ABSTRACT
On 3 July 1670 George Alsop, the recently appointed rector of Chipping Ongar in Essex, was sent by Humphrey Henchman, the Bishop of London, to read from the Book of Common Prayer in the Quaker meeting house in Gracechurch Street in the City of London. According to Alsop’s account he was attacked by the Quakers, who called him names such as ‘Popish Priest’ and ‘Jesuit’.1 The Quaker version of events is somewhat different, describing how Alsop arrived with a band of drunken soldiers, only to withdraw ‘without mollestation’.2 The incident itself was just one part of a concerted effort by the authorities in London to clamp down on religious dissenters in the immediate aftermath of the Second Conventicle Act (1670). It has been cited by historians of the Restoration period as an episode in what has been characterized as a ‘battle of London’ between the City authorities and religious dissenters, who were said to have flooded the capital in an effort to head off the threat posed by the new legislation.3 The aim of this paper is to focus upon a series of incidents occurring at Gracechurch Street meeting house and elsewhere in the
1 NA, SP29/277/14. See also, Extracts from State Papers Relating to Friends 1654 to 1672, ed. N. Penney (London, 1913), p. 314. I first discovered some of the events discussed in this paper while researching an MA dissertation, ‘Early Quaker Meeting Houses in London, 1654-1688’ (University of York, 2001). I remain indebted to Bill Sheils for his encouragement at that time. I am also grateful to Justin Champion and Andrew Spicer for discussing earlier drafts with me. All dates in the text have been modernized. 2 Library of the Society of Friends (hereafter LSF), Great Book of Sufferings, 44 vols, II, p. 102. 3 G.S. de Krey, ‘The First Restoration Crisis: Conscience and Coercion in London, 1667-
summer of 1670, and to consider the extent to which they illustrate the role played by notions of religious space in the conflicts of the Restoration period. In attempting to take possession of the Quaker meeting house for use by the established church, the secular and ecclesiastical authorities were seeking to conduct a structured form of worship within a space designed for a very different exercise of religion. The challenge to authority represented by groups such as the Quakers was physically manifested by the presence of meeting houses and dissenting chapels in and around London. In their efforts to assert the authority of the established church the Lord Mayor and the bishop of London employed a variety of tactics to disrupt dissenting activities by seeking to take control of the premises within which they conducted worship. In turn, the Quaker resistance of such efforts highlights the limitations of the capacity of the local authorities to exercise power over intransigent dissenting groups.4 Quaker Attitudes to Sacred Space
It may seem strange in a volume concerned with the notion of sacred space to have any discussion of Quaker meeting houses. The Quaker belief system has been interpreted as a ‘largely logical development’ of Puritanism. While the Puritans contended that the Holy Spirit indwells only in the converted, the Quakers believed that it indwells in all men, the converted completely and the unconverted incompletely.5 Leaving this difference aside, it is possible to find some similarities between the Quakerism of seventeenth-century England, and the Reformed churches of sixteenth-century Europe. In terms of locating the holy in Quaker belief, the internalization of the sacred that can be found in Quaker doctrine can be compared with the teachings of Jean Calvin. Calvin rejected the notion that the sacred was localized within churches, and told his readers not to attribute ‘any secret holiness’ to them. He wrote that the divine was located within the believer, and was not confined to the church building since, ‘if we are the real temples of the Lord, we must pray to him within ourselves if we wish to invoke him in his real temple’.6 Thus both for Calvin, and for other reformers, the church building held
4 On power relations in early modern Britain, see M.J. Braddick and J. Walter, ‘Introduction. Grids of Power: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society’, in M.J. Braddick and J. Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 1-42. 5 G. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1947), pp. 14, 161-2. 6 C. Grosse, ‘Places of Sanctification: the Liturgical Sacrality of Genevan Reformed
no special sacred status in its own right, and was only made holy through its use as an arena for the conduct of religious worship.7
