The true William Penn

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

I.— The Man ii •

II.— The Times 3^

II The Times

Penn was born October 14, 1644, and, as we read English history, that seems a troublous time for a child to come into the world, especially a child that was to be a man of peace. England was full of religious and political confusion. The great ideas of government and religion by which we have been living for two hundred years were then struggling for existence in their primitive form, and for the next fifty years were tossed about in the wild tumult of wars, revolution, and religious persecution.

There were two great political parties, the Royalists and the Roundheads, and several great religious parties, the Church of England, the various divisions of the Puritans, and the Roman Catholics, besides numerous fanatical small sects which were fiercely in earnest to establish their principles of politics or religion. At that time the discussion of such principles was not confined to argument. Each party and each religion was prepared for force, to inflict or to suffer martyrdom, to fight or to die in their cause.

For nearly half a century the king had been struggling hard to build up the power and privileges of the crown against Parliament and the people. 3>

James I. had been very diligent in this, and tyranny was gaining in spite of the frantic and spasmodic struggles of the people against it. Tyranny was growing because England was growing. As the island became more and more civilized and began to take a place among the nations, organization became more and more necessary. Regular methodical government must succeed the easy, noble, and manly freedom which was instinctive with the descendants of the Vikings, Angles, and Saxons. The followers of the king and all who admired absolute monarchy or loved place and power took advantage of this necessity to develop royalty and a church established by law, and for a long time they were very successful.

Other things, however, were growing besides the royal power and the Church of England. The great movement of the Reformation, starting in the invention of printing and the revival of learning, was still stimulating independent thought, arousing and encouraging more and more the Puritan sects, and leading them to see their interest in developing the ancient Anglo-Saxon liberties, as the Royalists saw their interest in developing the kingly power.

Strange creatures were those Puritans and other sects who had only recently broken through the restraints of the Middle Ages and begun to think for themselves. From the system of the Middle Ages, which ignored the Bible altogether, they had rushed to the opposite extreme of accepting it so literally that they gave their children the strange un-English names they found in the Old Testament. From the 32

THE TIMES

Church of Rome, which governed as an absolute monarchy and governed too much, the Presbyterians had reacted to a system of representative or repubhcan church government made up of elective assemblies and synods, while others, the Independents and Congregationalists, had reacted to the principle that there should be .no general church government at all, and each congregation should be a law unto itself in doctrine and discipline. From the excesses of image worship and ritual they had gone to the extreme of abolishing all ritual, vestments, and images, adopting extemporaneous prayer instead of prayers read from a book, and preaching to a congregation that sat within four bare walls.

They were austere in their manners ; they disciplined themselves into a hatred of all amusements and pleasures. They saw the terrible side of religion ; they convinced themselves of original sin, with which every man was born, and for which the vast majority of mankind would be burnt forever in hell by a wrathful God who, to gratify his rage and pleasure, had foreordained them to their fate, in spite of the good deeds and works they might do on earth.

They encouraged all feelings that were gloomy and sombre, which were, they thought, alone compatible with religion. They relied on inward experiences and feelings of conversion to supply the place of the dogmas and forms they had rejected. They trained their faces to conform to their feelings, assumed sour, malignant expressions, whined, groaned,* and drawled in their speech. 3 33

They were accompanied by smaller sects, with minds still more distorted by the new-found liberty of the age, — fifth monarchy men, who believed that Christ was about to come to establish an earthly kingdom for a thousand years. Desperate, dangerous fellows they were ; for when the rage of their belief was on them and they thought the kingdom about to come, they would fight like devils, attacking the militia and soldiery with the utmost fury and refusing quarter.

Pepys describes how thirty-one of them, shouting, "The King Jesus and the heads upon the gates!" put all London in terror, routed the trainbands, put the king's lifeguard to the run, broke through the city gates, killed twenty men, and led every one to believe that they numbered five hundred, while every householder armed himself, and forty thousand stood ready to oppose these fierce fanatics.*

Then there were strange antinomian and familistic sects, who found their liberty in dropping the original sin and gloom of the Puritans and believing that there was scarcely any sin at all, and that love and contemplation were religion. Of these we shall have more to say hereafter, for they, together with the Puritans, created a phase of religious thought which had great influence on William Penn, and, indeed, accounts for half his character. The Quakers also were coming into prominence at that time, and they Avere a very peculiar and important sect, of whom we shall have a great deal to say.

* Pepys's Diary, ed. 1S93, vol. 34

THE TIMES

In striking contrast to these strange sects were the Royalists, who stood by the king and the Church of England, with its moderate ceremonies and ritual and its moderate adoption of the ideas of the Reformation. Pleasure-loving and gay, devoted to sports and amusements, dressing fantastically, as it would now seem, in bright colors, with long hair and pointed beards, and all the more devoted to pleasures, theatres, oaths, ribaldry, and licentiousness, because these things were under the ban of Puritanism.

A long and terrible conflict was inevitable between these elements. How to combine the ancient freedom with the necessities of highly-organized government and have both liberty and government at the same time was the problem by whose solution England was to be torn and distracted for the rest of the century. During that time, which in effect covers the life of William Penn, "freedom," as Tennyson has expressed it, "broadened slowly down from precedent to precedent." Slowly hardly describes this movement. It was veiy slow ; often stagnation and sometimes retrogression ; and Penn's relation to this movement, which is still a movement, is the most important part of his life's history.

Charles I., who succeeded James I. in 1625, carried the royal power to still greater heights. He levied taxes and imposts as he pleased without authority of law, and governed for many years without any Parliament at all. In fact, he completely eclipsed and for the time being destroyed the ancient liberties and brought royalty to its climax and acme of power, 35

In the same way, reacting against the whole spirit of the Reformation, he built up the Established Church. He appointed Laud Archbishop of Canterbury, and it is needless to tell again how Laud became the terror and detestation of Puritans, filling the churches with images, elaborating ceremonies, and inflicting degrading punishment on the clergy who inclined to Puritan ways. They were imprisoned, whipped, had their ears cut off, their noses slit, and their cheeks branded with hot irons. We have all heard the story of the Puritan Pryne, who was stood in the pillory, lost both his ears, and was imprisoned for life, because he wrote condemning the balls, theatres, and other amusements of the court.

It was in those days that John Hampden sturdily refused to pay the ship-money, which was an old form of tax by which the seaports had supplied the king with war-vessels. Charles attempted to compel the inland towns to contribute, and Hampden resisted, although the suit against him was for only twenty shillings. Penn, as we shall see, in later years made a similar stand for trial by jury.

We have all read how the reaction by Charles I. against the Reformation brought on a counter-reaction from the Reformation itself ; for while despotism grew among the Royalists at court, wild republicanism spread among the people. Charles I. tried to force the Church of England's ritual and ceremonies, upon the Presbyterian Scotch, and when they rose in rebellion and mobbed the bishops he called a Parliament together to grant him an army with 36

THE TIMES

which to suppress them. There had been no Par- Hament for eleven years ; and this new one was filled with men of the Cromwell and Hampden order. They impeached and executed Laud and Stafford. They abolished the ecclesiastical courts which had been punishing the Puritans. They seized violently on all the rights they had so long declared they possessed. They completely reversed the condition of affairs, and instead of the king ruling without a Parliament, Parliament ruled without the king. He was driven from London, established himself at York, and declared war against his Parliament.

In this way began the great civil war in 1642, and when Penn was born, in October, 1644, four famous battles had been fought, — Edge Hill, Newbury, Nantwich, and Marston Moor. The Puritan cannon had battered down many an ancient castle of the nobility. The king's cause was lost, and the successful Puritan and parliamentary soldiers, with their extraordinary biblical names, — Praise God Barebones and Sergeant Hew Agag in Pieces before the Lord, — were roaming through the country, smashing the images in the churches, tearing out the pipes in the organs, breaking the stained-glass windows, and stabling their horses in cathedrals.

But although civil war rages in a country the ordinary affairs of life go on. The children play hideand-seek and lovers kiss their sweethearts as in the piping times of peace. We must not let the general statements and perspective of history deceive us, and we are assured that there was still some quiet life left in England when wc read of that country gentleman 37 who, on the morning of the battle of Edge Hill, was unconcernedly strolling with his dogs between the two armies. What concern had the war with him whose life as lord of his lands was self-contained and complete ?

So Penn, we may infer, was born as peacefully as children usually are in a house where his father and mother had lodgings, and which stood in London in a little court close to the Tower and adjoining what was called London Wall. His father had gone to sea, and soon the mother and her son left London and went to live in the pretty village of Wanstead, near Essex, and there Penn passed his boyhood and went to school.

Ill

Of Penn's mother very little is known, except that she was a Dutch woman, the daughter of John Jasper, a merchant of Rotterdam. Her son has left us no description of her. There is no portrait, no anecdotes or sayings, nothing that would reveal her character ; and very likely she was a plain, mediocre person ; for if she had been otherwise, something more definite about her would have come down to us.

Penn showed few if any Dutch traits. We might expect that his mother would have given him some of the thrifty, economical qualities of her nation. But he was just the reverse, a lavish spender of money rather than a saver, and a very poor business man, so far as regards details and management. His ideas of such subjects were grand, general, and sweeping like an Englishman's, in advance of his time and greater than his ability could accomplish. It might be said that his very earnest and advanced opinions on the subject of religious liberty were Dutch ; but he might have gained such opinions from the Quakers, who supported them more ardently than any other sect.

Pepys describes in his diary, in his amusing way, 39 his first meeting Lady Penn in August, 1664, and her appearance.

" At noon dined at home and after dinner my wife and I to Sir W Pen's to see his lady, the first time, who is a well looked, fat short old Dutch woman, but one that hath been heretofore pretty handsome, and is now very discreet and I believe hath more wit than her husband. Here we stayed talking a good while and very well pleased I was with the old woman at first visit." (Vol. iv. p. 207.)

In another passage he describes Lady Penn and some of the manners of the times when people visited one another in their bedrooms.

" So home vexed and going to my Lady Batten's there found a great many women with her in her chamber merry, my Lady Pen and her daughter, among others ; where my Lady Pen flung me down upon the bed, and herself and others, one after another, upon me, and very merry we were." (Vol. iv. pp. 391, 392.)

Later on Pepys describes her as " mighty homely and looks old." She was sufficiently good-looking, however, for him to make love to her.

She and her husband were, no doubt, plain people, and when they married were in moderate circumstances. The biographers describe Penn's birthplace near the Tower, as if his parents occupied the whole house ; but it seems they only lodged there. Pepys, who for many years associated with them very intimately, gives us an account of their beginnings ; but he obtained it from a certain Mrs. Turner, who was evidently an atrocious gossip.

" She [Mrs. Turner] says that he was a pityfull [fellow] when she

first knew them ; that his lady was one of the sourest, dirty women,

that ever she saw ; that they took two chambers, one over another,

for themselves and child in Tower Hill ; that for many years together they eat more meals at her house than at their own . . . that she brouglit my lady who then was a dirty slattern with her stockings hanging about her heels so that afterwards the people of the whole Hill did say that Mrs Turner had made Mrs Pen a gentlewoman." (Vol. vi. p. 329.)

But after making full allowances for Mrs. Turner, we can readily understand that there was a foundation of truth for what she said. Admiral Penn also, though of a respectable family, was a rough man. He was brought up as a sailor, and at the time he married and took lodgings near the Tower he had only lately come out of the merchant service, a very rough and brutal school. Lord Clarendon, as we shall see, described him as a man who was always trying to put on the appearance of good breeding, and not always with success. His whole career shows that, starting with almost nothing, he had a consuming ambition to make a fortune and get into good society without being over-scrupulous as to the means he used.

He is described on his tomb as descended from the Penns of Penns-Lodge, in the County of Wilts, and also from the Penns of Penn, in the County of Bucks. The family had apparently lived in those places from time immemorial, and that is all we know about them with any certainty. One of the ancestors is said to have been a monk in the Abbey of Glastonbury, in Somersetshire. When the monasteries were dissolved in the beginning of the reformation by Henry VHL, this monk was granted some of the Abbey lands, where he established Penns-Lodge, married, and had several children. It is possible 41 that from this man William Penn may have inherited his strong religious inclinations.

Several traditions attempt to trace back still farther the family history. Penn himself believed that he was of Welsh origin ; and according to Watson's "Annals of Pennsylvania," * the Rev. Hugh David, who went to Philadelphia in 1700, relates that he and Penn were on the ship together, when Penn, seeing a goat gnawing a broom, said, —

" Hugh, dost thou ol^serve that goat ? See what hardy fellows the Welsh are, how they can feed on a broom. However, Hugh, I am a Welshman myself, and will relate by how strange a circumstance our family lost their name. My grandfather (or great-grandfather) was named John Tudor, and lived upon the top of a hill or mountain in Wales ; he was generally called John Penmunrith which in English is ' John on the top of a hill.' He removed from Wales into Ireland, where he acquired considerable property. Upon his return into his own country, he was addressed by his old friends and neighbors, not in the former way, but by the name of Mr. Penn. He afterwards removed to London, where he continued to reside under the name of John Penn, which has since been the family name."

Some of the details of this statement are not consistent with the rest of the family history ; and in a letter written by Penn's son, John Penn, to the Rev. Dr. Smith, of Philadelphia, still another origin is suggested. It seems some woman in France named De Penn, or possibly De la Penne, had written to the Penns in England, claiming relationship with them. Some of her family, she said, had gone to England with William the Conqueror. This origin, seeming to be more flattering to the family pride, has been adopted by some writers ; but there is no proof of its correctness. Of the two, the Welsh origin is the more Hkely to be the true one.

But for our purpose we need go no farther back than Giles Penn, the grandfather of WilHam Penn. The family appear to have lived in Bucks and Wilts as respectable people of some means, belonging to the country gentry. But we must not think of the country gentleman of that time as anything like what he has been during the last century in England. He was a very rough farmer, leading a life of rude plenty, not on a country-seat with trim lawns and gardens, but on rugged acres, with his cattle and chickens of first importance, and allowed to wander under his bedroom windows. Instead of the excellent education, foreign travel, and familiarity with London for a few months every year, which characterize the squire of modern times, he seldom saw London more than once in his lifetime, he had never travelled, and his education was usually of the poorest. He was an aristocrat only because he held the political power in his county, presiding as a magistrate, and commanding the trainbands. In other respects his manners as well as his life were rude and boorish.

Whatever position the Penn family had they seem to have been unable to support towards the close of the sixteenth century, for the ancestral farm, Penns- Lodge, passed out of their hands, and we find that Giles Penn took to a seafaring life.

Commerce and shipping gave good opportunities in those days for making a fortune ; and Giles Penn no doubt was anxious to restore his family position, 43 and even to make it better than it had been. But the greatest opportunities for fortune-making came to the men who were courtiers, office-holders, or officers in the army or navy. The salaries of the courtiers who held office seem very large for the times ; but the perquisites and opportunities under the system of corruption which prevailed were enormous. The population of England was then considerably less than five million, and the population of London not half a million ; but the office of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, for example, was supposed to be worth forty thousand pounds a year ; and from this high official down to the lowest clerk, tide-waiter, or gauger, the same methods of gross corruption gave opportunities which varied only in degree.

Next in importance after the court officials for their opportunities for making money were the naval officers. Corruption and peculation were, if anything, more rife in the navy than at court ; and war-vessels were constantly employed to carry from port to port bullion and other valuable cargoes which merchants dared not trust to ordinary vessels. In this service naval captains, being in a position to demand large rewards, often made several thousand pounds by a short voyage.

The merchant marine was closely connected with the navy, for merchant ships were usually armed, carrying sometimes thirty or forty guns, and were often taken into the navy in large numbers to assist the public war-vessels. A training in the merchant service gave opportunities for entering the navy.

Giles Penn secured the release of some captives held by the Selee rovers, as the pirates of Algiers were then called, and for this service he was to have been made vice-admiral of a fleet to be fitted out to punish the Algerincs. He never received his commission, however ; but instead of it was made consul to the Mediterranean ports.

He failed to enjoy the lucrative opportunities of the navy, but he was determined that his son, the father of William Penn, should enjoy all that the navy had to bestow. He trained the boy most carefully on his own ship in the practice and theory of navigation, and the youth entered the navy of King Charles I. before he was twenty, and was at once given the rank of lieutenant. When he was twenty-one years old, in 1642, he was made a captain. He almost immediately married, and within a little over a year his famous son William was born.

So William Penn was the son of a very young man, almost a boy, but in command of the " Fellowship" of twenty-eight guns, with orders to join the fleet of Admiral Swanley in the Irish seas. Two years afterwards the father was made Rear-Admiral of Ireland ; in 1646 he was given command of a squadron as Vice-Admiral of Ireland, and by the time he was thirty-one he was Vice-Admiral of England.

This seems nowadays most ridiculously rapid advancement, and in lives of the admiral and also in lives of William Penn it is described in a way to give the impression that this youth must have been a naval prodig>^ But in the condition of affairs at 45 that time a man rose in the navy very rapidly, indeed ahnost instantly, under certain circumstances, so that such a thing as a boy admiral was not altogether impossible.

Clowes, in his " History of the British Navy," has described what a man-of-war was in those days. It was a beautiful creation of art, carved from stem to stern with a richness of curves and tracery which is the wonder and despair of modern eyes. It was more beautiful, indeed, than serviceable, and it is no exaggeration to say that within it was very often, so far as the crew were concerned, a floating hell and pest-house.

The sailors were wretched criminal creatures, collected largely by the press-gang, so ill paid and so seldom paid that they were continually in mutiny, and so ill fed that they were continually robbing and marauding for food. A mob of them once threatened to besiege the court at White Hall, and actually seized the Guild Hall at Plymouth. The sick were turned ashore starving, and the rapid mortality on many of the ships from disease and dirt Wcis frightful. They were punished for bad conduct by ducking, keel-hauling, tongue-scraping, flogging, dragging through the water at the stern of a rowboat, tying up with weights about the neck, and a sailor that slept four times on watch was lashed to the bowsprit and left there to starve to death or drown.

The officers who commanded them were more fortunate, and led a sumptuous, jovial life. Pepys, when with the fleet that brought back Charles II. 46 from Holland, describes how they spent the afternoon in playing nine-pins on the quarter deck, with a grand dinner in the evening, followed by music and heavy drinking, which sent every one to bed quite mellow. The captains and officers had their mistresses on board, or, as some accounts put it, their harems, and there were also abandoned women allowed among the crew.

Many of the officers in highest command, the captains and admirals, were landsmen without special training, and they bought and sold their commands and indulged in unlimited corruption and peculation.

" The dock-yard officials robbed wholesale ; the captains turned their ships into cargo-boats for their own profit, and conspired with the pursers to forge and sell seamen's tickets ; carpenters, gunners, boatswains, and pursers cheated and swindled ; imaginary men were borne in nearly all ships, and their wages were shared among the officers; and government store-houses were converted into surreptitious residences for government servants and their families." (Clowes's "Royal Navy," vol. ii. p. 19.)

Military men entered the navy as freely as landsmen. At that time, and, indeed, in all the previous history of the world, there was no complete separation between the naval and military departments of a nation. In ancient times Pompey and Agrippa commanded forces both on sea and land. Lord Howard, who commanded the British fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada, was a landsman. Sir Walter Raleigh w^as both an admiral and a general.

In Penn's time the best admirals, except himself, were landsmen, and naval captains were often spoken 47 of as colonels. Blake, who was the greatest of them, and who, indeed, is usually considered one of the two or three greatest admirals that Britain has produced, was a soldier, and never went to sea until he was fifty years old. Prince Rupert, who commanded the cavalry of Charles L, also commanded a fleet. Dean and Montagu, of that time, were also military men. General Monk, who restored Charles IL to the throne, also took his turn on the sea. It was he who, when he wanted his ship turned to the port side, aroused the amusement of his crew by giving the order, " Left wheel !"

The reason why military men succeeded so well in command of fleets would seem to be that the navy had few, if any, regularly trained officers who could be raised to positions of large responsibility. Those who had a knowledge of seamanship were mostly mere tarpaulins, with neither education, manners, nor honesty. They had risen from the forecastle, and many of them had been captains of privateers, an occupation which did not improve their morals. There were some exceptions to this rule. Sir Christopher Mings, Sir John Narborough, and Sir Cloudsley Shovel had begun life as cabin-boys. But for the most part men of this sort were valuable only for certain purposes within a limited sphere. They were incapable of forming comprehensive plans or dealing with complicated situations, and they were compelled to yield the important commands to military men of wider attainments and more general education and experience.

Penn rose to be an admiral at twenty-three for the 48 reason apparently that he was a rare instance of a man with practical sea experience, who also had enough education and breadth of mind to take the responsibility of a large command. At heart he was a Royalist and preferred the king's cause ; but his rapid promotions were received from Parliament and Cromwell. The army had gone over to the king and the navy had taken the side of Parliament. The crews, which had been starved and tortured under the king, thought they saw brighter prospects in the popular cause. They went over in large numbers, and Penn went with them. He was determined to rise in his profession, whatever flag he fought under, and he rightly judged that the popular and parliamentary cause would, for a time at least, be successful. He commanded the squadron that met with such ill success in its operations on the Irish coast ; but the failure was through no fault of his. He distinguished himself, and the Parliament voted him their thanks for his "courage and fidelity."

Soon afterwards he was put under arrest, apparently because he was suspected of having, as, indeed, he had, a secret interest in the king's cause. He was released, however, soon promoted, and it was not long before he commanded the squadron which went in pursuit of the ships of that gallant landsman. Prince Rupert. But, although Penn followed him through the English Channel and even into the Mediterranean, the cavalryman eluded the trained sailor on his own element.

Penn's greatest service now followed in the naval 4 49 war which Cromwell waged for two years with Holland. The Dutch, thinking they could wrest from the English the empire of the sea, refused to follow the ancient custom by which all ships had for ages saluted the British flag. This honor of the flag was originally a mere courtesy in recognition of the protection English ships had always given to the traders of all nations. But British men-of-war had now for a long time demanded it as a right and an insignia of their country's supremacy on the ocean. It was under this same principle of supremacy that they claimed the right of search which brought on the war of the United States with England in 1 8 1 2.