Dutch Quaker Peace-Makers (1934)

76 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION DUTCH QUAKER PEACE-MAKERS* By William I. Hull Willliam Savery was accompanied on this journey by David Sands, another American Quaker preacher, and by William Farrer of England. Although the whole Continent was in the throes of the military cyclone, the little party of Quaker missionaries traversed in safety northwestern Germany, the Netherlands , and the whole length of France. In Amsterdam, the Comité de Surveillance examined them, treated them with much civility and granted them through the French consul a pass to travel towards France; the American consul visaed their passports also, but advised them to see the American and French ambassadors in The Hague. In the Hague they went to see the French ambassador, who treated them respectfully, and although he said he had no authority to give a pass to an Englishman, with whose country France was at war, he thought Farrer would meet with no interruption as long as he remained in the company of the other two, "engaged in the good work of promoting religion among the people." John Quincy Adams was the ambassador from the United States at The Hague, and he received his fellow Americans very courteously, Savery records, endorsed their passes, and gave them such intelligence respecting their journey into France as was in his power. On their way through Rotterdam, they were invited to hold their meetings in "the episcopal worship-house, built by Queen Anne for the benefit of the English residing here ; . . . many of the English and Scotch people having gone away from Rotterdam in the heat of the war, among whom was the priest, it has been shut up for some time; the remaining part of the congregation, seeing that Friends' house was too small, offered it freely." Before the Napoleonic tempest had quite ended, in 1814, another Quaker missionary from southern France and America, namely, Stephen Grellet, completed an extraordinary journey in Europe, "amid robbers, Napoleon's defeated soldiers, armies of Cossacks , and military despots." * This is the continuation and conclusion of an article the first part of which was printed in the spring number of the Bulletin, pages 40-45. DUTCH QUAKER PEACE-MAKERS77 Quaker travelers amidst the war-torn Continent were not always so fortunate as to be unmolested by the dogs of war; nor was it only the Turkish pirates of Algiers who captured them. When Jan Claus piloted George Fox through Delfzijl in 1677, when Holland was at war with France, the guards of the town questioned Claus as to Fox's being "a militia soldier," evidently judging by Fox's stalwart frame that he was a deserter from the army; but when assured to the contrary, they permitted the two Quaker missionaries to pass peaceably on. When Fox and Claus arrived in Emden, they could not procure a wagon and horses to continue their journey into Germany, since "the master of the wagon durst not let his wagon go, for the Bishop of Münster's soldiers were up in the country, and he was afraid they would take away his horses." The two travelers pursued their journey, nevertheless, and saw many footprints of the war, among them the ruins of "Olden borrough [Oldenburg], a famous great place latly burned downe, and but few houses standinge." Two years later, Roger Longworth, after visiting the Friends in Frederikstad, writes : "I am about to goe to Hamburg through the armies : Dannemarke's army lies about Hamburg and the French are on the South of the River [Elbe]. But I hope the Lord will make way." Way was made for him in safety; but other similar wayfarers on land met with varied and sometimes insuperable difficulties. We learn, for example, of Benjamin Furly of Rotterdam intervening in behalf of two of his friends who had been arrested on the frontiers of Austria-Hungary and condemned as Turkish spies. Later still, Gharrett van Hassen, a Dutch Quaker of Utrecht, traveling in Scotland in 1745, the year of the second Stuart attempt to regain the British throne, was stopped by a party of soldiers who demanded: "What King are you for ?" The soldiers themselves may have been for either King Charles or...