Part 14
Some little time before I went to Aylesbury prison I was desired by my quondam master, Milton, to take a house for him in the neighbourhood where I dwelt, that he might go out of the city, for the safety of himself and his family, the pestilence then growing hot in London. I took a pretty box for him in Giles Chalfont, a mile from me, of which I gave him notice, and intended to have waited on him, and seen him well settled in it, but was prevented by that imprisonment.
But now being released and returned home, I soon made a visit to him, to welcome him into the country.
After some common discourses had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his; which being brought he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me, and read it at my leisure; and when I had so done, return it to him with my judgment thereupon.
When I came home, and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled “Paradise Lost.” After I had, with the best attention, read it through, I made him another visit, and returned him his book, with due acknowledgment of the favour he had done me in communicating it to me. He asked me how I liked it and what I thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him, and after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, “‘Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost,’ but what hast thou to say of ‘Paradise Found?’” He made me no answer, but sat some time in a muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell upon another subject.
After the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed and become safely habitable again, he returned thither. And when afterwards I went to wait on him there, which I seldom failed of doing whenever my occasions drew me to London, he showed me his second poem, called “Paradise Regained,” and in a pleasant tone said to me, “This is owing to you, for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of.” But from this digression I return to the family I then lived in.
We had not been long at home, about a month perhaps, before Isaac Penington was taken out of his house in an arbitrary manner by military force, and carried prisoner to Aylesbury gaol again, where he lay three-quarters of a year, with great hazard of his life, it being the sickness year, and the plague being not only in the town, but in the gaol.
Meanwhile his wife and family were turned out of his house, called the Grange, at Peter’s Chalfont, by them who had seized upon his estate; and the family being by that means broken up, some went one way, others another. Mary Penington herself, with her younger children, went down to her husband at Aylesbury. Guli, with her maid, went to Bristol, to see her former maid, Anne Hersent, who was married to a merchant of that city, whose name was Thomas Biss; and I went to Aylesbury with the children, but not finding the place agreeable to my health, I soon left it, and returning to Chalfont, took a lodging, and was dieted in the house of a friendly man, and after some time went to Bristol to conduct Guli home.
Meanwhile Mary Penington took lodgings in a farmhouse called Bottrels, in the parish of Giles Chalfont, where, when we returned from Bristol, we found her.
We had been there but a very little time before I was sent to prison again upon this occasion. There was in those times a meeting once a month at the house of George Salter, a Friend, of Hedgerly, to which we sometimes went; and Morgan Watkins being with us, he and I, with Guli and her maid, and one Judith Parker, wife of Dr. Parker, one of the College of Physicians at London, with a maiden daughter of theirs, neither of whom were Quakers, but as acquaintances of Mary Penington were with her on a visit, walked over to that meeting, it being about the middle of the first month, and the weather good.
This place was about a mile from the house of Ambrose Benett, the justice who the summer before had sent me and some other Friends to Aylesbury prison from the burial of Edward Parret of Amersham; and he, by what means I know not, getting notice not only of the meeting, but, as was supposed, of our being there, came himself to it, and as he came caught up a stackwood stick, big enough to have knocked any man down, and brought it with him, hidden under his cloak.
Being come to the house, he stood for a while without the door and out of sight, listening to hear what was said, for Morgan was then speaking in the meeting. But certainly he heard very imperfectly, if it was true which we heard he said afterwards among his companions, as an argument, that Morgan was a Jesuit—viz., that in his preaching he trolled over his Latin as fluently as ever he heard any one; whereas Morgan, good man, was better versed in Welsh than in Latin, which I suppose he had never learned: I am sure he did not understand it.
When this martial Justice, who at Amersham had with his drawn sword struck an unarmed man who he knew would not strike again, had now stood some time abroad, on a sudden he rushed in among us, with the stackwood stick held up in his hand ready to strike, crying out, “Make way there;” and an ancient woman not getting soon enough out of his way, he struck her with the stick a shrewd blow over the breast. Then pressing through the crowd to the place where Morgan stood, he plucked him from thence, and caused so great a disorder in the room that it broke the meeting up; yet would not the people go away or disperse themselves, but tarried to see what the issue would be.
Then taking pen and paper, he sat down at the table among us, and asked several of us our names, which we gave, and he set down in writing.
Amongst others he asked Judith Parker, the doctor’s wife, what her name was, which she readily gave; and thence taking occasion to discourse him, she so overmastered him by clear reason, delivered in fine language, that he, glad to be rid of her, struck out her name and dismissed her; yet did not she remove, but kept her place amongst us.
When he had taken what number of names he thought fit, he singled out half a dozen, whereof Morgan was one, I another, one man more, and three women, of whom the woman of the house was one, although her husband then was, and for divers years before had been, a prisoner in the Fleet for tithes, and had nobody to take care of his family and business but her his wife.
Us six he committed to Aylesbury gaol, which when the doctor’s wife heard him read to the constable, she attacked him again, and having put him in mind that it was a sickly time, and that the pestilence was reported to be in that place, she in handsome terms desired him to consider in time how he would answer the cry of our blood, if by his sending us to be shut up in an infected place we should lose our lives there. This made him alter his purpose, and by a new mittimus sent us to the House of Correction at Wycombe. And although he committed us upon the Act for banishment, which limited a certain time for imprisonment, yet he in his mittimus limited no time, but ordered us to be kept till we should be delivered by due course of law; so little regardful was he, though a lawyer, of keeping to the letter of the law.
We were committed on the 13th day of the month called March, 1665, and were kept close prisoners there till the 7th day of the month called June, which was some days above twelve weeks, and much above what the Act required.
Then were we sent for to the Justice’s house, and the rest being released, Morgan Watkins and I were required to find sureties for our appearance at the next assize; which we refusing to do, were committed anew to our old prison, the House of Correction at Wycombe, there to lie until the next assizes; Morgan being in this second mittimus represented as a notorious offender in preaching, and I as being upon the second conviction in order to banishment. There we lay till the 25th day of the same month, and then, by the favour of the Earl of Ancram, being brought before him at his house, we were discharged from the prison upon our promise to appear, if at liberty and in health, at the assizes; which we did, and were there discharged by proclamation.
During my imprisonment in this prison I betook myself for an employment to making of nets for kitchen-service, to boil herbs, &c., in which trade I learned of Morgan Watkins, and selling some and giving others, I pretty well stocked the Friends of that country with them.
Though in that confinement I was not very well suited with company for conversation, Morgan’s natural temper not being very agreeable to mine, yet we kept a fair and brotherly correspondence, as became friends, prison-fellows, and bed-fellows, which we were. And indeed it was a good time, I think, to us all, for I found it so to me; the Lord being graciously pleased to visit my soul with the refreshing dews of his divine life, whereby my spirit was more and more quickened to Him, and truth gained ground in me over the temptations and snares of the enemy; which frequently raised in my heart thanksgivings and praises unto the Lord. And at one time more especially the sense I had of the prosperity of truth, and the spreading thereof, filling my heart with abundant joy, made my cup overflow, and the following lines drop out:—
For truth I suffer bonds, in truth I live, And unto truth this testimony give, That truth shall over all exalted be, And in dominion reign for evermore: The child’s already born that this may see, Honour, praise, glory be to God therefor.
And underneath thus:
Though death and hell should against truth combine, Its glory shall through all their darkness shine.
This I saw with an eye of faith, beyond the reach of human sense; for,
As strong desire Draws objects nigher In apprehension than indeed they are; I with an eye That pierced high Did thus of truth’s prosperity declare.
After we had been discharged at the assizes I returned to Isaac Penington’s family at Bottrel’s in Chalfont, and, as I remember, Morgan Watkins with me, leaving Isaac Penington a prisoner in Aylesbury goal.
The lodgings we had in this farmhouse (Bottrel’s) proving too strait and inconvenient for the family, I took larger and better lodgings for them in Berriehouse at Amersham, whither we went at the time called Michaelmas, having spent the summer at the other place.
Some time after was that memorable meeting appointed to be held at London, through a divine opening in the motion of life, in that eminent servant and prophet of God, George Fox, for the restoring and bringing in again those who had gone out from truth, and the holy unity of Friends therein, by the means and ministry of John Perrot.
This man came pretty early amongst Friends, and too early took upon him the ministerial office; and being, though little in person, yet great in opinion of himself, nothing less would serve him than to go and convert the Pope; in order whereunto, he having a better man than himself, John Luff, to accompany him, travelled to Rome, where they had not been long ere they were taken up and clapped into prison. Luff, as I remember, was put in the Inquisition, and Perrot in their Bedlam, or hospital for madmen.
Luff died in prison, not without well-grounded suspicion of being murdered there; but Perrot lay there some time, and now and then sent over an epistle to be printed here, written in such an affected and fantastic style as might have induced an indifferent reader to believe they had suited the place of his confinement to his condition.
After some time, through the mediation of Friends (who hoped better of him than he proved) with some person of note and interest there, he was released, and came back for England. And the report of his great sufferings there (far greater in report than in reality), joined with a singular show of sanctity, so far opened the hearts of many tender and compassionate Friends towards him, that it gave him the advantage of insinuating himself into their affections and esteem, and made way for the more ready propagation of that peculiar error of his, of keeping on the hat in time of prayer as well public as private, unless they had an immediate motion at that time to put it off.
Now, although I had not the least acquaintance with this man, not having ever exchanged a word with him, though I knew him by sight, nor had I any esteem for him, for either his natural parts or ministerial gift, but rather a dislike of his aspect, preaching, and way of writing; yet this error of his being broached in the time of my infancy and weakness of judgment as to truth, while I lived privately in London and had little converse with Friends, I, amongst the many who were caught in that snare, was taken with the notion, as what then seemed to my weak understanding suitable to the doctrine of a spiritual dispensation. And the matter coming to warm debates, both in words and writing, I, in a misguided zeal, was ready to have entered the lists of contention about it, not then seeing what spirit it proceeded from and was managed by, nor foreseeing the disorder and confusion in worship which must naturally attend it.
But as I had no evil intention or sinister end in engaging in it, but was simply betrayed by the specious pretence and show of greater spirituality, the Lord, in tender compassion to my soul, was graciously pleased to open my understanding and give me a clear sight of the enemy’s design in this work, and drew me off from the practice of it, and to bear testimony against it as occasion offered.
But when that solemn meeting was appointed at London for a travail in spirit on behalf of those who had thus gone out, that they might rightly return and be sensibly received into the unity of the body again, my spirit rejoiced, and with gladness of heart I went to it, as did many more of both city and country, and with great simplicity and humility of mind did honestly and openly acknowledge our outgoing, and take condemnation and shame to ourselves. And some that lived at too remote a distance in this nation as well as beyond the seas, upon notice given of that meeting and the intended service of it, did the like by writing in letters directed to and openly read in the meeting, which for that purpose was continued many days.
Thus in the motion of life were the healing waters stirred and many through the virtuous power thereof restored to soundness, and indeed not many lost. And though most of those who thus returned were such as with myself had before renounced the error and forsaken the practice, yet did we sensibly find that forsaking without confessing, in case of public scandal, was not sufficient, but that an open acknowledgment of open offences as well as forsaking them, was necessary to the obtaining complete remission.
Not long after this, George Fox was moved of the Lord to travel through the countries, from county to county, to advise and encourage Friends to set up monthly and quarterly meetings, for the better ordering the affairs of the church in taking care of the poor, and exercising a true gospel discipline for a due dealing with any that might walk disorderly under our name, and to see that such as should marry among us did act fairly and clearly in that respect.
When he came into this county I was one of the many Friends that were with him at the meeting for that purpose; and afterwards I travelled with Guli and her maid into the West of England to meet him there and to visit Friends in those parts, and we went as far as Topsham in Devonshire before we found him. He had been in Cornwall, and was then returning, and came in unexpectedly at Topsham, where we then were providing (if he had not then come thither) to have gone that day towards Cornwall. But after he was come to us we turned back with him through Devonshire, Somersetshire, and Dorsetshire, having generally very good meetings where he was; and the work he was chiefly concerned in went on very prosperously and well, without any opposition or dislike, save in that in the general meeting of Friends in Dorsetshire a quarrelsome man, who had gone out from Friends in John Perrot’s business and had not come rightly in again, but continued in the practice of keeping on his hat in time of prayer, to the great trouble and offence of Friends, began to cavil and raise disputes, which occasioned some interruption and disturbance.
Not only George and Alexander Parker, who were with him, but divers of the ancient Friends of that country, endeavoured to quiet that troublesome man and make him sensible of his error, but his unruly spirit would still be opposing what was said unto him and justifying himself in that practice. This brought a great weight and exercise upon me, who sat at a distance in the outward part of the meeting, and after I had for some time bore the burden thereof, I stood up in the constraining power of the Lord, and in great tenderness of spirit declared unto the meeting, and to that person more particularly, how it had been with me in that respect, how I had been betrayed into that wrong practice, how strong I had been therein, and how the Lord had been graciously pleased to show me the evil thereof, and recover me out of it.
This coming unexpectedly from me, a young man, a stranger, and one who had not intermeddled with the business of the meeting, had that effect upon the caviller, that if it did not satisfy him, it did at least silence him, and made him for the present sink down and be still, without giving any further disturbance to the meeting. And the Friends were well pleased with this unlooked-for testimony from me, and I was glad that I had that opportunity to confess to the truth, and to acknowledge once more, in so public a manner, the mercy and goodness of the Lord to me therein.
By the time we came back from this journey the summer was pretty far gone, and the following winter I spent with the children of the family as before, without any remarkable alteration in my circumstances, until the next spring, when I found in myself a disposition of mind to change my single life for a married state.
I had always entertained so high a regard for marriage, as it was a divine institution, that I held it not lawful to make it a sort of political trade, to rise in the world by. And therefore as I could not but in my judgment blame such as I found made it their business to hunt after and endeavour to gain those who were accounted great fortunes, not so much regarding what she is as what she has, but making wealth the chief if not the only thing they aimed at; so I resolved to avoid, in my own practice, that course, and how much soever my condition might have prompted me, as well as others, to seek advantage that way, never to engage on account of riches, nor at all to marry till judicious affection drew me to it, which I now began to feel at work in my breast.
The object of this affection was a Friend whose name was Mary Ellis, whom for divers years I had had an acquaintance with, in the way of common friendship only, and in whom I thought I then saw those fair prints of truth and solid virtue which I afterwards found in a sublime degree in her; but what her condition in the world was as to estate, I was wholly a stranger to, nor desired to know.
I had once, a year or two before, had an opportunity to do her a small piece of service, which she wanted some assistance in, wherein I acted with all sincerity and freedom of mind, not expecting or desiring any advantage by her, or reward from her, being very well satisfied in the
## act itself that I had served a Friend and helped the helpless.
That little intercourse of common kindness between us ended without the least thought I am verily persuaded on her part, well assured on my own, of any other or further relation than that of free and fair friendship, nor did it at that time lead us into any closer conversation or more intimate acquaintance one with the other than had been before.
But some time, and that a good while after, I found my heart secretly drawn and inclining towards her, yet was I not hasty in proposing, but waited to feel a satisfactory settlement of mind therein, before I made any step thereto.
After some time I took an opportunity to open my mind therein unto my much-honoured friends Isaac and Mary Penington, who then stood _parentum loco_ (in the place or stead of parents) to me. They having solemnly weighed the matter, expressed their unity therewith; and indeed their approbation thereof was no small confirmation to me therein. Yet took I further deliberation, often retiring in spirit to the Lord, and crying to Him for direction, before I addressed myself to her. At length, as I was sitting all alone, waiting upon the Lord for counsel and guidance in this—in itself and to me—so important affair, I felt a word sweetly arise in me, as if I had heard a voice which said, “Go, and prevail.” And faith springing in my heart with the word, I immediately arose and went, nothing doubting.
When I was come to her lodgings, which were about a mile from me, her maid told me she was in her chamber, for having been under some indisposition of body, which had obliged her to keep her chamber, she had not yet left it; wherefore I desired the maid to acquaint her mistress that I was come to give her a visit, whereupon I was invited to go up to her. And after some little time spent in common conversation, feeling my spirit weightily concerned, I solemnly opened my mind unto her with respect to the particular business I came about, which I soon perceived was a great surprise to her, for she had taken in an apprehension, as others also had done, that mine eye had been fixed elsewhere and nearer home.