Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/125

 roborate this, denying, however, that it had any connection with ‘his former leather-work.’ For Carlyle's rhapsody (Sartor Resartus iii. 1) on the leathern suit stitched by Fox's own hands there is no foundation.

His first incarceration was at Nottingham in 1649, for the offence of brawling in church. He was described in the charge-sheet as ‘a youth,’ though now in his twenty-fifth year. Though he complains of the foulness of his cell, the action of the authorities was gentle as compared with the fury of the villagers of Mansfield Woodhouse on a similar occasion shortly after. By this time Fox had fairly entered upon a course of aggressive action as an itinerant preacher. He sought an interview (1649) with Samuel Oates and other general baptist preachers, at Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire. Barclay is probably right in inferring (Inner Life, p. 256) that there was enough in common between his objects and their free methods and Arminian views to make him think an approximation possible; but ‘their baptism in water’ stopped the way. It does not appear that Fox's society was recruited from the baptists more largely than from other sects, though it exhibits the influence of baptist ideas. The earliest documentary name for the new society is ‘Children of Light,’ which Barclay traces to a baptist source (ib. p. 262). It was soon, however, superseded by the happy designation of ‘Truth's Friends,’ or ‘Friends of Truth,’ abbreviated into ‘Friends.’ Their popular nickname was given to them at Derby on 30 Oct. 1650 by the wit of Gervase Bennet, a hard-headed oracle of the local bench (, Acts of the Witnesses, 1699, p. 94 sq.) Fox had bidden the magistrates ‘tremble at the word of the Lord,’ whereupon Bennet retorted upon Fox and Fretwell the name of ‘quakers.’ The term got into the House of Commons' journals as early as 1654.

The rise of this body synchronises with the parliamentary attempt to regulate the affairs of the church of England on the Scottish model; the new society was a collective protest against the presbyterian system, as inefficient for purposes of evangelisation. Fox's earliest recorded convert was a middle-aged widow at Nottingham, Elizabeth Hooton [q. v.] (mentioned 1647), who became the first woman preacher in the society. His adherents were soon numbered by thousands. They came for the most part from the lower middle class, drawn not merely from the puritan folds, but from the fringes of all the sects, from ranters, shakers, seekers, and visionaries of all sorts, who brought with them an exuberant emotional piety tending to pantheism, and a marvellous unrestraint of speech. The community exhibited all the signs, mental and physical, of strong religious enthusiasm. Their symbolic acts, grotesque and sometimes gross, were regarded as fanaticism gone mad. With the early characteristics of his society Fox has been often reproached. It is more to the point to observe how by degrees his calmer spirit prevailed over those whom his fervour had attracted, while his genius for organisation reduced to order an otherwise unmanageable mass. His discipline of religious silence had a sobering influence, and the growth of a systematic network of meetings, dependent on each other, induced a sense of corporate responsibility. Barclay notices (Inner Life, p. 11) that, with all its freedom, the society from the first was not ‘independent’ but ‘connexional’ in its character. There is shrewdness in Baxter's remark that the quakers were ‘the ranters revers'd,’ turned from wild extravagances to ‘extream austerity’ (, Abridgement, 1713, p. 102). Baxter ascribes the change to Penn. But the ranter spirit reached its climax and its fall in the Bristol ride (1656) of James Nayler [q. v.], who died in 1660, many years before the adhesion of either Robert Barclay (1667) or William Penn (1668). By this time the Perrot schism (1661–3) had removed the remaining elements of insubordination, and Fox had given final shape to his rules for the management of ‘meetings for discipline’ (printed as ‘Friends Fellowship,’ &c., 1668; reprinted, but not by a quaker, as ‘Canons and Institutions,’ &c., 1669; given in Beck and Ball). The system was completed by the institution of the yearly meeting, first held on 6 Jan. 1669.

In the organisation of his mission Fox had the valuable help of a remarkable woman, whom he afterwards married, Margaret Fell [q. v.], named by Barclay ‘the Lady Huntingdon of the new society’ (Inner Life, p. 259). She had been carried away by the teaching of William Lampett, who then held the perpetual curacy of Ulverston; he is explicitly described by Fox as ‘a ranter’ (original manuscript of Journal, p. 61). It was by degrees that Fox's teaching exerted a regulative influence over her mind. Her first letter to him in 1652 (facsimile in, Quakerism Examined, 1836) has the ranter swell which inflates the well-known letter of John Audland, printed by Leslie (Snake in the Grass, 1698, p. 369). Her husband's residence, Swarthmoor Hall, Lancashire, became the headquarters of the movement, the travelling preachers, of whom Fox had thirty in 1653, sixty in the following year (they usually went out in pairs), sending in their reports to her. At his own expense Fox built and endowed