Contrary to his popular image, William Penn was an unusually complex, energetic, versatile, and creative man: mystic and religious activist, political theorist and practical politician, administrator and author. His writings--more than 130 books, pamphlets, broadsides, and numerous letters--reflect the tensions, challenges, and tragedy of his life as well as the political and ideological turmoil of his times.

Shortly after entering Christ Church College, Oxford, on 26 October 1660 as a gentleman commoner, he composed "Verses on the Death of Henry, Duke of Gloucester," a Latin tribute of scant literary merit published in Epicedia Academiae Oxoniensis, in Obitum Celesissimi Principis Henrici Ducis Glocestrensis (1660), a collection of sixty seven memorial poems. When, in the winter of 1661-1662, he was expelled from Christ Church for religious nonconformism, his appalled father, the admiral Sir William Penn, sent him to France. However, Paris and the court of Louis XIV attracted the young man only briefly. He...