Isaac Penington

Isaac Penington (1616–1679)

Isaac Penington was born in London in 1616, the eldest son of Isaac Penington the elder, a wealthy merchant who rose to become Lord Mayor of London and a prominent Puritan member of the Long Parliament. The father signed the death warrant of no one, but he sat on the court that tried Charles I, and that fact would define the family's fortunes after the Restoration. The son grew up inside the Puritan establishment, educated at Cambridge, where he studied at Bury St Edmunds' orbit and at Trinity College, though he left without taking a degree. He had no formal ecclesiastical training and was never ordained. What he had instead was a mind that could not rest in the answers his tradition supplied.

For roughly two decades he searched. He moved through Puritan Independency, then through Presbyterianism and Independency again, writing against the sects and for them, and all the while finding that doctrinal correctness left him hungry. He later described these years as a long wandering among forms, each of which promised the living God and delivered an account of him. In 1654 he married Mary Proude Springett, a widow of strong intelligence and equally restless seeking, whose daughter by her first marriage, Gulielma, would later marry William Penn. Mary had already been through her own spiritual exhaustion, and the two of them, settled at Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire, came to the end of their searching together.

In 1658 they met George Fox, and the encounter was not what Penington expected. He had prepared himself to dislike the Quakers, whom he considered rude and spiritually presumptuous. Instead he found, in the plainness of these people, something he had been unable to find in the learned divines: a quiet waiting on the inward light of Christ, without mediating apparatus. He wrote afterward that he felt the "principle of life" in them and that his own reasoning fell silent. He and Mary joined the Society of Friends in 1658 and 1659, a step that cost them dearly, since Quakers were then regarded as dangerous enthusiasts and social levellers.

The Restoration of 1660 turned that cost into catastrophe. As the son of a regicide judge and now a Quaker, Penington was a double target. He was arrested in 1661 and imprisoned in Aylesbury gaol, and over the following years he spent about five years of his life in prison across six separate terms, often in conditions that ruined his health. His estates were seized and his home at Chalfont was taken from him and plundered, and the family was reduced from comfortable wealth to a precarious existence, moving between rented houses and Friends' hospitality. His father died in the Tower of London in 1661, a prisoner of the new regime. The Quaker burden of the Conventicle Acts and the refusal to swear oaths kept the family perpetually vulnerable, and Mary bore much of the practical weight of raising the children and managing a household in repeated absence.

Penington's inner life across these years was marked less by dramatic visions than by a slow deepening of what he called waiting, a patient attentiveness to the stirrings of the divine within. His letters from prison read less like protest than like pastoral care, written to Friends who were discouraged or divided. He was not a founder or a systematic organiser like Fox, and he held no formal office, but he became one of the movement's most trusted interpreters, a gentleman-scholar who could speak to the educated and to the broken alike.

He died on 8 October 1679 at Goodnestone Court in Kent, and was buried at the Quaker burial ground at Jordans in Buckinghamshire, where Mary would later join him.

His Writing and Its Influence

Penington began writing long before he became a Quaker. His pre-Quaker pamphlets of the 1640s and 1650s, shaped by Puritan controversy and by the tangle of sects that followed the Civil War, show a restless, probing mind that no single party could hold. What changed in 1658 was not his habit of writing but its object. Where he had once argued about the right forms of worship, he now wrote out of a settled experience, and the difference is audible. Among his Quaker works, The Way of Life and Death Made Manifest (1658) and Some Queries Concerning the Worship of God (1660) belong to the early years of his convincement, while Light Risen in Darkness and Observations on Some Passages of Lodowick Muggleton came later. He also wrote an extended answer to the criticism of Quakers by the Puritan Thomas Ellwood's contemporaries and by others, defending the movement against charges of Socinianism, enthusiasm, and the denial of Scripture. His letters, written largely from prison, form the most beloved part of his legacy and were gathered and circulated among Friends within and beyond his lifetime.

His prose is distinctive among early Quaker writers. Fox was blunt and prophetic, Barclay scholastic and systematic. Penington wrote as a seeker who had arrived without ceasing to be gentle. He knew what it was to be unable to pray, to be exhausted by argument, to want God and find only doctrine. He addressed that condition with a tenderness that his contemporaries recognised. His account of his own long wandering, set down in his writings, remains one of the most honest records of seventeenth-century spiritual searching, and his insistence that the inward life is a matter of patient yielding rather than intellectual achievement runs through everything he wrote. He was also willing to correct the movement from within. In disputes among Friends he counselled humility and mutual restraint, and he was among those who resisted the tendency of some Quakers to treat their own openings as beyond question.

The collected Works of the Long-Suffering and Faithful Servant of the Lord, Isaac Penington appeared posthumously in the late seventeenth century, and the letters in particular were reprinted and anthologised repeatedly. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries his writings were read in Quaker meetings as devotional and pastoral material, valued for their steadiness during periods of persecution and later of institutional dryness. His influence on later Quaker thought was less doctrinal than temperamental, shaping a tradition of quiet waiting and inward attention.

His reception widened considerably in the twentieth century. Quaker scholars and anthologists drew selections from his letters into collections of devotional reading, and non-Quaker readers interested in the contemplative strand of English Protestantism began to find in him a figure comparable to the mystical writers they knew from the medieval and Catholic traditions. The most widely quoted passages, on waiting, on the seed of God within, and on the sufficiency of the present moment before God, continue to appear in modern anthologies of Christian spirituality.

Who should read Penington: Readers who have tried the right answers and still find themselves hungry, and who suspect that the fault is not in their sincerity but in their method. He is particularly valuable for those exhausted by religious argument, those suffering under institutional pressure, and those who need a companion rather than a system. His letters reward slow, repeated reading. He is not for readers wanting a rigorous theology of the Quaker movement, for which Barclay is the better guide, nor for those seeking practical programmes or quick consolation. He is for those willing to be still long enough to find out what they are waiting for.