Free Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise

gambling and debauchery of his fellow Guardsmen. They in turn ribbed him about his piety, seriousness and love of solitude.
    His Portuguese adventure taught him a dislike of parliamentary politics. In Mr Perceval’s view, the Duke of Wellington had sold thePortuguese into the hands of a despot, King Dom Miguel I, for selfish, tactical reasons: ‘I felt . . . that we had been made fools and tools of . . . the blind instrument of power. My last attachment to the Tory party, and to the pride of being an Englishman, were then severed. I had thought my country upright, noble and generous, and that party honest and honourable. I now despised the one, and began to hate and fear the other.’ Such experiences forged within him an odd combination of radical and conservative: an acutely snobbish lover of the oppressed; a generous friend to the outcast who expressed contempt for those without aristocratic breeding; a very kind and exquisitely sensitive autocrat.
    From Portugal, his regiment was sent to Dublin, and while his colleagues carried on roystering and rogering, Mr Perceval set up a Scripture study class. He found both Dublin society and the Irish poor far more interested in and respectful of religion than the English of all classes; and when he returned to his mother country to begin studies at Oxford, he worried that the irreligious attitudes he saw everywhere would tempt him into wickedness. He wanted a wife, but met few eligible women during his studies; in his spare time, he mingled only with other serious young men and they would pore over the Bible together. He often fasted, and now began to wake himself at intervals during the night in order to pray – to ‘watch’. Sometimes on these nights, he would have visions, and he noticed that they were often prophetic, but that the events foretold by the visions would feature certain discrepancies when they did come to pass. He began to believe that it was some disobedience within him which had led to his prophetic visions containing inaccuracies. ‘You do not understand this, my reader – nor do I,’ he would later write. ‘Suffice it to say, I was expecting the fulfilment of the divine prophecies concerning the end of the world, or the coming of the Lord.’ He could see no reason for the non-fulfilment, except that his soul was lacking faith.
    His brother Spencer, and their good friend, Henry Drummond – banker, politician, economist and historian – had also been seeking a more satisfying religious experience and had become involved with the Irvingites, who had one of their bases at the Clydeside town of Row. The ‘Row Heresy’, or the ‘Row Miracles’, as their activities were variously called, of the late 1820s had involved healing, prophecy, automatic writing and ‘speaking in tongues’, and when John travelled to Row, he, too, fell in with the sect. One afternoon, at luncheon at the house ofa believer, one of the ‘inspired ladies’ left the table and called John out of the room. She led him into the drawing room, and with her arm raised and moving rhythmically, she exclaimed, ‘Hola mi hastos, Hola mi hastos, disca capita crustos bustos.’ John asked her what it meant and she said she didn’t know because the Holy Spirit was addressing him directly through her. ‘I could not help being awed,’ John wrote: ‘the sounds, the tone, the action were most impressive . . . I thought I recognized the marvellous work of the Almighty.’ (It turned out that it meant ‘Tarry ye not in Jerusalem’.) Before long, he too was channelling the Holy Spirit, and ‘opening my mouth, sang in beautiful tones words of purity, kindness and consolation . . . the words, the ideas even, were wholly unthought of by me, or at least, I was unconscious of thinking of them . . . The voice was given me, but I was not the master of it.’ He would throw his head back, and hear the beautiful sounds sailing up out of his throat. ‘I now attribute this