Upon the death of Cromwell, Penn’s father, who, like Monk, was purely an adventurer, and had served the Protector because there was no other career open, and who, according to Clarendon, had previously offered to bring over the fleet to Charles, remained with his family on the Irish estates which Cromwell had given him, of the value of £300 a year. On the deposition of Richard Cromwell he at once declared for the king and went to the court at Holland, where he was received into favour and knighted; and at the elections for the Convention Parliament he was returned for Weymouth. During these events young Penn studied under a private tutor on Tower Hill until, in October 1660, he was entered as a gentleman commoner at Christ Church. He appears in the same year to have contributed to the Threnodia, a collection of elegies on the death of the young duke of Gloucester.

The rigour with which the Anglican statutes were revived, and the Puritan heads of colleges supplanted, roused the spirit of resistance at Oxford to the uttermost. With this spirit Penn, who was on familiar terms with John Owen, and who had already fallen under the influence of Thomas Loe the Quaker, then at Oxford, actively sympathized. He and others refused to attend chapel and church service, and were fined in consequence. So far did the young enthusiasts proceed in the expression of their hatred to the Anglican regulations that it is said they fell upon the students who were clothed in surplices and violently tore the hated vestments from them. How faillis leaving the university resulted from this cannot be clearly ascertained. Anthony Wood has nothing regarding the cause of his leaving, but says that he stayed at Oxford for two years, and that he was noted for proficiency in manly sports. There is no doubt that in January 1662 his father was anxious to remove him to Cambridge, and consulted Pepys on the subject; and in later years he speaks of being “banished” the college, and of being whipped, beaten, and turned out of doors on his return to his father, in the anger of the latter at his avowed Quakerism. A reconciliation, however, was effected; and Penn was sent to France to forget this folly. The plan was for a time successful. Penn appears to have entered more or less into the gaieties of the court of Louis XIV., and while there to have become acquainted with Robert Spencer, afterwards earl of Sunderland, and with Dorothy, sister to Algernon Sidney. What, however, is more certain is that he somewhat later placed himself under the tuition of Moses Amyraut, the celebrated president of the Protestant college of Saumur, and at that time the exponent of liberal Calvinism, from whom he gained the patristic knowledge which is so prominent in his controversial writings, and whose example, doubtless, stimulated the tolerant views he already entertained. He afterwards travelled in Italy, returning to England in August 1664, with “a great deal, if not too much, of the vanity of the French garb and affected manner of speech and gait.”

Until the outbreak of the plague Penn was a student of Lincoln’s Inn. For a few days also he served on the staff of his father—now great captain commander—and was by him sent back in April 1665 to Charles with despatches. It will be observed that his letters to his father even at this time are couched in quaintly devout phraseology. Returning after the naval victory off Lowestoft in June, Admiral Penn found that, probably from the effect upon his mind of the awful visitation of the plague, his son had again become settled in seriousness and Quakerism. To bring him once more to views of life not inconsistent with court preferment, the admiral sent him in February 1666 with introductions to Ormonde’s pure but brilliant court in Ireland, and to manage his estate in Cork round Shannangarry Castle, his title to which was disputed. Penn appears also later in the year to have been “clerk of the cheque” at Kinsale, of the castle and fort of which his father had the command. When the mutiny broke out in Carrickfergus Penn volunteered for service, and acted under Arran so as to gain considerable reputation. The result was that in May 1666 Ormonde offered him his father’s company of foot, but, for some unexplained reason, the admiral demurred to this arrangement. It was at this time that the well-known portrait was painted of the great Quaker in a suit of armour; and, strangely enough, it was at this time, too, that the conversion, begun when he was a boy, according to Penn’s own account, by Thomas Loe in Ireland, was completed at the same place by the same agency.

On 3d September 1667 Penn attended a meeting of Quakers in Cork, at which he assisted to expel a soldier who had disturbed the meeting. He was in consequence, with others present, sent to prison by the magistrates. From prison he wrote to Lord Orrery, the president of Munster, a letter, in which he first publicly makes a claim for perfect freedom of conscience. He was immediately released, and at once returned to his father in London, with the distinctive marks of Quakerism strong upon him —the use of the “thee” and “thou,” and the refusal to remove his hat. So staunch on the hat question was he that he could not accept even the compromise suggested by his father, viz., that he should uncover before the king, the duke of York, and himself.

Penn now became a minister of the denomination, and at once entered upon controversy and authorship. His first book, Truth Exalted, in which he summons to trial princes, priests, and people, was “a short but sure testimony against all those religions, faiths, and worships that have been formed and followed in the darkness of apostacy,” and declared Quakerism to be “the alone good way of life and salvation.” Its tone and language were violent and aggressive in the extreme. The same offensive personality is shown in The Guide Mistaken, a tract written in answer to John Clapham’s Guide to the True Religion. It was at this time, too, that he appealed, not unsuccessfully, to Buckingham, who on Clarendon’s fall was posing as the protector of the Dissenters, to use his efforts to procure parliamentary toleration.

Penn’s first public discussion was with Thomas Vincent, a London Presbyterian minister, who had reflected on the “damnable” doctrines of the Quakers. In this he appears to have acted as second to George Whitehead. The discussion, which had turned chiefly upon the doctrine of the Trinity, ended uselessly, and Penn at once published The Sandy Foundation Shaken, a tract of ability sufficient to excite Pepys’s astonishment, in which orthodox views on the Trinity, plenary satisfaction, imputed righteousness, and other doctrinal points were so offensively attacked that, at the instance of the bishop of London, Penn was placed in the Tower, where he remained for nearly nine months. The imputations upon his opinions and good citizenship, made as well by Dissenters as by the church, he repelled in Innocency with her Open Face, in which he asserts his full belief in the divinity of Christ, the atonement, and justification through faith, though insisting on the necessity of good works. It was now, too, that he published the most important of his books, No Cross, no Crown, which, besides the lessons of constancy and resignation indicated by the title, contained an able defence of the Quaker doctrines and practices, and a scathing attack on the evils of the age, especially the loose and unchristian lives of the clergy.

While completely refusing to recant or to yield to the persuasions of Stillingfleet, who, it is stated on doubtful authority, was sent to argue with him, Penn addressed a letter to Arlington in July 1669, in which, on grounds of religious freedom, he asked him to interfere. It is noteworthy, as showing the views then predominant, that he was almost at once set at liberty.

An informal reconciliation now took place with his father, who had been impeached through the jealousy of Rupert and Monk (in April 1668), and whose conduct in the operations of 1665 he had publicly vindicated; and Penn was again sent on family business to Ireland. There is good reason for thinking that the extent of the differences between him and his father have been much exaggerated. While there he regularly attended Quaker meetings, and was active in intercession for imprisoned Friends. At the desire of his father, whose health was fast failing, Penn returned to London in 1670, and was immediately involved in fresh trouble. Having found the usual place of meeting in Gracechurch Street closed by soldiers, Penn, as a protest, preached to the people in the open street. With William Mead he was at once arrested and indicted at the Old Bailey on 1st September for preaching to an unlawful, seditious, and riotous assembly, which had met together with force and arms. The Conventicle Act not touching their case, the trial which followed, and which may be read at length in Penn’s People's Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted, was a notable one in the history of trial by jury. The prisoners and the jury were alike browbeaten and threatened by the bench, and particularly by the recorder. With extreme courage and skill Penn exposed the illegality of the prosecution, while the jury, for the first time, asserted the right of juries to decide in opposition to the ruling of the court. They brought in a verdict declaring Penn and Mead “guilty of speaking in Gracechurch Street,” but refused to add “to an unlawful assembly”; then, as the pressure upon them increased, and as they were sent back time after time without food, light, fire, or tobacco, they first acquitted Mead, while returning their original verdict upon Penn, and then, when that verdict was not admitted, returned their final answer “not guilty” for both. The court fined the jurymen 40 marks each for their contumacy, and, in default of payment, imprisoned them, whereupon they vindicated and established for ever the right they had claimed in an action before the Court of Common Pleas, when all twelve judges unanimously declared their imprisonment illegal.

Penn himself had been fined for not removing his hat in court, had been imprisoned on his refusal to pay, and had earnestly requested his family not to pay for him. The fine, however, was settled anonymously, and he was released in time to be present at his father’s death on 16th September 1670, at the early age of forty-nine. Penn now found himself in possession of a fortune of <£1500 a year, and a claim on the crown for £15,000, lent to Charles II. by his father. The admiral appears, from a later statement of Penn, to have asked the king and James to become his son’s protectors, and James accepted and acted up to the engagement in a special manner. Upon his release Penn at once plunged into controversy, challenging a Baptist minister named Ives, at High Wycombe, to a public dispute and, according to the Quaker account, easily defeating him. No account is forthcoming from the other side. Hearing at Oxford that students who attended Friends’ meetings were rigorously used, he wrote a vehement and abusive remonstrance to the vice-chancellor in defence of religious freedom. This found still more remarkable expression in the Seasonable Caveat against Popery (January 1671), in which, while refuting the arguments of Roman Catholics, he urges, far in advance of his age and of all other sects, entire and unlimited toleration of faith and worship,—not, be it observed, on the grounds of expediency or of Scripture, but upon the distinctively Quaker doctrine of the “inward light.” .

In the beginning of 1671 Penn was again arrested for preaching in Wheeler Street meeting-house by Sir J. Robinson, the lieutenant of the Tower, formerly lord mayor, and known as a brutal and bigoted churchman. Legal proof being wanting of any breach of the Conventicle Act, and the Oxford or Five Mile Act also proving inapplicable, Robinson, who had some special cause of enmity against Penn, urged upon him the oath of allegiance. This, of course, the Quaker would not take, and consequently was imprisoned for six months. A saying is recorded of Penn on this occasion worthy of remembrance. Robinson had ordered a corporal and some soldiers to take him to prison. “No, no,” said Penn, “send thy lacquey. I know the way to Newgate.” During this imprisonment Penn wrote several works, the most important being The Creat Case of Liberty of Conscience (February 1671), a noble defence of complete toleration. Upon his release he started upon a missionary journey through Holland and Germany; at Emden he founded a Quaker Society, and established an intimate friendship with the princess palatine Elizabeth. In his letters written during this journey will be found a full exposition of the doctrine of the “inward light.”

Upon his return home in the spring of 1672 Penn married Gulielma Springett, daughter of Mary Pennington by her first husband, Sir William Springett; she appears to have been equally remarkable for beauty, devotion to her husband, and firmness to the religious principles which she had adopted when little more than a child. He now settled at Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, and gave himself up to controversial writing. To this year, 1672, belong the Treatise on Oaths and England’s Present Interest Considered, in the latter of which, written immediately after the withdrawal of the Declaration of Indulgence, is contained an able statement of the arguments against comprehension and for toleration. It should not be omitted by any one who desires to understand the state of feeling on the subject. In the year 1673 Penn was still more active. He secured the release of George Fox, addressed the Quakers in Holland and Germany, carried on public controversies with Hicks, a Baptist, and Faldo, an Independent, and published his treatise on the Christian Quaker and his Divine Testimony Vindicated, the Discourse of the General Rule of Faith and Practice, Reasons against Railing (in answer to Hicks), Counterfeit Christianity Detected, and a Just Rebuke to One-and-tweηty Learned Divines (an answer to Faldo and to Quakerism no Christianity). His last public controversy was in 1675 with Richard Baxter, in which, of course, each party claimed the victory. During this year his active sympathies were enlisted on behalf of imprisoned Quakers at Aberdeen. At this point Penn’s connexion with America begins.

The province of New Jersey, comprising the country between the Hudson and Delaware rivers on the east and west, had been granted in March 1663-64 by Charles II. to his brother; James in turn had in June of the same year leased it to Lord Berkeley and Sir G. Carteret in equal shares. By a deed, dated 18th March 1673/74, John Fenwick, a Quaker, bought one of the shares, that of Lord Berkeley (Stoughton erroneously says Carteret’s) in trust for Edward By Hinge, also a Friend, for £1000. This sale was confirmed by James, after the second Dutch war, on 6th August 1680. Disputes having arisen between Fenwick and Byllinge, Penn acted as arbitrator; and then, Byllinge being in money difficulties, and being compelled to sell his interest in order to satisfy his creditors, Penn was added, at their request, to two of themselves, as trustee. The disputes were settled by Fenwick receiving ten out of the hundred parts into which the province was divided, with a considerable sum of money, the remaining ninety parts being afterwards put up for sale. Fenwick sold.his ten parts to two other Friends, Eldridge and Warner, who thus, with Penn and the other two, became masters of West Jersey, West New Jersey, or New West Jersey, as it was indifferently called. The five proprietors appointed three commissioners, with instructions dated from London 6th August 1676, to settle disputes with Fenwick (who had bought fresh land from the Indians, upon which Salem was built, Penn being himself one of the settlers there) and to purchase new territories, to survey and divide them, and to build a town,—New Beverley, or Burlington, being the result. For the new colony Penn drew up a constitution, under the title of “Concessions,” which he himself thus describes: “There we lay a foundation for after ages to understand their liberty as men and Christians, that they may not be brought in bondage but by their own consent; for we put the power in the people.” The greatest care is taken to make this constitution “as near as may be conveniently to the primitive, ancient, and fundamental laws of the nation of England.” But a democratic element is introduced, and the new principle of perfect religious freedom—“that no men, nor numbers of men upon earth, hath power or authority to rule over men’s consciences in religious matters ”—stands in the first place (chap, xvi.). With regard to the liberty of the subject, no one might be condemned in life, liberty, or estate, except by a jury of twelve, and the right of challenging was granted to the uttermost (chap, xvii.). Imprisonment for debt was not abolished (as Dixon states), but was reduced to a minimum (chap, xviii.), while theft was punished by twofold restitution either in value or in labour to that amount (chap, xxviii.). The provisions of chap, xix., taking their rise doubtless in Penn’s own trial at the Old Bailey in 1670, deserve special notice. All causes were to go before three justices, with a jury. “They, the said justices, shall pronounce such judgment as they shall receive from, and be directed by the said twelve men, in whom only the judgment resides, and not otherwise. And in case of their neglect and refusal, that then one of the twelve, by consent of the rest, pronounce their own judgment as the justices should have done.” The justices and constables, moreover, were elected by the people, the former for two years only (chap, xli.). Suitors might plead in person, and the courts were public (chap, xxii.). Questions between Indians and settlers were to be arranged by a mixed jury (chap, xxv.).

An assembly was to meet yearly, consisting of a hundred persons, chosen by the inhabitants, freeholders, and proprietors, one for each division of the province. The election was to be by ballot, and each member was to receive a shilling a day from his division, “that thereby he may be known to be the servant of the people.” The executive power was to be in the hands of ten commissioners chosen by the assembly. Such a constitution, which is in marked contrast with Locke’s aristocratic one for Carolina, settled eight years previously, soon attracted large numbers of Quakers to West Jersey.

It was shortly before these occurrences that Penn inherited through his wife the estate of Worminghurst in Sussex, whither he removed from Rickmansworth. He now (25th July 1677) undertook a second missionary journey to the Continent along with George Fox, Robert Barclay, and George Keith. Of this journey a full account, published seventeen years later, will be found in his selected works. He visited particularly Rotterdam and all the Holland towns, renewed his intimacy with the princess Elizabeth at Herwerden, and, under considerable privations, travelled through Hanover, Germany, the lower Rhine, and the electorate of Brandenburg, returning by Bremen and the Hague. It is worthy of recollection that the American settlers from Kirchheim, one of the places which responded in an especial degree to Penn’s teaching, are noted as the first who declared it unlawful for Christians to hold slaves. Penn reached England again on 24th October.

His attention was at once taken up both with the disputes which had arisen within the Quaker body itself on questions of discipline, and...