i
The business of this house is both deeply abstracted and deeply practical. This is the Quaker way.
The Quakers at this moment are in ascendancy. Since the Act of Toleration of 1689, they are allowed to worship freely without the fear of imprisonment. But as they refuse to swear all oaths including the Oath of Allegiance, they cannot become Members of Parliament, cannot ascend the hierarchy of the state, become justices of the peace, serve on juries. And they cannot attend grammar schools or go to either of the English universities. As the days of the week and the months of the year are tied to pagan names, the Quakers have recalibrated the calendar so that Sunday is now the First Day and January has become the First Month.
They hold themselves apart with their sombre dress, those wide hats and close bonnets, self-contained. Sixty years ago, it was the stocks. Thirty years ago, you might be arraigned. Now you get the odd shied stone from that knot of boys that forms and re-forms like a murmuration of starlings in autumn; A Quaker! A Quaker! A Quirl!, they yell, and the stones come over. You are not to respond or curse, but running is allowed.
This pushes the Quakers’ entrepreneurial energy into alternative spaces and ideas. In all those shared silences at Meeting – long and measuring and unfolding – you look at those around and there is a kind of assessment in these hours as you wait for God to call on your fellow Friends to speak.
The houses in Plough Court off Lombard Street were perfect for this careful knitting together of home and work and community. They have enough space for a workshop and apprentices. As in every part of London, there is a special timbre to belief in these few streets. Down in the east, in Spitalfields, there are the Huguenots, but here is Dissent with its collection of printers and doctors, and now chemists, merchants and coffee importers.
London is huge and chaotic, but this bit of territory is easy to map.
The Friends’ Meeting House is in White Hart Court in Gracechurch Street, four minutes away from the pharmacy if you are in hurry to get to Meeting. A watercolour shows a sea of bonnets, women on the left-hand side and men on the right-hand side, a few colourful visitors in the balconies. Though it is flooded by light, it is a study in umber.
In the shop, Silvanus and his assistants are dealing with agues, melancholy, bee stings, astonishment, dropsy, the pox, green sickness and gout, a woman who needs to know whether she is with child or not. The art of the apothecary is complex. It necessitates looking at the person standing in front of you and assessing their needs.
Silvanus, wrote Benjamin Franklin, another visitor to Plough Court, was ‘remarkable for the notice he took of countenances’, manifested through his talent for cutting ‘strong likenesses’ in ivory. Silvanus’s little ivory plaque of William Penn, all curlicued wig, shows a real man, substantial, confident, with his chins looking into the distance, pausing before speaking.
For William Cookworthy this art of taking notice, being shrewd, is another part of not mistaking one thing for another.
ii
And this fits with the obsessive record keeping that is part of Quaker life.
As the Quakers have opted out of the trappings of the state and conduct their own ceremonies, they keep lengthy records of marriage, permissions, wills, inheritances, the poor, grievances and concerns. There are ledgers and fair-copy letter books that minute the tremors of unease around the behaviour of a particular Friend, the caution of anything that might rebound on the image of the Friends. There is always the threat of exclusion, the sanction of removal from the Friends, and this necessitates more noting.
This ordering of life is easily understood. You know where you are.
All this accounting and counting and recounting on this earth helps to strengthen the rectitude needed for the final accounting to God.
I’m not sure how long I would last before the stern questioning of the Elders.
My methods in gathering material, noting it, and keeping clean records, my archival habits, are shot.
A couple of months ago, unable to sleep in the middle of the night, I bought William’s Patent for Porcelain from an online bookseller as I wanted to have it in my hands. I thought it might emit some tremor of all the aspirations of the old man. It was as ridiculously expensive as my four pages of Tschirnhaus bought during my research last year. When it arrives from the bookseller, it is perfect.
And now I can’t find it.
My papers and files are in disarray with notes on China buried somewhere by Meissen, with Tschirnhaus on top of this, and now the complete works of Defoe and the letters of Leibniz.
Do I have to stay awake until I’m in some fugue state to find it?
And God help me, I think, as I look at my desk. I’ve got rid of the Jesuits and landed myself with the Quakers.