CHAPTER TWO
DURING THE EIGHTEEN years after Benjamin retired from the sea, his main preoccupations—the dangers of false ministers and the evils of slavery—took shape amid intense engagements with the Quaker communities of London, Bridgetown, Barbados, and Colchester. Benjamin’s “zeal” became more pronounced and more public as he repeatedly conflicted with his fellow Quakers over matters he considered intolerable but they did not. Behind both themes was his worry that “covetousness” was destroying Quakerism. What slowly developed into a struggle for the soul of the faith became in the end something much bigger: a campaign to save the world from itself. Between 1714 and 1732 Benjamin walked a treacherous path toward prophecy.
The earliest record of Benjamin’s active participation in organized Quakerism originated in America. Even though he was based in London at the time, he had sailed to Boston to request a certificate of approval from local Quakers to marry Sarah Smith of Deptford, England. The Quaker meeting (actually located in Salem) in turn sent a letter to Benjamin’s home congregation, the Devonshire House Monthly Meeting (DHMM) in London, asking if he was a Friend in good standing and therefore eligible for marriage within the faith. Three London Quakers were appointed to look into “his Conversation & Clearness in Relation to marriage.”1
The committee gathered information and noted that Benjamin had joined the congregation about three years earlier, in 1714, and that “he is clear from Debts and from women in relation to marriage.” But the report added that Benjamin “hath given dissatisfaction to divers Freinds in severall Meetings” and suggested that this concern be expressed in the certificate as a warning to Quakers in Massachusetts. In an official document of June 1717 twenty-six signatories of the DHMM said of Benjamin:
We believe he is Convinced of the Truth but for want of keeping low and humble in his mind, hath by an Indiscreet Zeal been too forward to appear in our publick Meetings to the Uneasiness of ffriends, we therefore in Good Will Exhort him to Lowliness of mind, that he may know how to behave himself peaceably in the Church among you and Else where to ffriends Satisfaction and leave it to friends to act towards him in Charity, according to their freedom, and as he may deserve.
So convinced of the truth as to be arrogant, zealous, belligerent, and aggressive, the “Quaker comet,” as Benjamin was later called, made his first appearance in the skies of historical documentation. A lifelong pattern of troublemaking would follow.2
The woman Benjamin sought to marry, Sarah Smith, was born in Rochester, County Kent, near the Medway River, in 1677. Like Benjamin, she was a dwarf and a hunchback. Her deceased father, John Smith, had been a plaisterer, a middling artisan who specialized in plastering and whitewashing walls and ceilings. At some point the family moved to Deptford, located on the southern bank of the Thames River across from the Isle of Dogs and home of the first shipyard of England’s Royal Navy. Sarah converted to Quakerism “in her young years” and soon demonstrated a gift for preaching. By 1712 she had earned so much respect from the Quaker community of Deptford as to be designated an “approved minister.” She traveled widely and represented the local congregation. Around that time, one of the many sailors who passed through Deptford may have been Benjamin Lay. The two probably met at the Deptford Quaker Monthly Meeting.3
Benjamin and Sarah would settle down in a part of London called St. Ethelburga, located in the ward of Bishopsgate in northeast London. Benjamin left the sea and resumed his trade as a glover. Around this time he commenced what would be a lifelong practice: in “divers Places of this City and suburbs” he visited a variety of churches and even several different Quaker meetings to learn about their preachers, their ideas, and their congregations. He was a “Seeker” of the pure church. He was a member of the DHMM in Bishopsgate, but he also attended the Wheeler Street (Spitalfields), Gracechurch Street, Peel, Bullhill, and Bull and Mouth Quaker meetings. Through these meetings he cut a path of turmoil that would lead to his first disownment.4
Six months after Benjamin was exhorted to “Lowliness of mind,” he got into more serious trouble when he confronted two “Publick Friends” (approved ministers), William Selkald and Richard Price, during worship services at the Devonshire House and Wheeler Street Meetings. He did not like their preaching. The holy spirit, he was sure, was not in them. They were “preaching their own words,” not God’s truth, so Benjamin bid them “to be Silent, and sit down,” adding for good measure that Price was a hypocrite. Benjamin later described the kind of preaching he objected to: many, he wrote, “are grown restless and uneasy in sitting in silence.” Those who had “a strong Opinion of their own Performances, and a rich Conceit of the great good they do,” started speaking, “hammering and tampering.” They went to work “with Noise of Words, and oftentimes no Sense.” Conceit was vanity, and silence, so crucial to Quaker worship, was being disrespected, so Benjamin took it upon himself to enforce an old tradition. The leaders of Devonshire House disapproved. They appointed three Friends to speak with Benjamin, “tenderly,” about his outburst and to encourage him “to come to a sense of his offence.” The meeting officially condemned his acts and required that he affirm the condemnation in order to be reinstated.5
When questioned by the deputed Friends, Benjamin was ornery. He refused to provide direct answers and would not admit guilt. Rather, he “justifyed the Practice.” When he showed up a month later at a worship service, he was given a copy of the article drawn up against him. He replied that he hoped he would not grieve his friends any more by his actions. Two weeks later, when he reappeared, the article was read aloud in what amounted to a ritual of public shaming. He replied that he “would not joyn with the Meeting” in condemning what he had done. Urged again to admit his “Disorderly Practice,” Benjamin stated that he had nothing more to say. He was sure he was right and would not admit wrongdoing.6
A month later Benjamin submitted to the DHMM what was essentially the same apology in writing: “It appearing that freinds have been greived on my account, which I am sory for. And hope my conduct for the future will be such as to give no occasion to freinds.” It only “appeared” that Friends were “greived” and Benjamin merely “hoped” that he would do better in the future. Not surprisingly the DHMM did not accept the grudging apology. Moreover, until Benjamin demonstrated “sincerity and unity of Spirrit with us,” they decided to withhold the final, official copy of the marriage certificate he needed to marry Sarah. Their resolve had been stiffened by another recent event: Benjamin had gotten so angry at another “Publick Friend” that he shook a cane in his face after a meeting.7
Whatever their complaints about him, Benjamin insisted, they had no right to withhold his marriage certificate. He went over their heads with an appeal directly to the London Quarterly Meeting, which appointed ten Friends from all over the city to look into the matter. They conducted interviews with all parties and issued a report, saying that “wee absolutely disapprove of Benj Lays behaviour in his open opposition to some Publicke friends,” but the LQM added that the DHMM ought to give Benjamin the marriage certificate, which in fact they did. Benjamin had won the battle, and he and Sarah were married July 10, 1718. But tensions within the local meeting lingered as Benjamin never gave satisfaction for his disruptive behavior. Two months later Benjamin and Sarah set sail for Barbados to begin a new chapter of life.8
The Lays arrived in Barbados in fall 1718, putting Benjamin’s ruckus with his fellow Quakers in London behind them, at least for a time. Perhaps they chose the island destination because Benjamin had sailed there during his time at sea. Undoubtedly they wanted to live in a place that had a Quaker community, which Barbados, the first cradle of Quakerism in the Americas, did, although it was now small and declining. Once disembarked in the leading port of Bridgetown, the former sailor followed the path of many seafarers who aged out of a body-breaking occupation: he set up a small shop to serve those who worked on the bustling docks—from merchants and artisans to sailors, indentured servants, and those who slaved on the waterfront and sold their own produce there on “market day.” There is no evidence to suggest that Benjamin caused controversy or courted disownment among the Quakers of Barbados, but he certainly did create discord—of a bigger, more explosive kind—during his eighteen months on the island.9
Benjamin and Sarah had landed in the world’s leading slave society, the crown jewel of the British imperial tiara. Only a few years before they arrived, Thomas Walduck, a military man who had spent fourteen years in the West Indies, had drawn a rich portrait of their new island home. Walduck was no abolitionist but he nonetheless gave a vivid, critical, now humorous, now acid account of both the origins and material reality of Barbados slave society. He wrote that the first settlers “were a Babel of all Nations and Conditions of men, English, Welch, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, Deans [Danes], and French.” Each group made a singular contribution: “The English brought with them drunkenness and swearing, the Scotch Impudence & Falshood, The Welch covetousness & Revenge, the Irish Cruelty & perjury, the Dutch and Deans Craft & Rusticity and the French Dissimulation & Infidelity.” He added to the motley crew a significant Jewish population and many thousands of enslaved Africans from “the Guiney Angola and Weda [Ouidah] Coast.” The combination of nine thousand people of European descent and more than seventy thousand Africans added up to “the worst scene of all quarrells and contentious pride and poverty drunkenness and debauchery.”10
Slavery defined the island for all peoples who lived there: a master class ruled and terrorized an army of African slaves. The planters, observed Walduck, are “unmercifully cruel to their poor slaves by whome they get their living without a wet finger.” They forced bondsmen and women to work eighteen hours a day without rest. The sugar they produced brought huge profits: “It is a common saying amgt the planters that if they give 30 [pounds] for a Negro and he lives one year he payes for himself.” The planters, according to Walduck, were, as a class, “Unjust in their words & Dealings one to the Other,” as well as, “Horrible profane and rude in their Discourse and Conversation.” They possessed no moral code and no proper religion. They thought of God only in their “Curses & Blasphemies.” They took better care of their horses than the workers on whom they depended. Walduck concluded one of his letters with “An Acrostick upon ye Island of Barbadoes & ye Inhabitants thereof”:
Barbadoes Isle inhabited by slaves
And for one honest man ten thousand knaves
Religion to thee’s a Romantick Storey
Barbarity and ill gott wealth thy glory
All Sodom’s Sins are Centred in thy heart
Death is thy look and Death in every part
Oh Glorious isle in Vilany Excell
Sin to the height thy fate is Hell.
Benjamin and Sarah saw right away that in this land of “Barbarity and ill gott wealth” the struggle against slavery began with sheer existence. They witnessed enslaved people so weak they fainted and collapsed in the street. Some were “ready to perish with Hunger and Sickness.” Exhausted, emaciated workers staggered into their waterfront shop, buying, begging, and sometimes stealing small items and food. Early on, Benjamin responded to the theft in anger, lashing a few of the culprits, but he soon understood that this monstrous slave society called Barbados had been built by bigger thieves, who sought not subsistence but riches. Wracked with guilt for having behaved like a slave master, Benjamin decided to educate himself by talking with the enslaved and learning about their lives. He heard stories of violent mistreatment: “One Says, My Master very bad Man; another, My Mistress very bad Woman.”11
Benjamin saw with close intimacy the bloody dialectic of torture and resistance that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He got to know an enslaved man, “a lusty Fellow, a Cooper,” who made his master, Richard Parrot, “7 s. 6 d. a day.” The man was highly skilled and extremely valuable, but Parrot was a cruel master who “used to whip his Negroes on Second-day [Monday] Mornings very severely, to keep them in awe.” The unnamed man complained to the sympathetic Benjamin: “My Master Parrot very bad man indeed, whippe, whippe poor Negro evee Munne Morning for notin tall! me no bear no longer.” The cooper kept his dreadful word: on a Sunday night he took his own life because, as Benjamin explained, “he would not be whippe Munne Morning.”12
On another occasion Sarah visited “a plain coat,” a fellow Quaker and a slave owner, in Speightstown, a dozen miles up the coast from Bridgetown. Outside the Friend’s house she was startled to encounter “a Negro stark naked” suspended in the air, probably by chains. Below his “trembling and shivering” body lay a “Flood of Blood.” Tender-hearted Sarah froze in speechless horror. But “at last a little recovering,” she went indoors and begged the Quaker to explain. Not only did he show no remorse over the cruel treatment; he railed against the man, who had dared to run away for “a day or two.” The Quaker justified the torture Sarah saw outside his door.13
This was no uncommon event in Barbados. By “conversing, trading, and living daily” with the enslaved, Benjamin and Sarah witnessed, up close, a gruesome array of tortures: many people, Benjamin lamented, “are Murthered by Working hard, and Starving, Whipping, Racking, Hanging, Burning, Scalding, Roasting, and other Hellish Torments,” routine practices that were “very sorrowful to consider.” He witnessed public events staged to create terror and ensure planter control of their workers. He saw fatal accidents in the industrialized production of sugar. Slaves were mangled, sheared-off body parts fell into boiling sugar vats, and sugar itself ended up containing “Limbs, Bowels, and excrements.” Long before anyone campaigned against the extreme violence of plantation production, Benjamin knew that “sugar was made with blood.” He asked ruefully, “O when will there be an end of these things?”14
The Lays began to hold meetings and serve meals at their home, which drew ever larger crowds of enslaved people, many in defiance of their masters. Eventually “many hundreds” turned up, creating a public spectacle and fierce disapproval from the white population, who began to “clamour” against the Lays. At these gatherings the host and hostess denounced slavery, drawing the attention and, finally, the wrath of the island’s ruling class, which sought to banish them for their subversive fraternization with slaves and their growing opposition to slavery. In truth Benjamin and Sarah themselves had already decided to leave. Shocked by the crimson cruelties of daily life, they feared their hearts would harden and they would be “leavened too much into the Nature of the People there.” Would they come to resemble these “Masters and Mistresses of Slaves”? Would they take on their “Pride and Oppression” and compromise their own souls? They had already seen this happen to fellow Quakers.15
After eighteen months the Lays returned to London, but the look of death in Barbados had transformed them. Benjamin would remain haunted—one might say tormented—for the rest of his life by his encounter with slavery. He later wrote of the trauma he suffered in Barbados, noting that his “afflicted mind” had been “tossed as with a Tempest at times, above 17 Years, on this sad Account [of] Slave-Keeping.” He remembered that time as a turning point, when he converted to abolitionist principles. He would never forget the desperate hunger of the enslaved nor the vicious violence of the masters. Amid the gilded depravity of Barbados, Benjamin found a new Babylon. He would make it his life’s purpose to tear it down.16
Benjamin and Sarah sailed back to London in the fall of 1720, deeply shaken by their experience in Barbados. They returned to worship at the Devonshire House Monthly Meeting (DHMM), no doubt hoping to put past troubles behind them and to make yet another fresh start. But less than a month after their return, Benjamin was once again challenging Quaker ministers in public. His fellow Quakers in London already knew his disputatious ways—he had, after all, never atoned for his previous transgressions. Their patience soon wore out.
The trigger was an encounter in late October 1720 with a minister named Zachary Routh at the Quaker meeting on Wheeler Street. Benjamin and Routh apparently had some history. Benjamin spoke out against him as he preached, then insisted to several Quakers after the meeting that Routh was “a Drunkard and a Swine.” When asked to justify the charges Benjamin added that the man was “Drunk with wind”: he preached “in his own spirit and not from the Spirit of Truth.” Those who heard the charge were scandalized and reported Benjamin’s “vile accusations” to the DHMM, whose leaders once again investigated and asked Benjamin to retract his comments and repent, all for the sake of “the Peace of our Meeting.” Quaker Joseph North delivered the article to Benjamin, who was not willing to comply.17
When Benjamin appeared a month later at a worship meeting, the article about his disturbance at Wheeler Street was read aloud before the full congregation, again in order to shame him. Would he, in public, admit wrongdoing and renounce his attack on Brother Routh? He would not. He would not be shamed. Once again Benjamin refused the advice and discipline of the meeting and justified his criticism. After further deliberation the exasperated leaders of the DHMM turned to their most potent sanction: “the Meeting Doth Intirely Disown—and Him also—untill he repent and Acknowledge his Offence.” Three months after his return from Barbados, the man to whom Quakerism meant so much was now no longer a member of the community.18
Yet the DHMM did not give up on Benjamin. Two months later, in early March 1721, Joseph North once again tried to deliver to Benjamin the article that had been drawn up against him and to ask him to give satisfaction. North found Benjamin in his glover’s workshop in St. Ethelburga. Benjamin was not in a mood to receive the complaint. When North handed the paper to him, he looked at it, then “slighted it and threw it out of his shop window.” North dutifully retrieved the document, returned to the shop, and placed it on Benjamin’s counter, where he conducted business. But the glove maker ignored both the message and the messenger. Meantime, Benjamin continued to attend Quaker worship meetings and continued “to oppose Publicke ffriends in their Testimony.” The man was self-righteous—and stubborn. Three months after the London Quarterly Meeting received official news of his disownment, Benjamin decided to do what he had always done when confronted with deep and abiding conflict: he took to his feet and moved, this time back to his native Colchester.19
When Benjamin moved to Colchester in 1722 he returned to a historic city in whose shadow he had grown up, four miles away in Copford. Over the centuries Colchester had suffered Roman, Saxon, Danish, and Norman conquerors. Philip Morant, chronicler of the city’s history and “antiquities” in the eighteenth century, added English revolutionaries to the list when he described the siege of the city by Sir Thomas Fairfax and the New Model Army in 1648: “This poor and unhappy Town,” he wrote, was “brought under the tyranny of an Army, the most undesirable of Masters, and what is worse, an Army of Enthusiasts.” (William Dell and John Saltmarsh, whose ideas Benjamin would embrace, were two of the invading army’s leading enthusiasts.) When Benjamin arrived, the city still bore the marks of the siege in Colchester Castle’s “batter’d walls” and breached turrets. He and Sarah took up residence inside the walls in the oldest part of the city, near St. Peter’s, the medieval church noted in The Domesday Book of 1086. He opened a glover’s shop, but, ever the rebel, he did not register with the city as a “freeman,” for which he was soon indicted “for keeping open Shop being a foreigner.” He lived not far from “Red-Row” on High Street, later called “The Exchange,” where rich merchants gathered to organize the textile trade. A couple of blocks to the northwest, in “Quaker Alley,” stood the “Great Meeting House,” built in 1663 and consisting of three large rooms and a gallery, where Benjamin and Sarah worshipped. This was the home of the Colchester Two Weeks Meeting (CTWM). A slowly declining community of five hundred Quakers lived in the city and the surrounding region.20
By August 1722 Benjamin was renewing the history of “enthusiasm” as he attacked one local minister after another. He had “in a disorderly manner undertaken to charge some Public Friends with preaching their own words, and going beyond the leads of the Spirit of God.” His reputation for such behavior had preceded him. Knowing that Benjamin had been disowned in London and that he “threaten[ed] yet further the disturbance of Friends Meetings in this Town,” the leaders of the CTWM wrote the London Committee of Sufferings and the DHMM to ask what to do about this man they considered to be in a “Dark disordered Condition.” Benjamin had apparently inquired about membership, so he would be reminded that he had to make amends with the DHMM before the request could be considered.21
Seven elders of the CTWM summoned Benjamin to attend a meeting to discuss his “disorderly and irregular practices.” He refused. The CTWM then took decisive action, as announced in an official minute:
We therefore in concurrence with our Friends of Devonshire House Monthly Meeting do signify our great dislike to and dissatisfaction wth his irregular disorderly & evil practices tending to Confusions as well as at London as amongst us wherefore we can have no Unity with him until he has given ye Friends of ye Monthly Meeting of Devonshire House Satisfaction for his Offense during the time of his Residence in London and Afterwards gives this meeting satisfaction also.
The declaration of “no unity” was essentially a second disownment, although technically it would not count as such because Benjamin would have had to be reinstated at Devonshire House before he could be officially disowned again in Colchester. Once again he took less than three months to mire himself in deep conflict with his own congregation.22
Benjamin and Sarah looked for a more congenial meeting and found it in the Colchester Monthly Meeting (CMM), where Quakers gathered from villages outside Colchester proper: Copford (Benjamin’s place of birth), Bentley, Birch, Boxted, Harwich, Horkesley, Manningtree, Oakley, Osyth, and Thorpe. This was the meeting to which Benjamin’s parents and grandparents had belonged. Many Quakers from these scattered villages lived far from their monthly meeting place, so business meetings were usually small—and often dominated by women. An important part of the history of the CMM was its decision in 1692 to reject a national trend among Quakers toward separate meetings for men and women and to unite the two into a single deliberative body. It was collectively decided that the two would “meet together & not apart upon ye monthly meeting daies . . . to manage ye affairs of business except upon some peculiar occasions yt may happen.”23
As conflicts about Benjamin raged in the CTWM during the years 1723–1724, Sarah quietly shifted her allegiance and membership. She presented her certificate from Deptford, where she had lived before she married Benjamin, to the CMM, whose members readily accepted it. Among the women who welcomed her were Elizabeth Kendall, with whom she engaged in a traveling ministry, and Mary Bundock and Elizabeth Dennis, who were members of Benjamin’s extended family. At this very moment relations between the CTWM and the CMM turned hostile, and it seems that the Lays were at the center of the dispute. According to local Quaker historian Stanley Fitch, the two meetings ceased to cooperate, tensions lasting until 1759, the year of Benjamin’s death.24
Meantime, Benjamin continued to attend the meetings of CTWM at least some of the time, probably because his glover’s shop was only a few blocks away. He also continued to cause trouble, opposing those he considered to be false ministers and keeping his hat resolutely on his head when they prayed. (Quakers barred disowned members from business meetings, where group decisions were taken, but not from worship meetings, which were always open to all.) By May 1723 the meeting had formed a new committee to draw up fresh charges against Benjamin. The plan was to read them aloud the next time he attended a meeting.25
Benjamin somehow found out about the list of charges and requested a copy of it. The antinomian who considered himself above the law suddenly got legalistic: he challenged messenger Richard Freshfield, a representative of the meeting, asking “whether Friends ought not to have proved what they charged him with before they ordered ye Paper to be read against him.” Freshfield stated that he would convey the message to the meeting, to which Benjamin replied angrily, “he had no Message to send to ye Meeting.” He added that “in a proper time” he would insist on Friends proving the charges against him. He would then “dispute those Charges.” He was in no hurry.26
The CTWM wanted an immediate showdown, not least because they had learned of the move by Benjamin and Sarah toward the CMM, whose members they warned against the disowned Friend. Meantime, Benjamin asked that he be allowed to meet with a committee from the CTWM at a time when Sarah could attend, for “She hath laid some Blame on Friends as if they had dealt too hardly by her Husband.” In response Freshfield told Benjamin that they should meet at “ye Mens Gallery at ye Great Meeting House.” Sarah could be present and so should some “indifferent [i.e., impartial] persons . . . to judge whether ye Matters Charged were proved.” Benjamin rejected the proposal, saying that “neither he nor his Wife should meet Friends on that Accot.” Benjamin apparently thought the meeting was rigged against him. Emotions ran high and reverberated back to London. In October 1723 the Yearly Meeting sent an epistle to all localities “against any Disorder of keeping on ye Hat in time of Prayer or other appearance of Disunion.” Benjamin’s protests were becoming a national issue.27
The leadership of the CTWM could not figure out what to do about this impossible man in their midst: “he still continues to come to our Meetings, and gives us frequent disturbances.” In an act of desperation they resolved to go to the local Justice of the Peace, an office long involved in the harassment and repression of Quakers, in Colchester and around the country. Two weeks later they quietly abandoned the idea as too extreme. They decided instead to draw up a new indictment against Benjamin—adding “gross & abominable Practices”—and to read it aloud whenever he disrupted a future meeting. This would shame him and simultaneously make it clear to all that he was not a member of their community.28
On May 13, 1724, Benjamin dramatically escalated the conflict. He went to the women’s section of the Great Meeting House during worship services “& appeared in a very Rude & Audacious manner to ye great Disturbance of many friends in ye Meeting.” What he said and did was not recorded, but the symbolism of speaking from the women’s quarter was unmistakably subversive. Benjamin believed that male and female were “all one in Christ,” so he apparently did not accept the artificial division of meeting space by gender. Outraged, the leadership took another unprecedented step: they appointed three men, including Cyrus Scott, the grave digger in the Quaker burial ground, as an internal police force, “to keep him out of ye Gallery for ye future.” The pacifists would now use physical force to prevent Benjamin’s protests.29
To break the impasse, Benjamin decided to appeal his case to the Essex Quarterly Meeting (EQM). On June 8, 1724, he charged the CTWM “with doing him injustice & desired that he might have Liberty to appeal to ye sd Quarterly Meeting to hear the Matter between ye Meeting and him.” The Quakers at the EQM did not want to get involved and “signified that they had nothing to do with it.” They referred the matter back to the CTWM, who constituted yet another committee to chart a way forward. When two members visited Benjamin, he told them that “he refused to come to a hearing, and said he did not think the Meeting to be proper to judge concerning him, he signifying that several members of the Meeting are prejudiced against him.” The statement was probably true. By now Benjamin had many enemies, some of them quite determined to drive him out. The leaders of the CTWM in turn felt that they had been falsely and unfairly impugned before the EQM, which polarized the situation further.30
A few months later, Benjamin was ready to talk. In a letter to the CTWM dated December 7, 1724, he declared his readiness to have his case “decided by ffriends,” as long as they were “indifferent,” by which he meant impartial about him and the issues. He went on to explain who such “indifferent men” had to be: “Men fearing God, full of the Holy Ghost, far from, or hating Covetousness.” This phrase illuminates Benjamin’s understanding of the struggle. In his mind, the Quaker community in Colchester was being undermined by wealth and its profanation of values as it moved from its plebeian origins to a more prosperous, bourgeois social composition. To Benjamin and perhaps others like him, the covetous did not fear God and did not embody the Holy Ghost, the antinomian beat in the heart of radical Quakerism. Benjamin had surely attacked “the covetous” in meetings, and he knew that they would now sit in judgment in the CTWM. Benjamin wanted fair and virtuous judges, not those who were, in his eyes, destroying the faith.31
The showdown finally took place in late February 1725. Benjamin faced several accusers and a committee of eight men who would prepare a final report on the meeting. The details of the discussion are unknown, but Benjamin was in some measure contrite. He wanted to be readmitted. A postscript to the report said, “The above Committee do further report that Benjn Lay acknowledg’d to them that he has known sorrow for his unwarrantable Actions, wch gives this Meeting hopes, that his future conversation may be such, as may shew forth Sincere Repentance.” Despite the apology, the committee ruled against Benjamin: his “Corrupt” practices and principles were plainly proven “by Divers Witnesses.” But his penance had limits: as he left the meeting he insisted that “he was misunderstood.”32
Benjamin soon gave up on the CTWM and focused on making peace with the DHMM, the original source of his disownment. He began a letter of March 1725 in a warm and conciliatory tone, addressing himself to his “Dear & Loving Friends.” But he immediately laid bare the antinomian spirit that had led him into open opposition in the first place: “while I lived in ye Compass of your Quarter, it appeared to me in ye Light of ye Lord & in ye openings of his Pure truth in my Soul yt there was many appearances yt was not right in your Meetings.” God had directly revealed to him the shortcomings of the meeting and he considered it his duty to point them out. This was not the stuff of apology.33
Benjamin then switched suddenly from self-certainty to self-doubt and blame: he admitted that a “forward Zeal” had crept into his soul and “drew me forth to make opposition.” He saw the agency of the devil in his actions: he had fallen victim to “many cunning Snares & Subtill Stratagems strong Temptations and sore Buffetings of ye Enemy of our Souls.” He affirmed that the meeting was right to admonish him and added, “I did repent.” He concluded in regret: “I remain dear Friends your sincere true & Loving although Exercised & at times Sorrowful & much afflicted Brother.” He was in turmoil, but his message was clear: if God had forgiven him, how could the Friends at Devonshire House do otherwise? Trusting, perhaps desperately, that the DHMM would show mercy, Benjamin petitioned for reinstatement.34
Devonshire House received the letter but was not convinced: “Our meeting not being fully satisfied wth his first Letter did therefore postpone writing till he renewed his Solicitation.” They would keep him in limbo for a while to see if his sorrow, affliction, and repentance grew. Several months later, in November 1725, Benjamin wrote a follow-up letter:
Dear Friends, whereas I left a Paper with you near a Year ago, I think; Desire you will be pleased to let me hear once from you; for you may well think (if you can believe I have any sincerity) that it is no small Exercise to me to be separated from my Brethren whom I dearly love. I am your true & loving friend & Brother.
Benjamin wrote again in April 1726, reiterating his apology. At this point the Devonshire House Meeting softened, perhaps because they had not seen Benjamin’s antics firsthand for more than three years. They wrote to the CTWM saying that they could forgive Benjamin—if the Colchester Meeting could too.35
The Colchester Friends could not and would not do it. They wrote a long response to Devonshire House, explaining that Benjamin’s behavior had not improved, even since he wrote the letter of apology: he had continued to oppose ministers in public and he “kept on his hatt in time of Prayer,” contrary to the directive of the London Yearly Meeting. He was, in short, “ye same Restless Uneasy & troublesome Spirit” as ever. To make matters worse, he was disturbing churches all over town—Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers. It was true, Benjamin had apologized for his “unwarrantable Actions,” but locally, in conversation, he minimized them as “Slight folleys,” then he denied making a confession at all and even ridiculed the charges by the CTWM against him, calling them a “Bull,” a formal proclamation by the Pope detested by Protestants such as Quakers. He also attacked in meetings the Quakers “who were concern’d in ye Convicting him.” Personal animus and revenge were now intertwined parts of the struggle.36
On at least one occasion Benjamin’s practice of visiting local churches and ranting against ungodly ministers and their practices caused an uproar that landed him in the Essex Court of Quarter Sessions. In August 1723 a group of Essex gentlemen, including Mayor Robert Price and five justices of the peace, swore a grand jury to hear charges against him: “Benjamin Lay . . . stood Indicted for depraving the Sacrament of the Lords Supper.” It is not clear exactly what he did to provoke these charges as no details about his action were recorded. But it seems that he not only ranted but took some physical action to disrupt Anglican Communion. The use of the verb “to deprave” suggests that he engaged in an antiritualistic act of desecration, as indeed had been common practice among the “primitive Quakers” of the 1650s. In any case, Benjamin faced the gentlemen and jury defiantly and pleaded not guilty. When asked if he could provide surety that he would appear at the next Quarter Session for trial, he could not. When offered release on his own recognizance, he refused. He was determined to go to jail. The court scribe wrote that “he was ordered to be committed and he was committed accordingly.”37
In May 1726 Benjamin decided to try again with the CTWM, to whom he wrote a long letter of apology. He explained that he had “for several days been under very close Exercises of mind concerning War.” He sat in the “Coolness & Still” of his workshop and asked the Lord for direction. He mused on “outward War” in which “many were kill’d & Wounded” and, with characteristic honesty, on the inward, or spiritual, war that was raging among him and his “Brethren & of ye same Pretious Faith.” He was moved by God to seek forgiveness “for ye many offences I have given you by disturbing of your Meeting in making Publick Opposition & by over Shooting myself in a forward Zeal in disturbing other Assemblys.” He added that he had been “too familiar wth several women here in Colchester near 4 years Agoe & yt wch aggravated ye Cause.” He admitted that he was wrong in refusing to attend disciplinary meetings and that he did not submit with “Meekness & Quietness of mind as I ought to have done.” He had continued to speak taunting words and now regretted them. Yet Jesus, he knew, would forgive: he said “unto his followers yn & so now if you are Reviled[,] Revile not.” Benjamin wrote that he had already confessed all these things to God with “Strong Cries & many tears.” God had now showed mercy and forgiven him; of this he was certain. He concluded, I “humbly Intreat you will be pleas’d to Accept of this for your Satisfaction Doe Remain in true Simplicity & Godly Sincerity your truly Penitent & Christian Brother.”38
Benjamin added as a postscript the authority for the letter and requested, “Dear friends be pleas’d to read these Scriptures”: Galatians 6:1 (restore the wayward with meekness); II Corinthians 2:4–13 (about his “affliction and anguish of heart”); Colossians 3:13–14 (about forgiveness); Matthew 5:43–44 (“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you”). A second postscript added a personal touch, “I think I may say as one said Woe is me.” His mother “hast born me a Man of Strife & Contention”—these had been lifelong traits. But now, confessed Benjamin, “I am very weary of ym & never Intend to be found in such Practices or Contentions any more.” Thus ended the most searching and self-critical apology Benjamin ever wrote about his turbulent behavior.39
The CTWM received the letter and wrote back in clear, cold fashion, spelling out their conditions for acceptance. The meeting
desires that for time to come, Benj Lay may bring forth Fruits agreeable to the acknowledgments he has made in ye Paper he sent to this Meeting yt thereby he may manifest ye Sincerity of his Repentance of ye evil Practices yt he has therein acknowledged & Condemned & yt thereby he may be capable of giving Satisfaction to Devonshire House Monthly Meeting until wch we cannot receive his Paper as Satisfaction by Reason they were first offended and the Letter he has sent them being Invalid, Inasmuch as he has been in the like Practice since the Delivery thereof.
When a messenger delivered the document to Benjamin, he “expressed a great dislike thereto.” He told the bearer of the message that he intended to complain to the LYM. Benjamin had spoken from the heart, saying many things that were not easy for him to say, and in his view the CTWM had not responded in kind. Benjamin and Sarah both disappeared from all Quaker records for almost three and a half years. Their whereabouts during this time are unknown.40
Perhaps the Lays had been peaceably attending the more sympathetic CMM all along, and this is the reason for the uncharacteristic silence about Benjamin in Quaker meeting records from 1726 to 1729. But it seems more likely that the Lays, or at least Benjamin, had withdrawn from meetings for a while. Sarah hinted at this in the first documentary reference to the Lays after the hiatus, in a letter she wrote to the DHMM in November 1729. She expressed her concern about Benjamin having “stood at a distance” from Friends and worried further about what might become of him when she made a long trip as a traveling minister. Her own standing among Quakers had apparently not been affected by Benjamin’s turbulent history. She humbly requested that “this meeting would consider their Cases and give them a recommendation to Friends of Colchester.” She made a personal plea for help, not least, it seems, because the Lays had decided during Benjamin’s period of withdrawal that they wanted to migrate to Philadelphia and would need reinstatement to secure a certificate to join a Quaker community there.41
The Devonshire House Meeting took the request seriously and considered it, writing to the CTWM for an update on Benjamin’s recent behavior, hinting that they might be willing to forgive and reinstate him. The CTWM responded curtly: Benjamin “continues in a spirit of opposition & disorder.” But they added a more important observation: he was never “a Member of their Meeting.” He was disowned for what he had done in London, and what to do about that was entirely up to the good people of Devonshire House.42
A few months later the CMM weighed in on the controversy, writing Devonshire House with what may have seemed astonishing news: Benjamin had recently “behaved himself orderly as becometh the Truth.” They added that Benjamin had also made clear “his Intention of going beyond the Seas.” He needed a certificate of good standing to be able to join a Quaker community in Pennsylvania, but such could not be issued as long as his disownment stood. The CMM thus discreetly requested, said the Devonshire House scribe, “our advice & judgement therein.” Everyone knew this was a delicate matter.43
When the CTWM heard that Benjamin and Sarah were trying to get around them by joining CMM, they were furious. In March 1730 it was noted in their minutes that “Benj Lay & his Wife desires to be Joyn’d to ye [Colchester] Monthly Meeting.” This was objectionable because he lived “within [the] Compass of this Two Weeks Meeting.” It was, after all, their meetings Benjamin had attended and frequently disrupted. The CTWM therefore sent a committee of three to explain this to the CMM, “but could get no Satisfactory answer.” They wanted to emphasize that Benjamin “stands disown’d” by the DHMM and that it would be improper to let him join any meeting at all, which of course the CMM already knew. The simple truth was, the people of the CMM did not care what the CTWM thought.44
Meantime, in an extraordinary turn of events, Devonshire House discussed Sarah’s plea and declared their sympathy for it. They were probably moved by fond memories of her as a member of their community between 1718 and 1720 and between 1720 and 1722. In any case, John Baker and Philip Gwillim, who had been appointed to look into the matter, wrote the CMM
to signifie that if [Benjamin’s] Conduct and Behaviour have been agreeable to ffrds in your Part since he made us that Acknowledgement and ffriends are willing to receive him as a member our Meeting will be Contented with what he formerly offered for Satisfaction.
The phrase “in your Part” was ambiguous. If it meant the members of the CMM, Benjamin’s behavior was “agreeable.” But if it meant the whole Colchester region, including the CTWM, that was a different matter altogether. The latter meeting responded to the DHMM reiterating that Benjamin had not changed his ways, but decided to “Leave it to your Prudence to do as you shall think proper concerning him.” With the DHMM now satisfied and the CMM willing to grant membership, Benjamin and Sarah must have been overjoyed.45
Benjamin seized the moment to show largesse and good will to the people of the CMM and the broader region. In March 1731 he made out a will, leaving a considerable sum of money—£218 6s., approximately $50,000 in 2016 dollars—to family members, working-class friends, and the poor, many of them widows, who lived between London and Colchester, and in many of the small villages there around. It is impossible to know how many of these people were actually members of the CMM, for whom the bequest might have seemed a kind of bribery. Benjamin also left money to a few members of the CTWM. A big part of the bequest illuminated Benjamin’s state of mind at the moment: he reserved almost half of the bequest, £100, for individual Quakers (£5 each), who, like himself, wished to immigrate to America. At this time Benjamin also made himself useful to the CMM in other ways—for example, bringing writings “Relating to metten [meeting] houses and bearing [burying] grounds.” These documents may have come from efforts his father had made years earlier to secure buildings and lands for worship and burial in and around Copford, which was “within the compass” of the CMM.46
A couple of months later, an old struggle burst back into the open. Richard Price, one of the “Publick Friends” Benjamin had attacked fourteen years earlier, resurfaced and tried to prevent the CMM from granting him membership and a travel certificate. Price submitted an unsolicited letter about Benjamin to the CMM, but the members of the meeting immediately understood it as an act of revenge and rejected it decisively. It was unanimously agreed that Price’s letter “was Contrary to the Order used among ffriends & the bringing the sd Letter being an Irregular proceeding is ordered to be taken off the ffile & no farther notice taken of same.” The meeting rebuffed Price but he was undeterred. He wrote to the CTWM, fanning their flames of anger. The CTWM, still stung by Benjamin’s criticisms to the EQM, mobilized rapidly to prevent the award of the certificate, even though they had encouraged the DHMM to handle the matter of Benjamin’s disownment as they saw fit.47
It was too late. Devonshire House had sent a letter dated November 3, 1731, to the CMM “which clears Benj Lay from all offences committed against the same.” That letter was acknowledged and “put upon the file.” It was official. The CMM then moved quickly, unanimously making Benjamin a member of the meeting and voting to award a certificate to Benjamin and Sarah to permit them to move to Pennsylvania and join a Quaker congregation there. Most of the group who took these actions in the CMM were women—friends of Sarah, relatives of Benjamin, or both. As the outraged CTWM dispatched its representatives far and wide, to the CMM and the EQM, to carry on the now-desperate rearguard battle against the irrepressible antinomian rebel who had tormented them with debate and disruption for much of the past ten years, Benjamin and Sarah seized the moment. They took off for London, and in mid-March 1732 they boarded the Elizabeth and Dorothy, bound for Philadelphia.48