ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1656, James Nayler approached Bristol on horseback, accompanied by a small group of men and women reportedly singing “hosanna” and “holy, holy, holy.” Nayler was regarded by many, supporters and critics alike, as the leader of the first generation of Quakers in England. It was raining heavily, and the Quakers trudged knee-deep through mud in the part of the road where only horses and carts usually travelled. Some of the women spread their clothes on the ground in front of Nayler. A curious crowd followed the Quakers from the city gates to their inn, where they were able to warm themselves and dry their soaked outer garments before a fire. The city magistrates, believing that the entry embodied a claim that Nayler was Christ, arrested and questioned the members of the group. Nayler was charged with blasphemy, and— along with four of his supporters— was sent to London, where he was tried by the Puritan-dominated parliament. Found guilty, he narrowly escaped the death penalty, and was condemned instead to a series of painful humiliations. In London, he was scourged and pilloried, his tongue was bored through with a red-hot iron (Fig. 10), and his forehead was branded with the letter B for blasphemer. He was then returned to Bristol, where he was made to enter the city seated backwards on a horse, after which he was whipped through the streets and finally imprisoned. In conscious imitation of Christ, Nayler suffered all this without complaint. Released three years later, he died on his way home.

With few exceptions, historians have assumed that Nayler's entry into Bristol was a deliberate “reenactment of Christ's entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.” In a rare qualification of this judgment, Peter Toon distinguished between Nayler's action and its subsequent interpretation by the Bristol magistrates, affirming that Nayler “allowed his followers to treat him as though he were the Messiah, making the Bristol authorities think he was reenacting Christ's entry into Jerusalem.”