Small Quaker groups were planted in various places across Europe during this early period (For instance, see the Stephen Crisp article).
It undertakes research and advocacy in the fields of peacebuilding and human rights policy, notably in relation to the European Union and the Council of Europe.
The building itself, built in the 1890s by the architect Georges Hobé, is a well-preserved example of Art Nouveau architecture and has protected heritage status.
The Netherlands were seen by Quakers as a refuge from persecution in England and they perceived themselves to have affinities with the Dutch Collegiants and Mennonites who had sought sanctuary in the country.
He returned in 1677 with George Fox and Robert Barclay and at Walta Castle, their religious community at Wieuwerd in Friesland, he unsuccessfully tried to convert the similarly minded Labadists to Quakerism.
That same year, in 1666, the first Quaker tract in Danish and Norwegian was published: John Higgin's The Lord's Message to All Persons who confess their faith in God.
Other named Quakers were allowed to live in the Stavanger area by the Norwegian Royal Decrees of 1826 and 1828, on the condition that they reported births, deaths, and marriages to the authorities and did not proselytise.
During this time two Quakers, Elias Tastad and Knut Halvorsen, were prosecuted for burying their deceased family members in un-consecrated soil.
[5] In a wider act of objection, in 1898 the clerk of Stavanger meeting refused to submit the names of Quaker conscripts to the local authorities.
During World War II a number of Norwegian Quakers, including Olden and Lund, were imprisoned by the occupying German forces for resistance work.
Lindgrov School was established by Norwegian Friends in 1959, contributing ideas to national policies concerning training and work as aspects of care for people with learning disabilities.
In 1697, Peter the Great visited England as part of the Grand Embassy where he was presented with Barclay's Apology and other Quaker works.
[8] Further formal Quaker contact with Russia came in the 1760s, when Empress Catherine II sought a physician to inoculate herself and her son against smallpox.
In 1817, the Russian government wished to drain marshlands near St Petersburg, and Alexander sent a request for a suitable specialist to the Society of Friends in Britain.
Quakers Daniel Wheeler and his family responded to this call; they spent some thirty years reclaiming land near St Petersburg and introducing modern farming techniques.
In recognition of the Wheelers' services the Imperial government granted them in perpetuity the land in which the dead had been buried: the Quaker burial ground still exists at Shushary, close to the city.
An important facet of Quaker involvement with Russia which began at this time was war and famine relief, first carried out in the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland in the 1850s.
[9] The image of the Pietist "good Quaker" lingered in the Russian cultural imagination well into the nineteenth century and became especially noticeable in the second half of the reign of Alexander I, when the emperor was increasingly involved in mysticism.
The view of the "good Quaker" marked a religious awakening, fully manifested in Russian Martinism, it found increased development in the 1820s.
[12] Academics have remarked that Leskov's later adoption of Russian Orthodoxy was marked by a distinct rationalist ethics which can be attributed to his early Quakerism.
[9][15] The small Quaker office set up in Moscow in connection with these activities managed to maintain cooperation with the new Soviet authorities in the field of health through the 1920s, and survived until 1931.
[15] A remarkable pictorial record survives from this period in the sketches made in 1923 by Richard Kilbey of Wells-next-the Sea Meeting, when he and his brother Ernest were relief workers in South-Eastern Russia, in the town of Buzuluk.
Across the road was a malaria clinic in a building showing the marks of recent fighting between Red and White units in the Civil War.
[15] After the fall of the Soviet Union the meeting outgrew her home; it moved to the basement of a Russian Orthodox church, later to a school, to the premises of Friends House Moscow, and eventually to larger and more public quarters.
[15] The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the great hardships suffered by the Russian people in the 1990s offered new challenges to Western Friends.
In 1937, a number of Swedish Quakers (including sv:Emilia Norlind) formed Sweden Yearly Meeting, which was recognised by the government as an independent religious society outside the State Church.
About seventy kilometres Nirth of Stockholm, the rural Svartbäcken is used for general meetings for business, retreats and children's summer camps.
A number of them had been to the Quaker centre at Woodbrooke, in Birmingham, and were subsequently accepted as individual members of London Yearly Meeting.
[19] Well-known Swiss Quakers include: Pierre Ceresole, Adolphe Ferrière, Edmond Privat, Elisabeth Rotten, and Theophilus Waldmeier.
In 1693 William Penn wrote an essay entitled Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of a European Diet, Parliament or Estate.