Conscience and Convention: the Young Furly and the “Hat Controversy”

In August 1661 the Quaker community of London was set in turmoil by the arrival of their fellow Irishman John Perrot. The Quaker was a veteran of three years imprisonment in Rome where he had arrived in June of 1658 along with John Luffe with the intention of spreading the Creed of the Inner Light in Italy perhaps with the hope of converting the Pope. Immediately upon their arrival they had in vain asked for an audience with Pope Alexander VII and, instead, were that evening arrested by the Inquisition. Perrot was released after three years, in June 1661. During the long period of captivity Perrot had managed to get his writings to England. One of these documents fueled much discussion among the English Quakers leading to a deep schism within the movement. This document was a letter stating it was lawful for men to keep a hat on during prayer. This innovation proposed by Perrot was hardly a secondary issue: one must not forget that clothing was of great religious and civil symbolic significance that to some extent continues even in today’s secularized Europe as evidenced for example by the recent controversy on the chador. The violence of the divisions aroused by this proposal are stupefying especially considering that the Quakers, based as they were on the theology of the Inner Light had eliminated rituals and conceptions Christian tradition always considered essential (including baptism and the Eucharist). Perrot, however, did not insist on replacing the obligation of taking one’s hat off during prayer with the obligation to keep it on, but merely to contemplate the possibilities for those unwilling to take it off to remain covered if the spirit moved them to do so. Among his first supporters was Benjamin Furly, who lived in Rotterdam in 1659, who was likely in England when John Perrot entered into a collision course with the leading group of the movement. In 1662, just when the controversies surrounding the hat were at their height, Furly published a pamphlet in Dutch entitled De eere des werelds ontdeck, in which he, with a firm attitude, defended the Quakers’ right not to take off their hats in front of their superiors. The years that followed saw Furly in an eminent position among the Quakers. But from 1689 no traces of his active role inside the movement are to be found and around 1692 it is known his relationships with the Dutch Quakers were conflictual. From 1693, they did not consider him a Quaker anymore, accusing him of being worldly. The Quaker that thirty years before had written a book against the use of taking off the hat as a form of salute was accused of uncovering his head in the court and doing so for the ignoble reason of wanting to marry a rich widow. In fact, Furly, on 10 November 1693, married the widow Susanna Huis at the Stadhuis of Rotterdam. The civil wedding was not preceded by a Quaker matrimonial ceremony