The Pre-Quaker Writings of George Bishop

THE PRE-QUAKER WRITINGS OF GEORGE BISHOP J. W Martin* Quaker historiography has long recognized that the movement in its earliest years attracted people of varied backgrounds and temperaments , and in some instances considerable attention has been paid to the previous activities of those who became prominent Friends in the 1650s. W C. Braithwaite's The Beginnings of Quakerism, for example, devotes several pages to the pre-Quaker careers of Isaac and Mary Penington, and repeatedly notes John Lilburne's prominence as a political agitator before his conversion in the last year or two of his life; Joseph Smith, in his Descriptive Catalogue of Friends' Books, gives full citations to a dozen or so of Isaac Penington's pre-Quaker publications and to over a hundred of Lilburne's. Neither Braithwaite nor Smith, however, pays more than the sketchiest attention to the pre-conversion activities of George Bishop who was one ofthe pillars ofBristol Quakerism till his death in 1668 and author of over 30 Quaker publications, including New England Judged, the classic work on the persecution of early Quakers in Massachusetts. It might be noted in passing that the uncertainty about Bishop's early career apparently extends to the Wing Short Title Catalogue ofBooks Printed in English 1641-1700 which, in its 1982 edition, still carries separate listings for George Bishop, "quaker" and George Bishop, "capt."1 The purpose of the present paper is simply to note and describe the known surviving writings of Bishop which antedate his conversion in the mid-1650s. Bishop, before his conversion, was for a few years one of the Commonwealth government's more important civil servants. A native ofBristol who became son-in-law to one of its aldermen and who was in his early years as much a Puritan zealot as Mary Penington *J. W. Martin of Washington, D.C, has a special interest in Tudor and Stuart separatist groups. 1 . G. E. Aylmer, The State 's Servants: the Civil Service ofthe English Republic, 1649-1660 (London, Routledge, 1973), pp. 272-74, contains an excellent summary of Bishop's civil service career, though without definitely identifying him as Bristol -born. This association is made in the paragraph on the pre-Quaker Bishop written by J. W Frost for the Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, ed. R. L. Greaves and R. Zaller (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1982), Vol. I, p. 47. 20 The Pre-Quaker Writings of George Bishop21 had ever been, he was already a member of Parliament's armed forces when they surrendered Bristol to the royalists in 1643.2 How old he then was orjust when he became "Captain Bishop," as he was generally referred to, is not known. He soon proved useful in more than a military context, evidently because of his devotion to the parliamentary cause coupled with an ability to cut through a mass of detail and state the relevant findings effectively. After serving as a Bristol agent of the republican Council of State, he was brought by them to London in 1650 and there became secretary to the Council's successive Committees for Examinations—that is, for ferreting out royalist conspirators.3 Bishop described himself as "in the nature of a Secretary of State, though they being then in the form of a Commonwealth , they gave no such appellation,"4 and there is little doubt about the importance, or the effectiveness, ofthe intelligence service headed by Thomas Scot and Bishop. By astute use of secret agents, intensive interrogation of captured royalist plotters, and other traditional techniques they broke up one conspiracy after another before it could result in effective rebellion. This appeared most dramatically in Cromwell's final military victory over Charles ? and a Scottish army at Worcester in September 1651. Behind the "crowning mercy," as Cromwell termed his triumph, lay a number of welldirected arrests by Bishop's agents in the preceding months that prevented the armed risings of English royalists on which Charles had counted.5 From mid-1653 on, however, Bishop's position became increasingly difficult. His senior colleague, Scot, left the government with Cromwell's ouster of the Rump Parliament in April, and the growing importance of John Thurloe...