With Friends like these…

The ultimate driving force of William Penn’s adult life is inaccessible, as the Quaker phrase ‘Inner Light’ suggests. While a young man administering the family estates in Ireland, Penn experienced ‘convincement’, another Quaker term for what other Dissenters called conversion. But while these experiences were inward and personal, they had public consequences. Since they were potentially available to anyone, they brought in their wake a tendency towards egalitarianism, manifested in plain speaking, pacifism, and a refusal to swear oaths or doff one’s hat. These outward manifestations of private experience inevitably caused ructions in the hierarchical social structure of 17th-century England.

Ironically, Penn’s position in that hierarchy would have made him more liable to be doffed to than to doff. His father, Sir William Penn, was an admiral in the service of Charles II, and William junior would become a friend of King James II, though like other Quaker leaders he would find himself in and out of prison for his beliefs. Perhaps his privileged upbringing gave him the confidence to act as a spokesman and organiser for the Friends on both a national and international level. His access to the movers and shakers of his society enabled him to become proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony (named in honour of the admiral) and thus transform himself into one of America’s Founding Fathers.

Aware of the impossibility of exploring his subject’s innermost depths, Andrew Murphy focuses primarily on his contribution to a number of significant issues of his time, above all his advocacy of toleration and his evolving theories of government based on that principle. The austerity of this focus makes the occasional glimpse of domestic life all the more welcome. Penn wooed Hannah Callowhill (who would become his second wife) with three gallons of brandy (one for her mother, to whom he also sent a recipe for drying fruit).