The Quaker and the King

The meeting house was silent as always, though filled with people.  Quakers could spend an inordinate amount of time in quiet contemplation before the Spirit moved on a participant who would then stand and speak.  The faithful were never particularly disturbed by hours of silent worship.  It was in stillness that they found God. That day, however, concentration was a bit of a problem, especially for the young women of the congregation.  A tall, athletic young man of twenty-two years had taken his place beside the other men.  The handsome stranger could not be missed for his clothing spoke of wealth and contrasted with the simple suits worn by the rest of the flock.  His face, however, held the same honest fervor as those searching for spiritual understanding.  This young man, William Penn, would find his calling among these pacifists.

Born in London in 1644 to a well-connected naval hero, Penn would be left to his own devices for most of his life in his father’s absence.  He would desert his father’s Anglicanism for a radical and persecuted religious faction that called themselves the Society of Friends, or Quakers to their detractors.  It was illegal to be a Quaker in England: they had no ministers, they disavowed all violence, they disputed the doctrine of the Trinity, and they believed women were equal to men.  Quakers were imprisoned, tortured and put to death.  William Penn was drawn to them.

His father disowned Penn after he was arrested at age 23 when the religious meeting he was attending was raided by the police.  At first, only the obvious Quakers were seized. William Penn was left alone.  He was too richly dressed to belong to the unpretentious sect.  However, when he insisted he was a Quaker and demanded to be arrested, the police complied. Penn’s father, who had carefully nurtured a relationship with the Stuart kings of England, was mortified.  He never understood his son’s stubborn insistence to be hated.

Prison became familiar to Penn during his four sentences.  Once, while in the Tower of London, Penn exclaimed, “My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.” 

Tolerance for Quakers was no better in America.  John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote with satisfaction in his journal of the Quaker whose tongue the town council had cut out for preaching his faith.  Penn realized Quakers would only find peace when the law guaranteed religious tolerance, and he was the man who could make the law.

His father had loaned King Charles II £16,000, about $3,000,000 in today’s money.  Charles II had a copious number of mistresses and had gotten himself into quite a bit of debt supporting his extracurricular activities and thirteen illegitimate children.  He could not possibly repay the loan.  After his father’s death, William Penn respectfully decided to call the loan in a request for 28 million acres of land in the New World.  An indignant outburst came from the royal court when Penn obstinately clung to his Quaker principles by refusing to bow to the king or remove his hat.  His faith taught him that no man was below him and no man was above him – not even a king.  Charles II, impressed with the brazen visitor, dismissed the matter and granted the land which was named “Penn’s Woods” or Pennsylvania in honor of William Penn’s father.

This colony became the incubator for William Penn’s “Holy Experiment.”  Thousands of people persecuted for their religion flooded the colony – Jews, Baptists, Quakers, Mennonites, Lutherans, Huguenots, Swenkfelders.  Not only were they free to worship as they wished, but they would also be free from conscription in religious wars like those that had plagued Europe for centuries.

His ideas of equality extended to Native Americans whom he paid for the land granted him by the king.  He earned their respect when he walked into their villages unarmed and could outrun their braves.  The peace treaty he cultivated with the indigenous tribes lasted for seventy years, well after his death in 1718.

William Penn was a man of conviction.  The ideas that he stubbornly espoused became the model for the first nation created on the belief that man is born with natural rights that no government can take away.

And so, today we honor a Quaker who refused to budge.