No “Terror To Good Works, But To The Evil”

Abstract

Modern scholarship shows the enormity of Quaker religious sect misbehaviors starting about 1656 across colonial New England, including Quaker attacks on Plymouth Colony. After William Bradford’s 1657 death during that furor, Thomas Prence served as Plymouth governor for a third time. Prence made many valuable contributions to Plymouth and New England generally. However, unsurpassed among those achievements, his stout defense of Plymouth’s scripture based, separatist Puritan religious settlement against such Quaker attacks was especially meritorious. Scholarly insistence today on the vehemence of the threats posed to Plymouth by Quaker attackers, ca. 1656–62, validates continued appreciation of Prence’s disciplined responsive actions, emphatically voiced by Cotton Mather in the early 18th century.