Esther Biddle

The Execution of Charles I, 1649

Esther (or Hester) Biddle was born around 1629 and brought up in Oxford where she received a good education. She was a staunch Royalist and loyal to the Church of England. As a young woman she came to London where, she said, she sought satisfaction 'evening, morning and noonday, in the
Common Prayer' and when only one church was left open in the City she went to it. She adds, 'when their books were burned I stood for them and my heart was wholly joined to them, and when the King's head was taken off my heart and soul was burdened that I was weary of my life.'

In 1654 her life was changed when she met Francis Howgill and was convinced by him of the truth of Quakerism. In 1656 she began to travel in the ministry and to write in order to champion her new cause. She published several controversial works, some partly in verse.

Charles II c.1653

In 1656 Esther was arrested at Banbury and also at Launceston with John Stubbs and William Ames, who later went with her to Holland. In that year she also visited Newfoundland and in 1657 went to Barbados. On her return Esther had a vision of the king's restoration and went to Breda to tell Charles about it although George Fox and others had cautioned her against this course. Esther always followed her own line, which did not make her popular among Friends. During the late 1650s she spent some time in Holland and was described by her critics as a thorn in the side of Dutch as well as of English Quakers.

The Great Fire of London.

After her convincement Esther married Thomas Biddle who was also an active Friend. He was a shoemaker and seems to have had a prosperous business in London at Old Change employing a number of Quaker apprentices. This business prospered until Old Change was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. The family then moved south of the river but evidently never recovered their former prosperity. Shortly after Thomas's death in 1682 Esther became a pensioner of Peel Meeting and remained so for the rest of her life, at one time living in one of the rooms behind the meeting house given over to 'poor widows'. The only one of Thomas and Esther's four sons to reach adulthood was Benjamin. He was apprenticed first to his father, but after Thomas's death was re-apprenticed by Peel Meeting out of a bequest left for apprenticing sons of 'poor Friends'.

Throughout her life Esther spoke and wrote as she felt called to do without considering the consequences and was imprisoned at least fourteen times. As a widow, in spite of her poverty, Esther still managed to travel in the ministry, visiting both Scotland and Ireland during those years.

Mary II

Perhaps her most famous exploit occurred in 1694 towards the end of her life. Esther was most concerned about the war between England and France and determined, against the advice of Friends, to do something about it. She went first to Queen Mary, complained that the war with its suffering was a grief to her heart as a woman and a Christian, and asked the Queen to endeavour to end it. She then asked leave to go to France to speak to the French king on the same subject. Eventually Esther obtained a pass from the Queen's Secretary and set out. After various difficulties she came to Versailles and applied to the exiled James II, who she had met before and delivered to him the letter she had written to Louis XIV. James gave it to the Duke of Orleans who promised to pass it on to the King, but Esther was not satisfied and insisted on speaking to the King herself. 'Am I permitted to speak to the King of Kings, and may I not speak with men?' she said.

Louis XIV

When he heard about this Louis admitted Esther to his presence. She implored the King to make his peace with God and with the nations he was at war with and put a stop to 'such an overflowing and Rivulet of Blood that was shed.' The King replied, 'But woman I desire Peace and seek Peace and would have Peace, and tell the Prince of Orange so'. Having delivered her message Esther returned home. Although the war did not cease at once so that some Quakers judged her to have failed in her mission, there is no doubt that she had been faithful to her calling and her straightforwardness and fearlessness could not fail to make an impression.

Esther died in London in December 1696 at the age of sixty-seven, and was buried, probably in Bunhill Fields Quaker burying ground, having been an uncomfortable and outspoken Friend for more than forty years.

A modern view of Bunhill Fields burying ground

Mary Alexander

Mary Alexander was born on February 7th 1760 at Needham Market, Suffolk, the third of the eight children of Dykes Alexander, a shopkeeper and mealman, and his wife Martha Biddle, of whom five survived childhood. Both her parents were established Quakers, her father being an elder and her mother a minister. Mary was fifteen when her mother died and was conscious of the possibility that she too might be called to the ministry, a calling for which she tried to prepare herself. 

The former meeting house in Needham Market, built 1704,in use as a store.

Mary lived quietly at home, caring for her father, but in 1786 he died, aged 62, and this blow was followed only nine weeks later by the death of her eldest brother Samuel’s wife, Elizabeth. The family agreed that Mary should continue to live in her father’s house with her youngest brother William, who at the age of 18 took on his father's business, while Samuel and his four children were looked after by his wife’s aunt, Mary Gurney. 

Mary Alexander struggled between her call to the ministry and her family obligations, especially after Mary Gurney also died in 1788. However confirmation of her calling came one night in 1789 when, she says, 'a light shone round my bed and I heard a voice intelligibly say “Thou art appointed to preach the Gospel”'. Mary first spoke in meeting in July 1789 and was formally recognised as a Quaker minister in 1791. 

A silhouette of Ann Tuke Alexander

Mary’s first journeys as a minister were mainly local but in 1794 she ventured further afield to Lincoln where she met and travelled with another minister, seven years younger than herself. Ann Tuke, was the daughter of William and Esther Tuke of York and became a close friend. Their friendship developed further when Ann married Mary’s brother William in September 1796. William and Ann asked Mary to live with them in the family home but she decided to find a house nearby instead. A ministerial journey in 1797 with Ann and William to Wales was continually interrupted by Mary’s illnesses. She struggled on but at Cirencester felt close to death. She dreamed that she was dead, but was sent back to life as her time had not yet come. 

Silhouette of William Alexander

Eventually at the beginning of 1798 Mary returned to Needham Market and moved into her own 'very peaceful home', but her ministerial obligations gave her little time to enjoy it. She travelled extensively with Elizabeth Coggeshall of Newport, Rhode Island, returning home at the end of 1800. For the next few years most of Mary’s travels were in her own area. She also acted as 'an affectionate nurse and attendant' to her sister-in-law Hannah, the wife of her younger brother Dykes, at the birth of their daughter, but the experience depressed her. 

William Forster

1808 brought another change in Mary’s life when her brother William and his family were forced to make a move as the family business was failing. They went to York where they were helped by Ann's family and William eventually became a successful bookseller and publisher. Mary found this 'a closely trying separation'. At the end of October 1809 Mary went, with her older sister Martha Jesup, on a religious visit to Friends’ families in Worcester. There she was joined by another minister, William Forster, with whom she attended two crowded public meetings. She was obviously ill and as soon as she had done her duty went  back to Worcester to the care of her relation Thomas Burlingham. 

At first Mary’s illness was thought to be another attack of the bilious complaint from which she had often suffered before, but it soon became obvious that she had contracted smallpox and she gradually grew worse. Her brothers Samuel and Dykes were sent for and she died surrounded by her family on December 4th 1809 at the age of 49.

Her brother William could not be with her, but he made sure that her account of her spiritual life was published two years later.

Ann Crowley

Ann Crowley was born on May 8th 1765 at Shillingford, Oxfordshire, the sixth of the eight daughters of William Crowley, a mealman and maltster, and his wife Catherine Stiles. Ann felt that her Quaker family helped her struggle with what she perceived to be spiritual weakness. She confesses in her journal to a desire to dress fashionably, which she refers to as 'adorning the frail body with apparel inconsistent with the simplicity of truth'. She also loved music but put this aside as a 'worldly pleasure'. She dated her religious awakening from the age of 16 and found it confirmed by the shock of her father’s sudden death the following year, 1783, from an apoplectic fit at the age of 66. 

Wallingford Meeting House near Shillingford, built in 1724

Ann lived with her mother and unmarried sisters ‘in great harmony and tender affection’ but the family was further broken up when three of her sisters married, two of them to brothers. The death of her older sister Mary Ashby in 1791 aged 28, after less than two years of marriage, also gave Ann’s mind a serious turn and she began to feel that she might be called to the ministry. A few months later two visiting travelling ministers, Deborah Darby and Rebecca Young from Coalbrookdale, asked Ann to accompany them on their journey and under their influence she first spoke in meeting. 

Ann gradually extended her ministry, accompanying more experienced ministers and visiting local meetings. Her first longer journey was to Wales in 1794 with Mary Stevens of Staines, and the American Friends George and Sarah Dillwyn. Ann kept a careful note of the number of miles they travelled and meetings they attended. In 1795 Ann’s mother died after a stroke and this made it necessary for the remaining sisters to move house. Ann, as the eldest at home, felt that she should organise this, but she had ministerial commitments. The worry made her ill, but she recovered when a house in Uxbridge and her next journey in the ministry were both decided on. 

Uxbridge Meeting House window

Three weeks after she returned to her new home Ann’s family was again shaken by the death of her sister Catherine Ashby aged 36, who left a husband, Thomas, and six children in need of care. The aunts took turns to stay with their bereaved brother-in-law and his family in Staines, near London, but Ann did not take much part in this arrangement. Instead, in 1797, she left home to accompany Phoebe Speakman of Pennsylvania on her travels in the ministry throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The journey covered 4000 miles and took nearly two years, leaving Ann ill and exhausted.

In the next few years Ann continued to travel extensively, but eventually her health broke down and she was forced to remain at home for three years. In 1810 Ann went with Priscilla Hannah Gurney, who she had travelled with before, to Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, but her health was still in a very feeble state and she was confined to home again on her return, although this gave her the opportunity to nurse her younger sister Rebecca in her last illness until she died in 1814. 

View of Hastings in 1814

After travelling in the ministry again in 1815 and 1816 Ann was taken ill once more and again spent some time at home. In 1818 both Ann and her youngest sister Martha became dangerously ill and as they slowy recovered their doctors recommended warm baths and sea air for both of them. They went together to Hastings for some months which seemed to have a good effect. 

On her return Ann was never strong enough to travel in the ministry away from home again, although she attended local meetings when she could and was faithful to what she called her ‘little testimony’. Her health was very bad and she suffered much pain. During the last few weeks of her life her breathing was affected and she found speech difficult, so it was felt as a relief to herself, her family and friends when, after extreme suffering, she died on April 10th 1826 aged 60.

The two themes of Ann Crowley's life were family and ministry, but it was clear to her and to those around her that her religious calling always came first and that this was 'in right ordering'.

Lydia Rawlinson Lancaster

It is getting on for ten years ago that I started writing on this blog about Quakers in the past. I kept myself going with several Quaker alphabets and now I am continuing with this occasional series. I began with Grace Hall Chamber and I shall continue with one of her friends, Lydia Rawlinson Lancaster.

Lydia was born in 1683 at Graithwaite in Lancashire, near Lake Windermere, the seventh of the eight children of Thomas Rawlinson and his wife Dorothy, born Hutton. Brought up in a Quaker family, Lydia describes herself as one drawn to thoughts of God from infancy. Her father died when she was six and around this time she remembered being moved to floods of tears by the ministry of a visiting Friend. From the age of fourteen Lydia struggled with the conviction that she was being called to be a minister herself. She resisted this calling for ten years - a period which her contemporaries saw approvingly as a time when she grew in wisdom and experience but which she remembered as a 'long howling wilderness' of unfaithfulness.

Soon after the beginning of her ministry, in 1708, Lydia began to travel, at first to local meetings and then in 1710 as far as London. In 1712 she went to Ireland, in 1717 to Scotland and from 1718 to 1719 she visited America in the company of her brother Abraham’s wife, Elizabeth Beck Rawlinson (1670-1750). Lydia’s travels, although undertaken under a sense of religious duty, were however, as she says herself, '...sometimes pretty trying, not having such care taken at home in my absence as might have been desired.^' She had married, in January 1707, Bryan Lancaster, a tanner of Kendal, when she was 23 and he was 20. There were no children of the marriage and there are hints in contemporary records of sorrows and affliction, some of it possibly financial, brought upon Lydia by her 'nearest temporal connexion', her husband.

In 1729 Lydia moved with her aged mother to Colthouse, near Hawkshead, a small rural settlement next to a Quaker Meeting House, but there is no mention of her husband on the removal certificate. Her mother died in 1737 aged 93 and by 1743 Lydia was evidently living at Colthouse with her husband. Bryan Lancaster died in 1747 aged 60.

Lydia’s ministry was generally acknowledged to be expressive and powerful, but her experience gave her another dimension for, as was said by her fellow Quakers, 'being instructed in sorrow she was favoured with a sympathizing heart and knew how to partake in the affliction of others'.

Throughout her ministry Lydia was a staunch supporter of  Quaker Womens Meetings for business at a local level. In 1746 she also put her name to a petition aimed at extending them to a national level, although this was not accepted and the Womens Yearly Meeting was not set up until 1784. Lydia was not concerned with the equality of women as such but wanted them to be encouraged to take up their religious duties as much as the men were. In her local meetings Lydia, drawing on her own experience, was both stern and encouraging 'particularly to the timorous and backward'. She was remembered for always bidding farewell to those women who made the effort to come to womens meetings with a sort of blessing, and she continued to attend  meetings herself right up to her last days.

At the end of her life Lydia lived in Lancaster, free from financial worries and, she says in a letter to her friend James Wilson, 'mostly alone, for that is what I most delight in and have done most of my time'. She still travelled in the ministry, taking long journeys in 1749 and 1754. In 1760 she and Grace Chamber, at the end of both their lives but 'green in old age', travelled together to Welsh Yearly Meeting, Bath, Bristol and London.

Lydia died in 1761 at the age of 78 at Lancaster and was buried in the Friends burial ground there. Lydia published nothing in her lifetime but her influence continued. Many years after her death, in 1840, her descendant and namesake, Lydia Ann Barclay, edited and published a selection of extracts from her letters, feeling that they might be of use to future generations.