1 The historiography of William Penn is a fascinating story in its own right. In 1870 his papers were vandalized and sold for scrap paper, probably by an illegitimate and disinherited great-grandson. Fortunately, a dealer rescued much of the material. In the 20th century, 2,600 manuscripts have been microfilmed, and a generous selection issued in a letterpress edition of The Papers of William Penn. An interpretative bibliography of William Penn by Edwin Bronner and David Fraser has identified 135 works published in Penn’s lifetime or shortly thereafter. A distillation of Penn’s works in one volume by Frederick Tolles and E. Gordon Alderfer, The Witness of William Penn (New York, 1957), makes the best beginning for a modern reader.
Of more than 40 full-scale biographies of Penn, the most valuable are early works by Sewel (1722), Clarkson (1813) and Janney (1852), and later studies by Fisher (1900), Dobrée (1932), Pound (1932), Vulliamy (1934), Hull (1937) and Peare (1956, rpt. 1966). Specialized monographs of high quality include Mabel Brailsford, The Making of William Penn (London, 1930), Mary Maples Dunn, William Penn: Politics and Conscience (Princeton, 1967); Joseph Mick, William Penn the Politician (Ithaca, 1965); Edward C. O. Beatty, William Penn as a Social Philosophe) (New York, 1939); Melvin Endy, Jr., William Penn and Early Quakerism (Princeton, 1973); and Dunn and Dunn, eds., The World of William Penn.
2 The great-grandmother of William Penn’s first wife Gulielma Springett was Lord Thomas Culpeper’s great aunt. Culpeper’s daughter Frances Berkeley, the wife of Sir William Berkeley, corresponded with Penn and called him cousin. See Penn to Lord Thomas Culpeper, 5.xii. 1682/83; Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley to Penn, 13 Oct. 1685, Papers of William Penn, II, 350; III, 64-65.