WILLIAM PENN PORTRAYED BY Doug Thomas
William Penn is best known as the English-born Quaker who founded Pennsylvania. What is less well known is that Penn was also a key figure in the histories of Delaware and New Jersey. Born in 1644, Penn grew up in a time of great religious and political strife in England. Penn found himself drawn to the Religious Society of Friends who spoke of an “inner light”. Penn soon joined these Friends or Quakers as they were called and began to preach. Because Quaker teachings were contrary to the established state religion, Quakers were often persecuted- their meetings broken up and their members jailed. Penn himself spent time in the infamous Tower of London for his religious teachings and writings. He longed for a place where people would be free to worship as they choose. The death of his father and the subsequent inheritance of a debt owed by the king gave him the opportunity to create just such a place. In 1681 King Charles I granted William Penn the Provence of Pennsylvania. Penn immediately began to make plans for a capital city upon the Delaware River. Philadelphia would be his “holy experiment”; a place where people could worship based on the dictates of conscience, not on the religion of the king.
William Penn was, at points, a soldier, courtier, philosopher, preacher, and entrepreneur. The colony he created out of the green Pennsylvania wilderness was unique in many of the liberties we take for granted today. Religious tolerance, freedom from unjust imprisonment, and the right to trial by jury all were granted in Penn’s Charter of Privileges. It is in part because of these freedoms that William Penn’s “green country towne” was chosen as the place where, a century later, the Founding Fathers would meet to debate the issues that would lead to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Doug Thomas: Bio Actor/Historian, Interpreter, Reenactor, Impersonator