He was born in 1644, the son of Admiral Sir William Penn, educated at Christ church, Oxford, and, having turned Quaker, was twice turned out of doors by his father. Then he was tolerated, but not helped, at home, and no effort was made to release him when he was imprisoned for attendance at religious meetings. He began at the age of twenty-four (in 1668) to preach and write. For his second paper, “The Sandy Foundation Shaken,” he was imprisoned seven months in the Tower, and he wrote in prison, at the age of twenty-five, his most popular book, “No Cross, no Crown.” He obtained release by a vindication called “Innocency with her Open Face.” In 1670 his father died, reconciled to him. Penn inherited his estate; then wrote, travelled, supported his religious faith; and in 1681, for his father’s services and debts to him from the Crown, obtained a grant of New Netherlands, thenceforward called Pennsylvania. In 1682, having published his scheme in “A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania,” he embarked for America, and founded Philadelphia. In 1684, the last year of Charles II., Penn revisited England. He published, in 1694, “A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers,” and an “Account of his Travels in Holland and Germany in 1677, and for the Service of the Gospel of Christ, by way of Journal.” He died in 1718; and his collected writings, published in 1726, fill two folio volumes.
Personal
Mr. Pen, Sir William’s son, is come back from France and come to visit my wife. A most modish person, grown, she says, a fine gentleman…. After dinner comes Mr. Pen to visit me, and staid an houre talking with me. I perceive something of learning he hath got, but a great deale if not too much, of the vanity of the French garbe and affected manner of speech and gait. I fear all real profit he hath made of his travel will signify little.
Went to schoole in London, a private schole on that hill, and his father kept a tutor in the house: but first he went to school at Chigwell in Essex. (He was) mighty lively, but with innocence; and extremely tender under rebuke; and very early delighted in retirement; much given to reading and meditating of the scriptures, and at 14 had marked over the Bible. Oftentimes at 13 and 14 in his meditations ravisht with joy, and dissolved into teares. The first sense he had of God was when he was 11 yeares old at Chigwell, being retired in a chamber alone. He was so suddenly suprized with an inward comfort and (as he thought) an externall glory in the roome that he has many times sayd that from thence he had the seals of divinity and immortality, that there was a God and that the soule of man was capable of enjoying his divine communications.—His schoolmaster was not of his perswasion…. He speaks well the Latin and the French tongues, and his owne with great mastership. He often declares in the assemblies of his Friends, and that with much eloquence and fervency of spirit—by which, and his perpetuall attendances on K(ing) and P(rince) for the reliefe of his Friends, he often exposes his health to hazard.
William Penn was greatly in favor with the king—the Quaker’s sole patron at court—on whom the hateful eyes of his enemies were intent. The king loved him as a singular and entire friend, and imparted to him many of his secrets and counsels. He often honored him with his company in private, discoursing with him of various affairs, and that, not for one, but many hours together, and delaying to hear the best of his peers who at the same time were waiting for an audience. One of these being envious, and impatient of delay, and taking it as an affront to see the other more regarded than himself, adventured to take the freedom to tell his majesty, that when he met with Penn he thought little of his nobility. The king made no other reply, than that Penn always talked ingeniously, and he heard him willingly.
My friend Penn came there, Will Penn the Quaker, at the head of his brethren, to thank the Duke for his kindness to their people in Ireland. To see a dozen scoundrels with their hats on, and the Duke complimenting with his off, was a good sight enough.
He was a vain talking man…. He had such an opinion of his own faculty of persuading, that he thought none could stand before it: though he was singular in that opinion: for he had a tedious, luscious way, that was not apt to overcome a man’s reason, though it might tire his patience.
It appears that he was tall in stature and of an athletic make. He delighted when young, as has been before observed, in manly sports. In maturer years he was inclined to corpulency, but using a great deal of exercise he was very active with it. His appearance at this time was that of a fine portly man…. William Penn was very neat, though plain, in his dress. He walked generally with a cane. This cane he was accustomed to take with him in the latter part of his life into his study, where, when be dictated to an amanuensis, as was frequently his practice, he would take it in his hand, and walking up and down the room, would mark, by striking it against the floor, the emphasis on points he wished particularly to be noticed…. He was very neat also as to his person, and had a great aversion to the use of tobacco. However, when he was in America he was often annoyed by it, but he bore it with good humour…. Having a great variety of business to go through, he was obliged to be an œconomist of his time. He was therefore regular and methodical in his movements…. He is handed down, by those who knew him, to have been very pleasant and strikingly animated in conversation. He had rather a disposition to facetiousness, clothed, however in the purest habit of decorum.
William Penn and Robert Barclay are the names of the two most eminent members of the Society of Friends. They may be entitled to an equal measure of pure and desirable fame, the former as the practical, the latter as the theoretical, champion of their principles. But if services are to be weighed and measured by actual sum and cost, Penn, both in the labors of his life and of his pen, will receive the higher estimate. Barclay’s father approved and favored the devotion of his son to a despised sect; but Penn, as we have seen, found his first foe in his best friend. Through the whole of his subsequent life, his principles cost him a large amount of suffering of body and of mind; a loss of friends, and honors, and property; a subjection to insults and reproaches. They weighed with such a burden of care upon his active career, and were attended with such a disappointment of his most cherished wishes at his death, that we pronounce upon him the highest but well deserved encomium in saying, that, had he foreseen the course and issue of his life, he would not have shrunk from it.
To speak the whole truth concerning Penn is a task which requires some courage; for he is rather a mythical than a historical person. Rival nations and hostile sects have agreed in canonising him. England is proud of his name. A great commonwealth beyond the Atlantic regards him with a reverence similar to that which the Athenians felt for Theseus, and the Romans for Quirinus. The respectable society of which he was a member honours him as an apostle. By pious men of other persuasions, he is generally regarded as a bright pattern of Christian virtue. Meanwhile admirers of a very different sort have sounded his praises. The French philosophers of the eighteenth century pardoned what they regarded as his superstitious fancies in consideration for his contempt for priests, and of his cosmopolitan benevolence, impartially extended to all races and to all creeds. His name has thus become, throughout all civilised countries, a synonyme for probity and philanthropy. Nor is this high reputation altogether unmerited. Penn was without doubt a man of eminent virtues. He had a strong sense of religious duty and a fervent desire to promote the happiness of mankind…. His writings and his life furnished abundant proofs that he was not a man of strong sense. He had no skill in reading the characters of others. His confidence in persons less virtuous than himself led him into great errors and misfortunes. His enthusiasm for one great principle sometimes impelled him to violate other great principles which he ought to have held sacred. Nor was his rectitude altogether proof against the temptations to which it was exposed in that splendid and polite, but deeply corrupted society, with which he now mingled…. Unhappily it cannot be concealed that he bore a chief part in some transactions condemned, not merely by the rigid code of the society to which he belonged, but by the general sense of all honest men. He afterwards solemnly protested that his hands were pure from illicit gain, and that he had never received any gratuity from those whom he had obliged, though he might easily, while his influence at court lasted, have made a hundred and twenty thousand pounds. To this assertion full credit is due. But bribes may be offered to vanity as well as to cupidity, and it is impossible to deny that Penn was cajoled into bearing a part in some unjustifiable transactions of which others enjoyed the profits.
Lord Shelburne, Charles Austin, and Milman to breakfast. A pleasant meal. Then the Quakers, five in number. Never was there such a rout. They had absolutely nothing to say. Every charge against Penn came out as clear as any case at the Old Bailey. They had nothing to urge but what was true enough, that he looked worse in my History than he would have looked on a general survey of his whole life. But that is not my fault. I wrote the History of four years during which he was exposed to great temptations; during which he was the favourite of a bad king, and an active solicitor in a most corrupt court. His character was injured by his associations. Ten years before, or ten years later, he would have made a much better figure. But was I to begin my work ten years earlier or ten years later for William Penn’s sake? The Quakers were extremely civil. So was I.
My hope was that Macaulay would in time withdraw his charges as disproved. I had some reason for this hope. His mind was racked by doubts, and he was often busy with this portion of his book. It is within my knowledge that his latest thoughts on earth were given to Penn and that which he had said of Penn. Some part of what he might have done, the world can guess from what he did. He ceased the work of calumny. In what he wrote after 1857, there is not a single sneer at Penn. His indexes were greatly changed. He struck out much that was false, and more that was abusive. Penn’s Jacobitism was no longer “scandalous,” his word was no longer a “falsehood.” Penn was no longer charged with “treasonable conduct,” with “flight to France,” and with “renewing his plots.” What else Macaulay might have done can only be surmised; but it is fair to think that changes in his index would have been followed by amendments in his text. I know that he was far from satisfied with his “Notes” of 1857, and that he was engaged in reconsidering the defence of Penn when he leaned back in his chair and died.
A pleasant walk of about two miles from Chalfont St. Giles brings us to Jordans meeting-house…. In front of the meeting-house, and divided from it by a low fence and wicket, is the “dead garth.”… The grave farthest from the wicket in the first row of graves on the right is that of Penn and his second wife. It bears the inscription: “William Penn, 1718, and Hannah Penn, 1726.” The grave next this is that of Gulielma Maria Penn, his first wife, who died in 1689, while the next two are occupied by the remains of her mother and step-father respectively. In the second row are the graves of two other of Penn’s children, those of Letitia and Springett Penn. In the third row is that of Thomas Ellwood, the simple-hearted man who read to Milton when blindness had befallen him; also that of his wife. For periods of from one to two centuries all these graves were without memorials, as are still many others in this out-of-the-way burial-ground. A few years ago it might have been said with entire truth, in the words of Wordsworth:
| “In our church-yard | |
| Is neither epitaph nor monument, | |
| Tombstone nor grave; only the turf we tread, | |
| And a few natural graves.” |
He was not born with his hat on, but this is the only time he was ever seen in his bare head.
William Penn is now usually thought of as a pious, contemplative man, a peace-loving Quaker in a broad brim hat and plain drab clothes, who founded Pennsylvania in the most successful manner, on beautiful, benevolent principles, and kindness to the Indians. But the real Penn, though of a very religious turn of mind, was essentially a man of action, restless and enterprising, at times a courtier and a politician, who loved handsome dress, lived well and lavishly, and, although he undoubtedly kept his faith with the red men, Pennsylvania was the torment of his life. He came, moreover, of fighting ancestry, and was himself a soldier for a short time. His life was full of contests, imprisonments, disasters, and suffering, if not of actual fighting, and he lived during the most critical periods of English history. Few, if any, Quakers have shown so much energy as he. Indeed, there have been few men who have attempted to accomplish so much.
Pennsylvania
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, 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.
William Pen might glory in having brought down upon earth the so much boasted golden age, which in all probability never existed but in Pennsylvania.
Of all great reputations, Penn’s is that which has been most the effect of accident. The great action of his life was his turning Quaker: the conspicuous one, his behaviour upon his trial. In all that regards Pennsylvania, he has no other merit than that of having followed the principles of the religious community to which he belonged, when his property happened to be vested in colonial speculations.
The immortal memory of Penn, who subdued the ferocity of savages by his virtues, and enlightened the civilized world by his institutions.
This admirable person had employed his great abilities in support of civil as well as religious liberty, and hath both acted and suffered for them under Charles II. Even if he had not founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as an everlasting memorial of his love of freedom, his actions and writings in England would have been enough to absolve him from the charge of intending to betray the rights of his countrymen.
Beneath a large elm tree at Shakamaxon, on the northern edge of Philadelphia, William Penn, surrounded by a few friends, in the habiliments of peace, met the numerous delegation of the Lenni Lenape tribes. The great treaty was not for the purchase of lands, but, confirming what Penn had written, and Markham covenanted, its sublime purpose was the recognition of the equal rights of humanity. Under the shelter of the forest, now leafless by the frosts of autumn, Penn proclaimed to the men of the Algonquin race, from both banks of the Delaware, from the borders of the Schuylkill, and, it may have been, even from the Susquehannah, the same simple message of peace and love which George Fox had professed before Cromwell, and Mary Fisher had borne to the Grand Turk. The English and the Indian should respect the same moral law, should be alike secure in their pursuits and their possessions, and adjust every difference by a peaceful tribunal, composed of an equal number of men from each race. “We meet,” such were the words of William Penn, “on the broad pathway of good faith and good will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. I will not call you children; for parents sometimes chide their children too severely; nor brothers only; for brothers differ. The friendship between me and you I will not compare to a chain; for that the rains might rust, or the falling tree might break. We are the same as if one man’s body were to be divided into two parts; we are all one flesh and blood.” The children of the forest were touched by the sacred doctrine, and renounced their guile and their revenge. They received the presents of Penn in sincerity; and with hearty friendship they gave the belt of wampum.
To William Penn belongs the distinction, destined to brighten as men advance in virtue, of first in human history establishing the Law of Love as a rule of conduct in the intercourse of nations.
Controversy has now quite ceased to busy itself about his noble character, and his life of splendid unostentatious beneficence. His name, which without his consent and against his wishes was made part of the name of the State which he founded, will be remembered in connection with its history while the Delaware and the Schuylkill flow. Of his famous treaty with the Indians nothing perhaps was ever better said than the comment of Voltaire, that it was the only league between savages and white men which was never sworn to and never broken.
General
Especially of late some of them (the Quakers) have made nearer advances towards Christianity than ever before; and among them the ingenious Mr. Penn has of late refined some of their gross notions, and brought them into some form, and has made them speak sense and English, of both which George Fox, their first and great apostle, was totally ignorant.
The Life of William Penn, the settler of Pennsylvania, the founder of Philadelphia, and one of the first lawgivers in the Colonies, now United States, in 1682, containing also his celebrated Treaty with the Indians, his purchase of their country; valuable anecdotes of Admiral Penn, also King Charles II., James II., King William and Queen Anne, in whose reigns William Penn lived; curious circumstances that led him to become a Quaker, with a view of the admirable traits in the character of the people called Friends or Quakers, who have done so much to meliorate the condition of suffering humanity.
Penn however is worthy of a place in every theological collection.
It is doubtful whether any other work [“Reflections”] of the size can be found, containing so much sound, practical wisdom.
“No Cross, no Crown is a serious cross to me,” said Admiral Penn on reading this unworldly book. “No Cross, no Crown” arose out of the writer’s own position. He was suffering for opinion: he was suffering at the hands of men who professed to be the servants of God. He wished to present clearly to his own mind and to impress upon others the great Christian doctrine that every man must bear the cross who hopes to wear the crown. To this end he reviewed the character of the age. He showed how corrupt was the laity, how proud and self-willed were the priests.
Neither Penn nor Barclay has any special grace or vigour of style. Penn is lively and pointed, Barclay grave and argumentative.
William Penn possessed in full measure the culture of his century, and was himself a zealous writer, always full of his object. His abstractions remind one sometimes of Hobbes: his arguments of Sidney and Sidney’s historical learning; like Harrington he loves to analyse and weigh the interests on which states appear to rest. But all requires a special character and vigour from the special end which he pursues, namely, the emancipation of his sect from all oppression.
The plain recital of his doings is his best eulogy.
His character is a curious mingling of dissimilar qualities. He was at once a saint and a courtier, a religious fanatic and a shrewd man of affairs and of the world. With the controversies awakened by Macaulay’s sweeping charges we have here nothing to do. Penn appears in American history simply as the wise founder of a state, the prudent and just magistrate, the liberal-minded law-giver and ruler.
As an author, Penn appears as a defender of the views of Fox and Barclay, a writer of sententious ethical precepts, an opponent of judicial oaths, an advocate of a Congress of Nations for the settlement of international disputes, and a champion of complete and universal religious liberty. Many of his books and pamphlets were translated into German, French, Dutch and Welsh.
It [“No Cross, No Crown”] is an earnest, sometimes eloquent, exposition of the duty of self-denial as the chief requisite for salvation, denouncing all lip service and ceremonialism. The style is grave and uniform. It is perhaps somewhat ponderously earnest, and lacks the refreshing humour and imagery of some of his contemporary theologians. It is always clear, though the effect is sometimes spoilt by too much amplification. A fair amount of learning and culture is shown without pedantry.
His piety was profound; and though he had little or no interest in humane learning for its own sake, his knowledge of the Christian and prechristian mystics was considerable, and enabled him to give to the doctrine of the “light within” a certain philosophical breadth…. His style is clear and nervous, and his theological polemics, though for the most part occupied with questions of ephemeral importance, evince no small controversial power.
Penn himself during his residence in the colony wrote nothing except letters; these, however, are pleasant reading, something of the large, calm beauty of his spirit passing into his style. The long letter written in 1683 to the Free Society of Traders contains an interesting description of the Indians, whose friendship Penn so well knew how to win.
Penn had done what George Fox could also so effectually do. He had not merely endured his imprisonment with a spirit that won the respect both of his followers and his enemies, but he had made the imprisonment a means of advancing the cause he had at heart, of making it known to the world in a way that would arouse enthusiasm. He had stated more fully and completely than had yet been done the fundamental doctrines of his faith in his two pamphlets, “The Sandy Foundation” and “Innocency with her Open Face;” and these two pamphlets, the one that imprisoned him and the one that released him, are to this day the authorities used to prove the original doctrines of the Quakers. When we add to these two pamphlets his book, “No Cross, No Crown,” which has also a permanent value, we have Penn’s three most important works; and it was a good deal to be accomplished within a twelvemonth by a young man of only twenty-four, who had spent most of that time locked up in the Tower.
