When the Friends Came to Burlington

WHEN THE FRIENDS CAME TO BURLINGTON7 WHEN THE FRIENDS CAME TO BURLINGTON 1 By Amelia M. Gummere These are days of anniversaries and celebrations, and Burlington is not behind in this respect. In fact, she is quite before most of them, and to her ancient renown we now come again to pay tribute. I have wondered if it would not be well for a few moments to try to visualize the background of the original settlers—to see with our mind's eye, as it were, the places and people in England in the middle of the seventeenth century. I believe the average person has a distinct idea that the passengers on the ship " Kent " came over in what we now know as Quaker dress—the men in broad brimmed hats of beaver, and the women in coal scuttle bonnets ; the garb, let us say, of Joseph John Gurney and his sister Elizabeth Fry. Such costumes were not invented until the nineteenth century was beginning, and one hundred and fifty years before that the Quaker of the period of George Fox and William Penn wore what everybody else wore, only without the furbelows. The England of Oliver Cromwell's time was a singularly isolated nation. Her wealthier inhabitants—and many of her aristocracy were not of these —traveled on the Continent, where were going on most of the great movements of the day. The Thirty Years' War had turned Germany into a moral, intellectual, and economic desert, but to Italy had come the revival of learning and art, and Molière, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Grotius, Kepler—to name only a few at random—were moving the minds of all Europe. Holland and Italy were the Meccas of English youth. Milton traveled to complete his education, as did Evelyn, and as also did a few years later, a certain gay youth named William Penn. Art held sway abroad. The great Dutch, Flemish and Spanish painters, like Velasquez, were at their best. Rubens was alive, and Rembrandt lived through the greater part of Fox's life. Heemskerk and Honthorst were Dutch artists who have given us scenes from the earliest Quaker Meetings, one of whom became a Quaker and has left us a remarkable portrait of Fox. But art, to live, must have a background, and it is a singular fact that there were no native born artists in England at this time. The nation, slower than the Continent in its movement, was still in the turmoil of religious conflict, and its social atmosphere had not settled sufficiently for the delicate plant of imaginative art to flower. Let us for a moment try to picture social England in the middle of the seventeenth century. What were the colonists leaving? William Penn wrote in 1676, " We hope West Jersey will soon be planted, it being in the minds of many Friends to prepare for their going against the Spring." 1 Address at the Annual Meeting of Friends' Historical Association, Friends' Meeting House, Burlington, New Jersey, Eleventh Month 29, 1927. Certain paragraphs in this paper have appeared before. 8 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION The life of Fox covers the period in which the England of mediaeval days, with habits and customs and institutions bequeathed by feudalism and early political and social conditions, changed into modern. England. At the time of Fox's birth in 1624, life was running still in its old grooves, and the England about which Fox traveled before the establishment of Quaker meetings and the organization of the sect, was a very different one from that which saw his funeral procession of four thousand persons, winding its way to Bunhill Fields in 1690. One should, therefore, indicate two separate conditions and periods of English life, and it may be convenient to take the dates 1665 and 1666—those respectively of the plague and of the great fire—as the dividing line. This may at first sight seem to be confining ourselves to London too exclusively; but to an extent which we cannot now realize, London was England. Or rather, perhaps, there was London, and there was everything else outside. The relative position of the metropolis was far higher than today...