William Penn

• 1. Introduction

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  William Penn has stood above Philadelphia since 1894, when a bronze statue of him by Alexander Milne Calder was set on top of City Hall. At the time, City Hall was the tallest building in the city. Urban designer Edmund Bacon liked to say that no gentleman would build taller than the brim of Billy Penn's hat. For almost a century, the city's builders kept to that rule.

  In March 1987, the completion of One Liberty Place broke it. A so-called curse followed, and it lasted until 2008. That year, a small statue of Penn was placed on top of the newly built Comcast Center. The Philadelphia Phillies went on to win the 2008 World Series.

  The man behind the statue was an English Quaker, writer and theologian, and he was no stranger to trouble with the law. He sat in the Tower of London. His own father threw him out of the house. He died without a penny, even though a king had once granted him an enormous tract of land.

  How does a life like that produce a colony, a model of government that later American leaders studied, and a statue over a great city? Why were Quaker groups, centuries later, taking his name off their walls? The answers start in a naval household in Stuart England.

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• 2. The Admiral's Son

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  On the 24th of October 1644, a boy was born at Tower Hill in London to a naval officer named William Penn. His mother, Margaret Jasper, was Dutch. She was the widow of a sea captain and the daughter of a rich merchant from Rotterdam. Through her family, the boy is said to have been a cousin of the Op den Graeff family. They were prominent Mennonites in Krefeld who later became Quakers in Pennsylvania.

  Oliver Cromwell rewarded the elder Penn's service in the Commonwealth Navy with estates in Ireland. Those lands had been seized from Irish Confederates who took part in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The same officer later helped restore Charles II to the throne and was knighted for it.

  The boy was four years old when Charles I was beheaded. His father was often away at sea. Smallpox struck young William and cost him his hair, so he wore wigs for much of his life. The illness also pushed the family out of the suburbs and onto an estate in Essex. Country living left a lasting mark and kindled his love of horticulture.

  Their neighbour in Essex was the diarist Samuel Pepys. Pepys began as a friend of the family but turned secretly hostile to the Admiral. He was perhaps embittered by his failed attempts to seduce both Penn's mother and his sister Peggy.

  When Penn was about fifteen, a failed mission to the Caribbean sent the family into exile on the Admiral's Irish lands. There the household welcomed Thomas Loe, a Quaker missionary whom both Catholics and Protestants slandered. Loe spoke of the Inward Light. Penn later recalled that "the Lord visited me and gave me divine Impressions of Himself."

  A year later Cromwell was dead and the Royalists were rising. The family went back to England, and the Admiral was sent on a secret mission to bring home the exiled Prince Charles. For his part in restoring the monarchy, he was knighted and became Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty. His hopes for his son rode on that new influence.

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• 3. Oxford and Paris

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  Penn's schooling leaned heavily on the classical authors, and "no novelties or conceited modern writers" were allowed, Shakespeare included. He studied at Chigwell School, then with private tutors in Ireland, and later at Christ Church, Oxford. Running was his favourite sport, and he often ran more than three miles, about 5 km, from home to school. His school was strict, humorless and somber. Penn later opposed Anglicanism on religious grounds, yet he kept many Puritan habits, including a serious manner and little humour.

  In 1660, Penn arrived at Oxford as a gentleman scholar with an assigned servant. Three camps shared the colleges: Cavaliers, serious Puritans and nonconforming Quakers. The new government discouraged dissent, which gave the Cavaliers licence to harass the minorities. Because of his father's rank, Penn counted as a Cavalier, but his sympathies lay with the persecuted Quakers. He avoided the quarrels and became a reclusive scholar. "I was a child alone," he said later, a child "given to musing."

  Penn went home as a guest of honour at the lavish restoration ceremony for the King. His father stood beside him and received an unusual royal salute. Back at Oxford, Penn thought about a career in medicine and attended dissecting classes. Then the theologian John Owen was dismissed from his deanery, and Penn joined other open-minded students at seminars in Owen's house. There he learned to shape ideas into theory, argue them through reasoned debate and test them in the real world.

  Owen was censured again, and students were threatened with punishment for keeping his company. Penn stood by him and earned a fine and a reprimand. The Admiral pulled him out of Oxford, hoping distance would cure him of heresy. It did not. Back at the college, new rules demanded daily chapel and set required dress. Penn rebelled against compulsory worship and was expelled.

  His father, in a rage, beat him with a cane and drove him from the house. Penn's mother brokered a peace, but she soon concluded that her son threatened both her social standing and her husband's career. So at the age of 18, Penn was sent to Paris to polish his manners and keep him out of sight.

  At the court of the young Louis XIV, Penn found French manners far more refined than English ones. He disliked the show of wealth and privilege. Notre Dame impressed him, but Catholic ritual left him uneasy. He turned instead to the French Protestant theologian Moise Amyraut, who invited him to spend a year at Saumur. Amyraut taught a tolerant and flexible view of religion, and Penn took up his mentor's belief in free will. "I never had any other religion in my life than what I felt," Penn later said.

  After two years abroad, Penn came home polished and fashionable. Samuel Pepys noted the "vanity of the French" in him. Penn's taste for fine clothes lasted all his life, and he paid more attention to dress than most Quakers. His father enrolled him in law school.

  War with the Dutch interrupted his studies, and Penn joined his father at sea as a messenger between the Admiral and the King. He wrote to his father, "I never knew what a father was till I had wisdom enough to prize him." The Admiral came home in triumph, but London was in the grip of the Great Plague of 1665. Penn watched the dying and the way people reacted. The plague, he wrote, "gave me a deep sense of the vanity of this World." He also saw Quakers arrested while on errands of mercy. Some were even accused of causing the plague.

  In 1666, with his father laid low by gout, Penn went to Ireland to manage the family lands. He served as a soldier in putting down a local rebellion and had his portrait painted in a suit of armor. It is regarded as his most authentic likeness. His father cooled the idea of a military career with a warning: "I wish your youthful desires mayn't outrun your discretion."

  The Great Fire of 1666 consumed central London while Penn was away, and the family was spared again. He came back to a gloomy city and an ailing father, then returned to Ireland to think. The laws had tightened further. The Five Mile Act kept dissenting preachers and teachers from coming within that distance of any borough.

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• 4. Conversion

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  Near Cork, Penn began attending Quaker meetings, even though unauthorised worship now carried the penalty of imprisonment or deportation. A chance meeting with Thomas Loe again confirmed his pull toward the movement. Soon Penn was arrested. He could have avoided charges by denying he was a Quaker. Instead, he declared himself a member and formally joined at the age of 22. In his defence, he argued that Quakers, unlike Puritans, had no political agenda. They should not fall under laws aimed at political action by minorities.

  Penn's family rank, not his argument, won his release. His father called him back to London at once. The Admiral took the conversion as a personal insult and saw his hopes of court favour crushed. He also feared that his son was bent on a dangerous clash with the Crown. After reasoning with him in vain, the Admiral ordered him out of the house and withheld his inheritance.

  Homeless, Penn went to live with Quaker families. Quakers of the 17th century would not bow or remove their hats before social superiors, since they believed all men were equal under God. That belief clashed with a monarchy that claimed divine appointment. They also refused to swear oaths of loyalty to the King, citing the command of Jesus against swearing. Their refusal to pay tithes added to the charge of heresy.

  Quaker worship centred on silence. Groups gathered in a meeting house with no ritual and no professional clergy, and many Quakers rejected the idea of original sin. God spoke to each person directly, and anyone moved to share a revelation or opinion could do so before the group. Penn found that all of this sat well with his conscience and his heart.

  He became a close friend of George Fox, who founded the Quakers in the 1650s, amid the upheaval of the Cromwellian revolution. That era produced many sects, including Seekers, Ranters, Diggers, Levellers and Muggletonians, because the Puritans tolerated more than the monarchy had. After Cromwell's death, the restored Crown harassed every faith except Anglicanism. Fox risked his life travelling from town to town. He preached that the "God who made the world did not dwell in temples made with hands."

  By stripping the church of authority over its congregation, Fox pushed the Reformation further. He also helped advance the principle of individual rights on which modern democracies were later built. Penn travelled often with Fox in England and Europe. He wrote a detailed explanation of Quakerism and a tribute to Fox's character as the introduction to the Journal of George Fox. Penn thereby became the first theologian, theorist and legal defender of the Quaker movement.

  His journeys took him to Ireland in 1669, where he stayed with leading Quaker families. He made a great friend of William Morris, a prominent Quaker in Cork, and often stayed with him at Castle Salem near Rosscarbery. Between 1671 and 1677, Penn also visited Germany on behalf of the Quakers. The results later appeared in Pennsylvania, where German-speaking dissenters settled.

  Pennsylvania became the heartland of Anabaptist groups such as the Ephrata Cloister and the Brethren. Groups that later became the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites also lived there. It welcomed Lutheran refugees from places such as Salzburg, as well as German Catholics who faced discrimination at home.

  Francis Daniel Pastorius, a friend of Penn, negotiated the purchase of 15,000 acres, about 61 square km. He laid out the settlement that is now the Germantown section of Philadelphia. In 1764, the German Society of Pennsylvania was founded, and it still operates from its headquarters in the city.

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• 5. Tower and Newgate

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  In 1668, Penn published the first of his many pamphlets, Truth Exalted: To Princes, Priests, and People. It attacked every religious group except the Quakers, whom he saw as the only true Christians in England. He called the Catholic Church "the Whore of Babylon" and called the Puritans "hypocrites and revelers in God". Pepys, reading it, judged it a "ridiculous nonsensical book" that he was "ashamed to read".

  A follow-up tract, The Sandy Foundation Shaken, landed Penn in the Tower of London that same year. The Bishop of London ordered him held indefinitely until he publicly recanted. The official charge was publishing without a licence, but the warrant signed by Charles II named blasphemy. Penn was held in solitary confinement in an unheated cell and threatened with a life sentence.

  His accusers said he denied the Trinity. Penn answered in an essay titled Innocency with her open face, in which he set out to prove the Godhead of Christ. He said detractors had "maliciously insinuated" the charge to blacken the Quakers. What he rejected, he explained, were Catholic interpretations and the use of unbiblical concepts. In a letter to the anti-Quaker minister Jonathan Clapham, he insisted that Quakers did not deny "those glorious Three, which bear record in heaven."

  Authorities gave Penn writing materials in the hope that he would write a retraction. He wrote another inflammatory treatise instead, No Cross, No Crown. It urged believers to return to the spirit of Primitive Christianity. The book cited 68 authors, whose words and commentary Penn had memorised and recalled without any reference material. He asked the King for an audience and was refused, but a royal chaplain opened negotiations on his behalf. "My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot," Penn declared. He added, "I owe my conscience to no mortal man." After eight months, he was released.

  Penn gave no ground. He promised to keep attacking what he saw as the failings of Church and King. The Crown kept seizing Quaker property and jailed thousands of Quakers. Penn's faith effectively exiled him from English society, and he was expelled from Christ Church for being a Quaker. In 1670, he and William Mead were arrested. Penn stood accused of preaching to a crowd in the street, a gathering he had deliberately provoked.

  His aim was to test the Conventicle Act of 1664, renewed in 1670. It banned religious gatherings of more than five people beyond a household unless they followed Church of England rules.

  At the trial, Penn's solicitor was Thomas Rudyard, an eminent London Quaker lawyer. Penn asked for a copy of the charges and the laws he had supposedly broken, a right guaranteed by law. The Recorder of London, Sir John Howel, refused. He then told the jury to reach a verdict without hearing the defence.

  Despite heavy pressure from Howel, the jury returned a verdict of "not guilty". They refused to reconsider or to pick a new foreman, and they were locked in a cell for several nights. The Lord Mayor, Sir Samuel Starling, then warned them. "You shall go together and bring in another verdict, or you shall starve," he said. Penn was sent to Newgate Prison for contempt of court, because he would not remove his hat. The full jury followed him there, and each juror was fined the equivalent of a year's wages.

  From prison, the jurors fought on in what became known as Bushel's Case. They won the right for English juries to be free from judicial control. The case became a landmark for jury nullification and a victory for habeas corpus as a way to free the unlawfully detained.

  By then Penn's father was dying. Penn wanted to see him and mend things, but he wrote, "I entreat thee not to purchase my liberty." The Admiral refused to lose the chance and paid the fine. He had come to respect his son's integrity and courage. He told him, "Let nothing in this world tempt you to wrong your conscience."

  The Admiral also knew that his death would leave Penn exposed, so he wrote to the Duke of York, heir to the throne. In return for the Admiral's lifetime of service, the Duke and the King promised to protect young Penn and make him a royal counsellor. That letter helped set the stage for the founding of Pennsylvania.

  Penn inherited a large fortune but found himself in jail again, this time for six months. In April 1672, after his release, he married Gulielma Springett following a four-year engagement filled with frequent separations. A minor split had opened among Quakers between those who liked Penn's analytical arguments and those who preferred Fox's simple precepts. Rising persecution soon overrode it.

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• 6. The Holy Experiment

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  As conditions in England worsened, Penn went straight to the King and the Duke of York with a proposal for mass emigration of English Quakers. Some Quakers had already crossed to North America, but the New England Puritans were as hostile to them as the Anglicans at home. Some Quakers had even been banished to the Caribbean.

  In 1677, a group of prominent Quakers, Penn among them, bought the colonial province of West Jersey, the western half of present-day New Jersey. That same year, 200 settlers from Chorleywood and Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, and from nearby Buckinghamshire towns, arrived and founded Burlington. Fox crossed the Atlantic to judge the prospects for further growth. In 1682, Quakers also bought East Jersey.

  With New Jersey secured, Penn pressed for more. To his surprise, the King granted an extraordinarily generous charter. It made Penn the largest private landowner in the world outside royalty, holding over 45,000 square miles. Penn became sole proprietor of a vast tract west of New Jersey and north of Lord Baltimore's Maryland. He gained sovereign rule of it, short of the power to declare war. The Duke of York kept New York, the area around present-day New Castle in Delaware, and the eastern part of the Delmarva Peninsula.

  The Crown asked in return for one-fifth of all gold and silver mined there, though the province had virtually none. The grant also cancelled a debt of £16,000 that the Crown owed the Admiral.

  Penn first called the land "New Wales", then "Sylvania", Latin for forests or woods. Charles II changed it to Pennsylvania, in honour of the elder Penn. The King signed the charter on the 4th of March 1681. The next day, Penn wrote that God, who had given him the land "through many difficulties", would "make it the seed of a nation."

  Penn then travelled to America and negotiated Pennsylvania's first land-purchase survey with the Lenape. The first tract was bought under a white oak tree at Graystones in 1682. The Lenape kept the right to cross the sold land to hunt, fish and gather. Penn hoped the venture would turn a profit for his family, but he vowed not to exploit natives or immigrants. "I would not abuse His love," he wrote, "nor act unworthy of His providence, and so defile what came to me clean."

  Having proved himself a scholar and theorist, Penn now had to act as a real estate promoter, city planner and governor. His first commercial challenge was persuading oppressed Quakers to make a dangerous crossing. He wrote a glowing prospectus that promised religious freedom and material gain. By the standards of its time, it was honest and carefully researched. He marketed it across Europe in several languages.

  Within six months, he had sold 300,000 acres to more than 250 prospective settlers, mostly rich London Quakers. Later came other persecuted minorities, including Huguenots, Mennonites, Amish, Catholics, Lutherans and Jews. They arrived from England, France, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Wales.

  His moral code was still Puritanical. It banned swearing, lying and drunkenness, along with idle amusements such as stage plays, gambling, revels, masques, cock-fighting and bear-baiting.

  Across more than 20 drafts, Penn laboured over his Framework of Government with help from Thomas Rudyard, who had defended him in the Penn-Mead case. Rudyard later served as deputy-governor of East New Jersey. Penn borrowed freely from John Locke, whose ideas later shaped Thomas Jefferson. He added a revolutionary idea of his own, amendments, so that a written framework could change with the times. "Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them," he wrote. An amendable constitution, he hoped, would absorb dissent and allow real change without violent uprising.

  The Crown reserved the right to override any law, yet it raised no objection while Penn stayed in the province. Some Quaker friends complained that he was lifting himself above them. His enemies called him the "falsest villain upon earth". Penn said goodbye to his wife and children and told them to "avoid pride, avarice, and luxury."

  In December 1683, by the Julian calendar, Penn presided over the trial of Margaret Mattson, a Swedish-Finnish settler from Chester County accused of witchcraft. The proceedings took place in Philadelphia. The jury found her guilty only of having the "common fame" of a witch. It found her not guilty of practising witchcraft, the only charge that could legally stand.

  The case is often cited as proof of Penn's procedural fairness. Others argue it was a political tool. In that reading, it was used to subdue dissenting Swedish-Finnish settlers and to enable a land seizure tied to a dispute over Matson family property.

  Meanwhile, Penn had sailed up Delaware Bay and the Delaware River and founded Philadelphia on the river's western bank. He laid the city out as a grid, easy to navigate in contrast to London. It would become the largest and most influential city in the Thirteen Colonies. Its streets carry numbers and the names of trees.

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• 7. Fraud, Return and Ruin

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  In 1684, Penn went back to England to see his family and to settle a territorial dispute with Lord Baltimore. He had never worked out where the 40th degree of latitude, his charter's southern boundary, actually fell. He then wrote to several Maryland landowners telling them they were probably in Pennsylvania. He urged them to stop paying taxes to Baltimore. The row that followed turned into an eighty-year legal fight between the two families.

  At home, Penn found Bridewell and Newgate prisons crammed with Quakers, and political infighting threatened the Pennsylvania charter itself. He held back his political writings, saying "The times are too rough for print." In 1685, Charles II died and the Duke of York was crowned James II. The new King settled the border dispute in Penn's favour. Even so, he proved a stubborn and inflexible ruler. A Catholic, he faced a largely Protestant parliament.

  Penn backed James's Declaration of Indulgence, which gave toleration to Quakers, and toured England to promote it. At the London Yearly Meeting in June 1688, he proposed an advisory committee to counsel Quakers who were considering public office under James. Fox rebuffed him, saying it was "not safe to conclude such things in a Yearly Meeting". Penn also wrote to a friend in Huntingdon, asking him to name men who would support the King's campaign for liberty of conscience.

  Penn's carelessness with money caused the worst damage. His business manager, the Quaker Philip Ford, embezzled large sums from Penn's estates. Ford exploited Penn's habit of signing papers unread. One of them turned out to be a deed handing ownership of Pennsylvania to Ford, who then demanded rent Penn could not pay. Penn settled by letting Ford keep his Irish rents in exchange for silence about Ford's claim to the province.

  Feeling safer, Penn planned to settle in Pennsylvania for good. He sailed from the Isle of Wight on the Canterbury. With him were his second wife Hannah, his daughter Letitia and his secretary James Logan. They reached Philadelphia in December 1699.

  He found a province transformed after eighteen years. It had nearly 18,100 inhabitants, and Philadelphia had over 3,000. His tree plantings were supplying the green spaces he had pictured, and shops were full of imported goods.

  Religious diversity was working. Penn insisted that Quaker grammar schools admit all citizens, despite protests from fundamentalists and farmers. The result was a relatively educated workforce. High literacy and open debate made Philadelphia a leader in science and medicine. Quakers also treated mental illness in a modern way, decriminalising insanity instead of punishing it. One reform, solitary confinement for prisoners, was later judged less humane than hoped.

  Penn tightened some laws and acted almost like a Puritan to control the fractiousness that had grown in his absence. His writing lost much of its boldness and vision, although he did propose a federation of all English colonies in America. Claims that he fought slavery seem unlikely, since he owned and even traded slaves and his writings do not support the idea. He did promote some measures for more humane treatment, including marriage among slaves, but the council rejected them.

  Other Pennsylvania Quakers went further. Francis Daniel Pastorius and Abraham op den Graeff, founders of Germantown, were among the earliest fighters against slavery in America. They signed the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery. So did Abraham's brother Derick and Garret Hendericks. Both Op den Graeff brothers were Penn's cousins. Many Quakers pledged to free their slaves at death, Penn among them, and some sold their slaves to non-Quakers.

  Penn lived comfortably at Pennsbury Manor and kept a residence in Philadelphia. His son John, the only child of the couple born in America, was thriving. Penn commuted to Philadelphia on a six-man barge that he admitted he valued above "all dead things". Logan kept him informed of the news, and officials and delegations visited often. His wife disliked the role of governor's wife and missed the simple life she had led in England. When France again threatened the charter, the family sailed for England in 1701.

  Trouble greeted Penn at home. His eldest son William Jr. was leading a dissolute life, neglecting his wife and two children and running up gambling debts. Penn had hoped William would succeed him in America but could not even pay his debts. Penn himself had sunk more than £30,000 into America and received little in return except some bartered goods. He had also made generous loans and never pressed for repayment.

  Ford had meanwhile cheated Penn out of thousands of pounds by hiding Irish rents, claiming losses and then extracting loans to cover them. When Ford died in 1702, his widow Bridget threatened to sell Pennsylvania, which she claimed as hers. Penn sent William Jr. to America to manage affairs, but he proved as unreliable there as in England. There was open talk of scrapping the constitution.

  In desperation, Penn tried to sell Pennsylvania to the Crown before Bridget learned of it. He insisted the Crown uphold the civil liberties already won, and the deal collapsed. Bridget Ford took her claim to court. At the age of 62, Penn landed in debtors' prison. A rush of public sympathy reduced his punishment to house arrest, and the court denied Bridget's claim to Pennsylvania. A group of Quakers arranged payment of the back rents, and Penn went free.

  In 1712, Berkeley Codd of Sussex County, Delaware, challenged part of Penn's grant from the Duke of York. Penn's agents hired the lawyer Andrew Hamilton. His success began a relationship of goodwill with the Penn family. Penn was tired of Pennsylvania's politics and the restlessness under his rule, but Logan begged him not to abandon the colony to an opportunist.

  During a second attempt that year to sell Pennsylvania to the Crown, Penn suffered a stroke. A second stroke several months later left him unable to speak or care for himself. His memory faded slowly.

  In 1718, at the age of 73, Penn died penniless at his home in Ruscombe, near Twyford in Berkshire. He was buried beside his first wife, Gulielma, in the cemetery of the Jordans Quaker meeting house near Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. His second wife, Hannah, was his sole executor and acted as the proprietor until she died in 1726.

  Penn and Gulielma Posthuma Springett, who lived from 1644 to 1694, had three sons and five daughters. Many died in infancy or childhood. Their daughter Letitia lived to 1746, and their son Springett died in 1696. William Jr. died in 1720. Two years after Gulielma's death, Penn married Hannah Callowhill, who was 25 to his 52. They had nine children in twelve years. Their son John never married, and their daughter Margaret married Thomas Freame, a nephew of John Freame, founder of Barclays Bank. Another son, Thomas, born in 1702, would one day steer the province very differently.

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• 8. Afterlives and Reckonings

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  American historian Mary Maples Dunn offered a blunt portrait of Penn. In her account, he enjoyed money and expected to grow rich from his holy experiment. He was extravagant, a poor manager and a weak judge of people when making appointments. Yet he was sociable, with many friends and a gift for useful connections that shielded him through crises. Both his marriages were happy, and he called himself a family man, though public affairs kept him away from home. He was disappointed in the children he knew as adults.

  After his death, Pennsylvania slowly drifted from a colony founded on religion toward a secular state ruled by commerce. Many of his legal and political innovations survived. So did the Quaker school in Philadelphia, for which he issued charters in 1689 and 1701. It is a notable secondary school and the oldest Quaker school in the world. It was later renamed the William Penn Charter School.

  Voltaire praised Pennsylvania as the only government in the world that answered to the people and respected minority rights. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, whose father was a Quaker, later studied Penn's Frame of Government. His democratic principles in the West Jersey Concessions and the Frame of Government inspired the delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Jefferson and other Founding Fathers adopted Penn's idea of an amendable constitution, along with his vision that "all Persons are equal under God". Penn also left nearly 1,000 maxims on human nature and morality.

  Penn reflected deeply on war and peace as a pacifist. He proposed a United States of Europe built on a European Assembly, whose deputies would settle disputes peacefully. He is considered the first intellectual to propose a European Parliament, the forerunner of the European Union that emerged in the late 20th century. Later Quakers ranked him as a theologian alongside Fox and the apologist Isaac Penington. In the Gurneyite-Wilburite schism of the 1840s, both leaders, Joseph John Gurney and John Wilbur, drew on his writings.

  His family's record in Pennsylvania was darker. His son Thomas and Thomas's brother John renounced their father's faith and worked to restrict religious freedom, first for Catholics and later for Quakers. Thomas weakened or removed the power of the elected assembly and governed through governors he appointed. He fought Benjamin Franklin and Franklin's push for greater democracy in the years before the American Revolution. Through the Walking Purchase of 1737, the Penns cheated the Lenape out of their lands in the Lehigh Valley. The family held the province until the end of the Revolutionary War.

  Penn's name has also travelled far. The US Post Office issued a 3-cent stamp on the 24th of October 1932 for the 250th anniversary of his arrival in the colonies. On the 28th of November 1984, President Ronald Reagan declared Penn and his wife Hannah honorary citizens of the United States. A statue at Penn Treaty Park marks the site of his treaty with the Lenape. That treaty is commemorated in the painting Penn's Treaty with the Indians. In 1893, the Hajoca Corporation adopted that statue as its trademark.

  The Quaker Oats man dates to 1877 and was identified in advertising as Penn after 1909. The company's website now denies the link. A 1941 film, Penn of Pennsylvania, cast Clifford Evans in the title role. Bil Keane's comic Silly Philly ran in the Philadelphia Bulletin from 1947 to 1961.

  Schools, societies and streets carry his name. William Penn University in Oskaloosa, Iowa, was founded by Quaker settlers in 1873. Penn Mutual, a life insurance company established in 1847, bears his name. Chigwell School named one of its four houses after him and now owns several letters in his handwriting. A pub in Rickmansworth, where Penn once lived, is called the Pennsylvanian, with his picture on the sign.

  Since the murder of George Floyd, Quakers have openly questioned that legacy, chiefly because of his active part in the slave trade. In January 2021, it was reported that the Friends Committee on National Legislation was renaming the William Penn House in Washington, D.C. It cited his slave ownership as the reason. The hostel and seminar centre had opened in 1966 to house Quakers visiting the capital for protests and social movements.

  In 2022, Kathleen Bell wrote about Friends House, a Quaker-run building in London, dropping Penn's name from a room. She also argued that Quaker businesses often grew by taking advantage of the wide gap between rich and poor. That gap let them display benevolence while controlling much of their workers' lives. The renovated Washington building reopened as Friends Place in January 2022.

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