The Personality of William Penn

It is a commonplace to observe that William Penn regularly inhabited two worlds-the world of power, privilege and authority, and the peculiar egalitarian, spiritual and persecuted world of the Friends. Historians are suspicious of applications of psychology to actors so long departed from the scene, and yet one must ask questions about the inner world of William Pennabout his emotional make-up and personality-if we are to understand how he was able to move between these spheres, what tension or conflict existed for him, and what this ambivalence contributed to his development. It is not easy to understand William Penn's personality-too much of the evidence we have for his life is contained in public papers; few personal and intimate materials have survived; we have nothing written by him before he was sixteen, and very little before he converted to Quakerism. The pictures we have are misleadinga boy in armor, a fat man talking. We must therefore look at his social experience and what we know of his behavior in order to arrive at or infer the emotional determinants and habits which are such an important part of personality. Emotional habits are formed very early. We know about William Penn's early emotional development that as a youth he exhibited a strong mystical streak. By his own account, he had mystical experiences by the time he was twelve or thirteen.1 There was no pattern for this in his family; he said, pathetically, "I had no Relations that inclined to so solitary & Spirituall a Way; I was as a Child alone."2 His father was an energetic warrior, and a man who was capable of changing sides in the civil war. If he had dreams, they were dreams of a rather worldly glory, of social and political success for his son. The mysticism of the son may have been an early attempt to escape from the authority of his father, or from his father's dreams. William junior could have seen but little of his father when he was a young boy; his mother and his sister were his chief companions until he was eleven. He was then with his father a great deal, until he went up to Oxford at sixteen.3 A Freudian would no doubt be tempted to interpret the mysticism and other later escapes from the standards of the father in powerfully Oedipal terms, and it is indeed very difficult to avoid thinking about William junior's early religious life in terms of rejection of authority. In fact, between the ages of 18 (when he was expelled from Oxford) and 23 (when he converted to Quakerism) we see the double strand of religion and rebellion constantly coming together. At Oxford he joined forces with others of puritan persuasion to object to the prayer book and to ritual which seemed too popish (for example, wearing the surplice). He could not have been very surprised when he was sent down in 1662, although in later years he looked back at himself with pity, and referred to his experience as "my persecution at Oxford," a "hellish darkness and debauchery." But he seemed to relish "the bitter usage I underwent when I returned to my Father, whipping, beating, and turning out of Dores."4