sometimes such as to seem
to warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a
natural consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those
days all manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the
persecution which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and
unseemly vagaries. When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of
earthly magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he
walked up the street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and
interrupt the sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once
came into the Old South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand,
and, holding them up before the astonished congregation, knocked them
together and smashed them, with the remark, "Thus will the Lord break
you all in pieces"; how Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the
streets in the primitive costume of Eve before the fall, and called
their conduct "testifying before the Lord"; we can hardly wonder that
people should have been reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at
Munster by the Anabaptists of the preceding century. [Sidenote: Violent
manifestations of dissent]

Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the
cruel treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go
far toward explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the
new-comers had a chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere
coming to Boston was taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an
attack upon the Puritan theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that
age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive. There were at one
time more than four thousand of them in English jails; yet when any of
them left England, it was less to escape persecution than to preach
their doctrines far and wide over the earth. Their missionaries found
their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to Rome, where they testified under
the very roof of the Vatican. In this dauntless spirit they came to New
England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the
principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there
they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to
Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher,
sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott
happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard
Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arre