During his father's absence at sea, William Penn lived at
Wanstead in Essex, and went to school close by at Chigwell.
Like many children of sensitive
temperament, he had times of spiritual excitement. At the
age of twelve, he was "suddenly surprised with an inward
comfort,.....which gave rise to religious emotions, during
which he had the strongest conviction of the being of a God,
and that the soul of man was capable of communication with
Him."
Upon the death of Cromwell,
Penn's father who had served the Protector, remained with his
family on the Irish estates which Cromwell had given
him. On the resignation of Richard Cromwell he at once
declared for the King and went to court in Holland, where he
was knighted. Meanwhile young Penn studied under a tutor
at Tower Hill until in October, 1660 he 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 Glouchester.
The rigor 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 good
terms with John Owen (1616-1683), and who had already fallen
under the influence of Thomas Loe the Quaker, then at Oxford,
actively sympathiozed. He and others refused to attend
chapel and church servicxe, and were fined in
consequence. How far his leaving the University resulted
from this cannot be clearly ascertained. In January,
1662 his father was anxious to remove him to Cambridge.
In later years he speaks of being "banished" 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. He afterwards
traveled 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
dispatches. Returning after the naval victory off Lowestoft in June, Admiral
Penn found that 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
armor; and it was at this time, too, that the conversion, begun when he was a boy by Thomas Loe in Ireland, was completed at the same place
by the same agency.