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Viscount Saye and Sele and the Quakers

1973; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/qkh.1973.0015

1934-1504

Marc L. Schwarz,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

VISCOUNT SAYE AND SELE AND THE QUAKERS By Marc L. Schwarz* Following its first successes in the north of England in the early 1650's, the Quaker movement, driven by missionary zeal, was quick to promote its efforts in the more populated and Puritan south. Despite its successes, especially among the urban masses in such cities as London and Bristol, Quakerism met with an entrenched and well-organized Puritan interest and an unsympathetic magistracy which looked upon this new sect as a danger both to religious and civil order. The result of these clashes frequently led to persecution , imprisonment, and even death for Quakers—events which are documented in the "sufferings" literature of the movement from which it derived the strength that the examples of courageous martyrs provide. It is not difficult to comprehend the threat that these estabHshed groups found in Quakerism. Its emphasis upon the "inner light," its denial of the authority of, and detestation for, the character of the official ministry, its egaHtarianism, and chastisement of ungodly habits and institutions, promoted the notion that Quakers were spiritual anarchists, eating away at the fiber of true reHgion. On the other hand, the Quaker refusal to swear oaths, to do "hat honor," to use such titles as "Lord" in reference to another person, conjured up the notion that Quakerism was inimical to the maintenance of the pillars upon which civil society rested. Moreover, in an age familiar with such groups as the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchists , the LeveUers, and the Diggers, it was easy, if inaccurate, for contemporaries to cast the Quakers into the same extremist bag. One of the most illuminating examples of the harsh reception local hierarchies in the south gave to Quakerism in the 1650's is provided in the Oxfordshire town of Banbury, some forty miles north of the University. Strongly Puritan, Banbury could brag of staunch advocates of Puritanism in its pulpit from the early seventeenth-century divine William Whateley to the then-incum- *Department of History, University of New Hampshire, Durham. 14 VISCOUNT SAYE AND SELE AND THE QUAKERS 15 bent Samuel WeUes.1 A center of parHamentary support during the Civil War, Banbury poHtical Hfe was, in many ways, dominated by the presence in the neighboring town of Broughton of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and SeIe (1582-1662), a redoubtable Puritan and parHamentary peer.2 Quaker records themselves spell out the difficulties which the movement met in Banbury. Besse, for example, notes that from 1654 on, when the Quakers first made their appearance, the town authorities began a poHcy of persecution and harassment. Notable Quakers such as Ann Audland and Richard Farnworth were imprisoned for insulting the Reverend Mr. Welles or refusing to doff a hat to a magistrate. Others were Hkewise treated for similar offenses or for attending Quaker assemblies.3 Quaker sources reveal, in addition, that Viscount Saye and SeIe played a prominent, if not leading, role in these persecutions. According to Besse, for instance, Saye had two local Quakers, Simon Thompson and Nathanael Knowles, jailed for two months at Oxford for refusing to do him "the customary Ceremony of the Hat" and later, at the Quarter Sessions, caused the two "to be sent to the House of Correction, and detained there near eight Months, the said Nathanael Knowles being several Times cruelly whipt, and otherwise ill used."4 And that was not all, we are told, for having discovered that some of his tenants at Broughton were attending Quaker meetings, Saye not only had them put in jail but evicted two of them, including the unfortunate Simon Thompson ; in the descriptive phraseology of Besse, they were "arbitrarily and illegally forced . . . out of their Houses, had their Goods thrown into the Street" and were obHged with "their Wives, and seven 1.Whateley is discussed in Alfred Beesley, History of Banbury (London: Nichols, 1841), pp. 267-273, and Welles is described in the same work, pp. 464-466. Beesley also gives evidence of the strong Puritan flavor of Banbury; ibid., pp. 454-457. 2.J H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1941), p. 77. 3.Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People...