cesses in the exchequer by which quakers were fined 20l. a month and two-thirds of their estate for absence from their parish church. Assisted by Latey and William Mead and by the lord treasurer (Hyde, earl of Rochester), he succeeded in getting the fees of the pipe office reduced from the ‘many hundreds demanded’ to 60l. The result of several interviews with James II was a declaration for liberty of conscience on 4 April 1687.
Whitehead's continued efforts were crowned by the act of toleration passed in the first year of William and Mary. This he keenly scrutinised in draft, and, because the precise standing of the quakers was obscure, drew up a short creed and expounded it to the committee of the house. Many quakers still remaining prisoners, Whitehead, introduced by Daniel Quare [q. v.] the clockmaker, made a personal appeal to William III. The king was duly impressed by Whitehead's reference to the toleration of Mennonites in Holland, and a few weeks later released the quakers by act of grace. Whitehead then set about obtaining an alteration of the law which precluded quakers from taking any legal action, from proving or administering wills, from taking up their freedom in cities or corporations, and in some places from exercising any electoral rights. He had now, besides Edmund Waller (son of the poet), many influential friends in both houses, and was warmly congratulated outside when leave to bring in a motion passed by a large majority. The affirmation bill, drawn up by Sir Francis Winnington [q. v.], became law on 20 April 1696. This act, passed for seven years, was made perpetual in 1727. When the poll act obliging every dissenting preacher to pay 20s. quarterly was about to be renewed in 1695, Whitehead's influence prevailed for the introduction of a new clause exempting Friends, who have no paid preachers.
Although the status of the Friends was now legally much improved, a complete misunderstanding of their tenets still prevailed. In reply to a series of pamphlets by Edward Beckham, D.D., rector of Gayton Thorpe, and two other Norfolk rectors, Whitehead wrote his ‘Truth and Innocency Vindicated,’ 1699, 4to, and ‘Truth Prevalent,’ 1701, 4to, containing a well-reasoned and able defence of their civil and religious principles. A little later he issued, with Mead, ‘The People called Quakers truly represented … with a Brief Enquiry into a Persecuting Pamphlet lately delivered to the Members of Parliament stiled “A Winding Sheet for Quakerism”’ (by Edward Cockson, rector of Westcot Barton), London, 1712, 4to.
Whitehead's autobiography ceases on 18 Aug. 1711. His health was failing, but he was able to present the society's address to William III on his return from Holland in 1701; to Queen Anne on her accession; to George I on a like occasion, and also in 1716 on the suppression of the Scots rebellion. In an interview with the Prince of Wales (George II), he urged toleration and liberty of conscience, for which he had pleaded in person with seven English sovereigns. He died on 8 March 1723, in his eighty-seventh year, and was buried in the quakers' burial-ground at Bunhill Fields on 13 March.
Whitehead's first wife, Anne Downer (widow of Benjamin Greenwell), whom he married at Peel Meeting in Clerkenwell on 13 May 1670, was a minister as early as 1660. She travelled two hundred miles on foot preaching, and was prominent in settling the order of the separate women's meetings. She died at Bridget Austell's, South Street, 27 July 1686. Whitehead published a little memoir of her, ‘Piety promoted by Faithfulness,’ 1686, 12mo. His second wife, Ann, daughter of Captain Richard and Ann Goddard of Reading, was, when she married him at Devonshire House on 19 July 1688, an orphan keeping a shop in Whitechapel, ‘an honest and virtuously inclined maid.’ By neither had he any surviving issue.
It is almost impossible to overestimate Whitehead's share in the foundation of the Society of Friends, or his influence on the development of national religious liberty. Without the mysticism of Fox, Barclay, or Pennington, he addressed his acute legal knowledge and literary gifts to establishing the sect on a sound civil and political basis. His works were almost entirely controversial and written to confute existing attacks upon quakers. In the titles of his chief writings given below may be traced all the principal features of their creed. 1. ‘David's Enemies Discovered,’ and 2. ‘Cain's Generation Discovered,’ both London, 1655, 4to, against Jonathan Clapham's books in defence of singing Psalms. 3. ‘The Path of the Just cleared, and Cruelty and Tyranny laid open,’ 1655, 4to. 4. ‘Jacob found in a Desert Land,’ 1656, 4to. 5. ‘A Brief Treatise,’ 1658, 4to, in answer to Richard Baxter's ‘Sheet for the Ministry.’ 6. ‘An Unjust Plea Confuted. … In answer to a book called Moses and Aaron, or the Ministers Right and the Magistrates Duty, by Daniel Pointell [rector of Staplehurst, Kent],’ 1659, 4to. 6. (With James Nayler) ‘The True
