George Fox (July 1624 O.S. (July–August 1624 N.S.)Fox in Nickalls, p. 1: "I was born in the month called July in the year 1624". – 13 January 1691 O.S. (23 January 1692 N.S.)) was a Christian mystic and an English Dissenter, who was a founder of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers or Friends. The son of a Leicestershire weaver, he lived in times of social upheaval and war. He rebelled against the religious and political authorities by proposing an unusual, uncompromising approach to the Christian faith. He travelled throughout Britain as a dissenting preacher, performed hundreds of healings, and was often persecuted by the disapproving authorities.
In 1669, he married Margaret Fell, widow of a wealthy supporter, Thomas Fell; she was a leading Friend. His ministry expanded and he made tours of North America and the Low Countries. He was arrested and jailed numerous times for his beliefs. He spent his final decade working in London to organise the expanding Quaker movement. Despite disdain from some Anglicans and Puritans, he was viewed with respect by the Quaker convert William Penn and the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.
Early years Childhood and youth Birth and family Fox was born in July 1624 in the village of Drayton-in-the-Clay, now known as Fenny Drayton, in Leicestershire. There is no exact record of either his birthday or the date of his baptism. He was the eldest of at least six named children (the exact number is unknown) of Christopher Fox and his wife, Mary, née Lago. The names of his other siblings, extracted from scattered references in Fox's writings, were Dorothy, John (later of Polesworth), and Katherine. A further two Fox children appear on Drayton's parish baptismal record, named Mary and Sarah, probably the couple's youngest children.
Christopher Fox was a successful weaver, known to his neighbours as "Righteous Christer", probably out of scorn for his scrupulous Puritan morality. He was nevertheless respected sufficiently to be made churchwarden of Drayton by 1638, when Fox was 14 years old. Modern biographers have suggested that Fox's relationship with his father was fraught, noting his failure to record his death, that many of his references to him cast him as an enemy figure, and that he attributes to him only "a seed of God", rather than full maturity in holiness.
Fox's mother, Mary Lago, was a daughter of one of several Lago yeomen from the Drayton area, perhaps related to minor local gentry, and married beneath the social class in which she had been brought up. William Penn wrote that she was "a woman accomplished above most of her degree in the place where she lived." Fox himself described her as "an upright woman... of the stock of the martyrs," likely a reference to a family connection to either Robert Glover, burned in Coventry in 1555, or Joyce Lewis, burned in Lichfield in 1557. These forebears were executed during the Marian Persecutions for their Protestant faith. Fox's relationship with his mother was apparently far closer and he recorded an experience of deep grief on hearing of her death in 1673: "I did in verity love her as ever one could a mother; for she was a good, honest, virtuous, and a right natured woman." William Penn noted that "she was tender and indulgent over him, so that from her he met little difficulty."
William Penn would later describe Fox's parents as "honest and sufficient" people, reflecting the fact that the Fox family were unusually prosperous for their circumstances, relatively wealthy members of the emerging English middle class. They were able to provide their eldest son funds during his early religious journeys, and conceded to Nathaniel Stephens, the parish priest, that they had sent the young man away with "a great deal of gold and silver." The family's wealth is especially apparent from an incident while Fox was incarcerated in Derby Gaol in 1650, when his parents pledged £100 as bail, with additional bribes of £50. When Christopher died in the late 1650s, he left Fox a significant inheritance, which would help to support his itinerant ministry for the remainder of his life, as well as some smaller bequests to his younger siblings. Fox himself held assets in cash, loans and investments of around £700 a few years before his death, a substantial degree of personal wealth, much of it probably the residue of his inheritance.
His birthplace was, and remains, a small rural community, situated about 15 miles (24 km) south-west of Leicester, 10 miles (16 km) north of Coventry, and about a mile from Market Bosworth. Located just a few hundred yards off the ancient Roman road of Watling Street, the Leicestershire–Warwickshire and East–West Midlands boundary, once the border between the Danelaw and Anglo-Saxon England, and about eight miles north-west of High Cross, where Watling Street meets the Fosse Way, it lies close to the geographical centre of England. The manor and freehold of the village were held by the Purefoy family, Puritans and relatives of the regicide, William Purefoy. No buildings survive in Fenny Drayton from Fox's time with the exception of the parish church. The church contains the font in which Fox and his siblings are presumed to have been baptised and the elaborate tombs of the Purefoy squires.
There are two contrary traditions about his birthplace and childhood home, which was presumably also Christopher Fox's workplace, and its location cannot be precisely identified. The first suggests the cottage was known as the 'Dog Yard' and remained standing until the late 19th century. This house was photographed prior to its demolition and the image has been widely circulated under the title of Fox's Birthplace. The 'Dog Yard' stood on the site of the present Lodge Farm Cottages, between Fox's Covert and the Recreation Ground, also known as Adelaide's Park. Thomas Hodgkin records an American plan to transport the frame of the 'Dog Yard' to Pennsylvania for reconstruction. The plan was aborted when the uncertainty about its status as Fox's birthplace came to light. An alternative local tradition persisted which suggests Fox's home was demolished in the late 18th century, the location of which is unknown. A memorial obelisk was erected to Fox in 1872 by one of the Bracebridge family of nearby Lindley Hall. The monument is located on the corner of a bend in Old Forge Road. Since the 19th century, Fenny Drayton and its surrounding area has become a key place of pilgrimage for Quakers, commonly called '1624 Country'.
Early religious influences Fox's birth and upbringing fell during the early Stuart period, towards the end of the comparatively peaceful interval between the English Reformation and the English Civil War. The Reformation had transformed the once homogeneously Roman Catholic England into a society of deep religious divisions: firstly between Protestants and Roman Catholic Recusants, and secondly between various kinds of Protestant confession. Firstly, the Anglicans, those content with Elizabeth I’s religious settlement for the Church of England (a via media, or middle way, combining reformed theology and episcopal polity with Catholic traditions through the conciliatory liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer) and the subsequent reforms of Charles I and William Laud (which brought about a division in Anglicanism between Calvinist and Arminian views on volition and soteriology, and exacerbated the preexisting division between the low and high church parties). Secondly, the Puritans, who were themselves split between Presbyterians (the low church party of the established church, who sought to strengthen its Calvinist theology, restructure it into a presbyterian polity, and reform its liturgy from within the parish system) and early Congregationalists, the Separatists and the Independents (those who broke from the system of parish worship to form their own, largely Calvinist-inspired, churches). Thirdly, the radicals, especially the Baptists (those opposed to infant baptism and, like the Anglicans, divided into Arminian and Calvinist parties, the Generals and Particulars), as well as the Familists (a perfectionist mystical confession whose ideas greatly influenced the Quakers), and the Socinians (opposed to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the forerunners of the Unitarians). These divisions would crystallise and proliferate during the Civil War, thanks in large part to Fox's efforts. He was born roughly eight months before the accession of Charles I, whose contempt for the House of Commons, marriage to the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria, persecution of Puritans and unpopular High Church religious policy would help spark the Civil War.
In Fenny Drayton, the patronage (right to appoint clergy) of the parish church was held by the Puritan Purefoy squires. They had fostered the parish's staunch low church allegiance from Elizabethan times. Anthony Nutter, a notably radical Presbyterian, was rector between 1586 and 1605. The records of the Diocese of Lincoln show that he refused to wear vestments, kneel during services, make the sign of the cross during baptisms, or adhere to any of the vestiges of Roman Catholic ritual in Church of England liturgy. He briefly faced imprisonment in 1590 and was removed from office in 1604 for refusing to conform to James I's religious reforms following the Hampton Court Conference. Despite the relatively uncontroversial approach of his successor Robert Mason, rector from 1606 to his death in 1638 and Fox's childhood catechist, memory of Nutter's radicalism persisted in its influence on Fox's birthplace. Throughout the reigns of James and Charles I, cases of residents being excommunicated for refusing to receive Holy Communion appear in church records, notably Margaret Petty, George Heard, George Orton, George Batling, and George Smith. George Mason died in 1638 and Nathaniel Stephens replaced him as rector of Fenny Drayton when Fox was 14 years old. Stephens would come to play a prominent role in Fox's life, first as a spiritual advisor, then as a key opponent in his home district.
As to whether the religious radicalism widespread in the village influenced the religious attitude of Fox's parents, the evidence is mixed. On the one hand, his mother inherited a strong tradition of Protestant dissent within her family; Fox had an uncle, one William Pickering, active in the dissenting ministry as a Baptist preacher, and, according to his Journal, his parents practised conventional religion merely externally: "though they saw beyond the priests, yet they went to hear them." On the other hand, both of his parents seem to have opposed his abandonment of the state church and his Quaker ministry. Furthermore, Fox's father is on record as upholding the canon law of the Church of England over individual religious liberty of conscience in his role as churchwarden. George Smith's last case occurred as late as 1638, a few weeks after Nathaniel Stephens became rector of Fenny Drayton, and Christopher Fox is recorded as one of the two officials who oversaw his excommunication. The religious character of the family during Fox's early childhood was thus outwardly conformist, but touched by dissent and radicalism. A modern biographer has described the Foxes as conforming Presbyterians.
Education and character