Antichrist’s Revolution: Some Anglican Apocalypticists in the Age of the French Wars

Abstract

The article deals with the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century development of early modern English apocalyptic thought which permitted the identification of the Enlightenment and its political manifestations in Revolutionary France with the prophesied Antichrist. The importance of this phenomenon is discussed and a framework for further discussion of it, taken from general theories of apocalyptic, is provided. However, the article is chiefly concerned to go beyond existing, inadequate explanations of the phenomenon, which advert merely to the French wars and certain contemporary conspiracy theories, and seeks its origins and relationships in wider currents of British thought in the period and before. Notably, reference is made to the concern of the insular Counter-Enlightenment with rationalist christological heresy, the continuing vigour of the English tradition of apocalyptic exegesis and to contemporary renewed theological and pastoral emphasis on supernatural and dogmatic religion. However, popular thought is also adverted to and the phenomenon is situated within the history of the ideology of the British ancien régime. Throughout, the normality and acceptability of this apocalyptic thought in its contemporary setting is emphasized, implicitly suggesting a need to restrain historiographical emphasis on modernizing patterns of thought in treatments of the period.

‘Isaiah's Call to England': Doubts about Prophecy in Nineteenth-Century Britain

“…35 French defeats in the Middle East at the hands of Nelson and Sidney Smith, in particular, sparked an orgy of prophetic speculation about Britain's place in the divine plan, not just from wild-eyed enthusiasts but also from cultured high churchmen like the bishop of Rochester, Samuel Horsley, and from the respectable evangelical commentators G. S. Faber, James Bicheno and James Hatley Frere. 36 'Is it an improbable conjecture', asked Henry Kett, ' … that this maritime, commercial, Protestant kingdom should take the lead in executing the Divine will?' 37 Ralph Wedgwood was more bullish, his discovery that 'Brit' was the Hebrew word for 'covenant' acting as springboard for the extravagant theory that Scripture prophecies did not in fact refer to the Jews at all: 'the British Empire is the peculiar possession of Messiah, and his promised Naval Dominion'.…”

British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802

“…C. D. A. Leighton has also shown how belief in conspiracy strengthened belief in the imminent apocalypse. 30 denied sincere belief in the conspiracy-recounted tales of subterfuge and revolution à la Barruel and Robison without directly referring to the Proofs or Memoirs. 33 Their sermons and tracts constitute a reservoir of conservative clerical paranoia.…”