George Fox and the Quakers

George Fox was born in July 1624 at Drayton-in-the-Clay in Leicestershire, the son of a weaver, and left his family in 1643. He went to clergy and to dissenting preachers for help and found none, until, he writes, he heard a voice say: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”. He came to hold that God does not dwell “in temples made with hands” but in people’s hearts (Fox, Journal ch. 1). He would not take off his hat to anyone and said “thee” and “thou” to rich and poor alike (Fox, Journal ch. 2). In 1650 the justices of Derby sent him to prison for six months as a blasphemer, and one of them, Justice Bennet, he says, “was the first that called us Quakers, because I bade them tremble at the word of the Lord” (Fox, Journal ch. 4).

In 1652, from the top of Pendle Hill in the north of England, he writes, “the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered”. At Firbank in Westmorland he sat on a rock beside the chapel and spoke for about three hours to a crowd judged to be above a thousand, telling them that the church and its ground were “no more holy than that mountain” and that Christ had come and put an end to temple, priests and tithes. He went on to Swarthmoor, the house of Judge Fell near Ulverston. Margaret Fell, the judge’s wife, and her household were convinced, the judge allowed a meeting to be kept in his house, and Fox says that it met there until 1690 (Fox, Journal ch. 6).

After the Fifth Monarchy men rose in London, Fox writes, Friends were seized on their way to meetings, word came of several thousand imprisoned across the country, and Margaret Fell carried accounts of them to the king and council (Fox, Journal 1852 edition, vol. 1, pp. 378–380). Fox and other Friends printed a declaration, presented to Charles II, in which they “utterly deny” all bloody principles and practices, “with all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever” (Quaker Declaration to Charles II heading and first paragraph).

In 1666 Fell published Women’s Speaking Justified. She argues from Scripture that women who speak by the Spirit of Christ may speak in the church: women first carried the news of the resurrection to the apostles, and Paul’s command of silence was addressed to women who were in confusion and “under the Law” (Fell, Women’s Speaking Justified opening and the sections on 1 Corinthians 14). She and Fox married in a Friends’ meeting at Bristol (Fox, Journal ch. 17).

When Parliament freed Protestant dissenters from the penalties of the laws on worship in 1689, it allowed those who scrupled to take any oath to make a declaration of fidelity and a profession of Christian belief instead (Toleration Act section 10). See the Toleration Act and Locke’s Letter.