"Cross to My Honour": Status and Gender in the Life Writings of Mary Penington and Thomas Ellwood

"Cross to My Honour": Status and Gender in the Life Writings of Mary Penington and Thomas Ellwood Naomi Baker* Autobiographies by Quakers ofa relatively high social status are among the most accessible ofearly modern Quakertexts fortoday's reader. Instead of the deliberately plain, interiorized approach that characterises many Quaker tracts, the life accounts of those who either held or aspired to a superior social position provide a colorful and involved depiction of seventeenth-century life among the English elite. While more typical Quaker accounts convey only basic details of the external world, the autobiographies of Mary Penington and Thomas Ellwood therefore move beyond the strictly informative and factual, locating themselves within the complicated milieu ofthe social conventions, fashions, speech patterns and aspirations ofparticular classes ofthe English population. Most Quaker autobiographies inscribe a wholly victorious and unquestioning Quaker identity following the process of"convincement." Norman T. Burns likewise portrays Mary Penington's convincement as the "culmination ofthe narrative": "ending her long pilgrimage, she swims in the life ofbeing acceptedby the Lord (82, 83)." Despite the proliferation ofworldly detail that distinguishes this account from most other Quaker narratives, Burns describes Penington's autobiography as a "coherent and complete workthat followedher spiritual developmentvirtuallyto the exclusion ofall her other affairs (82)." He subsequently notes, however, that the work loses its unity when external details displace spiritual matters towards the end of the account. Rather than interpreting this development as evidence of contradiction and fragmentation within Penington's articulation of her identity, however, Burns attributes the sudden focus on externalities to Mary's newly "settled" Quaker identity (82). In this article I conversely arguethatboththehighrankingMaryPenington andthe socially aspirational Thomas Ellwood construct their conversion to Quakerism, and subsequent efforts to maintain this identity, in terms of an acute (and sometimes unsuccessful) struggle between their social status and the demands oftheir new allegiance. Instead of attempting to reconcile the opposing interests within the texts, I will seek to demonstrate that the contradictions and collisions between the spiritual and the worldly in the life writings of Penington and Ellwood generate texts which are ultimately fraught with unresolved tensions. *Dr Naomi Baker is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. Cross to My Honour2 1 Hugh Ormsby-Lennondiscusses the extenttowhichthe northernEnglish origins of the movement, including the shibboleths of the region, were pivotal in the early definition of the sect. Recognized markers of social inferiority became synonymous with the Friends' identity and, indeed, godliness itself: ... the ardent peregrinations ofFirst Publishers from the Quaker Galilee gave the area's speechways animmediatecurrencyamongnewlyconvincedFriends throughout Britain. Indeed the Society's northern origins were continually mocked, and the ridicule provoked by the yeoman speechways of "the 1652 country" (as Friends came to describe northwest England) surely came to function as a symbol, immediately and publicly recognizable, oftheir nationwide onslaught on spiritual pride (Ormsby-Lennon 82-83). The "uncivil" practices that characterized Quakerism appeared impossible to reconcile with an esteemed position within the wider society. Ephraim Pagitt demonstrated the association of such region-specific "speechways" with particular classes when he lambasted the Society of Friends as "an upstart branch of the Anabaptists, lately sprung up but thickest set in the Northparts . . . composed and made up out ofthe dregs of the common people (136, cited in Vann 47)." As Richard Vann points out, however, historians who accept the designation ofearly Quakers as "common people" are uncritically adopting the skewed perspective of the enemies of the early Friends (49). Rather than being unambiguously identified with the lower classes ofsociety, Quakerism also initially appealed to the gentry and wholesale traders (Vann 50; Reay, "Quakerism and Society" 143, 144). Vann concedes that the task of specifying exact class alliances inrelationto the earlymodernperiodisbeset with difficulties. Any reliable analysis ofthe class composition ofthe early Quakers would depend upon a comparison with the ratio ofrich andpoor in the wider society, and such information is almost impossible to ascertain with any certainty (Vann 50). While any conclusions must therefore remain tentative, Vann asserts that the class composition ofthe "first publishers" of Quaker truth around the nation does not comply with received stereotypes of"mechanicpreachers." Instead, "thepreponderance ofgentlemen, schoolmasters , and substantial yeomen, and the...