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5 / “Makinge a tumult in the congregation” At the end of January 1672/3, Bermudians assembled in Devonshire Church, called there by the governor who had proclaimed a special day of fasting and prayer. A day of humiliation, as seventeenth-century puritanism termed the practice, was a community action meant to direct members to meditate on the “wrath of a just God” and to renew their spiritual resolve to act in godly ways. The governor likely hoped for a somber, reflective day when Bermudians sat and listened to the words of the minister, William Edwards, quiet except for the occasional cough, the rustling of clothing, and perhaps muffled stamping as people tried to warm stiffening limbs against the raw dampness of a Bermudian winter day. While nothing like the cold of more northern climes, the high level of humidity made Bermuda’s winter weather chilling even through multiple layers of clothing. Perhaps some of Edwards’s listeners, which would have included enslaved Bermudians of color as well as free white Bermudians, felt, as the governor did, a “deep sence and fellow feiling of the general missereyes of Christendom by reason of a sharpe warr between England & their neigbors of the United Provinces, occasioned by their insolenties.”1 They could have worried that the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74) in Europe might spread to touch the island’s shores and did indeed wait to hear from the minister what message God was sending them through such events. However, others may have been too distracted by the chafing of perpetually damp fabric against their skin to concentrate fully on the minister’s words, or they may simply have welcomed the opportunity to sit still for a while. makinge a tumult / 127 A sudden disturbance suggested that there might be “general missereyes ” that lay closer to home. A visitor to the island, Elizabeth Carter, suddenly spoke across the minister’s words, the very interruption an unusual event in and of itself. The import of her words was still more astonishing: she corrected Edwards’s scriptural summary. As the Quaker chronicler Joseph Besse later described the event, the minister had “in his Discourse concerning Mordecai and Haman, so far mistook his Subjett, as to tell his Auditory that Mordecai was hanged, upon which the said Elizabeth told him, that it was Haman.”2 As Carter opened her mouth to correct Edwards, she might have thought of a now better-known Quaker woman, Mary Dyer, whom the Massachusetts General Court executed in 1660 for defying her exile from the colony. More than a simple connection by virtue of gender or religious inclination, Dyer’s letter to the General Court after her sentencing also invoked the biblical Book of Esther in which Mordecai, along with other Jews, suffered Haman’s persecution but with Esther’s help eventually brought him to justice. Dyer reversed typical reformed Protestant typology to liken puritan authorities to the corrupt Haman and herself and other Quakers to the ultimately triumphant Mordecai and Queen Esther.3 Without speaking any further, Carter—joined by Bermudian Quakers Parnell Wilkinson and William White—continued to stand for the rest of Edwards’s sermon. The records do not state how much longer the minister preached in the face of the silent confrontation, but when he had finished, Carter once again “began to speak to the People.” Edwards called out for church officers, who dragged Carter away “with much Violence, so that they had almost deprived her of Breath.” The sheriff later took all three Quakers into custody for disturbing Edwards “in the tyme of his preaching, and afterwards and makeing a tumult in the congregation.”4 How and why Carter, Wilkinson, and White made a tumult is not as obvious as it may appear at first glance, especially if we center their challenge to the puritan body of Christ in a framework that draws on Quaker rather than puritan categories and logic. By the time the three Quakers protested Edwards’s teachings in Bermuda in 1672, such starkly disruptive acts had become less frequent than in the previous two decades as some leaders of the movement worked to restrain such behavior in a defensive attempt against mounting opposition from other English Christians. At least some of the changes in performance were linked to a theological move away from leader George Fox’s radical ideas about the union between Christ’s physical body and the individual bodies [3.138.122.195] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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