CHRIST SAID THAT his kingdom was not of this world and embodied the message in his other teachings. His followers have nevertheless had to live in the world, trying in spite of his warning to bring it under his dominion or else bending his precepts almost beyond recognition in order to fit them to the ways of the world. Over the centuries Christianity has vibrated uneasily between what its founder prescribed and what the world demands. When the church becomes too fat and comfortable with the world, the contrast between the medium and the message will always prompt some prophet to summon true believers out of so unchristian an institution and into a way of life and worship that will more closely resemble Christ’s. We may call them protesters, but in the course of time they become Protestants, with a capital P, against whom new prophets must in turn raise the flag of protest.
When William Penn was born, in 1644, England was filled with prophets, each with his own version of what the Christian life entailed. The Church of England, which had been Protestant with a capital P from its inception, was under challenge not only by Presbyterians and Congregationalists but by a host of more radical visionaries, many of whom thought that Christ’s kingdom was shortly to commence, not by subduing the world, but by putting an end to it: Antinomians, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists, Anabaptists, Seekers, and so on. Penn’s father and mother were none of these. They were genteel Protestants, good Church of England folk, but perhaps with some sympathy for Presbyterianism or Congregationalism. The father, also named William, certainly had no scruples about working for a government run by a Congregationalist, for he made a brilliant career in Oliver Cromwell’s navy, before bringing himself to disgrace in an unsuccessful expedition against the Spanish in the Caribbean. But he also had no scruples about working for Charles II. When Charles returned to the throne in 1660, he restored Penn to his command as admiral and to a handsome living from lands in Ireland that had been confiscated from their Catholic owners. The elder Penn had reason to be content with a world that had served him well.
His son was cut from another cloth. From an early age, at least from his early teens, William Penn was preoccupied with religion to an extent that his parents found disconcerting in a young gentleman with a career in the highest places before him. They wanted him to have all the advantages that his father’s position entitled him to. They saw to it that he met all the right people, that he learned all the social graces. And indeed it all came easy to him. He was lively, energetic, and quickwitted. People liked him, and he liked them, including apparently a lot of pretty girls. But he had this unseemly bent for religion and for pursuing accepted religious beliefs to unacceptable conclusions.
When he was sixteen, they packed him off to Oxford, where the learned clergymen with which the place abounded might be able to keep him on track. But he proved too hot to handle. In less than two years the learned clergy sent him back, expelled for his outspoken contempt for them and their church. In desperation his parents sent him on the grand tour of the Continent with other young gentlemen, in hopes that there he would get the spirit and the flesh sorted out into the right proportions. And though he spent some of his time in France studying theology, when he returned to London in 1664, not quite twenty, his religious zeal had momentarily abated. He was full of fashionable continental mannerisms, and he showed a proper appreciation for the sensual pleasures awaiting a young gentleman in Restoration London.
In London he attended Lincoln’s Inn to learn the smattering of law appropriate to a gentleman of property; and he also attended at the King’s Court, where his father was in high favor, especially with the Duke of York, the king’s brother. The duke was in charge of naval affairs, with Sir William Penn, now knighted, as his leading admiral. The elder Penn, who could not have been more pleased with the way his son had seemingly turned out, introduced him to the duke, and the two quickly became friends. In 1666 Sir William sent the boy to Ireland to look after the family estates, and young William at once made friends among the Anglo-Irish nobility. But his career as proper young gentleman was short-lived. At Cork he met up with Thomas Loe, a Quaker preacher who had entranced him as a teenager ten years before. By the end of 1667, after a brief spell in an Irish jail, he was back in London, where Samuel Pepys, a clerk in the navy office, made that classic entry in his diary: “Mr. Will Pen, who is lately come over from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing.”
THE PROPHET
He was indeed a Quaker, and for his father and mother it was indeed a melancholy thing. Quakerism appeared to be another of those visionary, fringe movements that the 1640s and 1650s had continued to spawn, and of them all it may have seemed the most offensive. Its members were not content to depart from established institutions; they seemed to enjoy dramatic confrontations with authority, in which they defied not only the established church and all its ways but also the customary forms of good behavior. They wore their hats in the presence of their superiors, right up to the king himself. They refused to address people by their proper titles: they would not even vouchsafe a Mr. before the names of their betters. Some of them appeared naked at local church services. And instead of meeting in secret, where the authorities could ignore their violation of the laws against dissenting religions, they insisted on making their meetings public, in effect daring the sheriffs and constables to arrest them, a dare that was often taken.
Their beliefs were as offensive as their conduct. They claimed what amounted to direct revelation from God—the inner light they called it—of the same kind that the apostles had had from Christ himself. The Holy Scriptures, therefore, on which the whole Protestant movement rested, were no more to them than an imperfect record of past revelations of people like themselves. They denied that Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient in itself to bring redemption, but they thought that all men were capable of redemption, if they followed the inner light. Thus they denied the central Christian doctrines of atonement and predestination. They rejected not only all other churches and ministers, refusing to pay their tithes to the established church, but also all sacraments and sermons. Their only preaching came from those who claimed to be enunciating messages from on high via the inner light. And they rejected original sin, too, in its usual sense, for they claimed that with the assistance of the inner light they could completely free themselves from sin in their daily lives.
In espousing such beliefs, William Penn appeared to be repudiating his heritage, repudiating the society in which he had grown, repudiating his education, repudiating his class, repudiating his parents. And there can be no doubt that he thought he was doing so. His first important tract, No Cross No Crown, written in 1669 while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, had as its theme the conflict between the world and the cross, the import of its title being that no crown of eternal glory could be won without taking up the cross and undergoing the suffering and humiliation ever inflicted by the world on those who reject its ways.
There may have been something of adolescent, youthful rebellion in Penn’s stance, but it persisted throughout his life in a posture of no compromise with the world. In counseling other adherents to the cause, he continually admonished them that they should “Keep out of base Bargainings or Conniving at fleshly Evasions of the Cross,” that they should avoid “Reasonings with Opposers,” lest the purity of their commitment be sullied.
This last piece of advice was one that Penn was never able to follow himself, for Penn, in spite of being a likable person, had a contentious streak that impelled him not only to reason with opposers but even to denounce them. Although the Quakers officially professed an aversion to controversy, Penn took it upon himself (with the blessing of other Quaker leaders) to defend them against all comers and especially against the Church of England and the more respectable dissenters of Presbyterian or Congregational persuasion. Nearly all his voluminous writings are polemical. In a three-year span alone, from 1672 to 1674, he published twenty-two tracts, several of them lengthy, in which he went on the attack with no holds barred.
When one critic disclosed in a preface that he was sixty years of age, Penn, then at the ripe age of twenty-seven, mocked the man’s “decrepit” reasoning and rang the changes on the fact “that any Man should live so long, and to so little Purpose.” To Richard Baxter, perhaps the foremost dissenting divine of the Restoration period, he announced, “Scurvy of the minde is thy distemper; I feare its Incurable.” He was fond of proclaiming his own moderate spirit as enjoined by his faith, but even in doing so he could not resist a jab at his opponents, as when in an answer to one critic he began by saying, “I would give the Worst of Men their Due,” and then added, “I justly esteem him of that Number.”
In a running controversy with John Faldo, an Anglican minister, he addressed Faldo successively as Whistling Priest, Busie Priest, ungodly Priest, cavilling Priest, rude priest, ignorant priest, and told his readers,
…in the Earth there is not any Thing so Fantastical, Conceited, Proud, Railing, Busie-Body, and sometimes Ignorant, as a sort of Priests to me not unknown (among whom our Adversary is not the least) who think their Coat will bear out their worst Expressions for Religion, and Practice an haughty Reviling for Christ, as one of the greatest Demonstrations of their Zeal; an ill-bred and Pedantick Crew, the Bane of Reason, and Pest of the World; the old Incendiaries to Mischief, and the best to be spar’d of Mankind; against whom the boiling Vengeance of an irritated God is ready to be poured out to the Destruction of such, if they repent not, and turn from their Abominable Deceits.
This diatribe was not mere youthful exuberance. In one of his last tracts, written when he was fifty-four, he described his opponent as a “snake-in-the-grass” and then specified what kind, a rattlesnake.
Penn coupled his unrelenting hostility to conventional Christians with an anti-intellectualism that attributed the whole apparatus of Christian theology and ecclesiastical institutions, both Catholic and Protestant, to the pursuit of forbidden knowledge that had caused the expulsion from paradise. It was one of the marks of purity in the early followers of Christ, Penn thought, that “for the first Hundred Years, scarce an Eminent Scholar was to be found amongst the Christians.”
In his first publication he warned against “Extollers of Humane Learning,” and throughout his life in offering advice to the godly he warned them against “that Thirsting Spirit after much Head-Knowledge,” which would only clog the passages to truth that lay within them. “My Friends,” he would write, “disquiet not your Selves to comprehend Divine Things, for they that do so are of the Flesh.”
Those who claim direct access to divinity, whether they call it the inner light or the oversoul or by any other name, have always discounted the learning to be had from books, though they often, like Penn, couch their antibook message in books of their own (Penn’s bibliography runs to over 130 titles). Penn from the time of his conversion professed to be wary of books. Solitude and silence, not books, he thought, were the way to reach the Spirit. In his final testimony of advice to his children, he cautioned them that “reading many Books is but a taking off the Mind too much from Meditation…. much reading is an Oppression of the Mind, and extinguishes the natural Candle; which is the Reason of so many senseless Scholars in the World.”
The senseless scholars he had encountered personally in his stay at Oxford, and his impatience with human learning rose to a climax whenever he considered what went on in universities, those places of “Folly, Ignorance, and Impiety,” which “infect the whole Land with Debauchery, and at best Persecution, and anti-Christian clumsy-witted Pedants, and useless pragmaticks.” The universities were simply the last stop in the long line of degeneration from the simple truth of Christ and the prophets. God’s message had been lost in “the obscure, unintelligible and unprofitable Metaphysicks of the Heathen, too greedily received and mischievously increased by Fathers, Councils, School-Men and our modern Universities, to the corrupting of Christian Doctrine, and disputing away the Benefit of Christian life.” He was not against secular learning that devoted itself to secular things, to “Building, Improvement of Land, Medicine, Chirurgery, Traffick, Navigation, History, Government.” But when brought to bear on religion, human learning was only a block to the true knowledge that came from within.
Penn’s hostility to universities extended to the ministers trained there. Their objective, he claimed, was only to make a living out of religion, and their ministry was unavailing because they relied on book learning instead of the inner light. Penn thought of himself as a minister, unpaid and unordained but called, like all true ministers, directly by God. He advised others like him,
We are not to Study nor speak our own Words…. We are to minister, as the Oracles of God; if so, then must we receive from Christ, God’s Great Oracle, what we are to minister. And if we are to minister what we receive, then not what we Study, Collect, and beat out of our own Brains, for that is not the Mind of Christ, but our own Imaginations, and this will not profit the People.
True Christian doctrine, Penn insisted, did not have to be “prov’d by Aristotle and his Philosophy.” The Scriptures themselves needed no interpretation. Indeed, it was ridiculous to suppose that God had made the Scriptures so obscure that they required a privileged race of scholar-priests to be explained. They were “suited to the Capacity of the Young, the Ignorant, and the Poor.” And that was how Penn liked to think of the Quakers. To him they were always a “poor, despised people,” poor not only in their ignorance and in the bad treatment they received, but poor in lacking the good things of the world on which false Christians prided themselves. They were, he assured himself, mostly mechanics. And he gladly assimilated their humility to himself, gladly shared their sufferings, for he was convinced that in doing so he was opening the way for the spirit, which could scarcely penetrate the antichristian world of fleshly delights and scholarly philosophy that had been his heritage.
In his professed affinity for the poor, Penn touched a dynamic element of the Christian tradition that has sparked more than one rebel against the ways of the world. There is an egalitarian leaven in Christianity, subdued by the institutions that Christianity fosters, but ever ready to breed prophets in sackcloth to denounce the churches that forget it. “Christ,” Penn observed in No Cross No Crown, “came Poor into the World, and so lived in it.” Did he call his disciples from among the learned? “I would fain know,” asked Penn,
how many Rabbies, Greek and Latin Philosophers, yielded themselves Proselytes to the Christian Religion, though they had his Presence, Ministry, Death and Ressurection amongst them, who was and is the Author and Master of it? If such Learning be so great a Friend to Truth, how comes it that the greatest Things have fallen to the Share of Poor and Illiterate Men; And that such have been most apt to receive, and boldest to suffer for it? Why not Rabbies rather than Fishermen…?”
True Christians now as then, Penn believed, were most likely to be found among “Handicraft, Labouring, and Husband-men, Persons inexpert in the Scholastick Adages, Disputations and Opinions of the Heathenish Philosophical World.” George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, whom Penn revered, had been a simple and untutored man, “not of High Degree,” Penn recalled, “or Elegant Speech or Learned after the Way of this World.” To be a Christian was to be humble, meek, of low degree. Penn never tired of citing the first epistle to the Corinthians that “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.” And he continued to identify the Quakers with “the Weary and Heavy Laden, the Hungry and Thirsty, the Poor and Needy, the Mournful and Sick.”
Quaker doctrine, moreover, spelled out for him some of the egalitarian implications of Christian teaching. Quakers, as we have seen, made it a matter of principle to ignore and flatten social distinctions. Penn found refreshing their insistence on simplicity, their drab clothing, their refusal to doff their hats or to use customary forms of address. The world’s addiction to these empty forms was simply another sign of its apostasy. With his usual air of defiance Penn dismissed the objections that his own sort of people made to this seeming uncouthness: if, as they claimed, it would “overthrow all Manner of Distinctions among Men,” then so be it. “I can’t help it,” he said, “the Apostle James must answer for it, who has given us this Doctrine for Christian and Apostolical,” and he cited the second chapter of James, where the apostle warns against respect of persons.
After joining the Quakers and assuming, however proudly, the mantle of meekness, Penn welcomed unmeek confrontations with the authorities of Restoration England, representatives of the world he had left behind. With his acid tongue and sharp wit, he was more than a match for the judges before whom he and his Friends appeared. The incarceration he nevertheless suffered at Newgate Prison and the Tower of London only gave him the leisure to grind out more books and pamphlets denouncing the ways of the world he had known and justifying the ways of the Quakers.
We have, then, a man who made his life a testimony against the world he grew up in, a world that called itself Christian and allowed, indeed enjoined, its people to study and do what Christ had taught, but which seemed to a sharp young mind to deny his teachings in all its institutions, not least in all the churches save one that claimed the name of Christ. Why, then, may we ask, have we ever heard of William Penn? The world is pretty good at sending into oblivion those who defy or deny it. The meek may inherit it later on, but they don’t get far in the here and now. If we have heard of William Penn before this, it is because he was not meek. He was not humble. And being neither meek nor humble, he did not in fact reject as much of the world as he seemed to. The man who sassed his judges and filled the presses from his cell in Newgate was not content to inherit the world later on or to leave it as he found it. He wanted to change it now, and he did in fact leave his mark on it.
He left his mark because what he wanted and argued for, pleaded for, almost fought for was not quite outside the possible. He left his mark because he knew how the world worked and was prepared, in spite of his denunciations, to work within its terms.
We may find a first clue to his capacity for coming to terms with the world in his relationship to his parents. He was obviously fond of them, proud of his father’s success in a career that he himself had to eschew. In recounting the sacrifices he had to make for his faith, he always dwelt on the displeasure of his parents. And his father’s displeasure was real. Penn spoke of “The bitter usage” he underwent when sent down from Oxford in 1662, “whipping, beating, and turning out of Dores.” And when he returned from Ireland a full-fledged Quaker in 1667, it must have gone just as badly, though by this time whipping and beating were out of the question. But the Penns, after trying to talk their son out of his queer beliefs, became reconciled to them and to him. By the time the admiral died, in 1670 (not yet forty-nine years old), he had entrusted his son with many of his business affairs and made him his principal heir and executor of his considerable estate. Indeed, according to Penn, the parents “that once disown’d me for this blessed Testimonys sake…have come to love me above all, thinking they could never do and leave enough for me.” He showed no hesitation in accepting that share of the world which his father had accumulated, nor did he ever think of disowning his parents, as they for a time had thought of disowning him.
Admiral Penn had raised his son as a Protestant, as a gentleman, and as an Englishman. Penn was proud to be all of these. His understanding of what each entailed might differ from his father’s and from many other Englishmen’s, but not to the point of disavowal. Rather, he thought that if Protestants were true to their principles, they ought to become Quakers as he had. If gentlemen were true to their principles, they ought to give up the vices that he had given up. And if Englishmen were true to their principles, they ought to prevent their government from meddling in religion and threatening the liberty and property of Englishmen like him, who did not conform to the dictates of a set of bigoted priests. As a Protestant, a gentleman, and an Englishman, Penn presented his case, in terms designed to appeal to Protestants, to gentlemen, and to Englishmen.
THE PROTESTANT
Penn insisted throughout his life that he was a Protestant. In a speech before a committee of Parliament in 1678, supporting a bill for religious toleration, he told the members,
I was bred a Protestant, and that strictly too…. reading, travail and observation made the Religion of my education the Religion of my judgement…. I do tell you again, and here solemnly declare in the presence of Almighty God, and before you all, that the Profession I now make, and the society I now adhere to, have been so far from altering that Protestant judgment I had, that I am not conscious to myself of having receded from an Iota of any one principle maintained by those first Protestants and Reformers in Germany, and our own Martyrs at home against the Pope or See of Rome.
Protestantism, as Penn saw it, was Christianity rescued from the apostasy that had befallen it under Roman Catholicism. And Quakerism was Protestantism rescued from the apostasy that had befallen it after the passing of the great reformers of the sixteenth century. Almost all his voluminous writings were designed to demonstrate this proposition and to defend Quakerism from denials of it by Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Socinians, Anabaptists, and Catholics. His first tract, in 1668, like so many seventeenth-century tracts, tried to get the whole argument on the title page: Truth Exalted; In a Short, But Sure Testimony against all those Religions, Faiths, and Worships, That have been formed and followed in the Darkness of Apostacy: And For that Glorious Light which is now Risen, and Shines forth, in the Life and Doctrine of the Despised Quakers, as the Alone Good Old Way of Life and Salvation. Presented to Princes, Priests, and People, That they may Repent, Believe, and Obey. By William Penn, whom Divine Love constrains in an Holy Contempt, to trample on Egypt’s Glory, not fearing the King’s Wrath, having beheld the Majesty of Him who is Invisible. The same intent is apparent in his other tracts, such as (without the subtitles) Quakerism a New Nick-name for Old Christianity and Primitive Christianity Revived in the Faith and Practice of the People called Quakers.
Quakerism as Protestantism required a good deal of defending, because its distinctive doctrines seemed clearly heretical, in direct defiance, as we have seen, of central Protestant Christian dogmas. Protestant heresies generally went in one of two directions: either on the one hand toward antinomianism, in which the true believer was thought to be freed from adherence to the Law by the presence of Christ within him, or on the other hand toward Arminianism, in which the believer was thought to be capable of achieving his own salvation by escaping from original sin and obeying the Law. Antinomianism entailed a belief in direct revelation, which was supposed by the orthodox to have ceased with the writing of the Bible. Arminianism amounted to a denial of justification by faith and thus a return to the repudiated Catholic doctrine of justification by works. Quakerism, it seemed, embraced not one of these heresies but both at once. In the doctrine of an inner light, Quakers claimed a direct revelation from God. At the same time they affirmed that everyone possessed this inner voice of God and could achieve salvation by obedience to it. They thus rejected predestination and affirmed or seemed to affirm justification by works.
This combination of heresies appeared to subordinate the Scriptures to some fancied inner voice, and to eliminate Christ’s atonement for human sin. The recovery of the Scriptures had been central to the Reformation, which had also restored Christ as the sole savior of man, freeing the church from reliance on any kind of human merit. But the Quakers, as if to emphasize that they had no need of Christ, eliminated the sacraments that memorialized him. And to top off their heresies, they denied the conventional doctrine of resurrection of the dead at the last day.
In defending Quaker heresies as Protestant and Christian, Penn had one advantage. Protestants prided themselves on eliminating idolatry and superstition from their worship. They emphasized the Holy Spirit, which brought unmerited grace to those whom God would save. They destroyed graven images and denounced the materialism of the Roman church. Quakers, too, emphasized the spirit and explicitly affirmed God to be an infinite spirit, affirmed it far more unequivocally than orthodox Protestants did. It was thus possible for Penn to turn some accepted Protestant doctrines and institutions against his opponents in the Church of England, which still harbored many of the sensual accompaniments of worship inherited from Rome. English churches, despite the Puritans, still contained paintings and statuary, still contained some ceremonies and trappings that betrayed, in Penn’s and the Quakers’ view, the Protestant repudiation of graven images. It was, as Penn put it in his devastating fashion, as though “God was an old Man, indeed, and Christ a little Boy, to be treated with a kind of Religious Mask [i.e., drama], for so they picture him in their Temples; and too many in their Minds.”
The sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, in spite of the Protestant denial of transubstantiation, Penn dismissed as relics of superstition. Water baptism was only slightly less offensive than the Old Testament circumcision that it replaced, and the Lord’s Supper was “a Kind of Protestant Extream Unction.” Both sacraments were departures from true Christian and Protestant freedom from formalistic, external devices that encouraged sinners to think they could be saved without an inner transformation. Circumcision of the heart, baptism by fire was what Christ demanded of those who believed in him. “Where Ceremonies, or Shadowy Services [Penn’s term for traditional rituals] are continued, People rest upon the Observance of them, and Indulge themselves in the Neglect of the Doctrine of the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The ceremonies by which other Protestants memorialized Christ were in fact ways of escaping the burden that he laid on his followers.
The orthodox doctrine of resurrection of the dead similarly departed from Christ’s insistence on the spirit. Penn did not deny that the dead would be raised, but he regarded as grossly materialistic the notion that men would recover their earthly bodies. It betrayed a continuing sensual element in the orthodox view, as though heaven would be incomplete without a resumption of the earthly pleasures enjoyed in this world. “It makes the Soul,” said Penn, “uncapable of Compleat Happiness without a Fleshly Body, as if Heaven were an Earthly Place to see, walk in, and for all our Outward Senses to be enjoyed and exercised, as in this World, though in an higher degree.” This, Penn maintained, was neither Christian nor Protestant but Mohammedan. And he went on to heap scorn on the notion: if the dead were supposed to rise “so strictly…as they Dyed, then every Man is to rise Married, [single], Low, High, Fat, Lean, Young, Old, Homely, Handsome, and according to former Complexion and Sex….” The idea was too ridiculous to contemplate.
The central Quaker doctrine of an inner light, the voice of God in every man, was nothing if not spiritual. To Penn it was no novelty but the essence of Christianity and especially Protestant Christianity. Nor was it difficult to find passages in the writings of Christians from Saint Paul onward that could be interpreted to support it, a task to which Penn gladly devoted himself. Almost all explanations of saving grace, of God’s calling of his saints to salvation, could be read as expositions of the Quaker doctrine. Orthodox divines, to be sure, took pains to indicate that saving grace did not involve direct revelation; but the line between the two had always been difficult to maintain, and Quakers relieved themselves of the difficulty by erasing it. The inner light and saving grace, Penn maintained, were one and the same. They were the voice of Christ, who was God within man, enabling man to sin no more, to be made pure and thus acceptable to God.
In answer to the charge that Quakers denied Christ’s atonement for sin, Penn developed a distinction made by other Quakers, between past and present sin. Christ’s sacrifice, he maintained, was necessary to atone for the sins that every man committed before he submitted to the inner light. Christ justified man before God for these past sins, but this did not excuse future sins. And it was sacrilege to suggest that God would welcome to his bosom men who continued to sin. The inner light, Christ within man, enabled believers to stop sinning. Christ not only atoned for past sins but prevented future ones, and he did so for all men and women who heeded his voice within them. Such a view precluded predestination and robbed original sin of its power. And Penn went on the offensive against both these dogmas. Predestination he derided as the work of narrow, pinched-up souls who made “the Eternal God, as partial as themselves, like some Ancients, That because they could not Resemble God, they would make such Gods as might Resemble them.”
But it was unnecessary to waste much argument on predestination, for it was out of favor in the Church of England anyhow. Penn reserved his greatest scorn for the doctrine of original sin as something that debilitated men and prevented them while in the flesh from ever fully complying with the will of God. Penn dubbed this a “lazy” doctrine for “sin-pleasing times.” It was simply, in his view, an excuse for sinning, and he mocked the orthodox ministers who preached it. “Methinks,” he wrote,
these Hireling Ministers are like some Mercenary Souldiers…that cannot bear to think of the Enemy’s being totally routed, lest their War end, and their Pay with it…. They had rather the Devil were unsubdued, than they disbanded, that his being unconquered might be a Pretence for keeping such Mercenaries always on foot.
For all his wit, Penn was hard pressed to defend as Protestant a doctrine that resembled so closely the Catholic one of justification by works, but he could cite a good many Protestant divines, as well as Scripture, to show that the presence of saving faith was normally evidenced by good works. And he argued that making good works necessary to salvation was not the same as making them merit salvation. Good works, he said, were
not strictly meritorious; only they have an inducing, procuring, and obtaining Power and Virtue in them. That is Merit where there is an Equality betwixt the Work and Wages; but all those Temporary [i.e., temporal] Acts of Righteousness, can never equal Everlasting Life, Joy, and Happiness (being of Grace, and not of Debt) and therefore strictly no Merit.
This may seem a distinction without much difference, but Penn was convinced that “Preferring Opinion before Piety hath filled the World with Perplexing Controversies,” and this was one of them. The Puritan’s tendency to separate saving grace from morality seemed to him monstrous. Indeed, “This Distinction betwixt moral and Christian,” he thought, was “a deadly Poyson these latter Ages have been infected with to the Destruction of Godly Living, and Apostatizing of those Churches [Presbyterian and Congregational] in whom there might once have been begotten some Earnest, Living Thirst after the Inward Life of Righteousness.” It was God who had joined grace and virtue, and it was human “stinginess of spirit,” not Protestantism, that separated them.
In demonstrating the Christian and Protestant character of Quakerism, Penn knew that he had to meet other Protestants on their own ground. They would not listen to an argument that defended the inner light and other Quaker doctrines by means of the inner light itself. Erudition was what it would take, and in spite of his hostility to learning, Penn was prepared to supply erudition, probably better equipped to do so than any other Quaker. He knew Latin. He knew French. He knew enough Greek to discuss Greek texts of the New Testament. He could even put on a display of linguistic pyrotechnics (discussing the ninth chapter of First John) that included translations into French, Italian, German, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee (though it is clear that he did not know all these). Although he was no theologian and thought that theologians were in large measure responsible for the apostasy of Christianity from its primitive purity, he had studied the church fathers and the scholastic and Protestant divines enough to mine their writings for arguments. Similarly, although he held fast to the Quaker insistence that the inner light was a more direct and reliable avenue to God’s will than the Scriptures, he knew the Scriptures backward and forward and could always summon up appropriate passages to serve his cause.
Penn’s usual method of attack was to refute his opponents by appeals to reason and to Scripture and then to offer voluminous passages from past authorities. For example, in arguing that the inner light was present and recognized in all men before Christ’s appearance as well as after, he quoted, among others, passages from Orpheus, Hesiod, Thales, Sybilla, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Timaeus Locrus, Antis thenes, Plato, Parmenides Magnus, Zeno, Chrysippus, Antipater, Hieron, Sophocles, Menander, Philo, Cleanthes, Plutarch, Epictetus, Seneca, Diogenes, Xenocrates, Virgil, Justin Martyr, Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius, Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Augustine. In defending the Quaker refusal to take oaths, he dredged up no fewer than 122 authorities from ancient times to the seventeenth century.
When Penn was not occupied in defending the Quaker movement, he was often busy keeping it defensible. He recognized how vulnerable it was to the charge that reliance on the inner light could be used to justify any kind of conduct, say, “Murder, Adultery, Treason, Theft, or any such like Wickedness.” In answer he could only say, in effect, that it did not, that “God’s Spirit makes People free from Sin, and not to commit Sin.” Which was to say that Quaker morality was for the most part conventional Protestant morality: the inner light did not call Quakers to immoral actions. But Quakers had broken with convention at several points: in their mode of address, in refusing to take oaths, in wearing their hats before their betters. Penn was aware that some members, having broken convention at one point, might throw it to the winds. Such had been the case with another group, the so-called Ranters, antinomians who defined their actions, whatever they might be, as righteous by attributing them to the spirit of Christ within them. This was dangerously close to Quaker doctrine, and if Quakers were to gain the acceptance Penn thought they deserved, it was necessary to keep the movement free from such anarchistic tendencies.
Accordingly Penn took a strong stand, along with George Fox, in support of a church discipline that could restrain eccentricity and eccentrics. There was, for example, the case of William Mucklow, who carried his attachment to his hat to a stage that violated the whole purpose of Quaker practice. Quakers refused to take off their hats to human superiors in order to testify against worldly honors, and they could thereby distinguish their reverence for God by taking off their hats in worship. But Mucklow insisted on wearing his hat in prayer. When admonished for it, he fell back on the inner light and denied the right of the church to command his conscience. Others took up the same cry, challenging the right of the weekly, monthly, or yearly meetings of Quakers to supervise the conduct of members, including the right that the meetings had begun to exercise, of determining the appropriateness of members’ marriages.
In these controversies Penn was always on the side of authority, affirming the right of the church to rid itself of “Wrong Spirits under never such right Appearances.” His commitment was not simply to the doctrines of Quakerism but to the movement. He was ready to use arguments that he would have scorned in a Church of England man, maintaining that the majority in a church were more likely to be right than any individual, and advising anyone who dissented to “wait upon God in Silence and Patience…and as thou abidest in the Simplicity of the TRUTH, thou wilt receive an Understanding with the rest of thy Brethren.” And if this failed, “since the Spirit of the Lord is one in all, it ought to be obey’d through another, as well as in one’s self.” If anyone persisted in mistaking his own idiosyncrasies for the Spirit of the Lord, the only recourse was to expel him from the movement.
With Penn’s assistance, though it required adjusting principles a little, the Quakers avoided the errors of the Ranters. Though Quakers remained at the outer edge of Protestantism, they became, thanks in no small measure to Penn, a recognized church, a force in the world, unlike the ephemeral groups around them. And Penn, fervently a Quaker, could continue to think of himself as a Protestant.
THE GENTLEMAN
That Penn was a gentleman and remained a gentleman is apparent both in his behavior and in his beliefs. His social position gave him an access to power that no other Quaker enjoyed. At the same time, his gentility affected his understanding of Quakerism’s most controversial doctrine and helped to shape that doctrine in ways that presented a special challenge to men of his class.
The most radical departure of Quakerism from orthodox Protestantism was its insistence on the possibility of perfection in this world, the possibility of living entirely as God would have us live, pure and sinless. When Penn called on Christians to take up Christ’s cross in opposition to the ways of the world, he did not think he was asking the impossible. True Christians could imitate Christ, for Christ would enable them to make the imitation, to become pure and sinless. But what did purity and sinlessness require?
Since Penn continually emphasized the affinity of Christ for the poor and humble and of the poor and humble for Christ, it would be plausible to suppose that he thought the imitation of Christ required poverty, that those of his own class who gave up the ways of the world had to give up the privileges and perquisites that went with wealth and rank. And the Quaker refusal to recognize worldly honors in forms of address and behavior would seem to support such a supposition. But Penn took pains to assure everyone that this was not his meaning.
We get our first hint of his position in No Cross No Crown, immediately after his defiant statement that if Quaker doctrine will overthrow all distinctions among men, so be it, the apostle James must bear the blame, not the Quakers. This ringing declaration is followed by a statement that sounds odd to modern ears, beginning with a derision of worldly honors and closing with an affirmation of the obligations that Christianity imposes on the different ranks of men: “The World’s Respect,” he says, “is an Empty Ceremony, no Soul or Substance in it. The Christian’s is a solid Thing, whether by Obedience to Superiors, Love to Equals, or Help and Countenance to Inferiors.” Superiors, inferiors, equals—to an age that associates human progress with equality, Christian perfection would seem to have little to do with the duties of inferiors toward superiors or of superiors toward inferiors.
What this passage tells us is that Penn’s world was not ours. It was a world that, for all its faults, still bore the mark of its Creator. Most of the people who lived in it violated the Creator’s intention in many ways but not in the orderly, hierarchical structure of their societies. That kind of order, for Penn (and for virtually everyone else at the time) was part of the original plan. “Divine Right,” Penn believed, “runs through more Things of the World, and Acts of our Lives, than we are aware of; and Sacrilege may be committed against more than the Church.” It could be committed, one gathers, by ignoring social order as much as by following the empty ceremonies that proffered unfelt or exaggerated honor. “Envy none,” Penn told his children, for “it is God that maketh Rich and Poor, Great and Small, High and Low.”
In taking up a strange religious belief, Penn seemed to many of his contemporaries to be himself committing a kind of sacrilege against the divine right embedded in the social order: gentlemen ought not to depart from the religion established by law and thus set a bad example for lesser folk. When his Quakerism got him in trouble again on a visit to Ireland in 1670, an Irish friend, Lord O’Brien, thought it sheer stubbornness for Penn to persevere in so strange a religious belief when it would have been perfectly easy for him to stick to the standard Anglican one. Penn, he said, was rejecting “not what you cant but what you wont believe,…it is certainly possible for you to believe our faith, for it is reasonable.” Nevertheless, Lord O’Brien and Penn’s other noble friends in Ireland were clear that queer and stubborn religious beliefs were not sufficient in themselves to deprive a gentleman of his rank. His friends intervened for him against the mayor of Cork, because as one of them said, wrong religious opinions “certainly cannot make any man degenerate from being a Gentleman who was borne so.”
Penn’s priorities differed from his friends’. If religion and social position were at odds, religion had to prevail. But Penn saw no good reason why they should be at odds. Although he thought religion demanded of gentlemen a standard of virtue that few attained or even attempted, it did not follow that a man’s religious beliefs, whether strict or loose, should affect his place or power in society. That his friends should pull rank to help one of their own kind was perfectly proper, and he in turn used his own rank and influence to help himself and his Quaker friends in their encounters with authority.
Penn’s knowledge of the law, gained during his brief period of studies at Lincoln’s Inn, may have been superficial, but he had learned enough to be a troublesome defendant. When brought before the courts, he assumed not merely the defiant stance of the self-righteous but also the assurance of the cultivated gentleman in dealing with officials whom he evidently regarded as not quite his equals either socially or intellectually. When arrested for preaching at a Quaker meeting in 1670, he lectured the judges on the law and taunted them into statements that left the jury totally committed to him. He demanded to know what law he had broken, and when he was told it was the common law, he asked what that was, as if he didn’t know. There then followed this exchange:
COURT: You must not think that I am able to run up so many Years, and over so many adjudged Cases, which we call Common-Law to answer your Curiosity.
PENN: This answer I am sure is very short of my Question; for if it be Common, it should not be so hard to produce.
This evoked an apoplectic response and more exchanges, in which Penn seemed to be interrogating the court instead of vice versa. When the judge told him, “If I should suffer you to ask Questions till to Morrow-Morning, you would be never the wiser,” Penn could not resist the opening thus given him, and replied that whether he was wiser or not would depend on the answers he got.
The jury, in spite of browbeating by the bench, refused to convict this Quaker who talked back to his judges with such aplomb. A few months later the constables caught Penn preaching again and hailed him before the court, this time for violating the so-called five-mile act, which required no jury trial. Even without a jury to play up to, Penn maintained his posture of superiority and contempt. Asked at the outset of the hearing if his name was Penn, he answered, “Dost thou not know me? Hast thou forgotten me?” to which the judge replied, “I don’t know you, I don’t desire to know such as you are.”
“If not,” said Penn, “why dost thou send for me hither?”
“Is that your Name Sir?”
“Yes, yes, my Name is Penn, thou knowst it is, I am not ashamed of my name.”
After he had reduced the court to fury with a number of diatribes, the judges called for a corporal with musketeers to escort him to Newgate Prison, to which Penn gave his final sneer: “No, no send thy Lacky, I know the Way to Newgate.”
Although he served his terms in Newgate and the Tower of London, as other gentlemen had done before, Penn was able to retain or recover the place at the king’s court that his father had won for him, and he was able to do it without sacrificing his religious convictions. In 1681 he got the king to give him Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers, presumably in payment of a debt owed his father. After the Duke of York came to the throne as James II in 1685, Penn enjoyed even greater opportunities for influence, and he took them. His father, on his deathbed, had adjured the duke to help young Penn out of the difficulties that his religion would surely get him into, and the duke honored the request as king. From 1685 until revolution ousted James from the throne in 1688, Penn was in daily and effective attendance at Whitehall, pulling strings for better treatment of Quakers and of other religious dissenters.
Penn’s rejection of the world, then, was not a rejection of the existing social order or of the allocation of power within it. “I would not be thought,” he said, “to set the Churl upon the present Gentleman’s Shoulder.” And at every opportunity he advertised the submission and obedience of Quakers to civil authority, excepting always when civil authority required a violation of their special beliefs.
In keeping with this acceptance of the existing social order, Penn’s appeals for the Quaker cause were directed upward, to those in power, not downward to the mass of mechanics and laborers whom he liked to think the cause embraced. The direction of his efforts is apparent even in the record of his extended missionary tour, along with other leading Quakers, through the Rhineland and the low countries in 1677. His journal of the tour is studded with the names of potentates and of highly placed merchants and gentlemen and gentlewomen whom he sought to convert, if not to the cause, at least to toleration of it. Wherever he and his friends arrived, their first inquiry was to find out who were the most “worthy” local people, and it quickly becomes apparent that by “worthy” he meant the people who were worth something in wealth and power. He spent hours and days with Elizabeth, the Princess Palatine of the Rhine, and with her companion, the Countess van Hoorn, and later urged them to the faith in lengthy, almost passionate letters. The faith did not require, he was careful to assure them, that they give up their power and possessions. “I speak not,” he said, “of deserting or flinging away all outward substance.”
If Penn did not think the imitation of Christ required flinging away all outward substance, we may fairly ask what he did think it required. If perfect obedience to God was possible in this world and it did not mean a change in the social or political order, what precisely did it mean? Penn gives us the answer in numerous admonitions, denunciations, and apostrophes. Here is one written in 1677 and intended, he says, for “all Ranks and Qualities, from the Highest to the Lowest, that walk not after the Spirit, but after the Flesh”:
Arise, O God, for thy Name’s Sake! O what tremendous Oaths and Lyes! What Revenge and Murders, with Drunkenness and Gluttony! What Pride and Luxury! What Chamberings and Wantonness! What Fornications, Rapes, and Adulteries! What Masks and Revels! What Lustful Ornaments, and Enchanting Attires! What Proud Customs, and Vain Complements! What Sports and Pleasures! Again, what Falseness and Treachery! What Avarice and Oppression! What Flattery and Hypocrisie! What Malice and Slander! What Contention and Law-Suits! What Wars and Bloodshed! What Plunders, Fires and Desolations!
These are supposedly the sins of the age, and a number of them like lying and swearing and fornication were available to all classes, but hardly anyone outside the higher ranks of society and outside the corridors of power would have had the resources to indulge in most of them. Similarly, No Cross No Crown, Penn’s longest diatribe against self-indulgence, was aimed primarily at men and women who took pleasure in “curious Trims, Rich and changeable Apparel, Nicety of Dress, Invention and Imitation of Fashions, Costly Attire, Mincing Gates, Wanton Looks, Romances, Plays, Treats, Balls, Feasts, and the like….” In yet another catalog of the five great crying sins of the time, in 1679, Penn included: first, drunkenness; second, whoredom and fornication; third, luxury; fourth, gaming; and fifth, oaths, cursing, blasphemy, and profaneness. All but luxury would presumably be possible for the general run of people, but in discussing the prevalence of these sins Penn showed that he had in mind the people of his own class. Drunkenness was exemplified by having several different wines at one meal, whoredom and fornication resulted from following French fashions, gaming was bad because it resulted in the careless loss of great estates, cursing was most reprehensible in persons of quality, and so on.
In other words, Penn identified sin with the failings of his own class. He had been brought up among the gentry and nobility and reached his young manhood at a time when gentlemen were cutting loose from the restrictions of Puritan England. He was just sixteen when Charles II returned to the throne and set an example of licentiousness that had been missing in England for two decades. For a time Penn followed the example. He knew the vices of the gentry at first hand, as he often reminded his readers, and it was these vices he had in mind in his denunciations of the ways of the world; they were the ways of his world. His insistence that perfect obedience to God was possible for Christians meant that it was possible to do without the vices of gentlemen, the vices that he had learned at the court of the king and on the grand tour in France. Perfection was a matter of not doing what he had formerly done, and taking satisfaction instead in the pleasures of the spirit.
Thus the sinless perfection that Penn called for consisted largely in giving up those extravagant pleasures that only the few could afford anyhow. He sometimes defended this kind of abstention as socially beneficial. If gentlemen would deny themselves extravagant food, drink, and other fleshly pleasures, they could give more to the poor. He even recommended forming a public stock for the purpose, derived from “the Money which is expended in every Parish in such vain Fashions, as wearing of Laces, Jewels, Embroideries, Unnecessary Ribbons, Trimming, Costly Furniture and Attendance, together with what is commonly consumed in Taverns, Feasts, Gaming etc.” The funds could be used to provide “Work-Houses for the Able, and Alms Houses for the Aged and Impotent.” He never doubted that there would always be a supply of poor both able and impotent, to be thus relieved, as there would always be a supply of gentlemen to deny themselves in order to relieve the poor.
But relief of the poor was not the main objective of self-denial. Self-denial was an end in itself, pleasing to God, the essence of virtue. By suppressing the self, men not only avoided sin but opened the way to spiritual communion with the part of God that lay within them, the inner light. For some Quakers the inner light demanded specific actions. And it was standard Quaker doctrine, which Penn defended at length, that the inner light rather than Scripture was the guide by which to determine the rightness or wrongness of any particular action. Penn also, as we have seen, thought that ministers should be no more than mouthpieces for the inner light, passing on to their hearers what the inner light revealed to them. Yet Penn seems to have thought of the highest communion with the spirit as something that could not be put into words, as a feeling unconnected with the thoughts that words conveyed. Indeed, thoughts were to be banished from the mind, lest they get in its way. Not words, not speech, not even works, but silence, solitude, passivity were its usual accompaniment: “wait in the Stilness upon the God of all Families of the Earth, and then shall you have a true Feeling of him.”
Nowhere did Penn argue that this feeling, this silent, wordless, thoughtless reception of the spirit must eventuate in positive actions. He continually insisted on the good works that Christ would enable the believer to perform and that would justify him in the sight of God. But precisely what these works had to be, apart from avoidance of the sins he cataloged, remained nebulous. It was good to give to the poor, and especially to widows and orphans, but the objective to be sought in self-denial seems to have consisted mainly in the feeling of bliss that came to the soul when it was freed from the distractions of earthly pleasures.
What Penn demanded of Christians, then, was not beyond their reach: self-denial and passive reception of the spirit. It was no wonder that Christians were to be found most often among the humble, for the humble could reach these goals with less effort than the mighty. Penn directed his appeals upward, because it was the high and mighty who most needed them, and even for them the goals were not impossible. In order to make way for the spirit, his noble friends need only do out of choice what the humble did out of necessity. If it seemed to them like a pretty dull life to do without their accustomed pleasures of the flesh, Penn asked them to consider how they expected to amuse themselves throughout eternity. Better begin learning to appreciate spiritual joys now!
Few of the gentry and nobility to whom Penn addressed his demand were ready to comply with it, and his own austerity, he tells us, brought him a good deal of derision from his former boon companions. But if self-denial was not in fashion among the gentlemen of Restoration England, the demand for it was not something to disgrace a gentleman. Indeed, it was part of the traditional ideal of what a gentleman was supposed to be.
Penn did not compile a list of authorities to prove that gentlemen should be Quakers, as he did to prove that Protestants should be, but it would not have been impossible for him to do so. In handbooks that told seventeenth-century Englishmen how to behave, there are passages strikingly similar to the injunctions that Penn urged on them. The most popular handbook, Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentleman, could almost have been written as an introduction to No Cross No Crown. Brathwait argued, as did Penn, that virtue, not wealth, was what conferred nobility, and that the essence of virtue lay in self-restraint. Brathwait even urged something like the Quaker simplicity of dress. “Gorgeous attire,” he said, “is to be especially restrained, because it makes us dote upon a vessell of corruption, strutting upon earth, as if we had our eternall mansion on earth.” Virtue was something internal: “she seeketh nothing that is without her.” And Brathwait went on to praise the Levites who “were to have no possessions: for the Lord was their inheritance.” Brathwait can scarcely have expected English gentlemen to follow that example literally, but neither did Penn. And like Penn, Brathwait believed “there is no Patterne which we ought sooner to imitate than Christ himself.” Penn could even have found in Brathwait a rationale for directing his efforts so exclusively to those at the top. Self-restraint, temperance, was particularly important for gentlemen, Brathwait told them, because “You are the Moulds wherein meaner men are casten; labour then by your example to stampe impressions of vertue in others, but principally Temperance, seeing no vertue can subsist without it.”
In urging temperance, Brathwait probably did not have in mind quite the degree of restraint that Penn required. But Penn, in comparing such admonitions with the conduct of his noble friends on the one hand and of the Quakers on the other, could easily conclude that the Quakers were closer to the ideal of what a gentleman should be. As to be a Quaker meant, for him, to be truly a Protestant, to be a Quaker could also mean to be truly a gentleman.
THE ENGLISHMAN
Penn grew up in England at a time when it was not altogether clear what an Englishman was supposed to be, as the country swung from monarchy to republic and back to monarchy, from the Church of England to Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, and back to the Church of England. In spite of these transformations, perhaps because of them, most Englishmen who thought about the matter tried to locate themselves in relation to a more distant past. The national identity of any people generally rests, if not on their history as it actually happened, at least on a shared popular opinion about that history. Since the sixteenth century, Englishmen had seen themselves at the end of two great chains of past events: those comprised in the rise, fall, and recovery of the Christian church and those that gave their country its special form of civil government. In the minds of Englishmen the two were intertwined at many points, and there was a tendency for every group to identify itself and its own time as the proper culmination of developments inherent in both.
It was agreed by all except Catholics that the Christian church, beginning in purity, had quickly fallen prey to evil and worldly ways, indeed had fallen into the hands of Antichrist in Rome. John Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, had shown how the spark of true faith had been kept alive in England, had been blown into flame by Wycliffe and the Lollards in the fourteenth century, who spread it to Hus in Bohemia, who spread it to Martin Luther. England had thus been the spearhead of the Reformation. The English were an elect nation, replacing the Jews as God’s chosen people, and the English had therefore to lead the way in recovering primitive Christianity. There were many variations on this theme in the seventeenth century, as Englishmen disagreed over what primitive Christianity might be, what it required of true believers, and what the organization of England’s exemplary churches should be. By the time Penn came of age, a certain weariness had set in, as the high expectations of the preceding decades faded.
There was no weariness among the Quakers. They took a somewhat less provincial view of church history than other Englishmen, but they saw themselves nevertheless as the culmination of the Reformation. Penn believed that the apostasy of Christians “began immediately after the Death of the Apostles” with the development of ceremonial worship. It continued with the conversion of kings and emperors, who tried to enforce Christianity on all and thus change the kingdom of Christ into a kingdom of this world, “and so they became Worldly, and not true Christians.”
Penn dwelt less on the rise of the papacy than on the general degeneration of Christians, and he saw the beginnings of recovery in the French Waldensians and Albigensians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But he also gave more immediate credit to the English martyrs of the sixteenth century and to the Presbyterians and Congregationalists of his father’s day. The difficulty was that the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, too, had succumbed to worldliness, and by his own time he thought they were no better than the Church of England, especially in the Presbyterians’ continuing wish to force their own way on the whole nation. Quakers, he said, honored all true worshippers, especially the Waldensians and Albigensians, but it was the Quakers themselves who represented the highest point of the recovery that began with the Reformation. “We do confess,” he said, “it is our Faith, that so glorious a Vision, since the Primitive Days, has not happened to any, as to us in this our Day.” Not all England, but a small group of Englishmen at least, remained at the forefront of the history of redemption, making their way, not through force, not through any kind of coercion, but by their words and their example. In their own way, Christ’s way, they might eventually bring the whole country, nay the whole world, back to primitive Christianity and forward into the kingdom of God.
In thus placing the Quakers within a position that Englishmen had long assigned to themselves, Penn was following the path that might have been expected of any English spokesman for a holy cause. But Penn was also concerned, probably more than any other leading Quaker, to place the Quakers in the center of the English political tradition, at the end of the other chain of past events by which Englishmen identified themselves.
That chain of events, like the sacred one, had begun to take shape in the minds of Englishmen during the sixteenth century and had been fully articulated in the ferment of the contest between king and Parliament in the seventeenth century. It rested on the assumption that the people of a country are the ultimate source of the powers exercised by their government and the determiners of the form their government should take, the doctrine that has come to be known as popular sovereignty. The people of England, as Saxons, were supposed to have begun the exercise of these powers in the forests of Germany. When they migrated to England, it was held, they established a constitution of government to which they had adhered ever since and which their chosen governors could not rightfully alter. That constitution provided for a mixed government in which a hereditary king was limited by an assembly of his subjects. True, England had been invaded more than once by conquering hosts, most notably by William the Conqueror in 1066. But the conquests were not, in this view, truly conquests, for the conquerors had agreed to abide by the ancient constitution of the Saxons and had obtained the consent of the people to their authority only on that condition.
The kings and queens of England over the centuries had occasionally defied the ancient constitution and attempted to rule the land by arbitrary power, but the people had each time brought them back to the mark and obliged them to recognize the limits that the constitution set on them. The result was a set of landmarks in which the details of the constitution and of the rights of Englishmen had been set down in black and white, most notably in Magna Carta in 1215 and in the Petition of Right in 1628. The years since 1628 had seen more varied assaults on the constitution, first by Charles I attempting to rule without Parliament, then by Parliament attempting to rule without the king, and finally by Oliver Cromwell establishing a government without a king. But the English people, after suffering these usurpations had restored the ancient constitution and the monarch in 1660.
What the contest between Charles I and Parliament had demonstrated most significantly for Penn was that not only kings but Parliaments, too, could violate the constitution. The Long Parliament, which began in 1640, had attempted to perpetuate itself without recourse to the people who chose it. It had tried to alter the form of government, thus destroying its own foundation. Hitherto it had been Parliament that repaired breaches made in the constitution by the king. But how to repair breaches made by Parliament itself, by the very persons whom the people chose to protect their constitution? Englishmen had thought long and hard about this question without finding a satisfactory answer, though Oliver Cromwell had effected an unsatisfactory one. Yet one thing was clear: the representatives of the people in Parliament ought not to have powers that their constituents did not vest in them.
Such was the political tradition into which Penn was born, such was the history of England into which he had to fit the Quaker cause. Penn was no more successful than other Englishmen in finding a solution to the problem of how the people could prevent their own representatives from exceeding their powers, but he was squarely in the center of the tradition, as the recent past had shaped that tradition, in affirming that those representatives could not rightly alter the ancient constitution on which their very existence rested. There were two kinds of law, as Penn saw it. First, there were fundamental laws that obtained their authority from the direct consent of the people. Such was the constitution itself, the structure of the government inherited from the immemorial past, which neither king nor Parliament could legally change. Second, there were superficial laws, made for convenience. These were the proper business of Parliament, which could alter them or make new ones whenever circumstances demanded. For Parliament to meddle with fundamental laws was to betray its trust: “The Fundamental makes the People Free, this Free People makes a Representative; Can this Creature unqualify it’s Creator? What Spring ever rose higher than it’s Head?”
From this premise, for which he cited a multitude of authorities, especially Chief Justice Edward Coke, Penn argued that Parliament had no business at all to meddle with religion. Quakers did not ask that their religion be supported by government. Their political ideal was to have no religion supported by government. And this, Penn maintained, was precisely what fundamental law required, because the ancient constitution, the most fundamental of fundamental laws, gave Parliament no authority to prescribe religion. “Religion,” he insisted, had been “no Part of the Old English Government.” Indeed, how could the ancient constitution have made adherence to the Church of England a requirement for the enjoyment of the rights of Englishmen when the Church of England did not even exist at the time when the constitution was formed: “Our Claim to these English privileges, rising higher than the Date of Protestancy, can never justly be invalidated for Non-Conformity to any Form of it.” Yet the Restoration Parliament did require conformity to the Church of England, required everyone to pay tithes to support the church, virtually forbade other religions to exist at all, and thus deprived Englishmen of their fundamental rights in direct violation of Magna Carta. That great charter, Penn said, “considers us not, as of this or that perswasion in matters of Religion, in order to the obtaining of our antient Rights and Priviledges, but as English men.” And being English did not mean being of the Church of England: “A Man may be a very good Englishman, and yet a very indifferent Churchman.”
Penn’s position, that the English government was purely secular, was not a novel one. It had been adumbrated by radical religious groups in the 1640s and 1650s. But Penn was able to attach his argument to English political tradition in a variety of ways designed to win support even from the most ardent conservatives of his day. Given the propensity of men in all ages to justify revolution or rebellion on religious grounds, there is an inherent paradoxical conservatism in denying government any religious function or sanction. Penn, like Roger Williams before him, could denounce the monarchomachs, whether Catholic or Protestant, who called for the overthrow of kings whom they thought heretical. The Puritans who persecuted Quakers in Massachusetts were of a piece with the Puritans who brought Charles I to the block in England. Both, in Penn’s view, were enemies to civil peace and freedom. And he never lost an opportunity to denounce the arch-Puritan and monarchomach, Oliver Cromwell, and the “Oppression & Persecution which Reign’d during his Usurpation”—a position well designed to win the approval of the restored monarchy.
Although the new monarch himself was unwilling to forgo his position as head of the Church of England, Penn continually suggested to him that in attaching his regimen to any church, he was actually subjecting himself to ecclesiastical control, allowing “the State…to be Rid by the Church.” Charles II was content to be rid by the Church of England if that was the price of his throne, but he probably did not enjoy it. Penn’s good relations with him and his brother and Penn’s influence at court may have been owing in part, at least, to the fact that Penn did not regard the king’s religion as having any proper connection with his authority. Charles and James were both Catholics, Charles secretly, James openly; their subjects were not, and ultimately they ousted James from the throne because of his Catholicism, but not with any help from Penn.
Although Penn’s close ties with James resulted in accusations that he was himself a Catholic, accusations that jeopardized his campaign to prove that Quakers were Protestants, he considered his position to be the ultimate and true Protestant one. Religion, he maintained, was something that did not affect authority. The allegiance of subjects to their king was based on the fulfillment of his civil and political duties; his religion was his own business.
By the same token, according to Penn (though not according to Charles or James), a subject’s religion was his own business, not the king’s. It was probably on this ground that Penn and his father had finally become reconciled. Penn gives us at least a hint that his father shared his feelings about mixing religion and politics. At the beginning of the war with the Dutch in 1665, Charles asked the elder Penn for a list of the ablest naval officers to serve in the war. The admiral, according to his son,
pickt them by their Ability, not their [religious] Opinions; and he was in the Right; for that was the best Way of doing the King’s Business. And of my own Knowledge, Conformity robb’d the King at that Time of Ten Men, whose greater Knowledge and Valour… [would] have saved a Battel, or perfected a Victory.
Father and son agreed at least in making religious opinion irrelevant to the functions of government; and if Admiral Penn felt that way, probably a good many other Englishmen did.
But Penn’s strongest appeal against government interference in religion rested on the threat it posed, not to the monarch’s power but to the subject’s property. In the apostrophes that Englishmen regularly addressed to the ancient constitution, the protection it offered to property had always been paramount. Penn pointed out to them that bringing religion into the picture could impair this fundamental protection. The “plain English of publick Severity for Nonconformity,” he said, could be reduced to a simple maxim: “no Property out of the Church.” This was not only unconstitutional; it was a ridiculous intrusion of the church into a sphere where religion had no place, an attempt to make the security of property depend on religious opinion. Accordingly when Penn proposed to Parliament in 1678 two bills for toleration of religious dissent, he entitled the first one “An Act for the Preserving of the Subjects Properties, and for the repealing of Several penal Laws, by which the lives and properties of the subjects were subject to be forfeited for things not in their power to be avoyded.” The second one he called “An other Form of bill for the better Preserving, and maintaining English Property, being the true Fundation of English Government.” In the preambles to both bills, Penn recited the evils that the penal laws (against noncomformity in religion) had brought upon England, especially in inducing sober and industrious men to leave the country and in preventing others from coming there.
Penn did not get either of his bills passed, and three years after they failed, he took the step that made him famous, in establishing a refuge where sober and industrious people could enjoy the security of property that England continued to deny to people of his persuasion. Pennsylvania was designed not as an alternative to the ancient constitution of England but as the fulfillment of it in an age that had betrayed it.
If his colony had turned out as he wished, it would have been appropriate to call William Penn finally a Pennsylvanian. He had great plans for his colony when he arrived there to supervise its founding in 1682, but he left after two years, frustrated by the unruliness of the people who joined him, an unruliness continued by their successors until his death in England in 1718. In his dreams for his colony, he had envisioned “a blessed government, and a vertuous ingenious and industrious society, so as people may Live well and have more time to serve the Lord, then in this Crowded land.” In Pennsylvania, Penn expected Quakers to set an example of Christian, Protestant virtue. Quaker gentlemen would prove to be truly gentlemen, and with the willing consent of the people their paternal government would revive the ancient constitution of England, free from domineering prelates. Penn even rose to millennial hopes for his colony. “God,” he wrote, “will plant Americha and it shall have its day: the 5th kingdom or Gloryous day of [Jesus?] Christ…may have the last parte of the world, the setting of the son or western world to shine in.”
The prospect of a millennial kingdom in the New World brought out the prophet in Penn. While he was engaged in defending the Protestantism of Quakers and the rights of Englishmen, while he had George Fox by his side, fighting to keep the Quaker movement from splintering, Penn was dealing with a world where he knew his limits, a world in which one contended with hostile authority to achieve whatever approximation of right one could. In a new world, where he himself would hold the reins of authority, there seemed no limits to what might be achieved. If men were capable of perfection, Pennsylvania was the place where they could begin to show it, unhampered by the corruption that had overtaken England. Unfortunately Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvanians proved less than perfect.
And so did Penn. In escaping from the restraints of the world that had hitherto bound him, he expected too much both of himself and of those whom he persuaded to settle in his colony. If perfection meant self-denial, he was not ready to deny himself privileges and rights that he thought his position as founder of the colony entitled him to. And his colonists seemed unwilling to deny themselves anything.
Penn’s unfounded optimism became apparent even before the founding, as he planned and replanned a constitution for the colony. He had had some experience at planning already as one of the proprietors of West New Jersey, where he and his colleagues proposed in 1676 a government in which virtually all power was placed in a representative assembly of the colony’s freemen. In his initial plans for Pennsylvania, Penn again envisaged a government close to the people, with power centered in their representatives, who would be unable to act at all except under the instruction of their constituents. Though he provided for a bicameral legislature, the upper house was to be chosen by the representative lower house, which would have the initiative in proposing legislation (approved in advance by constituents). In assigning so much power to the people and their immediate representatives, Penn seems to have assumed that the settlers of Pennsylvania would align themselves willingly with his wishes for them or that they would spontaneously want for themselves what he wanted for them. It was symptomatic of his thinking about the colony that he did not specify his own power, except to place limits on it by providing for meetings of the assembly without summons from a governor and by providing for laws to take effect automatically if not assented to by the governor within fourteen days. He simply took for granted that there would be a governor—either himself or his substitute—and that the governor would normally give his assent to legislation.
As Penn thought about this scheme and discussed it with others, he evidently became concerned that the settlers might include some of the wrong sort of people and that the government should therefore be placed more firmly in the hands of the right sort, of which he had to be one. In his final “Frame of Government,” he provided for an upper house of the legislature, to be elected from “Persons of most Note for their Wisdom, Virtue and Ability” (“ability” in the seventeenth century carried the connotation of wealth) and for a governor who should sit with this “Council” and have a treble vote in its proceedings. He now assigned to the council virtually all governmental powers, with the sole authority to initiate legislation, which the representative assembly, no longer bound by instruction of their constituents, was empowered only to accept or reject without amendment. Again Penn left unspecified most of his own powers as governor (beyond the treble vote in the council), but provided that laws should be enacted “by the Governour, with the Assent and Approbation of the Freemen in Provincial Council and General Assembly.” He may have intended this to mean that laws would now require his assent. And he implied that his powers (whatever they might be) were to descend to his children, for in one clause he referred to “the Governour, his Heirs or Assigns,” and he made provision for a commission to serve in case the governor should be a minor.
What Penn wanted was a popular government in which a grateful people would gladly accept the measures that he and other men of “Wisdom, Virtue and Ability” devised for them. He disclosed his manner of thinking when he sent an agent to West New Jersey to take charge of the town of Salem there, which he had acquired as one of the proprietors. He had bought the title, but he wanted the people to sign some sort of agreement (the text is now lost) asking him to assume government over them. The agent went to Salem and reported the reaction: “some said if the Government belonged to thee, thou might assume it without our petitioning thee thereto, I replyed, thou wouldst rather have it by Consent of the people also; for William called the Conqueror acknowledged, he was chosen King, by the consent of the people.”
That was perhaps how Penn saw himself, a Quaker king by consent, William the First of Pennsylvania. Besides deciding on a proper government for Pennsylvania, he decided on a set of laws for the people of the colony to consent to at the outset. Here again he revealed his high hopes—and wishful thinking—for a society that was not to be troubled by the self-indulgent gentlemen, misguided statesmen, and corrupt prelates whom he contended against in England. Pennsylvania would be a place where his laws favored the industrious and penalized the idle (all children would be taught a skilled trade), where he would make all persons free to worship God as they chose, where he would allow no one to engage in “Stage-Plays, Cards, Dice, May-Games, Gamesters, Masques, Revels, Bull-baitings, Cock-fightings, Bear-baitings and the like, which excite the People to Rudeness, Cruelty, Looseness and Irreligion,” and where he would restrain the litigious by requiring every litigant to declare in court, before beginning a suit, “That he believes in his Conscience, his Cause is Just.”
IN HIS PLANS for Pennsylvania, Penn showed none of the realism that marked his dealings with the English world. Instead of consulting his own past experience, he studied the scheme of government that James Harrington had concocted for an imaginary England in Oceana (1656). This was the source of his notion of a representative assembly whose supine members would be content with saying “yea” or “nay” to laws proposed by their superiors. Anyone who thought twice about the behavior of England’s actual House of Commons should have known better. Quaker representatives might practice self-denial, but they were no more ready than other Englishmen for this kind of self-denial.
To be sure, some of Penn’s troubles with his colony came from the presence there and nearby of non-Quakers. After learning a little of the geography of Pennsylvania, he thought that he must have, in addition to his original grant, the area now comprised in the state of Delaware. Otherwise his settlers would not have proper access to the sea. He succeeded, through his friend the Duke of York, in wresting this area from Lord Baltimore, who claimed it as part of Maryland. But it was already inhabited by Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and English settlers who showed no sympathy with Quaker principles. And Baltimore, though frustrated here, entered into a lengthy dispute with Penn over Pennsylvania’s southern boundary, a dispute that kept Penn in England, after a brief stay in his colony (1682–84), during most of the rest of his life.
But it was neither Baltimore in England nor the outsiders on the Delaware who turned the early history of Pennsylvania into a contest between Penn and his settlers. The settlers at first accepted most of the Frame of Government he devised for them and elected leading Quakers, men of “ability” if not of wisdom and virtue, to the powerful Council. They even accepted, however grudgingly, the gubernatorial veto power over legislation that Penn made explicit once the colony was founded. But they saw Pennsylvania as their colony, and Penn saw it as his. In moving from England to the New World, both Penn and his settlers thought of themselves as moving from a position of opposition to a position of control. In England, Penn was their spokesman and defender against a hostile government—and he continued to fill that role in England before and after the overthrow of his friend James II—but within Pennsylvania the settlers did not need him. Within Pennsylvania he became the authority against which they would themselves contend, assisted by new homegrown leaders: the very men of ability who sat on the Council.
What they contended about mostly was property and the power that accompanied property. Penn, as proprietor of the colony, felt that it should bring him some revenue. He had never thought of it as a way of flinging away all outward substance. Though he had sold and continued to sell large amounts of Pennsylvania land, he had spent more than he gained in getting the colony started, and he expected some return on his investment, at the very least a small quitrent, such as the king collected in royal colonies, on lands in private hands. Moreover, the political power he claimed as governor seemed to him small indeed for one who still owned most of the colony. But the settlers did not see it that way. They had invested their savings and committed their lives in an enterprise that was supposed to make them free as they had never before been free, free not only in their religion but in their property and government. They wanted to pay no quitrents, and they wanted no directions from Penn or from the governors and agents he sent to represent him.
The settlers won. Though they were divided among themselves, they united in resisting Penn in almost every measure he proposed. The story is familiar and need not be repeated here. Penn’s settlers, led by large Quaker landowners and merchants, paid him no quitrents, or none to speak of; they defied his governors; they ignored his messages. In the end, though he retained his formal veto power, it was of little use. He continued to plead for his rights, both against the settlers and against attempts by the English government to bring the colony under royal control, but the settlers were less willing than the king to recognize his rights (though for two years, 1692–94, King William assumed control of the government). In Pennsylvania, it seemed, everyone’s rights were secure except Penn’s. After two decades of strife the colony wound up with a popularly elected unicameral legislative assembly that dominated the government and continued throughout the colonial period to quarrel with Penn and his heirs.
And yet Pennsylvania must be counted a success, a success not for Penn himself but for the principles he fought for all his life. He had contended that Quakers were Protestants, in the mainstream of Christianity and not wild enthusiasts who threatened the social order. In Pennsylvania, despite internal quarrels, they proved it. Though the settlers defied Penn, they established on a small scale the same sort of social order that prevailed in England, with small men deferring to those who had made their way in the world. And in Pennsylvania enterprising men made their way very rapidly indeed. Penn had contended that religion should be no concern of government, that making it so was a threat to the security of property and the rights of Englishmen. In Pennsylvania, although Penn compromised his principles by limiting public office to Christians (of whatever persuasion), all religions were tolerated, and the colony flourished economically beyond any other. The rapid growth of Philadelphia, outpacing all other colonial cities, the ships loading and unloading at its docks, the lush farms of the interior, all testified to the viability of a society where government was not entangled with the church.
Penn was not part of it. While his colony flourished, he languished in an English debtor’s prison (an institution he had tried to eliminate in Pennsylvania). But Pennsylvania could not have happened without him. There, in spite of himself, he left his mark on the world. If it was not as deep a mark as he might have wished, that was because, when it came to Pennsylvania, he wished for too much. But a prophet may be forgiven for sometimes asking more of himself and others than they can give. Without Penn’s prophetic vision, his colony would not have offered to the world the example that it did of religious freedom coupled with economic prosperity. And without his acceptance of so much of the world, he would not have had the opportunity to found a colony at all. Though he never became a Pennsylvanian, Pennsylvania became the testimony of William Penn—his mark on the world and at the same time a mark of his accommodation with the world.