HOLLISTER, Denis (d. 1676), of High Street, Bristol.

There were two numerous families of Hollister in Westerleigh by 1600, both of them made up of yeomen and husbandmen. The family of Denis Hollister was farming there at Wotton's Hill around 1600. Denis's father was a second son; his legacies from his own illiterate parents were a colt and four bushels of wheat and beans, augmented a few years later by 'two kine, one named Cherry, the other Hussey'.16Glos. RO, GDR wills 1603/136; 1610/131; 1639/228. Denis Hollister senior did not improve his meagre inheritance sufficiently for him to rise above the station of husbandman; the future MP was himself one of seven children, and was thus extremely fortunate to be apprenticed to a Bristol grocer, Anthony Kelly. Kelly was one of a small group of godly Bristol radicals with separatist leanings. Fast days and prayer meetings were held at his house on High Street, encouraged by the minister of St Philip's, William Yeamans.17Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 84. Hollister's time under the direct supervision of his master was short, as Kelly died around 1630, but the apprentice was well enough regarded by his master to be entrusted with witnessing his will.18Bristol RO, 04421/2, f. 5. The remainder of his eight-year term was served under Kelly's widow, Dorothy, 'very famous for piety and reformation', who incurred notoriety in Bristol for keeping open her shop on Christmas Day. After her first husband’s death, she married Matthew Hazzard, the newly-arrived lecturer and minister of St Ewin's, and is celebrated as Bristol's first woman separatist.19Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 85, 293. It was doubtless in her household that Hollister was exposed to the radicalism that marked his outlook during his maturity.

Hollister completed his apprenticeship by May 1637, married the following year, and was duly made a burgess of the city in July 1641. At the time of his marriage, Hollister was in tune with the established church sufficiently to conform to the ceremony in the parish church of St Nicholas. His bride, Bridget Popley, was the third daughter of an ironmonger of that parish who had died some 20 years earlier. Popley owned the White Hart in Broad Street, a property which was in time to pass by way of Bridget to Denis Hollister.20St Nicholas par. reg.; Bristol RO, 04421/3, f. 150. But three years after his marriage, and a month after his enrolment as a burgess of Bristol, Hollister came before the city magistrates charged with keeping a conventicle and instigating a late night disturbance outside the premises of another High Street grocer (13 Aug. 1641). This was a self-conscious political act. Hollister and his associate not only at first refused to name sureties when they appeared before the mayor, John Taylor*, but also declared 'they were advised by a Parliament man that they had done nothing but what was lawful, but denied to tell this Parliament man's name'.21Bristol RO, JQS/M/3, ff. 176v, 178. This event alone was probably sufficient to bar Hollister permanently from civic office. His initiative coincided with the decision of Dorothy Hazzard and her associates to form their own independent congregation, a move encouraged by a visiting minister, John Canne, a Baptist. Canne visited Westerleigh, Hollister's native parish, to preach and hold a disputation with the incumbent: the outcome was a clearer vision by the Bristol congregation of the possibilities of meeting in an unconsecrated building.22Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 90-3.

Hollister's movements during the civil war are uncertain, but we know that he left the city to serve the parliamentarian cause, and probably became a receiver of taxes in Devon.23Farmer, Sathan Inthron'd, 46; CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 346, 432, 450. His mentor, Dorothy Hazzard, remained in Bristol. In August 1642 her servant was arrested for pulling a ribbon from a man's hat on the grounds that its colour was favoured by royalists.24Bristol RO, JQS/M/3, f. 199. She herself played a remarkable role during the first siege. On 26 July 1643, she led 200 women in a stand against the invading royalists at Froom Gate, hoping that the women's example would stiffen the resolve of the governor, Nathaniel Fiennes I*. It was to no avail, and she subsequently became one of a number of Bristolians to give evidence against Fiennes at his court-martial for surrendering Bristol.25'A Catalogue of Witnesses', in W. Prynne, C. Walker, A True and Full Relation (1643), 32-3. There is every probability that Hollister shared her perspective; he was one of the parliamentarian committee appointed to secure the city after the second siege ended in victory for the New Model army, in September 1645. This committee proved to be Hollister's niche in public life; he served as a commissioner for assessments, militia and - doubtless gratifyingly for him - for the propagation of the gospel, in the later 1640s and after the execution of the king. His shop was a reliable staging-post for sequestration revenues en route from Wales to London.26CCC 277. He was one of those instrumental in inviting the Independent minister Thomas Ewins to serve as pastor in Bristol in 1651, under the auspices of the corporation. Ewins had been minister at Llanfaches, Monmouthshire, the first Independent church in Wales, and like many radicals in the region during the currency of the acts for propagating the gospel in Wales and elsewhere, Hollister was at this point content with the principle of state maintenance, if not with that of a calling to a specific tithe-supported living.27Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 103.

Hollister's name appeared first among the signatories to the letter inviting Ewins to Bristol, and it was followed by those of John Haggett and James Powell, both army officers.28CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 255-6; W.R. Williams, Parlty. Hist. Glos. (Hereford, 1898), 116. As a leader of a gathered church at Bristol, and as an associate of the local garrison establishment, Hollister was on both grounds likely to be recommended to the council of state as a suitable member of the assembly at Westminster proposed in 1653 following the dismissal of the Rump Parliament. His fellow church members considered him to have 'great influence upon the magistrates of the city'.29Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 106. A further influence on Hollister's public career was the millenarian senior army officer, Thomas Harrison I*, in the early 1650s a dominant figure in Wales and the west of England, as well as among the foremost confidants of Oliver Cromwell*.30Farmer, Sathan Inthron'd, 46. When the make-up of the new assembly became clear, however, Bristol no longer had specific representation, and there was lobbying by an informal federation of Gloucestershire Independent congregations for nominees for that county. In July 1653 Hollister sat instead in the Nominated Assembly for Somerset, in which county the Bristol suburbs on the south bank of the Avon lay, but unlike his colleagues for the county, he had no significant personal or business interests in the shire outside Bristol.

Hollister was appointed to the council of state after nomination by the committee charged with placing suggestions for membership before the House. His attendances were patchy. After attending three times in July, he was absent all through August and was present at meetings on four occasions in September. Only in October did Hollister attend with any frequency, on 13 days. Overall, only two members of the council had a worse attendance record than his, and one of those, Charles Fleetwood*, never attended because he was in Ireland.31CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. xxxvii, xxxix, xl, xli. His absences were possibly the result of his serving as an admiralty commissioner, from July to December, but he declared later that his inactivity reflected his own reluctance to be selected for the assembly, which hardened into outspoken distaste for office of all kinds.32D. Hollister, The Harlots Veil Removed (1658), 75. He sat on council committees for discoveries (4 Oct. 1653), St Katharine's hospital (20 Oct.) and a seamen's riot (27 Oct.).33CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 185, 208, 218. When fresh elections for the council of state took place in November, Hollister was not nominated: like many of his persuasion, he suffered in a general swing away from radical politics.

His activity in the general work of the House seems to have been no more enthusiastic. He was named as a commissioner for inspections of forests, and to a committee specifically on wastes in the Forest of Dean, reflecting the traditional Bristolian interest in a prime source of naval timber.34CJ vii. 322a, 337b. He sat on a committee to which had been referred a petition from London corporation (25 Oct.) and on a committee supervising the reduction of the law. With the millenarian Hugh Courtney he was added to the committee for regulating the customs, having been linked with Courtney on two of his limited number of council committees.35CJ vii. 339b, 348b, 350b; CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 206, 208. On 17 October, during a debate on a bill on chancery procedure, Hollister expressed himself in terms that gave offence; he was required to stand, and 'made an explanation of what was excepted against'.36CJ vii. 335b. He was probably pronouncing himself out of sympathy with this Parliament; not because it was too radical or not radical enough, but because it was a worldly body. His contemporaries located the source of his later spiritual development in his experiences at Westminster; Hollister in Parliament was as Nebuchadnezzar in his kingdom in the air, dreaming into madness.37R. Farmer, The Impostor Dethron'd (1658), 41; Daniel 4.

Hollister has been described in unambiguous terms as a Baptist, but only in 1653 did his Bristol church adopt those Baptist tenets which were later to distinguish it when it settled at Broadmead. When the weekly meetings for discussion took place at Hollister's house in Bristol High Street, the group was still inching its way to unanimity on points of doctrine.38B. Capp, Cromwell's Navy, 126; Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 104-6. His Bristol brethren considered that Hollister picked up strange ideas while in London attending Parliament, and that after the self-destruction of the Nominated Assembly he returned to his native city 'with his heart full of discontent and his head full of poisonous new notions'. At a church meeting, he was said to have announced that the Bible was 'the plague of England'.39Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 106; D. Hollister, The Skirts of the Whore Discovered (1656), 18-19; The.Church of Christ in Bristol recovering her Vail (1657), 16-17. He had evidently developed his thinking in an antinomian direction beyond his Independent former co-religionists, whose response was to move their weekly discussion group elsewhere. In politics, predictably, he cooled towards the protectorate, and was named to no further local committees. He maintained an affinity with the Bristol garrison officers, however, and possibly held military rank. He was particularly close to George Bishop, the garrison captain and former clerk to the council of state's committee for examinations under the Rump Parliament.40TSP iii. 170-1; Farmer, The Impostor Dethron'd, 47; G. Bishop, Mene Tekel (1659), 48 (E.999.13); Extracts from State Papers ed. N. Penney (1913), 120.

The visit to the city of the Quaker missionaries John Audland and John Camm in July 1654 proved momentous, both for the religious life of Bristol, and for Hollister personally. They spoke in Hollister's meeting, and were warmly enough received to encourage them to return in September, when thousands were said to have attended their gatherings.41The Cry of Blood (1656), 2-3; The Memory of the Righteous Revived (1689), sig. E2 (5). Thereafter, Hollister's house became a focus of the burgeoning Quaker movement. He and a group of around 18 members seceded from the Broadmead church after the summer, and his was probably the house into which Audland and Camm escaped from the mob on 19 December.42Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 110; The Church of Christ in Bristol Recovering her Veil (1657), preface, sig. A2 (1); The Cry of Blood, 28. He became an active supporter of beleaguered Quakers elsewhere, travelling to Banbury in September 1655 for the trial of Audland's wife.43Early Quaker Letters ed. G.F. Nuttall (unpublished, deposited in Friends Library, Euston, 1952), 185, 186. Taking advice from the pro-Cromwellian Welsh minister, Walter Cradock, the elders of the Broadmead congregation preferred sending admonitions to its errant members than to expel them, but Hollister was provoked into publishing his combative The Skirts of the Whore Discovered, bought in London by George Thomason on 3 December 1656. It was a comprehensive denunciation of his former co-religionists.44Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 112-3. Hollister's radicalism is visible in his advocacy of the local army officer John Haggett as deputy recorder of Bristol, and in his deposition against Miles Jackson* as a closet royalist.45CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 224; 1654, p. 332.

By the time that Hollister first stormed into print, however, Bristol had become a byword for Quaker extremism. One of those attending a meeting at the end of July 1656 in Hollister's orchard, a favoured venue for Quaker open-air meetings, was a former soldier called James Naylor. Observers noted afterwards that Naylor was silent at this meeting, but the charged emotional atmosphere triggered a group of his associates into chanting and singing, and as a body they left the city to travel further into the west country. After imprisonment at Exeter they returned to Bristol, amid scenes that inevitably suggested a blasphemous parody of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. The curious procession ended up at Hollister's house, the White Hart, in Broad Street.46W.C. Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism (1912), 244, 252-2; Farmer, Sathan Inthron'd, 3. The Bristol town clerk, Robert Aldworth*, took up the story to Parliament, and Hollister and his fellow Quaker apologist in Bristol, George Bishop, henceforth began to distance themselves from their notorious colleague.47Rabshakah's Outrage Reproved (1658), 14 (BL, 4151.b.107.9). The Naylor case only served to exacerbate relations between the Quakers, the Broadmead Baptists, as they had by this time more definitively become, and the minister Ralph Farmer, all of whom resorted to the printing press; Hollister's second publication, The Harlot's Vail Removed, was launched in 1658 in this febrile atmosphere.

Hollister continued as one of the principal Quaker leaders in Bristol. The movement's missionaries, among them George Fox himself, stayed at his house.48Friends Lib. Swarthmore mss, III. 11; PROB11/351, f. 292. He remained outside public life except in the emergency during the summer and autumn of 1659, when he was named a militia and sequestration commissioner. There is no evidence that he acted, and by October was in any case reported to be hors de combat through 'a violent fever to the eminent hazard of his life'.49Friends Lib. Swarthmore mss, I. 187. He recovered, only to face the full blast of persecution at the restoration of the monarchy. In March 1660 a meeting at his house was besieged by an armed, hostile mob, a disturbance which must be seen in the context of month-long unrest in the city during a period of intense political uncertainty.50Friends Lib. Swarthmore mss, IV. 134; Mercurius Politicus no.606 (2-9 Feb. 1660), 1084 (E.775.1); no. 607 (9-16 Feb. 1660), 1110 (E.775.4); no. 609 (23 Feb.-1 Mar. 1660), 1137 (E.775.9). In January 1661, a group of Bristol Friends was imprisoned, but Hollister and Bishop were excepted, the magistrates reluctant to make martyrs of them. The exasperation of the civic authorities shone through their deliberately offhand announcement that the two men 'might do as they would, if they had a mind to be in prison then they might go, or else they might go to their beds'.51Friends Lib. Great Book of Sufferings I, p. 81. Hollister went to prison, albeit probably only briefly, but a cat-and-mouse pattern of harassment ensued, with meetings at his house broken up by musketeers.52Friends Lib. Great Book of Sufferings I, p. 82; J. Besse, Sufferings of the Quakers, i. 42.

There was no question of Hollister returning to any kind of public life outside the Friends' meetings. George Bishop seems to have suffered more direct persecution, but Hollister was able to continue his business activities, conveying his house in 1662 in trust for his family. That year, he was made uncomfortable by a grant to a petitioner to the crown of arrears of taxes in his hands since his time as a receiver.53CSP Dom. 1661-2, 346, 432, 450. By 1667, Hollister was the unchallenged elder statesman of Bristol Quakerism, who oversaw the building of a new meeting house on his ground at the Friars.54Minute Bk. of the Men's Meeting, 5, 14, 25. To Hollister were referred difficult cases, such as those of a kinswoman of John Haggett (an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate of 1654) who wanted to marry 'out' of the meeting; the definition of what exactly was 'vain apparel', and the form of the ceremony that should be performed at Quaker marriages. He continued to be active in maintaining links with Friends at home and abroad, in Virginia and Maryland.55Minute Bk. of the Men's Meeting, 16, 18, 24-5, 48-9, 90, 92. Persecution was never far away, however; the doors of the meeting house were broken down in September 1670, as a meeting was in progress.56Extracts from State Papers ed. Penney, 320. Hollister died on 13 July 1676, a week after making a codicil to his will. He bestowed small gifts on many prominent Friends, among them Fox (whose marriage with Margaret Fell Hollister witnessed in Bristol in 1669), George Whitehead and William Dewsbury, and recorded how so many of them had 'often lodged at my house and broken bread at my table'.57PROB11/351, f. 292; Journal of George Fox ed. J.L. Nickalls (1952), 554; Friends Lib. ms portfolios 30, 65; 10, 53. A clerical error presumably accounts for the will being recorded as proved on 1 July 1676. His grand-daughter, Hannah Callowhill, became the second wife of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania.