The early Quakers - part two
In the previous part of this series I traced the evolution of scholarly interpretations of early Quakerism as well as how early Quakers were represented and perceived, both in comparison to some of their contemporaries and within the broader context of the English Revolution. Here I want to continue the discussion by focussing on their antecedents and origins.
III. Antecedents and origins
During a night-time meeting in 1660 at an inn in Dorchester (Dorset), George Fox had his hat forcibly removed and his head carefully inspected. Fox’s enemies were looking for signs that the crown of his head had been shaved in the Jesuit manner, since in their paranoid view a tonsure would have indicated that Fox was secretly working for the Papacy. By then lawyer William Prynne’s allegation that Quakers were Jesuit or Franciscan agents despatched from Rome ‘to seduce the intoxicated giddy-headed English Nation’ had become widespread. Thus Edward Terrill, compiler of an account of the Broadmead Baptist Church (Bristol), identified the doctrine of the light within together with the Quakers’ ‘affected sanctity, manner of speaking, and brutish deportment’ towards civil magistrates as marks of a Jesuitical design. The charges were vigorously refuted by, among others, the so-called ‘mother Quakerism’ Margaret Fell (1614–1702) of Swarthmore Hall, Lancashire in an unpublished rebuttal (1657?) of seven supposed similarities between the Quakers and Catholics.
Yet the muck stuck. Indeed, the nonconformist minister Richard Baxter (1615–1691) essentially concurred with Prynne. Baxter linked the Quakers to their ‘German brethren’, that is the followers of the ‘Luther of medicine’ Paracelsus (c.1493–1541) and Jacob Boehme (c.1575–1624), assuming that with their forerunners – ‘Seekers, Ranters, and Anabaptists’ – they were part of a Popish confederacy let loose by the Devil to undermine the pillars of the Protestant Reformation. Hence in The Quakers Catechism (1655) Baxter recounted the ‘abundance’ of Popery that the Quakers and Behmenists maintained. Likewise, the heresiarch Lodowick Muggleton (1609–1698) supposed that Jacob Boehme’s writings ‘were the chief books that the Quakers bought’, insisting that the ‘Principle or Foundation of their Religion’ was to be found there. Although Muggleton’s ability to observe subtle doctrinal distinctions was impaired, and although he seems to have associated Behmenism with a conception of God as immanent in direct opposition to his own view of him as corporeal, he was still right to emphasise Boehme’s Quaker readership – even if many Friends eventually repudiated the so-called Teutonic Philosopher.
Elsewhere I have suggested that both the Quakers’ engagement with Boehme’s difficult, inconsistent ideas and their association in contemporaries’ minds with his teachings was more extensive than has usually been acknowledged. And while it is clear that only a minority of early Quaker printed texts and extant manuscripts show familiarity with Boehme’s terms or doctrines, nonetheless among those that were influenced by Boehme were several important figures in the British Isles, Europe, the West Indies and North America at a time when Quakerism was taking shape. It is also significant that some of Boehme’s Quaker readers became schismatics; a few were also active outside England; while others still were foreigners. Yet many who became convinced of Quakerism turned away from the Teutonic Philosopher – as they did from other authors too. Partly this was due to a preference for Friends’ plain style over Boehme’s abstruse notions. But the crucial sticking point in this instance was that unlike the Behmenists, Quakers denied the validity of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as well as the Lord’s Prayer. Moreover, the minor post-Restoration controversy between Quakers and Behmenists that flared up over these issues illustrates in miniature the extent to which certain Quaker leaders were able to transform their followers into an organized, disciplined, doctrinally coherent group; particularly by shunning what Quakers held in common with their sectarian opponents and instead accentuating doctrinal differences between Friends and others.
Jacob Boehme, Het Mysterium Magnum, Ofte een Verklaaring over het Eerste Boek Mosis (published at Amsterdam in 1700 by the Quaker Jacob Claus)
Whereas Baxter, who was influenced by the Calvinist heresiographer Christian Beckmann, had focussed on Germany, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–1687) looked to the Netherlands. Writing in September 1670 to Anne, Viscountess Conway (who eventually converted to Quakerism), More indicated it would take too long to explain why the Quakers were descended from Hendrik Niclaes (1502?–1580?), a merchant active in Amsterdam and Emden who in the 1540s had founded the Family of Love. Represented by polemicists as a Nicodemite mystical sect who allegorized the Scriptures and stressed the immanence of Christ, not to mention being rebuked for seeking to attain perfectibility on earth, More believed that Familists had entered England through the wiles of Popish priests and their emissaries. Having met with the Scottish Quaker George Keith (1638?–1716), Lady Conway asked More to reconsider his judgment: ‘I hope we may believe the account they give of themselves, that they never were infected with what you call Familism’. Although unwilling to pronounce upon the ‘generality of their sect’, More responded that Lady Conway was overconfident that from the beginning the Quakers had ‘nothing to do with Familism’. He cited the example of James Nayler as a ‘demonstration’ of how many Quakers had been ‘tinctured with Familism’. Furthermore, he had been informed in London by a purported associate of about twenty Familists that they were ‘downright’ Quakers. Indeed, More confessed that he had always regarded Quakers as ‘Familists only armed with rudeness and an obstinate activity’. That the Quakers had ‘emerged into a greater nearness to the true Apostolic Christianity’ was a cause for good Christians to rejoice, but it was nonetheless plain to see for More that the Quakers were ‘hardly come off from all points of Familism’. Henry Hallywell’s An Account of Familism As it is Revived and Propagated by the Quakers (1673) developed this argument, which was swiftly refuted by the influential Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644–1718).
Henry More (1614–1687)
The Quaker reception of works by Hendrik Niclaes and indeed Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt (c.1520–c.1594), a prominent member of the Family of Love who broke from Niclaes and used the name Hiël (the ‘Life of God’), requires detailed examination. This was recognised long ago by William Braithwaite who, following Rufus Jones, pointed to common elements between Familism and Quakerism (rejection of oaths, war and capital punishment; waiting in silence; attitudes towards the Bible and sacraments) as well as between Niclaes’s and Fox’s experiences of spiritual illumination. In the same vein, Geoffrey Nuttall’s reassessment of James Nayler explored the milieu in which a ‘struggle ... took place in the soul of infant Quakerism: the struggle between Familism and Apostolic Christianity’. And while Familism was as much a polemical construction as some of the other disreputable labels we have noted, there is some evidence indicating individual engagement with the teachings of Niclaes and Hiël. Thus in April 1658 Richard Hickock reported disputing not just with Ranters at Leek, Staffordshire but also encountering a ‘woman of the family of love’. Furthermore, Robert Dring (1617–fl.1656), Quaker son of a Wiltshire woollen draper, owned a large manuscript containing a number of works by Niclaes in Low German to which he prefixed a table of contents identifying individual titles by their more familiar Latin equivalents and a list in English of other important writings excluded from the collection – including several secret texts meant only for ‘fellow-elders’. Dring knew Giles Calvert (1615–1663), the leading publisher of both Niclaes and Quaker authors in the mid-1650s, and also hosted George Fox at his London home. Fox himself possessed a copy of Niclaes’s Den Spegel der Gerechticheit [The Glass of Righteousness] in Low Dutch. In addition, between 1687 and 1690 Jacob Claus (c.1644–fl.1720) of Amsterdam, a Quaker who had published a Dutch version of an important treatise explaining and vindicating Quaker principles and doctrines, issued German translations of the complete works of Hiël. Claus, it should be added, would also publish several books by Boehme in Dutch.
Trinity College, Cambridge, MS Crewe 28, Hendrick Niclaes, ‘The Glasse of RIghteousnes’ (probably based on the published English translation of 1656)
Turning next to Grindletonians, whom the puritan minister Stephen Denison (c.1581–1649) regarded as but a northern offshoot of Familism, William Braithwaite, Rufus Jones, Theodor Sippell and Geoffrey Nuttall all detected significant antecedents. David Como, who has produced a fine and detailed study of this religious community – which takes its name not from an activity or founder but a village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, agrees: ‘Quakerism was almost certainly the unwitting progeny of Grindletonian divinity’. Here modern scholarship accords with opponents of Quakerism. Thus the religious controversialist Roger Williams (c.1606–1683) thought it probable that Quakers, an ‘upstart party or faction’ lately risen up in Lancashire, were the ‘offspring’ of the Grindletonians. Williams supposed that the Grindletonians derived from Familism and identified their two chief doctrines as those also espoused by Quakers: that they could not sin since they were perfect, and that the Holy Spirit was responsible for their actions. The Church of England polemicist Thomas Comber (1645–1699) repeated the charge, drawing on Denison for his knowledge of Grindletonian teaching. Although George Fox denied a genealogical connection, insisting the Grindletonians knew otherwise, this appears disingenuous. For it was atop Pendle Hill, Lancashire – less than five miles from Grindleton – that Fox claimed he had received a vision in 1652 of a ‘great people’ to be gathered. Moreover, since it is commonly accepted that the Pennine valleys had ‘provided safe places for the holding of unorthodox assemblies’, and that Fox thereafter made several converts in the region, it seems likely that the sermons of the Grindletonian progenitor Roger Brereley (1586–1637) – subsequently circulated and amplified by his followers – created a receptive environment for Quakerism. Indeed, on turning Quaker the cloth merchant Thomas Barcroft of Colne, Lancashire wrote a brief treatise intended mainly for those with whom he had once enjoyed:
sweet society and union in spirit in the days of that glimmering Light under the ministry of Breerely ... and some few more whose memories I honour, called then by the professors of the world, Grindletonians, Antinomians, Heretics, Sectaries, and such like names of reproach.
Pendle Hill, Lancashire
More problematic is the Quakers’ relationship to Seekers – particularly in light of J.F. McGregor’s contention that they should not be regarded as approximating to ‘a movement, let alone a sect, professing a particular doctrine’. Moreover, as McGregor notes, the traditional narrative of Fox’s progress through northern Seeker heartlands preaching to receptive communities is not only triumphalist in tone, but also based on retrospective evidence. All the same, it has proved difficult to dislodge the established orthodoxy. Thus Douglas Gwyn claimed in Seekers Found that ‘nearly all of the earliest Friends underwent classic Seeker phases before becoming Friends, and the earliest Quaker preachers found their most receptive audiences among those mournful “travellers after Sion”’. Certainly Presbyterian critics frequently grouped Quakers with Seekers and other undesirables, identifying them – as we saw with Baxter – as one of several Quaker forebears. In addition, there are a couple of significant references in contemporary Quaker sources, notably to ‘many honest hearts … among the Waiters’ and ‘an assembly of people called Seekers’ at London in summer 1654. So if we discount polemically constructed notions of Seekers and instead understand the term as denoting a collective if variegated spiritual state rather than a distinct sect, it is unsurprising to find Quaker accounts that looked back to encounters with a ‘seeking’ and religious people sometimes called ‘Seekers’.
A Catalogue of the several sects and opinions in England and other nations (1647)
Just as contentious is the Quakers’ connection with former Levellers. Thus the left-wing journalist and historian Henry Brailsford (1873–1958) thought it a ‘natural development’ that ‘many of the Levellers found a spiritual refuge in the Society of Friends’, while Christopher Hill assumed that ‘many former Levellers became Quakers’. These appear to be overstatements, however, and Barry Reay was doubtless closer to the mark when he found ‘no evidence of any substantial continuity’ between Levellers and Quakers. For although the Leveller leader John Lilburne (1615–1657) became a Quaker towards the end of his life, other documented Leveller adherents turned Quaker are few and far between. Even so, hostile observers perceived Quakers as the scummy reside of Levellers, Diggers, Seekers, Ranters, atheists and whatnot. Hence John Ward, vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, concluded that ‘several Levellers settled into Quakers’. More specifically, Quakers were accused of promoting community of goods and being ‘downright Levellers’ who ‘affirmed that there ought to be no distinction of Estates, but a universal parity’. ‘Magistrate, People, Husband, Wife, Parents, Children, Master, Servant’; all were supposedly alike for the Quakers. Accordingly an MP denounced Quakers as a ‘growing evil’ espousing a ‘plausible way; all levellers against magistracy and propriety’. In the same vein, a senior army officer writing in April 1657 explained that he had discharged one of his subordinates because he had become a Quaker. This ‘sottish stupid generation’ were ‘blasphemous heretics’ who would corrupt the rank-and-file with their ‘levelling principle’ since they neither valued the scriptures, ministry, magistracy, nor anything else. Little wonder that Fox was keen to disassociate Quakers from Levellers, condemning those ‘who go under a colour of Levelling’.
Disassociation has also long marked Quaker reactions towards Ranters. Indeed, even allowing for polemical exaggeration and distortion, an earlier generation of Quaker scholars frequently denounced the Ranters as a dangerous pantheistic aberration and disorganised degenerate movement whose extreme mystical doctrines and immoral excesses had threatened to spread like a contagion across the nation had it not been for the spiritual antidote afforded by Fox’s ministry and Quakerism. The verdicts of Robert Barclay, Rufus Jones and William Braithwaite, however, merely echoed contemporary Quaker antipathies. Thus Edward Burrough (1633–1663) denounced the Ranters as a viperous generation deceived by Satan in the guise of an angel of light and corrupted by the Whore of Babylon. Similarly, Margaret Fell reproved them for asserting several blasphemous doctrines; notably that God is darkness as well as light; that all acts were good in God’s eyes; and that to the pure even unclean or unlawful acts were pure. Nor were these isolated voices for other Quaker authors condemned the Ranters in manuscript, print and person, including Fell’s future husband George Fox, who rebuked them for their blasphemous expressions, cursed speaking, swearing, drunkenness, tobacco smoking, dancing and unbridled lust.
Forged in the heat of religious controversy this vitriolic if largely one-sided exchange demonstrated the early Quakers’ evident concern to distinguish between the Ranters’ sinful behaviour and their own upright conduct, since a variety of critics – Richard Baxter, John Bunyan (1628–1688), Baptists and Muggletonians among them – tarred Ranters and Quakers with the same brush. And for good reason, because despite the Quakers’ ‘outward austere carriage’, there appeared to hostile observers little theological difference between them: Fox accused the Ranters of claiming they were God and boasting of their communion with God and Christ, yet was himself charged with affirming that he had the Divinity essentially within him and that he was equal with God. Moreover, both were attacked for maintaining that the Light (Christ) was within everyone, denying the validity of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, antiscripturism, anticlericalism, falling into trances and public nakedness. Fox even conceded that the Ranters had experienced a ‘pure convincement’ (religious awakening), before straying from the path of righteousness and becoming enemies of Christ’s doctrine. Indeed, he admitted some Quakers had been Ranters; the most notable being the former Baptist evangelist John Chandler, who wrote a tract urging all Ranters to examine their conscience and turn to the light of Christ.
Speaking of Ranters, according to Lodowick Muggleton their ministry had mainly proceeded from the Baptists’ while the bulk of the Quakers’ doctrines – but not their proud, conceited, sanctimonious conduct – derived from the Ranters. In contrast to this derivation of Quakerism, several critics suggested that it was not the Ranters but the Diggers, and especially the works of their chief ideologue Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676), that were instrumental in shaping the formation of Quaker thought. Though the extent of this connection is still vigorously debated, Winstanley’s teachings do seem to have served as a bridge between the Quakers and their predecessors. Winstanley, formerly a General Baptist and who was buried as a Quaker, reportedly recognised this himself, claiming that the Quakers were ‘sent to perfect that work which fell’ in the Diggers’ hands. And certainly the resemblances between his heterodox notions and ‘the very draughts and even body of Quakerism’ were, as several contemporaries remarked, startling. This can be seen most vividly by highlighting some suggestive parallels between Winstanley’s and Fox’s teachings.
Winstanley maintained that he had been given the gift of the manifest ‘light of Christ within’. This belief in the revelation of Jesus Christ as an indwelling illuminating presence, the light within, became the battle-cry of the early Quakers who regarded themselves as the children of light called to fight the Lamb’s War in the last days. Nor was the Lamb’s War to be a bloody struggle since in Fox’s mind it was an inward conflict between flesh and spirit, Fox’s refusal to bear arms echoing the pacifist principles of the Schleitheim Articles (1527) enunciated by some early Anabaptists and mirroring Winstanley’s opposition to using weapons in self-defence. Again, both Winstanley and Fox made frequent reference to the verse concerning enmity between the woman’s and the serpent’s seed and bruising the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15); Winstanley interpreting it as a prophecy of the killing of the flesh by the rising spirit or indwelling Christ, Fox understanding it to speak of Christ’s coming within. Furthermore, Winstanley’s writings were characterised by deep-seated anticlericalism: he censured proud learned scholars as ‘enemies’ to the ‘Spirit of truth’ that had inspired the Prophets and Apostles (John 14:17). For by exercising a monopoly on preaching they prevented humble fishermen, shepherds, husbandmen and tradesmen – latter day Apostles – from speaking about their spiritual experiences and revealing truths which they had ‘heard and seen from God’ (Acts 4:20). Fox too insisted that he was required to obey Christ’s command and preach the everlasting gospel (Revelation 14:6), as the Apostles had done before him, because he was sent by God to turn people from darkness to light. And in the same vein, Fox regarded ministers as hirelings possessed by a ‘black earthly spirit’, who had made vast sums of money by selling the Scriptures and preaching in steeple-houses; stone temples of God where the Lord did not dwell since he lived in people’s hearts.
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Although the surviving evidence is uneven, the most plausible explanation for the Quakers’ origins is therefore to conceive of it as polygenetic rather than monogenetic; that is, they had multiple instead of singular beginnings. Those who became prominent early Quakers came from different parts of the country (but predominantly the Midlands, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Westmorland); were generally quite young, with an average age of 28; of low social status; engaged in humble artisanal or agricultural occupations and thus either relatively poor or of modest means; and – with the exception of a few University-educated converts – either meagrely schooled or autodidacts. In short, it might be better to reconceptualise the Quakers as initially consisting of an assortment of spiritual and temporal communities that while occasionally overlapping were nonetheless given added cohesion by their enemies. When George Fox, James Nayler and other pioneer itinerant evangelists proclaimed their message they sometimes cast their seed on ploughed ground, harvesting support from pre-existing communities of Independents, Baptists and so-called Seekers who had passed beyond the outward observance of gospel ordinances. Quakerism then was, ultimately, one of the main beneficiaries of the fragmentation of puritanism. All the same, it should be emphasised that its antecedents were not exclusively English.