Amongst these were Nathaniel Heywood, John Angier, Harry Newcome, Henry Pendlebury, Isaac Ambrose, Robert Bath, Richard Mather, John Harrison, and many others, all of whom soon had around them the nucleus of a future congregation. At first these men preached in private houses with impunity, but the passing of the Conventicle Act and the Five Mile Act, and the presence of large numbers of Roman Catholics, pressed hard upon them, and the amount of persecution and suffering which followed was extreme. For the next few years Nonconformists were persecuted with a vindictiveness worthy of the Dark Ages. Surrounded with spies on every hand, they were driven to hold secret meetings in out-of-the-way places, where they often met in the night-time. Those who were most zealous, or the most careless of discovery, were often apprehended at once, marched off to Lancaster, and sometimes, as in the case of Thomas Jolley (ejected from Altham), detained nearly twelve months in prison. Perhaps no sect suffered more severely in Lancashire than the Quakers, who took no care to hide their meetings, and from them not only were fines enforced and goods sold, but many of them were for long periods locked up in gaol with felons and other criminal prisoners. Dr. Halley[211] says that although "their sufferings were cruelly severe, it must be acknowledged that they provoked much of the persecution which they so patiently endured, and repelled the assistance which good men of other parties would have been ready to afford them. A modern Friend, mild, pleasant, neatly dressed, carefully educated, perfected in proprieties, is as unlike as possible, except in a few principles, to the obtrusive, intolerant, rude, coarse, disputatious Quaker of the early days of their sect." The Society of Friends may almost be said to have arisen in Lancashire, so great was the support which it received here in the days of its infancy. In 1652 George Fox made a visit to Swarthmore Hall, near Ulverston, when he made a convert of the young wife of Judge Fell, and by their united efforts they soon obtained a considerable number of followers in the district of Furness and Cartmel, whose sympathies were no doubt quickened by the knowledge of the cruel persecutions of these "children of the light" (as they were sometimes called) constantly being enacted in Lancaster Castle. Margaret Fell, after the judge's death, became the wife of George Fox, and she was subsequently the writer of several treatises, and journeyed to London to deliver a copy of one of them to the King. The Lancashire Quaker literature of the seventeenth century is remarkable not only for the quantity of it, but for the light it throws on the religious thought of those writers for and against the teachings of the early pioneers of the sect.[212]