“With chaplets of white roses?”, breathes another.
Julia is the only one among them who can sometimes ask Henry direct questions. She brings them word that bridal attire will be appropriate for all and no expense need be spared. White silks and satins, white velvets, laces and gauze are ordered from London, also the latest pattern of bridal gown. In less than a month the Agapemone dressmakers make nine gowns for women of several ages, shapes and sizes. Mrs Starky and Fanny Mayber have the finest dress sense and unselfishly suggest adjustments that show their sisters’ figures to the best advantage. When all are satisfied with their bridal gowns Henry announces the day of the final manifestation, which takes place before the congregated faithful on the sofa in the Agapemone church.
The ceremony is described in a pamphlet called The Little Book Open — The Testimony of Br. Prince concerning what Jesus Christ has done by His Spirit to Redeem the Earth: In Voices from Heaven. Henry published it in 1856, five years after the his Manifestation. A long preamble explains why God required it, then says. “Thus the Holy Ghost took flesh in the presence of those whom He called as flesh. Out of this one lump of clay — dust of the ground, living earth — flesh — He, the Great Potter took one piece to make it new. He took flesh — a woman — in their presence, and told them it was his intention to make it one with him, even as a man is one flesh with his wife. He consulted nobody’s pleasure in doing this but his own. He was not influenced by what others might think or say. And he took it with power and authority as flesh that belonged to God, and was at his absolute disposal. In taking it he left it no choice of its own. He did not take it because it loved him, for it did not — but because it pleased him to set his love upon it. Yet he took it in love; for having taken it his manner in it was such as flesh could know and appreciate as love. He kept it with him continually day and night. He took it openly with him wherever he went, not being ashamed of it. He made its life happy and agreeable by affording it the enjoyment of every simple and innocent gratification. Thus he made it one with him, and made it new flesh. He created it a new consciousness”.
Which means he began by raping the youngest virgin in the presence of the others (including his legal wife) and the Agapemone gentlemen. She was the daughter of the widow Paterson, a girl of fifteen. Her mother, as devoted to Henry as any other Princeite, had died a few months earlier of what doctors called consumption but Henry called doubt. He told the others, “She erred, so God took her”, which explained the matter. Female fashions in 1851 make his rape hard to imagine. Paris dominated these fashions more than nowadays, and French fashion was ruled by the wife of Napoleon’s nephew. She was a handsome Spaniard who loved ballroom dancing so popularized the crinoline to hide her pregnancies, for it covered women’s bodies from waist to feet in a circular whalebone cage a yard or more across at knee level, under a skirt descending to the ground. This fashion was denounced from pulpits, mocked by caricaturists and heartily complained of by most men, especially those who travelled in railway carriages and small horse-drawn buses, yet it triumphed for nearly two decades. Fashionable women liked it for the same reason as the French Empress; poorer women because, in days when Britain’s overcrowded industrial cities had no public lavatories for women, it let them urinate in streets and parks without noticeably doing so. Unless the Agapemone bridal gowns were unfashionably designed only an expert in historic costume can perhaps explain how Henry got through Miss Paterson’s crinoline. If his pamphlet is true he treated her afterwards with as much kindness and consideration as any devoted Victorian husband. There is now no way of knowing his wife Julia’s feelings. Neither she, he or anyone left word of them.
Not doubting he had done as God commanded, Henry wrote a description of his Great Manifestation in the third person (like Caesar describing his Gallic Wars) and published it, and sent Starky and Thomas out to preach it in Bridgwater and London. He must have changed his mind about God finally closing the gates of the Abode to everyone else, and was ready to let in new believers and (if they came in sufficient numbers with sufficient money) perhaps greatly enlarge the Abode of Love. That did not happen. The Bridgwater meeting was a failure and the best account of the London meeting is in a September 1856 edition of The Times:
On Friday evening two members of the “Agapemone” near Bridgwater appeared at the Hanover Square rooms according to their advertizement. The large room was densely crowded. Two respectably dressed men spoke to the meeting, urging the claims of their leader, “Brother Prince.” According to the speakers Brother Prince was “a child of wrath who had been made by grace into a vessel of mercy.” Some eleven years ago the Holy Ghost had fulfilled in Brother Prince all that He meant to be and do. The audience evinced much disapprobation and disgust, and cried out that this was gross blasphemy, and worse than Mormonism. The speaker, who seemed quite imperturbable and who calmly surveyed the meeting though a single glass stuck jauntily in one eye proceeded to allude to a second spiritual manifestation which had, he said, occurred at the Agapemone about five years ago, in which the phenomenon was exhibited in the person of a woman — a prophetess — “Not privately, but in the presence of us all.” Some of the expressions used in describing this transaction were perhaps mis-understood by many of his hearers, for they interrupted him indignantly, and at last stopped him with a general howl of execration. The two strangers then retired from the room; upon which Mr Newman, apparently a working man, arose and announced the doctrines of the Agapemone as impious. He moved as a resolution, “That the statements made by the two persons on the platform were contrary to common sense, degrading to humanity, and blasphemous toward God.” The resolution was carried with acclamation amid vociferous cheers. A sergeant of police stepped forward and said good-humouredly, “Now gentlemen, the meeting is over.”
After that only occasional newspaper reports brought the Agapemone to public notice. There was first the Rev. George Thomas’ unsuccessful attempt to remove his small son from Agnes, his wife, which ended with her divorcing Thomas and gaining legal custody of the child. The Great Manifestation estranged Rouse the attorney who left the Agapemone and brought a legal action that recovered some of his money. Lewis Price also left but could not persuade Harriet to go with him, nor could he persuade the police that she was kept in the Abode against her will. He therefore invaded it with about twenty local men who thought he had a right to his own wife, but Harriet had fled with Mrs Starky to lodgings in Salisbury. When she returned he obtained a writ claiming she was retained against her will, but she declared this was not true before a judge who dismissed the case. Said The Times, “As may be expected, Mr Price has obtained the sympathy of all right-minded people in the neighbourhood.” Then came the death of Mary Mayber, whose body was found in a sheep-dip pond. At the inquest Harriet Price (formerly Nottidge) declared that Mary had not been kept in the Agapemone against her will. Fanny Mayber declared that her sister Mary had been depressed for many months because she could not be as happy as others in the Agapemone, so felt Christ had abandoned her. A surgeon who conducted an autopsy on the deceased said she had died of drowning, not poisoning, and an adhesion of her brain to the skull indicated a tumour that explained her depression. The coroner’s verdict was suicide while of unsound mind.
It would be depressing to chart how all the original members of the Abode left or died away leaving Henry who outlasted them all. It is pleasanter to end with an account of the Agapemone by a friendly but critical reporter who went there in 1866 when most of its troubles seemed overcome.