Early years

Relatively little is known of Fox's early years because the first sixteen pages of his dictated memoir were lost or destroyed; Thomas Ellwood, who edited the memoir for publication after Fox's death, supplied some of the missing information. No record remains of Fox's formal schooling or education, although his scrawling handwriting and repetitiveness may reflect dyslexia or a neurological condition that inhibited his ability to express himself clearly in writing, not a lack of education. He was certainly able to read, amassing during his lifetime a substantial library, but his main reading remained the Bible, which he used polemically to good purpose. He remembered later that as a child he had exhibited much 'Gravity and stayedness of Mind and Spirit' (Journal, 1694, 2). In or soon after 1635 Fox's father apprenticed his son to George Gee, a shoemaker who lived in nearby Mancetter.

In late summer 1643, following his nineteenth birthday and after a drinking session with two other youths, Fox broke off his apprenticeship, left home, and went to London, stopping in towns on the way where parliamentary army troops were garrisoned. Plagued with periods of depression that paralysed him and led him to flee from the presence of others in the places he visited, he found no immediate satisfaction for his restlessness. After almost a year he returned home where he disputed religious issues with the scholarly Nathaniel Stephens, his parish minister and defender of the parliamentary cause.

Fox's religious experiences and message

From his base in Drayton-in-the-Clay, Fox wandered the midlands over the next few years, seeking out ministers and others who might suggest remedies for his malady of spirit. He was advised to seek relief by smoking and singing but rejected both, and once again found no help from the company of others. His isolation and religious contemplation led him to reject traditional clerical structures, which in turn led to a break with his parish church about 1646. Stephens went so far as to warn Fox's relatives in the neighbouring villages that the young man was one of the 'newfangles' (Ingle, 43). Supported by income from his shoemaking skills, Fox wandered further afield, into Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. There his anti-clericalism, coinciding with social and political upheaval in the aftermath of the civil war, attracted followers. However, he still suffered from melancholia and spiritual restlessness.

The turning point in Fox's life, as he later recalled, came some time in 1647 when he heard a voice saying, 'there is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy Condition' (Journal, 1694, 8). From then on Fox proclaimed the present accessibility of God who 'was now come to Teach his People himself' (ibid., 73). There was no need to rely on human teachers, Fox preached, for even the scriptures were less authoritative than one's inward guide. He relied on the Bible, which he knew well and whose words were prominent in his teaching and writing, but his stress on the primacy of the Spirit inevitably fed the kind of individualism that greatly hindered lasting unity among his diverse followers. Because the scriptures did not use the term and spoke nothing of it explicitly, he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, a position bound to alarm and antagonize the orthodox. Nor did he make clear distinctions between the Father and the Son. He opposed oath-taking because he wanted to adhere to the Bible's injunction to let his 'yea' be 'yea' and his 'nay' 'nay'. He could also find no scriptural justification for paying tithes to a church with which he disagreed, let alone to a private person who might be thus enriched; resistance to the continual support of a tithing system became an important area of Quaker agitation in the 1650s. This cluster of beliefs put Fox beyond the pale of mainstream puritanism. Most of these ideas did occur in the thinking of other contemporary radical sectaries and he was not the first to make a principle of the non-payment of tithes, but he did place this stance more centrally within his teaching than other radicals did.

Fox proclaimed his message first in the midlands, where it occasioned little success. Indeed, it led him to be gaoled at Nottingham and Derby. A millenarian dimension in his teaching lent Fox a subversive air that seemed to threaten the established order in a very radical way. He was seldom very specific about long-term goals, other than calling for his followers to allow the ever-present Christ to rule in their hearts and lives. But such generalizations, particularly when uttered by someone as forthright and uncompromising as himself, might have far-reaching consequences in the hands of people newly empowered by Fox and his followers. The group that emerged first called themselves 'Children of the Light' or 'Friends of the Truth', though the preferred term ultimately became the Religious Society of Friends. Following Fox's imprisonment in Derby in 1650 on a charge of blasphemy, a local justice, Gervase Bennett, labelled his followers 'Quakers' because they shook and trembled during their meetings, and this unwanted name endured. While in Derby, Fox turned down an offer of freedom and a captaincy to fight in the campaign that shortly ended at the battle of Worcester in September 1651, an assertion of the personal pacifism that later characterized the group as a whole. It was during his incarceration that he dealt with the first serious challenge to his leadership: a group of local Quakers, led by Rice or Rhys Jones, confronted Fox about the central Quaker belief in the inward Christ, arguing that this rendered the existence of a historic Jesus unnecessary. This dispute with the 'Proud Quakers', as Jones's followers came to be known, remained unresolved for at least a decade, despite Fox's attempts to lure them back into the mainstream movement.

Once freed late in 1651, Fox walked barefoot through the December mud into Lichfield, shouting 'Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!' and decrying the unfaithfulness of a people who had ignored a parliamentary order to tear down the city's magnificent cathedral and use its lead roof for ammunition—an episode that demonstrates some common ground between Fox's early beliefs and behaviour and those of other more spectacular Quaker prophets. Then he ventured into Yorkshire and Lancashire, tapping into local discontent. In the isolated and hidden dales of the north-west, he targeted religious seekers such as Baptists and political dissidents who disliked having their tithes appropriated for absentee landlords or to finance distant university colleges and their fellows. This campaign to bring an end to tithes without compensation led to rumours of his mounting a much wider attack on private property. Fox refused to bow or doff his hat to those who considered themselves his social superiors, and he insisted that his followers should stop paying tithes, that a university education did not qualify a person to be a minister, and that anyone, even women or children, could rightfully speak in the religious gatherings—called simply ‘meetings’—in which they congregated.

Fox ‘convinced’—the term used for those who saw and testified to the Quaker truth—most of the disciples prominent in the early movement: Richard Farnworth, Richard Hubberthorne, Francis Howgill, the justice Anthony Pearson, and, most important, Margaret Fell (née Askew) (1614–1702), whom he later married. He also claimed among his converts James Nayler, a figure as prominent as himself in the earliest years of the movement, although Nayler attributed his conversion to the work of God speaking directly to him, much in the manner of Fox's own conversion narrative. Following a vision on Pendle Hill, on 13 June 1652 Fox spoke with great effect to a crowd of over 1000 at Firbank Fell, between Kendal and Sedbergh; it has since become an important place for Quaker pilgrimage. Within weeks the nascent church began to take on an organized form following Fox's arrival at the end of June at Swarthmoor Hall, near Ulverston, the home of Fell and her husband, Thomas, vice-chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. Quaker missionaries soon spread throughout the British Isles, gaining particular success in the southern part of England.

The importance of Thomas Fell as one of the movement's most prominent supporters (although he himself never converted) was quickly demonstrated when in October 1652 Fox and Nayler were summoned to appear in nearby Lancaster on charges of blasphemy brought by three local puritan ministers worried about deteriorating relations with their parishioners. Fell, one of three presiding judges, managed to have the charges dismissed on a technicality. Fox remained in and around Swarthmoor Hall until late in July 1653, when he travelled towards Carlisle. Wherever he went, he invaded churches—he disparaged them as 'steeplehouses'—and excoriated ministers as the very symbols of an apostasy stretching back to the first century (for example, Journal, 1694, 17). 'Deceit', whether expressed in governing, trading, praying, or professing, remained his common target, and he prophesied about an approaching but not very well defined 'Day of the Lord' that would bring an end to such empty practices (ibid., 17, 137). His preaching won converts among New Model Army soldiers stationed in the borders, and he almost set off a riot in Carlisle's St Mary's Church when, in September, the authorities again arrested him on charges of blasphemy. In this instance Gervase Benson and Pearson, two convinced Friends and judges themselves, came to his assistance even as he bombarded the authorities with radical epistles against oppression and tithing on the grounds that, as he wrote, Christ 'Redeems Men out of the Tenths' (ibid., 115).

Quakers and the Commonwealth

By 1653 the emergence of some elements resistant to the developing discipline of the movement, such as Rhys Jones and his 'Proud Quakers' in Nottingham, led to worries about the involvement of ‘Ranters’ who considered themselves exempt from traditional moral and religious restraints. Fox was soon admonishing such followers to keep low in the truth and 'go not out from the spirit of God'. But in the same epistle he also averred that 'to the pure all things are pure' (Works, 7.38), a sentiment bound to feed the antinomianism occasioning his concern. The scattered meetings, up to this point accustomed to convening on an ad hoc basis in woodlands, barns, or private homes to await silently the mysterious moving of God's spirit, began to be formalized into ‘monthly meetings’ after one such was established for the Friends around Durham. These meetings maintained order and also saw to the needs of poor adherents in the neighbourhood; they also formed the basic discipline and decision making units of the sect.

Although the early Friends asserted the primacy of the spoken word, especially in spontaneous utterance, the movement made a very effective use of the press. In the early years there were scores of Quaker pamphlets, most prolifically and effectively from the pen of James Nayler. The first of Fox's own efforts reached London bookstalls in December 1653, followed early in the new year by the arrival of the first Quaker missionaries in the capital. Fox soon headed there himself, stopping along the way to attend general meetings which alerted the authorities enough to arrest him at Whetstone near his childhood home. From Leicester an armed guard escorted him to London, but he still proclaimed the approaching day of the Lord to all whom he met. 'The Lamb shall have the victory' (Works, 7.241), he confidently announced. The church, he insisted, was caught up in an apostasy going back nearly sixteen centuries, and this condition would remain until people came to 'know the scriptures by the spirit that gave them forth' (G. Fox, This is a Controversy betwixt the Quakers and the Papists, 1664, 2–3).

After arriving in London, Fox had an audience with a wary Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, a reception occupying the better part of the morning of 9 March 1654. Although Fox condemned the clergy and admonished his host to rule by God's will, he made a good enough impression for Cromwell to order the release of his guest. Once freed, Fox counselled the government to exclude all the nation's clergy save the most radical, a recommendation designed to replace ordained ministers with lay Quakers. He did preach in London but otherwise spent most of eighteen months in nearby counties, leaving the metropolis to other Quakers, in particular James Nayler, who arrived there in the summer of 1655.

Controversy with James Nayler

Nayler, a radiant and intelligent speaker and, because of his prominence in the capital city, widely regarded as the sect's pivotal leader, soon became Fox's chief rival. No formal theological differences divided them, although Nayler took a harder line than Fox in advising the Friends to avoid compromise with the government when they suffered arrest. Nayler began to collect a coterie of committed sympathizers, many of them women, a development that seemed to be leading to a split within the movement itself. Instead of confronting his rival, Fox left for a preaching mission in the west country late in December 1655 and by January in the following year ended up in the vindictively harsh conditions of Launceston gaol. With Fox absent, the tensions within the movement in London increased over the next six months; some followers of Nayler, in particular Martha Simmonds, disrupted Quaker meetings. In a move designed to heal the breach, a visibly troubled Nayler was persuaded by Fox's followers first to attend a meeting at Bristol and then to move on to visit Fox at Launceston, only to be intercepted and himself imprisoned at Exeter. In the meantime Simmonds arrived in Launceston to abuse Fox: 'she came singing in my face, inventing words' (RS Friends, Lond., Swarthmore MS 3.193).

Major-General John Desborough freed Fox and his companions in September. After 'tarrying' a full week following his release and preaching to large meetings in the region, Fox finally arrived at Exeter late in the month, but the reunion with the imprisoned Nayler only sharpened the personal animosity between the two. Fox gave Nayler his hand to kiss; when Nayler refused, Fox thrust out his foot for him to kiss instead, an act of submission which Nayler also refused to make. The two parted; Fox later described this as a moment of realization that 'there was now a wicked spirit risen amongst Friends to war against. I admonished him and his company' (Journal, 1694, 220). In the following month, after his own release, Nayler and a small group of followers, including Simmonds, entered Bristol in an unequivocal re-enactment of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. Arrested and taken to London, where he was tried by parliament, Nayler was whipped and branded, and his tongue was bored; he was returned to Bristol to be paraded and whipped before being imprisoned in Bridewell, London, where he remained until 1659. Fox was never truly reconciled with his former ally, nor did he publicly indicate that he himself bore some responsibility for these events, and he all but endorsed Nayler's harsh punishment.

Fox's activities following the sensation of Nayler's case indicate his belief that if Quakerism was to endure, he would have to give the movement's internal policy as much of his attention as other important matters, including the convincing of others through missionary activities. He extended monthly meetings to the entire nation, telling those who attended that they should search out disorder and see that 'Friends be kept in order' (RS Friends, Lond., Portfolio MS 36.140B). After 1657 there were more general meetings than usual, where Quaker leaders and others could come to hear instructions and return inspired to work against disunity. Quarterly meetings in each county with an established Quaker presence also emerged at this time. Together with the monthly meetings, this structure was designed to contain Naylerism and to ensure that power resided in the hands of a leadership willing to check the activities of those below them.

In this period, too, the second-day (i.e. Monday) morning meeting originated. Located in London, it was intended to make sure that ministers—the lay leaders recognized as likely speakers in the meetings—were evenly spread around the countryside. It amounted to a kind of executive committee of the Quaker leadership. Because it was dominated by those close to London, its growing influence meant that Swarthmoor Hall, which Margaret Fell had made the centre of the Quaker movement since 1652, was eclipsed: henceforth London would be the centre of power among Friends.

During this time Fox began to respond to rumours of sexual immorality among the Quakers, including marriage arrangements. He demanded bluntly that all 'Unrighteousness and Filthiness … be shut out' (G. Fox, Concerning Marriage, 1661, 5); leading Friends who engaged in illicit sexual activities had been disavowed and testified against publicly from the beginning. Having eschewed a class of pastors (or 'priests' as Fox always designated his clerical opponents), the Quakers had to find a substitute that would both confirm their own religious approach and meet the requirements of the law which, since 1653, allowed civil marriages. What Fox finally proposed was that a couple seeking marriage should appear before their local meeting, which would determine whether their marriage was acceptable; if the union was approved, the decision would be announced on a market day in the village square. The ceremony would occur during a meeting for worship in which, as always, all were free to speak. A certificate, including the promises the couple made to each other, was signed by those present to testify to what had occurred and to set the meeting's formal seal on the union. Although Fox hoped that this procedure would settle the matter once and for all, it failed to do so: as a result, he was continually faced with problems regarding marriage arrangements.

Restoration and pacifism

By 1659 the republican Commonwealth was increasingly threatened by a rising tide of conservative discontent, much of it focusing on the role of those perceived to be radicals, such as the Quakers. When Fox went to Scotland in 1657, for example, and preached his unsettling message to soldiers of the New Model Army, General George Monck ordered his arrest, but Fox had already returned south. Realizing that the restoration of a Stuart monarch would probably jeopardize the movement, Fox and his group redoubled their efforts to forestall what increasingly seemed inevitable.

In 1659 Fox wrote his socially most radical pamphlet, Fifty-Nine Particulars for the Regulating [of] Things, an appeal to the recently reconvened Rump Parliament. In it he not only called for such nostrums as cutting the cross out of the flag but also demanded that the estates of 'great ones' be confiscated and sold for the public relief of the poor. Few, however, took his suggestions very seriously: the authorities certainly did not, or at least there was no response, and the pamphlet failed to slow the rush towards restoration. It was not republished until the twenty-first century; instead, Quakers henceforth busied themselves reprinting more obscure but politically safer theological tracts. In the meantime, other Quakers wrote broadsides and pamphlets with both veiled and open references to the dangers posed by the threatened restoration. By the end of 1659 some Quakers went so far as to toy with the idea of an armed resistance, while others recruited for the militia to protect the republic. Fox had expansively hoped that the Commonwealth would offer a chance for the Friends to replace the Church of England as the dominant religious group in the nation, whereas the Commonwealth's demise would end such dreams. Always personally rejecting participating in war himself, Fox watched events warily. Torn by indecision over the direction he should take, he was immobilized by depression in Reading for ten weeks in autumn 1659. Back in London early in 1660, he was reconciled with the recently released Nayler, who knelt before him and begged his forgiveness. It proved a poignant final meeting. Shortly afterwards Nayler set off to rejoin his family in the north, but died following a violent robbery en route.

After the popular acclaim accompanying Charles II's return in May 1660, the Quakers, like other radical sectaries, were viewed as enemies of the new regime; Fox himself was gaoled for five months in Lancaster. Such governmental suspicion only increased following the thwarted Fifth Monarchist uprising led by Thomas Venner in January 1661. In response and later that same month Fox and his associate Richard Hubberthorne wrote a broadside, A Declaration from the Harmles & Innocent People of God, called Quakers, later known more famously as the ‘peace testimony’, that came to define the most long-lasting aspect of the movement. Designed to meet the political exigencies of the moment—to remove 'the Ground of Jealousie and Suspicion' towards them, as they phrased it—and to assert their understanding of what God was requiring of them, the document announced that Quakers denied 'All bloody Principles and Practices, … all outward Wars and Strife, and Fightings with Outward Weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever' (Journal, 1694, 233). They would never revert to practices from which Christ's spirit had called them. Although signed by twelve prominent men, the peace testimony was never promulgated by any body of Friends, but no successor body of Quakers has ever formally repudiated it.

However, the peace testimony was not immediately embraced by all Friends. For one thing, it did not settle the question of whether a Quaker should pay taxes to support a war. And it failed to address the broader question of whether war might be legitimate for the state even if Quakers would not participate. For example, Isaac Penington, son of a regicide and a leading Friend, thought the state had an obligation to use military force to protect the innocent and produced a pamphlet making this very point later that year. But Fox and the signatories ignored such attempted reconsiderations and instead moved to face the reality that their statement was signally failing in its intention of preventing parliament from taking action against political and religious dissidents such as themselves.

Restoration prosecution and Quaker consolidation

Although the new king proved conciliatory to the Friends, the new parliament was not, and approved a number of measures aimed at suppressing suspected radical groups. The Quaker Act became effective in 1662; it prohibited any group of more than five persons from gathering for any religious service contrary to that of the Church of England, a law calculated to make it practically impossible for the Friends to meet legally. Their opposition to paying tithes also brought the force of the law against them. Unique among dissenters, Fox counselled open resistance to such laws; he did so knowing full well that such defiance would mean going to gaol or paying fines for violating the act. Soon Quakers were being incarcerated almost indiscriminately, their numbers overcrowding the nation's gaols, women and children alike being swept up in raids sometimes provoked by reports from paid informers. Fox found himself imprisoned in three different towns—successive terms in Lancaster and Scarborough between January 1664 and September 1666, and in Worcester between December 1673 and February 1675—usually for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the crown, each occasion eroding the strength of his already weakened body and psyche.

Quakers did not go quietly in the face of such prosecution. Although efforts to restrict pamphleteering were intensified, they found ways to publish leaflets and other materials. They also petitioned both the king and parliament to alert the authorities to their plight. On one occasion 7000 women from all over the country presented and then published a petition calling for an end to tithing; this effort to politicize women's voices was a striking innovation. At the same time, a belief in the need to collect accounts of Quaker sufferings and petitioning for redress further centralized the movement in London and prompted the employment of a clerk to oversee the sect's office.

Missionaries were sent to other countries: Quaker emissaries soon appeared in Ireland, Algiers, Constantinople, Rome, France, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Poland, and there were also early forays into the English colonies of Barbados, Jamaica, and the American mainland—Fox himself visited the colonies between October 1671 and June 1673, and the first ever yearly meeting of Friends was organized in New England in 1661. Fox also addressed epistles of advice and admonition to Jews, Muslims, the Chinese people, and believers everywhere, and eagerly awaited word of Quaker successes (or setbacks) when such came back to their London headquarters. Much later, he travelled to the Netherlands and parts of Germany, encouraging those convinced earlier, and preaching to and disputing with other dissenters who flourished there.

Dissent and marriage

Quakerism, however, continued to be plagued by its own dissidents. They claimed, like Nayler, that their understanding of the demands of the 'Inward Light of Christ' was as valid and controlling as Fox's. The persecution occasioned by the Restoration—four Friends, including one woman, had already been hanged in Massachusetts before King Charles intervened to put a halt to it—put a premium on Quaker unity, always crucial if Fox was to assert his authority in defining the contours of the movement. Attention to details such as church polity might not be as immediately gripping or exciting as proselytizing, but the needs of the movement demanded that Fox now devote a major amount of his time to the task. The case of John Perrot underlined the need for doctrinal uniformity.

Perrot, a Quaker missionary who had run into trouble with the Inquisition while in Rome, had returned to London in 1661 and had begun to query the practice of requiring men to take their hats off when they spoke or prayed in meeting. This raised profound questions of authority and good order within the movement and about Quakers' use of the Bible itself. Perrot insisted that the principle of equality between men and women allowed Friends to override the apostle Paul's injunction that only women should cover their heads when they worshipped, and that if women kept their heads covered, so might men. Although Fox struggled to explain how he justified his position, by the end of 1661 he finally resorted to iterating that 'order, comeliness, and decency' (Works, 7.190) required him to uphold the present practice and that Perrot should submit in good order. Perrot refused, and in mid-1662 he accepted deportation to the New World, but his dispute with Fox had attracted the support of a group of Quakers led by John Pennyman, who felt the movement was becoming increasingly oligarchical. For Fox, 'the Hat' hereafter became a symbol of defiance, and he recalled as significant the fact that Nayler too had kept his head covered during prayer. Fox's victory over Perrot and his supporters—Isaac Penington prominent among them—did not end internal threats to his leadership, but it seemed to justify the need for tighter control of the movement.

Fox's allies in London took a major step in this direction in May 1666, as their leader was in prison in Scarborough Castle for refusing to swear the oath of allegiance. Donning the mantle of patriarchs and apostles, eleven Quaker leaders issued a 'Testimony from the brethren' to be sent to, and read at, all meetings with the requirement that it be kept for ready reference. It prohibited separatists like Perrot from holding office or travelling in the ministry and required all Quakers to submit their writings for approval before publication. When he was released in September, Fox saw no reason to question what his associates had done, as the 'Testimony from the brethren' clearly indicated that those with authority within the movement intended to exercise it. Instead, he immediately turned his attention to strengthening the authority of monthly meetings over those associated with Quakers, a matter he emphasized during a three-month tour of Ireland in 1669, his first trip overseas. He focused also on the still volatile question of marriage and seemed to be moving towards enhancing the role of women Friends in a new departure: in 1666 he had used an epistle to speak broadly of 'service' and 'duty' for women, but he did not at that time articulate anything very specific about what he had in mind.

Fox's determination in this regard was underscored by his planned marriage to the now widowed Margaret Fell, born ten years before him and the mother of eight living children, all but one of them active Quakers. A powerful figure within Quakerism in her own right, Fell advocated the equality of women, having published a skilfully argued pamphlet justifying female preaching. Fox approached the marriage in a matter-of-fact way more common to a business deal than a physical union; for example, in an early example of a prenuptial agreement, he won the approval of Fell's children and indicated that he had no financial interest in their mother's extensive property. The couple decided to be married on 27 October 1669 in the Quaker meeting in Bristol, a city with which neither had much direct contact. In the previous week Fox took advantage of this opportunity to illustrate the correct and evolving procedure for a Quaker marriage. The couple, accompanied by Fell's daughters and such luminaries as the recently convinced William Penn, appeared before Bristol Friends twice and won their expected approval; Bristol's male Quakers also met with the two separately and endorsed the union.

The wedding revealed no additional role for female Friends, so either Fox had not fully decided how they might contribute or he was not yet prepared to spring his decision on an unsuspecting society. Not until two years later, while he was in Barbados, did he issue an epistle describing the new role for women as he now conceived it. He provided that one of the responsibilities of the separate disciplinary meeting for women was to interview the couple first to make sure that they were ready for marriage, and that neither had financial obstacles or other commitments that might threaten their marriage. As much as anything else, this new departure fuelled a new upsurge of dissent among Quakers, particularly those from isolated rural areas in the north-west where women's meetings had not yet been instituted; London's women meetings, in contrast, had been active for more than a decade.

Within ten days of their marriage the couple departed on their separate ways, George to London and Margaret back to Swarthmoor Hall; there was no indication that either found any hardship from the decision to deny themselves the comforts of their 'outward Habitation' (Journal, 1694, ix). But Margaret Fox may have been more bothered than she appeared to be: the following year, imprisoned behind the heavy doors in the basement of Lancaster Castle, she fell victim at fifty-five to a false or imaginary pregnancy. Fox, for whom sexual relations do not seem to have been very important, left no comments about his reactions to this development. However, this was a period of suffering for him as well; a severe depression gripped him through autumn and winter 1670. With Margaret in Lancaster's gaol, he remained in London, nursed slowly back to health by a succession of the women overseen by one of his stepdaughters-in-law.

New World journey

Fit again by March 1671, Fox determined to travel to the plantations across the Atlantic, a trip that offered the opportunity not only to bolster Friends in that part of the world but also to deal with the remnants of Perrotism that had emerged when Perrot had emigrated to Jamaica—Perrot himself had died there some six years earlier. In August 1671 the thirteen-strong group of Quakers was seen off from Gravesend by Margaret Fox and William Penn. The party landed at Barbados early in October, and following a few weeks of recuperation, it was there that Fox took three momentous steps for the Society of Friends: he promulgated his decision on the role of women's meetings in overseeing marriages; he encountered African slaves for the first time and responded to the institution of slavery; and he composed another major declaration of the Quaker faith.

The new responsibility that Fox delegated to women divided Quakers into contending factions back in England, a threat that may have determined his choice of venue for his epistle. The sermon on slavery could be neither as controversial nor as radical as his decree on the role of women, but it lent the Quakers a vague reputation for opposing slavery without their doing very much to relieve Africans of their burden. Even so, Quakers in Barbados, although numerous and quite well off, bore the brunt of distrust from their neighbours because of suspicions that in encouraging their slaves to attend their religious services on an equal basis they did not fully favour the institution of slavery. It did not help their reputations, either, that they were accused of not paying their full share to defend the island colony. Preaching fewer than twenty days after he arrived on the island, Fox carefully spiritualized the issue of slavery, averring that status was determined by a person's possession of Christ. 'All are God's free people,' he asserted, 'who walk in the truth' (RS Friends, Lond., Epistle, 315, MS Q4–5). He broached but did not endorse outright the idea that a slave who had been faithful in discharging all responsibilities and who had been purchased with the master's money might be freed after thirty years; until then—and relying on the master's good judgement—slaves should remain loyal and full members of their owner's family. The sermon held out an indistinct hope for emancipation (albeit after a long time), but it also indicated that Fox believed slaves should be in some sense part of their owners' families, included in attendance at Quaker meetings.

Fox also dealt with the slave issue in his famous 'Letter to the governor and assembly of Barbados'. In the section on servitude, he attempted to lay to rest the 'lie' that Quakers encouraged slave unrest in a colony whose population was more than two-thirds African. Slave rebellions, he confessed, were abhorrent to his followers, and this was one of the reasons why Quakers encouraged slaves to attend their meetings for worship. There they learned to be sober, temperate, charitable, just, and certainly not to rebel; in fact, Fox insisted, Quakers' slaves were more apt to be law-abiding than the slaves of other masters. Let the island's authorities discard their misgivings about Quakers and their human property, he told the governor and assembly; then all would prosper together. However, Fox's letter is better remembered for dealing with Quakers' religious orthodoxy. The local 'evil slander' regarding Quaker beliefs was as bad as the attack on them for the way in which they dealt with their slaves. Fox affirmed that Friends adhered to traditional Christian views of God's creation of the universe, Jesus's virgin birth, his crucifixion for sin, and his bodily resurrection. In later centuries evangelical Quakers reasserted this dogma to position Friends squarely within the range of orthodox Christianity; the letter's only Quaker twist was Fox's affirmation that Christ 'is now come … to rule in our hearts', something he could hardly have omitted without repudiating everything for which he had already stood for nearly thirty years (Ingle, 234–5).

Three months after arriving in Barbados, Fox and his party left for Jamaica and the mainland. His seven-week visit to the island that William Penn's father had captured for the English in the mid-1650s went happily, with few signs of Perrot's residual influence; he also conferred twice with the island's governor, and started disciplinary men's and women's meetings. After a stormy passage, in April the voyagers arrived in Maryland, where the Friends were already quite influential. Fox took the opportunity to confer with the indigenous Americans, but, interestingly, he never mentioned any contacts with local slaves. The Quaker party did not stay long in Maryland but soon left for Long Island, where they were anxious to arrive in time for a half-yearly meeting late in October, especially as there was evidence of Perrotism there. Finding that their fears had been groundless, the group sailed across the sound to Rhode Island, home to every kind of dissenter because of the religious tolerance instituted by its founder, Roger Williams, who was now in his seventies. Many colonial and local officials were Quakers, a fact that elated Fox and lent his visit something of the quality of a royal progress. He stayed at the home of Nicholas Easton, the newly elected Quaker governor and attended a wedding and a general meeting, but left in July 1672 before a debate scheduled with Williams, who was an outspoken critic of the movement.

Perhaps surprisingly, Fox did not turn northwards to New England, where four Friends had been executed only a little more than a decade earlier; inspired by these martyrdoms, the Quaker numbers here had grown much larger. Instead he returned to the south, proceeding as far as North Carolina. Provincial officials came to greet him warmly everywhere he went, a contrast with his receptions on many occasions in England. In Maryland he spent a considerable time visiting Friends on both the eastern and western shores and dispatched an epistle to the governor explaining Quaker beliefs. In May 1673, firmly convinced that Friends in the colonies had a glorious future before them, Fox embarked for the voyage back to Bristol. The tour had been a good one for the Quaker leader, for it had given him a glimpse of the expansion of the faith far beyond its home island; newly established disciplinary meetings in the colonies would help shield these fledgeling groups from the influence of dissidents like Perrot's supporters and keep them within the mainstream. On his arrival in England, he set about seeing that books and pamphlets would be channelled to the colonial Quakers.

Controversy and further consolidation

Fox arrived on 28 June and quickly discovered that the situation in England was not nearly as straightforward as the one he had left across the Atlantic; the increased power that Fox's colonial declarations had conferred on female Quakers had ignited controversy back home. In November 1671, with Fox only recently arrived in the New World, male Friends in Bristol acted. Prompted by a substantial businessman, William Rogers, who was himself close enough to the centre of power to have attended the Fox–Fell wedding and to have signed their certificate, the men objected when women Friends (including Isabel Yeamans, Fox's stepdaughter) had tried to organize their own separate women's meeting. The men's meeting simply decreed that there would be no women's meeting until they all, male and female, assented to one. It was the first open challenge to the new order and reverberated sharply through the Quaker community. From his position in the midst of this controversy, Rogers emerged as the principal anti-Fox activist in the Society of Friends; his efforts made him, in fact, the initiator of what is usually known as the Wilkinson–Story dispute.

This dispute, the most serious and widespread of those that racked Quakerism in the later seventeenth century, had strong roots around Bristol and in the north-west. It presented Fox and the central Quaker leadership with a problem that lasted for a decade, but it also enabled them to define what became the basic polity of Quakers. One Friend confronted Fox directly in Wiltshire to remind him that the apostle Paul had advised women to remain silent in the church. Fox's laboured response silenced his critic, but the dissent he represented certainly did not dissipate so easily. However, Fox's position was significantly bolstered and enhanced by the influential expertise and writings of two forceful and socially prominent recent adherents to Quakerism, William Penn and the Scot Robert Barclay, both of whom took active roles in the struggle. Fox's own role, although still substantial, was none the less diminished by his imprisonment in Worcester late in 1673, not six months after he had returned from America. The Test Act, passed in March, provided for an oath recognizing the supremacy of the crown and abjuring the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation; Fox of course refused to swear to either, and even after his wife obtained a royal pardon for him, he refused to accept it lest he indirectly admit to wrongdoing. Dragging on for fourteen months, this imprisonment weakened his body and spirit, and he left Worcester Castle in poor health.

The dispute quickly expanded from a mere discussion of women's roles. Provincial leaders in the north-west already distrusted orders that came from London; and it seemed that such orders were becoming more frequent. The 'Testimony from the brethren' (1666) had established the principle of a central authority for the movement, and with it the London leadership had begun to act. Annual sessions of London yearly meeting started in 1668. The second-day morning meeting, going back to the 1650s, reasserted its right to oversee publications of Quakers: even a proposed Fox publication on women fell victim to its constraint in 1676. In the same year the London leadership set up the ‘meeting for sufferings’, a quaintly named body that convened weekly in London and gradually evolved into an executive committee for British Friends. Within it, a shadowy central group of twelve oversaw financial aspects of the movement; the need for such a body underscored one aspect of the stability that Quakerism had achieved by the mid-1670s. Not surprisingly, membership of these groups was centred in London and also overlapped, creating coteries of powerful men.

In the rural, isolated, and provincial north-west Quakers saw these moves as granting Fox and his associates powers that resembled those of the pope and his curia—indeed, that very analogy was used by contemporary critics to describe the supporters of Fox and his allies. The Lancastrians John Wilkinson and John Story, whose names were somewhat incorrectly attached to the dispute as a whole, objected not only to centralization but also to the Londoners' insistence that Quakers permit 'serious sighings, sensible groaning and reverent singing' in their meetings and stand firmly against paying tithes. Liberty of conscience became their cry, to which Fox thundered in response, 'God is a God of Order, and not of Confusion' (G. Fox, Several Plain Truths Manifested, 1684, 26). The fundamentals of the dispute could perhaps be encapsulated in a single couplet from a dissident Quaker pamphlet:

TAKE heed, beware of Novelty,And Female Authority.

Innocency Vindicated and Envy Rebuked, 1684, 10

The efforts in Westmorland of Margaret Fox, who had taken the lead since 1671 in defending the decrees from London, also irritated the dissenters within the movement—so much so, that Fox felt obliged to issue her with a rebuke in May 1674. Rumour and counter-rumour circulated about the words and actions of each side, becoming ever more exaggerated with each retelling. Meetings such as that at Reading (where Thomas and Anne Curtis, two of Fox's former closest colleagues, were leaders) split; some opponents of Fox reprinted tracts by Nayler and Perrot. Hints of class crept into the discussion: secessionists pointed to the wig worn by the gentrified Penn, which Fox had felt was acceptable because of hideous scarring that Penn had acquired during a youthful bout of smallpox.

Tired and ill, Fox allowed others to carry the burden of the dispute during the mid-1670s. Perhaps, too, he realized that his own teaching had laid the foundations for the dissent, something his opponents did not permit him to forget. He began assuming a rather unaccustomed pastoral role, trying to conciliate and win the opponents back for the movement, but he never shrank from supporting those who were making the rules in London. Such firmness from Fox and others eventually wore down the opposition: Story died in 1681, while Wilkinson sank into an obscurity that Fox may have believed he richly deserved; and an embittered William Rogers wrote a lengthy account of his side of the story, circulating it first in manuscript and then in print. Still, the two Reading meetings did not reunite until 1716; other aspects of the dispute lingered; and they all became part of the historical residue of Quakerism.

Fox's journal and the end of his life

After Fox's release from Worcester he spent most of the mid-1670s at or near Swarthmoor Hall. Here he rested and put in order the collection of letters his wife had saved from the movement's early days. This process—accompanied by a probable destruction of some letters—became the basis for refreshing his memory as he worked to finish his memoirs, which were posthumously published in 1694 as A journal or historical account of the life, travels, sufferings, Christian experiences and labour of love in the work of the ministry, of that ancient, eminent and faithful servant of Jesus Christ, George Fox. Fox had begun dictating the Journal while still at Worcester, but had not finished by the time he was freed. His memoir has remained a classic of religious literature and has never gone out of print. Although it is mistitled in its implication that, as a journal, it was a day-to-day account of his life, many still find its narrative compelling. As the autobiography of one who struggles with his inner uneasiness and then discovers a sense of security allowing him to transcend and overcome his wonderings, Fox's Journal speaks to a variety of seekers and people who simply want to understand the human condition. His central proclamations, 'the mighty Power of the Lord was over all' and 'Christ was come to teach [his] People himself', served to convey his own gripping awareness of God's powerful, immediate presence, but they also remind even casual readers that they, too, can be recipients of the same grace that Fox experienced (Journal, 1694, 82, 72).

However, the book has distorted the history of the movement. Centring as it inevitably does on Fox, it stands as his own view of things. Some people, for example Elizabeth Hooten, the first person Fox convinced, receive no more than occasional mentions, despite the major part she played as a Quaker minister until her death in Jamaica in 1672. The Journal emphasizes those aspects of the movement most associated with Fox himself (the great open-air rallies and disputations) at the expense of others (the brilliantly planned and executed publicity drives and the co-ordinated tithe-strikes) in which he was less involved. It was also a product of the struggle against dissent within the movement, reflecting the period of its composition. Fox casually excluded from his narrative or played down the role of several people who had once occupied prominent positions in the movement, such as the Curtises at Reading, Wilkinson and Story, and especially James Nayler. Fox took pains to emphasize how he had always been vindicated against his opponents, either by his own victories, by the direction of events, or by God's interventions on his behalf. Its main subject can therefore come across as mean-spirited and vindictive. Moreover, Fox never concedes, much less confesses, any errors on his part: here is a man always in the right, sure of himself and his role, and convinced beyond any human doubt that he will be victorious in the end. This kind of cocksureness can easily antagonize and raises questions about whether Fox and his supporters rewrote the history of their movement in a way to justify their decisions and to deprecate their opponents. No final answers can be offered to this important question, even though circumstantial evidence suggests that Fox destroyed letters he did not wish later generations to see, and he certainly rewrote enthusiastic letters that embarrassed him as he reread them; he knew that controlling the sources would control history's verdict.

By 1680 things were looking better for those in charge of the Quaker movement. Now spending most of his time in London, where he could attend meetings for sufferings and second-day morning meetings as well as lobbying parliament when something of immediate concern arose there, Fox became more sedentary than he had been during his entire life. Even so, he did review quite a few proposed pamphlets for the benefit of the morning meeting, admonishing its members to be sure that they did not permit Ranterish publications to go to the countryside in the name of Friends. Two of Margaret Fox's daughters lived in the area, and so Fox alternated between their homes in Kingston, Surrey, and Romford, Essex, or stayed closer to the centre of things in the Quaker settlement just off Gracechurch Street.

Fox put on extra weight, his face growing full—a visitor reporting that his fingers were so puffy that he could hardly write—and took juniper berries to medicate himself for what he called 'dropsy', or congestive heart failure. On bad days he was almost totally inactive, while on good ones he had much less energy than previously. Nevertheless, streams of pamphlets, fewer of them as polemical as in the past, still flowed from his pen. He took more time overseeing his money now than he had in the past, investing some in shipping, lending some to traders, even, his opponents whispered, secreting some to avoid ubiquitous tithe collectors. After Charles II gave William Penn the grant of land in the New World that became Pennsylvania, Penn gave Fox a plot in Philadelphia, 16 acres in the suburbs, and 1250 acres in the out-country. Fox wanted all these financial matters to remain a secret lest intelligence of them sully not only his reputation but also that of the movement.

Fox went to the continent on two brief trips, one in 1677, the other seven years later. The first, which lasted three months, was the more extensive, taking him as far east as the border area close to Denmark, where a small Friends' meeting had been established in Friedrichstadt. The party included George Keith (who after Fox's death became the most prominent of all the Quaker dissidents), Penn, Barclay, and Isabel Yeamans, as well as some well-to-do Quaker businessmen seeking to make valuable economic contacts in Europe—even Fox took some iron ore from the Fell forge to show around in the hopes of making a continental sale. Fox spent some time in Amsterdam where, as he did elsewhere, he set up both men's and women's meetings and advised the recently convinced Dutch Quakers to avoid schisms by reading his books and pamphlets; he also made sure that they instituted some kind of control over publications by continental Friends. A miracle allegedly occurred during this trip when a woman Fox described as creeping on her hands and knees for fourteen years proceeded to get up and walk normally; Fox, however, claimed no credit for it. The second of the continental trips was briefer—a six-week visit to the Low Countries—but the strain of mediating the deeply divided Dutch Quaker movement proved exhausting, forcing him to recuperate for a month on his return.

In the last decade of Fox's life things began to improve for the English Quakers, partly because of changes in the religious and political climate, and partly as a result of the lobbying they did; Penn, a close friend of the Stuart monarchs, played a particularly important role in this activity. In March 1686 James II issued a pardon for all those convicted of not attending the established church, a move that elated the Friends who saw over 1600 colleagues released from prison. In the following year James high-handedly promulgated a declaration of indulgence for dissenters, prompting many Quakers, mobilized by Penn but silently repudiated by Fox, to write public letters of thanks to James; many were rewarded with appointments to borough corporations through the new corporation charters that the king was issuing. However, with the replacement of James by William and Mary in the revolution of 1688–9, the Quakers lost influence; the Toleration Act of 1689 gave them a right of free religious assembly, but nothing more. Fox was, of course, happier with this bare liberty than with the handclasp with perceived tyranny, but relations between him and the royalist-inclined Penn soured, a situation that had been threatening for some time. Fox considered his younger associate contaminated by his closeness to kingly power, even as he wondered if a time of tolerance did not present a false liberty that would foster looseness and less strictness.

Fox still found enough energy during these final years to visit the London meetings, and he donated land at Ulverston for a Friends' meeting-house close enough to Swarthmoor Hall for his wife to supervise. In October 1688 he completed his last will and testament. Margaret, now aged seventy-six, arrived in April 1690 for a visit, a journey especially wearing for her. When she returned alone to the north-west at the end of June, Fox went back to Quaker business, reading reports about which the meeting for sufferings or the second-day morning meeting wanted his advice. Six months later, on 11 January 1691, Fox attended the Gracechurch Street meeting and, as usual, preached. At the end of the meeting he complained of a coldness near his heart and went to bed at the nearby house of Henry Gouldney, a local Quaker with whom Fox had stayed several times before. To reassure the Friends who waited at his bedside, Fox repeated: 'All is well. The Seed of God reigns over all, and over Death it self' (Journal, 1694, 614). Two days later, about 9.45 in the evening, he died of congestive heart failure, his chin firmed up, his spirit at peace. On 16 January a procession of thousands accompanied Fox's body to Bunhill Fields, where many other dissenters were interred. The exact location of the grave site, now adjacent to Bunhill Fields meeting-house, is unknown.

Aftermath

Fox's death did not end the problems Quakers faced; indeed, it marked little change at all, for he had successfully created a structure that easily survived his death. At the time of his death yet another schism was occurring among the Quakers in Pennsylvania, this time involving George Keith, who thought that the Friends there were not 'Christian' enough and wanted to compose a creedal statement for them. That most of the previous disagreements had involved the antinomian left wing rather than the theological right only underlined how far Fox had consolidated the individualistic Society of Friends into a more fundamentally stable and conservative position. Fox did leave the Society of Friends with the germs of these differences and with the likelihood that they would continue to breed discontent, but he also bequeathed the movement enough administrative machinery to deal with such problems.

To carry out their leader's wishes, the London yearly meeting's second-day morning meeting turned its attention immediately after Fox's death to compiling and completing his memoirs, assigning this task to Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker who had been a supportive friend of John Milton. Ellwood somewhat toned down its original vigour as he edited it for publication. The finished Journal issued from its publisher, Thomas Northcott, in 1694, containing a long preface by William Penn, as well as testimony by Fox's widow and long selections from Fox's other writings. Four years later, a second volume, consisting of selected epistles, appeared; a third volume, consisting of a collection of selected doctrinal works, was published in 1706. All three works naturally reflected the judgements of their editors. A memoir closer in time to most of the events described therein was dictated by Fox in 1664 when he was incarcerated at Lancaster; eventually published in 1925 as the Short Journal, it exudes more vibrancy and power in the selected events it describes after 1647.

A complete edition of Fox's voluminous writings, both published and unpublished, remains to be achieved; the closest approximation is an eight-volume edition brought out in Philadelphia in 1831. The extant and unpublished collections of documents that came to make up the Journal are housed in London in the library of the Religious Society of Friends; denominated the Spence manuscripts, these were edited by Norman Penney and first published in 1911. The Swarthmore manuscripts, collected only at the end of the nineteenth century, contain primarily the letters that Margaret Fell kept when she had oversight of the developing movement in the 1650s; an extremely valuable collection, they too are in the archives with the Spence manuscripts in London. A further valuable guide of major worth is the Annual Catalogue of George Fox's Papers, edited by H. J. Cadbury (1939), which not only provides a comprehensive catalogue but also contains sentences offering glimpses of documents long since lost or destroyed.

Fox was surely one of the most important religious figures that England produced, for his movement, although it remained small, both endured and spread worldwide, while numerous later reformers, including John Wesley and William Booth, were directly influenced either by his example or by his theological positions. The conflict that his compelling ideas occasioned during his lifetime continued (and continues) within the Religious Society of Friends; without a firmly based authority the possibility of disagreement was ever present. His life and experience also left to his followers a heritage of both a firm commitment to acting on ineffable religious insights and an assertive attitude about the rightness of their positions. Such inclinations, encapsulated in 1955 in the phrase 'speak truth to power', garnered for Quakers the 1947 Nobel peace prize, but made them, like Fox, sometimes difficult to get along with. Still, he remained a charismatic leader, almost uniquely able to articulate concretely what generations of his followers believed they themselves needed to say, whether theologically or not. A kind of touchstone, his career and experiences continue to inspire.