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Reviewed by:
  • James Nayler: Revolutionary to Prophet
  • Hugh Barbour
James Nayler: Revolutionary to Prophet. By David Neelon. Leadings Press, Becket, Massachusetts, 2009. xxxviii + 218 pp. Timeline, Notes, Index, & maps; $39.95.

Nayler was a key leader in the history of early Friends and is a continuing challenge for the faith and ethics of modern Quakers. Volumes of his many works are currently being republished after almost three centuries of avoidance. Readers who start with Neelon's account of Nayler's "fall" by his prophetic "Sign" at Bristol in 1656 will find a detailed, warm, and sensitive account centering on his sense of mission. It differs on no major facts from W.C. Braithwaite's classic Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge,1912, 1955) and the three other recent full works on Nayler. William Bittle of Kent State University got Friend William Sessions of York to publish (1986) his compact, well-written study of how Nayler's trial for blasphemy embodied the struggle for power between Oliver Cromwell and his Second Protectorate Parliament, correlating statistically their votes and speeches on Nayler and the offer of Kingship to the Protector. Douglas Gwyn's The Covenant Crucified: Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism (Pendle Hill,1995) combined his concern for "Covenants" as the bonds of communities with the "orthodoxford" Marxism of disciples of Christpher Hill such as Barry Reay, for whom The Experience of Defeat of the Puritan Commonwealth paralleled the failure of 20th century Socialism. Leo Damrosch's Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Harvard, 1996) (which I reviewed in Quaker History in Fall, 1997) sees the similarities between Nayler and William Blake in the loneliness of inspiration and the self-determined morality of "God in Man." Each work summarizes the English Civil Wars of 1641–51 and [End Page 53] the disillusionment of idealists such as Nayler and the Seekers that the "good old cause" for which so many died had not transformed English society. Each writer also drew on earlier, briefer studies such as Mabel Brailsford's and Emilia Fogelklou's.

Yet each book begins differently: Gwyn's with biblical covenants and the Puritan "Covenant of Grace," within which he overlooks the experience of God's forgiveness. Neelon begins, after an 18-page Timeline of interlocked events in Britain and in Nayler's life, by establishing his own academic authority with the results of his own well-grounded research of East &West Ardsley and Woodkirk in the Yorkshire Dales, whose market towns became the factory cities of Bradford, Leeds, and Halifax. (Supplement his end-paper maps of the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution with Braithwaite's that show the Quaker sites of 1651-60). Then Neelon explores Nayler's military career, from the three sieges of Pontefract Castle to the huge battle of Marston Moor in 1644 and to Dunbar in 1650, the field Neelon pioneered in 2001. He records without preaching, showing Neyler's role as the northern army's Quartermaster in key councils determining national policy, and Nayler's command of detail which later showed in his theological writing. Nayler was driven by illness and disillusionment with rivalries for power from the army and even from his Separatist congregation (Neelon lumps the Separatists with the Independent churches who as in New England wanted a narrow federation of self-governed churches.) He gives more detail than his predecessors to Nayler's influence upon and shared counseling with Margaret Fell, Nayler's preaching with Fox and Howgill and imprisonments in northern England in 1652-5, and impact in London and Cromwell's court whereby he began 1656 exhausted, and vulnerable to the caring of Martha Simmonds and her outstanding, but not self-critical family. Neelon notes Nayler's long fasts and silent periods of depression. Nayler believed crucifixion was part of reliving the life of Jesus as a person was taken over by the spirit or the "Inner Christ." Neelon is always sensitive to the life experiences of Nayler's opponents, but on Nayler's theological debates he only examines Friends' perfectionism.

Like the other Nayler studies, Neelon's accepts the tragic fact that Fox's effort to get Nayler to challenge...

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