This enthusiast, once quarter-master in a horse troop under Lambert, and regarded as "a man of excellent natural parts," had for three or four years kept himself within bounds, and been known only as one of the most eminent preachers of the ordinary Gospel of the Quakers and a prolific writer of Quaker tracts.

But, having come to London in 1655, he had been unbalanced by the adulation of some Quaker women, with a Martha Simmons for their chief.

"Fear and doubting then entered him," say the Quaker records, "so that he came to be clouded in his understanding, bewildered, and at a loss in his judgment, and became estranged from his best friends, because they did not approve his conduct." In other words, he became stark mad, and set up for himself, as "The Everlasting Son, the Prince of Peace, the Fairest among Ten Thousand, the Altogether Lovely." In this capacity he went into the West of England early in 1656, the admiring women following him, and chaunting his praises with every variety of epithet from the Song of Solomon, till he was clapped up in Exeter jail.

Nor was Nayler the only madman among the Quakers about this time.

A kind of epidemic of madness seems to have broken out in the sect, or among those reputed to belong to it.