Davies, Eleanor

Eleanor Davies (née Touchet; later Douglas; also Audley) (1590–1652) believed herself to be a messenger from the biblical prophet Daniel following a visionary call in 1625. Her eccentric character and aristocratic origins made her an odd case as a woman prophet, since she did not align herself with any dissenting group in the early and mid-decades of the seventeenth century. A prolific writer of some seventy tracts, she combined an apocalyptic vision of British political history with autobiographical episodes of her eventful life and appeals to civil disobedience. With her idiosyncratic style combining scriptural exegesis, scathing commentary, and anagrams, she predicted the death of her first husband, the rise of Parliament and the New Model Army, and the execution of Charles I. Her writings were printed without a license, first in Amsterdam and later in London. She distributed them herself, but her fierce attacks against the authority and corruption of the Church of England earned her the opposition of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, who ordered the destruction of some of Davies’s early pamphlets and sentenced her to prison for two years. Thanks to a petition to the king issued by Davies’s daughter Lucy Hastings in 1633, she was released from prison. She was jailed again in late 1636 for bursting into Lichfield Cathedral with a group of women followers and desecrating the altar. She was confined to Bedlam’s prison and her reputation as a “mad” woman writer was consolidated while she continued to publish in the 1640s during the ease in censorship restrictions. Davies predicted the execution of Archbishop Laud in 1645 and the regicide in 1649, which reinforced her prophetic mission in writing until her death in 1652.