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Muggletonians and Quakers: A Study in the Interaction of Seventeenth-Century Dissent*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Douglas G. Greene
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Extract

One of the most bitter pamphlet wars of the later seventeenth century was fought between the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who by 1689 had perhaps fifty-thousand followers, and the Muggletonians, a tiny sect which probably had fewer than one-thousand members. Despite the difference in the number of their adherents, the Quakers believed that the dispute with the Muggletonians was so significant that George Fox, William Penn, Edward Burrough, Isaac Penington, and other Quaker leaders attacked the Muggletonians in print. The Muggletonian prophets, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, believed that the Quakers were the greatest enemies of true religion, and they produced a steady stream of anti-Quaker tracts. Some of the accusations on both sides, such as being Antichrist or being worse than the Pope, were common in sectarian arguments, but the conflict reached a sustained height of invective which was rare even in such a contentious age. In Fox's opinion, Muggleton was a “heathen” whose “foul breath … comes from the foul spirit of thy father.” Another Quaker, Thomas Loe, addressed Muggleton as “thou son of perdition and child of the Devil … seed of the serpent and old sorcerer … ignorant sot.” Quaker attacks on the Muggletonians culminated in Penn's assertion that “from the most primitive times there has not appeared … a more complete monster … than John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, brethren and associates in the blackest work that ever fallen men or angels could probably have set themselves upon.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Summer 1983 , pp. 102 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1983

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article has been supported by a grant from the Old Dominion University Research Foundation. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the History Department, Old Dominion University, for a leave of absence from teaching responsibilities. I have benefited greatly from the knowledge and advice of Richard L. Greaves, Christopher Hill, Albert Mott, Barry G. Reay, Leslie Stringer, and E.P. Thompson. An early version of this paper was read at the Carolinas Symposium on British Studies. First printings of some Muggletonian pamphlets apparently no longer survive, and reprints during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries altered the original spelling and punctuation. Because of these inconsistencies, I have modernized spelling and punctuation, but retained the often erratic syntax, in all quotations in this article.

References

1 Braithwaite, William C., The Second Period of Quakerism (2nd ed.; Cambridge, 1961), p. 459.Google Scholar

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25 Reeve, John, A Transcendent Spiritual Treatise (London, 1652), pp. 22–26, 28–32, 36.Google Scholar

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43 Burrough, , Answers to Several Queries, p. 12Google Scholar and passim. Reeve's original list of questions does not survive, but Burrough quotes from it.

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51 In A Looking-Glass for George Fox, p. 1, Muggleton wrote that in 1653 the Witnesses had cursed Fox, Burrough, and Francis Howgill. This episode is not mentioned elsewhere, and it is likely that Muggleton was recalling the 1659 meeting.

52 Harwood, John, The Lying Prophet (London, 1659), signature A2, pp. 15–16Google Scholar. In his summary of the conversation, Harwood credited Clarkson with an assertion that Muggleton made, that “he had damned the Lord Mayor seven or eight years ago and 1000 more within this eight years.”

53 Clarkson, , The Lost Sheep Found, p. 39.Google Scholar

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55 Muggleton, , The Acts of the Witnesses, pp. 80–82.Google Scholar

56 A Journal of the Life of John Gratton, in The Friends' Library, 10 vols. (London, 1845) 9: 301Google Scholar. Cf. Reay, Barry G., “The Muggletonians,” pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

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66 Ibid., p. 55; Muggleton, , A Letter Sent to Thomas Taylor, pp. 2–4, 10Google Scholar; Muggleton, , A Looking-Glass for George Fox, p. 7.Google Scholar

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69 The book is dated “Amsterdam, 1663.” The British Library catalogue suggests that the correct date and place were London, 1667, perhaps because the Quakers seem not to have heard of the book until that year. I believe that it was printed in 1665, at the same time as A Letter Sent to Thomas Taylor. This pamphlet and The Neck of the Quakers Broken were produced by the same printer, and reprints of the two works were published together.

70 Muggleton, , The Neck of the Quakers Broken, pp. 16, 19, 27, 50–52, 55, 57–59.Google Scholar

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74 Penington, Isaac, Observations on Some Passages of Lodowick Muggleton (London, 1668), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

75 Muggleton, , An Answer to Isaac Pennington, pp. iv, 31, 33–34.Google Scholar

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79 Braithwaite, , The Second Period of Quakerism, pp. 251–255, 292–299.Google Scholar

80 Penn, , The New Witnesses, pp. 5–12.Google Scholar

81 In A Divine Looking-Glass Reeve said that “many men vainly imagine” that everyone has “the spirit of Christ living in his conscience;” yet in the same book he also said that Jesus will “bear record in the consciences of men to this epistle;” Penn, , The New Witnesses, p. 52Google Scholar. Reeve did not explain how Jesus can bear record in consciences without in some way being in those consciences.

82 Penn did not understand that to the Muggletonians the body which rises from the grave is “a pure spiritual body” yet contains physically the same flesh and bones. The point concerns the Muggletonian definition of “spirit” as that which quickens the flesh. Ibid., p. 53.

83 Ibid., pp. 60-62.

84 Muggleton, , The Answer to William Penn pp. [iii], 106, 121–124Google Scholar. Muggleton may have scored with this comment, for many Quakers denied the value of university education.

85 Ibid., pp. iv, 130. Note also Muggleton's, comment in The Neck of the Quakers Broken, p. 19Google Scholar: “Neither am I tied to the words of Christ … for he hath given me power to judge the scriptures.”

86 Muggleton, , The Answer to William Penn, p. 120.Google Scholar

87 For strange attempts to tar Fox by claiming that his theology was identical to Muggleton's, see Thompson, Thomas, The Quakers Quibbles … also the Pretended Prophet and Last Witness Lodowick Muggleton and the Quakers Compared and Considered (London, 1674)Google Scholar; Leslie, Charles, The Snake in the Grass (London, 1696)Google Scholar; Bugg, Francis, The Pilgrim's Progress from Quakerism to Christianity (London, 1698).Google Scholar

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89 Reeve, and Muggleton, , Supplement to the Book of Letters, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

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91 Muggleton, , A Looking-Glass for George Fox, p. 85.Google Scholar

92 Fox, , Journal, 1: 29.Google Scholar

93 Ibid., pp. 21-24, 29, 47, 150-152, 165-166, 184-185, 262; 2: 12, 26, 124-125, 222.

94 Muggleton, , A Looking-Glass for George Fox, p. 46Google Scholar. Reeve read Penington's, Divine Essays (London, 1654)Google Scholar, which, although it criticizes the Raners, contains some ideas which are similar to Ranter beliefs, e. g. p. 9: “The root, spring, or original of all things is perfect unity and being perfect unity is also perfect variety, compreheading all things in itself in entire oneness ….” Compare the vision of the Raner Abiezar Coppe: “I clearly saw distinction, diversity, variety, and as clearly saw all swallowed up into unity;” A Fiery Flying Roll, part 1, signature A3.

95 The most precise statement about Ranter ideas in Fox's Journal is a comment about William Lampitt, who “would talk of high notions and perfection and thereby deceived the people;” 1: 47. In 1655, Fox met some Ranters who claimed that “God made the Devil;” 1: 185.

96 Ibid., 2: 124-125.