102 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
Muggleton was only three years old when his 
mother Mary died in June 1612, and his father 
remarried. Gordon did not discover any more about 
his formative years, than Muggleton himself 
provided in The Acts of the Witnesses, in which he 
merely noted that after his mother died: 
I being but young, my Father took another Wife, so I 
being young was Expos’d to live with Strangers in the 
Country, at a distance from all my Kindred... But it 
came to pass when I was grown to 15 or 16 Years of age, 
I was put Apprentice to one John Quick, a Taylor. . .”’ 
Thus he returned, as an apprentice, to the 
Bishopsgate area of London as a young man, and 
by 1631 he was working as a journeyman to 
William Reeve. He would doubtless have got to 
know John at this time, but the two do not seem to 
have formed a close bond for about another twenty 
years. 
According to Muggleton’s account the Reeve 
family came from Wiltshire, and the father, Walter 
Reeve, was described as a gentleman and ‘clerk toa 
deputy of Ireland’, of a good family that had fallen 
into decay. In the D.N.B. Gordon repeated the 
information that both William and John (1608- 
1658) were born in Wiltshire, again probably taking 
The Acts of the Witnesses as his source.*’ A search of 
the North Wiltshire baptismal records of the period 
has located numerous members of a Reeve’s family 
in the parishes of Chippenham and Calne, 
including a John Henry Reeve who was baptised in 
St Andrew’s Church, Chippenham in January 1607/ 
8.*! This is tantalisingly close to the presumed facts 
of John Reeve’s birth, but unfortunately this John’s 
father was Henry not Walter, so either he was not 
Muggleton’s associate or Muggleton is mistaken 
about the identity of John’s father. As Muggleton’s 
information on his siblings is questionable it begs 
the question, if John came from the Chippenham 
area and Walter was not his father, perhaps he or 
John embellished the Reeve parentage to impress 
their followers? 
Like Lodowick, John had arrived from the 
country to be apprenticed to the tailoring trade, 
with his elder brother, in Bishopsgate, London, 
where Muggleton’s father and siblings also lived. 
The brothers were said to be Puritans originally but 
‘fell away’ to the Ranters around 1645. This was 
alleged to be the ruin of William, who apparently 
neglected his business, took to drink, and subsisted 
on charity. John came under the influence of the so- 
called Ranter’s God John Robins, and became a 
universalist.*” 
Spiritually Muggleton became a zealous 
Puritan, and remained so until the conditions of 
church life began to be remodelled. He refused to 
accept the new discipline of Presbyterianism, 
which Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Godwin and 
others were denouncing as engendering religious 
despondency.** In Hobbes’s view Presbyterian 
ministers: 
brought young men into despair and to think 
themselves damned because they could not (which 
no man can, and is contrary to the constitution of 
nature) behold a beautiful object without delight.** 
Neither could Muggleton accept the close 
fellowship of the Independents and in 1647 he 
withdrew from all worship to live ‘an honest and 
natural life’ as an agnostic. Many of his 
acquaintances were also coming to the conclusion 
that ‘there is no God but nature only’.* By 1650 he 
had read translations of Jacob Boehme’s works and 
been attracted by the teachings of the Ranter 
prophet John Robins and the fanatical Thomas 
Tany. For the next year or so he experienced 
scriptural revelations and, according to Gordon 
‘infected’ John Reeve with his views (although 
Reeve had been exploring alternative religious 
notions since coming under the influence of Robins 
in 1645). In February 1651/2 Reeve announced that 
he too had received a personal communication from 
God, appointing him as the messenger of a new 
dispensation with Muggleton as his ‘mouth’. The 
two identified themselves as the witnesses, foretold 
in the Book of Revelation, of a new system of faith 
with the authority to pronounce on the eternal fate 
of individuals, and their sect was born. They 
developed their beliefs along different lines from 
Robins and Tany to the extent that they passed a 
sentence of eternal damnation on Robins, in 1652, 
while he was imprisoned in the Bridewell at 
Clerkenwell. 
Although they came to be known as the 
Muggletonians, there is still debate regarding the 
inspiration for the sect, and if it might have 
developed differently but for Reeve’s early death in 
1658. The pair did not entirely agree on their 
movement’s place within the religious milieu, as 
Reeve sympathised with many of the tenets of 
Quakerism, a stance that Muggleton did not share. 
Some of his adherents kept aloof from Muggleton 
and were known as Reevites or Reevonians. 
Gordon’s interpretation, in the D.N.B., that it was 
Muggleton who had the earliest revelations and 
subsequently ‘infected’ Reeve, was based largely on 
