In 1681 Charles II granted William Penn a charter for an American province. In 1682 Penn arrived. The colony took the name Pennsylvania. For the people called Quakers, this was not another hiding-place at the edge of English law. It was the first large civil order in which Friends themselves framed the government, and in which liberty of conscience was the point of the experiment rather than a concession wrung from a hostile church.
England was still under the statutes that had been written to crush dissent. The Quaker Act, the Conventicle Act, the Test Act, and the rest still made a Friends meeting a crime. Some 13,500 Friends would be imprisoned in the British Isles before 1689. Penn had written No Cross, No Crown in the Tower of London in 1668. He had stood trial with William Mead in 1670. He knew what English law did to a people who would not swear, would not pay tithe, and would not shut the meeting-house door.
The charter of 1681 gave him room to try the opposite. Pennsylvania was to be a place where Friends, and other dissenters, could live without the magistrate breaking in on First-day. That is the fact this page will stand on. Penn’s own later books — A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers (1694) and Some Fruits of Solitude (1693 and 1702) — are the writings. The colony is the civil work that sits beside them.
Why it belongs in Quaker history
The English story of the Friends is a story of endurance until the Act of Toleration of 24 May 1689. The American story begins seven years earlier, when a Friend held a province. Meeting-houses in Pennsylvania did not have to wait on William and Mary’s statute. The Society that had been a prosecuted sect in England became, in one colony, the people who wrote the frame of government.
That did not make Pennsylvania a Quaker church-state. Penn meant liberty of conscience for more than his own communion — the same argument he had been making in England, now with land and a charter behind it. Nor did it end Friends’ disabilities in Britain. The 1689 Act still had to come, and even then it left them outside office, the universities, and Parliament.
What it did was prove, in public, that the people who would not swear and would not fight could nevertheless govern. English opponents had treated that as an absurdity. Pennsylvania made it a fact on the map.
The founder and the books
Penn’s last years in England were hard — money, politics, health. He died in 1718. The colony remained. So did the three books this site actually holds. The founder of Pennsylvania is the same man who wrote from the Tower and from solitude.
Search for the colony and search for the Friend should land in one place, and then go on to the writings.
- William Penn — who he was, who founded Pennsylvania, the three editions.
- The Act of Toleration — what 1689 did, and did not do, for Friends in England.
- Persecution and prison writings — the laws Pennsylvania was founded against.