The History of the Quakers, Volume II: Persecution & Restoration

Volume I of William Sewel’s great History told the story of a beginning — George Fox’s years of seeking, the great convincement of the North, and the raising up of the Valiant Sixty. This second volume takes up the thread exactly where the first laid it down, and carries the reader into the hardest and most dramatic decade the early Friends ever knew. The years covered here run from 1656 to 1664, and they hold together three of Sewel’s twelve “Books” — the fourth, fifth, and sixth. We have called the volume Persecution and Restoration, because those two words name the double weight the Friends carried through these years: at home, a monarchy fell and rose again, and each new government found fresh reasons to fear and to fine a people who would not swear, would not fight, and would not take off their hats; abroad, the message ran to Boston, to Rome, to Malta, and even to the court of the Turkish Sultan — and wherever it went, it was met with prisons, ropes, and branding-irons, and it did not stop.

No story shadows this volume as the tragedy of James Nayler does. Once among the ablest and most admired of the early preachers, Nayler was led on horseback into Bristol in the autumn of 1656 by a company of over-zealous followers, in a sign that his enemies read as blasphemy. Parliament seized on the case and voted a punishment of shocking cruelty — the pillory, the lash, the boring of the tongue, the branding of the forehead. Sewel, who never excuses Nayler’s error, tells the whole story with a historian’s honesty and a Friend’s compassion: the fall, the terrible sentence patiently borne, and the slow, genuine repentance that ended in one of the most moving passages of confession in the English language.

Alongside Nayler’s fall runs the darkest chapter of Quaker history in the New World. In these pages the reader will watch the Massachusetts Bay colony pass its escalating laws against the Quakers — fines, whippings, the cutting of ears, and finally death — and will stand on Boston Common as William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra go to the gallows rather than promise to stay away. Here too are the stories that carried the Quaker name across the world: Mary Fisher’s journey to the camp of the Turkish Sultan, who received her with more courtesy than the magistrates of Boston ever showed; and Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, held for years by the Inquisition at Malta, whose steadfastness under examination Sewel recounts at length from their own letters.

Behind it all, England itself is overturning. Oliver Cromwell dies and his Protectorate crumbles; the army and the Parliament wrestle for power while Edward Burrough delivers his prophetic warnings to each government in turn; General Monk marches south, and Charles II returns amid the bells and bonfires of the Restoration — bringing first a promise of liberty of conscience, and then the Quaker Act of 1662, under which thousands of Friends filled the jails of England. The volume closes at the end of Sewel’s sixth Book, with Edward Burrough dead in Newgate prison at thirty and the movement he helped build refusing, still, to meet in secret.

This edition is drawn from 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. 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.