Free-born John: A Biography of John Lilburne, and The King and the Quaker: A Study of William Penn and James II (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Editor apologizes for an error which appeared in the Spring Number in the review of Hubert !!abetter's The Friends' Meeting House, published by William Sessions, Ltd. The English price of this book should have been given as 35/—. Free-born John: A Biography of John Lilburne. By Pauline Gregg. London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd. 1961. 424 pages. Illustrations. 30s. The King and the Quaker: A Study of William Penn and James II. By Vincent Buranelli. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1962. 241 pages. $5.00. The liberties of the subject in seventeenth-century England is the basic theme of these very different books. The fundamental liberty for both John Lilburne and William Penn was religious freedom, although for the Leveller it was more profoundly entangled with others. Neither widened it to its ultimate extent, but both asked for so much beyond their contemporaries ' views that the stabilization of the 1690's in one sense defeated their aims. The integrity of their prophetic stance, however, may have helped move the whole English body toward the Whig compromise. The synthetic spirit, seeking unities in the welter of human experience, does not find obvious ones in the stories of these men. The long-lived Quaker statesman was convinced in 1667 at twenty-three. The radical Puritan first associated with Friends in 1653, was forty when convinced, and lived only twenty comparatively quiet months a Quaker. But both labored passionately on issues of religion and the state, chiefly with ministry , counsel, and individual action. Quakerism, although "a natural development from Congregationalism," was not the logical fruit of the Leveller movement, for it "splayed out," as Pauline Gregg puts it, into a variety of contradictions (pp. 342, 349). After eighteen years of contention , Lilburne found Friends above "opinion" and below spiritual pride. These two studies, both dealing with the religious politics of 1638-88, have little else in common. Gregg, writing a detailed life and times, describes the English scene in which Friends arose, but Quakers do not appear until the last twenty pages. Buranelli's Penn, representative of Restoration Quakers not much more numerous than James II's 30,000 Roman Catholics, is made to seem a principal actor of the reign. Gregg is deeply conversant with the pamphlet literature and other sources of the English Revolution. Buranelli is well acquainted with Penn's writings, but no Restoration specialist. He reflects the current Tory interpretation and 122 Book Reviews123 duels the Whig historians in defense of the Stuarts. Gregg avoids debates with historians, and I have little debate with her. For Buranelli, Penn's loyalty to James II was reasonable and justified. Penn was right in gambling on James, the well-meaning fool, right in prophesying illiberal Whig-Anglican domination of eighteenth-century England, right in seeing no danger of Catholic domination, but wrong in gauging English McCarthyitis. His brief, full of selected evidence and judgments on the views of others, and assuming the reader's considerable knowledge, seeks to revise a chapter in Penn's life—his role as courtiercensor . He concludes that "the greatest man ever to join" Friends was "the most significant figure of a significant group — the pro-James nonCatholics ," and wrote "the ablest defense of James II ever written" (pp. 199, 201). Penn was at court, by his own statements, to promote toleration for Catholic and Dissenter, do favors for the oppressed, and protect his infant colony. Yet the author ignores Pennsylvania affairs as almost irrelevant , certainly secondary in Penn's behavior. He seems to try to rehabilitate James's reputation by asserting that Penn, "perhaps the best man in the kingdom," "wielded enormous authority with James" (pp. 79, 81). Other studies of the reign find brief mention of Penn sufficient. The first three chapters economically establish a firm friendship between the Quaker and the Catholic. But instead of the ensuing apology, a narrative of James's reign, play by play, as seen from Penn's box seat, might have been more persuasive. Giving weight to Keith Feiling's and Godfrey Davies's works might have set Englishmen's insistence on law over prerogative in better perspective, and left Penn more of an enigma because...