gnified for a
Colonel to take any notice then of the soldiers' tittle-tattle; so he
said nothing, only bided his time and waited until he could pay back
his grudge against the sergeant. A whole year he waited--then his
chance came. It was at the Battle of Worcester, when the two armies
were lying close together, but before the actual fighting had begun,
that two soldiers of the King's Army came out and challenged any two
soldiers of the Parliamentary Army to single combat, whereupon Colonel
Barton ordered the soldier who had likened him to Nebuchadnezzar to
go with one other companion on this dangerous errand. They went; they
fought with the two Royalists, and one of the two Parliamentarians was
killed; but it was the other one, not Fox's friend. He, left alone,
with his comrade lying dead by his side, suddenly found that not even
to save his own life could he kill his enemies. So he drove them both
before him back to the town, but he did not fire off his pistol at
them. Then, as soon as Worcester fight was over, he himself returned
and told the whole tale to Fox. He told him 'how the Lord had
miraculously preserved him,' and said also that now he had 'seen the
deceit and hypocrisy of the officers he had seen also to the end of
Fighting.' Whereupon he straightway laid down his arms.

The trooper left the army. Meanwhile his friend and teacher had
suffered for refusing to join it. We must go back a little to the
time, some months before the Battle of Worcester, when the original
term of Fox's imprisonment in the House of Correction in Derby was
drawing to a close.

At this time many new soldiers were being raised for the Parliamentary
Army, and among them the authorities were anxious to include their
stalwart prisoner, George Fox. Accordingly the Gaoler was asked to
bring his charge out to the market-place, and there, before the
assembled Commissioners and soldiers, Fox was offered a good position
in the army if he would take up arms for the Commonwealth against
Charles Stuart. The officers could not understand why George Fox
should refuse to regain his liberty on what seemed to them to be such
easy terms. 'Surely,' they said, 'a strong, big-boned man like you
will be not only willing but eager to take up arms against the
oppressor and abuser of the liberties of the people of England!'

Fox persisted in his refusal. 'I told them,' he writes in his Journal,
'that I knew whence all wars arose, even from men's lusts ...