Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  During Fox’s first visit to Swarthmoor, Margaret took him along to “lecture day” at her church—much to the dismay of her own minister, William Lampitt. When the singing ended, Fox stood up in his pew and asked for permission to speak about the Inner Light and the irrelevance of outward symbols and rituals (many of which he had just witnessed). Fox used a peculiar reference to Jews to underline his point, observing that a man “is not a Jew that is one outward: neither is that circumcision which is outward: but he is a Jew that is one inward; and that is circumcision which is of the heart.” He then spoke out strongly against pedantic, literal interpretations of the Bible that lacked “the illumination of the spirit of Christ.”3 Margaret, whose later writings showed her complete familiarity with both the Old and New Testaments, wept when she heard Fox’s excoriation of those who treated every word of the Bible as literally true. She wrote that Fox’s remarks “opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly that we were all wrong…and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, ‘We are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the Scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves.’ ”4

  Margaret’s minister was so incensed by Fox’s statements that he directed the church wardens to throw the itinerant preacher out of the chapel. Fox, undeterred by his expulsion from the consecrated precincts, continued his talk in the churchyard and on the walk back to Swarthmoor Hall.

  This first meeting and its aftermath are envisioned in The Peaceable Kingdom (1971), a popular novel by the Dutch writer Jan de Hartog.*4 A key issue in the novel’s depiction of Fell and Fox’s first meeting is the Quaker mandate that all believers be addressed as equals with the familiar “thou.” Margaret tells Fox (their real names are used in the novel) that her entire household requires more instruction in understanding the new equality of which he has spoken. “As I told thee,” says the fictional Fox, “it is not I but God….” “God, fiddlesticks!” Margaret cries, realizing too late that this was hardly the language of a meek, unquestioning convert.5

  •

  When Judge Thomas Fell returned home about three weeks later, he was greeted on the riverbank near his house by an angry group of local burghers, including the vicar. They told the judge that a spiritual catastrophe had taken place in his own family while he was away, that his wife and entire household had been bewitched by Fox, and that he must send the Quaker preachers away to avoid the further catastrophe of the spread of a false faith throughout the area. Poor Judge Fell! After a long business trip, he must have been looking forward to a joint of roast lamb or beef, perhaps accompanied by a tankard of ale, in the bosom of his family. Instead, he was greeted by an outraged parish priest, who suggested that his wife had fallen under the spell of a wizard—an accusation that was anything but harmless in an era when most Christians believed in witches, and death was the penalty for sorcery. At home, Judge Fell was met by a wife who, as she later wrote, was torn by the realization that “either I must displease my husband, or offend God.”6

  This recollection suggests that the Fells enjoyed a close relationship even though the judge was more conservative than his wife in matters of religion. Fox’s friend was waiting to talk to Thomas Fell about the spiritual equality of believers, and Margaret noted that her husband became noticeably calmer and quieter when he saw that his dinner was ready. There is no record of whether the repast included a roast and ale, but Judge Fell was content enough to tell Margaret that he was willing to hear, upon her recommendation, what Fox had to say. After Fox had spoken to the judge, Margaret reports, her husband “came to see clearly the truth, of what he [Fox] spoke, and said no more, and went to bed.”7 We do not know whether Thomas Fell was more impressed by Fox’s arguments or by the prospect of peace in the home, but, the very next day, he offered the use of the great hall of Swarthmoor for the area’s first Meeting of Friends. He also continued to attend services at the Puritan parish church, displaying an uncommon flexibility at a time when choosing one church over another was generally considered mandatory and often a matter of life and death. The judge died in 1658, but he and Margaret had had another child in 1653. Remarkably for that era, all eight children survived to adulthood. It was said that, sometime before his death, Judge Fell stopped going to the parish church and left a door open between his study and the large hall where the Quaker meeting was held each week—a solution reflecting a preference for compromise that was rarely a feature of religious life anywhere in the seventeenth century. Judge Fell was clearly not as convinced of the truth of all Quaker beliefs as his wife, but he was a highly unusual man to have created no obstacles to Margaret’s intense involvement in the birth and dissemination of a religion that he did not fully share.

  Possibly because she was one of the few founding Quakers who were members of the landed gentry, Margaret was often asked—when she was not in prison herself, for holding Quaker meetings in her home or refusing to take oaths—to intercede with the authorities on behalf of her imprisoned co-religionists. She met with King Charles in London on June 22, 1660, only a month after his restoration to the throne. Shortly afterward, she issued a long statement, addressed to the king and Parliament, that is credited today with being the first comprehensive declaration of Quaker opposition to all war and violence. Despite her importance in her own time, attested to repeatedly in correspondence from men whose names we know well—such as William Penn, who founded the colony of Pennsylvania—Fell’s contributions were largely overlooked and “seriously underestimated” before twentieth-century feminist scholarship cast a new light on the role of women in religion.8

  In her declaration, Fell pointed out that Quakers had been persecuted under each new regime at times of political change because they refused to take oaths or doff their hats to superiors. “We who are the people of God called Quakers, who are despised and everywhere spoken against, as People not fit to live…we have been a Suffering People under every Power and Change, and under every Profession of Religion, that hath been, and born the outward Power in the Nation these Twelve Years….Even some [have been] persecuted and prisoned till Death…and this done, not for the wronging of any Man, nor the breach of any just Law of the Nation, nor for Evil-doing, nor desiring any Evil, or wishing hurt to any Man, but for Conscience sake towards God, because we could not bow to their Worship.”

  Fell’s statement emphasized that their religious resistance to practices such as taking oaths in no way implied any rejection of lawful governing authorities. “Our Intentions and Endeavours are and shall be Good, True, Honest, and Peacable towards them,” she declared, “and that we do Love, Own, and Honour the King, and these present Governors, so far as they do Rule for God, and his Truth, and do not impose anything upon peoples Consciences….We do not desire any Liberty that may justly offend anyone’s Conscience; the Liberty we do desire is, that we may keep our consciences clear and void of Offence towards God and toward Men, and that we may enjoy our civil Rights and Liberties of Subjects as Freeborn Englishmen.”9 (That little caveat, “so far as they do Rule for God,” would not have escaped the scrutiny of any perceptive monarch and goes a long way toward explaining why a religious movement committed to nonviolence was nevertheless viewed as threatening to the established order.)

  •

  Margaret married George Fox in 1669, eleven years after her first husband’s death. While Thomas Fell was alive, and during her long period as a widow, Margaret worked closely with Fox as one of the main founders of Quakerism. It is somewhat surprising, although Quakers were regarded—even by their religious enemies—as people of unusual rectitude, that there were so few rumors of any improper sexual relations between Margaret and Fox. Their marriage was solemnized and witnessed at a large Quaker meeting (attended by many non-Quakers as well) on October 27, 1669. The form of Quaker marriage was and is simple: the bride and groom stand before the congregation, with no clerical officiant, and declare their love for and intention to be faithful to each other. After Fell’s wedding to Fox, the marriage cert
ificate was signed by ninety-four witnesses, including Margaret’s children by her first marriage. The certificate of marriage was legal (and remains in a county record office in England today), but the religious form of the ceremony was not. Although there were few accusations of sexual impropriety before their wedding, the nature of the Quaker ceremony would be used to insult Margaret when she was imprisoned during the winter of 1683. Her indictment for holding Quaker meetings in her home and refusing to attend an officially approved church was addressed to “Margaret Fell, widow,” with the clear intention to declare her second marriage illegal and sinful in the eyes of church and state. After she was released from jail, Margaret protested the use of her first husband’s name in the indictment and reminded the judges, the king, and the public that she had been married to George Fox for fourteen years.

  It is unlikely that Margaret’s pleas on behalf of religious dissenters would have been respectfully received, or that she would have been seen personally by Cromwell or King Charles, had these men considered her anything but a morally unimpeachable representative of her faith. Fox’s intellectual appeal to women is certainly easy to understand; a frequent cause of his falling out with clerics of other Christian faiths was his insistence not only that women had souls but that their souls, spiritual faculties, and intellectual abilities were as capable of full development as those of men. Even the most misogynistic of the church fathers in the early Christian era did believe that women possessed souls, but not that women’s intellectual (not to mention theological) faculties were equal to those of men.

  Most scholars agree that Fox and Fell considered their marriage a primarily, even exclusively, spiritual union in which they joined forces as advocates of Quakerism. They were separated for much of their marriage, by imprisonment (his and hers), Fox’s frequent travels abroad to spread the faith, Margaret’s religious activism throughout England, and her heavy family responsibilities to children and grandchildren. However, the sexlessness of the marriage is certainly debatable, and the scholars’ views may well have been influenced by the ages of the bride and bridegroom at the time of their marriage. Fox was in his mid-forties and Margaret in her mid-fifties in 1669. Many people (yes, even respected historians) still have trouble imagining that a man in his forties might desire a woman in her fifties—even if the most powerful component of their relationship was a spiritual affinity. Fox also took care to renounce, in writing, any claim to the estate bequeathed by Margaret’s first husband. Under English law at the time, he could have assumed total control of her fortune and spent it as he wished. This renunciation of male financial privilege was as much a statement of Quaker religious principles of equality as of Fox’s feelings for his bride.

  •

  The birth of Protestantism—whether Anglicanism in England, Calvinism in Switzerland and France, or Lutheranism in Germany—took place in a pre-Enlightenment world. It should not therefore be surprising that many of these denominations were as insistent on their absolute rightness and righteousness as the Catholic Church had been (and remained). Seventeenth-century Quakerism, however, belongs to the early Age of Enlightenment, to an era when religious toleration was beginning to be seen by pioneering Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke not only as politically desirable but as morally virtuous. In a paradox that makes perfect sense, the same period was one of fierce religious intolerance in England and on the continent, with the Catholic Church making a violent and repressive effort to return to the pre-Reformation status quo in France, and conservative Protestants attempting to stamp out nonconformist Protestantism, which included Quakerism and all of the Anabaptist sects, in England and Europe. In the 1680s, when Margaret Fell was working ceaselessly for the release of Quaker prisoners in England, Locke was writing some of his most important works promoting religious toleration. Fell, then nearly seventy, was imprisoned in the fall of 1683—heading into the coldest winter ever recorded in England. She was released after six weeks, but more than a hundred religious dissenters died in prison, mainly of starvation and hypothermia, during that winter. By 1685, some fifteen hundred Quakers were imprisoned. Many Quaker meeting houses were either reduced to rubble or nailed shut, and the Friends were forced to meet outdoors through the “great, severe, and long frost and snow…when the river Thames was so frozen up that horses, coaches, and cars could pass to and fro on it.” When children tried to keep the Quaker meetings going in the absence of their imprisoned parents, some were put in the stocks or imprisoned themselves.10 (Quakers, unlike other religious denominations, considered children equals in the spiritual sphere and allowed them to speak at meetings. They also opposed corporal punishment—a natural outgrowth of their belief in nonviolence.) In no other religion of her time and no earlier era could a fully articulate female convert like Margaret Fell have functioned as she did—as an advocate for her specific beliefs and for freedom of conscience in general, in both the public and private spheres. The very word used by the Quakers for conversion—“convincement”—implies a voluntary, individual process and rules out the forced conversions long practiced by the Catholic Church, and more recently adopted by both Calvinists and Lutherans when Anabaptists appeared on their turf. Like other Christian denominations, Quakerism was a proselytizing religion, but argument—not violence—was its only method of obtaining convincements.

  Quakers were certainly as interested in converting Jews, for instance, as every other Christian sect was at the time. In 1651, the famous rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, a leader of the Amsterdam Jewish community originally formed by refugees from persecution in Spain and Portugal, wrote to Cromwell to request the admission of Jews to England. (King Edward I had expelled all Jews from England in 1290, and Cromwell did permit them to return—in exchange for considerable contributions to the treasury—in 1657.) Throughout the 1650s and early 1660s, both Jewish and Christian messianists believed that the coming of the Messiah was imminent and would take place in the year 1666. Faithful Jews were waiting for the first Messiah, and Christians, including Quakers, for the second coming of their Messiah, who had already walked the earth. Ben Israel alluded to this common belief in his plea to Cromwell, which observed that the “opinion of many Christians and mine concurre herein; that we both believe that the restoring time of our Nation into their Native County, is very near at hand…and therefore this remains only in my judgment, before the Messia come and restore our Nation, that first we must have our seat here [in England] likewise.”11 (Exactly why the appearance of the Messiah should have anything to do with the admission of Jews to England is unclear. In any case, Cromwell did wait to readmit the Jews until the fateful year 1666 had passed, as all such deadlines for Judgment Day have passed since then.)

  Before and after the re-entry of Jews into England, there were numerous connections between English Quakers and Dutch Jews. Between 1656 and 1658, Fell wrote four tracts specifically appealing to the Jews to convert; she was the first Quaker writer whose works were translated into Hebrew and Dutch, and her books were imported into Holland. Her initial appeal to the Jews was titled For Manasseth-ben-Israel: The Call of the Jews Out of Babylon. Although as convinced as other Christians that those who rejected Christ would be judged harshly at the Second Coming, Fell in For Manasseth does not actually mention Jesus but says, “This is the Way, walk in it.” She does not cite the New Testament but tactfully confines herself to Old Testament imagery. Above all, Fell emphasizes what she sees as the connection between her particular branch of Christianity and Judaism. Among the words substituted for Christ in her early tracts, she uses “Light,” “Living Water,” “Spirit,” “Tree of Righteousness,” and “Ancient of Days.”12 Nowhere in Fell’s writings is there any mention of the cornerstone of Christian persecution of Jews—the notion that the Jewish “race” was tainted by hereditary guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus. Hers was a forward-looking appeal based on the joy that would come to anyone who saw the light of God, rather than a backward-looking condemnation of Jews for deicide. This is not to say tha
t believing Jews would have been any more responsive to Fell’s appeals (or those of any other Quaker) than to harsher Christian appeals charging them with deicide. The important point is that Jews who were unpersuaded and unconvinced by Quaker proselytizing had nothing to fear from missionaries dedicated to nonviolence.

  One of the more intriguing connections between Quakers in England and Jews in Amsterdam—accepted by many but no means all scholars—involves the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who was excommunicated by the Amsterdam synagogue in 1656, when he was just twenty-three. William Ames, another member of the founding generation of English Quakers, led what proved to be a fruitless effort to convert Amsterdam Jews at roughly the same time. While in Holland, he wrote a letter to Fell describing a meeting with an apostate Jew who may well have been Spinoza. “There is a Jew at Amsterdam,” Ames wrote, “that by the Jews is Cast out (as he himself and others sayeth) because he owneth no other teacher but the light and he sent for me and I spoke to him and he was pretty tender…and he said to read of Moses and the prophets without which was nothing to him except he came to know it within….I gave order that one of the Dutch copies of thy book should be given to him and he sent me word he would Come to our meeting but in the meantime I was imprisoned.”13 Since Ames’s letter to Fell was written in 1657, both the timing and the description do fit Spinoza. Ames himself, despite the greater tolerance extended to Quakers in the Netherlands than in his native England, wound up at one point in the city insane asylum in Rotterdam, where he was visited by Job’s comforters in the person of Dutch Reformed ministers attempting to show him the error of his missionary ways.