William Penn Political Writings

Cambridge Texts in the History of

Political Thought Andrew R. Murphy
(Editor)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/william-penn-political-writings-cambridge-texts-in-the-
history-of-political-thought-andrew-r-murphy-editor/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

History of American Political Thought 2nd Edition

Bryan-Paul Frost (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/history-of-american-political-
thought-2nd-edition-bryan-paul-frost-editor/

The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology

Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology Danny Osborne

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-cambridge-handbook-of-
political-psychology-cambridge-handbooks-in-psychology-danny-
osborne/

The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of

Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination 1st
Edition Zubia

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-political-thought-of-david-
hume-the-origins-of-liberalism-and-the-modern-political-
imagination-1st-edition-zubia/

The Political Thought of the English Free State,

1649-1653 Markku Peltonen

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-political-thought-of-the-
english-free-state-1649-1653-markku-peltonen/
Political Ideologies 7th Edition Andrew Heywood

https://ebookmeta.com/product/political-ideologies-7th-edition-
andrew-heywood/

Rousseau The Discourses and Other Early Political

Writings 2nd Edition Rousseau

https://ebookmeta.com/product/rousseau-the-discourses-and-other-
early-political-writings-2nd-edition-rousseau/

Fichte The System of Ethics Cambridge Texts in the

History of Philosophy 1st Edition Johann Gottlieb
Fichte

https://ebookmeta.com/product/fichte-the-system-of-ethics-
cambridge-texts-in-the-history-of-philosophy-1st-edition-johann-
gottlieb-fichte/

Tragedy and Enlightenment Athenian Political Thought

and the Dilemmas of Modernity Christopher Rocco

https://ebookmeta.com/product/tragedy-and-enlightenment-athenian-
political-thought-and-the-dilemmas-of-modernity-christopher-
rocco/

Danzig A Novel of Political Intrigue William N Walker

https://ebookmeta.com/product/danzig-a-novel-of-political-
intrigue-william-n-walker/
 WI L L I A M PE N N
Political Writings
William Penn (1644–1718) – Quaker activist, theorist of liberty of conscience,
and colonial founder and proprietor – played a central role in the movement
for religious liberty on both sides of the Atlantic for more than four decades.
This volume presents, for the first time, a fully annotated scholarly edition
of Penn’s political writings over the course of his long public career, tracing
his thinking from his early theorisation of religious toleration and liberty of
conscience in England, as a leading member of the Society of Friends during
the 1670s, to his colonial undertaking in Pennsylvania a decade later, his con-
troversial role in the years leading up to the 1688 Revolution, and the ongo-
ing consequences of that Revolution for his future prospects. Penn’s political
writings provide an illuminating window into the increasingly sophisticated
and influential movement for liberty of conscience in the early modern world.

Andrew R. Murphy is Professor of Political Science at Virginia Common-

wealth University. His work on Penn has spanned several decades, including
a biography, William Penn: A Life (2019); a collection of essays (co-edited
with John Smolenski), The Worlds of William Penn (2019); and the first study
of Penn’s political thought in fifty years, Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration
(2016).
 CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

General editor
Quentin Skinner
Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities, School of History,
Queen Mary University of London

Editorial board
Michael Cook
Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
Gabriel Paquette
Professor of History, The Johns Hopkins University
Andrew Sartori
Professor of History, New York University
Hilde de Weerdt
Professor of Chinese History, Leiden University

Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought is firmly established as

the major student series of texts in political theory. It aims to make available
all the most important texts in the history of political thought, from ancient
Greece to the twentieth century, from throughout the world and from every
political tradition. All the familiar classic texts are included, but the series
seeks at the same time to enlarge the conventional canon through a global
scope and by incorporating an extensive range of less well-known works,
many of them never before available in a modern English edition, and to pre-
sent the history of political thought in a comparative, international context.
Where possible, the texts are published in complete and unabridged form,
and translations are specially commissioned for the series. However, where
appropriate, especially for non-western texts, abridged or tightly focused
and thematic collections are offered instead. Each volume contains a critical
introduction together with chronologies, biographical sketches, a guide to
further reading and any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. Overall,
the series aims to provide the reader with an outline of the entire evolution of
international political thought.

For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of book
 WI LLI AM PENN

Political Writings
e dit e d b y
A ND R E W R . MUR PH Y
Virginia Commonwealth University
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108497121
doi: 10.1017/9781108684156
© Andrew R. Murphy 2021
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2021
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
isbn 978-1-108-49712-1 Hardback
isbn 978-1-108-73950-4 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Acknowledgmentspage vii
Introduction: The Political Thought of William
Penn (1644–1718) 1
Note on the Texts 24

p a r t i p o l i t i c a l liberties
1 The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670) 32
2 England’s Present Interest Discover’d (1675) 83
3 England’s Great Interest in the Choice of this New
Parliament (1679) 140
4 The Great and Popular Objection Against the Repeal of the
Penal Laws & Tests (1688) 149

p a r t i i t o l e r a t ion and liberty of conscien ce

5 The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1670) 163
6 The Proposed Comprehension (1673) 207
7 One Project For the Good of England (1679) 212
8 A Perswasive to Moderation to Church Dissenters (1686) 230

v
 Contents

p a r t i i i p e n nsylvania
9 Some Account of the Province of Pennsilvania in America (1681) 286
10 The Fundamentall Constitutions of Pennsilvania (unpublished,
summer 1681) 299
11 The Frame of the Government of Pennsilvania…Together
with certain Laws Agreed upon in England (1682) 315
12 The Charter of Privileges (1701) 332

p a r t i v b r o a der perspectives
13 An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693)  344
14 A Briefe and Plaine Scheame (unpublished, February 1697) 363
15 Proposal for the Advancement of Trade in America
(unpublished, March 1697) 365
Select Bibliography 368
Index 372

vi
 Acknowledgments
This volume represents the culmination – and, for the time being, the
completion – of more than two decades in which the life, career, and
thought of William Penn has played a major role in my scholarship.
From my doctoral dissertation (a revised version of which was published
as Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent
in Early Modern England and America)1 to my most recent work on Penn
(Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William
Penn; William Penn: A Life, and the co-edited volume The Worlds of Wil-
liam Penn),2 I have devoted a great deal of energy to arguing for Penn’s
inclusion in the canon of political thinkers worthy of sustained scholarly
treatment.
To be sure, Penn produced neither an architectonic masterwork of
Leviathan-esque proportions nor a touchstone for later generations like
Locke’s Second Treatise. Moreover, he was viewed with suspicion by
many (including Locke) in his own day, and by others ever since (most
famously, Macaulay in his History of England),3 for his close and sup-
portive relationship with James II. However, as I have argued in my prior
work on Penn, between the late 1660s and the early 1710s, William Penn

1
Andrew R. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent
in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press,
2001).
2
Andrew R. Murphy, Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William
Penn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Andrew R. Murphy, William Penn: A
Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Andrew R. Murphy and John Smolenski
(eds.), The Worlds of William Penn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019).
3
Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 vols.
(London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849–1861), vol. I, ch. 4.

vii
 Acknowledgments

played an enormously influential role in the movement for toleration in

both England and America. Not only did he articulate principles of liber-
ty of conscience in his native country, most particularly during the 1670s,
but he seized the opportunity to attempt to instantiate those principles in
Pennsylvania. (That he found practice far more challenging than theory
ought neither to surprise us nor lessen the importance of his career to the
history of toleration.)
This volume’s publication in the Cambridge Texts series originated
in an offhand comment made more than a decade ago, over coffee, by
Quentin Skinner, a comment that I had either the temerity or the fool-
hardiness to remember years down the road. I am grateful to the editors
of this august series for deeming Penn worthy of inclusion, and hope
that this volume’s appearance sparks renewed interest not only in Penn
himself, but in the broader seventeenth- and eighteenth-century contexts
that shaped him, and that he did so much to shape.
Over the years countless colleagues and friends have offered help-
ful observations, encouragement, and conversation about Penn and the
broader tolerationist movement. It is impossible to remember, much less
to mention, them all individually. With regard to this volume in particu-
lar, I thank Steve Angell, Teresa Bejan, Alastair Bellany, Jane Calvert,
John Coffey, Ben Pink Dandelion, Mark Goldie, Evan Haefeli, Christie
Maloyed, John Smolenski, and Scott Sowerby for their intellectual ca-
maraderie as well as, at times, their assistance in tracking down some of
Penn’s more obscure references. In addition, as it depended on access to
the many different printings of Penn’s original texts, this volume also
would not have been possible without the helpful assistance of reference
librarians at the British Library, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania,
and the Library of the Religious Society of Friends at Friends House,
London. At Cambridge University Press, Elizabeth Friend-Smith, Atifa
Jiwa, and Ruth Boyes guided the project from proposal to publication;
along the way, Christopher Jackson and Heather Dubnick provided out-
standing copyediting and indexing services.
Although I have been working on Penn for quite some time, the com-
pletion of this manuscript coincided with my institutional move to the
Political Science Department at Virginia Commonwealth University in
2019. I have benefited greatly from the intellectual camaraderie of my
new colleagues at VCU, and I thank them all, particularly my department
chair, Jason Arnold, for warmly welcoming me into the VCU commu-
nity. In addition, much of the final work on annotations was advanced

viii
 Acknowledgments

immeasurably by support from the Jepson School of Leadership Stud-

ies at the University of Richmond, where I held the Richard L. Morrill
Distinguished Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values during Fall 2018.
I thank the Jepson School’s dean, Sandra Peart, all my Jepson colleagues,
and Richard Dagger and Kevin Cherry of the UR Department of Politi-
cal Science, for their hospitality.
Finally, but no less importantly, my debts of gratitude to Beth Angell,
and to Peter and Sam Murphy, go beyond words. I shall leave them there.

ix
 Introduction

The Political Thought of William Penn (1644–1718)

This volume aims to introduce William Penn and his political thought to
audiences who may be familiar with his contemporaries (Hobbes, Locke,
Harrington, Sidney) but less so with Penn himself. As I have written
elsewhere, more than 300 years after his death Penn remains “a man
apart, a figure whom many know a little, but few know well.”1 But a
close examination of William Penn’s remarkable political career – of the
ideas that he developed as a Dissenter in England, and his attempts to
implement them as a colonial proprietor in America – provides a window
into the broader emergence of civil and religious liberty in early modern
England and America. Born two years after the outbreak of civil war,
Penn came of age during the Restoration and lived on, though in declin-
ing health, into the reign of George I. At the height of his involvement
in politics, between 1685 and 1688, he was one of the best-known and
most influential Dissenters in the land. At its depths, he found himself
imprisoned on several occasions in the aftermath of the 1688 Revolu-
tion, suspected of Jacobite sympathies, and accused of treason. Later
still, he spent much of 1708 in debtors’ prison. But between the late
1660s and the early eighteenth century, William Penn played a central
role in the political life of the nation, the development of Quakerism, the

1
Murphy, Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration, p. ix. For more extensive treatment of these
topics, see chapters 1 and 8 of Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration, from which much of the
material in this Introduction is drawn.


 Introduction

articulation of religious liberty as a necessary component of legitimate

government, and the launching of a major American colony.
Penn has never been without champions. Voltaire sang his praises in
some stirring passages in the fourth of his Letters on the English (though
it must also be admitted that Voltaire’s paeans to Penn misstate a num-
ber of key dates and details). Thomas Jefferson pronounced Penn “the
greatest lawgiver the world has produced, the first in either ancient or
modern times who has laid the foundation of government in the pure and
unadulterated principles of peace, of reason and right” in pursuit of “the
only legitimate objects of government, the happiness of man.”2
Yet for years, with the exception of Mary Maples Dunn’s William
Penn: Politics and Conscience, systematic scholarly attention to Penn’s po-
litical thought lagged behind that lavished on his more famous contem-
poraries.3 To be sure, Penn often appears in studies of his more famous
contemporaries, such as John Locke, Algernon Sidney, or James II. Oth-
er scholars have explored the key role he played in the Society of Friends,
as well as the founding of Pennsylvania and the religious, political, and
economic developments that made its early years so noteworthy in the
history of English colonizing efforts in North America.4 In what follows,
I lay out some of the reasons for this oversight, as well as the payoffs of
reintroducing Penn into the history of political thought.
2
Voltaire, Lettres, Ecrites de Londres sur les Anglois et Autres Sujets (London, 1734), Letter
4; “Jefferson to Peter Stephen Duponceau,” November 16, 1825; http://rotunda.upress
.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-04-02-02-5663
3
Mary Maples Dunn, William Penn: Politics and Conscience (Princeton University Press,
1967).
4
On Penn’s famous contemporaries, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and
Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton University Press, 1986); Jonathan
Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991); Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009); Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the
Glorious Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
  On his role in the Society of Friends, see Melvin B. Endy, Jr., William Penn and
Early Quakerism (Princeton University Press, 1973); William C. Braithwaite, The Second
Period of Quakerism (London: Macmillan, 1919); Richard C. Allen and Rosemary Moore
(with specialist contributors), The Quakers, 1656–1723: The Evolution of an Alternative
Community (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018); Jane E. Calvert,
Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  On early Pennsylvania, see Edwin B. Bronner, William Penn’s Holy Experiment: The
Founding of Pennsylvania, 1681–1701 (New York: Temple/Columbia, 1962); J. William
Frost, A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania (University Park, PA: Penn
State University Press, 1993); Sally Schwartz, A Mixed Multitude: The Struggle for
Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: NYU Press, 1988).


 Introduction

Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William

Penn, by the present writer, more recently joined Dunn’s as the only
book-length treatment of Penn’s political thought, and sought to enrich
scholarship by drawing on the recent insights of Cambridge School and
contextualist approaches to the history of political thought since the late
1960s.5 And in the wake of the 300th anniversary of Penn’s death, which
was marked in 2018, a new scholarly biography, along with a new collec-
tion of essays, The Worlds of William Penn, approached its subject’s com-
plex legacy – both the worlds that shaped him and the worlds he helped
shape – from a multidisciplinary set of perspectives.6
***
At first glance, William Penn’s political thinking can appear puzzling.
Although deeply engaged in both political theorizing and active political
involvement, Penn did not produce a political-philosophical magnum opus.
Most of Penn’s public writings were pièces d’occasion, and his public career
embodied a number of paradoxes that have challenged scholars seeking
to understand his complex legacy. First, William Penn lived with a sharp
tension between egalitarian ideas and hierarchical and deferential expecta-
tions. As a zealous convert to, and an influential leading member of, the
Society of Friends, Penn espoused a radically egalitarian theology that
proclaimed human equality in the sight of God and the transformative
power of the Light within.7 Yet, as a member of the English gentry, raised
in a prominent family with a war hero for a father, Penn expected defer-
ence and subordination from others, consistently lived beyond his means,
was never without servants, and even owned slaves who worked at Penns-
bury, his American estate. Much of Penn’s correspondence with Pennsyl-
vania’s government during his extended absences from the colony read
like the fulminations of a parent disappointed in his wayward children.

5
Murphy, Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration. I refer of course to the pioneering work of
Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and the “Cambridge School.” See the essays collected
in Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge University Press,
2002); Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History
(University of Chicago Press, 1971); and John Dunn, Political Obligation in Historical
Context: Essays in Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
6
Murphy, William Penn: A Life; and Murphy and Smolenski (eds.), The Worlds of
William Penn, the title of which pays homage to, and moves beyond, another outstanding
collection: Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn (eds.), The World of William Penn
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).
7
See Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain, 1646–1666
(University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000).


 Introduction

Second, Penn’s own political loyalties shifted dramatically over the

course of his long public career. In its early days, he became a national
figure by defending the rights of Dissenters, and he championed repre-
sentative popular institutions, such as juries and parliament, as guaran-
tors of the people’s liberties. Yet during the late 1680s Penn was widely
reviled as James II’s mouthpiece, the paid lackey of an absolutist monarch
bent on destroying the rule of law. Penn himself reconciled his varied
commitments – to representative institutions, to liberty of conscience,
and to the king’s program for granting liberty of conscience – by insist-
ing that the king’s Declaration of Indulgence be followed in short order
by parliamentary confirmation. Nonetheless, in such a heated political
atmosphere, we ought not to be surprised if the nuances of his position
escaped those who saw his employer as an existential threat to English
liberties.
Third, despite his high hopes for Pennsylvania, Penn’s physical ab-
sence from his American province virtually ensured that such aspirations
would go unfulfilled. A few months after his arrival in Pennsylvania, Penn
wrote that “I am mightily taken with this part of the world…I like it so
well, that…my family being once fixt with me; and if no other thing occur,
I am like to be an adopted American.”8 Yet he would spend just about four
years of his remaining thirty-six in America. The man whose name would
eventually grace American banks, insurance companies, hotels, universi-
ties, and schools became a cipher to those he had so assiduously recruited
to America. He spent his final seventeen years far from Pennsylvania and
was finally laid to rest in Old Jordans Cemetery outside of London.
The divergent fortunes of Penn and his colony represent a fourth para-
dox worth considering here. From modest beginnings in the early 1680s,
Philadelphia grew into the “richest, fastest-growing, and most cultivated
of American cities” by the middle of the next century.9 Yet Penn was
never able to reap the benefits of the colony’s multifaceted promise. His
imprisonment for debt in 1708 provides evidence of his chronic difficul-
ties managing money, and his excessive borrowing is inseparable from his

8
Penn to Lord Culpeper, February 5, 1683, Papers of William Penn, ed. Richard S. and
Mary Maples Dunn, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981–1986),
vol. II: p. 350. Hereafter, references to the Papers will appear as PWP volume: page
number – so here, PWP II: 350.
9
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976),
pp. 80, 197.


 Introduction

inability to realize the economic possibilities of American colonization. In

fact, he was attempting to sell Pennsylvania back to the crown when he
was incapacitated by the first of several strokes in 1712. It seems likely that
the dynamic growth of Pennsylvania might well have taken place precisely
because of, rather than in spite of, the proprietor’s extended absences.
***
If William Penn produced no masterwork, no synthetic or architectonic
work that guaranteed him entry into the canon of political philosophy, he
nonetheless played a crucial role in the emergence of religious toleration
and liberty of conscience as a fundamental element of early modern polit-
ical thought. His importance derives, first and foremost, from his central
role in the increasingly vocal, organized, and philosophically sophisti-
cated tolerationist movement that gained strength over the second half
of the seventeenth century. Shaped by the experience of religious and
political dissent on both sides of the Atlantic, theorists of toleration gen-
erated substantive principles of civil and religious liberty, insisting that
individuals and groups be free to follow the dictates of their conscience
not only in the narrow essentials of religious worship, but in the many
ways in which issues of conscience arise in public life. Penn’s placement
at the heart of this movement grants his political thought a signal impor-
tance in the emergence of toleration as both a philosophical principle and
a political reality.
Not only did Penn attempt to articulate principles of religious liberty
as a Quaker in England, he actually experienced firsthand the complex
relationship between theory and practice. Unlike most theorists of tolera-
tion (certainly, unlike his contemporary, Locke), Penn wielded political
power as the chief officer of a constituted government. Given the di-
vergent localities in which Penn produced most of his political theoriz-
ing (England) and in which he occupied public office (America), a study
of Penn sheds a great deal of light on the transatlantic context of early
modern political thought, and especially on the complex phenomenon
known as the “British Atlantic.” On the one hand, despite living into the
eighteenth century and founding an American colony, Penn’s world was
that of the seventeenth century, and his center of gravity – intellectually,
religiously, socially – was English. Viewing Penn primarily as an Ameri-
can “founder,” then, runs the risk of underplaying the degree to which
he was shaped by his English background. On the other hand, Penn was
no ordinary English Dissenter: He was the proprietor and governor of a


 Introduction

large American colony, a recipient of crown largesse, and deeply invested

in the project of imperial expansion and American settlement. An Atlan-
tic perspective helps make sense of Penn’s multifaceted political thought
and its interplay with the exercise of political power.10
***
Twenty-first century audiences, for good reason, often consider “tol-
eration” rather minimal and uninspiring compared with the more ro-
bust defenses of difference articulated by contemporary theorists of
identity. Nor is it only twenty-first-century audiences who express such
sentiments: In his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport,
Rhode Island, George Washington noted that “It is now no more that
toleration is spoken of, as if it were the indulgence of one class of people
that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”11 That
said, the concrete victories won by tolerationists over the course of the
seventeenth century represented a basic level of legal protection and co-
existence for people who had long faced fines, corporal punishment, and
jail time for attempting to live with conscientious integrity, and paved
the way for the eighteenth-century developments lauded by Washington.
Toleration (often also referred to as “indulgence”) generally refers to
the political protection of dissenting individuals and groups. In Penn’s
time, it contained a number of different dimensions: nonpunishment for
those whose religious commitments placed them outside the Church of
England, and an end to jailing, fines, or other sanctions for refusing to
conform to the Church of England; a reduction in the social power of the
established church and the acceptance that Dissent was a permanent fea-
ture of English life; and some minimal freedom of assembly and speech
(for proselytizing and gathering for worship).12 Toleration is also closely
connected to “liberty of conscience,” a term often understood to ground
political protections for Dissent on the less ambiguous theoretical foot-
ing of natural-rights arguments. Yet the seventeenth-century sense of
these terms was hardly a model of consistency: Penn himself used the two
terms interchangeably in his Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, whose

10
On Atlantic history, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Atlantic in World History (Oxford
University Press, 2012); Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Atlantic History: A
Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
11
George Washington, Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, August 18,
1790: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-the-hebrew-
congregation-at-newport/
12
See Teresa M. Bejan, “Evangelical Toleration,” Journal of Politics 77 (2015): 1103–1114.


 Introduction

extended title proclaimed the work to be “a general reply to such late

discourses as have opposed a toleration.”13
William Penn came of age during the Restoration, but religious and
political discord had plagued English society for years, firing the English
Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, and dominating the Com-
monwealth and Protectorate periods. Prior to his restoration, in the
Declaration of Breda (April 1660), Charles II had indicated his desire
for a moderate religious settlement; the Restoration’s ultimate outcome,
however, effected by a series of parliamentary statutes known as the Clar-
endon Code, imposed a narrow and rigid Anglicanism. Thus Restoration
debate over the rights of Dissenters always took place against the back-
drop of struggles for preeminence between king and parliament.
Tolerationist arguments during these years drew upon a range of
sources, and Penn employed all of them. Christian and Protestant argu-
ments emphasized the sanctity of individual conscience, and such Scrip-
tural offerings as Jesus’s claim that his kingdom was not of this world
(John 18:36), the parable of the tares and wheat (Matthew 13), and Paul’s
exhortation that whatever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14). Epistemo-
logical arguments insisted that the heart of religion resided in inner con-
viction, and that belief represented a faculty of the understanding and
not the will, and was thus impervious to physical coercion. Civil govern-
ments, on this view, might control their subjects’ bodies for the com-
mon good, but could not compel belief. Historical arguments invoked the
ancient English constitution and Magna Carta, maintaining that Eng-
lishmen held their civil liberties irrespective of religious differences, and
offering catalogues of English and European statesmen who endorsed
principles of religious liberty, thus providing an historical pedigree for
tolerationist claims. And finally, prudential or pragmatic arguments em-
phasized the prosperity and civil peace that toleration would yield after
years of religious strife.
But tolerationists always faced an uphill battle. After all, they were
calling for a departure from longstanding practices of political and re-
ligious uniformity, and they struggled against often-vivid memories
of numerous instances where political and religious unrest clearly had
gone hand in hand. It is impossible to understand discourses of tolera-
tion without careful consideration of the criticisms they faced. Historical
or political arguments drew on memories of the 1640s and 1650s, when

13
See Penn, The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1670) (Selection 5 in this volume).


 Introduction

Dissenters played a central role in a civil war and regicide. Religious or ec-
clesiastical arguments reflected the widespread view that civil rulers were
charged with overseeing matters of worship within their borders. An-
glican thinkers developed a doctrine of passive obedience that was only
reluctantly discarded in 1688, and then only in the face of a frontal assault
by a Catholic monarch.14 And theological or epistemological arguments un-
dergirded penal legislation and the suppression of Dissent, with English
Protestants going so far as to draw on Augustine’s writings justifying
coercion against the Donatists.
When Penn entered into these debates over toleration in Restoration
England, he did so on behalf of the Society of Friends, a sect that had
burst across the British Isles during the 1650s and was soon sending mis-
sionaries to Europe and North America. Their “peace testimony” not-
withstanding, Quakers continued to attract condemnation from authori-
ties in church and state: They refused to observe conventional practices
of decorum and deference, exuberantly celebrated what George Fox, one
of the group’s key founders, called “the inward Light” or “that of God
in every man,” and dissented from central elements of Christian ortho-
doxy such as the Trinity. The Restoration years saw the growth of the
Society of Friends from a movement that emphasized the experience of
inner Light and the spirit of Christ within to a far more ordered system
of Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly Meetings, complete with disciplinary
ecclesiastical structures and collective oversight of members’ writings.
Penn’s support for Fox’s organizational efforts sought to provide a bal-
ance between the power of individual religious experience and the need
for established structures to facilitate the Lord’s work.15
Complicating all these disputes, England was never a closed system:
It was situated within a European world and, increasingly, an ever more
intricate incipient global empire overseen by royal officials determined
to centralize colonial affairs in the service of a “grand imperial vision.”16
The English had been settling the North American coast, with varying
degrees of success, for nearly a century: from Jamestown in 1607 through

14
Mark Goldie, “The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution,” in The Revolutions
of 1688: The Andrew Browning Lectures, ed. Robert Beddard (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), pp. 102–136.
15
Endy, William Penn, p. 154, and chs. 4, 5 more generally. Also Moore, The Light in Their
Consciences; Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism; and Allen and Moore, The
Quakers.
16
Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious
Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 25.


 Introduction

Massachusetts and Maryland during the 1630s; from Carolina in the

1660s through New Netherland, which the English finally took from the
Dutch in the 1670s. Although he never visited America until his voyage
to Pennsylvania in 1682, Penn had been involved in mediating disputes
between Quakers involved in the New Jersey colony during the 1670s,
and was a signatory of the West Jersey Concessions of 1677.
Domestic religious considerations intersected with policy toward the
Catholic European powers as well as the Protestant Dutch. Stuart kings
and Restoration parliaments often had rather different agendas: The se-
cret clauses of the 1670 Treaty of Dover (in which Charles II promised to
convert to Catholicism in return for a French subsidy) show the lengths
to which English kings would go to be freed from dependence on parlia-
ment. In 1685, Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes reignited
debates about “popery” and persecution just as James II, a Catholic king,
began his reign in England.

***
The selections included in this volume span three decades in William
Penn’s public career. Born in 1644 to then Captain (later Admiral, later
Admiral Sir) William Penn and his wife, Margaret, a widowed Dutch-
woman who had fled to London from the Irish violence of the early
1640s, William Penn grew up in and around London. His father rose
through the ranks of the navy, siding with parliament during the Civil
Wars and gaining additional renown under Cromwell. In the mid 1650s,
Admiral Penn (having invoked Cromwell’s displeasure due to his failure
to capture Hispaniola in the ill-fated “Western Design”)17 took his family
to their lands in County Cork, Ireland, which Cromwell had bestowed in
happier times. The boy spent four years there, leaving to attend Christ
Church College, Oxford, in the fall of 1660. It was a miserable expe-
rience, and Penn was ejected after just two years for some unspecified
religious nonconformity. Thus began an unsettled period between 1664
and 1666: travel in Europe, including study at the Protestant Academy
in Saumur, France; a stint as messenger between his father and royal
officials, including King Charles II himself, in the run-up to the Second
Anglo-Dutch War; and an attempt to study law at Lincoln’s Inn, which
ended almost before it began when plague hit London. Finally, in early

17
See Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for
Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).


 Introduction

1666, Sir William sent his son to Ireland to negotiate lease agreements
with his tenants. The following year, at a Quaker Meeting in Cork, Penn
underwent a profound spiritual transformation and joined the Society of
Friends. It was a religious conversion with equally profound social and
political implications – Quakers were one of the most despised sects in
Britain – and represented an apparently unambiguous repudiation of his
father’s plans for him to enter the English elite.
But when one door closes, another door opens. His Quaker convince-
ment set Penn’s life on a radically new path, and his prominent family
name provided Friends with a high-profile convert. Over the next sev-
eral decades, William Penn would build bridges between the Society of
Friends and a variety of other audiences.18 One particular aspect of that
early career stands out: Penn’s 1670 trial with his fellow Quaker William
Mead, in which the defendants effectively hijacked a trial for disturbing
the peace and transformed it into an impassioned defense of religious as-
sembly and the rights of Englishmen.19 The publication of a “transcript”
of this trial, The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (Selection 1),
made Penn a widely known figure in the movement for toleration during
these years.
Before the decade was out, another political crisis engulfed the realm.
The Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis not only framed Penn’s po-
litical thinking between 1678 and 1681, but also provided the immediate
backdrop for his petition for an American colony. Rumors of Catholic
plots to assassinate Charles II and install his (Catholic) brother James
on the throne gave new life to Whig efforts to exclude James from the
succession, and led to passage of the Test Act of 1678, which extended
to parliament the terms of earlier legislation that had required public of-
ficeholders to swear oaths of allegiance to the monarch, as well as renun-
ciations of Catholic doctrine, and to receive Communion in an Angli-
can church, as a condition of holding public office.20 Penn was deeply
engaged in politics during these years, preparing petitions defending
Quakers, endorsing toleration, and working (unsuccessfully) in support
of Algernon Sidney’s efforts to get elected to the House of Commons.
Like many of his contemporaries, Penn denounced “popery” – one of the

18
See my “William Penn after 300 Years: Paradoxes and Legacies of a Boundary-Spanner,”
Quaker Studies 24: 1 (2019): 5–23.
19
The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670) (Selection 1).
20
Test Act of 1678 (30 Car. II. st. 2); Test Act of 1673 (25 Car. II c. 2).


 Introduction

most charged political epithets in seventeenth-century English political

debate – and called for Protestant unity in the face of the Catholic threat.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Penn continually sought
a place for peaceful and politically loyal English Catholics, developing a
notion of “civil interest” aimed at unifying a society deeply divided along
religious lines.
One of the signal events of Penn’s life was the founding of Pennsyl-
vania. Petitioning for a colony in America in lieu of repayment of debts
the crown owed his father, Penn received the charter for Pennsylvania in
March 1681. He famously described his hope “that there may be room
there, though not here, for…an holy experiment” to secure liberty of
conscience; earlier, he had told another correspondent that “God…will I
believe bless and make it the seed of a nation.”21 He journeyed to America
in 1682, and spent two years fully immersed in the business of founding.
Although he had hopes of remaining in Pennsylvania and convincing his
family to join him, Penn returned to England in fall 1684 to litigate an
increasingly bitter dispute over the Pennsylvania–Maryland border with
Lord Baltimore, his southern neighbor. Although he emerged victorious,
he was quickly drawn back into the world of English politics, aligning
himself with the new king, James II, an association that would have fatal
consequences for his reputation as well as his ability to oversee his colony.
James II acceded to the throne in February 1685 upon the death of his
brother Charles. An old naval colleague of Penn’s father, James shared
with Admiral Penn’s son a disaffection from the established church and
a desire for liberty of conscience. The new king welcomed Penn at court,
and enlisted him in a controversial campaign to extend toleration to Prot-
estant Dissenters and English Catholics by royal decree, which he hoped
to follow with parliamentary approval. The years between 1686 and
1688, when James was campaigning for liberty of conscience and Penn
was one of his lieutenants in that cause, saw Penn reach the pinnacle of
his public influence. It was an ambitious – and politically unrealistic –
vision, and it collapsed in spectacular fashion when William of Orange
invaded England in December 1688. Penn spent much of 1689 either
in hiding or in prison, under suspicion as chief ideologist of a disgraced
regime and suspected sympathizer of ongoing Jacobite efforts to reinstate
James as king. He lost control of the colony altogether between 1692 and

21
“To James Harrison,” August 25, 1681, PWP II: 108; “To Robert Turner,” March 5,
1681, PWP II: 83.


 Introduction

1694, when William and Mary assigned the government to New York
governor Benjamin Fletcher; and suffered personal tragedy as well, with
the death of his wife, Gulielma, in 1694 and son, Springett, in 1696. (He
did remarry in 1696, to Hannah Callowhill, a wealthy Bristol Quaker who
would administer Pennsylvania as his health declined after 1712.)
The debacle of 1688 did not signal the end for Penn. Although he
would never again attain the kind of public profile that he had achieved
during James’s reign, he gradually worked his way back into public life.
In 1693, he published An Essay toward the Present and Future Peace of
Europe, which envisioned a deliberative European Diet to which states
could take their grievances and work for the peaceful settlement of their
disputes. He played an increasingly prominent role as a spokesman for
colonial proprietors and others engaged in the project of American colo-
nization. And at the very end of the decade, he finally returned to his
colony after an absence of fifteen years. It was a quite different visit from
his 1682 voyage, made even more difficult by the fact that the colony’s
magistrates had revised the Frame of Government without Penn’s permis-
sion during his lengthy absence. This second stay lacked the drama and
high aspirations that characterized the earlier, founding voyage, with fif-
teen years of bitterness, miscommunication, and rivalry producing fric-
tion between the proprietor and many of his colonists. In agreeing to the
Charter of Privileges (Selection 12) granted upon his final departure in
1701, Penn made a number of difficult and painful concessions to the fact
that his political position was markedly weaker than in those early days
of settlement.
Penn had been in poor financial shape when he initiated his colony in
the early 1680s, and despite recruiting nearly 600 investors and under-
taking an impressive sales campaign over the ensuing decades, he never
realized the financial promise that danced before his eyes in the early
1680s. As Richard S. Dunn has put it, “The selling of Pennsylvania was
a grand success all around – except for William Penn.”22 In 1704 Penn
sent his son, William, to Pennsylvania in his stead, apparently hoping
that responsibilities there would cure William Jr. of his spendthrift and
dissolute ways (hopes that were quickly dashed). James Logan, his agent
in Pennsylvania, fought an increasingly lonely battle there to protect
the proprietor’s investment and prerogatives. Penn spent much of 1708

22
Richard S. Dunn, “William Penn and the Selling of Pennsylvania,” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 127 (1983): 328.


 Introduction

in the Fleet (debtors’) prison. His health failed after 1710, and his pass-
ing in 1718 removed from the scene an individual who had played a vital
role in the articulation of religious liberty as a fundamental element of
legitimate government across the Atlantic world.

***
Introducing Penn’s political thought to the political theory canon ne­
cessarily invites comparisons with two of his seventeenth-century tolera-
tionist contemporaries: Roger Williams and John Locke.
Like Penn, Williams was born, raised, and formed (philosophically,
politically, and religiously) in England, and came to be closely identi-
fied with a particular American colony.23 Both Penn and Williams ar-
rived in America in their 30s, seeking to transcend what they saw as the
errors of religious establishment in England through the theorizing and
creation of societies in America. Each projected onto America a variety
of hopes and fears directly related to the many ways in which England,
in their view, remained unwilling to adopt the proper relationship be-
tween church and state. Recall Penn’s invocation of a “holy experiment”
in America: “There may be room there, though not here, for such an
holy experiment.”24 During the Pequot War of 1636 to 1638, Williams
elaborated a view of the Massachusetts Bay settlements as not essentially
different from Old England, with its national church, and predicted “the
end of one vexation…[and] the beginning of another, till conscience be
permitted (though erroneous) to be free amongst you.”25
Yet despite these similarities, Penn and Williams’s firsthand personal
engagement with their polity differed dramatically. Williams arrived in
Providence a fugitive and an exile, Penn as a royally designated proprie-
tor. Williams was never a wealthy man, and after helping to settle Provi-
dence and the surrounding towns, he played a number of official and
unofficial roles: ambassador to the surrounding tribes, colonial agent in
England, chief governing officer, trader, farmer, preacher, colonial agent

23
This consideration of Penn and Williams draws on my more extensive comparison in
“‘Lively Experiment’ and ‘Holy Experiment’: Two Trajectories of Religious Liberty,” in
The Lively Experiment: Religious Toleration in America from Roger Williams to the Present,
ed. Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda (Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015),
pp. 37–51.
24
“To James Harrison,” August 25, 1681, PWP II: 108.
25
“To Governor John Winthrop,” July 21, 1637, in The Correspondence of Roger Williams,
ed. Glenn W. Lafantasie (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England,
1988), vol. I: p. 106.


 Introduction

in England (again), president of Providence Plantations, and all-around

mediator. Penn, on the other hand, received his province directly from
the crown; a number of already existing settlements of English, Dutch,
and Swedish inhabitants were incorporated into the new province of
Pennsylvania, along with territory ceded by his personal friend, the duke
of York (later King James II). He arrived in Pennsylvania as proprie-
tor and governor; upon his arrival, he assembled the inhabitants at the
courthouse in New Castle, and shortly thereafter set about directing the
ongoing physical construction of Philadelphia according to plans he had
drafted in England.
Furthermore, despite the reputations of their colonies as outposts of
religious liberty, both Penn and Williams found enacting and maintain-
ing civil society, and staving off disorder, without an established religion
to be a difficult undertaking. Internal dissension, American neighbors,
and English rivals all contributed to the difficulties in securing order.
The early years of Rhode Island were littered with fractious political de-
bates, and, like Penn, Williams lamented not only the fact of division, but
the ammunition that these divisions would provide for the colony’s en-
emies. Dissension was endemic from Rhode Island’s early years on, and
not surprisingly: individuals who could not stomach religious authority
were often similarly unwilling to abide political magistrates. The hostility
of the Massachusetts Bay settlements proved a constant source of con-
cern; land disputes between towns persisted. Rhode Island’s rejection of
civil governors’ authority to enforce moral and spiritual orthodoxy struck
at the heart of conventional understandings of the legitimate functions of
government, and provided the colony’s early residents with an enormous
challenge, that of creating civil order in a heavily religious culture while
maintaining a religiously neutral governmental sphere.
Although Pennsylvania has had, in one sense, quite a different rep-
utation – thanks in no small part to its Quaker promoters, both at its
founding and ever since – it was not, or rather was not only, an oasis
of peace and harmony. From the very beginning, Penn’s “Quaker col-
ony” had to contend with a sizable population of non-Quakers, who
had their own ideas about governance and were not shy about voting
in a bloc to pursue their interests. Disputes over land were widespread.
A decade after the colony’s founding, the Keithian schism of 1692 to
1694, which began as a debate about theological principles and grew into
a full-fledged attack on the colony’s leadership, provided an especially
vivid example of the difficulty of establishing order while simultaneously


 Introduction

preserving a broad understanding of liberty of conscience.26 The domi-

nance of Friends in the political and economic life of the young colony,
while it reflected the founder’s vision, aroused resentment among non-
Quakers. Pennsylvania’s Anglicans successfully petitioned for their own
clergy, criticized Quaker hegemony, and accused Friends of everything
from fixing legal proceedings to turning a blind eye to smuggling. Penn-
sylvania’s religious diversity did not always operate as harmoniously as
the founder insisted, and concerns about order and discord were con-
stantly present during the colony’s early years.
For both Penn and Williams, the search for order involved something
that we might consider rather minimal by today’s standards: What they
sought, ultimately, was a modus vivendi – literally, a way of living togeth-
er. Tolerationists sought to create a public space in which individuals and
groups of differing persuasions could live out their own deepest commit-
ments with some degree of integrity. Recent reconsiderations of Williams
have sought to appreciate the importance of his use of “civility” to de-
scribe a central tolerationist aspiration, although we should not confuse
the early modern content of that term with contemporary, and generally
much more expansive, understandings of its meaning or requirements.27
One final point of comparison between these two figures: Each found-
er articulated powerful theories of religious liberty that reflected larger
debates in seventeenth-century England and that predated, and went
beyond, the more famous theory later put forward by Locke. Although
Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration would become the most widely cel-
ebrated exposition of what we now call “liberal” tolerationism, Penn and
Williams arguably present more ambitious theories, with a more robust
understanding of the individual conscience and a broader range of pro-
tected beliefs and behaviors.
Williams’s articulation of liberty of conscience, as presented in The
Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, began from a concern for the purity of the
church and the sanctity of the individual conscience. Civil affairs were
the proper prerogative of the state, and necessarily involved the exercise

26
I pass over the details of the events of the schism: for a collection of the primary documents,
see J. William Frost, The Keithian Schism in Early Pennsylvania (Norwood, PA: Norwood
Editions, 1980); and my own “Persecuting Quakers? The Politics of Toleration in Early
Pennsylvania,” in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Religious Intolerance in
the Making of America, ed. Christopher Beneke and Chris Grenda (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 143–167.
27
See Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), ch. 2.


 Introduction

of coercion; in effect, governments are responsible for people’s bodies,

while salvation remained in the hands of God.
[M]agistrates, as magistrates, have no power of setting up the form
of church government, electing church officers, punishing with
church censures…And on the other side, the churches as churches,
have no power…of erecting or altering forms of civil government,
electing of civil officers, inflicting civil punishments…as by depos-
ing ­magistrates from their civil authority, or withdrawing the hearts
of the people against them, to their laws, no more than to discharge
wives, or children, or servants, from due obedience to their husbands,
parents, or masters; or by taking up arms against their magistrates.28
Put more briefly, “all civil states…[are] essentially civil, and therefore
not judges, governors, or defenders of the spiritual of Christian state and
worship.”29 Later, in his famous “ship of state” letter to the town of Prov-
idence, Williams reiterated the shared interest that “papists, protestants,
Jews, or Turks” have in the smooth functioning of their shared political
community.30 Yet this radical political position had an orthodox theologi-
cal foundation. Williams drew upon the traditional Christian notion of
conscience, admitting that conscience could err; even while holding that
one should not be persecuted even for erroneous conscientious views,
since conscience was a faculty of the understanding and not the will, and
thus could not be coerced into believing anything of which it was not
fully persuaded by its own judgment.
Penn shared many of the commitments that animated Williams’s
thinking on these matters, and his theory, laid out over the course of the
1670s and 1680s, will become clear in the pages of this volume. Persecu-
tion was rooted, in Penn’s view, in spiritual pride and in a fundamental
misunderstanding of the nature of Jesus’s ministry. A proper under-
standing of the nature of Christ’s kingdom, as well as of the nature of the
individual conscience, would lead to a proper understanding of earthly
politics and to firm guarantees of religious liberty. All of these arguments
together formed the basis of Penn’s view of England as a civil common-
wealth, bound together by civil interest. And it was some version of this

28
Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, of persecution (London, 1644), p. 136.
29
Ibid., p. 3.
30
To the Town of Providence, c. January 1654/5, Correspondence, II: 423–4. The ship
of state metaphor is not, of course, unique to Williams: it appears in book 6 of Plato’s
Republic.


 Introduction

theory that Penn sought to plant – with all the ambiguity inherent in such
an attempt – in America.
And yet again, within this broad parallel, it is worth noting an im-
portant distinction between Penn and Williams: Penn’s political career
involved a movement from theory to practice, Williams’s apparently the
other way around, developing (or at least sharpening and elaborating) a
theory of religious liberty out of his experience of persecution in Mas-
sachusetts Bay. The powerful theory of liberty of conscience that Wil-
liams laid out in his public debate with John Cotton was elaborated in
the mid to late 1640s, a full decade after Williams’s expulsion from Mas-
sachusetts Bay. Penn, on the other hand, initiated his public career with
a call for liberty of conscience: His Great Case of Liberty of Conscience
(Selection 5) contains all the basic building blocks of his mature theory.
Penn was a published theorist of religious liberty long before he ever set
foot in America. The contentious early months of his first residency in
Pennsylvania – when he had to deal with the colony’s assembly, which
he himself had created but which turned out to have political ideas of its
own – provided Penn with a rough lesson in the realities of politics in a
fallen world, in the difficult road one begins down when attempting to
translate political theory into political practice.
***
Penn’s more immediate contemporary, John Locke, represents another
fruitful avenue of comparison.31 Each possesses an enduring importance
for scholars of toleration for the way in which they encapsulate a dy-
namic and ongoing political debate in early modern England and Amer-
ica. The immediate aftermath of Penn’s fall from grace in the late 1680s
saw the publication of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, which has
come to be viewed as a sort of proto-liberal ur-text in the tolerationist
tradition.32 Penn and Locke shared several important personal and pro-
fessional connections. Each one advanced Whig arguments during the
1670s, and their contact was facilitated by mutual friendships with well-
connected figures like Algernon Sidney, James Tyrrell, William Popple,
and Benjamin Furly. Locke owned copies of Penn’s Great Case of Liberty

31
This consideration of Penn and Locke draws on my more extensive comparison in Liberty,
Conscience, and Toleration, ch. 8.
32
See John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman’s critique of the “Locke obsession”
in their Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 2.


 Introduction

of Conscience and each of his three 1687 Letters from a Gentleman in the
Country.33 Yet despite the persistence of a myth about Penn arranging a
pardon for Locke during the late 1680s, Locke deeply distrusted Penn’s
alliance with James.34 Both men also had keen interests in American colo-
nization, although their experiences in that realm were quite different.
Locke’s involvement with the Carolina colony unfolded as the secretary
to a large investor, and not as a proprietor with governing powers.
Just as, in the Two Treatises, Locke emphasized that God has not
granted natural political authority to any individual, so he insisted in the
Letter that God has not conferred such authority over salvation to any
individual. He offered religious arguments linked to the nature of Chris-
tianity and the testimony of Scripture, and, by distinguishing between
the outward nature of force and the inward nature of persuasion, evoked
the broader tolerationist tradition of which he and Penn were a part. In-
deed, even if one’s magistrate believed the correct religion – an arguable
premise, to be sure, given the lack of human certainty on such matters
laid out in Book IV of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding35
– persecution was still not justified:
Although the magistrate’s opinion in religion be sound, and the
way that he appoints be truly evangelical, yet if I be not thoroughly
perswaded thereof in my own mind, there will be no safety for me
in following it. No way whatsoever that I shall walk in, against the
dictates of my conscience, will ever bring me to the mansions of the
blessed.36
As a result, then, Locke pronounced toleration as both “agreeable to the
gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind.”37

33
John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 153; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 489.
34
The myth about the pardon has been cited by many Penn scholars, including Vincent
Buranelli, The King and the Quaker (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1962), p. 174; Joseph Illick, William Penn the Politician: His Relations with the English
Government (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 137; Edward C. O. Beatty, William
Penn as Social Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 5–6, 10; and
Nicholas P. Miller, The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and
the Separation of Church and State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 51. It
was convincingly demolished by Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 514–20.
35
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 4.
36
Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, in Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning
Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 232.
37
Ibid., p. 217.


 Introduction

Politically speaking, Locke’s argument depends on a sharp bifurcation

between the church and the commonwealth. He defined the common-
wealth as
a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and
advancing of their own civil interests…It is the duty of the civil mag-
istrate, by the impartial execution of equal laws, to secure unto all
the people in general, and to every one of his subjects in particular,
the just possession of these things belonging to this life.
A church, by contrast, Locke understood as “a voluntary society of men,
joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the publick
worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him,
and effectual to the Salvation of their Souls.”38 From the late 1660s on-
ward, Penn had built a similar distinction, calling on civil magistrates
“to regulat[e] civil matters with most advantage to the tranquility, en-
richment and reputation of their territories” and defining government as
“an external order of justice, or the right and prudent disciplining of any
society, by just laws.”39
While neither Locke nor Penn presented full-fledged arguments for
disestablishment, each envisioned societies that would forswear coercion
while endorsing the evangelical efforts of religious individuals to convert
their neighbors. No one disputed the idea that churches possess discipli-
nary authority over their own members. But such clerical influence must
remain confined to the ecclesiastical realm:
Churches have neither any jurisdiction in worldly matters, nor are
fire and sword any proper instruments wherewith to convince mens
minds of error, and inform them of the truth…[Clerical] author-
ity…ought to be confined within the bounds of the church…because
the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the
commonwealth.40
Ultimately, the tolerationist tradition sought not to liberate individuals
from their spiritual duties, but to locate the responsibility for the fulfill-
ment of those duties on individuals and their freely chosen religious com-
munities. Individuals ought to fulfill their religious obligations through
the church that they find most efficacious to their own salvation, since

38
Ibid., pp. 218, 220, 224.
39
Penn, The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, this volume, pp. 62–63, 23.
40
Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 223.


 Introduction

“every man has an immortal soul…whose happiness depending upon his

believing and doing those things in this life, which are necessary to the
obtaining of Gods favour, and are prescribed by od to that end; it fol-
lows…the observance of these things is the highest obligation that lies
upon mankind.”41
At the same time, humans are not simply spiritual, but also temporal
and corporeal, beings.
[B]esides their souls…men have also their temporal lives here upon
earth…[T]he necessity of preserving men in the possession of what
honest industry has already acquired and also of preserving their
liberty and strength…obliges men to enter into society with one an-
other, that by mutual assistance and joint force they may secure unto
each other their properties…leaving in the meanwhile to every man
the care of his own eternal happiness.42
The tolerationist agenda, for Locke, boiled down to one very simple phrase:
that, regardless of religious differences, “the sum of all we drive at is, that
every man may enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.”
Penn could scarcely have agreed more, and his repeated emphases on
“civil interest” as the bond of civil society pushed toward broadly similar
goals regarding the relief of Protestant Dissenters. In fact, Penn’s agenda
encompassed a broader range of belief and practice than did Locke’s.
Penn, for example, refused to impose oaths in Pennsylvania legal pro-
ceedings out of respect for Quaker objections to swearing, and after 1692
Pennsylvania was the only American colony to permit the public celebra-
tion of the Catholic Mass. Each of these practices pushes beyond the
limitations that Locke placed on his theory of toleration.43
The tolerationist tradition did not end with Locke and Penn, of
course, and a broader account of these ideas would certainly have to in-
clude Jefferson (who was so heavily influenced by Locke) and, in turn,
Madison and the American constitutional tradition that he did so much
to put in place. If Locke’s Letter has become the most renowned theoreti-
cal product of these early modern disputes over toleration in England,
Penn’s colony represents an attempt to institutionalize the foundational
precepts of the tolerationist platform: not simply in England, where a

41
Ibid., p. 241.  42 Ibid., p. 242.
43
See Joseph J. Casino, “Anti-Popery in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography 105 (1981): 279–309.


 Introduction

precise constellation of political and religious forces would be required

even to achieve the halfway measures of the Toleration Act, but in the
setting-up of a new society in America.
***
William Penn was far from the only political actor attempting to get a
colony off the ground during the seventeenth century; he entered this
transatlantic enterprise rather late in the game. Virtually the entire east-
ern seaboard of America had been settled by the time he received his
charter in 1681. But he was an effective and well-connected promoter,
and Pennsylvania quickly became an integral part of the early modern
British empire, which stretched from Canada to the Caribbean, appeal-
ing to both the economically aspiring and the religiously distressed. Such
rapid growth was facilitated by the cessation of armed conflict with the
Dutch: namely, the 1674 Treaty of Westminster, which returned New
York to the English and made possible the Quaker-dominated coloniza-
tion efforts that resulted in New Jersey during the mid 1670s and Penn-
sylvania early in the following decade.44
Nor is the transatlantic connection simply about politics. Commercial
interests figured heavily in Penn’s plans for his American colony. The
colonies formed a part of a British imperial system in which the Royal
African Company provided slaves to work sugar plantations in the Carib-
bean, whose products went to Great Britain along with tobacco, timber,
wheat, furs, and skins from the North American colonies. Quaker mer-
chants, drawing on the extensive network of Friends across Europe and
unburdened by later Quaker support for abolitionism, eagerly grasped
the commercial opportunities of a growing imperial system. Pennsyl-
vania merchants shipped grain, flour, pork, beef, and shingles (wooden
house-tiles), along with fish from New England, to the West Indies;
meanwhile, a thriving textile trade was carried on by the English East
India Company. Tobacco from the lower counties, furs from the Indi-
ans, grains, beef, bread, barrel staves: The story of early Pennsylvania, as
recounted by Frederick Tolles, is the story of “Philadelphia’s rapid rise
to unchallenged commercial supremacy in colonial America.”45 An even
fuller consideration of Pennsylvania’s role in these developments would

44
Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), esp. ch. 10.
45
Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial
Philadelphia, 1682–1763 (New York: Norton Editions, 1948), p. 85.


 Introduction

place the British Atlantic into a broader story of Atlantic history writ
large, including the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French colonial
systems.
***
William Penn was intimately involved in both the theorizing and the
practice of politics, on both sides of the Atlantic, over a span of more than
four decades. Between 1668 and 1671, Penn emerged as a public figure;
as a young and newly convinced member of the Society of Friends, his
involvement in the public controversy over the Conventicle Act culmi-
nated in his celebrated 1670 trial with Mead. A decade later, during the
furor surrounding the Popish Plot and the effort to exclude James from
the throne, Penn spoke out in support of parliament, Protestant unity,
English liberties, and the rights of Dissenters, theorizing the limits of
civil magistrates’ legitimate functions even while he participated first-
hand in Algernon Sidney’s unsuccessful campaign for parliament. The
plot years also laid the foundation for Penn’s colonizing effort in Ameri-
ca: the founding of Pennsylvania involved him in everything from draft-
ing governing documents and attracting investors and settlers to selling
land. After Penn’s arrival, the complex process of adjusting theory to
practice – and vice versa – proved an enormously time-consuming task,
and the ongoing search for a firm legal foundation for the colony led him
back to England just two years later. While James II reigned, Penn was
able to maintain his colony’s independence from the crown’s increasingly
assertive attempts to gain control over its far-flung territories, but after
1688 such efforts became much more challenging. Although he regained
control of Pennsylvania in 1694, and returned at the end of the decade,
that second visit was also cut short by Penn’s concern about additional
moves afoot in London.
***
The William Penn whose political thought emerges from the selections
in this volume possesses all the hallmarks of a political theorist as schol-
ars understand the term. He thought carefully about the foundations of
political legitimacy and authority, the ways in which political institutions
function to instantiate political principles, and the fundamental ideals
on which societies ought to be based. Above all, he consistently sought
to ensure that governments respected the primacy and sanctity of the
individual conscience. That said, the twists and turns of his political


 Introduction

career, not to mention the occasional character of so much of his political

writing, have tended to obscure the importance of his contribution to
the development of ideas and practices of toleration in the early modern
world. Bringing Penn’s political thought into the canon of early modern
political theory will add a long-neglected voice to scholarly and popular
understanding of the emergence of liberty of conscience as both a theo-
retical principle and a practical aspect of early modern politics.


 Note on the Texts
The texts included in this volume span more than three decades, from
Penn’s 1670 Great Case of Liberty of Conscience to the Charter of Privileges
he granted as he prepared to leave Pennsylvania in late October 1701. All
but three were published in Penn’s lifetime; details on the specific edi-
tions and the context(s) of their composition and publication appear in
the introductions to each part. Unlike most extant collections of Penn’s
writings, this volume presents all texts in their entirety and exactly as
Penn intended them to appear (i.e., not in excerpts, and not reprinted
from the posthumously published A Collection of the Works of William
Penn, which appeared in 1726 and introduced some alterations to Penn’s
texts). Providing the Wing Short-title catalogue reference for each title
allows scholars wishing to consult PDF images to locate the exact edition
reprinted here.
For the most part, in keeping with the practices of the Cambridge
Texts series, I have retained Penn’s original (often idiosyncratic) orthog-
raphy, including such early modern conventions as past tense verbs end-
ing in t or ’d, “then” rather than “than,” and the additional “e” at the end
of words like “dayes” and “alwayes.” Any general approach, however,
requires judicious application and the occasional exception, particularly
in the case of obvious printing errors or where preserving the original
runs the risk of confusing or impeding contemporary readers’ compre-
hension of Penn’s texts. For example, I have silently changed such terms
as “gaol”/“goal” (jail), “loose” (when in context Penn meant “lose”), and
“presidents” (precedents). All of Penn’s original capitalization and itali-
cization has been preserved, except where noted, although I have silently


 Note on the Texts

standardized the occasional double-capitalization (“THe” to “The”).

Editorial additions or clarifications are marked off by brackets, as are
page numbers from the original editions, which appear in the margins;
[p.b.] denotes an unnumbered page break (generally found in a Preface or
“To the Reader” introducing a text). Though it can be distracting to the
contemporary reader, I have retained Penn’s prodigious early modern
love of commas.
Although I provide details on important pieces of legislation that Penn
cites, or where the context seems to call for elaboration, it is simply not
possible, nor have I attempted, to provide a detailed reference for every
statute mentioned. Readers can use the standard format to identify such
references (year of reign, monarch, statute number) and consult Statutes
of the Realm (11 vols. [London, 1810–28]), which is also widely available
online at databases such as Hathi Trust and British History Online. For
example: 3 Car. I c. 1, the Petition of Right (1628), was the first statute
passed in the third year of Charles I’s reign. (Sometimes the monarch’s
name is abbreviated to just the first letter, as in H. VIII for Henry VIII.)
Where a reference, or Scriptural citation, is clear by the context (e.g.,
“Chief Justice Cook in his Proaem to the 2d Part of his Institutes”) I do
not add further information. The same goes for foreign-language phrases
that Penn translates for his reader: if he provides a reasonable translation
I have not added another one of my own.


 Part I
Political Liberties
 Part I: Political Liberties

Although I have titled this opening part “Political Liberties” and the one
following it “Toleration and Liberty of Conscience,” there is of course a
certain arbitrariness in designating early modern texts as primarily “po-
litical” or “religious” in nature. For Penn, as for most of his contem-
poraries, liberty of conscience was simultaneously a political and reli-
gious aspiration, driven by Scriptural, theological, economic, political,
and epistemological commitments. Part I includes texts that foreground
Penn’s emphasis on English law, juries, and representative institutions,
and that invoke Magna Carta or the English “ancient constitution,” as
foundations for popular liberties. Those more narrowly concerned with
Penn’s tolerationist agenda appear in Part II, although clearly the two
sets of texts mutually inform each other.
Part I opens with The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted, an
account of Penn’s September 1670 trial with fellow Quaker William
Mead. Upon his return to London from Ireland in mid 1670, Penn dis-
covered that, under the terms of the recently passed Conventicle Act,
the authorities had shuttered the Quaker meetinghouse on Gracechurch
Street in London. Accompanied by Mead, Penn began preaching in the
street outside the meetinghouse. Arrested and charged with the com-
mon law offense of disturbing the peace (i.e., riot) and taking part in a
tumultuous assembly, the two men were brought to the Old Bailey for
trial, where they faced a hostile court intent on securing public order and
defending political and religious orthodoxy. The defendants, of course,
had other aims. Though Peoples reads like a transcript of the trial, its
presentation of the events that took place in the courtroom is clearly a
stylized construction, aimed at presenting the defendants as heroic Dis-
senters railroaded by a persecuting state–church system. “The question
is not whether I am guilty of this indictment,” Penn famously insisted,
“but whether this indictment be legal.”1 I have argued at length, else-
where, that Peoples is best understood as both a work of political theory
and a piece of political theater (or, put another way, it offers a view of
political theory as political theater).2
The publication of Peoples marked Penn’s emergence as a new voice in
the world of English Dissent. The work was enormously popular, going
through nine printings in 1670 alone and occasioning a blistering rebuttal

1
The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (Selection 1), p. 41 below.
2
Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration, ch. 3, which draws on my earlier “Trial Transcript as
Political Theory: Principles and Performance in the Penn–Mead Case,” Political Theory
41: 6 (2013): 775–808.


 Part I: Political Liberties

by London Mayor Sir Samuel Starling, whose Answer to a scandalous

and seditious pamphlet took issue with Peoples’ account of the trial and
defended the actions of court officers (including himself).3 Although
Penn’s sole authorship of the work has never been authoritatively estab-
lished, he was clearly involved in its composition and publication, and
reaped the benefits of its stylized portrayal of him as a heroic spokesman
for popular liberties. The work made Penn a national figure (although
sharing a name with his famous father did not hurt in this regard), and it
remains an essential part of the Anglo-American legal tradition through
its connection with “Bushel’s case,” which established the principle of
jury independence. (Edward Bushel was one of the Penn–Mead jurors,
and successfully appealed the fine levied on him by the court.) In addi-
tion to the “transcript” proper, Peoples included numerous supporting
documents aimed at establishing the injustice of the court’s proceedings.
This volume reprints the second edition (Wing P1334C), which cor-
rected a number of errata present in earlier printings.
The next selection, England’s Present Interest Discover’d (1675),
appeared midway through the 1670s, during a time of continuing politi-
cal and religious turmoil: the aftermath of the disastrous Anglo-Dutch
War of 1672 to 1674. In March 1672, just two days before he declared
war against the Dutch as part of his alliance with Louis XIV, Charles
II had issued a Declaration of Indulgence directing that “the execution
of . . . all manner of penal laws in matters ecclesiastical…be immedi-
ately suspended.”4 Dissenters enjoyed a brief respite from persecution.
Ironically, perhaps, granting Quakers freedom to worship openly in fact
increased attacks on them, as their critics’ opposition and hostility now
had a more concrete target: Friends openly practicing in their midst. The
parliamentary backlash was not long in coming, and the king withdrew
the declaration after less than a year.
England’s Present Interest proposed three steps for navigating the con-
flictual political and religious landscape that persisted in the wake of the
Conventicle Act’s passage. First, rulers should recommit themselves to
the longstanding English rights of liberty, property, representation, and
juries, and the principle of popular consent that undergirded them all.

3
Samuel Starling, An Answer to the Seditious and Scandalous Pamphlet (London, 1670),
which drew a rejoinder from Penn: Truth Rescued from Imposture (London, 1670).
4
Declaration of Indulgence, March 15, 1672; reprinted in Frank Bate, The Declaration
of Indulgence, 1672: A Study in the Rise of Organized Dissent (London: University of
Liverpool Press, 1908), pp. 76–78.


 Part I: Political Liberties

(For the historical details of this argument, Penn’s marginal citations,

and occasionally his exact wording, draw heavily on Nathaniel Bacon’s
Historicall Discourse [London, 1647], which itself drew on earlier work
by John Selden.)5 Second, Penn argued, rulers should balance the reli-
gious interests of the kingdom, rather than privileging of the Church of
England at the expense of Dissenters. And finally, authorities should
promote a general, practical religion that rewarded works of charity and
mercy, rather than exercising their coercive powers against groups who
dissent on matters of doctrine. Such an approach would emphasize what
all English Christians agreed upon, rather than dwell on the details that
divided them: “Every man owns the text; tis the comment that’s dis-
puted.”6 The second edition (Wing P1280), which corrected errata from
the first edition, appears in this volume.
In January 1679, facing a deadlock over finances and the disbanding
of the army, and in the midst of rumors of popish plotting, Charles II
dissolved the Cavalier Parliament, which had sat since 1661. Prepara-
tions began for the first general election in eighteen years. Selection 3,
England’s Great Interest in the Choice of this New Parliament (Wing
P1278, first edition) appeared in spring of that year, while Penn worked
in support of Algernon Sidney’s candidacy for parliament. Indeed, Jon-
athan Scott has described Selection 3, England’s Great Interest as the
“manifesto [of] the first Sidney/Penn campaign.”7 It couples a theoreti-
cal defense of parliament’s role in the realm’s governance with a series
of pointed recommendations to those casting ballots in the upcoming
election. As the guardian of English rights, Penn argued, parliament was
charged with the task of “secur[ing] to us the execution of our ancient
laws, by new ones.”He pointed out the important business facing par-
liament: pursuing popish plotters, opposing those at the royal court
who would misinform the king and seek arbitrary power, and easing the
condition of loyal Protestant Dissenters. He urged electors to choose
“sincere Protestants” and “men of large principles” who would stand
steadfastly against the machinations of papists while maintaining the
civil rights of Dissenters.8
The final selection in Part I is The Great and Popular Objection Against
the Repeal of the Penal Laws & Tests (1688), written as part of Penn’s

5
See below, fn. 129, where more details of this feature of the text are explained.
6
Penn, England’s Present Interest (Selection 2), p. 136 below.
7
Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, p. 135.
8
England’s Great Interest (Selection 3), pp. 141, 146 below.


 Part I: Political Liberties

support of James II’s tolerationist agenda. Penn stood at the intellectual

forefront of a group dedicated to repealing the penal laws and tests, and
to securing a “new Magna Charta” for liberty of conscience. James issued
his royal Declaration of Indulgence in April 1687, and hoped to have it
ratified by a subsequent parliament. By the time of the publication of
The Great and Popular Objection, the impending parliamentary elections
dominated public debate over the issue, with James (and Penn) attempt-
ing to ensure a compliant parliament that would repeal the penal laws and
Test Acts. Had they succeeded, they would have placed liberty of con-
science on the firm foundation of fundamental law. That the effort failed
spectacularly – “the repealer utopia never arrived,” Scott Sowerby has
written, “William of Orange and a Dutch fleet did” – should not obscure
the radical nature of James and Penn’s vision of a multiconfessional Brit-
ish nation.9 This volume reprints the first edition (Wing P1298A).

9
Sowerby, “Forgetting the Repealers: Religious Toleration and Historical Amnesia in
Later Stuart England,” Past and Present 215 (2012): 106.


 1. THE Peoples {Ancient and Just} Liberties
ASSERTED, IN THE TRYAL OF William
Penn, and William Mead, At the Sessions held
at the Old-Baily in London, the first, third,
fourth and fifth of Sept. 70. against the most
Arbitrary procedure of that Court.
Isa. 10. 1, 2. Wo unto them that Decree Unrighteous Decrees,
and write grievousness, which they have prescribed; to turn away
the Needy from Judgment, and to take away the right from the
Poor, &c.
Psal. 94. 20. Shall the Throne of Iniquity have fellowship with
thee, which frameth mischief by a Law.
Sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas.10
Old-Baily, 1st. 3d. 4th, 5th of Sept. 1670.
Printed in the Year, 1670.

[3] To the English Reader.

If ever it were time to speak, or write, ’tis now, so many strange Occurrances,
requiring both.

10
Slight misrendering of Juvenal, Satires, VI: l. 223: “Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione
voluntas”; that is, “I will it, I command it, let my will stand for reason.”


 Selection 1: The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties

How much thou art concerned in this ensuing Trial (where not only the
Prisoners, but the Fundamental Laws of England) have been most Arbi-
trarily Arraigned: Read, and thou mayst plainly judge.
Liberty of Conscience, is counted a Pretence for Rebellion, and Reli-
gious Assemblies, Routs, and Riots; and the Defenders of both, are by
them reputed Factious and Dis-affected.
Magna Charta, is Magna Far— with the Recorder of London; and to
demand Right an affront to the Court.
Will and Power are their great Charter, but to call for Englands, is a
Crime, incurring the penalty of their Bale-Dock, and Nasty-hole, nay,
the menace a Gag, and Iron Shackles too.
The Jury (though proper Judges of Law and Fact)11 they would have over-
ruled in both, as if their Verdict signified no more, than to echo back the illegal
charge of the Bench; and because their courage and honesty did more then hold
pace, with the threat and abuse of those, who sate as Judges, (after two dayes
and two nights restraint for a Verdict) in the end were fined and imprisoned
for giving it.
O! what monstrous, and illegal proceedings are these? Who reasonably can
call his Coat his own? When Property is made subservient to the Will and
Interest of his Judges; or, Who can truly esteem himself a Free-man? When
all Pleas for Liberty are esteemed Sedition, and the Laws, that give, and
maintaine them, so many insi[g]nificant pieces of formality.
And what do they less than plainly tell us so, who at Will and Pleasure
break open our Locks, rob our Houses, raze our Foundations, imprison
our Persons, and finally, deny us Justice to our relief; as if they then acted
most like Christian men, when they were most barbarous, in ruining such
as are really so; and that no Sacrifice could be so acceptable to God, as the
destruction of those, that most fear him.
In short, That the Conscientious should only be obnoxious, and the just [4]
demand of our Religious Liberty, the reason why we should be denied our
civil Freedom (as if to be a Christian and an English-man were inconsistant)
and that so much solicitude and deep contrivance, should be imployed only to
ensnare and ruin so many ten thousand conscientious Families so eminently,
industrious, serviceable and exemplary; whilst Murders can so easily
obtain pardons, Rapes be remitted, publick Uncleanness pass unpunished, and

11
Penn refers to the longstanding question of whether juries are merely judges of fact (did
Penn and Mead in fact preach in Gracechurch Street?), or whether they are also properly
judges of law (did Penn and Mead incite a riotous assembly?). Peoples claims that juries
were legitimate judges of both law and fact.


 Part I: Political Liberties

all manner of Levity, Prodigality, Excess, Prophaneness and Atheism,

universally connived at, [(]if not in some respect manifestly encouraged) can-
not but be detestably abhorrent to every serious and honest mind.
Yet that this lamentable state is true, and the present Project in hand, let
London’s Recorder, and Canterburies Chaplain be heard.
The first in his publick Panegerick, upon the Spanish Inquisition, highly
admiring the prudence of the Romish Church, in the erection of it, as
an excellent way, to prevent Schism, which unhappy expression, at once
passeth sentence, both against our fundamental Laws, and Protestant Refor-
mation.12
The second in his printed Mercinary Discourse against Toleration,13
asserting for a main Principle, That it would be less injurious, to the
Government, to dispence with Prophane and Loose Persons, then to
allow a toleration to religious Dissenters: It were to over-do the business,
to say any more, where there is so much said already.
And therefore to conclude, We cannot chuse but admonish all, as well Persecu-
tors, to relinquish their Heady, Partial, and Inhumane Prosecutions (as what
will certainly issue in disgrace here, and inevitable condign punishment hereafter)
as those who yet dare express their moderation (however out of fashion, or made
the Brand of Fanaticism) not to be huf’d, or menaced out of that excellent temper,
to make their parts and persons subservient to the base humors, and sinister designs
of the biggest mortal upon Earth; but to reverence and obey the Eternal just God,
before whose great Tribunal all must render their accounts, and where he
will recompence to every Person according to his works.

[5] The Tryal of William Penn and William Mead.

AS there can be no Observation, where there is no Action; so its impos-
sible, there should be a juditious Intelligence, without due Observation.
And since there can be nothing more seasonable then a right infor-
mation, especially of Publick Acts; and well knowing, how industrious
some will be, to mis-represent, this Trial to the disadvantage of the Cause
and Prisoners, it was thought requisite, in defence of both, and for the
satisfaction of the People, to make it more publick; nor can there be any
business wherein the People of England are more concerned, then in that

12
See below, p. 49.
13
Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1670). Parker became
archdeacon of Canterbury in June 1670 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography –
hereafter ODNB).


Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “No! To see you here, in these barracks where I have spent so
much time thinking about you, I can scarcely believe my eyes. I must
be dreaming. And how are you? Better, I hope. You must tell me all
about yourself presently. We’ll go up to my room; we mustn’t hang
about too long on the square, there’s the devil of a draught; I don’t
feel it now myself, but you aren’t accustomed to it, I’m afraid of your
catching cold. And what about your work; have you started yet? No?
You are a quaint fellow! If I had your talent I’m sure I should be
writing morning, noon and night. It amuses you more to do nothing?
What a pity it is that it’s the useless fellows like me who are always
ready to work, and the ones who could if they wanted to, won’t.
There, and I’ve clean forgotten to ask you how your grandmother is.
Her Proudhons are in safe keeping. I never part from them.”
An officer, tall, handsome, majestic, emerged with slow and
solemn gait from the foot of a staircase. Saint-Loup saluted him and
arrested the perpetual instability of his body for the moment
occupied in holding his hand against the peak of his cap. But he had
flung himself into the action with so much force, straightening himself
with so sharp a movement, and, the salute ended, let his hand fall
with so abrupt a relaxation, altering all the positions of shoulder, leg,
and eyeglass, that this moment was one not so much of immobility
as of a throbbing tension in which were neutralised the excessive
movements which he had just made and those on which he was
about to embark. Meanwhile the officer, without coming any nearer
us, calm, benevolent, dignified, imperial, representing, in short, the
direct opposite of Saint-Loup, himself also, but without haste, raised
his hand to the peak of his cap.
“I must just say a word to the Captain,” whispered Saint-Loup. “Be
a good fellow, and go and wait for me in my room. It’s the second on
the right, on the third floor; I’ll be with you in a minute.”
And setting off at the double, preceded by his eyeglass which
fluttered in every direction, he made straight for the slow and stately
Captain whose horse had just been brought round and who, before
preparing to mount, was giving orders with a studied nobility of
gesture as in some historical painting, and as though he were setting
forth to take part in some battle of the First Empire, whereas he was
simply going to ride home, to the house which he had taken for the
period of his service at Doncières, and which stood in a Square that
was named, as though in an ironical anticipation of the arrival of this
Napoleonid, Place de la République. I started to climb the staircase,
nearly slipping on each of its nail-studded steps, catching glimpses
of barrack-rooms, their bare walls edged with a double line of beds
and kits. I was shewn Saint-Loup’s room. I stood for a moment
outside its closed door, for I could hear some one stirring; he moved
something, let fall something else; I felt that the room was not empty,
that there must be somebody there. But it was only the freshly
lighted fire beginning to burn. It could not keep quiet, it kept shifting
its faggots about, and very clumsily. I entered the room; it let one roll
into the fender and set another smoking. And even when it was not
moving, like an ill-bred person it made noises all the time, which,
from the moment I saw the flames rising, revealed themselves to me
as noises made by a fire, although if I had been on the other side of
a wall I should have thought that they came from some one who was
blowing his nose and walking about. I sat down in the room and
waited. Liberty hangings and old German stuffs of the eighteenth
century managed to rid it of the smell that was exhaled by the rest of
the building, a coarse, insipid, mouldy smell like that of stale toast. It
was here, in this charming room, that I could have dined and slept
with a calm and happy mind. Saint-Loup seemed almost to be
present by reason of the text-books which littered his table, between
his photographs, among which I could make out my own and that of
the Duchesse de Guermantes, by the light of the fire which had at
length grown accustomed to the grate, and, like an animal crouching
in an ardent, noiseless, faithful watchfulness, let fall only now and
then a smouldering log which crumbled into sparks, or licked with a
tongue of flame the sides of the chimney. I heard the tick of Saint-
Loup’s watch, which could not be far away. This tick changed its
place every moment, for I could not see the watch; it seemed to
come from behind, from in front of me, from my right, from my left,
sometimes to die away as though at a great distance. Suddenly I
caught sight of the watch on the table. Then I heard the tick in a fixed
place from which it did not move again. That is to say, I thought I
heard it at this place; I did not hear it there; I saw it there, for sounds
have no position in space. Or rather we associate them with
movements, and in that way they serve the purpose of warning us of
those movements, of appearing to make them necessary and
natural. Certainly it happens commonly enough that a sick man
whose ears have been stopped with cotton-wool ceases to hear the
noise of a fire such as was crackling at that moment in Saint-Loup’s
fireplace, labouring at the formation of brands and cinders, which it
then lets fall into the fender, nor would he hear the passage of the
tramway-cars whose music took its flight, at regular intervals, over
the Grand’place of Doncières. Let the sick man then read a book,
and the pages will turn silently before him, as though they were
moved by the fingers of a god. The dull thunder of a bath which is
being filled becomes thin, faint and distant as the twittering of birds in
the sky. The withdrawal of sound, its dilution, take from it all its
power to hurt us; driven mad a moment ago by hammer-blows which
seemed to be shattering the ceiling above our head, it is with a quiet
delight that we now gather in their sound, light, caressing, distant,
like the murmur of leaves playing by the roadside with the passing
breeze. We play games of patience with cards which we do not hear,
until we imagine that we have not touched them, that they are
moving of their own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play with
them, have begun to play with us. And in this connexion we may ask
ourselves whether, in the case of love (to which indeed we may add
the love of life and the love of fame, since there are, it appears,
persons who are acquainted with these latter sentiments), we ought
not to act like those who, when a noise disturbs them, instead of
praying that it may cease, stop their ears; and, with them for our
pattern, bring our attention, our defensive strength to bear on
ourselves, give ourselves as an objective to capture not the “other
person” with whom we are in love but our capacity for suffering at
that person’s hands.
To return to the problem of sounds, we have only to thicken the
wads which close the aural passages, and they confine to a
pianissimo the girl who has just been playing a boisterous tune
overhead; if we go farther, and steep the wad in grease, at once the
whole household must obey its despotic rule; its laws extend even
beyond our portals. Pianissimo is not enough; the wad instantly
orders the piano to be shut, and the music lesson is abruptly ended;
the gentleman who was walking up and down in the room above
breaks off in the middle of his beat; the movement of carriages and
tramways is interrupted as though a Sovereign were expected to
pass. And indeed this attenuation of sounds sometimes disturbs our
slumbers instead of guarding them. Only yesterday the incessant
noise in our ears, by describing to us in a continuous narrative all
that was happening in the street and in the house, succeeded at
length in making us sleep, like a boring book; to-night, through the
sheet of silence that is spread over our sleep a shock, louder than
the rest, manages to make itself heard, gentle as a sigh, unrelated to
any other sound, mysterious; and the call for an explanation which it
emits is sufficient to awaken us. Take away for a moment from the
sick man the cotton-wool that has been stopping his ears and in a
flash the full daylight, the sun of sound dawns afresh, dazzling him,
is born again in his universe; in all haste returns the multitude of
exiled sounds; we are present, as though it were the chanting of
choirs of angels, at the resurrection of the voice. The empty streets
are filled for a moment with the whirr of the swift, consecutive wings
of the singing tramway-cars. In the bedroom itself, the sick man has
created, not, like Prometheus, fire, but the sound of fire. And when
we increase or reduce the wads of cotton-wool, it is as though we
were pressing alternately one and the other of the two pedals with
which we have extended the resonant compass of the outer world.
Only there are also suppressions of sound which are not
temporary. The man who has grown completely deaf cannot even
heat a pan of milk by his bedside, but he must keep an eye open to
watch, on the tilted lid, for the white, arctic reflexion, like that of a
coming snow-storm, which is the warning sign which he is wise to
obey, by cutting off (as Our Lord bade the waves be still) the electric
current; for already the swelling, jerkily climbing egg of boiling milk-
film is reaching its climax in a series of sidelong movements, has
filled and set bellying the drooping sails with which the cream has
skimmed its surface, sends in a sudden storm a scud of pearly
substance flying overboard—sails which the cutting off of the current,
if the electric storm is hushed in time, will fold back upon themselves
and let fall with the ebbing tide, changed now to magnolia petals. But
if the sick man should not be quick enough in taking the necessary
precautions, presently, when his drowned books and watch are seen
barely emerging from the milky tide, he will be obliged to call the old
nurse who, though he be himself an eminent statesman or a famous
writer, will tell him that he has no more sense than a child of five. At
other times in the magic chamber, between us and the closed door, a
person who was not there a moment ago makes his appearance; it is
a visitor whom we did not hear coming in, and who merely
gesticulates, like a figure in one of those little puppet theatres, so
restful for those who have taken a dislike to the spoken tongue. And
for this totally deaf man, since the loss of a sense adds as much
beauty to the world as its acquisition, it is with ecstasy that he walks
now upon an earth grown almost an Eden, in which sound has not
yet been created. The highest waterfalls unfold for his eyes alone
their ribbons of crystal, stiller than the glassy sea, like the cascades
of Paradise. As sound was for him before his deafness the
perceptible form in which the cause of a movement was draped,
objects moved without sound seemed to be being moved also
without cause; deprived of all resonant quality, they shew a
spontaneous activity, seem to be alive. They move, halt, become
alight of their own accord. Of their own accord they vanish in the air
like the winged monsters of prehistoric days. In the solitary and
unneighboured home of the deaf man the service which, before his
infirmity was complete, was already shewing an increased discretion,
was being carried on in silence, is now assured him with a sort of
surreptitious deftness, by mutes, as at the court of a fairy-tale king.
And, as upon the stage, the building on which the deaf man looks
from his window—be it barracks, church, or town hall—is only so
much scenery. If one day it should fall to the ground, it may emit a
cloud of dust and leave visible ruins; but, less material even than a
palace on the stage, though it has not the same exiguity, it will
subside in the magic universe without letting the fall of its heavy
blocks of stone tarnish, with anything so vulgar as sound, the
chastity of the prevailing silence.
The silence, though only relative, which reigned in the little
barrack-room where I sat waiting was now broken. The door opened
and Saint-Loup, dropping his eyeglass, dashed in.
 “Ah, my dear Robert, you make yourself very comfortable here;” I
said to him; “how jolly it would be if one were allowed to dine and
sleep here.”
And to be sure, had it not been against the regulations, what
repose untinged by sadness I could have tasted there, guarded by
that atmosphere of tranquillity, vigilance and gaiety which was
maintained by a thousand wills controlled and free from care, a
thousand heedless spirits, in that great community called a barracks
where, time having taken the form of action, the sad bell that tolled
the hours outside was replaced by the same joyous clarion of those
martial calls, the ringing memory of which was kept perpetually alive
in the paved streets of the town, like the dust that floats in a
sunbeam;—a voice sure of being heard, and musical because it was
the command not only of authority to obedience but of wisdom to
happiness.
“So you’ld rather stay with me and sleep here, would you, than go
to the hotel by yourself?” Saint-Loup asked me, smiling.
“Oh, Robert, it is cruel of you to be sarcastic about it,” I pleaded;
“you know it’s not possible, and you know how wretched I shall be
over there.”
“Good! You flatter me!” he replied. “It occurred to me just now that
you would rather stay here to-night. And that is precisely what I
stopped to ask the Captain.”
“And he has given you leave?” I cried.
“He hadn’t the slightest objection.”
“Oh! I adore him!”
“No; that would be going too far. But now, let me just get hold of
my batman and tell him to see about our dinner,” he went on, while I
turned away so as to hide my tears.
We were several times interrupted by one or other of Saint-Loup’s
friends’ coming in. He drove them all out again.
“Get out of here. Buzz off!”
I begged him to let them stay.
“No, really; they would bore you stiff; they are absolutely
uncultured; all they can talk about is racing, or stables shop.
Besides, I don’t want them here either; they would spoil these
precious moments I’ve been looking forward to. But you mustn’t
think, when I tell you that these fellows are brainless, that everything
military is devoid of intellectuality. Far from it. We have a major here
who is a splendid chap. He’s given us a course in which military
history is treated like a demonstration, like a problem in algebra.
Even from the aesthetic point of view there is a curious beauty,
alternately inductive and deductive, about it which you couldn’t fail to
appreciate.”
“That’s not the officer who’s given me leave to stay here to-night?”
“No; thank God! The man you ‘adore’ for so very trifling a service
is the biggest fool that ever walked the face of the earth. He is
perfect at looking after messing, and at kit inspections; he spends
hours with the serjeant major and the master tailor. There you have
his mentality. Apart from that he has a vast contempt, like everyone
here, for the excellent major I was telling you about. No one will
speak to him because he’s a free-mason and doesn’t go to
confession. The Prince de Borodino would never have an outsider
like that in his house. Which is pretty fair cheek, when all’s said and
done, from a man whose great-grandfather was a small farmer, and
who would probably be a small farmer himself if it hadn’t been for the
Napoleonic wars. Not that he hasn’t a lurking sense of his own rather
ambiguous position in society, where he’s neither flesh nor fowl. He
hardly ever shews his face at the Jockey, it makes him feel so
deuced awkward, this so-called Prince,” added Robert, who, having
been led by the same spirit of imitation to adopt the social theories of
his teachers and the worldly prejudices of his relatives, had
unconsciously wedded the democratic love of humanity to a
contempt for the nobility of the Empire.
I was looking at the photograph of his aunt, and the thought that,
since Saint-Loup had this photograph in his possession, he might
perhaps give it to me, made me feel all the fonder of him and hope to
do him a thousand services, which seemed to me a very small
exchange for it. For this photograph was like one encounter more,
added to all those that I had already had, with Mme. de Guermantes;
better still, a prolonged encounter, as if, by some sudden stride
forward in our relations, she had stopped beside me, in a garden hat,
and had allowed me for the first time to gaze at my leisure at that
plump cheek, that arched neck, that tapering eyebrow (veiled from
me hitherto by the swiftness of her passage, the bewilderment of my
impressions, the imperfection of memory); and the contemplation of
them, as well as of the bare bosom and arms of a woman whom I
had never seen save in a high-necked and long-sleeved bodice, was
to me a voluptuous discovery, a priceless favour. Those lines, which
had seemed to me almost a forbidden spectacle, I could study there,
as in a text-book of the only geometry that had any value for me.
Later on, when I looked at Robert, I noticed that he too was a little
like the photograph of his aunt, and by a mysterious process which I
found almost as moving, since, if his face had not been directly
created by hers, the two had nevertheless a common origin. The
features of the Duchesse de Guermantes, which were pinned to my
vision of Combray, the nose like a falcon’s beak, the piercing eyes,
seemed to have served also as a pattern for the cutting out—in
another copy analogous and slender, with too delicate a skin—of
Robert’s face, which might almost be superimposed upon his aunt’s.
I saw in him, with a keen longing, those features characteristic of the
Guermantes, of that race which had remained so individual in the
midst of a world with which it was not confounded, in which it
remained isolated in the glory of an ornithomorphic divinity, for it
seemed to have been the issue, in the age of mythology, of the union
of a goddess with a bird.
Robert, without being aware of its cause, was touched by my
evident affection. This was moreover increased by the sense of
comfort inspired in me by the heat of the fire and by the champagne
which bedewed at the same time my brow with beads of sweat and
my cheeks with tears; it washed down the partridges; I ate mine with
the dumb wonder of a profane mortal of any sort when he finds in a
form of life with which he is not familiar what he has supposed that
form of life to exclude—the wonder, for instance, of an atheist who
sits down to an exquisitely cooked dinner in a presbytery. And next
morning, when I awoke, I rose and went to cast from Saint-Loup’s
window, which being at a great height overlooked the whole
countryside, a curious scrutiny to make the acquaintance of my new
neighbour, the landscape which I had not been able to distinguish
the day before, having arrived too late, at an hour when it was
already sleeping beneath the outspread cloak of night. And yet, early
as it had awoken from its sleep, I could see the ground, when I
opened the window and looked out, only as one sees it from the
window of a country house, overlooking the lake, shrouded still in its
soft white morning gown of mist which scarcely allowed me to make
out anything at all. But I knew that, before the troopers who were
busy with their horses in the square had finished grooming them, it
would have cast its gown aside. In the meantime, I could see only a
meagre hill, rearing close up against the side of the barracks a back
already swept clear of darkness, rough and wrinkled. Through the
transparent curtain of frost I could not take my eyes from this
stranger who, too, was looking at me for the first time. But when I
had formed the habit of coming to the barracks, my consciousness
that the hill was there, more real, consequently, even when I did not
see it, than the hotel at Balbec, than our house in Paris, of which I
thought as of absent—or dead—friends, that is to say without any
strong belief in their existence, brought it about that, even although I
was not aware of it myself, its reflected shape outlined itself on the
slightest impressions that I formed at Doncières, and among them, to
begin with this first morning, on the pleasing impression of warmth
given me by the cup of chocolate prepared by Saint-Loup’s batman
in this comfortable room, which had the effect of being an optical
centre from which to look out at the hill—the idea of there being
anything else to do but just gaze at it, the idea of actually climbing it
being rendered impossible by this same mist. Imbibing the shape of
the hill, associated with the taste of hot chocolate and with the whole
web of my fancies at that particular time, this mist, without my having
thought at all about it, succeeded in moistening all my subsequent
thoughts about that period, just as a massive and unmelting lump of
gold had remained allied to my impressions of Balbec, or as the
proximity of the outside stairs of blackish sandstone gave a grey
background to my impressions of Combray. It did not, however,
persist late into the day; the sun began by hurling at it, in vain, a few
darts which sprinkled it with brilliants before they finally overcame it.
The hill might expose its grizzled rump to the sun’s rays, which, an
hour later, when I went down to the town, gave to the russet tints of
the autumn leaves, to the reds and blues of the election posters
pasted on the walls an exaltation which raised my spirits also and
made me stamp, singing as I went, on the pavements from which I
could hardly keep myself from jumping in the air for joy.
But after that first night I had to sleep at the hotel. And I knew
beforehand that I was doomed to find there sorrow. It was like an
unbreathable aroma which all my life long had been exhaled for me
by every new bedroom, that is to say by every bedroom; in the one
which I usually occupied I was not present, my mind remained
elsewhere, and in its place sent only the sense of familiarity. But I
could not employ this servant, less sensitive than myself, to look
after things for me in a new place, where I preceded him, where I
arrived by myself, where I must bring into contact with its
environment that “Self” which I rediscovered only at year-long
intervals, but always the same, having not grown at all since
Combray, since my first arrival at Balbec, weeping, without any
possibility of consolation, on the edge of an unpacked trunk.
As it happened, I was mistaken. I had no time to be sad, for I was
not left alone for an instant. The fact of the matter was that there
remained of the old palace a superfluous refinement of structure and
decoration, out of place in a modern hotel, which, released from the
service of any practical purpose, had in its long spell of leisure
acquired a sort of life: passages winding about in all directions,
which one was continually crossing in their aimless wanderings,
lobbies as long as corridors and as ornate as drawing-rooms, which
had the air rather of being dwellers there themselves than of forming
part of a dwelling, which could not be induced to enter and settle
down in any of the rooms but wandered about outside mine and
came up at once to offer me their company—neighbours of a sort,
idle but never noisy, menial ghosts of the past who had been granted
the privilege of staying, provided they kept quiet, by the doors of the
rooms which were let to visitors; and who, every time that I came
across them, greeted me with a silent deference. In short, the idea of
a lodging, of simply a case for our existence from day to day which
shields us only from the cold and from being overlooked by other
people, was absolutely inapplicable to this house, an assembly of
rooms as real as a colony of people, living, it was true, in silence, but
things which one was obliged to meet, to avoid, to appreciate, as
one came in. One tried not to disturb them, and one could not look
without respect at the great drawing-room which had formed, far
back in the eighteenth century, the habit of stretching itself at its
ease, among its hangings of old gold and beneath the clouds of its
painted ceiling. And one was seized with a more personal curiosity
as to the smaller rooms which, without any regard for symmetry, ran
all round it, innumerable, startled, fleeing in disorder as far as the
garden, to which they had so easy an access down three broken
steps.
If I wished to go out or to come in without taking the lift or being
seen from the main staircase, a smaller private staircase, no longer
in use, offered me its steps so skilfully arranged, one close above
another, that there seemed to exist in their gradation a perfect
proportion of the same kind as those which, in colours, scents,
savours, often arouse in us a peculiar, sensuous pleasure. But the
pleasure to be found in going up and downstairs I had had to come
here to learn, as once before to a health resort in the Alps to find that
the act—as a rule not noticed—of drawing breath could be a
perpetual delight. I received that dispensation from effort which is
granted to us only by the things to which long use has accustomed
us, when I set my feet for the first time on those steps, familiar
before ever I knew them, as if they possessed, deposited on them,
perhaps, embodied in them by the masters of long ago whom they
used to welcome every day, the prospective charm of habits which I
had not yet contracted and which indeed could only grow weaker
once they had become my own. I looked into a room; the double
doors closed themselves behind me, the hangings let in a silence in
which I felt myself invested with a sort of exhilarating royalty; a
marble mantelpiece with ornaments of wrought brass—of which one
would have been wrong to think that its sole idea was to represent
the art of the Directory—offered me a fire, and a little easy chair on
short legs helped me to warm myself as comfortably as if I had been
sitting on the hearthrug. The walls held the room in a close embrace,
separating it from the rest of the world and, to let in, to enclose what
made it complete, parted to make way for the bookcase, reserved a
place for the bed, on either side of which a column airily upheld the
raised ceiling of the alcove. And the room was prolonged in depth by
two closets as large as itself, the latter of which had hanging from its
wall, to scent the occasion on which one had recourse to it, a
voluptuous rosary of orris-roots; the doors, if I left them open when I
withdrew into this innermost retreat, were not content with tripling its
dimensions without its ceasing to be well-proportioned, and not only
allowed my eyes to enjoy the delights of extension after those of
concentration, but added further to the pleasure of my solitude,
which, while still inviolable, was no longer shut in, the sense of
liberty. This closet looked out upon a courtyard, a fair solitary
stranger whom I was glad to have for a neighbour when next
morning my eyes fell on her, a captive between her high walls in
which no other window opened, with nothing but two yellowing trees
which were enough, to give a pinkish softness to the pure sky above.
Before going to bed I decided to leave the room in order to explore
the whole of my fairy kingdom. I walked down a long gallery which
did me homage successively with all that it had to offer me if I could
not sleep, an armchair placed waiting in a corner, a spinet, on a table
against the wall, a bowl of blue crockery filled with cinerarias, and, in
an old frame, the phantom of a lady of long ago whose powdered
hair was starred with blue flowers, holding in her hand a bunch of
carnations. When I came to the end, the bare wall in which no door
opened said to me simply: “Now you must turn and go back, but, you
see, you are at home here, the house is yours,” while the soft carpet,
not to be left out, added that if I did not sleep that night I could easily
come in barefoot, and the unshuttered windows, looking out over the
open country, assured me that they would hold a sleepless vigil and
that, at whatever hour I chose to come in, I need not be afraid of
disturbing anyone. And behind a hanging curtain I surprised only a
little closet which, stopped by the wall and unable to escape any
farther, had hidden itself there with a guilty conscience and gave me
a frightened stare from its little round window, glowing blue in the
moonlight. I went to bed, but the presence of the eiderdown quilt, of
the pillars, of the neat fireplace, by straining my attention to a pitch
beyond that of Paris, prevented me from letting myself go upon my
habitual train of fancies. And as it is this particular state of strained
attention that enfolds our slumbers, acts upon them, modifies them,
brings them into line with this or that series of past impressions, the
images that filled my dreams that first night were borrowed from a
memory entirely distinct from that on which I was in the habit of
drawing. If I had been tempted while asleep to let myself be swept
back upon my ordinary current of remembrance, the bed to which I
was not accustomed, the comfortable attention which I was obliged
to pay to the position of my various limbs when I turned over were
sufficient to correct my error, to disentangle and to keep running the
new thread of my dreams. It is the same with sleep as with our
perception of the external world. It needs only a modification in our
habits to make it poetic, it is enough that while undressing we should
have dozed off unconsciously upon the bed, for the dimensions of
our dream-world to be altered and its beauty felt. We awake, look at
our watch, see “four o’clock”; it is only four o’clock in the morning,
but we imagine that the whole day has gone by, so vividly does this
nap of a few minutes, unsought by us, appear to have come down to
us from the skies, by virtue of some divine right, full-bodied, vast, like
an Emperor’s orb of gold. In the morning, while worrying over the
thought that my grandfather was ready, and was waiting for me to
start on our walk along the Méséglise way, I was awakened by the
blare of a regimental band which passed every day beneath my
windows. But on several occasions—and I mention these because
one cannot properly describe human life unless one shews it soaked
in the sleep in which it plunges, which, night after night, sweeps
round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea—the intervening
layer of sleep was strong enough to bear the shock of the music and
I heard nothing. On the other mornings it gave way for a moment;
but, still velvety with the refreshment of having slept, my
consciousness (like those organs by which, after a local anaesthetic,
a cauterisation, not perceived at first, is felt only at the very end and
then as a faint burning smart) was touched only gently by the shrill
points of the fifes which caressed it with a vague, cool, matutinal
warbling; and after this brief interruption in which the silence had
turned to music it relapsed into my slumber before even the
dragoons had finished passing, depriving me of the latest opening
buds of the sparkling clangorous nosegay. And the zone of my
consciousness which its springing stems had brushed was so
narrow, so circumscribed with sleep that later on, when Saint-Loup
asked me whether I had heard the band, I was no longer certain that
the sound of its brasses had not been as imaginary as that which I
heard during the day echo, after the slightest noise, from the paved
streets of the town. Perhaps I had heard it only in a dream, prompted
by my fear of being awakened, or else of not being awakened and so
not seeing the regiment march past. For often, when I was still
asleep at the moment when, on the contrary, I had supposed that the
noise would awaken me, for the next hour I imagined that I was
awake, while still drowsing, and I enacted to myself with tenuous
shadow-shapes on the screen of my slumber the various scenes of
which it deprived me but at which I had the illusion of looking on.
What one has meant to do during the day, as it turns out, sleep
intervening, one accomplishes only in one’s dreams, that is to say
after it has been distorted by sleep into following another line than
one would have chosen when awake. The same story branches off
and has a different ending. When all is said, the world in which we
live when we are asleep is so different that people who have
difficulty in going to sleep seek first of all to escape from the waking
world. After having desperately, for hours on end, with shut eyes,
revolved in their minds thoughts similar to those which they would
have had with their eyes open, they take heart again on noticing that
the last minute has been crawling under the weight of an argument
in formal contradiction of the laws of thought, and their realisation of
this, and the brief “absence” to which it points, indicate that the door
is now open through which they will perhaps be able, presently, to
escape from the perception of the real, to advance to a resting-place
more or less remote on the other side, which will mean their having a
more or less “good” night. But already a great stride has been made
when we turn our back on the real, when we reach the cave in which
“auto-suggestions” prepare—like witches—the hell-broth of
imaginary maladies or of the recurrence of nervous disorders, and
watch for the hour at which the storm that has been gathering during
our unconscious sleep will break with sufficient force to make sleep
cease.
Not far thence is the secret garden in which grow like strange
flowers the kinds of sleep, so different one from another, the sleep
induced by datura, by the multiple extracts of ether, the sleep of
belladonna, of opium, of valerian, flowers whose petals remain shut
until the day when the predestined visitor shall come and, touching
them, bid them open, and for long hours inhale the aroma of their
peculiar dreams into a marvelling and bewildered being. At the end
of the garden stands the convent with open windows through which
we hear voices repeating the lessons learned before we went to
sleep, which we shall know only at the moment of awakening; while,
a presage of that moment, sounds the resonant tick of that inward
alarum which our preoccupation has so effectively regulated that
when our housekeeper comes in with the warning: “It is seven
o’clock,” she will find us awake and ready. On the dim walls of that
chamber which opens upon our dreams, within which toils without
ceasing that oblivion of the sorrows of love whose task, interrupted
and brought to nought at times by a nightmare big with
reminiscence, is ever speedily resumed, hang, even after we are
awake, the memories of our dreams, but so overshadowed that often
we catch sight of them for the first time only in the broad light of the
afternoon when the ray of a similar idea happens by chance to strike
them; some of them brilliant and harmonious while we slept, but
already so distorted that, having failed to recognise them, we can but
hasten to lay them in the earth like dead bodies too quickly
decomposed or relics so seriously damaged, so nearly crumbling
into dust that the most skilful restorer could not bring them back to
their true form or make anything of them. Near the gate is the quarry
to which our heavier slumbers repair in search of substances which
coat the brain with so unbreakable a glaze that, to awaken the
sleeper, his own will is obliged, even on a golden morning, to smite
him with mighty blows, like a young Siegfried. Beyond this, again,
are the nightmares of which the doctors foolishly assert that they tire
us more than does insomnia, whereas on the contrary they enable
the thinker to escape from the strain of thought; those nightmares
with their fantastic picture-books in which our relatives who are dead
are shewn meeting with a serious accident which at the same time
does not preclude their speedy recovery. Until then we keep them in
a little rat-cage, in which they are smaller than white mice and,
covered with big red spots, out of each of which a feather sprouts,
engage us in Ciceronian dialogues. Next to this picture-book is the
revolving disc of awakening, by virtue of which we submit for a
moment to the tedium of having to return at once to a house which
was pulled down fifty years ago, the memory of which is gradually
effaced as sleep grows more distant by a number of others, until we
arrive at that memory which the disc presents only when it has
ceased to revolve and which coincides with what we shall see with
opened eyes.
Sometimes I had heard nothing, being in one of those slumbers
into which we fall as into a pit from which we are heartily glad to be
drawn up a little later, heavy, overfed, digesting all that has been
brought to us (as by the nymphs who fed the infant Hercules) by
those agile, vegetative powers whose activity is doubled while we
sleep.
That kind of sleep is called “sleeping like lead”, and it seems as
though one has become, oneself, and remains for a few moments
after such a sleep is ended, simply a leaden image. One is no longer
a person. How then, seeking for one’s mind, one’s personality, as
one seeks for a thing that is lost, does one recover one’s own self
rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not
another personality than yesterday’s that is incarnate in one? One
fails to see what can dictate the choice, or why, among the millions
of human beings any one of whom one might be, it is on him who
one was overnight that unerringly one lays one’s hand? What is it
that guides us, when there has been an actual interruption—whether
it be that our unconsciousness has been complete or our dreams
entirely different from ourself? There has indeed been death, as
when the heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical friction of the
tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if we have seen it only
once before, awakens memories to which other, older memories
cling. Or were some memories also asleep in us of which we now
become conscious? The resurrection at our awakening—after that
healing attack of mental alienation which is sleep—must after all be
similar to what occurs when we recapture a name, a line, a refrain
that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after
death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.
When I had finished sleeping, tempted by the sunlit sky—but
discouraged by the chill—of those last autumn mornings, so
luminous and so cold, in which winter begins, to get up and look at
the trees on which the leaves were indicated now only by a few
strokes, golden or rosy, which seemed to have been left in the air, on
an invisible web, I raised my head from the pillow and stretched my
neck, keeping my body still hidden beneath the bedclothes; like a
chrysalis in the process of change I was a dual creature, with the
different parts of which a single environment did not agree; for my
eyes colour was sufficient, without warmth; my chest on the other
hand was anxious for warmth and not for colour. I rose only after my
fire had been lighted, and studied the picture, so delicate and
transparent, of the pink and golden morning, to which I had now
added by artificial means the element of warmth that it lacked,
poking my fire which burned and smoked like a good pipe and gave
me, as a pipe would have given me, a pleasure at once coarse
because it was based upon a material comfort and delicate because
beyond it was printed a pure vision. The walls of my dressing-room
were covered with a paper on which a violent red background was
patterned with black and white flowers, to which it seemed that I
should have some difficulty in growing accustomed. But they
succeeded only in striking me as novel, in forcing me to enter not
into conflict but into contact with them, in modulating the gaiety, the
songs of my morning toilet, they succeeded only in imprisoning me in
the heart of a sort of poppy, out of which to look at a world which I
saw quite differently from in Paris, from the gay screen which was
this new dwelling-place, of a different aspect from the house of my
parents, and into which flowed a purer air. On certain days, I was
agitated by the desire to see my grandmother again, or by the fear
that she might be ill, or else it was the memory of some undertaking
which I had left half-finished in Paris, and which seemed to have
made no progress; sometimes again it was some difficulty in which,
even here, I had managed to become involved. One or other of
these anxieties had kept me from sleeping, and I was without
strength to face my sorrow which in a moment grew to fill the whole
of my existence. Then from the hotel I sent a messenger to the
barracks, with a line to Saint-Loup: I told him that, should it be
materially possible—I knew that it was extremely difficult for him—I
should be most grateful if he would look in for a minute. An hour later
he arrived; and on hearing his ring at the door I felt myself liberated
from my obsessions. I knew that, if they were stronger than I, he was
stronger than they, and my attention was diverted from them and
concentrated on him who would have to settle them. He had come
into the room, and already he had enveloped me in the gust of fresh
air in which from before dawn he had been displaying so much
activity, a vital atmosphere very different from that of my room, to
which I at once adapted myself by appropriate reactions.
“I hope you weren’t angry with me for bothering you; there is
something that is worrying me, as you probably guessed.”
“Not at all; I just supposed you wanted to see me, and I thought it
very nice of you. I was delighted that you should have sent for me.
But what is the trouble? Things not going well? What can I do to
help?”
He listened to my explanations, and gave careful answers; but
before he had uttered a word he had transformed me to his own
likeness; compared with the important occupations which kept him
so busy, so alert, so happy, the worries which, a moment ago, I had
been unable to endure for another instant seemed to me as to him
negligible; I was like a man who, not having been able to open his
eyes for some days, sends for a doctor, who neatly and gently raises
his eyelid, removes from beneath it and shews him a grain of sand;
the sufferer is healed and comforted. All my cares resolved
themselves into a telegram which Saint-Loup undertook to dispatch.
Life seemed to me so different, so delightful; I was flooded with such
a surfeit of strength that I longed for action.
“What are you doing now?” I asked him.
“I must leave you, I’m afraid; we’re going on a route march in three
quarters of an hour, and I have to be on parade.”
“Then it’s been a great bother to you, coming here?”
“No, no bother at all, the Captain was very good about it; he told
me that if it was for you I must go at once; but you understand, I
don’t like to seem to be abusing the privilege.”
“But if I got up and dressed quickly and went by myself to the
place where you’ll be training, it would interest me immensely, and I
could perhaps talk to you during the breaks.”
“I shouldn’t advise you to do that; you have been lying awake,
racking your brains over a thing which, I assure you, is not of the
slightest importance, but now that it has ceased to worry you, lay
your head down on the pillow and go to sleep, which you will find an
excellent antidote to the demineralisation of your nerve-cells; only
you mustn’t go to sleep too soon, because our band-boys will be
coming along under your windows; but as soon as they’ve passed I
think you’ll be left in peace, and we shall meet again this evening, at
dinner.”
But soon I was constantly going to see the regiment being trained
in field operations, when I began to take an interest in the military
theories which Saint-Loup’s friends used to expound over the dinner-
table, and when it had become the chief desire of my life to see at
close quarters their various leaders, just as a person who makes
music his principal study and spends his life in the concert halls finds
pleasure in frequenting the cafés in which one mingles with the life of
the members of the orchestra. To reach the training ground I used to
have to take tremendously long walks. In the evening after dinner the
longing for sleep made my head drop every now and then as in a
swoon. Next morning I realised that I had no more heard the band
than, at Balbec, after the evenings on which Saint-Loup had taken
me to dinner at Rivebelle, I used to hear the concert on the beach.
And at the moment when I wished to rise I had a delicious feeling of
incapacity; I felt myself fastened to a deep, invisible ground by the
articulations (of which my tiredness made me conscious) of muscular
and nutritious roots. I felt myself full of strength; life seemed to
extend more amply before me; this was because I had reverted to
the good tiredness of my childhood at Combray on the mornings
following days on which we had taken the Guermantes walk. Poets
make out that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long
ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live
in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end
as often in disappointment as in success. The fixed places,
contemporary with different years, it is in ourselves that we should
rather seek to find them. This is where the advantage comes in, to a
certain extent, of great exhaustion followed by a good night’s rest.
Good nights, to make us descend into the most subterranean
galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of
memory comes to lighten the inward monologue (if so be that it
cease not also), turn so effectively the soil and break through the
surface stone of our body that we discover there, where our muscles
dive down and throw out their twisted roots and breathe the air of the
new life, the garden in which as a child we used to play. There is no
need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to
discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer upon it but
beneath; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead
city, excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain
impressions, fugitive and fortuitous, carry us back even more
effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a flight
more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring,
more immortal than these organic dislocations.
Sometimes my exhaustion was greater still; I had, without any
opportunity of going to bed, been following the operations for several
days on end. How blessed then was my return to the hotel! As I got
into bed I seemed to have escaped at last from the hands of
enchanters, sorcerers like those who people the “romances” beloved
of our forebears in the seventeenth century. My sleep that night and
the lazy morning that followed it were no more than a charming fairy
tale. Charming; beneficent perhaps also. I reminded myself that the
keenest sufferings have their place of sanctuary, that one can
always, when all else fails, find repose. These thoughts carried me
far.
On days when, although there was no parade, Saint-Loup had to
stay in barracks, I used often to go and visit him there. It was a long
way; I had to leave the town and cross the viaduct, from either side
of which I had an immense view. A strong breeze blew almost
always over this high ground, and filled all the buildings erected on
three sides of the barrack-square, which howled incessantly like a
cave of the winds. While I waited for Robert—he being engaged on
some duty or other—outside the door of his room or in the mess,
talking to some of his friends to whom he had introduced me (and
whom later on I came now and then to see, even when he was not to
be there), looking down from the window three hundred feet to the
country below, bare now except where recently sown fields, often still
soaked with rain and glittering in the sun, shewed a few stripes of
green, of the brilliance and translucent limpidity of enamel, I could