William Penn
... not have clergy or churches and offered equal rights to all races and religions. They insisted that people obey their inner light or Holy Spirit. The Quakers highly endorsed Pacifism. They considered themselves nonconformists. Some of the Quaker’s other beliefs were refusing to bow, swear, or to take oaths. Though going to these meeting was considered illegal. Some time in September of 1667, police broke into one of the meetinghouses and arrested everyone. Fortunately William Penn was released because he didn’t look like a fashionable nobleman rather than a simple Quaker. This caused him to protest that he was a Quaker and wanted to be treated the same as the other Quakers. He was then arrested and placed in prison. In prison he wrote about freedom of conscience. When he was released from prison his father disowned him, so he lived with some other fellow Quakers. Penn noticed that there was very little Quaker literature, so began writing pamphlets, which would be distributed to others. In 1668 William met Gulielma Springett who was the stepdaughter of Isaac Pennington, a rich man from Buckinghamshire. About four years later on April 4, 1672 Penn married Gulielma Springett. She give birth to seven children four, however, died in infancy. Penn began attacking Catholic/Anglican principles regarding the Trinity. The bishop ordered him to be jailed in the Tower of London. In the seven months that he was there he had written pamphlets describing the principle elements of Quakerism. His greatest work in this seven-month phase was, No Cross, No Crown, which was an important part of religious toleration. Not long after he was released from prison Stuarts and the Parliament passed the Conventicle Act. This was intended to restrain religious disagreements as treason mainly for the Quakers. Thousands of people were imprisoned for their beliefs. On August 14 1670 Penn decided to challenge the act by holding a public meeting. The Lord Mayor of London arrested Penn and the other Quakers at the meeting once he began exchanging nonconformist views. William Penn next went to court to plead his case, but he did not know what he was charged with. The jury members would not tell him. Fortunately, he was not guilty but they did not like his behavior in court so he went to prison again. The Lord Mayor of London would not accept this verdict. The Lord Mayor of London charged the jury members with fines and ordered their brutal imprisonment. After two months the House of Common Pleas issued a court order of habeas corpus to set the jury members free. The Lord Mayor of London was then sued for falsely arresting the juries. The Lord Chief Justice of England and his eleven associates voted that the juries would not be penalized for the verdict of the case. This set an important precedent for defending the right to trial by jury. Persecution in England was fierce toward the Quakers. Some went to Massachusetts, but the Puritans acted negative toward them. Those Quakers were shipped to the Caribbean. When William Penn finally decided that it was impossible for religious toleration to be achieved in England, he went to the king and asked if he could begin a colony in the new world. King Charles II must have thought it would be a simple way to get rid of the Quakers. On March 4, 1681 King Charles II signed a charter for the region west of the Delaware River and north of Maryland. There had been approximately a thousand Dutch, Germans, and Indians who had lived in that region but did not have a permanent government established. The King named it Pennsylvania, which means “Forest of Penn” in respect towards William’s father who had recently passed away. William Penn would be the proprietor of the colony because he owned the land. King Charles II owed William’s father a large sum of money. Penn agreed to cancel the debt by receiving a large tract of land. Also Lord John Berkeley sold half of New Jersey to Quaker, which became part of Pennsylvania. There were no documents concerning this debt, so at the beginning of each year Penn had to give the King two beaver skins and a fifth of the gold mined in the Pennsylvania region. Penn boarded the ship Welcome and arrived in the new world on November 8, 1682. He would be the trustee of the colony. With Help from some friends he founded Philadelphia. Philadelphia means “city of brotherly love” in Greek. The location of Philadelphia was between the Delaware and the Schuylkill rivers. He pictured a ten thousand acre city but it accepted only as a one thousand two hundred acre city. William Penn had finally founded a haven for Quakers. Ma...