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  • Liberty, Conscience & Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn by Andrew R. Murphy
  • J. William Frost
Liberty, Conscience & Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn. By Andrew R. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xiii + 301 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $74.

Murphy, author of Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (2006) and an edition of Penn’s political works, has now written an in-depth study of Penn’s political theories. He argues that, like John Locke’s famous essay on religious toleration, Penn’s writings were a response to specific events and are important not because of originality but because both men summarized and popularized major themes. Agreeing with Mary Dunn’s William Penn, Politics and Conscience (1967), Murphy insists that working for toleration or liberty of conscience remained a constant feature of Penn’s life.

The book focuses on Penn’s response to the II Conventicle Act, Bushel’s [End Page 30] Case, the Popish plot and Exclusion Crisis, the founding and early history of Pennsylvania, and James II’s attempt to guarantee toleration through the suspending power and then by act of Parliament. Murphy has mastered the secondary literature on each of these subjects and his analysis provides new insights. For example, in Bushel’s Case Penn sought for the jury to determine both fact and law and his actions were a kind of performance theater that made him a national figure. Penn consistently defended religious liberty for Roman Catholic individuals, but opposed “popery” that he defined as an attempt by Rome or the Church of England to merge ecclesiastical and state power and to force worship. For Britain, Penn advocated toleration – that is, no disestablishment of the Church of England and freedom for public worship. In Pennsylvania, the law guaranteed freedom of worship, ignored tithes or any taxes for churches, required strict enforcement for morality, and supported Quaker beliefs on marriage, oaths, and peace. Freedom to error in religious belief did not allow liberty for a licentiousness that threatened civic interest in either Britain or Pennsylvania.

Depending on circumstances, Penn emphasized a variety of reasons for toleration: Christianity (Jesus’ kingdom was spiritual and the early church did not persecute), English history (Magna Carta, Great Charter, and common law), human nature (conscience cannot be coerced), economics (property rights and dissenters’ hard work strengthened the realm), and pragmatism (persecution did not work). Opponents of toleration agreed that conscience could not be forced but feared spiritual anarchy as leading to another Puritan revolution, undermining political unity, and strengthening Catholicism. Murphy’s careful analysis of Penn’s writings and use of examples from early Pennsylvania to illustrate the difficulties implementing theories should appeal to political scientists – the book’s intended audience.

Those primarily interested in Quaker history may be dissatisfied. The book does not discuss Quaker writings on religious freedom before Penn or comment on how he might have changed Friends’ emphases or tactics. Also ignored is the influence of Penn’s study at Saumur where he encountered a moderate Calvinist defense of religious toleration and saw the actual practice of harmony between Catholics and Protestants. Penn’s defense of property rights could have been juxtaposed against the Quaker refusal to pay tithes and disputes over impropriated tithes. There are no meeting minutes cited and the only personal papers are the microfilmed Penn Papers. Except for Fox’s Journal, Barclay’s Apology, and several [End Page 31] works by George Keith, Penn exists in isolation from other Friends, except in Pennsylvania.

Here are the kinds of issues that more concentration on Penn’s Quakerism would have brought to Murphy’s political focus. In 1681–82 as Penn sought settlers and drafted Frames of Government, he published A Brief Examination and State of Liberty Spiritual and the revised edition of No Cross, No Crown. Why should historians assume that these were directed only to Quakers in England and not to prospective settlers? Penn knew the disruptive effects of religious schism. If Pennsylvania were to become a harmonious civil society populated by Quakers, then Penn needed to stop religious disputes, build deference to spiritual and political leaders, and foster moral...

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