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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