Leaders of the Primitive Quaker Movement

Leaders of the Primitive Quaker Movement Rosemary Moore* Recent books on early Quakers have been mainly concerned with the best-known leaders. H. Larry Ingle in First among Friends, Bonnelyn Kunze in The Family, Social and Religious Life ofMargaret Fell and Richard Bailey inNew Light on George Fox have concentrated on Fox and Fell, and on the clash between Fox and Nayler. The relationships between Fox, Fell and Nayler and the many other men and women who influenced the growth ofQuakerism in its first few years have not been the subject of a specific study, but the necessary information is available. The letters preserved in the Swarthmore manuscripts and other collections, contemporary Quaker pamphlets and, even more, the publications of opponents of Quakerism, togetherpresent apicture ofa number ofleading Quakers, how they viewed each other, and their relative importance in the eyes of members ofthe public. This paper deals with the period ofthe first rapid expansion ofthe Quakermovement in Britain, which was completed before the end of 1655. Little is known ofthe first few years ofQuakerism. In the East Midlands of England, around 1646 or 1647, the young George Fox met with a "shattered Baptist" church and a "tender people," among them a woman called Elizabeth Hooton, a married woman with a family, about fifty years old, whom Fox described as a "very tender woman" (NJ9, 25, 43, Manners, Mack 127-130, Trevett 16-22).' Fox in his Journal has little to say of his helpers and companions, but Hooton is known from other Quaker sources. The rôle ofMargaret Fell as friend and supporter ofFox is well known, but before Fell there was Hooton, another middle-aged, capable, strongminded woman, who, like Fell, opened her house to Fox. ElizabethHooton devoted the rest ofher long life to the Quaker ministry, travelling twice to New England at a time when Quakers were not welcome, and where she was whipped as a vagabond. She died in Jamaica in 1 672 at the commencement of a third visit to the New World, when she was one of a group accompanying George Fox. Fox'sJournal gives a picture ofgrowing numbers ofFriends in the East Midlands in the later 1640s, with "divers meetings. . .in several places" (NJ 27). In the autumn of 1650 George Fox was in Derby, together with some other Friends including Elizabeth Hooton, who left her home and her husband (with whom she was laterreconciled) to travel with Fox.2 Fox and ?Rosemary Moore recently completed a Ph.D. thesis on "The Faith of the First Quakers" at the University ofBirmingham. A version ofthis paper was presented at the George Fox Conference at Lancaster in 1991. 30Quaker History a companion, John Fretwell, were charged with blasphemy and imprisoned , while Elizabeth Hooton was imprisoned for interrupting a minister (?G/51-52, Bessei.137). Fox was now becoming known beyond his immediate district. Richard Farnworth (1629?-1666), who laterbecame a leading Quaker minister, was at this time aged about twenty and in the throes ofa religious upheaval. He heard ofFox and wrote to him.3 After being released from prison in Derby in September 1651, Fox travelled north to an area of Yorkshire near Doncaster, known as Balby, where he met Farnworth and others who had developed ideas similar to the Quakers' (Ingle 74). Farnworth was the outstanding personality among them. He later wrote an account of his religious journey, saying that he could find no satisfaction in formal religion, and presently came to see, "by the breaking forth of the light of God in my spirit, that the steeplehouse was no church. . .that the Church of Christ was made all of living stones" (F485). As regards social position, the leader ofthis group was Thomas Aldam, a substantial yeoman in his mid-forties.4 In spite of imprisonments and several distraints for tithe he retained enough wealth to pass on a considerable estate at his death. His surviving letters and publications show him to be a firm supporter ofthe Parliamentary cause, with a strict sense ofright and wrong and no notion ofcompromise. He was strongly antagonistic to the established church, and it was probably this aspect of Fox's teaching that particularly attracted him. Fox...