George Fox

George Fox, July 1624 O.S. (July-August 1624 N.S.) – 13 January 1691 O.S. (23 January 1692 N.S.), was an English Dissenter, who was a founder of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers or Friends. The son of a Leicestershire weaver, he lived in times of social upheaval and war. He rebelled against the religious and political authorities by proposing an unusual, uncompromising approach to the Christian faith. He travelled throughout Britain as a dissenting preacher, performed hundreds of healings, and was often persecuted by the disapproving authorities.

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.

Fox was born in July 1624 in the village of Drayton-in-the-Clay, now known as Fenny Drayton, in Leicestershire. He was the eldest of six children of Christopher Fox and his wife, Mary, née Lago. There is no record of either his birthday or his baptism, however the baptismal record of his sisters Mary and Sarah survived. The names of his other siblings, extracted from scattered references in Fox's writings and parish records, were John (later of Polesworth), Dorothy, and Catherine. His father Christopher was a successful weaver, called "Righteous Christer" by his neighbours, respected sufficiently to be made churchwarden and part of the relatively financially secure middle class. Christopher would leave his son a significant legacy when he died in the late 1650s which would help to support Fox's travelling ministry for the remainder of his life. He described his mother as "an upright woman... of the stock of the martyrs," likely referring to a family connection to Robert Glover, burned in Coventry in 1555, or Joyce Lewis, burned in Lichfield in 1557 (or perhaps both). These forebears were executed during the Marian Persecutions for their Protestant faith. William Penn would later describe Fox's parents as "honest and sufficient" people, and Mary Lago especially as "a woman accomplished above most of her degree in the place where she lived."

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 house and the 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 of St Michael and All Angels, containing the font in which he and his siblings were baptised and the elaborate tombs of the Purefoy squires. The house where Fox was born and grew up was demolished in the 19th century however it's location is marked by a monument erected in 1872.

Fox’s birth and upbringing fell during the early Stuart period, towards the end of the comparatively peaceful interval that fell between the English Reformation and the English Civil War. The Reformation had taken the once homogeneously Roman Catholic England to a place of deep religious divisions: firstly between Protestants and Roman Catholic Recusants, and secondly between Anglican Protestants and Puritans, the former content with Elizabeth I’s Calvinist Episcopal reform of the Church of England, the latter thinking it insufficiently radical. The Puritans themselves were subdivided between the Presbyterians (before the Restoration of 1660, mostly members of the Established Church seeking to reform its polity and liturgy) and the dissenters such as the Separatists, the Independents, the Baptists, and the Familists. Finally, within both the High Church Episcopalian party of the Established Church, and among Independents and Baptists, there were further tensions between those with either Calvinist or Arminian views on volition and soteriology. These divisions would proliferate during the Civil War, thanks in large part to Fox’s adult ministry. As noted, his own family had been touched by the violence of the Reformation. He was born roughly eight months before the death of James I and the accession of his son, Charles I, whose contempt for the House of Commons, 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. This had developed the parishes 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. Smith's last case came as late as 1638, when Fox was 14 during Christopher Fox's tenure as churchwarden. The Puritan radicalism widespread in the village extended to Fox's parents, who, according to his Journal, "saw beyond the priests" despite external conformity. Fox was, therefore, born into an atmosphere of pious resistance to church authority.

According to William Penn, Fox's parents "endeavoured to bring him up, as they did the rest of their children, in the way and worship of the nation" - that is to say as a practicing member of the Church of England as by law established and, given the character of Fenny Drayton as a parish, a radical Puritan. There is no record of any formal schooling, but it is clear from his literacy that Fox learned to read and write. It may be concluded that, like most children in the Stuart period, his education and his religious formation were interconnected, focused nearly exclusively on knowledge of the King James Version of the Bible, the 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 works.

Fox's Journal emphasises his serious disposition from an early age: "a gravity and staidness of mind not usual in children." By the end of his childhood this developed into an earnest religious commitment to purity and integrity: