The single hardest fact about early Quakerism is also the easiest to miss when reading the Journals by a warm hearth three hundred and fifty years later: this was a persecuted movement. Not metaphorically. Not occasionally. Not at the hands of mobs only. Persecution was the ordinary, lawful, year-after-year condition under which the first Friends preached, gathered, married, raised their children, and buried their dead.
The numbers, when one stops to total them, are sobering. By the most careful contemporary accounting — Joseph Besse’s two folio volumes of Sufferings, published in 1753 — more than 13,500 Friends were imprisoned in the British Isles between 1650 and 1689. Of these, at least 450 died in prison or of injuries received there. Many thousands more had goods distrained — looms, livestock, household linen, family Bibles — to satisfy fines for refusing tithes or for “absenting” themselves from the parish church.
This is the world out of which the Quaker classics came. The Journal of George Fox, Penington’s Letters, Burrough’s Trumpet, Penn’s No Cross, No Crown, Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified, Ellwood’s autobiography — all are prison literature, in whole or in part. To understand them, one must understand the prisons.
The Commonwealth years (1652–1660)
It is sometimes assumed that the Friends suffered only after Charles II returned to the throne. They did not. Even under the Commonwealth — under Cromwell, who tolerated more dissent than any English ruler before him — Friends were jailed in great numbers. They were jailed for refusing to take oaths in court (the Quaker conscience could not swear). They were jailed for refusing tithes (a tenth of one’s produce went, by law, to the parish minister, even if one disagreed with every word he said). They were jailed for refusing the hat-honour due to magistrates and gentlemen. They were jailed for “interrupting the priest” — that is, for waiting until a sermon was over and then offering, as Friends believed they were called to offer, a contrary witness from the same congregation.
Cromwell himself was personally sympathetic; he met Fox more than once, and tears reportedly stood in his eyes after one of those interviews. But his magistrates, his army officers, his town clerks, and his parish ministers did not share his sympathy, and they had the law on their side.
The Restoration crackdown (1660–1689)
When Charles II returned in 1660, the screws tightened. A series of statutes designed to crush all religious dissent — collectively known as the Clarendon Code — fell on Friends with particular weight, because Friends would not adopt any of the available evasions:
- The Quaker Act of 1662 singled the Friends out by name. It made it illegal for five or more Friends over the age of sixteen to gather for worship; for any Friend to refuse the Oath of Allegiance; or for any Friend to “maintain that the taking of any oath is in any case unlawful.” The penalty for a third offense was transportation to the colonies.
- The Conventicle Act of 1664, renewed in 1670, made any unauthorized religious meeting of more than five persons an offense.
- The Five Mile Act of 1665 prohibited dissenting ministers from coming within five miles of a corporate town.
- The Test Act of 1673 required all officeholders to swear oaths and to receive the Anglican sacrament.
Each of these laws was, for a Friend, unkeepable on principle. The result was that Friends spent the entire reign of Charles II living, in effect, outside the law of England.
The pattern in any town where there was a Quaker meeting became wearily familiar. Constables, often accompanied by soldiers, would arrive on First-day morning. They would break the door if it was barred. They would drag Friends out — men, women, children — by the hair, by the collar, by the ankle if necessary. Often the Friends came back the next First-day. The constables came again. The cycle repeated, sometimes for years, until the magistrates either tired of it or struck so hard that the meeting could not gather at all.
The prisons themselves
The prisons of seventeenth-century England were not modern penitentiaries. They were squalid, overcrowded, often privately run, frequently fatal. Newgate, in London, was the most notorious — a stone hulk near the Old Bailey where typhus, called gaol-fever, killed in epidemic waves. Edward Burrough died in Newgate in 1663, aged twenty-eight, after sixteen months in conditions that contemporaries described as “more like a hog-sty than a Christian’s lodging.” Francis Howgill died in Appleby Gaol in 1669. Many of the Boston martyrs and dozens of named Friends in Reading, Bristol, Norwich, York, Exeter, and Lancaster met the same end.
When prisoners were not killed by the conditions, they were broken financially. Fees were charged for everything: for entering, for leaving, for food, for straw, for sometimes even the right to receive visitors. Thousands of small Quaker businesses — shopkeepers, weavers, smiths, tailors — were ruined by the combined cost of fines, distraints, and prison fees, leaving widows and children to be supported by the Meetings for Sufferings, a relief network that the Friends organized with extraordinary care.
George Fox himself spent more than six years of his life in various prisons: Derby (1650–51), Carlisle (1653), Launceston in Cornwall (1656, where he was held in Doomsdale, a foul subterranean cell), Lancaster (1660–61, 1664–66), Scarborough Castle (1665–66), and Worcester (1673–74). The hardships were genuine. So was the courage.
What happened in those prisons
Something unexpected, however, happened in those cells.
The Friends wrote. They wrote letters of comfort to other prisoners and to gathered meetings on the outside. They wrote treatises in defense of their principles. They wrote autobiographies — what later Friends would call Journals — which became the most distinctive Quaker literary form. They wrote epistles for the encouragement of the persecuted everywhere.
It is no exaggeration to say that most of the great Quaker classics of the seventeenth century are prison literature.
- George Fox dictated the early portions of his Journal to Thomas Lower in Worcester Gaol in 1674–75.
- Isaac Penington wrote his most beloved letters from a series of imprisonments in Aylesbury and Reading.
- William Penn wrote No Cross, No Crown — perhaps the most influential single Quaker book — in the Tower of London in 1668–69, at the age of twenty-four.
- Margaret Fell wrote Women’s Speaking Justified in Lancaster Castle in 1666.
- Robert Barclay’s prison years yielded both A Catechism and Confession of Faith and the early drafts of his Apology.
- William Dewsbury, who spent nineteen of his last twenty years in prison, wrote some of the most tender pastoral letters in the English language from his cell at Warwick.
- Edward Burrough’s Memorable Works — his collected pamphlets and epistles — were almost entirely composed in prison, and many were published only after his death there.
A pattern emerges. The persecution that was intended to silence the Friends gave them, instead, the leisure and the urgency to write down what they had learned. A Quaker outside the prison walls had to be busy — at trade, at meeting, at travel in the ministry. Inside the prison walls, all that fell away. There was time, and there was suffering, and the two together produced a literature.
The character of Quaker prison writing
The body of work that came out of these prisons has a recognizable temper. It is not bitter. It does not curse the persecutor. It almost never argues for political relief. It assumes that suffering for the Truth is a normal Christian condition, indeed a privilege.
It is, above all, interior. The Quaker prisoner does not chiefly complain about the cell, the food, the cold, the fever. He turns inward, listens for the Light, attends to his own state, and writes about what he finds. He ministers to those outside as one who has touched bottom and not been moved.
Penington is the great exemplar. His letters from prison contain almost no description of the prison itself. They are wholly given to spiritual counsel — how to wait on God, how to bear oneself under temptation, how to mind the inward seed. Reading him, one would scarcely know whether he wrote from a country house or a dungeon. The Light, to Penington, is not less but more accessible in the dark.
Fox is more outward. His Journal records jails, magistrates, debates, healings, miles walked, meetings held. But beneath the energetic prose runs the same conviction: the Lord’s power is over all. Over all meant precisely over the magistrates, the gaolers, the gaol-fever, and the slow grinding of the laws.
My prison shall be a pulpit; and my sufferings shall preach more than ever my tongue hath done. — attributed to Thomas Ellwood
What the suffering accomplished
Persecution did not destroy the Friends. It refined them.
It killed the early movement’s most flamboyant voices and left a quieter, more disciplined remnant. It pushed the leadership toward William Penn, Robert Barclay, and George Whitehead — men of tact and learning who could plead the Quaker cause at court. It taught the Meetings to organize their own poor relief, their own legal aid, their own publishing. It produced a literature of devotion that would feed Friends, and many outside the Friends, for generations.
It also did one further thing. It created, in English public memory, an image of the Quaker that was impossible to dislodge. The Quaker was the man who would not lie to save his life, would not strike back to save his face, and would die in a stone room rather than swear a needless oath. This was the reputation the Friends carried into the eighteenth century. It would, in time, win them the right to give an affirmation in court, the right to administer their own marriages, the right to walk freely in any English town. But it had been bought at a very dear rate, and Penn was not wrong to remind his readers, late in the century, that the liberties of the people of this kingdom must never be cheaply parted with.
Out of the prisons came a free people. Not free because they had been spared, but free because they had not yielded.