The Quaker movement had its origins in the deepest radicalism of Interregnum England. Characterized by the most extreme of religious and political thought, combined with outlandish and belligerent behavior, they were soon the most feared group in the English speaking world. This fear led to persecution which was even intense by the standards of the time, especially in New England.
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On June 1, 1660, in Boston, Massachusetts, Mary Dyer became the third person, and infamously the only woman, to be executed for the crime of being a Quaker. This was something even John Endicott hesitated to do. He’d even gone so far as to commute her sentence once before, and he gave her an opportunity to escape punishment yet again, but she refused. The 49 year old wife and mother was marched to the gallows surrounded by drums loud enough that no one could hear her speak, and her body left hanging for two days afterward. The question is why. Why, of all the religious dissidents in 17th Century New England, would Quakers be the ones singled out for death? So feared that drums were used to drown out their last words?
Last episode, we referenced an interpretation of two Bermuda witch trials as being motivated more by fear that the women were Quakers, than that they were witches. And the same question arises. We’re going to answer it, and as we answer it, the question of how the movement changed will arise, and we’re going to answer that, too.
Introduction
When we hear about Quakers, even those of us with a vague familiarity with the term likely envision quiet, anti-slavery pacifists and industrialists who did things like reducing worker exploitation. The first couple decades of the Quakers’ existence, though, had a significantly different character and history. Different enough to make them the most feared radicals in a decade characterized by unchecked radicalism, emerging out of the ashes of wartorn England, with an attitude that came from the circumstances. In addition to this, or perhaps because of it, early Quakerism was also one of the fastest spreading denominations ever, and that certainly didn’t help matters.
Quakerism had emerged in 1652, which made the movement a relative latecomer to the radical scene. This was a time, as we’ve referenced time and again, in which radicalism was characterized, even defined, by intense millenarian beliefs. Radical Puritans believed that Christ’s return was imminent, and most of them believed that their own actions would determine the timing of His coming. And looking at the state of the world, it was easy to want it to come as soon as possible. Quakers were no different. In fact, they were among the most intensely focused groups on this concept. Their focus on prophecy, miracles and other supernatural things has led people to focus on mysticism as the root of Quakerism, but in reality, it was simply a logical extension of the ideas which were already common among British Puritans.
So, going into 1652, there were the Congregationalists, and the Levellers, and the Diggers, and the Antinomians. And more radical still, there were the Baptists, and the Diests. There were the Fifth Monarchists. And further still, there were the Familists, Ranters and Seekers. These last three groups differed slightly from each other, but they were united in the adamant belief that their inner feelings and understandings were far more important in reaching the truth than the Bible was, and that the Church was worthless, even actively harmful. Christ, they said, was resurrected in the hearts of believers, so the ideas they had carried far more weight than anything else could.
And with this belief, you got some seriously weird behavior. And that actually brings me to an important point, which is that this episode gets a little more inappropriate than most of this show. It’s not too bad, but fair warning. Among that weird behavior, you had free love communes saying that salvation absolved them of all guilt and rules, and restored them to the pre-fall state of Adam and Eve. Some people denied the existence of heaven and hell, or said the Bible was outright untrue, as well as embracing pantheism, and even atheism, ironically. Members of these groups were known for swearing, getting drunk, committing adultery, and public nudity. Streaking wasn’t just some joke, it was a form of religious agitation. Familists and ranters ranged from subdued, depressed nihilism to manic hedonism, and many alternated between the two extremes. And they followed the weirdest sorts of people. There were two merchants who went around London saying they were the prophets spoken of in the Book of Revelation, and people believed them. Another popular figure said that adultery was impossible, because all women were the same person.
There truly is no weird like 17th Century weird. And, perhaps my most important personal belief when interpreting history is that people don’t change, and so the best starting point for understanding anything is to try to understand people as being fundamentally like us, just reacting to different circumstances. As such, I really try to avoid looking at some people as smarter or more enlightened than others, either within a single time period or across time periods, and to try to understand people through that lens, even if they’re doing things that are almost incomprehensibly weird or evil. But my goodness, sometimes they make that tricky!
The thing is, though, that for all the overwhelmingly weird behavior, these were overwhelmingly weird times. In the previous hundred years, there had been wars, diseases, failed harvests, comets, a mini ice age, and the complete overturning of the social order. As part of that overturning, people had been set free to interpret the Bible for themselves for the first time ever, and this a century of too few pastors, so people had been left to their own devices in those interpretations, and combined with those external pressures. People knew not to be Catholic, but not what to be instead. And then, to push everything over the edge, there’d been a decade of civil war which refused to end, got way more extreme than anyone could have imagined, had no historical precedent, itself, and left the country an absolute shambles. A lot of people have compared the emergence of these radical religious movements to the radical political movements of the 1960s, and it’s definitely a logical place for your mind to go when you read about them.
When the Quakers emerged, led by George Fox and John Nayler, they pretty much absorbed most of those other movements. They’d been around for years without any discernible change, and the Quakers were new and intensely charismatic. The first converts had been “convinced” with a couple speeches by Fox, one of which discussed his vision of a “great people to be gathered” at Pendle Hill, and another which worked to turn a large group of Yorkshire Seekers into “finders.” In that one, he told the Seekers not to look for a prophet to lead them, but to look to the Christ within, to that Light which the Gospel of John says enlightens every person who comes into the world. And from there, the movement spread quickly, becoming a major presence in every region of England, Scotland and Wales within two years.
It was an easy jump for everyone from the Levellers and Diggers to the Ranters to join this new movement, and within Quakerism, the most radical ideas could be exchanged among groups, and combined to form a movement that embraced pretty much all of them. That’s one reason the Quakers spread so very, very fast. But it also meant there was a lot of ideological diversity within the movement. For a while, this diversity was so extreme that Quaker beliefs consisted of a series of negative statements more than anything. They didn’t deny the existence of a God or a historical Christ, nor of Heaven or hell, nor did they believe that people could attain perfection on Earth. But there were plenty of people within the movement who didn’t fit this most basic of descriptions.
As a group, though, they practiced healings, did nothing structured or formal, opposed singing psalms as a manner of worship. And then, there was “going naked for a sign,” again practiced by all manner of Quakers. And it was exactly what it sounds like. “The Lord made one to go naked among you,” said Fox. “A figure of thy nakedness, and of your nakedness, and as a sign amongst you before your destruction cometh, that you might see that you were naked and not covered with the truth.” People would take off their clothes, and proclaim some aspect of Quaker doctrine, and tell people to repent. They did it in markets, they did it in chapels, and at the height of the practice, groups of naked Quakers would swarm the Yorkshire Dales. So in one story, one of these people walked naked through the market square, stood right at the base of the town cross and started preaching. In another, a man ran through the town with nothing but his shirt on. In another, a woman exposed herself in a Church while confronting the preacher. One man named William Simpson spent three years touring the country and doing this.
And politically, they were no less controversial or inflammatory. Fox said of the Levellers, “you had a flash in your mind, a simplicity, but your minds run into the earth and are smothered by it, and so get up into presumption.” They issued political demands, such as one for annual parliaments, and served in office. They published tracts which did seem to advocate for Leveller ideas, though these weren’t endorsed by the movement as a whole, and they spoke as strongly as anyone against the idea of restoring the English monarchy. Going further, the complete abolition of wealth, the idea that Parliament was as repressive as the King, and complete abolition of class were ideas that had gained at least some traction within the movement. Over the course of time, for both political and religious reasons, which were intertwined in the 17th Century anyway, plenty of Quakers also started to refuse to remove their hats in front of social superiors, or to use formal language to address them.
There’s no better example of this diversity, though, than the differences between Nayler and Fox, who were both co-leaders of Quakerism, and also kind of rivals. Both believed in millenarianism, prophecy, egalitarianism and a Spirit-led religion rather than one which was either doctrinal or liturgical. But, Fox was from an affluent artisan family, while Nayler had been a farmer. Fox used his education and articulateness to attract people, while Nayler emphasized his simple roots, dressing like a farmer and harshly denouncing the rich. Fox was devoted to the prophecies of Revelation, but Nayler made him look restrained by comparison. Fox rejected the practices of the Ranters, while Nayler embraced them wholeheartedly. So, well before the Quakers got popular, Fox emphasized that no one could reach the righteousness and holiness of pre-fall Adam in this life. Nayler didn’t so much, even after people with those beliefs became Quakers. Fox had been the one who got the ball rolling, but for a while, Nayler was even more prominent.
The Ranters who were “convinced” by Quakerism joined Nayler’s followers, while people like William Penn followed Fox.
And in addition to that, this was a time in which propaganda was new and false accusations had become the norm rather than the exception, so rumors started to spread and worsen these worries. Quakers, opponents said, denied the Trinity, denied the Scriptures as the Word of God, and denied their own sin. They would have no law but their lusts, no heaven nor glory but here, and no sin but what men fancied to be so. They were nothing less than Ranters with a new name to avoid the stigma of their old one, and who had learned to be a tiny bit more respectable in some public situations. “Quakerism is become the common sink of them all,” anabaptists, antinomians, socinians, familists, libertines, atheists, ranters, diggers, the rest. And they believed that any extreme views the movement didn’t openly embrace, it was teaching in secret.
And the thing is, there were absolutely Quakers who fit these descriptions. Fox could deny it, could try his best to draw a solid line dividing Quakers from Ranters and making the movement even borderline respectable, but it was clearly true. And Nayler didn’t even bother to deny it.
One example of a relatively extreme, but highly publicized action of a Quaker, was when a man walked into the lobby of the House of Commons in 1654, drew a sword and burned a Bible because it deceived the people, and then he proceeded to refer to himself as King of the Jews. For those of you who aren’t religiously inclined, in the Bible that term refers to Jesus. That just didn’t go over well.
And, speaking of swords, at this point in time, Quakers were assuredly not pacifists, either. A huge percent of them had served in the Army in the recent wars, which makes sense because the Army was the place in which the radical ideas had first become prominent. And that was even worse, because then people also saw this gigantic group of people, many soldiers, expressing dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, as a potential new army, ready to raise up yet another war.
But, one thing that was fundamental to the Quaker movement of the time period, and which made enemies even disregarding what they believed, or variations and perceptions, is that the entire movement was built on a foundation of confronting preachers in their own Churches. Even preachers who had a live and let live attitude toward their cause quickly turned against them when people burst into their congregations, picking apart their sermons and interrogating them in an attempt to turn their parishioners against them. And like I said, this was both Fox, and Nayler, and their followers on both sides of the Atlantic.
So with all of this combined, it’s a lot easier to see why Quakerism was so hated and feared. And Fox, in 1654, was arrested under suspicion of plotting against the government, but Cromwell supported him. And Nayler said that the Quakers never plotted against the magistrates, but he also admitted that they preached that magistrates weren’t to be obeyed as a rule. So when Quaker preachers were considered sowers of sedition and subverters of laws, they really couldn’t deny it. In 1655, Quakers were labeled the biggest enemy left, having principles which were incompatible with either civil government or army discipline.
There was an event, though, which caused the Quaker movement to reign itself in a little bit, at least temporarily. It put a temporary stop to going naked for a sign, while causing a lot of Quakers to rethink their actions and beliefs a little bit. It happened in Bristol, which was the home of a large and growing Quaker community, the community in fact which sent most of the Quakers who ended up in the Americas. There, in 1656, Nayler rode a donkey into the city with women laying palms before him, clearly recreating the scene of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem before his crucifixion. He talked about the return of Christ, and he preached that it was possible for a man to achieve Christ’s perfection and perform His works. There had been a lot of individual Quakers whipped in the past for claiming relation to Jesus in some way or another, but this was different. This was one of the leaders of this massive, scary movement seemingly equating himself to Jesus, and it was too much. It was too blasphemous, too ranter, and from someone too influential to let this go.
At this point, some people called for the death penalty, but instead, authorities imprisoned, flogged and branded him. It was still a brutal affair, but he survived and was released a few months later. And after that, he did back off a bit, even correcting his Ranter followers in a way he never had before. And more important than that, Nayler’s supporters started to take a second look at their own beliefs and behaviors. His excesses showed the dangers of a purely Spirit-led movement. If there was nothing tangible to tell you, “hey, maybe this isn’t a good idea,” then even the best and brightest could go astray. So they stopped being so outlandish and started moderating their actions a bit.
In light of this, it’s worth reexamining that assertion about the two witches potentially being Quakers. It becomes very clear why a colony as fundamentally unstable as Bermuda would be afraid of a force as fundamentally destabilizing as the Quakers. At this point, there was no death penalty for Quakers, nor any legal precedent for keeping them out, so conflating them with witches wouldn’t be the worst strategy for intimidating and keeping them away.
Within a couple years of their foundation, though, Quakers had sent missionaries everyone from Ireland to Rome to India, and in 1655 they went to Barbados. Its reputation preceded it across the Atlantic, but Barbados had always been a more tolerant sort of a place, with a specific tolerance for these radical movements that had always made New Englanders uneasy. Winthrop had called the island overrun with familists just a few years before. So it was a great place to start. It was also extravagantly wealthy, which was nice.
So, some Bristol Quakers went in 1655, most notably a woman named Mary Fisher, and in 1656 Henry Fell of Kent followed them. He’d been a minister for the previous three years, had written unpublished pamphlets, and would travel the world for the cause, but his biggest project was Barbados. He settled there, getting involved with commerce and even buying a ship to trade with New England. He arrived in October, and at first he didn’t have much luck. The people were rough and tumble, and the Anglican ministers actively opposed him. After traveling the island with Fisher convert John Rous for a few months, though, he had a small group of converts.
And these converts included some of the leading citizens of the island, like Lewis Morris. Lewis Morris that old indentured servant turned privateer from our Providence Island story. Morris ended up being the person at whose house the Quakers met, and he had people arrested for attacking Fell. Governor Searle was sympathetic to their cause, too, and in this positive environment, after the first few converts, there was a flood. By 1670, Barbados had six times the rate of Quakerism that England had.
And Barbados became their base to travel the rest of America, which they did as quickly as they evangelized everywhere else. In 1657, they had gone everywhere from Newfoundland to Suriname. The first ministers in Suriname found themselves imprisoned for six weeks, after which they left. Fell, himself went to Suriname a year later. His trip was delayed by the fact that he’d been captured by Spanish sailors and sent to Spain as a prisoner, escaped, traveled through France and sailed to England. A month after reaching England, he’d gone back to Barbados, and then to Suriname. He felt like the people in Suriname were more wicked than anywhere else in the English speaking world, to the point that it had hardened the hearts of the Indians to the idea of God. His group’s books were burned, they were put in the stocks and imprisoned, with threats of whipping that never materialized. They were put on a ship and sent back to Barbados.
Quakers who reached the Chesapeake were also banished, imprisoned and whipped, but it’s extremely difficult to figure out the details of their time there. Quakers didn’t keep good records, and didn’t even differentiate between Maryland and Virginia in their records, referring to everything owned by the old Virginia Company of London as “Virginia.” We do know that a lot of the named converts to Quakerism were Virginia Puritans who had been exiled to Maryland, with Providence/Anne Arundel and Kent Island being key locations for the Quaker movement, along with other settlements along the Eastern Shore. And, some of the Quakers’ most intense opponents fit the same description. We also know that whatever the details, Quakerism did emerge as one of the dominant denominations in Maryland.
After the Chesapeake, Quakers sailed to New England. And it was there that they would face the most intense persecution of anywhere. They didn’t even get along well in Providence and Rhode Island. They weren’t persecuted there, nor were there legal barriers to their participating in government, so it was a very important place for them, but they weren’t liked, in large part because they were immediately pulled into pre-existing economic conflicts. A man named William Harris had been in a land dispute with Roger Williams, and he converted to Quakerism in order to bring the weight of the organization behind him.
Quakers and Baptists, the colony’s two main religious groups, lobbed accusations at each other of threatening liberty. Quakers pointed to Baptists’ organization and structure to support their argument, while Baptists highlighted the Quakers’ lack of distinction between religious and civil liberty, especially when coupled with their reliance on personal revelation. So, anyone could say that God told them something, and use that as an excuse to take away someone else’s rights, which was horrifying. Still, thanks to its tolerant nature, Rhode Island became a strong base for the movement.
From there, they went to Martha’s Vineyard, and confronted the man trying to preach to a group of Wampanoag Christians, again in front of his congregation. After decades of promises, New Englanders had actually sent evangelists to preach to the Indians, and now Quakers were confronting and arguing with those very evangelists. The English kicked them out, Indian Christians took care of them, and then allowed them to go on their way.
It was Massachusetts, though, that was the biggest and strongest colony, and therefore the main focus, and 35 Quakers went there between 1656 and 1659. There and in New Haven, there were whippings, ear croppings, stocks, irons and floggings, and when that wasn’t enough to stop the influx, a law was passed banishing Quakers on pain of death. It was the only such law in the English speaking world.
And within a year, this law had led to three executions. Two of these, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, were men who had come from England as Quaker missionaries, but the third was a woman who had lived in New England since 1635. This, to get back to the beginning of the episode, was Mary Dyer. She had been one of Anne Hutchinson’s closest followers, the woman who had comforted her after her trial. She and her husband had been known as religious radicals, and they had relocated to Providence after the Antinomian Controversy.
They’d visited England not too long before, and there, Mary had converted to Quakerism. She stayed in England to learn more while her husband returned to America, and when she followed him, she was ready to give anything for the cause. They landed in Boston, and Mary returned to her family in Providence, while Robinson and Stephenson stayed. When she heard, she returned to them and was thrown in jail with them for two months. They were banished again, but the situation unfolded the exact same way. This time, seeing that things weren’t changing, they were sentenced to death for having refused to stay out of Massachusetts.
On October 27, 1659, the three Quakers were led to the scaffold, surrounded by an armed band and drums beating to drown out any last words they might use to convert people. The men were executed first, while Dyer was forced to watch, and then she stepped up the ladder and a rope was placed around her neck, too. But, at the last minute, someone shouted to stop, “for she was reprieved.” She said she was willing to die, but the officials simply carried her back to the Providence border and left her there. Her family had pleaded for her life, and Endicott and the other colony officials really didn’t want to execute a woman who wasn’t, you know, a witch or murderer or something. Dyer had a very respectable demeanor, too, which could make her more sympathetic in the eyes of the crowd, and could easily turn her into a martyr for the Quaker cause. And she probably saw the exact same possibility. If she could turn popular sentiment against the harshest law against Quakerism in the English speaking world, it would help the cause more than anything else she could do.
She stayed in Providence and Long Island over winter, but the next spring she again returned to Massachusetts. And this time, Endicott saw no alternative but to execute her. She would keep returning as long as she was alive, to convert and proselytize. And if they didn’t stop her, they wouldn’t be able to stop the other Quakers who followed. She was sentenced to death, again marched to the scaffold surrounded by a militia and drums, and this time she was hanged. Her body was left up for two days, and the General Court called it “a flag for others to take example by,” but she did become a martyr. People didn’t like seeing a woman executed for something like that, and with the high rate of women missionaries in Quakerism, this was going to be an insurmountable problem. After Mary Dyer, only one man was executed for his Quaker proselytizing. The law was rolled back, and Dyer became a rather iconic figure within the history of New England.
Like I said, though, the question raised by our discussion so far is how the Quaker movement changed. And the answer to that question involves things that we’ve alluded to but not yet openly discussed.
In short, it was the Restoration. The Restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660 undid Cromwell’s Commonwealth experiment. This was the event which brought back the monarchy which still exists in England today. We’ll get into the hows and whys later, but Cromwell had died in 1658, and by 1660, pretty much everyone was ready to bring back the king.
The exception to that, though, was the people who still held on to their millenarian hopes. For them, the Restoration was unthinkable, because it was a pretty clear signal that the Millenial Reign of the Saints wasn’t starting. Christ wasn’t returning just yet. The world would continue in all its scary, painful, unpredictable … everything. And this was a huge thing to process. If you’ve been listening, you know this. If you haven’t, I’d suggest you go back and listen to episode 18 of this series to get an idea. People had given up so much, and accepted so much they didn’t understand or really approve of, on the sole premise … no, not premise, but promise … that Christ’s return would be the reward, and now they had to face the fact that that wasn’t the case. This, to get a little bit ahead of ourselves, would lead to a whole new wave of witch trials, and even contribute at least somewhat to the Salem Witch Trials years later.
It would lead another radical movement, led by a former New Englander, to revolt. Thomas Venner’s Fifth Monarchists would not be successful in their rebellion. But, that rebellion would force the Quakers to finalize some decisions.
The Quaker movement had already started to fragment and focus after Nayler’s Bristol incident, and after he’d been discredited, a lot of the Ranters who’d joined the Quakers had either conformed to Fox’s idea of Quakerism or fallen away. Fox emerged as the leader of the Quaker movement, and the man who would define its history. In order to avoid being blamed for the Fifth Monarchist revolt, something which was absolutely likely given the highly visible, militant and controversial nature of the Quaker movement, Fox made a declaration of absolute pacifism in January 1661. He hoped that this would protect Quakers from being arrested or charged with sedition. Many Quakers and many interpreted his proclamation as also forbidding them from holding either civil or military office in any capacity, and Fox approved of this. Some continued to serve in the military, but the movement as a whole had been redefined as a purely pacifist one.
More fundamentally, though, if the world was going to last longer than a couple more years, Quakerism needed to either disappear, or adopt a longterm strategy. Up until the Restoration, Quakerism had existed as a visceral, undefined movement of purest radicalism and impulse, but it could do that because it only expected to be around for a few years before the world entered into a new age. Now it was clear that the world would be around a bit longer than that, so Fox had to either give up on Quakerism altogether, or redefine it in a way that would allow it to persist. And this made him the man responsible for helping turn Quakerism into a movement that could survive in the long term. So, he came up with a meeting structure that would ensure the movement remained connected and united. Some actual, tangible agreements on good, lawful behavior also had to be reached. Simply letting people go with their gut instincts on everything was not a sustainable approach. So he formulated those, too. What Ranters remained were pushed out for good, in favor of a milder and more moderate movement.
Fox’s reforms did prompt a series of splits within the movement, and most notable was one led by John Perrot, who emerged as Nayler’s de facto successor. Nayler’s Ranter and other followers who had had no one to follow after Fox took over, did now. Perrot said that hats must be worn during prayer, and denied all human arrangements for worship, even meeting at stated times and places. He openly said that he had far more in common with the Seekers, independents and others than he did with those who were called Quakers. Perrot ended up being exiled to Barbados, where he lived until 1665. And in response to this and other splits, Fox tightened the organization even more, creating what disappointed opponents saw as a hierarchical structure no different from any other. Quakerism became a fundamentally normal denomination with a strong ideological foundation, and a few quirky practices that hearkened to its radical past. There would be no more going naked for a sign. Quakers would be quiet types, and Fox wrote a history emphasizing the parts of the Quaker story which would lead you to believe that that had always been the case, while encouraging Quakers to accept this new version of their religion. Fox, himself, visited America at around this time.
So that’s the origin of Quakerism, how they came to be persecuted, and how they came to be the sect we know today. And Fox’s second in command, his likely successor, was a man who we’ll be hearing more about in our story – William Penn. In fact, we’re going to hear more about him next week, when he leads the Western Design.