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William Penn, Model of Protestant Liberalism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Hugh Barbour
Hugh Barbour
Affiliation:
professor of religion inEarlham College, Richmond, Indiana.
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Extract

William Penn intended no new synthesis of thought. His practical social reforms, combining the Quakers' radical hope for the total transforming of men, ethics and society by God's Spirit with a humanist's trust in reason and conscience already at work in all men universally, were a new stance for Quakers. But Friends noted mainly his exuberance and pragmatism and his uncritical openness about ideas. In Europe and America as a whole, he was best known in his own time for his practical career: he was the man of peace with the Indians, the founder of Pennsylvania, the champion of toleration. For these he was later celebrated in the paintings of “the Peaceable Kingdom” and the writings of Voltaire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 156 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1979

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References

2. Penn's biographies continue to make lively reading, although those of Hans Fantel (New York, 1974) and Harry Emerson Wilde (New York, 1974) add little factually to those of William I. Hull (New York, 1937) and Catherine Peare (Ann Arbor, 1960), despite the readier recent availability of the Albert Cook Myers materials at West Chester and the photocopied manuscripts at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

3. On Pennsylvania, see Bronner, Edwin, William Penn's Holy Experiment (New York, 1962).Google Scholar Penn and Edward Billing had used similar ideas in the “Concessions and Agreements of West New Jersey” in 1675, apparently drawing from Leveller teachings as much as from Sidney, Locke and the Whigs (cf. Barbour, Hugh, “From the Lamb's War to the Quaker Magistrate,” Quaker History 55 (1966): 3–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Some ideas of Penn also parallel Harrington's; see Beatty, Edward C. O., William Penn as Social Philosopher (New York, 1939), pp. 10, 68,Google Scholar etc. and Dunn, Mary Maples, William Penn: Politics and Conscience (Princeton, 1967), pp. 81–87,CrossRefGoogle Scholar both responding to Russell-Smith, H. F., Harrington and his Oceana (Cambridge, 1914).Google Scholar

4. Thus Coates, William, White, and Schapiro, , in The Emergence of Liberal Humanism (New York, 1966), 1: 136ff.Google Scholar distinguish utopians from millenarians.

5. Insofar as Penn's doctrines can be patterned into a theological system, it would be hard to improve on Endy, Melvin Jr, William Penn and Early Quakerism (Princeton, 1973),Google Scholar but we are testing wider issues. For fuller documentation of the earliest Quakers' experience, see Barbour, Hugh, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven, 1964), ch. 4,Google Scholar and the journals and tracts presented in Barbour, and Roberts, , Early Quaker Writings (Grand Rapids, 1973).Google Scholar

6. See Lacey, Douglas, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics, 1661–1689 (New Brunswick, 1969), ch. 9;Google ScholarBauman, Richard, For the Reputation of Truth (Baltimore, 1971);Google Scholar and Wellenreuther, Hermann, Glaube und Politik in Pennsylvania, 1681–1776 (Köln, 1972).Google Scholar Friends wrote fewer tracts to or about the government between 1662 and 1670 than before, and these mainly for toleration (see statistical charts in Barbour and Roberts, pp. 567–576). The turning point may have come in a decision of the Morning Meeting or executive committee of London Friends, including Penn, on May 31, 1675, to urge Friends in all counties to work for the election to Parliament of men favoring toleration (see micro-filmed Morning Meeting Minutes).

7. Cf. Amyraut, Moise: Treatise Concerning Religions [(London, 1660)Google Scholar from Traite des Religions (1631)]; Dissertationes theologicae sex … trium personarum (Saumur, 1660);Google Scholar and La Morale Chrestienne, 6 vols. (Saumur, 1652–1660);Google Scholar also on background Armstrong, Brian G., Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy (Madison, 1969).Google Scholar On John Owen, see his Brief Declaration Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (1669) and Endy, pp. 96–98. Amyraut's ethics follow the medieval pattern, centering on the nature of virtue and the chief ends of man. These men and even Hugo Grotius, quoted the Roman and Greek philosophers but insisted on the differences between Christian and pagan ethics, and between natural reason and revelation. That Calvin, Viret and Beza were also humanists fond of quoting Latin classics is shown by Linder, Robert, “Calvinism and Humanism,” in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 44 (06, 1975): 174ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Misquotations and mis-references often survived two or three editions.

9. Out of 16 successive paragraphs of quotations from Greek moralists in chs. 10 and 11 of Penn's, Christian Quaker [(1674;Google Scholar these are chs. 7 and 8 of the 1699 and later editions] he took four from Clement of Alexandria and ten almost verbatim from Sir Thomas Stanley's History of Philosophy, itself largely drawn from Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.

10. Penn, William, No Cross, No Crown (1682), pp. iv, 9 –Google ScholarWorks (1726) 1: 273, 277;Google Scholar cf. Endy, pp. 103–106, quoting Penn's letter to Countess Falkenstein.

11. Penn, William, Counsel and Advice (Amsterdam, 1677).Google Scholar This first edition was written and published in Dutch; the English edition, from which the quotes were taken on pp. 3, 4, 7, and 10, was published in 1695.

12. Except for a Latin ode, Penn's earliest-known writing is a poem against “Tyrant Lust,” see his Letter-Book in Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter: HSP).

13. Winifred, , Burghclere, Lady: George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (Port Washington, 1903 and 1971) pp. 187–198.Google Scholar

14. Penn, , No Cross (1669) pp. 61–62,Google Scholar spelling modernized.

15. Letter preserved in Penn's, Works, 1: 154.Google Scholar Penn had more reason not to like Dr. Fell, Peter Mews' predecessor, who had expelled Penn from Oxford, perhaps for attending John Owen's prayer meetings.

16. Thus his multiple tracts in debates with Thomas Hicks, John Faldo, and more briefly with Jeremy Ives and Richard Baxter in the 1670s (a total of 14 tracts, see his Works, 1: 221–290 and 2: 179–186, 227–708) repeated most of the arguments in his first writings as a Friend, in 1668 against Vincent and Clapham, (Truth Exalted, Guide Mistaken, Sandy Foundation) and many arguments recur against George Keith in the 1690s.

17. Penn's new editions of The Christian Quaker (1674 and 1699) and even of A Key Opening a [the] Way, (1692 and 1699) show many subtle changes. It is interesting that he did not in 1684 make major modifications in reprinting the Sandy Foundation which had landed him in the Tower of London in 1668. No Cross, No Crown appeared in two very different editions. In 1669, from the Tower, he wrote the sections on “hat honor,” titles, “thee-and-thou,” luxury and clothing. This early edition called men to a stern, hard standard, and repeatedly poured scorn on “mincing gaits, wanton looks,” and music, on the endless hunger of the court for “a Play, a Morris Dance, a Punchanello, a Ball, a Masque, Cards, Check” [–.Chess?] or for “Revels, Romances, Love Songs, [and] Flattering Sonnets,” (pp. 42, 37, 33, 60). But these sections became merely chapters 9, 10, 14–18 and 21 in the double-length second edition of No Cross which Penn delivered to the printer just before sailing for America in 1682. His eight new introductory chapters turned away from defending Quaker truth and challenging worldliness. He set out instead to persuade and win the non-Friends: “Come, Reader: I seek thy Salvation; that's my plot… The Great Business of Men's Life … is to Glorifie God and Save His own Soul,” (1682 edition, preface, p. iii). It was not the world which Penn now assaulted, but “the God of this World” within men.

18. See Dyck, Cornelius, “The Place of Tradition in Dutch Anabaptism,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 43 (03, 1974): 34–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Penn, , Letter-Book in HSP, pp. 51–56.Google Scholar

20. Spelling as in Letter-Book, pp. 1–3; the Dutch, Een Basuyne Geblaesen, was printed in 1675. Will Ames, Will Caton, Benjamin Furly and Stephen Crisp had been nurturing Dutch Quakerism for fifteen years; but the son of a fighting admiral who had seen England humbled by the Dutch fleet in the Medway can be forgiven for seeing Holland only as virgin territory for the Spirit's conquest.

21. William, Penn, To the Children of Light (bsd, 1678).Google Scholar The combination of English patriotism with radical Protestant theocratic ideas was already fairly common under Cromwell, whose victories even Fox had identified as God's. Penn's, first Christian Quaker (1674),Google Scholar like Edward Burrough and George Fox “the Younger” before him, had surveyed all English religious history from the heroic martyrs under Mary Tudor's Catholicism up through the phases of the Puritan movement, and pointed to their fulfilment in Quakerism.

22. Cf. Freund, Michael, Die Idee de Toleranz im England der großen Revolution (Halle, 1927);Google ScholarKuhn, Johannes, Toleranz und Offenbarung (Leipzig, 1923);Google ScholarJordan, W.K., Development of Religious Toleration in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1932–1940).Google Scholar

23. William, Penn, Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1670), p. 12.Google Scholar

24. John, Clarke, Ill Newes from New England (1652), p. 21;Google ScholarPenn, , Great Case, p. 4.Google Scholar Disturbance of the peace of sinners is a virtue; George Fox, like the Hebrew prophets, felt divinely called to interrupt idol-worship.

25. Penn, , Great Case, p. 20;Google ScholarWilliam, Penn, A Defence of the Duke of Buckingham's Book (1685), p. 19.Google Scholar

26. Penn, , Great Case, p. 20.Google Scholar Penn's willingness to use contradictory arguments for toleration goes far to validate Mary Dunn's thesis that toleration was the mainspring of all Penn's politics (Politics and Conscience). Penn's logic here may also reflect Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying. While this skepticism, however, might assert that no doctrines were sure enough to justify persecution, it could also lead Taylor to Latitudinarianism; all men could be roped into a national church based on a low common denominator of doctrines on God, Christ and the afterlife accepted always everywhere by everyone. Even Penn favored “promotion of General and Practical Religion, … the Ten Commandments, moral law, and Christ's Sermon on the Mount” as national policy (England's Present Interest (1675), Ch. 3).

27. Penn, , Great Case, p. 16;Google ScholarPenn, William, A Persuasive to Moderation (1685), p. 1.Google Scholar

28. Penn, Great Case, preface.

29. Ibid., p. 23.

30. The earliest use of this argument may have been Margaret Fell's 1653 letter to Howgill and Nayler in prison (Spence, MSS 3:27,Google Scholar reprinted in A Brief Collection (1710), p. 52).

31. Penn, , Works, 1: 797–799.Google Scholar

32. Penn, Persuasive, preface.

33. Among Quakers, this was also being said by Robert Barclay but without implying a permanent pluralism [Apology (1678), proposition 5, p. xvi]. Those who still have the Light only in lesser measure should later grow into Quaker truth.

34. See Endy, pp. 182–194; Cragg, Gerald R., The Cambridge Platonists (New York, 1968)Google Scholar part 3; Barclay, Apology, propositions 9–10 and especially his Possibility and Necessity of … Immediate Revelation (1686).

35. See Endy, pp. 262–215; Barbour and Roberts, part C.

36. Penn, , No Cross (1682) pp. 44, 20, 46, 81Google Scholar = Works, 1: 291, 281, 305.

37. William, Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude (1693), maxims 73 and 79.Google Scholar

38. Some Fruits may nevertheless owe much in both form and thought to Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living, (cf. ch. 2, section vi; ch. 4, section viii:3); and No Cross to Holy Dying (ch. 2).

39. See Frost, J. William, “Unlikely Controversialists: Caleb Pusey and George Keith,” Quaker History 64 (Spring, 1957): 16–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. See Buranelli, Vincent, “William Penn and the Socinians,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History Biography 83 (1959): 369–381.Google Scholar

41. See Henry, Hedworth, The Spirit of the Quakers (1672) p. 15,Google Scholar and Controversies Ended (1673), p. 4.Google Scholar

42. See auction catalogues of auctions by Sotheby's (1851), James Coleman (1871), Puttick & Simpson (1872) and Christie's (1916). Penn's Crellius, with his bookplate, survives by James Logan's gift of it to the Library Company of Philadelphia, whose staff were notably helpful to me in this hunt. Penn later quoted this book by name, along with biblical commentaries by Crellius, Socinus and Schlichtingius in his reply to Hedworth entitled The Spirit of Truth (1672).

43. Sandy Foundation (1668), p. 15,Google Scholar lists nine of the same eleven Anti-Nicene Fathers' statements against the Trinity in the same order as in Biddle's tract. Penn corrected a printer's error in this list. Penn and Stegman used the same anecdote on Sejanus' daughter from Tacitus, Annales V in the same way.

44. These were against distinguishing substance and subsistence, and compared the Trinity to treating three men, Peter, James and John, as one apostle. George Whitehead had also used this argument in the verbal debate that led to the tracts; but it is Whitehead's only apparent use of uniquely Socinian arguments. His autobiographical Christian Progress, which ignores this debate, describes (pp. 166 and 196) Whitehead arguing with Archbishop Tennison and an unnamed priest about the relationship of “3 persons” and “3 substances,” but here and in three earlier debate tracts cites other arguments and church fathers than Biddle's and Penn's. The Divinity of Christ (1669), which is Whitehead's later version of the debate with Vincent's group, re-used the “3 apostles” argument, but it and Danson's own Synopsis of Quakerism (1668) make clear that it was Penn who introduced the list of anti-trinitarian church fathers Biddle had used, and had argued about whether a person can be infinite (Divinity of Christ, pp. 10, 16, 19, 25, 26, 58). Thus I am inclined to doubt that Penn knew Biddle's material through Whitehead.

45. Penn, William, The Invalidity of John Faldo, in Works, 2: 453,Google Scholar cf. Buranelli, p. 371.

46. Penn, William, Innocency with her Open Face (1669), p. 13.Google Scholar Biddle and his friends were not labelling themselves Socinian (and hence Hedworth's tracts were confusingly circumspect), but these men did try to raise a fund in Oxford and London which Crellius' son could take back to the persecuted and penniless Polish Socinians, recently driven out of Poland by Jesuit pressure.

47. Penn, William, Guide Mistaken (1668) pp. 31–32.Google Scholar He may have been referring to Przypkowski's life of the austere Socinus (English edition, London, 1653), or some oral account of Biddle's life (whose biography only appeared in 1691). Biddle, on release from the Scilly Isles, had won the protection of Sir Harry Vane, courageously returned to London, preached, and returned to jail where he died in 1662. In an earlier prison term, Biddle had argued with Archbishop Ussher, and Knowles had debated Samuel Eaton at Chester, but Penn does not make clear whom he means by “the adversary.”

48. Edward Stillingfleet, Six Sermons… with a Discourse Concerning the True Reason of the Sufferings of Christ, wherein Crellius' Answer to Grotius is Considered (1669) is quoted by Penn, , Innocency, p. 14,Google Scholar “that faith and repentance are made conditions on our parts” (for our salvation), admittedly ignoring Stillingfleet's main stress on rigid satisfaction for sin by Christ. George Whitehead used Stillingfleet's same pages 270–273 to disprove Vincent's, Calvinism in Divinity of Christ 2: 85–90.Google Scholar

49. Penn admitted that Friends were Sabellians in his letter to Dr. John Collinges, 22/11/1673/74 (HSP, Letter Book, p. 114 = Works 1: 164). It is often assumed that Penn's father, the king, or a member of his council had suggested the visit to Stillingfleet, but evidence is limited to the note admitting the chaplain to the Tower. Penn's open-face was saved, and after Stillingfleet had reported to the Privy Council, and Penn had written to prove his Innocency, he was released.

50. Penn's bookplated copy was sold by Puttick & Simpson in 1872. Page 18 of this edition (Amsterdam, 1663) sets out as “religionis principia: 1: esse Deum summum; 2: coli debere; 3: Virtutem esse praecipuam partem cultus divini; 4: resipiscendum esse a peccatis; 5: dari praemium & poenam turn in hac vita, turn post hanc vitam.” Penn also knew Bishop Wilkins and owned his Principles of Natural Religion, but its date (1675) rules Out direct borrowing. Grotius, Hugo' De Veritate Religionis Christianae (Paris, 1640)Google Scholar firmly contrasts natural and revealed truth, though using Jewish, Muslim and natural evidence for God's existence.

51. He may have owned the 1629 edition (Paris: Carol Morell). I have found no intermediate source for his use of Clement's material on Timaeus Locrus, Antisthenes and Lyricus Menalipides (from Stromateis 5 in that order). No English edition of Clement existed at that date and Penn preserved some Latinisms.

52. Part of More's Conjectura Cabbalistica (1653), quoting Numenius via Clement on sig Bl and p. 188. This book was probably also owned by Penn, who quotes it in praise of Pythagoras, in Christian Quaker, p. 79,Google Scholar and on the Divine Light in The Invalidity of John Faldo (Works, 2: 435). Cudworth also used Clement, but published only in 1679 and showed his debt to More regarding Gentile monotheism by linking it through “Mosaic Cabala” (True Intellectual System, 2: 340). On Clement's argument that Pythagoras knew the Pentateuch, see More's, Antidote Against Atheism, p. xviii,Google Scholar and the appendix to the Defence of the Philosophick Cabbala, pp. 100–102. More also cited Grotius and Philo to the same conclusion, pp. 84 and 81 of the Defence.

53. Henry More to Penn, 22 May 1675, in HSP, acc. no. 625. This sixteen-page letter, long and remarkably tactful considering that he had ridiculed the Quakers in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, rejoices that “the Quakers have emerged above that low beginning of an heartlesse and hopelesse Familisme” (i.e. their indifference to immortality), and regrets Penn's failure to find More while delivering a copy of his book A Just Rebuke (1674). The letter is concerned to dissuade Penn from the Quaker teachings on resurrection and the sacraments and to discuss the universal light of God in men.

54. Barclay and Keith knew More through the Countess of Conway's circle at Ragley. Penington was a contemporary of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith at Cambridge, and may have known them: he speaks of the “Seed” of God or Christ within men in a way more like Henry More's than George Fox's; (cf. More's, Discourses on Several Texts, 13,Google Scholar as abridged in Patrides, C. A., The Cambridge Platonists (London, 1969), pp. 208–212.Google Scholar But see Penn, , Reason against Railing (1673)Google Scholar ch. 7, where he follows Fox.

55. See Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists; Cragg, Cambridge Platonists; and the works they abridge; also Colic, Rosalie L., Light and Enlightenment:… Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (London, 1957).Google Scholar In The Invalidity of John Faldu's Vindication (Works, 2; 440)Google Scholar Penn quotes More's, Mystery of Godliness (1660), pp. 221–225,Google Scholar on the Resurrection, and this book argues for toleration (ch. 10) in pragmatic ways like Penn's. I have not found other citations by Penn from the Cambridge Platonists, though Endy, p. 121, notes references by Penn to Cudworth and John Smith.

56. John Smith, The Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion, ch. 1; Patrides, p. 183; and Cragg, p. 115. See also Ralph, Cudworth, Sermon Preached Before the House of Commons (1647).Google Scholar

57. Smith in Patrides, p. 151.

58. John, Smith, A Discourse Concerning the True Way or Method of Attaining Divine Knowledge, section 2, in Cragg, p. 86.

59. More, , The Philosophick Cabbala, p. 27.Google Scholar

60. See More, Henry, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1662),Google Scholar section 32. This contrast is emphasized by Cassirer, Ernst in The Platonic Renaissance in England (Edinburgh, 1953) pp. 49–50, 67–72.Google Scholar