MY COUSIN WILLIAM PENN

Rembrandt's Girl With a Broom

Some decades ago, I visited the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art to view a traveling exhibit titled “The Dutch Reformation.” The darkly painted landscapes engulfing tiny human figures, the ports overcrowded with heavily masted ships, the portraits of maids at their daily chores and the red-cheeked men lifting their glasses at taverns were captivating. Fueling this wave of creativity were the newly rich burghers and the art guilds, whose members sold their works in the markets. Among the masters detailing life in the 17th century Netherlands were my favorites, Rembrandt and Vermeer.

At the exhibit, I bought a dozen postcards and decorated my dorm room at the University of Michigan with them. I also purchased a poster-size copy of Rembrandt’s “Girl With a Broom” at the famous Ulrich’s bookstore on campus. During one of my many moves, I gave this framed poster to my parents and it hung for decades in their living room in Lone Mountain, Tenn.
Many years later, I found out that some of our family roots go back to this era of the Netherlands. Through the art, I already felt familiar with my forebears.

Adding spice to the family history was the little known fact that among those of Dutch extraction was the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn. His father, Admiral William Penn (1621-1670) of England had married the Dutch widow of Nicasius Van der Schure in Bristol. This Margaret was the daughter of Jan Jasper, a burgher of Rotterdam, and Alet Gobels Pletjes, whose family came from Kempen, Prussia. In London, on October 14, 1644, their son, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, was born.

Penn’s great-aunt, who was Alet Pletjes’ sister, Greitjen Pletjes, was the wife of our ancestor Herman Op Den Graeff (1585-1642). That would make William Penn and the Op Den Graeff’s son, Isaac Hermans Op Den Graeff, first cousins. Isaac was to set sail from Krefeld, Rhineland, Germany to become one of the original 13 Krefeld immigrants in Pennsylvania.
William Penn came from a well-heeled family. His father, a ship’s captain at 20, moved steadily up the ranks of the English navy as rear-admiral and vice-admiral of Ireland and then vice-admiral of England. He was a general in the first Dutch war, fought primarily over trade disputes, and, in 1664 he was chosen great captain-commander under James, Duke of York, who as King James II, knighted Admiral William Penn.

The Battle of Scheveningen, 10 August 1653 by Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten, painted c. 1654, depicts the final battle of the First Anglo-Dutch-War.

The young William received much of his early religious training from his mother, because of the admiral’s long absences at sea. Although Admiral Penn’s fierce loyalty remained with the crown, perhaps because of the maternal Dutch influence, they were not as staunch in their fealty to the state-mandated Anglican religion. When the family removed to Ireland during the elder Penn’s service as vice-admiral and were living at Macroom Castle in County Cork, which the family was granted instead of the property of his wife, Margaret, Admiral Penn invited Thomas Loe, the itinerant Irish preacher who was a disciple of George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement, to his home. At the age of 12 or 13, William had a spiritual experience he later described as God appearing unto him and making it clear there was important work for him.

Penn’s higher education began at age 15 or 16 at Christ Church College at Oxford University, where he was befriended by the Lord Robert Spencer, second earl of Sunderland, a friendship that would dishearten Penn’s father because of Spencer’s disloyalty to Penn’s benefactor, King James II. Young Penn himself became a nonconformist after again hearing the preaching of Thomas Loe. Loe railed against the Anglican Church, which operated the college, and what he viewed as popish trappings at Oxford, including the wearing of gowns. In sympathy, Penn stopped attending Oxford’s mandatory Anglican services and was fined. He joined other rebels who refused to wear vestments and continued to criticize the established church. Loe was thrown imprison for preaching what was then regarded as arising from an evil spirit, and anyone connected to this teaching was held in disgrace.

Penn was expelled from the college, and his friend, Robert Spencer, left, too. Perhaps as a distraction and perhaps to remove his son from Anglican authorities, William Penn the elder sent his son to France, where he was presented to King Louis XIV and enrolled in l'Académie Protestante, a well-respected French Protestant university in Saumur. He studied theology under the eminent scholar, minister and Christian humanist Moses Amyraut, who supported religious toleration. The restless Penn, however, took up traveling through France and Italy and was joined by his fast friend Lord Robert Spencer. His worried father brought him back to England in 1644 and convinced him to study law at London’s most prestigious law school, Lincoln’s Inn.

A year later, the plague struck London, and the specter of death rekindled the law student’s spiritual fervor. He was sent back to Ireland and tended the family estates there. For a time, he pursued the military under the leadership of the Duke of Ormond in Dublin and, as a soldier, helped subdue a mutiny at Carrickfergus, Ireland. But it was here, also, that he made his final break with Anglicanism as he came for a third time under the influence of the Quaker Thomas Loe. Of his conversion, Penn wrote: “It was in this way that God, in His everlasting kindness, guided my feet in the flower of my youth when about 22 years of age."

Within a year, Penn became invested as a Quaker preacher. He remained a Quaker until his death, 51 years later. Penn’s life after his conversion did not lead through a garden path, however. Penn published a pamphlet, “Sandy Foundations of God Standeth Still,” and Anglican officials found Penn's views blasphemous. He was tossed into the Tower of London prison for seven months, the first of six imprisonments for his Quaker beliefs. During his confinement, he continued to write, including the first draft of what is considered his great masterpiece, “No Cross, No Crown” Two quotes from this treatise:

“No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.”

“True religion does not draw men out of the world but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.”

In 1670, British authorites padlocked Gracechurch Street Friends Meetinghouse in London, where Penn was a prominent member. Denied access to the church, Penn took his preaching to the streets, where hundreds gathered to hear him. He was arrested and charged with inciting a riot. Bolstered with his legal training at Liberty Inn, Penn used the trial to argue against the charges.

"If these ancient and fundamental laws, which relate to liberty and property, and which are not limited to particular persuasions in matters of religion, must not be indispensably maintained and observed, who then can say that he has a right to the coat on his back? Certainly our liberties are to be openly invaded, our wives to be ravished, our children slaved, our families ruined, and our estates led away in triumph by every sturdy beggar and malicious informer -- as their trophies but our forfeits for conscience's sake."

The jury members, which refused to convict him, were fined and imprisoned, but were they vindicated by the lord chief justice on appeal. Their victory and Penn’s established the principle of independence of the jury in British law.

Penn made short trips to Germany and Holland to see how Quakers there were faring. In Holland, he experienced a country unencumbered by laws that outlawed dissenting religions and he began to visualize a community based on the equality of its citizens. When he returned to England, he presented his notion of religious toleration to Parliament, but its members were more worried about the royal family of the Stuarts reinstating Catholicism, as the Duke of York had converted to that religion and was married to a devout Catholic.

William Penn's first wife, Gulielma Maria Springett

In 1672 he married Gulielma Maria Springett. Gulielma was the daughter of Lady Mary Proude Penington by her first husband, Sir William Springett. Gulielma shared her husband’s Quakerism, and he was devoted to her. In a letter to her just before he first sailed to America, he wrote:

My Dear Wife,
Remember thou was the love of my youth, and much the joy of my life - the most beloved as well as the most worthy of all my earthly comforts; and the reason of that love was more thy inward than thy outward excellencies, which yet are many. God knows and thou knowest I can say it was a match of His making; and God's image in us both was the first thing, and the most amiable and engaging ornament in our eyes. Now I am to leave thee, and that without knowing whether I shall ever see thee more in this world. Take my counsel into thy bosom, and let it dwell with thee in my stead while thou livest.

Penn had another idea: He called in a debt owed his father by King Charles II, and, on March 4, 1681, he was presented with the charter for Pennsylvania. In August 1682, he gained the rights to Delaware from his friend James, the Duke of York. His ostensible goal was to sell tracts of land to investors, but his spiritual goal, as he explained to his friend and land agent for Pennsylvania, James Harrison, was to create a "holy experiment" that would become the “seed of a nation." With this goal in mind, he wrote a charter of liberties, based on his belief in a divine right of government, for the 7,000 residents of his territory. A sentence in this first Frame of Government reads:

Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature ... no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.

Thomas Jefferson would later call Penn “the greatest law-giver the world has produced.” Penn remained as governor of his new colony from the fall of 1682 until August 1684. During this first sojourn, he drew up treaties with the Delaware, Iroquois and other native leaders. He also began construction on his mansion. He had this to say in a farewell:

And thou. Philadelphia, the virgin settlement of this province, named before thou wast born, what love, what care, what service, and what travail hath there been to bring thee forth and preserve thee from such as would abuse and defile thee! My soul prays to God for thee, that thou mayest stand in the day of trial, that thy children may be blessed of the Lord, and thy people saved by his power.

Penn did not return to his colony of Pennsylvania until 1699. His Quaker preachments were still considered dangerous by the authorities, but England had other troubles. Penn remained a supporter of Catholic-leaning King James II, who abdicated during the bloodless “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 led by the Dutch prince William of Orange and his consort, Mary, the Protestant daughter of James. Suspected of treason, Penn lost control of his colony from 1692 to 1694. He also suffered the loss of his wife on February 23, 1694.

Gulielma and William had been married two decades. The Rev. S.F. Hotchkin wrote a tender account of this sad occasion:

The blessed end is thus described by the husband: "She quietly expired in my arms, her head upon my bosom, with a sensible and devout resignation of her soul to Almighty God. I hope I may say she was a public as well as a private loss; for she was not only an excellent wife and mother, but an entire and constant friend; of a more than common capacity, and great modesty and humility, yet most equal and undaunted in danger; religious, as well as ingenuous, without affectation; an easy mistress and a good neighbor, especially to the poor; neither lavish nor penurious, but an example of industry as well as of other virtues; therefore our great loss, though her own eternal gain."

This lovely woman, whom her husband calls "one of ten thousand," left two sons and a daughter. These were Springett, Lætitia and William the younger. Mary and Hannah, the other children, had died in infancy.

Gulielma's health was broken by troubles, and the strain of the absence of her loved husband in the strange and distant land. She died at Hoddesden, away from her loved home. Her body was carried thence to the sweet and quiet graveyard at rustic Jordans, where her husband in after days was buried at her side, and the picture has often met the eyes of Americans. The green graves are not far from Chalfont, where began the young dreams of a pure love which are now renewed in Paradise.

In the year before his wife’s death, Penn carved out a vision for the “Present and Future Peace of Europe,” a primer for settling disputes between nations by arbitration rather than war. Centuries later, his work served as a prototype of the United Nations. The annual U.N. Day is aptly celebrated on Penn's birthday, October 24.

William Penn's second wife, Hannah Callowhill

After the loss of his wife, Penn began preaching at Quaker meetings throughout England, becoming reacquainted in Bristol with a Quaker friend and linen draper, Thomas Callowhill, whose daughter, Hannah, immediately captured his attention. At 24 and half his age, Hannah did not immediately share his interest. And a relationship was complicated by her sense that he was born to a wealthy family and because of his recent loss of fortune, and his reliance on the eventual inheritance of his late wife. But Penn was determined to win her, and wrote her letters professing his love and beseeching her to love him in return:

O let us meet here, most Dear H! the comfort is unspeakable, and the fellowship undissolvable. I would persuade my Self thou art of the same mind, though it is hard to make thee say so. Yet that must come in time, I hope and believe; for why should I love so well & so much when I am not well beloved?

Even Penn’s daughter Letitia sent letters of encouragement to the young Hannah, writing:

I must tell thee that at my father’s first coming from Bristol ten months since, though I kept it to my self, I perceived which way his inclinations was going, and that he had entertained an inward and deep affection for thee, by the character he gave of thee, and the pleasure he took to recommend thee for an example to others.

It took a year, but Penn finally prevailed and the couple received approval for their marriage before a Friends meeting. Three months later, on March 5, 1696, they were married. Hannah was 24 and Penn 52.

Hannah was expecting their son John, one of seven children and later nicknamed “The American,” when Penn sailed on the ship Canterbury to Pennsylvania. To the consternation of her family, who thought that Penn would remain to help at the drapery in Bristol, Hannah went with her husband. Traveling with them was Penn’s new secretary, James Logan, and Penn’s daughter Letitia.

The return to Philadelphia had its challenges. In 1691, George Keith had led a religious schism, and Pennsylvania and Delaware had been separated into two provinces. By 1696, a charter written by William Markham, Penn’s former secretary and later governor of Delaware, had replaced Penn’s earlier charter. Penn again revised this charter when he returned.

Penn had planned to remain at his manor Pennsbury, located up the Delaware River from Philadelphia, but the political troubles in England forced him to return. In 1712, he was felled by a series of strokes that disabled him both physically and mentally. Hannah managed his affairs in Pennsylvania until his death at the age of 73 on July 30, 1718, and continued as proprietor until her own death in 1727, at which time the proprietorship of Pennsylvania passed to their sons John, Thomas and Richard.

Postscript:

On November 28, 1984, President Ronald Reagan made both Hannah and William Penn honorary citizens of the United States. Hannah Callowhill Penn was the first woman to receive this honor.