Introduction

Abstract

Early in the morning of 19 July 1591, two Puritan gentlemen, Edmund Coppinger and Henry Arthington, mounted a cart in Cheapside to announce that they had discovered the messiah. William Hackett, a Presbyterian of dubious moral character, had assumed ‘the office and spirite of S. Iohn Baptist, affirming, that hee was sent thither by God, to prepare the way of the Lord before his second comming to iudgement’.¹ Arthington and Coppinger, viewing themselves as the two witnesses of God predicted in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 11:1–12), believed that Hackett had been sent to overthrow episcopacy and Elizabeth I, and inaugurate a new era of perfected church government on earth. The authorities were not amused, and Hackett was executed. Roughly two hundred years later, and several thousand miles to the west, an altogether more respectable New Jersey Presbyterian preacher, David Austin, predicted Christ’s return for the fourth Sunday of May 1796. When the prophecy failed, Austin was not imprisoned or attacked by concerned authorities. Instead his flock (which included a number of politicians) humoured his preaching, until finally losing patience and dismissing him as minister as his prophecies continued unabated. Undeterred, the preacher fell to designing wharves and houses to prepare the Jews for their prophesied return to Palestine.²