Below is a letter found by Camille Gager in her search for, Quaker Game Theorist, Levi Tuke. Excerpt from the novel "The Tuke Massive".

Newgate Prison, 1670

My Dearest wife and Love’s Gift,

Camille’s eye filled with tears . . . Love’s Gift.

You have known me to be a man of moderation and certainly of no particular public attention until being called upon as Juror in the case brought by The Lord High Mayor of London against one, William Penn, son of Admiral Lord William Penn. The case against Penn and the injustice ensuing from it defines our time. I am now myself only recently set free from imprisonment in Newgate as were all of my fellow jurors, who do now represent, in the fullness of our resolve, reason in retreat, victims of religious tyranny.

The younger Penn was arrested with great violence when with William Meade he did preach before a Quaker gathering. When Penn pleaded for his right to see in writing the charges laid against him and the laws he had supposedly broken, the judge, The Lord Mayor of London himself, refused — even though this right was guaranteed by the law. Despite heavy pressure from the Lord Mayor to convict Penn, we the Jury returned a verdict of "not guilty". The Lord Mayor then not only had Penn conveyed to jail again on a charge of contempt of court, but also the full Jury, including myself. The members of the Jury, fighting their case from prison, have not merely prevailed against the Lord Mayor, but have managed to win the right for all English juries to be free from the control of judges. Reason wills out. Reason at last. Reason, thou art the fountainhead of justice.

Lo that we are all of us, Finders, and as such are known to others as, Quakers, and to our brethren as, Friends. 

We are called by the voice within to Find those who have or may one day find within themselves the living God, so that we might minister to their needs. We are certain, without the forced and unwanted intersession of ecclesiastical interpretation of our belief, that no amount of academic, clerical, familial, or political prominence makes one a minister. A minister is one who serves and who makes God real to others. It is God’s call to man and woman alike that makes them ministers, and nothing else. Nothing else. Nothing. For this pure and liberal stance we are hounded from our homes and persecuted without mercy by a mindless cadre of effete clerics leashed to a foundering monarchy.

They are to a man consumed by their avarice and conceit to a degree that blinds them to the growing number of the angry, truly wronged, and skeptical within their own congregation. They laugh at the tears of children made orphan by their cruelty. They confiscate our property to pay the cost of our own humiliation. Families are torn apart son from father to preserve the hard won land and necessities it provides, save that land and sustenance too be taken away. Our sensible and obvious rejection of implicit-obedience to their corrupt and self-serving institution is not only our right, it is our obligation to the spirit of Our Lord. We cannot but bear this burden of state and church upon our necks.

All strife and sorrow is inflicted upon us by the State mandated Church of England and those vested interests and institutions that maintain it and benefit from its power. This cynical organ of man’s vanity in the name of God is an affront to all men who are blessed with his gift of reason and fair-minded judgment. The practice of self-aggrandizing ceremony and cryptic ritual staged within their obscene cathedrals, those vainglorious temples to excess, and their stifling constraint of thought are an affront to every word of our Lord and Savior.

Of all those blasphemies for which we are defamed none gathers more ire and retribution than our true and fundamental belief that no one should be compelled to take any oath or more importantly be compelled to be baptized without their full and willing consent, and that new born children are not of an age to grant nor understand in their own hearts what baptism obligates of them. The Church of England prefers instead to take control over each and every subject of their realm before they are of an age to consent or consider for themselves whether or not they are called to the faith. It is that choice, a singular choice freely made, to choose to become one of the baptized that is the bedrock of our Fellowship. Any and all beliefs or practices a man may take unto himself must be of his own accord, informed only by his own reading of the scriptures, the wisdom born from the tribulations of his own life and the voice he hears from within his own heart.

This first right, the right to choose how we address God’s light within, is the fount that nourishes all Quaker belief. We cannot compel an other to believe what we believe, nor can we be compelled upon the loss of our very souls to believe what other’s do. We cannot deny the voice inside. This principle being the first principle, requires us to extend our belief concerning forced baptism to all areas of self-determination, and beyond to all other facets of our lives and therefore cause us not to intervene nor judge the choices of others. But this freedom is anathema to a church indistinguishable from the state. The monarchy and those industries whom would be struck down by a society that refuses its edicts, or thinks for itself, has no defense from our resolve.

It is my duty and solemn right therefore to renounce all ties to this State and its Church and to its agents and apologists and liquidators, in this year of our Lord, 1670,

I have moved all holdings from my textile factories in Sheffield and sold the lands and property. I have sold all my holdings in and about the city of London and have converted all proceeds to Dutch Kroner’s to be held by the Bank of Amsterdam for my use in establishing myself, and you my beloved wife and our precious daughter Camillia, in the Village of De Rotte, a newly founded sanctuary for those who believe as we do in freedom of thought. We shall live there and lend our good fortune and charity to those whom we believe to be just and reasonable.

Signed hereby today by my own hand,

Aaron Wondrice