Quakers

The Religious Society of Friends, one of the radical Protestant groups that emerged during the English Civil War.

History

George Fox founded the movement in the 1650s. Quakers believed in direct, unmediated experience of God — no clergy, no sacraments, no prepared sermons. They sat in silence until someone felt moved to speak.

Their practices put them in constant conflict with authority. They refused to swear oaths (a problem in courts), refused to doff their hats to social superiors, refused to pay tithes to the Church of England, and addressed everyone as “thee” and “thou” regardless of rank. After the Restoration in 1660, they were persecuted heavily — thousands were imprisoned under laws targeting Nonconformists.

William Penn, a Quaker, founded Pennsylvania in 1681 partly as a refuge where Friends and other religious dissenters could live without persecution.

In the Novel

The Waterhouse family are Puritans, not Quakers, but they inhabit the same broader world of religious Dissent. Quakers appear as part of the landscape of radical Protestantism that shapes Daniel’s upbringing and the novel’s political tensions.