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Chapters A Rogues' Gallery: Richard Brothers and Nimrod Hughes A number of prophets, admittedly a small minority, were public figures of some renown, men and, less commonly, women who spoke directly to and for a promiscuous audience of skeptics, believers, and agnostics . While revolutionary-era prophets on the whole preferred the safety of the printed page to the perils of live theater, a handful of men and women braved ridicule and worse to offer themselves as living sacrifices to the public 's thirst for novelty and scandal.I When they did so, they entered the public sphere on its own terms. The clash of cultures represented by millenarianism 's encounter with the Anglo-American public produced entertaining if not always heroic stories, complete with stock characters and familiar plot twists. Two such stories are told here, drawn from opposite ends of the revolutionary era and different national contexts: that of Richard Brothers, the most famous British prophet of the 1790s, and of Nimrod Hughes, his lesserknown American counterpart who enjoyed his own fifteen minutes of fame in the winter of1811-12. By offering these stories as portraits in a "rogues' gallery;' I am not questioning the credibility of the supernatural claims of Brothers and Hughes. Prophets they believed themselves to be, and prophets they are for 1 E. P. Thompson's discussion of the "theater and countertheater" of patrician-plebian relations in the eighteenth century provides a model for historians interested in the more subtle uses of power to define and delimit popular expression in an age in which "patrician hegemony;' if tattered, was still intact. As Thompson describes it, the increasing theatricality of public contests over custom and rights over the long eighteenth century was a function of the growing autonomy of commoners from paternalist systems of rule, whether on the manor, in the church, or in Whitehall. Deprived (largely through voluntary forfeiture) ofcoercive means to compel obedience and exact deference, England's ruling classes entered into a social bargain with the laboring classes in which authority was maintained and contested more through symbolic gestures than through direct acts of resistance or repression. Thompson's model explains much of the studied theatricality of millenarian culture in the late eighteenth century, as well as the roots of this theatricality in the commercial and political developments of the century. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991). A Rogues'Gallery 179 our purposes. But to most of their contemporaries they, and men like them, belonged in a much larger category of social and political disorder, that of "rogues": itinerants for the most part, the "straggling auxiliaries" of a floating underground of radical sectarians and publicists, hawkers of suspect emotional goods who were fully enmeshed in the commodity culture of late eighteenth-centuryAnglo-America in which people and the goods they peddled were not to be believed or trusted.2 Enemies of enthusiasm in the 1790s and early 18oos saw a direct line of incorrigibility connecting contemporary "prophets of evil" with rogue millenarians in earlier ages, from Oliver Cromwell, "a Rogue of more talents than the contemptible lunatic[s] of the present day:' to the French Prophets, those "rogues and vagabonds" driven into exile in the early 1700s.3 The image of a "rogues' gallery" speaks more to the expectations and fears of revolutionary-era audiences than to the integrity of millenarians as messengers of God. "King Richard Brothers ... a Democrat and a Prophet" In January 1795, the British monthly Critical Review devoted a lengthy article to dissecting the public furor caused by the penniless ex-navy lieutenant Richard Brothers, who had set up shop at 57 Paddington Street where he dispensed prophecies warning of swift destruction should England declare war against the new French republic. "That a poor madman should be under such an unhappy delusion as to believe himself inspired, is not unprecedented ; but that such a man, in so enlightened a city as London, should fill for a moment the public ear, and employ the public tongue, is a humiliating consideration for those who wish to feel proud of their country, or ofhuman nature. Whether this man be merely an enthusiast, or partly an impostor (a mixture not uncommon,) we presume not to say:'4 For several months in 1795, the Brothers affair was the talk of London. The hyperbole surrounding 2 The phrase "straggling auxiliaries" is William H. Reid's, the radical apostate who in 18oo wrote a searching critique ofthe infidel...

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