TRUE STORIES OF GREAT AMERICANS

WILLIAM PENN

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO

WILLIAM PENN BY RUPERT S. HOLLAND

AUTHOR OF "HISTORIC BOYHOODS," "THE KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN SPUR," ETC.

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1915

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1915, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1915.

Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

WILLIAM PENN

CHAPTER I William Penn goes to College

The middle of the seventeenth century was a very exciting time in England. The Cavaliers of King Charles the First were fighting the Roundheads of Oliver Cromwell, and the whole country was divided into King's men and Parliament's men. On the side of Cromwell and the Parliament was Admiral William Penn, who had in 1646 been given command of a squadron of fighting ships with the title of Vice Admiral of Ireland, and who had proved to be an expert navigator and sea-fighter. He had married Margaret Jasper, the daughter of an English merchant who lived in Rotterdam, and when he went to sea, he left his wife and children in the pretty little English village of Wanstead, in the county of Essex.

The Admiral's son William was born on October 14, 1644, when four great battles of the English Civil War had already been fought: Edge Hill, Newbury, Nantwich, and Marston Moor. The Roundheads were winning the victories, and these Puritan soldiers, fired with religious zeal, and taking such striking names as "Praise God Barebones" and "Sergeant Hew Agag in Pieces before the Lord," were battering down castles and cathedrals, smashing stained-glass windows and pipe organs, and showing their hatred of nobles and of churchmen in every way they could think of. The wife of Admiral Penn, however, lived quietly in her country home, and by the time William was five years old the Cavaliers had lost the battle of Naseby, had surrendered Bridgewater and Bristol, and King Charles the First had been beheaded. A new England, a Puritan England, had taken the place of the old England, but the boy was too young to understand the difference. He knew that his father was now fighting the Dutch, but he was chiefly interested in the games he played with his schoolmates at Wanstead and with the boys from the neighboring village of Chigwell.

Now Admiral Penn had fought on the side of the Roundheads because the English navy had sided with the Parliament, while the English army had largely sided with the king, and not from any real love of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. He was indeed a Royalist at heart, and had very little patience with the new religious ideas that were becoming so popular in England. The people in Wanstead, however, were mostly Puritans, and young William, boy though he was, heard so much about their religion that he became a little Puritan like his playmates. Some of the fathers and mothers boasted that they had seen "visions," and soon the children were repeating what their parents said. Strange experiences of that kind were in the air, and so little William Penn, when he was only eleven, claimed that he had himself met with such an adventure, and seen a "vision" too.

The news of this story of William's would have annoyed his father, but the Admiral was too much concerned at the time with his own difficulties to give much heed to his son. Admiral Penn had sent word secretly to the exiled son of Charles I. that he would enter his service against Oliver Cromwell, and the latter heard of it, and when the Admiral returned to England, Cromwell had him clapped into the Tower of London to keep him out of mischief. Mrs. Penn and her children went up to London and lodged in a little court near the Tower, where they might at least be near the Admiral. Presently the Admiral, stripped of his commission, was released, and left London for a country place in Ireland that Cromwell had given him for his earlier services. There he stayed until the Royalists got the better of the Roundheads, and Charles II. was placed on the English throne. Then Admiral Penn hurried to welcome the new king, was made a knight for his loyalty, and began to bask in the full sunshine of royal favor. He was now a great figure at court, was a man of wealth, and a close friend and adviser to the king's brother, James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral of England. Being so thoroughly a Royalist and Church of England man himself, it never occurred to him that his son William was already more than half a Puritan.

The Admiral sent his son to the aristocratic Christ Church College at Oxford when William was sixteen, and entered him as a gentleman commoner, which gave him a higher social standing than most of the students. The father meant his son to be a courtier and man of fashion, and wanted him to make friends among the young aristocrats of Oxford. But Oxford University, like the rest of England, had felt the Puritan influence during the days when Cromwell was Lord Protector, and although the Cavaliers did everything they could to restore the revelries and sports of the good old times of Charles the First, some of the soberer notions of the Puritans still stuck to the place.

The Puritans were fond of long sermons and much psalm-singing, and shook their heads at all games and light entertainments. The Royalists stopped as much psalm-singing as they could, while they themselves got up Morris dances and May-day games and all kinds of masques and revels. Sometimes they went too far in their desire to oppose the Puritans, and indulged in all sorts of dissipations. Young William Penn, and many other boys at college, thought the Royalists were too dissolute, and leaned toward the Puritan standards; but he was the son of a knight and a courtier, as well as being naturally fond of sports and gayety, and so he did not dress so soberly nor attend so many sermons as some of his college friends. When the king's brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, died of smallpox, Oxford University issued a volume of verses, called "Threnodia," on the duke's death, and young William Penn sent in some Latin lines for the volume. In some matters he was a strong king's man, but in others he was more fond of the stricter Puritan notions. Withal he was a fairly good student, a popular young fellow, and something of an athlete. He might very well have graduated and followed his father to the king's court at London had not a new and strange religious party caught his wide-awake attention while he was at college.

When William Penn went to Oxford, some people in England were beginning to be called Quakers, or, as they preferred to be known, Friends. They were almost as much opposed to the Puritans as they were to the Royalists, who belonged to the Church of England. They were a religious sect, and more. They refused to pay the tithes or taxes for the support of the Established Church, they refused to take an oath in the law courts, they would wear their hats in court and in the presence of important persons. They called every one by his first name, and would not use any title, even that of Mister; "thee" and "thou" took the place of "you," although those pronouns had customarily only been used to servants. Nothing gave so much offense to a Royalist as to have a Quaker say "thee" or "thou" to him. They preached in taverns and in highways, and walked the streets uttering prophecies of doom in a loud singsong voice. Either because of this trembling mode of speech, or because their leader, George Fox, had bade the magistrates tremble at the word of the Lord, they were called Quakers.

It seemed to both the Churchmen and the Puritans that these Quakers were breaking away from all forms of religion; they did not believe in baptism nor in the communion service; they would not listen to clergymen or hired preachers, and often they sat silent in their meetings, only speaking when one of them felt inspired to address them. Quietness was their watchword, and so they condemned all sports and games, theaters, dancing, card playing; they disapproved of soldiers and of fighting; they kept out of politics, and they dressed as soberly as possible. Their leader, George Fox, was a strange person, very brave but very excitable, and he managed to rouse discussion wherever he went. Again and again he was put in jail; he was stoned and abused and laughed at; but such was his power that more and more people came to follow him, and admired and reverenced and loved him.

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. The answer must be that he was by nature serious-minded and very much interested in questions of religion. More than that, he had in him a strong streak of heroism which made it easy for him to throw his whole soul into a cause that appealed to him. Whatever Penn was he was never lukewarm, but ardent and fiery and always tremendously in earnest.

He left Oxford after about two years, and there is a story that he was expelled because he and some friends refused to obey a college rule about the wearing of gowns and tore off the surplices that were worn by the Church of England students. He had heard the Quaker preacher Thomas Loe, and although he had not actually joined the Society of Friends he was already largely of a mind to. From college he went to his father's house in London, and then Admiral Sir William Penn found that his son was not at all the worldly-minded youth he had hoped, but a young man of quite a different sort. He did not care for the life of a cavalier or court gallant, but wanted to go to strange religious meetings. The Admiral begged and entreated, threatened and stormed, used arguments and even blows, and finally in a fit of rage drove his son from his house. But Lady Penn pleaded for her son, and the Admiral at length allowed William to return to his home.

CHAPTER II The Early Quakers

To understand the history of William Penn we must have a clear idea of the Quaker faith in the time of Charles II. All through the Middle Ages the Christian Church, which was the Roman Catholic Church, had built up a network of beliefs that people took for granted, so that men never used their minds where religion was concerned, but were, to all intents and purposes, merely children, believing whatever the priests told them to believe. For centuries England, as well as all of Western Europe, had taken its creed directly from the Pope and his clergy, no more doubting the truth of what was told them than a child doubts the truth of the multiplication-table. But at length certain men of unusual independence of mind, men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, became restless under the arbitrary teachings of the Pope and dared to question whether the priests were always right, no matter what they said. These men, and others like them, took part in what was known as the Reformation, an era in which men began to do a little thinking for themselves. The revival of the classical learning of Greece and Rome and the invention of the printing-press helped this new freedom of thought greatly. The first books to come from the printing-presses were copies of the Bible, which had formerly been beyond the reach of all but the priests, and as men soon translated the Scriptures from Latin into English and French and German and other languages, the people gradually became able to read the Old and New Testaments for themselves. The Bible was no longer a sealed book, from which the clergy gave the ordinary man and woman as much or as little as they thought good. It was free to all, and new teachers began to explain its meaning according to their own ideas.

It took a long time, however, for men to break away from the implicit obedience they had given for centuries to the Church of Rome. The most daring reformers only rid themselves of one or two dogmas at a time. Wycliffe, the first great leader of the Reformation in England, only denied a part of the truth of the Mass, and kept almost all the rest of the Catholic belief. Huss, who followed him, only dared to doubt the truth of certain of the miracles, though he did declare that he believed in religious liberty. Martin Luther himself devoted most of his eloquence to attacking the sale of indulgences, which had been carried to great excess. Later he grew so bold as to oppose the authority of the Pope, but he still held to the larger part of the creed of the early Church.

In England Henry the Eighth had broken with the Pope chiefly because the latter had refused to grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and not because of any great difference in religious views. This break, however, gave the reformers an official position in England, and led to the establishment of the Church of England, which was called a Protestant Church to distinguish it from the Catholic. Henry's daughter, Mary, was a Catholic, and her reign saw a bitter struggle in England between Catholics and the new reform Protestants. Mary's sister, Elizabeth, favored the Protestants, and with her reign the new Church actually came into its own, and the teachings of the Reformation began to bear fruit.