The next First-day the meeting of the Friends was held at Swarthmoor Hall on Judge Fell's own invitation, though he himself went, as usual, to "the Steeplehouse." The spirit of persecution was soon abroad, and one day, when the Judge was absent on circuit, Fox, while speaking in the church, was set upon, knocked down, trampled, beaten, and finally whipped out of town. On Judge Fell's return, he dealt with the Friend's assailants as common rioters. The Judge held, however, his mother's faith to the end, never becoming a member of the Society. He died in the year of Cromwell's death, 1658, and was buried by torchlight under the family pew in Ulverston church. "He was a merciful man to God's people," wrote his widow, adding that, though not a Friend, he "sought after God in the best way that was made known to him."
Meanwhile Margaret Fell had become a leader among the Children of Light. Twice she wrote to Cromwell in behalf of their cause, and again and again to Charles II, with whom she pleaded face to face. Now that her husband's protection was withdrawn, persecution no longer spared her, and she, like Fox and many another of the Society, came to know well the damp and chilly dungeons of Lancaster Castle,—that stern prison of North Lancashire which may be viewed afar off from the ominous height of Weeping Hill.
"Thousands, as toward yon old Lancastrian Towers,
A prison's crown, along this way they passed,
For lingering durance or quick death with shame,
From this bare eminence thereon have cast
Their first look—blinded as tears fell in showers
Shed on their chains."
Refusing, as a Quaker must needs refuse, to take the oath of supremacy, Mistress Fell stood her trial in 1663, her four daughters beside her. Her arguments irritated the judge into exclaiming that she had "an everlasting tongue," and he condemned her to imprisonment for life, with confiscation of all her property to the Crown. But after some five years of Lancaster's grim hospitality she was released, and forthwith set out on a series of visits to those English jails in which Quakers were immured. It was not until eleven years after Judge Fell's death that she married George Fox. The courtship is summarised in Fox's "Journal": "I had seen from the Lord a considerable time before that I should take Margaret Fell to be my wife; and when I first mentioned it to her she felt the answer from God thereto." Yet after the marriage, as before, they pursued, in the main, their separate paths of preaching, journeying, and imprisonment. It was seven years before illness brought Fox to Swarthmoor, which had been restored to the family, for a brief rest. About a quarter of a mile from the mansion, stood a dwelling-house in its three or four acres of land. This modest estate Fox purchased and gave it "to the Lord, for the service of his sons and daughters and servants called Quakers.... And also my ebony bedstead, with painted curtains, and the great elbow-chair that Robert Widder sent me, and my great sea case with the bottles in it I do give to stand in the house as heirlooms, when the house shall be made use of as a meeting-place, that Friends may have a bed to lie on, a chair to sit on, and a bottle to hold a little water for drink." He adds: "Slate it and pave the way to it and about it, that Friends may go dry to their meeting. You may let any poor, honest Friend live in the house, and so let it be for the Lord's service, to the end of the world."
A deep hawthorn lane, winding to the left, led us to that apostolic meeting-house, well-nigh hidden from the road by its high, grey, ivy-topped wall. We passed through a grassy outer court into an inner enclosure thick-set with larches, hollies, and wild cherry. The paths are paved. Luxuriant ivy curtains porch and wall, and clambers up over the low tower. Above the door is inscribed:
Ex dono G. F., 1682.
The meeting-room within is of Quaker plainness, with drab-tinted walls. The settees are hard and narrow, though a few "at the top" are allowed the creature comforts of cushions. Only the posts are left of the ebony bedstead, but two elbow-chairs of carven oak, a curiously capacious and substantial travelling-chest, and a Bible still are shown as Fox's personal belongings. The Bible is a black-letter folio of 1541, the Treacle Bible, open at the third chapter of Jeremiah, where, in the last verse, comes the query: "Is not there any tryacle in Gylyad?"
But Lancashire has other saints no less holy than those dear to Protestant and Quaker memory. Surely martyrs, irrespective of the special phase of the divine idea for which they gladly give up their bodies to torture and to death, are the truest heroes of history.
"For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow."
This remote county, especially the north with its perilous bogs and rugged fells, clung to the mother faith. Many of its old families are still Catholic; many a Tudor mansion can show its "priest-hole" from which, perhaps, some hidden Jesuit has been dragged to the dungeon or the scaffold. We journeyed up from Manchester on a sunny afternoon, for love of one of these, to the beautiful valley of the Ribble, rich in manifold traditions. Our time was short, but we climbed to the keep of Clitheroe Castle, ruined for its loyalty to Charles I, and viewed that wide prospect whose most impressive feature is the witch-storied stretch of Pendle Hill. On that long level range the famous witches of Lancashire used to hold their unseemly orgies, hooting and yowling about Malkin Tower, their capital stronghold, whose evil stones were long since cast down and scattered. Peevish neighbours they were, at the best, ready on the least provocation to curse the cow from giving milk and the butter from coming in the churn, but on Pendle Hill the broomstick battalion was believed to dance in uncouth circle about caldrons seething with hideous ingredients and to mould little wax images of their enemies who would peak and pine as these effigies wasted before the flames, or shudder with fierce shoots of agony as red-hot needles were run into the wax. What were honest folk to do? It was bad enough to have the bride-cake snatched away from the wedding-feast and to find your staid Dobbin all in a lather and dead lame at sunrise from his wild gallop, under one of these "secret, black and midnight hags," to Malkin Tower, but when you were saddled and bridled and ridden yourself, when the hare that you had chased and wounded turned suddenly into your own wife panting and covered with blood, when your baby was stolen from the cradle to be served up in the Devil's Sacrament of the Witches' Sabbath, it was time to send for one of King James's "witch-finders." So the poor old crones, doubled up and corded thumb to toe, were flung into the Calder to see whether they would sink or swim, or sent to where the fagot-piles awaited them in the courtyard of Lancaster Gaol, or even—so the whisper goes—flung into their own lurid bonfires on Pendle Hill. But still strange shadows, as of furious old arms that scatter curses, are to be seen on those heather-purpled slopes, and from the summit black thunderstorms crash down with supernatural suddenness and passion.