They swore not at all; but their "Yea" and "Nay" were
known to be more binding than the oaths of many of their
persecutors. And as they would not go through the required form of
swearing allegiance to the Government whenever called upon to do so,
they were continually liable to penalties of imprisonment when
imprisonment too often meant jail fever, misery, and death. George
Fox began his teaching when Ellwood was eight years old. Ellwood
was ten years old when Fox was first imprisoned at Nottingham, and
the offences of his followers against established forms led, as he
says, to "great rage, blows, punchings, beatings, and
imprisonments." Of what this rage meant, and of the spirit in which
it was endured, we learn much from the History of Thomas Ellwood.
Isaac Penington, whose influence upon young Ellwood's mind is often
referred to in this book, was born in the year of Shakespeare's
death, and had joined the Society of Friends in 1658, when his own
age was forty-two and Ellwood's was nineteen. He was the son of
Alderman Isaac Penington, a Puritan member for the City of London,
who announced, at a time in the year 1640 when the Parliament was in
sore need of money, that his constituents had subscribed 21,000
pounds to a loan, which the members of the House then raised to
90,000 pounds, by rising, one after another, to give their personal
bonds each for a thousand pounds.
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