Again and again he had been brought before justices and magistrates, to whose presence indeed he naturally tended of his own accord for the purpose of lecturing them on their duties, and to whom he was always writing Biblical letters.

He had been beaten and put in the stocks; he had been in Derby jail and in several other prisons, charged with riot or blasphemy; and in these prisons he had found work to his mind and had sometimes converted his jailors.

And so, by the year 1654, "the man with the leather breeches," as he was called, had become a celebrity throughout England, with scattered converts and adherents everywhere, but voted a pest and terror by the public authorities, the regular steeple-house clergy whether Presbyterian or Independent, and the appointed preachers of all the old sects.

By this time, however, he was by no means the sole preacher of Quakerism.

Every now and then from among his converts there had started up one fitted to assist him in the work of itinerant propagandism, and the number of such had increased in 1654 to about sixty in all.