It was a strange day in January last, when a King was shortened. Folk still gawk and hawk over the cobbles there in Whitehall. A mile to the east, and turds bob in the gutters. This is Cheapside, high in the summer of 1649. The energy of discord courses everywhere, as free as the rank air. A nation is in foment, this city its eye.

The name of this street is Pissing-Conduit. In it, a swollen meeting-house, the elements of the crowd diverse. None seem exactly well-to-do, but there is good cloth and healthy complexion among the rags and sores. And there is expectancy. The most notorious man in all London is due to speak.

To comprehend this time, first suspend belief in the values of your own. Forget all structure, all social order, all mores and method. Imagine a world turned upside down.

This Commonwealth sprang from the might of an army. They called it the New Model Army : shielded by faith, fortified through piety, ruthless in its austerity. It trampled a royal dynasty, and it bore up a novel tyrant. Now is the age of a brutal church, one of murderous simplicity. But a soldier’s conviction is a two-edged sword. Never dare to sleep, if you would clamber to power in its wake.

Once they were war-dogs. Now they are stripped of their muzzles of drawn and hammered iron, but their memories are not so lightly put aside. Fairfax down, these are terrible men, utterly convinced of redemption through a mire of holy blood. The lieutenants of Christ and Cromwell can never be released from the thrall of battle. Down and down they fight, now for the soul of the nation itself, and the zeal of the usurper is no less rancid than the decadence of those he banished.

True, there is reason and the promise of new order on St George’s Hill. Here and there in this luckless land, fine calls to arms are heard. Likewise rational denouncements of church and state, but there is a baser impulse too. The strongest tides are seldom the most coherent. A thousand years of political impotence are coming to an end. The people are rising up.

This is the time of the Ranters. This man is their mouthpiece. This is Coppe.

There will never be a revolution like this one. Fruitless, stillborn, sloughed in frustration,and yet nonetheless nobler than the travesties of republicanism and atheism that will succeed in its wake. This is the rage of England’s puberty, its wet dream of misdirected concupiscence. These are the years in which the Father of the World grew painfully to manhood.

Suddenly, the mob in the meeting-house falls silent. A mad-man stands astride the trestle, eyes ablaze. The rumours said he would be naked; instead his blouse is open to the waist and his neck is flecked with blood. His appearance is an enigma – perhaps he has been beaten by troopers, or perhaps he has been gouged by whores.

And now he begins to speak. A miasma descends on his audience. The world dissolves in the cauldron of his ardour.

Almost the death of his mother, expelled in a welter of gore and foam. It was 1619 in Warwick, and his family was one of standing. Dearly schooled, sent up to All Souls in his eighteenth year, but no scholar was he. A debaucher of wanton housewives in his chambers, never to gain a degree. As war flared, he made himself a travelling preacher and at last an army chaplain.

Despised by royalist, mistrusted by puritan, he baptised and chastised. Afire with rhetoric, scorning propriety, charged-up and hell-bound in incendiary fervour. His writings hovered between revelation and insanity. His appetites invited inspiration and disgust. He was a man of no time before or since, but in this hour of calamity he blazed across the land like a sign.

And there came A Fiery Flying Roll, a Word from the Lord to all the Great Ones of the Earth, and this may them concern, being a last Warning-Piece at the Dreadful Day of Judgement. And behold, he writ, since a Hand was sent unto him, and A Roll of a Book was therein and was thrust into his Mouth, whereupon he ate it up, and it filled his Bowels. It lay there Bitter as Wormwood, broiling, Burning in his Stomack, till he Brought it Forth in this Forme.

Comes the Apocalypse, there is yet no Sin. There can be no immorality of the flesh while the rich rob the poor. Each one of us dwells within a Church of his own Body, and salvation lies in Community of Possession.

Charged with blasphemy, his books burned, he taunted his prosecutors with a hail of peanut-shells. They locked him in Newgate Gaol for a year, and at last they broke this wild horse of a spirit.

On December 23rd, 1651 Abiezer Coppe delivered a sermon at Burford in Oxfordshire, appearing to entirely renounce the principles of his extraordinary book. He retired to the parish of Barnes in Surrey, where he practised medicine under the alias of Dr. Higham until his death in 1672.

The abomination of the Monarchy was restored. The righteous pomposity of Church and Parliament blights us still. A dozen generations after Coppe, we struggle with the yoke he scorned.

And yet words once spoken can never die. Oaths thus terrible may never be recanted. He lives on in every flicker of ire at the misdeeds of our betters, every time we thrust and groan entwined with our bedmate, whenever our hearts are touched by a higher music than the civic drumbeat.

Call nothing you have your own. Then all that you do shall be Holy. All of what you are shall be likewise.

Believe only this, and the flame yet burns. A little spark of Transcendent, Unspeakable Glory.