This was probably Thomas Newhouse, whose name is included in a list of English Friends visiting N.E., 1661 to 1671 (in the possession of William C. Braithwaite, Banbury, Oxon). The incident is associated with the name of Thomas Newhouse in the histories of Bishop, Besse and Bowden. In Newhouse’s own account of the event and its results, given by Bishop (op. cit. p. 472), we read:
“Upon a Lecture-day at Boston in New-England, I was much pressed in Spirit to go into their Worship-house amongst them.... They cryed, Away with him; and some took me by the Throat, and would not suffer me to answer to it, but hurried me down Stairs, to the Carriage of a great Gun, which stood in the Market place, where I was stripp’d, and tyed to the wheel, and whipp’d with ten Stripes ... and then ... whipp’d ... at Roxbury ... and at Dedham ... and then sent into the Woods.”
In Bishop’s fuller account of this scene, he tells us (op. cit. p. 432) that Newhouse, “having two Glass Bottles in his Hands, dash’d them to pieces, saying to this effect, That so they should be dash’d in Pieces”—a very close parallel with the account given by E. Hooton.
William Edmondson states in his Journal, under date 1672, that the Friends of Virginia were “stumbled and scatter’d by his [Newhouse’s] evil Example ... who went from Truth into the Filth and Uncleanness of the World.” See Jones, Quakers in American Colonies.
It must have been a sorry spectacle—an old woman and a young man, both half naked, tied side by side to the back of a cart, and lashed with a whip of three knotted cords till blood ran.
HOOTON DESCENDANTS
The materials with which to re-erect the house of Hooton are scattered and difficult to identify; the frequent use of the same fore-name is a source of danger; but we venture to place before our readers such facts as at present see the light, in the hope that later research will be aided thereby.
Samuel Hooton
Samuel, son of Oliver and Elizabeth Hooton, was baptized at Ollerton in 1633.
The hand of persecution rested upon him in early life; we find him in prison in Nottingham in 1660 for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance,[150] and in Leicester in 1662 he was in prison with George Fox and others,[151] being “cast into yᵉ Dungeon amongst yᵉ felons. There was hardeley roome to lye downe they [the prisoners] were soe thronge.”[152] Before reaching the age of thirty he was the objective of Muggletonian curses,[153] as was his mother later; and eight years after, in 1670, as recorded by Besse,[154] restraints were laid upon his goods “for the Cause of religiously Assembling to worship God.”