The Quakers and the English Revolution (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Edited by Edwin B. Bronner The Quakers and the English Revolution. By Barry Reay. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. xiv, 184 pp. $22.50. Secular social historians are increasingly quarrying solid insights and data from early Quakerism, notably in the period of the English Puritan Commonwealth. Friends have much to learn from Barry Reay's book. The first part, before he discusses popular reactions against early Friends, will remain the best summary in print of Quaker social and geographical origins, at least until Richard Vann and D. E. C. Eversley publish their Demography ofQuakers in Britain. Reay's presentation is more careful than mine and broader than Vann's Social Development of English Quakerism, focused on Norwich and Bucks. Reay analyzes Essex, Cheshire , Somerset, Warwickshire and Worcestershire to show that early Friends were rural and included few gentlemen, though also admittedly few laborers or Levellers. Reay's accurate, concise summary of pre-Quaker radical sects stumbles only in assuming Friends rejected "the Puritan sense of sin" as a "psychological malaise. " Barry Reay of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, was a star doctoral student at Balliol College, Oxford, under Christopher Hill whose Marxian approach to Friends and the Puritan Revolution is reflected in his preface to this book. But Reay's study is more balanced and complete than most works of Hill's circle or his own 1979 thesis on "Early Quaker Activity and Reactions to It, 1652-1664. " He admits that the "middling" and "poorer sort," as well as "the rude people," attacked Quaker preachers, even though Friends were "a concrete example of popular aspirations and discontent," because of rustics, "xenophobic, parochial, deferential style" as shown in the localism ofthe "clubmen," and because they were swayed by warnings of parsons over Quaker doctrines as well as by Quaker attacks on tithes. Reay rehearses the Parliamentary trial of Nayler to show the upperclass's fear of Quakers. His major new contribution, however, is to show how widespread were the conservative reactions to Quakers' and other radicals' efforts to abolish the parish churches, so that in 1659 both the "Rump" Parliament and Lambert's Council of Army officers, despite their own sympathies, turned back from abolishing tithes. Thus when the radical Puritans in power acted to make sure military control remained in the hands of those "well affected" to "the good old cause" they had fought for, it only added to conservatives' suspicions. Reay shows how active George Bishop and 25 others were to support the radical governments and militia. Like Hill he is eager to show that "for the first decade Quakers . . . were by no means pacifists" individually—though Reay agrees they stressed the peaceful nature of the Quaker movement. Many Friends had been "ironsides" and Cromwell's garrisons often welcomed "publishers of Truth." Fear of Friends helped enthrone Charles II. Yet at this point Reay's secular focus betrays itself. He is accurate and fair on specific debates with Puritans, on how Quakers turned apocalyptic doctrines inward , and on how intensely the Puritans felt that "salvation was at stake." But Reay finds it hard to see how much the early Quaker struggle against evil by the Spirit's power is inseparable from Friends' own personal religious experience and victory over inward evil, and that the "Peace Testimony," though only slowly universalized, was always more than an accommodation to political reality. Thus there are inherent limits in Reay's last section on the change ofoutlook after 1660, by which time Friends, who had "become the conscience of the radical, 54 Book Reviews55 republican cause," with the fading of perfectionism and enthusiasm, became an "alternative society," a sect with its own structures for mutual aid. Here too Reay remains alert to details such as the conservativism of Penn's "Frame" for Pennsylvania by comparison with the charter given to West Jersey by the former Leveller Edward Billing. Earlham CollegeHugh Barbour The Carolina Quaker Experience, 1665-1985: An Interpretation. By Seth B. Hinshaw . Greensboro, N.C: North Carolina Yearly Meeting and North Carolina Friends Historical Society, 1984. ix, 342 pp. Illus., index. $14.00. Seth Hinshaw has written a book that may be read on different levels by...