First among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism

420 Pages·1996·25.79 MB·English

by  H. Larry Ingle

First Among Friends
Supposed portrait of George Fox, 1677. Detail from engraving, after painting of "Quaker
Meeting" by Egbert van Heemskerk. See William I. Hull, Benjamin Furly and Quakerism
in Rotterdam, Swarthmore College Monographs on Quaker History, no. 5 (Swarthmore,
Pa.: Swarthmore College, 1941), 255-58. (Reprinted by permission of the Library
Committee of London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.)
First Among Friends
GEORGE FOX AND THE CREATION OF QUAKERISM
H. Larry Ingle
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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First issued as an Oxford University Press Paperback, 1996
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Library of Congress Cataloging—in—Publication Data
Ingle, H. Larry (Homer Larry), 1936-
First among friends: George Fox and creation of quakerism/H. Larry Ingle,
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-507803-9
ISBN 0-19-510117-0 (pbk.)
1. Fox, George, 1624-1691. 2. Quakers—England—Biography.
I. Title.
BX7795.F7I54 1994
289.6'092—dc20
[B] 93-7660
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
for
JAAN AND JON
"Prize your Time for your soul's sake."
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PREFACE
George Fox has long needed a biography firmly rooted in the period in which
he lived, grew to manhood, and preached the message that pulled together the
diverse group of people who made up the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers.
Numerous studies of this important person have appeared, of course, many pro-
duced by members of the sect he did so much to found. But almost without
exception these studies have been excessively filiopietistic, have tried to squeeze
the last drop of meaning (and life) from his "theology" and have amounted to
a virtual paraphrase of his Journal, available to interested readers for three cen-
turies. Some have written as though the guns of the English Civil Wars and the
divisive debates that characterized England's revolutionary era rumbled far off-
stage, rather than at the center of the period's common life. The authors of such
volumes could hardly be critical of Fox or willing to subject their hero to the
kind of biographical treatment one might expect in a study of—to name at ran-
dom one of Fox's contemporaries—Oliver Cromwell. As perhaps the most careful
scholar to approach the period bluntly asserted, "There is no real biography of
George Fox"; nothing has appeared since Henry J. Cadbury wrote those words
in 1972 to alter that assessment.1
Interestingly enough, this attitude toward Fox has even infected the wider
world of scholarship. When I applied for a grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities to allow me to pursue my research, I was turned down despite
numerous favorable reviews. The most amazing response came from a critic who
solemnly dogmatized that, given the corpus of Fox's work, the large body of
theological commentary on it, and scholarly work on Quakerism in the English
Civil War and Interregnum periods, "it would be straining patience to argue that
a biography of Fox will tell us anything substantial that we don't already know
about the subject." Let the reader judge whether either strain or patience is
required to find anything new and substantial here.
This biographical study attempts to rescue Fox from poorly grounded, usu-
ally uncritical, and theologically oriented works. It is firmly rooted in manu-
script and published sources of the period and brings to the forefront the back-
ground that has hitherto been too much ignored. It is based on the hardly novel
assumption that a person in the past is, to a large degree, a product of his or her
time. It depicts a human being like the rest of us, and able thereby to speak to
his contemporaries, but different enough to offer a compelling vision to a por-
tion of his divided society and win their allegiance. If it celebrates anything about
viii Preface
George Fox, it honors his capacity to respond to his times in a way that allowed
him and his followers to help mold them. Unlike other works on the man, it is
freighted with few explicit lessons, so that the reader is left free to appropriate
the countless implicit ones.
During the course of a formidable research task, particularly for one whose
field of research and teaching includes other epochs and other lands than England,
I have accumulated numerous obligations. My needs, ranging from a magnify-
ing glass to use at the British Library to information on esoteric medical prob-
lems, were so great that my thanks can hardly surmount them. I must express
my gratitude to Jan Ridley, Peter Cottingham, Elizabeth Salisbury, Walter and
Maisie Birmingham, Angela Barlow, Rosemary and Derek Moore, Dennis F. Hall,
Joseph Pickvance, Malcolm Thomas, James Pym, Ole Riis, Kim Collis, Maude
White, Donald Moates, David L. Smiley, Cathy Aldridge, Thomas Hamm, J.
William Frost, Arthur J. Mekeel, Jaan Ingle, Paul Ramsay, Doug Gwyn, Hugh
Barbour, Kathleen Denbigh, Donald Rhodes, Edwin J. Bronner, Stephen A. Kent,
Yvonne Gee, Lesley (Lel) Bound, Richard Vann, Carole Treadway, Elizabeth P.
Brown, Irven Resnick, Paul Schlotthauer, Philip Holthaus, Mary and John Reader,
and John Anderson. Geoffrey Makins expertly drew the map. Carolyn Mitchell
performed a signal, and I hope not unrewarding, task in reading and critiquing
a late version of the manuscript. The following institutions and their staffs were
most helpful: British Library at the British Museum, London; Library of the
Society of Friends, London; Dr. Williams's Library, London; Institute of Histor-
ical Research, University of London; Library of Woodbrooke College; Public
Record Offices in London (Chancery Lane), Leicester, Preston, and Kendal; the
public libraries in Lichfield, Northampton, Kendal, Atherstone, Whitehaven, and
Derby, Great Britain; the public library in Chattanooga, Tennessee; University
of Tennessee-Chattanooga Lupton Library; Haverford College Library (Quaker
Collection); Swarthmore College Library (Friends Historical Library); Pendle Hill
Library; Bequest Committee (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting); Library of Jefferson
Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University; Historical Society of Pennsyl-
vania; Faculty Research Committee (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga);
and Quaker International Centre, London. My tenure in 1990-1991 as the first
Henry J. Cadbury Scholar at Pendle Hill in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, was invalu-
able because it put me near three excellent libraries and afforded me the most
valuable commodity a historian needs: time to write.
Three people made such major contributions to my work that they must be
mentioned separately. Neal Coulter, an indefatigable and intrepid librarian at
the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was always on call to help locate
stray tidbits of information I required. James A. Ward, a close friend and valued
colleague, constantly encouraged and supported me, taking time away from the
history of the Packard Motor Car Company and nineteenth century railroads to
listen and advise. My wife, Becky, not only endured me but lived with Fox, too,
including a five-month stint in London when she demonstrated that one does
not have to be a historian to cultivate the most important characteristic of his-
torical research, namely, the willingness to dig into and learn from the sources.
Her continued insistence that my theorizing be based on concrete evidence would
Preface ix
serve any scholar well, particularly those who work in rarefied areas where some-
thing as elusive as religious faith impinges on human beings.
I have dealt with two perennial problems facing historians of this period—
citing dates and quoting seventeenth-century English—by placing the beginning
of each year at January 1, quite a change from the England of the time where it
began on Lady Day, March 25, and by modernizing grammar, syntax, and spell-
ing to make this tale, I hope, more appealing to late-twentieth-century eyes and
ears. Thus, when it comes to the calendar, I am "old style" with slight modifica-
tions, but with language I am newfangled. There are problems with any decision
in these areas, but I think that, on balance, I have made the right ones.
The problem of converting seventeenth-century English pounds into twentieth-
century American dollars is more complicated, and I do not have the final answer.
(The interested reader might want to consult the most recent academic source
on this problem, John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money?: A Histor-
ical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United
States [Worchester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1992].) I have looked
at prices in the seventeenth century and tried to find a formula that would relate
them to those of the present. For example, Sarah Fell kept a detailed account
book of her expenses and income that has been published.2 Some samples from
this book are extremely enlightening: 6 chickens were sold for 12 pence while
white bread was a very dear 4 pence; a man's riding saddle cost 94 pence; 1 pound
of soap was 4 pence; and Fell paid 4 pence for 2 days of corn weeding. A 1688
estimate gives an annual family income of 38 pounds for artisans or people skilled
in handcrafts, such as a weaver, 154 pounds for a lawyer, and 280 pounds for
a gentleman.3 Having considered these figures, I tried to find an average that
would be accurate in reflecting these diverse expenses and costs and decided on
a rough conversion rate of approximately 1 English pound to 100 American
dollars. While this ratio can not be applied in every case, it allows for a relatively
accurate figure.
Keys to frequently used abbreviations appear in the bibliography. Because of
the vagaries of seventeenth-century printing, I have had to cite material from
pages 189-202 of the first edition of Fox's Journal by using the printer's signa-
tures. To ground this biography firmly in the soil of Fox's country and to give
my readers a taste of the popular views of the time, I have chosen English prov-
erbs common to the seventeenth century as chapter titles. (My source for these
proverbs was The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3d ed., edited by F. P.
Wilson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970]).
Chattanooga, Tenn. H. L. I.
June 1993