THE POLITICS OF DESPAIR:
THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY, 1661
--Continued
As the lnterregnum came to an end, the slogan of not a few Quakers seems to have been, "Peaceful if we can, Forceful if we must." The year 1659 was a darkening period that sobered the Children of the Light. Their movement seemed such a threat in the deteriorating political situation that those previously committed to fundamental change began to tighten up. Talk of a restoration of the monarch increased; military commanders, like George Monck in Scotland, clamped down on Quaker activity in the army; rumors of conspiracies floated freely around the capital and fed demands for greater law and order; soldiers, their pay long since in arrears, refused to carry out customary orders; and the Rump parliament proved so unpopular that street urchins shouted "Kiss my Parliament" to replace their usual "Kiss my arse" when they wanted to insult their betters.
More pertinent for Fox and his followers, Parliament spurned his long letter outlining "Fifty-nine Particulars for the Regulation of Things"; this document, the most radical ever to flow from his pen, went so far as to propose confiscation of the lands of all "great" houses, churches, and abbeys. The charged atmosphere of 1659 did not win Quakers another hearing but rather fed popular distrust of the Children of the Light.
No wonder that for ten weeks, from October through December, Fox was immobilized by one of his periodic depressions; it was aggravated no doubt by the fact that he convalesced at the Reading home of Thomas Curtis, where he could hardly escape the presence of one taking a different course from the one he espoused. Meanwhile Richard Hubberthorne, galvanized by the impending crisis, proclaimed that God’s power would take off the people’s bondage, "to make his creature a free creature and his people a free people."11
After his recovery, Fox headed for his home base in the north, where rumors of an armed uprising echoed across the countryside to alert the forces of General Monck. On May 29, 1660, Charles II, son of the beheaded king, entered London to the cheers of relieved and happy crowds of people. Grousing about evil days and perilous times, Friends glumly watched these events and bemoaned the perfidy and fickleness of people who had scorned their chance.
Within a month Fox had been picked up at Swarthmoor Hall and jailed in the dungeon in Lancaster castle, labeled a "Common Enemy to his Majesty." He remained there, in that dark, dank, and dreary place, with more time than he needed to ponder where he and the Children had missed their chance to mold events and change history.
"If I or my Friends," he ruefully remembered, "had been moved to go into a steeple house and look in any of the priests’ faces, their mouths would have been stopped, they would have gone away. . and they would have come down out of the pulpit.. . . The power of God would have gone so over them, they being so full of deceit, that it would have choked them."12
Surely he could not have forgotten that he had done these very things, so probably what he meant was that he and the Children had not done enough, enough to forestall the disaster that had now overtaken the nation and his movement. No matter how well organized--and they were better organized than any other of the country’s sects, including the all but moribund Anglicans--or how adroitly they turned out pamphlets and broadsides to publicize their cause, they had failed and failed miserably. The Day of the Lord, the day Fox had proclaimed from the heights of Pendle Hill, the millennium Revelation had promised and the signs of the times pointed to, that great Day had not arrived.
How he ached there in his cell, how he castigated himself for failing to rally his forces more successfully, how he must have wondered if he had placed his faith not in the truth but in a lie--it was enough to make the very stones that surrounded him cry out with anguish. Bitterness burned in his mouth at these hard facts.
But Fox rallied himself and composed an epistle warning that what had now come to be was God’s doing; to murmur against it would only provoke thunder from heaven. In the same breath, though, he promised that the divine hand would began to work its mysterious will and confound the saints’ enemies.
Clearly, he was trying to recapture the essence of the faith that had gripped him early on and empowered him--his belief that the Day of the Lord, despite secular ups and downs, was still possible. He began to search for a way out, one that would at once preserve the Children from what was bound to be the days of persecution that lay ahead, yet hold out hope that they might resurrect the Good Old Days. He groped toward what we would call a pacifist position.
In 1660, probably about the same time that Charles mounted his newly proffered throne, Fox buried in a broadside on why Quakers did not swear oaths a sentence explaining that they rejected force except for a "war with the devil and his works." Friends denied, he went on, "to plot and confederate or to raise insurrections,... or taking up arms outwardly," but they would not swear even to this.13
It only remained for him to define more precisely a war with the devil and his works. On another occasion, he yet again embraced the view that the sword might be used to pursue God’s will. He admonished the new king that permitting plays and maygames would only indicate that he carried his sword in vain. It might be used, he implied, for worthwhile purposes, such as, for example, keeping the peace and protecting people’s estates. Fox seemed to be searching for the right balance, one allowing him and his followers to hold on to their past commitments to broad societal justice, yet one that would not bring down on them the kind of persecution likely to inhibit their growth, especially among people whose property, as they saw it, needed protecting.
Freed from jail in September, Fox arrived in London during the third week in October. If he needed evidence of the change in mood, he did not have far to look: that very week royal vengeance was gruesomely evident when the regicides were hanged before giddily happy crowds at Charing Cross. For a reason not altogether clear, however, the king adopted a conciliatory tone toward Fox’s Children, dismissing all charges against him and ordering others released from jail or not incarcerated for wearing hats in court or failing to attend church.
On January 6, 1661, an event occurred that threatened to overwhelm whatever friendship King Charles harbored toward these sectarian subjects of his. A London congregation of Fifth Monarchists, a Baptist-derived group of millenarians who held that Jesus intended to return physically to sit upon England’s throne, staged an abortive uprising under the slogan, "King Jesus." Although occupying St. Paul’s cathedral for a brief time, they were quickly subdued; fourteen, including their leader, were executed, their heads stuck up on London Bridge as grisly warnings to others with similar ideas.
In a city traumatized by fear, shops were hastily shuttered, and armed militiamen nervously patrolled the streets. The government, ignoring the king’s own personal friendliness toward Fox’s followers, issued a proclamation for Scotland lumping together Quakers with Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchists because of their "cruel tenets and bloody practices"ö and allowing magistrates to seek out their meetings and arrest those taking part; soon reports came in from Yorkshire, just south of the Scottish border, that detentions had taken place there also.
In this tense atmosphere the Quaker peace testimony emerged. Stating formally that Friends were "against all plotters and fighters in the world," that is, people like the Fifth Monarchists, it was designed "that all occasion of suspicion may be taken away and our innocency cleared."