inhabitants of a little Somerset seaport, and indeed far beyond the time in which they themselves had lived. There was, in fact, a second story, hidden inside the folds of the Wrst. It concerned an English clergyman, who rose from obscurity to become a bishop in Ireland, and then suVered a spectacular fall from grace. It soon became clear to me that the ghost in Minehead was thoroughly and intimately connected, though not in an entirely straightforward way, with a notorious clerical scandal. The humili- ation of the bishop came, moreover, at a moment of acute historical importance, occurring right on the eve of the civil wars which engulfed both Ireland and England for most of the 1640s. His predicament was rooted in personal failings, but it was also hugely political. Examining the case seemed to oVer the opportunity to say something about the relationship between English and Irish aVairs in these crucial years, and to think about how a ‘British dimension’ might inXuence our understanding, both of political culture as a whole, and of individual life experiences.3 At the same time, the close association of a ghost with a high-proWle political and eccle- siastical scandal invited some serious reXection on the continuing x Preface signiWcance of ‘supernatural’ events at a time of changing attitudes towards the design and workings of the created universe. Yet as I continued to work on the materials relating to the case, I became increasingly convinced that perhaps its most interesting and signiWcant aspect was the way it seemingly refused to remain Wxed in its original historical location. Over the course of the three centuries and more following the ghost’s Wrst appearances in Mine- head, the story—or rather the two interweaving stories—did not simply fall asleep to await the modern historian’s awakening kiss. Rather, they demonstrated a recurring and disconcerting capacity to get up and walk about, in the process often acquiring new sets of meanings, and illuminating for us some of the cares and concerns of new sets of actors on the historical stage.

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