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Anna Keay Biography

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“For decades, indeed centuries, the English legal system had been decried for its unfairness. The lists of its short-comings varied, but most included the sheer time it took to resolve any case and the eye-watering cost in lawyers' fees of legal action. This indefinite imprisonment of debtors and the power of the central courts in London were also causes for repeated complaint, as was the fact that the law was a closed shop, conducted in Latin and French, to the absolute exclusion of non-professionals.”

“It was not to be a blunt instrument of instruction, but something subtler. Humour and satire were to be its methos. 'It must be written in a jocular way,' he explained; to sway the opinions of the 'multitude' required not disputation, but amusement and 'phantasie' that would delight and charm.”

“There appeared before her eyes the figure of Oliver Cromwell, in the guise of the Old Testament military leader Gideon, going into the Commons Chamber and demanding the resignation of the Speaker and the end of the assembly: 'I saw suddenly a departure of them, though they were very loath thereunto.' When, four days later, news reached the Hillingdon vicarage that exactly these events had just occurred in London, Anna's friends were thunderstruck. She was not mad. God himself was speaking through her.”

“... she had foreseen the New Model Army's occupation of London in the tense weeks before Charles I was tried. Two years after that she had experienced a further trance and this time saw an army on the battlefield, led by a figure of valour and courage, God indicating that 'Oliver Cromwell, then Lord General, was that Gideon'. Cromwell's defeat of the Scots at the battle of Dunbar soon afterwards offered Anna confirmation of the truth of her visions.”

“As soon as the edifice of the knowledge of the ancients had been shaken in the minds of the most inquisitive, questions upon questions arose which now demanded technology, including -- crucially -- the invention of the telescope and the microscope, enabling a generation of scholars to see clearly things which had been absolutely invisible to their forefathers. It was a thrilling, and dangerous, time to be alive.”