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The Riverside Biographical Series
ANDREW JACKSON, by W. G. BROWN
JAMES B. EADS, by LOUIS HOW
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by PAUL E. MORE
PETER COOPER, by R. W. RAYMOND
THOMAS JEFFERSON, by H. C. MERWIN
WILLIAM PENN, by GEORGE HODGES
GENERAL GRANT. (_In preparation_)
LEWIS AND CLARK, by WILLIAM R. LIGHTON. (_In preparation_)
Each about 100 pages, 16mo, with photogravure portrait, 75 cents;
_School Edition_, 50 cents, _net_
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
The Riverside Biographical Series
NUMBER 6
WILLIAM PENN
BY
GEORGE HODGES
[Illustration:]
WILLIAM PENN
BY
GEORGE HODGES
[Illustration]
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Boston: 4 Park Street; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
Chicago: 378-388 Wabash Avenue
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY GEORGE HODGES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. A PURITAN BOYHOOD: WANSTEAD CHURCH AND CHIGWELL SCHOOL 1
II. AT OXFORD: INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE 8
III. IN FRANCE AND IRELAND: THE WORLD AND THE OTHER WORLD 22
IV. PENN BECOMES A QUAKER: PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 33
V. THE BEGINNING OF PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE: THE HOLY
EXPERIMENT 53
VI. THE SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA: PENN'S FIRST VISIT TO THE
PROVINCE 68
VII. AT THE COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND, AND "IN RETIREMENT" 93
VIII. PENN'S SECOND VISIT TO THE PROVINCE: CLOSING YEARS 113
WILLIAM PENN
I
A PURITAN BOYHOOD: WANSTEAD CHURCH AND CHIGWELL SCHOOL
The mother of William Penn came from Rotterdam, in Holland. She was the
daughter of John Jasper, a merchant of that city. The lively Mr. Pepys,
who met her in 1664, when William was twenty years of age, describes her
as a "fat, short, old Dutchwoman," and says that she was "mighty
homely." He records a tattling neighbor's gossip that she was not a good
housekeeper. He credits her, however, with having more wit and
discretion than her husband, and liked her better as his acquaintance
with her progressed. That she was of a cheerful disposition is evidenced
by many passages of Pepys's Diary. That is all we know about her.
William's father was an ambitious, successful, and important person. He
was twenty-two years old, and already a captain in the navy, when he
married Margaret Jasper. The year after his marriage he was made
rear-admiral of Ireland; two years after that, admiral of the Straits;
in four years more, vice-admiral of England; and the next year, a
"general of the sea" in the Dutch war. This was in Cromwell's time, when
the naval strength of England was being mightily increased. A young man
of energy and ability, acquainted with the sea, was easily in the line
of promotion.
The family was ancient and respectable. Penn's father, however, began
life with little money or education, and few social advantages. Lord
Clarendon observed of him that he "had a great mind to appear better
bred, and to speak like a gentleman," implying that he found some
difficulty in so doing. Clarendon said, also, that he "had many good
words which he used at adventure."
The Penns lived on Tower Hill, in the Parish of St. Catherine's, in a
court adjoining London Wall. There they resided in "two chambers, one
above another," and fared frugally. There William was born on the 14th
of October, 1644.
Marston Moor was fought in that year, and all England was taking sides
in the contention between the Parliament and the king. The navy was in
sympathy with the Parliament; and the young officer, though his personal
inclinations were towards the king, went with his associates. But in
1654 he appears to have lost faith in the Commonwealth. Cromwell sent an
expedition to seize the Spanish West Indies. He put Penn in charge of
the fleet, and made Venables general of the army. The two commanders,
without conference one with the other, sent secret word to Charles II.,
then in exile on the Continent, and offered him their ships and
soldiers. This transaction, though it seemed for the moment to be of
none effect, resulted years afterward in the erection of the Colony of
Pennsylvania. Charles declined the offer; "he wished them to reserve
their affections for his Majesty till a more proper season to discover
them;" but he never forgot it. It was the beginning of a friendship
between the House of Stuart and the family of Penn, which William Penn
inherited.
The expedition captured Jamaica, and made it a British colony; but in
its other undertakings it failed miserably; and the admiral, on his
return, was dismissed from the navy and committed to the Tower.
About that same time, the admiral's young son, being then in the twelfth
year of his age, beheld a vision. His mother had removed with him to the
village of Wanstead, in Essex. Here, as he was alone in his chamber, "he
was suddenly surprised with an inward comfort, and, as he thought, an
external glory in his room, which gave rise to religious emotions,
during which he had the strongest conviction of the being of a God, and
that the soul of man was capable of enjoying communication with him. He
believed, also, that the seal of Divinity had been put upon him at this
moment, or that he had been awakened or called upon to a holy life."
While William Penn the elder had been going from promotion to promotion,
sailing the high seas, and fighting battles with the enemies of England,
William Penn the younger had been living with all possible quietness in
the green country, saying his prayers in Wanstead Church, and learning
his lessons in Chigwell School.
Wanstead Church was devotedly Puritan. The chief citizens had signed a
protest against any "Popish innovations," and had agreed to punish every
offender against "the true reformed Protestant religion."
The founder of Chigwell School had prescribed in his deed of gift that
the master should be "a good Poet, of a sound religion, neither Papal
nor Puritan; of a good behaviour; of a sober and honest conversation; no
tippler nor haunter of alehouses, no puffer of tobacco; and, above all,
apt to teach and severe in his government." Here William studied Lilly's
Latin and Cleonard's Greek Grammar, together with "cyphering and
casting-up accounts," being a good scholar, we may guess, in the
classics, but encountering the master's "severe government" in his sums.
Chigwell was as Puritan a place as Wanstead. About the time of William's
going thither, the vicar had been ejected on petition from the
parishioners, who complained that he had an altar before which he bowed
and cringed, and which he had been known to kiss "twice in one day."
It is plain that religion made up a large, interesting, and important
part of life in these villages in which William Penn was getting his
first impressions of the world. All about were great forests, whose
shadows invited him to seclusion and meditation. All the news was of
great battles, most of them fought in a religious cause, which even a
lad could appreciate, and towards which he would readily take an
attitude of stout partisanship. The boy was deeply affected by these
surroundings. "I was bred a Protestant," he said long afterwards, "and
that strictly, too." Trained as he was in Puritan habits of
introspection, he listened for the voice of God, and heard it. Thus the
tone of his life was set. There were moments in his youth when "the
world," as the phrase is, attracted him; there were times in his great
career when he seemed, and perhaps was, disobedient to this heavenly
vision; but, looking back from the end of his life to this beginning,
"as a tale that is told," it is seen to be lived throughout in the light
of the glory which shone in his room at Wanstead. William Penn from that
hour was a markedly religious man. Thereafter, nothing was so manifest
or eminent about him as his religion.
II
AT OXFORD: INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE
On the 22d of April, 1661, we get another glimpse of William.
Mr Pepys, having risen early on the morning of that day, and put on his
velvet coat, and made himself, as he says, as fine as he could, repaired
to Mr. Young's, the flag-maker, in Cornhill, to view the procession
wherein the king should ride through London. There he found "Sir W. Pen
and his son, with several others." "We had a good room to ourselves," he
says, "with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well." The streets
were new graveled, and the fronts of the houses hung with carpets, with
ladies looking out of all the windows; and "so glorious was the show
with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at
last being so overcome."
This was a glory very different from that which the lad had seen, five
or six years before, in his room. The world was here presenting its
attractions in competition with the "other world" of the earlier vision.
The contrast is a symbol of the contention between the two ideals, into
which William was immediately to enter.
The king and the Duke of York had looked up as they passed the
flag-maker's, and had recognized the admiral. He had gone to Ireland,
upon his release from the Tower, and had there resided in retirement
upon an estate which his father had owned before him. Thence returning,
as the Restoration became more and more a probability, he had secured a
seat in Parliament, and had been a bearer of the welcome message which
had finally brought Charles from his exile in Holland to his throne in
England. For his part in this pleasant errand, he had been knighted and
made Commissioner of Admiralty and Governor of Kinsale. Thus his
ambitions were being happily attained. He had retrieved and improved his
fortunes, and had become an associate with persons of rank and a
favorite with royalty.
He had immediately sent his son to Oxford. William had been entered as a
gentleman-commoner of Christ Church, at the beginning of the Michaelmas
term of 1660. It was clearly the paternal intention that the boy should
become a successful man of the world and courtier, like his father.
Sir William, however, had not reflected that while he had been pursuing
his career of calculating ambition and seeking the pleasure of princes,
his son had been living amongst Puritans in a Puritan neighborhood.
Young Penn went up to Oxford to find all things in confusion. The
Puritans had been put out of their places, and the Churchmen were
entering in. It is likely that this, of itself, displeased the new
student, whose sympathies were with the dispossessed. The Churchmen,
moreover, brought their cavalier habits with them. In the reaction from
the severity which they had just escaped, they did many objectionable
things, not only for the pleasure of doing them, but for the added joy
of shocking their Puritan neighbors. They amused themselves freely on
the Lord's day; they patronized games and plays; and they tippled and
"puffed tobacco," and swore and swaggered in all the newest fashions.
William was the son of his father in appreciation of pleasant and
abundant living. But he was not of a disposition to enter into this
wanton and audacious merry-making,--a gentle, serious country lad, with
a Puritan conscience.
Moreover, at this moment, in the face of any possible temptation,
William's sober tastes and devout resolutions were strengthened by
certain appealing sermons. Here it was at Oxford, the nursery of
enthusiasms and holy causes, that he received the impulse which
determined all his after life. He spent but a scant two years in
college; and the work of the lecture rooms must have suffered seriously
during that time from the contention and confusion of the changes then
in progress; so that academically the college could not have greatly
profited him. The profit came in the influence of Thomas Loe. Loe was a
Quaker.
The origin of the name "Quaker" is uncertain. It is derived by some
from the fact that the early preachers of the sect trembled as they
spoke; others deduce it from the trembling which their speech compelled
in those who heard it. By either derivation, it indicates the earnest
spirit of that strange people who, in the seventeenth century, were
annoying and displeasing all their neighbors.
George Fox, the first Quaker, was a cobbler; and the first Quaker dress
was the leather coat and breeches which he made for himself with his own
tools. Thereafter he was independent both of fashions and of tailors.
Cobbler though he was, and so slenderly educated that he did not express
himself grammatically, Fox was nevertheless a prophet, according to the
order of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa. He looked out into the England of
his day with the keenest eyes of any man of the times, and remarked upon
what he saw with the most honest and candid speech. A man of the plain
people, like most of the prophets and apostles, the offenses which
chiefly attracted his attention were such as the plain people naturally
see.
Out of the windows of his cobbler's shop, Fox beheld with righteous
indignation the extravagant and insincere courtesies of the gentlefolk,
and heard their exaggerated phrases of compliment. In protest against
the unmeaning courtesies, he wore his hat in the presence of no matter
whom, taking it off only in time of prayer. In protest against the
unmeaning compliments, he addressed no man by any artificial title,
calling all his neighbors, without distinction of persons, by their
Christian names; and for the plural pronoun "you," the plural of dignity
and flattery, he substituted "thee" and "thou."
The same literalness appeared in his selection of "Swear not at all" as
one of the cardinal commandments, and in his application of it to the
oaths of the court and of the state. The Sermon on the Mount has in all
ages been considered difficult to enact in common life, but it would
have been hard to find any sentence in it which in the days of Fox and
Penn, with their interpretation, would have brought upon a conscientious
person a heavier burden of inconvenience. Not only did it make the
Quakers guilty of contempt of court and thus initially at fault in all
legal business, but it exposed them to a natural suspicion of disloyalty
to the government. It was a time of political change, first the
Commonwealth, then Charles, then James, then William; and every change
signified the supremacy of a new idea in religion, Puritan, Anglican,
Roman Catholic, and Protestant. Every new ruler demanded a new oath of
allegiance; and as plots and conspiracies were multiplied, the oath was
required again and again; so that England was like an unruly school,
whose master is continually calling upon the pupils to declare whether
or no they are guilty of this or that offense. The Quakers were
forbidden by their doctrine of the oath to make answer in the form which
the state required. And they suffered for this scruple as men have
suffered for the maintenance of eternal principles.
To the social eccentricity of the irremoveable hat and the singular
pronoun, and to the civil eccentricity of the refused oath, George Fox
and his disciples added a series of protests against the most venerable
customs of Christianity. They did away with all the forms and ceremonies
of Churchman and of Puritan alike. Not even baptism, not even the Lord's
Supper remained. Their service was a silent meeting, whose solemn
stillness was broken, if at all, by the voice of one who was sensibly
"moved" by the Spirit of God. They discarded all orders of the ministry.
They refused alike all creeds and all confessions.
Not content with thus abandoning most that their contemporaries valued
among the institutions of religion, the Quakers made themselves
obtrusively obnoxious. They argued and exhorted, in season and out of
season; they printed endless pages of eager and violent controversy;
they went into churches and interrupted services and sermons.
Amongst these various denials there were two positive assertions. One
was the doctrine of the return to primitive Christianity; the other was
the doctrine of the inward light. Let us get back, they said, to those
blessed centuries when the teaching of the Apostles was remembered, and
the fellowship of the Apostles was faithfully kept,--when Justin Martyr
and Irenæus and Ignatius and the other holy fathers lived. And let us
listen to the inner voice; let us live in the illumination of the light
which lighteth every man, and attend to the counsels of that Holy Spirit
whose ministrations did not cease with the departure of the last
Apostle. God, they believed, spoke to them directly, and told them what
to do.
George Fox, in 1656, had brought this teaching to Oxford; and among the
company of Quakers which had thus been gathered under the eaves of the
university, Thomas Loe had become a "public Friend," or, as would
commonly be said, a minister. When William Penn entered Christ Church
College, Loe was probably in the town jail. It is at least certain that
he was imprisoned there, with forty other Quakers, sometime in 1660.
To Loe's preaching many of the students listened with attention. It is
easy to see how his doctrines would appeal to young manhood. The fact
that they were forbidden would attract some, and that the man who
preached thus had suffered for his faith would attract others. Their
emphasis upon entire sincerity and consistency in word and deed would
commend them to honest souls, while the exaltation of the inward light
would move then, as in all ages, the idealists, the poets, the
enthusiasts among them. William Penn knew what the inward light was. He
had seen it shining so that it filled all the room where he was sitting.
Accordingly, he not only went to hear Loe speak but was profoundly
impressed by what he heard.
If Penn was naturally a religious person,--by inheritance, perhaps, from
his mother,--he was also naturally of a political mind, by inheritance
from his father. What Loe said touched both sides of this inheritance.
For the Quakers had already begun to dream of a colony across the sea.
The Churchmen had such a colony in Virginia; the Puritans had one in
Massachusetts; somewhere else in that untilled continent there must be a
place for those who in England could expect no peace from either
Puritan or Churchman. Not only had they planned to have sometime a
country of their own, but they had already located it. They had chosen
the lands which lay behind the Jerseys. While Loe was preaching and Penn
was listening, Fox was writing to Josiah Cole, a Quaker who was then in
America, asking him to confer with the chiefs of the Susquehanna
Indians. This plan Loe revealed to his student congregation. It appealed
to Penn. He had an instinctive appreciation of large ideas, and an
imagination and confidence which made him eager to undertake their
execution. It was in his blood. It was the spirit which had carried his
father from a lieutenancy in the navy to the position of an honored and
influential member of the court. "I had an opening of joy as to these
parts," he says, meaning Pennsylvania, "in 1661, at Oxford."
This meeting with Loe was therefore a crisis in Penn's life. William
Penn will always be remembered as a leader among the early Quakers, and
as the founder of a commonwealth. He first became acquainted with the
Quakers, and first conceived the idea of founding at Oxford, or
assisting to found, a commonwealth, by the preaching of Thomas Loe.
It is a curious fact that the spirit of protest will often pass by
serious offenses and fasten upon some apparently slight occasion which
has rather a symbolical than an actual importance. William Penn, so far
as we know, endured the disorders of anti-Puritan Oxford without
protest. He entered so far into the life of the place as to contribute,
with other students, to a series of Latin elegies upon the death of the
Duke of Gloucester; and he "delighted," Anthony Wood tells us, "in manly
sports at times of recreation." It is true that he may have written to
his father to take him away, for Mr. Pepys records in his journal, under
date of Jan. 25, 1662, "Sir W. Pen came to me, and did break a business
to me about removing his son from Oxford to Cambridge, to some private
college." But nothing came of it. William is said, indeed, to have
absented himself rather often from the college prayers, and to have
joined with other students whom the Quaker preaching had affected in
holding prayer-meetings in their own rooms. But all went fairly well
until an order was issued requiring the students, according to the
ancient custom, to wear surplices in chapel. Then the young Puritan
arose, and assisted in a ritual rebellion. He and his friends "fell upon
those students who appeared in surplices, and he and they together tore
them everywhere over their heads." Not content with thus seizing and
rending the obnoxious vestments, they proceeded further to thrust the
white gowns into the nearest cesspool, into whose depths they poked them
with long sticks.
This incident ended William's course at college. It is doubtful whether
he was expelled or only suspended. He was dismissed, and never returned.
Eight years after, chancing to pass through Oxford, and learning that
Quaker students were still subjected to the rigors of academic
discipline, he wrote a letter to the vice-chancellor. It probably
expresses the sentiments with which as an undergraduate he had regarded
the university authorities: "Shall the multiplied oppressions which thou
continuest to heap upon innocent English people for their religion pass
unregarded by the Eternal God? Dost thou think to escape his fierce
wrath and dreadful vengeance for thy ungodly and illegal persecution of
his poor children? I tell thee, no. Better were it for thee thou hadst
never been born." And so on, in the controversial dialect of the time,
calling the vice-chancellor a "poor mushroom," and abusing him
generally. Elsewhere, in a retrospect which I shall presently quote at
length, he refers to his university experiences: "Of my persecution at
Oxford, and how the Lord sustained me in the midst of that hellish
darkness and debauchery; of my being banished the college."
III
IN FRANCE AND IRELAND: THE WORLD AND THE OTHER WORLD
In his retrospect of his early life, Penn notes what immediately
followed his departure from the university: "The bitter usage I
underwent when I returned to my father,--whipping, beating, and turning
out of doors in 1662."
The admiral was thoroughly angry. He was at best but imperfectly
acquainted with his son, of whom in his busy life he had seen but
little, and was therefore unprepared for such extraordinary conduct. He
was by no means a religious person. For the spiritual, or even the
ecclesiastical, aspects of the matter, he cared nothing. But he had, as
Clarendon perceived, a strong desire to be well thought of by those who
composed the good society of the day. He expected the members of his
family to deport themselves as befitted such society. And here was
William, whom he had carefully sent to a college where he would
naturally consort with the sons of titled families, taking up with a
religious movement which would bring him into the company of cobblers
and tinkers. It is said, indeed, that Robert Spencer, afterwards Earl of
Sunderland, helped William destroy the surplices. But this is denied;
and even if it were true, it would be plain, from Spencer's after
career, that he did it not for the principle, but for the fun of the
thing. William was in the most sober earnest. Accordingly, the admiral
turned his son out of doors.
The boy came back, of course. Beating and turning out of doors were not
such serious events in the seventeenth century as they would be at
present. Most men said more, and in louder voices, and meant less. It
was but a brief quarrel, and father and son made it up as best they
could. It was plain, however, that something must be done. Whipping
would not avail. William's head was full of queer notions, upon which a
stick had no effect. His father bethought himself of the pleasant
diversions of France. The lad, he said, has lived in the country all his
days, and has had no acquaintance with the merry world; he shall go
abroad, that he may see life, and learn to behave like a gentleman; let
us see if this will not cure him of his pious follies.
Accordingly, to France the young man went, and traveled in company with
certain persons of rank. He stayed more than a year, and enjoyed himself
greatly. He was at the age when all the world is new and interesting;
and being of attractive appearance and high spirits, with plenty of
money, the world gave him a cordial welcome. So far did he venture into
the customs of the country, that he had a fight one night in a Paris
street with somebody who crossed swords with him, and disarmed his
antagonist. He had a right, according to the rules, to kill him, but he
declined to do so. When he came home, he pleased his father much by his
graceful behavior and elegant attire. "This day," says Mr. Pepys in his
diary for August 26, 1664, "my wife tells me that Mr. Pen, Sir William's
son, is come back from France, and came to visit her. A most modish
person grown, she says, a fine gentleman." Pepys thinks that he is even
a bit too French in his manner and conversation.
"I remember your honour very well," writes a correspondent years after,
"when you came newly out of France, and wore pantaloon breeches."
This journey affected Penn all the rest of his life. It restrained him
from following the absurder singularities of his associates. George
Fox's leather suit he would have found impossible. He wore his hat in
the Quaker way, and said "thee" and "thou," but otherwise he appears to
have dressed and acted according to the conventions of polite society.
He did, indeed, become a Quaker; but there were always Quakers who
looked askance at him because he was so different from them, able to
speak French and acquainted with the manners of drawing-rooms.
In two respects, however, his visit to France differed from that of some
of his companions in travel. There were places to which they went
without him; and there were places to which he went without them. He
kept himself from the grosser temptations of the country. "You have been
as bad as other folks," said Sir John Robinson when Penn was on trial
for preaching in the street.
"When," cried Penn, "and where? I charge thee tell the company to my
face."
"Abroad," said Robinson, "and at home, too."
"I make this bold challenge," answered Penn, "to all men, women and
children upon earth, justly to accuse me with ever having seen me drunk,
heard me swear, utter a curse, or speak one obscene word (much less that
I ever made it my practice). I speak this to God's glory, that has ever
preserved me from the power of those pollutions, and that from a child
begot an hatred in me towards them."
He went away alone for some months to the Protestant college of Saumur,
where he devoted himself to a study of that primitive Christianity in
which, as Loe had told him, was to be found the true ideal of the
Christian Church. Here he acquired an acquaintance with the writings of
the early Fathers, from whom he liked to quote.
Thus he returned to England in 1664, attired in French pantaloon
breeches, and with little French affectations in his manner, but without
vices, and with a smattering of patristic learning. He was sent by his
father to study law at Lincoln's Inn. He was to be a courtier, and in
that position it would be both becoming and convenient to have some
knowledge of the law. Thus he settled down among the lawyers, and it
seemed for the moment as if his father had succeeded in his purpose. It
seemed as if the world had effectually obscured the other world.
There are two letters, written about this time from William to his
father, which show a pleasant mixture of piety with a lively interest in
the life about him. He has been at sea for a few days with the admiral,
and returns with dispatches to the king. "I bless God," he writes, "my
heart does not in any way fail, but firmly believe that if God has
called you out to battle, he will cover your head in that smoky day." He
hastened on his errand, he says, to Whitehall, and arrived before the
king was up; but his Majesty, learning that there was news, "earnestly
skipping out of bed, came only in his gown and slippers; who, when he
saw me, said, 'Oh! is't you? How is Sir William?'"
That was in May. Within a week the plague came. On the 7th of June,
1665, Mr. Pepys makes this ominous entry: "This day," he says, "much
against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with
a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord, have mercy,' written there; which
was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my
remembrance, I ever saw." Day by day the pestilence increased, and
presently there was no more studying at Lincoln's Inn. Young Penn went
for safety into the clean country. There, among the green fields, in the
enforced leisure, with time to think, and the most sobering things to
think about, his old seriousness returned. The change was so marked that
his father, feeling that it were well to renew the pleasant friendship
with the world which had begun in France, sent him over to Ireland.
At Dublin, the Duke of Ormond, the Lord Lieutenant, was keeping a merry
court. William entered heartily into its pleasures. He resided upon his
father's estates, at Shannagarry Castle. He so distinguished himself in
the suppression of a mutiny that Ormond offered him a commission in the
army, and William was disposed to accept it. He had his portrait
painted, clad in steel, with lace at his throat. His dark hair is parted
in the middle, and hangs in cavalier fashion over his shoulders. He
looks out of large, clear, questioning eyes; and his handsome face is
strong and serious.
But the young cavalier went one day to Cork upon some business, and
there heard that Thomas Loe was in town, and that he was to preach. Penn
went to hear him, and again the spoken word was critical and decisive.
"There is a faith," said the preacher, "which overcomes the world, and
there is a faith which is overcome by the world." Such was the theme,
and it seemed to Penn as if every word were spoken out of heaven
straight to his own soul. In the long contention which had been going on
within him between the world and the other world, the world had been
getting the mastery. The attractions of a martial life had shone more
brightly than the light which had flamed about him in his boyhood. Then
Loe spoke, and thenceforth there was no more perplexity. Penn's choice
was definitely made.
In his account of his travels in Holland and Germany, written some ten
years after this crisis, Penn recurs to it in an address from which I
have already quoted. He was speaking in Wiemart, at a meeting in the
mansion-house of the Somerdykes, and was illustrating his exhortations
from his own experience. He passed in rapid review the incidents of his
early life which we have recounted. "Here I began to let them know," he
says, "how and where the Lord first appeared unto me, which was about
the twelfth year of my age, in 1656; how at times, betwixt that and the
fifteenth, the Lord visited me, and the divine impressions he gave me of
himself." Then the banishment from Oxford, and his father's turning him
out of doors. "Of the Lord's dealings with me in France, and in the time
of the great plague in London, in fine, the deep sense he gave me of the
vanity of this world, of the deep irreligiousness of the religions of
it; then of my mournful and bitter cries to him that he would show me
his own way of life and salvation, and my resolution to follow him,
whatever reproaches or sufferings should attend me, and that with great
reverence and tenderness of spirit; how, after all this, the glory of
the world overtook me, and I was even ready to give myself up unto it,
seeing as yet no such thing as the 'primitive spirit and church' upon
earth, and being ready to faint concerning my 'hope of the restitution
of all things.' It was at this time that the Lord visited me with a
certain sound and testimony of his eternal word, through one of them the
world calls Quakers, namely, Thomas Loe."
Struggling, as Penn was, against continual temptations to abandon his
high ideal, getting no help from his parents, who were displeased at
him, nor from the clergy, whose "invectiveness and cruelty" he
remembers, nor from his companions, who made themselves strange to him;
bearing meanwhile "that great cross of resisting and watching against
mine own inward vain affections and thoughts," the only voice of help
and strength was that of Thomas Loe. Seeking for the "primitive spirit
and church upon earth," he found it in the sect which Loe represented.
His mind was now resolved. He, too, would be a Quaker.
IV
PENN BECOMES A QUAKER: PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY
William now began to attend Quaker meetings, though he was still dressed
in the gay fashions which he had learned in France. His sincerity was
soon tested. A proclamation made against Fifth Monarchy men was so
enforced as to affect Quakers. A meeting at which Penn was present was
broken in upon by constables, backed with soldiers, who "rudely and
arbitrarily" required every man's appearance before the mayor. Among
others, they "violently haled" Penn. From jail he wrote to the Earl of
Orrery, Lord President of Munster, making a stout protest. It was his
first public utterance. "Diversities of faith and conduct," he argued,
"contribute not to the disturbance of any place, where moral conformity
is barely requisite to preserve the peace." He reminded his lordship
that he himself had not long since "concluded no way so effectual to
improve or advantage this country as to dispense with freedom [i. e. to
act freely] in all things pertaining to conscience."
Penn wrote so much during his long life that his selected works make
five large volumes. Many of these pages are devoted to the statement of
Quaker theology; some are occupied with descriptions of his colonial
possessions; some are given to counsels and conclusions drawn from
experience and dealing with human life in general; but there is one idea
which continually recurs,--sometimes made the subject of a thesis,
sometimes entering by the way,--and that is the popular right of liberty
of conscience. It was for this that he worked, and chiefly lived, most
of his life. Here it is set forth with all clearness in the first public
word which he wrote.
William's letter opened the jail doors. It is likely, however, that the
signature was more influential than the epistle; for his Quaker
associates seem not to have come out with him. The fact which probably
weighed most with the Lord President was that Penn was the son of his
father the admiral, and the protégé of Ormond. His father called him
home. It was on the 3d of September that William was arrested; on the
29th of December, being the Lord's day, Mrs. Turner calls upon Mr. and
Mrs. Pepys for an evening of cheerful conversation, "and there, among
other talk, she tells me that Mr. William Pen, who has lately come over
from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing; that he
cares for no company, nor comes into any."
Admiral Penn was sorely disappointed. Neither France nor Ireland had
availed to wean his son from his religious eccentricities. Into the
pleasant society where his father had hoped to see him shine, he
declined to enter. He said "thee" and "thou," and wore his hat.
Especially upon these points of manners, the young man and his father
held long discussions. The admiral insisted that William should refrain
from making himself socially ridiculous; though even here he was
willing to make a reasonable compromise. "You may 'thee' and 'thou' whom
you please," he said, "except the king, the Duke of York, and myself."
But the young convert declined to make any exceptions.
Thereupon, for the second time, the admiral thrust his son out of the
house. The Quakers received him. He was thenceforth accounted among them
as a teacher, a leader: in their phrase, a "public Friend." This was in
1668, when he was twenty-four years old.
The work of a Quaker minister, at that time, was made interesting and
difficult not only by the social and ecclesiastical prejudices against
which he must go, but by certain laws which limited free speech and free
action. The young preacher speedily made himself obnoxious to both these
kinds of laws. Of the three years which followed, he spent more than a
third of the time in prison, being once confined for saying, and twice
for doing, what the laws forbade.
The religious world was filled with controversy. There were discussions
in the meeting-houses; and a constant stream of pamphlets came from the
press, part argument and part abuse. Even mild-mannered men called each
other names. The Quakers found it necessary to join in this rough
give-and-take, and Penn entered at once into this vigorous exercise. He
began a long series of like documents with a tract entitled "Truth
Exalted." The intent of it was to show that Roman Catholics, Churchmen,
and Puritans alike were all shamefully in error, wandering in the
blackness of darkness, given over to idle superstition, and being of a
character to correspond with their fond beliefs; meanwhile, the Quakers
were the only people then resident in Christendom whose creed was
absolutely true and their lives consistent with it.
"Come," he says, "answer me first, you Papists, where did the Scriptures
enjoin baby-baptism, churching of women, marrying by priests, holy water
to frighten the devil? Come now, you that are called Protestants, and
first those who are called Episcopalians, where do the Scriptures own
such persecutors, false prophets, tithemongers, deniers of revelations,
opposers of perfection, men-pleasers, time-servers, unprofitable
teachers?" The Separatists are similarly cudgeled: they are "groveling
in beggarly elements, imitations, and shadows of heavenly things."
Presently, a Presbyterian minister named Vincent attacked Quakerism.
Joseph Besse, Penn's earliest biographer, says that Vincent was
"transported with fiery zeal;" which, as he remarks in parenthesis, is
"a thing fertile of ill language." Penn challenged him to a public
debate; and, this not giving the Quaker champion an opportunity to say
all that was in his mind, he wrote a pamphlet, called "The Sandy
Foundation Shaken." The full title was much longer than this, in the
manner of the time, and announced the author's purpose to refute three
"generally believed and applauded doctrines: first, of one God,
subsisting in three distinct and separate persons; second, of the
impossibility of divine pardon without the making of a complete
satisfaction; and third, of the justification of impure persons by an
imputed righteousness."
Penn's handling of the doctrine of the Trinity in this treatise gave
much offense. He had taken the position of his fellow-religionists, that
the learning of the schools was a hindrance to religion. He sought to
divest the great statements of the creed from the subtleties of mediæval
philosophy. He purposed to return to the Scripture itself, back of all
councils and formulas. Asserting, accordingly, the being and unity of
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, he so refused all the conventional phrases
of the theologians as to seem to them to reject the doctrine of the
Trinity itself. He did deny "the trinity of distinct and separate
persons in the unity of essence." If the word "person" has one meaning,
Penn was right; if it has another meaning, he was wrong. If a "person"
is an individual, then the assertion is that there are three Gods; but
if the word signifies a distinction in the divine nature, then the unity
of God remains. As so often happens in doctrinal contention, he and his
critics used the same words with different definitions. The consequence
was that the bishop of London had him put in prison. He was restrained
for seven months in the Tower.
The English prison of the seventeenth century was a place of disease of
body and misery of mind. Penn was kept in close confinement, and the
bishop sent him word that he must either recant or die a prisoner. "I
told him," says Penn, "that the Tower was the worst argument in the
world to convince me; for whoever was in the wrong, those who used force
for religion could never be in the right." He declared that his prison
should be his grave before he would budge a jot. Thus six months passed.
But the situation was intolerable. It is sometimes necessary to die for
a difference of opinion, but it is not advisable to do so for a simple
misunderstanding. Penn and the bishop were actually in accord. The young
author therefore wrote an explanation of his book, entitled "Innocency
with her Open Face." At the same time he addressed a letter to Lord
Arlington, principal secretary of state. In the letter he maintained
that he had "subverted no faith, obedience or good life," and he
insisted on the natural right of liberty of conscience: "To conceit," he
said, "that men must form their faith of things proper to another world
by the prescriptions of mortal men, or else they can have no right to
eat, drink, sleep, walk, trade, or be at liberty and live in this, to me
seems both ridiculous and dangerous." These writings gained him his
liberty. The Duke of York made intercession for him with the king.
Penn had occupied himself while in prison with the composition of a
considerable work, called "No Cross, No Crown." It is partly
controversial, setting forth the reasons for the Quaker faith and
practice, and partly devotional, exalting self-sacrifice, and urging men
to simpler and more spiritual living. Thus the months of his
imprisonment had been of value both to him and to the religious movement
with which he had identified himself. The Quakers, when Penn joined
them, had no adequate literary expression of their thought. They were
most of them intensely earnest but uneducated persons, who spoke great
truths somewhat incoherently. Penn gave Quaker theology a systematic and
dignified statement.
When he came out of the Tower, he went home to his father. The admiral
had now recovered from his first indignation. William was still, he
said, a cross to him, but he had made up his mind to endure it. Indeed,
the world into which he had desired his son to enter was not at that
moment treating the admiral well. He was suffering impeachment and the
gout at the same time. He saw that William's religion was giving him a
serenity in the midst of evil fortune which he himself did not possess.
He could appreciate his heroic spirit. He admired him in spite of
himself.
William then spent nearly a year in Ireland, administering his father's
estates. When he returned, in 1670, he found his Quaker brethren in
greater trouble than before. In that perilous season of plots and
rumors of plots, when Protestants lived in dread of Roman Catholics, and
Churchmen knew not at what moment the Puritans might again repeat the
tragedies of the Commonwealth, neither church nor state dared to take
risks. The reigns of Mary and of Cromwell were so recent an experience,
the Papists and the Presbyterians were so many and so hostile, that it
seemed unsafe to permit the assembling of persons concerning whose
intentions there could be any doubt. Any company might undertake a
conspiracy. The result of this feeling on the part of both the civil and
the ecclesiastical authorities was a series of ordinances, reasonable
enough under the circumstances, and perhaps necessary, but which made
life hard for such stout and frank dissenters as the Quakers. At the
time of Penn's return from Ireland, it had been determined to enforce
the Conventicle Act, which prohibited all religious meetings except
those of the Church of England. There was, therefore, a general
arresting of these suspicious friends of Penn's. In the middle of the
summer Penn himself was arrested.
The young preacher had gone to a meeting-house of the Quakers in
Gracechurch or Gracious Street, in London, and had found the door shut,
and a file of soldiers barring the way. The congregation thereupon held
a meeting in the street, keeping their customary silence until some one
should be moved to speak. It was not long before the spirit moved Penn.
He was immediately arrested, and William Mead, a linen draper, with him,
and the two were brought before the mayor. The charge was that they
"unlawfully and tumultuously did assemble and congregate themselves
together to the disturbance of the king's peace and to the great terror
and disturbance of many of his liege people and subjects." They were
committed as rioters and sent to await trial at the sign of the Black
Dog, in Newgate Market.
At the trial Penn entered the court-room wearing his hat. A constable
promptly pulled it off, and was ordered by the judge to replace it in
order that he might fine the Quaker forty marks for keeping it on. Thus
the proceedings appropriately began. William tried in vain to learn the
terms of the law under which he was arrested, maintaining that he was
innocent of any illegal act. Finally, after an absurd and unjust
hearing, the jury, who appreciated the situation, brought in a verdict
of "guilty of speaking in Gracious Street." The judges refused to accept
the verdict, and kept the jury without food or drink for two days,
trying to make them say, "guilty of speaking in Gracious Street to an
unlawful assembly." At last the jury brought in a formal verdict of "not
guilty," which the court was compelled to accept. Thereupon the judges
fined every juryman forty marks for contempt of court; and Penn and the
jurors, refusing to pay their fines, were all imprisoned in Newgate. The
Court of Common Pleas presently reversed the judges' decision and
released the jury. Penn was also released, against his own protest, by
the payment of his fine by his father.
The admiral was in his last sickness. He was weary, he said, of the
world. It had not proved, after all, to be a satisfactory world. He did
not grieve now that his son had renounced it. At the same time, he could
not help but feel that the friendship of the world was a valuable
possession; and he had therefore requested his patron, the Duke of York,
to be his son's friend. Both the duke and the king had promised their
good counsel and protection. Thus "with a gentle and even gale," as it
says on his tombstone, "in much peace, [he] arrived and anchored in his
last and best port, at Wanstead in the county of Essex, the 16th of
September, 1670, being then but forty-nine years and four months old."
The admiral's death left his son with an annual income of about fifteen
hundred pounds. This wealth, however, made no stay in his Quaker zeal.
Before the year was ended, he was again in prison.