Elizabeth West was the grandmother of Ann Toovey, the wife of William Rolles (m 1686). She must have been born in about 1605 and was buried in the Friends’ Burying Ground in Henley-on-Thames on 21 Mar 1688. She was a prominent Quaker based in Turville Heath, Buckinghamshire. She was a direct associate of George Fox and her house became the Quaker Meeting House in the area. She was frequently punished for her beliefs.
We cannot be sure of her maiden name but she must have married Richard West of Turville in about 1630 and had at least four daughters. Her husband Richard, a yeoman farmer, is recorded as being buried in St Mary’s Turville on 22 Mar 1654.
Turville is a relatively remote and inaccessible village in the Chiltern Hills but was to become a small haven of dissenters both during the Civil War and in its aftermath. The sequence of this ‘radicalisation’ is not clear, but geographically Turville was less than 25 miles from Royalist Oxford but it was a world apart. Turville was in the Diocese of Lincoln and viable road access for carts and many goods was essentially down the Hambledon valley to the wharves at Henley-on-Thames. It was thus well placed to be a refuge for a number of fleeing Oxford clerics.
Elizabeth’s oldest daughter Mary married first a radical Oxford educated preacher called Richard Delamaine in about 1651. When Richard died in 1657 Mary remarried James Forbes, another similar radical preacher and Scottish ‘divine’. Mary predeceased her mother and died in Gloucester, where her husband was a preacher in 1687.
Her second oldest daughter, Elizabeth married Peter Toovey, whose will of 1668 survives.
By 1660 we know Elizabeth West’s house was a Quaker meeting place. George Fox on his travels records in his journal how on one occasion he visited Widow West’s house and clearly not for the first time. In a footnote written in 1705 the journal records that Quakers still met there welcomed by her grandchildren.
In 1669, Richard Morgan, recently appointed Vicar of Turville, wrote a report back to the Bishop of Lincoln about dissenting meetings and conventicles in his parish. Below is transcript of part of it:-.
In answer to a late order concerning conventicles, these are to certifye unto each particular thereof as follows:
1. That there is but one conventicle in this parish of Turfeild, and it consists of Quakers, held at the house of the widdow West above these eight yeares.
2. That the numbers which ordinarily meetes there is about fifty or three score, and sometymes above a hundred, and they rather encrease then otherwise.
3. That theire meetings usually consists of a midle sort of people, as farmers and tradesmen etc; some of the cheife whereof are Thomas Curtis of Reading, William Waters of Henley upon Thames, and William Tovey of the same, John Gom, William Crooke, and Thomas Hardaway, of Pissell in the County of Oxon. As likewise John Raunce, of High Wiccombe in the County of Bucks.
4. Their teachers are Thomas Curtis, Joseph Cole from Reading goal, [blank] Gilpin of Harborow in the County of Oxford, and John Raunce, practitioner of physicke in High Wiccombe aforesayd, all of them say to be Quakers.
Towards the end of the reign of Charles II and more oppressively still under James II, persecution of dissenters and Quakers increased. We find Elizabeth West and her daughter Elizabeth Toovey, now both widows, appearing at the Quarter Sessions on a large number of occasions accused of recusancy
Elizabeth died on 19 Mar 1688 as recorded in the Quaker register. The next entry is that of her spinster daughter Ann West, who died in 1694. One suspects that at least one of Elizabeth Toovey’s own daughters were also spinsters and heavily bound up in the Quaker movement.
Sources and Notes
- The Short Journal and Itinerary Journeys of George Fox (ed Norman Penney) CUP, 1925
- Foot Note written in 1705 https://archive.org/details/shortjournalitin0000foxg/page/372/mode/2up
- Buckinghamshire Record Society (ed John Broad) Volume 28:Buckinghamshire Dissent and Parish Life, 1669-1712 (1993)
- Buckinghamshire Sessions Records: Volume 1. 1678 to 1694 – Repeated indictments of Elizabeth Toovey and Elizabeth West
- Will of Richard Delamaine, Clerk of Hereford, PCC Probate 14 Aug 1657 (Son-in-law)
- Will of Peter Toovey, PCC Probate 17 Jul 1668 (Son-in-law)
- Will of John Thorpe, Tailor of Turville Heath, PCC Probate 16 Mar 1701 (Son-in-law)