Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 35

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question which someone who wishes to cling to Christian orthodoxy will be
interested in. There seems little reason, in the context of Conway’s system, for the
historical figure of Jesus (and his role in the salvation of humankind) at all, and this
perhaps shows why any sort of reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity that
van Helmont and Conway dreamed of, is something of an impossibility.
In addition, and just as potentially scandalous, was Conway’s increasing
affiliation with Quakerism throughout the final decade of her life, to the extent that
her friendship with More (as well as her wider social standing) was put in some
considerable danger. Ragley Hall became a centre for Quaker activity, with visits
from important Quakers such as George Fox and William Penn, and offering
employment for Quakers as servants.13 In a letter to More, Conway defended her
association with the Quakers as offering a palliative for her great suffering:
They have been and are a suffering people and are taught from the
consolation [that] has been experimentally felt by them under their great
tryals to administer comfort upon occasion to others in great distresse…
The weight of my affliction lies so very heavy upon me, that it is incredible
how very seldom I can endure anyone in my chamber, but I find them so
still, and very serious, that the company of such of them as I have hitherto
seene, will be acceptable to me.14
There is little evidence of much substantial intellectual impact from the Quakers on
the philosophy found in the Principles, so Conway is perhaps being truthful in this
letter regarding the primary medical importance of her Quaker companions.
Nevertheless, it appears that by the end of her life, she very much saw herself as a
Quaker.
Having suffered greatly through so much of her life, Conway died at the age of
forty-seven. Her husband away in Ireland, Conway’s body was preserved in wine by
van Helmont for a number of months before burial. Her epitaph was simply, “Quaker
Lady”. She left behind a notebook, dated to her final years, from which van Helmont
drew the text of the Principles. The text eventually appeared anonymously in a Latin
translation in Amsterdam in 1690. The original English manuscript seems to have
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14

Ibid., xxiv.
Nicholson and Hutton, ed. The Conway Letters, 421-22.