By this time the Quakers had gained so many converts that the other sects were beginning to be afraid of them, and continually challenged them to more and more of those strange public debates in which the speakers did not hesitate to call their opponents harsh names. It was said of Penn that "he never turned his back in the day of battle," and he apparently threw himself into these arguments with the same ardor his ancestors had shown in warfare. Besides taking up the cudgel in defense of the new creed, he wrote many pamphlets and letters to people who disapproved of the Quakers. In this way he kept himself very busy during the two years he lived at his charming country home.
Charles II.'s Declaration of Indulgence proved so unpopular with the Parliament that the king had soon to withdraw it, and then the old opposition to all rivals of the Church of England broke out more violently than ever. George Fox was arrested and kept in prison for a year. The king offered to give him a pardon, but the Quakers were unwilling to accept pardons, as that would imply that they had really done something that was wrong. But Fox was ill, and Penn and some others went to court and tried to secure the favor of the Duke of York in behalf of Fox. The duke was very friendly to Penn, as he had been to Penn's father, but he did nothing to free Fox. However, the Quakers soon afterward secured the release of their leader by an appeal to the law courts.
Then a man named Richard Baxter happened to go to Rickmansworth and found the place "abounding with Quakers," as he put it, "because Mr. W. Penn, their captain, dwelleth there." Baxter wanted to redeem these people from their errors and challenged Penn to an argument. They debated from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, before a great crowd, and at the end of that time all present held to their original views, although each debater claimed the victory. Penn enjoyed this argument immensely, for he told Baxter he would like to give him a room in his house, so "that I could visit and get discourse with thee in much tender love." But Baxter did not accept that invitation, and soon afterward Mrs. Penn inherited a house and estate at Worminghurst, in Sussex, so she and her husband moved their home to that place. A little later Penn, with George Fox and other Quakers, set out on a missionary visit to Holland and Germany.
CHAPTER VII Penn in Politics
People in Holland and Germany, as well as in England, had now felt the new spirit of religious liberty, so that William Penn and George Fox found more men and women in those countries eager to listen to their teachings than they had found elsewhere. The Quaker leaders traveled from one town to another, meeting many people, giving them copies of the pamphlets that Penn and others had written, and urging them to join the new Society of Friends. The Quaker missionaries met with considerable success, although by no means all the people who listened to them became Quakers, but many joined one or another of the new sects that were springing up at the time.
When he returned to England, Penn found the condition of the Quakers there as unsatisfactory as ever. The majority of the English people were so afraid that King Charles II. wanted to turn the country over to the Catholics that they were making the laws more and more strict against all who were not members of the Church of England, and this, of course, included the Quakers. They were being fined and imprisoned right and left, and treated worse than if they had no religion at all.
As it was against the Quaker rule to take an oath of any kind, members of the new sect were at a great disadvantage in courts of law and in all places where an oath of allegiance to the government was required. To help them in this difficulty, Penn succeeded in inducing the House of Commons to allow Quakers to affirm instead of taking an oath, but before he could succeed in having the House of Lords pass the same bill the king dissolved Parliament.
Then, in the summer of 1678, occurred what was known as the Popish Plot. This plot was probably largely invented by a man named Titus Oates, who claimed that he had discovered evidence that the Catholics intended to seize the government of England, kill the king and the leading statesmen, set fire to the shipping on the Thames, at a given signal murder all the Protestants, and seize Ireland with a French army. The people were so excited that they were willing to believe even such a wild story as Titus Oates told them, and immediately the authorities began to arrest and imprison Catholics as zealously as they had been imprisoning Quakers. The Quakers kept out of the dispute between the Church of England and the Catholics as well as they could, following the advice of Penn, who told his people to keep away from all worldly controversies. "Fly as for your lives," he wrote them in a letter, "from the snares therein, and get you into your watch-tower, the name of the Lord." He urged the Protestants to treat the followers of other creeds more fairly, trying to show them that in their persecution of others the Protestants were themselves guilty of doing the very things which they had most feared from others.