Chapter 2

The boy came back, of course. Beating and turning out of doors were not such serious events in the seventeenth century as they would be at present. Most men said more, and in louder voices, and meant less. It was but a brief quarrel, and father and son made it up as best they could. It was plain, however, that something must be done. Whipping would not avail. William's head was full of queer notions, upon which a stick had no effect. His father bethought himself of the pleasant diversions of France. The lad, he said, has lived in the country all his days, and has had no acquaintance with the merry world; he shall go abroad, that he may see life, and learn to behave like a gentleman; let us see if this will not cure him of his pious follies.

Accordingly, to France the young man went, and traveled in company with certain persons of rank. He stayed more than a year, and enjoyed himself greatly. He was at the age when all the world is new and interesting; and being of attractive appearance and high spirits, with plenty of money, the world gave him a cordial welcome. So far did he venture into the customs of the country, that he had a fight one night in a Paris street with somebody who crossed swords with him, and disarmed his antagonist. He had a right, according to the rules, to kill him, but he declined to do so. When he came home, he pleased his father much by his graceful behavior and elegant attire. "This day," says Mr. Pepys in his diary for August 26, 1664, "my wife tells me that Mr. Pen, Sir William's son, is come back from France, and came to visit her. A most modish person grown, she says, a fine gentleman." Pepys thinks that he is even a bit too French in his manner and conversation.

"I remember your honour very well," writes a correspondent years after, "when you came newly out of France, and wore pantaloon breeches."

This journey affected Penn all the rest of his life. It restrained him from following the absurder singularities of his associates. George Fox's leather suit he would have found impossible. He wore his hat in the Quaker way, and said "thee" and "thou," but otherwise he appears to have dressed and acted according to the conventions of polite society. He did, indeed, become a Quaker; but there were always Quakers who looked askance at him because he was so different from them, able to speak French and acquainted with the manners of drawing-rooms.

In two respects, however, his visit to France differed from that of some of his companions in travel. There were places to which they went without him; and there were places to which he went without them. He kept himself from the grosser temptations of the country. "You have been as bad as other folks," said Sir John Robinson when Penn was on trial for preaching in the street.

"When," cried Penn, "and where? I charge thee tell the company to my face."

"Abroad," said Robinson, "and at home, too."

"I make this bold challenge," answered Penn, "to all men, women and children upon earth, justly to accuse me with ever having seen me drunk, heard me swear, utter a curse, or speak one obscene word (much less that I ever made it my practice). I speak this to God's glory, that has ever preserved me from the power of those pollutions, and that from a child begot an hatred in me towards them."

He went away alone for some months to the Protestant college of Saumur, where he devoted himself to a study of that primitive Christianity in which, as Loe had told him, was to be found the true ideal of the Christian Church. Here he acquired an acquaintance with the writings of the early Fathers, from whom he liked to quote.

Thus he returned to England in 1664, attired in French pantaloon breeches, and with little French affectations in his manner, but without vices, and with a smattering of patristic learning. He was sent by his father to study law at Lincoln's Inn. He was to be a courtier, and in that position it would be both becoming and convenient to have some knowledge of the law. Thus he settled down among the lawyers, and it seemed for the moment as if his father had succeeded in his purpose. It seemed as if the world had effectually obscured the other world.

There are two letters, written about this time from William to his father, which show a pleasant mixture of piety with a lively interest in the life about him. He has been at sea for a few days with the admiral, and returns with dispatches to the king. "I bless God," he writes, "my heart does not in any way fail, but firmly believe that if God has called you out to battle, he will cover your head in that smoky day." He hastened on his errand, he says, to Whitehall, and arrived before the king was up; but his Majesty, learning that there was news, "earnestly skipping out of bed, came only in his gown and slippers; who, when he saw me, said, 'Oh! is't you? How is Sir William?'"

That was in May. Within a week the plague came. On the 7th of June, 1665, Mr. Pepys makes this ominous entry: "This day," he says, "much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord, have mercy,' written there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw." Day by day the pestilence increased, and presently there was no more studying at Lincoln's Inn. Young Penn went for safety into the clean country. There, among the green fields, in the enforced leisure, with time to think, and the most sobering things to think about, his old seriousness returned. The change was so marked that his father, feeling that it were well to renew the pleasant friendship with the world which had begun in France, sent him over to Ireland.

At Dublin, the Duke of Ormond, the Lord Lieutenant, was keeping a merry court. William entered heartily into its pleasures. He resided upon his father's estates, at Shannagarry Castle. He so distinguished himself in the suppression of a mutiny that Ormond offered him a commission in the army, and William was disposed to accept it. He had his portrait painted, clad in steel, with lace at his throat. His dark hair is parted in the middle, and hangs in cavalier fashion over his shoulders. He looks out of large, clear, questioning eyes; and his handsome face is strong and serious.

But the young cavalier went one day to Cork upon some business, and there heard that Thomas Loe was in town, and that he was to preach. Penn went to hear him, and again the spoken word was critical and decisive. "There is a faith," said the preacher, "which overcomes the world, and there is a faith which is overcome by the world." Such was the theme, and it seemed to Penn as if every word were spoken out of heaven straight to his own soul. In the long contention which had been going on within him between the world and the other world, the world had been getting the mastery. The attractions of a martial life had shone more brightly than the light which had flamed about him in his boyhood. Then Loe spoke, and thenceforth there was no more perplexity. Penn's choice was definitely made.

In his account of his travels in Holland and Germany, written some ten years after this crisis, Penn recurs to it in an address from which I have already quoted. He was speaking in Wiemart, at a meeting in the mansion-house of the Somerdykes, and was illustrating his exhortations from his own experience. He passed in rapid review the incidents of his early life which we have recounted. "Here I began to let them know," he says, "how and where the Lord first appeared unto me, which was about the twelfth year of my age, in 1656; how at times, betwixt that and the fifteenth, the Lord visited me, and the divine impressions he gave me of himself." Then the banishment from Oxford, and his father's turning him out of doors. "Of the Lord's dealings with me in France, and in the time of the great plague in London, in fine, the deep sense he gave me of the vanity of this world, of the deep irreligiousness of the religions of it; then of my mournful and bitter cries to him that he would show me his own way of life and salvation, and my resolution to follow him, whatever reproaches or sufferings should attend me, and that with great reverence and tenderness of spirit; how, after all this, the glory of the world overtook me, and I was even ready to give myself up unto it, seeing as yet no such thing as the 'primitive spirit and church' upon earth, and being ready to faint concerning my 'hope of the restitution of all things.' It was at this time that the Lord visited me with a certain sound and testimony of his eternal word, through one of them the world calls Quakers, namely, Thomas Loe."

Struggling, as Penn was, against continual temptations to abandon his high ideal, getting no help from his parents, who were displeased at him, nor from the clergy, whose "invectiveness and cruelty" he remembers, nor from his companions, who made themselves strange to him; bearing meanwhile "that great cross of resisting and watching against mine own inward vain affections and thoughts," the only voice of help and strength was that of Thomas Loe. Seeking for the "primitive spirit and church upon earth," he found it in the sect which Loe represented. His mind was now resolved. He, too, would be a Quaker.

IV

PENN BECOMES A QUAKER: PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY

William now began to attend Quaker meetings, though he was still dressed in the gay fashions which he had learned in France. His sincerity was soon tested. A proclamation made against Fifth Monarchy men was so enforced as to affect Quakers. A meeting at which Penn was present was broken in upon by constables, backed with soldiers, who "rudely and arbitrarily" required every man's appearance before the mayor. Among others, they "violently haled" Penn. From jail he wrote to the Earl of Orrery, Lord President of Munster, making a stout protest. It was his first public utterance. "Diversities of faith and conduct," he argued, "contribute not to the disturbance of any place, where moral conformity is barely requisite to preserve the peace." He reminded his lordship that he himself had not long since "concluded no way so effectual to improve or advantage this country as to dispense with freedom [i. e. to act freely] in all things pertaining to conscience."

Penn wrote so much during his long life that his selected works make five large volumes. Many of these pages are devoted to the statement of Quaker theology; some are occupied with descriptions of his colonial possessions; some are given to counsels and conclusions drawn from experience and dealing with human life in general; but there is one idea which continually recurs,--sometimes made the subject of a thesis, sometimes entering by the way,--and that is the popular right of liberty of conscience. It was for this that he worked, and chiefly lived, most of his life. Here it is set forth with all clearness in the first public word which he wrote.

William's letter opened the jail doors. It is likely, however, that the signature was more influential than the epistle; for his Quaker associates seem not to have come out with him. The fact which probably weighed most with the Lord President was that Penn was the son of his father the admiral, and the protege of Ormond. His father called him home. It was on the 3d of September that William was arrested; on the 29th of December, being the Lord's day, Mrs. Turner calls upon Mr. and Mrs. Pepys for an evening of cheerful conversation, "and there, among other talk, she tells me that Mr. William Pen, who has lately come over from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing; that he cares for no company, nor comes into any."

Admiral Penn was sorely disappointed. Neither France nor Ireland had availed to wean his son from his religious eccentricities. Into the pleasant society where his father had hoped to see him shine, he declined to enter. He said "thee" and "thou," and wore his hat. Especially upon these points of manners, the young man and his father held long discussions. The admiral insisted that William should refrain from making himself socially ridiculous; though even here he was willing to make a reasonable compromise. "You may 'thee' and 'thou' whom you please," he said, "except the king, the Duke of York, and myself." But the young convert declined to make any exceptions.

Thereupon, for the second time, the admiral thrust his son out of the house. The Quakers received him. He was thenceforth accounted among them as a teacher, a leader: in their phrase, a "public Friend." This was in 1668, when he was twenty-four years old.

The work of a Quaker minister, at that time, was made interesting and difficult not only by the social and ecclesiastical prejudices against which he must go, but by certain laws which limited free speech and free action. The young preacher speedily made himself obnoxious to both these kinds of laws. Of the three years which followed, he spent more than a third of the time in prison, being once confined for saying, and twice for doing, what the laws forbade.

The religious world was filled with controversy. There were discussions in the meeting-houses; and a constant stream of pamphlets came from the press, part argument and part abuse. Even mild-mannered men called each other names. The Quakers found it necessary to join in this rough give-and-take, and Penn entered at once into this vigorous exercise. He began a long series of like documents with a tract entitled "Truth Exalted." The intent of it was to show that Roman Catholics, Churchmen, and Puritans alike were all shamefully in error, wandering in the blackness of darkness, given over to idle superstition, and being of a character to correspond with their fond beliefs; meanwhile, the Quakers were the only people then resident in Christendom whose creed was absolutely true and their lives consistent with it.

"Come," he says, "answer me first, you Papists, where did the Scriptures enjoin baby-baptism, churching of women, marrying by priests, holy water to frighten the devil? Come now, you that are called Protestants, and first those who are called Episcopalians, where do the Scriptures own such persecutors, false prophets, tithemongers, deniers of revelations, opposers of perfection, men-pleasers, time-servers, unprofitable teachers?" The Separatists are similarly cudgeled: they are "groveling in beggarly elements, imitations, and shadows of heavenly things."

Presently, a Presbyterian minister named Vincent attacked Quakerism. Joseph Besse, Penn's earliest biographer, says that Vincent was "transported with fiery zeal;" which, as he remarks in parenthesis, is "a thing fertile of ill language." Penn challenged him to a public debate; and, this not giving the Quaker champion an opportunity to say all that was in his mind, he wrote a pamphlet, called "The Sandy Foundation Shaken." The full title was much longer than this, in the manner of the time, and announced the author's purpose to refute three "generally believed and applauded doctrines: first, of one God, subsisting in three distinct and separate persons; second, of the impossibility of divine pardon without the making of a complete satisfaction; and third, of the justification of impure persons by an imputed righteousness."

Penn's handling of the doctrine of the Trinity in this treatise gave much offense. He had taken the position of his fellow-religionists, that the learning of the schools was a hindrance to religion. He sought to divest the great statements of the creed from the subtleties of mediaeval philosophy. He purposed to return to the Scripture itself, back of all councils and formulas. Asserting, accordingly, the being and unity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, he so refused all the conventional phrases of the theologians as to seem to them to reject the doctrine of the Trinity itself. He did deny "the trinity of distinct and separate persons in the unity of essence." If the word "person" has one meaning, Penn was right; if it has another meaning, he was wrong. If a "person" is an individual, then the assertion is that there are three Gods; but if the word signifies a distinction in the divine nature, then the unity of God remains. As so often happens in doctrinal contention, he and his critics used the same words with different definitions. The consequence was that the bishop of London had him put in prison. He was restrained for seven months in the Tower.

The English prison of the seventeenth century was a place of disease of body and misery of mind. Penn was kept in close confinement, and the bishop sent him word that he must either recant or die a prisoner. "I told him," says Penn, "that the Tower was the worst argument in the world to convince me; for whoever was in the wrong, those who used force for religion could never be in the right." He declared that his prison should be his grave before he would budge a jot. Thus six months passed.

But the situation was intolerable. It is sometimes necessary to die for a difference of opinion, but it is not advisable to do so for a simple misunderstanding. Penn and the bishop were actually in accord. The young author therefore wrote an explanation of his book, entitled "Innocency with her Open Face." At the same time he addressed a letter to Lord Arlington, principal secretary of state. In the letter he maintained that he had "subverted no faith, obedience or good life," and he insisted on the natural right of liberty of conscience: "To conceit," he said, "that men must form their faith of things proper to another world by the prescriptions of mortal men, or else they can have no right to eat, drink, sleep, walk, trade, or be at liberty and live in this, to me seems both ridiculous and dangerous." These writings gained him his liberty. The Duke of York made intercession for him with the king.

Penn had occupied himself while in prison with the composition of a considerable work, called "No Cross, No Crown." It is partly controversial, setting forth the reasons for the Quaker faith and practice, and partly devotional, exalting self-sacrifice, and urging men to simpler and more spiritual living. Thus the months of his imprisonment had been of value both to him and to the religious movement with which he had identified himself. The Quakers, when Penn joined them, had no adequate literary expression of their thought. They were most of them intensely earnest but uneducated persons, who spoke great truths somewhat incoherently. Penn gave Quaker theology a systematic and dignified statement.

When he came out of the Tower, he went home to his father. The admiral had now recovered from his first indignation. William was still, he said, a cross to him, but he had made up his mind to endure it. Indeed, the world into which he had desired his son to enter was not at that moment treating the admiral well. He was suffering impeachment and the gout at the same time. He saw that William's religion was giving him a serenity in the midst of evil fortune which he himself did not possess. He could appreciate his heroic spirit. He admired him in spite of himself.

William then spent nearly a year in Ireland, administering his father's estates. When he returned, in 1670, he found his Quaker brethren in greater trouble than before. In that perilous season of plots and rumors of plots, when Protestants lived in dread of Roman Catholics, and Churchmen knew not at what moment the Puritans might again repeat the tragedies of the Commonwealth, neither church nor state dared to take risks. The reigns of Mary and of Cromwell were so recent an experience, the Papists and the Presbyterians were so many and so hostile, that it seemed unsafe to permit the assembling of persons concerning whose intentions there could be any doubt. Any company might undertake a conspiracy. The result of this feeling on the part of both the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities was a series of ordinances, reasonable enough under the circumstances, and perhaps necessary, but which made life hard for such stout and frank dissenters as the Quakers. At the time of Penn's return from Ireland, it had been determined to enforce the Conventicle Act, which prohibited all religious meetings except those of the Church of England. There was, therefore, a general arresting of these suspicious friends of Penn's. In the middle of the summer Penn himself was arrested.

The young preacher had gone to a meeting-house of the Quakers in Gracechurch or Gracious Street, in London, and had found the door shut, and a file of soldiers barring the way. The congregation thereupon held a meeting in the street, keeping their customary silence until some one should be moved to speak. It was not long before the spirit moved Penn. He was immediately arrested, and William Mead, a linen draper, with him, and the two were brought before the mayor. The charge was that they "unlawfully and tumultuously did assemble and congregate themselves together to the disturbance of the king's peace and to the great terror and disturbance of many of his liege people and subjects." They were committed as rioters and sent to await trial at the sign of the Black Dog, in Newgate Market.

At the trial Penn entered the court-room wearing his hat. A constable promptly pulled it off, and was ordered by the judge to replace it in order that he might fine the Quaker forty marks for keeping it on. Thus the proceedings appropriately began. William tried in vain to learn the terms of the law under which he was arrested, maintaining that he was innocent of any illegal act. Finally, after an absurd and unjust hearing, the jury, who appreciated the situation, brought in a verdict of "guilty of speaking in Gracious Street." The judges refused to accept the verdict, and kept the jury without food or drink for two days, trying to make them say, "guilty of speaking in Gracious Street to an unlawful assembly." At last the jury brought in a formal verdict of "not guilty," which the court was compelled to accept. Thereupon the judges fined every juryman forty marks for contempt of court; and Penn and the jurors, refusing to pay their fines, were all imprisoned in Newgate. The Court of Common Pleas presently reversed the judges' decision and released the jury. Penn was also released, against his own protest, by the payment of his fine by his father.

The admiral was in his last sickness. He was weary, he said, of the world. It had not proved, after all, to be a satisfactory world. He did not grieve now that his son had renounced it. At the same time, he could not help but feel that the friendship of the world was a valuable possession; and he had therefore requested his patron, the Duke of York, to be his son's friend. Both the duke and the king had promised their good counsel and protection. Thus "with a gentle and even gale," as it says on his tombstone, "in much peace, [he] arrived and anchored in his last and best port, at Wanstead in the county of Essex, the 16th of September, 1670, being then but forty-nine years and four months old."

The admiral's death left his son with an annual income of about fifteen hundred pounds. This wealth, however, made no stay in his Quaker zeal. Before the year was ended, he was again in prison.