In 1652, on a hill called Pendle in Lancashire, George Fox saw “a great people to be gathered.” Within months he had walked to Sedbergh, to Firbank Fell, and across the limestone country of Westmorland and the dales of Yorkshire. Wherever he went, communities of seekers — many of them already gathered without a minister, sitting in silence — heard him and were convinced. By the end of 1654, sixty or so of these northern Friends had set out, in twos and threes, to carry the message into the rest of England, and from there to Scotland, Ireland, the European continent, the Caribbean, and the American colonies.
These were the First Publishers of Truth — the Valiant Sixty, as later Friends would call them. They were not preachers in the ordinary sense. They had no parish, no salary, no university training. Most of them were yeomen, weavers, husbandmen, shopkeepers — Cumbrians and Yorkshiremen of the kind who had served in the New Model Army or read Foxe’s Acts and Monuments by candlelight. What they carried was an experience, a few weeks of fellowship with Fox, and the conviction that the Spirit who had sent the apostles was sending them now.
The northern springtime
The convincement of 1652 was extraordinary. Within eighteen months, Quaker meetings had been planted across the entire north of England — Westmorland, Cumberland, Yorkshire, Durham, Lancashire. The center of the movement was Swarthmoor Hall, the Furness home of Judge Thomas Fell and his remarkable wife Margaret. Fox stayed there for weeks at a stretch. Letters and counsel went out from Margaret Fell’s writing desk to “the Children of Light” everywhere.
Among those convinced in the first wave were nearly all the figures whose names dominate early Quaker literature:
- Edward Burrough of Underbarrow, only eighteen, “the Son of Thunder”;
- Francis Howgill of Grayrigg, schoolteacher turned preacher, who said of those first meetings, “We came to know a place to stand in, and what to wait in”;
- John Camm and John Audland, the partners who would carry the message to Bristol;
- James Nayler of Wakefield, the Yorkshire farmer whose preaching some thought equal to Fox’s;
- William Dewsbury, soldier-turned-pastor, who would later write the great Quaker letters of comfort from prison;
- Richard Farnworth, Thomas Aldam, Thomas Killam, and dozens of others.
Margaret Fell, although she did not generally travel as the men did, was the organizing center of the movement. From Swarthmoor she gathered news, kept books, raised money for prisoners, and corresponded with hundreds of Friends across the country. The early Quaker movement could not have functioned without her.
“Publishing Truth”
What did it mean, in 1654, to publish Truth?
Sometimes it meant standing at a market cross and calling people to repent. Sometimes it meant going into a parish church (a steeple-house, as the Friends called it) and waiting until the priest had finished, and then standing up to bear witness. Sometimes it meant a long letter to a magistrate. Sometimes it meant kneeling in silence at the door of a prison and waiting for the Spirit to give a word.
Always it meant being prepared to be hurt. Friends were beaten with clubs in the streets of Cambridge. They were dragged from meetings by their hair. They were dropped into village ponds, pelted with stones, shut up in lockups, thrown into ditches at night. Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Williams were stripped to the waist and whipped in Cambridge — the first Quakers to suffer in that university town. Mary Fisher would later be expelled from Boston, sail to the eastern Mediterranean, and obtain an audience with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
The Friends bore it without retaliating. This was the visible mark of the movement. Hostility met meekness; abuse met patience; the magistrate’s birch met the prisoner’s prayer. Many who had stoned a Quaker preacher found themselves, weeks later, sitting in his meeting.
The southern campaigns
In 1654 Fox sent companies of Friends southward. Edward Burrough and Francis Howgill went together to London, where they preached daily for years and drew enormous crowds. John Camm and John Audland went to Bristol, where the meetings overflowed into orchards and Bristol thereafter became the second great center of English Quakerism. Thomas Holme and Elizabeth Leavens went into Wales. Christopher Holder, John Copeland, and several others sailed for the colonies.
The campaign was extraordinarily disciplined for a movement with no formal hierarchy. Friends went where they were sent or where they were drawn. They gave account of themselves in letters to Margaret Fell at Swarthmoor. They raised funds for prisoners through a careful network of Meetings for Sufferings. They produced an enormous body of pamphlet literature — by 1660, perhaps 2,000 separate Quaker publications had appeared. The “Children of the Light” had become a national fact, and one which the authorities could no longer ignore.
The crisis: James Nayler at Bristol
The high point of early Quaker public influence was also the moment of its first severe crisis.
In October 1656, James Nayler — second only to Fox in stature among the Friends — rode into Bristol on a pony, with a few followers walking alongside crying Holy, holy, holy. Nayler had been deeply unsettled by months of imprisonment and a long fast. To his admirers, he was bearing prophetic witness; to his enemies, he was claiming to be Christ.
Parliament took the latter view. Nayler was tried as a blasphemer, narrowly escaped execution, and was sentenced to be flogged through the streets of London and Bristol, branded on the forehead, and bored through the tongue. He survived, and made full public reconciliation with Fox before his death in 1660 — the so-called Last Words of James Nayler are among the most beautiful things in the Quaker corpus. But the Nayler affair badly damaged the movement, gave its opponents the propaganda victory of a generation, and forced Fox to spend years repairing the breach.
It also forced upon Friends a question they had not yet answered: how much liberty does the Spirit allow to the individual minister? The lesson of Nayler — that gifts unwatched can devour even saints — would shape the more disciplined Quakerism of the post-Restoration years.
The colonial frontier
Friends began landing in New England in 1656. The Puritan colony of Massachusetts received them with a ferocity that shocked even the Anglican establishment back home. Mary Fisher and Ann Austin were stripped, examined for “marks of witchcraft,” imprisoned, and shipped back to Barbados. Subsequent Friends were branded, had ears cut off, and four — William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra — were hanged on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661 simply for returning to Massachusetts after banishment.
Their deaths broke the Massachusetts magistrates’ nerve. Charles II, on his return to the throne, ordered the executions to stop. The four Boston martyrs would haunt the conscience of New England for generations.
Beyond Massachusetts, Friends were better received: in Rhode Island (where Roger Williams had built a colony of toleration), in the Dutch settlements that became New York, in the Carolinas, in Virginia. By 1672 Fox himself made a long American journey, holding meetings at the General Meetings on Long Island, in Maryland, in the Carolinas. The Friends were now a transatlantic movement.
They also went to harder places: William Edmundson into Ireland (where he would become the Father of Irish Quakerism); Mary Fisher to Adrianople to preach to the Sultan; John Stubbs and Henry Fell to the courts of Asia. None of this was sponsored. None of it was funded. It was carried on by Friends who paid their own way and who believed they had been sent.
The legacy of the First Publishers
By the time Charles II returned in 1660, perhaps 35,000 to 40,000 English men and women had been “convinced of the Truth as it is held by us, the people called Quakers.” The Friends were no longer a northern peculiarity. They had a presence in every county of England, in Ireland and Wales, in the New England colonies, in the Caribbean, and in scattered cells across the Continent. Their preachers had been to Rome, Vienna, Constantinople, and Jamaica. Their books had been printed by the thousands.
What the First Publishers handed on to the next generation was not a doctrine and not an institution. It was a habit. They taught Friends to go — to step out when called, to speak when moved, to keep silence when not, to refuse all the props that other ministers leaned on. They taught Friends to suffer without retaliating. They taught Friends to write — voluminously, plainly, often beautifully — out of their own experience.
Most of the First Publishers did not live to see the Toleration of 1689. Burrough died in Newgate in 1663, aged twenty-eight. Howgill died in Appleby Gaol in 1669. Camm and Audland died young of the privations of their travels. Nayler died on the road in 1660. Of the Valiant Sixty, only a handful — Fox, Penn (in the next generation), Edmundson, Whitehead, Crisp — saw the better day.
But what they planted endured. Every later Quaker — every Penington, Penn, Woolman, Job Scott, Lucretia Mott, John Greenleaf Whittier — drew from a fountain that had been dug by these northern husbandmen and weavers in the 1650s. They had published Truth, and Truth had taken root.
The Lord’s power was over all, and we were carried through all opposition, persecution, and imprisonment, by the power and Spirit of God. — Edward Burrough