George Bishop: Seventeenth-Century Soldier Turned Quaker (review)

Book Reviews Edited by Thomas D. Hamm George Bishop: Seventeenth-Century Soldier Turned Quaker. By Maryann S. Feola. York, Eng.: Sessions, 1996. ix + 141pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper, $14.95. In the first decade ofthe Quaker movement, George Bishop of Bristol was the mostinfluential Friend in southernEngland. In 1656, while Fox and Nayler were in prison, he was their spokesman to Cromwell's government. He had recently been a Puritan soldier, and an intelligence agent for Cromwell's Council of State, uncovering royalist plots to overthrow it by arms. The son ofa wealthy brewer, Bishop was made a burgess ofBristol in 1649, and married Elizabeth Canne, daughter ofa City Council member, Master of the Merchant Venturers. Her mother, Margaret Yeamans, was daughter of the royalist sheriff, and brother of William Yeamans who, by then a Quaker, later married Margaret Fell's daughter Isabel. Various other Yeamans and Cannes, actively anti-Quaker, reflected the divisions, shifts and complexities of Bristol politics through 1640-1660. Bishop's first tracts also expressed the intensely religious idealism ofpuritan radicals. He proclaimed their victory at Naseby in 1645, in which he tookpart, as God's providence. When Charles I refused peace, reopening the "Second Civil War," Bishop at the Putney debates endorsed the King's execution: The way had opened for a godly Commonwealth with civil rights and religious liberty. But the high tide of such hopes, the Nominated "Parliament of Saints," called in 1 653 to draft a new constitution, was paralyzed by the breach between the puritan moderates and radicals. Cromwell's resulting "swing to the right" to reconcile English conservatives has parallels today. Disillusioned and ignored in London, Bishop returned to Bristol, andran in vain for the 1 654 Parliament. He helped the puritan garrisonprotect visiting Baptist and Quaker preachers from Bristol citizens. Feola thinks he was convinced of Quakerism there by Camm and Audland. For Friends, Bishop's importance was his role in James Nayler's "fall," the ride into Bristol in 1656 to reenact Jesus' "Palm Sunday" entry into Jerusalem. Bishop had already told Fox at Reading his fears about Nayler and his disciples, and by a letter to Margaret Fell and pamphlets to Parliament afterward dissociated Bristol Friends from the "blasphemy." ' 1 This event and Nayler's trial, flogging, and imprisonment by conservative Parliament, are more fully told in William G. Bittle, James Nayler 1618-1660, (York, Sessions, 1908), Feola's own "Warringe with ye worlde': Fox's Relationship with Nayler" in Michael Mullett, New Light on George Fox (ibid. 1991) and verbatim in Quaker History, Fall 1992 (Vol. 81, 63-72); and Leo Damrosch, TAe Sorrows ofthe Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Harvard Univ. Press, 1996). 62Quaker History Bishop's first concern was the politics oftoleration. For its sake he again lobbied the succession ofradical governments in 1659. He was also one of the few Friends willing in 1659 to sign on as a Commissioner ofMilitia to defend "the good old cause" when invited by the radicals as they faced "the experience ofdefeat" ofa century ofpuritan hopes and twenty years under arms. Bishop thus became the favorite example of early Quakers as tired revolutionaries driven back into pacifism, in the eyes ofMarxist historians suchasChristopherHillandBarryReay,plusW. A. Cole,DavidUnderdown, and Austin Woolrych. Maryann Feola, in this book which was her doctoral thesis at CUNY, gives credit in many opening footnotes to this current orthodoxy of British historians. Like them, she is thorough and careful, notably in her search ofBristol city records and the London Public Records Office. She also ignores doctrines, including Marxism. Her two-page Epilogue promises to explore some day how "Bishop combined natural reason and the more quiet form of Quakerism" (p. 107) after 1660, in Bishop's tracts (13 out of29) which her book does not cover nor list. Her weakness is that in ignoring Quaker historians ofQuakerism (except Ingle and Braithwaite) she was unaware that Friends from the beginning saw the work ofthe Spirit ofGod & Christ in "the Lamb's War" as a fierce struggle to conquer evil, pride, and self-will within each person, thereby transforming lifestyles, church, and state. Bishop's tracts such...