CONVERSION TO QUAKERISM

The first Heacock to whom we can point with certainty as a Quaker is Jonathan, the founder of the family in this country. He married and emigrated as a Quaker and it is a reasonable assumption that his parents brought him up in that faith. Furthermore a member of his family landed in Pennsylvania when Jonathan was two years old, which is an indication of Quakerism in an earlier generation. The family was very likely one of the earliest to embrace the faith.

Quaker history records Richard Hickock of Staffordshire among its earliest (if unstable) converts:

Staffordshire developed strong groups of Friends, if we may judge by the fact that there were one hundred and eighty-three imprisonments in 1661 from this county. The history is obscure, but contains some passages of singular interest. Richard Hickock, the son of old Richard Hickock, the host of the Green Dragon, at Chester, after suffering imprisonment there came into the moorland corner of the county adjoining Derbyshire at the end of 1654. He convinced many persons in Leek and the neighborhood, and settled several meetings. The Leek magistrates strongly objected to the meetings in the town itself; they stationed men with halberds at the door and kept the town's people from coming. A letter from Hickock to Margaret Fell (wife of George Fox) in 1658, gives a good idea of his work as it had then developed. There is scarcely a first-day meeting in Staffordshire, he says, which has an affendance of less than a hundred, sometimes there will be above two hundred at a meeting. He has had two in Newcastle-under-Lyme and finds it a pretty moderate town. He has also been twice lately among the Ranters at Leek, all their mouths were stopped, only one woman belonging to the Family of Love stood up at the last meeting and opposed. The Baptists are much dashed to hear of the great Quaker meetings in market towns and elsewhere. Hickock wrote a fract to Ranters in 1659, and published another in the following year. A few years later, ". . . giving way to the imaginations of his own heart, (he) was drawn into whimseys, and so lost the knowledge of the eternal power: he degenerated from the Truth and became an absolute apostate, and many that were convinced by him in this country turned back from the Truth also."^(*)

In view of the previously cited studies on the origin of names, Richard Hickock of Staffordshire may have been a distant cousin of the Heacocks of Stafford.