Excerpt from The History of the Rise, Increase and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers, Vol. 2 of 2: Intermixed With Several Remarkable Occurrences

In the time of Cromwell he had been very fierce against the royalists, especially at Abingdon, not far from Oxford for this error he endeavored now to make compensation by violently persecuting the harmless Quakers; otherwise he was a comely man, and could commit cruelty with a smiling countenance. But more of his actions may be represented hereafter.

The Quakers, so called, seeing that they could not obtain justice, let the matter of the murdered person alone; for suffering was now their portion, and therefore they left their cause to God. Often-times they were kept out of their meeting-houses by the soldiers but then they did not use to go away, but stood before the place, and so their number soon increased; and then one or other of their ministers generally stepped upon a bench, or some high place, and so preached boldly. Thus he sometimes got more hearers than otherwise he might have had. But such an one sometimes was soon pulled down, which then gave occasion for another to stand up and preach, and thus often four or five, one after another, were taken away, as innocent sheep, and carried to prison with others of their friends, it may be forty or fifty at once. This puts me in mind of what I heard my mother, Judith Zinspenning say, who in the year next following being gone for England, with William Caton and his wife, who lived at Amsterdam, to visit her friends there, and coming to London, went with others to the Bull and Mouth meeting; but entrance being denied, they stayed in the street, where she saw one preacher after another pulled down, at the instant cry of some officer or other, Constable, take him away.' Several being thus led away, the constable came also to her, and perceiving by her dress that she was a Dutch woman, pulled her by the sleeve, and said with admiration, ' What, a Dutch Quaker but meddled no further with her. This keeping of meetings in the streets became now a customary thing in England; for the Quakers, so called, were persuaded that the exercise of their public worship was a duty no man could discharge them from, and they believed that God required the performing of this service from their hands. And by thus meeting in the streets, it happened sometimes that more than one, nay, it may be three or four at a time, did preach, one in one place and another in another, which in their meeting places could not have been done conveniently. But thus they got abundance of auditors, and among these sometimes eminent men, who passing by in their coaches.

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