Welsh Journals

of the Wolf that had worried them'.4 Like the founder of Quakerism, George Fox,5 Wynne discussed his problems with those 'men of low degree' who had thrust themselves into the pulpits, but, to his utter dismay, he found them 'miserable Comforters'. Thrown into agonising depths of moral uncertainty and spiritual confusion, Wynne wrestled furiously with his doubts and sins. He earnestly sought a means by which he could free himself from sin, but Protestants and Papists alike disabused him of the notion that he could ever free himself from sin in this life. Sometime in the mid-1650s, however, Wynne's life acquired a new meaning. Between 1654 and 1656, John ap John, 'the Apostle of Quakerism in Wales', and his colleagues were proclaiming the spiritual vigour of Quakerism throughout North Wales.6 John ap John first established a foothold in Wrexham, and it is significant that, in 1655, Thomas Wynne married a Quaker, Martha Buttall, daughter of Randle Buttall, a Wrexham blacksmith.7 Either before or after his marriage, Wynne experienced a pulsating conversion. His account of his dramatic regeneration is the most startling confession known to me by a seventeenth-century Welsh Friend. The 'heavenly power,' he wrote, 'wounded as a Sword, it smote like a Hammer at the whole Body of Sin, & in my Bowels it burned like Fire, yea, so dreadfully it burned, that it made my Bowels boyl, it pierced as a Sword, it broke as a Hammer: And then the Pangs of Death I felt in my Members which did make me to roar, yea, and to Quake and Tremble: for this Fire, when it burned, it gave Light, as its the Nature of Fire to do, and it discovered to me and these poor despised People the great body of Sin and Death, which was indeed terrible to behold'.8 Wynne's conversion corresponded with the three-fold stages of a typical Quaker conversion: his growing dissatisfaction and restlessness with orthodox religion; his unfulfilled search for the truth among the radical sects thrown up during the revolutionary period; and his eventual discovery of the inward light.9 To a man in spiritual turmoil, the very simplicity of Quakerism had much to commend it. But it was the searing inward experience which truly changed his life. The anointing within drew him from darkness and despair to light and hope. Henceforth, as far as Wynne was concerned, Quakerism was the only true religion. By trade, Thomas Wynne was a barber-surgeon. He claimed to have developed a natural flair for surgery from the very earliest age. On many occasions before he was ten, Wynne wandered far from his home and played truant from school, much to his parents' disapproval, in order to watch local surgeons dressing wounds 'Thomas Wynne, An Antichristian Conspiracy Detected (1679), p. 8. sThe standard version of Fox's journal is Norman Penney (ed.), The Journal of George Fox (2 vols., 1911). 'Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Welsh Saints, 1640-1660 (1957), pp. 55-73. 7 George E. McCracken, The Welcome Claimants Proved, Disproved and Doubtful (1970), p. 568. For Randle Buttall's will, in which he bequeathed a shilling to his son-in-law, see N.L.W., Probate records of the diocese of Bangor, 1684. 8 An Antichristian Conspiracy Detected, p. 24. •Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience (1972), pp. 161-2.