The Project Gutenberg eBook ofWilliam PennThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: William PennAuthor: Rupert Sargent HollandRelease date: April 20, 2013 [eBook #42567]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Greg Bergquist, Martin Pettit and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM PENN ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: William PennAuthor: Rupert Sargent HollandRelease date: April 20, 2013 [eBook #42567]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Greg Bergquist, Martin Pettit and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Title: William Penn
Author: Rupert Sargent Holland
Author: Rupert Sargent Holland
Release date: April 20, 2013 [eBook #42567]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Greg Bergquist, Martin Pettit and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM PENN ***
TRUE STORIES OF GREAT AMERICANS
WILLIAM PENN
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANYNEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLASATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO.,LimitedLONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTAMELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA,Ltd.TORONTO
Wm Penn
AUTHOR OF"HISTORIC BOYHOODS," "THE KNIGHTS OFTHE GOLDEN SPUR," ETC.
New YorkTHE MACMILLAN COMPANY1915All rights reserved
Copyright, 1915,ByTHE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1915.
Norwood PressJ. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
WILLIAM PENN
The middle of the seventeenth century was a very exciting time in England. The Cavaliers of King Charles the First were fighting the Roundheads of Oliver Cromwell, and the whole country was divided into King's men and Parliament's men. On the side of Cromwell and the Parliament was Admiral William Penn, who had in 1646 been given command of a squadron of fighting ships with the title of Vice Admiral of Ireland, and who had proved to be an expert navigator and sea-fighter. He had married Margaret Jasper, the daughter of an English merchant who lived in Rotterdam, and when he went to sea, he left his wife and children in the pretty little English village of Wanstead, in the county of Essex.
The Admiral's son William was born on October 14, 1644, when four great battles of the EnglishCivil War had already been fought: Edge Hill, Newbury, Nantwich, and Marston Moor. The Roundheads were winning the victories, and these Puritan soldiers, fired with religious zeal, and taking such striking names as "Praise God Barebones" and "Sergeant Hew Agag in Pieces before the Lord," were battering down castles and cathedrals, smashing stained-glass windows and pipe organs, and showing their hatred of nobles and of churchmen in every way they could think of. The wife of Admiral Penn, however, lived quietly in her country home, and by the time William was five years old the Cavaliers had lost the battle of Naseby, had surrendered Bridgewater and Bristol, and King Charles the First had been beheaded. A new England, a Puritan England, had taken the place of the old England, but the boy was too young to understand the difference. He knew that his father was now fighting the Dutch, but he was chiefly interested in the games he played with his schoolmates at Wanstead and with the boys from the neighboring village of Chigwell.
Now Admiral Penn had fought on the side of the Roundheads because the English navy had sided with the Parliament, while the English army had largely sided with the king, and not from any real love of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans.He was indeed a Royalist at heart, and had very little patience with the new religious ideas that were becoming so popular in England. The people in Wanstead, however, were mostly Puritans, and young William, boy though he was, heard so much about their religion that he became a little Puritan like his playmates. Some of the fathers and mothers boasted that they had seen "visions," and soon the children were repeating what their parents said. Strange experiences of that kind were in the air, and so little William Penn, when he was only eleven, claimed that he had himself met with such an adventure, and seen a "vision" too.
The news of this story of William's would have annoyed his father, but the Admiral was too much concerned at the time with his own difficulties to give much heed to his son. Admiral Penn had sent word secretly to the exiled son of Charles I. that he would enter his service against Oliver Cromwell, and the latter heard of it, and when the Admiral returned to England, Cromwell had him clapped into the Tower of London to keep him out of mischief. Mrs. Penn and her children went up to London and lodged in a little court near the Tower, where they might at least be near the Admiral. Presently the Admiral, stripped ofhis commission, was released, and left London for a country place in Ireland that Cromwell had given him for his earlier services. There he stayed until the Royalists got the better of the Roundheads, and Charles II. was placed on the English throne. Then Admiral Penn hurried to welcome the new king, was made a knight for his loyalty, and began to bask in the full sunshine of royal favor. He was now a great figure at court, was a man of wealth, and a close friend and adviser to the king's brother, James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral of England. Being so thoroughly a Royalist and Church of England man himself, it never occurred to him that his son William was already more than half a Puritan.
The Admiral sent his son to the aristocratic Christ Church College at Oxford when William was sixteen, and entered him as a gentleman commoner, which gave him a higher social standing than most of the students. The father meant his son to be a courtier and man of fashion, and wanted him to make friends among the young aristocrats of Oxford. But Oxford University, like the rest of England, had felt the Puritan influence during the days when Cromwell was Lord Protector, and although the Cavaliers did everything they could to restore the revelries and sports of the good oldtimes of Charles the First, some of the soberer notions of the Puritans still stuck to the place.
The Puritans were fond of long sermons and much psalm-singing, and shook their heads at all games and light entertainments. The Royalists stopped as much psalm-singing as they could, while they themselves got up Morris dances and May-day games and all kinds of masques and revels. Sometimes they went too far in their desire to oppose the Puritans, and indulged in all sorts of dissipations. Young William Penn, and many other boys at college, thought the Royalists were too dissolute, and leaned toward the Puritan standards; but he was the son of a knight and a courtier, as well as being naturally fond of sports and gayety, and so he did not dress so soberly nor attend so many sermons as some of his college friends. When the king's brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, died of smallpox, Oxford University issued a volume of verses, called "Threnodia," on the duke's death, and young William Penn sent in some Latin lines for the volume. In some matters he was a strong king's man, but in others he was more fond of the stricter Puritan notions. Withal he was a fairly good student, a popular young fellow, and something of an athlete. He might very well have graduated and followed his father to theking's court at London had not a new and strange religious party caught his wide-awake attention while he was at college.
When William Penn went to Oxford, some people in England were beginning to be called Quakers, or, as they preferred to be known, Friends. They were almost as much opposed to the Puritans as they were to the Royalists, who belonged to the Church of England. They were a religious sect, and more. They refused to pay the tithes or taxes for the support of the Established Church, they refused to take an oath in the law courts, they would wear their hats in court and in the presence of important persons. They called every one by his first name, and would not use any title, even that of Mister; "thee" and "thou" took the place of "you," although those pronouns had customarily only been used to servants. Nothing gave so much offense to a Royalist as to have a Quaker say "thee" or "thou" to him. They preached in taverns and in highways, and walked the streets uttering prophecies of doom in a loud singsong voice. Either because of this trembling mode of speech, or because their leader, George Fox, had bade the magistrates tremble at the word of the Lord, they were called Quakers.
It seemed to both the Churchmen and thePuritans that these Quakers were breaking away from all forms of religion; they did not believe in baptism nor in the communion service; they would not listen to clergymen or hired preachers, and often they sat silent in their meetings, only speaking when one of them felt inspired to address them. Quietness was their watchword, and so they condemned all sports and games, theaters, dancing, card playing; they disapproved of soldiers and of fighting; they kept out of politics, and they dressed as soberly as possible. Their leader, George Fox, was a strange person, very brave but very excitable, and he managed to rouse discussion wherever he went. Again and again he was put in jail; he was stoned and abused and laughed at; but such was his power that more and more people came to follow him, and admired and reverenced and loved him.
It may seem strange that the Quakers should have appealed so strongly to a youth like William Penn, who was a gentleman commoner at the most aristocratic college in England, a good-looking, popular, sport-loving fellow, surrounded by the sons of noblemen and courtiers. The answer must be that he was by nature serious-minded and very much interested in questions of religion. More than that, he had in him a strong streak ofheroism which made it easy for him to throw his whole soul into a cause that appealed to him. Whatever Penn was he was never lukewarm, but ardent and fiery and always tremendously in earnest.
He left Oxford after about two years, and there is a story that he was expelled because he and some friends refused to obey a college rule about the wearing of gowns and tore off the surplices that were worn by the Church of England students. He had heard the Quaker preacher Thomas Loe, and although he had not actually joined the Society of Friends he was already largely of a mind to. From college he went to his father's house in London, and then Admiral Sir William Penn found that his son was not at all the worldly-minded youth he had hoped, but a young man of quite a different sort. He did not care for the life of a cavalier or court gallant, but wanted to go to strange religious meetings. The Admiral begged and entreated, threatened and stormed, used arguments and even blows, and finally in a fit of rage drove his son from his house. But Lady Penn pleaded for her son, and the Admiral at length allowed William to return to his home.
To understand the history of William Penn we must have a clear idea of the Quaker faith in the time of Charles II. All through the Middle Ages the Christian Church, which was the Roman Catholic Church, had built up a network of beliefs that people took for granted, so that men never used their minds where religion was concerned, but were, to all intents and purposes, merely children, believing whatever the priests told them to believe. For centuries England, as well as all of Western Europe, had taken its creed directly from the Pope and his clergy, no more doubting the truth of what was told them than a child doubts the truth of the multiplication-table. But at length certain men of unusual independence of mind, men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, became restless under the arbitrary teachings of the Pope and dared to question whether the priests were always right, no matter what they said. These men, and others like them, took part in what wasknown as the Reformation, an era in which men began to do a little thinking for themselves. The revival of the classical learning of Greece and Rome and the invention of the printing-press helped this new freedom of thought greatly. The first books to come from the printing-presses were copies of the Bible, which had formerly been beyond the reach of all but the priests, and as men soon translated the Scriptures from Latin into English and French and German and other languages, the people gradually became able to read the Old and New Testaments for themselves. The Bible was no longer a sealed book, from which the clergy gave the ordinary man and woman as much or as little as they thought good. It was free to all, and new teachers began to explain its meaning according to their own ideas.
It took a long time, however, for men to break away from the implicit obedience they had given for centuries to the Church of Rome. The most daring reformers only rid themselves of one or two dogmas at a time. Wycliffe, the first great leader of the Reformation in England, only denied a part of the truth of the Mass, and kept almost all the rest of the Catholic belief. Huss, who followed him, only dared to doubt the truth of certain of the miracles, though he did declare that he believedin religious liberty. Martin Luther himself devoted most of his eloquence to attacking the sale of indulgences, which had been carried to great excess. Later he grew so bold as to oppose the authority of the Pope, but he still held to the larger part of the creed of the early Church.
In England Henry the Eighth had broken with the Pope chiefly because the latter had refused to grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and not because of any great difference in religious views. This break, however, gave the reformers an official position in England, and led to the establishment of the Church of England, which was called a Protestant Church to distinguish it from the Catholic. Henry's daughter, Mary, was a Catholic, and her reign saw a bitter struggle in England between Catholics and the new reform Protestants. Mary's sister, Elizabeth, favored the Protestants, and with her reign the new Church actually came into its own, and the teachings of the Reformation began to bear fruit.
Very gradually, then, men came to think more and more freely for themselves. The Church of England discarded some of the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church, but held to a great many of them, and once it became well fixed as the Established Church of England it also becameconservative, and insisted that people should obey its teachings, just as the Catholic Church had done. But the idea of the right of every one to think for himself had been set rolling and could not be stopped. Men and women who wished liberty to worship God in their own way went to America and founded communities with that principle as their basis, while others in England began to show their independence of the Established Church, and began to league themselves together as Presbyterians or Lutherans, under a number of different names, and many were often spoken of as Puritans. The Civil War between Charles I. and Parliament was also largely a war between the men of the Church of England and the Puritans. Then, when the Puritans had won a place for themselves and a certain amount of power, they in their turn became conservative, and wanted to impose their own beliefs and religious observances upon the rest of England.
By this time, however, men had grown so used to freedom of thought in religious matters that every little group had its own peculiar creed. Any man of an original turn of mind could start a new sect and win converts. The Puritans themselves were not sufficiently liberal to suit men who now took pride in recognizing no authority in questionsas to what they should think. Most of these small sects played very small parts in history. Some, such as the Independents, the Anabaptists, and the Pietists, flourished for a short time, and then became merged in other sects. The Quakers, however, made a much stronger appeal than many of the others, and drew into their ranks a great number of those who were dissatisfied with the conservatism of the Catholics, the Church of England, and the Puritans.
The reason the Quakers absorbed many of the other sects and grew so rapidly, and doubtless the chief reason why they appealed so strongly to the liberal mind of young William Penn, was that they set forth as their aim the definite plan of returning to primitive Christianity in its simplest form. To those men and women who thought that all religion had become hopelessly corrupt through the ignorance and fraud and cruelty of the priesthood that had so long controlled the church, the Quaker leaders tried to show that original Christianity was as pure and simple as ever. What they wanted was that people should return to the doctrines of the Christian Church as they were before the Bishop of Rome became Pope, and before the priests interpreted the Bible as best suited themselves. The Quaker teachers declared that the Church ofEngland and the Puritans had gone only halfway; they were still making their appeal chiefly to the rich and influential; this new religion was to satisfy the ordinary, the poor, the simple, those who cared little for wealth or high station. No wonder that this direct appeal made many converts among the great mass of English people, who were tired of the endless struggles between kings and parliaments, bishops and ministers.
In their desire to return to the simplicity of the early days of the Christian Church, the Quakers became earnest students of those who were called the fathers of the Church,—the early writers on Christianity, such as Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Cyprian, and Origen. There they found the principles of a religious worship that was free from all elaborate ceremonies. There they found an absolute freedom of opinion; preachers who served without pay and solely because they felt spiritually called upon to preach; they also found that many of the early Christians were opposed to war and to the taking of oaths, and that they protested against the use of titles, elaborate clothes, and entertainments that tended to corrupt the tastes. Therefore it was easy for the Quaker leaders to show their audiences that the ideas they were urging upon them were actuallythe beliefs of the earliest Christians, and were therefore worthy of earnest consideration.
Other people had urged a return to primitive Christianity earlier than the Quakers. The Albigenses, in the south of France during the thirteenth century, and the Waldenses, who lived in the valleys of Piedmont, in Northern Italy, both held somewhat similar ideas, but in each case the iron hand of persecution had suppressed them. The Quakers would doubtless have met with a similar fate had they come into existence a century earlier, for they held even more extreme views than had the Albigenses. But by the reign of Charles II. the principles of the Reformation had made such headway that it was impossible to do away with a new form of religion by killing its converts. The government was willing to go a certain distance in suppressing these new heretics, and ordinances were passed empowering justices to imprison any who denied the validity of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Quakers who held meetings in the streets or market-places were liable to be arrested for committing a breach of the peace, and their missionaries were often treated as vagrants and whipped; but these were extremely light punishments compared with those that had been inflicted earlier.
Although there were a few men and women among the early Quakers who made themselves conspicuous by their extreme views, as there are among the people of any sect, the Quakers were for the greater part a remarkably sober, sensible, and law-abiding party. The Catholics, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, and others had never hesitated to hold their meetings in secret when the laws seemed too severe against them. The Quakers, however, never held secret meetings; they performed their duties openly, no matter how much the magistrates were opposed to them. They argued their cause freely and openly on all occasions, and they wrote a great many pamphlets setting forth their belief and also telling to what persecutions they had been subjected. These tracts were widely distributed, and served to call attention to the reasonableness of their cause and to win sympathy for their struggles with the law.
They also soon showed the English virtue of obstinacy in their cause; for no matter how many times they were imprisoned or arrested they continued steadfastly on their course. At first people laughed at the Quakers' custom of holding their religious meetings in prison just as they might have held them in their meetinghouses, but before long the laughter changed to respect, and finallybecame sincere admiration. The Puritans, who had themselves had to endure the same sort of treatment a little while before, could appreciate the attitude of this still younger religious movement, and though they did not sympathize with the views of the Quakers they came to admire their courageous independence.
William Penn, young as he was, saw that the Quakers stood at the opposite pole from what he had come to consider a superstitious priesthood; he saw that with them religion had nothing to do with politics or power; that it was destined to stand for a more reasonable and simple faith than any of the others then existing in England. It was the latest form of that great wave of liberty that had begun with the Reformation; and as the latest it appealed to him as the most liberal form. He had a natural interest in religion, a natural earnestness of mind that led him to study the new movement, and sufficient strength of judgment to be able to find the truth in it that was hidden from many others. Add to this a basis of heroism, inherited from adventure-loving ancestors, and it is not difficult to see how the young man was led to sympathize with, and then to adopt, the Quaker faith as his own.
When his son William came home from Oxford, Admiral Penn was a prominent figure in London. He held numerous offices, for he was a Naval Commissioner, a Member of Parliament, Governor of Kinsale, Admiral of Ireland, a Member of the Council of Munster, and a favorite of King Charles and the Duke of York. He was in high hopes that he would soon be made a peer. His wife, Lady Penn, and his daughter Margaret, or Peg, as she was usually called, were fond of society and fashion. It was somewhat natural, therefore, that Admiral Penn should not altogether understand or appreciate the new religious views of his son William. He thought the youth exceedingly willful, but could not believe that his interest in the new movement was anything more than a passing whim. Therefore, in order to interest William in other things, he introduced him to his own friends and showed him something of the pleasant side of life at King Charles's court. He took William to suppers atthe Bear Inn, and to plays at Drury Lane Theater. There was a satire on the Puritans, called "The Jovial Crew," then being given at a theater known as "The Cockpit," and the Admiral took William there in order to show him how absurd Puritans, and all the newer religious sects, actually were. But no matter how heartily the Admiral laughed and encouraged his son to laugh, he could not get William to throw himself into the pleasures of London life as readily as he thought a normal young fellow ought to.
The father was really very fond of his son, and spent considerable time in casting about as to what was best for his boy. At length it occurred to him that a visit to the gay city of Paris would entertain William, and drive out of his head some of his strange Oxford notions. Some of his college friends were going to France to study, and the Admiral arranged that William should go abroad with them. Some of them were of high rank, and they would easily have entrance to the best French society.
The young men were made welcome in Paris. Penn was presented to the king, Louis XIV, and was charmed by the brilliance of the French court. He made the acquaintance of entertaining people, and he had at least oneadventure. The story is told that as he was returning late one night from a ball, he was stopped by a rogue who angrily called out to him to draw his sword and defend himself. The rascal flashed his own rapier before Penn's eyes, and declared that Penn had insulted him,—that he had bowed and taken off his hat politely to the young Englishman, but that the latter had paid no attention to him. Penn answered courteously that he had not seen the stranger, and so could not have insulted him by failing to bow to him. The stranger, however, only grew more excited, and insisted that Penn must fight him or he would run him through.
Penn saw that argument was useless, and being by that time angry himself, drew his own sword and stood on defense. The street was dark, but a small crowd had gathered, attracted by the loud words, and several men announced that they would see fair play. The swords flashed in a few passes, and then Penn showed himself the more skillful swordsman. With a twist of his rapier he sent his opponent's sword flying into the air. The crowd expected him to attack his opponent again, but instead Penn stooped, and, picking up the other man's sword, handed it back to him with a bow, saying that he hoped the Frenchman was satisfied. News of the little encounter quickly spread amongthe young Englishman's friends, and on the strength of it he became quite a hero.
Meantime the Admiral in London was much pleased with the reports he had of William's success in the social world of Paris. He wanted him to have a more thorough education, however, than Oxford afforded, and so made arrangements that he should go to Professor Moses Amyrault, at Saumur, to live in his home and study under him. Penn followed his father's wishes and spent some time at Saumur, becoming well acquainted with the language and literature of France, and having a pleasant time generally. Afterwards with a friend he traveled through Switzerland into Italy, making a part of the "grand tour" that in those days was considered an important part of the education of every young Englishman of fashion.
When he returned to London, he was very French and very gallant; indeed, he was so much a gentleman of fashion that Admiral Penn was really delighted. He had hopes, now, that William would, after all, follow in his own footsteps, and become a figure at the king's court. With that end in view Sir William entered his son at Lincoln's Inn to study law. If he was to hold important offices in the government of his country, he must have some knowledge of law; and, besides, the legal trainingwould bring him into contact with rising men of good families. So William began his studies, and the Admiral, well pleased, embarked with the Duke of York to fight the Dutch.
Penn's studies at Lincoln's Inn were interrupted by the great plague that swept over London and devastated the city. Like most other people of means he left the place and went into the country, carrying with him memories of the sick and suffering in the wretched, ill-kept streets and alleys. He was lonely in the country, and he could not help remembering the scenes in the plague-stricken town; so that when his father came back and joined him, the Admiral found William again in his former speculative frame of mind. To once more divert his mind, Sir William sent him to enter the service of the Duke of Ormond, who, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, held quite a court in the city of Dublin.
The Admiral was Governor of Kinsale, in County Cork, and William was given charge of his father's affairs there, as well as being employed in various ways by the Duke of Ormond. He enjoyed this work, and when there was a mutiny of the soldiers at Carrickfergus, he took a large part in quelling it, so pleasing the duke by his ability that the latter suggested that young Penn should be madecaptain of the Admiral's troop of soldiers. Sir William was glad to hear such good reports of his son, but did not think him fitted as yet to command his soldiers.
Young Penn was enjoying life on his father's estate and at the duke's court in Dublin, and was decidedly the courtier and man of affairs; when one day, being in Cork on business, he happened to hear the preaching of Thomas Loe, a man he had already heard at Oxford. The message of that sermon lay in the words, "There is a faith which overcomes the world, and there is a faith which is overcome by the world." It made a deep impression on the young man. Was his faith of the type that overcomes the world? Or was it of the kind that is overcome by pride of place and fortune? He feared that thus far his faith had shown itself of the latter sort. He gave a great deal of thought to that message of Thomas Loe.
Being so ardent by nature, he determined that his faith should overcome the temptations that surrounded him. He would fight by the side of those who believed in the simple teachings of early Christianity and who were unhampered by the forms and ceremonies the other churches had imposed upon their members. Thomas Loe's sermon was the spark that set Penn's zeal ablaze. Hemade up his mind to become a Quaker, in spite of all that his family or friends might say. The new faith had made its appeal to the deepest springs of his earnest and religious nature.
So William Penn, already considerable of a courtier, became a Quaker; and contrived, strange though it seems, to be both things at one and the same time. His father had been both a Roundhead and a Royalist, though in his case it had always been from motives of self-interest. The son was now to combine two widely different types of man, but with him this resulted entirely from the two sides of his nature. Yet it was a very odd combination, that of a Quaker and a courtier, and one sure to bring him into many curious situations.
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 witha 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 askedWilliam 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.