London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World

The Creation of an Early Modern Community

J. Landes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137366689
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne

This book explores the Society of Friend's Atlantic presence through its creation and use of networks, including intellectual and theological exchange, and through the movement of people. It focuses on the establishment of trans-Atlantic Quaker networks and the crucial role London played in the creation of a Quaker community in the North Atlantic.

1

Quaker Institutional Structures

The establishment of the Gospel Order made possible the travelling ministry and political activity of the Josiah, from the approval and support of Thomas Chalkley, William Ellis, Aaron Atkinson, and Thomas Turner to regular correspondence and lobbying in support of Maryland Friends. The following three chapters explore the activity of the London Yearly Meeting and its constituent meetings and their impact on emerging Quaker trans-Atlantic networks, examining how these meetings created and maintained a trans-Atlantic community with the goal of a unified faith. The Second Day’s Morning Meeting (Morning Meeting) and the Meeting for Sufferings, collectively known as the ‘London meetings for discipline’,¹ became essential to the flow of communication between London and more distant meetings, and chapters 1–3 describe how the meetings developed and utilized networks to enable communication. The structure of communication that developed between the London Yearly Meeting and colonial meetings required a level of control by the meetings for discipline over the religious message distributed throughout the Quaker Atlantic world. Furthermore, reception and acceptance of that message by colonial Friends relied on a sense of community strengthened by the London Yearly Meeting’s networks. These trans-Atlantic networks were tested several times when colonial Quakers were challenged from within, but also by forces from outside the faith, and those situations allow historians to assess the London Yearly Meeting’s levels of control over the trans-Atlantic religious message. For example, the controversy surrounding George Keith provoked an Atlantic-wide response from the London Yearly Meeting, the Morning Meeting, and the Meeting for Sufferings, who addressed his schismatic ideas. The Meeting for Sufferings lobbied not just Parliament and the Board of Trade, but also the King, in the case of anti-Quaker laws in the colony of Maryland. Through various challenges to Quakers, the London Yearly Meeting relied on its own methods of communication for sending and receiving information and responses, with its position in London key to the delivery of the Quaker religious and political message.

The London Yearly Meeting, and especially its meetings for discipline, dominated information exchange and distribution of Quaker doctrine and beliefs following their creation, but the origins of Quaker trans-Atlantic networks predated their establishment. Travelling Quakers and Quakers in England maintained contact through letters and accounts of their travels beginning in the 1650s, laying the foundations of the London Yearly Meeting’s networks. Even after the creation of the meetings for discipline, there was parallel activity to the London Yearly Meeting’s trans-Atlantic activity, such as that by Quakers in Bristol, as well as in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Furthermore, other meetings in London had connections to Quaker trans-Atlantic activity, such as the London Six Weeks Meeting and the Box Meeting, sometimes sharing networks and sometimes developing their own. Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic strove to maintain contact with one another even before the establishment of the Gospel Order. Tolles states that this first period of Quaker trans-Atlantic travel and ministry lasted from 1655 to 1662, during which time the concern was focused on spreading the Quaker beliefs to the colonies.² Margaret Fell at Swarthmoor Hall in Cumbria served as a central point to which correspondence and reports were sent.³ Among the earliest trans-Atlantic communications were the writings and letters to Fell, Fox and other leading Quakers in England from travelling Quaker ministers and Friends who settled in the American and Caribbean colonies. The collection of early Quaker documents known as the ‘A. R. Barclay Manuscripts’ holds the account of Robert Fowler’s journey to New Amsterdam in 1657 and reports of Thomas Thurston, Josiah Coale, and Thomas Chapman in the Chesapeake in 1658. The majority of the collection is composed of letters, some of which predate the establishment of the central London meetings for discipline.⁴ The letters include those from travelling ministers, frequently with reports of their journals and success, as well as the state of Quakerism in particular colonies. Two letters contain descriptions of attempts to purchase land for Quaker settlement; that of Josiah Coale in 1660 from Maryland to George Fox in England, discussing attempts to buy ‘a peece of land of the Sussquahana Indians’;⁵ and that of Frances Danson of Nansemond, Virginia, to George Fox, describing her discussion with local native chiefs, and that ‘the[y] wil sel my Frinds any land the[y] have’.⁶ A large part of the collection originated from Barbados, Virginia, and Maryland, demonstrating early Quaker interest in the Atlantic world.

Friends were inspired to cross the Atlantic in the ministry as early as 1655, when John Audland wrote to Margaret Fell that ‘[m]any are raised up and moved for several parts; there are four from hereaway moved to go for New England’.⁷ In 1656, George Fox’s journal read that ‘Alsoe this yeere there was established & ordered for generall Collections to be [F]or the service of truth & Friends that travailed beyond the seas: through all the nation … about the 3d moth 57.’⁸ Ministers from Bristol, Yorkshire, and London travelled to various colonies before 1662.⁹ Their correspondence included travel accounts, as well as reports from colonial meetings, as in Coale’s 1660 letter to Fox reporting that Maryland ‘meetings are pretious’.¹⁰ Surviving manuscripts also include communications exchanged by travelling Quakers, colonial Quakers, and English Quakers, demonstrating that trans-Atlantic networks existed as early as 1655, when the first Quaker ministers travelled to the Caribbean, New England, and Maryland. For example, George Rofe wrote to Richard Hubberthorne in Barbados in 1661 that Rofe had travelled to Bermuda, Maryland, and Virginia, from where he reported there were ‘many Friends … in those p[ar]ts in whom the pretious life is’.¹¹ Travelling ministers had introduced Quakerism to Barbados and Maryland a decade before the Testimony of the Brethren, and Quaker networks existed before the Gospel Order did. Once established, the Gospel Order influenced Quaker Atlantic networks, reinforcing connections through exchange of discipline and news, creating the framework of the trans-Atlantic Quaker community.

The Second Day’s Morning Meeting

Ministers from around England first met in 1658, then in several years following, including a ‘mighty meeting’ composed of many ministers in June 1671.¹² The minutes of the London Yearly Meeting began with a meeting in the eleventh month of 1668 in London, but the next meeting recorded in the minutes was a ‘Generall Meeting At Devonshire House’ in the third month of 1672.¹³ The 1672 meeting decided that the purpose of the meeting was to ‘nominate and appoint the Number of friends aforesaid there to advise about the Manageing of the Publick affaires of friends throughout the Nation’, establishing that ‘the friends to be chosen for the aforesaid be advised to be at London by the 2d day at night of Whitsun week soe called in every yeare at furthest’.¹⁴ Two ministering Friends from each county would attend, with three from Bristol, two from Colchester, and six from London agreed. Over several days, the attendees discussed financial issues, discipline, publication and distribution of books, and anything that had an impact on Friends, meeting mostly at Devonshire House in Bishopsgate in London, but occasionally at the Bull and Mouth on Aldersgate Street or at the Gracechurch Street Meetinghouse. Issues of Friends ‘beyond Seas’ were discussed in detail, including topics like the distribution of books, general and religious news, and monetary help for Friends abroad. Meeting for a few days once a year meant that the London Yearly Meeting relied on the Morning Meeting and Meeting for Sufferings as administrators during the rest of the year, under the authority of the London Yearly Meeting, managing correspondence, printing and distribution, the travelling ministry, and cases of persecution.

After their creation, the Morning Meeting and the Meeting for Sufferings continued the practice of communicating with Quakers in the Caribbean and American colonies via Fox, Fell, and others.¹⁵ Fox, perhaps recognizing the ill health that led to his death in 1691, wrote the following to the Morning Meeting in the February 1690/1691:

All Friends in all the World that used to write to me of all manner of things and Pasages and I did Answer them – Let them all Writte to the 2.d dayes meeting in London and Directing of them first to Correspond[ent]s there, and to the Second dayes Meeting in London for them to Answer them in the Wisdom of God, And for a Coppy of this be Sent to all places in the World among Friends, that they may know and Understand this And for the Yearly and half Yearly Letters and papers that cometh once a Year to the Yearly meeting at London, And they to see that all be carefully Read and Answered in the Truth and Righteousness to the glory of God and to the comfort and refreshment of all his People.¹⁶

In addition to maintaining communications, members of the Morning Meeting took part in the reading and approving of books, as well as the approving of ministers, and members of the Meeting for Sufferings took part in recording sufferings, lobbying government, and handling finances. Although each meeting’s original responsibilities were different from the other, their activities overlapped, especially when dealing with trans-Atlantic communication.

The Second Day’s Morning Meeting gradually became responsible for the outward face of Quakerism that emerged following the Testimony of the Brethren and the emergence of the Gospel Order. The roots of the Morning Meeting can be traced to the nascent Quaker travelling ministry and to Margaret Fell’s establishment of the Kendal Fund in 1654 when the growing ministry often carried religious writings, both handwritten and printed, which had been read and approved by early Quaker leaders. However, the precise origins of the Morning Meeting are somewhat uncertain. The London Yearly Meeting of 1900 did not know the details of the creation of the Morning Meeting, simply stating that the Meeting’s minutes began in September 1673, ‘not by the appointment of any other Meeting, although it was recognized by the Yearly Meeting at an early date’.¹⁷ Braithwaite writes that George Fox himself set up the Morning Meeting, which Braithwaite bases on a 1676 letter from Fox to London Women Friends: ‘I was not moved to set up that meeting to make orders against the reading of my papers; but to gather up bad books that was scandalous against Friends; and to see that young Friends’ books that was sent to be printed might be stood by.’¹⁸ Composed solely of men with experience in the ministry, the meeting was responsible for the editing and publication arrangements of works written by Quakers, an assumption of the previous authority of scattered Quaker leaders, such as Margaret Fell and Thomas Aldam, in the 1650s.¹⁹ Where Aldam and Fell had previously used their contacts with London printers, such as Giles Calvert and Thomas Simmonds,²⁰ the Morning Meeting interceded with the London printers for Quaker authors, and also read, edited, and even censored Quaker works. As stated by Fox, the Morning Meeting initially collected anti-Quakeriana, but also took the occasional step of assigning authors to write responses to it.

All members of the Morning Meeting were ministers, those who felt moved to preach the gospel as Quakers understood it, most of whom had travelled at least throughout England preaching.²¹ A membership composed solely of ministers committed to spreading the faith was knowledgeable of the emerging set of Quaker beliefs and experienced in the challenges faced by travelling ministry. Early members included James Claypoole, Gilbert Layty, and Clement Plumsted, all former travelling ministers. Some attendees appeared in the minutes a few times, while some ministers were more regular members who performed the majority of the meeting’s tasks. For example, Theodor Eccleston’s first entry in the minutes was in the fifth month of 1694 and he continued to read submitted writings, as well as receive and answer letters and epistles from abroad, through to 1725. James Claypoole, who hosted several early Morning Meetings at his home, disappeared from the minutes with his removal to Philadelphia in 1683. The Morning Meeting was also made up of Friends with trans-Atlantic interests, some even born in the American or Caribbean colonies, like William Wilkinson and Richard Partridge. Some members were merchants, such as William Warren and Simeon Warner, and some members had other international interests, such as Clement Plumsted, a proprietor of East Jersey, and John Edridge, who leased land in West Jersey.²² In essence, the Morning Meeting members were already looking outward from England, providing the meeting with experience and knowledge of Quaker communities abroad; insight into the unpredictable nature of shipping and travel, shipping regulations and laws; and, in some cases, contacts in other countries and among those in the maritime trades. The Meeting’s base in London meant that attendees were either London Quakers or visitors to London, giving the meeting something of a London perspective.

Throughout the 1650s, Quakers published tracts and books with great frequency. The earliest of the Quaker publications were the letters of travelling Friends in the ministry, and these were intended to spread news and to bolster faith among Quakers around England.²³ Furthermore, as the geographic range of Quaker ministers increased, so did the number of Quaker publications.²⁴ Papers and publications were more safely and easily se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Quaker Institutional Structures
• 2. Communicating Religion with Friends ‘Beyond the Seas’
• 3. Communicating Politics with Friends ‘Beyond the Seas’
• 4. Quaker Merchants and Trans-Atlantic Commercial Activity in London
• 5. The Trans-Atlantic Quaker Book Trade
• 6. Movement of People in the Quaker Atlantic
• 7. Colonial Perceptions
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Books Most Frequently Shipped by the Morning Meeting to Colonial Quakers
• Appendix 2: Ministers from England with Approval or Acknowledgement from the Morning Meeting to Travel to the Americas
• Appendix 3: London Quaker Merchants in this Study
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index