On a second visit in December 1659, when Thomas attended a Quaker meeting at a neighbouring farmhouse and made the acquaintance of Edward Burrough and James Nayler.
Burrough's preaching impressed Ellwood, and after attending a second meeting at High Wycombe he joined the new sect and adopted their modes of dress and speech.
[2] In 1660 Ellwood was divinely inspired, according to his own account, to write and print an attack on the established clergy entitled An Alarm to the Priests.
Loe was at the time in prison in Oxford Castle, and Ellwood's letter fell into the hands of Lord Falkland, lord-lieutenant of the county.
A party of horse was sent to arrest him: he was taken before two justices of the peace at Weston, refused to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and was imprisoned for some months at Oxford in the house of the city marshal, a linendraper in High Street named Galloway.
For no apparent reason he was immediately afterwards arrested as a rogue and vagabond by the watch at Beaconsfield while walking home from Chalfont St. Peters, but was released after one night's detention.
[2] In June 1665 Ellwood hired a cottage for Milton at Chalfont St. Giles, where the poet lived during the Great Plague of London.
When the Conventicle Act became law in July 1670, and the Quakers were at the mercy of corrupt informers, Ellwood against two named Aris and Lacy for perjury.
He also wrote much against tithes from 1678 onwards, and attacked William Rogers, who in 1682 ignored the authority of Penn and Fox, and denied their right to control the Quaker community.
[2] Ellwood's account of his own life stopped in July 1683, when he was protesting against the injustice of treating Quaker meetings as riotous assemblies.
He lived in retirement at Amersham for the greater part of his remaining years, writing constantly against internal divisions in the Quaker ranks, and denouncing in 1684 the heresy of George Keith.
[2] Ellwood was the author of several polemical works in defence of the Quaker position, of which Forgery no Christianity (1674), The Foundation of Tithes Shaken (1678) and two tracts attacking Thomas Hicks deserve mention.