George Fox(1624–1691)

George Fox was born at Drayton-in-the-Clay (the modern Fenny Drayton) in southern Leicestershire in July 1624, son of Christopher Fox, a weaver of the village, and Mary Lago. The family were Puritan Anglicans of the small-yeoman class; the boy was raised on the Geneva Bible and the parish-pulpit Puritanism of the early Caroline period and was apprenticed at twelve to a Drayton shoemaker and grazier. From around 1643, in his nineteenth year, he became preoccupied with the question of where religious authority truly resided, left the apprenticeship and the parish, and walked through the Midlands and the East Anglian fenland on a long unstructured spiritual journey of about three years in which he visited every form of Puritan and Independent meeting then available in England and found, in his own later account in the Journal, that none of them satisfied his question.

He had on a hillside in Derbyshire in 1647 in his twenty-third year the central religious experience of his life: the conviction that the inner Christ-light was directly available to every individual believer without the intermediation of priest, sacrament or formal church structure, and that this immediate inward access was the foundation on which a Christian church could be built. He began preaching the doctrine across the Midlands and the North through 1648 and 1649, was first imprisoned at Nottingham in 1649 and at Derby in 1650 to 1651 (the prosecuting Justice of the Peace at Derby is the one who is said to have coined the nickname Quaker, on Fox's instruction that he tremble at the word of the Lord), and through 1651 and 1652 walked north into the Yorkshire and Lancashire Pennine country to deliver the message to the seeker communities of the northern uplands.

On the morning of the seventeenth of May 1652 he climbed Pendle Hill in Lancashire in his twenty-eighth year and at the summit had the vision that became the foundational image of the new movement: the great people to be gathered, spread across the Lancashire and Westmorland fells and beyond. He came down off Pendle to the Westmorland valley of Lune at Sedbergh and on the second of June 1652 preached to a fair-day gathering of about a thousand Seeker farmers, weavers and miners at Firbank Fell above Sedbergh; substantially the entire Seeker network of the northern fells came in to the new movement on the strength of the Firbank sermon. From Firbank he travelled the few miles to Swarthmoor Hall outside Ulverston in Furness, the country house of the Judge Thomas Fell and his wife Margaret Fell, who became from June 1652 the principal aristocratic patrons of the movement and the institutional builders of its organisational structure; Fox married Margaret Fell at Swarthmoor in 1669 after Judge Fell's death.

He travelled across the next forty years through England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the West Indies, the North American colonies of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, Holland and Germany, preaching the Quaker doctrine and organising the local meetings. He suffered eight imprisonments in English jails (1649 Nottingham; 1650 to 1651 Derby; 1653 Carlisle; 1654 Charing Cross; 1656 Launceston; 1660 Lancaster; 1664 Lancaster and Scarborough; 1673 to 1675 Worcester), totalling roughly seven years of his life inside prison walls. He drafted in 1666 the Letter to the Governor of Barbadoes, the foundational Quaker statement against slavery (the first organised English-language religious denomination to take the anti-slavery position); he wrote and posthumously published the Journal (1694), the central spiritual autobiography of the seventeenth-century English-speaking world after Bunyan; he organised the meeting structure (the monthly meetings, the quarterly meetings, the yearly meeting at London from 1668) that has been the constitutional architecture of the Religious Society of Friends ever since. He died at Henry Goldney's house in White Hart Court off Gracechurch Street, London, on the thirteenth of January 1691 in his sixty-seventh year, and was buried at the Quaker burial-ground at Bunhill Fields. The Religious Society of Friends today numbers over four hundred thousand members across more than ninety countries, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize twice (1947, jointly to the American Friends Service Committee and the British Quaker Council), and continues in unbroken meeting since Fox. The Fox name in modern Christian history carries the weight of the climb of Pendle Hill on the seventeenth of May 1652.