The History of the Quakers, Volume I: The Rise

Of all the early chroniclers of Quakerism, none has worn so well as William Sewel (1653–1720). A weaver and printer of Amsterdam, the grandson of English Friends who had fled persecution to the Dutch Republic, Sewel grew up bilingual, devout, and possessed of a historian’s patience. He gave the better part of his life to a single great labor: to set down, fully and faithfully, how the people called Quakers had arisen out of the religious ferment of seventeenth-century England, and how — through suffering, controversy, and unwearied travel — they had spread across the world. The result, first written in Dutch and then translated into English by Sewel’s own hand, is The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers.

Sewel was not the first to attempt such a history, but he was the first to do it justice. An earlier account by the Dutch scholar Gerard Croese had appeared in 1695, riddled with errors and colored by hostility, and it stung Friends into wishing for something both accurate and fair. Sewel undertook to supply it. He worked, as a good historian must, from documents — the journals and letters of the first Friends, the records of their sufferings, printed tracts, and the testimonies of eyewitnesses, many of whom he had known. Where he could verify a fact he stated it plainly; where the evidence was thin he said so. That honesty and care are the reason his History outlasted every rival and became, for two centuries, the standard account from which later writers drew.

This first volume gathers the first three of Sewel’s twelve “Books” and covers the founding decade, from about 1647 to 1656 — the era we have called The Rise. Within these chapters the reader will follow the long Reformation background out of which the movement was born; the spiritual pilgrimage of George Fox, his years of seeking and the “openings” that became the heart of Quaker preaching; the origin of the name “Quaker” at Derby in 1650; the great convincement of the North in 1652 — the preaching on Firbank Fell, the winning of Margaret Fell and the household of Swarthmoor Hall, and the raising up of that band of itinerant preachers remembered as the Valiant Sixty; and the first wave of expansion and persecution, as Edward Burrough, Francis Howgill, and the rest were sent forth into Bristol, London, and Ireland, down to Fox’s interview with Oliver Cromwell and the martyrdom of the young James Parnell in Colchester Castle.

This edition is drawn from the 1728 Philadelphia printing of Sewel’s own English translation and gently modernized for contemporary readers: spelling and punctuation brought into present-day usage, the most archaic verb forms lightened, and the longest run-on sentences divided for clarity — while Sewel’s voice, his vocabulary, and the plain testimony of the Friends he quotes are kept intact. The early Friends’ plain speech of thee and thou has been preserved wherever it stands in their own recorded words, prayers, and letters, for it was a testimony they suffered for. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and the names of persons, places, and events linked to encyclopedic articles, so that any reader may turn at once from Sewel’s narrative to the Scripture and history behind it.