In the Stocks: Reflections on a Proud Family Tradition
by Kevin Annett
I’m the same age now that my free-thinking ancestor Peter Annett was when, late in 1761, the British Crown locked him away. Old Pete’s ‘offense’ was to challenge the doctrines of the Church of England in his rabble-rousing newspaper The Free Enquirer. The Attorney-General called that ‘blasphemous libel’ and sentenced him to a year at hard labor. But first Peter had to be made a public example of, as a warning to others.
Sound familiar?
There was no internet back then, naturally, so the best way to humiliate and denigrate a dissident was by bolting him into the public stocks for everyone to mock and spit at. Pete was stuck in the pillory at Charing Cross in London for two days, where foes and former friends alike jeered and tossed garbage, rocks, and shit at him.
Next, Peter’s sixty-eight-year-old frame was dragged to the dank recesses of Bridewell Prison in London where you only ate if you paid for the food and tipped your jailer.
One of the scumbags who had put him there came to gloat. He was Thomas Sherlock, the Anglican Bishop of London, and a member of King George’s Privy Council.
Apparently, Thomas told Peter that he was the author of his own ruin. Pete replied by calling the churchman an “impotent poltroon” and saying that it was better to be a free man in prison than a Bishop in hell. That remark tacked another six months onto Pete’s sentence.
Despite all that, the tough free thinker beat the odds. Peter Annett endured Bridewell prison and emerged ‘broken in body but not in spirit’, according to one biographer. And to prove it, Pete immediately resumed publishing The Free Enquirer and, cheeky-monkey style, posted a copy of it on Bishop Sherlock’s Lambeth Palace door.
You just can’t keep a good guy down when he refuses to die.
I’ve been thinking of Peter a lot these days, and not just because of the eerie similarity of our actions, personalities, and enemies. Our lives are ending up the same, even though the stocks and prisons are different.
The Church and State are a lot more adept now at defaming and erasing people like Peter and me without having to stomp us physically, although that does happen. Instead, the thoughts of those around us are simply rearranged. The rebel and his cause are expunged from public consciousness and memory or made to be feared, hated, and avoided, thanks to the cybertechnology that now monitors and runs the thoughts of most of humanity.
Free will and free thinking? They’re pretty much gone, for now at least.
Strangely, and as much as I experience this Orwellian horror every day, it doesn’t really bother me. Being an exile in my own land and a veteran of a lot of battles has taught me not only endurance but the long view. It’s been enough to have “exposed the hidden works of darkness, and driven falsity to the bottomless pit”, to quote Peter. For, as he wrote just before his death in a London poorhouse at the age of seventy-six,
“The beauty of true understanding is more durable than what age withers and more radiant than what circumstance destroys. Reason, wisdom, and virtue are the attributes of divine nature and the birthright of every free man and woman.”
For many years now I’ve carried with me the only surviving copy of Peter Annett’s Free Enquirer. Its fading brown pages bind me to the great river that led from him to me and will carry on long after I’m dust: a restorative water from which I drink each day. Even as insanity and unreason grips our world, I am reminded by Peter that,
“Reason is a divine faculty; it is the divinity operating within us; it is God incarnate … Why then do you not judge for yourselves what is right, as Jesus admonishes in Luke 12:57? Why must you be told everything? You are all taught naturally by God; why then look to any man or to wicked priest craft to save you? The man who has discovered his own mind has found the means to shatter the chains he wears.”
I honored my ancestor last year by writing a play about him, entitled Judging for Ourselves. (Amazon.com: Judging for Ourselves: The Witness of Peter Annett: 9798853045781: Annett, Kevin: Books) It’s mostly a one-man performance, set in Peter’s cell in Bridewell prison. In more ways than one, the play is a mirror of my own tale.
In one scene, as Peter is expounding his thoughts, a food riot erupts outside his window, and the sound of shots and peoples’ screams. In outrage, Peter yells out the window,
“Just feed them, you stupid bastards! All they want is bread! (turning to the audience) Ah! All my words! All my appeals to reason. What do they weigh against the power of evil in this world, the oppression of the few over the many? The same men who condemned me are ordering their dragoons to fire and hack into those starving women and children! Those families are just penniless farmers and laborers thrown out of their homes by bishops and bankers hungry for their land!
When I was a clergyman, I sat with those poor people in their hovels and tried to comfort them. Again and again they asked me, ‘Pastor, when will Christ return to free us? How long should we forgive those who starve and beat us?’ What could I tell them? The truth was, I had nothing to say to them. But it was they who finally made me see who I was, there, in my snug pulpit. I was a servant of the power that was killing them.
I was licensed by the Crown to laudanum the poor with religion and false promises so they would die content in their yokes.
But the lie ended for me and I left the false church. Those starving people are still my congregation, but the streets are my pulpit now. My sermons are my appeals to their reason that I post as broadsheets in Stepney and Whitechapel. I am tearing down the religious fraud and superstition that chains the minds of the poor. Once their thoughts are free, they will liberate their lives and end this tyranny themselves! So it surprises me not a whit that I am so hated by those of Crown and Pulpit who feed off the peoples’ miserable serfdom!”
As one writer observed about Peter,
“Annett was more of a proselytizer than a scholar. He yearned to reach the multitudes of London with his writings. He was the first English Deist to address the man and woman in the streets rather than the effete aristocrats of Voltaire’s parlors, and he called on the people to throw off their mental subservience. The particular severity of the sentence imposed on Peter Annett by the Attorney-General reflected the ire he aroused in the ruling classes by his message and his direct approach to the masses.”
I’ve tried to get Judging for Ourselves produced, but like my other play The Land of No-One, about medical genocide in Canada, every theater group I’ve approached has quickly declined it. Maybe my name was enough to dissuade them, considering that it’s on a list of proscribed authors in Canada.
Peter had the same dilemma as me after he left prison. He was increasingly shunned and impoverished, but he kept his pride and dignity. When someone offered him the job of composing a grammar book but only if he used a pseudonym, Peter refused. He had no reason to be ashamed of his name.
Perhaps one day in an unimaginable future one of my presently banned books will be discovered by someone browsing through an antiquarian bookstore, if such things still exist, just as fate brought me to find Peter Annett’s faded volume. For as Peter exclaims in the ending scene of Judging for Ourselves,
“Some part of me may yet still survive! Pray that its seed will fall on good soil.”
May it be so, pillories and prisons be damned.
Peter Annett (1693-1769)
