Moderation, Toleration, and Revolution: William Penn’s Perswasive in Context

• In Event: Revisiting Moderation in Polarized Times

Abstract

This paper explores an important episode in the history of both toleration and moderation, by undertaking two tasks: 1) explicating the relationship between moderation and liberty of conscience in William Penn’s 1685 A Perswasive to Moderation, which Penn published in support of King James II’s ill-fated attempt to implement toleration in England by royal decree (efforts that ended with the king’s ejection in 1688); and 2) placing Penn’s Perswasive in the context not only his own public career as theorist of liberty of conscience and colonial founder, but of a broader debate over political and religious affairs and, indeed, over the meaning of moderation itself. Penn’s high-profile intervention in the political debates of his time drew on a broader rhetoric of moderation in late seventeenth-century England, one that aimed to stigmatize Anglican elites as extremists who would deny liberty to others in order to maintain their positions of privilege and power in society. His political alliance with James II pushed him to the center of a controversial political campaign championed by a controversial monarch, who sought liberty of conscience for both Protestants and Catholics, and ultimately proved the catalyst for his spectacular fall from grace after 1688.

In the Perswasive, Penn directly links toleration and moderation ("MODERATION...is in plainer English, Liberty of Conscience to Church Dissenters"). I situate this text not only in Penn's career and the run-up to the 1688 Revolution, but also as speaking to a broader discourse during the 1680s, one that tied moderation as a virtue to toleration as a political practice/goal [(to name just a few examples: A Plea for Moderation (1681); Moderation stated (1682); Moderation a virtue (1683); The trimmer, or the life and death of moderation (1684)]. Yet though he ardently championed liberty of conscience, Penn combined his pleas with a clear sense of the limits of such toleration. The bulk of A Perswasive addresses two main criticisms of toleration: 1) its political impact (the claim by antitolerationists that granting liberty of conscience endangers the state); and 2) its religious implications (the claim that toleration abandons erroneous individuals to their errors and perpetuates disunion). He also included an extensive list of historical personages (from biblical figures, to ancient and modern statesmen, to English monarchs and churchmen) who had endorsed a policy of moderation and benefitted from it; or, conversely, who had pursued extremist policies and suffered unfavorable consequences

The rhetorical linkage of moderation and toleration that Penn articulated in his Perswasive both reflected broader currents in the polemical literature at the time and showed how consensus on such broadly endorsed notions like moderation could continue to elude a deeply divided society, masking the tensions and conflicts that would lead to regime change just a few short years later.

Author

• Andrew R. Murphy, Virginia Commonwealth University