The following proposal was a Finalist for the Roy W. Dean New Zealand Writer's Fellowship
Grant Proposal sample
Project name: “Divine Experimentation: The Story of William Penn”
Producers: Jessica Lakis Mullan
Grant requested: 2007
Introduction and Request:
“Divine Experimentation: The Story of William Penn,” tells the story of a vision made reality. Overlooked by history, William Penn, English aristocrat, Quaker, and founder of the colony of Pennsylvania, became the first man to set forth as law religious toleration as the inherent right of mankind.
William Penn and his wife Hanna have been lost in the shadows of figures such as Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. But without their tireless work in defense of the freedoms that William Penn established in Philadelphia, his “Holy Experiment,” this city would never have become the birthplace of the fight for the ideals of Toleration and Independence, a fight that continues throughout the world to this day.
We are requesting the six-week New Zealand writer’s grant in order to expand upon and further research an already existing project in order to expand its scope to focus more on the character of Penn and his wife, and the wider implications of their actions beyond the formation of the Pennsylvania colony, and demonstrate their proper place in the historical development of the ideal of freedom for all humankind.
Background:
The roots of this project reach back five years ago. Co-producer Michael Mullan has been involved in historical preservation societies in Philadelphia since the age of eleven, specifically the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War and the Grand Army of the Republic Museum and Library. While some of the members of these organizations are professors of history, most average Philadelphians dedicated to preserving their city’s historical legacy. But through them, he was asked to film the re-dedication of the desecrated grave of a fallen Philadelphian Civil War hero, Captain Thomas Elliot, upon whose death, was laid in state in Independence Hall for three days. His grave marker in historic Laurel Hill Cemetery was replaced by the SUVCW and GAR members, and marked by a ceremony including the playing of taps and a gun salute. As the Veterans of Foreign Wars does not cover the preservation of any grave pre-World War I, it falls to the Sons and other similar organizations to not only preserve and honor Philadelphia’s war-time past, but other decaying remnants of our shared past.
We realized that there must be hundreds of such pieces of “hidden history” in Philadelphia. And so the idea was born to create a series for local Public Broadcasting Affiliate WHYY that would bring light to the thousands of stories, landmarks, and people of Philadelphia beyond the common mythology of the events of 1776. Originally titled “The Philadelphia Archives,” We set to work seeking historians, professional and amateur, to interview, collect photographs and reproductions from the City Archives, and footage for the telling of this story.
As our self-financed work and support gradually gained momentum, one of our historians suggested that the real story of Philadelphia lay in its founding. Research led us to the story of William Penn.
“Divine Experimentation” – Development of an Idea
The original script for “Divine Experimentation” was simply to be Episode One of the series. We followed the thesis that to understand what Penn established in Philadelphia is to understand why the city allowed for the free-flow of ideas that came to fruition in The United States’s founding documents.
But the story of the William Penn and his “Holy Experiment” soon took on a life of its own. Our first draft for the one hour episode ran the length of a full-length feature. Thinking that maybe it was a case of “killing our darlings,” we attempted revision after revision, but a new story was emerging, breaking out of the confines we had set upon it. This story and its message deserved not only deeper treatment, but a wider audience.
Proposal:
Our research on Penn brought us to the question of why he did what he did. What we found was a story within a story. The background is of a time of great social upheaval and war, and the tale of how one man turned the brutal lessons of his time into a vision for an ideal society that would be free of the roots of the devastation into which he was born. William Penn would carry his vision across an ocean and establish it in reality, and he and his wife would risk the rest of their lives, fortune, and even personal freedom in their fight to preserve an ideal that the United States and the world still struggles to achieve today.
The background is the story of England’s brutal Civil Wars that decimated every corner of the British Isles during the mid-seventeenth century, killed the King, made England a Republic, and finally ended with the Restoration of the Monarchy. Our readings of Parliamentary documents and the statements of King Charles I make clear three causes of the war. The rise of a literate Middle Class with vested interest in their government, which led their representatives in Parliament to demand greater powers. This is the first modern instance where such a body had begun to take up the mantle of “representatives of the people.” Charles I, crowned in 1626, was of Scottish background and more closely allied with Scotland’s European allies such as the eternal enemies of England, the French. He based His actions on the common European idea of the “Divine Right of Kings” that insisted that a king, ordained by God, was to act as a father to his people who were his children. Unfortunately for Charles this flew in the face of the long-held English belief in rule by law, known variously as the Common Law or the “Immemorial Constitution.” And with an increasingly politically aware populace, these ideas began to take on near-religious significance. Charles was seen as a tyrant. The second cause, linked to the first, was taxation. Charles routinely dismissed Parliaments when they would not vote Him the money He desired, and would then proceed to extract His taxes from the people through increasingly menacing means. Finally, in response to the spread of varying Calvinist sects, commonly termed Puritans, the King initiated a draconian system of religious conformity with infractions such as unorthodox preaching punishable by removal of the tongue. To many of the Calvinist sects, these actions were not only tyrannical but “Papist,” Catholic. To the English, to be Catholic meant to be a slave, as the situation in Europe demonstrated by the oppression of the people and the arbitrary use of power by Catholic monarchs, and were feared and hated by the English. And with the Catholic wife of Charles allowed to practice her faith openly, Charles came to be seen as worse than a tyrant, but a puppet of the Pope, determined to bring England and Her Church under the gilded fist of Rome.
Politics, religion, and money combined in a explosive mixture that was touched off by the complete inflexibility, the complete intolerance, of either side. It was into this environment that William Penn was born. His father William the Elder, had risen to prominence in the Royal Navy of Charles I. But when the tide of the war turned against the King, he became admiral for Parliament, gaining lands and wealth along the way. After the beheading of the King, Admiral Penn sailed for Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, but the savvy Admiral must have known that the chaotic new Republic would die with the battle-scarred Cromwell. And so, Admiral Penn disappeared from history for two years. He reappeared in 1660, after the death of Cromwell to escort Charles’ son, Charles II, back from exile in Holland to claim his crown. Rewards were heaped upon the Admiral, including a title and lands throughout the isles. He determined that his son would reap the benefits of his new aristocratic stature. Young William was educated at Oxford and Paris, and apparently cut a dashing figure in the Restoration Court. William Penn had the world before him, a place in Court, possibly politics, and a life of leisure tending his lands and hunting to look forward to. Then he was sent to Ireland to put down an uprising near his father’s lands. And although he seems to have distinguished himself in the battle, the event changed young Penn forever. William returned to England not only changed, but a convert—to the outlawed sect of the Society of Friends, or Quakers.
Facing his Father’s wrath, he became the first articulate voice of social stature for the Quakers, who were mainly made up of the left0vers of the losing side of the Civil Wars, ex-Parliamentary soldiers, war widows, and uprooted peasants, and were not the gentle people we think of today. These were angry people, and determined to bring down the decadence of Restoration England. Their ideas were a direct assault upon the hierarchy of England’s social structure. In their refusal to accept the social structure, Quakers would refuse to bow to “superiors” or use titles such as “sir,” instead calling all people “friend.” Women were outspoken advocates and teachers and treated with an equality unheard of in their time. However, at the core of their beliefs was the idea that God dwelt within each person, and so there was no need for churches, alters, and bishops. In a land where The Church was The State, their refusal to attend worship and pay their tithe was not only illegal, but treasonous.
William’s fervent conversion led him to street preaching and prolific pamphleteering, acquainting him with London’s many jails, including the Tower. The dashing young gentleman was now an outlaw. But, never the less, upon his Father’s death, he became a man of property, and seems to have been something of a pet curiosity to the out-going Charles II. But it seems that, to William, the most interesting piece of his inheritance lie in the debt owed by the King to the Admiral for raising the fleet that returned to Him the throne. Seeing an easy way to rid the country of the Quakers and a debt, Charles II granted Penn the land that would become Pennsylvania in 1681.
Penn the zealot transformed again into Penn the Utopian. Obsessed with the idea that his colony was to be a herald of the new Millennium of God’s reign upon the world, he chose the name of his capital city from the book of Revelations. The passage he chose declares that the ancient city of Philadelphia shall be spared the Apocalypse because it’s people had done God’s will, and that it will be the site of the “New Jerusalem,” the seat of God’s Kingdom on Earth.
And so, without ever seeing the land the was to be the site of his “godly city,” he set about its planning. Physically, it was to be unlike any other city in the world, new or old. It was to be open, not garrisoned. This is significant. All other colonial towns were gated or protected in some fashion because of constant warring with the native Americans. Penn, as a Quaker and pacifist, intended to deal with the native Lenape tribes with fairness and a policy of friendship. Penn laid out the city with broad avenues on a simple grid system between the two rivers of the Schuylkill and Delaware, to prevent pestilence, overcrowding, and devastating fires such as the recent plague epidemic and Great Fire of London. He also had land set aside for common parks, and a large central square where he intended a great Quaker meeting hall to be erected.
But the truly revolutionary aspect of his “Holy Experiment,” lay in his original “Frame of Government.” In it he declares that the end of government is to promote “human felicity,” happiness. “Any government is free to the people under it where the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.” To this end he decided upon a large, nearly Athenian style legislature that was to make laws to inhibit evil, and cherish and uplift goodness. But there were two main caveats, absolute freedom of conscience for all and the establishment of public schools for all boys and girls, so that they may grow up to be good citizens and participate in their own government.
Penn first set foot on site of where he would make his dream reality with the first settlers of Pennsylvania in 1682. But he was not destined to remain there long. Politics in England were changing, and Parliament wanted to bring the colony under their rule, subjecting the colony to the very laws Penn had deemed unjust. Forced to leave his beloved city of Philadelphia, he would not return for nearly ten years. Penn used all of his money and property in the fight to preserve the independence and freedoms he had set forth in his colony. Meanwhile, his devoted wife Hanna remained to see to the administration of the colony. Upon Penn’s return, much had changed. Under his policies of openness and toleration, the city had exploded with colonists: Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, persecuted English Catholics, Welsh, free blacks, German Mennonites, and Jews. The city had also become a haven for persecuted people from Puritan New England and the slave-holding South, making it the most diverse city in the New World.
But perhaps the aristocrat in Penn had never fully understood the implications of what he had created. Instead of settlement taking place evenly between the two rivers of the Delaware and the Schuylkill Rivers, he found a crowded port had established itself along the Delaware. And the Athenian-style assembly he established angry, impracticable, and dominated by wealthy Quaker merchants. And so, before leaving Philadelphia for the final time, he drafted a new “Charter of Privileges,” in 1701. Penn died in England a decade later after a stay in debtors’ prison, just two years before Benjamin Franklin would make his legendary debut on Market street with his pockets stuffed with rolls—symbolically ushering in a new era in the city’s growth. After his death, Hanna became the first female governor of an American colony and administered the business of state for twenty more years. Unfortunately, two of his sons would renounce the idealistic Quakerism that had ruined their father’s fortunes and taken up most of his life’s work. They would return to England, rebuild their family holdings, and living as English gentlemen, use the colony for their own personal profit and support for their aristocratic lifestyle.
Aristocrat, religious zealot, Utopian visionary, failed businessman—William Penn was many things over the course of his life. And although the chaos and industry of the free and democratic system he established may have ruffled his gentile feathers, there is no escaping the ramifications of his life’s work, his “Holy Experiment.” Years before The Enlightenment, through his dedication to a revolutionary vision, he established and fought for the security of what would become the living model for a new nation. In this time where intolerance, tyranny, and hatred tears not only at the fabric of our own supposed American ideal, but dominates the lives of human beings all over our world, it is time for the story of this strange and extraordinary man raised amidst tyranny and the devastation of war, a man of peace, a man of patience, a man of tolerance, to be told.
Producers: Jessica Lakis Mullan
Grant requested: 2007
Introduction and Request:
“Divine Experimentation: The Story of William Penn,” tells the story of a vision made reality. Overlooked by history, William Penn, English aristocrat, Quaker, and founder of the colony of Pennsylvania, became the first man to set forth as law religious toleration as the inherent right of mankind.
William Penn and his wife Hanna have been lost in the shadows of figures such as Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. But without their tireless work in defense of the freedoms that William Penn established in Philadelphia, his “Holy Experiment,” this city would never have become the birthplace of the fight for the ideals of Toleration and Independence, a fight that continues throughout the world to this day.
We are requesting the six-week New Zealand writer’s grant in order to expand upon and further research an already existing project in order to expand its scope to focus more on the character of Penn and his wife, and the wider implications of their actions beyond the formation of the Pennsylvania colony, and demonstrate their proper place in the historical development of the ideal of freedom for all humankind.
Background:
The roots of this project reach back five years ago. Co-producer Michael Mullan has been involved in historical preservation societies in Philadelphia since the age of eleven, specifically the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War and the Grand Army of the Republic Museum and Library. While some of the members of these organizations are professors of history, most average Philadelphians dedicated to preserving their city’s historical legacy. But through them, he was asked to film the re-dedication of the desecrated grave of a fallen Philadelphian Civil War hero, Captain Thomas Elliot, upon whose death, was laid in state in Independence Hall for three days. His grave marker in historic Laurel Hill Cemetery was replaced by the SUVCW and GAR members, and marked by a ceremony including the playing of taps and a gun salute. As the Veterans of Foreign Wars does not cover the preservation of any grave pre-World War I, it falls to the Sons and other similar organizations to not only preserve and honor Philadelphia’s war-time past, but other decaying remnants of our shared past.
We realized that there must be hundreds of such pieces of “hidden history” in Philadelphia. And so the idea was born to create a series for local Public Broadcasting Affiliate WHYY that would bring light to the thousands of stories, landmarks, and people of Philadelphia beyond the common mythology of the events of 1776. Originally titled “The Philadelphia Archives,” We set to work seeking historians, professional and amateur, to interview, collect photographs and reproductions from the City Archives, and footage for the telling of this story.
As our self-financed work and support gradually gained momentum, one of our historians suggested that the real story of Philadelphia lay in its founding. Research led us to the story of William Penn.
“Divine Experimentation” – Development of an Idea
The original script for “Divine Experimentation” was simply to be Episode One of the series. We followed the thesis that to understand what Penn established in Philadelphia is to understand why the city allowed for the free-flow of ideas that came to fruition in The United States’s founding documents.
But the story of the William Penn and his “Holy Experiment” soon took on a life of its own. Our first draft for the one hour episode ran the length of a full-length feature. Thinking that maybe it was a case of “killing our darlings,” we attempted revision after revision, but a new story was emerging, breaking out of the confines we had set upon it. This story and its message deserved not only deeper treatment, but a wider audience.
Proposal:
Our research on Penn brought us to the question of why he did what he did. What we found was a story within a story. The background is of a time of great social upheaval and war, and the tale of how one man turned the brutal lessons of his time into a vision for an ideal society that would be free of the roots of the devastation into which he was born. William Penn would carry his vision across an ocean and establish it in reality, and he and his wife would risk the rest of their lives, fortune, and even personal freedom in their fight to preserve an ideal that the United States and the world still struggles to achieve today.
The background is the story of England’s brutal Civil Wars that decimated every corner of the British Isles during the mid-seventeenth century, killed the King, made England a Republic, and finally ended with the Restoration of the Monarchy. Our readings of Parliamentary documents and the statements of King Charles I make clear three causes of the war. The rise of a literate Middle Class with vested interest in their government, which led their representatives in Parliament to demand greater powers. This is the first modern instance where such a body had begun to take up the mantle of “representatives of the people.” Charles I, crowned in 1626, was of Scottish background and more closely allied with Scotland’s European allies such as the eternal enemies of England, the French. He based His actions on the common European idea of the “Divine Right of Kings” that insisted that a king, ordained by God, was to act as a father to his people who were his children. Unfortunately for Charles this flew in the face of the long-held English belief in rule by law, known variously as the Common Law or the “Immemorial Constitution.” And with an increasingly politically aware populace, these ideas began to take on near-religious significance. Charles was seen as a tyrant. The second cause, linked to the first, was taxation. Charles routinely dismissed Parliaments when they would not vote Him the money He desired, and would then proceed to extract His taxes from the people through increasingly menacing means. Finally, in response to the spread of varying Calvinist sects, commonly termed Puritans, the King initiated a draconian system of religious conformity with infractions such as unorthodox preaching punishable by removal of the tongue. To many of the Calvinist sects, these actions were not only tyrannical but “Papist,” Catholic. To the English, to be Catholic meant to be a slave, as the situation in Europe demonstrated by the oppression of the people and the arbitrary use of power by Catholic monarchs, and were feared and hated by the English. And with the Catholic wife of Charles allowed to practice her faith openly, Charles came to be seen as worse than a tyrant, but a puppet of the Pope, determined to bring England and Her Church under the gilded fist of Rome.
Politics, religion, and money combined in a explosive mixture that was touched off by the complete inflexibility, the complete intolerance, of either side. It was into this environment that William Penn was born. His father William the Elder, had risen to prominence in the Royal Navy of Charles I. But when the tide of the war turned against the King, he became admiral for Parliament, gaining lands and wealth along the way. After the beheading of the King, Admiral Penn sailed for Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, but the savvy Admiral must have known that the chaotic new Republic would die with the battle-scarred Cromwell. And so, Admiral Penn disappeared from history for two years. He reappeared in 1660, after the death of Cromwell to escort Charles’ son, Charles II, back from exile in Holland to claim his crown. Rewards were heaped upon the Admiral, including a title and lands throughout the isles. He determined that his son would reap the benefits of his new aristocratic stature. Young William was educated at Oxford and Paris, and apparently cut a dashing figure in the Restoration Court. William Penn had the world before him, a place in Court, possibly politics, and a life of leisure tending his lands and hunting to look forward to. Then he was sent to Ireland to put down an uprising near his father’s lands. And although he seems to have distinguished himself in the battle, the event changed young Penn forever. William returned to England not only changed, but a convert—to the outlawed sect of the Society of Friends, or Quakers.
Facing his Father’s wrath, he became the first articulate voice of social stature for the Quakers, who were mainly made up of the left0vers of the losing side of the Civil Wars, ex-Parliamentary soldiers, war widows, and uprooted peasants, and were not the gentle people we think of today. These were angry people, and determined to bring down the decadence of Restoration England. Their ideas were a direct assault upon the hierarchy of England’s social structure. In their refusal to accept the social structure, Quakers would refuse to bow to “superiors” or use titles such as “sir,” instead calling all people “friend.” Women were outspoken advocates and teachers and treated with an equality unheard of in their time. However, at the core of their beliefs was the idea that God dwelt within each person, and so there was no need for churches, alters, and bishops. In a land where The Church was The State, their refusal to attend worship and pay their tithe was not only illegal, but treasonous.
William’s fervent conversion led him to street preaching and prolific pamphleteering, acquainting him with London’s many jails, including the Tower. The dashing young gentleman was now an outlaw. But, never the less, upon his Father’s death, he became a man of property, and seems to have been something of a pet curiosity to the out-going Charles II. But it seems that, to William, the most interesting piece of his inheritance lie in the debt owed by the King to the Admiral for raising the fleet that returned to Him the throne. Seeing an easy way to rid the country of the Quakers and a debt, Charles II granted Penn the land that would become Pennsylvania in 1681.
Penn the zealot transformed again into Penn the Utopian. Obsessed with the idea that his colony was to be a herald of the new Millennium of God’s reign upon the world, he chose the name of his capital city from the book of Revelations. The passage he chose declares that the ancient city of Philadelphia shall be spared the Apocalypse because it’s people had done God’s will, and that it will be the site of the “New Jerusalem,” the seat of God’s Kingdom on Earth.
And so, without ever seeing the land the was to be the site of his “godly city,” he set about its planning. Physically, it was to be unlike any other city in the world, new or old. It was to be open, not garrisoned. This is significant. All other colonial towns were gated or protected in some fashion because of constant warring with the native Americans. Penn, as a Quaker and pacifist, intended to deal with the native Lenape tribes with fairness and a policy of friendship. Penn laid out the city with broad avenues on a simple grid system between the two rivers of the Schuylkill and Delaware, to prevent pestilence, overcrowding, and devastating fires such as the recent plague epidemic and Great Fire of London. He also had land set aside for common parks, and a large central square where he intended a great Quaker meeting hall to be erected.
But the truly revolutionary aspect of his “Holy Experiment,” lay in his original “Frame of Government.” In it he declares that the end of government is to promote “human felicity,” happiness. “Any government is free to the people under it where the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.” To this end he decided upon a large, nearly Athenian style legislature that was to make laws to inhibit evil, and cherish and uplift goodness. But there were two main caveats, absolute freedom of conscience for all and the establishment of public schools for all boys and girls, so that they may grow up to be good citizens and participate in their own government.
Penn first set foot on site of where he would make his dream reality with the first settlers of Pennsylvania in 1682. But he was not destined to remain there long. Politics in England were changing, and Parliament wanted to bring the colony under their rule, subjecting the colony to the very laws Penn had deemed unjust. Forced to leave his beloved city of Philadelphia, he would not return for nearly ten years. Penn used all of his money and property in the fight to preserve the independence and freedoms he had set forth in his colony. Meanwhile, his devoted wife Hanna remained to see to the administration of the colony. Upon Penn’s return, much had changed. Under his policies of openness and toleration, the city had exploded with colonists: Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, persecuted English Catholics, Welsh, free blacks, German Mennonites, and Jews. The city had also become a haven for persecuted people from Puritan New England and the slave-holding South, making it the most diverse city in the New World.
But perhaps the aristocrat in Penn had never fully understood the implications of what he had created. Instead of settlement taking place evenly between the two rivers of the Delaware and the Schuylkill Rivers, he found a crowded port had established itself along the Delaware. And the Athenian-style assembly he established angry, impracticable, and dominated by wealthy Quaker merchants. And so, before leaving Philadelphia for the final time, he drafted a new “Charter of Privileges,” in 1701. Penn died in England a decade later after a stay in debtors’ prison, just two years before Benjamin Franklin would make his legendary debut on Market street with his pockets stuffed with rolls—symbolically ushering in a new era in the city’s growth. After his death, Hanna became the first female governor of an American colony and administered the business of state for twenty more years. Unfortunately, two of his sons would renounce the idealistic Quakerism that had ruined their father’s fortunes and taken up most of his life’s work. They would return to England, rebuild their family holdings, and living as English gentlemen, use the colony for their own personal profit and support for their aristocratic lifestyle.
Aristocrat, religious zealot, Utopian visionary, failed businessman—William Penn was many things over the course of his life. And although the chaos and industry of the free and democratic system he established may have ruffled his gentile feathers, there is no escaping the ramifications of his life’s work, his “Holy Experiment.” Years before The Enlightenment, through his dedication to a revolutionary vision, he established and fought for the security of what would become the living model for a new nation. In this time where intolerance, tyranny, and hatred tears not only at the fabric of our own supposed American ideal, but dominates the lives of human beings all over our world, it is time for the story of this strange and extraordinary man raised amidst tyranny and the devastation of war, a man of peace, a man of patience, a man of tolerance, to be told.