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morals were bad, and he was intriguing with the wives of many of his acquaintances. In weighing what he says, we must remember that by his own statement he attempted familiarities with Admiral Penn's wife, and also had designs on his daughter.

Lord Clarendon, who knew Penn well, has also left us a description of him :

"Penn, who had much the worse understanding, had a great mind to appear better bred and to speak like a gentleman; he had got many good words which he used at adventure; he was a formal man and spake very leisurely, but much, and left the matter more intricate and perplexed than he found it.” (Vol. ii. p. 354.)

But I cannot give the whole life of the admiral. I have dwelt on many of the details of it principally to show what a strong hold he secured on the affections of Charles II. and the Duke of York, for this was the foundation of his son's career. After his service against Opdam the duke wanted him to take another command at sea; and when Penn declined, insisted on his acceptance. But military men were now in control of the navy, and they were very jealous of regular sailors like Penn. They had him impeached for helping himself too liberally to the silk, spices, and jewels on board some rich prizes that had been taken from the Dutch. He does not appear to have been guilty; but the impeachment proceedings effectually blocked his appointment until it was too late for him to go to sea, and then the prosecution was dropped.

The king, anxious to reward him, was about to raise him to the peerage under the title of Viscount Weymouth; but his son William had by this time

become a Quaker and was protesting loudly against

It seemed ridicu

all titles as vanities of the flesh. lous to give a title that would descend to such a strange fanatic, and the king's good intentions were checked. So the admiral, through his nuisance of a son, failed to attain what was, no doubt, one of the chief objects of his ambition. But he had picked up in one way or another a considerable fortune, which he left to the deluded boy; and, most important of all, he left him the extreme good-will and affection of Charles II. and the Duke of York, who became James II.

He had lent to the crown various sums of money, and these at the time of his death, with the arrears of his pay, amounted to over twelve thousand pounds. Eleven years afterwards the debt, with interest, had grown to sixteen thousand pounds, and was liquidated by the grant to the son of the province of Pennsylvania.

IV

EARLY INFLUENCES

DURING all of Admiral Penn's service for Cromwell and the Parliament his son William remained with his Dutch mother at Wanstead, living quietly while the battle of Naseby was fought and Bridgewater and Bristol stormed, and the unfortunate King Charles beheaded in 1649. Penn was only five years old in 1649, and up to that time public events could not have made much impression on him. The foundation of his opinions inherited from his father was royalist, and his close relations with King Charles and King James afterwards made him still more of a Royalist. But the principles of the opposite party—the principles of liberty and free government—also made a deep impression on him, and he was, as we shall see, a curious mixture of the two political parties. His liberal ideas seem to have been imbibed in his early youth at Wanstead, when his father was away for years and never saw him. He heard a great deal there about civil liberty and the rights of Parliament, and during the subsequent six or seven years, as he became more impressionable, he continued to hear the same principles.

A new era began with the death of King Charles. In fact, a new England was created. Parliamentary

government and national consent, as against monarchy and despotism, got a surer foothold than they had ever had before, a foothold which they struggled to keep until the boy William Penn lived to see them, much to his surprise, securely and permanently established by William III. in 1688.

He lived at Wanstead until he was twelve years old, and during that time saw little or nothing of his father the admiral, who sailed to join the fleet on the Irish coast two days before his son was born, and after that was in continuous sea employment until he returned from the taking of Jamaica.

The boy went to school at Wanstead, and seems to have received the regular training in Latin, Greek, and mathematics which was given at that time. Wanstead and the village of Chigwell near by were pretty places, with all the advantages of country life and amusements. Penn was afterwards at college fond of athletic sports, and he doubtless laid the foundation for this taste in the fields and woods of his country home.

This same country neighborhood was intensely Puritan, and this seems to have had an important influence on the future Quaker leader. It no doubt modified his inherited royalist opinions, and it is not unlikely that during those twelve years he unconsciously received from his surroundings that tinge of thought which led to Quakerism. Puritans were in the habit of discussing religious subjects day and night; and the burden of all that the boy heard would be rejection of forms and ceremonies and more or less reliance on the individual judgment.

The Quakers carried individual judgment farther than the Puritans, but the Puritan state of mind was a natural foundation for Quakerism. There was no sect that the Puritans despised so much as they despised the Quakers; but, unconsciously, they had made easier the path to Quakerism.

We are confirmed in this view by learning that, when he was only eleven years old, Penn, when alone one day in his room, had a religious experience, as it is called.

"He was suddenly surprised with an inward comfort; and, as he thought, an external glory in the room, which gave rise to religious emotions, during which he had the strongest conviction of the being of God, and that the soul of man was capable of enjoying communication with Him. He believed also that the seal of divinity had been put upon him at this moment, or that he had been awakened or called upon to a holy life."

The teaching of the Church of England at that time would not have led a boy to such an experience; but emotionalism of that sort was an almost every-day experience among the Puritans, and he had, no doubt, heard many edifying accounts of it. Indeed, it is impossible to find in Penn during his youth any trace of Church of England teaching. His bent was radically the other way; and it is highly probable that it was started by the influences at Wanstead.

This was unfortunate for his father, the admiral, whose aristocratic tastes and ambition for a peerage led him to see nothing but folly in any deviation from the religion of the crown and the court. The great object of his life had been to restore the for

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