Mary Fisher (ca. 1623 – 1698) was an early preacher and missionary of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). She is one of a group of such preachers who are called the Valiant Sixty. She was humiliated, beaten, and imprisoned on more than one occasion for promoting Quaker beliefs.
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Fisher was born in northern England. As a young woman she worked as a housemaid for Richard and Elizabeth Tomlinson.
Some time in the early 1650s Fisher was convinced by the preaching of George Fox to join the Friends. She soon began preaching herself, which got her into trouble with the authorities. She had several strikes against her in the minds of the civil and religious leaders—she was still quite young, a female, and uneducated. She was arrested and put in prison for 16 months. Afterwards she was stripped to the waist and flogged, along with some other Quaker women.
In 1655 Fisher and another Quaker, Ann Austin, believed that God had called them to go to the Americas to spread their beliefs. First they went to Barbados. Then they went to Massachusetts, where they met with hostility from the Puritan leaders. Their books were burned, they were stripped and searched for signs of witchcraft, and then they were imprisoned. They were fed only because a compassionate townsman, Nicholas Upsall, bribed the jailer. Upon their release, the two women were deported back to England.
In 1658 Fisher believed that she should go to the Ottoman Empire and explain her beliefs to Sultan Mehmed IV. When she reached Smyrna, she asked the English Consul how to contact the Sultan of Turkey. He told her that she was on a foolhardy mission and put her on a ship for Venice. She got off at the next port and traveled on her own until she reached the Sultan’s headquarters. She persuaded the Grand Vizier to arrange a meeting with the Sultan to relay to him a message from God. According to her report, the Sultan received her as an ambassador and listened to her message attentively. She went back to England with the belief that her mission had been fulfilled.
She wrote :
Fisher married William Bayly in 1662; he died at sea in 1675. She then married John Cross(e) in 1675, with whom she emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina. She died in Charleston and her remains are buried at the Quaker Burial Ground there.
One panel of the Quaker Tapestry, panel B2, is devoted to Mary Fisher, as one of the Publishers of Truth, a collective name for the early Quaker movement.