A Canadian Visionary

Henry Wentworth Monk was born in 1827 on a farm along the Ottawa River in the community of March, Upper Canada (present-day Kanata), on land that had been awarded to his father, Captain John Benning Monk, by the British government in recognition of military service during the Napoleonic Wars. Monk’s godfather, Hamnett Pinhey of March, a governor of the Blue Coat School, or Christ’s Hospital, in London, arranged for Monk to attend the strict Protestant school from age seven to fifteen. This experience left Monk with a strong identification with the exiled.

Returning to March in 1842, he no longer fit into rural pioneer life. He tried studying for the Anglican ministry, but became disillusioned after a year by the strict adherence to church doctrine and lack of interest in searching for “the truth.” Raised on the Old Testament, he was fascinated by prophesies regarding the return of the Jews to Palestine. Over the next five years, while working on the farm, he studied the Book of Revelation and travelled to the United States where he encountered religious movements that stressed the importance of the rebirth of Israel.

Toward the end of 1852, believing himself divinely inspired, Monk began writing a book in which he analyzed world problems and proposed solutions. He went to Palestine in 1853, working his passage as a common sailor, and settled in an agricultural colony in the Valley of Ourtass near Bethlehem. Meshullam, a wealthy Jewish convert, had founded the colony around 1850 as part of his goal to reconcile Jews and Christians. Monk took a vow of poverty and decided not to shave his beard or cut his hair until the Jews were restored to Palestine.

One morning toward midsummer 1854, as Monk set out before dawn carrying a lantern to work among the fruit trees, he saw two men ride up to Meshullam’s house, one of whom was Holman Hunt. Hunt never forgot the moment when he “first caught sight of Monk stepping through a gateway in Meshullam’s garden, carrying a light, and wrapped in profound meditation. That slender figure, with flowing auburn locks and curly beard, radiant eyes and serene forehead—was it not a living image of his own inspiration in England a year ago?” He saw in Monk a startling resemblance to the Christ figure he had painted in The Light of the World. The two men, who shared many of the same views, regarded this meeting as providential.

They lamented the fact that despite all the advances of the British Empire, Victorians were no closer to understanding the meaning of life. They were disenchanted by the established church and organized religion but abhorred the onslaught of materialism and atheism. They were deeply concerned by the way in which imperialistic goals were paving the way for devastating wars that threatened the basis of civilization. As the major powers jostled for position, they became increasingly concerned about the future of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, particularly the future of Palestine. Their hopes were based on the prophesy in the Book of Revelation that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land would inaugurate one thousand years of peace on earth. They were identified with the non-Jewish Zionist movement, which worked with Jewish Zionists (also known as Christian Zionism and Gentile Zionism) to achieve this goal. While it is true that the motives of non-Jewish Zionists ranged from spiritual and humanitarian to pragmatic and imperialistic, Hunt and Monk belonged to the former group and were fuelled by the desire to find a homeland for the growing number of Russian Jewish refugees and the desire to counter the growth and spread of anti-Semitism.

In 1855, following the death of his father, Monk returned to Canada, and spent two years completing his manuscript entitled A Simple Interpretation of the Revelation: Together with Three Lectures Lately Delivered in Canada and the United States of America on the Restoration of Judah and Israel; God and Man; Christianity. In it, he urged the governments of leading nations to acquire land from the Turks and create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He urged Christians to come to the financial assistance of impoverished European Jews who wished to settle there. Believing that it would be the only place spared the coming conflict, Monk proposed that an international tribunal—a “united nations”—be set up in Jerusalem that could put an end to standing armies and war. He hoped to see the reconciliation of Jews and Christians on the common basis of revealed religion. He envisioned the building of a utopian community of “enlightened” Jews and Christians that would become a model to the rest of the world through the sharing of wealth and talent, access to congenial work (aided by machinery), a liberal education and leisure time in which to read, write and study the sciences. Monk’s vision may have come to the attention of William Morris, a good friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose utopian vision described in his News from Nowhere is remarkably similar.

In 1857 Monk took his completed manuscript to London and went to visit Hunt, who had planned to introduce Monk to the Pre-Raphaelites, but by this time the Brotherhood had begun to unravel. He introduced him instead to “those prophetic writers” Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle, hoping, without success, that they would support Monk’s campaign. Knowing that John Ruskin, like himself, was looking for a means to reconcile science with Revelation, Hunt introduced him to Monk in 1858. After reading Monk’s manuscript, Ruskin provided him with a letter of introduction to his publisher, John Constable of Edinburgh, and offered to support the publication, if necessary.

Before Monk left for Edinburgh, Hunt painted a portrait of him holding a bible open at the Book of Revelation and a sealed copy of the London Times, indicating his belief that ancient prophesies would be fulfilled in modern times. As Constable was reluctant to take the risk, Ruskin underwrote the publication but cautioned Monk: “I shall have much pleasure in helping you in this matter and my name must not be seriously connected with it … I haven’t examined your pamphlet thoroughly and can’t be responsible for its contents. I think you right in your main views—and a person who ought to be helped—because you mean what you say.” One thousand copies were published by Tallant in London.

Both Hunt and Ruskin entertained reservations about Monk’s theories. Hunt wrote to Ruskin: “I am not single enough in my reliance upon the other world or in my faith in those interpreters of its meaning … to be induced to throw aside my ordinary judgment and join him. My experience teaches me … that we must not look to miraculous interposition on the part of Providence … [Monk] is a man of extraordinary goodness, of great genius, of the most evident sincerity and of wonderful unselfishness. These qualities make me like the poor fellow and take an interest in his career.”

Ruskin asked for a sign that Monk was divinely inspired and decided to send him on a peace mission to North America to try to end the American Civil War. Although Monk supposedly met Abraham Lincoln, gave him a copy of his Simple Interpretation of the Revelation and urged him to support the cause, he was forbidden from travelling to the South. Considering his mission a failure, he returned to Jerusalem, where he was thrown out by the Ottoman authorities. He was working his passage back to Boston when he was shipwrecked off Nantucket. The sole survivor, he swam to shore and suffered from exposure and temporary amnesia.

In 1868 Monk’s family and friends believed he was showing signs of insanity, and he was briefly committed to the Rockwood Asylum in Kingston, Ontario. His unstable state of mind was attributed to his religious studies and was substantiated by his illegal sale of family lands. After his release, he travelled to the United States to visit unorthodox religious groups before his return to March in 1870. There he witnessed “the great fire of Carleton County,” which began in March Township and blew toward Ottawa, threatening to consume Canada’s new capital. Monk saw this as a sign of the spiritual fire to come. He saw the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War that same year as its commencement.

In 1872 Monk returned to London to find Ruskin disaffected. Although Ruskin had earlier signed a paper declaring his readiness to devote the tenth part of his wealth to helping to establish the “Kingdom of God” on earth, he was mourning the loss of his great love, Rose La Touche, and had no time for Hunt and Monk’s preoccupation with Zionism. The following January Hunt wrote to Ruskin’s secretary, Charles Augustus Howell, to report that “Monk has been having a serious fit of madness.” He advised them to “do nothing but regard it as the exhibition of earnestness of a man in the world interesting from the possession of a wild genius.”

The support that Monk had requested from Hunt and Ruskin remained the subject of debate. After Hunt wrote to Howell a month later saying that Monk had recovered his sanity, Ruskin wrote to Monk saying, with personal insight, “You appear to me to be mad; but for aught I know—I may be mad myself.” He withdrew his financial support, and Monk returned to Canada, leaving Ruskin to pay his hotel bill.

While living in England in the early 1880s, Monk campaigned weekly in The Jewish World and the Jewish Chronicle for the restoration of Israel. Laurence Oliphant, a leading figure in the non-Jewish Zionist movement and an agent for Queen Victoria’s Secret Service, had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the purchase of land in Palestine from the Sultan in Constantinople in 1879. After the pogroms began in Russia, Jacob Moses Rosenthal, secretary of the Holy Land Agricultural Society, wrote to The Jewish World expressing concern over the collapse of Oliphant’s mission and also stating his “unfeigned gratitude to Mr. Henry Wentworth Monk for his sincere regard for the welfare of our nation … Providence will not always select those exclusively from our midst, but even from the Gentiles, who will vigorously protect our people.”

In May 1882, Monk advertised in both papers for a Joint Stock Bank of Israel proposing to raise ten million pounds in capital by selling one million shares at ten pounds each. Half the interest would go to the shareholders and half to “distressed Jews.” Among those Monk lobbied were Queen Victoria and British prime minister William Gladstone. Hunt lent credibility to the cause by writing two letters to the Ottawa Free Press saying: “I knew Mr. Monk when we were in Judaea together in 1854, and I have followed his career ever since. Every day it has seemed his purpose has become more a possibility and still further, a necessity.” He went on to call it “the noblest scheme now offered to men.”

From 1885 to 1896 Monk, aided and abetted by Hunt, tried to convince the young Dominion of Canada to throw its efforts behind the establishment of an international government in Jerusalem. He addressed a broadside entitled “The Peace of the World and the Welfare of Canada” to the “electors of Ottawa,” proposing that Canada “earn an honorable position among the great nations of the earth” by intervening in the European crisis to prevent war and save lives and money. He wrote letters to Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, which were published in the Ottawa Citizen, saying that if only Canada could induce England to espouse his proposals, war between Britain and Russia might be averted and an end put to all war through the establishment of an international tribunal in Jerusalem. Sympathetic but skeptical, Macdonald replied that “there are no means of enforcing the decisions of such a tribunal. By slow degrees however the principles of arbitration seem to gain force … I don’t see however that any action on the part of Canada can be of any avail in aiding in the establishment of an International tribunal.”

As the international situation began to spiral out of control, Monk did everything he could to draw attention to it. In two broadsides published in 1888, “The Revelation: The ‘Book Sealed with Seven Seals’ Now Open” and “The Revelation: ‘The Seven Trumpets,’” he not only reiterated his by now familiar proposal; he expanded his vision for the Holy Land to include all three “revealed religions,” stating that as the nations of Christendom, together with the Jews and Mohammedans, constituted now about “the third part of men,” the conditions were favourable for the prophesy to be fulfilled. He sought to secure support from leading Jewish philanthropists.

Hunt, who was by this time a celebrated and influential figure, contributed to the letter-writing campaign on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1890 he wrote to English Baptist preacher John Clifford saying that he supported Monk’s purpose because it “is so noble, so necessary, and so otherwise inadequately considered.” In 1891 he wrote to the editor of the Ottawa Free Press, sending the texts of two letters he had written to the prime minister and the marquess of Salisbury exhorting the British government to take the lead in this cause. Like Monk, he argued that the time was right: “When can we reasonably expect another British Sovereign whose long and prosperous reign could more appropriately culminate in ‘the kingdom of God upon earth’ than that of our present Sovereign?” He called upon British subjects everywhere to favour as much as possible the restoration of homeless and destitute Jews and wrote: “The present condition and circumstances of the Jewish people also proclaim loudly and distinctly, that the time for their restoration has at last arrived; for hundreds of thousands of them are now exposed to absolute starvation, destitution and misery in Russia, while no other nation upon earth is willing to receive them in their present condition, consequently, the only suitable refuge for them now upon earth, is ‘the land of their fathers’.”

The letter-writing campaign appears to have been carefully coordinated. In 1895–96 Monk sent four letters to the marquess of Salisbury urging “the most powerful nation on earth” to take the lead in rallying America and other Christian nations to purchase Palestine and create in Jerusalem a “permanent international tribunal” or world government where “the representatives of all nations may meet at stated intervals and consult together for the best welfare of the whole world.” He maintained that “the Almighty calls on the nations of Christendom to ‘comfort’ the millions of poverty-stricken Jews who for eighteen centuries have been subjected to the utmost injustice and cruelty although it was by the earnest efforts and self-sacrifice of many thousands of that devoted race, that Christianity was first introduced and established on earth.” Hunt followed these up with a long letter to the Jewish Chronicle “expressing the strongest possible ideological support” for the return of the Jews to Palestine. He was aware, however, that gaining political support required selling the idea on political as well as religious grounds. These included the reduction of anti-Semitic persecution in Europe and the de-escalation of political tensions undermining the Ottoman Empire by negotiating peacefully with the Ottomans for the purchase of Palestine.

Monk was a familiar, if eccentric, figure on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, where he ceaselessly lobbied politicians. He lived to hear his proposal debated in the Senate on March 23, 1896. It was moved that “the time has come when the consideration of the formation of a permanent International Tribunal may with advantage be entered upon, with a view of affording the various nations the requisite security and protection from a constant liability to the most costly and destructive warfare.” Unfortunately it was withdrawn for lack of support. Undaunted, Monk issued another broadside on May 28 entitled “Stand Up, O Jerusalem: A ‘Manifesto to the Jewish People’,” quoting the text of a letter to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Right Honourable G.J. Goschen, proposing that the British fleet begin to convey Jewish refugees to Jerusalem.

When Monk died on August 23, 1896, his niece, Fanny Heming, sent Hunt the obituary published in the Ottawa Evening Journal. The artist wrote back: “I suffer much to think of his departure. He always made life more hopeful and bright … I hope next week to write a paper on him for The Jewish World and I will send you the number. I wonder whither [sic] he knew that he was dying while he was still conscious.”

Hunt sent a stirring obituary to The Jewish World, stating that Monk “was never narrow in his views. His independent study of the Scriptures had led him early to see that … Judaism was an everlasting form of worship. He also valued Mohammedanism as a revelation for Arabs … and endorsed the idea that the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian were all servants of the one God of Abraham, and were doing His work each in the way best fitted for the nature of the race to which he belonged, and that the time had come at which they should no longer do this apart … but in unison and brotherly emulation.” He pointed out that “what forty-five years ago seemed altogether visionary and illusory, had since in certain sections of his scheme, been taken up as within the realm of practical politics.” These included the concepts of “international arbitration” and “the return of the Jews to Palestine,” which were matters “talked of now and worked for by businessmen, and even officials of Governments. Very different was the first reception of these ideas.” While regretting the withdrawal of the motion by the Senate six months earlier, Hunt ended by saying, “Perhaps the activity of Mr. Monk may meet with more open acknowledgement, or it may simply permeate men’s minds, and work like leaven to prepare them for the coming changes which all agree are impending in the world.”

In 1909 Hunt told Byron Edmund Walker that he believed that Monk’s work had helped to bring about the First Hague Conference in 1899. Called at the initiative of one of Monk’s many European correspondents, Czar Nicholas II of Russia, it established the Permanent Court of Arbitration, or Hague Tribunal.

In the course of her curatorial research into the life and work of English pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt, Katharine Lochnan followed up on an obscure connection to a Canadian, Henry Monk, who inspired Hunt’s lifelong devotion to Christian Zionism and its hoped-for concomitant, universal peace. This essay is adapted from the draft and published versions of “The Canadian Diaspora: Last Rights,” the last chapter of Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, published by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Yale University Press. The book accompanies the eponymous exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, on display there until May 10, 2009, in association with Manchester Art Gallery in England.