authorities, the regular steeple-house clergy whether Presbyterian or Independent, and the appointed preachers of all the old sects.  By this time, however, he was by no means the sole preacher of Quakerism.  Every now and then from among his converts there had started up one fitted to assist him in the work of itinerant propagandism, and the number of such had increased in 1654 to about sixty in all.  Richard Farnsworth, James Nayler, William Dewsbury, Thomas Aldam, John Audland, Francis Howgill, Edward Burrough, Thomas Taylor, John Camm, Richard Hubberthorn, Miles Halhead, James Parnel, Thomas Briggs, Robert Widders, George Whitehead, Thomas Holmes, James Lancaster, Alexander Parker, William Caton, and John Stubbs, of the one sex, with Elizabeth Hooton, Anna Downer, Elizabeth Heavens, Elizabeth Fletcher, Barbara Blaugden, Catherine Evans, and Sarah Cheevers, of the other sex, were among the chief of these early Quaker preachers after Fox.  They had carried the doctrines into every part of England, and also into Scotland and Ireland; some of them had even been moved to go to the Continent.  Wherever they went there was the same disturbance round them as round Fox himself, and they had the same hard treatment—­imprisonment, duckings, whippings.  It is necessary that the reader should remember that in 1654 Quakerism was still in this first stage of its diffusion by a vehement propagandism carried on by some sixty itinerant preachers at war with established habits and customs, and had not settled down into mere individual Quietism, with associations of those who had been converted to its principles, and could be content with their own local meetings.  In the chief centres, indeed, there were now fixed meetings for the resident Quakers, the main meeting place for London being the Bull and Mouth in St. Martin’s-le-Grand; but Fox and most of his coadjutors were still wandering about the country.—­There was already an extensive literature of Quakerism, consisting of printed letters and tracts by Fox himself, Farnsworth, Nayler, Dewsbury, Howgill, and others, and of invectives against the Quakers and their principles by Presbyterians and Independents; and some of the letters of the Quakers had been directly addressed to Cromwell.  There had also, some time in 1654, been one interview between the Lord Protector and Fox.  Colonel Hacker, having arrested Fox in Leicestershire, had sent him up to London.  Brought to Whitehall, one morning early, when the Lord Protector was dressing, he had said, on entering, “Peace be on this House!” and had then discoursed to the Protector at some length, the Protector kindly listening, occasionally putting a question, and several times acknowledging a remark of George’s by saying it was “very good,” and “the truth.”  At parting, the Protector had taken hold of his hand, and, with tears in his eyes, said “Come again to my house!  If thou and I were but an hour of the day together, we should be nearer one to another.  I wish no more harm to thee than I do to my own soul.”  Outside, the captain on guard, informing George that he was free, had wanted him, by the Protector’s orders, to stay and dine with the household; but George had stoutly declined.[1]