Lady Mary had been drawn to Protestantism[clarification needed] during her earlier life, and had therefore refused to have Maria baptized.
At some point after Sir William's death, Lady Mary met Isaac Penington, a fellow Protestant who had also studied at Katharine Hall, Cambridge.
After this, locals started objecting to their presence as dissenters,[clarification needed] abusing them, both verbally and physically, so that eventually they had to leave the Grange.
However, before they married, Mary Penington asked Ellwood to accompany Gulielma to her uncle's estate in Ringmer, Sussex, to help her attend to matters relating to property she had inherited from her father.
spent several months in the Tower of London, having been convicted of blasphemy for publishing his second tract, The Sandy Foundation Shaken, concerning Quaker theology.
It appears that William Penn first encountered Gulielma during a visit to Bury Farm shortly after his release from the Tower, in September 1669.
At the following Monthly Meeting, satisfactory reports were given, so Friends gave their 'consent and approbation' for the marriage to proceed, which duly went ahead on 4 April 1672, in a Chorleywood farmhouse.
Now an orphan, and with William's mother also having died earlier that year, she relied on the help and support of her old friend Thomas Ellwood and also George Fox's wife, Margaret with whom she had become very close.
[14] Penn returned from Pennsylvania in October 1684 and was kept busy writing, preaching, attending to a boundary dispute relating to his new colony, and continuing to work hard towards having the persecution of dissenters eased.
John Aubrey, in his Brief Lives said of Gulielma: She herself is described as "a comely Personage, of temper not easily moved to extremes"...the image of her Father, Sir William Springett, beong virtuous, generous, wise, humble, generally beloved for those good qualities and one more—the great cures she does, having great skill in physic and surgery, which she freely bestows.William described his wife, in an account of her final illness and death, as follows:[16] ...she was not only an excellent Wife and Mother, but an entire and constant Friend, of a more than common Capacity, & greater Modesty and Humility; yet most equal and undaunted in Danger.