Judge then said, "You pretend to be
extraordinary men, and to have an extraordinary knowledge of God."
Dewsbury replied, "We witness the work of regeneration to be an
extraordinary work, wrought in us by the Spirit of God." The
conversation then turned on their preaching itinerancy, and
abstinence from all ordinary callings, the Judge remarking that even
the Apostles had worked with their hands. Dewsbury admitted that some
of the Apostles had been fishermen, and Paul a tent-maker, but
asserted that, "when they were called to the ministry of Christ, they
left their callings to follow Christ whither he led them by his
Spirit," and that he and his fellow-prisoners had but done the same.
The end of the colloquy was that the Judge, with every wish to be
lenient, could not make up his mind to discharge the prisoners. "I
see by your carriage," he said, "that what my brother Hale did at the
last assizes, in requiring bond for your good behaviour, he might
justly do it, for you are against magistrates and ministers"; and
they were remitted to Northampton jail accordingly.--If judges like
Hale and Atkins had to act thus, one may imagine how the poor Quakers
fared in the hands of inferior and rougher functionaries. Fines and
imprisonment for vagrancy, contempt of court, or non-payment of
tithes, were the ordinary discipline for all; but there were cases
here and there of whipping by the hangman, and other more ferocious
cruelties. For among the Quakers themselves there were varieties of
milder and wilder, less provoking and more provoking. The Quakerism
of men like Fox and Dewsbury was, at worst, but an obdurate and
irritating eccentricity, in comparison, for example, with the
Quakerism run mad of James Nayler. This enthusiast, once
quarter-master in a horse troop under Lambert, and regarded as "a man
of excellent natural parts," had for three or four years kept himself
within bounds, and been known only as one of the most eminent
preachers of the ordinary Gospel of the Quakers and a prolific writer
of Quaker tracts. But, having come to London in 1655, he had been
unbalanced by the adulation of some Quaker women, with a Martha
Simmons for their chief. "Fear and doubting then entered him," say
the Quaker records, "so that he came to be clouded in his
understanding, bewildered, and at a loss in his judgment, and became
estranged from his best friends, because they did not approve his
conduct." In other words, he became stark mad, a