Anne Whitehead
Anne Whitehead or Anne Downer; Anne Greenwell was an English Quaker organizer, preacher and writer.Life and work
Whitehead was born in Charlbury in about 1624 to Thomas and Mary Downer. Her father was vicar and her grandfather is thought to have been Ralph Hutchinson, who was a biblical scholar and college head at Oxford University.
Quakerism spread during Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth that followed the English Civil War. Anne Downer joined the Religious Society of Friends in London in 1654. In 1655 she became the first Quaker woman preacher, for which she was imprisoned and beaten. In 1656 she preached in Chadlington, and then went to Launceston prison in Cornwall to serve as secretary to the Quaker leader George Fox. She then preached at her home town of Charlbury, where Quaker meetings were held in the homes of William Cole and Alexander Harris. Both men were jailed in 1657–1658 for refusing to pay tithes to the Church of England; Cole died in prison.
Many Quakers in Charlbury were distrained for refusing to pay the Church Rate. In 1660 a Chadlington Quaker who attended the Charlbury meetings was jailed for refusing to swear the Oath of Allegiance, and in 1663 Henry Shad, a Quaker schoolmaster, was barred from teaching.
In 1670 she married George Whitehead who was a Quaker preacher who had been imprisoned, whipped and placed in the stocks because of his religion.
Whitehead died in Middlesex in 1686. Among those to laud her was Mary Forster in her 1686 work Piety Promoted.
