Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents, and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents, and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Legends -- England -- Yorkshire; Yorkshire (England) -- Miscellanea
He was confined about two years, and was then set at liberty. He
thereupon went to Bristol, where in a public meeting he made confession
of his offence and fall so movingly as to draw tears from most of those
present; and he was then restored to the community of the Quakers, from
which he had been excluded by George Fox at Exeter for his presumption
and pride.
Charges of the most gross immorality have been brought against James
Naylor, whether truly or falsely who can now decide? It is possible that
the language of the women who followed him, in speaking of him, their
letters to him, one of which has been quoted, may have given rise to
these reports. Naylor, however, never would admit that there had been
anything unseemly in his behaviour towards the women who followed him
from London into Cornwall, and from Cornwall to Bristol; and Sewell, who
knew Hannah Stranger, repudiates the charge as utterly false. But it is
curious to notice how that religious fanaticism and sensuality so
frequently run together. It was so in that outburst of mysticism in the
Middle Ages--the heresy of the Fraticelli; it was so with at least one
branch of the Hussites in Bohemia; and in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, when the great convulsion of the Reformation had set minds
naturally predisposed to religious excitement in a ferment, this was
most conspicuous, as in the ferocious licentiousness of John Bockelson,
the Anabaptist King of Sion, or the more cautious profligacy, under a
cloak of religion, of Ludwig Hetzer and David Joris.
James Naylor quitted London finally in 1660, intending to return to
Wakefield; but was found by a countryman one evening in a field near
Holm and King's Rippon, in Huntingdonshire, having been robbed and left
bound. He was taken to Holm, and his clothes were changed. To those who
kindly cared for him he said, "You have refreshed my body; the Lord
refresh your souls."
He shortly after died there of the rough handling he had received from
the highwaymen who had plundered him, and was buried in a Quaker's
cemetery belonging to Thomas Parnel, a physician.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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