In Our Time - George Fox and the Quakers

Episode Date: April 5, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the origins of Quakerism. In the mid-seventeenth century an itinerant preacher, George Fox, became the central figure of a group known as the Religious Society of Friends, whose members believed it was possible to obtain contact with Christ without priestly intercession. The Quakers, as they became known, rejected the established Church and what they saw as the artificial pomp and artifice of its worship. They argued for religious toleration and for the equality of men and women. Persecuted for many years, particularly after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Quakers survived to become an influential religious group, known for their pacifism and philanthropy. With:Justin ChampionProfessor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of LondonJohn CoffeyProfessor of Early Modern History at the University of LeicesterKate PetersFellow in History at Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. England in the 1650s was a land recovering from the turmoil of civil war. The execution of Charles I in 1649 and the dismantling of the Church of England created a fertile ground for new and radical approaches towards Christianity in the state. It was from this background of revolution and churchry formed that the Quaker movement emerged, the biggest force in Puritanism. The name Quaker was originally a term of derision,

intended to insult the members of this radical Protestant sect, the religious society of friends, for the spiritual intensity of their worshipping. The quest for religious toleration, equality for all men and women, and the emphasis on the direct communication with God through once inner light, ensured both the Quakers' popularity and their savage persecution, by Charles II and subsequently. Today the Quakers were a thriving and global religious community, well known for their pacifism and philanthropy. But how did this group of friends acquire such a large and devoted following,

who were their early leaders, and how were they able to survive and even flourish during times of persecution? With me to discuss the Quakers a Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London, John Coffey, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester, and Kate Peters, fellow in history at Murray Edwards, College at the University of Cambridge. Justin Champion, can you give us some idea of the political climate and religious climate in England in the 1650s?

I think in essence we're dealing with a traumatised society. The execution of Charles I really staggered everybody's convictions in hierarchy, in order. Because he was a divinely, he thought wily to be a divinely appointed king. In essence, God had been killed. And the consequence for normal account, of religion was very, very traumatic. We also have the consequences of a very brutal and bloody civil war. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people, had perished.

So the sort of traditional forms of order had been taken away. And in every parish, one can imagine that there's a sense of loss, there's a sense of trauma, and there's a sense of apocalypse. We're probably living in end times. We can see, if we're into our numerology, we can coordinate the book of revelation with events that are happening. So Quakerism and a lot of the other radical sectarians grow out of that sense of loss of expectation.

I think people think of the civil war as these cocker spaniels and these chaps with funny hats, but proportionally more men were lost in that war than in the First World War in this country, right? Absolutely, and I was thinking about how to convey the image of that. Baghdad and the Iraq, the sort of desperate consequences of the loss of authority and then the sort of sectarianism as a consequence of those civil wars.

I don't think it's too extreme to think of the nation as one driven by fundamental division and anxiety. And there are many fundamentalist sects grew up, but we can ripple through them, but we're going to concentrate on Quakerism, which emerged as the most powerful. Can you tell us what it had, what it was against? There were the Mughaltonians, the Fifth Monarchist,

the Leviners and so and so and so, but the Quakers. I think that the Quakers grow out of radical Puritanism, radical Calvinism, and they have scripture and they see the world around them and they see that the two things aren't matched together. So their fundamental hostility is towards the sort of pride and hierarchy of the church and in particular churchmen and steeple houses.

So they believe you can have a closer and more perfect relationship with God without the intervention of all of these forms of hierarchy. So it's a very social objection in one sense to the black-coated priest. They may not be the established church. There may not be Anglicans. Protestants, Presbyterians, anyone who claims to have authority over somebody else's belief is the subject of their hostility. And churches themselves,

steeple houses. These are sort of idolatrous buildings. So Quakers very much object to the formality of public religion in this period. And inside what you said, you're saying that anybody who is ordained and therefore thought themselves to be specially appointed by God was not to be accepted. Everybody was equal. Absolutely. And one of the sort of classic Protestant objections to Roman Catholicism is taken by Quakers to extend to anybody who claims a sort of special priesthood. Everybody is equal. Man, woman, child. And they kept driving this through. And so in the 1650s, they're fighting that through still, aren't they? And this is not just simply a sort of intellectual opposition. This takes the form of active protest.

You know, Quakers will disrupt church services. They fight what they call the Lamb's War. It's their duty and their conscience to contest at every opportunity, these forms of hierarchy and these forms of domination. They are the first people to object, if you like, to priestcraft. And they wreck services and they're fierce people. A lot of them have come out of the New Model Army and fought in the war, of course. John Coffey, George Fox is generally guided as the founder of Quakerism.

Can you tell us about him? Well, Fox comes from Leicestershire, from the village of Drayson and the Clay, which is now Fennie Drayton, which is still a place of Quaker pilgrimage. His father's a weaver. So he comes from a relatively humble background, but his father is fairly prosperous,

leaves a fair bit of money to fox and his will eventually, and is a churchwarden, quite a prominent man in the community. So most of the Quaker leadership come from the middling sort rather than from the ranks of the poor. The family are also godly. The neighbours call his father righteous Christa, and his mother is proud of being descended from one of the Protestant martyrs under Mary I. So he grows up in this Puritan milieu and he's a very serious young boy.

I mean, he talks about his gravity and staidness of spirit and how he disapproves of elderly men who wanton and light. And there's a quest for religious perfection and purity in Fox, which drives a lot of his religious pilgrimage. How is he involved in the Civil War? he's not really I mean some of the Quaker leaders like James Naler spend years in the new model army

Fox avoids it but in 1643 a year after the war is broken out he leaves his home he packs his bags and he goes on a kind of religious pilgrimage he goes to London he travels around the East Midlands everywhere he goes he seeks out the company of the godly he meets Baptists he pours out his soul

to Puritan pastors but he gradually becomes disillusion with the Puritan clergy. One of them gets very upset when he steps on his flower bed, and another tells him to lighten up and to take tobacco and sing psalms, and he claims that his own local parish minister recycles some of his conversational material in Sunday sermons. So by 1646, he is disillusioned with the clergy, and he has a series of revelations or openings, as he says, which transform his life. One of them is that you don't need to be bred up at Oxford or Cambridge to be a minister of Christ.

That doesn't qualify you to be a minister of Christ. So this anti-clericalism that Justin's been talking about is absolutely central to Fox's mission. Can we get, in a way, to the heart or the spirit of it, in his words, he heard Christ. And then he spoke of the inner light. And that became the guiding principle of the Quaker's spiritual quest and strength. Can you tell us a little about that? Yeah, so one of his other revelations are openings is that there is one even Christ Jesus

that can speak to thy condition, famous phrase from Fox. And he basically, from that point on, calls people away from false teachers and calls them to take Christ as their teacher. Everybody has Christ inside them. It can be discovered. Yeah, and this is quite a radical idea.

I mean, the general view among Calvinists at the time is that the elect, those are chosen for some, have the Holy Spirit within inside them. Quakers argue that all of humanity has Christ within, and the proof text they use for that is from the prologue of John's Gospel, which says that Christ enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world. Can you, he came together with other dissenting preachers. You told he went this trip with disillusion.

And the religious society of friends began to form. How did he begin to form? Did he push it into shape? A lot of it was in the north of England and the north-western so on. How did he bring it together? Well, he starts out in the East Midlands, and he goes around proclaiming the Day of the Lord, which I think is apocalyptic.

So it's the idea that the apostasy of the church is ending, God's restoring the true church. And he has some success in the East Midlands, and this is probably where they're first called Quakers, but then they really coalesce in the north of England in 1652, when a whole series of religious groups, seekers, independents, join the Quaker movement almost on mass.

Fox climbs Pendle Hill on a clear day. He sees out to the Irish Sea. He has this vision of a great people being gathered together. And there's real momentum. It bursts into life, really, in 1652, in the north of England. So it's preaching and persuasion through preaching

that brings a lot of sex together into Quakerism. Yeah, and through prophecy, they see themselves as reenacting the Bible, being like Old Testament prophets and reenacting the acts of the apostles. It's a new act of the apostles. And we'll come to how they were organised a bit more specifically quite soon. Kate Peters, can you just, it was begun there, but can you develop their theological beliefs of the Quakers, please, contrasted with others?

Yeah, I mean, the key doctrine is this idea of the inner light of Christ, that everybody has the light of Christ within them. And that is, as John was saying, that's in very stark contrast to Calvinist predestinarianism, stresses, so Orthodox Puritans would have believed that God has predetermined who will be saved and who will not be saved. The Quakers, and they're not the first to do this, but they do it in a very organized way, argue that with this inner light of Christ that is within everybody, it's a very optimistic idea that gives people actually a lot of agency. Again, in the context of the despair of the 1650s, people have agency to turn to the light of Christ within them.

So a lot of Quaker preaching is urging people, exhorting people to listen to the inner light of Christ within them. There is therefore something they can do to secure their salvation. Would this be some sort of answer to what Justin began by saying is the trauma of the civil war? Yes, absolutely. And it gets away from the idea that there is nothing one can do about salvation. There is something that can be done about salvation. And it's to do with turning to the inner light within you. Now, what's the flip side, so it gives you lots of agency on the one hand. What do you mean by agency?

That people can do something in order to secure not only their salvation, but I would also argue the shape of the godly Commonwealth, this Republican Commonwealth, that there are things that they can do in order to ensure this is a godly nation that doesn't involve a national church, it doesn't involve formalistic, formulaic worship, but it involves everybody joining in, participating and listening to this inner light. John took us some way towards the organising, the Pendle Hill Revelation,

the work in the north and gathering together from our other small sects. But how, in the 1650s, you have this country still in trauma, you have Cromwell on the rampage, you have the bits of royalists around, all sorts of savagery going on, how did they come into shape as such a big, of a big group. What was their organisation? Well, again, I think they're spurred on optimistically by the fact that they want, they are on a mission to enlighten everybody to the inner light. And what they do effectively is people like George Fox, it's not just Fox, it's Richard Farnas, it's James Naler, people who clearly see themselves as prophets who are able to communicate the word of God,

travel around two gathered sects that already exist, that are already worshipping out. of course there is no Church of England, so there are a number of sects who meet informally anyway. And a lot of what the Quakers are doing is simply joining up those congregations with quite optimistic preaching. There is something that can be done. The thing I think is interesting about the Quakers is because it doesn't happen in London, it happens in the north of England. They necessarily have to write letters to each other. So in travelling, people like Fox, who clearly have made a big impression through their preaching, write letters back to encourage them to carry on meeting,

to carry on listening to the inner light of Christ. So it's the letters and the tracts that actually join up a lot of people who are very open to this idea of the inner light. You've used the word meeting several times and meeting became central to the idea, the Quaker Meeting. And all of us know the Quaker Meeting House. How did that develop? Was it developing then that they were building meeting houses?

Sort of. They're certainly having meetings. I think the key thing is that... And the meetings are equal meetings. They're equal meeting. They don't have a formal ministry. They don't have a formal system of worship. In fact, they are very, very keen to avoid that.

So they... But they do meet together in order to listen to the inner light of Christ. So they come together in formal meetings. Now, meetings can be both... There will be preaching. There will be prophecy. people, the idea is that the word of God comes to people and they communicate it to a small meeting. So these will often be relatively small groups of people coming together.

They absolutely reject the idea that a church has a special spiritual significance. So they will meet in people's houses, they will meet in fields and barns and so on. In the 1650s, in the Commonwealth, Cromwell's still there. How were they thought of? That's quite an interesting and quite a complicated question to answer. I think the key thing about the 1650s is that there is no Church of England. After 1653, there is a written constitution, the instrument of government, which actually states that the duty of the magistrate is to protect people from religious persecution

and that people should not be persecuted for their religious beliefs. Now, the Quakers go about very zealously in the 1650s actually seeking to enforce that. So they're going around challenging both Puritan ministers but also magistrates if they think they are being persecuted. So although they are deeply unpopular, people are very frightened of the Quakers because of their social egalitarianism because they say everybody is equal, we don't want a ministry, we don't want a national church. And on a trivial point, they won't doff their hats.

They won't doff their hats. They won't say you to people. They say thee and thou because they want to indicate social egalitarianism at every opportunity. So they are seen to be socially very dangerous and religiously very dangerous. But ironically in the 1650s they're going around actually saying we want the constitution to be enforced and we don't think the magistrates are enforcing it. Can we stay in the 1650s because that was the furnace in which it was formed, really Justin Champion and then it was tested in the 1660s and very harshly and went on from there.

We've talked about George Fox a little. There was James Naler and there were others. Perhaps we should concentrate on James. now as another wing of Quakerism, which is, and just keep repeating to the list of, as that this was a time of fury, really. Absolutely, and I think, in one sense, from the perspective of the 21st century, we can see that Fox and later his wife, Margaret Fell, are very important in creating Quakerism. But from the perspective of the 1650s, that there are many, many rival profits.

And James Naler is perhaps the most extreme and radical of those figures, a man who's sort of forged in the new model army, a man who believes he is perfect, believes Christ is in his body, believes that if he persuades other people to that path, then society can become perfect as well. And there's a great tension between Fox and Naylor. And I think Naylor decides to form his sort of charismatic group in cities,

in London in particular, but later on in Bristol. And the sense there again is these people are often, finding their way, they're experimenting. And one of the difficulties for the regime in the 1650s and Cromwell in particular is he's not quite sure what God wants. So although Cromwell gets represented as a very

Machiavellian sort of military figure, he's a godly man who wants to pursue godly reformation. And when he sees groups like Quakers and Rantors and seekers and Mughletonians, he's not quite sure whether they're on God's side or not. And that sense of exploring and experiment is absolutely key to somebody like Naila. Let's take the extreme act that Naila did,

which as it were took quaterism to an extreme and got him, as it were. The entry into Bristol on a donkey. October 1656. Nailer believes he is a prophet, and like many individuals, including Fox, he believes he can do miracles. So it's not clear whether Nailer is claiming to be Christ at this moment. Certainly contemporaries believe he is,

and he's welcomed. with cries of Holy Holy, Holy, Hosanna to the King of the Sabbath. He's clearly parodying or replicating Christ's entry. He enters into Bristol, October 1656. And, again, the appalling reaction is difficult for us to recover. I can't imagine what somebody could do today, unless they're offending another religious group.

In this country. At the moment. At the moment. I just can't imagine that. And the local Puritan magistrates are appalled. And the initial reaction is this man's utterly blasphemous and must be executed. And there's a long process by which he's put ultimately on formal trial. And the outcome is very brutal.

He's given 300 lashes. Blasphema is imprinted on his forehead. Branded. Branded. Tongue board. His tongue is bored with an iron. An iron broad. The intriguing thing is that Cromwell is reported to have intervened to stop him being executed.

Because Cromwell again, and Cromwell's argument will be, we don't know whether this man is a second Christ or not. Look what happened to the first one. We got it terribly wrong when he was crucified. We need to be careful with this person. John Coffey, let's talk about, let's turn to the equality. Now, people tend to say that and say there was a bit of this and a bit of it. But they meant it, didn't they?

and we can see that in the figure of Margaret Fell from Lancashire, Swarthmore Hall, a woman who was married to a JP, MP, she had eight children, she was the mother of Israel in the New Quaker sense. Can we talk about equality and bring her in? Yeah, well, Fell is the matriarch of Quakerism from her conviction by George Fox in 1652 through to her death half a century later in 1701. So she's a very important leadership role within the movement. Swarthmore Hall becomes in the early days Quaker HQ

and as we were hearing it really is a clearinghouse for the Quaker Correspondence Network Can I pause one second? Again it's useful to stress for listeners the degree of literacy among the Quakers and the number of records that you all have New scholars. Yeah I mean they're fantastic record keepers and this is one of the reasons

historians like them and have written so many books about them but Fell is very literate she publishes many pamphlets herself. She writes official declaration sometimes for the Quakers. She also writes to magistrate. She writes to Cromwell and Charles the Second in support

of the Quakers. But are we talking about real equality? She can preach. She can do everything men can do. It isn't tokenism, is it? It isn't tokenism. They do, I think, still think, of the family largely in patriarchal terms. Swarthmore Hall is an interesting example

because in a sense it's Margaret fell who runs Swarthmore Hall. She's convinced by Fox when her husband is away on a business trip. He comes back and discovers the entire household's converted to Quakerism. He never does, but he nevertheless sympathises with them and protects them, but she's very much running the show. And she's very active in terms of organisation of the movement. And of course, Quaker women are given much greater scope than they are in other religious groups at the time. Well, about half of women's publications in the 1650s are by Quakers. So many Quaker women are writing pamphlets.

They're involved a lot in petitioning, but particularly in prophesying. So Quaker women are itinerant ministers who travel around the country and prophecy. You get two Quaker women, for example, who go to Cambridge. They get in an argument with the students at Sydney Sussex College, because they call it a synagogue of Satan. The students are not very happy about this and throw stones at them. And the women are whipped for their pains. And perhaps more remarkably, Quaker women travel well beyond England itself.

So they go on missions to the Caribbean, to Barbados. One Quaker woman is hanged in Boston. And perhaps most... For one? Well, they're hanged essentially for being Quakers. but they've been banished and the banishment order says that if they return they will be hanged. So Mary Dyer is hanged in 1660.

There aren't any Quakers executed in England. It happens in New England, though many Quakers do die in jail. But perhaps the most remarkable illustration of the ambition and the drive of Quaker women is the case of Mary Fisher, who travels very widely, and she goes on a mission to Turkey

where she actually manages to gain an audience with the Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad IV. And through an interpreter, she gives him a message, a message, as she says, from the great God to the Great Turk. And they have quite an amicable conversation. He asks her what she thinks of Muhammad.

She says she doesn't know much about Muhammad, but she believes Christ is the light of the world. And she says that the Great Turk was very noble unto me. Kate Peters, we're still in the 1650s. that is where it's all formed. And the authorities, as Justin has indicated, are very strongly against these Quakers, even though the authorities are comulian in a sense.

These people are very dangerous. Can you give us some instances of the way the magistrates felt tested by the power of the Quaker movement? Well, I mean, I think the Quakers are setting out to test the magistrates, so I think they are certainly provoking confrontations with them And the way they do it is actually through, I think the way to understand the Quakers is actually to think about this as an episode within a long reformation. They are having an argument about the role of government, the state, the national church and how it should be regulated.

So very often Quakers will go and address a minister, preaching minister, and say, by what authority do you preach? and it's at the point where the magistrate then will arrest them perhaps for disturbing the peace, that they then say, and what is your legitimacy as a magistrate to prevent my speaking? They're very, very knowledgeable legally. John was talking about Margaret Fell and gender relationships. What's quite interesting about Margaret Fell is, of course, she's married to Thomas Fell, who is a judge. They've got actually very good legal advice, and one of their techniques is, as they travel around the country, they interrupt preaching. They do so in a legal way if they are, and they will read out the laws, which

indicate that they have a right to interrupt sermon, although they have not interrupted a sermon. They always wait until the sermon has finished, because legally that is allowed. So they carry with them bits of legislation. They read out laws when they're in courthouses being prosecuted. So they've got very, very good legal advice across the country, into London, into Lancashire. They're getting judge. and people advising them about their legal tactics, if you like. Briefly, John, what did Cromwell himself? Do we know what he thought of Quakers? I think Cromwell is very conflicted about the Quakers. On the one hand, he is a reputation as a protector of the sect.

And the new model army, he's encouraged the Baptist, he's encouraged lay preaching. On the other hand, he's a good Calvinist. So I think he sees the Quakers as downplaying the importance of the Trinity, of the atonement of justification by faith. He has a number of interviews with Fox, which are very interesting. Fox is arrested and brought down to Whitehall, and on their first conversation, it actually ends, according to Fox's account, with Cromwell catching Fox's hand and with tears in his eyes saying,

come again to my house. The second interview is different. The second interview England's premier Calvinist theologian, John Owen, is standing at Cromwell's shoulder. He's a vice-chancellor of Oxford University. and Cromwell really goes for Fox on the doctrine of the inner light saying the inner light is just a natural light. It's not going to save you.

You need a supernatural light from outside. In other words, you need to be one of the elect. So they have a interesting relationship. When Cromwell, at the restoration, Cromwell's body is disinterred and the corpse is hanged at Tibern. And Fox says that he goes along and sees it. and he says this is God's judgment on Cromwell for not abolishing tithes. Finally, before we leave the 1650s, which is hard to leave because so much is going on,

just in Champion, can you just put the Quakers in the context of other such groups, as it were, who are fermenting away here before we hit the 60s, return of Chars or seconds, then all really all hell breaks loose again. I think the first thing to say is that Quakers are probably the biggest sectarian group, but there are one part of a spectrum that Christopher Hill famously wrote about in the world turned upside down. So this is a period of absolute religious experimentalism. At the far-flung right or left wing,

one might have a group like the ranters if they existed who really seek perfection through sin in one sense. They believe God is within them. God has preordained everything. So the greater the sin, the greater the godliness. This is appalling to most sort of organ. organized society. But there are other groups, seekers, Mughletonians, who

developed much more in the 1660s. And we need to think of... The levelers. The levellers and the diggers and the true diggers. And there's a wonderful, if depressing book written by a nasty Presbyterian called Thomas Edwards, called Gangrene,

that gives a list of the hundreds of peculiar sectarians that he spots in the body politic rotting away sort of godly society. And the sense of experimentalism there is, I think driven by scripture. This is one of the sort of core values

that Quakers really pursue. They believe in God's revelation, but they are not sure it's contained within Orthodox King James Bible scripture. In 1660, Monarchus resored, Charles II comes back, and doesn't come back, Charles II, returns to England becomes Charles a second. How did this

affect the Quakers? Can we go straight to the Quaker Act, Kate Peters, 1662, the Quaker Act? Why was that brought in, and what did it? portended? It portended the serious persecution of the Quakers. So in the 1650s there had been religious toleration of the Quakers. 1662, there was an act of uniformity which says everybody has to belong to the Church of England and there is an additional Quaker, this so-called Quaker act which gets at Quakers in two ways. One is the thing that Quakers don't like doing,

this is part of the inner light is they don't like swearing oaths because they're their argument would be that whenever they speak, they speak the truth. They don't have to have a special moment of oath in which the truth comes out because all of their utterances are truthful. So they will not swear oaths. Now, at the restoration, people need to swear an oath of allegiance to the king, and the Quakers won't do that on grounds of conscience. That's very worrying to the authorities precisely because the Quakers have been part of republicanism in the 1650s. They've been part of the New Model Army.

So for the authorities, they see the Quakers as potentially, having the potential to be involved in armed insurrection. So they won't swear oaths of allegiance. The Quaker Act also fines people for attending Quaker meetings. So any meeting of five Quakers or more makes you liable to a fine. John Coffey, there was a brilliant manoeuvre really by Fox, George Fox, to regroup and re-align the Quakers. fierce, aggressive, men and women who'd been in the Civil War

and fought their cause very strongly, as we've heard, in the 1650s. Can you tell us what Fox did in, he wrote something called the Peace Testimony? How did that, as it were, set out to change and protect them? Change the scene and protect the Quakers. Well, panic about the Quakers and about radical sects is probably one of the causes of the restoration. People see the Quakers as a threat to social and moral order. So the restoration of the monarchy is a way of,

of restoring that. They were that important with that, because I think people think quiet Quakers in the corner of... They weren't quite, they were noisy in the 1650s, and characteristically, Quakers have had an influence out of all proportion to their numbers from the 1650s, I think, up to the present day. The other problem is that in the wake of the restoration,

a mad cat millinarian, Thomas Vener, goes on the rampage with some followers around London for several days. Quite a number of people are killed. And that causes a great panic. about the Quakers. Although the Quakers are not directly involved, thousands of them are incarcerated. So the peace testimony is issued at that point

to make it quite clear that they reject bloody principles. Can we develop the peace testimony, Justin, because it really is crucial, isn't it? It is, and I think it's a very clever maneuver. George Fox wants to convince the magistrates in localities and nationally. that Quakers are peaceful and that they can be good citizens

and that they will in some sense conform in some measure to some of the disciplines. What also happens is that the Quakers are absolutely insistent on pursuing their own conscience, though. So what they are prepared to do is suffer the consequences. And we get the creation of the books of suffrage that describe their sufferings way back into the 1650s. And these are tremendous propaganda tools in one sense, and they're tremendous historical sources

for all of us to reconstruct the, again, brutality that was subjected on that community. The Quaker Act of 62, the Conventical Acts of 64 and 1670, described by Marvell as the quintessence of arbitrary malice, really try and impose an iron cage of Anglican discipline on these communities, and they suffer. We talk about whippings, if I mean, Prison month, we're talking about serious.

Quickly, John, then I want to come to Kate Peters. I mean, even their critics admire that Richard backs to the Presbyterian who has no time for Quakers, gives them credit for their bravery and the restoration. They take the brunt of the persecution. They distract persecution from what the persecution or what it was. Kate, do you want to talk about that? It's thousands of Quakers in prison. So it's a variety of quite interesting and quite pernicious persecution.

So at the extreme end, they will be imprisoned. One of the reasons we know that we prioritise George Fox in Quaker historiography is so many of the other leaders actually die in prison before, by about 1666. Most of them are dead through incarceration. But I think much, as well as that, there is the pernicious persecution that goes with their refusal to swear oaths actually means that they can't get credit. It means that they can't hold offices in their local communities. so they are impeded as tradesmen, which is very important to Quakers.

So they suffer financially as well as three incarceration. Justin, I know you want to come in, but could you also answer, how did they fight back? Because these people weren't people who gave up, were they? No, they weren't. And I was just simply going to say that we need to think of really very brutal violence, very often popular violence, met it out against the persons. What do you mean by popular violence?

Crowns. Crowds would gather outside meeting houses. they'd destroy meeting houses, they'd stone Quakers on the way to their meeting houses. So it's very brutal and spontaneous at times. Right the way through into the 18th century, there are still records of Quaker meeting houses being stoned by Anglican crowds in the 1730s. Quakers, though, are clever. In the urban environment of metropolitan London,

where the persecutors have actually organized newspapers and gangs of informers to try and ensnare them, Quakers will use all sorts of tactics preaching through the window of one house into a meeting in another so you can say, well, we're just two separate houses collapsing their houses, having their own list of... Collapsing their houses being actually like tents. Absolutely. These houses were designed to protect

in cases of fire, so if you hear the constables on the way to arrest the Quakers, just pull the plug, house collapse, can't have been a meeting. So they're very creative and imaginative, but they had to be. These were times of very, very brutal, bloody persecution. But I think it's also worth saying this is political tactics by the Quakers. So they are extraordinarily brave in taking on the authorities. But it's part of a much bigger argument for long reformation.

They are saying we want liberty of conscience. And you can actually see a continuity between the 1650s and the 1660s and beyond arguing for a church settlement finally that gives people religiously liberty of conscience. John Coppe. And they see persecution as a mark of the false church. The fact that they persecute, authenticate their status as the true church. And they make a big contribution to toleration in the later 17th century, particularly because Pennsylvania, which is established by a Quaker, writes liberty of conscience into its constitution.

That's William Penn. It was a friend of James II, a Catholic, who admired the religious passion of the Quakers. That's right, yeah. So they make common cause on liberty of conscience. conscience. It's also worth remembering that John Locke, one of whose first letters is about the Nailer case, and he does no time for the early Quakers. When he's in political exile in the 1680s, he's staying with Benjamin Furley, a Quaker who has this great library of radical Protestant books, particularly books on toleration. And Furley's circle has been described as the epicenter of the early Enlightenment, and it makes toleration a central enlightenment value. And that continues right through. In 1689, and we have. the act of toleration and how did that what impact did that have on the Quakers? Well, in some ways it sees the achievement

of their long campaign for toleration. They're included within it despite the fact that it's only covers Orthodox Trinitarian Protestants. So anti-Trinitarians are excluded, Catholics are excluded atheists are excluded and the Quakers have often been suspected as being unorthodox on the Trinity. But nevertheless they are

included as one of the denominations covered by it And they really take advantage of it. They register many meeting houses more systematically than any other denomination. Just a champion, they began to work towards success in this country in the British government. But they were spectacular successful overseas, in America, particularly in Pennsylvania, named after William Penn, Quaker.

Can you give us some indication of that? I think, again, one of the things about Quakers is they are not just an English phenomenon. There's a Scottish and an Irish dimension, there's a European dimension, and there's a global dimension. So by the later half of the 17th century, Quakers are colonising, especially in North America, in huge numbers.

And we can see, again, their use of correspondence. The Quaker meeting houses in London and the monthly meetings are enabling a whole network, a sort of virtual community across the globe, to be both disciplined and godly. So this, you know, Pennsylvania is the classic example, but there are other examples of Quaker settlements in North America, and there they have the opportunity, if you like, a platform

to establish a good Quaker society. They have difficult relations at times with some of the other Protestants in North America, and they have contested relationships with Native Americans who obviously they want to civilise too. But in America, we say that for a while, two things balance. One is that they become extremely successful in business,

going for chocolate to deter people from drinking alcohol, so eat chocolate instead. But that's a bit silly. They are very successful in business and they're philanthropic in business. On the other hand, on the other side, they lead the campaign against slavery. So Kate Peters, can you talk about their success in business? Well, I think, I mean, they come out of a bit.

John Coffey talked about them being middling sort. They come out of a commercial network. So one of the ways, even in the 1650s, that they actually know about each other is that they are traders, they are linen drapers, they are printers, so they're used to, they have commercial networks, and even in the 1650s,

they are clearly going to Barbados and so on to buy tobacco. So they are coming out of a trading network. And well trusted in the trading network, aren't you? Well, they are trusted in the trading network precisely actually because of this issue of the oaths, so George Fox argues in his journal that people trust the Quakers because they have to be extra squeaky clean.

They have to kind of gain people's trust because they won't do it through the traditional system of swearing oaths and so on. So businesses are now usually comparatively, anyway, philanthropically. Let's just briefly talk about anti-slavery, starting with you, John Coffey. They were slave owners like most people were, and then they turned against it and were very strong in their opposition to it in second half the 18th century in America. Yeah, they're very strong in Barbados.

Many of them do actually own slaves in the 17th, early 18th, century, but from the mid-18th century, you get a reformation within American Quakerism. Anthony Benazette becomes the father of Anglo-American abolitionism. Nine out of 12 of the founding members of the British Abolition Society are Quakers. It's a Quaker Elizabeth Herrick, who puts the idea of immediate emancipation of West Indian slaves on the agenda in the 1820s. And it's an Anglican-stroke Quaker Thomas Fowell Buxton, who carries through the parliamentary legislation against slavery in the 1830s. So Justin Champion, what is the result?

What would you say is the lasting influence still, impact of Quakerism in English-speaking world? I think it's their commitment first to equality, but also to personal conviction. This model we have today that as individuals we need to have a set of beliefs and we need to hold them sincerely and be prepared to defend them, I think can be traceable to that Quaker conviction in 1650s that you will put your life on the line, that you have the possibility to be godly and good, to be optimistic.

And I think it's a non-sacred principle in the end that comes out of that tradition. John mentioned the Enlightenment, but some of those early Quakers are friends with Spinoza. They recognise that there is a rationality in human beings that is optimistic, and if we use that rationality and defend it, we will have a good society. So it's equality and it's the moral conscience of the two big things that are still driving through.

Well, thank you all very much for rampaging through that. Thank you very much to Kate Peters, Justin Champion and John Coffey. And next week we'll be talking about early geology from Pliny through Leonardo to Lyle. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to this Radio 4 podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you might like to try others like it, such as Start the Week or Thinking Aloud, which are both available from the Radio 4 website.