Admiral Penn now summoned his son home, being greatly annoyed at this open profession of quakerism. At home, the demeanour of his son, which exhibited all the rigid peculiarities of the sect, still further displeased him. He tried every means; even blows, to obtain conformity; but in vain. As regarded “hat worship,” the admiral would have been satisfied if his son would merely have uncovered his head in presence of the king, the Duke of York and himself; but even that the young man would not concede. The scoffs, jeers and wonderment of his gay London acquaintance mattered nothing to him. He bore all meekly, steadfast to that which appeared to him the requirements of duty; and finally his father in anger turned him out of doors penniless.
The affection of his mother preserved him from absolute want; and soon he became quaker preacher and author; and his “Sandy Foundation Shaken” was published, which led to his imprisonment in the Tower. Here he remained for seven months, during which he wrote his “No Cross, No Crown,” the most celebrated of his works. The steadfastness of his spirit was shown by this imprisonment. In vain the good-natured Charles II. wished to lure him to submission; he could not or would not gainsay his conscience. After his liberation, in 1669, he was reconciled to his father through the intervention of the Duke of York, but his adherence to his quaker principles remained unshaken.
The following year, the Conventicle Act being passed, Penn was one of the first sufferers under it. He was committed to Newgate for preaching at what was called “a riotous and seditious assembly,” which was merely one of those out-of-doors meetings which the resolute Quakers held when driven out by force from their meeting-houses. The famous trial of Penn and Mead at the Old Bailey followed, in which an English jury, as resolute in the right as the Quakers themselves, asserted and maintained the prerogative of independent judgment in defiance of the bench, though they were fined forty marks each, and Penn was returned to prison. The same year Admiral Penn died, testifying to his son on his death-bed, that if the Quakers remained true to that which was in them, they would regenerate the world.
William Penn inherited from his father property to the value of £1,500 per annum, and a claim on government to the amount of £16,000. The following year he was again a prisoner in Newgate, one of the most wofully noisome prisons at that time in London, where he lay for six months.
In 1677, in company with George Fox and Robert Barclay, he paid a “religious visit” to Holland and Germany, distributing pamphlets wherever they went, seeds of liberty and truth, which sprang up into after plentiful harvest. And not alone did they address the people, but kings and princes, palatine-princes and magistrates, promulgating everywhere the universal principle of truth, and awakening many souls to its consciousness. The year after his return, Penn pleaded before a committee of the House of Commons, that the affirmation of the Quaker might be legalised instead of an oath; and an enactment for this purpose would have passed but for the sudden prorogation of parliament.
The sufferings of the people to whom he was attached led William Penn to seek for them an asylum in the New World, and his efforts on their behalf were blessed, as we have seen, by their establishment in West Jersey. This great and benevolent act, this planting of “the truth” on a new and prolific soil, led to the extension of still more magnificent plans of philanthropy; and in 1681 William Penn applied to Charles II. for an extensive tract of land, lying on the other side of the Delaware, in liquidation of the debt due to his father. Had Penn demanded the amount of the debt itself from the lavish and impoverished monarch, he would have asked in vain; but to ask the payment of a debt by a grant of land was to make the thing easy to the monarch, while to William Penn the land had fourfold the value of the money. The application was seconded by the Duke of York, who had ever shown a friendly interest in the son of his former naval associate. Besides which, it has been said, that belonging to a persecuted sect himself, he had strong sympathy with a man who, like Penn, had suffered so unflinchingly for conscience-sake.
“At length, after many waitings, watchings, solicitings and disputes in council,” writes William Penn, “my country was confirmed to me under the great seal of England. God will bless and make it the seal of a nation.”
Penn, now in the thirty-seventh year of his age, became the sovereign of a vast province, which was called by the king, Pennsylvania, though Penn himself would have dispensed with the first syllable of the name, as being a species of self-glorification; but the monarch insisted upon its retention.
In April, 1681, Penn issued his proclamation as absolute proprietary, in the following words, addressed to his subjects in the New World:—
“My Friends,—I wish you all happiness here and hereafter. These are to let you know that it hath pleased God in his providence to cast you within my lot and care. It is a business that, though I never undertook before, yet God has given me an understanding of my duty and an honest mind to do it uprightly. I hope you will not be troubled at your change and the king’s choice, for you are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great. You shall be governed by laws of your own making, and live a free, and if you will, an industrious people. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person. God has furnished me with a better resolution, and has given me his grace to keep it. In short, whatever sober and free men can reasonably desire for the security and improvement of their own happiness, I shall heartily comply with. I beseech God to direct you in the way of righteousness, and therein prosper you and your children after you.—I am, your true friend, William Penn.”