The Faithful Testimony of William Dewsbury: His Life, Epistles and Writings
The collected life and writings of William Dewsbury (c. 1621–1688), one of the Valiant Sixty and a founder of the People Called Quakers. A Yorkshire farm servant turned soldier turned prophet, Dewsbury spent nearly thirty years in the gaols of Northampton, York, and Warwick — and from those cells sent out a body of fiery prophetic tracts and tender pastoral letters that read not as a captive's complaints but as the joy of a man who called his prison a palace. Modernized for present-day readers with linked scripture and historical references.
- His life, early prophetic tracts, and pastoral epistles in twenty-three sections
- The prison writings of one of the Valiant Sixty, written from the gaols of Northampton, York, and Warwick
- EPUB format
About This Edition
Some men are remembered for the journeys they made; William Dewsbury is remembered for the place he could not leave. For the better part of thirty years he was a prisoner, shut up in the common gaols of Northampton, York, and Warwick for no crime but the faith he would not deny. And yet the writings he sent out from behind those walls do not read like the complaints of a captive. They read like the letters of a man who has found, in the narrowest of rooms, the widest of horizons. He called his prison a palace. He counted his chains a privilege.
Dewsbury was born about the year 1621 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, of plain country stock, and went out young into the world as a farm servant. A serious and seeking soul from boyhood, he searched through the whole landscape of Puritan England and found rest in none of it. When the civil wars came he took up arms in the Parliamentary army, hoping to see the kingdom of God advanced by the sword — and laid his weapons down again, convinced that the only warfare worth the name was the inward one, the Lamb’s War waged not against men but against sin in the soul. His long seeking ended where so many others ended in those years: in the message that swept out of the north of England in the early 1650s, when he was “convinced” — the word Friends used for that decisive turning. From that hour he gave the rest of his life to proclaiming the Light of Christ shining inwardly in the conscience, becoming one of the first generation of traveling ministers later remembered as the Valiant Sixty.
This Friends Illuminated edition gathers the testimony of his friends concerning his life and death, his early prophetic tracts — including his word to Oliver Cromwell, his answer to John Timson, and his searching “Discovery of Mystery Babylon” — and the great body of tender pastoral letters he wrote across decades of imprisonment, down to the closing scenes of his death at London in 1688. The text is gently modernized for present-day readers, with his fiery prophetic voice preserved, the plain speech of thee and thou kept where it carries his testimony, and scripture and historical references linked throughout.