The Frame of the Government...

The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsylvania was written by the Quaker William Penn in 1682.

Granting of land

In 1681, King Charles II of England granted Penn a large tract of land on the west bank of the Delaware River. Charles named Pennsylvania in honour of Penn’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn, and the grant repaid money the admiral had lent the Crown during the English Civil War period (1642 – 1651).

Penn, a member of the Society of Friends, envisioned Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other persecuted groups. He argued for religious toleration on both pragmatic and moral grounds, believing that a harmonious society, unhampered by intolerance, would be prosperous as well.

First governor of Pennsylvania

In 1682, before leaving England to become the first governor of Pennsylvania, Penn drafted The Frame of the Government of Pennsylvania, which served as the colony’s first constitution.

He sought to create a political framework that would frustrate corruption and prevent any ruler from assuming absolute authority to the detriment of the community. To guard against absolutism, Penn employed the concept of balancing powers, an approach that later influenced the framers of the United States Constitution in their separation of authority between branches of government.

Most importantly for Penn, freedom of worship was to be absolute.

To ensure that The Frame of the Government of Pennsylvania could evolve with changing circumstances, Penn included an amending clause. This was the first such provision in any written constitution and later informed amendment processes in American constitutional practice.

The Charter of Privileges

The Frame of the Government of Pennsylvania underwent three major revisions in 1683, 1696 and 1701. The final revision, issued in 1701, became known as The Charter of Privileges and remained in force until the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Penn signed the Charter of Privileges for the Province of Pennsylvania and its Territories before sailing back to England. The document expressed his vision of a new political settlement in the Atlantic world: a distinctive form of representative government in the New World.

Historians have argued that the Charter of Privileges helped lay foundations for American traditions of civil liberty. Its provisions included separation of church and state, representative self-government, and freedom of religious conscience.

In 1751, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Penn’s Charter of Privileges, the Liberty Bell was commissioned for the town hall and rung in celebration.

Influence of Magna Carta

The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsylvania, together with its accompanying ‘Laws Agreed upon in England’, incorporated several provisions drawn from Magna Carta.

These included the injunction that ‘All courts shall be open, and justice shall neither be sold, denied nor delayed’ (Law V); that court proceedings should ‘be understood, and justice speedily administered’ (Law VII); and that ‘all fines shall be moderate’ (Law XVIII).

The first of these closely echoed clause 40 of Magna Carta (‘To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice’), while Law XVIII reflected clause 20, which required that penalties be proportionate to the offence committed.

This marked the first occasion on which an American colony explicitly incorporated elements of Magna Carta into its founding constitutional framework.

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