page_title: William Penn
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: William Penn / Biography / Early years
caption_attribution_description: William Penn memorial at All Hallows Church, labeled as "the oldest in England". That means realy really old.
context_page_description: William Penn was the son of the admiral and politician Sir William Penn. Penn was a writer, early member of the Religious Society of Friends, and founder of the English North American colony the Province of Pennsylvania. He was an early advocate of democracy and religious freedom, notable for his good relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans. Under his direction, the city of Philadelphia was planned and developed. Philadelphia was planned out to be grid-like with its streets and be very easy to navigate, unlike London where Penn was from. The streets are named with numbers and tree names. He chose to use the names of trees for the cross streets because Pennsylvania means "Penn's Woods".
  In 1681, King Charles II handed over a large piece of his North American land holdings along the North Atlantic Ocean coast to Penn to pay the debts the king had owed to Penn's father. This land included the present-day states of Pennsylvania and Delaware. Penn immediately set sail and took his first step on American soil, sailing up the Delaware Bay and Delaware River, in New Castle in 1682.
context_section_description: William Penn was born in 1644 at Tower Hill, London, the son of English Admiral Sir William Penn, and Margaret Jasper, from the Netherlands and the widow of a Dutch captain and the daughter of a rich merchant from Rotterdam. Admiral Penn served in the Commonwealth Navy during the English Civil War and was rewarded by Oliver Cromwell with estates in Ireland. The lands were seized from Irish Catholics in retaliation for the failed Irish Rebellion of 1641. Admiral Penn took part in the restoration of Charles II and was eventually knighted and served in the Royal Navy. At the time of his son's birth, then-Captain Penn was twenty-three and an ambitious naval officer in charge of quelling Irish Catholic unrest and blockading Irish ports.
  Penn grew up during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, who succeeded in leading a Puritan rebellion against King Charles I; the king was beheaded when Penn was three years old. Penn's father was often at sea. Little William caught smallpox at a young age, losing all his hair (he wore a wig until he left college), prompting his parents to move from the suburbs to an estate in Essex. The country life made a lasting impression on young Penn, and kindled in him a love of horticulture. Their neighbor was famed diarist Samuel Pepys, who was friendly at first but later secretly hostile to the Admiral, perhaps embittered in part by his failed seductions of both Penn's mother and his sister Peggy.
  Penn was educated first at Chigwell School, by private tutors whilst in Ireland, and later at Christ Church, Oxford. At that time, there were no state schools and nearly all educational institutions were affiliated with the Anglican Church. Children from poor families had to have a wealthy sponsor to get an education. Penn's education heavily leaned on the classical authors and "no novelties or conceited modern writers" were allowed including William Shakespeare. Foot racing was Penn's favorite sport, and he would often run the more than three-mile (5  km) distance from his home to the school. The school itself was cast in an Anglican mode – strict, humorless, and somber – and teachers had to be pillars of virtue and provide sterling examples to their charges. Though later opposing Anglicanism on religious grounds, Penn absorbed many Puritan behaviors, and was known later for his serious demeanor, strict behavior and lack of humor.
  After a failed mission to the Caribbean, Admiral Penn and his family were exiled to his lands in Ireland. It was during this period, when Penn was about fifteen, that he met Thomas Loe, a Quaker missionary, who was maligned by both Catholics and Protestants. Loe was admitted to the Penn household and during his discourses on the "Inner Light", young Penn recalled later that "the Lord visited me and gave me divine Impressions of Himself."
  A year later, Cromwell was dead, the royalists resurging, and the Penn family returned to England. The middle class aligned itself with the royalists and Admiral Penn was sent on a secret mission to bring back exiled Prince Charles. For his role in restoring the monarchy, Admiral Penn was knighted and gained a powerful position as Commissioner of the Navy.
  In 1660, Penn arrived at Oxford and enrolled as a gentleman scholar with an assigned servant. The student body was a volatile mix of swashbuckling Cavaliers (aristocratic Anglicans), sober Puritans, and nonconforming Quakers. The new government's discouragement of religious dissent gave the Cavaliers the license to harass the minority groups. Because of his father's high position and social status, young Penn was firmly a Cavalier but his sympathies lay with the persecuted Quakers. To avoid conflict, he withdrew from the fray and became a reclusive scholar. Also at this time, Penn was developing his individuality and philosophy of life. He found that he was not in sympathy with either his father's martial view of the world or his mother's society-oriented sensibilities, "I had no relations that inclined to so solitary and spiritual way; I was a child alone. A child was given to musing, occasionally fee
caption: William Penn was baptised in 1644 at All Hallows-by-the-Tower Church in London
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