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"In the late Spring of 1677 there came
to Boston from Barbados, the English colony in the West Indies, a Quaker.
She came because she believed herself
appointed by God to warn the Puritans against oppressing her coreligionists.
Her idea was not a new one. Others had come [to Boston] on [similar]
missions before, and had been whipped for their trouble. But Margaret
Brewster was to put across an old idea in a brand new way.
A law had recently been passed
requiring constables "to make diligent search...especially on the Lord's
Day, in all suspected places & houses, & where they know or may be informed
that any Quakers are [meeting] to celebrate their irregular & prohibited
worship, and are hereby empowered to break open any door where peaceable
entrance is denied them..."
Accordingly, there was a tremendous
breaking down of doors and carrying out of Quakers to the House of
Correction, which stood in what is now Park Street, opposite Boston Common.
There they were kept three days on a diet of bread and water, or else made
to pay a fine of 5 Pounds, which few of them could or would do.
It was against this treatment that
Margaret Brewster felt moved to protest. And her protest was registered in a
way which, while not so daring that of Lydia Wardell of Hampton, "a woman of
exemplary modesty in her behavior," who strolled into the church at Newbury
wearing nothing more than a sorrowful countenance, or of Deborah Wilson, who
walked naked through the streets of Salem, was decidedly the more
spectacular.
One morning in July, while the
congregation of the South Meeting House was listening to the words of the
pastor, Reverend Thomas Thatcher, a weird procession moved quickly from the
door to the preacher's desk.
The chief figure was Margaret
Brewster. Her feet and legs were bare. About her shoulders was a wrap of
sackcloth. Her hair hung loose, her head was covered with ashes and her
face was blackened with soot. Two young women led her. A man
followed, carrying the clothing that had been discarded at the door.
There was a moment of awful silence,
then an uproar—"the
greatest and most amazing uproar that I ever saw," wrote Samuel Sewell [one
of the judges of the later Salem witch trials in 1692], who was present. He
described Margaret as wearing "a canvas frock, her hair disheveled and loose
like a periwig, her face as black as ink." Women shrieked and fainted. Men
shouted. The aged preacher raised his voice in protest. The intruders were
seized and removed from the meeting.
The five principles, Margaret
Brewster, Lydia Wright of Long Island, Sarah Miles of Salem, John Easton Jr.
and Barbara Bowers, who appear to have joined the group after they had
entered the church, were thrown into prison, and, in early August brought
before the justices.
"What have you to say to her
charge?" asked John Leverett, the Governor. "If this be the woman," said the
constable who arrested her, "If this be the woman, I don't know. For she was
then in the shape of a devil. I thought her hair had been a periwig, but it
was her own hair."
"Are you the woman," he demanded,
"who came into Mr. Thatcher's meeting house with your hair frizzled and
dressed in the shape of a devil?"
"I am the woman," said Margaret
Brewster, "that came into the priest Thatcher's house of worship with my
hair about my shoulders, ashes upon my head, my face colored black, and
sackcloth upon my upper garments."
"You owe yourself to be the woman?"
"Yes, I do."
"What made you come so?" said the
Governor.
"I am in the obedience of the Lord."
"The Lord!" cried Leverett. "The
Lord never sent you, for you came like a devil, and in the shape of a devil
incarnate."
"Noble Governor," replied the
prisoner, "your name is spread in other parts of the world, for a moderate
man. Now I desire thee and thy Assistants to hear me with patience..."
"The Lord God of Heaven and Earth,
the Maker and Creator of all mankind, laid this service upon me to visit
this bloody town of Boston," said the woman.
"She should be stopped!" cried one
of the magistrates. But the Governor said: "Let her go on."
The Quaker began a harangue which
the magistrates soon interrupted. "Did your husband give consent to your
coming?" asked the Governor.
"Yes, he did."
And then she started off again,
telling of her mission, and her love for her enemies in Boston.
"Hold, hold woman! You run too
fast," cried Leverett, his patience exhausted. "Silence in the court!"
But Margaret Brewster would not
stop. She pleaded that laws against Quaker meetings be changed. "If you will
draw your swords against the Lord and his people, the Lord will assuredly
draw His sword against you," she said.
"Hold woman!" said the Governor
again. The other three [Quakers] were then called and their cases heard.
Finally: "Take them away, and carry
them to prison," said the court crier.
"Yea, I am willing to go to prison
and to death," said the Quakeress, who seemed to have an idea that God had
called upon her to give her blood in His cause.
"Margaret Brewster," read the clerk,
"you are to have your clothes stripped off to the middle, and to be tied to
a cart's tail at the South Meeting House, and to be drawn through the town,
and to receive 20 stripes upon your naked body."
The other women were to be tied to
the cart's tail, but not whipped. The lone man in the affair seems to have
got off with a reprimand.
"I will go without pulling," cried
[Margaret], as the jailor led her away. "I will go as cheerfully as Daniel
went to the lion's den, for the God of Daniel is with me.... I am glad that
I am worthy to be a sufferer in this bloody town...."
And so runs the account, "they were
carried to prison again...and on the fifth day following, the sentence was
executed." |
