William Penn

by George Hodges

On the 22d of April, 1661, we get another glimpse of William.

Mr Pepys, having risen early on the morning of that day, and put on his velvet coat, and made himself, as he says, as fine as he could, repaired to Mr. Young's, the flag-maker, in Cornhill, to view the procession wherein the king should ride through London. There he found "Sir W. Pen and his son, with several others." "We had a good room to ourselves," he says, "with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well." The streets were new graveled, and the fronts of the houses hung with carpets, with ladies looking out of all the windows; and "so glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so overcome."

This was a glory very different from that which the lad had seen, five or six years before, in his room. The world was here presenting its attractions in competition with the "other world" of the earlier vision. The contrast is a symbol of the contention between the two ideals, into which William was immediately to enter.

The king and the Duke of York had looked up as they passed the flag-maker's, and had recognized the admiral. He had gone to Ireland, upon his release from the Tower, and had there resided in retirement upon an estate which his father had owned before him. Thence returning, as the Restoration became more and more a probability, he had secured a seat in Parliament, and had been a bearer of the welcome message which had finally brought Charles from his exile in Holland to his throne in England. For his part in this pleasant errand, he had been knighted and made Commissioner of Admiralty and Governor of Kinsale. Thus his ambitions were being happily attained. He had retrieved and improved his fortunes, and had become an associate with persons of rank and a favorite with royalty.

He had immediately sent his son to Oxford. William had been entered as a gentleman-commoner of Christ Church, at the beginning of the Michaelmas term of 1660. It was clearly the paternal intention that the boy should become a successful man of the world and courtier, like his father.

Sir William, however, had not reflected that while he had been pursuing his career of calculating ambition and seeking the pleasure of princes, his son had been living amongst Puritans in a Puritan neighborhood. Young Penn went up to Oxford to find all things in confusion. The Puritans had been put out of their places, and the Churchmen were entering in. It is likely that this, of itself, displeased the new student, whose sympathies were with the dispossessed. The Churchmen, moreover, brought their cavalier habits with them. In the reaction from the severity which they had just escaped, they did many objectionable things, not only for the pleasure of doing them, but for the added joy of shocking their Puritan neighbors. They amused themselves freely on the Lord's day; they patronized games and plays; and they tippled and "puffed tobacco," and swore and swaggered in all the newest fashions. William was the son of his father in appreciation of pleasant and abundant living. But he was not of a disposition to enter into this wanton and audacious merry-making,—a gentle, serious country lad, with a Puritan conscience.

Moreover, at this moment, in the face of any possible temptation, William's sober tastes and devout resolutions were strengthened by certain appealing sermons. Here it was at Oxford, the nursery of enthusiasms and holy causes, that he received the impulse which determined all his after life. He spent but a scant two years in college; and the work of the lecture rooms must have suffered seriously during that time from the contention and confusion of the changes then in progress; so that academically the college could not have greatly profited him. The profit came in the influence of Thomas Loe. Loe was a Quaker.

The origin of the name "Quaker" is uncertain. It is derived by some from the fact that the early preachers of the sect trembled as they spoke; others deduce it from the trembling which their speech compelled in those who heard it. By either derivation, it indicates the earnest spirit of that strange people who, in the seventeenth century, were annoying and displeasing all their neighbors.

George Fox, the first Quaker, was a cobbler; and the first Quaker dress was the leather coat and breeches which he made for himself with his own tools. Thereafter he was independent both of fashions and of tailors. Cobbler though he was, and so slenderly educated that he did not express himself grammatically, Fox was nevertheless a prophet, according to the order of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa. He looked out into the England of his day with the keenest eyes of any man of the times, and remarked upon what he saw with the most honest and candid speech. A man of the plain people, like most of the prophets and apostles, the offenses which chiefly attracted his attention were such as the plain people naturally see.

Out of the windows of his cobbler's shop, Fox beheld with righteous indignation the extravagant and insincere courtesies of the gentlefolk, and heard their exaggerated phrases of compliment. In protest against the unmeaning courtesies, he wore his hat in the presence of no matter whom, taking it off only in time of prayer. In protest against the unmeaning compliments, he addressed no man by any artificial title, calling all his neighbors, without distinction of persons, by their Christian names; and for the plural pronoun "you," the plural of dignity and flattery, he substituted "thee" and "thou."