William Penn-Just Among Friends

WILLIAM PENN—JUST AMONG FRIENDS1 By Henry J. Cadbury WE HAVE all had occasion of late to remember many different aspects of William Penn. His public and private life have come before our imagination in many ways, both the manifold public services which he rendered and the mingled romance and tragedy of his domestic life. Aware of this abundance, not to say surfeit, I have naturally selected for this occasion a less hackneyed and more limited theme, his relations within the Society of Friends of his time. I am not asking how good a Friend he was by our standards nor how effective he was as an exponent of Quakerism to his contemporaries, though his reputation would not seriously suffer if I did. But a Quaker audience like this knows that even the most conspicuous or outwardly influential member of the Society is not by foregone conclusion taken for granted within all its membership, accepted by others, and himself perfectly at home in its meetings. The wider the range of his outside interests and influence, the more are the possibilities of tension and the need for mutual adjustment and understanding. Anyone who knows the intimate side of John Bright's or Herbert Hoover's Quaker connections will understand what I mean. When one inquires into this somewhat obscure and delicate phase of William Penn—William Penn "in a Society capacity," to use the old Quaker phrase—the source material is neither direct nor abundant. That he served the Society so well in what we call today public relations—by personal contacts with the most highly placed persons and by voluminous writing—is not 1 Paper presented at the annual meeting in Philadelphia of Friends Historical Association, Eleventh Month 27, 1944. The following abbreviations are used : APS= the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia ) ; BFHA = Bulletin of Friends Historical Society (Association) ; HSP = the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) ; JFHS = Journal of Friends Historical Society (London) ; PMHB = Pennsylvania Magasine of Hwtory and Biography. Works = A Collection of the Works of William Penn [edited by Joseph Besse], 2 vols. London, 1726. 5 Vol. 34, Spring 1945 6 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION evidence of'an easy adjustment between himself and his fellow members. Evidence to the contrary would scarcely be recorded in the biographies,2 and at most would have to be read between the lines of personal correspondence. Letters of this sort from or to our subject are not known to me in great numbers. For example, the great major collection of Swarthmore MSS. all is of earlier date than Penn's Quakerism. Neither Maria Webb's Penns and Peningtons nor J. Francis Fisher's Discourse . . . on the Private Life and Domestic Habits of William Penn, though both full of interesting and intimate details, helps us much here. Perhaps some of the most intimate and gossipy letters were destroyed. A hint is conveyed by a batch of letters to Penn in 1670 which I lately learned of in the Public Record Office, London—six or seven letters including what is, I suppose, the only extant love letter from GuIi, an account of an interview by Penn's representative with his irate parents, and a rather indiscreet letter about Margaret Fell soon after her marriage to George Fox from an obscure London Quakeress named Elizabeth Bowman. These I hope to publish some day in full. I shall collect here a few evidences, using as far as possible other examples that are not noticed by his biographers. "PENN'S position in early Quakerism was much like that of *· a convinced Friend today. Of course all early Friends were "convinced," but when Penn threw in his lot with the Society about 1667 at the age of 23 it was a movement that already was well under way. Now what it is like to come into Quakerism, as it were, from the outside, everyone who hears or reads this article either knows or can easily learn. Full acceptability on either side may not be felt at once. Penn knew he was not a 2 An honorable exception is William Penn: A Topical Biography by William I. Hull (1937). See especially pp. 178-181. As to Penn's correspondence...