George Fox, Historian

Abstract

Carl Lotus Becker (1873-1945), a leading American historian of two generations ago, once wrote an essay entitled, His Own Historian (Becker, Everyman 233-55), whose gist he stated quite explicitly: For all practical purposes history is, for us and for the time being, what we know it to (Becker, Everyman 234). Becker was, of course, a renowned scholar, author of numerous books, and interested in the impact of ideas on the course of human development (Becker, Freedom ix-xlvii).1 He did not publicly announce his conclusion until he was fifty-eight years old, when the bulk of his scholarly work was completed, when, in short, he could draw on nearly a lifetime of thought and experience to validate his point (Becker, Freedom xiii). History is what we know it to be. What it required Becker nearly a scholar's lifetime to articulate, George Fox ( 1 624-91 ), founding organizer of the Religious Society of Friends, came to see just as clearly, and he was poorly educated, practical, and unphilosophical.2 Like Becker, Fox's realization of the truth about history grew out of his experience, but his took place in a far more eruptive arena than Becker's tranquil academic milieu. When he began to think seriously about history, during the 1 670s in the fifth decade of his life, Fox had seen his religious movement develop from a small sect in the midlands and north country of England into a group that helped shatter the government of the English Commonwealth and bring on the reaction called the Stuart Restoration (Reay). He had, moreover, witnessed it wracked by three major schisms and numerous smaller ones (Fox 2: 314-15). He had overseen organization of his followers' scattered and rather independent meetings into an orderly system that allowed control from the center yet preserved a good deal of local autonomy; in fact this may have been his most important contribution, for the Society of Friends was the single revolutionary-era sect to survive to the present.3 Doting disciples lionized him indeed, deified would hardly be an inaccurate term so much that he grew embarrassed by their accolades; he might have ruefully recalled that he had done little to discourage such adulation. To paraphrase a proverb of the time, Fox was as full of history, much of it of his own making, as others were of ale (Wilson 8). In the 1670s, as he began to go through the movement's archives, kept by the diligent Margaret Fell (161 4-1702), and dictate his memoirs comprising his history of the movement,4 Fox demonstrated that he had learned what