by bantering Fox at an interview, sitting on a table and talking in “a light manner,” as Fox himself tells us, he would end with some serious words.  Both to Fox personally, and to the letters from him and other Quakers, his reply in substance uniformly was that they were good people, and that, for himself, “all persecution and cruelty was against his mind.”  Cromwell was only at the centre, however, and could not regulate the administration of the law everywhere.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Council Order Books of date; and Sewel’s History of the Quakers, I. 210-233.]

John Lilburne once more, but now for the last time, and in a totally new guise!  Committed to prison in 1653 by the government of the Barebones Parliament, acting avowedly not by law but simply “for the peace of this nation” (ante, IV. 508), he had been first in the Tower, then in a castle in Jersey, and then in Dover Castle.  In this last confinement, which had been made tolerably easy, a Quaker had had access to him, with very marked effects.  “Here, in Dover Castle,” Lilburne had written to his wife, Oct. 4, 1655, “through the loving-kindness of God, I have met with a more clear, plain, and evident knowledge of God, and myself, and His gracious outgoings to my soul, than ever I had in all my lifetime, not excepting my glorying and rejoicing condition under the Bishops.”  Again, in a later letter:  “I particularly can, and do hereby, witness that I am already dead or crucified to the very occasions and real grounds of outward wars, and carnal sword-fightings, and fleshly bustlings and contests, and that therefore confidently I now believe that I shall never hereafter be a user of the temporal sword more, nor a joiner with those that do.  And this I do here solemnly declare, not in the least to avoid persecution, or for any politic ends of my own, or in the least for the satisfaction of the fleshly wills of any of my great adversaries, or for satisfying the carnal will of my poor weak afflicted wife, but by the special movings and compulsions of God now upon my soul ... and that thereby, if yet I must be an imprisoned sufferer, it may from this day forward be for the truth as it is in Jesus, which truth I witness to be truly professed and practised by the savouriest of people, called Quakers.”  This had not at once procured his release, for he remained in Dover Castle through at least part of 1656.  At length, however, after some proposal to let him go abroad again, or to send him and his wife to the Plantations, security had been accepted for his good behaviour, and he had been allowed to live as he liked at Eltham in Kent.  Here, and elsewhere, he sometimes preached, and was in much esteem among the Quakers; and here, on Saturday the 29th of August, 1657, he died.  On the following Monday his corpse was removed to London and conveyed to the house called “The Bull and Mouth” at Aldersgate, the chief meeting-place of the London Quakers.  “At this place, that afternoon,