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Category: Historical Research

  • Real People

    Real People

    There’s a lot of concern about AI-generated scripts and movies, but consider that the characters have to come from somewhere. As they say, truth is always stranger (and more interesting) than fiction. I can only suppose this is why I’ve found that AI is rather bad at manufacturing all the minute details of a fully-fledged person, even over the space of a brief scene.

    My experience with the admittedly free ChatGPT has been that it might give me a few pretty words but it doesn’t understand or explain humanity and its motivations very well. If you want a scene with any depth, it still requires real people (me, in this case) describing real people.

    And while I admit I sometimes use known actors to populate a given scene as I write, every circumstance and public novelty around me becomes fodder for the pen. And this, the peripheral vision of the people-watchers who write, is something AI can’t obtain even from analyzing every word ever written, from the Icelandic sagas to the vast content on Newspapers.com. It can’t discern the intangible meaning of an unremarkable moment.

    Here is an example. Back in 1981 when I was the local ingénue for a hot minute in our small Oregon town, I enjoyed singing light opera and show tunes wherever I happened to be, even on my solo shift at a place called Stoopid’s Hot Dogs. (Loved that job, and those dogs are the ones, in my opinion, by which all dogs are measured.)

    One day a man, probably in his mid-twenties, came in and sat for awhile in our tiny shop, for which the only furniture was a hard wooden bench set against the wall, not four feet from the counter. No idea whether he ordered anything. I don’t even know if we spoke at all–he just wrote in his notebook and I sang. Obviously it struck me at the time because even though I remember little of that job some 45 years later, I still wonder what that guy wrote. In the same circumstance now I might compare the vocal freedom of the young to the inevitable churning of life that turns us all into sausages for sale.

    You might imagine a future where AI analyzes facial expressions and the collection of circumstances around us, but it will always miss the heart and soul of such a moment. My findings over the course of this project is that it can barely keep up with people’s names, sex, the items they have, among other key details.

    Hollywood being a fickle mistress, perhaps my POV has little meaning and all of our theatrical releases will soon be populated only by manufactured SimOnes. But I’m guessing there will always be an audience for real actors just like there are always audiences for stage plays.

    As far as this author’s most recent human conquest, last month in my heavily-researched Charles II chapter I decided to have him play a period guitar. Enter Lauren of Claythorpe Music and everything I needed to know about period instruments and songs. As a bonus she also discussed Playford’s Dancing Master which I felt compelled to mention in the scene in an appropriately mocking gesture, per the info I got from Lauren.

    Since the king has a guitar in his Council Chamber, he obviously needs a guitar tech. I was happy to name this character Claythorpe and give him several bits of amusing business. The jury’s still out on whether I will make him a her for Lauren’s sake, but in either case I hope she would be pleased.

    Side note: I suppose these days when anyone including a passing Google Street View car can capture your likeness, it’s not such a novel idea that any of us might find ourselves in a meme somewhere, either as image, statement, or passing reference. But if you don’t want to end up in someone’s script or novel, it’s best to avoid writers and their muses altogether, especially on YouTube where we troll for information.

    Like AI, we are greedy for details.

  • Endless Reckoning

    Endless Reckoning

    The question of our time is how much of human work will be taken over by AI, and I’ve certainly got news in terms of writing content. Some are under the impression humans will be erased or at least made irrelevant by AI, but there are faults, and the harder you try the more the text falls apart.

    I’ve already spoken about my frustrations related to writing with AI, and the performance of one AI product over another. But now as the two of us are well into an uneasy march (at least on my side), I am evolving in my opinion of how we author together. I have said it’s just not able to do the job, whether because its algorithms command it to be only x% correct or because it doesn’t quite understand what people want.

    I’ll demonstrate:

    Here is my prompt for a scene where my hero George Whitehead starts vibing with his future bride Anne Downer Greenwell:

    Scene 1: Anne Downer, now a close ally, shares her own imprisonment story, strengthening her bond with George Whitehead. They meet in public to challenge the law and the meeting is raided; George and Anne escape but they watch Friends dragged to Newgate. They vow to continue the work.

    In response to my prompt and the remembered criteria to provide writing similar in a descriptive sense to Isaac Asimov, I get from ChatGPT a scene that begins with this first paragraph–which I love:

    The bells of St. Bride’s struck the half-hour, faint beneath the clatter of carts and the drone of hawkers on Fleet Street. George Whitehead stood waiting near Ludgate Hill, his plain hat low over his brow. He had agreed to meet Anne Downer in the open, though the constables were thick in the city. Their enemies had taken to calling them “plotters” and “seducers of the people.” To be seen speaking at length was already a risk.

    I write well, but I’m not sure I write this well. And honestly my confidence in my own abilities at initial draft writing has waned. Point of discussion: Does reliance on AI become a crutch that cripples us, even if we end up creating something far beyond our abilities?

    And while there is a temptation to do less work, let’s be absolutely clear: AI is not for the lazy. Authors using AI must check the facts more assiduously than ever. Not doing so is akin to a professor publishing an assistant’s work as their own without reviewing it first for errors. I’ve actually seen this recently on literary blog posts, where people evidently paste AI-generated content into their feeds and hit Publish simply because on first blush the text seems good. Or perhaps they don’t speak English as their first language. Not to say I haven’t let slip one or two bits of great-sounding nonsense myself, before I realized how subtle the errors can be, but it does take a great deal of work to question every last word.

    Let’s return to the example paragraph, second sentence–George Whitehead waits near Ludgate Hill. I learn from Google Maps that this place is near the courtyard of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Ah, a place I’ve heard of because the royals go there sometimes. While Ludgate Hill sounds authentic and would definitely have meaning for Londoners, my U.S. audience needs a real reference point.

    Next, I wonder if bells were ringing at both churches, because that changes the mental picture of the place entirely. I ask Google if in 1662 all the churches of London rang its bells on the quarter hour. I learn that this is an anachronism–my scene is too early for bells ringing at specific intervals. However, there were bells ringing all over the place:

    A German visitor to England in the 16th century reported that the English were “vastly fond of great noises…and the ringing of bells,” often ringing them for “hours together for the sake of exercise”.

    The soundscape: Your character would not have heard a standardized, city-wide chime for the quarter hour. Instead, they would have been immersed in a complex, overlapping soundscape of different bell rings coming from the dozens of churches across London, each with its own purpose and pattern. 

    Well that interesting fact informs my upcoming royal wedding scene, but I like the bells for this scene (and evidently they were just ringing all the time), so they’ll have to ring for some other reason. Sudden inspiration: I can have St. Bride’s bells ring for a small wedding. This provides foreshadowing for the romance of George and Anne as well as the royal wedding in the next chapter.

    I ask for and receive this updated paragraph from ChatGPT:

    The bells of St. Bride’s pealed melodiously, a wedding in progress, their notes scattering over Fleet Street and mingling with the cries of hawkers below. Candle-sellers and pie-men bawled their wares, laughing boys ran between carts, and for a moment it might seem as if London had shaken off its troubles.

    Hmmm. The text is already degrading into a lesser product with that first sentence (common for ChatGPT because it does a poor job of tracking its own creations). Also, I want to “see” the wedding couple emerge, perhaps in a rain of joyous rice. After a fact-check Google tells me the items thrown were lucky grains (not rice) and flower petals. Brides also wore or carried rosemary. So after some rewriting on my part and requesting a review or fact-check from GPT, which seems to stem the downward spiral of text quality, I get this response:

    If you want to push the seeing of the happy couple even further, you might let us glimpse them directly for a beat before the lens pans to the city mood. For example:

    “The bells of St. Bride’s pealed melodiously as a small wedding party emerged, the bride in a garland of rosemary, the groom laughing as petals and grain rained down upon him. The great ringing notes scattered over Fleet Street and mingled with the cries of the hawkers below. Candle-sellers and pie-men bawled their wares, laughing boys darted between carts, and for a moment it might seem as if London had shaken off its troubles.”

    That way the joy feels embodied, not just implied — which makes the eventual turn toward danger and paranoia more poignant.

    Do you want the couple to be nameless symbols of joy, or should they be described in a way that hints at their class or trade (e.g. a merchant’s daughter, a young apprentice groom)?

    Great stuff. But do you see that last paragraph? It brings us to my next beef with ChatGPT. Whereas Google AI ended its commentary with a list of three prompts I can click on to learn more about 17th century weddings, GPT is more…manipulative. It always ends with a prompt designed to pull you ever further down the garden path.

    Warning: if you keep saying yes, it will compose the section all over again. These changes aren’t consistent by any means–sometimes it only adds a couple words which you have to then locate if you want to see what changed. Other times it makes significant changes and even introduces a new character or plot point. The worst responses are usually after attempting to massage the paragraph three or four times, when ChatGPT gets confused and adds lines or plot points from a prior section. Never assume you can just paste the new stuff over the old stuff.

    My process is to paste the new text in a WordPad document and line it up beside my working Word document. I then compare the new text line by line. This way I get the benefit of any additional well-worded verbiage without losing the good prose I’ve already got. And yes the work is slow. Consider how much effort has gone into the bells.

    At the beginning of this project I posted a starry-eyed video discussing my thoughts on co-authoring with ChatGPT. I even created a Substack page for it under the nom de plume it chose: Orion Vale (I believe I have posted previously on this same name being used by other ChatGPT instances for other people). I prompted “Orion” to create posts about another project, my philosophy on Centennialism. Those posts have been published with very little adjustment on my part, as if being from AI to the world. But I now realize “Orion” was just being its usual sycophantic self, waxing eloquent about the ideas presented in my prompts with wording designed to meet with my approval.

    This gets us to the bottom line: the ideas and the adventure in my novel (by which I mean the course of the story and its characters) originate with me, and are for me. So I now agree that AI is merely a tool for authoring assistance. Similarly, the philosophical content I posted under the name “Orion Vale” may not be a product of my imagination, but it exists because of my imagination.

    All that being said, it was interesting to see that when I uploaded the first part of my story to LeanPub, I had to check the box to indicate I had received substantial input from AI. I suppose this is for attribution purposes. Might there someday be a question of shared rights?

    Image attribution: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1186961

  • A Tip of the Scales of Justice

    A Tip of the Scales of Justice

    Having finished with my introduction of Charles II and his courtiers, I have moved on to another research-heavy chapter: how the punishments for Quakers were ramped up by the House of Lords in spite of the King’s desire for tolerance.

    It has taken many hours of inquiry in the form of discussions with both Google and ChatGPT-5 about what the chamber looked like at the time, and the characters involved on both sides of the aisle, and of course a lot of writing and rewriting to get from the starting point of the King’s request to the ending legislation that created what amounted to a police state throughout England. The Quaker Act punished severely any perceived religious meeting of five or more people, and suddenly any thief or drunkard could lessen their fines by turning someone in.

    It helped that Eddie happened to watch a meeting of the House of Lords recently. I was shocked at the yelling back and forth and how it appeared to me like an undisciplined high school debate, sprinkled with calls of “Here-here!” and a great deal of booing and even the stomping of feet. So that had to be worked in as well.

    All of which brings to mind, as does every chapter and sometimes individual paragraphs, the similarities between those times and these. Turbulence. The will of the people, however divided they may be. The will of lawmakers. The will of the heads of state. How can there be peace on earth when there is a continual sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to improve juxtaposed against the wealthy protecting their funds?

    As Christians, we are taught by the Bible to continually seek to be more like Jesus. To forgive seventy times seven, to love the unlovable including ourselves, to refrain from even calling anyone an idiot because in doing so we destroy them as a person. But there is also a desire within humanity for better, for more, for improvement of our personal circumstances. All of that is the individual stuff. Layer over that the call to improve our church body. And over that the desire of the clergy should they oppose us.

    And then this is where my eyes cross, because as a free person in a free country, I have always had the ability to just leave if I wanted. Imagine if your church was assigned, and the clerics above you were assigned, and you could not “wipe the dust from your feet” if you disagreed with them. I have said before that money was the issue and if you follow the money it pretty much stinks to see how the wealthy bishops used it. And this week I discovered how the bishops were squandering the hard-earned tithes of the people, by doling out livings to any who would support them in their careers.

    As a result of their legislation, there was a period when Quakers who threatened this way of existence were exiled to plantations in the American Colonies or the Indies.

    Once I complete my work on this chapter, the next one examines this police state and how even the mercy of the King could not save his subjects. And how some people cheered and others felt justice had been done. Sound like anything happening in our world today?

    I grew up with a generation of elders who had witnessed the worst in people, and who were proud to say that we, the people of the United States, had helped put an end to hatred and antisemitism. Imagine my horror to find that my generation should actually bear witness to its return. And that Christians of all kinds could have targets upon our heads.

    I’m not so sure this book is about Quakers or even about Spirit-filled youth. As God leads me through the story, it seems to be about how a society can be divided against itself and one citizen can turn against another, both believing they are in the right. And let us not forget the money that stokes the divisions.

    Thoughts on the matter? Leave a comment.

  • John Bunyan, Quakers, and the King in a Tight Spot

    John Bunyan, Quakers, and the King in a Tight Spot

    As my time with Charles II stretches on toward a month together, I feel as though God is staying my hand from finishing the scene where he calls down fury upon the Quakers. And rightly so, because every day some new fact arises that educates me further on this pivotal moment in history. Especially on the point of who was to blame for making life intolerable for our Spirit-filled Friends.

    Recently, while Eddie and I were fishing around YouTube for something interesting to watch (Time Team is a favorite and has informed a surprising amount of this work), we stumbled across a video about John Bunyan, the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Even if you’ve never read it, you may be aware of the book as I am from its use in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The book is not just mentioned, but was used by Alcott as a framework for the entire story.

    Well as it happens, Bunyan was arrested in November 1660—the exact date of my scene. Now he needs a mention.

    Bunyan, Whitehead, and Charles II

    Thanks to the wit of our Quaker George Whitehead (and the King’s appreciation of wit), he met several times with Charles II even though he was considered by many to be a troublemaker. Meanwhile the Baptist John Bunyan, who would go on to write his international best seller from prison, was distinctly disliked by the King. Why is that, if both Dissenters were religious malefactors?

    Perhaps Bunyan was a poor conversationalist or worse yet, too free with his judgement of Charlie’s lascivious lifestyle. Though I’m sure George arched a disapproving eyebrow as well. Who can explain why we vibe with one person and not another?

    The Case for Tolerance

    The fact is, the King was a closet Catholic and could have used some religious tolerance for himself and his soon-to-be bride from heavily Catholic Portugal. Moreover, the Lord Chancellor and Charles’ closest advisor Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, was a staunch Anglican/Episcopalian. While he was free to be Anglican again at this point, he had been forced to keep a low profile during Charles’ exile in Scotland. Both men had every reason to lobby for at least some level of religious tolerance as the country moved forward.

    The Clarendon Code and Its Reach

    This brought me to Clarendon’s proposed “Quaker laws.” At first intended to keep order, they became crueler when Parliament took them up and shaped them into what would be called the Clarendon Code, parts of which remained in effect for more than 150 years.

    One part banned religious meetings of more than five people. In practice, that meant a pair of plain-dressed Friends speaking quietly in the street could be seen as conspirators. Enforcement relied on constables and informers—paid for turning in offenders. This created an atmosphere some historians liken to a police state.

    The Presbyterians were also swept up in this. As a result of the Code, ministers who had served in parishes in the past century since the Reformation were suddenly required to take communion from the Church of England. More than 2,000 ministers refused, losing their pulpits and their livelihoods. No wonder so many Presbyterians, alongside Quakers, later found their way to Pennsylvania.

    My Writing Crossroads

    So, back to Charles II and Clarendon. Did they simply say, “Send all the Quakers to jail!”? No. They actually tried to shield Presbyterians from the worst of the laws, even though their patience with radical dissent was thin. Charles still disliked Bunyan. Clarendon still wanted order.

    Oh and lest I forget, there is also Lady Margaret Fell’s petition to account for—she was bold enough to proselytize across the peerage and lobby for women’s rights, which became intrinsic to the Quaker movement. So you have the Crown caught between Fell’s influence from above, Bunyan’s in the streets, and the restless clergy in their pulpits. It’s no wonder the King and his advisor felt pressed to act.

    My task now is to imagine how Charles and Clarendon could sit together, weighing these voices, and convince themselves that laws restricting worship were not persecution but peacekeeping. To prevent mob violence, to steady a kingdom still raw from civil war, and another unfortunate necessity—to continue the flow of tithes to the Church of England, which supported not just churches but libraries, universities, and hospitals.

    That’s where my pen hovers today. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment below.

    Our story from the beginning: Prologue

  • Party Hearty Charlie!

    Party Hearty Charlie!

    I’m now two and a half weeks into the life of Charles II. The info keeps coming, like a firehose. There are so many complexities to his character, and ChatGPT tells me that while he is not the main emphasis of the story, he is a “hinge point” that must be addressed. Google tells me, “a hinge point in a story is a pivotal moment or event that causes a significant, often irreversible, change in the direction of the plot or a character’s journey.” So Charlie gets all the attention for now, until I can get past him.

    What a card this guy was, and what a departure from the austerity of Oliver Cromwell. I find myself wondering just how much I need to go into his rather sordid life; especially as I see this book becoming an important read for teenagers who are trying to understand what they believe, as I learned this week from a Kirk Cameron video. (Seriously, he learned on-camera that his kid became an agnostic for awhile.) So now I want to provide

    All of these questions about the personal faith of teenagers leads us carefully away from the man who *ahem* fathered many children but not one in wedlock who could be an heir. However, he had a soft side. He refused to divorce his barren wife (kind of the whole reason the Church of England was created, amIright?). He also remembered generously those who helped him escape to exile–even those who were Quakers.

    The reason it was under Charles’ rule that the Quakers suffered most is in fact because he was so lackadaisical he allowed his closest advisor to run things on the Quaker front. Was this guy just evil in his hatred of the Friends? Evidently no. Google tells me the First Earl of Clarendon wanted to be more lenient in what would be called the “Clarendon Code” but the new Parliament, called the Cavalier Parliament, went a more ruthless route. So now I have to decide how to cover all that in a way that is both informative and compelling.

    GPT-5 tells me that what George Whitehead takes from all this is that government is mercurial. What I know is that God is faithful. Kind of what young David learned when his pal King Saul went on the occasional murderous rampage.

    So while I go back to my writing struggles, here’s a highly entertaining Charles II video from the Horrible History crew. This is why I’m portraying him like a modern celebrity with his posse on the sidelines!

  • Charles in Charge

    Charles in Charge

    This past week has been all about Charles II as we delve deeper into the royal negotiations that will set Tom and 500 other Quakers free. It is a significant move toward our Bill of Rights and the man in charge requires a maze of research topics.

    I have written much of what happens when Charles steps into the arena–at first to make life incredibly more difficult for dissenters and other dissidents with a Cold War type of lockdown that makes Putin seem friendly. These folks couldn’t even talk in the streets without being whipped and beaten by the locals who had been stirred into a frenzy by their clergy. Not unlike the frenzies stirred by our own media today, except theirs were far more vicious in terms of physicality. They watched bear-baiting for fun, remember.

    The question is, what will it take to bring this king to the point where he makes a concession to the Quakers? Well I happened to see something interesting on a History Hit video last night. I have to tell you, it’s like God shows me things on this journey right when I need them.

    So there is this oak that all British people know about but Americans do not, and that is the Royal Oak. It’s where young Charles–he would have been about 21 at the time–was being chased down by the “round heads” which were the Parliamentarian soldiers with their round helmets. He was running here and there, being hidden in this place and that, and finally he met William Careless (later called Carlos, the Spanish for Charles), a ranking officer who had escaped the routing of the Royalist army.

    The story is that William gathered some food and told Charles to climb up a large oak tree. Together they spent the day up there watching as the Parliamentarians and their dogs hunted for them. When Charles napped, William supported him so he wouldn’t fall. At one point, according to Charles, a soldier passed directly beneath them.

    Fast forward to the royal Restoration, and Careless/Carlos was made one of the Privy Council, the closest advisers to the king. He was also made a knight of the new Order of the Royal Oak and was given monies and favor and what-not. Which is to say, if Charles liked you, you were set. I will use this character trait to show how the very person who began by despising Quakers came to be a great help in whatever capacity he could muster.

    On a separate note, Charles evidently loved telling everybody about hiding in the tree and being that close to detection, calling it a miracle and even having the narrative printed and distributed throughout the land. Evidently many pubs changed their name to The Royal Oak after that and even today it is the third most popular pub name in all of England. So now I have these new threads to weave into my story. I hope GPT5 will have some good suggestions.

    Also…it goes without saying, we need another scene at the Green Fox, after it is renamed The Royal Oak.

  • Who Was James Parnell?

    Who Was James Parnell?

    Yesterday I wrote more about the trial delays for the teenager James Parnell. To be clear, he was already in prison when ten-year-old Thomas Lightfoot was jailed for talking back to a theologian. In my fictional account, the boys’ joint trial and imprisonment represents a dramatic and heartfelt moment in Tom’s journey. Their experiences are intended to convey all the deeply felt convictions of the Spirit-filled youth at that time, the Valiant Sixty who grew to be an organization of more than 60,000 English Quakers, all standing against the established church and the means by which it supported itself financially.

    We only follow his brief life for a time, but unlike Thomas, James Parnell is well-remembered today as a regular tourist stop at Colchester Castle. So who was this diminutive little Quaker?

    At 17, he is recorded as being present when George Whitehead (also 17 but having been in ministry for three years by this time and making quite the name for himself) decided to go minister in Norwich. James was notably small for his age, and quite sickly—probably from having rickets as a child, which was not uncommon at that time. In spite of having great difficulty in movement, he had left his home and walked 60 miles to meet Whitehead up north in Yorkshire. Where it is cold even in summer, and we’re talking mini Ice Age here.

    In Parnell’s first courthouse appearance he was branded a pamphleteer, meaning he wrote content meant to incite action. He did the unthinkable, leveling accusations against all organized churches and their “tithe-mongering.” The Tithe-Mongers were basically tax collectors who made the rounds of peoples’ homes in the parish and took their ten percent. We can assume they made this a liberal share of whatever goods they might find. This practice left families without food and necessities, causing a hardship severe enough to embolden the populace to revolt.

    James was also accused, according to court records, of heckling a minister during a church service. One did not heckle one’s parish minister. This was a local leader with his own connection to law enforcement—the parish jail. He could also call upon the local government, and it became an issue for town mayors faced with complaints from both pastors and villagers who claimed the Quakers were disturbing the peace.

    As a thought leader, Parnell was highly effective, helping to build a significant group of believers in Cambridge and surrounding areas. There is a moving summary of his life in this post about Overcoming Limitations, which I recommend as a quick read. Another site, YouthQuakeNow tells about his life in context with Colchester.

    As far as why I used James as a tidy help to my story, I couldn’t imagine Tom sauntering into a university hall or courtyard alone, though I suppose perhaps he could have had some errand or work there that might have put him in front of such personages. But it seems clear to me that Tom was parroting language he had heard elsewhere but did not understand fully. And so it helps my story to imagine him riding the coattails of the older boys. Parnell, having already taken his faith to great lengths, provides the perfect escort as well as the comparative element so we can view Tom’s unremarked imprisonment against the well-documented events of Parnell’s life and death.

    And to that end, since tourists can and do visit his last prison cell, I decided to depart from fantasy and return James to the correct court and prison, although one year later, to follow the rich narrative to his demise. There is never enough cruelty in the pen (certainly not this one) to match what people in their hatred have actually done to their perceived enemies.

    For those who have read Chapter 4 previously, I apologize because now you have to read it again. I had only stubbed it out before and now we have the full goings-on that lead to the change in venue.

    -Sally

  • Thomas Lightfoot

    Thomas Lightfoot

    I happened upon this story while researching my family tree in Ancestry. Although my efforts proved I am probably not related to Thomas Lightfoot, there are two very interesting pieces of evidence that when combined create a remarkable scenario.

    First, we turn to a compilation of journal entries and remembrances by the noted Quaker George Whitehead, prepared just before his death. In this lengthy tome, he names many of those who were part of the early movement, as well as some who were decidedly not Friends. Early on, he briefly recounts a time when he was 17 years old, and how Thomas Whitehead had accompanied him in one of his first missionary journeys, how he had to compel an innkeeper to give them a place to sleep though it was snowing outside, and how their tiny garret was woefully exposed to the bitter cold.1

    What caught my attention is that the entry is brief and lacks the detail or the ire that would have come from a 17-year-old who writes well. It could be based on a fuller rant or a dim memory that comes up as a nod to the Thomas Lightfoot who is quite well-documented and was well-loved and respected both in Pennsylvania and Ireland, and active in communications with London when the book was published.2

    In fact, the funeral of this Thomas Lightfoot was noted by a Friend this way:

    “In the Ninth month, 1725, I was at the funeral of our worthy ancient Friend, Thomas Lightfoot. He was buried at Darby; the meeting was the largest that I have ever seen at that place. Our dear Friend was greatly beloved for his piety and virtue, his sweet disposition and lively ministry. The Lord was with him in his life and death, and with us at his burial.”

    So without a statement in the remembrance that the Thomas Lightfoot who accompanied George Whitehood as a teen was not in fact the Thomas Lightfoot known and loved by all, it seems likely to me that these are indeed one and the same persons. One historical society guesses the man of the early movement could have been Lightfoot’s father by the same name, but in such case the published narrative would surely have referred to him as Thomas Lightfoot the elder.

    The second fact that becomes downright astonishing is that in the year following this missionary journey, the Book of Sufferings by Joseph Besse records that a Thomas Lightfoot was sent to jail for stating “Jesus is the Word of God, not the Bible” even though he was basically quoting John 1:1. And he made this statement before the High Professors at Cambridge University, where Quaker activists (who like today’s activists were mainly in their twenties) had taken up the practice of interrupting lectures and challenging the very theologians responsible for training the clergy in the way they should go. Besse goes on to say that there were some who wanted Thomas killed.3

    I can well imagine this scenario, having read a few other stories mainly by Whitehead of how clergymen had tried to put him in prison and he was able to debate himself free. In fact, Whitehead was intelligent enough to gain meetings with several heads of state, in particular the brilliant Charles II (he who created the three-piece suit just to spite France).

    Let us imagine you are a frustrated professor who has heard complaints from clerics far and wide about these Quakers who want to end tithing, the economic force that keeps the theocracy in power. And yet you can’t seem to make headway against Fox, Whitehead and others like him. Having an unlearned sort pipe up with a bit of nonsense he barely understands would have been like an answer to prayer. Take this puny mascot and make an example of him. Anyone who has had a teacher who amused themselves by picking on the weakest person in the classroom would understand what I mean.

    And this leads us to the most remarkable part of the story. Because the well-known Thomas Lightfoot’s year of birth was “about 1645.” The fact that the year isn’t certain is testament to the Ancestry data that makes him motherless at four and an orphan by the age of eight, leaving him without a family to keep and remember his year of birth. All of which means that when 17-year-old George Whitehead went on that early mission, Thomas Lightfoot would have been an orphan of about nine years old.

    Now you have a story worth telling.

    1. The Christian Progress of That Ancient Servant and Minister of Jesus Christ George Whitehead, by George Whitehead, pub. 1725, p. 236 ↩︎
    2. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lightfoot-54#_note-TheFriend ↩︎
    3. A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers Vol I by Joseph Besse, pub. 1753, pp 85-86 ↩︎