Had Penn always been in this favorable position? We shall see. The
admiral, his father, was a good churchman and a conservative man. King
Charles held him in very high estimation. The son was brilliant, and of
noble character. He was sent to Oxford University; and what was the
father's astonishment, after the boy had been there some little time, to
hear that he had joined the despised and persecuted sect of the Quakers!
This was very much as if, at the present day, the son and heir of a
great multi-millionaire should join, not merely the Socialists, but the
Anarchists at Paterson!
Sir William raved and scolded. The son only grew more firm in the faith.
Sir William endured much; but finding the young man actually inclined to
address the king as "thou," he told him that if he committed this
impropriety, or "thee-ed" and "thoued" either him, the admiral, or the
Duke of York, he would disown him, and cut him off without a shilling.
On the very first opportunity after this, young William addressed King
Charles as "thou!" The king, having a more than royal sense of humor,
made a jest of the matter, but Sir William did not. He was as good as
his word. He turned his son out of doors, and bade him begone. The youth
went abroad, and took up for a time a very much discredited existence.
He had already been expelled from the university.
Here, for a time, the fate of Pennsylvania certainly trembled in the
balance. It was quite within the outraged admiral's power to make the
ban permanent. If he had done so, there would never have been a
Quaker-German commonwealth in America.
It is known that the son accepted his banishment as permanent. But his
mother did not. She pleaded with the father for his forgiveness. She
reminded him of the boy's great natural goodness, his brilliancy, his
affectionateness. He would, Lady Penn maintained, recover from his
distemper of Quakerism. She begged her husband, before it was too late,
to relent and recall him.
At length, moved by this appeal and the promptings of his own heart, the
admiral called the young man home. Once or twice afterwards he was on
the point of a more radical banishment of him. But, fortunately for the
New World, Sir William's heart was soft after all. The son was
reëstablished in his good graces. After the admiral's death, in 1670, it
was found that he had bequeathed all his wealth to the son, and, owing
to the son's influence, the Quakers improved their position not a
little, and in due time Penn organized and put through the Pennsylvania
experiment. But King Charles took good care to inform him that the name
"Pennsylvania," officially bestowed on the colony, was not in honor of
the founder, but in compliment to the admiral, his father.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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