William Penn

Smallpox took his hair as a small boy and he wore wigs for the rest of his life. His father was an admiral who had done well out of Cromwell — estates in Ireland confiscated from men who rebelled in 1641 — and then done well again out of the king's return. The son went to Chigwell School and, in 1660, to Christ Church, Oxford, where he was expelled for refusing compulsory worship. The admiral beat him with a cane and drove him out of the house, then shipped him to Paris to be civilized. It half worked. Sent back to manage the Irish estates in 1666, Penn started attending Quaker meetings near Cork instead, was arrested at one, and at 22 declared himself a member rather than deny it.

He wrote his way into the Tower of London in 1668 and produced No Cross, No Crown in an unheated cell, refusing to recant. In 1670 he preached in the street to test the Conventicle Act, and the jury that acquitted him was jailed and fined a year's wages each. Fighting from their cells, those jurors won English juries independence from the bench in Bushel's Case. Eleven years later Charles II cancelled a 16,000-pound debt to Penn's father with 45,000 square miles of North America. Penn wrote his Frame of Government over more than 20 drafts, cut the list of capital crimes from about 200 to two, built in a power to amend, laid Philadelphia out on a grid, and bought his first tract from the Lenape under an oak.

The proprietor of the first colony founded on liberty of conscience owned enslaved people and traded in them. The old claim that he fought slavery does not survive the record — he backed a few milder measures, including marriage among the enslaved, which his council rejected, and he was among the Quakers who promised to free their slaves at death. His own cousins Derick and Abraham op den Graeff signed the Germantown petition against slavery in 1688 without him. The money went the same way. Penn signed papers without reading them, and his manager Philip Ford turned one of them into legal title to Pennsylvania, then Ford's widow sued for the province. At 62 Penn landed in debtors' prison and then house arrest. A stroke in 1712 and a second one months later took his speech, and then his memory.

He died at Ruscombe in Berkshire in 1718 with nothing, and was buried at the Jordans meeting house beside his first wife. Hannah ran the province until her own death in 1726. His sons Thomas and John then dropped the faith, stripped the elected assembly of power, and took the Lenape's Lehigh Valley land in the Walking Purchase of 1737. Ronald Reagan made Penn and Hannah honorary American citizens in 1984. Philadelphia put Alexander Milne Calder's bronze on top of City Hall in 1894 and observed an unwritten rule against building above the hat brim until 1987. Quakers began arguing about him in public after 2020: the William Penn House in Washington reopened as Friends Place in January 2022.

William Penn's life against the full span of the corpus.

• No Cross, No Crown book
  Written in solitary confinement in the Tower of London 1669
• Frame of Government of Pennsylvania law
  More than 20 drafts, two capital crimes, and a clause allowing amendment 1682
• Philadelphia building
  Laid out on a grid with numbered and tree-named streets, unlike London 1682
• Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims book
  Part of the roughly 1,000 maxims he wrote on human nature 1682
• An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe book
  A proposal for a European parliament to arbitrate between states 1693
• Primitive Christianity Revived book
  His late statement of what he thought the faith had been 1696

• 1660 aged ~16 Enters Christ Church, Oxford Expelled for rebelling against compulsory worship. His father beat him with a cane and put him out of the house.
• 1667 aged ~23 Arrested at a Quaker meeting near Cork and declares himself a Quaker He was 22 and could have avoided the charge simply by denying it.
• 1668 aged ~24 Imprisoned in the Tower of London for blasphemy Given paper in the hope of a retraction, he wrote No Cross, No Crown instead.
• 1670 aged ~26 The Penn-Mead trial produces Bushel's Case The jury acquitted him, was jailed and fined for it, and won English juries their independence from the bench.
• March 4, 1681 aged 36 Charles II signs the charter for Pennsylvania The debt cancelled was 16,000 pounds owed to Penn's father.
• 1682 aged ~38 Buys his first tract from the Lenape and lays out Philadelphia
• December 1699 aged 55 Returns to Pennsylvania after 15 years away, meaning to stay He left again in 1701 when the charter came under threat.
• c. 1707 aged ~63 Goes to debtors' prison at 62 over Philip Ford's claim to the province Sympathy reduced it to house arrest, and Friends paid off the back rents.
• 1712 aged ~68 A stroke, then a second one, take his speech and his memory He was trying to sell Pennsylvania back to the Crown at the time.

• Roger Williams 1603–1683
  Founder of Rhode Island and early advocate of religious liberty and separation of church and state. successor in the experiment
• Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790
  Polymath who invented the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among many other creations. built on his charter
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. carried the argument into law
• James Madison 1751–1836
  Fourth President and Father of the Constitution who co-authored the Federalist Papers. drafted the amendment
• Anne Hutchinson 1591–1643
  Religious dissenter whose trial and banishment exposed tensions over authority, gender, and conscience in Puritan New England. earlier casualty of the same orthodoxy
• John Winthrop 1588–1649
  Long-serving Massachusetts Bay governor whose vision of a covenant community influenced New England political culture. opposed by