When the Westmorland Quaker Ambrose Rigge argued, in 1669, that Friends followed ‘the Doctrine and practise of the most Famous and renowned Christians, both testified of in the Scriptures of Truth, and the Books of Martyrs’, he mentioned the Bible and John Foxe’s magisterial Christian history in the same breath.Footnote 1 Yet modern historians of early Quakerism have tended to emphasise just one side of this equation. To be sure, scholars have recognised the extent to which a second generation of Quakers was engaged, by the early eighteenth century, in efforts to construct an historical tradition for their movement.Footnote 2 However, this concern for history and tradition has generally been regarded as a departure from the principles which underpinned early Quakerism. Indeed, even the biblicism of the first Friends was peculiarly ahistorical. Although they emulated the Old Testament prophets and early Apostles,Footnote 3 they were distinguishable from other Protestants insofar as they were not attempting to return to the forms and models of primitive practice, but rather believed that ‘they were the New Testament church’.Footnote 4 In other words, the early Quakers believed that the same spirit which had inspired the authors of Scripture was present within themselves. This emphasis on the ‘immediate inward presence of God’ has seen Richard Vann claim that the ‘beliefs of Quakers [were] almost uniquely hostile to history’, while Erin Bell has more recently argued that the first Friends deemed history ‘detrimental to true appreciation of the inward voice of God’.Footnote 5 According to this view, the ‘Light within’ – a divine immanence which ‘consciously distinguished itself from a return to the past’ – precluded a concern for precedent.Footnote 6 The early Quakers, in other words, should not have needed history.
Yet George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, was himself more than prepared to appeal to the post-biblical past. When on trial in Lancaster in 1664, Fox turned to history to provide precedent for Quaker beliefs, pointing in particular to those of Foxe’s martyrs who ‘suffered because they could not swear’ oaths.Footnote 7 The influence of the Elizabethan Foxe upon his seventeenth-century namesake has been acknowledged,Footnote 8 but this has rarely been translated into a more general consideration of the way in which the broader Quaker movement interpreted history in the first decades following its inception in the early 1650s.Footnote 9 Moreover, those historians who have appreciated the historical consciousness of the early Friends have nevertheless tended to view it in fundamentally conservative terms, attributing an apparent historiographical turn to the broader process whereby the early Quaker movement became increasingly institutionalised after the Restoration of 1660.Footnote 10 An important corrective to this account has recently been provided by Susan Royal, who has instead stressed the radical potential of Foxe’s Acts and monuments for seventeenth-century Quakers. However, her study of the Lollards in the English Reformation is necessarily limited to a consideration of the Lollard legacy.Footnote 11 More significant is Anthony Milton’s magisterial survey of England’s second Reformation, which examines the way in which the ambiguous history of the sixteenth-century Church of England was contested in the mid-seventeenth century. Milton is absolutely right to recognise that the proposals of religious radicals did not necessarily constitute ‘a conscious and dramatic break with the past, an extreme renunciation of the Church of England and its history’, and could instead be ‘presented as a continuation of the existing, ongoing reformation’.Footnote 12 Nevertheless, he concedes that such ‘sectarians’, given their self‑conscious opposition to ‘the very notion of a national church’, receive little attention in his study of ‘the battle for the Church of England’.Footnote 13 There thus remains clear scope for a broader, more systematic, analysis of the early Quakers’ involvement in these historiographical debates.
To this end, the first section of this article will survey a range of ways in which Quakers invoked history during both the Interregnum and the reign of Charles ii. The second section will then analyse the intellectual framework through which this first generation of Friends interpreted history, before a third and final section will examine the way in which Quakers continued to appeal to the past for polemical purposes in the aftermath of the Restoration. Not only does this possess important implications for our understanding of the development of early Quakerism, but it also holds much broader historiographical significance. By analysing the way in which the Acts and monuments, in particular, proved a powerful resource for the Quakers, this study builds upon recent work which has increasingly recognised the radical potential of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’.Footnote 14 Foxe’s legacy, and that of the Elizabethan Reformation more generally, were undoubtedly ambiguous, and it was this ambiguity which ensured that the history and identity of the English Church remained such contested issues in the mid-seventeenth century. By tracing Quaker involvement in these debates beyond 1662, this article extends Milton’s exploration of ‘England’s second Reformation’. Not content to be confined to a radical fringe, the early Quakers were – and remained – active participants in the battle to represent the true heirs of the English Reformation.
I
The turn to history constituted a powerful polemical weapon in the seventeenth century. Perhaps most obviously, then, the early Quakers appealed to the past in order to refute the plenitude of polemical charges laid against them. In answer to attempts to associate Quakers with the infamous Münster Anabaptists of 1533–5,Footnote 15 Edward Burrough stressed the differences in their ‘Iudgement and Practice’, while the Scottish Friend Robert Barclay would later claim to ‘abhor and detest those wild Practices, which are written, concerning the Anabaptists of Munster’.Footnote 16 Moreover, Quakers were repeatedly accused of crypto‑Catholicism. For those with eyes to see, their views on biblical authority and the possibility of spiritual perfection could appear suspiciously Catholic, and their refusal to swear oaths saw them tried according to Elizabethan legislation against recusants and Jesuits.Footnote 17 Quakers were particularly vulnerable to the claim that, by assailing other Protestants, they worked with Catholics to undermine, divide and destroy the true religion.Footnote 18 In response to such accusations, the controversial Yorkshire Quaker James Nayler made clear that it was ‘your Ancestor’ and ‘father the Pope’ that ‘got you into your Parsonages, and Masterships, and Ordained you, and your place, and form of Worship’.Footnote 19 This retort was widely emulated by other Quakers.Footnote 20 When Burrough rejected the claim that ‘we did arise from the Papists’, he did so specifically by arguing that ‘if it be an offence to be risen from the Papists’, then ‘the Protestants (so called) are in the offence, and their Ministry, and the chief part of their Church-Government, Worship and Ordinances are evil; for did not the Protestants spring from the Papists?’Footnote 21
It was often in order to substantiate this claim that Quaker works contained historical discussion.Footnote 22 By tracing the introduction of swearing on the Gospel to the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century, or the wearing of surplices to the pontificate of Adrian i, Quakers could show that such practices – retained in the Restoration Church – represented man‑made innovations.Footnote 23 Chief among such remnants of popish idolatry was the payment of tithes.Footnote 24 Drawing upon John Selden’s Historie of tithes (1618), Anthony Pearson asserted that there was no ‘Law, Canon, or Constitution of any general Council as yet found, that purposely commanded the payment of tythes, nor any that expresly supposed them a duty of common right, before the Council of Lateran, held in the year 1215’.Footnote 25 The payment of tithes had been introduced to England in the eighth century by legates of Pope Adrian – and subsequently confirmed by a succession of Saxon, Norman and Plantagenet laws – but they continued to be thought of as discretionary payments intended to support provision for the poor.Footnote 26 Only at the height of papal dominion in the thirteenth century did tithes become established on a regular parochial basis.Footnote 27 It was then that ‘pope Innocent the third sen[t] his Decretal Epistle to the Bishop of Canterbury, commanding him to enjoyn every man to pay his temporal Goods to those that ministred spiritual things to them’, and the ‘general Parochial payment of tythes in England’ was first imposed.Footnote 28
There was a clear coherence between this historical logic and a biblical mode of argumentation. The Quakers’ primary argument against tithes was that there was no evidence of their payment following the abrogation of Mosaic law, and this was complemented by the historical demonstration of their medieval invention.Footnote 29 Nevertheless, such arguments only serve to support Erin Bell’s claim that the ‘early Quakers aligned history with superfluous tradition’.Footnote 30 In fact, Friends were prepared to make much more positive appeals to the past. Alongside his attempt to establish the papal origins of tithes, Pearson also included a litany of proto-Protestant reformers who ‘did in their dayes bear their testimony against’ them.Footnote 31 The same was true of Ambrose Rigge and Thomas Lawson, both of whom drew directly and explicitly upon the ‘Book of Martyrs’.Footnote 32 From Foxe, they cited the objection made by followers of Jan Hus in fifteenth-century Bohemia: ‘although in the Old‑Testament it were commanded to give Tythes’, this was not applicable to Christians as that ‘precept of the Old‑Testament had an end in the first year of our Lord Jesus Christ’.Footnote 33 Nor were the Hussites alone in having anticipated this argument. Hus had himself been influenced by the Oxford don John Wyclif, and the judgement of both he and his followers was frequently referenced by a wide range of Friends.Footnote 34 The Lollards Walter Brute and William Thorpe, for example, had denied the obligation of ‘the old law’ following ‘the coming of Christ’, just as the Quakers now did.Footnote 35
Although, as Francis Howgill insisted, ‘Antiquity without Truth, proveth nothing’, it was clearly helpful for Quakers to appeal to the precedents provided by these proto-Protestants.Footnote 36 Not only did it serve to guard against the generic charge of innovation, but the invocation of Foxe’s imprimatur also allowed Friends to assert their unimpeachably Protestant credentials in response to continual accusations of crypto-Catholicism. Indeed, Foxe’s authority was so great among Protestants that it might lend a veneer of respectability to even the most controversial of beliefs.Footnote 37 Writing in defence of the Quaker belief in immediate revelation, the Aberdonian Quaker George Keith appealed to ‘Foxes book of Martyrs’ in an attempt to show that the ‘purest Primitive Protestants’ – including Hus – had ‘maintained Immediate Calls, and the Spirit of Prophecy’.Footnote 38 The Quaker position on oaths was particularly problematic; given their centrality to common-law procedure, as well as their importance as tests of loyalty, Friends’ refusal to swear only served to support accusations of civil disobedience.Footnote 39 In their defence, Quakers attempted to demonstrate that ‘this Doctrine … had the Voice of several Ages to confirm it’, and called upon a familiar cast of Foxean forerunners in order to do so.Footnote 40 As we have seen, this was a strategy employed by George Fox; he pointed, in particular, to the Marian martyrs, as well as those – such as Basilides and Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna – who had suffered during the ten primitive persecutions.Footnote 41 In the eyes of early modern Protestants, a similar level of proximity to the primitive Church could be claimed by the Waldensians, the heretical community of medieval Europe which was widely considered ‘to have continued Uncorrupted … ever since the Apostles Times’.Footnote 42 Like Fox, the leading Restoration Quakers William Penn and George Whitehead deemed these ‘most antient and true Protestants’ to have ‘denyed the taking of any Oath’.Footnote 43 ‘To deny swearing in obedience to Christ’s commands was’, therefore, ‘no new thing.’Footnote 44
Most remarkable of all was the Quakers’ attempt to legitimate their rejection of hat honour. Friends refused to remove their hats in deference to authority on the grounds that there was no scriptural requirement to do so, and that it therefore represented a worshipping of man that was offensive to God.Footnote 45 The result was a form of radical social protest, and, in the face of widespread hostility, Quakers once again turned to find precedents which might vindicate their actions. The Friends’ first recording clerk, Ellis Hookes, was particularly inventive in his invocation of Nicholas Ridley, the Edwardian bishop of London who had been put to the stake during the reign of Mary i.Footnote 46 Although Ridley could be considered something of a religious radical in the context of Mary’s Catholic counter‐Reformation, he would, of course, have been horrified by the extremity of Quaker beliefs. Nevertheless, when on trial in 1555, Ridley had ostentatiously replaced his hat on his head at the mention of the pope, and thus refused to honour both the pontiff and his Legate, Cardinal Pole.Footnote 47 As far as Hookes was concerned, Ridley’s refusal to honour the ‘usurped Supremacy’ and ‘abused Authority’ of the papacy served as a precedent for the Quakers’ own refusal to extend to man the honour that was due to God alone.Footnote 48 So, too, did the example set by Thomas Cranmer; the archbishop of Canterbury had similarly refused to doff his cap to James Brooks, the Marian bishop of Gloucester, and thus failed to do ‘reverence to him that represented the Pope’s Person’. Yet Hookes seemingly detected little irony when including Archbishop Cranmer’s admission that he would, in fact, have removed his hat in honour of an authority other than that of the pope.Footnote 49 While clearly not impossible, claiming Cranmer for the Quaker cause was not a straightforward task.
II
As the awkwardness of this example suggests, the precedents which Foxe’s martyrs might provide for the Quakers were often far from obvious. It is for this reason that Carla Gardina Pestana has argued that scriptural sources were ‘less problematic’ for Quakers than historical ones: she argues that the early Quakers drew upon the Acts and monuments ‘in only a limited way’, given that Foxe’s martyrs, as ‘Anglicans’, ‘offered dubious models for those who opposed the Anglican hierarchy’.Footnote 50 In light of the more recent work of Thomas Freeman, this is clearly a mischaracterisation of Foxe’s contribution.Footnote 51 But the sentiment has been shared by other historians. As far as Christopher Hill was concerned, historically-minded religious radicals of the seventeenth century ‘looked back to Wyclif and Hus rather than to Luther and Calvin’.Footnote 52 In the same vein, Rosemary Moore has argued that the range of historical examples available to the early Quakers was largely limited to those who provided direct precedents for their positions, such as the Lollards and Hussites ‘who had not supported tithes’.Footnote 53 More recently, Susan Royal has suggested that, although the Quakers ‘recognised that all the Reformation-era martyrs had some truth in their beliefs’, they ‘assigned more weight to some than others’. Recognising the flaws of more ‘conservative’ figures such as Cranmer, the Quakers saw themselves, accordingly, as ‘descendants of other, more radical witnesses’.Footnote 54 In spite, then, of Royal’s much greater appreciation of the early Friends’ historical consciousness, she nevertheless reinforces the notion that the scope of Quaker appeals to history was necessarily restricted.
It is certainly true that the Quakers drew heavily upon the Waldensians, Lollards and Hussites to provide precedents for their most controversial beliefs. However, we have already seen that Quakers looked favourably upon the bishop-martyrs Cranmer, Ridley and Hugh Latimer, and this merely represented the tip of a much larger iceberg.Footnote 55 Hookes, for example, counted the continental reformers Ulrich Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius and Philip Melanchthon among the ‘many eminent men raised up’ to father the Protestant Church, and he followed John Foxe in describing Martin Luther as the light that ‘shined in the Church as a bright Star after a long Cloudy and Obscure Skie’.Footnote 56 Francis Howgill, too, claimed to ‘honor’ Luther, as well as John Calvin, just as ‘God did … in their day’.Footnote 57 It is significant, in light of Christopher Hill’s comments about the lack of a radical interest in the sixteenth century, that these figures all stood within the more mainstream magisterial tradition that defined the Reformation of that age. Contrary, then, to Hill’s claim that seventeenth-century religious radicals looked back purely to ‘the persecuted, not the successful’, the Quakers sought to claim the full gamut of Foxean forebears as their own.Footnote 58
The co-existence of historical heroes as disparate as Melanchthon and the Mennonites on the pages of Quaker pamphlets requires an explanation, and it was readily provided by Isaac Penington.Footnote 59 The son of his namesake, who had been Lord Mayor of London and signatory to Charles i’s death warrant, Penington the younger was ‘convinced’ in 1658.Footnote 60 Two years later, Penington wrote that ‘the blessed Martyrs, who suffered for the Testimony of a pure Conscience towards God, and all the Worthies of the Lord in their several Generations, who fought against that Scarlet Whore … are not disowned by us, but dearly owned and honoured therein’.Footnote 61 This explicitly included Luther and Hus, with whom the Quakers agreed ‘in their testimony in several things’. But where they did not, Penington made clear that ‘all things were not discovered at once’. Instead, when ‘the times were … dark, and the light small’, those that were ‘faithfull according to what was discovered’ were nevertheless ‘pretious’ in the eyes of the Lord, who was willing to overlook ‘what through ignorance they erred in’.Footnote 62 As long as they held fast to their ‘testimony, in the faith and in the patience which they had learned and received from God, … they were accepted of him’.Footnote 63 This understanding of piecemeal revelation was crucial. By downplaying the significance of doctrinal difference, Quakers could claim that they suffered ‘for testifying against the hypocrisies and corruptions of our age’, just as the earlier martyrs ‘did in their day, from the same Spirit that persecuted them’.Footnote 64
In times of varying ignorance, then, what united these generations of Christians was not any strict doctrinal affinity, but a shared experience of suffering against the ‘Spirit of Persecution’.Footnote 65 There was a clear biblical basis for this worldview, but the influence of the evangelical Tudor historians John Bale and John Foxe cannot be overestimated.Footnote 66 In The image of both Churches (1545), the former had interpreted Christian history as an apocalyptic contest in which a remnant of God’s faithful struggled against the corruption of the false Church in all ages.Footnote 67 Bale drew a parallel between the evangelical martyrs of his day and those who had earlier suffered at the hands of Rome, and this framework was extended by Foxe, Bale’s fellow Marian exile, in successive editions of his magisterial Acts and monuments. Here, Foxe propounded a progressive understanding of the Reformation, whereby the light of God was only gradually revealed to his elect. Despite noting, for example, ‘some blemishes’ in the opinions and beliefs of John Wyclif, Foxe nevertheless maintained that he had been an invaluable assailant of Rome, in ‘darke and misty tymes of ignoraūce’.Footnote 68 Given, then, that ‘the revelation of God’s will was progressive’,Footnote 69 it was the shared experience of popish persecution that identified historic members of the true Church, and which allowed Foxe to trace its continuous existence through the age of apostasy.
Scholars have long appreciated that this progressive interpretation of revelation allowed Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritans to incorporate the prestige of earlier Protestant martyrs within their arguments for further reform,Footnote 70 but there has been less appreciation of the extent to which it enabled Quakers to situate themselves within Foxe’s succession of sufferers for the true Church. Friends, however, went to great lengths to record and publicise details of their persecution, and it is clear that they interpreted their experience in fundamentally Foxean terms.Footnote 71 When, for example, Edward Burrough published a county-by-county compilation of Quaker sufferings in 1659, he claimed that Friends had ‘patiently born the greatest sufferings that any people of this Nation ever lay under, since Queen Maries dayes’.Footnote 72 Nor is it a coincidence that Ellis Hookes, who is best known for collating two manuscript volumes of Quaker tribulations in the ‘Great Book of Sufferings’, also published more explicitly historical works than any other Restoration Quaker.Footnote 73 In the largest and the most influential – The spirit of the martyrs revived – Hookes both abridged and extended Foxe’s martyrology, explicitly tracing the ‘Succession of the TRUE CHURCH’, through the ‘FAITHFUL MARTYRS In All AGES’, to those who suffered for their faith in the seventeenth century.Footnote 74 Although, as we have seen, plenty of Foxe’s martyrs did share at least some of the Quakers’ beliefs, the majority clearly did not. In fact, many of the martyrs included by Hookes were admitted for clearing the relatively low bar of denying transubstantiation or the papal supremacy. In the struggle between Christ and Antichrist, then, affliction by the ‘persecuting Spirit’ represented the real mark of the true Church, and the vital link between the Quakers and their Foxean forebears.Footnote 75
Nor was the criterion for suffering a narrow one. Here, once again, the influence of Foxe was important, as his own attempts to construct an extensive proto-Protestant lineage of martyrs for the true Church saw him include many sufferers whose experience of harassment, abjuration and penance had not been fatal.Footnote 76 So, Hookes’s own litany of martyrs could also include Martin Luther, who, despite dying ‘in peace in his own Country’, was nevertheless ‘oppressed’ by ‘Popish Idolatry’.Footnote 77 This capacious understanding of suffering was articulated by another prominent Restoration Quaker, Thomas Ellwood. In The foundation of tythes shaken (1678), Ellwood explained that the status of martyr was ‘applicable to them who make confession of the Truth, and bear witness to it, but more especially … to them that suffer for the Truth’. He made clear that this included ‘Sufferings which extend not unto Death’, but which could nevertheless be ‘as grievous and cruel as death it self’.Footnote 78 In the context of Quaker persecution, this was important. Under the penal legislation passed by the Cavalier parliament in 1661–5 – known, somewhat misleadingly, as the Clarendon CodeFootnote 79 – Friends were regularly subjected to brutal beatings, swingeing fines and widespread imprisonment, and this was particularly the case during the ‘Tory Reaction’ of 1681–5.Footnote 80 But although a great many died in insanitary jails, Quakers were not judicially executed, at least outside of New England.Footnote 81 A capacious understanding of suffering as the mark of the true Church was, therefore, crucial: it allowed the Quakers – in spite of their more radical convictions – to claim that they were the true heirs of the Reformation begun by Luther.
It was Ellwood who offered perhaps the most articulate expression of this historical perspective. In his 1678 dispute with Thomas Comber, later dean of Durham, Ellwood was faced with the problem posed by the Protestant martyrs whose position on tithes contradicted Quaker belief.Footnote 82 Reiterating the notion that ‘all Truths were not discovered at once’, Ellwood instead claimed that, in the ‘Day‑Break’ or ‘Infancy of Reformation’, ‘it pleased God … to rend the Vail as it were by little and little, and so discover things gradually unto’ his witnesses. As a result, ‘many of the blessed Martyrs … had not so full and clear a sight of All the Superstitions and Abominations, which in the dark Night of Ignorance had crept into the Church of Rome, as it hath pleased God since to give’.Footnote 83 This was not, however, intended to ‘detract’ from the ‘honour’ of ‘those worthy men’, all of whom were deemed ‘good and godly’ by Foxe, and he explicitly condemned any attempt ‘to oppose the Martyrs one to another’.Footnote 84 To suggest, with Susan Royal, that Ellwood held more radical reformers ‘in higher regard’ is thus to somewhat misinterpret his approach to his Foxean forerunners.Footnote 85 Ellwood was, of course, well aware of the doctrinal differences between Foxe’s martyrs. In fact, it was the Lollards, living ‘in times of greater Darkness’, who did ‘not see so many of the Corruptions of the Church of Rome as Cranmer and his Associates did’.Footnote 86 Yet that, for Ellwood, was beside the point. It was precisely because he understood the martyrs’ ‘true excellency’ to lie ‘not so much in knowing much (though much they knew) as in being faithful to what they knew’ that such distinctions were not deemed significant. Regardless of historical differences in doctrine, it was for that faithfulness ‘to the Lord in what they did see’ that all of Foxe’s martyrs ‘were accepted by him’.Footnote 87
III
It is clear, then, that the intellectual apparatus inherited from Foxe allowed the early Quakers to appeal to historical exemplars who did not provide direct precedents for their radical beliefs. The point is an important one: not only does it overturn implicit assumptions about the incompatibility of historical inquiry and Quaker theology, it also possesses broader implications for our understanding of the development of early Quakerism. For Rosemary Moore, appeals to the past differed markedly between the Quakers of the Interregnum and Restoration periods: the former were ‘too conscious of their new beginning, and too sure that they alone constituted the true church, to be much concerned about what had gone before’. It was not until 1659 that Friends made ‘unambiguously favourable references’ to ‘John Foxe’s book and the earlier martyrs’.Footnote 88 Even then, ‘the main reference was not to the sixteenth century but to an earlier time, to Wyclif and Hus’, and it was only during the 1660s that Quakers became ‘willing to see themselves as standing in the tradition of earlier British martyrs’ such as those persecuted during the reign of Mary.Footnote 89
For Moore, then, this process reflected a broader development in the early Quaker movement, whereby the early enthusiasm of the Interregnum was extinguished after 1660. It is not difficult to detect, here, the prevailing paradigm of ‘defeat’ which pervades historiography on early Quakerism. Ever since Christopher Hill’s influential characterisation of the Restoration experience in those terms, historians of early Quakerism have tended to draw a sharp distinction between Interregnum militancy and Restoration quietism, with the latter encapsulated by the ‘Peace Testimony’ issued by Friends in 1661. This process of institutionalisation and withdrawal, we are told, represented a necessary act of ‘self-defence’ in a ‘hostile post-restoration world’.Footnote 90 Not only were thousands of Quakers imprisoned in the aftermath of Venner’s Fifth Monarchist rising of January 1661, but they were also penalised for refusing to take oaths and holding religious meetings under the Quaker Act of 1662.Footnote 91 For Barry Reay, it was the ‘struggle to survive’ this ‘Restoration persecution’ that ‘encouraged organization’, which in turn ‘stimulated conservatism’.Footnote 92 The view that Quakerism developed in a necessarily defensive manner thus remains a powerful and persistent one,Footnote 93 in spite of several important challenges.Footnote 94 Indeed, Moore has herself explicitly aimed to challenge the extent to which 1660 represented a dividing line in the history of Quakerism. Yet she none the less attributes the acceleration of pre-Restoration developments to the necessity of ‘mere survival’ in the 1660s.Footnote 95
We are left, then, with a familiar – and fundamentally Hillian – account of the Restoration as a period in which the radicalism of the Interregnum was suppressed, and the Quaker movement increasingly institutionalised.Footnote 96 For Moore, in particular, the move to claim more mainstream historical heroes was a fundamentally conservative one, borne of this search for Restoration ‘respectability’.Footnote 97 Yet, in 1659, Edward Burrough was already invoking the examples of both Luther and Calvin, as well as Wyclif.Footnote 98 It was ‘for their zeal in publishing abroad what then was manifest unto them’ that Burrough could not only ‘commend’ the pair, but also draw a direct parallel between contemporary Quakers’ testimonies and those of these magisterial reformers.Footnote 99 He proceeded, in 1661, to defend the bishop-martyrs celebrated by Foxe in his Acts and monuments – namely Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley. Burrough was adamant that ‘God did awaken these men, with many more, and stir up their hearts in their day against the Idolatries and Superstitions of the times they lived in’, and it was for that reason that he considered them ‘sincere men, according to their Light and Knowledge in their day’.Footnote 100 Although articulated after 1660, this merely represented a fuller expression of the argument which had allowed Burrough to lay claim upon the legacy of Luther and Calvin prior to the Restoration. This is significant: not only was Burrough a leading Interregnum Quaker, but he was also one of a core cast of characters central to Hill’s more radical portrait of that period.Footnote 101
Yet Burrough was not the first Friend to make this argument, nor the most radical. James Nayler achieved widespread notoriety when, in October 1656, he rode into Bristol, imitating Christ’s entry to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.Footnote 102 He was subsequently convicted of blasphemy by the Second Protectorate Parliament, only narrowly avoiding the death penalty.Footnote 103 Just a year before this infamous episode, Nayler claimed that the Quakers ‘own[ed]’ and suffered ‘with’ all of those ‘tortured, martyred and burned, whipt and imprisoned, to this day, who suffered for conscience sake, following the Lamb in their measure’.Footnote 104 More remarkably, he, too, invoked Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer by name. Although the bishop‑martyrs had preached from pulpits, and had taken tithes for doing so, Nayler none the less maintained that it was for their denial of ‘the Popish way of worship, according to their measure of Light, that these men then suffered’. It was for ‘being faithful to that measure’, ‘though the fulness of the Light was not then come’, that Nayler claimed them as ‘Predecessors’: these historic martyrs ‘suffered in obedience to that measure of light in their times’ just as the Quakers ‘suffer in obedience to the light of Christ in these times’.Footnote 105 As early as 1655, then, the most notorious of Quaker radicals was clearly articulating the interpretative framework which would continue to underpin Quaker invocations of history throughout the Restoration period.
As we have seen, that essentially Foxean perspective elided doctrinal differences between Quakers and earlier members of the true Church, allowing Friends to claim such esteemed spiritual company for themselves. But crucially, its binary nature also allowed Quakers to associate their adversaries with the forces of Antichrist. For Nayler, in exchange with Richard Baxter, it was precisely because the Presbyterians were ‘persecuting and not suffering’ that they followed the practice of the ‘popish Priests’ who had burned Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer at the stake.Footnote 106 Also writing in 1655, John Whitehead levelled the same accusation at his judges,Footnote 107 while two years earlier, Margaret Fell had similarly likened the Commonwealth’s imprisonment of Quakers to the popish persecution of ‘the marters’ in ‘Queen Mary dayes’.Footnote 108 There was, therefore, a clear polemical purpose to Quaker appeals to the past, and their persistence after the Restoration alerts us to the continually confrontational nature of the Quakers’ printed output. When, in 1658, the Bristol Quaker Dennis Hollister compared the treatment of Quakers by the Gloucestershire preacher Richard Fowler to the notorious persecution of Protestants by Edmund Bonner, he anticipated Ambrose Rigge’s condemnation, in 1669, of the ‘Bonner[‑]like’ proceedings of Leonard Letchford against his wife for her refusal to pay tithes.Footnote 109
There was, of course, a clear sense in which history – and particularly historical martyrology – could serve as a source of comfort to Quakers in troubled times.Footnote 110 Indeed, Hookes expressed hope that the examples of Foxe’s faithful martyrs would prove ‘strengthening to the Faith of some who are Innocent and Upright to the Lord’.Footnote 111 But it would be a mistake to see his repeated exhortations to ‘constancy’ as straightforward evidence of the patient and quiescent suffering by which the second period of Quakerism is so often characterised. For Hookes, ‘the spirit of the martyrs’, and that ‘of the old persecuter [sic]’, were two sides of the same apocalyptic coin, and it was because the fates of persecutor and persecuted were providentially intertwined that Quakers paid so much attention to both.Footnote 112 Writing in 1661, Francis Howgill recalled how the ‘Heathen Emperors’ responsible for the ten persecutions were ‘rewarded’ by God ‘according to their deeds’.Footnote 113 Ambrose Rigge was less specific, but he explicitly referenced the ‘Book of Martyrs’ in order to argue that ‘God in every Age shewed his severe wrath against the Spirit of Persecution’.Footnote 114 The point was not a subtle one. On the basis of these ‘Just Iudgments of God INFLICTED UPON PERSECUTORS’, recorded at length in his abridgement of Foxe, Hookes concluded that ‘the Lord was against those persecuting Priests and Bishops’.Footnote 115
Comfort and condemnation thus went hand in hand, just as they had for Foxe.Footnote 116 It was, therefore, imperative for the Quakers not only to claim membership of the true Church, but simultaneously to deny it to their adversaries. As Hookes extrapolated his historical martyrology beyond the Marian terminus of Foxe, he traced the true Church more specifically to the ‘People called Brownists’, after the Elizabethan separatist Robert Browne.Footnote 117 Hookes recorded that these Elizabethan and Jacobean separatists, such as Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, suffered ‘for no other cause but seperating themselves’ from a Church of England which they deemed irredeemably tainted by popish ‘corruptions’.Footnote 118 There was certainly an irony here – Barrow had himself denounced the bishop-martyrs as ‘pseudo-martyrs’ – but not inconsistency.Footnote 119 It was, after all, because the Reformation had merely cast ‘out the name and Persons of the Pope and Papists’ that Quakers could deem these separatists to have been afflicted by the same persecuting spirit as their episcopalian predecessors had been, and thus to belong on the same side of the apocalyptic divide.Footnote 120 Crucially, this provided a clear parallel between the Brownists and Quakers, on the one hand, and their respective Protestant persecutors, on the other. The latter consisted not merely of episcopalian conformists, but also those Independents and Presbyterians who, in spite of their shared experience of Restoration persecution, had nevertheless subjected the Quakers to the same popish treatment during the Interregnum. In case the point was too subtle, Hookes expressly condemned ‘the Independants and Presbyterians’, who ‘forgot their time of deep Sufferings’ and ‘turn’d as riggid Persecutors, if not worse, then those they had turned out’.Footnote 121 It was ultimately because these so‑called Protestants had perpetuated the persecutory practices of the papists that they renounced any claim to represent the true spiritual heirs of Wyclif, Luther and Cranmer.Footnote 122
At exactly the time, then, that Friends were supposedly concluding that interdenominational debates were ‘damaging to the Quaker cause’,Footnote 123 leading Restoration Quakers were extending and adapting the Foxean succession in order to invalidate the claims of even fellow Nonconformists to represent the true Church. Rather than retreating inwards, Friends thus remained ‘active agents in the political and religious controversies of Restoration England’.Footnote 124 Indeed, Hookes’s historical writings seem to have been carefully calculated to influence the direction of religious policy. In 1665, Hookes and his fellow Quaker, Thomas Rudyard, turned to the Acts and monuments in order to compile a list of Quaker beliefs for which Foxe’s martyrs had also suffered. Most pointedly, given the recent passage of the 1664 Conventicle Act, Hookes and Rudyard provided a number of examples of private religious meetings held by Henrician and Marian martyrs, in order to show that ‘assembling in houses is no new thing’.Footnote 125 Even more remarkable, in 1661, was Hookes’s recollection of the deposition of Richard ii in 1399. Given that Richard’s untimely end had been preceded by his persecution of Lollardy, Hookes suggested that ‘Kings and Princes may take warning by this King Richard, not to fulfill the cruel and bloody desires of their Prelats.’Footnote 126 Following the Declaration of Breda, issued by Charles ii in April 1660, the implication of Hookes’s intervention was thinly veiled: it served to remind the king of the divine displeasure which he could expect to incur, should he fail to honour his promise of ‘liberty to tender consciences’.Footnote 127
But, having tried the stick, Hookes turned to the carrot. Specifically, he went to great lengths throughout The spirit of the martyrs revived to absolve monarchical authority of any responsibility for the persecutions of the past. So, when describing the persecution of Elizabethan separatists, Hookes expressly stressed that ‘the chief Instruments of their deaths were the Clergy, and not the Queen’.Footnote 128 In the same vein, Hookes claimed that ‘the original Cause’ of Puritan suffering in the reign of James i ‘did not appear to proceed from the King’, citing the aversion to religious ‘Compulsion’ which James had expressed in his opening speech to the parliament of 1621.Footnote 129 The point is thrown into sharp relief by comparison with the treatment of the same material by the Presbyterian historian Samuel Clarke, who was more than prepared to attribute the prosecution of Protestant heresy to the initiative of Elizabeth i.Footnote 130 Hookes’s approach did not, then, reflect an ‘inevitably adversarial relationship’ between Quakers and the Restoration authorities,Footnote 131 but a more deliberate and precise attempt at political engagement, appealing directly to the king himself. Charles was, after all, the Quakers’ best hope of securing toleration. Having met with leading Friends in 1660, he proceeded to provide relief to imprisoned Quakers, before issuing more general – but ultimately abortive – Declarations of Indulgence in 1662 and 1672.Footnote 132 Given that these attempts to override penal legislation by royal prerogative were thwarted by parliament, Friends could hope to promote a sense of shared interest between king and Quakers, attributing any apparent shortcomings in religious policy to the influence of evil counsel.Footnote 133 This approach was at the heart of Hookes’s history. Repeatedly and consistently attributing the persecutory impulse to clerical – not monarchical – influence, Quakers could hope to persuade Charles by eschewing an obviously antagonistic approach to royal authority. Yet, simultaneously, Hookes could indicate that it was incumbent upon Charles to oppose the persecutory policies of his prelates, just as his predecessors had apparently done.
IV
Unsurprisingly, Hookes’s efforts ended in failure. But it is the Quakers’ persistent attempts to intervene in the political landscape of Restoration England, in spite of such repeated failures, which reminds us of just how outward-facing the movement remained after 1660. The appeal to history was at the heart of this activity, and we should thus reject the prevailing historiographical assumption of its essentially conservative nature. It has been all too easy to divorce religious radicals from debates over the ‘identity of the present and the historic Church of England’ which, as Anthony Milton has noted, ‘would continue to be as much a matter of contestation in the later decades of the seventeenth century as it had been in the earlier ones’.Footnote 134 This article has thus attempted to remedy that relative neglect. In so doing, it has stressed that the early Quakers were not intellectually isolated, but instead deeply implicated in the wider issues and debates which convulsed English Protestantism in the seventeenth century.Footnote 135
Perhaps most surprising is the ease with which the first Friends could stake a claim upon the legacy of John Foxe and his magnum opus. If the Reformation was progressive, and the experience of persecution the mark of the true Church, then the Quakers – who held more ‘advanced’ beliefs, and were more persistently persecuted than their denominational rivals – could coherently claim to represent the heirs of the true Church delineated in Foxe’s history. There is, of course, an irony in the fact that the Acts and monuments, which had proved so instrumental to the foundation of Anglophone Protestantism in the sixteenth century, could subsequently contribute to its disintegration in the seventeenth.Footnote 136 Indeed, although beyond the scope of this study, there is a clear sense in which disagreement over a shared historical discourse could contribute to the growth of religious pluralism by the early eighteenth century. Yet, even in the shorter term, it helps to explain the divisive nature of religious politics in Restoration England. Recent historiography has emphasised the power of Tory‑Anglican interpretations of the past – and particularly the ‘late troubles’ – but they did not hold a monopoly over the mnemonic landscape of the Restoration period.Footnote 137 Contrary to Jonathan Scott’s claim, the Restoration nation did not remain ‘a prisoner of memory’,Footnote 138 and it is largely because of the potential for alternative historical perspectives that ‘the story of the late seventeenth century remains one of conflict’.Footnote 139 Ultimately, it is because the past was so malleable and multivalent that it proved – even for the Quakers – so important.
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