WILLIAM PENN. - English Quaker, founder of Pennsylvania, b. at Tower Hill (London) on 14 Oct. 1644, d. at Ruscombe (England) on 30 July 1718. Reared under Puritan influence, from his student years at Oxford—where, after Cromwell’s death, the Anglican restoration was taking place—he sympathized with the Quaker movement (v. QUAKERS).
Expelled from the university in 1662 for his religious nonconformity, he was sent to the Continent, where for a time he attended the Huguenot Academy at Saumur. Having embraced Quakerism during a stay in Ireland (1667), he became a preacher and propagator of the movement upon his return to England. The publication of a pamphlet of religious controversy earned him nine months’ imprisonment in the Tower of London (1668–69). While in prison he wrote his principal work, *No Cross, No Crown*, an eloquent defense of his faith and a vehement indictment of moral corruption. After a period of controversy with Presbyterians and Baptists and of conflict with the constituted authorities—during which he vigorously championed religious tolerance and political liberalism, enduring repeated arrests and several missionary journeys to the Continent—he obtained in 1681 from the Crown, in settlement of a debt inherited from his father, a vast tract of land in the New World that was named Pennsylvania. Arriving in America in 1682, he established himself as governor of the settlement and gave it a constitution designed to make it a “Christian State” according to Quaker principles. He established freedom of worship and cultivated friendly relations with neighboring Indian tribes, then returned to England in 1684, where he took an active part in the political and religious struggles of the day. His advocacy of tolerance, even on behalf of Catholics, was notably courageous. He was first removed from and then reinstated in the governorship of Pennsylvania, returning to the colony in 1699 to reorganize its government. He came back to England in 1701 and resumed his position as leader of the dissenters.