A Collection of the Several Books and Writings of Richard Hubberthorne, Volume I: The Testimony & Early Controversial Tracts

Richard Hubberthorne (c. 1628–1662) was a Lancashire farmer’s son who became one of the boldest and clearest voices of the first generation of Quaker ministers — the company later remembered as the Valiant Sixty. Convinced under the preaching of George Fox in the early 1650s, he laid down a soldier’s commission and took up a harder warfare, traveling the length of England to declare the inward Light of Christ, disputing with priests and magistrates, suffering imprisonment again and again, and at last finishing his testimony in Newgate prison in 1662, dead at about thirty-four. This first volume of his collected writings gathers the testimonial and controversial tracts of those crowded years.

The volume opens with his Testimony of Obedience to the Heavenly Call, a brief spiritual autobiography in which Hubberthorne traces his own turning from the forms of religion to the voice of God within. From there the collection moves through the great controversies of the 1650s: his threefold Reply to Priest Sherlock, the Mittimus Answered in which he meets the legal warrant of his jailers with the higher law of conscience, The Zeal of the Oxford-Professors Tried, and his tracts on the Innocency of the Righteous Seed and the Distance between the Flesh and the Spirit. The book closes with the sustained and searching Word from the Lord and the long defense of Truth and Innocency, in which Hubberthorne sets out, with characteristic plainness, the Quaker conviction that the Light which shows a man his sin is the same Light that can lead him out of it.

These are documents of a movement under fire. Hubberthorne wrote not for the study but for the street and the prison, answering specific adversaries by name and defending Friends against the charges of blasphemy and disorder that filled the pamphlet wars of the Interregnum and the early Restoration. Yet beneath the controversy runs a steady devotional current — the same confidence in the sufficiency of the inward Christ that carried him, unbroken, to a felon’s death in London.

This edition gently modernizes Hubberthorne’s seventeenth-century prose for present-day readers: archaic spellings and the longest run-on sentences eased for clarity, while his voice, his arguments, and his imagery are kept intact. The plain speech of thee and thou has been preserved where it carries weight, for it was a testimony the first Friends suffered for. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and the people and places behind the controversies linked to encyclopedic articles, so that any reader may turn at once from Hubberthorne’s pages to the Scripture and history beneath them.