Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/446

432 and sixty-nine perished. Everywhere their meetings were broken up by parish priests, with troopers and mobs at their heels; scarcely an adult was left at large. In Bristol at one time not a single grown-up quaker was out of prison; but the very children collected in meetings in spite of the beatings and insults of their persecutors, who struck them in the face, as they were accustomed to do women, whom it was a favourite play to drag by the hair of the head, pinch their arms till black and blue, and prick them with bodkins and packing-needles. When this would not do, they sold them to the colonies and sugar-plantations for slaves, where their doctrines soon spread, and persecution soon became as hot as at home, especially in Barbadoes and New England, where monstrous fines, cutting off ears, and hanging became the order of the day.



Before the persecution ceased, all the meeting-houses of the quakers were pulled down, and the materials sold. Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul's, by command of the king, pulled down their meeting-house at Horselydown. The Friends, however continued to meet on the sites of the razed meeting-houses, where they were attacked by the soldiery, who knocked them down with the butt-end of their guns, and maltreated them so dreadfully, that the blood lay in the streets, and several died in consequence. Old age met with no re-