It was not a
compassionate
age.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
It has no mean
dramatic power, and is in strong contrast to the historic and
argumentative Good Old Cause Revived of a few months later.
Nor did the trick tire till the close of the century. A nobler form,
that of Biblical narrative, also had its misusers. Pordage, a by-
word for Grub-street poverty, wrote the tame, but not abusive,
1 Cf. vol. II, pp. 482 it.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
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Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
Azaria and Hushai, in 1682, while Settle, in his Absalom Senior,
a mere echo of Dryden, among much nonsense has, here and there,
good lines, such as:
To what strange rage is Superstition driven,
That Man can outdo Hell to fight for Heaven.
Brady produced an obscene Giant's War about the same time, and
the change to a classical subject is also seen in Tarquin and
Tullia, a bitter Jacobite attack on William III and his queen.
A most effective weapon for decrying opponents was the
character, which, indeed, formed an essential part of the Biblical
narrative. One of the wittiest was written by the duke of Bucking-
ham, in his Advice to a Painter, against his rival Arlington; one
of the loftiest is Shaftesbury's Farewell, a kind of inimical epitaph
on the whig leader's death in Holland (“What! A republic air, and
yet so quick a grave ? '). Shadwell has the disgrace of unsurpassed
virulence in his Medal of John Bayes (1682), which drew upon him
a heavy punishment from the quondam friend whom he lampooned.
The most cutting, perhaps, was the sham Panegyricon King
William by the hon. J. H[oward ? ). Nor should The Man of no
Honour, where James II's subservient courtiers are assailed, be
forgotten. An argumentative style is to be discerned in the
description of the views of The Impartial Trimmer, which, in fact,
is a whig manifesto of 1682, and where real knowledge and a
weighty personality seem to transpire. Thus, the gap is bridged
to the unadulterated argument which is to be found in the earlier
tory Poem on the Right of Succession or in Pordage's spiritless
attack on persecution, The Medal Revers'd (1682).
More imaginative in conception are the visions and ghosts ;
Hodge's Vision (1679) is a diatribe on the court; The Battle
Royal (1687) is a nonconformist burlesque of papist and parson.
The Waking Vision (1681) contains a dialogue in Oldham's
undramatic manner between Shaftesbury and Monmouth. A
loquacious phantom appears in most of the type. Thus, in Sir
Edmundbury Godfrey's Ghost, written about 1679, by some whig,
whose gift of sardonic wit makes us curious to know his name,
the ghost is made to appear to Charles II. Humour, on the other
hand, is the special talent of the tory who wrote Tom Thynne's
Ghost in Hudibrastic metre (1682). Hell, at any rate, is under a
despot, and the dead whigs have no scope for their energies,
For none his boundless power questions,
Or makes undutiful suggestions.
Charles II himself was called on for ghostly comment after his
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
Dialogues and Squibs
93
death. The angry tory who wrote Caesar's Ghost (c. 1687) begins
quite well and impressively with the rise of the royal shade from
the tomb, but tails off into the usual scurrilities, this time against
the officers of James II's army at Hounslow heath. The Ghost of
King Charles II (? c. 1692) also gives advice, written, possibly, by
some disgusted whig, to the pensive prince, not given to replies. '
William III.
From the ghost to the last will is a natural transition, but,
whereas the ghost is almost always tragic, and with good reason,
too, according to the authors, the will is sprightly and squiblike, if
rather hideous, in its fun. The best, perhaps, is the attack on
Shaftesbury in exile, The Last Will and Testament of Anthony K.
of Poland (1682). The legacies, some of which are heartlessly
enough invented, satirise the legatees as well as the great whig
leader himself, and there is no denying the stinging wit of the
whole.
Next to these sham dramatic poems we may notice the dialogues,
of which Marvell’s Dialogue between two Horses (1675) is justly
celebrated. The witty humour of the piece blends well with an
only too serious political indictment of Charles and his brother,
and we may excuse the doggerel lilting metre as an echo of the
clumsy canter of his brass and marble horses. Rochester, too,
wrote a short dialogue, The Dispute, on the duke of York's
conversion to Catholicism, which contains his accustomed rankling
sting. . Curiously enough, there is a satire or two, consisting of
alternate recriminations between the duchess of Portsmouth and
Nell Gwynn (1682), conducted much to the advantage of the English
and 'protestant' mistress : but, in this species, the palm should be
assigned to the octosyllabic Dialogue between James II and his
Italian queen, which is replete with vulgar humour.
Scarcely to be distinguished from the dialogues is the ill-
defined class of squibs. Their metres are varied. Some are lyric
in character and form a link between compositions intended for
reading and ballads intended for singing: some are in octo-
syllabic lines of a Hudibrastic kind. Indeed, although they go
naturally together, it is hard to give a reason for thus grouping
them; except that invective and indignation are markedly sub-
ordinate in them to the wish to ridicule and scoff. 'Eminent
hands, as the booksellers would have said, were engaged in their
production. Marvell made a striking success of the spirited ballad
quatrains of his Poem on the Statue in Stocks-market (1672). Each
stanza contains a separate conceit on the offering of a wealthy
6
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
Londoner to Charles II, a statue of Sobieski (of all people) being
altered for the purpose to suit Charles's features. As usual with
Marvell, the chief political grievances of the day are catalogued,
but the prevailing tone of the indictment is one of witty pleasantry.
Two of Rochester's poems also may come under this heading,
The History of Insipids (1676), which is the least revolting
among the effusions said to have led to his banishment from court.
Its cold and effective malice was, at least, dangerous enough to
cause some royal displeasure. Later, he displayed the same
mordant wit against the whigs in the epigrammatic Commons'
Petition to the King (1679). Still better as a work of art, and not
so envenomed in substance, is the lampoon On the Young States-
men (1680), otherwise, the 'Chits,' who were Charles II's chief
advisers at the close of his reign. If not by Dryden, as the
publishers claimed, the polish of this squib seems to indicate
Rochester grown ripe. Two octosyllabic pieces also demand notice,
one, On the Duchess of Portsmouth's Picture (1682), for its wrath-
ful pungency, the other, a parody of King James's Declaration
(1692), by Sir Fleetwood Sheppard, for its tolerant victorious
humour. Lastly comes a group of poems in three-lined single-rimed
stanzas. The metre was peculiarly suitable for sententious argument
or a string of accusations, and some excellent talent went to their
production. Instances of their effective employment may be seen
in The Melancholy Complaint of Dr Titus Oates, and in The
Parliament dissolved at Oxford (1681), a pointed, if unmetrical,
production
Along with literary satires, attempts, in this nature, of the
dramatist Thomas Otway may be ranked. Their form is somewhat
unusual, and, in consequence, they do not easily fall into any of the
groups distinguished above. The earlier is a Pindaric ode, The
Poet's Complaint to his Muse, written when, in 1679, the duke
of York was banished, in consequence of the agitation about the
Popish plot. Very long, hyperbolical, straggling and unmelodious,
the Complaint is not an attractive piece of writing ; but the name
of its author and the furious attack on the potent ‘Libell,' who, of
course, is a whig satirist only, lend it interest. Otway's later
satiric effort, the comic scenes in Venice Preserved (1682), where
senator Antonio represents Shaftesbury, only shows to what depths
of ineptitude he could descend"; of the power to caricature he
seems devoid.
Otway, in his Complaint, mentions the kinds of poetry that
1 See chap. VII, post.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
Ballads
95
'Libell' was proficient in, "Painter's Advices, Letanies, Ballads.
The first of these represent the would-be literary work intended
for reading. The other two species, which had been, earlier, em-
ployed in mockery of the ruling puritans, were the property of the
ballad-monger, and were hawked about the country to be chanted
at street-corners and in taverns. Their manner is, therefore, far
more popular than that of the semi-literary satires. In scurrility,
indeed, there is little to choose between them. If anything, the
ballads have a poorer vocabulary, and hurl a few customary
epithets from Billingsgate at their opponents with a smaller
amount of detailed obscenity than opportunities of the heroic
couplet allow. But their strokes of criticism are mainly more
coarsely done and not so strongly bitten in: their humour is more
rollicking and clownish; their occasional argumentation more
rough and ready; and, in it, the ruin of trade,' due, of course, to
the wicked whigs or tories as the case might be, finds an additional
prominence.
Since they were intended for popular recitation and for an
immediate effect, it was necessary that they should be readily sung,
and this end was attained by fitting them to tunes which were
already well known and popular. This was not very difficult to
achieve. A certain number of ballad-tunes were old favourites
throughout the country; and the more successful operas or plays
of Charles II's reign frequently left behind them some air or other
which caught the general fancy and was sung everywhere. Both
these sources were put under contribution by ballad-makers, and
it was only rarely that a new tune had to be expressly composed
for a ballad, and, being composed, was admitted into the singer's
répertoire. The consequence was that a flavour of parody pervaded
almost all the political ballads of the day. It was tempting to
adopt words and phrases together with the tune; and there
resulted, for instance, a whimsical contrast between 'Hail to the
knight of the post,' directed against Titus Oates, and ‘Hail to the
myrtle shades' which began the original ballad.
Among ballad-tunes, the litany stands in the front rank. With
its three riming lines and short refrain, it was, in fact, the most
successful variation of the three-lined satiric verse.
Its name was
taken from its original refrain ‘Which nobody can deny,' which
was often superseded, especially when the attack was most bitter,
by the litany-prayers Libera nos, Domine, Quaesumus te, Domine,
or their English equivalents. A hortatory, and less implacable,
satire, which came into vogue in the later days of Charles, altered
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
the refrain again to 'This is the Time. They were mainly, however,
sung to the one tune, although The Cavallilly Man, a cavalier
air, was occasionally used, when the lilt of the three lines and their
length were suitable. The usual type may be seen by one stanza of
the tory Loyal Subject's Litany (1680):
From the Dark-Lanthorn Plot, and the Green-Ribbon Club;
From brewing sedition in a sanctified Tub;
From reforming a Prince by the model of Job,
Libera nos, Domine !
The other ballad-tunes may be conveniently divided into old and
new. Of the first class, two were much more popular than their
.
congeners. Packington's Pound was a lilting tune, fitted for a
scheme of words not unlike parts of The Ingoldsby Legends, and a
ready vehicle for broad and dashing fun. Its vogue continued
unabated till the reign of queen Anne, and some of the best ballad-
satires were written in it, the more easily as it admitted some
small variations of structure in the verse. Almost equal to
Packington's Pound in general favour was Hey, boys, up go we !
or Forty-one. This accompanied an eight-lined stanza of vigorous
movement, octosyllabic and hexasyllabic lines being alternated.
The eighth line was usually the refrain, such as 'Hey, boys, up
go we ! ' or 'The clean contrary way,' or some special one for the
occasion; but it might remain undistinguished from the rest of the
verse. Other old tunes only need a mention; there were used, for
example, Chevy Chase, Sir Eglamore, Eighty-eight, Cock Lawrel,
Ohone, ohone, Fortune, my foe, The Jolly Beggars, Ill tell thee,
Dick and Phillida flouts me, all of which date from before the
commonwealth.
Tom D'Urfey appears to have been the most popular ballad-
composer under the restoration. Tunes of his, like Sawney will
ne'er be my love again, Now the fights done, Hark, the thund ring
cannons roar and Burton Hall, were at once made part of the
ballad-monger's stock-in-trade, along with other competitors, such
as Digby's Farewell, Russell's Farewell, How unhappy is Phyllis
in love, Lay by your pleading, and a tory political tune, Now ye
Tories that glory. All these, however, are outdone in importance
by Purcell's Lilliburlero, which conferred an instant and extra-
ordinary success on Thomas lord Wharton's doggerel rimes, and
was, of course, employed for still poorer effusions afterwards. Here,
we reach the high-water mark of the ballad's effectiveness, and,
fortunately, know to whom both music and words are due? .
1 Chappell, W. , Old English Popular Music, ed. Wooldridge, 1893, vol. 11, p. 59, and
Macaulay, Hist. of England (5th ed. ), vol. II, p. 428.
## p. 97 (#119) #############################################
Ballads
97
With regard to most ballads, however, we are left in the dark
as to their authorship. Who was the reasoning tory humourist
who wrote the first two parts of A Narrative of the Popish Plot
(1679—80), or the ‘lady of quality' who continued his work? What
whig wrote the wrathful Tories Confession (1682), the disgusted
Satyr on Old Rowley (1680—1), or the scornful Lamentable Lory
(1684 ? ) (against Laurence Hyde), or the drily humorous Sir T.
Jenner's Speech to his Wife and Children (1688-9) ? Nocte
premuntur. And along with the writers of these are forgotten
their tory antagonists, the authors of the gay invective of A New
Presbyterian Ballad (1681), or the fiery Dagon's Fall (1682)
against Shaftesbury, the exulting Tories' Triumph (1685) or the
witty lampoon on bishop Burnet, The Brawny Bishop's Complaint
(c. 1698). Yet the names of the ballad-makers, even when known,
are rather disappointing. It was Charles Blount, the deist, who is
responsible for the clever and haughty Sale of Esau's Birthright
on the Buckingham election of 1679. William Wharton, a son of
Philip, fourth lord Wharton, although reputed dull, was the author
of A New Song of the Times (1683), one of the most brilliant of
whig squibs. Walter Pope, a physician and astronomer, wrote The
Catholic Ballad (1674), which displays genial pleasantry. Another
physician, Archibald Pitcairne, translated and improved the Jacobite
De Juramento illicito (1689). The 'protestant joiner,' Stephen
College, perpetrated some yapping pasquinades. And we find
some professionals. There was Thomas Jordan, the city poet, who
shows a fine lyrical feeling in The Plotting Papists' Litany (1680),
which stands quite apart in structure from the Which nobody can
deny series. His successor as city poet, Matthew Taubman, edited
a volume of tory compositions, of some of which he was presumably
author. Finally, the courtier, song-writer and dramatist, Tom
D'Urfey, composed several tory songs, all of them facile and tune-
ful, and one, The Trimmer (c. 1690), sardonically witty. D'Urfey
furnishes us with a sidelight on the audience of these ballads, when
he tells how he sang one, in 1682, with King Charles at Windsor ;
he holding one part of the paper with me. ' On one side or another,
they appealed to all the nation, and their comparative popularity
was the best gauge of public opinion.
But there were good reasons for the anonymity of this political
literature, poems, ballads and tracts. If the censorship had lapsed
or was inefficient, the law of libel gave the government ample
means for punishing the publishers and authors of anything tending
to civil division, and, naturally, while the whigs had most present
7
a
E. L. VIII
OH. III
## p. 98 (#120) #############################################
98
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
reason to fear, the tories did not forget the possibility of a turn of
the wheel. The last four years of Charles II saw a number of
prosecutions of booksellers like Nathaniel Thompson, Richard
Janeway, Benjamin Harris and others, and, although these cases do
not seem to have been very efficient deterrents, they tended to
make anonymity advisable as an obvious and easy precaution.
Meanwhile, a straggling and feebler race of prose satires existed
under the shadow of the poems and ballads. Its comparatively
scanty numbers and its weakly condition were, may be, due to the
fact that prose satire could not be disentangled without difficulty
from sober argument. The seventeenth century pamphleteer kept no
terms with his political or ecclesiastical adversaries. His reasoning
is interlarded with invective, and, if possible, with ridicule. Yet
the serious content of his tract may remain obvious, and a
traits of satire are not sufficient to change its classification. In
tracing the course of pure satire, therefore, we are left mostly to a
series of secondrate pamphlets, the authors of which, it would seem,
were distrustful of their argumentative powers and unable to
employ the more popular device of rime.
One amphibious contribution, The Rehearsal Transpros'd
(1672–3), of Andrew Marvell, deserves mention on its satiric
aspect. Though that book belongs essentially to the region of
serious political controversy, its author's design of discrediting his
opponent by ridicule and contumely is too apparent throughout for
it to be excluded from satire. As such, it possesses undeniable
merits. Marvell understood the difficult art of bantering the enemy.
He rakes up Parker's past history, sometimes with a subdued
fun—as when he says that his victim, in his puritan youth, was
wont to put more graves in his porridge than the other fasting
'Grewellers'-sometimes with a more strident invective. He can
rise to a fine indignation when he describes Parker's ingratitude to
Milton. And there is a shrewdness in his humour which brings over
the reader to his side. Yet, with all this, the wit of his book is the
elder cavilling wit of the chop-logic kind. It is a succession of
quips, which need a genius not possessed by Marvell to keep their
savour amidst a later generation. That he had high powers in
humorous comedy was shown in his parody of Charles II, His
Majesty's Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament
(1675). Its audacious mockery and satiric grasp of a situation
1. Graves' or 'greaves,' a fatty substance or juice. The word is clearly connected
both with gravy' and the composition used in graving'a ship.
## p. 99 (#121) #############################################
Satirical Narratives and Dialogues 99
>
preserve its fun from evaporating, and exhibit a dramatic faculty
we barely expect in the musing poet of The Garden.
A favourite form of prose, as of poetic, satire was the narrative.
Cabala (1663) is a fine example. Here, we are given delightful
sham minutes of meetings held by the leading nonconformists in
1662. Sardonic and malicious as it is, it includes burlesque of
great talent, as when the well-affected' minister is described as
one who indeed complieth with the public injunction of the
Church, yet professeth they are a burthen and a grief to him. ' It
has a distinct affinity with a much later composition, which, how-
ever, is by a whig and directed against the Jacobites, A true and
impartial Narrative of the Dissenters' New Plot (1690), where the
extreme high church view of English history since the reformation
is parodied in a brilliant, unscrupulous fashion. The gay, triumphant
irony and solemn banter of the piece only set off to better advantage
the serious argument which is implied and, at last, earnestly stated.
The List of goods for sale is a very slight thing compared to
elaborate productions like the above, but it gave opportunity for
skilful thrusts and lasted throughout the period. Books were the
objects most frequently described, but other items appear, as in the
Advertisement of a Sale of choice Goods, which dates from about
1670. One lot consists of 'Two rich Royal Camlet Clokes, faced
with the Protestant Religion, very little the worse for wearing,
valued at 4l. to advance half a Crown at each bidding'; which
must have amused Charles II, if not his brother.
The dialogue was a favourite form for polemic in the party
newspapers. It appears in A Pleasant Battle between tro
Lap-dogs of the Utopian Court (1681), where Nell Gwynn's dog,
following the example of his mistress, wins the day against the
duchess of Portsmouth's. So, too, there are several characters,
like that written by Oldham, but none worth special notice, save
that the railing style gives place to a more polished invective.
Another form, the parable, was in favour under William III. It
was a kind of prolonged fable, where personages of the day appear
as various birds and beasts. Thus, in the nonconformist whig
Parable of the Three Jackdaws (1696), which, perhaps, is identical
with that of The Magpies by Bradshaw, the eagle stands for
Charles II, the falcon for Monmouth, archbishop Sancroft is called
a ‘metropolitical Magpye’ and the dissenters are styled 'blackbirds
and nightingales. '
Along with these distinct genres there were printed some satires
* Cf. Dunton, J. , The Life and Errors of J. D. vol. I, p. 182.
560466 A
7-2
## p. 100 (#122) ############################################
IOO
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
hard to classify, pretended documents, sham letters and so forth.
The Humble Address of the Atheists (1688) to James II, a wbig
concoction, is superior to most of its fellows, although it has but
scanty merit. Some way below it rank the mock whig Letter from
Amsterdam to a Friend in England (1678) and Father La Chaise's
Project for the Extirpation of Heretics (1688), in which the
opponents of the two factions decorated what they imagined were
the designs of whig or papist with products of a lurid fancy.
When we try to sum up the impression which these satires,
in verse or prose, give us, we are struck at once by the low place
which they hold as literature. Witty they often are, and with
a wit which improves. We change from flouts and jeers and
artificial quips to humorous sarcasm, which owes its effect to the
contrast of the notions expressed, and to its ruthless precision.
But even this is not a very clear advance; the quip had, perhaps,
always been a little popular form, and mere jeering continued to
be the staple satire. In fact, except Oldham, who stands apart,
these authors did not aim at a literary mark. They were the
skirmishers of a political warfare, bandying darts all the more
poisoned and deadly because it was known that most would miss
their billet. Many of them were hirelings with little interest in
the causes they espoused. Their virulence, which seems nowadays
hideous, was mainly professional : and the lewd abuse which fills
those of them which are in rime was accordingly discounted by the
public.
It was not a compassionate age. The very danger of the
libeller's trade under the censorship made him the more un-
scrupulous in his choice of means. The tories, as a matter of
course, harp continually on Shaftesbury's ulcer, the result of a
carriage accident, and the silver tap which drained it was the
source of continual nicknames and scoffs : and the whigs are equal
sinners. A debauched riot reigns in most of the poetical satires,
degraded into an absolute passion for the purulent and the ugly.
The writers of them, it would appear, worshipped and loved
animalism for its own sake, not the least when they searched
through every depth of evil in order to defame their adversaries in
the most brutal way possible.
## p. 101 (#123) ############################################
CHAPTER IV
THE EARLY QUAKERS
The rise of the quaker movement in England, which began
with the public preaching of George Fox, just about the time of
the execution of Charles I, was marked by a surprising outburst
of literary activity. The new conception of religion was pro-
pagated with extraordinary zeal, and seemed likely at one time
not only to change the face of English Christianity but to mould,
after the quaker pattern, the religious life of the American
colonies. It was essentially the rediscovery, by men and women
whose whole training and environment were puritan, of the
mystical element which lies close to the heart of Christianity, but
which puritanism, with all its strength, had strangely missed. It
was a revivified consciousness of God, bringing with it the con-
viction that the essence of Christ's religion is not to be found in
submission to outward authority, whether of church or of Bible,
but in a direct experience of God in the soul, and in a life lived in
obedience to His will inwardly revealed.
The overmastering enthusiasm kindled by the new experience,
due, as Fox and his followers believed, to the immediate inspira-
tion of the Holy Spirit, impelled them to make it known by pen
as well as voice. Rude countrymen from the fells of Westmorland,
as well as scholars with a university training-even boys like
James Parnell, who died a martyr in Colchester castle at the age
of nineteen-became prolific writers as well as fervent preachers
of mystical experience and practical righteousness. Books and
pamphlets, broadsheets and public letters, followed one another in
rapid succession, setting forth the new way of life, defending it
against its adversaries, and pleading for liberty of conscience and
of worship. The organisation by which they contrived to get so
## p. 102 (#124) ############################################
IO2
The Early Quakers
large a mass of writing into circulation is not yet fully understood'.
But the fact that they found readers affords noteworthy evidence
of the ferment of men's minds in that day, and of the dominance
over their thoughts and lives of the religious interest.
Of all this vast output, there is not much that could possibly,
by its intrinsic qualities, find any permanent place in English
literature ; its chief interest now is for the curious student of
religious history. Nor can it be said to have influenced in any
appreciable degree the intellectual outlook of English-speaking
peoples, except in so far as it was one of the unnoticed factors in
the evolution of religious thought from the hard dogmatism of
puritan days to a more liberal and ethical interpretation of
Christianity. Most of the early quaker writings, having served
their temporary purpose, were read, so far as they continued to
be used at all, by the adherents of the new conception of religious
life, and by few or none beside.
That is only what would naturally be expected, when we look
at the forces that gave birth to these writings and at the con-
ditions under which they were poured forth. The purpose of these
numerous authors was not intellectual, and not (primarily at
least) theological, but experimental. They felt an inward com-
pulsion to make known to the world 'what God had done for
them,' that they might draw others into the same experience, and
into the kind of life to which it led. Moreover, the sense of
direct Divine communion and guidance, in which they lived, found
expression in terms that too often seemed to deny to the Christian
soul any place for the artistic faculty, and even for the develop-
ment of the intellectual powers. In striving to set forth what
they had discovered, they used, without transcending it, the
philosophical dualism of their day, which divided the world of
experience into water-tight compartments, the natural and the
spiritual, the human and the Divine. The terminology of the
seventeenth century, even if it served well enough to set forth
the 'religions of authority,' broke down when the quakers tried
to use it to expound their religion of the Spirit. ' The conception
of the Divine immanence, in the light of which alone they could
have found adequate expression for their experience, had been
well-nigh lost. The Power which they felt working wi in them
1 'The history of the Quaker Press in London has yet to be written. How did the
Society of Friends, who had no connection whatever with the Company of Stationers,
manage to pour out so many books in defence of their principles through all this
troublous period? That has yet to be made krown. ' Arber, Edward, preface to the
Term Catalogucs, 1668–1709 (1903).
## p. 103 (#125) ############################################
Early Quaker Journals 103
was set forth by them in language representing it as wholly
transcendental. It was only (they believed) when ‘the creature' and
all his works were laid in the dust that the light of 'the Creator'
could shine undimmed within their souls. In the quakers, as
often in other mystics, the ascetic impulse, which a dualistic
theory has usually aroused in the minds of those who take religion
seriously, tended to aesthetic and intellectual poverty. Hence, it
is only a few of these multitudinous works that, rising above the
general level, either in thought or style, deserve attention in a
history of English literature.
The most characteristic form into which the literary impulse
of the mystic has thrown itself, from Augustine's Confessions to
Madame Guyon, is that of the attempt to 'testify to the workings
of God' in his soul. And in no group of mystics has that impulse
found more general expression than in the early quakers. Their
Journals, though written without pretensions to literary art,
maintain a high level of sincere and often naïve self-portraiture,
and the best of them contain a rich store of material for the
student of the 'varieties of religious experience. ' But they are
seldom unhealthily introspective; they contain moving accounts
of persecution and suffering, borne with unflinching fortitude, in
obedience to what it was believed the will of God required; of
passive resistance to injustice and oppression, recounted often
with humour and rarely with bitterness; of adventures by land
and sea, in which the guiding hand and providential arm of God
are magnified. The quaint individuality of these men and women
is seldom lost, though the stamp of their leader Fox is upon them,
and their inward experiences clothe themselves in the forms of
expression which he first chose, and which soon became current
coin in the body which he founded. 'I was moved of the Lord'
to go here and there; 'weighty exercise came upon me'; ‘my
mind was retired to the Lord' in the midst of outward tumult,
and so forth.
George Fox's Journal is by far the most noteworthy of all
these autobiographical efforts, and it is one which, for originality,
spontaneity and unconscious power of sincere self-expression, is
probably without a rival in religious literature. George Fox was
a man of poor education, who read little except his Bible, and
who, with pen in hand, to the last could hardly spell or construct
a grammatical sentence. Yet, such was the intense reality of his
## p. 104 (#126) ############################################
104
The Early Quakers
experience, and such the clearness of his inward vision, that his
narrative, dictated, for the most part, to willing amanuenses,
burns with the flame of truth and often shines with the light of
artless beauty? The story of his early struggles with darkness
and despair is in striking contrast with another contemporary
self-portraiture, that of Bunyan in his Grace Abounding. Fox
does not tell us of personal terrors of judgment to come; his grief
is that temptations are upon him, and he cannot see light. The
professors of religion to whom he turns for help are empty hollow
casks,' in whom he cannot find reality beneath the outward show.
My troubles continued, and I was often under great temptations; I fasted
mnoh, and walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my
Bible, and went and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came
on; and frequently, in the night, walked mournfully about by myself; for
I was a man of sorrows in the times of the first workings of the Lord
in me. . . .
As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and
those esteemed the most experienced people, for I saw that there was none
among them all that could speak to my condition. When all my hopes in
them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me,
nor could I tell what to do; then, 0! then I heard a voice which said, 'there
is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition'; and when I heard
it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none
apon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give
him all the glory.
After telling of an inward manifestation of the powers of evil
‘in the hearts and minds of wicked men,' he goes on:
6
I cried unto the Lord, saying, “Why should I be thus, secing I was nover
addicted to commit these evils ? ' and the Lord answered, That it was needful
I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all con-
ditions ? ' and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there
was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love,
which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love
of God, and I had great openings. . . .
Now the Lord opened to me by his invisible power, ‘that every man was
enlightened by the divine light of Christ'; and I saw it shine through all;
and that they that believed in it came out of condemnation to the light of
life, and becaine the children of it; but they that hated it, and did not believe in
it, were condemned by it, though they made a profession of Christ. . . . These
things I did not see by the help of man, nor by the letter, though they are
written in the letter; but I saw them in the light of the Lord Jesus Christ,
and by his immediate Spirit and power, as did the holy men of God, by whom
the Holy Scriptures were written. Yet I had no slight esteem of the Holy
i The Journal, as hitherto printed, was edited in grammatical English by Ellwood
and other Friends. The original has now been published verbatim, with copious notes,
by the Cambridge University Press.
## p. 105 (#127) ############################################
George Fox and Thomas Ellwood 105
Scriptures, but they were very precious to me, for I was in that Spirit by
which they were given forth; and what the Lord opened to me, I afterwards
found was agreeable to them.
The above passages may serve to illustrate at once the sim-
plicity and directness of Fox's style, and, also, the kernel of the
new interpretation of the Christian Gospel which he and his
followers proclaimed, and which brought them into constant
collision with the ecclesiastics and the Bible-worshippers of their
day. The Journal is the record, told in the same simple and
often racy language, of their conflicts with 'priests' and magistrates
and howling mobs; of their valiant efforts to secure justice, and
to solace the oppressed in their sufferings; of troubles from
the 'ranters' who joined the movement; and of the successful
endeavours, made by one who was no mere fanatic, but in whose
mind flowed a clear spring of more than worldly wisdom, to
build up an organisation which should be proof against the
anarchic tendencies of a system that recognised no ultimate
authority but the Light Within.
Thomas Ellwood, son of an Oxfordshire squire, was a man of
liberal education, who, though he moved in good society, was
constrained in early years to throw in his lot with the despised
people of God. ' He was an intimate friend of William Penn
and Isaac Penington; and, through the good offices of the latter,
he was for some years engaged as reader to the poet Milton in
his blindness. It was Ellwood, according to a doubtful tradition",
who, after reading with delight the manuscript of Paradise Lost,
suggested to Milton the theme afterwards worked out in Paradise
Regained.
The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, written by his
own hand, gives a very lively picture of his early life and home
surroundings, of inward struggles, of 'passive resistance to the
monstrous tyranny of his father, and of his share in the persecu-
tions to which all his people were subjected. His description of
prisons and prison life in the seventeenth century is of great
historical value. He writes in a vivid, racy style, the interest of
which rarely or never flags. He hits off, in a fashion worthy of
Bunyan, the characters alike of friends and persecutors; and (also
like Bunyan) he intersperses his prose narrative with verses which
he mistakes for poetry.
Take, for illustration, the story of John Ovey, the fellmonger
magistrate 'accustomed to ride upon his pack of skins,' 'grey-
i Of. ante, vol. vii, p. 120.
a
## p. 106 (#128) ############################################
106
The Early Quakers
headed and elderly,' who had been a preacher among the baptists
or independents and had been drawn towards Friends. Ellwood
took him to a meeting at Isaac Penington's, which was unexpectedly
broken up by a troop of horse? :
We all sate still in our places, except my companion John Ovey, who sate
next to me. But he being of a profession that approved Peter's advice to his
Lord, to save himself, soon took the alarm, and with the nimbleness of a
stripling, cutting a caper over the form that stood before him, ran quickly
out at a private door (which he had before observed) which led through the
parlour into the gardens, and from thence into an orchard; where he hid
himself in a place so obscure, and withal so convenient for his intelligence by
observation of what passed, that no one of the family could scarce have found
a likelier.
Several of the party are hurried away four miles to a
magistrate, but are released :
Back then we went to Isaac Penington's. But when we came thither,
O the work we had with poor John Ovey! He was so dejected in mind, so
covered with shame and confusion of face for his cowardliness, that we had
enough to do to pacify him towards himself.
John Gratton was another quaker of good education, brought
up in the presbyterian faith in Derbyshire. Like many mystics,
he was subject to deep inward exercises, frequently culminating
in visions or other incursions from the deeper layers of personality;
and his Journal, like that of George Fox, is of great interest to
the student of religious psychology. He was, however, a man of
sane and sober spirit, and there is no question as to his funda-
mental orthodoxy. He writes with ease and clearness, but lacks
the crisp, pungent manner of Fox and Ellwood. Like most of his
contemporaries, he is apt to be long-winded.
One of the liveliest and best written of these early auto-
biographies is that of Richard Davies, of Welshpool, who tells the
story of his own 'convincement' and sufferings, and of the first
propagation of the 'truth' in Wales.
The Memoir of John Roberts, of Cirencester (who died in
1683), was written by his son Daniel in 1725; yet it properly
belongs to this period, since the notes from which it is compiled
must have been, to a large extent, contemporary with the events
described For its brightness and unfailing humour, it well
deserves a place in English literature. Oliver Wendell Holmes
said of it:
See Masson's Milton, vol. vi, pp. 586—8, for a lively description of the difficulties
encountered by magistrates in attempting to put a forcible stop to the Friends'
worship.
## p. 107 (#129) ############################################
William Penn
107
It is as good as gold-better than gold-every page of it. It is comforting
to meet, even in a book, a man who is perfectly simple-hearted, clear-headed,
and brave in all conditions. The story is admirably told too-dramatically,
vividly1.
The great mass of early quaker writings may be described
as mystical, in the sense that they seek to set forth the reality of
the experience of direct Divine communion, and the life of self-
surrender and obedience as at once the condition and the fruit of
that experience. But we may distinguish as mystical writings
proper those of the works of the quakers which are not mainly
autobiographical on the one hand, or controversial on the other.
William Penn, son of the admiral Penn frequently mentioned
by Pepys, is the most widely known of the early quakers—chiefly
as the founder and first governor of the colony of Pennsylvania.
His character has been fiercely assailed by Macaulay and others;
but there seems no reason to doubt that, whatever difficulties a
quaker statesman may have had to encounter in putting his
principles consistently into practice, he remained absolutely
sincere and worthy of the respect in which he was always held
by his people. Though 'convinced' of the truth of the quaker
way of life at the age of 22, he does not seem to have been a
mystic by temperament, but rather a clear-headed English man
of action, whose principles were formed, not in the school of
speculation, but in that of experience. Though possessed of rich
stores of learning, and great qualities as a statesman, he can
hardly be regarded as a deep thinker; and, as an author, in
common with nearly all the writers of his time, he is often tedious
and infelicitous in expression
The best known of his early works, No Cross No Crown, was
written at the age of 24, while he was in prison in the Tower for
the 'blasphemy' of a pamphlet, The Sandy Foundation Shaken,
in which he had assailed what were regarded as the strongholds of
the Christian faith. His purpose in writing No Cross No Crown
he describes as 'to show the nature and discipline of the holy
Cross of Christ; and that the denial of self. . . is the alone way to
the Rest and Kingdom of God. ' This is a familiar theme with
mystics; but Penn interprets the cross with the utmost puritan
6
* From a prefatory letter to the first complete edition, entitled A Quaker of the
olden Time, 1898.
· This criticism does not apply to Some Fruits of Solitude (see later), which is
written in crisp and excellent English.
## p. 108 (#130) ############################################
108
Quakers
The Early
rigour, decrying luxury and most of the customary ways of society.
His effort is a warning against wrath to come, and only incidentally
an invitation to enjoy the crown of rest in the kingdom here and
now.
Come, Reader, hearken to me awhile; I seek thy salvation; that's my Plot;
thou wilt forgive me. A Refiner is come near thee, His Grace hath appeared
to thee; it shows thee the World's lusts, and teacheth thee to deny them,
Receive His leaven and it will change thee; His medicine and it will cure
thee. This is the Crown, but where is the Cross? Where is the bitter cup
and bloody baptism? Come, Reader, be like him; for this transcendent Joy
lift up thy head above the World; then thy Salvation will draw nigh
indeed.
To avoid giving a false impression of narrowness in Penn, it
should be added that he was a warm friend of education, and fully
alive to its importance.
'Nature,' he says (in his Address to Protestants), 'is an excellent book,
pleasant and profitable; but how few, alas! are learned either in the Macro-
cosm or their Microcosm! I wish this were better understood; it would be
both our honour and advantage. '
He made ample provision for education in his colony; and he was
the first statesman in power willing to run the risk of granting
absolute liberty of conscience and of worship.
More of a mystic than Penn was his friend Isaac Penington,
son of an alderman and high sheriff of London who was one of the
regicide judges. Penington was a graduate of Cambridge, as
Penn was of Oxford. The stern and gloomy Calvinism in which
he had been brought up distressed his tender spirit, and it was not
till after years of deep inward questioning and isolation, and even
of agnosticism, that he found peace at last by identifying himself
with the quakers, whose teaching he had known but had long
despised as uncouth and contrary to reason. He came to find
the presence and power of the Most High among them,' and
declares:
I have met with my God; I have met with my Saviour; and he hath not
been present with me without his salvation; but I have felt the healings drop
upon my soul from under his wings. I have met with the true knowledge,
the knowledge of life.
Penington's writings, it has been recently said, 'are diffuse,
and on the whole unreadable. Even the titles of his voluminous
works are forgotten now; but the purest breath of Christian
mysticism is in them for those who have the patience to find it
and the power to breathe it. Take the following passage as
typical of many others:
## p. 109 (#131) ############################################
Isaac and Mary Penington. James Nayler 109
6
Know what it is that is to walk in the path of life, and indeed is alone
capable of walking therein. It is that which groans, and which mourns;
that which is begotten of God in thee. The path of life is for the seed of life.
The true knowledge of the way, with the walking in the way, is reserved for
God's child, for God's traveller. Therefore keep in the regeneration, keep in
the birth; be no more than God hath made thee. Give over thine own
willing; give over thine own running; give over thine own desiring to know
or to be anything, and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart
and let that grow in thee.
Before the light dawned on Isaac Penington, he had found a
kindred spirit in the youthful lady Springett (born Mary Proude),
who, after the death of her husband at the siege of Arundel,
married Penington, as she says herself, that she might be service-
able to him in his desolate condition. ' Their love was the
mature passion of pure and intense natures,' and together they
suffered cheerfully the loss of worldly goods and frequent separa-
tions when Penington was thrown into prison for what he
believed to be the truth. A beautiful and worthy testimony
remains in the words which Mary Penington wrote, by the bedside
of her sick child, when her husband had been called away from
earth:
Ah me! he is gone! he that none exceeded in kindness, in tenderness, in
love inexpressible to the relation as a wife. Next to the love of God in Christ
Jesus to my soul, was his love precious and delightful to me. My bosom-one!
that was as my guide and counsellor! my pleasant companion! my tender
sympathising friend! as near to the sense of my pain, sorrow, grief, and
trouble as it was possible. Yet this great help and benefit is gone; and I,
a poor worm, a very little one to him, compassed about with many infirmities,
through mercy let him go without an unadvised word of discontent, or
inordinate grief.
There is no more pathetic figure, in the history of early
quakerism, than that of the unhappy James Nayler, whose
grievous lapse into sheer extravagance led him, as a sign of the
coming of the living Christ, to allow a crowd of silly women to
hail him as the Messiah; and who, after his case had been debated
at length in the House of Commons, bore with deep contrition and
exemplary patience the ferocious punishment which was meted
out to him. His writings after this baptism of fire breathe the
purest spirit of inward penitence and forgiving love. The following
are the words of his ‘last Testimony,' taken down about two hours
before his death:
There is a spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge
any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the
end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all
exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees
## p. 110 (#132) ############################################
IIO
The Early Quakers
to the end of all temptations; as it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none
in thoughts to any other; if it be betrayed it bears it; for its ground and
spring is in the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its
life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its Kingdom with entreaty and not
with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind.
Another beautiful testimony to the spirit that animated those
early quakers is given by William Dewsbury who, shortly before
his death, said, after a long and terrible imprisonment in Warwick
castle:
This I can say, I never played the coward, but joyfully entered Prisons as
Palaces, telling mine enemies to hold me there as long as they could, and in
the Prison House I sung praises to my God, and esteemed the Bolts and
Locks put upon me as Jewels, and in the name of the Eternal God I alway
got the Victory.
The early quakers, like most Christian mystics, had no thought
of setting themselves in opposition to fundamental orthodoxy as
they understood it. But, inevitably, their constant appeal to the
Light Within, and their consequent refusal to bow down to
outward authority, brought them into fierce conflict with the
religious teachers of their day, by most of whom the Bible had
been erected into the final and only 'rule' of faith and practice.
And so, as they were compelled to defend themselves against
attacks which condemned them, with indiscriminate violence, as
papists, heretics, atheists and blasphemers, the purpose of their
writings became more and more directly theological. On both
sides, it is to be feared, abuse counted for more than argument,
and the oblivion into which these reams of printed matter have
fallen cannot be said to have been undeserved.
So early as 1656, John Bunyan attacked the quakers, without
explicitly naming them, in Some Gospel Truths Opened, and was
answered by Edward Burrough and George Fox.
George Fox. Thomas Hicks,
the baptist, roused the wrath of Ellwood by his Dialogue between
a Christian and a Quaker; and Richard Baxter, in his Quaker's
Catechism, complaining of their 'violent and railing language,'
denounced them as 'abominable infidels,' Pagans' and 'a genera-
tion of the Devil. ' In kindlier vein, Henry More, the Cambridge
Platonist, while admitting as 'safe and reasonable' the principle
of the light within a man,' expressed his sorrow at their 'uncouth
and ridiculous' opinions, and was sorely grieved when his friend
the learned and philosophical viscountess Conway (daughter of
speaker Finch) joined herself to what he described as the most
6
## p. 111 (#133) ############################################
Samuel Fisher. Barclay's Apology III
melancholy sect that ever was in the world. ' To all these, and
many more, the quakers issued voluminous replies 1.
Of Penn's controversial writings, The Sandy Foundation
Shaken, which got him into the Tower; Innocency with her Open
Face, by which he won his release; The Christian Quaker, and
Primitive Christianity Revived, it is needless now to speak. A
word must, however, be said concerning the prodigious apologia
of Samuel Fisher (1666), entitled Rusticus ad Academicos: a work
of nearly 800 quarto pages, closely printed, containing single
sentences that sometimes run to a page and a half? . In spite of
its incredible long-windedness, it is a work of great learning and
sound sense. Fisher deals in a quite modern manner with the
canon of Scripture, showing wide knowledge of its history, and
also of the various Biblical manuscripts then accessible to scholars.
He can be caustic, too, when he chooses, as when he replies to the
argument of dean Owen that the Holy Spirit, while preserving
somewhere the true text, has arranged variations between the MSS
in order to encourage diligence in the study of Scripture-
'Whence came this whiffle and whimzy within the circumference
of thy figmentitious fancy ? '
There is one book, out of all this welter of controversy, that
can be read today with interest and profit: An Apology for the
True Christian Divinity, by Robert Barclay, son of David
Barclay, of Ury, who had served as a soldier under Gustavus
Adolphus, and had afterwards joined the quakers. Robert Barclay
was brought up among the strictest Calvinists in Scotland, and
among Catholics during his studies in Paris; nevertheless, without
any urging from his father, he, also, at the age of nineteen became
a quaker.
6
When I came into the silent assemblies of God's people, I felt a secret
power among them, which touched my heart; and as I gave way unto it,
I found the evil weakening in me, and the good raised up; and so I became
thus knit and united unto them, hungering more and more after the in-
crease of this power and life, whereby I might feel myself perfectly
redeemed 3.
1 In vol. 1 of E. Arber's Term Catalogues, the titles are given of 44 books written
against the quakers between the years 1671 and 1680. Joseph Smith's Bibliotheca
Anti-Quakeriana (1873), contains an alphabetical catalogue of many hundreds of these
writings. George Fox's The Great Mystery (1659) has replies to over one hundred
attacks on the quakers.
· The index to this extraordinary work is worth examining as a quaint example of
the controversial methods of the seventeenth century. See, under the heading Nick-
names,' the extraordinary selection of terms applied to the quakers.
3 Apology, Proposition xi, $ 7.
## p. 112 (#134) ############################################
I I2
The Early Quakers
Robert Barclay is the first of the very few theologians whom
the Society of Friends has produced. Possessed of remarkable
.
natural gifts, he set himself deliberately to the study of theology,
mastering Greek and Hebrew, the writings of the Fathers and the
history of the Christian church. His Apology was written at the
early age of 28, but is the work of a mature mind.
dramatic power, and is in strong contrast to the historic and
argumentative Good Old Cause Revived of a few months later.
Nor did the trick tire till the close of the century. A nobler form,
that of Biblical narrative, also had its misusers. Pordage, a by-
word for Grub-street poverty, wrote the tame, but not abusive,
1 Cf. vol. II, pp. 482 it.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
Azaria and Hushai, in 1682, while Settle, in his Absalom Senior,
a mere echo of Dryden, among much nonsense has, here and there,
good lines, such as:
To what strange rage is Superstition driven,
That Man can outdo Hell to fight for Heaven.
Brady produced an obscene Giant's War about the same time, and
the change to a classical subject is also seen in Tarquin and
Tullia, a bitter Jacobite attack on William III and his queen.
A most effective weapon for decrying opponents was the
character, which, indeed, formed an essential part of the Biblical
narrative. One of the wittiest was written by the duke of Bucking-
ham, in his Advice to a Painter, against his rival Arlington; one
of the loftiest is Shaftesbury's Farewell, a kind of inimical epitaph
on the whig leader's death in Holland (“What! A republic air, and
yet so quick a grave ? '). Shadwell has the disgrace of unsurpassed
virulence in his Medal of John Bayes (1682), which drew upon him
a heavy punishment from the quondam friend whom he lampooned.
The most cutting, perhaps, was the sham Panegyricon King
William by the hon. J. H[oward ? ). Nor should The Man of no
Honour, where James II's subservient courtiers are assailed, be
forgotten. An argumentative style is to be discerned in the
description of the views of The Impartial Trimmer, which, in fact,
is a whig manifesto of 1682, and where real knowledge and a
weighty personality seem to transpire. Thus, the gap is bridged
to the unadulterated argument which is to be found in the earlier
tory Poem on the Right of Succession or in Pordage's spiritless
attack on persecution, The Medal Revers'd (1682).
More imaginative in conception are the visions and ghosts ;
Hodge's Vision (1679) is a diatribe on the court; The Battle
Royal (1687) is a nonconformist burlesque of papist and parson.
The Waking Vision (1681) contains a dialogue in Oldham's
undramatic manner between Shaftesbury and Monmouth. A
loquacious phantom appears in most of the type. Thus, in Sir
Edmundbury Godfrey's Ghost, written about 1679, by some whig,
whose gift of sardonic wit makes us curious to know his name,
the ghost is made to appear to Charles II. Humour, on the other
hand, is the special talent of the tory who wrote Tom Thynne's
Ghost in Hudibrastic metre (1682). Hell, at any rate, is under a
despot, and the dead whigs have no scope for their energies,
For none his boundless power questions,
Or makes undutiful suggestions.
Charles II himself was called on for ghostly comment after his
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
Dialogues and Squibs
93
death. The angry tory who wrote Caesar's Ghost (c. 1687) begins
quite well and impressively with the rise of the royal shade from
the tomb, but tails off into the usual scurrilities, this time against
the officers of James II's army at Hounslow heath. The Ghost of
King Charles II (? c. 1692) also gives advice, written, possibly, by
some disgusted whig, to the pensive prince, not given to replies. '
William III.
From the ghost to the last will is a natural transition, but,
whereas the ghost is almost always tragic, and with good reason,
too, according to the authors, the will is sprightly and squiblike, if
rather hideous, in its fun. The best, perhaps, is the attack on
Shaftesbury in exile, The Last Will and Testament of Anthony K.
of Poland (1682). The legacies, some of which are heartlessly
enough invented, satirise the legatees as well as the great whig
leader himself, and there is no denying the stinging wit of the
whole.
Next to these sham dramatic poems we may notice the dialogues,
of which Marvell’s Dialogue between two Horses (1675) is justly
celebrated. The witty humour of the piece blends well with an
only too serious political indictment of Charles and his brother,
and we may excuse the doggerel lilting metre as an echo of the
clumsy canter of his brass and marble horses. Rochester, too,
wrote a short dialogue, The Dispute, on the duke of York's
conversion to Catholicism, which contains his accustomed rankling
sting. . Curiously enough, there is a satire or two, consisting of
alternate recriminations between the duchess of Portsmouth and
Nell Gwynn (1682), conducted much to the advantage of the English
and 'protestant' mistress : but, in this species, the palm should be
assigned to the octosyllabic Dialogue between James II and his
Italian queen, which is replete with vulgar humour.
Scarcely to be distinguished from the dialogues is the ill-
defined class of squibs. Their metres are varied. Some are lyric
in character and form a link between compositions intended for
reading and ballads intended for singing: some are in octo-
syllabic lines of a Hudibrastic kind. Indeed, although they go
naturally together, it is hard to give a reason for thus grouping
them; except that invective and indignation are markedly sub-
ordinate in them to the wish to ridicule and scoff. 'Eminent
hands, as the booksellers would have said, were engaged in their
production. Marvell made a striking success of the spirited ballad
quatrains of his Poem on the Statue in Stocks-market (1672). Each
stanza contains a separate conceit on the offering of a wealthy
6
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
Londoner to Charles II, a statue of Sobieski (of all people) being
altered for the purpose to suit Charles's features. As usual with
Marvell, the chief political grievances of the day are catalogued,
but the prevailing tone of the indictment is one of witty pleasantry.
Two of Rochester's poems also may come under this heading,
The History of Insipids (1676), which is the least revolting
among the effusions said to have led to his banishment from court.
Its cold and effective malice was, at least, dangerous enough to
cause some royal displeasure. Later, he displayed the same
mordant wit against the whigs in the epigrammatic Commons'
Petition to the King (1679). Still better as a work of art, and not
so envenomed in substance, is the lampoon On the Young States-
men (1680), otherwise, the 'Chits,' who were Charles II's chief
advisers at the close of his reign. If not by Dryden, as the
publishers claimed, the polish of this squib seems to indicate
Rochester grown ripe. Two octosyllabic pieces also demand notice,
one, On the Duchess of Portsmouth's Picture (1682), for its wrath-
ful pungency, the other, a parody of King James's Declaration
(1692), by Sir Fleetwood Sheppard, for its tolerant victorious
humour. Lastly comes a group of poems in three-lined single-rimed
stanzas. The metre was peculiarly suitable for sententious argument
or a string of accusations, and some excellent talent went to their
production. Instances of their effective employment may be seen
in The Melancholy Complaint of Dr Titus Oates, and in The
Parliament dissolved at Oxford (1681), a pointed, if unmetrical,
production
Along with literary satires, attempts, in this nature, of the
dramatist Thomas Otway may be ranked. Their form is somewhat
unusual, and, in consequence, they do not easily fall into any of the
groups distinguished above. The earlier is a Pindaric ode, The
Poet's Complaint to his Muse, written when, in 1679, the duke
of York was banished, in consequence of the agitation about the
Popish plot. Very long, hyperbolical, straggling and unmelodious,
the Complaint is not an attractive piece of writing ; but the name
of its author and the furious attack on the potent ‘Libell,' who, of
course, is a whig satirist only, lend it interest. Otway's later
satiric effort, the comic scenes in Venice Preserved (1682), where
senator Antonio represents Shaftesbury, only shows to what depths
of ineptitude he could descend"; of the power to caricature he
seems devoid.
Otway, in his Complaint, mentions the kinds of poetry that
1 See chap. VII, post.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
Ballads
95
'Libell' was proficient in, "Painter's Advices, Letanies, Ballads.
The first of these represent the would-be literary work intended
for reading. The other two species, which had been, earlier, em-
ployed in mockery of the ruling puritans, were the property of the
ballad-monger, and were hawked about the country to be chanted
at street-corners and in taverns. Their manner is, therefore, far
more popular than that of the semi-literary satires. In scurrility,
indeed, there is little to choose between them. If anything, the
ballads have a poorer vocabulary, and hurl a few customary
epithets from Billingsgate at their opponents with a smaller
amount of detailed obscenity than opportunities of the heroic
couplet allow. But their strokes of criticism are mainly more
coarsely done and not so strongly bitten in: their humour is more
rollicking and clownish; their occasional argumentation more
rough and ready; and, in it, the ruin of trade,' due, of course, to
the wicked whigs or tories as the case might be, finds an additional
prominence.
Since they were intended for popular recitation and for an
immediate effect, it was necessary that they should be readily sung,
and this end was attained by fitting them to tunes which were
already well known and popular. This was not very difficult to
achieve. A certain number of ballad-tunes were old favourites
throughout the country; and the more successful operas or plays
of Charles II's reign frequently left behind them some air or other
which caught the general fancy and was sung everywhere. Both
these sources were put under contribution by ballad-makers, and
it was only rarely that a new tune had to be expressly composed
for a ballad, and, being composed, was admitted into the singer's
répertoire. The consequence was that a flavour of parody pervaded
almost all the political ballads of the day. It was tempting to
adopt words and phrases together with the tune; and there
resulted, for instance, a whimsical contrast between 'Hail to the
knight of the post,' directed against Titus Oates, and ‘Hail to the
myrtle shades' which began the original ballad.
Among ballad-tunes, the litany stands in the front rank. With
its three riming lines and short refrain, it was, in fact, the most
successful variation of the three-lined satiric verse.
Its name was
taken from its original refrain ‘Which nobody can deny,' which
was often superseded, especially when the attack was most bitter,
by the litany-prayers Libera nos, Domine, Quaesumus te, Domine,
or their English equivalents. A hortatory, and less implacable,
satire, which came into vogue in the later days of Charles, altered
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
the refrain again to 'This is the Time. They were mainly, however,
sung to the one tune, although The Cavallilly Man, a cavalier
air, was occasionally used, when the lilt of the three lines and their
length were suitable. The usual type may be seen by one stanza of
the tory Loyal Subject's Litany (1680):
From the Dark-Lanthorn Plot, and the Green-Ribbon Club;
From brewing sedition in a sanctified Tub;
From reforming a Prince by the model of Job,
Libera nos, Domine !
The other ballad-tunes may be conveniently divided into old and
new. Of the first class, two were much more popular than their
.
congeners. Packington's Pound was a lilting tune, fitted for a
scheme of words not unlike parts of The Ingoldsby Legends, and a
ready vehicle for broad and dashing fun. Its vogue continued
unabated till the reign of queen Anne, and some of the best ballad-
satires were written in it, the more easily as it admitted some
small variations of structure in the verse. Almost equal to
Packington's Pound in general favour was Hey, boys, up go we !
or Forty-one. This accompanied an eight-lined stanza of vigorous
movement, octosyllabic and hexasyllabic lines being alternated.
The eighth line was usually the refrain, such as 'Hey, boys, up
go we ! ' or 'The clean contrary way,' or some special one for the
occasion; but it might remain undistinguished from the rest of the
verse. Other old tunes only need a mention; there were used, for
example, Chevy Chase, Sir Eglamore, Eighty-eight, Cock Lawrel,
Ohone, ohone, Fortune, my foe, The Jolly Beggars, Ill tell thee,
Dick and Phillida flouts me, all of which date from before the
commonwealth.
Tom D'Urfey appears to have been the most popular ballad-
composer under the restoration. Tunes of his, like Sawney will
ne'er be my love again, Now the fights done, Hark, the thund ring
cannons roar and Burton Hall, were at once made part of the
ballad-monger's stock-in-trade, along with other competitors, such
as Digby's Farewell, Russell's Farewell, How unhappy is Phyllis
in love, Lay by your pleading, and a tory political tune, Now ye
Tories that glory. All these, however, are outdone in importance
by Purcell's Lilliburlero, which conferred an instant and extra-
ordinary success on Thomas lord Wharton's doggerel rimes, and
was, of course, employed for still poorer effusions afterwards. Here,
we reach the high-water mark of the ballad's effectiveness, and,
fortunately, know to whom both music and words are due? .
1 Chappell, W. , Old English Popular Music, ed. Wooldridge, 1893, vol. 11, p. 59, and
Macaulay, Hist. of England (5th ed. ), vol. II, p. 428.
## p. 97 (#119) #############################################
Ballads
97
With regard to most ballads, however, we are left in the dark
as to their authorship. Who was the reasoning tory humourist
who wrote the first two parts of A Narrative of the Popish Plot
(1679—80), or the ‘lady of quality' who continued his work? What
whig wrote the wrathful Tories Confession (1682), the disgusted
Satyr on Old Rowley (1680—1), or the scornful Lamentable Lory
(1684 ? ) (against Laurence Hyde), or the drily humorous Sir T.
Jenner's Speech to his Wife and Children (1688-9) ? Nocte
premuntur. And along with the writers of these are forgotten
their tory antagonists, the authors of the gay invective of A New
Presbyterian Ballad (1681), or the fiery Dagon's Fall (1682)
against Shaftesbury, the exulting Tories' Triumph (1685) or the
witty lampoon on bishop Burnet, The Brawny Bishop's Complaint
(c. 1698). Yet the names of the ballad-makers, even when known,
are rather disappointing. It was Charles Blount, the deist, who is
responsible for the clever and haughty Sale of Esau's Birthright
on the Buckingham election of 1679. William Wharton, a son of
Philip, fourth lord Wharton, although reputed dull, was the author
of A New Song of the Times (1683), one of the most brilliant of
whig squibs. Walter Pope, a physician and astronomer, wrote The
Catholic Ballad (1674), which displays genial pleasantry. Another
physician, Archibald Pitcairne, translated and improved the Jacobite
De Juramento illicito (1689). The 'protestant joiner,' Stephen
College, perpetrated some yapping pasquinades. And we find
some professionals. There was Thomas Jordan, the city poet, who
shows a fine lyrical feeling in The Plotting Papists' Litany (1680),
which stands quite apart in structure from the Which nobody can
deny series. His successor as city poet, Matthew Taubman, edited
a volume of tory compositions, of some of which he was presumably
author. Finally, the courtier, song-writer and dramatist, Tom
D'Urfey, composed several tory songs, all of them facile and tune-
ful, and one, The Trimmer (c. 1690), sardonically witty. D'Urfey
furnishes us with a sidelight on the audience of these ballads, when
he tells how he sang one, in 1682, with King Charles at Windsor ;
he holding one part of the paper with me. ' On one side or another,
they appealed to all the nation, and their comparative popularity
was the best gauge of public opinion.
But there were good reasons for the anonymity of this political
literature, poems, ballads and tracts. If the censorship had lapsed
or was inefficient, the law of libel gave the government ample
means for punishing the publishers and authors of anything tending
to civil division, and, naturally, while the whigs had most present
7
a
E. L. VIII
OH. III
## p. 98 (#120) #############################################
98
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
reason to fear, the tories did not forget the possibility of a turn of
the wheel. The last four years of Charles II saw a number of
prosecutions of booksellers like Nathaniel Thompson, Richard
Janeway, Benjamin Harris and others, and, although these cases do
not seem to have been very efficient deterrents, they tended to
make anonymity advisable as an obvious and easy precaution.
Meanwhile, a straggling and feebler race of prose satires existed
under the shadow of the poems and ballads. Its comparatively
scanty numbers and its weakly condition were, may be, due to the
fact that prose satire could not be disentangled without difficulty
from sober argument. The seventeenth century pamphleteer kept no
terms with his political or ecclesiastical adversaries. His reasoning
is interlarded with invective, and, if possible, with ridicule. Yet
the serious content of his tract may remain obvious, and a
traits of satire are not sufficient to change its classification. In
tracing the course of pure satire, therefore, we are left mostly to a
series of secondrate pamphlets, the authors of which, it would seem,
were distrustful of their argumentative powers and unable to
employ the more popular device of rime.
One amphibious contribution, The Rehearsal Transpros'd
(1672–3), of Andrew Marvell, deserves mention on its satiric
aspect. Though that book belongs essentially to the region of
serious political controversy, its author's design of discrediting his
opponent by ridicule and contumely is too apparent throughout for
it to be excluded from satire. As such, it possesses undeniable
merits. Marvell understood the difficult art of bantering the enemy.
He rakes up Parker's past history, sometimes with a subdued
fun—as when he says that his victim, in his puritan youth, was
wont to put more graves in his porridge than the other fasting
'Grewellers'-sometimes with a more strident invective. He can
rise to a fine indignation when he describes Parker's ingratitude to
Milton. And there is a shrewdness in his humour which brings over
the reader to his side. Yet, with all this, the wit of his book is the
elder cavilling wit of the chop-logic kind. It is a succession of
quips, which need a genius not possessed by Marvell to keep their
savour amidst a later generation. That he had high powers in
humorous comedy was shown in his parody of Charles II, His
Majesty's Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament
(1675). Its audacious mockery and satiric grasp of a situation
1. Graves' or 'greaves,' a fatty substance or juice. The word is clearly connected
both with gravy' and the composition used in graving'a ship.
## p. 99 (#121) #############################################
Satirical Narratives and Dialogues 99
>
preserve its fun from evaporating, and exhibit a dramatic faculty
we barely expect in the musing poet of The Garden.
A favourite form of prose, as of poetic, satire was the narrative.
Cabala (1663) is a fine example. Here, we are given delightful
sham minutes of meetings held by the leading nonconformists in
1662. Sardonic and malicious as it is, it includes burlesque of
great talent, as when the well-affected' minister is described as
one who indeed complieth with the public injunction of the
Church, yet professeth they are a burthen and a grief to him. ' It
has a distinct affinity with a much later composition, which, how-
ever, is by a whig and directed against the Jacobites, A true and
impartial Narrative of the Dissenters' New Plot (1690), where the
extreme high church view of English history since the reformation
is parodied in a brilliant, unscrupulous fashion. The gay, triumphant
irony and solemn banter of the piece only set off to better advantage
the serious argument which is implied and, at last, earnestly stated.
The List of goods for sale is a very slight thing compared to
elaborate productions like the above, but it gave opportunity for
skilful thrusts and lasted throughout the period. Books were the
objects most frequently described, but other items appear, as in the
Advertisement of a Sale of choice Goods, which dates from about
1670. One lot consists of 'Two rich Royal Camlet Clokes, faced
with the Protestant Religion, very little the worse for wearing,
valued at 4l. to advance half a Crown at each bidding'; which
must have amused Charles II, if not his brother.
The dialogue was a favourite form for polemic in the party
newspapers. It appears in A Pleasant Battle between tro
Lap-dogs of the Utopian Court (1681), where Nell Gwynn's dog,
following the example of his mistress, wins the day against the
duchess of Portsmouth's. So, too, there are several characters,
like that written by Oldham, but none worth special notice, save
that the railing style gives place to a more polished invective.
Another form, the parable, was in favour under William III. It
was a kind of prolonged fable, where personages of the day appear
as various birds and beasts. Thus, in the nonconformist whig
Parable of the Three Jackdaws (1696), which, perhaps, is identical
with that of The Magpies by Bradshaw, the eagle stands for
Charles II, the falcon for Monmouth, archbishop Sancroft is called
a ‘metropolitical Magpye’ and the dissenters are styled 'blackbirds
and nightingales. '
Along with these distinct genres there were printed some satires
* Cf. Dunton, J. , The Life and Errors of J. D. vol. I, p. 182.
560466 A
7-2
## p. 100 (#122) ############################################
IOO
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
hard to classify, pretended documents, sham letters and so forth.
The Humble Address of the Atheists (1688) to James II, a wbig
concoction, is superior to most of its fellows, although it has but
scanty merit. Some way below it rank the mock whig Letter from
Amsterdam to a Friend in England (1678) and Father La Chaise's
Project for the Extirpation of Heretics (1688), in which the
opponents of the two factions decorated what they imagined were
the designs of whig or papist with products of a lurid fancy.
When we try to sum up the impression which these satires,
in verse or prose, give us, we are struck at once by the low place
which they hold as literature. Witty they often are, and with
a wit which improves. We change from flouts and jeers and
artificial quips to humorous sarcasm, which owes its effect to the
contrast of the notions expressed, and to its ruthless precision.
But even this is not a very clear advance; the quip had, perhaps,
always been a little popular form, and mere jeering continued to
be the staple satire. In fact, except Oldham, who stands apart,
these authors did not aim at a literary mark. They were the
skirmishers of a political warfare, bandying darts all the more
poisoned and deadly because it was known that most would miss
their billet. Many of them were hirelings with little interest in
the causes they espoused. Their virulence, which seems nowadays
hideous, was mainly professional : and the lewd abuse which fills
those of them which are in rime was accordingly discounted by the
public.
It was not a compassionate age. The very danger of the
libeller's trade under the censorship made him the more un-
scrupulous in his choice of means. The tories, as a matter of
course, harp continually on Shaftesbury's ulcer, the result of a
carriage accident, and the silver tap which drained it was the
source of continual nicknames and scoffs : and the whigs are equal
sinners. A debauched riot reigns in most of the poetical satires,
degraded into an absolute passion for the purulent and the ugly.
The writers of them, it would appear, worshipped and loved
animalism for its own sake, not the least when they searched
through every depth of evil in order to defame their adversaries in
the most brutal way possible.
## p. 101 (#123) ############################################
CHAPTER IV
THE EARLY QUAKERS
The rise of the quaker movement in England, which began
with the public preaching of George Fox, just about the time of
the execution of Charles I, was marked by a surprising outburst
of literary activity. The new conception of religion was pro-
pagated with extraordinary zeal, and seemed likely at one time
not only to change the face of English Christianity but to mould,
after the quaker pattern, the religious life of the American
colonies. It was essentially the rediscovery, by men and women
whose whole training and environment were puritan, of the
mystical element which lies close to the heart of Christianity, but
which puritanism, with all its strength, had strangely missed. It
was a revivified consciousness of God, bringing with it the con-
viction that the essence of Christ's religion is not to be found in
submission to outward authority, whether of church or of Bible,
but in a direct experience of God in the soul, and in a life lived in
obedience to His will inwardly revealed.
The overmastering enthusiasm kindled by the new experience,
due, as Fox and his followers believed, to the immediate inspira-
tion of the Holy Spirit, impelled them to make it known by pen
as well as voice. Rude countrymen from the fells of Westmorland,
as well as scholars with a university training-even boys like
James Parnell, who died a martyr in Colchester castle at the age
of nineteen-became prolific writers as well as fervent preachers
of mystical experience and practical righteousness. Books and
pamphlets, broadsheets and public letters, followed one another in
rapid succession, setting forth the new way of life, defending it
against its adversaries, and pleading for liberty of conscience and
of worship. The organisation by which they contrived to get so
## p. 102 (#124) ############################################
IO2
The Early Quakers
large a mass of writing into circulation is not yet fully understood'.
But the fact that they found readers affords noteworthy evidence
of the ferment of men's minds in that day, and of the dominance
over their thoughts and lives of the religious interest.
Of all this vast output, there is not much that could possibly,
by its intrinsic qualities, find any permanent place in English
literature ; its chief interest now is for the curious student of
religious history. Nor can it be said to have influenced in any
appreciable degree the intellectual outlook of English-speaking
peoples, except in so far as it was one of the unnoticed factors in
the evolution of religious thought from the hard dogmatism of
puritan days to a more liberal and ethical interpretation of
Christianity. Most of the early quaker writings, having served
their temporary purpose, were read, so far as they continued to
be used at all, by the adherents of the new conception of religious
life, and by few or none beside.
That is only what would naturally be expected, when we look
at the forces that gave birth to these writings and at the con-
ditions under which they were poured forth. The purpose of these
numerous authors was not intellectual, and not (primarily at
least) theological, but experimental. They felt an inward com-
pulsion to make known to the world 'what God had done for
them,' that they might draw others into the same experience, and
into the kind of life to which it led. Moreover, the sense of
direct Divine communion and guidance, in which they lived, found
expression in terms that too often seemed to deny to the Christian
soul any place for the artistic faculty, and even for the develop-
ment of the intellectual powers. In striving to set forth what
they had discovered, they used, without transcending it, the
philosophical dualism of their day, which divided the world of
experience into water-tight compartments, the natural and the
spiritual, the human and the Divine. The terminology of the
seventeenth century, even if it served well enough to set forth
the 'religions of authority,' broke down when the quakers tried
to use it to expound their religion of the Spirit. ' The conception
of the Divine immanence, in the light of which alone they could
have found adequate expression for their experience, had been
well-nigh lost. The Power which they felt working wi in them
1 'The history of the Quaker Press in London has yet to be written. How did the
Society of Friends, who had no connection whatever with the Company of Stationers,
manage to pour out so many books in defence of their principles through all this
troublous period? That has yet to be made krown. ' Arber, Edward, preface to the
Term Catalogucs, 1668–1709 (1903).
## p. 103 (#125) ############################################
Early Quaker Journals 103
was set forth by them in language representing it as wholly
transcendental. It was only (they believed) when ‘the creature' and
all his works were laid in the dust that the light of 'the Creator'
could shine undimmed within their souls. In the quakers, as
often in other mystics, the ascetic impulse, which a dualistic
theory has usually aroused in the minds of those who take religion
seriously, tended to aesthetic and intellectual poverty. Hence, it
is only a few of these multitudinous works that, rising above the
general level, either in thought or style, deserve attention in a
history of English literature.
The most characteristic form into which the literary impulse
of the mystic has thrown itself, from Augustine's Confessions to
Madame Guyon, is that of the attempt to 'testify to the workings
of God' in his soul. And in no group of mystics has that impulse
found more general expression than in the early quakers. Their
Journals, though written without pretensions to literary art,
maintain a high level of sincere and often naïve self-portraiture,
and the best of them contain a rich store of material for the
student of the 'varieties of religious experience. ' But they are
seldom unhealthily introspective; they contain moving accounts
of persecution and suffering, borne with unflinching fortitude, in
obedience to what it was believed the will of God required; of
passive resistance to injustice and oppression, recounted often
with humour and rarely with bitterness; of adventures by land
and sea, in which the guiding hand and providential arm of God
are magnified. The quaint individuality of these men and women
is seldom lost, though the stamp of their leader Fox is upon them,
and their inward experiences clothe themselves in the forms of
expression which he first chose, and which soon became current
coin in the body which he founded. 'I was moved of the Lord'
to go here and there; 'weighty exercise came upon me'; ‘my
mind was retired to the Lord' in the midst of outward tumult,
and so forth.
George Fox's Journal is by far the most noteworthy of all
these autobiographical efforts, and it is one which, for originality,
spontaneity and unconscious power of sincere self-expression, is
probably without a rival in religious literature. George Fox was
a man of poor education, who read little except his Bible, and
who, with pen in hand, to the last could hardly spell or construct
a grammatical sentence. Yet, such was the intense reality of his
## p. 104 (#126) ############################################
104
The Early Quakers
experience, and such the clearness of his inward vision, that his
narrative, dictated, for the most part, to willing amanuenses,
burns with the flame of truth and often shines with the light of
artless beauty? The story of his early struggles with darkness
and despair is in striking contrast with another contemporary
self-portraiture, that of Bunyan in his Grace Abounding. Fox
does not tell us of personal terrors of judgment to come; his grief
is that temptations are upon him, and he cannot see light. The
professors of religion to whom he turns for help are empty hollow
casks,' in whom he cannot find reality beneath the outward show.
My troubles continued, and I was often under great temptations; I fasted
mnoh, and walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my
Bible, and went and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came
on; and frequently, in the night, walked mournfully about by myself; for
I was a man of sorrows in the times of the first workings of the Lord
in me. . . .
As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and
those esteemed the most experienced people, for I saw that there was none
among them all that could speak to my condition. When all my hopes in
them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me,
nor could I tell what to do; then, 0! then I heard a voice which said, 'there
is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition'; and when I heard
it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none
apon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give
him all the glory.
After telling of an inward manifestation of the powers of evil
‘in the hearts and minds of wicked men,' he goes on:
6
I cried unto the Lord, saying, “Why should I be thus, secing I was nover
addicted to commit these evils ? ' and the Lord answered, That it was needful
I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all con-
ditions ? ' and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there
was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love,
which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love
of God, and I had great openings. . . .
Now the Lord opened to me by his invisible power, ‘that every man was
enlightened by the divine light of Christ'; and I saw it shine through all;
and that they that believed in it came out of condemnation to the light of
life, and becaine the children of it; but they that hated it, and did not believe in
it, were condemned by it, though they made a profession of Christ. . . . These
things I did not see by the help of man, nor by the letter, though they are
written in the letter; but I saw them in the light of the Lord Jesus Christ,
and by his immediate Spirit and power, as did the holy men of God, by whom
the Holy Scriptures were written. Yet I had no slight esteem of the Holy
i The Journal, as hitherto printed, was edited in grammatical English by Ellwood
and other Friends. The original has now been published verbatim, with copious notes,
by the Cambridge University Press.
## p. 105 (#127) ############################################
George Fox and Thomas Ellwood 105
Scriptures, but they were very precious to me, for I was in that Spirit by
which they were given forth; and what the Lord opened to me, I afterwards
found was agreeable to them.
The above passages may serve to illustrate at once the sim-
plicity and directness of Fox's style, and, also, the kernel of the
new interpretation of the Christian Gospel which he and his
followers proclaimed, and which brought them into constant
collision with the ecclesiastics and the Bible-worshippers of their
day. The Journal is the record, told in the same simple and
often racy language, of their conflicts with 'priests' and magistrates
and howling mobs; of their valiant efforts to secure justice, and
to solace the oppressed in their sufferings; of troubles from
the 'ranters' who joined the movement; and of the successful
endeavours, made by one who was no mere fanatic, but in whose
mind flowed a clear spring of more than worldly wisdom, to
build up an organisation which should be proof against the
anarchic tendencies of a system that recognised no ultimate
authority but the Light Within.
Thomas Ellwood, son of an Oxfordshire squire, was a man of
liberal education, who, though he moved in good society, was
constrained in early years to throw in his lot with the despised
people of God. ' He was an intimate friend of William Penn
and Isaac Penington; and, through the good offices of the latter,
he was for some years engaged as reader to the poet Milton in
his blindness. It was Ellwood, according to a doubtful tradition",
who, after reading with delight the manuscript of Paradise Lost,
suggested to Milton the theme afterwards worked out in Paradise
Regained.
The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, written by his
own hand, gives a very lively picture of his early life and home
surroundings, of inward struggles, of 'passive resistance to the
monstrous tyranny of his father, and of his share in the persecu-
tions to which all his people were subjected. His description of
prisons and prison life in the seventeenth century is of great
historical value. He writes in a vivid, racy style, the interest of
which rarely or never flags. He hits off, in a fashion worthy of
Bunyan, the characters alike of friends and persecutors; and (also
like Bunyan) he intersperses his prose narrative with verses which
he mistakes for poetry.
Take, for illustration, the story of John Ovey, the fellmonger
magistrate 'accustomed to ride upon his pack of skins,' 'grey-
i Of. ante, vol. vii, p. 120.
a
## p. 106 (#128) ############################################
106
The Early Quakers
headed and elderly,' who had been a preacher among the baptists
or independents and had been drawn towards Friends. Ellwood
took him to a meeting at Isaac Penington's, which was unexpectedly
broken up by a troop of horse? :
We all sate still in our places, except my companion John Ovey, who sate
next to me. But he being of a profession that approved Peter's advice to his
Lord, to save himself, soon took the alarm, and with the nimbleness of a
stripling, cutting a caper over the form that stood before him, ran quickly
out at a private door (which he had before observed) which led through the
parlour into the gardens, and from thence into an orchard; where he hid
himself in a place so obscure, and withal so convenient for his intelligence by
observation of what passed, that no one of the family could scarce have found
a likelier.
Several of the party are hurried away four miles to a
magistrate, but are released :
Back then we went to Isaac Penington's. But when we came thither,
O the work we had with poor John Ovey! He was so dejected in mind, so
covered with shame and confusion of face for his cowardliness, that we had
enough to do to pacify him towards himself.
John Gratton was another quaker of good education, brought
up in the presbyterian faith in Derbyshire. Like many mystics,
he was subject to deep inward exercises, frequently culminating
in visions or other incursions from the deeper layers of personality;
and his Journal, like that of George Fox, is of great interest to
the student of religious psychology. He was, however, a man of
sane and sober spirit, and there is no question as to his funda-
mental orthodoxy. He writes with ease and clearness, but lacks
the crisp, pungent manner of Fox and Ellwood. Like most of his
contemporaries, he is apt to be long-winded.
One of the liveliest and best written of these early auto-
biographies is that of Richard Davies, of Welshpool, who tells the
story of his own 'convincement' and sufferings, and of the first
propagation of the 'truth' in Wales.
The Memoir of John Roberts, of Cirencester (who died in
1683), was written by his son Daniel in 1725; yet it properly
belongs to this period, since the notes from which it is compiled
must have been, to a large extent, contemporary with the events
described For its brightness and unfailing humour, it well
deserves a place in English literature. Oliver Wendell Holmes
said of it:
See Masson's Milton, vol. vi, pp. 586—8, for a lively description of the difficulties
encountered by magistrates in attempting to put a forcible stop to the Friends'
worship.
## p. 107 (#129) ############################################
William Penn
107
It is as good as gold-better than gold-every page of it. It is comforting
to meet, even in a book, a man who is perfectly simple-hearted, clear-headed,
and brave in all conditions. The story is admirably told too-dramatically,
vividly1.
The great mass of early quaker writings may be described
as mystical, in the sense that they seek to set forth the reality of
the experience of direct Divine communion, and the life of self-
surrender and obedience as at once the condition and the fruit of
that experience. But we may distinguish as mystical writings
proper those of the works of the quakers which are not mainly
autobiographical on the one hand, or controversial on the other.
William Penn, son of the admiral Penn frequently mentioned
by Pepys, is the most widely known of the early quakers—chiefly
as the founder and first governor of the colony of Pennsylvania.
His character has been fiercely assailed by Macaulay and others;
but there seems no reason to doubt that, whatever difficulties a
quaker statesman may have had to encounter in putting his
principles consistently into practice, he remained absolutely
sincere and worthy of the respect in which he was always held
by his people. Though 'convinced' of the truth of the quaker
way of life at the age of 22, he does not seem to have been a
mystic by temperament, but rather a clear-headed English man
of action, whose principles were formed, not in the school of
speculation, but in that of experience. Though possessed of rich
stores of learning, and great qualities as a statesman, he can
hardly be regarded as a deep thinker; and, as an author, in
common with nearly all the writers of his time, he is often tedious
and infelicitous in expression
The best known of his early works, No Cross No Crown, was
written at the age of 24, while he was in prison in the Tower for
the 'blasphemy' of a pamphlet, The Sandy Foundation Shaken,
in which he had assailed what were regarded as the strongholds of
the Christian faith. His purpose in writing No Cross No Crown
he describes as 'to show the nature and discipline of the holy
Cross of Christ; and that the denial of self. . . is the alone way to
the Rest and Kingdom of God. ' This is a familiar theme with
mystics; but Penn interprets the cross with the utmost puritan
6
* From a prefatory letter to the first complete edition, entitled A Quaker of the
olden Time, 1898.
· This criticism does not apply to Some Fruits of Solitude (see later), which is
written in crisp and excellent English.
## p. 108 (#130) ############################################
108
Quakers
The Early
rigour, decrying luxury and most of the customary ways of society.
His effort is a warning against wrath to come, and only incidentally
an invitation to enjoy the crown of rest in the kingdom here and
now.
Come, Reader, hearken to me awhile; I seek thy salvation; that's my Plot;
thou wilt forgive me. A Refiner is come near thee, His Grace hath appeared
to thee; it shows thee the World's lusts, and teacheth thee to deny them,
Receive His leaven and it will change thee; His medicine and it will cure
thee. This is the Crown, but where is the Cross? Where is the bitter cup
and bloody baptism? Come, Reader, be like him; for this transcendent Joy
lift up thy head above the World; then thy Salvation will draw nigh
indeed.
To avoid giving a false impression of narrowness in Penn, it
should be added that he was a warm friend of education, and fully
alive to its importance.
'Nature,' he says (in his Address to Protestants), 'is an excellent book,
pleasant and profitable; but how few, alas! are learned either in the Macro-
cosm or their Microcosm! I wish this were better understood; it would be
both our honour and advantage. '
He made ample provision for education in his colony; and he was
the first statesman in power willing to run the risk of granting
absolute liberty of conscience and of worship.
More of a mystic than Penn was his friend Isaac Penington,
son of an alderman and high sheriff of London who was one of the
regicide judges. Penington was a graduate of Cambridge, as
Penn was of Oxford. The stern and gloomy Calvinism in which
he had been brought up distressed his tender spirit, and it was not
till after years of deep inward questioning and isolation, and even
of agnosticism, that he found peace at last by identifying himself
with the quakers, whose teaching he had known but had long
despised as uncouth and contrary to reason. He came to find
the presence and power of the Most High among them,' and
declares:
I have met with my God; I have met with my Saviour; and he hath not
been present with me without his salvation; but I have felt the healings drop
upon my soul from under his wings. I have met with the true knowledge,
the knowledge of life.
Penington's writings, it has been recently said, 'are diffuse,
and on the whole unreadable. Even the titles of his voluminous
works are forgotten now; but the purest breath of Christian
mysticism is in them for those who have the patience to find it
and the power to breathe it. Take the following passage as
typical of many others:
## p. 109 (#131) ############################################
Isaac and Mary Penington. James Nayler 109
6
Know what it is that is to walk in the path of life, and indeed is alone
capable of walking therein. It is that which groans, and which mourns;
that which is begotten of God in thee. The path of life is for the seed of life.
The true knowledge of the way, with the walking in the way, is reserved for
God's child, for God's traveller. Therefore keep in the regeneration, keep in
the birth; be no more than God hath made thee. Give over thine own
willing; give over thine own running; give over thine own desiring to know
or to be anything, and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart
and let that grow in thee.
Before the light dawned on Isaac Penington, he had found a
kindred spirit in the youthful lady Springett (born Mary Proude),
who, after the death of her husband at the siege of Arundel,
married Penington, as she says herself, that she might be service-
able to him in his desolate condition. ' Their love was the
mature passion of pure and intense natures,' and together they
suffered cheerfully the loss of worldly goods and frequent separa-
tions when Penington was thrown into prison for what he
believed to be the truth. A beautiful and worthy testimony
remains in the words which Mary Penington wrote, by the bedside
of her sick child, when her husband had been called away from
earth:
Ah me! he is gone! he that none exceeded in kindness, in tenderness, in
love inexpressible to the relation as a wife. Next to the love of God in Christ
Jesus to my soul, was his love precious and delightful to me. My bosom-one!
that was as my guide and counsellor! my pleasant companion! my tender
sympathising friend! as near to the sense of my pain, sorrow, grief, and
trouble as it was possible. Yet this great help and benefit is gone; and I,
a poor worm, a very little one to him, compassed about with many infirmities,
through mercy let him go without an unadvised word of discontent, or
inordinate grief.
There is no more pathetic figure, in the history of early
quakerism, than that of the unhappy James Nayler, whose
grievous lapse into sheer extravagance led him, as a sign of the
coming of the living Christ, to allow a crowd of silly women to
hail him as the Messiah; and who, after his case had been debated
at length in the House of Commons, bore with deep contrition and
exemplary patience the ferocious punishment which was meted
out to him. His writings after this baptism of fire breathe the
purest spirit of inward penitence and forgiving love. The following
are the words of his ‘last Testimony,' taken down about two hours
before his death:
There is a spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge
any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the
end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all
exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees
## p. 110 (#132) ############################################
IIO
The Early Quakers
to the end of all temptations; as it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none
in thoughts to any other; if it be betrayed it bears it; for its ground and
spring is in the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its
life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its Kingdom with entreaty and not
with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind.
Another beautiful testimony to the spirit that animated those
early quakers is given by William Dewsbury who, shortly before
his death, said, after a long and terrible imprisonment in Warwick
castle:
This I can say, I never played the coward, but joyfully entered Prisons as
Palaces, telling mine enemies to hold me there as long as they could, and in
the Prison House I sung praises to my God, and esteemed the Bolts and
Locks put upon me as Jewels, and in the name of the Eternal God I alway
got the Victory.
The early quakers, like most Christian mystics, had no thought
of setting themselves in opposition to fundamental orthodoxy as
they understood it. But, inevitably, their constant appeal to the
Light Within, and their consequent refusal to bow down to
outward authority, brought them into fierce conflict with the
religious teachers of their day, by most of whom the Bible had
been erected into the final and only 'rule' of faith and practice.
And so, as they were compelled to defend themselves against
attacks which condemned them, with indiscriminate violence, as
papists, heretics, atheists and blasphemers, the purpose of their
writings became more and more directly theological. On both
sides, it is to be feared, abuse counted for more than argument,
and the oblivion into which these reams of printed matter have
fallen cannot be said to have been undeserved.
So early as 1656, John Bunyan attacked the quakers, without
explicitly naming them, in Some Gospel Truths Opened, and was
answered by Edward Burrough and George Fox.
George Fox. Thomas Hicks,
the baptist, roused the wrath of Ellwood by his Dialogue between
a Christian and a Quaker; and Richard Baxter, in his Quaker's
Catechism, complaining of their 'violent and railing language,'
denounced them as 'abominable infidels,' Pagans' and 'a genera-
tion of the Devil. ' In kindlier vein, Henry More, the Cambridge
Platonist, while admitting as 'safe and reasonable' the principle
of the light within a man,' expressed his sorrow at their 'uncouth
and ridiculous' opinions, and was sorely grieved when his friend
the learned and philosophical viscountess Conway (daughter of
speaker Finch) joined herself to what he described as the most
6
## p. 111 (#133) ############################################
Samuel Fisher. Barclay's Apology III
melancholy sect that ever was in the world. ' To all these, and
many more, the quakers issued voluminous replies 1.
Of Penn's controversial writings, The Sandy Foundation
Shaken, which got him into the Tower; Innocency with her Open
Face, by which he won his release; The Christian Quaker, and
Primitive Christianity Revived, it is needless now to speak. A
word must, however, be said concerning the prodigious apologia
of Samuel Fisher (1666), entitled Rusticus ad Academicos: a work
of nearly 800 quarto pages, closely printed, containing single
sentences that sometimes run to a page and a half? . In spite of
its incredible long-windedness, it is a work of great learning and
sound sense. Fisher deals in a quite modern manner with the
canon of Scripture, showing wide knowledge of its history, and
also of the various Biblical manuscripts then accessible to scholars.
He can be caustic, too, when he chooses, as when he replies to the
argument of dean Owen that the Holy Spirit, while preserving
somewhere the true text, has arranged variations between the MSS
in order to encourage diligence in the study of Scripture-
'Whence came this whiffle and whimzy within the circumference
of thy figmentitious fancy ? '
There is one book, out of all this welter of controversy, that
can be read today with interest and profit: An Apology for the
True Christian Divinity, by Robert Barclay, son of David
Barclay, of Ury, who had served as a soldier under Gustavus
Adolphus, and had afterwards joined the quakers. Robert Barclay
was brought up among the strictest Calvinists in Scotland, and
among Catholics during his studies in Paris; nevertheless, without
any urging from his father, he, also, at the age of nineteen became
a quaker.
6
When I came into the silent assemblies of God's people, I felt a secret
power among them, which touched my heart; and as I gave way unto it,
I found the evil weakening in me, and the good raised up; and so I became
thus knit and united unto them, hungering more and more after the in-
crease of this power and life, whereby I might feel myself perfectly
redeemed 3.
1 In vol. 1 of E. Arber's Term Catalogues, the titles are given of 44 books written
against the quakers between the years 1671 and 1680. Joseph Smith's Bibliotheca
Anti-Quakeriana (1873), contains an alphabetical catalogue of many hundreds of these
writings. George Fox's The Great Mystery (1659) has replies to over one hundred
attacks on the quakers.
· The index to this extraordinary work is worth examining as a quaint example of
the controversial methods of the seventeenth century. See, under the heading Nick-
names,' the extraordinary selection of terms applied to the quakers.
3 Apology, Proposition xi, $ 7.
## p. 112 (#134) ############################################
I I2
The Early Quakers
Robert Barclay is the first of the very few theologians whom
the Society of Friends has produced. Possessed of remarkable
.
natural gifts, he set himself deliberately to the study of theology,
mastering Greek and Hebrew, the writings of the Fathers and the
history of the Christian church. His Apology was written at the
early age of 28, but is the work of a mature mind.
