[After a visit with William Penn at the latter's home at
Rickmansworth, he started on his journey north towards
Swarthmore, accompanied by his wife, two of her daughters and
his son-in-law, Thomas Lower, a journey which led to more than a
year's imprisonment--his last imprisonment, as it proved.]
At night, as I was sitting at supper, I felt I was taken; yet I
said nothing then to any one of it. But getting out next morning,
we travelled into Worcestershire, and went to John Halford's, at
Armscott, where we had a very large and precious meeting in his barn,
the Lord's powerful presence being eminently with and amongst us.
After the meeting, Friends being most of them gone, as I was sitting
in the parlour, discoursing with some Friends, Henry Parker, a
justice, came to the house, and with him one Rowland Hains, a priest
of Hunniton, in Warwickshire. This justice heard of the meeting
by means of a woman Friend, who, being nurse to a child of his,
asked leave of her mistress to go to the meeting to see me; and she
speaking of it to her husband, he and the priest plotted together to
come and break it up and apprehend me.
But from their sitting long at dinner, it being the day on which his
child was sprinkled, they did not come till the meeting was over, and
Friends mostly gone. But though there was no meeting when they came,
yet I, who was the person they aimed at, being in the house, Henry
Parker took me, and Thomas Lower for company with me; and though he
had nothing to lay to our charge, sent us both to Worcester jail, by
a strange sort of mittimus.
Being thus made prisoners, without any probable appearance of being
released before the quarter-sessions at soonest, we got some Friends
to accompany my wife and her daughter into the north, and we were
conveyed to Worcester. Thence, by the time I thought my wife would
reach home, I wrote her the following letter:
"DEAR HEART:
"Thou seemedst to be a little grieved when I was speaking of
prisons, and when I was taken. Be content with the will of the
Lord God. For when I was at John Rous's, at Kingston, I had
a sight of my being taken prisoner; and when I was at Bray
Doily's, in Oxfordshire, as I sat at supper, I saw I was taken,
and I saw I had a suffering to undergo. But the Lord's power is
over all; blessed be His holy name forever!
G. F."[173]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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