A secluded country house. A rogue Anglican priest. Ceremonial sex and mislaid fortunes.

This is the almost-forgotten story of Victorian Britain's strangest religious sect and its wealthy, mostly female, followers who believed they could ascend directly to heaven. Henry James Prince was a rogue Anglican priest with a flare for the dramatic, and the founder of the Agapemone, or 'Abode of Love'. He also claimed to be the immortal conduit of the Holy Spirit and purportedly engaged in free love and ceremonial sex with his female followers. But Prince's eventual death didn't mark the end of this strange sect… he was promptly replaced by another: John Hugh Smyth-Pigott – otherwise known as the Clapton Messiah.

The Abode transformed a sleepy, rural corner of Somerset into one of England's most notorious locations. While the followers shut themselves away and waited patiently for the end of the world, outrage grew – the word 'Agapemone' became a byword for licentiousness or idleness, used by Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford. The reclusive Clapton Messiah became a fixture in the nation's papers, with frenzied efforts to discredit the organisation and undermine its leader. And still the cult grew.

Expertly drawing on primary sources to tell the story of the Agapemonites in details for the first time, Stuart Flinders shines a light on the people drawn to the cult – the forced marriages; the swindled fortunes; the women condemned to asylums; and those who managed to escape from the Abode. It is also the story of two extraordinary men, whose claims of divinity were at the heart of this very British cult.