George Fox

In 1669, he married Margaret Fell, widow of a wealthy supporter, Thomas Fell; she was a leading Friend. His ministry expanded and he made tours of North America and the Low Countries. He was arrested and jailed numerous times for his beliefs. He spent his final decade working in London to organise the expanding Quaker movement. Despite disdain from some Anglicans and Puritans, he was viewed with respect by the Quaker convert William Penn and the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.

Early years

Childhood and youth

Birth and family

Fox was born in July 1624 in the village of Drayton-in-the-Clay, now known as Fenny Drayton, in Leicestershire. There is no exact record of either his birthday or the date of his baptism. He was the eldest of at least six named children (the exact number is unknown) of Christopher Fox and his wife, Mary, née Lago. The names of his other siblings, extracted from scattered references in Fox's writings, were Dorothy, John (later of Polesworth), and Katherine. A further two Fox children appear on Drayton's parish baptismal record, named Mary and Sarah, probably the couple's youngest children.

Christopher Fox was a successful weaver, known to his neighbours as "Righteous Christer", probably out of scorn for his scrupulous Puritan morality. He was nevertheless respected sufficiently to be made churchwarden of Drayton by 1638, when Fox was 14 years old. Modern biographers have suggested that Fox's relationship with his father was fraught, noting his failure to record his death, that many of his references to him cast him as an enemy figure, and that he attributes to him only "a seed of God", rather than full maturity in holiness.

Fox's mother, Mary Lago, was a daughter of one of several Lago yeomen from the Drayton area, perhaps related to minor local gentry, and married beneath the social class in which she had been brought up. William Penn wrote that she was "a woman accomplished above most of her degree in the place where she lived." Fox himself described her as "an upright woman... of the stock of the martyrs," likely a reference to a family connection to either Robert Glover, burned in Coventry in 1555, or Joyce Lewis, burned in Lichfield in 1557. These forebears were executed during the Marian Persecutions for their Protestant faith. Fox's relationship with his mother was apparently far closer and he recorded an experience of deep grief on hearing of her death in 1673: "I did in verity love her as ever one could a mother; for she was a good, honest, virtuous, and a right natured woman." William Penn noted that "she was tender and indulgent over him, so that from her he met little difficulty."

William Penn would later describe Fox's parents as "honest and sufficient" people, reflecting the fact that the Fox family were unusually prosperous for their circumstances, relatively wealthy members of the emerging English middle class. They were able to provide their eldest son funds during his early religious journeys, and conceded to Nathaniel Stephens, the parish priest, that they had sent the young man away with "a great deal of gold and silver." The family's wealth is especially apparent from an incident while Fox was incarcerated in Derby Gaol in 1650, when his parents pledged £100 as bail, with additional bribes of £50. When Christopher died in the late 1650s, he left Fox a significant inheritance, which would help to support his itinerant ministry for the remainder of his life, as well as some smaller bequests to his younger siblings. Fox himself held assets in cash, loans and investments of around £700 a few years before his death, a substantial degree of personal wealth, much of it probably the residue of his inheritance.

His birthplace was, and remains, a small rural community, situated about 15 miles (24 km) south-west of Leicester, 10 miles (16 km) north of Coventry, and about a mile from Market Bosworth. Located just a few hundred yards off the ancient Roman road of Watling Street, the Leicestershire–Warwickshire and East–West Midlands boundary, once the border between the Danelaw and Anglo-Saxon England, and about eight miles north-west of High Cross, where Watling Street meets the Fosse Way, it lies close to the geographical centre of England. The manor and freehold of the village were held by the Purefoy family, Puritans and relatives of the regicide, William Purefoy. No buildings survive in Fenny Drayton from Fox's time with the exception of the parish church. The church contains the font in which Fox and his siblings are presumed to have been baptised and the elaborate tombs of the Purefoy squires.

There are two contrary traditions about his birthplace and childhood home, which was presumably also Christopher Fox's workplace, and its location cannot be precisely identified. The first suggests the cottage was known as the 'Dog Yard' and remained standing until the late 19th century. This house was photographed prior to its demolition and the image has been widely circulated under the title of Fox's Birthplace. The 'Dog Yard' stood on the site of the present Lodge Farm Cottages, between Fox's Covert and the Recreation Ground, also known as Adelaide's Park. Thomas Hodgkin records an American plan to transport the frame of the 'Dog Yard' to Pennsylvania for reconstruction. The plan was aborted when the uncertainty about its status as Fox's birthplace came to light. An alternative local tradition persisted which suggests Fox's home was demolished in the late 18th century, the location of which is unknown. A memorial obelisk was erected to Fox in 1872 by one of the Bracebridge family of nearby Lindley Hall. The monument is located on the corner of a bend in Old Forge Road. Since the 19th century, Fenny Drayton and its surrounding area has become a key place of pilgrimage for Quakers, commonly called '1624 Country'.

Early religious influences

Fox's birth and upbringing fell during the early Stuart period, towards the end of the comparatively peaceful interval between the English Reformation and the English Civil War. The Reformation had transformed the once homogeneously Roman Catholic England into a society of deep religious divisions: firstly between Protestants and Roman Catholic Recusants, and secondly between various kinds of Protestant confession. Firstly, the Anglicans, those content with Elizabeth I’s religious settlement for the Church of England (a via media, or middle way, combining reformed theology and episcopal polity with Catholic traditions through the conciliatory liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer) and the subsequent reforms of Charles I and William Laud (which brought about a division in Anglicanism between Calvinist and Arminian views on volition and soteriology, and exacerbated the preexisting division between the low and high church parties). Secondly, the Puritans, who were themselves split between Presbyterians (the low church party of the established church, who sought to strengthen its Calvinist theology, restructure it into a presbyterian polity, and reform its liturgy from within the parish system) and early Congregationalists, the Separatists and the Independents (those who broke from the system of parish worship to form their own, largely Calvinist-inspired, churches). Thirdly, the radicals, especially the Baptists (those opposed to infant baptism and, like the Anglicans, divided into Arminian and Calvinist parties, the Generals and Particulars), as well as the Familists (a perfectionist mystical confession whose ideas greatly influenced the Quakers), and the Socinians (opposed to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the forerunners of the Unitarians). These divisions would crystallise and proliferate during the Civil War, thanks in large part to Fox's efforts. He was born roughly eight months before the accession of Charles I, whose contempt for the House of Commons, marriage to the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria, persecution of Puritans and unpopular High Church religious policy would help spark the Civil War.

In Fenny Drayton, the patronage (right to appoint clergy) of the parish church was held by the Puritan Purefoy squires. They had fostered the parish's staunch low church allegiance from Elizabethan times. Anthony Nutter, a notably radical Presbyterian, was rector between 1586 and 1605. The records of the Diocese of Lincoln show that he refused to wear vestments, kneel during services, make the sign of the cross during baptisms, or adhere to any of the vestiges of Roman Catholic ritual in Church of England liturgy. He briefly faced imprisonment in 1590 and was removed from office in 1604 for refusing to conform to James I's religious reforms following the Hampton Court Conference. Despite the relatively uncontroversial approach of his successor Robert Mason, rector from 1606 to his death in 1638 and Fox's childhood catechist, memory of Nutter's radicalism persisted in its influence on Fox's birthplace. Throughout the reigns of James and Charles I, cases of residents being excommunicated for refusing to receive Holy Communion appear in church records, notably Margaret Petty, George Heard, George Orton, George Batling, and George Smith. George Mason died in 1638 and Nathaniel Stephens replaced him as rector of Fenny Drayton when Fox was 14 years old. Stephens would come to play a prominent role in Fox's life, first as a spiritual advisor, then as a key opponent in his home district.

As to whether the religious radicalism widespread in the village influenced the religious attitude of Fox's parents, the evidence is mixed. On the one hand, his mother inherited a strong tradition of Protestant dissent within her family; Fox had an uncle, one William Pickering, active in the dissenting ministry as a Baptist preacher, and, according to his Journal, his parents practised conventional religion merely externally: "though they saw beyond the priests, yet they went to hear them." On the other hand, both of his parents seem to have opposed his abandonment of the state church and his Quaker ministry. Furthermore, Fox's father is on record as upholding the canon law of the Church of England over individual religious liberty of conscience in his role as churchwarden. George Smith's last case occurred as late as 1638, a few weeks after Nathaniel Stephens became rector of Fenny Drayton, and Christopher Fox is recorded as one of the two officials who oversaw his excommunication. The religious character of the family during Fox's early childhood was thus outwardly conformist, but touched by dissent and radicalism. A modern biographer has described the Foxes as conforming Presbyterians.

Education and character

There is no record that Fox received any formal schooling. It is widely accepted that he was taught to read, probably in the home, but whether he was taught to write in childhood is questionable. His written sentences are often confusing and disorganised, his spelling is idiosyncratic and the surviving examples of his handwriting are scrawled and heavily laboured. One modern biographer has suggested that, like many people of his age, he may have learned to write only when occasion required in later life, and is thought to have composed many of his voluminous writings with the help of an amanuensis. It is fairly clear he knew no Latin (in later life he may have learned a little Hebrew and been able to speak some Welsh and Dutch) and was uninitiated in the classical humanist learning undertaken by those of higher social standing. Like most scantily educated rural children in the early Stuart period, Fox's education and his religious formation were closely related, focused almost exclusively on knowledge of Scripture, the 1604 Book of Common Prayer, and the Anglican Catechism.

His later writings show a thoroughgoing saturation in the King James Version of the Bible, with either direct quotations or clear allusions appearing every few lines in many cases. A contemporary hyperbolically suggested that, should all copies of the Scripture be lost, Fox could reconstruct it from memory. He probably had no knowledge of philosophy, literature, science or post-biblical history. On one occasion he attempted to convince an interlocutor that the world was flat. Aside from Scripture, he seems to have expressed some interest in esoteric thought, as evidenced by an incident in 1655 when he spoke to an interlocutor “of the glory of the first body and of the Egyptian learning” (perhaps a reference to Hermeticism) “and of the language of the birds.” The Testimony of some of George Fox's Relations, appended to Thomas Ellwood's edition of the Journal speaks thus of Fox's learning: "though of no great literature, nor seeming much learned, as to the outward (being hid from the wisdom of this world), yet he had the tongue of the learned."

In his Journal, Fox stated his serious disposition from an early age and his earnest religious commitment to purity and integrity. He was a solitary child, avoiding games and other children, even describing himself as "afraid" of them. He reacted with shock and disapproval when he met morally questionable behaviour among his peers and the adults around him, an attitude arising from the Puritan sensibilities of his upbringing and, given his nickname 'Righteous Christer', probably his father's influence particularly. He had an especial horror of religious hypocrites, characterising them in his Journal as "professors" - outwardly practising members of the church who showed no signs of spiritual and moral conversion. Modern biographers have described Fox's early character as shy, socially awkward, idealistic and judgemental: "something of a prig" and "one who loved men in the aggregate but who strongly disapproved of them as individuals."

Apprenticeship and Atherstone incident

As he grew up, Fox's relatives "thought to have made me a priest", but the plan was not pursued. Fox does not record the reason for this, but modern authors have suggested either a lack of funds or the marginalisation of Puritans in the Church of England by Charles I and William Laud. It has been speculated that, had Fox attempted to study for Holy Orders, he may have been thrown out of university for his heterodoxy. He was instead apprenticed to a local cordwainer and grazier, George Gee of nearby Mancetter on an unrecorded date, probably sometime after his 11th birthday. He apparently learned more than merely husbandry and shoemaking, since Gee's enterprise required him to develop accounting and administrative skills as well. Of his role as shepherd, William Penn noted after his death that "he took most delight in sheep... an employment that very well suited his mind in several respects, both for its innocency and solitude; and was a just figure of his after ministry and service." During his early ministry, Fox sometimes supplemented his travelling expenses with the earnings from cobbling. One of his detractors referred to him by this profession: "a poor journeyman cordwainer" who "could not live from his trade."

In the early summer of 1643, the 18-year-old Fox reached what William C. Braithwaite called the "hour of decision," after an incident at a fair in Atherstone, a market town about three miles from Fenny Drayton. Fox was sitting and drinking with other young men – his cousin and their friend, both professing Puritans – who demanded that he pay their bill if he declined to join them in drinking games. Disgusted, he paid the bill but refused to participate and left their company. This incident marked the onset of a prolonged spiritual, and likely mental health, crisis that would lead him to abandon his apprenticeship. It would last until around 1647–8, was accompanied by a sense of vocation to solitude and itinerancy, and played out against the backdrop of the First English Civil War (1642–1646).

The war was initially concentrated in the Midland counties where Fox lived. It had started in August 1642 when Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham, around 50 miles north of Fenny Drayton. Charles had then besieged Coventry later that month, and the first major battle of the conflict had been fought the following October at Edgehill, around 30 miles south. The war would continue until 1646, before briefly breaking out again in 1648.

Spiritual crisis and first journey

In September 1643 Fox "left my relations, and broke off all familiarity or fellowship with young or old", setting out on a journey down Watling Street that ended in London, as his crisis progressed. The exact nature of his difficulties is unclear, described in the Journal by terms such as "sorrow," "exercises," "great darkness," "trouble of mind," "tempted to sin" and "tempted to despair" (that is, give up hope of salvation). Subsequent biographers have characterised it as depression, a personal symptom of the wider unsettling of traditional certainties brought on by the Civil War, avoidance of conscription to the Roundhead army or an attack on his village, and, given Fox had abandoned his apprenticeship and would come to renounce both the Church of England and his parents' Calvinist theology, a conventional adolescent rebellion. Modern scholars have also speculated that adolescent sexual development played a part in Fox's struggle. As Fox himself stated in an unpublished letter of the 1650s, "I have drunk the cup of fornication". It has been suggested his first journey was the occasion of that confessed loss of virginity. His crisis was also a time of religious experimentation for Fox, coinciding with the widespread religious experimentation afoot in the nation. He sought counsel from many clergy, both Puritans in the established church and members of the new dissenting groups. Their failure to "speak to my condition" initiated his rejection of almost all outward forms of religion, and a determination to know all religious truth only "by experiment."

His journey progressed slowly at first, and he spent time living near to Drayton, in Lutterworth (the former home and burial place of the Lollard leader John Wycliffe) and in Northampton. Later he travelled south from Northampton, staying awhile at Newport Pagnell, before arriving at Barnet in June, 1644. He passed through predominantly parliamentarian regions, however, both Roundhead and Cavalier troops were stationed in the villages and towns along his route. While at Barnet, Fox was torn by depression and perhaps physical urges (Barnet was a rural resort for London and staging post of the Parliamentarian Army, noted for its prostitutes during the Civil War). He alternately shut himself in his room for days at a time or went out alone into the countryside. He was about 20 years old at this time.

First visit to London

Still afflicted by melancholy, Fox left Barnet for the City of London in late summer 1644, securing lodgings and renewing acquaintance with his uncle, William (or Edward) Pickering, a Baptist minister. Fox's first visit to London coincided closely with important developments among both the conformist Puritans and the Independents and radicals – perhaps referred to obliquely by his line in the Journal, "I looked upon the great professors of the city of London". He noted that many in his uncle's nascent Baptist movement were, as he put it, "still tender" (i.e. not hidebound by Calvinist doctrine and still open to personal religious experience). Nevertheless, it was in October 1644, almost certainly while Fox was in the city, that seven London Baptist congregations issued the First London Baptist Confession, a firmly Particular or Calvinist statement of faith. This was a response to the official Westminster Assembly of Puritan divines, meeting just up the River Thames, in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey, on the orders of the Long Parliament. This group was responsible for drafting the constitutional documents for a never realised state Presbyterian Church of England, the Westminster Confession and the Directory of Public Worship, both of which were published in 1644. Fox's depression continued during his time in London, while his disaffection from both mainstream and the radical Baptists increased.

Return to the Midlands

After nearly a year of travelling, Fox returned to his family in Drayton, probably in 1645, his spiritual despondency still unresolved. He had received word in London that his parents were worried for his safety amid the Civil War, returning around the time of the brutal Siege and Sack of Leicester (31 May 1645), the county town of his native Leicestershire, and the conclusive Parliamentary victory at the Battle of Naseby (14 June 1645), in neighbouring Northamptonshire. His family urged him to marry, while others advised him to enlist with the Roundheads. Dissatisfied with either prospect, he instead spent a short period lodging with a Puritan cleric in Coventry, about 10 miles south of Drayton. Coventry was then a leading centre of Calvinism, considered a "second Geneva", and Fox must have witnessed at first hand the impact of the Presbyterian revolution that was reshaping religious life in most Parliamentarian towns across England. In spite of the city's staunch Calvinism, he mentions encounters with many "tender people" (i.e. those open to religious experience) in Coventry. After a few months, he returned to reside at Drayton for around one more year. During this time his spiritual despair deepened. The Journal speaks of deep melancholy, long bouts of solitary nocturnal walking, and a frantic search for advice. Nathaniel Stephens, Fox's parish priest since his early teens, a Calvinist Presbyterian and an academic theologian in the scholastic tradition, at first did his best to minister to him with kindness, and they often visited one another. Stephens considered Fox a gifted young man, but the two disagreed on many issues, and he later called Fox mad and spoke against him.

After despairing of Stephens's advice, he sought the counsel of a spate of local clergymen around the Leicestershire–Warwickshire border. The "ancient" vicar of Mancetter, Richard Able, told him to take tobacco (which Fox disliked) and sing the psalms (he couldn't sing). Able soon tired of him, grew annoyed, and gossiped to his flock about what he had said. Another clergyman in Tamworth struck him as foolish. A third, Dr Cradock of Coventry, lost his temper when Fox accidentally stepped on a flower bed in his garden. A fourth, John Machin of Atherstone, recommended bloodletting, which, when attempted, drew no blood. As each clerical counsellor disappointed him, Fox's condition grew worse. His Puritan asceticism intensified during this period, and in 1645 he abandoned the celebration of Christmas to devote himself to missions of poverty relief. He also refused to attend wedding celebrations, sending only a present of relief money to poor couples.

Fox's experience of dissenters in this formative period was more mixed than that of the clerics of the established church. He expressed admiration for the “tenderness” of many, particularly Baptists and mystics, and horror at others, specifically at Calvinist rigidity, an overemphasis on “sin and imperfection”, and at blatant scriptural unorthodoxy, notably from those who denied that women had immortal souls. In spite of occasional sympathies, however, he resolutely refused to join any of the existing dissenting groups.

Initial "openings" and break with the Established Church

Fox's crisis of confidence came to a head in spring 1646 with his first revelations, or "openings" to use his term. They led him to reject all conventional religious activity (except Scripture reading), thus entering into schism with the Church of England. The step is presented in the Journal as three visions, revelations, realisations, or "openings":

1. That discipleship without spiritual baptism and personal sanctification is false. Apparently received while walking up to a gate, perhaps the surviving Swanswell or Cook Street Gates, in Coventry's city walls.
2. On the superfluity of stipended clerical ministry. Poignantly received while walking in the fields on a Sunday morning.
3. On the superfluity of sacred buildings, which thereafter he began to call "steeple-houses".

Though central to his later message, these were symptoms of a broader conviction forming around 1646: that God is directly accessible without a mediator, expressed in one of Fox's best-loved and most quoted passages:

As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also... And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, "There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition"; and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy... And this I knew experimentally.

Both Fox's family and Nathaniel Stephens were alarmed by his refusal to attend church, which followed shortly after, and it occasioned considerable objection from both. In response he cited the First Epistle of John (2:27): "The anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you."

Fox resolved to accept no spiritual truth not taught to him personally and "experimentally" (experientially) in prayer, developing an alternative habit of worship in solitary silence while reading and meditating on Scripture. The Journal describes this charmingly in the following terms: "I would go into the orchard or the fields, with my Bible, by myself... in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came on; and frequently in the night walked about." This interior prayer and reflection led to gradual spiritual breakthroughs and the formulation of his distinctive, mystical understanding of Christianity. A period marked by joyful “openings” and ongoing sorrow followed, during which he resumed his travels around the beginning of 1647 and gradually began to preach his ideas.

Fox's personal rejection of clerical authority coincided with a complete collapse of order in the Church of England. By the execution of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, in January 1645, the authority of the bishops had effectively disintegrated. Later that year, in October, the Long Parliament passed the Ordinance Abolishing Archbishops and Bishops, formally removing the episcopal structure from the Church. FollowingPride's Purge in 1648, the Puritans' longstanding hope for Presbyterian reformation based on the Westminster Assembly's proposals was foiled. By September 1650, Parliament repealed the Act of Uniformity, making Sunday attendance at parish churches optional. This both recognised the existing sects and encouraged a host of new ones, including Fox's Quakers.