Free Final Voyage by Peter Nichols

they least of all desire to come . . . for . . . they are not opposed by the civill authority, but with all patience and meekness are suffered to say over their pretended revelations and admonitions. . . . We find that they delight to be persecuted by civill powers, and when they are soe, they are like to gain more adherents by the [sight] of their patient sufferings, than by consent to their pernicious sayings.
    Yet few could articulate what these pernicious, heretical doctrines were. They were poorly understood, if at all, by the bristling paranoiacs in power in Massachusetts. In truth, the Quakers resembled no one so much as the Puritans themselves in their earlier, purer, condition. Like them, the Quakers had resisted the formal doctrines and rituals of the Church of England as a path to God. They sought the divine illumination of Christ in the individual’s heart. “Believe in the Light, that ye may become Children of the Light,” urged George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, as they called themselves. Fox’s words led to their being frequently referred to as the Children of the Light.
    Born in Leicestershire, England, in 1624, Fox—like the Mayflower Puritans who predated him—espoused a simpler, more austere, more personal relationship with God, without the muddying mediation of a minister or a church. He got into trouble everywhere and was continually being brought before judges and jailed for blasphemy. One judge, ridiculing Fox’s instruction to his followers to “tremble at the word of the Lord,” called them “quakers.” Mary Fisher, Ann Austin, and the Quakers who followed them were, in fact, almost indistinguishable from the original Puritans who voyaged to America. But they came in small groups, without the municipalizing quorum and financial backing that had launched the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And Quakers exhibited two conspicuous behavioral trademarks that readily enabled the authorities to identify them and brand them as deviants. They held strong egalitarian beliefs, and, following the custom set by George Fox, they doffed their hats to no man, including magistrates. And they peppered their speech with the quaint biblical pronouns, already old-fashioned in the seventeenth century, “thee” and “thou.”
    Mary Fisher and Ann Austin were inspected for witchcraft and interviewed for hours, and their books were examined, yet none of the damning proofs (if any) was needed when they were finally brought before Deputy Governor Richard Bellingham. The moment one of the ladies uttered the word “thee,” Bellingham turned to his constable and said, “I need no more, now I see they are Quakers.” When a later Quaker trial bogged down in legal abstruseness (for it proved difficult to both level and defend against poorly defined charges), Boston magistrate Simon Bradstreet cut in: “The court will find an easier way to find out a Quaker than by blasphemy—the not putting off the hat.”
    When Quaker convert Edward Wharton was brought before a magistrate, he asked, “Friends, what is the cause and wherefore have I been fetched from my habitation, where I was following my honest calling, and here laid up as an evil-doer?”
    The magistrate replied, “Your hair is too long and you are disobedient to that commandment which saith, ‘Honor thy mother and father.’ ” (The “mother” and “father” of the Fifth Commandment were routinely employed by the courts as metaphorical stand-ins for a local authority; the accusation of Anne Hutchinson’s civil disobedience had also been supported by the Fifth Commandment.)
    “Wherein?” answered the baffled Wharton.
    “In that you will not put off your hat before the magistrates.”
    Such disrespect may have been proof of a mild social disobedience, but it didn’t illuminate the nature of Wharton’s, or any other Quaker’s, blasphemy. Nevertheless, it was sufficient for the magistrates, and the public, to indicate guilt of more nebulous