Public Disputations, Pamphlets and Polemic
Ann Hughes continues our articles on the Civil War period by investigating the controversies in public debate and the printed word that fuelled religious arguments before and after the Interregnum.
In October 1656, Francis Fullwood, a young Devonshire minister, gate-crashed a Quaker meeting and engaged in public debate with a Quaker leader, Thomas Salthouse, on the validity of the public ministry and the Quaker notion of the inner light. Fullwood clearly felt his action required justification, going to some pains to excuse his rashness in an account of the dispute published 'out of a single and sincere desire that error may be shamed and the truth cleared'.
At about the same time a young man in the congregation of the minister Adam Martindale, in Cheshire, was barred from the sacrament because his wife had been pregnant when they married, and as a consequence (in Martindale's opinion) turned Quaker. When Martindale and a leading parishioner visited him to talk him out of his errors, they found him, ‘as yet raw in that way' and:
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