THE POLITICS OF DESPAIR:
THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY, 1661
H. Larry Ingle
Copyright (c) by H. Larry Ingle. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
Hallowed by Friends even as it provoked attacks from opponents, the Quaker peace testimony remains the most remarked-on feature of the Religious Society of Friends. When the world’s people think of Friends, they think of our eschewal of war, and when Quakers want to distinguish themselves from other Christian groups, they identify themselves as one of the "historic peace churches."
Although "testimony" does not have the same connotation as "dogma" or "creed," it still points to the most fundamental practice that corporate bodies of Quakers have always formally adhered to; while some Friends have participated in every war that has torn asunder their human communities since 1661, no yearly or monthly meeting, insofar as I am aware, has ever formally repudiated it. (A group of so-called "Free Quakers," disowned by their meetings for supporting the military struggle for American independence, did set up a dissident meeting in 1781 in Philadelphia; they hung on, in dwindling numbers, until 1836.)1 To do so would be to cut that body off from other Quakers even more surely than, for example, using those whom early Friends dismissed as "hireling priests."
While considering Friends’ commitment to the testimony "feeble," historian Rufus Jones yet affirmed its centrality and importance: "It gave the world, as a living object-lesson, the exhibition of a coherent body of Christians who, generation after generation, staked their lives and fortunes on the absolute reality and worth of love as a working principle of social relations; who believed the kingdom of God as Christ proclaimed it should be put into operation here and now and practiced with seriousness and sincerity; and who were determined to test out that way of life in all its bearings and implications, whether, here in the temporal order, it led to survival or to annihilation."2
Surely, what we have here, if Jones be representative, was a way of life that somehow partook of a response to a divine commission. It is strong evidence of continuing revelation that our peace testimony has grown beyond its genesis. Not only was it bitterly resisted by weighty Friends like Isaac Penington, helping spark the dissident movement of John Perrot in the early 1660s, but it also amounted to a tactical political retreat at the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 166O.3
Springing from the despair that gripped leading Quakers as the Cromwellian Protectorate tottered on its way to oblivion, a despair falling with particular weight on England’s First Friend George Fox, the testimony represented an unwillingness of Quakers to continue challenging the established order and seeking a government led by men embodying Christ’s spirit. In a very real sense, it marked the beginning of the kind of decorous Society of Friends that the world has since admired, one with peculiar principles but never mounting the basic threat it posed to the existing order of the 1650s. It represented a move to respectability, to what would become a slightly leftward position.
Thus one can certainly understand how the American Friends Service Committee embraces the kind of fashionable liberalism for which it is noted and applauded (if not always in Quaker quarters), or how Britain Yearly Meeting enjoys its honored status as a "privileged body," with the right to formally address the monarch on special royal occasions and holidays.4
Unable to read the future, George Fox and Richard Hubberthorne, the testimony’s two principal authors, would probably have looked askance at the respectability of the sect they labored so hard to create. Fox, who outlived his junior by nearly thirty years to face down opposition from both left and right, came to recognize that the kick-over-the-traces exuberance of Quakerism’s early years had best be replaced with more stringent discipline. Whatever he himself may have desired, his tightening of internal controls inevitably and inexorably produced respectable Friends.
George Fox’s role as first among Friends was never more clearly evident than in the evolution of his sect’s witness for peace. Not only did he refuse to participate in the civil wars that wracked the Midlands countryside that was his home, he also specifically rejected a captaincy in the New Model Army offered to him while he was in Derby jail in 1651. Citing the apostle James epistle, Fox answered that he knew wherein wars arose, "Lust," and added that he "lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars."5 On another occasion he rejected a similar request by saying that he had been "brought off outward wars."6
Fox’s statement was the first we know about on English soil of what we could call "pacifism." In that context, his comment pushed the peace movement a giant leap forward in his own country, particularly in that he was rejecting participation in a conflict with whose overall aims he was in fundamental agreement. The New Model Army, for example, was hardly your usual fighting force but a veritable praying, preaching, prophesying, and plundering throng of holy sectarians; in some ways it was a mass uprising on the model of the French revolutionary armies nearly 150 years on. And its leaders emphasized their determination to right the status quo by their execution of Charles I in 1649, a move Fox never explicitly allowed himself to endorse but one he used to advantage when he undertook to round up adherents for his movement.7
Many joined Friends and remained in army ranks. Both officers and recruits found that Quakerism spoke to their condition, and early Friends, including Fox, targeted them as potential converts without requiring them to give up their positions. Indeed, many early Quaker leaders were refugees from military service. Richard Hubberthorne himself and James Nayler, who rivaled Fox in the public mind as the movement’s chief spokesman, had held high positions in the army, and others like Thomas Curtis, one of Fox’s closest early companions, and Anthony Pearson, a amiable fellow traveler, served as militia commissioners and busily raised soldiers for the army as late as 1659; Pearson accepted the post but refused to don a sword, a kind of symbolic balancing act highlighting the tensions produced in the period. And the most notorious of all the leading army officers, John Lilburne, capped his career as a Friend.
Committed to his own personal peace witness, Fox never, until 1661, took the kind of unequivocal position that Agnes Wilkinson evinced in 1853. In a brief epistle to "all who wear swords" she advised those who bore arms "to strip yourselves naked of all your carnal weapons and take upon you the sword of the Spirit, for the Lord is coming to judge men."8
It is clear that their acceptance of this last clause of Wilkinson’s advice caused Fox and his male compatriots to resist a firm commitment to a totally pacifist position during the turbulent 1650s. Proclaiming that Christ had come to teach his people, they could easily assent to the implication that he had given them power to become the nation’s rulers. Fox and the early Friends thought the Interregnum’s instability offered them an opportunity to take over England; in such a fashion God would rule through them. As a part of his millenarian position, Fox personally rejected the use of military force, but he did not repudiate the notion that the Children of the Light would replace the nation’s interim rulers and come to power.9
The same position led men like Curtis and Pearson to conclude that military action represented a legitimate way to achieve their goal of a godly society, one in which Christ would rule as surely as they were convinced that he ruled in their hearts. Edward Burrough, too young to have participated in the civil wars of the 1640s but filled with the same zeal that motivated the soldiers then, postured that the Children were ready to lay down their lives for what aging revolutionaries liked to call "the Good Old Cause."10