Then came the Test Act of 1673, which required public officials to affiliate with the Church of England and to swear allegiance to the king. Friends were frequently arrested on trivial charges and made to demonstrate their loyalty by swearing allegiance to the crown. Their refusal was interpreted as disloyalty and an indication of papist leanings, and the jails filled with Fox’s followers. Approximately 1,000 Friends had been imprisoned by 1657. Fox, too, saw the inside of a jail many times during his life. Other Quakers withstood beatings and torture for their beliefs, and in 1675 the sect began the Meeting for Sufferings to keep record of their persecutions.

As a son of an admiral and a friend of the royal family, William Penn suffered far less hardship than his fellow Quakers. Born on October 14, 1644, Penn joined the Society of Friends in 1667, and by September of that year he was in prison. Young Penn quickly dispatched a letter to a local nobleman and was released. Thereafter he traveled the countryside preaching, writing pamphlets and working to liberate Quakers from prison, as well as spending time in jail himself. During one seven-month stint in the Tower of London, Penn drafted his first version of No Cross, No Crown, one of his most notable works, in which he argues against worldliness and advocates virtuous simplicity.

Penn grew in prominence in the Society and in time even stood as a substitute for George Fox when needed, as in the fall of 1671 when Fox went to the American colonies to help organize the meeting structure there. Individual Quakers had been emigrating to the colonies since the 1650s. Full-scale migration came in 1675 when the first full shipload of Quakers arrived and settled in West Jersey. Within six years approximately 1,400 members of the Society had emigrated there.

Penn had served as a trustee of the West Jersey endeavor and his participation fed the idea of creating a colony of religious freedom. He envisioned a haven from persecution and a place where Quakers could live in harmony, ‘love and brotherly kindness,’ as an example for all Christians. Indeed, ‘there may be room there,’ he wrote, ‘though not here, for such a holy experiment.’

The government owed Penn’s father money. In lieu of payment, on June 1, 1680, Penn formally petitioned King Charles II for a land grant west of the Delaware River between New York and Maryland. The king granted the request in 1681 with the stipulation that the new province be named in honor of Admiral Penn. Thus, the Quaker became the proprietor of Pennsylvania, an area of some 600,000 square miles (larger than the present commonwealth of Pennsylvania).

As soon as everything was settled, Penn began advertising for the sale of land tracts and sent his cousin William Markham to the colony to act as deputy governor. He instructed Markham to form a preliminary government that granted the right to vote to virtually all free inhabitants. Penn later drafted laws that promised public trials where ‘justice shall be neither sold, denied, nor delayed.’ Verdicts would be delivered without harassment. All court proceedings would be conducted in English, instead of Latin, and ‘in ordinary and plain character, that they may be understood.’ Bail would be allowed in all but capital cases.

Mindful of his own experience with English jails, Penn wanted also to ensure the humane treatment of prisoners. To that end, he scrapped the traditional practice of charging detainees fees for food, heat and lodging in favor of a system that incorporated rehabilitation. Perhaps most noteworthy, unlike the New England colonies, the new province assured religious tolerance, although only Christians (including Catholics) could vote or hold office.

Penn’s laws also regulated marriage and outlawed a long list of items that included’swearing, cursing, lying, profane talking, drunkenness, drinking of healths, obscene words…[and] mayhems….’ Stage performances, May Day dances, cards, dice and anything else that might ‘excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and irreligion’ were banned.

Markham was also charged with finding a location for a town that would be called Philadelphia, meaning the ‘city of brotherly love,’ after the ancient city that is praised for its faithfulness in the New Testament book of Revelation. Penn dreamed of a ‘great town’ built in a grid formation, unlike the sprawling, congested cities of Europe, which had grown up without planning and where fires could wreak havoc. He later gave instructions for laying out the town, calling for ‘every house [to] be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of its plot…so there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a green country town, which will never be burnt and always be wholesome.’

Large numbers of emigrants began pouring into the province. The year 1682 saw 23 ships bring some 2,000 colonists to settle in Pennsylvania. Ninety more ships followed during the next three years, and by 1715 approximately 23,000 emigrants had relocated there. Most were either Quakers or Quaker sympathizers. By 1750 the Society of Friends was the third largest denomination in Britain’s American colonies.

As for the native inhabitants of the territory, Quakers enjoyed a far different relationship with the Indians than did most other colonists. They saw Native Americans as children of God no different from themselves, and Penn endeavored to deal honestly and fairly with them, trying to give them a fair price for the land. In a letter dated October 18, 1681, Penn wrote to an Indian leader, saying: ‘I am very sensible of the unkindness and injustice that has been too much exercised towards you by [colonists]…which I hear has been matter of trouble to you and caused great grudgings and animosities, sometimes leading to the shedding of blood, which has made the great God angry. But I am not such a man, as is well known in my country. I have great love and regard toward you, and I desire to win and gain your love and friendship by a kind, just, and peaceable life….’

Unlike Indian nations to the north and south, the Lenni Lenape that Penn dealt with also desired peace and responded positively to the Quakers. Altogether the relationship was an unparalleled success, but it wouldn’t last as settlers pushed farther west.

Penn’s savvy with the local Indians did not always carry over to his dealings with the colonists, however. He seemed incapable of selecting suitable representatives to govern the colony, and a series of incompetent choices created friction with the province’s inhabitants and threatened Penn’s credibility and authority there. Furthermore, his stand on nonviolence, while valued by the Lenni Lenape, didn’t sit well with New York’s governor, who expected aid against Indian attacks. Penn’s woes included frequent financial straits and a boundary dispute with Lord Baltimore to the south.

Nor were troubles confined to the New World. Political anglers in London looked to consolidate crown authority, and on more than one occasion Penn came dangerously close to losing his colony. This became an even greater concern with the 1685 death of Charles II and the subsequent bloodless revolution that saw the removal of Charles’ son, the Catholic King James II, just three years later. James’ very Protestant daughter and Dutch son-in-law, Mary and William, ascended the throne, but they were not fans of Penn. Because of his friendship with James, Penn was arrested late in 1688, and again in 1691, and charged with conspiring to commit treason. He was quickly released on both occasions, but trouble in London and in Pennsylvania continued to plague him until a stroke in 1712 crippled his mind. Death followed six years later.

Despite the difficulties, Penn’s is a success story. George Fox’s philosophy and William Penn’s determined vision proved a powerful combination that had lasting effects. As Penn wrote to the Pennsylvania colonists in 1681: ‘You shall be governed by laws of your own making, and live a free and, if you will, a sober and industrious people. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person.’ The Quaker promised, ‘Whatever sober and free men can reasonably desire for the security and improvement of their own happiness I shall heartily comply with….’

Penn offered the dream of a harmonious, peaceful and self-governing alternative to the raucous Cavaliers to the south and the repressive, puritanical society to the north. All the colonists had to do was live it. And they did — for eight decades, Quaker society dominated the Delaware Valley. The reality fell short of the dream, but the culture of burgeoning freedom and pluralism made a lasting impression. Many of Penn’s ideals live on in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

As Brooks Adams wrote of Quakers in The Emancipation of Massachusetts, ‘We owe to their heroic devotion the most priceless of our treasures, our perfect liberty of thought and speech.’

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This article was written by Allyson Patton and originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of British Heritage. For more great articles, subscribe to British Heritage magazine today!

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