How a rogue priest’s sex cult went unexposed for decades

In A Very British Cult, Stuart Flinders tells – but frustratingly does not analyse – the grimly fascinating story of the Agapemonites

Telegraph, UK/October 21, 2024

By Catherine Pepinster

If you’re a reader of 19th-century literature, you’ve probably rifled through the footnotes at times to find out what now-obscure words mean. One word that crops up in the works of Dickens and occasionally as late as the 1930s is “Agapemone”. In one 1939 newspaper report for example, it’s used to describe the then foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, surrounded by six women while lunching at the Ritz. In Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End novels, it hints at something darker. “This whole war was an Agapemone,” the character Sylvia Tietjens, tells her husband. “You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women.”

But it was first used in the 1840s to describe a religious community in Somerset – also known as the Abode of Love – which was founded by a rogue Anglican priest, Henry James Prince. As Stuart Flinders tells us in A Very British Cult, the majority of Prince’s followers were young women, many of them prosperous. Prince presented himself to them as the voice of God, demanded absolute obedience and promised an instant passage – without death – to heaven.

In turn, many of his followers donated large sums of money. Among those enticed were three sisters from the Nottidge family, who each pledged the then vast sum of £6,000, to be put towards a luxurious mansion for Prince and his followers. (They were also told to marry Prince’s loyal lieutenants). Prince’s successor, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, who had similar charms, declared himself the Christ.

Unsurprisingly, rumours of these happenings, as well as the court cases brought forward by relatives, whetted the appetite of the press. Newspapers were amused by the Agapemonites’s billiard table, installed in their Somerset chapel, and the obsession with playing hockey that seemed to take over followers. Even Punch mocked Agapemonites about their mysterious fixation on money.

Then there were journalists who were entranced by the group’s London church, called the Ark of the Covenant, designed in Gothic style for Smyth-Pigott. John Betjeman swooned about it in The Spectator in 1956, declaring the Agapemonites as “good, gentle people, much maligned”. But the Abode of Love was actually neither amusing, nor harmless, as Betjeman seemed to imply. Ford Madox Ford was closer to the real story, with his character’s comment about rape.

Thanks to Stuart Flinders’s investigations, we are now nearer the truth. In A Very British Cult, he has used contemporaneous news reports, court records and family memoirs to piece together the full story of how first Prince and then Smyth-Pigott dragooned women followers into sex with them. There were allegations that Prince even had sex in the Abode of Love chapel, with one of the women living there, in front of his followers, pronouncing that this was the Holy Spirit taking flesh.

What would have improved A Very British Cult is more analysis. Words like “sect” and “cult” are used frequently, but are lacking the benefit of definitions from, for example, the work of psychologists, or even sociologist experts in cults. Certainly for those of us who have reported on religious cults, the Agapemone has many familiar characteristics, particularly the leader’s unquestioned authority, the submission of followers, especially women, and their separation from their families.

It’s not clear either why this volume is called A Very British Cult. After all, the Agapemone spread to the United States and Scandinavia and its obsessions typify religious cults all over the world. Nor is the authorities’ failure to act typically British either: again, this failure is international. The most British aspect of this tale, if anything, is the relentlessness of the press in trying to expose Prince and Smyth-Pigott. They never really laid a final punch: once Smyth-Pigott died in 1927, the Agapemonites faded into relative obscurity, the last follower dying in 1956.

Flinders has done readers a service in digging out this mostly forgotten but engrossing tale. It’s not only grimly fascinating to read how individuals can seduce others, financially, sexually and spiritually, but it also exposes one reality of many Victorian women’s lives. Several of those mentioned here were trapped: they either did what they were told by Prince or Smyth-Pigott, or by their parents or husbands, who ordered them home. Liberty was not for them.

To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here.