William Penn

William Penn founded Pennsylvania as a colony guaranteeing religious liberty, and wrote a frame of government that influenced the United States Constitution. Born in London in 1644, the son of Admiral Sir William Penn, who conquered Jamaica for Cromwell and later served the restored monarchy, he was expelled from Christ Church, Oxford for nonconformity and sent to France to be cured of it. He converted to Quakerism at twenty-two, a movement then violently persecuted for refusing oaths, tithes, hat honour and military service. He was imprisoned four times, including eight months in the Tower of London, where he wrote No Cross, No Crown, and told the authorities that the Tower was to him the worst argument in the world. His 1670 trial with William Mead for preaching in the street produced a landmark in English law. The jury refused to convict; the judge imprisoned and starved them for it; and the Court of Common Pleas ruled in Bushel's Case that juries cannot be punished for their verdicts, establishing jury independence. Charles II owed Penn's father a large debt, and in 1681 settled it with a grant of land in America. Penn called it his holy experiment. He guaranteed freedom of worship, an elected assembly, humane criminal law with only two capital offences, and no established church, and he laid out Philadelphia on a grid with public squares. He learned some Lenape and paid for land by treaty rather than seizing it, and the peace held for decades — unusual enough to be remarked on for a century. He lost control of the colony in the 1690s, was later imprisoned for debt, and died in England in 1718 after a stroke.

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