early Quaker preachers after Fox.
They had carried the doctrines into every part of England, and also
into Scotland and Ireland; some of them had even been moved to go to
the Continent. Wherever they went there was the same disturbance
round them as round Fox himself, and they had the same hard
treatment--imprisonment, duckings, whippings. It is necessary that
the reader should remember that in 1654 Quakerism was still in this
first stage of its diffusion by a vehement propagandism carried on by
some sixty itinerant preachers at war with established habits and
customs, and had not settled down into mere individual Quietism, with
associations of those who had been converted to its principles, and
could be content with their own local meetings. In the chief centres,
indeed, there were now fixed meetings for the resident Quakers, the
main meeting place for London being the Bull and Mouth in St.
Martin's-le-Grand; but Fox and most of his coadjutors were still
wandering about the country.--There was already an extensive
literature of Quakerism, consisting of printed letters and tracts by
Fox himself, Farnsworth, Nayler, Dewsbury, Howgill, and others, and
of invectives against the Quakers and their principles by
Presbyterians and Independents; and some of the letters of the
Quakers had been directly addressed to Cromwell. There had also, some
time in 1654, been one interview between the Lord Protector and Fox.
Colonel Hacker, having arrested Fox in Leicestershire, had sent him
up to London. Brought to Whitehall, one morning early, when the Lord
Protector was dressing, he had said, on entering, "Peace be on this
House!" and had then discoursed to the Protector at some length, the
Protector kindly listening, occasionally putting a question, and
several times acknowledging a remark of George's by saying it was
"very good," and "the truth." At parting, the Protector had taken
hold of his hand, and, with tears in his eyes, said "Come again to my
house! If thou and I were but an hour of the day together, we should
be nearer one to another. I wish no more harm to thee than I do to my
own soul." Outside, the captain on guard, informing George that he
was free, had wanted him, by the Protector's orders, to stay and dine
with the household; but George had stoutly declined.[1]

[Footnote 1: Sewel's _History of the People called Quakers_ (ed.
1834), I, I--136; Rules and Discipline of the Society of Friends
(1834), _Introduction_; Baxter