Admiral Sir William Penn, Father of William Penn
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.
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 andunprincipled 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 theablest 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 onreligious 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 arguewith 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.
By this time no one could doubt that William Penn had courage, for it took considerable bravery to face and endure imprisonment in the Tower of London as he had done, and this show of courage won admiration even from his father the Admiral. At this time Sir William was having troubles of his own. The command of his fleet had been taken from him, and he was suffering from the gout; altogether he was not in a very pleasant frame of mind, but he softened sufficiently toward his son to ask him to go again to Ireland to look after the family property there, although the request was made through William's devoted mother, and not directly. When he wrote to his son, he showed that he still rather doubted William's filial regard, for he said, "If you are ordained to be another cross to me, God's will be done, and I shall arm myself as best I can against it."
When William reached Ireland, he found the lot of the Quakers was then no better than it hadbeen before. Their very virtues—for they were generally a hard-working and thrifty people—had set many against them. Indeed, nearly all the Quakers in Cork had been lodged in prison. Even in prison, however, they managed to carry on their affairs; for, said Penn, they turned the jail into "a meetinghouse and a workhouse, for they would not be idle anywhere."
He at once set to work to help these friends of his, and drew up a statement of the charges against the imprisoned Quakers and a defense of them, and with the help of some friends took the matter to the Lord Lieutenant at Dublin, with the result that before long the Quakers in Cork were given their freedom. Encouraged by this success, he made it his business to try to free people of his religion whenever he found them in the grasp of the law.
He managed the family estate in Ireland so well that when he went back to London in 1670, his father decided to forgive his son all the trouble he had put him to, and the courtier father and the Quaker son were completely reconciled. That did not mean, however, that the son had given up any of his opinions. It happened that at about the same time the government decided that the new religion was winning too many converts, and so put intoeffect a law that made unlawful any meetings for religious worship other than those held by the Church of England, by the terms of which law the magistrates were allowed to fine and imprison offenders without giving them a trial by jury; it also allowed to those who gave information about such illegal meetings one third of all the fines that were imposed. Whenever the Quakers held a meeting, therefore, some enemy was sure to give notice of it, and many Friends were imprisoned and more were fined, of course to the advantage of meddling busybodies.
One day in August William went to a Quaker meetinghouse in Gracechurch Street in London, and happened to find soldiers on guard before the building. That roused the young man's spirit, and he with some of his companions decided to hold a "silent meeting" on the sidewalk before the front doors. Presently Penn felt called upon to speak, but no sooner did he open his mouth than the soldiers pounced upon him and marched him off to the mayor.
According to Quaker custom, Penn kept his hat on before the mayor, and this so maddened that official, that he said the prisoner "should have his hat pulled off, for all he was Admiral Penn's son." Then he went on to abuse the Admiral himself,saying that he had starved the sailors of his fleet, and repeating other stories that were popular among the Admiral's enemies. He threatened to send young William to Bridewell Prison, and see that he was soundly whipped! Finally Penn was taken to a certain jail known as the Black Dog, where he was locked up with a number of other Quakers and Baptists and Independents, who had all been holding meetings in despite of the law. From the Black Dog William wrote to his father. "I am very well," said he, "and have no trouble upon my spirits, besides my absence from thee, especially at this juncture, but otherwise I can say, I was never better; and what they have to charge me with is harmless."
Penn and a man named William Mead were put on trial in the Old Bailey early in September, 1670, charged with having preached at an unlawful meeting, thereby causing a great concourse and tumult, to the disturbance of the king's peace and the great terror of many of his subjects. The two prisoners went into court with their hats on, but the officers promptly pulled the hats off. Thereupon the judges ordered the officers to put the hats again on the prisoners' heads, and began to question them about their wearing hats in court. This was regarded as very disrespectful, and could notpass unreproved. Finally the judges fined each man forty marks for such "contempt of court."
The prisoners were not allowed lawyers to defend them, and the judges proceeded to make sport of the two Quakers, as if the trial were a form of bull-baiting. Penn said that he had broken no law, but had only been worshiping God according to his own conscience. He stood up for his rights as an Englishman, and evidently impressed the jury with the justice of his claims, for, in spite of all the efforts of the judges, the jury would only find him "guilty of speaking" in Gracechurch Street, and of no crime whatever. The judges sent the jury out again and again, finally keeping them locked up for two days and nights without beds or food, but the jury were not to be browbeaten. The judges at last had to accept the verdict, "not guilty," but in revenge fined each of the prisoners forty marks and ordered them imprisoned until the fines were paid, and in addition actually fined the jury for bringing in what they considered a mock verdict!
Penn and Mead and the jury were then sent to Newgate, where they simply refused to buy their liberty by paying the unjust fines. From there Penn wrote to his father: "I intreat thee not to purchase my liberty. They will repent them oftheir proceedings. I am now a prisoner notoriously against law." In another letter he wrote: "Considering I cannot be free, but upon such terms as strengthening their arbitrary and base proceedings, I shall rather choose to suffer any hardship.... My present restraint is so far from being humor, that I would rather perish than release myself by so indirect a course as to satiate their revengeful, avaricious appetites."
The question of the right of the judges to fine the jury was finally brought before the Court of Common Pleas, which decided that the fines were unlawful, and ordered the jury set at liberty. Penn and Mead, however, had been fined for wearing their hats in court, and there is no knowing how long they might have been kept in prison if the Admiral, who was ill, had not disregarded his son's letters, and paid the fines of both Penn and Mead, when they were at once set at liberty.
Admiral Penn was very ill, and when his son returned this time from prison, he was so much concerned for the future of a young man who seemed to have such a knack for getting into trouble that he sent a friend to the Duke of York asking that the duke look after William and try to defend him before King Charles should William continue in his course of resistance to the laws. Both theduke and the king sent back their promises of help to the sick Admiral, and both of them kept those promises when William Penn needed friends later on.
As his gout increased the Admiral began to think that perhaps his son William had been right after all, and that the court of King Charles II. was not altogether what it should be. He began to talk almost like a Puritan, and to condemn many of the nobles, once his boon companions, for their loose way of living. Father and son were drawn close together in those last days of the Admiral's illness. Sir William said to his son, "Three things I commend to you:
"First.—Let nothing in this world tempt you to wrong your conscience; so you will keep peace at home, which will be a feast to you in the day of trouble.
"Secondly.—Whatever you design to do, lay it justly and time it seasonably, for that gives security and despatch.
"Lastly.—Be not troubled at disappointments, for if they may be recovered, do it; if they cannot, trouble is vain. If you could not have helped it, be content; there is often peace and profit in submitting to Providence: for afflictions make wise. If you could have helped it, let not your trouble exceed instruction for another time.
"These rules will carry you with firmness and comfort through this inconstant world."
The Admiral died on September 16, 1670, leaving William to look after his mother and his younger brother Richard. His sister Margaret had married Antony Lowther, of Maske, in Yorkshire.
Penn's Crest
Penn's Crest.
Admiral Penn had managed to accumulate a very considerable fortune, and as a result William, the eldest son, became a rich man. His family was a prominent one, he had many influential friends, and now had plenty of money; so it was thought that he would naturally become a cavalier and gentleman of fashion. He soon made it clear, however, that he meant to retain the simple way of living adopted by the Quakers. Friends of his own age made fun of him, saying it was preposterous that a man of his means and abilities should spend his time with such dull people as those of the new religion. Sir John Robinson, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, said to him, "I vow, Mr. Penn, I am sorry for you; you are an ingenious gentleman, all the world must allow you and do allow you that, and you have a plentiful estate. Why should you render yourself unhappy by associating with such a simple people?"
"I confess," frankly answered Penn, "I havemade it my choice to relinquish the company of those that are ingeniously wicked, to converse with those that are more honestly simple."
In those days men challenged each other to arguments over their religions much as they might have challenged each other to a duel. Penn enjoyed defending the Quaker cause in public. A Baptist preacher by the name of Ives denounced Penn and the Quakers in a sermon, and Penn sent him a challenge to argue the question in public.
Ives did not appear at the meeting, but his brother took his place, and, according to the rules of such arguments, had to speak first. When he had finished his argument, he, with some friends, left the hall, hoping to draw so many people away with him that few would be left to listen to his opponent. But the audience stayed to hear Penn, and he spoke so eloquently that he won the house over to his side, and cost Ives the support of many of his followers. The young Quaker was proving as convincing a speaker as he had already shown himself to be a vigorous writer. He was fast becoming a power in the new sect.
He soon found a bigger man than Ives to argue with, for as he traveled through Oxfordshire preaching the Quaker cause he came to the Universityof Oxford, where he had been a student, and learned that the young men there who were interested in Quakerism were treated worse than ever. The Vice Chancellor of Oxford thought that the Quakers might become a dangerous political party, and was doing all in his power to abolish the new religion. Penn wrote him a letter in which, with fiery ardor, he denounced the Vice Chancellor for his persecution of Quaker students, and followed it up with other broadsides of attack on all who held similar views. He was a militant character, and when he argued before a public meeting, or wrote a letter that was to be read by his opponents, he never hesitated to express himself as strongly as he knew how. So in his letter to the Vice Chancellor he gave himself free rein. He wrote: "Shall the multiplied oppressions which thou continuest to heap upon innocent English people for their peaceable religious meetings 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 hadst thou never been born. Poor mushroom, wilt thou war against the Lord, and lift up thyself in battle against the Almighty? Canst thou frustrate his holy purposes, and bring his determination to nought? He has decreed toexalt himself by us, and to propagate his gospel to the ends of the earth." Fine, spirited words are these, worthy of the valiant courage of young William Penn!
Penn returned from Oxfordshire to London, and went one day to a meeting in Wheeler Street. He started to address the meeting, but no sooner had he begun than a sergeant marched in with a file of soldiers, dragged him from the platform, and carried him off to the Tower. That evening an officer and some musketeers marched him from the Tower to Sir John Robinson, the lieutenant, who asked him many questions, trying to make it appear that Penn was a dangerous man, who, unless he were checked, might turn out to be another Cromwell. Sir John, knowing that the Quakers were opposed to all oaths, called on Penn to swear that he would never take up arms against the king, and also to take a solemn oath that he would never try to make any change of government either in church or state. This oath Penn refused to take, saying that the Quakers were opposed to all fighting as well as oath-taking. "If I cannot fight against any man (much less against the king)," said he, "what need I to take an oath not to do it? Should I swear not to do what is already against my conscience to do?"
Sir John and the other judges sneered at him, told him that he was bringing an honorable name to disgrace, and treated his principles with haughty contempt. Finally Sir John said, "But you do nothing but stir up the people to sedition; and one of your friends told me that you preached sedition and meddled with the government."
Penn looked these accusers squarely in the face. "We have the unhappiness to be misrepresented," he answered, "and I am not the least concerned therein. Bring me the man that will dare to justify this accusation to my face, and if I am not able to make it appear that it is both my practice and all my friends' to instill principles of peace and moderation (and only war against spiritual wickedness, that all men may be brought to fear God and work righteousness), I shall contentedly undergo the severest punishment all your laws can expose me to.
"As for the king, I make this offer, that if any living can make it appear, directly or indirectly, from the time I have been called a Quaker (since from thence you date me seditious), I have contrived or acted anything injurious to his person, or the English government, I shall submit my person to your utmost cruelties, and esteem them all but a due recompense. It is hard that I, beinginnocent, should be reputed guilty; but the will of God be done. I accept of bad reports as well as good."
But he could not make Sir John and the other judges believe in his innocence. "You will be the heading of parties and drawing people after you," said Sir John, doggedly, and ordered Penn taken to Newgate, the worst prison in London, where Quakers were herded with criminals of the lowest types.
People with money could hire rooms for themselves at Newgate and so avoid some of the discomforts of that vile place, and Penn spoke to his jailers about having a private room, but they answered him so abusively and insultingly and charged him so much for a private room that he said he preferred to share the lot of the poorest criminals. And there this man of wealth and education bravely stayed for six months, writing a number of essays and a spirited religious pamphlet. When the authorities thought the incorrigible young man must surely have learned his lesson in the wretched prison, they set him free again. He had spent half of the last three years in jails.
When he was at length liberated, he went abroad for a time, traveling in Holland and Germany, perhaps because his stay in Newgate had injured his health, perhaps to give the suspicionsconcerning him a chance to disappear. Yet, even on these journeys, whenever Penn found people showing any interest in the Quaker faith, he stopped and explained it fully to them. But in most places the new sect was looked upon as something very strange, and its members were suspected of designs against the government, so very few were anxious to learn about it.
In the autumn of 1671 Penn returned to England, and, for the first time in a number of years, lived a quiet life, giving over preaching and arguing and writing fiery pamphlets. He was twenty-seven years old, and he had fallen in love with a Quaker girl named Gulielma Maria Springett, or, as she was called by her friends, Guli Springett. Penn now busied himself in looking about for a suitable home in which to start housekeeping.
The father of William Penn's sweetheart was a young Puritan officer, who had been killed when only twenty-three years old at the siege of Bamber. Guli was born a few weeks later. Her mother, like many other people at that time, was neither satisfied with the religion of the Church of England nor that of the Puritans. Some time after her husband's death she married Isaac Pennington, and both became Quakers. So Guli was brought up in the new religion. They all lived quietly inBuckinghamshire until his neighbors began to complain to the authorities that Isaac Pennington was "talking Quaker doctrines." Then he was put in prison, and his wife and Guli wandered from one place to another.
Guli had a considerable fortune, and her charms brought her many suitors, even though her stepfather had fallen under the displeasure of the government. But she preferred the young and ardent Quaker who had himself suffered imprisonment so often in the same good cause; and in the spring of 1672 Guli and William were married. They made their home in the country, at Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire. They were comfortably well-to-do, and as the marriage was a very happy one, it might have been predicted that William Penn would become a prosperous country squire and have done with all religious discussions that were so likely to lead to a cell in the Tower of London.
At about the same time the king, Charles II., issued a proclamation, which was known as the Declaration of Indulgence, by the terms of which he did away with all the laws against the Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, Roman Catholics, and all who dissented from the Church of England. There was only one objection to this decree, and that wasthat the king issued it by his own act, and without the approval of Parliament, which meant that Charles II. had it in mind to try to rule without Parliament if it could be managed. The Declaration of Indulgence released over four hundred Quakers from prison, and in view of that benefit Penn and others were willing to overlook for the time the king's attempt to rule solely by his own will.
From his home in the country Penn began to make short trips through Kent and Sussex and Surrey, preaching the Quaker doctrines, a free lance who served without pay and purely because he loved the work. Occasionally he took his wife with him on his travels. They went together to Bristol to welcome the Quaker leader George Fox on his return from America, and hear from him what progress the new faith was making in the strange new country across the Atlantic Ocean.
By this time the Quakers had gained so many converts that the other sects were beginning to be afraid of them, and continually challenged them to more and more of those strange public debates in which the speakers did not hesitate to call their opponents harsh names. It was said of Penn that "he never turned his back in the day of battle," and he apparently threw himself into thesearguments with the same ardor his ancestors had shown in warfare. Besides taking up the cudgel in defense of the new creed, he wrote many pamphlets and letters to people who disapproved of the Quakers. In this way he kept himself very busy during the two years he lived at his charming country home.
Charles II.'s Declaration of Indulgence proved so unpopular with the Parliament that the king had soon to withdraw it, and then the old opposition to all rivals of the Church of England broke out more violently than ever. George Fox was arrested and kept in prison for a year. The king offered to give him a pardon, but the Quakers were unwilling to accept pardons, as that would imply that they had really done something that was wrong. But Fox was ill, and Penn and some others went to court and tried to secure the favor of the Duke of York in behalf of Fox. The duke was very friendly to Penn, as he had been to Penn's father, but he did nothing to free Fox. However, the Quakers soon afterward secured the release of their leader by an appeal to the law courts.
Then a man named Richard Baxter happened to go to Rickmansworth and found the place "abounding with Quakers," as he put it, "because Mr. W. Penn, their captain, dwelleth there." Baxterwanted to redeem these people from their errors and challenged Penn to an argument. They debated from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, before a great crowd, and at the end of that time all present held to their original views, although each debater claimed the victory. Penn enjoyed this argument immensely, for he told Baxter he would like to give him a room in his house, so "that I could visit and get discourse with thee in much tender love." But Baxter did not accept that invitation, and soon afterward Mrs. Penn inherited a house and estate at Worminghurst, in Sussex, so she and her husband moved their home to that place. A little later Penn, with George Fox and other Quakers, set out on a missionary visit to Holland and Germany.
People in Holland and Germany, as well as in England, had now felt the new spirit of religious liberty, so that William Penn and George Fox found more men and women in those countries eager to listen to their teachings than they had found elsewhere. The Quaker leaders traveled from one town to another, meeting many people, giving them copies of the pamphlets that Penn and others had written, and urging them to join the new Society of Friends. The Quaker missionaries met with considerable success, although by no means all the people who listened to them became Quakers, but many joined one or another of the new sects that were springing up at the time.
When he returned to England, Penn found the condition of the Quakers there as unsatisfactory as ever. The majority of the English people were so afraid that King Charles II. wanted to turn the country over to the Catholics that they were making the laws more and more strict against all whowere not members of the Church of England, and this, of course, included the Quakers. They were being fined and imprisoned right and left, and treated worse than if they had no religion at all.
As it was against the Quaker rule to take an oath of any kind, members of the new sect were at a great disadvantage in courts of law and in all places where an oath of allegiance to the government was required. To help them in this difficulty, Penn succeeded in inducing the House of Commons to allow Quakers to affirm instead of taking an oath, but before he could succeed in having the House of Lords pass the same bill the king dissolved Parliament.
Then, in the summer of 1678, occurred what was known as the Popish Plot. This plot was probably largely invented by a man named Titus Oates, who claimed that he had discovered evidence that the Catholics intended to seize the government of England, kill the king and the leading statesmen, set fire to the shipping on the Thames, at a given signal murder all the Protestants, and seize Ireland with a French army. The people were so excited that they were willing to believe even such a wild story as Titus Oates told them, and immediately the authorities began to arrest and imprison Catholics as zealously as they had been imprisoningQuakers. The Quakers kept out of the dispute between the Church of England and the Catholics as well as they could, following the advice of Penn, who told his people to keep away from all worldly controversies. "Fly as for your lives," he wrote them in a letter, "from the snares therein, and get you into your watch-tower, the name of the Lord." He urged the Protestants to treat the followers of other creeds more fairly, trying to show them that in their persecution of others the Protestants were themselves guilty of doing the very things which they had most feared from others.
Penn could advise others to keep out of worldly discussions, but he found it hard to do so himself. His nature was too bold and energetic, and he was above all things else a public man. So he tried to help his friend Algernon Sydney win a seat in the House of Commons, and, as a Whig, used all his influence to win success for that party in the elections. Sydney was defeated, but William Penn now became known as something of a politician as well as a religious leader.
In 1680 Penn began to work out a plan that had been in the minds of George Fox and other Quakers for some time, namely, to obtain from the king a grant of land in America where the Quakers might establish a settlement for themselves. They hadalready seen the Puritans cross the Atlantic and found the colony of Massachusetts Bay, where they were free to establish their own religion, and they had seen the Catholics go to Maryland under the guidance of Lord Baltimore. The Quakers were having a hard time of it at home; why should they not choose a new land where they could do as they pleased? They were not welcome in Massachusetts, where some of them had been hung and some whipped at the tail of a cart. Virginia was being settled by members of the Church of England, Maryland by the Catholics, and the Dutch were in possession of New York. They looked about to find some territory not yet well occupied.
Some time earlier George Fox had considered founding a Quaker colony in the country lying north of Maryland and west of New York and the Jerseys. Travelers reported that this was easy to reach by a broad river called the Delaware. Penn already knew a good deal about this and the neighboring country, partly from George Fox, and partly because he had already acted as arbitrator in a dispute as to the boundary line between East Jersey and West Jersey. He had also helped to draw up the constitution for West Jersey, and, as that constitution established religious liberty in that territory, many Quakers had gone there tolive. Indeed, West Jersey might have become a great Quaker colony had it not been that men who went out there reported that its soil was not so fertile nor its general character so attractive as the land that lay farther to the west.
In spite of the difficulties he had so often experienced with the law courts, Penn was now looked upon with favor by both King Charles and his brother the Duke of York. His father, Sir William, had never been paid all the money that was due him as a naval officer; the government was therefore in debt to Penn to the amount of £16,000, and Penn knew that the king was always hard pressed for money to keep up his very expensive court. Penn knew also that the king would make difficulties about paying him the money that was owed, but he thought that Charles might be glad to give him some of the unoccupied land in North America in place of payment in money. Therefore he now, in 1680, sent a petition to King Charles asking that in payment of the money owed to his father he be granted a tract of land "bounded on the east by the Delaware River, on the west limited as Maryland, and northward to extend as far as plantable."
The petition was referred to a committee of the Privy Council, where much discussion followed asto whether such a grant would not conflict with other grants to some of the New England colonies. There was much confusion in the plans, and great doubt as to the boundaries of Maryland. But when the grant was finally made to Penn, it covered a vast stretch of territory, including more than forty thousand square miles of land, the largest grant that had ever been made to one person in America. The tract was larger than Ireland, and not very much smaller than all of England. One reason for such liberality on the part of the king may have been that it canceled a debt of considerable money; another reason was that Charles was particularly well disposed toward the son of his friend Admiral Penn.
Now let us learn how our great State of Pennsylvania was named. On March 4, 1681, the king signed the charter. Penn wrote, "This day my country was confirmed to me under the great seal of England, with large powers and privileges, by the name of Pennsylvania; a name the King would give it in honor of my father. I chose New Wales, being as this is a pretty hilly country, but Penn being Welsh for a head, as Pennanmoire in Wales, and Penrith in Cumberland, and Penn in Buckinghamshire, the highest land in England, called this Pennsylvania, which is the high or head woodlands;for I proposed when the secretary, a Welshman, refused to have it called New Wales, Sylvania, and they added Penn to it; and though I much opposed it, and went to the King to have it struck out and altered, he said it was past and would take it upon him; nor could twenty guineas move the under secretary to vary the name; for I feared lest it should be looked on as a vanity in me, and not as a respect in the King, as it truly was, to my father, whom he often mentions with praise."
So, in spite of William Penn's modesty, the new colony was christened, as it were by chance, one of the most beautiful names in all the new continent.
Penn owned the new colony much as the lord of an English manor owns his estate. The land belonged to him, and the colonists were in reality to be his tenants, paying him rent for their right to use the land. Penn, on his part, was to pay two beaver skins to the king each year at his castle of Windsor, and the king was also to have one fifth of all the gold and silver that might be found in Pennsylvania.
The charter set forth the form of government for the province. The people were to elect delegates who should pass laws, and Penn was to have the right to veto such laws as he did not approve. He had the right to appoint judges and other officersand to grant pardons for crimes. He was to be the perpetual governor of the province, but if he chose to remain in England, he might govern the colony by a deputy whom he should send out in his place.
A month after the charter was granted to him Penn sent his cousin, William Markham, who was a son of Admiral Penn's sister, to Pennsylvania, to take temporary charge of the few scattered families of Swedes, English, and Dutch, who were living along the shores of the Delaware. Markham arrived at the colony in July, 1681, and established his home at Upland, a settlement some fifteen miles below the site of the present city of Philadelphia. Markham examined the province, and sent word to Penn that Lord Baltimore disputed the boundary lines between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and that, if his claim was correct, Maryland would cut into a large section of southern Pennsylvania. Penn then went to the Duke of York and secured from him an additional grant that gave him land now forming part of the state of Delaware. What he wanted was to obtain control of the entire western shore of the Delaware River from his province down to the Atlantic Ocean.
Then he advertised for settlers for his new domain, warning them that, for a few years at least,they would have to do without some of the comforts of England, but explaining that it was a glorious opportunity to spread English influence in a new world. He offered them very easy terms of rent; they could have five thousand acres by paying £100; and a shilling rent for every hundred acres annually afterward. If they did not have the money to take up so large a tract of land, they could have two hundred acres or less for the rent of one shilling an acre. These terms were very attractive, and many persons who were eager to take a share in what Penn was pleased to call "his holy experiment of Pennsylvania," applied for tracts of land in the new colony.
Penn was now a very practical, businesslike man, and he meant to add to his fortune by means of his new province, and also to become a man of great influence. He intended to show that a people like the Quakers could build up a community where liberty should be the watchword, where war should be frowned upon, and where every man should have a chance to own land and cultivate it. He was not a dreamer only, but a great planner and organizer as well, one of those men who seized the opportunity that the new world of America presented, and hoped that he might there set right the wrongs that had brought so much troubleto the poorer classes in Europe. There was probably no finer type of man among those who settled the colonies of North America than this broadminded, well-balanced, shrewd, and yet ideal-loving Quaker courtier, with his profound sense of justice, and his determination to deal fairly by all,—both settlers and Indians.
Some men came to him offering to form a company and pay him £6000 in return for a monopoly of the trade with the Indians in his province, but this he refused. He had his own ideas as to how he and his settlers must deal with the Indians; they must deal with them fairly; and since they were to take land that belonged to the Indians, they must pay for every acre they occupied in their settlements and farms. This was a new idea, and not the usual custom, since most colonists paid no regard whatever to any right the Indians might have to their lands. He wrote out a set of rules for dealing with the Indians, and among them it was stated that a white man who injured an Indian was to be dealt with exactly as if he had injured another white man; and that all disputes between the two races were to be adjusted by a jury of twelve men, six settlers and six Indians. A man who tried to obtain some special privileges from him paid him the following noble tribute: "Ibelieve he truly does aim more at justice and righteousness, and spreading of truth, than at his own particular gain."
Meantime, several ships carrying settlers started for America, and Penn sent out three agents to choose a site for a town and deal with the Indians of the neighborhood. He told these agents to examine the different creeks on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River in order to choose one that should allow boats to go up into the country. To use his own words, he ordered them, "to settle a great town, and be sure to make your choice where it is most navigable, high, dry, and healthy; that is, where most ships may best ride, of deepest draught of water, if possible to load or unload at the bank or quay side, without boating or lighterage."
When the agents arrived, they found that the settlers already there knew the best situation for a great settlement,—at a place a few miles north of where the Schuylkill River flowed into the Delaware. This place they named Philadelphia, a word that means "Brotherly love."
What pleasure and satisfaction Penn must have taken in planning how this new town should be built! He outlined it very carefully, directing where the markets and storehouses should beplaced, and telling his agents to choose a site in the center of the line of houses facing the river for his own residence. "Let every house be placed," he suggested, "if the person pleases, in the middle of its plat, as to the breadth of it, that so there may be ground on each side for gardens, or orchards, or fields, that it may be a green country town, which will never be burnt and always wholesome." From that comes the name of "Penn's green country town" that was so often applied to Philadelphia in the early years of its existence.
Penn sent a special letter to the Indians. "Now the great God hath been pleased to make me concerned in your part of the world," he wrote them, "and the King of the country where I live hath given me a great province therein; but I desire to enjoy it with your love and consent, that we may always live together as neighbors and friends; else what would the great God do to us who hath made us (not to devour and destroy one another, but) to live soberly and kindly together in the world?"
Penn was now such a prominent figure in England, the owner of a great tract of land given him by the king, that he was able to help those Quakers who got into trouble with the government; and when he was not busy planning his colony, he was usuallyhelping some persecuted members of his faith, and urging them to join him in his new province where liberty in religion was to be the keynote. He also drew up a constitution for Pennsylvania, and then, in the summer of 1682, he was ready to set sail for his new domain.