The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  Nevertheless Margaret Fell from the first moment she heard George Fox preach ‘saw it was the truth and I could not deny it’. Judge Fell on his return home was told that Margaret and her daughter Sarah had been bewitched. As Margaret Fell wrote: ‘any may think what a condition I was like to be in, that either I must displease my husband, or offend God’. She chose to displease her husband (although Judge Fell was in fact to show himself remarkably tolerant of his wife’s earnest convictions). Now many of the Fell female household, including ‘little Mabby’, Bet Drinkall, Peg and her sister ‘Old Jane’, became Quakers. Margaret Fell herself was to be, in George Fox’s own words ‘the nursing mother’ of Quakerism.25

  Her role as a nursing mother (she is addressed on occasion by her fellow Quakers in quite lyrical language: ‘O thou daughter of God, thou art comely in thy beauty, clothed with the sun and moon under thy feet’)26 was however essentially different from that of the itinerant Elizabeth Hooton and Mary Fisher. Margaret Fell did not preach. She did not travel the country. She did not venture abroad. The presence of this established socially unassailable woman in the Quaker midst emphasized that other side of female Quakerism: its organizational philanthropy towards its own members. The hospitality which Margaret Fell dispensed, with her daughters, at Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire, stood for more than mere material need gratified, though that was important too; it also indicated that not all female Quakers could be classed as wild spirits or even witches in the grip of the devil’s ‘Extempore Way’.

  It is suggested by Margaret Fell’s biographer, Isabel Ross, that the emotionalism of her first response to George Fox, and that of her daughters, enabled her to understand and cope with this phenomenon in Quakerism later. Postscripts in letters to Fox give some indication of the flavour of this. Susan aged two [sic]: ‘O my dear father, when wilt thou come’; Mary aged five: ‘thou art the fountain of life’; and Margaret Fell herself: ‘We thy babes … O thou bread of life … O our life … O our dear nursing father … O our life, our desire is to see thee again that we may be refreshed and established’.27

  But more practically it was Margaret Fell who led the first Women’s Petition of 1659, a supplement to the general Quaker protest against tithes. She protested against the imprisonment of George Fox at Lancaster, and was instrumental in securing from Charles II that release of Quakers which attended the Restoration. Margaret Fell’s social position enabled her to write to such high-born ladies as Mary Princess of Orange and Elizabeth of Bohemia (rumoured to have Quaker sympathies); she even tackled the arch-Catholic Dowager Queen Henrietta Maria, presenting her with Quaker books.

  Even these connections could not free Margaret Fell from the problems posed by her own conscience. She could not – would not – take an oath. At the March Assizes of 1664 Margaret Fell was summoned for allowing illegal meetings in her house. She refused to take the necessary oath in court. Although Margaret Fell was courteously granted a stool and a cushion by the judge (something not offered to Elizabeth Hooton and Mary Fisher), she was none the less threatened with the forfeiture of her estate, as well as life imprisonment, if she would not swear. At the death of Judge Fell, Margaret Fell had inherited Swarthmoor Hall for herself and her daughters; her son George received her own dowry of Marsh Grange, where he was probably already living. At this threat of forfeiture therefore Margaret Fell spoke up boldly: ‘I am a widow, and my estate is a dowry, and I have five children unpreferred [unplaced]; and if the King’s pleasure be to take my estate from me, upon the account of my conscience, and not for any evil or wrong done, let him do as he pleaseth’.28

  Refusing to take the oath, or remove her glove, or promise to hold no further Quaker meetings, Margaret Fell was duly imprisoned in Lancaster Castle (where George Fox was already installed). There, in lodgings which let in the rain and the snow, she remained until the summer of 1668; she lay under sentence for Praemunire, that is, for rejecting the authority of the English courts in favour of some other (spiritual) authority. It was finally on the orders of the King and Council that she was set free.

  Gossips had long connected the names of George Fox and the widowed Margaret Fell: ‘I am so well used to them I know how to bear them’, she told one of her daughters.29 Contemporary satire was always rich – or poor – in jokes about the sexual morals of the Quakers. Some of this was owing to the unrestrained behaviour of the group surrounding James Naylor under the Commonwealth. Quaker inspiration was also mocked. Chapbooks (cheap popular fiction) of the 1680s included one story entitled Love’s Masterpiece which ended with a Quaker suggesting to his mistress that they should retire to the coal-hole: ‘there only the light within will shine’. Quaker marriage was another fertile source of allusions, since the Quakers persisted in having their own form of ceremony at a Quaker Meeting, when the couple simply testified in the presence of the Friends. This led to accusations that the Friends ‘went together like brute beasts’, as was asserted at the Nottingham Assizes.30

  Quaker marriage also led to troubles about inheritance: if the Quaker ceremony was not valid, then were the children of the marriage illegitimate? At Nottingham, where the inheritance of Mary Ashwell, daughter of the Quakers William Ashwell and Ann Ridge, was in doubt, the judge found for the Quakers. He compared the Quaker marriage to the union in paradise when Adam took Eve and Eve took Adam: ‘it was the consent of the woman that made the marriage’. The general vagueness of the time about the state of marriage and the status of the ceremony which introduced it acted in this case to the benefit of the Quakers. Even so it remained a source of popular anxiety. At the end of the century The Athenian Oracle was asked whether a Quaker marriage was valid. The reassuring answer was that it was valid, if not strictly legal, and ‘accordingly their children are for inheritance’.312

  When George Fox did marry Margaret Fell – in October 1669 – he was forty-five and she was fifty-five. It was a spiritual match. According to the Quaker custom for the preliminary examination of the parties concerned (which meant that Quaker marriages, far from being more loosely performed, were actually more carefully contracted) Fox was questioned on the subject of his bride’s age. Surely marriage was only for the procreation of children? Fox answered his interlocutor: ‘I told him I never thought of any such thing [marriage] but only in obedience to the power of the Lord …’ He added: ‘I had no command to do such a thing till a half year before, though some people had long talked of it.’ He also took the trouble to make it clear that he was not interested in marrying a rich widow; carefully asking his future step-children whether their rights under their father’s will had been respected. Fox also engaged himself never to meddle with the estate.32

  The intention of George Fox and Margaret Fell to marry was published at three separate Meetings: a Man’s Meeting where Margaret, her daughters and twelve women Quakers were also present: a Meeting of men and women Friends; and a public Meeting. They were eventually married at a very large public Meeting.

  At the first of these Meetings, one of Margaret’s daughters, Rachel, testified: ‘And I do believe, that the thing [the marriage] is of the Lord’. Unfortunately George Fell, Margaret’s only son, and his wife Hannah, who were not Quakers, held the very opposite belief. George Fell felt humiliated by the union of his mother with this weird and wild itinerant preacher, habitué of prisons, and there were financial considerations as well, for all Fox’s precautions. Margaret Fell was after all in possession of Swarthmoor. There is reason to believe that George and Hannah Fell were instrumental in securing Margaret Fell’s return to prison in 1670 when the Conventicle Act was renewed.33 And when George Fell died in 1670, he specifically bequeathed the Swarthmoor Estate to his infant son, although his father in his will had left it to Margaret to provide for the girls. Hannah Fell, established at Marsh Grange, continued the vendetta. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the legal position (by no means clear in view of a wife’s weak position at law), where Hannah Fell is concerned, it is difficult to disagree with the incensed judgement of
old Elizabeth Hooton: ‘What a rebellious daughter-in-law art thou! Was there ever such a wicked thing done in England or in any age before, that thou should ruinate thy husband’s mother? The same hand that cut off thy husband will do the same by thee and leave thee neither root nor branch if thou do not speedily repent.’34

  In April 1671 Margaret Fell was released on the orders of the King, and her part of Swarthmoor Estate was granted to her daughters. The odious Hannah lived on at Marsh Grange. Nor was this family dispute thoroughly settled until 1691 when Daniel Abraham, husband of Rachel Fell, ‘bought’ the Swarthmoor Estate.

  It would be wrong, however, to see life at Swarthmoor as dour, or Margaret Fell herself as priggish. She besought the Friends to think where dress was concerned, that uniform dress and colour did not necessarily bespeak a pure life within. When disapproval of coloured and striped apparel was minuted at a Yearly Meeting (the beginnings of the so-called Quaker look of plain dressing) Margaret Fell exclaimed: ‘This is a silly poor Gospel. It is more fit for us to be covered with God’s eternal Spirit, and clothed with his Eternal Light.’ She was probably less rigid in this respect than Anne Countess of Winchilsea, groaning at the demands of the fashionable life. Her clever eldest daughter Sarah wore red stockings and others of sky-coloured worsted. White wine, claret and brandy featured in the household accounts at Swarthmoor. Luxuries like oranges were sent for from London as were gloves and even frivolities like vizard masks,35 so frequently employed by the courtesans of the capital to conceal their countenances, that the term ‘vizard mask’ became synonymous with their profession.

  It was in 1666, during Margaret Fell’s first spell in prison, that she wrote her defence of female preaching, Womens Speaking. Even among the Quakers themselves, the revolutionary proposition that a woman’s voice might be heard in public on religious matters met with opposition.36 Margaret Fell met the challenge boldly with quotations from the Acts of the Apostles and also from Joel: ‘And it shall come to pass, in the last days, saith the Lord, I will pour out my spirit upon all Flesh; your sons and daughters shall Prophesy.’ Her basic message was that ‘God hath put no such difference between Male and Female as man would make.’ She firmly blamed the devil – ‘the Serpent’ – whose ancient enmity towards Eve had led to the general silencing of women since the Fall: ‘and if the seed of the Woman speak not, the Seed of the Serpent speaks; for God hath put enmity between the two seeds, and it is manifest that those that speak against the Woman and her Seeds speaking, speak out of the enmity of the old Serpent’s seed’. In short: ‘all this opposing and gainsaying of Women’s Speaking: hath risen out of the bottomless Pit …’37

  As for the message of St Paul, why should women be specifically ordered by the Apostle to have their heads covered when they prayed or prophesied, if the latter activity was not to be permitted? Margaret Fell was also free in quoting many texts in which Jesus – or his predecessors the prophets – compared the Church to a woman: from that of Isaiah (‘I have called thee as a Woman forsaken’), via David (‘The King’s Daughter is all glorious within’) to the vision of St John concerning heaven (‘a Woman clothed with the Sun, and the Moon under her feet …) She also pointed out that the most important revelations concerning Himself were spoken by Jesus to women, including that to Martha at Bethany: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’. And was it not to a woman that Jesus first appeared on earth after the Resurrection?38

  Like George Fox, who had early on pointed to the Magnificat as the supreme example of a woman ‘speaking’, Margaret Fell pointed triumphantly to the use of the words of Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, and the Virgin Mary in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Are you not here beholden to the woman for her sermon to use her words to put into your Common Prayer? And yet you forbid women’s speaking.’ But perhaps Margaret Fell’s most telling point, at least from the modern point of view, was that men were trying to limit the power of Almighty God, by contending that it existed only in the male sex.39

  The first organization of the Quaker movement was developed by George Fox out of sheer necessity to combat the effects of persecution (although there were those who continued to criticize him for abandoning his original conception of an unorganized religion). In some places women featured in this at an early stage; in about 1656 two Women’s Meetings developed in London, the Box Meeting (for succouring the poor, so called because money was gathered in a box) and the Two Weeks’ Meeting, on the model of the Men’s Two Weeks’ Meeting. Elsewhere in the country the participation of women was dependent on local prejudice – and no doubt on the availability of energetic women. It seems that it was not until 1671 that George Fox set in train the formation of the Women’s Monthly and Quarterly Meetings to come together at the same time as the Men’s. Fox, constantly using the word ‘helpmeet’ where the women were concerned, believed that they were intended for special work such as the care of Quaker servants and the examination of future spouses as well as the tending of the poor.40

  It was a point of view well expressed by one of Margaret Fell’s married daughters, Isabel Yeamans, writing from Swarthmoor in 1676 on the subject of Women’s Meetings.41 She thought these should be ‘constant and frequent … to wait upon the lord to feel his power to administer counsel, wisdom and Instruction that thereby your minds may be seasoned and fitted for the lords business’. This business was ‘to inquire into the necessities of the poor and to relieve the widows and the fatherless and to visit the sick and the afflicted which is the pure practice of the pure religion’. The fallen should be reproved – but mildly. A private warning about ‘undue conduct’ should precede the reproof of the Women’s Meeting. In general it was the duty of the ‘elder and honourable women’, in the footsteps of the holy women gone before, to be ‘teachers of good things that they may teach the young women according to the holy apostles’ exhortation and so to be good examples and patterns of prudence …’

  Isabel Yeamans continued: ‘Here will be work and business enough for us all that none need to be Idle in God’s vineyard, but as we have everyone received a measure of God’s spirit and grace some may be fellow helpers and workers together with our brethren in the work of the lord in these gospel days …’ It was the distinguishing Quaker argument, first laid down by George Fox, that women too should be allowed to be ‘serviceable’ in their own ‘places and stations’. Isabel Yeamans wrote: ‘So every member of the body whereof Christ our lord is head may be serviceable and although we may be many members and some much more honourable than others yet no member though it be small is to be despised.’

  George Fox himself defended his original contention concerning women’s right to speak, both in England and on his travels abroad. In Flushing, New England, for example a minister’s son disputed the subject with Fox at the end of a meeting in 1672. ‘And as for women’s speaking, such as the apostles did own, I owned, and such as they did deny, I did deny’, was Fox’s reply. In 1673 one Nathaniel Coleman spoke up against the whole principle of the Women’s Meetings at Slaughterford in Wiltshire. Eventually Coleman flung out of the house ‘in a rage and passion’ vowing that ‘he would rule over his wife’ and so on and so forth.

  To combat this, Fox explained that woman’s lack of authority was part of the bad order of things, and had not existed in a state of innocence. Eve, by her transgression, her evil ‘teaching’ of her husband, had brought that about, but in the restoration, brought about by Jesus Christ, ‘all the family of God, women as well as men, might know, possess, perform and discharge their offices and services in the house of God’. He also made the point, which arose in different forms throughout the seventeenth century, that if husbands such as Nathaniel Coleman could rule over their wives, which he did not seek to deny, ‘neither he [Coleman] nor they must rule over widows and young women, and other men’s wives’.42

  In general, however, Fox attempted conciliation rather than provocation. So the arguments about the Women’s Meetings and their precise purpose, and women’s right to sp
eak, continued within the Quaker movement itself: the very existence of such a controversy at that period being of course a tribute to the movement’s early ideals concerning the spiritual equality of women.

  Margaret Fell did not only enrich the Quaker movement with her own stalwart example of a woman whose conscience was unshackled by wealth, uncowed by adversity; she also bequeathed to it those further crusaders, her brilliant daughters. The possible influence of the mother for good at a period when few women were subject to influence outside the home is demonstrated at its fullest by the lives of the Fell girls. Sarah Fell, later married to William Meade, was said in her preaching to ravish ‘all her beholders and hearers with admiration and wonder’. Margaret Fell herself had long shown an interest in Hebrew literature and teaching, leading towards the possible reconversion of the Jews. Sarah taught herself Hebrew to confound her critics, who claimed that she could not understand the biblical texts.43 Isabel Yeamans accompanied her step-father on his travels to Europe.

  George Fox died in January 1691 but Margaret lived on another eleven years, to benefit from the expanding atmosphere of toleration following the accession of William III. She was not bereft of the traditional joy of old age. Her eight children gave her twenty-four grandchildren, fourteen of whom survived childhood. As little John Abraham, son of Rachel, wrote in 1687: ‘Dear Grandmot thou art oftener in my mind than I can menshon.’44

  As for Margaret Fell’s spiritual convictions, as late as 1695 she was reminding the Women’s Yearly Meeting in London that the ‘seed is one in male and female’.45

  1 Although one would hardly today go as far as Mabel R. Brailsford who, writing in 1915 in Quaker Women 1650–1690, was influenced – but unfavourably – by the actions of the suffragette movement; she compared the plight of the ‘priest’ faced by a Quaker woman to that of a Cabinet Minister faced by a suffragette, her sympathies being with the politician.9