Many hallowed memories cluster about that old Elizabethan mansion. It was in 1632 that Judge Fell brought thither his bride, Margaret Askew, sixteen years his junior. She was a descendant of Anne Askew, who, a beautiful woman of twenty-four, thoughtful and truthful, had been burned as a heretic,--one of the closing achievements of the reign of Henry VIII. "I saw her," reports a bystander, "and must needs confess of Mistress Askew, now departed to the Lord, that the day before her execution, and the same day also, she had on an angel's countenance, and a smiling face; though when the hour of darkness came, she was so racked that she could not stand, but was holden up between two serjeants."
It was then that the Lord Chancellor--who previously, when even the callous jailer had refused to rack the delicate body further, had thrown off his gown and worked the torture-engine with his own hands--offered her the king's pardon if she would recant, receiving in reply only the quiet words, "I came not hither to deny my Lord and Master."
It is not easy for us who read to echo the prayer of her who suffered:
"Lord, I Thee desyre, For that they do to me, Let them not taste the hyre Of their inyquyte."
No wonder that Margaret Fell, with such a history in her heart, should have lent a ready ear to the doctrines of the "Children of Light," as the people dubbed them, the "Friends of Truth," as they called themselves, the "Quakers," whose prime contention was for liberty of conscience.
She had been married twenty years when George Fox first appeared at Swarthmoor Hall, where all manner of "lecturing ministers" were hospitably entertained. Three weeks later, Judge Fell, a grave man not far from sixty, was met, as he was riding home from circuit, by successive parties of gentlemen, "a deal of the captains and great ones of the country," who had come out to tell him that his family were "all bewitched." Home he came in wrath, but his wife soothed him as good wives know how,--had the nicest of dinners made ready, and sat by him, chatting of this and that, while he ate.
"At night," says her own account, "George Fox arrived; and after supper, when my husband was sitting in the parlour, I asked if he might come in. My husband said yes. So George walked into the room without any compliment. The family all came in, and presently he began to speak. He spoke very excellently, as ever I heard him; and opened Christ's and the Apostles' practices.... If all England had been there, I thought they could not have denied the truth of these things. And so my husband came to see clearly the truth of what he spake."