William Penn

“ Our narrow limits are insufficient to do justice to the character of William Penn, in setting forth his uprightness, his firmness, his zeal, his diligence, his love of the truth. Whether we consider him as a religious writer, a wise and Christian legislator, or as a faithful and devoted minister of the gospel, we must regard him as a benefactor to mankind. Of such the everlasting memorial is sure: "They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever." ”

“ Admiral Sir William Penn, Father of William Penn.
From the portrait by Peter Van Dyke.
The people of the court and town in the England of Charles II. were a very dissipated and [Pg 29] unprincipled set. Most of the fashionable people were proud of their lack of morals, and the plays, the writings, and even the speech of the ruling class were coarse and vulgar beyond belief. William Penn saw all this, and his nature, being on a higher plane and more serious than that of his father's friends, turned instinctively to those who were living clean and respectable lives. ”

“ For one hundred and thirty years, William Penn has slumbered in the grave. That hutesium et clamor, that spirit of persecution, by which this excellent man was pursued, vilified, impoverished, and exiled, has long been hushed. The high churchman, the bigot, the Quaker renegade, the false accuser, have worn out their viperous teeth upon the file. All, that bore the primeval impress of human weakness, in William Penn, had well nigh perished, and departed from the minds of men. ”

“ CHAPTER XII Penn goes to America Again
King William had taken the government of Pennsylvania away from William Penn probably because he thought that a colony governed by a Quaker friend of James Stuart might easily become a prey to French greed. But when the king and Penn became reconciled, the province was given back to Penn, in August, 1694. Although he was anxious to see his new city of Philadelphia again, it was not until five years later that Penn was able to cross the Atlantic. ”

“ The part which Pennsylvania began to play from the moment of Penn's arrival, and which it still plays, in American affairs, was directly dependent upon Penn's character and genius, and, for a long time, upon his wealth and social position. Without the wealth which William Penn inherited from his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, he could not have organized his Pennsylvania Society, nor bought the site of Philadelphia. Without the position, as well as the wealth, which he inherited, he could not, in the first place, have aspired to the acquaintance with and confidence of King Charles II ”

“ William Penn was always a deeply religious and honorable man, thoroughly sincere, and indomitable in his defense of what he believed to be the truth. He was a great man, for he led the new sect of Quakers through their early trials; he had the vision to build them a new home beyond the seas and to set them standards of liberty and government that were far in advance of his time. His faults of judgment were many; he too often trusted the wrong men, and frequently he showed himself a child in caring for money matters. ”

“ William Penn could look with no little degree of pride upon his work. If ever man was justified in being proud, he was. Looking upon the result of his work, he, with righteous exultation, wrote to Lord Halifax, "I must, without vanity, say I have led the greatest colony into America that ever man did upon private credit, and the most prosperous beginnings that ever were in it are to be found among us."
Penn bade the colonists farewell, with the brightest hopes for the future, saying, "My love and my life are to and with you, and no water can quench it, nor distance bring it to an end. ”

“ William Penn, anxious to have the cases of himself and his friend reviewed by a Superior Court, wrote to his father, affectionately desiring him not to interfere to have him released. But the old man, who was fast declining, and anxious to have the company and attentions of his son, to whom he was not only reconciled, but on whose filial affection and care he had learned to lean for comfort and support, was not willing to wait the tardy process of law; and therefore paid the fines of both the Friends, and had them set free. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The uniformity and plainness which William Penn has bequeathed in such an abiding legacy to Philadelphia, however, is seen but by a faint penumbra in the dress of the inhabitants, or in their equipages, style of living, and costliness of furniture and entertainment. A faint shadow of original simplicity there still certainly exists, visible through all the departures from the spirit of Quakerism; and it is a leaven of taste and elegance in the ferment of luxury which has given Philadelphia emphatically a character for refinement. ”

“ Under these circumstances, some accounts represent that William Penn voluntarily secluded himself where he could not be easily seen; waiting until a time should arrive when he might have a fair opportunity to clear himself ”

“ William Penn thought it would be wise to do as the Pilgrims and Puritans had done. There was plenty of land in America, and it would be easy there to make a home for the poor Quakers where they could live in peace and worship God in the way they thought right. This they could not do in England.
Penn went to the king and told him how he could pay his debt. If the king would give him a tract of land on the west side of the Delaware River, he would take it as payment in full for the money owing to his father. ”

“ He was the son of William Penn, who, trained to nautical life, had by his genius and courage risen rapidly in the navy, until at the age of twenty-nine he became "Vice-Admiral of the Straits." From the account of his life and public career, given by Granville Penn, a descendant, he appears to have been a man who made self-interest a leading principle of conduct, but who, while eagerly coveting wealth and honor, was never accused of being corrupt as a public servant. ”

“ William Penn was the son of Sir William Penn, an admiral in the navy of the Commonwealth and a friend of Charles II. At Oxford young William Penn was known as an athlete and a scholar and a linguist, a reputation he maintained in after life by learning to speak Latin, French, German, Dutch, and Italian. After becoming a Quaker, he was taken from Oxford and traveled in France, Italy, and Ireland, where he was imprisoned for attending a Quaker meeting. ”

“ He kept great lords waiting without while he conversed at leisure with the Quaker. He liked Penn, and Penn liked him. In spite of the disparities in their age, rank, and creed, William Penn and James Stuart were fast friends, united by the bond of genuine affection.
It was characteristic of Penn to be blind to the faults of his friends. He brought great troubles both upon himself and upon his colony by his refusal to believe the reports which were made to him against the character of men whom he had appointed to office: he was unwilling to believe evil of any man. ”

“ William Penn still had many friends at court, and it was doubtless largely through their efforts that he succeeded in having the bill to take Pennsylvania away from him withdrawn from Parliament. There were a number of prominent men in the government, however, who thought that none of the American colonies should be owned by private persons, but that all should be directly under the Crown, and these men soon offered another bill much like the earlier one. To defeat this, Penn and Lord Baltimore joined hands and ceased to wrangle over the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. ”

“ William Penn arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682, and in that year and the two following fifty vessels came into the Delaware River, bringing several thousand emigrants; the most of them from Great Britain, and some from Germany. Nearly all of them were professors with Friends, and many substantial, consistent members, who came under a sense of religious duty, and made the practice of the religion they had embraced the primary object of life. ”

“ Half a century later, however, when William Penn's son Thomas was the governor, the Lenni-Lenape, or Delaware Indians, from whom Penn had bought much land, became uneasy at the encroachments of some of the settlers, and asked to have a distance, stated in the old agreement to be "as far as a man can go in a day and a half," definitely determined. Thomas Penn, the governor of Pennsylvania, and the chiefs of the Delawares agreed that the distance should be determined by a walk to take place on September 19, 1737. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 1668 William Penn was imprisoned on account of one of his publications, "The Sandy Foundation Shaken." It resulted from himself and George Whitehead having been unfairly prevented from orally replying to a Calvinistic preacher who had assailed the doctrines of Friends. In this tract he was not so guarded in the language he used, but that he was misunderstood by many, and supposed to be unsound on the fundamental doctrines of the proper divinity and meritorious death and atonement of Christ. ”

“ William Penn will always be remembered as a leader among [19] the early Quakers, and as the founder of a commonwealth. He first became acquainted with the Quakers, and first conceived the idea of founding at Oxford, or assisting to found, a commonwealth, by the preaching of Thomas Loe.
It is a curious fact that the spirit of protest will often pass by serious offenses and fasten upon some apparently slight occasion which has rather a symbolical than an actual importance. William Penn, so far as we know, endured the disorders of anti-Puritan Oxford without protest. ”

“ The evidence of the three witnesses examined was altogether inconclusive, but William Penn boldly said to the Court, "We confess ourselves to be so far from recanting or declining to vindicate the assembling of ourselves, to preach, pray, or worship the eternal, holy, just God, that we declare to all the world, that we do believe it to be our indispensable duty to meet incessantly on so good an account; nor shall all the powers upon earth be able to divert us from reverencing and adoring the God who made us." ”

“ In 1668 Thomas Loe was called away from the church militant to enter upon his reward in the church triumphant. When on his death-bed, he said to William Penn, who, with other Friends, was waiting on him, "Bear thy cross and stand faithful to God; then He will give thee an everlasting crown of glory, that shall not be taken from thee. There is no other way which shall prosper than that which the holy men of old walked in. God hath brought immortality to light, and life immortal is felt. Glory! glory! ”

“ Similar treaties had been made between the settlers and the natives for years in that neighborhood and in other parts of North America. The only thing that made Penn's treaties really remarkable was that the Quaker proprietor actually kept his promises. The Indians came to regard this as remarkable, after they had dealt with other white men, and spread the word that Penn, or Onas, as the Iroquois called him, or Mignon, as the Delawares called him, was really a man of his word. In time this unusual reputation of William Penn [Pg 85] spread across the sea to England and to France. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He graciously closed his letter in these words: "God give you [Pg 154] his wisdom and fear to direct you, that yet our poor country may be blessed with peace, love, and industry, and we may once more meet good friends, and live so to the end, our relation in the Truth having but the same true interest. I am, with great truth and most sincere regard, your real friend, as well as just Proprietor and Governor, William Penn."
The English Crown was to pay Penn £12,000 in four annual installments. Before the matter could be finally settled it had to be ratified by an Act of Parliament ”

“ PENN, JOHN (1760–1834) , miscellaneous writer, born in London on 22 Feb. 1760, and baptised at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields on 21 March, was the eldest surviving son of Thomas Penn [q. v.] and of his wife Juliana, daughter of Thomas Fermor, first earl of Pomfret. William Penn [q. v.] , founder of Pennsylvania, was his grandfather. On the death of his father in 1775 John succeeded to his property, which included the moiety of the proprietorship of the province of Pennsylvania, with hereditary governorship, and Stoke Pogis Park in Buckinghamshire, which his father had purchased in 1760. ”