THE life of the simple Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, to whom the pomps and
shows of earth were nowhere so vain as in association with the spiritual
life of man, may serve as companion to another volume in this Library,
the “Life of Wolsey” by George Cavendish, who, as a gentleman of the
great prelate’s household, made part of his pomp, but had heart to love
him in his pride and in his fall. “The History of Thomas Ellwood,
written by Himself,” is interesting for the frankness with which it makes
Thomas Ellwood himself known to us; and again, for the same frank
simplicity that brings us nearer than books usually bring us to a living
knowledge of some features of a bygone time; and yet again, because it
helps us a little to come near to Milton in his daily life. He would be
a good novelist who could invent as pleasant a book as this unaffected
record of a quiet life touched by great influences in eventful times.
Thomas Ellwood, who was born in 1639, in the reign of Charles the First,
carried the story of his life in this book to the year 1683, when he was
forty-four years old. He outlived the days of trouble here recorded,
enjoyed many years of peace, and died, near the end of Queen Anne’s
reign, aged 74, on the first of March 1713, in his house at Hunger Hill,
by Amersham. He was eleven years younger than John Bunyan, and years
younger than George Fox, the founder of that faithful band of worshippers
known as the Society of Friends. They turned from all forms and
ceremonies that involved untruth or insincerity, now the temple of God in
man’s body, and, as Saint Paul said the Corinthians, “Know ye not that ye
are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you,” they
sought to bring Christ into their hearts, and speak and act as if Christ
was within governing their words and actions. They would have no formal
prayers, no formal preaching, but sought to speak with each other as the
Spirit prompted, soul to soul. They would not, when our plural pronoun
“you” was still only plural, speak to one man as if he were two or more.
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 to a loan, which the members of
the House then raised to £90,000, by rising, one after another, to give
their personal bonds each for a thousand pounds. Isaac Penington the
son, whom Ellwood loved as a friend and reverenced as a father, became a
foremost worker and writer in the Society of Friends. In a note upon
him, written after his death, Thomas Ellwood said that “in his family he
was a true pattern of goodness and piety; to his wife he was a most
affectionate husband; to his children, a loving and tender father; to his
servants, a mild and gentle master; to his friends, a firm and fast
friend; to the poor, compassionate and open-hearted; and to all,
courteous and kind?” In 1661 he was committed to Aylesbury gaol for
worshipping God in his own house (holding a conventicle), “where,” says
Ellwood in that little testimony which he wrote after his friend’s death,
“for seventeen weeks, great part of it in winter, he was kept in a cold
and very incommodious room, without a chimney; from which hard usage his
tender body contracted so great and violent a distemper that, for several
weeks after, he was not able to turn himself in bed.” “His second
imprisonment,” says Ellwood, “was in the year 1664, being taken out of a
meeting, when he with others were peaceably waiting on the Lord, and sent
to Aylesbury gaol, where he again remained a prisoner between seventeen
and eighteen weeks.
“His third imprisonment was in the year 1665, being taken up, with many
others, in the open street of Amersham, as they were carrying and
accompanying the body of a deceased Friend to the grave. From hence he
was sent again to Aylesbury gaol; but this commitment being in order to
banishment, was but for a month, or thereabouts.
“His fourth imprisonment was in the same year 1665, about a month after
his releasement from the former. Hitherto his commitment had been by the
civil magistrates; but now, that he might experience the severity of
each, he fell into the military hands. A rude soldier, without any other
warrant than what he carried in his scabbard, came to his house, and told
him he came to fetch him before Sir Philip Palmer, one of the
deputy-lieutenants of the county. He meekly went, and was by him sent
with a guard of soldiers to Aylesbury gaol, with a kind of mittimus,
importing ‘That the gaoler should receive and keep him in safe custody
during the pleasure of the Earl of Bridgewater,’ who had, it seems,
conceived so great, as well as unjust, displeasure against this innocent
man, that, although (it being the sickness year) the plague was suspected
to be in the gaol, he would not be prevailed with only to permit Isaac
Penington to be removed to another house in the town, and there kept
prisoner until the gaol was clear. Afterwards, a prisoner dying in the
gaol of the plague, the gaoler’s wife, her husband being absent, gave
leave to Isaac Penington to remove to another house, where he was shut up
for six weeks; after which, by the procurement of the Earl of Ancram, a
release was sent from the said Philip Palmer, by which he was discharged,
after he had suffered imprisonment three-quarters of a year, with
apparent hazard of his life, and that for no offence.”
This was not the end of the troubles of Ellwood’s patron and friend. He
had been home only three weeks when “the said Philip Palmer” seized him
again, dragged him out of bed, sent him, without any cause shown, to
Aylesbury gaol, and kept him a year and a half prisoner “in rooms so
cold, damp, and unhealthy, that it went very near to cost him his life,
and procured him so great a distemper that he lay weak of it several
months. At length a relation of his wife, by an _habeas corpus_, removed
him to the King’s Bench bar, where (with the wonder of the court that a
man should he so long imprisoned for nothing) he was at last released in
the year 1668.” “Paradise Lost” had appeared in the year before. Yet a
sixth imprisonment followed in 1670, when Penington, visiting some
Friends in Reading gaol, was seized and carried before Sir William
Armorer, a justice of the peace, who sent him back to share their
sufferings. Penington died in 1679.
Of Thomas Ellwood’s experience as reader to Milton, and of Milton’s
regard for the gentle Quaker, the book tells its own tale. I will only
add one comment upon an often-quoted incident that it contains. When
Milton gave his young friend—then twenty-six years old—the manuscript of
“Paradise Lost” to read, his desire could only have been to learn what
comprehension of his purpose there would be in a young man sincerely
religious, as intelligent as most, and with a taste for verse, though not
much of a poet. The observation Ellwood made, of which he is proud
because of its consequence, might well cause Milton to be silent for a
little while, and then change the conversation. It showed that the whole
aim of the poem had been missed. Its crown is in the story of
redemption, Paradise Found, the better Eden, the “Paradise within thee,
happier far.” Milton had applied his test, and learnt—what every great
poet has to learn—that he must trust more to the vague impression of
truth, beauty, and high thought, that can be made upon thousands of
right-hearted men and women, than to the clear, full understanding of his
work. The noblest aims of the true artist can make themselves felt by
all, though understood by few. Few know the secrets of the sunshine,
although all draw new life from the sun. When Milton—who, with his
habitual gentleness, never allowed Ellwood to suspect that he had missed
the whole purpose of “Paradise Lost”—showed him “Paradise Regained,” and
made him happy by telling him that he caused it to be written; he showed
him a poem that expanded the closing thought of “Paradise Lost” into an
image of the Paradise within, that is to be obtained only by an imitation
of Christ under all forms of our temptation.
Of Ellwood’s life after the year in which he ends his own account of it,
let it suffice to say, that he wrote earnest, gentle books in support of
his opinions and against the persecution of them. He lived retired until
the year 1688, and occupied himself with an attempt at a _Davideis_, a
Life of David in verse. He had not then seen Cowley’s. Ellwood carried
on his verses to the end of David’s life, and published them in 1712.
When George Fox died, in 1690, Thomas Ellwood transcribed his journal for
the press, and printed it next year in folio, prefixing an account of
Fox. He was engaged afterwards in controversy with George Keith, a
seceder from the Friends. His intellectual activity continued unabated
to the end. In 1709 he suffered distraint for tithes; goods to the value
of £24 10s. being taken for a due of about £14, after which the
distrainers “brought him still in debt, and wanted more.”
Ellwood’s life was healthy, except that he was asthmatic towards the end.
His wife died five years before him. Of her, J. Wyeth, citizen of
London, who was the editor of “Ellwood’s History of his Life,” and wrote
its sequel, says that she was “a solid, weighty woman.” But the context
shows that he means those adjectives to be read in a spiritual sense.
“The liberal soul shall be made fat,” says Solomon.