Of all the new religious movements that emerged during the English Revolution of 1641–60 the Quakers were the largest, most successful and enduring. Barry Reay, for example, estimated that by the early 1660s there were certainly between 35,000 and 40,000 Quakers in England and Wales, and perhaps as many as 60,000 out of a population numbering some 5.28 million people. Naturally the importance of early Quakerism means that it is an extremely well-studied subject so my intention here is mainly to present an overview, informed by my own interpretation, of what is largely familiar evidence to specialists.
Accordingly, this series of posts begins with some historical background followed by a summary of the main scholarly literature on early Quakerism, together with an assessment of its merits. I will then examine the origins of the name, comparing it with the ways in which polemicists used other terms of abuse, before suggesting that Quakerism had multiple, loosely interlinked beginnings rather than a singular basis. Other aspects of early Quakerism that will be discussed include its defining characteristics, social composition, and the beliefs of its adherents. These included the supremacy of individual experience over religious traditions and dogma; hostility to the sacraments, the clergy and the payment of tithes; impassioned pleas for religious toleration; concern for social justice; calls for legal and medical reform; as well as their attitude towards the Bible, Apocrypha, extra-canonical texts, Jews and the occult.
In addition, I will briefly look at Quaker preaching, literary style, modes of speech, use of silence, prophetic behaviour and attempted miracle working within the context of a widespread belief in an imminent apocalypse and the re-emergence of Christian primitivism; that is a desire to return to the original, uncorrupted version of Christianity as preached and practiced by Jesus and his apostles. Finally I will suggest some reasons for the success of early Quakerism: the appeal of its message and charisma of those who preached it – notably George Fox (1624–1691) and James Nayler (1618–1660); an organised program of evangelism wedded to contemporary political concerns; the willingness of believers to undergo sufferings and even martyrdom for their faith; the resilience of those engaged in pamphlet wars with competing sects and other detractors; the effective manner in which money was raised to finance and distribute these publications; the ability of the leadership to impose doctrinal uniformity and overcome rivalry and schism; and the ways in which Quakerism was able to evolve and adapt so as to survive the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the changed political and religious landscape that came in its wake.
Egbert van Heemskerck (after), A Quaker meeting (late 17th century) [Ashmolean Museum]
I. Contexts and historiographical developments
The emergence of Quakerism must be situated within wider contexts: the breakdown of pre-publication censorship in 1641; rebellion in Ireland and widespread fear of Popery; a recently concluded yet devastating Civil War that had spread through many regions of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, during which an estimated 80,000 soldiers were killed or maimed; the execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury, abolition of episcopacy and emasculation of the Church of England; the unprecedented trial and public beheading of a reigning monarch; the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords; the imprisonment, disarmament and occasional execution of defeated Royalists; the seizure and sequestration of a number of Royalists’ estates together with the state’s confiscation and redistribution of property that had belonged to the crown, bishops, dean and chapters; the growing belief among all sides in the conflict that the sinful shedding of ‘innocent’ blood was a pollutant that had defiled the land; harvest failure; murrain, famine, destitution, and localised outbreaks of plague; army mutinies over arrears of pay; sick and maimed soldiers together with the widows and orphans of slain combatants in need of charity; as well as campaigns to release people imprisoned for debt, introduce liberty of conscience, initiate ecclesiastical, educational, electoral, legal, medical, and taxation reforms, abolish the maintenance of ministers by tithes, and promote free trade.
Then there was the political transition from the English Commonwealth inaugurated in 1649 to the Cromwellian Protectorate of 1653–1659. Here the new republic failed to fully legitimate itself. Partly this was through some missed opportunities, partly through the absence of systematic brutality. Indeed, the old world was turned upside down but never eradicated as the ruling majority sought moderation, compromise and restraint – the quest for settlement. Consequently an oligarchic republic was eventually supplanted by an uncrowned Lord Protector presiding with the aid of his council and successive Parliaments over a perpetual Reformation implemented by an unsteady alliance of magistracy, ministry and military power.
Like other Protestant nonconformists that survived the restoration of the monarchy, the Quakers refashioning of their history and identity began early and in earnest. Unsurprisingly, while several of their enemies provided a genealogy for them that stretched from the mystics and spiritual reformers of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century continental Europe such as Hendrik Niclaes (1502?–1580?) and Jacob Boehme (c.1575–1624) to their immediate forerunners – Grindletonians, Levellers, Diggers, Baptists, Seekers and Ranters – Quakers themselves preferred to concentrate upon the sufferings of their founding fathers and mothers. Coupled with this established tradition of martyrology were biographical studies of the leadership and their more prominent followers. There was also a related emphasis on genealogy, regional and local history, and bibliography that chimed with antiquarian research interests. From William Sewel’s early-eighteenth-century history of the rise of the Quakers to William Braithwaite’s early-twentieth-century account of the beginnings of Quakerism these narratives had common elements.
Thus Quaker origins were explained as a long-term development of the Protestant Reformation and contextualized against the backdrop of puritan separatists, continental and native Baptists, Civil War, regicide, and revolution. The major personality was George Fox, although there were other ‘first publishers of truth’ – supposedly a ‘valiant sixty’ – including James Nayler, Edward Burrough, Francis Howgill, George Whitehead, Margaret Fell and Elizabeth Hooton. These pioneer evangelists followed in the Apostles’ footsteps; boldly preaching their message of the revelation of Jesus Christ as an indwelling presence – the light within. Despite religious persecution they remained steadfast in their opposition to clerical authority, church worship, infant baptism, tithes, and oath taking, refusing to take the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper or remove their hats, and using plain speech. Gathered primarily from pre-existing northern communities of Independents and Seekers, these Quakers, as they were scornfully called, engaged in theological disputations with various groups: notably Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, as well as what Braithwaite called ‘some of the less stable products of Puritanism’, i.e. Ranters and Muggletonians. Itinerant preaching spread their ideas from the fertile soil of the northern counties to the midlands, eventually reaching London, Norwich, Bristol, and beyond – thereby fulfilling, in lawyer William Prynne’s eyes, Jeremiah’s prophecy ‘That out of THE NORTH AN EVILL SHALL BREAK FORTH UPON ALL THE INHABITANTS OF THE LAND’. Thereafter they crossed the sea westward to Ireland, the West Indies, and North America; eastward to the Dutch Republic, German territories, and Ottoman Empire; southward to France, Spain, the Italian states, Malta and North African ports (Algiers).
While there is no watershed in Quaker historiography there was a gradual shift from a predominantly self-serving denominational version which venerated the founders towards a more critical appraisal of their role within the movement and its broader contribution to the English Revolution. The bulk of this work, as before, was biographical and regional, concentrating on the leadership’s itinerant preaching combined with Quaker sufferings in local and national context. Yet there was also renewed interest in old questions. Hence Geoffrey Nuttall (1911–2007) rejected the suggestion of Rufus Jones (1863–1948) that Quaker origins could be traced to continental Anabaptism, spiritualism, and mysticism, insisting rather that Quakerism was indigenous, having evolved from English puritanism. Further studies examined the early Quakers’ interests in law, medicine, Hermeticism, Hebrew and Jews, as well as their attitudes towards the Bible, Apocrypha, and extra-canonical texts. Others considered the meaning of the Quakers’ prophetic gestures, attempts at faith healing, and the symbolism of silence, together with their understanding of eschatology and apocalyptic belief that they were the children of light called to fight the Lamb’s war with spiritual weapons in the last days. The social origins of the early Quakers, their relationship with their neighbours, and attitudes towards them generally also received attention, as did their customs, costume, and manners. So too did their opposition to tithes, and controversies with rival religious groups – notably Baptists, Ranters, and Muggletonians. In addition, scholars explored early Quaker speech, testimonies and self-representation, noting the emergence of a distinctive literary style. At the same time a number of books and articles extended our knowledge of women Quakers, focussing on their activities as prophetesses, preachers, pamphleteers, prisoners, publishers, missionaries and letter writers.
The sources from which these studies of early Quakerism were constructed are well-known. Like Baptists and Muggletonians, Quakers carefully collected, collated, and copied manuscripts which, together with bound volumes of printed tracts, constitute the majority of the group’s archives. Although a number of documents were lost as a result of the Great Fire of London of 1666, and although it has been convincingly demonstrated that Fox and the editor of his Journal – possibly in collusion with an ‘official board of censorship’ (the Morning Meeting) – suppressed or distorted unwelcome evidence so as to magnify and sanitise his foundational role within the movement, there are still important collections surviving from this period and today held at Friends House Library: particularly the Abram Rawlinson Barclay, William Caton and Swarthmore manuscripts. There are also calendars available of George Fox’s papers by Henry Cadbury (1883–1974) and the Swarthmore MSS. to 1660 by Geoffrey Nuttall, as well as Norman Penney’s Extracts from State Papers relating to Friends, 1654 to 1672. In short, historians of the Quaker movement tread on well-worn ground.
Among the first to stress the radical nature of early Quakerism was Alan Cole, whose seminal work of the mid-1950s on Quakers and politics between 1652 and 1660 rejected the largely denominational view that early Quakers were pacifists aloof from political life; if anything ‘it was forced upon them by the hostility of the outside world’. Barry Reay agreed: ‘from the start, the Quaker movement was a movement of political and social as well as religious protest’; it was ‘very much a creature of its age, part of the radicalism and enthusiasm of the revolutionary years’. Likewise, in a lecture delivered at Friends House, London in 1991 Christopher Hill (1912–2003) speculated about the nature of the Quakers’ pre-Restoration political programme: they ‘expected the rule of the saints’ and ‘expected that rule to bring about a better society’. James Nayler’s entry into Bristol on horseback in October 1656, however, in imitation of Christ’s messianic entrance into Jerusalem exposed divisions among the leadership in what was undoubtedly the most dramatic and damaging schism in the history of early Quakerism; a ‘parting of the ways’ that suited Fox’s preference for discipline, law and order. For Hill the failure of English radicalism – including by implication the radical aspects of early Quakerism – was partly attributable to duplicity. This was the betrayal by the propertied bourgeoisie of the plebeian revolution that never happened; what he termed the ‘revolt within the Revolution’. With the triumph of the ‘protestant ethic’ and the Stuart Restoration the Quakers became part of a nonconformist remnant forced to adapt or perish in an unreceptive environment. In the immediate aftermath of Thomas Venner’s bloody and disastrous Fifth Monarchist insurrection of January 1661 they therefore adopted the ‘peace principle’ as a means of ensuring their survival.
Relatively recently, a new generation of Quaker students of their own history has emerged. Usually drawing on Hill and other conceptually outmoded studies of the period for their historical framework, often asking the same sort of questions as their predecessors, they have tended not so much to challenge or even reframe our existing picture as to coat certain aspects in new varnish. Nonetheless, interesting work has still been produced. And while space precludes discussion, mention should be made of Douglas Gwyn’s exploration of Quaker apocalyptic thought, particularly within Fox’s message, together with Gerrard Guiton’s focus on Jesus’s proclamation of the ‘Kingdom of God’ within early Quaker theology. Both are good examples of innovative – if not entirely unproblematic – approaches.
II. Representations and perceptions of early Quakerism
Scripture states that God favours those of a contrite spirit who tremble at his word. Consequently Quakers were so called in order to mock their physical actions. Although a newsletter from London dated 14 October 1647 referred to ‘a sect of women ... from beyond sea called Quakers’, George Fox recalled that the term was first used of his group in 1650 by Justice Gervase Bennett of Derby. This defining feature of the formative years of the movement was variously interpreted by polemicists as evidence of diabolic possession, witchcraft or epileptic seizures. Thus disparaging relations of Quaker assemblies narrated how certain adherents would lie on their bellies or backs, their expressions distorted, mouths contorted, ‘strangely whining, squealing, yawling, groaning’ as if in a trance. Others were said to be suddenly taken with fits, falling down to the ground as if in a swoon:
while the Agony of the fit is upon them their lips quiver, their flesh and joints tremble, their bellies swell as though blown up with wind, they foam at the mouth, and sometimes purge as if they had taken Physic.
Quick to defend their behaviour, the early Friends explained their ecstatic posturing as a benign affliction, as an affirmation of their prophetic calling. Their worldly critics, however, were disdainful. While some mocked, ridiculing the self-regarding children of light for shivering with fear before the secular authority of magistrates, others pointed to the malefic origins of their unseemly gestures, suggesting that it was not the Holy Spirit but the Father of Lies that possessed their rapturous bodies. A few detractors looked not to diabolic pacts but to natural causes, detecting melancholic temperaments and a predisposition to apoplectic or epileptic fits behind the pretended trances of the Quakers. Long considered a sacred disease, associated with prophecy, divination, hallucination, intelligence and even lunacy, the falling sickness or epilepsy was a readily believable explanation for the ecstasies experienced by the Quakers. Even so, that all the quaking Quakers suffered from recurrent seizures appears improbable. It is more likely that the manner in which the early Friends trembled was indicative both of their immersion in the Bible and their belief that collectively they constituted an elect nation, an uncorrupted remnant speaking a pure language in the last days initiated with the coming of Christ.
In addition to their trembling, early Quakers were depicted as of low social standing – ‘the dregs of the common people’ to quote one heresiographer; ignorant lying blasphemers puffed up with malice and pride; presumptuous dissimulators; railing fanatical disrupters of organised religious services; disrespecters of ministry and magistracy; flouters of the law; fomenters of sedition; even papal agents bent on undermining the foundations of the Protestant Reformation. Besides often being defamed as sufferers from mental illness, even as people willing to sacrifice children (the charge was by no means unique), there were, moreover, lampoons depicting their engagement in bestial sexual practises – not to mention, as Barry Reay has outlined, ‘allegations of incest, buggery and general immorality’.
These textual and visual representations of Quakers, it must be emphasised, resonated with distorted portrayals of oppositional social and political movements, as well as with other religious communities mostly real but occasionally imagined – that had separated from or refused to reach an accommodation with the Church of England. Hence the Catholic recusant minority, which probably numbered more than 60,000, were accused of licentiousness, idolatry and superstition, as well as being suspected of conspiracy, disloyalty and treason. Against a background of alarming stories warning of foreign intervention and widespread fear of Popish plots, the Pope became increasingly identified with Antichrist, while Jesuit became a byword for casuistry. Similarly, just as medieval Jews had been associated with leprosy and accused of spreading the Black Death, so Anabaptism was compared to a contagion, canker or gangrene that had infected several limbs of the body politic. Shocking accounts of adult baptism rituals contained lurid allegations that young women were immersed naked in rivers, afterwards indulging their carnal appetites with those who had dipped them.
As for a handful of Anabaptist splinter groups’ adoption of communism, their enemies purposefully conflated communal ownership of property and possessions (community of goods) with polygamy (community of women). In the same vein, Levellers were accused of seeking to abolish social distinctions and private ownership of property, of levelling men’s estates and introducing anarchy. They were also defamed as atheists, devils, mutineers, rebels and villains. Another group, though much smaller in size and envisaging themselves as both a spiritual and temporal community of love and righteousness, were regarded as new-fangled, distracted, crack brained and tumultuous. These were the Diggers, one of whose leaders was accounted a blasphemous, violent mad man and reputed sorcerer. Then there were those whom heresiographers categorised as new sect of Seekers or Expecters. These people sought and awaited a return to the primitive Christianity of the Apostles questioning the validity of outward gospel ordinances such as baptism, yet were likened to libertines that had scandalously defected from the bosom of the Church.
More infamous still were the Ranters, who were regularly demonised as a lustful, ungodly crew given to all manner of wickedness. Their allegedly filthy lascivious practises and sinful theatrical antics (cursing, excessive drinking, revelling, roaring, smoking, whoring and parodying of religious ceremonies) were envisaged as a threat to patriarchal norms and societal order, their teachings denounced by Presbyterian moralists and scandalised former co-religionists alike as detestable doctrines inspired by the Devil. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton meanwhile, a pair of London artisans who believed they were the two witnesses foretold in Revelation 11, were frequently abused and derided by their contemporaries as wild, impudent, railing madmen who vented strange senseless blasphemies and other ridiculous opinions. Then there were Jews, whose pleas for readmission to England in autumn 1655 were accompanied by the circulation of pernicious stories that recycled prevailing negative stereotypes. These dwelled on ‘horrid’ accusations revolving around the appalling if familiar themes of deicide, blasphemy, superstition, spiritual blindness, diabolism, magic and blood, together with an imagined Jewish predisposition towards avarice, clannishness, conspiracy, criminality, cruelty, dishonesty, disloyalty and stubbornness. Finally, it is noteworthy that from the late Elizabethan period Christian converts to Islam were derogatorily called renegados – especially on stage – while Islamic customs such as circumcision, polygamy, concubinage and divorce scandalised the majority of English Protestants. Muhammad, moreover, was typically regarded as an impostor, pseudo-prophet and instrument of Satan who had spread a pernicious heresy enshrined in a book of falsehoods; not to mention an ambitious, bloodthirsty, epileptic, plundering rapist.
Taken together these distasteful representations suggest a number of provisional ways in which we can contextualise and explain predominantly hostile perceptions of, and reactions to, early Quakerism. Firstly, there were the compilers of early modern English heresy catalogues. These heresiographers tended to position themselves within a long line of anti-heretical writing that stretched from Saul [Paul] of Tarsus (c.5–c.65), Irenaeus of Lyon (c.130–c.202), Epiphanius of Salamis (d.403), and Augustine of Hippo (354–430) to Martin Luther (1483–1546), John Calvin (1509–1564) and the Presbyterian controversialist Thomas Edwards’s notorious Gangraena (1646). As Ann Hughes has shown, heresiographies should be read cautiously – less as accurate guides to what they denounced, more as exaggerated and self-serving accounts. Their purpose was to represent doctrinal and behavioural errors as inversions of truths so as to facilitate their extirpation. Secondly, those engaged in constructing damaging portrayals of Protestant dissenters were constantly alert to precedents. They attached labels (sometimes borrowed from their predecessors) to aid categorisation, thereby providing loosely connected individuals with a sectarian identity and genealogy that may have deliberately obscured or ignored subtle doctrinal distinctions. Thirdly, in mobilising political opinion, primarily through the medium of print, they illustrate not only the effectiveness with which well-financed, organised polemical campaigns were able to damage the religious and sexual reputations of their actual and supposed enemies, but also how imagined types of heretical, blasphemous and sectarian ‘Others’ were disseminated, popularised and received at moments of tension and conflict.
These constructed ‘Others’ – in the sense of that which lay outside or was excluded from the group with which someone identified themselves – had some obvious differences yet also shared several significant features. Among them were an emphasis on blasphemous religious beliefs and rituals, diabolic inspiration, sinful conduct (especially sexual immorality), mental instability, dissimulation, disloyalty and disorder. By preying upon individual and collective fears they combined to create panics centred on perceived threats to the progress of the Protestant Reformation, national security, good government, a hierarchical social system, the maintenance of law and order, property ownership and patriarchal authority. Furthermore, because contemporaries envisaged these ‘Others’ as the antitheses of perfect models (divine truths, religious orthodoxy, constant devotion, sexual probity, virtuous conduct, faithfulness) their inverse reveals constructed notions of idealised individual and communal selves. Resemblances between perceived Quakers and some of their immediate contemporaries – particularly Baptists, Familists, Diggers and Ranters – therefore suggest that these were not interchangeable static stereotypes but rather a blurring of notional boundaries between different types of ‘Others’. This noticeable degree of fluidity was partly a consequence of the readily available repertoire of constantly evolving tropes from which they derived as well as the common functions they served. It also highlights the type of problems associated with sources of this nature together with the need to be wary of unsympathetic explanations of the antecedents and origins of Quakerism. Accordingly, it is to these antecedents and origins that we turn in the next part of this series
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Ariel, thanks for the contextualizing overview of the literature with its extremes of demonization and martyrolatry. Your initial listing of “advances” attributable to the Quakers correlates with a common perception of their profile, one that I share to some degree. I hope as you pursue this topic that you will also give consideration to the more banal annoyances attributed to them by other sectarians: deviousness and self-righteousness, the infliction of well-intended cruelty (such as the “humane” sentencing to a meditative silence in a Philadelphia prison which Ch. Dickens characterized as mental torture). I’m looking forward to a rounded image of the Quakers in common perception then and later. What occupations did they typically pursue and what was their reputation in non-doctrinal contexts? This is an intriguing launch.