B iddle, H ester

Abstract

Hester Biddle (1629/30–97), Quaker writer and itinerant preacher, addressed pugnacious pamphlets to those who persecuted religious dissenters, worshipped in the Anglican Church, or refused to help the poor. Raised in Oxford, she grew up in the Anglican Church; no record of her early life survives but the brief account in her writing. She moved to London, where she mourned the burning of the prayer books and the beheading of Charles I so greatly ‘that I was even weary of life … then did the Lord take away my hearing that I was deaf as to all Teachings of Men for a year’ ( The trumpet of the Lord sounded forth unto these three nations , 1662). After attending Quaker meetings and being inspired by the preaching of Edward Burrough and Francis Howgill, she converted to Quakerism in 1654. With her husband, Thomas Biddle (d. 1682), a cobbler, she had four sons; after his death, charitable funds from a local Quaker meeting helped to support her. Irrepressible in spite of frequent arrests, imprisonments, even beatings, during the fiercest periods of Quaker persecution, she continued publishing provocative pamphlets and composed The trumpet of the Lord sounded forth unto these three nations from Newgate prison in 1662. Like her Quaker sisters Katherine Evans, Sarah Cheevers, and Mary Fisher, Biddle travelled as a missionary not only across England, Ireland, and Scotland but also to the Netherlands, Barbados, Egypt, and finally, in her last years, to France. In her last years, she delivered her message of peace to Louis XIV of France. She died of natural causes in London at the age of 67.