Friends Sufferings—Collected and Recollected

FRIENDS SUFFERINGS— COLLECTED AND RECOLLECTED By Richard T. Vann* The early Friends were as notable for their zeal in describing their sufferings as for their constancy in undergoing them. Scarcely had the first persecution befallen them than the first broadside rang out in response, and published accounts of sufferings continued to appear at frequent intervals for more than half a century, with an intensity shown in the following table : 1 YEARSPUBLICATIONS 1653-165966 1660-166671 1667-167320 1674-168029 1681-168733 1688-170930 249 After 1710 there were only three publications of any importance, and by now the era of retrospective compilations had begun. John Whiting's Persecution Expos'd appeared in 1715, Joseph Besse's three-volume Abstract of the Sufferings of the People CaWd Quakers in the 1 730's, and finally the massive climax of Besse's two folios, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, published in 1753.2 Not content with these publications, Friends were diligent in preserving manuscript records of their sufferings. Every monthly *Professor of History and Letters, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. 1.See under the entry "Sufferings of Friends" in Joseph Smith, A Descriptive Catalogue of Friends' Books (London, 1867), II, 644-686. 2.Volume I of Besse's Abstract, covering the years from 1650 to 1660, appeared in 1733; Volumes II and III, covering the years from 1660 to 1666, were published in 1738. The full scope of his final achievement is best indicated in the title: A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, for the Testimony of a Good Conscience, from the Time of their being first distinguished by that Name in the Year 1650, to the Time of the Act, commonly called the Act of Toleration, granted to Protestant Dissenters in the first Year of the Reign of King William the Third and Queen Mary, in the Year 1689. Taken from Original Records and other Authentick Accounts. 24 FRIENDS SUFFERINGS25 meeting was supposed to keep such records, with each quarterly meeting maintaining a volume in which the sufferings were transcribed . Quarterly meetings were also expected to send in annual accounts of their sufferings, which were transcribed and kept in London by the Meeting for Sufferings. As a consequence there are now preserved in the Library of the Society of Friends in London forty-four folios of transcripts, of which the first six cover the period up to 1690 and six more the period 1690-1710. Also preserved is a mass of loose papers, including some quarterly meeting records and many letters and other personal documents, known as the Original Records of Sufferings. This profusion of published and unpublished sources presents the historian of Quakerism with a not unusual embarras de richesse ; for it is by no means clear how the various sources are related to one another nor which offer the most extensive and accurate accounts. It would be natural to believe that the locally compiled manuscript sources—that is, the quarterly meeting books of sufferings —provide the fullest and best accounts, and that the volumes of transcripts kept by the Meeting for Sufferings are less full and accurate, but still provide more detail than the excerpts from them which were published by Besse. In fact, close examination of the various sources, both the local and the national ones, reveals a somewhat different picture; and it is a picture which not only helps to indicate which are the best sources for Friends' sufferings, but also the objectives of Friends in compiling and publishing the record of their persecution. It is important to distinguish between those manuscript records which were compiled without any thought of publication and those which were to be published. The work of compilation was urged on Friends, not only by George Fox, but by the steady prompting of London Yearly Meeting and the Meeting for Sufferings. Whenever these meetings noticed the deficiencies of some quarterly meetings in sending up their accounts of sufferings, they never failed to admonish the lax meeting to repair the lack and be more careful in the future. Local meetings were no less vigilant, and a failure by an individual Friend to report sufferings was equally...