A view of Malta. Photo: Helen M Bushe / flickr CC.
Women of courage
Author Susanna Hoe asks why two seventeenth-century Quaker women were imprisoned in Malta
On the door of one of the prison cells in the former Inquisitor’s Palace in Birgu, Malta, there is an unexpected notice. The first lines read:
Sarah Cheevers, 50 years of age
British Quaker from Wiltshire, wife of Henry
Katherine Evans, 40 years of age
British Quaker from Somerset, wife of Jacob
In 1658, the two women decided to take their Quaker message to Alexandria; Malta was merely a stop on the way. A staunchly Roman Catholic archipelago under the suzerainty of Sicily, Malta would not be a British colony for nearly 150 years, and Sarah and Katherine were the first British women travellers that I found in Malta during my research for Malta: Women, History, Books and Places.
Alexandria could wait; seeing Malta as fertile ground, they decided to stay. But when they started handing out Quaker pamphlets they were denounced to the Inquisition by a Franciscan friar, and then interrogated at the house in Valletta of their host, the Anglo-Belgian consul. As a result, he was instructed to confine them to the house; so they simply shouted prophecies out of the window to passersby.
At the beginning of April 1659, they were arrested and taken to the inquisitor’s prison. They were to stay there until the summer of 1662, as the Holy Office, via English friars, attempted to convert them. They strongly resisted and, in their turn, promoted the tenets of their belief.
CV Wedgwood, in ‘The Conversion of Malta’, contained in her book of essays Velvet Studies (1946), delightfully describes the two: ‘Women of character and courage, versed in the Scriptures and in little else, Katherine had the readier and sharper tongue, Sarah had the louder voice for preaching and the greater persistence in what she undertook. Both, like many Englishwomen before and since, were indifferent to ridicule. They would do as they thought right, whether they be mocked by rude boys or burnt alive.’
The imprisonment, quite apart from the gruelling intellectual challenge, was not easy. They were first shut in a small inner room with ‘two holes in it for light and air’, and they had no means of washing, their hair began to drop out, and their skin to grow as rough as ‘sheep’s leather’. Soon their Bibles were taken from them – though, happily, they knew them by heart. Katherine wrote to the inquisitor, so pen and ink were removed, though later they were able to write home.
Some months later, the two were separated. Sarah’s new room gave onto an alley leading to a church; from there she would exhort – in English – the worshippers to repent. When soldiers and sailors gathered to pray for victory before a foray against the Turks, she shouted: ‘Go not forth to murder, nor to kill one another.’ They were threatened with torture, to be tied with chains, and with burning, but it did not deter them; suffering was to be embraced rather than feared.
Eventually, the pope was approached and, in July 1662, the Vatican ordered their unconditional release. It was another three months before a suitable vessel was found to take them home. They spent this time with the new consul ‘whose wife and servants, they sadly noted, became less and less civil daily’, for they continued to cause trouble.
Also on board the vessel leaving Malta were twenty-four knights of St John of Jerusalem, the organisation which, since its arrival in 1530, had taken command of the islands. They included a brother of the grand master who sought Katherine out. She dealt with him. Back home, they continued to proselytise, including in Scotland and Ireland, and to be arrested and imprisoned. Although they were among the earliest Quakers proclaiming a dissenting Christianity; it would not be uncommon for women to play a leading part.
Malta: Women, History, Books and Places by Susanna Hoe. Holo Books. ISBN: 9780957215351, £19.99.
