American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  Penn’s rejection of the world, then, was not a rejection of the existing social order or of the allocation of power within it. “I would not be thought,” he said, “to set the Churl upon the present Gentleman’s Shoulder.” And at every opportunity he advertised the submission and obedience of Quakers to civil authority, excepting always when civil authority required a violation of their special beliefs.

  In keeping with this acceptance of the existing social order, Penn’s appeals for the Quaker cause were directed upward, to those in power, not downward to the mass of mechanics and laborers whom he liked to think the cause embraced. The direction of his efforts is apparent even in the record of his extended missionary tour, along with other leading Quakers, through the Rhineland and the low countries in 1677. His journal of the tour is studded with the names of potentates and of highly placed merchants and gentlemen and gentlewomen whom he sought to convert, if not to the cause, at least to toleration of it. Wherever he and his friends arrived, their first inquiry was to find out who were the most “worthy” local people, and it quickly becomes apparent that by “worthy” he meant the people who were worth something in wealth and power. He spent hours and days with Elizabeth, the Princess Palatine of the Rhine, and with her companion, the Countess van Hoorn, and later urged them to the faith in lengthy, almost passionate letters. The faith did not require, he was careful to assure them, that they give up their power and possessions. “I speak not,” he said, “of deserting or flinging away all outward substance.”

  If Penn did not think the imitation of Christ required flinging away all outward substance, we may fairly ask what he did think it required. If perfect obedience to God was possible in this world and it did not mean a change in the social or political order, what precisely did it mean? Penn gives us the answer in numerous admonitions, denunciations, and apostrophes. Here is one written in 1677 and intended, he says, for “all Ranks and Qualities, from the Highest to the Lowest, that walk not after the Spirit, but after the Flesh”:

  Arise, O God, for thy Name’s Sake! O what tremendous Oaths and Lyes! What Revenge and Murders, with Drunkenness and Gluttony! What Pride and Luxury! What Chamberings and Wantonness! What Fornications, Rapes, and Adulteries! What Masks and Revels! What Lustful Ornaments, and Enchanting Attires! What Proud Customs, and Vain Complements! What Sports and Pleasures! Again, what Falseness and Treachery! What Avarice and Oppression! What Flattery and Hypocrisie! What Malice and Slander! What Contention and Law-Suits! What Wars and Bloodshed! What Plunders, Fires and Desolations!

  These are supposedly the sins of the age, and a number of them like lying and swearing and fornication were available to all classes, but hardly anyone outside the higher ranks of society and outside the corridors of power would have had the resources to indulge in most of them. Similarly, No Cross No Crown, Penn’s longest diatribe against self-indulgence, was aimed primarily at men and women who took pleasure in “curious Trims, Rich and changeable Apparel, Nicety of Dress, Invention and Imitation of Fashions, Costly Attire, Mincing Gates, Wanton Looks, Romances, Plays, Treats, Balls, Feasts, and the like….” In yet another catalog of the five great crying sins of the time, in 1679, Penn included: first, drunkenness; second, whoredom and fornication; third, luxury; fourth, gaming; and fifth, oaths, cursing, blasphemy, and profaneness. All but luxury would presumably be possible for the general run of people, but in discussing the prevalence of these sins Penn showed that he had in mind the people of his own class. Drunkenness was exemplified by having several different wines at one meal, whoredom and fornication resulted from following French fashions, gaming was bad because it resulted in the careless loss of great estates, cursing was most reprehensible in persons of quality, and so on.

  In other words, Penn identified sin with the failings of his own class. He had been brought up among the gentry and nobility and reached his young manhood at a time when gentlemen were cutting loose from the restrictions of Puritan England. He was just sixteen when Charles II returned to the throne and set an example of licentiousness that had been missing in England for two decades. For a time Penn followed the example. He knew the vices of the gentry at first hand, as he often reminded his readers, and it was these vices he had in mind in his denunciations of the ways of the world; they were the ways of his world. His insistence that perfect obedience to God was possible for Christians meant that it was possible to do without the vices of gentlemen, the vices that he had learned at the court of the king and on the grand tour in France. Perfection was a matter of not doing what he had formerly done, and taking satisfaction instead in the pleasures of the spirit.

  Thus the sinless perfection that Penn called for consisted largely in giving up those extravagant pleasures that only the few could afford anyhow. He sometimes defended this kind of abstention as socially beneficial. If gentlemen would deny themselves extravagant food, drink, and other fleshly pleasures, they could give more to the poor. He even recommended forming a public stock for the purpose, derived from “the Money which is expended in every Parish in such vain Fashions, as wearing of Laces, Jewels, Embroideries, Unnecessary Ribbons, Trimming, Costly Furniture and Attendance, together with what is commonly consumed in Taverns, Feasts, Gaming etc.” The funds could be used to provide “Work-Houses for the Able, and Alms Houses for the Aged and Impotent.” He never doubted that there would always be a supply of poor both able and impotent, to be thus relieved, as there would always be a supply of gentlemen to deny themselves in order to relieve the poor.

  But relief of the poor was not the main objective of self-denial. Self-denial was an end in itself, pleasing to God, the essence of virtue. By suppressing the self, men not only avoided sin but opened the way to spiritual communion with the part of God that lay within them, the inner light. For some Quakers the inner light demanded specific actions. And it was standard Quaker doctrine, which Penn defended at length, that the inner light rather than Scripture was the guide by which to determine the rightness or wrongness of any particular action. Penn also, as we have seen, thought that ministers should be no more than mouthpieces for the inner light, passing on to their hearers what the inner light revealed to them. Yet Penn seems to have thought of the highest communion with the spirit as something that could not be put into words, as a feeling unconnected with the thoughts that words conveyed. Indeed, thoughts were to be banished from the mind, lest they get in its way. Not words, not speech, not even works, but silence, solitude, passivity were its usual accompaniment: “wait in the Stilness upon the God of all Families of the Earth, and then shall you have a true Feeling of him.”

  Nowhere did Penn argue that this feeling, this silent, wordless, thoughtless reception of the spirit must eventuate in positive actions. He continually insisted on the good works that Christ would enable the believer to perform and that would justify him in the sight of God. But precisely what these works had to be, apart from avoidance of the sins he cataloged, remained nebulous. It was good to give to the poor, and especially to widows and orphans, but the objective to be sought in self-denial seems to have consisted mainly in the feeling of bliss that came to the soul when it was freed from the distractions of earthly pleasures.

  What Penn demanded of Christians, then, was not beyond their reach: self-denial and passive reception of the spirit. It was no wonder that Christians were to be found most often among the humble, for the humble could reach these goals with less effort than the mighty. Penn directed his appeals upward, because it was the high and mighty who most needed them, and even for them the goals were not impossible. In order to make way for the spirit, his noble friends need only do out of choice what the humble did out of necessity. If it seemed to them like a pretty dull life to do without their accustomed pleasures of the flesh, Penn asked them to consider how they expected to amuse themselves throughout eternity. Better begin learning to appreciate spiritual joys now!

  Few of the gentry and nobility to whom Penn addressed his demand were ready to comply with it, and his own austerity, h
e tells us, brought him a good deal of derision from his former boon companions. But if self-denial was not in fashion among the gentlemen of Restoration England, the demand for it was not something to disgrace a gentleman. Indeed, it was part of the traditional ideal of what a gentleman was supposed to be.

  Penn did not compile a list of authorities to prove that gentlemen should be Quakers, as he did to prove that Protestants should be, but it would not have been impossible for him to do so. In handbooks that told seventeenth-century Englishmen how to behave, there are passages strikingly similar to the injunctions that Penn urged on them. The most popular handbook, Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentleman, could almost have been written as an introduction to No Cross No Crown. Brathwait argued, as did Penn, that virtue, not wealth, was what conferred nobility, and that the essence of virtue lay in self-restraint. Brathwait even urged something like the Quaker simplicity of dress. “Gorgeous attire,” he said, “is to be especially restrained, because it makes us dote upon a vessell of corruption, strutting upon earth, as if we had our eternall mansion on earth.” Virtue was something internal: “she seeketh nothing that is without her.” And Brathwait went on to praise the Levites who “were to have no possessions: for the Lord was their inheritance.” Brathwait can scarcely have expected English gentlemen to follow that example literally, but neither did Penn. And like Penn, Brathwait believed “there is no Patterne which we ought sooner to imitate than Christ himself.” Penn could even have found in Brathwait a rationale for directing his efforts so exclusively to those at the top. Self-restraint, temperance, was particularly important for gentlemen, Brathwait told them, because “You are the Moulds wherein meaner men are casten; labour then by your example to stampe impressions of vertue in others, but principally Temperance, seeing no vertue can subsist without it.”

  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.

  THE ENGLISHMAN

  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?”