Beschreibung:

QUAKER PERSECUTIONS] BISHOP, GEORGE. New-Englands persecutions. Being a brief relation of the sufferings of the people called Quak... . London: Robert Wilson 1661. First edition. Modern calf-backed boards. 7 1/8 x 5 1/2 inches (18 x 14 cm); 96, 89-96, 105-176 pp., collating A-Y^(4). B1 and signatures U-Y shorter and likely inserted from another copy, the final leaf (the letter from Bishop) in facsimile, some minor staining and thumbing. Page 53 bears marginal pen trials and the name Ann Round; there is a note on p. 73 correcting an execution date, and it is intriguing to conjecture that Round was a contemporary witness. This work chronicles the ascendancy of the New England theocrats, and the events it records also mark the very beginnings of New England's attempts to wrest independence from English rule. The infamous executions and whippings of Quakers, ordered by the colonial legislature, led to the revocation by England of the Massachusetts Charter, the appointment of a new Governor to replace John Endicott, and the 1689 Toleration Act. The accounts in Bishop's work of the deaths of the Quakers Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson and Mary Dyer and of William Leddra of Barbados are a powerful indictment of religious intolerance. Mary Dyer's execution, in particular, was an act of startling cruelty and injustice; it also engendered much negative reaction in the Colony itself; at least one of the officers attending her execution, Edward Wanton, became a Quaker convert shortly thereafter, and the poet Anne Bradstreet (who was married to one of the magistrates) is reported to have been so distraught that she permanently ceased to write. The persecutions of the Quakers and the resulting reaction resonate strongly with the history of American civil rights, freedom of religion, and the freedom of speech and assembly, all part of the bedrock of the American legal system. Two subsequent parts of the work were published, through 1667; only the first is present here. Only two copies of the first edition have appeared since 1949 (The Harmsworth and the Frank Deering copy). Church 571; Sabin 5628; Howes B-481; ESTC R13300. C