Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/309

  

PENINGTON or PENNINGTON, ISAAC, the younger (1616–1679), puritan and quaker, born in London in 1616, was eldest son of Alderman Sir (1587?–1661) [q. v.], by his first wife, Abigail, daughter of John Allen of London, merchant. He matriculated as a fellow commoner at Catherine Hall, Cambridge, on 1 April 1637 (, Alumni Cantabr. 1891, p. 3), but did not follow any profession. From early years he was troubled by religious doubts, and described his perplexity in ‘A Brief Account of my Soul's Travel towards the Holy Land,’ and ‘A True and Faithful Relation in Brief concerning Myself, in reference to my Spiritual Travails and the Lord's dealings with me.’ The latter was written long after (15 May 1667) in Aylesbury gaol (Works, 3rd edit. p. xlii). A work published by Penington in 1649 is entitled ‘The Great and Sole Troubler of the Times represented in a Mapp of Miserie: or a Glimpse of the Heart of Man, which is the Fountain from whence all Misery flows and the source into which it runs back, drawn with a dark Pencil, by a dark Hand in the midst of Darkness.’ Between 1648 and 1656 Pennington published eleven works, all of a religious nature. But he made during the period an excursion into political controversy, and advocated a representative democracy in a pamphlet called ‘The Fundamental Right, Safety, and Liberty of the People (which is radically in themselves, derivatively in the Parliament, their Substitutes or Representatives) briefly asserted,’ London, 1651.

For a short time Pennington joined the independents, but while still unsettled made the acquaintance of Lady Springett, whom he married at St. Margaret's, Westminster, on 13 May 1654. Born about 1625, she was the only child and heiress of Sir John Proude of Goodnestone Court, Kent, by his second wife, Anne, daughter of Edward Fagge, of Ewell, Faversham, Kent. Both her parents died in 1628, and she passed her youth in the house of Sir Edward Partridge, the husband of her mother's sister. In January 1642 she married Partridge's nephew, William Springett, who was knighted, and she was left a widow in 1644, with a posthumous child, Gulielma Maria. As a girl she had shown strong puritan predilections, which were shared by Springett, but since his death she had grown unsettled in her faith, and ‘went in for the gay world.’ ‘I gave up much to be a companion to him,’ she writes, in her autobiography, of her marriage with Penington.

They lived sometimes in London, sometimes at Datchet, or at Caversham Lodge, near Reading, and made the acquaintance of Thomas Curtis of Reading, and other quakers, and read quaker writings. In 1656 Penington attended a quaker meeting at Reading, and on Whit-Sunday 1657 he heard George Fox preach at the large general meeting at the house of [q. v.], near Luton in Bedfordshire. Shortly after, Penington and his wife publicly joined the sect which, he says, ‘his understanding and reason had formerly counted contemptible.’ ‘His station,’ says [q. v.], who married Gulielma Springett, Penington's stepdaughter, ‘was the most considerable of any that had closed with this way.’ Penington's father was indignant, and wrote harshly to his son, but the latter was immovable (Devonshire House MSS.)

In 1658 Penington and his wife settled at the Grange, Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, which his father gave him on his marriage. An influential body of quakers worshipped in their house until the meeting-house of Jordans, in the next parish of Chalfont St. Giles (still in perfect preserva-