THE QUAKERS IN EVESHAM 1655–1660: A STUDY IN RELIGION, POLITICS AND CULTURE

Abstract

AbstractOn Sunday 19 August 1655, after morning service at the fashionable Evesham Church of All Saints, the vicar, George Hopkins MA, left his pulpit and led his congregation into the Market Place. With Hopkins at their head, the citizens strode down Bridge Street, crossed the Avon by the battered Bengeworth bridge and headed up the hill to Bengeworth church. There, Hopkins preached a probably prepared sermon against ‘quaking’, comparing it to witchcraft and to popery and describing its adherents as Pharisees, ‘who wear their hats like mortars’. A Quaker meeting in Bengeworth was then mobbed but not broken up, and the crowds dispersed. By the evening, however, the leading Quakers in the town, Humphry Smith and Thomas Cartwright, were taken to the house of a prominent magistrate, Samuel Gardiner, and examined by deputy recorder Theophilus Andrews and by Robert Martin and Gardiner himself, all justices. The next day Smith and Cartwright were imprisoned, and throughout the following week Quakers were rounde...