THE YOUNG QUAKER COURTIER
William Penn had studied at Oxford, had traveled and mixed with gay
people on the Continent, had been entered as a law student at Lincoln's
Inn, had been employed by the Duke of Ormond in Ireland, and now had
decided to throw in his lot with the people of this new religion that
had suddenly sprung up in England and who called themselves by the
simple name of Friends. He stayed in Ireland, looking after his father's
business at Kinsale, still wearing the bright clothes of a cavalier, but
he went regularly to all the meetings of Quakers that were held in Cork.
These meetings were no more popular with the government in Ireland than
in England, and while Penn was attending one on September 3, 1667,
several constables, with a squad of soldiers, appeared at the doors and
arrested everybody on the charge of holding a riotous assembly. There is
a story, perhaps not altogether true, that, as the first soldier entered
the hall to break up the meeting, William Penn seized him by the
collar, and would have thrown him down the stairs had not some older
members interfered and told the young man that such an act would be
inconsistent with the Quaker's love of peace.
Penn, however, was probably not as hot-headed as the story would
indicate; he went with the other Quakers to the mayor, and that
official, seeing that the young man wore cavalier dress, offered to set
him free if he would give bond for his future good behavior. Penn would
not agree to this; instead he argued that the arrest of the Quakers was
altogether unlawful. Thereupon he was sent to prison, and from there he
wrote a remarkably well-worded letter to the Earl of Orrery, the Lord
President of Munster, setting forth the injustice of interfering in such
a way with any people's religion.
The young man of three-and-twenty had stood by his new comrades, and had
written an excellent letter on their behalf, but there was no gainsaying
the fact that he himself was in a rather bad plight. The dashing young
cavalier, son of the courtier Sir William Penn, and a member of the Duke
of Ormond's court at Dublin, had actually been caught in all his fine
clothes at a meeting of the Quakers, and had been marched off to prison
with a troop of his new friends. That was an entertaining bit of
gossip; but as soon as it came to the ears of the Earl of Orrery, that
nobleman, being a friend of Admiral Penn, and anxious to rescue his son
from the company of the Quakers, ordered that William should be released
from prison. Time and again it happened that William Penn, being a
cavalier as well as a Quaker, was gently handled by cavalier officers on
account of his rank and position.
The Admiral had heard of this new "prank," as he chose to call it, of
his son, and had ordered William home. William obeyed willingly enough.
In his famous Diary we find Mr. Pepys, who was no great admirer of
Admiral Penn, writing at this time: "At night comes Mrs. Turner to see
us; and then among other talk she tells me that Mr. William Penn, who is
lately come over from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some very
melancholy thing; that he cares for no company, nor comes into any;
which is a pleasant thing after his being abroad so long and his father
such a hypocritical rogue."
But other surprises were awaiting Admiral Penn. He soon found that
William kept his hat on when talking to him, which, in the Admiral's
opinion, was a mark of great disrespect. He sternly asked William what
he meant by this. William boldly answered that it was a Quaker custom
and that he was a Quaker. The father argued, pleaded, and stormed, and
finally asked if William would not at least take off his hat in the
presence of three persons,--his father, the king, and the Duke of York.
This was a great concession on the part of the Admiral, and shows that
he must at last have waked up to the fact of his son's determination.
But all William would answer was that he would "consider the matter."
This answer made Sir William furious. He thought his son meant to ask
the advice of some of his new friends. The son, however, asked no
advice, but after long thought announced that he could not grant his
father's request.
Then the Admiral, in a great huff, turned William out of the house, and
the latter went to visit various friends, his mother secretly sending
him money from time to time. Finally Lady Penn won her husband's consent
to allowing William to return home; but his father treated William like
a stranger and gave up trying to help a son, who, in his opinion, was
such an ungrateful and stiff-necked fellow.
[Illustration: _Reproduced from Buell's "William Penn," through the
courtesy of D. Appleton and Company._
ADMIRAL SIR WILLIAM PENN, FATHER OF WILLIAM PENN.
From the portrait by Peter Van Dyke.]
The people of the court and town in the England of Charles II. were a
very dissipated and unprincipled set. Most of the fashionable people
were proud of their lack of morals, and the plays, the writings, and
even the speech of the ruling class were coarse and vulgar beyond
belief. William Penn saw all this, and his nature, being on a higher
plane and more serious than that of his father's friends, turned
instinctively to those who were living clean and respectable lives. In
the jumble of new ideas and new religions he found comfort in the
simplest and quietest sect; and now, having publicly declared himself a
Quaker, he asked permission to be one of their preachers.
The Quakers were glad to have a man of William Penn's education and
position join their ranks, and when he was twenty-four, he was accepted
as one of their regular preachers. Several other men of his own type
joined the new sect at about the same time, and these men, having better
judgment than the earliest leaders, began to do away with the rather
extreme preachings of Fox, and taught a simple and easily understood
Christianity. Penn himself kept his cavalier dress, and even continued
for a time to wear his sword, which was a sign of a person of fashion.
He asked the advice of George Fox about keeping his sword, and the
latter, in spite of his extreme views, said, "I advise thee to wear it
as long as thou canst."
The new recruit made himself very useful to the religious party he had
joined. Besides preaching, he wrote a number of tracts, the first of
which he called "Truth Exalted." In this he attacked, according to the
custom of the times, all religious views that differed from his own, and
answered the criticisms of other sects. He was even more useful in
interceding for Quakers who had been put in prison. Having friends at
court, and being still regarded as something of a courtier, he could
appeal to the officers of state better than others of the new sect. His
arguments in favor of setting the Quaker prisoners at liberty were
listened to respectfully by the high officials, but his requests at that
time were not granted.
The young preacher and tract writer soon had his hands full with heated
arguments and stormy disputes. He wrote a pamphlet called "The Guide
Mistaken," and at about the same time two men who belonged to the
congregation of the Presbyterian preacher Thomas Vincent in London
became Quakers. Thomas Vincent was very angry and called Penn unpleasant
names. Thereupon Penn and his friend George Whitehead challenged Vincent
to an open debate in the latter's church. The challenge was accepted.
Penn and Whitehead went to Vincent's church, which was crowded, and as
they pushed their way forward Vincent denounced them in no measured
words. The two Quakers joined in the wordy warfare, and began a heated
religious argument, while the congregation hissed and flung at them such
names as "blasphemers" and "villains." Vincent himself kept
interrupting, and at length, pretending to be shocked at what the two
men were saying, began to pray for them. The people blew out the candles
that lighted the church and tried to eject the two Quakers. The meeting
ended in uproar, as was usually the case in the religious debates of
those days.
Not in the least daunted by the harsh and unkind criticisms that were
showered on him from all sides, Penn wrote more pamphlets, criticizing
the religious views of some of the older sects, and calling many of
their ideas relics of the ignorance and superstition of the Middle Ages.
He was a clear and powerful writer and showed his satisfaction in
stating in black and white the views that had led him to believe that
truth was to be found in the religion of the Quakers rather than in any
other creed. This was doubtless more satisfactory to him than holding
noisy and hot-tempered arguments with opponents on street corners or in
public halls, and won for him the reputation of being the ablest of all
the early Quaker leaders. Samuel Pepys, of the famous Diary, says thus
frankly of Penn's pamphlet, "The Sandy Foundation Shaken," "I find it so
well writ as I think it is too good for him ever to have writ it; and it
is a serious sort of book and not fit for everybody to read." Pepys is
nothing if not outspoken, and his view was doubtless the same as that
held by many fashionable people who knew the twenty-four-year-old author
and considered him a strange, misguided young man.
Although Penn might have been allowed to preach as he pleased in the
fields or market-places, it became quite another matter when he printed
his views and scattered them broadcast throughout England. The Bishop of
London read one of William Penn's pamphlets and decided that the writer
was denying the fact of the divinity of Christ. That had been made a
crime by act of the English Parliament. The young man was arrested and
imprisoned in the Tower of London, and though his cavalier friends tried
to get him out they met with no success, and for some time they were not
allowed even to see him. Some one told him that the Bishop of London had
determined that he must either publicly recant his impious views or
spend the rest of his life in the prison of the Tower. Penn calmly and
boldly wrote: "All is well: I wish they had told me so before, since the
expecting of a release put a stop to some business; thou mayst tell my
father, who I know will ask thee, these words: that my prison shall be
my grave, before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no
mortal man; I have no need to fear; God will make amends for all; they
are mistaken in me; I value not their threats and resolutions, for they
shall know I can weary out their malice and peevishness, and in me shall
they all behold a resolution above fear; conscience above cruelty, and a
baffle put to all their designs by the spirit of patience.... Neither
great nor good things are ever attained without loss and hardships. He
that would reap and not labor, must faint with the wind and perish in
disappointments; but an hair of my head shall not fall without the
Providence of my Father that is over all." Brave words these to be
written by a youth in a cell of the Tower of London with small prospect
of leaving it!
In his gloomy prison William Penn, like Cervantes and Walter Raleigh and
John Bunyan, took to writing a book, one that he called "No Cross, No
Crown." It became the most famous of all his writings. To people who
read it now, when every one may think as he pleases on religious
matters, the ideas in this book are not particularly new or striking;
but Penn's statement that the cross was not meant to be considered as an
outward thing of wood and nails, but as an inward inspiration, and that
religion was the feeling of each individual regarding divine subjects
rather than a matter of words and customs,--all this was startling and
even revolutionary in that far-away time.
Fresh abuse was heaped upon him for his new writings, and he was called
all the bitter names that the enemies of the Quakers could invent.
Meantime he sent a letter to Lord Arlington, the Secretary of State, in
which he asked to be freed from prison because he had had no trial and
had not been allowed to make any defense. "Force," he wisely said, "may
make hypocrites, but it can never make converts." He ended his letter
boldly. "I make no apology for my letter, as a trouble--the usual style
of supplicants; because I think the honor that will accrue to thee by
being just and releasing the opprest exceeds the advantage that can
succeed to me."
The Bishop and the government did not intend to give William Penn a
chance to make a dramatic speech in defense of the Quakers at a trial,
but instead they sent his father and other friends to argue with him.
Their arguments had little effect, and the prisoner resigned himself to
doing without a trial. He did not, however, want the world to think that
he had meant to deny the divinity of Christ, and so he now wrote another
pamphlet to explain his belief.
This pamphlet gave his friends a better chance to work for his release.
Admiral Penn was a great friend of the king's brother, and the latter
finally went to the king and persuaded him to order that William be set
at liberty. So after nine months of imprisonment in the Tower the young
Quaker Cavalier was free again, thanks not so much to the justice of his
appeal for liberty as to his powerful friends at court.
He then began to look about to see how he could be of most service to
the people who were of his own religious faith.