In 1650, Humphrey Ellis wrote a 62-page piece of instant journalism, entitled “Pseudochristus: Or, a true and faithful Relation of the Grand Impostures, Horrid Blasphemies, Abominable Practices, Gross Deceits; Lately spread abroad and acted in the County of Southampton”.

Ellis, one of the two ministers appointed by Parliament to serve the Cathedral Church at Winchester, tells the story of William Franklin who claimed to be “The Christ, The Messiah, The Son of God”; and his mistress, Mary Gadbury, “The Spouse of Christ.”     

It’s 1649. We had just undergone the upheavals of two bloody civil wars. A traumatic period with death rates proportionately higher than those in the First World War. Thousands had left their homes to follow the armies. All the old anchors were cut loose. Soldiers were away from their homes, probably for the first time, shifting around the country, encountering people with new and fresh ideas in surroundings highly charged with political and religious opinion.

These were teeming, boisterous times. With the collapse of priestly authority, people were free to interpret the Bible in their own lights as the spirit moved them. Some believed the Bible was a dead letter because God was still revealing his truths. People were free to assemble their own congregations; free to elect their own preachers. Many became religious tourists – moving from sect to sect, joining new congregations, hearing new preachers. Anyone with fresh ideas was free to preach, and anyone with an ounce of charisma was guaranteed a following.

For many it was a period of intense religious expectation. The upheavals of the last few years were the upheavals foretold in scripture to herald the kingdom of heaven on earth. King Charles’s execution had cleared the way for the reign of King Jesus. The question was not so much when, but in whose body, Christ would reappear.

William Franklin was born in Overton in about 1610. He was apprenticed as a ropemaker and moved to Stepney to follow that trade. In early 1649 he started receiving revelations and visions. He abandoned his wife of 16 years and his three surviving children and began to “keep company with other women.”

Mary Gadbury was aged about 30 when she met William Franklin. After they met, she began to have ecstatic fits and to see visions and hear voices. A voice told her, “I will send my Son in the person of a Man.” Excited by this message, she asked William, “Hath God revealed to you, that his Son shall reign in the person of a Man?” “I am that Man”, he replied. William told Mary that it had been revealed to him that she was the woman who was set apart for his use. It would do her good if he stayed the night with her.

One day in November 1649, Mary had a vision in which a voice told her to go to the “Hill Country, the Land of Ham”. William said that he had also received a similar revelation. Two days later they set off for Hampshire in Hunt’s Andover Wagon.

In Andover, they took lodgings at “the sign of the Starre”, now the White Hart Hotel. When William had to nip off to London to get some money, Mary told everyone that she had seen Christ in the person of a man. The description she gave bore a striking resemblance to William Franklin. Soon people from Andover and the surrounding country flocked to the Star to see if the rumours of the second coming were true.

Edward Spradbury, a cloth worker from Andover, was one of the first to believe her. Fired with the news that Christ was in Andover, he rode to Crux Easton, some eight miles north of Andover, to tell William Woodward, the Minister of that parish, and his wife Margaret.

In Andover, the mood was mixed. There were those who believed William was Christ. And there were people from Overton who knew him as a lad, and knew he had a wife and children in Stepney, and that Mary was not his wife. As feelings in Andover were running high against William and Mary, mainly led by a woman named Goody Waterman, (who probably went around Andover saying, “He’s not the Messiah: he’s a very naughty boy”) they moved in with the Woodwards at Crux Easton Rectory.

Shortly after they moved, Goody Waterman found herself “with a great power drawne ... to Crooxeason”. She told William Woodward that she had been possessed by Satan, but the power she had reproached (meaning William Franklin) had delivered her from Satan.

Reports that Christ was in Crux Easton drew “multitudes of people” to the rectory from whom William selected his disciples. They included John Noyce, who was given the title John the Baptist, “sent forth to tell that Christ was come upon the earth.” Henry Dixon of Stockbridge and William Holmes of Houghton became the destroying angels in the Book of Revelation. Holmes told the vicar of Houghton that he and the rest of his village were damned. Edward Spradbury was the healing angel, sent to save and restore, in the name of the newly arrived Christ, those whom Dixon and Holmes had cursed.

According to a soldier based at a Hampshire garrison, some five or six hundred people believed that Christ had come to earth in the form of William Franklin. The local clergy became alarmed by this collective madness that was sweeping North-West Hampshire and emptying their churches. They petitioned Thomas Bettesworth and Richard Cobbe, the two Winchester Justices of the Peace. The Justices issued warrants against William Franklin, William Woodward, Edward Spradbury and Henry Dixon.

The four men appeared before the two justices at Thomas Bettesworth’s house in the Cathedral Close on 27 January 1650. Although they weren’t included in the warrant, Mary Gadbury, Goody Waterman and other disciples insisted on appearing before the justices to support the accused. Goody Waterman, whom Ellis described as “a very talkative woman”, insisted on addressing the Justices. One told her to stand further back, “saying her breath did stink”. She snapped back, saying, that her “breath was the breath of the Lord.”

William and Mary were sent to prison to await trial on charges of bigamy. While they were in jail together, “great multitudes of persons from divers places” came to visit them and left convinced that William was the Messiah. Eventually William and Mary were released and disappeared from history.

Many who met William said they experienced the “Visions, Revelations and Voyces”. Ellis said that if they were genuine, they came from Satan. Considering the prolonged history of wet harvests, ergot might have been a contributing factor. They were all going off on LSD trips.

William Woodward was thrown out of his living in Crux Easton but later became vicar of Trottiscliffe in Kent. Shortly after the Restoration, he had his living taken from him. The parishioners alleged that when one of them tried to give him a copy of the Book of Common Prayer to read in Church, he told him to keep his book and stop his breech with it, and when one of them accused him of denying Christ and setting up a ropemaker to be his Saviour and the Son of God, Woodward told him that William Franklin was a better Saviour than he would ever have.