Author Penn William

tain previously widowed and the daughter of a Rotterdam merchant.[1] William Penn, Sr., served in the Commonwealth Navy during the English Civil War and was rewarded by Oliver Cromwell with estates in Ireland. The lands were seized from Irish Catholics, in retaliation for an earlier massacre of Protestants. Admiral Penn took part in the restoration of Charles II and was eventually knighted and served in the Royal Navy. At the time of his son’s birth, Captain Penn was twenty-three and an ambitious naval officer in charge of quelling Irish Catholic unrest and blockading Irish ports.[2] William Penn grew up during the reign of Oliver Cromwell, who succeeded in leading a Puritan revolt against King Charles I, who was beheaded when Penn was age 5.[3] His father was often at sea. Little William caught the pox, losing all his hair (he wore a wig until he left college), prompting his parents to move to the suburbs to an estate in Essex.[4] The country life made a lasting impression on young Penn, and kindled a love of horticulture.[5] Their neighbour was famed diarist Samuel Pepys, who was friendly at first but later secretly hostile to the Admiral, perhaps embittered in part by his failed seductions of both Penn’s mother and his sister Peggy.[6] Penn was educated at Chigwell School, by private tutors in Ireland and then at Christ Church, Oxford.[7] At that time, there were no state schools, and nearly all educational institutions were affiliated with the Anglican Church. Children from poor families had to have a wealthy sponsor to get an education, as did Sir Isaac Newton. Penn’s education heavily leaned on the classical authors and “no novelties, or conceited modern writers’’ were allowed including William Shakespeare.[8] Foot racing was Penn’s favorite sport, and he would often sprint the more than three mile (5 km) distance from his home to the school. The school itself was cast in a Puritan mode—strict, humorless, and somber—and teachers had to be pillars of virtue and provide sterling examples to their charges.[9] Though later opposing the Puritans on religious grounds, Penn absorbed many Puritan behaviors, and was known later for his serious demeanor, strict behavior, and lack of humor.[10] After a failed mission to the Caribbean, Admiral Penn and his family were exiled to his lands in Ireland. It was during this period, when Penn was about fifteen, that he met Thomas Loe, a Quaker missionary, who was maligned by both Catholics and Protestants. Loe was admitted to the Penn household and during his discourses on the “Inner Light”, young Penn recalled later that, “the Lord visited me, and gave me divine Impressions of Himself.”[11] A year later, Cromwell was dead, the royalists resurging, and the Penn family returned to England. The middle class aligned itself with the royalists and Admiral Penn was sent a secret mission to bring back exiled Prince Charles. For his role in restoring the monarchy, Admiral Penn was knighted and gained a powerful position as Commissioner of the Navy.[12] In 1660, Penn arrived at Oxford, and enrolled as a gentleman scholar with an assigned servant. The student body was a volatile mix of swashbuckling Cavaliers (aristocratic Protestants), sober Puritans, and nonconforming Quakers. The new government’s discouragement of religious dissent gave the Cavaliers the license to harass the minority groups. Because of his father’s high position and social status, young Penn was firmly a Cavalier but his sympathies lay with the persecuted Quakers. To avoid conflict, he withdrew from the fray and became a reclusive scholar.[13] Also at this time, Penn was developing his individuality and philosophy of life, and found that he was not in sympathy with either his father’s martial view of the world or his mother’s society oriented sensibilities, “I had no relations that inclined to so solitary and spiritual way; I was a child alone. A child given to musing, occasionally feeling the divine presence.”[14] Penn returned home for the extraordinary splendor of the King’s restoration ceremony and was a guest of honor alongside his father, who received a highly unusual royal salute for his services to the Crown.[13] Though undetermined at the time, the Admiral had great hopes for his son’s career under the favor of the King. Back at Oxford, Penn considered a medical career and took some dissecting classes. Rational thought began to spread into science, politics and economics. When Dean Owen was fired for his free-thinking, Penn and other open-minded students rallied to his side and attended seminars at the dean’s house, where intellectual discussions covered the gamut of new thought.[15] Penn learned the valuable skills of forming ideas into theory, discussing theory through reasoned debate, and testing the theories in the real world. He also faced his first moral dilemma. After Owen was censured again after being fired, students were threatened with punishment for associating with him. However, Penn stood by the dean, thereby gaining a fine and reprimand from the university.[16] The Admiral despaired of the charges, pulled young Penn away from Oxford hoping to give him distractions from the heretical influences of the university.[17] The attempt had no effect and father and son struggled to understand each other. Back at school, the administration imposed stricter religious requirements including daily chapel attendance and required dress. Penn rebelled against enforced worship and was expelled. His father, in a rage, attacked young Penn with a cane and forced him from their home.[18] Penn’s mother made peace in the family which allowed her son to return home but quickly concluded that both her social standing and her husband’s career were being threatened by their son’s behavior. So at age 18, young Penn was sent to Paris to get him out of view, improve his manners, and expose him to another culture.[19] In Paris, at the court of young Louis XIV, Penn found French manners far more refined than the coarse manners of his countrymen—but the extravagant display of wealth and privilege did not sit well with him.[20] Though impressed by Notre Dame and the Catholic ritual, he felt uncomfortable with it. Instead he sought out spiritual direction from French Protestant theologian Moise Amyraut, who invited Penn to stay with him in Saumur for a year.[21] The undogmatic Christian humanist talked of a tolerant, adapting view of religion which appealed to Penn, who later stated, “I never had any other religion in my life than what I felt.”[22] By adapting his mentor’s belief in free-will, Penn felt unburdened of Puritanical guilt and rigid beliefs, and was inspired to search out his own religious path.[23] Upon returning to England after two years abroad, he presented to his parents a mature, sophisticated, well-mannered, “modish” gentleman, though Samuel Pepys noted young Penn’s “vanity of the French”.[24] Penn had developed a taste for fine clothes, and for the rest of his life would pay somewhat more attention to his dress than most Quakers. The Admiral had great hopes that his son then had the practical sense and the ambition necessary to succeed as an aristocrat. He had young Penn enroll in law school but soon his studies were interrupted. With warfare with the Dutch imminent, young Penn decided to shadow his father at work and join him at sea.[25] Penn functioned as an emissary between his father and the King, then returned to his law studies. Worrying about his father in battle he wrote, “I never knew what a father was till I had wisdom enough to prize him...I pray God...that you come home secure.”[26] The Admiral returned triumphant but London was in the grip of the plague of 1665. Young Penn reflected on the suffering and the deaths, and the way humans reacted to the epidemic. He wrote that the scourge “gave me a deep sense of the vanity of this World, of the Irreligiousness of the Religions in it.”[27] Further he observed how Quakers on errands of mercy were arrested by the police and demonized by other religions, even accused of causing the plague.[28] With his father laid low by gout, young Penn was sent to Ireland in 1666 to manage the family landholdings. While there he became a soldier and took part in suppressing a local Irish rebellion. Swelling with pride, he had his portrait done in a suit of armor, his most authentic likeness.[29] His first experience of warfare gave him the sudden idea of pursuing a military career, but the fever of battle soon wore off after his father discouraged him, “I can say nothing but advise to sobriety...I wish your youthful desires mayn’t outrun your discretion.”[30] While Penn was abroad, the great fire of 1666 consumed central London. As with the plague, the Penn family was spared.[31] But after returning to the city, Penn was depressed by the mood of the city and his ailing father, so he went back to the family estate in Ireland to contemplate his future. The reign of King Charles had further tightened restrictions against all religious sects other than the Anglican Church, making the penalty for unauthorized worship imprisonment or deportation. The “Five Mile Act” prohibited dissenting teachers and preachers to come within that distance of any borough.[32] The Quakers were especially targeted and their meetings were deemed as criminal.