Andrew R. Murphy, a political science professor at Rutgers University, uses a broad strategy to examine the political theory of William Penn, particularly his testimony for liberty of conscience. Murphy argues that scholars of political thought have failed to appreciate Penn's significance in promoting religious freedom, instead emphasizing John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Murphy suggests that the tendency to focus on major works such as Locke's Letter has led scholars to underestimate the importance of people like Penn, who moved their agendas forward through a combination of writings and political action. While both Penn and Locke largely built upon prior work, Penn was more inclusive than many other English theorists, including Locke, in extending liberty of conscience to Roman Catholics.
Through close reading of Penn's works and papers, those of his contemporaries, and the secondary literature, Murphy explores Penn's focus on religious freedom from the late 1660s through his approval of the Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges in 1701. A man of contradictions, Penn joined the reviled Society of Friends against the wishes of his aristocratic father, Sir William Penn. Young Penn landed in jail for worshipping illegally, but then marshalled his family's resources to obtain the charter for Pennsylvania and become a stalwart of the Catholic king, James II. False rumors that Penn was a Catholic subsequently dogged his career; his failure to reap a profit from colonization, propensity to overspend, and carelessness in business affairs led him to debtors’ prison in 1708.
Murphy investigates Penn's complex path, demonstrating his nearly consistent adherence to an expansive (for seventeenth-century England) definition of religious freedom, despite political strife on both sides of the Atlantic. As Murphy shows, beginning with opposition to the post-Restoration Conventicle acts, “Penn sought to expand the notion of liberty of conscience to include not only individual belief but also corporate worship; not simply an individual but a collective right (‘the exercise of ourselves in a visible way of worship’)” (42). Like others, including those who opposed toleration, Penn affirmed that belief could not be coerced. Unlike the anti-tolerationists, he separated political opposition to the Crown and Parliament from religious belief, suggesting even within the toxic anti-Catholic environment of late seventeenth-century England that pious Catholics could be loyal subjects. He also defended the Quakers’ refusal to swear oaths and use honorific speech.
Penn's policies in establishing Pennsylvania in 1681 reflected and underscored his earlier writings against religious persecution. Though Penn incorporated representative bodies such as juries and the popularly elected assembly into the colony's frame of government, Murphy convincingly argues that the “bedrock substantive element of [Penn's] body of political theory is liberty of conscience, and a key component of the story of Pennsylvania's founding—and, indeed, of the colony's legacy—must certainly be Penn's efforts to secure the maximal protections for his colonists’ religious exercise” (155). Penn and his settlers often disagreed, but the great majority appreciated his commitment to liberty of conscience. Two decades after the founding, with the 1701 Charter of Privileges, the assembly forced Penn to accept its right to initiate legislation, yet prominently protected religious liberty for everyone who believed in God, though only Christians could hold political office.
Murphy's discussion of the Keithian schism in Pennsylvania in the early 1690s raises the question of whether Penn failed consistently to practice his tolerationist principles. The theological and political challenge of Quaker George Keith and his followers to the colony's Quaker elite highlighted the ambiguity of the anti-authoritarian Friends holding governmental power. Whether or not their prosecution of Keithians represented religious persecution was then, and still is, debated. Penn was in England, threatened with charges of high treason, during part of this time, and, as Murphy shows, did not have a significant role in the Keithian struggle. This underscores Murphy's point in his conclusion entitled “Legacy?” that it was not Penn alone who determined the course of Pennsylvania's development. Not only he, but the diverse inhabitants sought “a way of living together, a way of negotiating the inevitable differences that arise between groups short of bloodshed and invective” (251). While Murphy correctly sees Penn moving beyond the theoretical to create a legal framework for Pennsylvania liberty, the author could have highlighted more clearly the role of Penn's fellow Quakers, the Lenape Indians, and Swedish, Finnish, and Dutch settlers in fostering a society based on ideals of freedom and mutual respect.
Even so, Murphy rightly celebrates Penn's broad definition of toleration, showing how the Quaker essayist expanded the debate in tracts such as An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693). In the midst of European war, Penn proposed a parliament made up of representatives from England east to Russia and Turkey. He believed that including “the turks and muscovites . . . seems but fit and just,” thus promoting peace (219). Throughout Penn's chaotic career, despite theological, political, and personal controversies, Penn steadfastly promoted liberty of conscience as a basic human right.
