Theaurau John Tany

Theaurau John Tany (baptised Thomas Totney; 21 January 1608 - 1659) was an English preacher and religious visionary.

Early activities

Totney was born at South Hykeham, near Lincoln, the third, but eldest surviving, son of John Totney and Anne, née Snelle. His father, although a poor farmer and never of the parish elite, was a respectable member of the local community. Nothing is known of Thomas's education.

Goldsmithery In April 1626, Totney was bound as an apprentice in London to a fishmonger but was not taught his trade, instead receiving instruction in his master's adopted profession of goldsmith. On receiving his freedom, he married a daughter of Richard Kett, a prosperous Norfolk landowner, whose great-uncle had been executed as leader of the 1549 East Anglian rebellion. While his former surname may have been vocalised as Tawtney, his new last name was usually pronounced Tawney. Because he had a speech impediment he may have dropped the consonant. In addition, he appropriated a coat of arms; "azure, three bars argent surmounted by the crest a hind's head erased, gules, ducally gorged, or". This device, based on that of the de Tany family, appears on several of his works. Furthermore, he declared himself ‘a Jew of the Tribe of Reuben’ and took the titles High Priest and Recorder to the thirteen Tribes of the Jews. Tany justified his claims by inventing a fantastic genealogy that traced his descent from Aaron, brother of Moses, through the tribe of Judah and by way of the ten tribes of Israel, the Tartars and the Welsh. He also circumcised himself.

Thereafter, believing he had been given the gift of tongues with which to preach the everlasting gospel of God's light and love to all nations, he went forth armed with sword and word. Crying vengeance in the streets of London, he declared woe and destruction upon the city, prophesying that the ‘Earth shall burn as an Oven’ and all the proud, the wicked and the ‘ungodly shall be as stubble to this flame’. Drawing on the potent image of Christ as goldsmith, purging dross and corruption in a furnace, Tany forged his prophetic identity – the messenger foretold by Malachi. He claimed his authority rested with the one who sent him, God: but who may abide the day of his appearing? for he is like fullers sope, a refiners fire.

Jewish millenarianism Insisting that the restitution of the Jews was at hand and that he had been sent forth to gather them and proclaim ‘Israels return’, Tany set about enacting a millenarian mission to restore the Jews to their own land. In the manner of the children of Israel before him, he began living in a tent, perhaps modelled upon the tabernacle, which he decorated with a symbol representing the tribe of Judah. He preached in the parks and fields around London and gathered a handful of followers. His message was strong, denouncing the clergy as ‘diabolical dumb dogs, Tythe-mongers’, who fleece rather than succour the people.

As their own accounts of the trial's proceedings make clear, the defendants adamantly maintained that their words had been misrepresented, altered and taken out of context. Even so, on 13 August 1651, they were convicted jointly of blasphemy by a jury of twelve men at the London sessions of the peace held in the Old Bailey. They were each sentenced to six months imprisonment in Newgate gaol without bail or mainprise.

Appeals On 27 October 1651, legal proceedings were initiated in the Court of Upper Bench appealing the verdict. After several sessions the case was deferred until the next law term. More hearings followed. On 4 February 1652, Tany appeared before the Court. A London tailor named John Reeve claimed that the same morning God revealed to him that he had been chosen as the Lord's ‘last messenger’. Reeve and his cousin Lodowick Muggleton, a freeman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, announced themselves to be ‘the two Witnesses of the Spirit’ foretold in the Revelation of Saint John. In addition, they denounced Tany as a ‘counterfeit high Priest’ and pretended prophet, marking him as a Ranter, the spawn of Cain. A few days later, the judges of the Upper Bench made their judgement: Lord Chief Justice Rolle washed his hands of the business. On 16 February 1652, Tany and Norwood, having served their sentence, were each released on £100 bail pending good behaviour for one year. Thomas Totney's former master and another man, later described as a goldsmith, provided sureties. In Easter term Norwood initiated a new legal appeal. After several hearings the judges deferred proceedings until the following law term. On 28 June 1652, they reversed the guilty judgement against Norwood and Tany, resolving that their opinions had been made to rigidly conform to the strictures of the Blasphemy Act. For, whereas the Act made it unlawful to maintain that ‘there is neither Heaven nor Hell, neither Salvation nor Damnation’, the defendants who affirmed that: there is ‘no Hell nor Damnation’, are not within the Statute, for tho by Implication if there be no Hell there is no Heaven, yet the court is not to Expand these words by Implication but according to the Letters of the Stat[ute].

Resumption of activities and second name change Within a month of his release, Tany published a pamphlet he had written in Newgate entitled High Priest to the IEVVES, HIS Disputive challenge to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the whole Hirach. of Roms Clargical Priests (March 1652). Echoing Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Tany proclaimed the return of ‘Israels Seed’ from captivity. About 1 January 1653, it appears from his own account that Tany underwent another purificatory ritual. He refrained from speaking for thirty-four days, isolating himself for twenty-one of them. On the fourteenth day he transcribed an edict to ‘all the Jewes the whole earth over’, which was to be engraved in brass and sent to the synagogue in Amsterdam. He signed this proclamation "Theauroam Tannijahhh, King of the seven Nations, and Captain General under my Master Jehovah, and High-Priest and Leader of the Peoples unto HIERUSALEM". Together with some other material, it was issued by an unknown publisher under the title HIGH NEWS FOR HIERUSALEM (no date). It exasperated one reader, who complained ‘truly I skill not the man, nor his spirit; in his writing he offends against all rules of Grammar, Geography, Genealogy, History, Chronology, Theology & c, so far as I understand them’.

In March 1654 a list of some thirty ‘Grand Blasphemers and Blasphemies’ was submitted to the Committee for Religion, which included: XIX. A Goldsmith that did live in the Strand, and after in the City, and then at Eltham; who called his name Theaurau John Tany, the High Priest, & c. Published in Print, That all Religion is a lie, a deceit, and a cheat.

Climax of claims

Claims of divine power Writing from ‘the Tent of Judah’ on the ‘Tenth DAY NISAN’ (probably 16 April 1654), Tany addressed a millenarian epistle ‘Unto his Brethren the QUAKERS scornfully so called, who ARE the Children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; who ARE circumcised in Heart’. He saluted them as descendants of the Jewish race, an elect remnant who spoke a pure language and trembled at the word of God. On 8 May 1654, he issued an edict to all ‘earthen men and women’ announcing that he would shortly proclaim the Law and Gospel from his tent standing in the bounds of the Middle Park at Eltham, Kent. On 8 June 1654, he read out a speech in which he laid claim to the crowns of France, Rome, Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem, as well as reaffirming an earlier claim to the crown of England. He did this by repeating Pontius Pilate’s reply to the chief priests of the Jews after Pilate had written ‘JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS’ as the title to be put on Christ's cross: What I have written, I have written.

Assault on Parliament On the morning of Saturday, 30 December 1654, in the week that Cromwell was offered the crown, Tany made a large fire at Lambeth into which he cast his great saddle, sword, musket, pistols, books and bible. He crossed the River Thames in a rowing boat and made his way to Parliament, ascending the stairs into the lobby outside the door. Unable to deliver a petition he departed, returning after about an hour oddly attired with a long, rusty sword by his side. Pacing up and down the lobby he threw off his cloak and began slashing wildly, but was disarmed before anyone was hurt. He was brought to the bar of the House and questioned by the Speaker. He refused to remove his hat, was evidently mistaken for a Quaker and committed to the Gatehouse prison. Having been examined by the Committee for regulating printing, he wrote to the Speaker requesting liberty to have an audience with Cromwell. He then attached a great lock and long chain to his leg as a symbol of ‘the people of Englands Captivity’. Legal proceedings were transferred to the Court of Upper Bench, but on 10 February 1655 he was bailed upon habeas corpus.

Two days later a fire broke out in Fleet Street. In the following months, London was engulfed by several more unexplained fires which were interpreted as a sign of the impending destruction of the world. Eventually an arsonist was apprehended who may have been in the pay of William Finch, one of Tany's disciples.

Final years In September 1655, after weeks of heavy rain and widespread floods, Tany ‘in one of his old whimsies’ pitched his tent in the large tract of open ground between Lambeth Marsh and Southwark known as St George's Fields. A satirical newsbook writer thought him ‘a madman’, fitter ‘for Bedlam then a Tent’. Sometime after 16 June 1656, Tany set sail. He crossed the English Channel and at an unknown date arrived in the United Provinces, perhaps to gather the Jews of Amsterdam. Some three years later, now calling himself Ram Johoram, he was reported lost, drowned after taking passage in a ship from Brill bound for London. He was survived by his eldest daughter and probably also a second daughter and second son.

Evaluation Tany's writings embrace currents of magic and mysticism, alchemy and astrology, numerology and angelology, Neoplatonism and gnosticism, hermeticism and Christian Cabbala. His sources were varied, although they seem to have included almanacs, popular prophecies, and legal treatises, as well as The Testament of the Twelve Patriarches, the Sonnes of Jacob (1647), Jacob Boehme's A Description of the Three Principles of the Divine Essence (English translation, 1648) and Mercurius Teutonicus (1649), Theologica Germanica, or, Mysticall Divinitie (1648), Paracelsus of the Nature of Things (1650), Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1650), and Menasseh ben Israel's The Hope of Israel (1650). Tany had a few loyal followers but he failed to found a sect.