Society of Friends

George Fox later reported meeting HB in the Strand in London in about 1657, at a time when Cromwell was persecuting Quakers . She told him of her plan to seek out the future Charles II

By this stage in her life she had been imprisoned fourteen times over a period of fifty years. The Society of Friends gave her permission for her journey. Once abroad, she first visited James II

Late in life HB lived in a room behind the Peel meeting house in London, a place set aside for poor widows, and received an allowance of five shillings a week from that congregation...

BB was converted to Quakerism by two of the early adherents of the sect, John Audland and John Camm .

BB (future autobiographer) wrote and delivered a political letter to James II protesting about the treatment of Quakers .

BB was a later seventeenth-century Quaker minister and autobiographer. Her writing is, typically, political as well as religious.

She was said to have been well-connected, though whether this was through her parents or her husband is likewise unclear. Her contacts suggest that she was at least at ease with the upper classes, and...

Her religious witness had, owing to the persecution of Quakers , its political side. She was clearly a persuasive speaker, as shown by her success with the Mayors of Basingstoke and of Marlborough. She also...

She was at this time probably a widow, and an active Quaker minister and missionary.

BB relates her conversion to Quakerism back in the 1650s, and its consequences for just the first three years of her ministry. First come the adverse results of being a Friend: the resultant collapse of...

BB , a colonial American Quaker , published just one of the many texts she says she wrote. This work, An Alarm Sounded, 1709, a spiritual autobiography in pamphlet form, is a narrative of...

Born as an American colonist to parents who had themselves emigrated from England because of their Quaker faith, she was, she says, not a gentlewoman by birth. She defined a gentlewoman as one with no...

At six or seven, BB wrote, she became fearful about her future state, and was afraid of dying because of the prospect of Hell. The smallpox renewed these religious terrors. She had thrown them...

Meanwhile the attitude of the Puritan government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hardened against the Society of Friends , so that in opting for serious Quakerism BB would be joining a persecuted minority.

After her move to Philadelphia, BB attended Quaker meetings regularly, but without recovering the sweetness her soul had felt at her first conversion. She did not confide her religious difficulties, but kept them to herself...