861J Martha Simmonds [Simmons; née Calvert] (1625-1665)
A lamentation for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. With an invitation to have them turn in their mindes to the true shepherd of their soules. ALSO, something in discovery of the nakedness of all professions, who are found in the words without the life and power. Written by one of the children of the Light, who is known to the world by the name of Martha Simmonds, [sic]
London : printed for Giles Calvert, at the Black spread Eagle neer the west end of Pauls, 1656 Price: $Sold
Martha (Calvert) Simmonds was probably born January 1624. She was the younger sister of the booksellers George and Giles Calvert. Giles’s shop at the Black Spread Eagle in St Paul’s Churchyard, London, which was the leading outlet for the works of early Quakers.
Martha Simmonds, in this, all but hidden, book emphatically demonstrates how The Anglican Church are the lost sheep of Israel and how ‘The children of light” will expose the evil acts of profits and ministers and render them with more than words.
In 1656, England was awash in radical voices—Quakers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists—all challenging Cromwell’s fragile religious settlement. Among them was Martha Simmonds (née Calvert), one of the most outspoken early Quaker women. Her pamphlet Lost Sheep (London, 1656) may read today as a torrent of contradictions and prophetic “ranting,” but in its own moment it carried the urgent cadence of biblical prophecy. Drawing on the language of Ezekiel and John, she denounced “hireling” ministers as wolves and cast the Quakers as Christ’s true flock. That she dared to speak in print at all—claiming the authority of Christ’s own voice—was extraordinary for a woman in mid-seventeenth-century England, and her words stand as a rare survival of female prophetic authorship from the Interregnum.
I am sure that this pamphlet while published in three editions, was hardly popular and most copies destroyed.
Bernadette Smith, The Testimony of Martha Simmonds (2008) writes: “Perhaps the reason for the continued hiddenness of the early Quaker women’s writings is the failure of successive generations to question both the structure and nature of theological discourse, which has excluded women. Martha Simmonds has been among this hidden group of women for four centuries and I hope to present her as one of a group of Quaker women who were able to consolidate their mission through the utilisation of, and engagement with, the contemporary cultures of print, religious discourse and apocalyptic preaching which made them unique as a group, if not unprecedented.
The Last decade of Marth’s life was one of religious turmoil. Martha moved to London to live with her brother and was converted to Quakerism in about 1654, and wrote several pamphlets about her new faith, three of which were published by her brother Giles Calvert: When the Lord Jesus Came to Jerusalem 1655 ½ sheet One UK copy two variations. (2); A Lamentation for the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel 1655 Haverford, 1655 , 1656 Ucla & Lib Co. of Philad (3); and O England, thy Time is Come Haverford. [for a total of 7 publications represented in fewer than 20 copies]
As soon as a year after her conversion Martha was very active and by December 1655 she had been imprisoned several times in Colchester for interrupting church services and walking through the town in sackcloth and ashes. In about 1655 she married Thomas Simmonds who had recently returned to London after several years as a bookseller in Birmingham. In March 1655 the Quakers established the Bull and Mouthas their main London meeting place, where Thomas opened his bookshop; he became their principal publisher the following year. But Martha Simmonds was interpretation of Quakerism was a situational one, and Almost a performative expression of an individual relation with God . Martha and other women began in 1656 to interrupt Quaker meetings led by Francis Howgilland Edward Burrough, singing and chanting “innocency”. Some male Quakers considered her a witch. H. Larry Ingle argues that “she was certainly a powerful woman, a fact that helps explain the degree of opposition to her.” According to Ingle one of the problems was that like many Quakers “she spoke in a language that could not be read literally but was peppered with metaphors and images that had meaning to her but to few others…. it is easy to see how her enemies – and she had many in and outside the Children of the Light – could consider her a witch.”
Bernadette Smith, has attempted to recover Simmonds’ reputation in her article The Testimony of Martha Simmonds (2008). Smith argues that male writers have constantly referred to Simmonds as a”‘possible witch”, a “Ranterish woman”. Smith quotes Andrew W. Brink sees Simmonds as the “model for Eve and compares Eve’s supposed deception of Adam to Simmonds’ part in Nayler’s downfall… Simmonds: would not leave him (Nayler) alone in London or in Bristol, following him… much as Satan tracked Eve until he (Satan) implanted the self-destructive idea of becoming a goddess.”
Scarce and fragile, Lost Sheep survives today in only a handful of institutional copies (Wing S3792), a reminder of how easily such prophetic voices could have been silenced or destroyed. This pamphlet stands out among seventeenth-century Quaker pamphlets, and it offers a vital glimpse into the intersection of gender, prophecy, and radical religion under the Protectorate. Martha Simmonds’ words—fiery, contradictory, and insistent—capture the unsettling power of female authorship in a world where women’s voices were expected to remain silent.
Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States: Wing S3792 Log.2318.Q.
Primary Copy
University of California, Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
New ESTC Beta R184168, Wing S3792
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