The Life and Letters of William Dewsbury

by: William Dewsbury

William Dewsbury (1621-1688) was an eminent minister and elder in the early Society of Friends whose role in the formation and oversight of the Society was comparable to that of George Fox. Like many others in his day, Dewsbury suffered great persecution for the testimony of Jesus Christ, but never played the coward in the face of adversity. Speaking of his nineteen years of wrongful imprisonment, he declared, “I joyfully entered prisons as palaces and sang praises to my God, esteeming the bolts and locks put upon me as jewels.” After visiting William Dewsbury in 1676, John Whiting described him as “an extraordinary man in many ways, and I thought, as exact a pattern of a perfect man as I ever knew.”