Racked at Comorra — Two Quaker Missionaries Before the Inquisition in Hungary
“If I should do so for fear or favour of you, the Lord not requiring it of me, I should not have peace in my conscience, and the displeasure of the Lord would be more intolerable than yours.” — John Philly & William Moore
John Philly 'appears to have been an inhabitant of Dover, where he suffered distraint in the year 1660, for not paying tithes'; in 1670 he was committed to prison there for teaching school without the bishop's licence and recommitted for refusing the oath of Allegiance.
Being in Germany with other Friends in the first month of 1662, and refreshed 'under the baptizing ministry of William Caton', they set out on the 29th of the first month and reached Cushart, a day's journey from Presburg, on the 16th of the second month, preaching and distributing books among the Hortesche Brethren.
Pressing on toward a settlement three hundred miles off at Pattuck in Upper Hungary, they came to the garrison of Comorra; Moore, met by soldiers with a Quaker book in his hand, was stripped, searched and chained by Captain Fusch, Philly was arrested at the inn across the river, and the two were held apart, Philly in 'the Hungarian's vault' with its rack, stocks and gallows.
On the eighth day, under a pretended order of the Emperor Leopold, the hangman screwed Moore's thumbs, tied him to the ladder and drew him off it until his left arm 'was put out of joint with a loud crack'; Philly, who had supposed his friend hanged, was thumbscrewed and twice drawn up, and cried out 'Innocent'.
Set to earn bread throwing earth into a wheelbarrow, the two wrote to the governor of Comorra, whose moderation checked the Inquisitor; their intercepted letters were recovered and their chains taken off, and after about sixteen weeks they were sent to Vienna.
Delivered in iron bolts to Lord Francis of Nadasti, the emperor's lord chamberlain, they were sentenced to be burned unless they embraced the Roman Catholic religion, then confined five miles from Vienna in a hole with shackled Turks; Adam Bien, the earl's barber, read their papers, was convinced, and became 'their steadfast and useful friend'.
In the deep snow of that winter Moore was lured into the fields, beaten until 'they shed much of his blood', chained by the neck, and shut blindfold for four days in a lightless hole at a cloister, where the monks hung him in a tub over a well, whirled him on a rope, locked neck and feet together and spun him in a wheel to make him turn.
Set at liberty on the 4th of the seventh month 1663 with five small coins, Moore walked by 'the most private and unfrequented ways' through a country at war with the Turks, was turned back at the gates of Gratz, and reached Paltz about the 2nd of the eighth month and Friends at Christein on the 7th; Adam Bien's letter reported Philly freed on the 6th of the seventh month.
In 1683 Moore was committed in Gloucestershire for a month's absence from the national worship, was tried at Guildhall on the 8th of the tenth month 1684 for a street meeting in White Hart Court, and in 1686 was discharged at the Quarter Sessions with fifty-five fellow-sufferers under King James's proclamation.
Before leaving Germany in 1662 they were 'refreshed with the overflowings of the love of God under the baptizing ministry of William Caton', and took leave of their brethren there.
Asked who first brought up these doctrines, Moore told Captain Fusch 'that George Fox was the first who preached it in these latter days'; the Inquisitor later handed a priest 'a paper of George Fox's on the Apostacy of Christendom', which enraged him.
Besse's Collection of the Sufferings (1753) prints 'the Trials, Jeopardies and Torments, which John Philly and William Moore' endured, beginning with the same 29th of the first month 1662 departure; the Friends' Library narrative and its record of the Dover, Gloucestershire and Guildhall sufferings rest on that account.
The account of their 1662–63 journey to the Hortesche Brethren of Hungary, their arrest at Comorra, the rack, the sentence at Vienna and Moore's abduction to a cloister, told largely in William Moore's own words and reprinted in the Friends' Library, volume 4 (1840).