Hester Biddle

Hester (or Esther) Biddle (c. 1629–1697) was an English Quaker writer and itinerant preacher who "addressed pugnacious pamphlets to those who persecuted religious dissenters, worshipped in the Anglican church, or refused to help the poor." She became a Quaker in 1654. Her subsequent preaching took her to Ireland and Scotland, Newfoundland, the Netherlands, Barbados, Alexandria and France.

Nothing is known of Hester Biddle's family origin, except that she was born in Oxford and brought up as an Anglican. She disapproved of the abolition of the Book of Common Prayer in the Cromwellian period. Her conversion to the Quakers took place after hearing Edward Burrough and Francis Howgill preach in 1654.

All her writings appeared under her married name, so that her marriage would have taken place before 1655. Her husband was the shoemaker Thomas Biddle (died 1682), with whom she lived in the Old Exchange area of the City of London until the Great Fire of 1666, and then in Bermondsey, on the South Bank. They had four sons, of whom one died in infancy. She lived in comparative poverty after she was widowed, but received five shillings a week from the Quaker Peel monthly meeting.

Hester Biddle died in the parish of St Sepulchre, Bermondsey on 5 February 1697 at the age of 67. Her eldest son Benjamin was appointed as executor of her estate.

Biddle stated that she found "Peace of Conscience" on joining the Quakers in 1654. Her first two broadsides (similar in content) appeared in May 1665 and proclaimed "wo" (woe) to Oxford and Cambridge for their financial and ideological domination. These already link her voice (as "I") with God's light within her, in accordance with Quaker teaching.

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