Episode Details

In 1670 a London jury was locked up without food, water, or heat and ordered to convict a young Quaker named William Penn. They refused — and the ruling that followed made the independence of juries a foundation stone of the fair trial. Penn knew, in his own body, what arbitrary power felt like: the admiral's son thrown out of Oxford, disowned, jailed in the Tower, where he swore his prison would be his grave before he would surrender his conscience. Eleven years later the King of England, settling a debt to Penn's late father and glad to export a troublesome sect, handed him a piece of America larger than England and told him to govern it as he liked.

Penn called what he built a holy experiment: a government founded on consent rather than command and on conscience rather than conformity, with a constitution declaring that where the law rules and the people are a party to the law, anything more is tyranny. He laid out Philadelphia as a planned green city, opened it to the persecuted of all Europe, and dealt with the Lenape — honestly, by the standards of the century — by buying their land and keeping a peace that held as long as he did. The experiment thrived and broke its maker: fought by his own colonists, ruined by a thieving steward, jailed for debt, dead in England having spent barely four years in the colony that bore his name. It was the built proof of the opposite answer to the question the age kept asking — and it stood alongside the Dominion that was its opposite, in an empire that had not yet decided which one it meant to be.