William Penn (1644-1718)

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BURDETTE, R. J. William Penn (1644-1718). By Robert J. Burdette. New York : Henry Holt & Co., 1882. i6mo, pp. 2>^(i. (Lives of American Worthies,)

Chapter I. He Puts On His Hat

IT riLLIAM PENN was born in London, on • • Monday morning, October 14, 1644. He was not born with his hat on, but this is the only time he was ever seen in his bare head. The fact that he was born on wash-day was regarded by the augurs as an indication that he would be a man of peace, loving quiet and determined to ^have it, if it cost him a life-time of contention and dispute.

He came of an old family. The Penns dated their back numbers away into the earlier years of the 1 6th century. In Penn village, Buckinghamshire, the first William Penn on record, the great-grandfather of our William, died in 1591, and he now lies before the altar of Mintye church, in Wiltshire. Even in those old days, the Penns were mightier than the sword. They were merchants, and brought much wealth from the loud-sounding sea.

The father of the great Quaker, also William Penn,— for this thrifty family was very economical in the matter of names, — was a sailor. His father before him, Giles Penn, was captain of a merchantman, and young VViUiam shipped before the mast on his father's vessel. In those o-ood old times the traffic of the sea was about equally divided between the merchants and the pirates; so the honest merchant, who robbed nobody save his customers, carried his purse in one hand and a pistol in the other, as he sailed. The pirate of the time was a most avaricious wretch. Whatever he saw he wanted, and what he wanted he got, unless the owner carried the longest cutlass and the heaviest guns. So the young sailor was well trained in all the ways of trade. He bought in the cheapest and sold in the highest market, and thumped the pirates, until, loving fighting better than trading, he entered the royal navy.

It is evident that this WiUiam Penn did not inherit the Quaker principles of his renowned son. Before he was twenty years old he was a captain in the royal navy, not by purchase, but

^t. I.J A FIGHTING PENN. 3

by rapid promotion on his merits. Having now a secured position which would keep him away from home the greater part of the time,— for only officers of the United States navy are compelled to live ashore,— Captain Penn married a Dutch girl, Margaret Jasper, daughter of John ■ Jasper, a merchant of Rotterdam. Margaret was very wealthy, but Captain Penn did not consider this a bar to their union. '' No," said the frank, honest-hearted sailor, '' I would marry you if you had ten times so much money." His father-in-law was deeply affected by this unselfish declaration, and on the 6th of January, 1643, the young people were married, and took handsome lodgings in London, living near the Tower, which was then the fashionable quarter for naval men. Captain f enn was a good liver ; he wore good clothes, drank good claret and better sack, was fond of gay society, and took good care of William Penn. He was ambitious, but his ambition was tempered Avith caution, and he was led more by interest than principle. " So long as I get the interest regularly," he said, ''I will not trouble you for the principle," and this feeble joke affords a key to his motives in life. In the quarrel between the King and the Commons, in 1643, Captain Penn calmly but firmly established himself upon the fence until he could see in which cart the melons were loaded. Those were stirring times. Charles was more than ever absolute, the people more than ever republican ; the quarrel was deepening in its intensity and bitterness. One of the first trials of strength, the dispute over the command of the navy, was settled in favor of the Commons by the appointment of Lord Warwick as Lord High Admiral; and when Captain Penn saw the melons loaded into the people's cart, he came down from his high seat on the fence and said that he too was a reformer, and cast his lot with the strongest side. " It is a frosty day," he said, " when I happen to be shut out with a minority." He was placed in command of a twenty-eight-gun ship, the " Fellowship; •" slipped anchor and dropped down the river Saturday morning, October 12th, and the Monday morning following he was telephoned from the city:

'' Hello, Fellowship !"

*' Hello, Central !"

" Boy — 'smorning — blue eyes — eight-pounder. Good-bye."

And without another word he rushed ashore

^t. lo.] CLIMBING UP. 5

and chased the first street-car all the way to his lodgings.

Stormy times for the young Quaker, passing his childhood in Essex, while his father sailed the seas over, sweeping St. George's Channel like a cyclone, threshing the French wherever he found them, winnowing the seafaring royalists like chaff, chasing the dashing Rupert all along the coasts of Portugal, and first carrying the terror of English arms into Italian waters ; a captain at nineteen years, rear-admiral at twenty-three, admiral of the Irish Sea at twenty-five, and vice-admiral " to the Streights" at twentynine. There was a model fighting father for a peace-loving Quaker son. The arm of the people had torn away the crown of Charles Stuart, and his head c^me away with it ; the Protector succeeded Parliament, and Vice-Admiral Penn was one of the first naval officers to send in his adhesion to the new government. For Cromwell he smote the navy of Holland, and fairly drove his wife's relations off the seas; he added Jamaica to the British dominions, and suffered his first defeat at Hispaniola.

Never at heart devoted to Cromwell, and always loyally and devotedly attached to the b WILLIAM FENN. [1654.

interests of Admiral Penn, Admiral Penn demanded compensation of the Protector for the losses his family suffered in Ireland during the civil war, and received all he demanded, ** lands of full value of 300 pounds a year, near to a castle or fortification for their better protection, with a good house upon them for his residence." Furthermore, Cromwell made it a special personal request that *' this order should be so obeyed as to leave no cause of trouble to the Admiral and his family in the matter ; but so that they might enjoy the full benefit of the estate while he was fighting his countrj^'s battles in foreign lands."

And having thus got out of Cromwell all he could reasonably expect, and seeing the Penn family well provided for so far as the Protectorate was concerned, the thrifty Admiral, December 25, took his pen in hand and wrote his Christmas present to Charles Stuart, at Cologne, offering to place the whole of the fleet under his command at his disposal, and run it into any port he might designate. '' It will be a lively administration," said Admiral Penn, " that can change quicker than I can," and he smiled to

^t. 10.] LAID BY THE HEELS. y

think how easily a true statesman can get around civil-service reform.

Cromwell knew of the Admiral's treason almost as soon as Charles, but he said not a word, until the failure of the attack on Hispaniqla, when in his wrath he stripped General Venables and Admiral Penn of their commands and dignities, and shut them up in separate dungeons of the Tower, to think about it. Here the Admiral subsisted for some time on liberal rations of humble-pie, an English dish very similar to the American '' crow." He ate all that was sent him, and passed his plate for more. He addressed a very humble petition to Cromwell, confessing his faults, at least those of which he supposed Cromwell was already informed, and threw himself on the Protector's mercy. Cromwell at once generously restored him to home and liberty, and the grateful Admiral immediately resumed his treasonable correspondence. He retired to his Irish estates, that with the greater security he might plot for the return of the exiled princes and the overthrov/ of the man who gave him those estates. He prefaced this step in the usual manner by announcing, as all politicians do when about to concoct some unusual piece of rascality and dishonesty, that he had gone out of politics forever.

Then came the night of September 2d ; there was awe and unrest and fear, conflicting hopes and anxious thoughts in the hearts of men. The day went drearily out on London town, and the darkness of a night settled down upon it such as no man's remembrance could parallel. The storm came with the darkness. Through the clouds that tossed, a sea of inky fury in the skies, came no gleam of light, no ray of any star. The wind came on in sullen, sobbing gusts. Then in wailing cadences it swept over the darkened town, wilder and louder as the night wore on, a shrieking gale that rose at midnight to the madness of a hurricane ; chimneys toppled and were hurled headlong in the streets, and the roofs were torn crashing from the houses. Ships dragged their anchors, and their hawsers parted at the wharves. In the parks at the Protector's palace the uprooted trees were hurled to the ground. In the horror of the contending elements in all that long night of darkness and storm, Cromwell lay dying, praying for his enemies. With the next morning dawned

^t. 15.] DEATH OF CROMWELL. 9

the anniversary of the battles of Dunbar and Worcester, and the hand that smote the enemies of the Commonwealth on these fields was stilled and nerveless forever-more.

At this time, and for a year thereafter, the Penns remained on their Irish estates, but the Admiral was busy with his intrigues. But in the Protectorate, mediocrity succeeded genius ; one year of the feeble Richard sufficed. With his deposition, Admiral Penn promptly descended the fence on the safe side ; declared for Charles ; brought the fleet over to the Restoration ; personally, on board his own ship, welcomed the King to his navy ; and for all this he was promptly knighted by Charles and was made, at different times. Commissioner of the Admiralty and Navy, Governor of the town and fort of Kingsale, Vice-Admiral of Munster, member of the Provincial Council of 1664, and Great Captain Commander under his Royal Highness, James, Duke of York, with the understanding that he was to be made several, more things as soon as the Secretary of State could invent names for them. And the Admiral, Commissioner, Governor, Vice-Admiral, Councillor, and Great Captain Commander,

Sir William Penn, called his son to his side and said, " William, my gentle boy, there is nothing like seeing the melons loaded on the cart before you climb in."

In the mean time, William Penn, Junior, was at home, taking more interest in the measles than in politics, and getting his lessons and floggings with equal regularity, in accordance with the educational system of that day. He first attended a free grammar school at Chigwell in Essex; at twelve years of age he was sent to a private school in London, on Tower Hill, and at the age of fifteen, about the time of the Restoration, he was sent to Oxford, where he matriculated as gentleman commoner at Christ's Church. Pie was a hard student, and could row a boat in French, German, Dutch, and Italian, and in later life he learned to sell glass beads in two or three Indian dialects; but as base-ball was not then invented, his hands were not deformed, nor Avas his nose backed like a camel, but his college advantages were somewhat limited. He was tall and slender, but very athletic and fond of out-door sports ; a boy of earnest religious convictions. The only outburst of natural depravity that has

^t. 15.] SOME RELIGIOUS PEOPLE. II

been placed on record against his college life is the fact that he wrote a Latin poem for the Duke of Gloucester, with all the jokes in Italics. All about this boy — whose mind had from earliest childhood been deeply impressed on the subject of rehgion ; who, at the age of eleven years, *' Avhile sitting alone in his chamber, was suddenly surprised with an inward sense of 'comfort and happiness, akin to a strong religious emotion ; the chamber at the same time appearing as if filled with a soft and holy light;" who, in his first year at Oxford, found his greatest delight in reading the doctrinal discussions developed by the Puritan idea — the air was fairly tremulous with religious excitement and doctrinal debate. Puritanism and the profligate, gay, irreligioys court of Charles were fighting with other weapons than Roundhead and Cavalier had wielded on Marston Moor. There was a madness in the world on the subject of religion, or rather religions, for every man seemed to have more religions than Colonel Ingersoll has none, and Familists, Anabaptists, Libertines, Puritans, Arians, Brownists, Antinomians, Ranters, Antitrinitarians, Independents, Calvinists, Arminians, Baptists, Perfectists, Presbyterians,

Antiscripturists, Enthusiasts, Levellers, Papists, Fifth-Monarchy men, Muggletonians, Sceptics, Seekers, and Socinians wrangled and pelted each other with pamphlets. Atheists swarmed all over the kingdom ; one sect arose, holding as one of its tenets that a woman has no sovd ; St. Paul's Cathedral was used as a stable for horses ; hogs were baptized according to the established ritual, by the soldiers, at the consecrated fonts ; *' one man was found with seven wives," a species of religious observance which was even then considered abominably wicked, and is now only followed and permitted in some portions of South Africa and the United States ; prophets, lunatics, preachers, martyrs, fools, knaves, and dupes disturbed and distressed the poor old world with new and old doctrines, predictions, denunciations, dreams, revelations, and visions. Not only the ignorant and vulgar, but the educated and refined had visions, and Lady Springett, Penn's mother-in-law, ''twice saw and spoke with the Son of God in her ecstatic dreams."

Just at this time came George Fox, an illiterate shoemaker, plain and unlettered, read only in the pure diction of the English Bible, waging iEt. i6.] AN UNPOPULAR SECT. 1 3

relentless war against all existing creeds, teachers, and doctrines, asking no quarter and giving none, preaching a divine light concealed in every man, a spark of the infallible Godhead, which was the highest guide of human conduct; a light free of all control ; every man and woman was supreme ; even the Scriptures, Fox said, are to be judged by the Light, — without it they are useless. As he preached, the established church, the government, the rabble, and the members of other denominations sought, by the usual means employed in those days, to modify his teaching, and turn him from the error of his ways. He was beaten and stoned, pilloried, imprisoned, set in the stocks, fined, passed the greater part of his time in jail, but the more he was persecuted the more boldly he preached ; men flocked to his belief, and the Children of Light, as they called themselves, or Quakers, as their less respectful neighbors called them, grew in number and multiplied and kept the jails and stocks so full that for some time the martyrs of the other denominations were unable to be accommodated even with standing-room by the authorities.

And now in Oxford, Thomas Loe was preaching the new doctrmes taught by George Fox, and Penn and a few fellow-students were attracted by the neglect of forms and ceremonies in the services, and regularly neglected chapel to hear Thomas Loe. For this they were promptly brought up and given ten days or ten dollars, for non-conformity, a crime which at that time was considered a trifle less odious than high treason, but infinitely more wicked than murder.

The punishment had the usual effect upon the young men. They now declared they would never attend chapel again ; they would not wear the gown themselves, and they would make it warm for any person who did. They publicly declared that any man who would take a book to church to pray out of, would use a pony for his Latin translations. Whenever these independent young men met students wearing the hated rubric, they pursued after them, and encompassed them roundabout, and smote them sore, and tore the vestments from their courtly shoulders, and entreated them roughly ; and in all these reformatory movements William Penn was the chief reformer. He was promptly brought up for judgment, and without ceremony the faculty suspended him.

When William returned home, his father did not see him while he was yet a long way off, and run to meet him and fall upon his neck. And when William told him that he had gone through college ahead of his class by several years, the Admiral did not appear very glad. He received the information with a cold silence that must have been very discouraging to his son. He could have forgiven anything but this. The Admiral w^as fond of recreation and fighting himself, went to the theatre, '' loved to dine at a tavern with a set of jovial companions, and was addicted to all the genial weaknesses of a busy man," says Pepys, — whatever the "genial weaknesses of a busy man" may be. But conscience was a complaint that never troubled Sir William very much. If ever he was vaccinated for a conscience, it didn't take. He had, in his busy and ambitious life, always managed to get down on that side of the fence where the greater multitude was assembled, and he took his conscience, if he indulged in such a dangerous non-conformist sort of luxury, with him. And to find his eldest and favorite son, the son on whose head he had builded so many bright dreams and plans of gayety and worldly greatness and

Splendor, cultivating an independent unbiased conscience, a non-conformist at seventeen, with a leaning- toward Quakerism, — it was too much. He immediately sent the young man to Paris, accompanied by a select assortment of college friends.

They were not Quaker college friends. Ah, no! They were ''howling swells," who wore purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously three times a day and once or twice at night. Penn joined in the recreations of the time. He was presented to Louis Quatorze, he wore a rapier, he fought in the streets one night and disarmed his man, he " sassed " the police, called the waiters by their first names, wore his watchchain outside of his coat, danced the racket, and was " one of our kind of boys."

In this whirl of fashionable Hfe and the brilliant society of the French court, he temporarily went out of the Quaker business, put up the shutters, discharged the boy, and rented the shop for a sail-loft. But he was not altogether absorbed in Parisian revelry ; he was not frivolous. Even while he shared in the recreations of the time, he continued his studies under the learned Moses Amyrault, and with this eminent

^t. 21.] EVIL COMMUNICATIONS. \J

scholar he read theology and pored over the Fathers. Leaving Paris, he travelled through France and Italy with Lord Robert Spencer, and made the acquaintance and won the friendship of Algernon Sidney, who was then living in exile rather than compromise his political faith.

After an absence of two years, Penn was recalled by Sir WiUiam. His father was pleased with him. The young man was tall, graceful, and handsome, with an almost womanly beauty ; wore stylish clothes, was an especial favorite with the ladies, parted his hair in the middle, wore it long and curled it ; a rapier dangled at his side, and it was believed by the cook that he carried a razor in his boot ; and, to crown all, he wrote poetry, French poetry — chansons d' amour, a kind of poetry so unfit to read that it is kept in duplicate in all public libraries.

In order the more fully to crush out his Quakerism, the Admiral kept his son employed on the King's business, which brought him in continual contact with the irreligious and profligate court of Charles; he entered the young man as a student at Lincoln's Inn, with the intention of making him a lawyer, thereby destroying the last vestige of anything like a conscience the young man might possess ; took him to sea on his own ship, and let him see some sharp fighting between the Dutch and the English ; sent him to the King with despatches, and just when he thought he had knocked his son's broad-brim into a cocked hat, the plague broke out in London and tumbled the Admiral's airy castles all about his ears. In the horror of the pestilence that walked in darkness and the destruction that wasted at noon-day,* the mind of the young courtier turned back into its old channels of rehgious fervor. When people fell dead in the streets and the death-rate ran up to 10,000 cases in a single day, when the dead-cart rumbled through the streets, and the dismal cry "■ Bring out your dead !" rose like a wail on the night, the young man became more serious than ever. He swore off going to court, bought more religious works, and oft as he heard a dead-cart rumble by, he buried himself in the Fathers and filled himself with tough old rugged theology that it would plague the plague to understand. When Sir William perceived with pain that the

* David. Now do you know where to find it ?

^t. 21.] AMONG THE LAND-LEAGUERS. I9

Quakerine idea with which Thomas Loe had inoculated his son was taking again worse than ever, he sent him off to Ireland to look after the estates which the worldly-wise old Admiral had secured from Cromwell and the Commonwealth. He thought if he could get his son settled on the Irish estates, the excitement of being Boycotted, evicting tenants, and dodging the land-leaguers would divert his mind from Quakerism.

Alas for the careful Sir William's plans ! His son went to Ireland willingly enough, but Ireland at that time was so full of Quakers that their feet stuck out of the dormer windows. Their familiar accents fell upon the young man's ears like words of welcome when he reached Dublin. " Con,^avick, dost thee know the gossoon in the ruffled shirt an' the cocked hat? Ah, tundher an' turf, look at the murdherin* plume ov him !"

"Verily, friend Murphy, acushla, sorra the wan ov me knoweth. Will thee make a rush wid me fur the baggage ov him, do ye mind?"

And so once more the dreams of the ambitious Sir William were frustrated. He thought when his son got to Shangarry Castle in the barony of Imokelly, and met with the fox-hunting roisterers of the KillataHcks of Killmanaisy and the Barrynahagles of Ballymachanshara, and learned the taste of peat whiskey, he would forever-more be a man of the world. The Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Ormond, maintained a brilliant court. The Ormonds were soldiers, and their talk of war infected Penn. He marched away with young Lord Arran to suppress an insurrection of the soldiers at Carrickfergus. In the siege he so distinguished himself that he won favorable mention in Lord Arran's despatches and praise from all the soldiers, for he inherited his father's fighting qualities. The Viceroy proposed that Penn should join the army, and offered him a company of foot. Penn himself, fired with military ardor, eagerly fell in with the idea, and earnestly besought his father to comply with this proposal.

Here at last was an open road leading straight away from George Fox and Thomas Loe and the much-dreaded Quakerism, and WiUiam himself was anxious to walk right down that road to worldly ambition and fame, when the Admiral deliberately put up the bars, resolutely

^t. 22.] A WARLIKE PORTRAIT. 21

refused his son permission to join the army, and planted his own unyielding will in opposition to the one possible plan of carrying- out his long-cherished desires. Surely the Fates intended that William Penn should be a Quaker. He regretfully gave up his dream of a military career, and, proud of his uniform and war record, had his portrait painted, '' the only time in his life," says Dixon, " in his military costume. It is a curious fact that the only genuine portrait of the great apostle of peace existing represents him armed and accoutred as a soldier." There were two original copies of this portrait, and one of them is now in the hall of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. The portrait bore the motto, '' Pax quseritus bello," and the warlike inscription, ^' Friend of Liberty, Justice, and Peace."

William took off his armor, laid down his Quaker gun, and resumed the business of looking after the Irish estates, devised by his shrewd father to turn his mind away from the Quakers. In less than a year after his military career was closed, he went to Cork on this business, because nobody ever goes to Cork save on compulsion, heard by accident that Thomas Loe was preaching there, went in one night and heard him deliver a sermon on the text, '^ There is a faith that overcomes the world, and there is a faith that is overcome by the world," and walked out of that meeting-house a Quaker ; in conviction, in principle, in scu^ and intellect, body, bones, breeches, and hat, a Quaker.

On the 3d of September he was worshipping in Cork, when he was arrested with the rest of the congregation by a body of soldiers, and dragged to the Mayor's court on a charge of " riot and tumultuous assembling." The Mayor recognized him, and knowing him to be a friend of the Viceroy, offered to turn him loose on his own recognizance ; but William '' would not go back on the crowd," and so went to prison. The Lord President of Munster ordered his immediate discharge, of course, but all Dublin and the rest of the world knew that William Penn soldier, courtier, son of Admiral Sir William Penn, had joined the Quakers.

There was wrath in the house of the Penns when the glad news reached London. William was ordered home, and when he met his father the debate was opened before the speaker had time to put the question. William did not look like a Quaker, — at least, not a broad-brim, thirtybutton-coat, long-weskit Quaker. He was a lardy-dah Friend, with lace ruffles, rapier, long plume, and curls ; but he was a Quaker all the same, as Sir William soon learned.

After a very stormy session the Admiral made a test question of the hat. His son, in common with all Quakers, had hat on the brain. He ate, walked, lived, moved, and had his being in his hat. The Admiral asked if he would wear his hat in the presence of his own father. William said he would. H^ would wear his hat to bed, if anybody slept with him, rather than take it off in the presence of mortal man. He might take off all the rest of his clothes, but his hat, never! You had to draw the line somewhere, and he drew it at the hat. Then the Admiral wanted to know what he would do with his hat in the presence of the King ? And WilHam, Avith the calm confidence of a man who has one ace in his hand ana three in his sleeve, said he would wear his hat over his right eye, aslant and defiant, turned up in front and slouched down behind, in the presence of all the kings in the deck.

The Admiral, stunned with amazement that any man could vSet his conscience above good breeding, faced his peace-loving but rebellious son toward the front door and gently but firmly eliminated him.

Chapter II. And Gets Into Prison

'T^HROWN thus suddenly upon the country, ■^ William boarded around for a few months, explaining- to his astonished relatives that he had had his resignation handed in to him. The houses of his Quaker friends were open to him, and his mother, eluding Sir William's vigilance, sent him money. It was impossible for the Admiral to continue the siege when the besieged kept up unbroken communication with his base of supplies, and aftei*" a few months' banishment the young Quaker was recalled, and came joyously home, put on a clean shirt, and passed his plate for another slice of the fatted veal.

But the Admiral was still nursing his wrath, although it was a large, healthy wrath, that required no nursing to keep it alive. He refused to speak to or even see his son. William stuck to his hat, and, reciprocally, his hat stuck to him. He graciously thee'd and thou'd everybody he met ; but Sir William refused to recognize either of them, and obstinately ignored his son, his hat, and his grammar.

The Quaker was the most perfect democrat the world had ever known. He acknowledged no superior. He was the peer of any man ; hence he could not descend to the servility and hypocrisy of what the gentle Friends called '' hat worship," he would uncover in the presence of no man. He believed he was as good as any other man.