Page 4 - NewsandViews Summer 2024

CATHERINE PHILLIPS – a travelling Quaker minister (1726-1795)

Len Wiggs

From the early days of Quakers women have played important roles. The story of Margaret Fell (1614-
1702) and her long time support of George Fox, latterly becoming his wife in 1669, is well known. Women
also had travelling ministries abroad, as Mary Fisher (1623-98) visited Barbados and Massachusetts 1655-
57) and then visiting the Great Turk (1657-70).

Catherine grew up in a Quaker family in Dudley in Worcestershire with her father John Payton, ‘being a
travelling minister in the service of truth in divers parts of this nation, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and
America’. She nursed him in his declining years. Then in 1748 she joined her elder brother James in
visiting meetings in Wales. In Swansea she met William Phillips from Cornwall, who was visiting relatives
there. She continued her travels, her second journey being to Bristol and then south western counties
from Dorset to Cornwall.

For most of the rest of her life she was riding on horseback between Quaker communities throughout the
British Isles and Ireland, always trying to include the British Yearly Summer Meeting in London in her
plans. In 1753 she sailed to Barbados and then Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. She
returned in the summer of 1757 by way of Dublin, and Holyhead, from where she travelled 155 miles
home on horse back in four days. She calculated she had ridden 8750 miles in the islands and America. In
the autumn of that year she rode to Kent and then East Anglia and crossed to Holland.

In 1766 while in Cornwall she met William Phillips again and they travelled together for some while. He
had married and had two children. He was a copper merchant needing to travel much on business. His
wife then died. The paths of William and Catherine crossed at a number of Quaker meetings in the Duchy,
but she waited until 1772 before they actually married at Bewdley in Worcestershire. Then they both
rode to Swansea to visit his relatives and sailed across the Bristol Channel to Ilfracombe and then on to
Cornwall, which became their home. She observed that “she had a friendship with him of 23 years and
then 13 years of marriage”. She visited Ringwood and Poole in 1775 when travelling from London Yearly
Meeting back to Looe and Cornwall. In 1783 she rode to Yearly Meeting in London via Bristol, Salisbury,
Poole and Ringwood. By this time she had suffered several falls, twice from her horse, and so used a
chaise for more safety and comfort. She died at Falmouth in August 1794 and was buried at Kea, near
Falmouth.

Clearly her two brief visits to Poole were not as lengthy or dramatic as her stays at many other places,
particularly in the midlands in her younger days.

A copy of her Memoirs published in 1797 has recently been deposited at Wimborne Chained Library. It
was part of Roger Gilletts extensive collection of old Quaker books.

Because this book has some of her Epistles, we have a way of hearing her ‘voice’ over the years. When
she was sailing to America in October 1753 she wrote to her brother ‘In religion, the soul is enlarged, and
set at liberty to exercise its most noble faculty, in actions, or on an object, worthy the dignity of its
nature….Religion teaches us that we do not live for ourselves only; but that in order to obtain the great
end of our being we must seek the good of mankind and endeavour to be serviceable in society.’

In July 1778 she wrote from Swansea to someone who was favoured with a Divine visitation when far
advanced in life: ‘Esteemed Friend, I have several times thought of writing thee since our return from
Bristol, but till now have neglected it; and as I know not but we may pretty soon turn homewards, it may

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