Fox, George
FOX, GEORGE (1624–1691), was the chief founder and early leader of the Quakers, a popular movement without clergy, ritual, or sacraments, gathered from among English Puritan Separatists. Despite frequent imprisonments, he traveled throughout Britain, North America, and northern Europe, calling hearers to experience directly the Spirit of God, met as "the Light of Christ" or "Truth" within each person. Those who were open and obedient to the Light he called upon to gather as "Children of Light" and to bear witness to God's power, which was to conquer the world without outward violence in "the Lamb's War." Fox also gave structure to gatherings, or Meetings of Friends, and wrote 270 tracts and 400 "epistles."
Fox was the son of a Puritan weaver of Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire. As a young man he was apprenticed as a cobbler and shepherd; his sensitivity to temptations caused him intense strain, which in 1643 drove him away from his family and then from a series of prominent Puritan clergy and congregations whom he had sought out in the Midlands and in London. By contacts with Separatist and Baptist groups, and perhaps also among Ranters and Familists, he acquired beliefs about the inward nature of heaven, the Last Judgment, the sacraments, and Christ's "heavenly body." He experienced in 1646 and 1647 a series of "openings," or insights, into the Bible, much of which he knew by heart: namely, that true ministers are not made at universities; that Christ within "can speak to thy condition"; that Christ too experienced and conquered temptation; that the source of temptation is the evil within human hearts. Notably, Fox saw evil in his own heart, where "there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness."
Having faced his dark impulses, he called others to "the witness of God within them," which would "judge and guide them"—not into a vicarious righteousness but into a total purging and obedience. When he began preaching in the Midlands he was jailed at Derby in 1650–1651 for blasphemy, having glimpsed perfect holiness as he "was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God." He refused a captaincy in Oliver Cromwell's army, because he "lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars." In 1651 he preached through northern Yorkshire, winning his chief colleagues, Nayler, Dewsbury, Farnworth, and Aldam. In 1652 he went northwest by way of Pendle Hill, where he had a vision of "a great people to be gathered," and he went on to win to his cause several groups of Separatists who met on Firbank Fell and in villages around the English Lake District. Swarthmoor Hall, home of Margaret Fell and her family, became the center for a mass movement throughout the poorly served moorland parishes of Westmorland and Cumberland, despite jailings and mob violence in several towns. In 1654, a "valiant sixty" of the newly won Quaker men and women, mainly yeomen farmers, spread out on foot throughout Britain as "publishers of Truth," announcing "the Day of the Lord." Fox recalled them that winter to plan their further work and to have them agree to report their travels to Swarthmoor. In 1655 Fox was sent as a prisoner to London, which had already become a Quaker center through casual contacts and earlier missions. Freed by Oliver Cromwell, Fox talked sympathetically with him, attempting without success to persuade him to end the parish system.
While traveling through southern England to Lands End, Fox was jailed in Launceston's "Doomsdale" dungeon for a harsh winter, during which his colleague James Nayler let some women disciples stir up a breach between the two leaders and stage in Nayler's honor a reenactment of Palm Sunday at Bristol. Nayler was tried for blasphemy before Parliament and savagely punished, but this episode, offending England's growing conservatism from 1656 through 1658, cast a shadow over the Quakers. To rally them, Fox encouraged older Quakers to visit the struggling meetings already gathered for weekly worship in silence, while younger Friends carried the Quaker message overseas to Ireland, continental Europe, and the American colonies. Fox was mainly near London as the Puritan Commonwealth fell apart, and he went through weeks of doubt and exhaustion when the Quakers were asked by a radical Puritan government to provide Commissioners of Militia to protect twenty years' gains in justice and freedom. Fox's warning against reliance on arms became a standard to which Quakers could point after the returning Royalists in 1660 accused Friends of plotting rebellion against Charles II. Fox also organized weekly meetings of Quaker men and women leaders in London and wrote piecemeal his only long theological book, The Great Mistery (1659). Between and after two more long imprisonments for refusing the Oath of Allegiance (and all oaths) and defying the 1664 Conventicle Act, Fox again visited Quaker meetings throughout England and Ireland to set up a network of men's and women's monthly and quarterly meetings for local groups and for counties. At Bristol on October 17, 1669, he married Margaret Fell, eleven years a widow; though his letters to her were curiously formal, he began to express to her the affection and humor others had loved in him.
After the 1670 Second Conventicle Act, when Fox and thousands of "Nonconformists" to the Anglican church were again arrested, the Indulgence of 1672 freed him to sail with twelve other Quakers to visit Quaker groups in the American colonies. They proclaimed their Christian orthodoxy to the governor of Barbados and gathered into regular meetings the Friends of Jamaica and Chesapeake Bay and later those in New England and Virginia. Guided by Indians through the forests of New Jersey, Fox would urge Quakers to colonize there in 1675. Returning to England in June 1673, Fox was again imprisoned and seriously ill at Worcester in December. Later, recovering his health slowly at Swarthmoor Hall, Fox dictated to Margaret's son-in-law Thomas Lower the text of his Journal. In 1677 Fox traveled with William Penn and Robert Barclay to visit small Quaker groups in Holland and northwestern Germany. Fox revisited Holland in 1684 but spent most of his last years in or near London, where he died on January 13, 1691. Penn witnessed that "abruptly and brokenly as sometimes his sentences would fall from him … it showed that God had sent him, that he had nothing of man's wit or wisdom, so that he was an original, being no man's copy. He had an extraordinary gift in opening the Scriptures. But above all the most awful, living, reverent frame was his in prayer."
Bibliography
Works by Fox
A Battle-Dor for Teachers and Professors to Learn Singular and Plural (1660). Written with John Stubs and Benjamin Furly. Reprint, Menston, England, 1968. Shows that "thee & thou," as used by Quakers to all individuals, was true grammar in forty languages.
Catechism. London, 1657. Lessons for children.
Doctrinals (originally, Gospel Truth Demonstrated). London, 1706. Ninety-nine of his 52 previously printed tracts.
Epistles. London, 1698. Four hundred letters, twenty-nine previously printed.
George Fox's Book of Miracles. Cambridge, U.K., 1973. Henry Cadbury's careful reconstruction of a lost Fox manuscript.
The Great Mistery of the Great Whore Unfolded. London, 1659. Refutes anti-Quaker tracts by Puritans, Baptists, and others.
Journal. Edited by Thomas Ellwood, with a preface by William Penn. London, 1694. Repeatedly reprinted in abridged form with prefaces by Rufus Jones, Henry Cadbury, et al.; currently available from Friends United Press (Richmond, Ind., 1983).
The Works of George Fox. 8 vols. Philadelphia, 1831. Reproduces first editions of Fox's works uncritically.
Works About Fox
Bensen, Lewis. Catholic Quakerism. Philadelphia, 1968. Presents Fox's ethic.
Braithwaite, William C. The Beginnings of Quakerism (1912). Rev. ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1955. Presents historical facts and settings of Fox's life.
Braithwaite, William C. The Second Period of Quakerism (1919). Revised by Henry Cadbury. Cambridge, U.K., 1961.
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