ABSTRACT
In his excellent study of the interactions of Quakers with the legal system in the period of the greatest persecution, Craig Horle complains about the tendency of Quaker historians to perpetuate the image of Quakers joyfully suffering hardships at the hands of cruel persecutors. The first important history of the Quakers, William Sewel's The History of the People Called Quakers, tells a story of progress through suffering similar to William Penn's, although with greater emphasis on the heroic character of Quaker endurance. The experience of the Quaker prisoners, presented largely through their own words, dominates the last part of Joseph Besse's account of Bristol. The fact that relatively little of the threatening language of the early Quakers found its way into Besse's Sufferings, however, suggests that he was more comfortable representing a suffering people than a sometimes fiercely oppositional one.
