Anna Trapnell Explained

Anna Trapnel (1620-?) was a travelling Baptist prophet and Fifth Monarchist active in England in the 1650s.

Early Life

Trapnel was born in Poplar in the parish of Stepney to the east of the City of London to William Trapnel, a shipwright, and Anne. Her father passed away while she was still in infancy and so Trapnel was raised by her mother. When Trapnel's mother passed away c. 1644 she moved to live with friends within the City near London Bridge on the north side of the Thames. This dwelling was close to the church of Allhallows the Great with its congregation of Baptists, of which she was a member. As well as being home to this worshipping community of nonconformists, Allhallows was a centre of Fifth Monarchism, a radical millenarian movement in which Trapnel was an active participant, whose members interpreted the ongoing political and religious turmoil of the Republic and Protectorate eras as the realisation of apocalyptic prophecies from the books of Daniel and Revelation. Hoping for the fall of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, which they viewed as the final of the four earthly monarchies described in Daniel’s vision (Daniel 7), they awaited the imminent coming of Christ’s universal rule as king – the Fifth Monarchy. As ‘a pressure group rather than a new denomination or party’ the movement was defined not doctrinally but politically with its members from various Congregationalist and Baptist churches being united by common grievances.^[1]

Prophecies and Travel

Trapnel quickly developed a celebrity status in the opening months of 1654 after an extended prophetic performance in Whitehall in January. Falling into an eleven-day visionary trance, she prophesied in song and prayer from a bedchamber, visited by droves of spectators including several high-ranking parliamentarians and army officers, eager to see the prophet and hear her rapturous utterances which denounced the Lord Protector and called for Christ’s earthly reign. Her prophecies from Whitehall were transcribed by an unknown amanuensis present in her chamber and printed in February in The Cry of a Stone, the first of a number of texts published in 1654 under Trapnel’s name. The printer Robert Sele soon published Strange and Wonderful News from White-Hall: Or, The Mighty Visions Proceeding from Mistris Anna Trapnel, a condensed version of The Cry of a Stone. Shortly after her Whitehall trance, Trapnel was invited by Captain Francis Langdon and Colonel Robert Bennet, former MPs for Cornwall in the Barebones Parliament, to travel with them to Cornwall. Travelling by stagecoach, Trapnel reached Cornwall in thirteen days. Her Report and Plea is the earliest known record of stagecoach travel for women or men in England.^[2]

Moving between houses of fellow Fifth Monarchists and sympathisers, Trapnel prophesied in prayer and song on several occasions, falling into visionary trances as she had in Whitehall. In April 1654 she was arrested and brought to the Sessions House in Truro to stand trial before the magistrates. She was accused of vagrancy, attending illegal meetings, and sedition against the government.^[3] Trapnel was later transported by stagecoach and ship to London and imprisoned in Bridewell by order of the Council of State. A Legacy for Saints; Being Several Experiences of the dealings of God with Anna Trapnel was published by Thomas Brewster during her imprisonment. It contains a number of autobiographical writings and letters by Trapnel and was compiled for publication by members of her Allhallows Congregation to testify to her piety and innocence, and the unjustness of her persecution in Cornwall and imprisonment in London. Trapnel was released from Bridewell in July 1654.

Works

• The Cry of a Stone, 1654
• Strange and Wonderful News from White-Hall: Or, The Mighty Visions Proceeding from Mistris Anna Trapnel, 1654
• Anna Trapnel's Report and Plea; or, a Narrative of Her Journey from London into Cornwall, 1654
• A Legacy for Saints; Being Several Experiences of the dealings of God with Anna TrapnelI, 1654

Further reading

• Lyn Bennet. ‘Women, Writing, and Healing: Rhetoric, Religion, and Illness in An Collins, “Eliza”, and Anna Trapnel’. Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 36, 2015, pp. 157–70.
• Rebecca Bullard. ‘Textual Disruption in Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654)’. The Seventeenth Century, vol. 23, 2008, pp. 34–53.
• Kate Chedgzoy. ‘Female Prophecy in the Seventeenth Century: The Instance of Anna Trapnel’. Writing and the English Renaissance, edited by William Zunder and Suzanne Trill, Longman, 1996, pp. 238–54
• Catie Gill. ‘“All The Monarchies Of This World Are Going Down The Hill” The Anti-Monarchism of Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone (1654)’. Prose Studies, vol. 29, pp. 19–35.
• Elspeth Graham. ‘“Licencious Gaddyng Abroade”: A Conflicted Imaginary of Mobility in Early Modern English Protestant Writings’. Études Épistémè, vol. 35, 2019, pp. 1–30.
• Hilary Hinds. ‘Soul-Ravishing and Sin-Subduing: Anna Trapnel and the Gendered Politics of Free Grace’. Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 25, 2001, pp. 117–37.
• Kevin Killeen. ‘“People of a Deeper Speech”: Anna Trapnel, Enthusiasm, and the Aesthetics of Incoherence’. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1700, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 203–16.
• Erica Longfellow. Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Maria Magro. "Spiritual Biography and Radical Sectarian Women's Discourse: Anna Trapnel and the Bad Girls of the English Revolution". Journal of Medieval and Modern Studies, 2004.
• Susannah B. Mintz. ‘The Specular Self of “Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea’. Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 25, 2000, pp. 1–16.
• Marcus Nevitt. ‘“Blessed, Self-Denying, Lambe-like?” The Fifth Monarchist Women’. Critical Survey, vol. 11, 1999, pp. 83–97.
• Ramona Wray. ‘“What Say You to [This] Book? [...] Is It Yours?”: Oral and Collaborative Narrative Trajectories in the Mediated Writings of Anna Trapnel’. Women’s Writing, vol. 16, 2009, pp. 408–24.

Notes and References

1. Book: Capp, Bernard . Radical Religion in the English Revolution . Oxford University Press . 1984 . 170.
2. Williamson Ambrose . Laura . 2019 . Moved by God: Mobility and Agency in Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea’ . Renaissance Studies . 33 . 609–23.
3. Anna Trapnel, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea; or, A Narrative of Her Journey from London into Cornwall (1654), edited by Hilary Hinds, Iter Press, 2016, n. 250.