William Penn, 17th-century Quaker leader and polemicist, founder of Pennsylvania, and advisor to British monarchs, is commonly viewed as a man of action. He is seldom placed in the company of the major political thinkers of his century, either his predecessors — Hobbes, Milton, and Harrington — or his near contemporaries, most notably Algernon Sidney and John Locke. It is a major goal of Andrew Murphy's Liberty, Conscience and Toleration, a fine new study of Penn's religious and political thought to change that perception.

From the first page of text, Murphy argues that “Penn was a significant and sophisticated political thinker worthy of careful scholarly attention by political theorists and historians of political thought” (ix). He locates the key to Penn's thoughts and deeds, from his earliest writings to his last acts as proprietor of Pennsylvania, in his unwavering commitment to religious toleration, based on his deep belief in freedom of conscience, as a crucial element in a broader defense of English liberties, both religious and secular.

To make his case, Murphy engages in a close reading of some 30 of Penn's religious and political pamphlets, published between 1668 and 1694, and directed variously to other Quakers, Dissenters, and all Englishmen. He sets nearly all these works, from the shortest polemics to the longest treatises, firmly in the broader context of English law and culture, and often favorably compares Penn's ideas about toleration with those of other English thinkers, particularly that of John Locke (especially,114, 234–39). Murphy's Penn was never a narrow sectarian, but routinely addressed his appeals to all English Dissenters, and often to the whole nation, to achieve both his deeply held religious objectives and his closely related political goals.

Although this comprehensive intellectual narrative covers Penn's entire career, Murphy highlights four crucial episodes in his subject's life. The first (chap. 3), centers on the Penn-Mead Trial of 1670. Penn and Mead, arrested for creating a public disturbance by preaching in a London street, skillfully turned their trial into a test of the right to peaceably assemble. The court tried to bully the jury to convict, but the jurors balked, insisting on their right to judge both the facts and the law, and were fined by the judge. Juror Edward Bushel appealed his fine, and Chief Justice Vaughn ruled that jurors could not be restricted to ruling on the facts. Penn brilliantly employed the trial to make a case for political and religious liberties by incorporating a “transcript” of the court proceedings in The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670). In Murphy's careful analysis, Penn made his first powerful connection between religious liberty and the civil rights of all Englishmen.

Murphy's next episode (chap. 4), traces a tortuous path through a difficult period of English history. The alleged “Popish Plot” (1678) to bring Roman Catholicism back to England just as the nation was preparing to elect its first new Parliament in 18 years, closely followed by the Exclusion Crisis, an attempt by the House of Commons to prevent the Catholic James, the Duke of York, from succeeding his brother Charles II to the throne, kept not only Catholics but all Dissenters and even Anglican Whigs on the defensive. The ever-optimistic William Penn, encouraged by the prospect of a new Parliament, openly backed the radical Whig Algernon Sidney for a seat in the Commons, only to see him defeated, and later arrested and executed for treason. Penn's few pamphlets in these years were among his most political, but by 1680 he became so discouraged at the prospect of securing religious liberty at home that he turned to America.

This reviewer's greatest familiarity with the several chapters of Penn's life is with his founding of Pennsylvania, a product of his work, some decades ago, on Richard and Mary Dunn's fine edition of The Papers of William Penn. Murphy's fifth chapter, entitled “Founding: Theory Meets Practice?,” is a superb retelling of this story. He untangles the complex body of successive drafts of frames of government and bodies of laws, their publication and reception in England and amendment in Pennsylvania, and Penn's successes and failures in creating a harmonious society based on religious freedom and broad political participation. I would suggest two small additions to this story, and one deletion. Penn's role as administrator of the Quaker-dominated West New Jersey colony in the 1670s was more important than Murphy allows. It not only taught him his first lessons in colonization, but showed him that a large area, still lightly inhabited by Europeans, was available for the profitable enterprise of settling persecuted English Dissenters in America. Second, Penn's first published Frame of Government (1682) clearly follows the teachings of James Harrington's Oceana (1656), and thereby ties Penn and his advisors to a major political thinker of his age. Finally, I see no need for the question mark in this chapter's title. Murphy brilliantly discusses the connection between theory and practice at the chapter's end; no more is needed.

The fourth major episode in Penn's life is the most tragic: his ardent public support of the quest for religious toleration by the new monarch James II (1685–1688), a man most Englishmen grew to distrust, and finally drove from the throne. Murphy concedes that Penn's faith in James was naïve, but shows that his advocacy for James's toleration campaign was utterly sincere and consistent with all his writings since 1668. When James fell, Penn lost his influence everywhere, even for a time among Quakers, and he only barely escaped prison. But the man was irrepressible. By 1694 he was writing a pioneering tract proposing a means of securing perpetual peace in Europe, and in 1699 he made one last visit to Pennsylvania to restore his influence there, an attempt that largely failed.

Andrew Murphy is clearly an admirer of William Penn (as is this reviewer). For all Penn's flaws, many of which Murphy openly acknowledges, he makes the first full, explicit, and persuasive case for seeing the man as “a significant and sophisticated political thinker,” and for connecting his religious to his political thought and tying both to the complexities of seventeenth-century England.