American Heroes (22 page)

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.

T
HE
E
NGLISHMAN

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,