William Penn and the charter of privlidges Research Paper

William Penn and the charter of privlidges - Research Paper Example The move toward democracy which is found in this document and in its own antecedent frameworks -- including the important initial document known as the First Frame, which had been drawn up by Penn while he was still in England and preparing to move his group of colonists under the royal charter -- came to be a critical influence in the building of a political foundation eventually leading to the establishment of the new nation. In this brief paper, the development of the Charter of Privileges and its outlines for self-government will be reviewed in order to discuss in detail the influence that the document held for later events in the founding of the nation. A chronological approach will be taken to studying the Charter, with comments on the political and social contexts of the document and the times. First, it will be shown how the document known as First Frame led to the Charter of Privileges and following this, a discussion of the content of the Charter itself will be offered to s how how it led to the concept of democratic self-government. Penn was a member of the religious group known as the Quakers. This group held to a series of strong religious and ideological beliefs that often brought them into conflict with the political and religious authorities in England. They were convinced that their forms of religious worship, which revolved around a pacifist, silent meditation on the nature of God and man, were correct, and they were unwilling to bend to the dictates of either the English government or the their more aggressively zealous religious rivals, the Puritans. Because of the societal and religious strife that occurred in England during the civil wars of the mid-1600s, they eventually came to be persecuted for their beliefs, often being harassed to the point of being locked up (Powell, n.d.). Penn’s father had made a sizeable loan to the king before his death, and in an attempt to find a way to move his people out of England, to somewhere that th ey could practice their religion freely and openly, Penn called in the loan. He was granted a charter to establish the Pennsylvania colony and given the proprietary rule of the colony to govern as he saw fit, provided that the laws he established fell under the general legal purview of the English constitutional monarchy (Powell, n.d.). In line with both his religious convictions and his own beliefs regarding the need for self-government Penn decided that he would establish a government that moved much further toward democracy than anything that was evident in England at the time. He drew up the First Frame as a governing document to accomplish his objectives. The First Frame begins with a description of why law is needed among men. It argues that God established men as his deputies to rule the word and gave them the skills and intelligence that they needed in order to rule justly. However, it points out that a lust for power and other â€Å"transgressions† had led men to be disobedient to God’s law and therefore a need was evident for judicial administration. Such administration required the need for rules that would govern men, as well as a governor to administer the rules (Penn, 1682). But the question then arose: How should one design the government? Should rule by monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy be preferred? Penn answered with the following: I choose to solve the controversy with this small distinction, and it belongs to all three: Any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or