The first rapid spreading in the North of England was materially helped by the establishment, in 1652, of a centre at Swarthmoor Hall, near Ulverston in Lancashire, the property of Judge Fell and his wife Margaret, good churchpeople, much given to religious exercises, and holding open house for travelling ministers of all denominations. The capture of this stronghold gave the movement a northern headquarters, and a post-office. Margaret Fell, converted by Fox at the age of thirty-eight, built the rest of her life into the movement; seventeen years later—more than ten years after the death of her husband—she became Fox’s wife. Her voluminous and carefully preserved correspondence with the leading missionaries of the group alone forms almost a journal of the early years of the Society.[8]
The whole of the countryside at Swarthmoor, whose minister Fox had repudiated, finding him filled with a ranting spirit, high words and “notions”—“full of filth,” as he tersely notes in his Journal—came out against him.
He was given up to justice, ordered to be whipped, and then handed over to the mercy of the mob, who beat him until he fell senseless. Presently, rising up, he bade them strike again. A mason numbed his arm with a blow from a staff; the arm recovered instantly under the power of his outgoing love for his persecutors. Incidents of this kind—of beatings, stonings, and assaults of a more disgusting nature—are typical of the treatment received with unvarying sweetness by the Quaker missionaries, both in England and in America. On several occasions Fox’s life was attempted.
Persecutions of all kinds, moreover, fell far more heavily upon the Quakers than upon other nonconformists, owing to their persistence in holding their meetings openly—meeting in the street if their premises were burned down, the children meeting together when the parents were imprisoned. Fines, flogging, pillory, the loathsomeness of damp and uncleansed dungeons, the brutality of gaolers, left their serenity unmoved; the exposure of women in the stocks for seventeen hours on a November night confirmed their faith. In the Restoration period particularly, when the strong influence of the religious soldiers of the Commonwealth—many of whom, including Cromwell, were able to grasp the tendency of Fox’s conception—was removed, persecution became methodical. Some three thousand odd had suffered before the King came back, twenty-one dying as a result of cruel treatment. Three hundred died during the Restoration period, and they were in prison thousands at a time, for although Charles II., once the leaders had made clear their lack of political ambition, promised them full freedom from disturbance, the panic of fear of sectaries of all kinds which followed the Fifth Monarchy outbreak in London opened an era of persecution and imprisonment. Enormous sums of money were extracted from them under various pretexts; the Quaker and Conventicle Acts were used against them with ingenious brutality, an inducement in the shape of the fine imposed being held out to informers. The Militia Act was, of course, a convenient weapon, and their refusal to pay tithes meant a perpetual series of heavy distraints. It was a common trick with judges and magistrates when they could find no legitimate ground of complaint, to tender to Quakers the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and turn them into law-breakers on the ground of their refusal to swear. Wales offered the most ferocious persecution suffered by them in these islands, but the Welsh converts furnished Pennsylvania with a fine group of vigorous, industrious colonists.
In 1654 the “new doctrine” was brought to the South by some sixty travelling missionaries. The Universities, inflamed, no doubt, in advance by the report of the Quaker scorn of wisdom and high “notions”—having already revenged themselves upon four Quaker girls who were the first to “publish truth” in the colleges and churches, Cambridge following up the savagery of the students by public flogging, Oxford by ducking—had little but rage and evil treatment for the missionaries. Amongst the few converts made in Oxford, however, was the man who, in his turn, brought William Penn into the Quaker fold. In pious London, sunk in theological strife, the obscure Waiters, Ranters, and Seekers were the most favourable soil.
The Quakers, however, worked everywhere, ploughing up the land, calling men to cease the strife of words, and to wait before the Lord for living experience.
They had come down in June, and in August were so far settled as to undertake expansion east and west. The east, a stronghold of Puritanism, was less receptive than the western country, where Seekers abounded and convincements took place by hundreds.
Ireland was broken into by William Edmondson, an ex-Cromwellian soldier. The country was in process of being “settled” by English colonists, who, most of them being either Baptists or Independents, were already a sufficient source of irritation, and the progress of the new message was slow, and met with a persecution, borrowing much of its bitterness from the state of nervous fear prevailing amongst the civil and military authorities. For a time there was an attempt systematically to exclude Friends from the country, but it gave way before the zeal and simplicity of the preachers, and Quakerism, gaining most of its early converts from the army, became in the end a rapidly expanding force.
In Scotland Quaker teaching progressed slowly. By 1656 the Continent had been attacked, Holland and Germany, Austria and Hungary, Adrianople, where a young girl who had gone out alone reasoned with the Sultan, and was told that she spoke truth, and asked to remain in the country; Rome—where John Love was given up by the Jesuits to the Inquisition, examined by the Pope, and hanged—the Morea, and Smyrna, and Alexandria were visited. Many attempts were made to land at the Levantine ports, most of which were, however, frustrated by English consuls and merchants; George Robinson reached Jerusalem, and came near to meeting his death at the hands of the Turks; and the first isolated attempt had been made in the West Indies and America. These activities and expansions were helped forward and confirmed by Fox during the intervals between his many imprisonments. He spent altogether some six years in prison. For the rest, his life was one long missionary enterprise, and during his detentions he worked unceasingly.
He early recognized the need of a definite church organization, and matured a system whose final acceptance by the society as a whole was helped on by an incident occurring during his eight months’ confinement in Launceston gaol.[9] James Nayler, one of the sweetest and ablest of Quaker writers and preachers, of an acutely “suggestible” temperament, and less stable than his followers, unsettled by the success attending his work both in the north and the south and by the adulations of some of the more excitable of his fellow-workers, permitted on the occasion of his entry into Bristol a triumphant procession, the singing of hosannas, and Messianic worship. It is noteworthy that of the thousand odd Quakers in Bristol at the time not one took any part in the outbreak. The matter was taken up by Parliament, a committee was appointed, and Nayler came near being put to death for blasphemy. He suffered in the pillory, was whipped through London and Bristol, his tongue was bored, his forehead branded, and he was kept in prison for three years. He made full public recantation of his errors, and enjoyed full communion with the society which had never repudiated him, recognizing even in his time of aberration the fine spiritual character of the man. This incident, loaded with publicity, brought much discouragement to Friends; but it also showed them their need of the organization and discipline insisted upon by Fox. And so the Quaker church—the most flexible of all religious organizations—came into being.