William Penn's Holy Experiment: Biblical Principles and a Colony

In the earlier articles of this series I have mostly introduced you to Friends who had very little worldly power. George Fox was an itinerant preacher with no standing but his calling. Margaret Fell led the movement through ten years in prison. This time I want to introduce you to a Friend who was handed an enormous amount of power, all at once, and had to decide what to do with it.

Penn's friendship with Fox and his book No Cross, No Crown are covered in companion articles. Here I want to look at the most remarkable thing he ever attempted. In 1681 he received a province of his own and set out to govern it by the convictions he had preached for years. He called it a Holy Experiment.

With much of church history we work from fragments. With Penn we have his charter, his constitution, his letters, his treaties, and his council's minutes. He wrote it down, and then had to live with what he wrote. Both halves of that sentence matter.

A charter from the king who had jailed Friends

The colony's legal foundation is the Royal Charter of Pennsylvania, granted by Charles II in 1681. It made Penn Proprietor, fixed the boundaries, and granted him governing authority under limited royal oversight.

Sit with that a moment. This is the same Charles II who, seven years earlier, had authorized the legal action that released Margaret Fell from a decade in prison. The government that jailed Friends now handed one Friend a province, and with it an opportunity almost no reformer has ever received. Not merely to argue for his principles, but to try them.

It also plants the first honest tension in the story, and I would rather name it early. A colony devoted to government by consent existed because a king had given one man a grant. Penn's authority to establish liberty was, at bottom, delegated from the Crown. Historians study precisely this, under the heading of constitutional government under the proprietary system.

Convictions on paper before there was power to use them

Penn did not invent his principles once he had a colony to run. In 1675, six years before the charter, he published England's Present Interest Considered, arguing for liberty of conscience, constitutional government, and limits on coercion.

His blueprint was the Frame of Government of Pennsylvania (1682, revised in 1683 and 1701), setting out a separation of powers, elected representatives, freedom of conscience, limits on executive authority, and procedures for amendment. It became one of the most influential colonial constitutions in America.

Notice how much of that list is about restraint. Remember who the executive was. Penn was writing fences around himself.

The amendment procedures may be the most telling item. To write a procedure for amendment into your own founding document is to admit, in advance and in public, that you will get some of it wrong. I hear an echo of Paul: "For we know in part, and we prophesy in part" (1 Corinthians 13:9). A man who believes deeply and also believes he is fallible builds a door into his own constitution. Penn built one, and it was used twice.

The invitation and the city

A colony needs people. In 1681 Penn published Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania to encourage immigration, describing the land, the farming, the Native Americans, and the government. His Letter to the Free Society of Traders (1683) followed, on Philadelphia, city planning, commerce, and the Native Americans.

Let me set a caution beside the first. Some Account is advertising, written to persuade people to cross an ocean. That does not make it dishonest, but a promotional tract should be read as a promotional tract. What a founder promises prospective settlers and what a colony becomes are two different historical questions, and we must not let the first quietly answer the second.

Land, purchase, and the honest questions

Now we come to the part of this history that asks for the most care. I want to handle it as I tried to handle Grant's Peace Policy in the essay on the Friends' social witness: by keeping the facts, the intentions, the outcomes, and the evaluation as four separate questions rather than collapsing them into one verdict.

Here are the facts as the documents give them. Penn negotiated numerous land purchases with Native American nations rather than claiming territory solely by royal grant. The surviving deeds and treaties show negotiated purchases, compensation, mutual agreements, and boundary descriptions. His correspondence discusses Indian treaties, and his Council's minutes record Indian diplomacy as ordinary business. Behind all of it lay a conviction he held on religious grounds, that land should be acquired through consent rather than conquest.

I do not want to hurry past that, because it is a genuine achievement. Penn held a royal charter that purported to give him the ground. He went and bought it anyway, recorded what he paid, and put his name to agreements with the people already living there. He was reaching, I think, for something like "to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah 6:8), and it was not the ordinary practice of European colonization.

Now let me be equally plain about what that does not settle. Notice the careful word in the record: Penn purchased rather than claiming territory solely by royal grant. The grant did not go away. It remained the basis of his authority, and the purchases happened inside it. Relations with Native American nations and treaty-making remain a major and active field of study, precisely because a stack of deeds does not close the questions they raise.

Historians come at him from different angles, and the range is itself instructive. Edwin Bronner's study of the Holy Experiment attends to Pennsylvania's founding, its government, religious liberty, and Quaker society. Richard S. Dunn's studies place Penn within Restoration England, colonial expansion, Atlantic history, and imperial politics. Mary Maples Dunn's William Penn: Politics and Conscience, often regarded as the best modern scholarly biography, works across political history, Quaker theology, colonial administration, and even Penn's financial troubles. I am not going to set those scholars against one another, and I do not think we must choose among them. Where a student of history begins will shape what comes into focus, and the whole man requires all of it. Penn dealt more fairly than his contemporaries, and he was still one of them, working inside a system whose logic he did not invent and did not overturn.

The sources themselves are candid that the colony did not always fully realize its ideals. That is not a modern accusation smuggled into the story. It is what the record shows, and the tension between Penn's ideals and the practical realities of governing a diverse colony is one of the named research topics in this field. Anyone who tells you this history as unbroken triumph has not read the minutes, and anyone who tells you the purchases and treaties amounted to nothing has not read the deeds.

The Charter of Privileges

Penn's final settlement came in 1701 with the Charter of Privileges, which expanded religious liberty, legislative authority, and local self-government, and governed Pennsylvania until the Revolution.

Notice the direction of travel. After twenty years of governing real people, the instinct is to tighten the reins. Penn loosened them.

Where the ideals met the minutes

If you want to know how a vision actually fared, do not read the vision. Read the minutes. The Minutes of the Provincial Council record legislation, Indian diplomacy, land grants, defense, and taxation.

Look again at that list. Indian diplomacy, defense, taxation. A people whose testimony was peace now had to answer for the defense of a province. A people who had suffered for conscience now had to govern immigrants of many convictions, because the colony grew quickly and grew diverse.

Penn's own life reflects the strain. The founder of one of the most successful colonies in America had money troubles, traced in Mary Maples Dunn's William Penn: Politics and Conscience.

Weighing a holy experiment

These sources show a man not trying to found merely another English colony. He wanted a place where representative government, liberty of conscience, peaceful relations with Indigenous peoples, and the rule of law would hold one another up. He called it holy because he believed those four things were what obedience to Christ looked like once written into law.

It was never fully realized, and it still marked Pennsylvania and the American political development that followed.

So let me commend him to you as I commended Fox and Margaret Fell, as a brother worth knowing. Not because he got everything right. He did not, and he wrote an amendment procedure into his own constitution because he knew he would not. I commend him because he set down what he believed while he belonged to a people with no power to enforce anything, and then, when he was handed a province and could have done as he pleased, he opened his own book and tried to govern by it.

That is rarer than success. And it is still worth studying.