PENN, WILLIAM (1644–1718), Quaker religious leader and theologian, was a proponent of religious and political rights, and founder of Pennsylvania. Educated at Oxford, the French Protestant academy at Saumur, and, briefly, at Lincoln's Inn, Penn came under Dissenter influence and renounced a life of social prominence for Quakerism in 1667. Intent on transforming England into a more truly Christian society, he wrote many of his more than 140 books, pamphlets, and broadsides from 1668 to 1680, when he spent virtually all of his time working to organize, spread, and protect the Quaker movement, also known as the Society of Friends. Having found England resistant to change, he secured a charter for a colony he envisioned as both a haven for persecuted Friends and a model consensual society that would demonstrate to a skeptical world the fruitfulness and practicality of Quaker principles. Pennsylvania received most of his time and energy from 1680 to...