by Graham Taylor.
What follows is the text of the lecture delivered to the Quaker Socialist Society by Zoom on 04 November, 2024. Unlike the first posting of the text on 21 November, this version is accompanied by extensive footnotes. They have been added in response to several requests for more information.
George Fox – The First Quaker Socialist?
This year is the 400th anniversary of George Fox’s birth. Quaker Socialists will naturally ask themselves how socially radical was Fox? Was he the first Quaker Socialist?
Strictly speaking, historians cannot say Fox was a Quaker ‘Socialist’. To say someone in the 17th century was ‘socialist’ is anachronistic. The word did not appear in print until 1827. ‘Socialism’ was a reaction to the rise of capitalism and of an industrial working class. None of that applies to the 17th century. There was no working class in the 17th century and no large-scale industry.1 Instead, there were aristocratic landowners, rich merchants, self-employed artisans, agricultural labourers, servants, and slaves.
There is an alternative approach. The British Quaker, John Bellers,2 who died in 1725, and the American Quaker, John Woolman,3 who died in 1772, have both been called ‘pioneers of Quaker socialism’. Maybe Fox was a pioneer too? All three use the language of social justice and equality. Bellers, praised by Karl Marx and Robert Owen,4 knew Fox personally and his last publication was a reprint of George Fox’s Advice… Concerning the Poor.5
Some are appalled by the idea that early Quakerism was socialistic. They say Quakerism is a religion, pure and simple, and has nothing to do with politics. That was certainly not true in the 17th century. Quakerism was at the same time both religious and political, because in Fox’s time the Church was the religious arm of the state. Think of a country like Iran today, where the religious question and the political question are the same question.
Fox was born in Leicestershire in 1624. His father was a weaver and he was apprenticed as a shoemaker. The family was quite well-off, and related to the Pickering family, rich merchants, some of whom were Brownists associated with the Mayflower. The Brownists wanted to separate from the Anglican church and were still called ‘Separatists’ in Fox’s youth. They hated the established Church because it enforced compulsory attendance on Sunday, persecuted dissenters in special courts, and had upper-class clergy educated at Oxford or Cambridge, arranged in a hierarchy of bishops. Brownists often referred to the Church simply as “the hierarchy”. It was a class question. The Brownists, just like the Quakers, were from the lower middle class: weavers, tailors, carpenters, or shoemakers, like Fox himself.6
When Fox was 18 a revolution began in London and the Church began to disintegrate. On all sides people set up their own churches. As a religious young man, in terrible anxiety about his spiritual condition, Fox was faced with the problem of which church was right, and which wrong, and in 1643 he left home, for London, in search of the Truth. Those who have read his Journal will remember how he travelled on horseback and on foot through an England torn by civil war, and plodded from one church to another eager for answers, but often in tears of despair, until he decided the best thing to do was to trust the inward light of Christ in his own heart.7
According to Fox, this ‘Truth’, as he called it, spread first in Leicestershire in 1644, and then spread to Nottinghamshire in 1646 and Derbyshire in 1647. By 1649, he says, there was a “great convincement” in the East Midlands. Decisive for the progress of the Truth was his move to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire in 1647. As William Braithwaite points out, Mansfield is near to Scrooby, the base of the Mayflower Pilgrims, and Sturton le Steeple, home of Pastor John Robinson, who famously said the Bible was not God’s last word after all, and there was “more light” from God to be expected.8 In Mansfield Fox ran a business repairing shoes and it was there that he finally resolved the problems that had been haunting him. He discovered he could learn from Christ directly without the help of any church. In a flash the problem of which church to go to ceased to exist.
In Mansfield his spiritual progress was assisted by a woman called Elizabeth Hooton who had initially been attached to a group of Baptists and Brownists. At her house in Skegby Fox was introduced to the silent worship practised by the ‘Children of Light’.9 Some say Hooton was the founder of Quakerism, not Fox, who was only 23.10 This may in fact be true, but it was Fox’s phenomenal preaching that made the difference. Lewis Diman says of Fox: “In person he was large; his eyes were bright and piercing, and his voice powerful enough to command the attention of the most tumultuous assemblage.”911 By 1649, says Braithwaite, “Fox had already become the leader of the Nottinghamshire Children of Light”.12
Fox’s spiritual breakthrough in 1647 was at the peak of the political revolution, midway between the execution of Archbishop Laud in 1645 and the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Ruth Fry strikes a balance. She says Fox was primarily religious but his message was actually social because he dared to tell “the ordinary man and woman” that “they could find God without priest or book”.13 Dispensing with priests and the Bible rendered the Church pretty redundant at a time when the state depended on the Church for both political support and social control. Barry Reay sums up: “From the start the Quaker movement was a movement of political and social as well as religious protest.”14
By now it can be no surprise that Fox’s first public speech was a campaign against low wages.15 He had been preaching in Mansfield when he heard that the local Justices were about to fix wages at what nowadays would be called a tribunal. Fox says that as soon as he heard this, he ran eight miles “as fast as I could” to warn them that they should not fix wages below what was just and equitable.16 Yet his sense of social justice was part of his visionary religion, for he says that at this time he saw “an ocean of darkness and death”, but together with “an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness”.17 This light and love swamping darkness was to make Quakerism an optimistic religion, able to promote both personal salvation and social change.
Fox had allies for his sense of social justice, the so-called ‘Levellers’ down in the South of England. Levellers called for religious toleration, for extending the vote to the majority of adult males, and for civil rights. They had to be taken seriously by the authorities because they were supported by several regiments in the army and by much of the population in London. They became close to the Quakers and their leader, John Lilburne, was converted to Quakerism in 1656. An offshoot of the Levellers in Surrey was the Diggers. They were called Diggers because they dug common land in an enterprise later hailed as ‘socialist’. Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, seems to have become a Quaker around 1654 and his death was noted in Quaker records. Just like Bellers, Winstanley and Lilburne are Quakers regarded as ‘pioneers of socialism’ and, tellingly, all three were associates of George Fox.
In 1649 the English Revolution reached the end of the road. Charles I was executed, and Parliament abolished both the monarchy and the House of Lords. A republic, called the ‘Commonwealth’, was declared. Fox supported these measures, though not the execution of the king. Unfortunately, tragedy now ensued. As often happens in history the triumph of a revolution is followed by the destruction of its most radical elements. Leveller soldiers were now executed in Burford; Winstanley’s Diggers were dispersed by force in Surrey; and Fox was imprisoned first in Nottingham, and then in Derby for nearly a year. Significantly, Levellers, Diggers and Quakers were all attacked at the same time. The Marxist historian, Edward Bernstein, explains that the Quakers, Levellers and Diggers, were the extreme left of the revolution, and that is why the authorities cracked down on all three.18
In the long run the purge benefited the Quakers, who proved more difficult to wipe out. According to Christopher Hill, the Levellers were destroyed but the remnants crossed over to the Quakers. Similarly, the crackdown in the army meant Fox became popular with rank-and-file soldiers, and soldiers in Derby even demanded Fox be made their captain.19 By now the Children of Light were being called ‘Quakers’ and by 1652 the Quakers were expanding out of their Midlands base into Yorkshire and Cumbria. By 1654 Quakers were in London, and Bristol, and had reached the south coast.
At first Londoners did not know what to make of the weird Quakers who when they met their social superiors would not take off their hats, and who spoke to their betters rudely with ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ instead of the respectful ‘you’.20 They must have found George Fox just as rude. In his pamphlet, News Coming up out of the North, Fox wrote that, of all thieves, the rich man is the “greatest thief”. When rich men appeared in court they were not asked to remove their hats, so why then should the poor? Fox also attacked priests: “Woe is to all who… take tithes… you are them that appear beautiful outwardly to men, but are full of poison within… you are they who say and do not, you are those that lay heavy burdens upon the people.” In his sarcastic pamphlet, To the High and Lofty Ones, Fox bitterly attacked the games and sports enjoyed by the rich in the face of all the poverty around them. In The Basis of Truth, Fox denounced the land-grabbers who enclosed the people’s land: Woe unto you, “that set your rents on high, join house to house, field to field, till there be no place [left] for the poor.”21
In 1657 Fox turned his righteous anger on London itself. In his pamphlet, To All the Magistrates of London, he wrote: You “that are called Christians – your blind men, widows, and fatherless children crying up and down [the streets] half a dozen together for bread… Is not this a shame for your Christianity? How dwelleth the love of God in you? … Surely you know that [we] are all of one Mould and Blood that dwell upon the Face of the Earth. Would not a little out of your abundance and superfluity maintain these poor Children some Lame and Blind, or set them at work that can work, and they that cannot, find a place of relief for them?” Note that here Fox, in appealing for aid to be given to beggars and disabled children, is not asking passers-by to give charity. He is making a political point directly at the magistrates of the City. He is asking them to find work for the beggars and provide children’s homes for disabled children. This is ethical socialism. Fox tells them: “You all are members of one body, the poor as well as the rich. For consider what abundance of riches is in this city, and what good you might do with it… What doth all your pleasures and sumptuous fares and apparel avail you, dogs have more compassion upon the poor than you.”
In his 1658 pamphlet, A Warning to the Merchants of London, Fox tells the merchants not to cheat the poor: “Away with all… your buying and selling, and Sir, and bow the Hat, and scrape the foot, and make the cour(t)sie, and [saying] Master, and Mistris, in your service, and forsooth”; and then asking double the true price. “Fear God, and do that which may be an honour to you, and Christianity, and your City; and in all your Shops, and Ware-Houses, and Exchanges, keep to your words… for this City hath a… bad report of deceitful Merchandise, which deceives the [poor] Country people.” He advises shop-keepers: “Commend yourselves to the innocent and simple, that a child may come among you and not be wronged.” Again he calls not for charity, but for public provision: “Have a place provided that all the poor, blind, lame creeples should be put into, and Nurses set over them, and looked to, cherished, and seen unto that they do not want… that there should not be seen a beggar walk up and down the streets, but that there might be a place where they might be maintained.”22
Fox was also scathing about injustice to women. In one church a priest was asked whether members of the congregation could speak, and he said yes. But then, says Fox indignantly, a woman rose “and the priest said to her, I permit not a woman to speak in the church… Whereupon I was wrapped up, as in a rapture, in the Lord’s power… For the woman asking a question, he ought to have answered it, having given liberty for any to speak.”
In a court a judge referred to Fox by the contemptuous term, ‘sirrah’, aimed sarcastically at a socially inferior person who was not a ‘sir’. Fox says he told him: “I was none of his sirrahs, I was a Christian; and for him, an old man and a judge, to sit there and give nicknames to prisoners it did not become him either his grey hairs or his office.” ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I am a Christian too.’ ‘Then do Christian works’, said I.”
A priest told Fox that in the Bible people paid their tithes. Fox replied that there was a difference between the Jews in the Bible and Anglican priests. The Jews took tithes for the relief of the poor and had store-houses for relief of the poor if there was a famine, but Anglican priests just took money for their own purposes. You take tithes and fees from the people, he railed at the priest, and “your actions make you stink in the country”.23
Fox was against the monarchy, and was opposed to Cromwell accepting the crown. He thought it was anti-Christian to have a king. Those who favoured a monarchy, he said, were “ignorant and foolish people” and talk of keeping the House of Lords, he said, was “dirty, nasty talk”.24 Fox also wanted Oxford and Cambridge universities to be closed down, because they trained the clergy to enjoy a life of ease at the expense of the poor. This puts Fox far to the left of a Tony Benn, or a Jeremy Corbyn…
In 1659, after the Cromwell government collapsed but before the restoration of the monarchy, the country descended into virtual anarchy, and this brief moment of freedom was perhaps the only time in his life that Fox was completely free to set out what he truly believed. The pamphlet he wrote is called 59 Particulars laid down for the Regulating things and the taking away of Oppressing Laws, and Oppressors, and to ease the Oppressed. He addressed it to Parliament; it is his manifesto; and it is the most radical political programme ever published by a Quaker. Taking for granted the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, Fox’s main points are: abolition of tithes (thus ending the wealth of the Church); no use of Latin in legal proceedings, only English (so that the poor can understand); no imprisonment for not doffing a hat or for saying thou (to so- called superiors), or for refusing to swear an oath (which assumes Quakers, or the lower class, do not tell the truth); no capital punishment for any crimes against property (the poor could be hung for theft); no fines for failing to attend church; no prisoners left to rot in jail in “their own dung, and Piss”; some church lands to be given to the poor, and church buildings used for the disabled; fines taken by the lords of the manor to be given to the poor because the “Lords have enough” already; the poor and disabled provided for so there are no longer any beggars; and England become “equal with the Jews” in providing social welfare; in addition an end of saints days and holy days including Easter and Christmas; a ban on sports, theatres, gambling, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, public music (as these were then for the urban leisured class, not the labouring class); and lands taken already by the priests from the poor to be restored to them.
In July Parliament negated Fox’s Particulars by endorsing tithes. As this was his top demand, he was devastated. It must have dawned on him then that what was coming down the track was an extremely reactionary regime. Sure enough, there followed the restoration of the church and the monarchy, and worst of all, the election of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’, which imposed on the political left a systematic code of persecution. There was even a ‘Quaker Act’, specifically aimed at Quakers. Over the next 36 years, 13,562 Quakers were imprisoned, and 338 died either in prison or from ill-treatment. On top of that, heavy fines were imposed repeatedly on Quakers all over the country, and 198 Quakers were transported. Remarkably, Quaker membership increased but their militancy was muted. Fox could have continued to defy the law but this persecution was collective: it was no longer just himself who would suffer. In London there were constant raids by soldiers on the Quakers, whenever they dared to put their heads above the parapet. If it had not been for the Quaker declaration of pacifism in 1661, and the support they received from the king, it could have been much worse.25
An example of how difficult it was for Quakers under the Great Persecution was the question of slavery. In 1657 Fox had written an epistle, To Friends beyond the sea that have Blacks and Indian Slaves, in which he said slaves should be treated well, be given religious instruction and not used for profit. He reminded Quakers in the West Indies that God “has made all nations of one blood, and enlightened every man that came into the world”. They should also remember the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would be done by”.26
Quakers arriving in America had found the circumstances difficult. They found slavery was already well established; it was well endorsed in the Bible; and, worst of all, the powerful pro-slavery lobby in London made sure Parliament protected the slave trade. Anyone who challenged slavery would have to deal with brutal suppression and, ultimately, British troops. That is why when Fox visited the West Indies and North America in 1671 he presented a carefully crafted four-step policy: firstly, Quaker slave-owners should treat Negroes well, just like members of their family; secondly, they should train them in the Christian religion; thirdly, they should free them from slavery as soon possible; fourthly, when they freed them, they should give them enough property, or money, to survive.27 Quakers knew this policy was problematic because the chances were that any slave freed would soon be re-enslaved and sold on. Fox also had the problem of how long should he say it might be before slaves were freed. At first he gave a long period. Later, he made reference to the Hebrew slaves in the Bible who were freed after 6 years.28
Nonetheless, Fox came out against the slave trade and asked for slaves to be freed. The 1679 Yearly Meeting reflected this when it called slave traders “a sort of men more inhuman, cruel and brutish than some beasts”. Fox also responded to the first signs in the Caribbean of developing racism and gave this advice: “So now consider, do not slight them, to wit, the Ethiopians, the blacks now, neither any man or woman upon the face of the earth; in that Christ died for all, both Turks, Barbarians, Tartarians, and Ethiopians; he died for the [Indians] and for the blacks as well as for you that are called whites.”29
Despite Fox’s careful words, another Quaker leader, Edmundson, was more outspoken against slavery and a backlash against Quakers was unleashed. They were accused of stirring up slaves to rebellion and in 1675, when there was an uprising by some slaves, this was blamed on the Quakers and Quakers were physically attacked, even killed. By 1680 Quakers in Barbados were closed down. They were banned from holding religious meetings of any kind.
The reason Fox’s policy was hated by the authorities was not because he urged Quakers to free slaves after a while, but because he told Quakers to convert them to Christianity. Christians had legal rights but heathens did not. As Hilary Hinds says, the authorities knew that conversion to Christianity led to freedom, as it was legally “forbidden for one Christian to enslave another”.30
In recent years the Quakers’ outstanding record on slavery has been attacked for political reasons, but Fox’s policy, followed by Penn and others, was praised by the abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson. Later, when the black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, listed the ten people “most distinguished of those who early on struggled against slavery” he included Fox in the ten.31 Christopher Hill says Fox was “one of the first Englishmen to declare publicly against slavery”32 and Brycchan Carey says, if Fox had not started Quakers on an anti-slavery tack in 1657, the anti-slavery achievement of 18th century Quakers might never have happened.33
Fox did not have an easy life. He was beaten up several times, imprisoned eight times and endured in all nearly six years in prison. At one point he was close to execution and at another close to being made a slave himself. Yet he wrote some 300 pamphlets, dictated his world famous Journal, and he lived to see Quakers in America, Germany and the Turkish Empire.
In 1691 Fox died, and William Penn addressed 2,000 people at his funeral. Penn loved Fox but recalled a character quite different from the fire-brand in the pamphlets. He said Fox was “so meek, contented, modest, easy, steady, tender, it was a pleasure to be in his company”.34 This was clearly another side to the prophetic preacher who denounced the monarchy, the House of Lords, the landowners, the city merchants, the lawyers, and the priests. But circumstances had changed as well. One reason Fox died “contented” was that he lived long enough to witness in 1688 a second revolution, and another king overthrown. The Toleration Act of 1689 ended the Great Persecution. Quakers and others were now free to run their own Meetings, though still excluded from public life. This was what Quakers, and the Brownists before them, had been demanding for a century. Significantly, with religious freedom also came political freedom for Parliament, freedom for the merchants from royal monopolies and freedom of speech. There were still unjust restrictions, and Fox must have been sad that the tithe-tax was still retained, but overall in his final years he witnessed progress and even success.
Some have said Fox was a mystic but if he was a mystic, he was not only a mystic. Mystics sit on mountain-tops or down in the desert, but Fox’s Quakers sat in the Bull and Mouth Tavern, their headquarters in central London.35 The Levellers did not join Quakers because they were mystics, but because they were social activists.
Edward Grubb says Fox would have strongly objected to any distinction made between ‘social’ and ‘religious’.36 So how did Fox connect the two? It was not , as is sometimes said, through ‘Inner Light’ or ‘something of God in everybody’. He did not connect these with social equality and both of those tags, though worthy, are static and passive. What Fox saw was new light flooding inward from Christ, and bringing with it a power to set things right, a power that spilled over from the individual into social causes. The power to overcome personal problems was also a power to improve the world. This ‘moral perfectionism’, within and without, was optimistic and practical in everyday life and it distinguishes Quakers from other denominations. Grubb expresses it this way: everyone has access to the Light; a “universal and saving Light”, and therefore “the ‘Children of the Light’ and Fox in particular, “without knowing or consciously intending it, became the most ardent social reformers of their day.”37
Joshua Rowntree explains the unity of the social and the religious like this. He says to Fox “all life, religious and civil, domestic and ecclesiastical, was… one life. There were no lines of demarcation…” Social service was automatic, “as warmth follows fire”. Fox’s message was a democratic one because anyone can sit in a room and do it. It is aimed at the common people and it “called them to grandeur”.38
Bernstein says that when the early Quakers proclaimed that the inward light of Christ was available to every person they gave “a theological basis and impulse to the principle of social equality, freedom and brotherhood”. That is why the tiny sect of Quakers, he says, has been able to produce such a historic improvement in the social conditions of the world.39
With Fox improvement starts with personal morals and spreads outwards. As Rowntree says, Fox and the early Quakers “found that politics are not the real means of improving the general public; that a beginning has to be made with its morals and that new morals have to be taught.”40 Rufus Jones agrees: “It was in this focussing upon moral effort that the Quakers differed most from the other sects of the Commonwealth period.”41 Bernstein and Rowntree drew the conclusion that Quakers were “the ethical socialists of the epoch”.42 Quaker Socialism, unlike Marxism and unlike Social Reform, is just such an ethical or moral socialism. That was also the vision of Ada and Alfred Salter.
So, we can now return to our original question: Was George Fox the first Quaker Socialist? The word, ‘socialism’, is anachronistic, but Quaker Socialism is an ‘ethical socialism’, a blend of ethics and politics that Fox would recognise as his. Strictly speaking, Fox was not the first Quaker Socialist; but, unstrictly speaking, he was at very least a pioneer.
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