American Heroes (21 page)

In taking up a strange religious belief, Penn seemed to many of his contemporaries to be himself committing a kind of sacrilege against the divine right embedded in the social order: gentlemen ought not to depart from the religion established by law and thus set a bad example for lesser folk. When his Quakerism got him in trouble again on a visit to Ireland in 1670, an Irish friend, Lord O'Brien, thought it sheer stubbornness for Penn to persevere in so strange a religious belief when it would have been perfectly easy for him to stick to the standard Anglican one. Penn, he said, was rejecting “not what you cant but what you wont believe,…it is certainly possible for you to believe our faith, for it is reasonable.” Nevertheless, Lord O'Brien and Penn's other noble friends in Ireland were clear that queer and stubborn religious beliefs were not sufficient in themselves to deprive a gentleman of his rank. His friends intervened for him against the mayor of Cork, because as one of them said, wrong religious opinions “certainly cannot make any man degenerate from being a Gentleman who was borne so.”

Penn's priorities differed from his friends'. If religion and social position were at odds, religion had to prevail. But Penn saw no good reason why they should be at odds. Although he thought religion demanded of gentlemen a standard of virtue that few attained or even attempted, it did not follow that a man's religious beliefs, whether strict or loose, should affect his place or power in society. That his friends should pull rank to help one of their own kind was perfectly proper, and he in turn used his own rank and influence to help himself and his Quaker friends in their encounters with authority.

Penn's knowledge of the law, gained during his brief period of studies at Lincoln's Inn, may have been superficial, but he had learned enough to be a troublesome defendant. When brought before the courts, he assumed not merely the defiant stance of the self-righteous but also the assurance of the cultivated gentleman in dealing with officials whom he evidently regarded as not quite his equals either socially or intellectually. When arrested for preaching at a Quaker meeting in 1670, he lectured the judges on the law and taunted them into statements that left the jury totally committed to him. He demanded to know what law he had broken, and when he was told it was the common law, he asked what that was, as if he didn't know. There then followed this exchange:

This evoked an apoplectic response and more exchanges, in which Penn seemed to be interrogating the court instead of vice versa. When the judge told him, “If I should suffer you to ask Questions till to Morrow-Morning, you would be never the wiser,” Penn could not resist the opening thus given him, and replied that whether he was wiser or not would depend on the answers he got.

The jury, in spite of browbeating by the bench, refused to convict this Quaker who talked back to his judges with such aplomb. A few months later the constables caught Penn preaching again and hailed him before the court, this time for violating the so-called five-mile act, which required no jury trial. Even without a jury to play up to, Penn maintained his posture of superiority and contempt. Asked at the outset of the hearing if his name was Penn, he answered, “Dost thou not know me? Hast thou forgotten me?” to which the judge replied, “I don't know you, I don't desire to know such as you are.”

After he had reduced the court to fury with a number of diatribes, the judges called for a corporal with musketeers to escort him to Newgate Prison, to which Penn gave his final sneer: “No, no send thy Lacky, I know the Way to Newgate.”

Although he served his terms in Newgate and the Tower of London, as other gentlemen had done before, Penn was able to retain or recover the place at the king's court that his father had won for him, and he was able to do it without sacrificing his religious convictions. In 1681 he got the king to give him Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers, presumably in payment of a debt owed his father. After the Duke of York came to the throne as James II in 1685, Penn enjoyed even greater opportunities for influence, and he took them. His father, on his deathbed, had adjured the duke to help young Penn out of the difficulties that his religion would surely get him into, and the duke honored the request as king. From 1685 until revolution ousted James from the throne in 1688, Penn was in daily and effective attendance at Whitehall, pulling strings for better treatment of Quakers and of other religious dissenters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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