The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (69 page)

It was however from this experience, this wholesale incarceration of people who were not themselves members of the criminal classes, that the honourable Quaker commitment to prison reform sprang. It has been pointed out that in her letters from prison Elizabeth Hooton herself anticipated by 150 years the demands of the nineteenth-century Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry.
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Elizabeth Hooton’s earliest extant letter to the Mayor of Derby contrasted the state of the prisoners with his own comfort and honour, warning him of the fate of Dives ‘if he will not regard the poor and in prison’. Elizabeth Hooton was first shut
up in the Fen Country; then in York prison (where she found a number of other Friends) on and off for two years; then in Beckenham prison for once again ‘exhorting the people to repentance’ for five months; finally she was imprisoned in Lincoln Castle, and here she found herself entirely among felons.

At Lincoln Castle too Elizabeth Hooton encountered a further hazard in the shape of a particularly malevolent female gaoler. The law permitted the magistrates to send Quakers to prison, but they were not obliged to make provision for the Quakers’ maintenance (nor for that of other prisoners of course). The Quakers then had to find their own board and pay fees for their lodging, something which brought them squarely within the power of their gaolers if malevolently inclined. It was easy for ‘a malignant woman’ like the gaoler of Lincoln Castle to persecute her Quaker prisoner, and also to whip up the other prisoners against her.
Elizabeth Hooton
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Prisoner in Lincoln Castle
,
pleads to him in Authority to reform the Abuses of the Gaol
drew attention not only to the system of ‘fees’ but also to Brueghel-like conditions within the prison itself. Elizabeth Hooton described ‘in drinking and profaneness and wantonness, men and women together many times part of the night …’ She asked that strong drink at least should be removed from the gaols.
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One of Elizabeth Hooton’s fellow prisoners in York prison had been a Quaker servant-girl, originally from Pontefract, called Mary Fisher. She had probably been converted by George Fox in 1651 when she was about twenty-seven.
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It was this Mary Fisher who was inspired by the Inner Light to carry the Quaker message to New England. Accompanied by Anne Austin, she reached Boston in July 1656. Her reward was to be ‘searched’ for being a witch. The hundred or so books on Quakerism which filled her baggage were confiscated. She was then flogged at the orders of the Governor of Massachusetts and expelled. In 1657 and 1658 the General Court of Massachusetts passed laws against Quakers’ landing. Elizabeth Hooton, once more at liberty, was moved in her turn to set forth for New England. She intended to carry on the work of Mary Fisher and the other Friends, regardless of the Governor’s prohibition.

The death of Oliver Hooton in 1661 placed ‘old Elizabeth’ in that traditionally strong position of a widow of considerable property at her own disposal. At the age of sixty she determined, despite the opposition of her children, to set forth for Boston; Joan Brocksoppe of Derbyshire, reputedly about the same age, ‘freely resolved to be her companion’. The two women, having taken this resolve, were however forced to kick their heels for a considerable time before a passage to New England could be secured; this because a new law had been passed in Boston fining the captain of any ship bringing a Quaker within its jurisdiction £100.

When Elizabeth Hooton and Joan Brocksoppe did reach Boston, by a sea and land route, they entered a town where one Quaker woman, Mary Dyer, had already been hanged on Boston Common in 1659, to say nothing of those who had been whipped at the cart-tail from town to town. None of this prevented the two ‘ancient’ Quakers from interrupting the preachers when moved to do so. Soon enough, therefore, old Elizabeth and old Joan found themselves shut up in that ‘Lion’s Den’, Boston prison.

From here they were taken to confront the dreaded Governor Endicott. He roundly called both these women witches, and asked them why they had come to Boston.

‘To do the will of Him that sent me,’ was the reply.

‘What do you understand by that will?’ demanded the Governor.

‘To warn thee of shedding any more innocent blood,’ answered Elizabeth Hooton. When the Governor countered that he would hang many more yet, Elizabeth Hooton pointed out that the Lord might spoil his plans by choosing to take him away.
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Awaiting this happy event, she was put back into the Lion’s Den, expecting to meet the same fate as Mary Dyer. In prison at the same time lay a Quaker man, Wenlock Christiansen, who was himself due to be hanged on 13 June. Unexpectedly all the Quakers – including Christiansen – were released the day before. It transpired that the execution of Mary Dyer was regarded with displeasure in England; for while no one could
work out a plan for muzzling the Quakers, hanging was certainly considered an inappropriately harsh solution.

Perhaps there were moments when Elizabeth Hooton wondered if the fate which was substituted for it was not even worse than the gallows. Or on second thoughts, since there is no record of despair, we must assume her remarkable faith sustained her through the ordeal which followed. In Elizabeth Hooton’s own words, another jury was called ‘which condemned us all to be driven out of their jurisdiction by men and horses, armed with swords and staffs and weapons of war, who went along with us near two days’ journey in the wilderness, and there they left us towards the night amongst the great rivers and many wild beasts that useth to devour and at night we lay in the woods without any victuals but a few biscuits that we brought with us and which we soaked in the water’.

By degrees the two old women reached Rhode Island, the centre of religious toleration since its foundation by the liberal-spirited Roger Williams. From Rhode Island they proceeded to Barbados, where Mary Fisher had also brought the message of Quakerism, and there were in consequence a number of Friends to receive them. Even at this point the two women were convinced that it was their duty to return to Boston; but having sailed back to New England, they were once more arrested in Boston and deported to Virginia. From here at last they took ship again for home.

In England however old Elizabeth’s problems hardly diminished. She found herself returned to a land where Quakers were beset by the problems posed by the recent Acts comprised in the ‘Clarendon Code’ (which included the harsh Conventicle Act). A magistrate summoned Elizabeth’s son at harvest-time, and when he would not take the oath in court, according to Quaker practice, fined him £5. When the son refused to pay, Elizabeth Hooton’s property – to the value of £20 – was confiscated; to meet such demands the old woman was further forced into selling her farm at a severe financial loss. Then Elizabeth Hooton herself was imprisoned for twelve weeks, for not taking the oath.

At this point Elizabeth embarked on a relationship with King
Charles II based – in her opinion – on her crying need for temporal mercy and his equally pressing need for spiritual conversion. Even if somewhat one-sided, this relationship does at least give some kind of lighter touch to her otherwise painful story. This lightness was not entirely due to the piquant combination of the earnest old Quaker woman with the playful womanizing monarch: ‘king charles,’ she would exclaim some years later, ‘how oft have I come to thee in my old age, both for thy reformation and safety, and for the good of thy soul, and for justice and equity. Oh that thou would not give up thy kingdom to the papists nor thy strength to the women …’ Lightness was often King Charles’s way with solemn events, as though good-natured mockery might palliate those ills which could not be eliminated. Pepys witnessed a scene when a pretty young Quaker presented an extremely long petition to the King. (She was probably the Kentish Quaker’s wife who was debauched by an adventurer called John Scott; he got hold of her entire fortune to purchase an imaginary estate in Long Island, and then fled to America himself, taking with him her jewels and her eldest son.) Charles II listened to the petition and then observed that ‘if all she desired was of that length, she might lose her desires’. The pretty Quaker declined to join in a conversation of such immodesty; it was not until it had returned to a more serious level that she began again. ‘O King!’
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Yet the compassion of the King towards his ‘tender consciences’ was genuine enough, a feeling of mercy strengthened by his own sufferings in exile – so long as he did not consider that their deeds were threatening the security of the newly established stable state. The King frowned upon any possible connection between the Quakers and the Fifth Monarchists. But he chided his brother the Duke of York for an explosion against the Quakers and suggested that they might do better instead to amend the quality of their own lives. When the brave Baptist girl from the West Country, Hannah Hewling, presented a petition to James II in 1685 on behalf of her brothers William and Benjamin, implicated in the Monmouth rising, Lord Churchill warned her of the hardness of King James’s heart: ‘marble is as capable of
feeling compassion’. (Nor did Hannah’s pleas save the boys: both were hanged, although Hannah’s money did at least spare their corpses the indignity of ‘quartering’.)
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There was nothing of this chill quality about the heart of Charles II.

Elizabeth Hooton first thought of coming to court in response to a revelation she had had at sea ‘and in great danger of my life, that I should go before the King, to witness for God, whether he would hear or no …’ But now she also asked for justice concerning the confiscation of her goods towards her son’s fine. With the cry ‘I wait for Justice of thee, O King’, she now proceeded to follow Charles II wherever he went, including two visits to his tennis court, when she spoke to him as he went up into his coach, ‘after he had been at his sport’, and an encounter in another favourite place of royal relaxation, St James’s Park, when she presented the King with two letters.

Familiarity bred in the soldiers round the King a rough sympathy for the persistent old lady, and the King’s coachman actually read aloud one of her letters. In the park, the ordinary people murmured because old Elizabeth did not kneel before her sovereign. But one of the kindly soldiers did eventually get Elizabeth a kind of informal audience. She used it of course for a lengthy bout of preaching; and was in the end put once more outside the palace gates. The next morning Elizabeth Hooton returned, having devised a costume of sackcloth and ashes for herself in the meanwhile; once more she was pulled away from her preaching, but as she was being ejected, she continued to preach all the way through Westminster Hall and the palace yard, denouncing in particular the lawyers (who made professional use of that area).

Elizabeth Hooton’s master-plan, apart from the need for justice, was to be able to buy a house and land within Boston itself, so that the Quakers of New England would have at once a meeting-house, a resting-place and a burial ground, all three being denied to them by current laws. The fact that Charles II eventually granted the old woman a certificate to settle in any British colony will not surprise anyone who is familiar with the parable of the importunate widow (even she did not think to
accost a man exhausted after his favourite sport). So Elizabeth Hooton sold her farm, and armed with the King’s certificate succeeded in sailing to Boston, the certificate preventing the captain of the ship from being fined for transporting a Quaker. But the royal backing did not prevent her from having to pay up to 20s a night for her lodging – to cover the fine which might be levied.

Elizabeth Hooton’s subsequent experiences in New England, where she wandered about North Massachusetts preaching, were indeed even more harrowing than her previous ones, certificate or no certificate. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the college boys, never as a class very sympathetic to Quakers, as ‘Little Elizabeth’ Fletcher found at Oxford (see p.321), mocked and pelted her.
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She was then put into a stinking dungeon and left for two days and nights without food, before being sentenced by the court to be whipped through three towns and finally expelled from the colony. So she was tied to a Cambridge whipping-post and lashed ten times with a three-stringed whip, three knots in each string. At Watertown willow-rods were used; at Dedham, on a cold frosty morning, she received ten lashes at the cart-tail. Once more, but this time ‘beaten and torn’ she was carried into the wilderness: ‘towards night they left her there, where there were many wolves, bears and other wild beasts, and many deep waters to pass through’. Once again, as on her first visit, Elizabeth Hooton made her way to friendly Rhode Island; she ascribed her preservation to the guidance of ‘an invisible hand’ and thanked God fervently that for His sake she had been able to endure ‘beyond what her age and sex, morally speaking, could otherwise have borne’.

Still Elizabeth Hooton did not abandon her mission, continuing to assail Boston with her fervour, before being assailed in turn by the authorities and returning to Rhode Island to recuperate. A rare treat was provided by the funeral of Governor Endicott, taken away by the Lord just as Elizabeth had predicted five years earlier, in 1665. Elizabeth Hooton attended the ceremony; but since the Lord guided her to preach at it, she was removed from there to prison once more.

Elizabeth Hooton never succeeded in buying a house and
land; after five years therefore she returned to England. Her experiences were summed up by her son Samuel, who later tried to continue her mission and told the justices: ‘I had an old mother who was here amongst you and bore many of your stripes and much cruelty at your hands!’ Back in England, Elizabeth Hooton was in time to witness the fresh wave of Quaker imprisonments consequent upon the second Conventicle Act of 1670, the penalties of which were still more severe than those of the previous one; Margaret Fell was one of these victims and Elizabeth Hooton lobbied her old friend the King on her behalf. In 1671 a London Meeting of the Friends made her one of the Overseers of the Fleet prison, to help care for the Quakers therein.