Early Quaker Writing, Oliver Cromwell, and the Nationalization of Conscience

Quakers’ extensive correspondence with Oliver Cromwell reveals how they hoped to make a precise intervention in the political sphere of the 1650s through their radical understanding of conscience. The language of conscience was central to Friends’ discourse of the ‘light within’ and their belief in that light as an alternative site of authority to both Church and state. This connection between the ‘light within’ and conscience also contributed to Quakers’ belief in the universal nature of conscience: not only was conscience available to all Englishmen and women, but also its dictates — when led by the light — were identical for all believers. Striving to effect national change, Friends aggressively used this idea of a universal conscience to advise, challenge, and reprimand Cromwell in person, in print, and in private letters. In this way, early Quakers transformed conscience into a tool through which they expected — and demanded — that Cromwell would shape the English nation into the Kingdom of God.