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Quaker Studies

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According to the English edition of Willem Sewel's History of the rise, increase, and progress of the Christian people called Quakers (1722), the first-generation Quaker preacher James Nayler rode to Bristol in early November 1656, and

Condemning his followers as mad for their treatment of Nayler who, in his entrance to Bristol imitated that of Jesus into Jerusalem, as described in the Gospel of St Matthew, this version of Nayler's ‘fall’ demonstrates the changes that had taken place in Quakerism between the 1650s and the eighteenth century, beginning at the Restoration. If, as one historian suggests, early Quakerism was a ‘thaumaturgical (signs and wonders) movement’Footnote ² then signs such as Nayler's, whether the result of ‘celestial inhabitation christology’, the ‘flesh and bone’ presence of Christ in the believerFootnote ³ or perhaps ‘a single symbolic act condensing a number of competing Quaker beliefs’Footnote ⁴ were to be expected, if not easily explained. Such signs illustrate the radical nature of early Quaker belief, as defined by Nigel Smith,Footnote ⁵ by demonstrating the workings of the Inner Light in ways that would, within a few years, become unacceptable to orthodox Friends. Although the ‘beliefs of Quakers are almost uniquely hostile to history’Footnote ⁶ and early Quakers aligned history with superfluous tradition, detrimental to true appreciation of the inward voice of God, by the 1690s the first histories of Quakerism had appeared. Whilst Leo Damrosch seeks to identify what Nayler thought that he was doing,Footnote ⁷ this study considers what motivated Restoration and eighteenth-century Quakers to censor his works and historical accounts of his life. Their motivations and representations are interlinked, and demonstrate how later Friends were compelled to accommodate such episodes, and certain individuals, by writing history.

Early Quakers sought to perform miracles as ‘a sign of the presence of the true church’, but by the later seventeenth century this had been largely replaced by history writing.Footnote ⁸ Justin Champion has studied the significance of history writing to early modern Anglicans and nonconformists, and his work is particularly useful when considering the extent to which Friends' representation of their past is comparable to that of other Protestants. He notes that the Restoration ‘saw many rival claims to be the true religion’Footnote ⁹ and, during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, history writing became particularly important. To claim to be ‘good, religious and true’ was not enough; ‘the ability to present a cogent and credible version of the past could shore up such a claim’.Footnote ¹⁰ Certainly, the Dutch Friend Willem Sewel created a rival history to those of other Protestants and wanted to represent ‘truth’ both in historical and spiritual terms. However, English Friends did not consider his first attempt, published in 1717, to be acceptable; his depiction of Nayler was not seen to represent historical truth or spiritual Truth. In contrast, the ‘weighty’ Friend George Whitehead's detailed introduction to Nayler's collected works, published in 1716, was the orthodox version of events.

A corpus of literature has considered the ways in which individuals have been depicted as ‘folk devils’, leading to the caricaturing of the group to which they belong.Footnote ¹¹ Thus this study focuses less on Nayler during his lifetime, than on what he came to stand for in later years. It sets accounts of Nayler's actions alongside an examination of the extent to which later Quakers amended his works before publication. Peter Burke's analysis of Louis xiv is similarly concerned ‘not so much with the man … as with his image’ and his place ‘in the collective imagination’ through representation in ‘texts (poems, plays, histories)’.Footnote ¹² Indeed, for more than seventy years scholars have interpreted Nayler's behaviour and subsequent representation in print as evidence of ‘the ever-recurring tension between idea and power … liberty and authority’Footnote ¹³ which led to increased persecution of Friends, who gradually renounced much of their enthusiastic behaviour. They have debated the extent, though, to which Quakers renounced ‘godly radicalism’, as Catie Gill describes it, and withdrew from the ‘world’.Footnote ¹⁴ Leo Damrosch and Adrian Davies, for example, have considered the theological and social shift in Quakerism from radical millenarianism in the 1650s to late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century respectability.Footnote ¹⁵ Bailey has dated the withdrawal to shortly after the Nayler dispute.Footnote ¹⁶ Michele Lise Tarter has commented upon the rejection of women's mystical writings from the 1670s, and the growing expectation that writers be ‘still and quiet’, in contrast to the earliest years of Quakerism. She concurs with Luella Wright that this led to an eighteenth-century period of literary ‘barrenness’.Footnote ¹⁷ John R. Knott has concluded that late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quakerism was ‘stabler, quieter, more rational, and more concerned with decorum’ than the Quakerism of the 1650s, a shift reflected in Ellwood's exclusion of ‘extravagances of language or behaviour’ from George Fox's Journal before its publication in 1694.Footnote ¹⁸

The silencing of radicalism was in part achieved by the Second Day Morning Meeting, one of several London meetings established in the decades following the Restoration, as well as the regular meetings for worship and business organised in each county. Founded by the Quaker leader George Fox in 1673 to consider works for publication, the Meeting was believed by critics within the Society to suppress individual inspiration whilst favouring uniformity and avoiding of controversy.Footnote ¹⁹ Although Thomas O'Malley has analysed its role before the 1689 Toleration Act, and Sheila Wright has addressed its influence in the later eighteenth century,Footnote ²⁰ there has been little consideration of its activities in the intervening period aside from Michele Tarter's brief comments on the rejection of prophetic writings, often by women, as ‘not mete to print’Footnote ²¹ and Richard Bailey's account of its efforts to transform the Quaker Christ into an inward, mystical figure.Footnote ²² However, as Kate Peters suggests, much information about the earliest Friends is ‘directly attributable to the efforts of a later generation of Quakers’ keen to prevent ‘the publication of enthusiastic or politically dangerous works’.Footnote ²³ As the emerging sectarian identity of Quakerism during the 1650s was only ‘in the process of being formed’,Footnote ²⁴ later Friends had to remould this fluid early identity, adding to their unwillingness to address the issue.

Further, after Nayler's trial several anti-Quaker writers had produced ‘histories’ of the Friends, emphasising his blasphemy conviction. These included William Grigge's The Quaker's Jesus of 1658 and Richard Blome's Fanatick history of 1660.Footnote ²⁵ Grigge described Quakers as ‘deluded and seduced Souls’ led astray by Fox and Nayler.Footnote ²⁶ Blome, although claiming to consider all ‘fanaticism’, used the Nayler episode to depict English Quakerism. In response, Nayler blamed ‘the many cruel Spirits, who pursued my Soul unto death’.Footnote ²⁷ However, despite his protestations, anti-Quaker works from the mid-seventeenth century were still used, and in some cases disseminated overseas, during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These included the German version of Blome's work, published in 1701.Footnote ²⁸ It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in 1677 the Meeting agreed that the proposed volume of Nayler's collected works ‘be suspended till it be taken into further & more generall Consideration by the 2d dayes meeting’.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, some historians have suggested that Fox actively blocked the project.Footnote ³⁰ The absence of references to it may also be related to the wave of persecutions of nonconformists, identified by scholars such as Tim Harris and Craig Horle, who date its peak to the 1680s.Footnote ³¹ Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, in the wake of a demand for works to describe Friends' sufferings, bolster their strength in the face of persecution, and defend their position,Footnote ³² the proposal was only mentioned again in 1698, when a letter from Thomas Hammond of York about Nayler's works was acknowledged, and George Bowles was ‘desired to get JNs Recantation’.Footnote ³³ Two months later Bowles brought this, and John Whiting provided a list of Nayler's works. The business continued in a similar fashion until 1700, when the Meeting declared that if the Yearly Meeting insisted on publication, ‘something by way of Advertizement should be writt to cleare Fri[en]ds and Truth from the Reproach yt came by him’.Footnote ³⁴ The proposal was only renewed in 1710, after pressure from some Friends earnest to publish ‘either with or without this Meet[ing]s Approbation’.Footnote ³⁵ Settle (Yorks.) Monthly Meeting seems to have been involved, as in 1708 they recorded ‘proposals Made by ye Printer touching ye Reprinting James Naylors Works’.Footnote ³⁶ The Morning Meeting agreed that the relevant minutes, spanning more than thirty years, be produced for inspection. Nayler's works were also to be gathered together and considered alongside ‘letters and Testimonys of Friends as tend to clear Truth and Friends from ye offence given by him and his followers when Clouded’.Footnote ³⁷ Only works considered ‘propper and safe’, and in one case, passages safe to be abstracted,Footnote ³⁸ were to be included. As Tarter suggests, such amendments formed part of a ‘wave of censorship and controlled historiography’ aiming to ‘eradicate all traces of enthusiasm’.Footnote ³⁹ By 1712 Thomas Raylton had examined which works had been approved, and which were still unread. In 1714 approval was finally given for publication ‘when Opportunity presents’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Settle Friends noted this, as their Quarterly Meeting agreed to purchase six copies.Footnote ⁴¹ It was two years before they were able to do so.

That is not to suggest that all scholars view the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a period of cautious quietism. Even Nigel Smith, who asserts that most radical groups compromised after the Restoration, suggests that beyond the ‘central ground’ of 1660s and 1670s Quakerism, whilst discipline was being established, a few were still ‘celebrating diversity of belief as evidence of the power of the Spirit’.Footnote ⁴² Referring particularly to the tithe testimony, Nicholas Morgan suggests that a ‘sense of outward mission’ continued until the 1730s. He rejects the idea that eighteenth-century Friends resigned from ‘the early Quaker wish to convert the world’ and claims that they ‘refused the acceptance of standards which compromised the precepts of their earliest co-religionists’.Footnote ⁴³ However, Friends were also keen to secure their future. Although Nayler was eventually accepted back into the fold, the introduction to A collection of sundry books, epistles and papers, published in 1716, described him as having ‘crucified to themselves the Lord of Life afresh, and put him to open Shame and Reproach’Footnote ⁴⁴ and his works were censored by, amongst others, the editor George Whitehead. Significantly, Rosemary Moore describes Whitehead as ‘much closer to standard seventeenth-century theology than most Quaker writers’Footnote ⁴⁵ of the 1650s and 1660s, although like Nayler he had been an early controversialist.Footnote ⁴⁶ This may have influenced the decision to allow him to edit the works. The twenty-three excluded tracts, half of Nayler's works from 1652–6, were not silently left out.Footnote ⁴⁷ Instead, they were listed as ‘His controversial books not reprinted in this collection, in the years, 1655 and 1656’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Excepting Sewel's letters to English Friends, there are few extant relevant manuscripts other than the Morning Meeting minutes, as is demonstrated by Paula McDowell's reliance upon them for much of her analysis of the Quaker press. The scholar is therefore reliant upon comparison of the republished and excluded works, the Meeting minutes, and to some extent Whitehead's journal, published in 1725.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although Whitehead did not comment upon the Collection in his journal, which was completed in 1711, it throws light upon the decision to amend Nayler's works. Like Nayler, during the Interregnum Whitehead had been involved in several ‘Controversies and Disputes’ although he elected only to ‘relate the Substance of the most material Passages, which concern our Christian Profession and Principles, held from the Beginning’.Footnote ⁵⁰ His aim, at least in part, seems to have been to draw on selected aspects of Friends' history, including his own, to represent their beliefs as unchanged since the 1650s. Arguably, this too occurred when he reviewed Nayler's works. Further, although Whitehead had been released from prison shortly before the Bristol incident, he does not seem to have been present, and does not comment upon it in his journal.Footnote ⁵¹ Perhaps this literal distance from events, alongside his ‘Circumspect Life and Godly Conversation’ in later years, when he was ‘had in Good Esteem amongst most sorts of People’Footnote ⁵² justified his role as editor of the works of another controversial young Friend who had been unable to redeem himself in the eyes of the world, and of later Quaker orthodoxy, because of his early death.

As part of his attempt to understand what Nayler thought that he was doing, Damrosch has identified the need for historians of mid-seventeenth-century Quakerism to be aware of silent alterations to works included in the Collection.Footnote ⁵³ He is by no means the first scholar to identify such changes; almost a century earlier William C. Braithwaite commented on the amendments made to Robert Barclay's Apology for the true Christian divinity (1678 [1676]) when it was translated from Latin, describing the English version as ‘carefully revised’.Footnote ⁵⁴ David J. Hall has concluded that Friends believed that the first edition of a work was not necessarily the most true, and edited passages accordingly.Footnote ⁵⁵ Many of Nayler's reprinted works had originally been planned to coincide with his ministry, as polemical tools.Footnote ⁵⁶ As Hilary Hinds has recently asserted, ‘the Quaker travelling ministry was also a publishing ministry’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Unsurprisingly, then, some alterations bear out Whitehead's claim that the original language needed to be changed for a later audience. Whitehead appealed to the charity of the eighteenth-century reader to ‘make the best or most favourable Construction … with Respect to the general Import of the Matters and Things in those most clear and evident Truths aym'd at’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nayler was accepted to have aimed at clear truths; however, it was up to the reader to discern them. To clarify further, the word ‘letter’ was replaced by ‘the Scriptures’ in the 1716 version of Milk for babes. Footnote ⁵⁹ Other changes, though, were more fundamental. Damrosch has identified significant alterations, which reflect changes in Quaker theology and self-representation.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the same work, first published posthumously in 1661, the concluding ‘psalm’, ‘of James, the servant of Jesus … even how the Lord was with him when he was beset with darkness, and assaulted with strong temptation’, is entirely absent.Footnote ⁶¹ Whitehead's introduction and Nayler's recantation were to be the only references to his downfall. Another work originally stated that ‘Christ never believed that he could never be perfect’, but this changed to ‘it is not the faith of Christ to believe that men could never be perfect’. Damrosch believes that the first version represents Nayler's belief that the divine element in Jesus the man brought him to perfection, as it continued to do in the saints.Footnote ⁶² His identification with Christ, when acted out, formed the crux of blasphemy charges against Friends and is considered shortly. The Meeting also took advantage of the republication of the works to address issues relevant to the eighteenth-century reader. Love to the lost, first published in 1656, was amended to include a passage condemning fashions, customs, ‘Feasting, and Riotings, Sports and vain Pleasures’.Footnote ⁶³ The relationship of God and his creation was also inverted to be more acceptable; the creature expecting to be ‘wel-pleased with his Maker’ became ‘well-pleasing to his Maker’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Caution was key to Friends' assertions; editors reading Nayler's ‘yet doth the Sons of God know the Incorruptible body that shall never wax old’ replaced ‘know’ with ‘believe, and in measure understand’.Footnote ⁶⁵

However, more significantly, Damrosch does not consider the content of works that were not republished, ignoring the ‘controversial books’, although these works often included first-generation beliefs unacceptable to later Quakerism. They included subjects as varied as mendicant preaching, other denominations, honour and witchcraft. For example, A dispute between James Nayler and the parish teachers of Chesterfield (1655) called for Friends to follow the will of God, ‘leave all and follow him as wanderers … deny our selves, and worldly Interest’.Footnote ⁶⁶ This posed obvious logistical problems to the later organisation. Vagrants were condemned under the 1601 vagrancy laws, and by the 1680s Friends had to be reminded that ‘sins of Sodom’ included ‘contempt of the poor’.Footnote ⁶⁷ What might be viewed by non-Quakers as disorderly rambling had become unacceptable to a group individually respected in the community, and no longer evangelical but ecumenical in most of their sentiments.Footnote ⁶⁸ Controversy might also have arisen from Something further in answer to John Jackson's book (1655) which claimed that non-Quakers ‘live in pride, oppression and deceipt, [and] gets their words once a weeke’. Nayler's direction that instead they should ‘read Christ … a gazing-stock where ever he comes in flesh … we rejoyce to be counted worthy to suffer with him’Footnote ⁶⁹ is similarly contentious. In one passage alone Nayler condemned non-Quakers, and claimed that Friends were experiencing sufferings comparable to those of Jesus. The following year Nayler again compared Christ's experience of persecution by ‘Priests and people, that lived in pride and fulnesse’ to that of ‘these who follow him … at this day’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Although Fox frequently represented himself as suffering in a Christlike way, with perhaps more basis in Christopresent theology than later orthodoxy admitted,Footnote ⁷¹ Nayler's entry into Bristol made such comparisons inherently dangerous for later Friends.

Another subject of the controversial tracts, criticism of other Interregnum Churches, exhibited the greatest variety of forms. Claiming in one work that the only churchgoers left were ‘prophane persons, swearers, oppressors, drunkards and fighters’,Footnote ⁷² Nayler also attacked the hierarchy of the institution, the falsity, perversity or even diabolic nature of hireling teachers, and their failure to reform themselves satisfactorily. All such criticisms, especially those claiming that clergy were in league with the Devil, were highly inflammatory from the Restoration onwards, when Friends wanted to maintain their good name, and not condemn others as Satan's agents or as pagans. Penney similarly concludes that the probable reason for the omission of comments on Baptists from Fox's Journal was a ‘desire to avoid offence’, although disputations between groups continued in print and occasionally in public.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, the passing of the 1662 act to prevent the printing of seditious literature may have added to fears of persecution; those of the following years were often produced underground as ‘sedition’ could be interpreted to include works deviating from mainstream religious belief.Footnote ⁷⁴ Given Nayler's conviction for blasphemy, such works were perhaps too dangerous to reprint, and in addition were not immediately useful to Friends at a time when ‘mainstream’ Quakerism was attempting to formulate survival strategies.Footnote ⁷⁵ This is usefully demonstrated by consideration of Nayler's work on honour, which, while largely in accordance with the beliefs of later Friends, had arguably been superseded by the works of others.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quakers, both women and men, were regularly exhorted to be honourable in business and modest in appearance. The honour of the world required, for example, ‘hat honour’, a man's removal of his hat upon meeting a social superior. However, Quakers, including William Penn, condemned such behaviour as superfluous and transient, contrasting it with true, permanent honour, which lay in ‘the right ordering of mens Affections and Actions’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Nayler's comments consider the honour of the world, the ‘Spirit of Pride and Flattery’Footnote ⁷⁷ which Friends despised; and that of God which Quakers, as God's people, sought to maintain through impeccable behaviour. In The railer rebuked he actively criticised worldly honour, condemning those practising it as ‘honouring thou knowst not what with the proud cloathing, and the gold ring … this is not in the Lord, but in the earth’. He defined divine honour as ‘that power which is of God, to whom ever he hath placed it without respect of persons’. Friends were to give ‘honour to whom honour is due, But no place for pride, nor the prince of pride’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Elsewhere, Nayler asserted that carnal honour was embodied in the world's oppression of the Friends, ‘a people, which by thy own words are so contemptible’. He concluded that this was because of ‘something in the bottom of greater price … else why should you gather thus from all quarters?’Footnote ⁷⁹ Nayler's expression of his views on honour was part of what Peters has described as ‘a peculiar “Quaker style”’ of the 1650s.Footnote ⁸⁰ His bitter polemic contrasted with the politeness of conduct books written by non-Quaker authors, dealing with ostensibly similar issues. Although later Quakers discussed similar topics, their arguments were less rancorous. The later seventeenth century saw a move from vindictive doctrinal debate towards ‘polite religion’,Footnote ⁸¹ although for Friends this change began after the Restoration, when enthusiastic assertions of infallibility needed to be quashed for the Society to survive. In this respect, Nayler's mode of expression, rather than the content, was contentious, and his ideas reappear in later works. In No cross, no crown (1669) Penn reasserted Nayler's rejection of ‘vain Apparel’ alongside other examples of money and time wasting, including ‘Rich Furnitures’ and ‘vain and unnecessary Visits’.Footnote ⁸² He extended Nayler's arguments against pride in clothing with the scripturally-based assertion that pleasure in apparel was ‘impudently shameless’ as the first garments after the Fall were worn with a sense of shame brought on by sin.Footnote ⁸³ In many ways Nayler and Penn represent contrasting figures of Quaker manhood. Whilst Nayler's behaviour led to his trial for blasphemy, Penn, the son of an admiral, typified respectable post-Restoration Quaker manhood, so his development of these themes arguably made Nayler's comments superfluous.

Finally, although Fox considered witchcraft in his Journal, and Nayler treated it as a known phenomenon, stating that ‘to fore-tell things to come without the Spirit of God is witchery’,Footnote ⁸⁴ by the early eighteenth century it was less likely that Friends would be accused of witchcraft than of schism, heresy or obstinacy. In the 1650s Friends' own prophecies led to accusations of witchcraft, and in response Nayler asserted that his enemies had conspired to convince people that Friends ‘are wizards, because we wil not bow downe to mens person’.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, by 1716 bewitching was no longer a legitimate explanation for the events in Bristol, although Nayler's behaviour had been originally attributed to the witchcraft of one of his female followers, Martha Simmonds.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thus Whitehead asserted that ‘Martha fell into a Passion in a kind of Mourning … which so entered and pierced poor James Nayler, that it smote him down in so much Sorrow … Fears and Doubting then entered him, that he came to be clouded in his Understanding, bewildred, and at a loss in his Judgment.’Footnote ⁸⁷ Whitehead's explanation is complex and to some extent sensitive to the penitent Nayler depicted through the works selected for publication. Although the women present were still blamed, something that Christine Trevett amongst others has seen as an overemphasis,Footnote ⁸⁸ the element of witchcraft had been erased. The explanation instead refers to a spiritual crisis brought on by Nayler's sensitivity to the feelings of others and his naivety in allowing himself to be glorified. His struggle was against the Devil, the ‘subtil Adversary’, who was blamed for the division amongst Friends at the time. The Devil, though, did not take the physical form of non-Quakers, or even ‘turbulous’ women, but was an internal state which only Nayler could fight against to reappear, contrite and humbled. The representation of Nayler's downfall had moved into abstract spiritual and mental realms: rather than as a priest, the Devil appeared as doubt and discord amongst the faithful. Nayler was carefully depicted by Whitehead as being far from Christlike, rather as all too human, an ‘everyman’ figure of the suffering Quaker.Footnote ⁸⁹ Instead of radical manhood, which gave ear to disorderly women, he was reinvented in the mould of later quietism. Through this representation Whitehead could justify, to the Quaker editorial board, and to a readership, that insight and even guidance might be gained from the works of the penitent blasphemer.

That is not to suggest, however, that the works of other significant and prolific early Friends were not reworked. Bailey, in his study of the process of silencing early Quaker radicalism, considers how the group that had accepted itself as a divinised part of God's nobility later considered this belief to be detrimental to the movement and expunged evidence of it from records within Fox's lifetime and with his acceptance, if not his blessing.Footnote ⁹⁰ He confirms Penney's belief that a minority of changes made before the publication of Fox's Journal were substantive, and interprets this as a deliberate attempt to downplay Fox's earlier ‘avatar’ status.Footnote ⁹¹ Such changes had included ‘laudatory’ personal references to FoxFootnote ⁹² and his likening of his sufferings at the hands of clergy, when awaiting trial for blasphemy, to those of Christ.Footnote ⁹³ A renewed emphasis was also placed on the spirit of the Apostles, perhaps as a more cautious way of confirming the continuous experience of Pentecost for the believer.Footnote ⁹⁴ Penn's character sketch of Fox in the preface to his Journal therefore emphasised similarities between Fox's experiences and those of the early Christians: ‘this man of God had his share of suffering’, yet ‘like his blessed Master, he was a servant to all’.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, unlike Fox, Nayler remained a particularly infamous figure. This was due in part to his followers, some of whom remained outcasts because they refused to accept the need to revise the representation of Nayler. Robert Rich, a self-declared disciple, who licked Nayler's wounds after his branding for blasphemy in ‘an extravagant re-enacting of events surrounding the crucifixion’,Footnote ⁹⁶ continued to blame Fox for divisions amongst Friends, and represented Nayler as a Christlike figure taking on the sins of the world to redeem humanity: ‘J. N. took all the blame on himself, and made himself of no reputation … a true Israelite indeed.’Footnote ⁹⁷ In 1669 he published extracts from Nayler's letters in an effort, Smith believes, ‘to keep Nayler's voice of the 1650s alive’.Footnote ⁹⁸ With this ‘association of ex-Naylerites and fellow-traveling enthusiasts’Footnote ⁹⁹ remaining faithful to the memory of Nayler long after his death, it is not surprising that Friends withdrew from the use of exalting language; still less that the controversial books were not reprinted.

Although Damrosch has demonstrated that some tracts included in the volume were silently edited, ‘usually for stylistic reasons but sometimes for significant doctrinal ones’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ for the same reasons others were left out entirely. Indeed, analysis of both the absent works and those included in the Collection highlights changes in theology and social attitudes that developed during the sixty years between the 1650s and 1710s. Friends succeeded in obscuring early forms of Quakerism considered radical, enthusiastic and unsound at the time of editing, confirming that Quaker religious beliefs and social aspirations had altered in the intervening period. The collection was, then, produced in part because of pressure from the remnants of Nayler's followers, ‘only after much debate and with many misgivings’Footnote ¹⁰¹ and not only because of the generosity of Whitehead noted by Damrosch, who depicts it as a result of his solitary labours.Footnote ¹⁰² It was also published in response to external pressures, such as popular images of Friends in plays and anti-Quaker histories from the Restoration. In English popular literature Friends had became a ‘cultural stereotype’Footnote ¹⁰³ and ‘a byword for “false prophets” throughout Europe’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Depicted as the captain of ‘that frantick self-afflicting crew of trembling Quakers’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ by Billingsley in 1658, by the 1670s Nayler was placed alongside notorious figures representing inversions of the social, gender and moral order, including the peasant leaders Watt Tyler and Jack Straw, Pope Joan and the polygamous Anabaptist prophet and sometime king of Münster Jan van Leiden.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Fifty years after his downfall, Friends were still depicted as ‘Brethren of the Quaking Naylor’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Perhaps most significantly, Edward Ward's History of the grand rebellion, first published three years before the Sundry books, included an account of ‘Naylor the Quaking Saint’, depicted as ‘wearing such a forked Beard/And Head of Hair, compos'd as might agree/With those we in the Volto Santo see/Affecting many Phrases which were us'd/By Christ, whose Words and Godhead he abus'd/So far as to blaspheme his Holy Name/By preaching up himself to be the same’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Based on the report of a committee of fifty-five MPs given in December 1656, accusing Nayler of assuming ‘the gestures, words, honour, worship and miracles’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ of Jesus, the durability of this stereotype, ‘the least pliable of literary sorts, the one least sensitive to social vibrations’,Footnote ¹¹⁰ was probably of great concern to Friends who had no control over the content of plays, songs and poetry. They had to weigh up the pros and cons of republishing his works, including the potential of the volume to direct attention away from stock representations, especially those which suggested that he aspired to resemble the volto santo, a crucifix based on the face of Jesus impressed on Veronica's veil, towards the orthodox Quaker depiction of a misled man who truly repented and was, at times, genuinely inspired.

However, more impartial accounts did not necessarily receive universal acceptance. The Dutch Reformed pastor Gerard Croese's General history, written in the early 1690s with the assistance of the Dutch Friend Willem Sewel, and published in Latin in 1695 and in English and German in 1696,Footnote ¹¹¹ was the earliest full-length history of Quakerism, but it fell foul of the Meeting, as it was considered to include ‘some things not true in Fact’.Footnote ¹¹² Sewel described the published version as ‘imperfect and defective’, as Croese ‘knew better’.Footnote ¹¹³ Champion has identified the importance of ‘truth’ to historical writing of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such claims, he suggests, were ‘essential to conveying a political or theological precept in historical form’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although Croese was asked to allow a postscript and corrections, by 1696 news had reached the Meeting that Dutch Friends ‘have Writt Something and intend to print against the s[ai]d History’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This was in part because, as the English manuscript translation revealed, it carried ‘Reflections on Fri[en]ds’, although the printer, John Dunton, was willing to publish an appendix, ‘to correct any false acco[un]ts’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In addition, the apostate Francis Bugg, ‘the bitterest and most persistent’ of the period, had also, by 1697, ‘corrected’ the work, apparently at the request of the Church of England.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Although he claimed that Croese's work had not given ‘an impartial Account … [of] ways and methods by which Quakerism have grown and increased’, he concluded that it was otherwise ‘very well done’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Indeed, he only commented on the sections that he wished to amend, such as the negative depiction of English magistrates.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Tellingly, however, he made no reference to the Nayler incident.Footnote ¹²⁰ Presumably Croese's version was considered damning enough. Tainted by falsehood and Bugg's efforts, the General history had to be superseded by an orthodox account.

Champion has suggested that rival accounts of ecclesiastical history in the Restoration era represent ‘competing human claims’ over ‘the authoritative interpretation of truth’.Footnote ¹²¹ Indeed, on a very practical level post-1689 Quakerism was in direct competition with other denominations for a share of churchgoers, necessary for their claim to a monopoly on Christian interpretation.Footnote ¹²² In this sense, Sewel's History, translated into English and published after considerable amendment in 1722, represents both the Quaker contribution to historical debate and English Quaker claims to such a monopoly. Whilst Locke, who influenced Anglican writers, believed humanity had only been afforded ‘twilight knowledge’, so had to rely upon probabilities,Footnote ¹²³ Sewel considered the ‘time of twilight’ to have ended, as the Protestant Reformation had reached its zenith with Quakerism.Footnote ¹²⁴ Providing a spiritual genealogy for Friends, he asserted that God only gradually enlightened Calvin and Luther as ‘idolatry had so universally blinded mankind … it would have been impossible for them to have understood the declaration of an entirely reformed religion’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Using the analogy of a man kept imprisoned in the dark, Sewel suggested that in the twilight ‘he would by Degrees have learned to discern the Objects and come to an Ability of beholding every Thing in a clear Day aright’. For Friends, the clear day had arrived. The Inner Light of God, inspiring and guiding the believer, meant that history writing was shaped with this in mind, and could be seen as ‘truth’ not only in factual terms, but also as a demonstration of God's Truth, manifested by Friends' spiritual state and deportment. In this respect the History may be seen as a rival account to those of the Whig bishops Gilbert Burnet and Edward Stillingfleet, establishing Quakerism within Reformation history, a subject of ‘persistent importance’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Melinda S. Zook has suggested that the first Whigs, like early Quakers, selected their records in preparation for their earliest histories. They too reiterated the significance of the Protestant Reformation when writing the story of the Revolution, and during the eighteenth century amended earlier representations ‘to further fit their own tastes and concerns’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Burnet's History of his own time (1724) stressed suffering whilst demonising opponents, and Stillingfleet aimed to refute ‘anti-episcopalian visions’ of the history of the Church of England when the relationship between Church, priest and civil sovereignty had become a source of clerical dissension,Footnote ¹²⁸ whilst Sewel's History corroborated claims that the tithe demands of the established Church perpetuated Quaker martyrdom. Indeed, by choosing to rework the title of Bugg's anti-Quaker ‘history of the rise, growth and progress of Quakerism’, Sewel's account of their ‘rise, increase and progress’ reclaimed control over their history. The English version of the Nayler episode is particularly illustrative, showing Friends' rejection of extreme behaviour alongside the depiction of a penitent sinner. Explicitly denying White Kennett's claim in A complete history of England (1706) that he died without signs of repentance, it also demonstrates the extent to which the English Quaker representation of Nayler had become the only one acceptable.Footnote ¹²⁹

Friends did occasionally have contact with such divines, and Whitehead recounted how, in 1695, Burnet had spoken against Quakers in the House of Lords ‘for falsly quoting his Name’ as author of History of the Reformation, in the Low-Countries, which had been cited in a Quaker petition. When Whitehead discovered that this was due to a printer's error, he approached Burnet with proof ‘that the Quakers could have no design, to misrepresent him in the Quotation’. After Whitehead had convinced Burnet that Friends were not atheists, and assured him that they would include the phrases ‘in the Name of God’ and ‘in the Presence of God’ in the affirmation, Burnet ‘promised he would be for us’.Footnote ¹³⁰ During an era of religious disunity, such histories created assurance for Whigs and QuakersFootnote ¹³¹ and, as this case demonstrates, the need to be cited accurately was so important that to misattribute a work might have dire consequences. This underscores the link in the Restoration period between historical and theological accuracy: Friends' appeals were nullified when they were suspected of misrepresenting another's work. For Quakers too, the Interregnum and Restoration needed to be depicted carefully. If, as Champion suggests, ‘the presentation of the past, became a displaced crucible for ideological dispute’Footnote ¹³² then Sewel's genealogy may even have been intended as a corrective to German and Dutch depictions of Quakerism. Works such as Anabaptisticum et enthusiasticum Pantheon (1701–2) borrowed elements from depictions of Münster Anabaptists ‘imprinted on the Lutheran consciousness in exaggerated and grotesque outlines as veritable monsters, set up by the devil as a rival show to the Reformation’.Footnote ¹³³

However, although Dutch Friends did not write against the account of the Nayler episode given in Sewel's Histori, the first full-length history of Quakerism written by a Quaker, it did lead to contention between Dutch and English Friends.Footnote ¹³⁴ English Friends originally considered the manuscript in 1712, when Francis Davis gave an account of Sewel's ‘great & long Industry’. Information about the work in progress had probably been received from the author himself via Thomas Ellwood, to whom Sewel wrote in Latin for several years from around 1710.Footnote ¹³⁵ Indeed, in a letter dated 1710 to the German scholar and separatist Johannes Otto Gluesing, Sewel said that he had laboured since 1696 over the work, which contained examples of such ‘truly Christian fortitude’ that the world would be thunderstruck. In addition, he had subjected all his sources to ‘the rigid rule of truth’, unlike Croese, who had omitted several important elements ‘so that things were made to seem otherwise than they truly were’.Footnote ¹³⁶ In combination with his comments on fortitude, it is probable that for Sewel ‘truth’ meant factual accuracy and use of sources, especially given his assertion that the work would be ‘fortified with many authentic writings … for it is not the mark of a good historian to please the credulous’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Despite this, objections by eminent Friends in 1716 culminated with the request that Sewel's version of Nayler's trial would not ‘be Exposed to Publick View’. A year earlier Sewel had written to the clerk of the London Meeting for Sufferings, Theodor Eccleston, about his dilemma as a Quaker and a historian, revealing that

His obvious disassociation from English Quakers, ‘you as a people’, may have stemmed from frustration with London Friends' rejection of his account of Nayler's fall and decision to rewrite it. Although English Friends held a manuscript section of the Dutch version, no comment on its publication in 1717 is registered.Footnote ¹³⁹ This may explain the lack of attention given to it by scholars such as Damrosch and Knott, who refer only to the English translation, demonstrating the extent to which this has affected the version of Quaker history available to modern scholars.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In 1721 the Morning Meeting commented coolly upon sections of it, presumably available in English, noting that ‘Robert Barclay's Theses, may be a Better Summary of our Principles’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The most significant alteration, though, was made to the Nayler section, and is ‘interesting both for its omissions and additions’.Footnote ¹⁴² The substitute version claimed, upon publication in 1722, to have been ‘revis'd … with some amendments’, fulfilling English ideas of orthodoxy.Footnote ¹⁴³ Arguably this was achieved by moving from Sewel's ‘truth’, based in part on reproduction of sources and factual accuracy, to Truth, by rooting Nayler and all he had come to stand for firmly in the Quakerism of the eighteenth century. Appearing only a few years after the Sundry books, it was imperative that the official History depict Nayler in a similar way to Whitehead, and this is evident when the Dutch and English editions are compared.

One of the most significant differences is the lack of footnotes in the Dutch original. They are especially important in the English edition, as they clarify Nayler's status. A footnote about his father, a husbandman ‘of good Repute’, accompanies a description of his ‘honest parents’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Husbandry, for eighteenth-century Friends, represented a spiritual and moral state, even for those who were not husbandmen by occupation. As part of the tithe testimony, ‘the imagery and language of husbandry’ contrasted an exploitative clergy with productive husbandmen.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Champion has suggested that the use of footnoting had originated in the late seventeenth century as ‘the attempt to accredit a particular text with authority … an image of transparent truth’ so that those without references became suspected as fictional, or untrue.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Whilst Freethinkers and Anglicans vied to provide ‘the more creditworthy account of the truth’,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Sewel's History aimed to provide Truth itself, albeit after several attempts. Perhaps also because of this shift in emphasis, the English edition does not include several letters about Nayler, including a petition by Robert Rich.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Although used by Sewel to demonstrate his probity as a historian by ‘anchoring the text in probable reality’ and as a form of testimony,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ the individuals named were presumably thought unsuitable by the Morning Meeting: Rich had been expelled from Quakerism partly for his unorthodox view of Nayler's trial and sentence as a form of martyrdomFootnote ¹⁵⁰ and unofficial pro-Nayler histories of the ‘innocent, humble holy meek’ and ‘Thrice blessed Saint’Footnote ¹⁵¹ were still appearing in the early eighteenth century. Orthodox Quakerism needed an official version laced with footnotes to prove that although Nayler was not holy, he did come from respectable stock and was manipulated into blasphemy. Thus Sewel's original assertion that Nayler resembled ‘our Saviour in the letter of Publius Lentelus [sic] written to the Senate of Rome’Footnote ¹⁵² was removed. Although early Quakers had ‘a fondness’ for this description,Footnote ¹⁵³ later Friends prudently wished to disassociate themselves from it.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Only a few years earlier Ward had alleged that Nayler's blasphemy lay partly in his use of early Christian texts to resemble Christ. Indeed, Knott's assertion that ‘Sewel's work illustrates the growing tendency to omit the excesses of early Quakers’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ itself illustrates the success of the Meeting in silently amending works.

However, the desire of the Meeting to control the image of English Quakerism is most apparent in the 1742 German edition.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ English Friends had been particularly keen to prevent the Dutch Histori from reaching Germany, ‘where we have been greatly misrepresented by some adversaries’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ ‘Misrepresentations’ included Blome's Historia and other works in the Pantheon, a ‘spiritual armoury’ against Quakers.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Such works borrowed elements from depictions of German Anabaptists, and included illustrations of Nayler's entry into Bristol, with verses highlighting the role of his female followers, possibly alluding to the polygamist van Leiden.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ After the rejection of Croese's Quaker-Historie, no official account in German existed until Sewel's Geschichte was ‘newly revised and published with some corrections’, a direct translation from the English with little mention of the Dutch original.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ English Quakerism had, in this respect, become the adjudicator of orthodoxy, with English the language of Quaker belief. Although, as Bailey suggests, written history may ‘validate a faith experience’, discord between believers led in this case to the suppression of other accounts.Footnote ¹⁶¹

By the time that Nayler's works were republished individual Friends were respected figures in the community, but it was still relatively easy for enemies to refer to the group of young radicals who in the 1650s had not been pacifist, had openly condemned other denominations and had been accused of blasphemy for their religious principles, some of which they later rejected. As Peters concludes, ‘Nayler cast a long shadow over the movement’,Footnote ¹⁶² but it was longer and more influential than she suggests. The content of his works had to justify their publication as those of an eminent early Friend, and had to reflect eighteenth-century orthodoxy. The Collection could then be read by, amongst others, sympathetic outsiders who would find their preconceptions of Nayler refuted by the piety and orthodoxy of his writings, and a historical account that avoided his more contentious affiliations and emphasised his status alongside other early Quakers as a spiritual husbandman. Nayler was still, however, a controversial figure. In 1732, almost a century later, the bishop of Lichfield commended his punishment for blasphemy.Footnote ¹⁶³ Amongst Friends, though, the dying words of the suffering penitent remained a source of inspiration. Cuthbert Wigham, a Northumberland convert, took comfort when persecuted for his tithe testimony in the 1730s from Nayler's deathbed assertion, reproduced in Sewel's History, that ‘There is a spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong; but delights to endure all things.’Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Twentieth-century theologians proclaimed Nayler ‘the most alert Quaker theologian’ before Barclay, his writings ‘a sure canon’ of original Quakerism,Footnote ¹⁶⁵ but Barclay and Penn came to represent respectable, peaceable manhood, idealised in publications of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whilst Nayler's works, unlike his repentance, remained underappreciated. As those of a former Quaker radical, they had to be scrutinised and edited before they could be viewed by the sympathetic and the critical alike.