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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
In October 1655, two Quakers, Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, imprisoned in Exeter gaol, published a warning to the priests and people of England. It was in many ways a typical Quaker tract, decrying the national Church of England, and urging people to turn to the inner light of Christ, rather than rely on the outward teachings of the national Church. But Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole also levelled the following bitter accusation against England’s ministry:
1 I am grateful to Profs Patrick Collinson, Patricia Crawford, and Ann Hughes, all of whom have commented on drafts of this paper. Unless otherwise stated, all manuscript references are to material held at London, Friends’ House Library.
2 Priscilla Cotton and Cole, Mary, To the Priests and People of England, we Discharge our Consciences (London, 1655), pp. 6–8 Google Scholar. The London bookseller George Thomason dated his copy on 16 Oct 1655. Many Quaker tracts were collected by Thomason, a bookseller and collector who literally bankrupted himself in an attempt to obtain a copy of everything published during the tumultuous years of the 1640s and 1650s. Beyond ensuring the survival of thousands of books from this period, the Thomason Collection is significant because he noted the date of acquisition on the title page of each tract he obtained. Thomason’s dates are useful as an approximate guide to when tracts were published, or when they were in circulation in London. Where relevant, this essay will note Thomason’s dating of the tracts under discussion. Details of his dating system, and of the history of the Thomason Collection as a whole, are given in the introduction in Fortescuc, G. K., ed., Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers and Manuscripts relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and Restoration, collected by Geotge Thomason, 1640–1661, 2 vols (London, 1908 Google Scholar). For a more recent discussion of the Thomason Tracts, and especially the validity of using his dates, see Greenberg, Stephen J., ‘Dating civil war pamphlets, 1641–1644’, Albion, 20 (1988), pp. 387–401 Google Scholar, and Mendle, Michael, ‘The Thomason Collection: a reply to Stephen J. Greenberg’, Albion, 22 (1990), pp. 85–93 Google Scholar.
3 An example of this is in a letter from Arthur Cotton to George Fox, 20 Feb. 1656, Swarthmoor Transcript [hereafter Sw Tr] 1: 628. In 1664, one Nicholas Cole of Plymouth – probably a relative of Mary Cole – was named as a distributor of Quaker books. PRO, SP 29/109, fo. 44. I am grateful to Michael Frearson for this reference.
4 Arthur Cotton to George Fox, 18 Nov. 1656, Sw Tr 1: 630.
5 Margaret Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism: the Story of Quaker Women in America (San Francisco, CA, 1986); Christine Trevett, Women and Quakerism in the Seventeenth Century (York, 1991), p. 10.
6 Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA, 1992), pp. 168–9.
7 The role of women in recording Quaker history is in itself interesting, from Elizabeth Hooton and Margaret Fell keeping copies of their letters from 1652, to Emily Jermyn and Charlotte Fell Smith transcribing the Swarthmoor and Abram Barclay manuscripts in the nineteenth century. For Hooton’s decision to keep copies of everything she wrote, see Thomas Aldam and Elizabeth Hooton to George Fox, Autumn 1652, A. R. Barclay Mss 1: 16, fo. 54.
8 Brailsford, Mabel, Quaker Women (London, 1915 Google Scholar); Braithwaite, W. C., The Beginnings of Quakerism (London, 1911 Google Scholar).
9 Taylor, Ernest E., ‘The first Publishers of Truth; a study’, JFHS, 19 (1922), pp. 66–81 Google Scholar. Compare with Reay, Barry, ‘The social origins of early Quakerism’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11 (1980), pp. 55–72 Google Scholar; and also idem, ‘Early Quaker activity and reactions to it, 1652–1664’ (Oxford University D. Phil, thesis, 1979), pp. 37–8. Phyllis Mack argues that Quaker women from London tended to be of higher social status than those from the north of England: Mack, , Visionary Women, pp. 186–96 Google Scholar.
10 Ross, Isabel, Margaret Fell, Mother of Quakerism, 2nd edn (York, 1984 Google Scholar); Kunze, Bonnelyn Young, Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism (London, 1994 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Margaret Fell is not the only early woman minister to have been the subject of a biography; see also Manners, E., Elizabeth Hooton: First Quaker Woman Preacher (1600-1672), JFHS, Supplement series, 12 (London 1914 Google Scholar); Hodgkin, Lucy, A Quaker Saint of Cornwall: Loveday Hambly and her Guests (London, 1927 Google Scholar).
11 In 1991, Christine Trevett felt the need for a new feminist study on Quaker women in the seventeenth century, and, in her own words, wrote it, ‘because no-one else had’. Trevett, Women and Quakerism, p. vii.
12 This was famously argued by Thomas, Keith nearly forty years ago in his seminal article, ‘Women and the civil war sects’, P&P, 13 (April, 1958), pp. 42–62 Google Scholar. There has been an explosion in scholarship in this field over the past twenty years, much of it very usefully assimilated in Crawford, Patricia, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London, 1993), esp. pp. 119–82 Google Scholar; eadem, The challenges to patriarchalism: how did the revolution affect women?’, in Morrill, John, ed., Revolution and Restoration. England in the 1650s (London, 1992), pp. 112–28 Google Scholar.
13 Crawford, Patricia, ‘Women’s published writings, 1600–1700’, in Prior, Mary, ed., Women in English Society, 1500–1500 (London, 1985), p. 269 Google Scholar.
14 Patricia Higgins, The reactions of women, with special reference to women petitioners’, in Manning, Brian, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 179–222 Google Scholar; Ludlow, Dorothy, ‘“Arise and be doing”: English preaching women, 1640–1660’ (Indiana University Ph. D. thesis, 1978 Google Scholar); eadem, , ‘Shaking patriarchy’s foundations’, in Greaves, Richard L., ed., Triumph over Silence (London, 1985 Google Scholar); Mack, Phyllis, ‘Women as prophets during the English Civil War’, Feminist studies, 8 (1982), pp. 19–45 Google Scholar; Crawford, , Women and Religion in England, chs 6–8 Google Scholar.
15 Anon., Lucifers Lacky (1641), sig. A3, cited in Michael Watts, The Dissenters. From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1985), p. 83.
16 Hobby, Elaine, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (London, 1988 Google Scholar); Ezell, Margaret, ‘Breaking the seventh seal: writings by early Quaker women’, in her Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore, MD, 1993), pp. 132–60 Google Scholar; for a statistical analysis of Quaker women’s writings within the context of other women’s writing, see Crawford, , ‘Women’s published writings, 1600–1700’, pp. 265–74 Google Scholar.
17 Huber, Elaine C., ‘“A woman must not speak”: Quaker women in the English left wing’, in Reuther, Rosemary and McLaughin, Eleanor, eds, Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York, 1979), pp. 154–81 Google Scholar; the most substantial and authoritative study of this subject is Mack, Visionary Women.
18 Patricia Crawford, echoing the question posed by Joan Kelly, ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’, wonders whether women in mid-seventeenth-century England had a revolution, and seems to think not: Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 5; see also eadem, The challenges to patriarchalism’, pp. 112–28.
19 Mack, ‘Women as prophets’, pp. 19–38.
20 Trevett, Women and Quakerism, p. 52.
21 Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 134, 236–61.
22 Trevett, Women and Quakerism, pp. 13–14, 47–8; Huber, ‘A woman must not speak’, p. 160; Mack, Visionary Women, p. 240. Mabel Brailsford also devoted the whole first chapter of her book to the influence of the teachings of George Fox on the women of the Quaker movement: Brailsford, Quaker Women, ch. 1.
23 The texts are: Farnworth, Richard, A Woman Forbidden to Speak in the Church (London, 1654 Google Scholar), reprinted in 1655; Audland, Ann et al., The Saints Testimony Finishing through Sufferings (London, 1655 Google Scholar); Cotton, Priscilla and Cole, Mary, To the Priests and People of England (London, 1655 Google Scholar); Fox, George, A Woman Learning in Silence (London, 1656 Google Scholar).
24 But note the important caveat that seventeenth-century texts about the role of women are frequently misread by historians: ‘because they can so readily be situated in the context of gender politics, they are never fully situated in the political and discursive specificities of the early modern period’. Diane Purkiss, ‘Material girls: the seventeenth- century woman debate’, in Clare Brant and Purkiss, Diane, eds, Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760 (London, 1992), p. 70 Google Scholar.
25 Fell, Margaret, Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (London, 1666 Google Scholar, re-issued by Press, Pythia, London, 1989 Google Scholar); Ferguson, Moira, ed., First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578–1799 (Bloomington, IN, 1985), p. 114 Google Scholar; Ross, , Margaret Fell, p. 201 Google Scholar.
26 Kunze, Young, Margaret Fell, pp. 65–82 Google Scholar, esp. pp. 78–9. Thomas Fell died in 1658.
27 Kunze, Bonnelyn Young, ‘Religious authority and social status in seventeenth-century England: the friendship of Margaret Fell, George Fox, and William Penn’, ChH, 57 (1988), pp. 170–86 Google Scholar.
28 Kunze, Young, Margaret Fell, pp. 154–5 Google Scholar.
29 Trevett, , Women and Quakerism, p. 54 Google Scholar; Hobby, , Virtue of Necessity, p. 45 Google Scholar. Elaine Hobby is also quite correctly at pains to make mention of the earlier visionary Quaker works which vindicated women’s preaching in far more extravagant terms before the Quaker ‘official stance on the subject became ever more guarded’ (ibid., p. 45).
30 The stationer George Thomason obtained a copy on 18 Jan. 1654.
31 Cf. I Cor. 14.34; I Tim. 2.11.
32 Cf. Joel 2.28; and also Acts 2.17-18.
33 Farnworth, A Woman Forbidden to Speak, p. 2.
34 Ibid., p. 3.
35 Farnworth, A Woman Forbidden to Speak, p. 7. Compare with Romans 16.
36 Ibid., p. 4.
37 Ibid., p. 8.
38 Fox, Woman Learning in Silence.
39 Farnworth, Richard [and Aldam, Thomas], An Easter Reckoning (London, 1653 Google Scholar), sig. Air.
40 Ibid., pp. 17–20.
41 Farnworth, Richard [and Aldam, Thomas], An Easter Reckoning, pp. 18–19 Google Scholar. Cf. Eph. 5.21, Col. 3.18-25, 4.1.
42 Farnworth, , An Easter Reckoning, p. 19 Google Scholar.
43 For a discussion of the genesis of the wider, but very similar ‘protestant family’, see Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London, 1988), pp. 60–93 Google Scholar.
44 Fawne, Luke et al., A Second Beacon Fired (London, 1654 Google Scholar).
45 Fox, , Woman Learning in Silence, p. 2 Google Scholar. Cf. Eph. 5.25-7.
46 Audland, The Saints Testimony.
47 For John Audland, see Richard Greaves and Zaller, Robert, eds, Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (Brighton, 1982-4), 1 Google Scholar.
48 DNB; Dictionary of Quaker Biography (typescript index available at Friends’ House Library, London).
49 I infer this from a letter by John Audland and John Camm to Edward Burrough and Francis Howgill, 13 Sept. 1654, A. R. Barclay Mss 2: 157; see also The Journal of John Audland’, in ‘Letters of John Audland, 1653’, Sw[arthmoor] Mss Box P2/15, pp. 32–4.
50 Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, p. 199. Ann Audland requested of Burrough and Howgill: ‘Let mee heare how the childe at Kendall doth’ in a letter from Banbury. Ann Audland to Edward Burrough and Francis Howgill, [?6 April 1655]. A. R. Barclay Mss 2: 175.
51 Audland, Ann, A True Declaration of the Suffering of the Innocent (London, 1655 Google Scholar). George Thomason obtained a copy on 3 March 1655.
52 Ibid., p. 2.
53 Ibid., p. 5.
54 News of Ann Audland reached Kendal and thence Margaret Fell: Thomas Willan to Fell, 10 May 1655, Sw Mss 1: 235, 247. John Audland sent news of his wife to Edward Burrough and Francis Howgill in London: A. R. Barclay Mss 1: 116, 2: 175. Audland also informed John Wilkinson and John Storey of the prisoners in Banbury just as they were about to set off for London from Wiltshire in early April: John Audland to John Storey and Wilkinson, 1 April 1655, A. R. Barclay Mss 1: 28.
55 Audland, The Saints Testimony, p. 2. See also John Audland to Margaret Fell, 1 Oct. 1655, Sw Mss 1: 391, who noted that Bristol heavyweights Captain Edward Pyott, Dennis Hollister, Thomas Gouldney, Walter Clement, John Camm, and Robert Rich had gone to Banbury for the assizes.
56 Audland, The Saints Testimony, mispaginated, sig. Bv.
57 Ibid., pp. 14–15.
58 Ibid., pp. 15–16.
59 Ibid., p. 24.
60 Audland, The Saints Testimony.
61 The Quaker doctrine of spiritual equality was by now being discussed in Quaker meetings in Edinburgh. The puritan minister of Terling, John Stalham, who had visited Edinburgh in March 1655, was sufficiently well versed in the argument to be able to relay it in his tract, Contradictions of the Quakers (Edinburgh, 1655). P. 7.
62 Thomas Taylor to George Fox, Lichfield, 16 March 1655, Sw Mss 3: 30.
63 Ibid.
64 Francis Howgill to Margaret Fell, c. Jan. 1656, A. R. Barclay Mss 1: 65, fo. 192.
65 William Dewsbery to Margaret Fell, 15 Oct. 1655, Sw Mss 4: 141. Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 168–70.
66 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Clarendon State Papers 2624, MSS Clarendon vol. 30, fo. 140r.
67 Alexander Delamain to Thomas Willan, 1654, Sw Mss 3: 93.
68 Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 146–7.
69 Trapnel, Anna, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (London, 1654 Google Scholar).
70 Mary Prince and Sarah Bennett to George Fox, [June, 1656], Sw Mss 3: 116.
71 Sarah Bennett to Margaret Fell, Bristol [1656], Sw Mss 4: 71.
72 Margaret Fell’s daughters Margaret and Sarah were in Bristol in June or July 1655: John Audland to Edward Burrough and Francis Howgill, 2 July 1655, A. R. Barclay Mss 1:58.
73 Phyllis Mack makes the important point that men also wrote to Margaret Fell, the main recipient of Quaker correspondence, in equally enthusiastic terms. This does not deny the fact that Quaker women ministers had a unique role model in Margaret Fell. Mack, , Visionary Women, pp. 153–4 Google Scholar.
74 Ann Audland to Margaret Fell, [1655], Sw Mss 1: 22; cf. Luke 1.28.
75 Ann Dewsbery to Margaret Fell, 1 March 1656, Sw Mss 4: 142.
76 For a more detailed account of the Kendal Fund and its significance, see M Kate Peters, ‘Quaker pamphleteering and the development of the Quaker movement, 1652–1656’ (University of Cambridge PL D. thesis, 1996), pp. 92–6.
77 George Taylor to Margaret Fell, Sw Mss 1: 215.
78 George Taylor and Thomas Willan to Margaret Fell, [1655], Sw Tr 3: 543; Margaret Killin and Pattison, Barbara, A Warning from the Lord to the Teachers and People of Plimouth (London, 1656 Google Scholar). George Thomason dated his copy 29 Dec. 1655; George Taylor to Margaret Fell, 1654, Sw Mss 1: 215.
79 George Taylor and Thomas Willan to Margaret Fell, [1655], Sw Mss 1: 238.
80 Ibid. They found this particularly galling as Agnes Wilson had already been given 3s. for the journey, which they clearly considered adequate funding.
81 Mercurius Fumigosus, or, The Smoking Nocturnal, 18–25 Oct 1654, p. 186.
82 Kellett, Joseph et al, A Faithful Discovery of a Treacherous Design (London, 1653), p. 42 Google Scholar.
83 Aldam, Thomas, The Searching Out the Deceit (London, 1655), pp. 1–4 Google Scholar; see Peters, , ‘Quaker pamphleteering’, pp. 160–3 Google Scholar.
84 Thomas Lawson to ‘Friends’, Sw Mss 1: 246.
85 William Cole, Welde, Thomas, et al., The Perfect Pharise under Monkish Holines (London, 1654), p. 49 Google Scholar; Nayler, James, An Answer to the Booke called The Perfect Pharisee ([London], 1654), p. 27 Google Scholar.
86 Richard Hubberthome to George Fox and James Nayler, 10 Dec. 1654, Sw Tr 2: 569; Richard Clayton to Margaret Fell, 12 July 1655, Sw Tr 1: 564; George Taylor to Margaret Fell, 14 July 1655, Sw Mss 1: 239. See also Peters, ‘Quaker pamphleteering’, p. 33.
87 Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 228–35, 236–61.
88 Richard Hubberthorne to Fox, 20 March 1656, Sw Tr 2: 593.
89 Mary Howgill had been at the centre of controversial preaching for some time. In June 1656 she had visited Cromwell; in July of that year she travelled to Dover, and as a result published a piece of prophecy, A Remarkable Letter of Mary Howgill to Oliver Cromwell, called Protector (London, 1657).
90 Thomas Aldam to ‘Friends’, [Nov. 1652], Sw Mss 3:40; Aldam to Thomas Towndrowe [1652/3], Portfolio 36:114; Brailsford, Quaker Women, p. 22.
91 Thomas Aldam to Margaret Fell, 30 Oct. 1654, Sw Mss 4: 89.
92 Crawford, Women and Religion in England, pp. 173–80. This paper deliberately avoids discussion of James Nayler’s infamous fall from power in the Quaker movement, the ramifications of which were so cataclysmic. I would argue that the tension surrounding the status of women in the movement clearly pre-dated the spectacular events surrounding Nayler, Martha Simmonds, Hannah Stranger, and Dorcas Erbury. The Nayler case can be better understood against the background of a movement where gender was always an important and problematic dynamic.
93 William Caton to Margaret Fell, 23 July 1656, Sw Mss 1: 313.
94 Richard Clayton to Margaret Fell, 5 Aug. 1656, Sw Tr 1: 568.
95 William Caton to Margaret Fell, Sw Mss 1: 314; 1: 366; Edward Burrough to George Fox, A. R. Barclay Mss 1: 36, fo. 100.
96 Tomlinson, William, A Word of Reproof to the Priests or Ministers (London, 1653), p. 28 Google Scholar.
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