English Works

Lesson 2: Admirable and undesirable characters

The Reverend Mompellion: becomes a worthy leader during the bubonic plague

Please see pages 99 – 105.

Initially, Mompellion’s leadership qualities become a beacon to the suffering villagers in the quarantined city of Eyam, which is defined by the “boundary stone”.

Brooks depicts Mompellion as a worthy role model who rises to the challenge and who provides an admirable contrast to the Cromwellian Puritans who resort to self-destructive tendencies. Seeing the plague as a symbolic “casket of gold”, Mompellion leads by example and exposes himself to danger. He exhorts the villagers to be resilient and so prove that they can withstand God’s test. Essentially, he is their pillar of strength

Mompellion uses the metaphor of the transformation of metals through burning to capture what he sees as the true test of the plague, which is, Christ-like, to return God’s love rather than to see it as a “punishment for our sins” (103) .

“Like the ore that must be melted all to liquid to find the pure metal, so must we be rendered in the fiery furnace of this disease. And as the smith tends his furnace all through the night if need t, to secure the valuable ore within, so is God here, near to us, hearer perhaps that He has ever come, or ever will come, in all our lives”. (102)

“If his Son had endured sufferings “for our sake”, then “were we not bound to return this love to our fellow humans”. Even to lay down our own lives, if that was what God asked of us?” He believes that this “venom in the blood” is one of the most terrible things (its boils and its blains and its great carbuncles. Grim Death, the King of Terrors that marches at its heels.” (102) He uses the analogy of the “smith” who tends his furnace all through the night, to suggest that God is near and, “nearer perhaps than He has ever come, or ever will come in all our lives.” He challenges those who would flee, and perhaps spread the plague, to stay and endure, and “accept this Cross”. “Let us carry it in God’s Holy Name!”

Alluding to a narrative of revenge, Mompellion alludes to the radical puritans who, during the Black Death, preyed upon “troubled souls”. They exploited the crisis in order to gather followers and supporters.  He further explains: “There have been times when, in mobs, they have laid blame for the Plague on the sins of others – Jews, many times.”   “I have read of how in foreign cities they put hundreds of such innocents to death by fire.” As they become ever more desperate, the self-flagellants despair of assuaging God’s wrath and look for convenient scapegoats among themselves.  Puritans such as Urith and John Gordon and Lib Hancock are part of the surging “mob” that hysterically labels Anys as a ‘whore, and ‘fornicator’.