,;";'i J |Sfe§f?';*.W?>S>5i' CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Digitized by Microsoft® 200 1-68 820 ^261. £ UJIO eamuouiiuos om) jo jspuno) se uusd uieiUjM zea zzgi. d AjBjqn A||8jaA|un II9UJ03 Digitized by Microsoft® This book was digitized by Microsoft Corporation in cooperation witli Cornell University Libraries, 2007. You may use and print this copy in limited quantity for your personal purposes, but may not distribute or provide access to it (or modified or partial versions of it) for revenue-generating or other commercial purposes. Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Digitized by Microsoft® Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://archive.ora/cletails/cu31924028831002 Otgitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN. Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN AS THE FOUNDER OF TWO COMMONWEALTHS BY AUGUSTUS C. BUELL AUTHOR OF SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON PAUL JONES, FOUNDER OF THE AMERICAN NAVY, ETC. ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY MCMIV Digitized by Microsoft® COPTBIGHT, 1904, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Published, FebriMry, 1904 Digitized by Microsoft® CONTENTS CHAPTER I 1644-1660 PAGE The Environment of his Youth 1 CHAPTER II 1660-1662 Under the Restoration 37 CHAPTER III 1661-1670 Under his Father's Displeasure 51 CHAPTER IV 1668-1678 Quaker Preacher and Founder or West Jersey . . 81 CHAPTER V 1680 The Pennstlvania Charter 105 CHAPTER VI 1681-1684 Penn's First Year in Pennsylvania 129 V Digitized by Microsoft® CONTENTS CHAPTER VII 1684-1686 PAGE At the Court of James II. . 173 CHAPTER VIII 1688-1694 Under William op Orange 197 CHAPTER IX 1684-1694 Pennsylvania in Penn's Absence 217 CHAPTER X 1699-1701 Penn, with Logan, Returns to his Province . . . 237 CHAPTER XI 1702-1715 Government by Correspondence 261 CHAPTER XII 1702-1712 Penn's Last Days and his Letters to Logan . . . 293 CHAPTER XIII 1717-1776 Pennsylvania under Penn's Descendants .... 345 VI Digitized by Microsoft® LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS FACING PABK William Penn ,,,..,,. Frontispiece Admiral Sir William Penn 6 George Fox 18 The Swedes' church and Sven Sener's house 114 Treaty Tree and Fairman's mansion 114 Caves used by early settlers 120 Penn landing at Blue Anchor Inn 137 Penn landing at Chester 137 Penn's treaty with the Indians 139 The Lsetitia House 148 James II 180 William of Orange 200 The Slate-roof House 243 Penn's silver tea service 246 Jordan's Meeting-House 342 John Penn 350 Thomas Penn 356 Map showing Connecticut's claim in Middle States. Page 360 Arrest of the Connecticut settlers 362 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER I 1644-1660 THE ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN CHAPTER I 1644-1660 THE ENVIRONMENT OP HIS YOUTH The seventeenth century was essentially an epoch of warfare between kingly despotism and the conscience of the people. During that century, for the first time since the birth of Christ, aspirations for religious liberty found em- bodiment in organized armies and achieved definite form in victory over the hosts of oppression and the hordes of bigotry. It witnessed two revolutions in England, in which the forces of the people were arrayed against monarchs who aimed at absolutism; in which religious freedom waged war against dynastic intolerance. The whole result was one king beheaded and another driven from his throne to die in exile. On the Continent of Europe the seventeenth century witnessed the emancipation of North Germany from the sway of the Holy Roman Empire. Its first half saw the Thirty Years' War, illuminated by the genius of Gustav Adolf and made splendid by his heroic virtues. Its last half saw the complete religious liberation of North Ger- 3 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN many, the growth of a great Protestant power in Prussia, and the elevation of the house of Hohenzollern to mon- archy based upon toleration; destined to carry the princi- ples of free thought and unfettered conscience from the shores of the Baltic to the banks of the Danube, from the summits of the Carpathians to the foot-hills of the Alps. Beyond the confines of Europe the seventeenth cen- tury saw the cause of religious freedom and toleration of conscience carried in frail barks far across the Atlantic and planted ineradieably in the virgin wilderness of America; planted in isolated colonies, few in numbers but indomitable in soul; colonies destined through much trav- ail and great tribulation to blossom and bear fruit in the mightiest republic of earth's history. In such an environment, and near the middle of such an era, William Penn was born, hard by the gates of Lon- don Tower, on October 14, 1644. It was the year of Mar- ston Moor, and the child was only a year old when Crom- well, from the smoke and carnage of Naseby, proclaimed the cause of the people gained. He was little more than four years old when the stubborn Stuart king died beneath the ax at Whitehall. His childhood and early youth to the age of sixteen were passed amid the scenes and sub- ject to the austere yet simple popular thought and manners of the great Protectorate; the social atmosphere of Crom- well and the Puritans ; the political inspirations of an Eng- land that then, for the first time, began to feel her power. Upon a bright boy such as he, the lessons of such a time could not fail to make a deep and lasting impress. Whether the actual outcome in later years was that best 4 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH suited to his powers for usefulness has been debated by the ablest pens for nearly two centuries and without apparent conclusion. The discussion need not be pursued here. The character of William Penn presents three sides: the political, the commercial, and the religious. With the last-mentioned aspect the writer possesses neither the capacity nor the inclination to deal. It is his purpose to view Penn as an agent and promoter of secular civiliza- tion in its broadest sense, and therefore his religious char- acter need not be introduced except as it may from time to time become incidental as a key. William Penn came of seafaring and fighting stock on the paternal side and of commercial stock on the maternal. His father was Captain — afterward Admiral — Sir William Penn of the British navy. His mother was Margaret, daughter of John Jasper, an English merchant, settled in Rotterdam as correspondent or "resident partner" of an important London trading-house. The fact that Penn's mother was living in Rotterdam when married has apparently led some writers to conclude that he was half Dutch. But this, like many hasty conclu- sions reached in historical research, is an error. Margaret Jasper was quite as English as Captain Penn, and their son was a full-blood, thoroughbred Englishman. Captain Penn was the son of a daring and successful merchant captain named Giles Penn, who had taken his boy to sea with him at the early age of ten, teaching him step by step the mariner's art in the hard school of actual practise. In 1638, when the young sailor was seventeen, his father secured for him the warrant of master's mate 5 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN in the royal navy. The rapidity of his promotion is all the evidence we have of his ability; but that is enough. At nineteen he was master commandant; at twenty-one second captain of Blake's flag-ship; and at twenty-three post captain in command of the Speaker, a new second- rate ship, said by such authorities as Charnoek and Fincham to have been "the best-built ship of her time." Captain Penn did not remain quite a year in that rank ; he was promoted to be rear-admiral before reaching the age of twenty-five. This was in 1645, a year after William Penn's birth. His rise thenceforward was almost equally remarkable, until in 1751, at the age of thirty, he was pro- moted to the highest rank a seagoing officer could then attain — ^that of Vice-Admiral of England — inferior only to the Lord High Admiral. By this time Cromwell was in the fulness of his power. The monarchy had expired on the block with King Charles and England was a common- wealth instead of a kingdom. These vast changes wrought havoc among public serv- ants on land. Soldiers and civic functionaries alike had, perforce, to take sides. But it was diiferent with the navy. Governments and rulers might come and go, but the navy "went on forever." During the final struggle between Charles and Parliament, when an effort was made to induce the navy to declare openly for the King, Admiral Blake — ^the foremost seaman of his time — issued a Private Circular to Officers of Rank. In this he said : It is not meet that we should meddle in affairs of the land. True it is that two parties ashore are fighting for control of England. But whichsoever may win, they 6 Digitized by Microsoft® ADMIEAL SIR WILLIAM PENN. Father of William Penn. Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH will be Englishmen and the country England still. . . . Our office is to defend all England from the designs of foreigners. Therefore we must be united. Should schism come into our midst and mutiny, the distractions of our country would be without end and both factions together would fall prey to our common enemies. It therefore be- hooveth us to keep our strength against a day of need. It is not for us to mind state affairs, but to keep foreigners from fooling us altogether. Grovernment is all one to us, so it be the government of England by Englishmen! Wisely hearkening to the counsels of its cherished chief- tain, the British navy kept the peace outside while con- tending parties fought to the finish within the realm. And the navy was as ready to obey the Protector as it had been to obey the King ; as zealous to fight for the Commonwealth as it had been to battle for the Crown. Young Rear- Admiral Penn, along with many others as fervent royalists at heart as himself, accepted the advice of the old sea-dog philosopher, and upon the accession of Cromwell to absolute power was not long left without reward. The day after Christmas, in 1654, a fleet of fifty- four ships, including sixteen transports, sailed from the Motherbank with a force of 4,200 men on board. The commander of the fleet was Vice- Admiral Penn; of the land forces General Venables. The destination was Cuba. The object was to strike a blow against Spain in her weak- est part. This expedition is chiefly remarkable as being the first effort put forth by England on a large scale to employ her sea power offensively against distant foes. Drake had indeed ravaged the Spanish main long be- 7 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN fore that, and had "singed the Spaniard's beard" in far- oif seas. But Drake's exploits were more the raids of buc- caneer than organized operations in regular warfare. The expedition of Penn and Venables was the first to combine sea and land forces in a systematic attack having a well- defined objective. Like most pioneer enterprises, it failed — and failed miserably. Penn and Venables returned to England in 1655 to abide the wrath of Cromwell, who forthwith took away the commissions of both and threw them into dun- geons in the Tower to ruminate on the uncertain fortunes of war. To "Venables he said: "No doubt you did your best— in all things but one! You might have died with your soldiers!" To Penn, Cromwell imputed no particular blame, ex- cept that he had commanded the naval arm of a combined expedition that failed as a whole. Just a century later England shot Admiral Byng for failing in a smaller mat- ter. Cromwell was more lenient than the second George. All these things happened while young William Penn was struggling with the manifold ills and tribulations of childhood down to his eleventh birthday. But, young as he was, the sudden misfortunes of his father deeply and ineradicably impressed his mind. The Penn family then lived on a small estate at Wanstead in Essex, and William had been for about two years a student at the Free Gram- mar-school of Chigwell, founded by the late Archbishop of York, the most learned Dr. Samuel Harsnet. Some idea of the educational atmosphere of Chig- well may be gained from the Articles of Foundation as 8 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH drawn up by the Episcopalian founder. Among other things, Dr. Harsnet proclaimed that "the master should be a good poet ; of sound religion, neither papist nor puri- tan; of a grave behavior; no tipler, no puffer of tobacco; and, above all, apt in teaching and severe in government. ... Of reading there should be none but the Greek and Latin classics; no novelties, fictions, nor conceited modern writings." The incarceration of the admiral in the Tower caused his wife and child to move from Wanstead and take apart- ments near that historic pile. This event detached young William from the Chigwell school at the age of twelve, and he never returned to it. In fact, though its course of study was supposed to carry boys up to the age of sixteen, he had to all intents and purposes exhausted its curriculum at twelve. The admiral was not long prostrated under the great Protector's displeasure. He promptly petitioned Crom- well that the commander of the naval part of the expedi- tion could not be held responsible for the conduct of the land part of it. He had safely convoyed General Vena- bles's army to the scene of operations and landed his troops without accident at the place selected by the general for debarkation. He had then blockaded the coast to prevent reenforcements or supplies reaching the enemy from Spain. Finally, when the land forces retreated to their ships in much confusion and distress, he had put ashore a force of sailors and "ship soldiers" (the marines of that day) to cover their retreat and protect their reembarkation. After detaching a suitable squadron to convoy the transports 9 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PBNN back to England, he had cruised with the rest of his fleet on the station as long as his victualing would permit, and had "much harried the commerce of the enemy and grievously beaten up his coasts." The Protector accepted Admiral Perm's memorial, and after some investigation released him from the Tower, re- instated him in rank, and restored all his emoluments — including the special allowance of £365 a year granted four years before for eminent services in the Dutch war of 1652. But he did not give the admiral further com- mand or other employment at sea. The fact was, that by the year 1656 Cromwell, though to all outward appear- ances in the zenith of his power, had already discerned the growth or recrudescence of royalism not only among the people, but in the services as well, even the "new model" army having begun to show symptoms of the dis- affection that, only four years later, was destined to cul- minate in General Monk and the Restoration. That Cromwell's distrust of Admiral Penn's fealty to the Commonwealth and the protectory did him no injustice was abundantly proved when the test and the opportunity came. As a naval officer afloat Penn had adopted Blake's advice and had supported the Cromwellian cause right sturdily against the Dutch and the Spaniards for the sake of England. But at heart he had never been anything but a royalist, a monarchist, and a Stuartist. He was by no means alone in the Protector's suspicions. Many others of high rank and great power in the state shared them. And the suspicions were as well founded in other cases as in Penn's. 10 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIEONMENT OF HIS YOUTH Cromwell was too shrewd not to observe the clouds gathering over his head. Though the year 1656 had been signalized by the election of a Parliament all his own, which not only voted all the supplies he asked for in aid of the Spanish War, but offered him a crown he did not ask — a crown he sternly refused — yet his sagacity taught him that Puritanism, as a predominant political power in England, was nearing its end. He doubtless felt that, waning though the forces of his party might be, there was yet enough left of the heart and bone and fiber that had won Marston Moor, Naseby, Dunbar, and Worcester to win again if only he could be spared to command. Though he well knew that England at large was tiring of Puritan rule — ^which meant the ascendency of less than one-fourth over more than the other three-fourths of all the people — ^yet he was resolved to hold the grasp he and they had fixed upon the throat of government to the last breath of his own marvelous life and to the last drop of Praise-God-Barebones blood in his sect and his army. He reckoned right. So long as Cromwell lived, no one or no multitude in England wished to provoke again the sword of Naseby or the ax of White- hall! Though secure in this, he was insecure in all else. And so, beetle-browed and defiant to the end, one of the great- est Englishmen that ever lived eked out in slow disease and in sullen distrust of all who had best served him in the heyday of fortune — from Sir Harry Vane to Sir Wil- liam Penn — ^the last two years of a life that has never yet found an adequate biographer, a career that still needs a competent historian. 11 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Admiral Penn lost no time in moping. As soon as his foot crossed the Tower threshold he moved his family back to the Wanstead house and went himself to Ireland, bent upon clearing title to an estate in the County Cork in which his father, Giles Penn, had long before acquired a lawful, though disputed, interest. Young William Penn was then just past twelve years old. During the next four years the admiral was absent from home nearly all the time, and young William did not return to the Chigwell school. Most of his biographers adopt the theory that his education was in the care of "private tutors" from 1656 to 1660; but there seems to be no extant evidence of it in family papers or in the voluminous writings of Penn himself. Ordinarily the years between twelve and sixteen do not afford material for an interesting chapter in the biography of even the greatest of men. As a rule, those four are what old-fashioned people call "the monstrous years" of a boy; full of mischief, redolent with the aroma of birch, a period to be forgotten or ignored rather than paraded or perpetuated. It was different in the case of William Penn. These four years were the formative period of his mind, the receptive period of his nature, and the determinative period of his career. Completely to understand this we must survey his mental quality and his moral environment to- gether. His mind had grown or was growing far in ad- vance of his years. His bodily development was as pre- cocious as his growth of brain. Both were abnormal. The time in which he lived his boyhood — or what ought 12 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH to have been his boyhood — was the middle of the seven- teenth century. The first half of that century was a veri- table ■ cyclone of theologies. At least four-fifths of the English literature of that period was written by sectarian preachers and read by schismatic zealots. Fortunately for the peace of mankind it has mostly been forgotten now. If a writer in this year of grace should offer a simple list of the names of those whose writings convulsed England two hundred and fifty years ago, he would either dishearten his readers at the outset or drive them to aimless and unprofitable delving in obscure literature. This is as it should be. The theological ava- lanche that devastated the seventeenth century has long since spent its force in the chasms of oblivion and been melted in the steady sunlight of common sense. But in Penn's youth-time this avalanche was descending like a snow-plunge from the crags of the Jungf rau ! To change the simile, when Martin Luther cut the strings by which Eomanism had for ages held human thought in leash, the result was like that of uncorking champagne not properly cooled. The long pent-up wine effervesced half its substance in froth and foam that van- ished in the air which had oxygenated it, and the foam and froth left no trace but a literature as evanescent as the causes of its being. Of this ephemeral and fortunately forgotten literature doubtless the most captivating to the student of dialectics pure and simple, or of rhetoric for rhetoric's sake alone, are the writings of John Saltmarsh. It is probably safe to say that not more than one man in a hundred thousand 13 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN to-day, fairly conversant with English literature, will be any the wiser for the mention of Saltmarsh's name than he was before he heard or read it. And yet, when WilUam Penn was a boy between twelve and sixteen, John Salt- marsh was among the foremost writers — if not altogether the leading writer — of theological polemics in the language. He was born in Yorkshire, in the year 1596, just fifty years after Martin Luther died. Educated for the Presbyterian ministry, he took up the great reformer's doctrine of "justification by faith," declared it to be "but a glimpse of the true light," and forthwith endowed himself with the attributes of divine glory incarnate. His writings were voluminous, and as many of them were published as he or those he deluded could pay for the printing of. Prom Presbyterian he became Puritan by an easy step; from Puritan he passed to Antinomian. Doubtless some of us have smiled at the quaint conceit of the French traveler in this country many years ago who described the United States as "a land of three hundred and sixty-five religions and one gravy." We are not ad- vised as to the number of gravies in the English cuisine of the seventeenth century, but there can be no doubt as to the redundancy of religions. Theological thought was running mad. Dissents, protests, and new dispensations were the order of the day. There were denominations, creeds, and schisms. Then divisions and subdivisions in the denominations, creeds within creeds, and schisms from schisms. Sects multiplied like insects. Finally, in the high riot of this doctrinal hurricane— this theological cloud- burst — it was easier to found a new sect than refrain from 14 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH founding one. Almost every non-eonf ormist minister capa- ble of polemic writing or paroxysmal preaching had a sect of his own, frequently named after the preacher himself by affixing "ite" to his cognomen. Could Martin Luther have had a second advent and visited England a hundred years after his death, he must have been overwhelmed with horror at the monstrous mul- titude of fantastic "beliefs" and grotesque "doctrines" into which his own plain and simple faith had been dis- torted and tortured. In one word, England, at the middle of the seventeenth century, was a theological Babel, in which no disputant understood the language of the others — and many a one of them could not comprehend his own! Into such a chaos John Saltmarsh threw all the forces of a mystic mind and a marvelous pen. He vsrote books and preached sermons. The culmination — the chef-d'oeuvre — of his polemic literature was Sparkles of Glory. This little work could hardly be found now outside of a few great public libraries or an occasional private collection of rare and quaint books. Yet two hundred and fifty years ago it was the most talked-about if not most widely read book in England. Dissenting and non-conformist preach- ers of a hundred sects and schisms laid aside the Bible to take their texts from Saltmarsh. Orthodox and strict- conformist prelates, professors, and clergymen "replied to" him by the dozen and denounced him by the legion. He was to the Protestantism of his time what Percy Bysshe Shelley became to the atheism of a later day — its ultimate intellectual development, its extreme visible 15 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN apostle. There was, however, this difference : Shelley wrote a great deal of rationalistic philosophy in captivating verse ; John Saltmarsh wrote volumes of transcendental poetry in mystic prose. To exhibit at once the fine chaos of his fancy and the subtle cant of his diction one extract may suffice : All outward administration, whether as to religion or as to natural, civil, and moral things, is only the visible appearance of God as to the world or in this crea- tion; or, the clothing of God, being such forms and dis- pensations as God puts on Amongst Men to appear to them in : this is the garment the Son of God was clothed in down to the feet or to His lowest appearance. And God doth not fix Himself upon any one form or outward dispensa- tion, but at His own will and pleasure comes forth in such and such an administration and goes out of it and leaves it and takes up another. And this is clear in all God's proceedings with the world, both in the Jewish Church and State, and Christians now. And when God has gone out and hath left such an administration, of what kind soever it is, be it religious, moral or civil, such an administration is a desolate house, a temple whose veil is rent, a sun whose light is darkened ; and to worship it then is to worship an idol, an image, a form, without God or any manifestation of God in it, save to him who, as Paul saith, knows an idol to be nothing. The pure, spiritual, comprehensive Christian, then, is one who grows up with God from administration to admin- istration and so walks with God in all his removes and spiritual increases and Sowings. This rhapsody contains the key to Saltmarsh 's doctrine. Stripped of mystical metaphor, it amounts to a protest 16 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH against all formalism, regularity, and discipline in religious organization; against canons, observances, litanies, set modes of worship, and ordained ecclesiastical functions of all kinds whatsoever. On the other hand, it amounts to a declaration that the human conscience which "grows up with God" is a supreme law unto itself and unto its own being. Interpreted in connection with another passage which follows it, in a dissertation upon "the Inner Light," it means that in all "pure, spiritual, comprehensive" re- ligion the conscience of the individual, sanctified by the "Inner Light," must" be the measure of sanctity and the guide to holiness. The postulate of all this is that organ- ized churches, under any and all forms of administration, may become "desolate houses" or "temples whose veils are rent" or "suns whose light is darkened," whenever "God is gone out and hath left such an administration." It remains to add only that the sole judge as to whether "God is gone out and hath left such an administration," etc., is the conscience of the individual sanctified by the "Inner Light." And the individual is also endowed with judgment from which there can be no appeal as to the presence of the "Inner Light" in his own conscience, and also as to its quality, degree, and intensity. Viewed upon the plane of common sense this doctrine of Saltmarsh was the opposite extreme to a then prevail- ing canon of Romanism. That Church in those days de- clared the infallibility of the Pope. Saltmarsh retorted by declaring the infallibility of the individual. This was a convenient doctrine for emotional persons, or for those whom Saltmarsh himself designates as "glow- 3 17 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN ing souls." Almost any emotional person in the presence of great peril, or under stress of a cruel bereavement, or h3T)notized by the rant of a revivalist, might be seized with a mental spasm or moral paroxysm and easily mistake it for the "Inner Light." For this psychological phenom- enon Saltmarsh seems to have made no provision whatever. But most of his readers were people of little knowledge, less education, and redundant superstition. Hence, his lapse in this particular made no difference. And as the faith of the disciple could not possibly be less logical than the precepts of the teacher, his doctrine found numerous converts not only in one creed, but here and there in all. Though Saltmarsh expounded a doctrine, he did not follow the usual practise of his time by proselyting a sect upon it. That omission may have been due to his lack of the executive ability required. Or he may not have lived long enough. At all events, he became insane at the age of forty-eight — perhaps overcome by an effort to compre- hend his own creed — and died three years later in the Chelmsford asylum. In the last stages of his mania he fancied himself Christ returned to earth, implored his at- tendants to bind up the bleeding wounds of crucifixion, and ever and anon would recite with singular eloquence some of the most beautiful passages in his Sparkles of Glory. Among the first works — perhaps the very first — that young "William Penn read, aside from text-books, was the book just mentioned. Imagine the influence such a work so clothed in mysticism and so beclouded in imagery would have upon a young untrained and inexperienced mind, 18 Digitized by Microsoft® jj. -4 - __ ^ ^ilHii^^^^ ^^^ H^H^S WKm ^^M^K ^ ^wBbbbbMw / '""F' ^ !h^^^^^^^I ^^^^ 1W^^MM^£ ^3?^^. ^^^B^^H Hbh- ''^^HHn ■■^^/^ 'HP^iJH^H rH 1 1 ..^diH S'' J^^Sm M j^^^BV m ( ^^^■^t^^mf ,^ J^ Jh ■Kv^^ *i ^^M ^^^W GEORGE FOX. Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH far beyond its years already in receptivity and suscepti- bility to the appeals of the strange, the unknown, and the beautiful ! Whether the reading of Saltmarsh would have done more than promote a tendency to mysticism in young Penn's mental processes may be doubted. But just about the time he was reading this Antinomian gospel and try- ing to understand its application to human affairs, a new sect, based upon the central doctrine of Saltmarsh, came to the front, the sect founded by George Fox and named by him the "Society of Friends." So far as can be ascertained from authentic records. Fox began to preach in 1647, the same year in which Salt- marsh was dying. Whether the first expounder of the doctrine would have approved the apostle's practical ap- plication of it must forever remain an unanswered ques- tion, because mania and death deprived him of the oppor- tunity to investigate or even observe the work of Fox. The two men were antipodal in fiber, traits, and antece- dents. One was a classical scholar of exquisite learning; the other a "village yokel," as his contemporaries called him. One was a recluse, a dreamer, and a poet; the other a hustling, stalwart zealot, a giant in bodily strength, moral fortitude, and mental audacity. One was a subtle-brained mystic of the cloister; the other a huge-muscled, strong- voiced preacher of the open air, the fields, and the high- ways. Fox proclaimed that God had appeared to him as in a pillar of cloud and "called him to awaken men from their lifeless forms and dogmas to a sense of the vital need of 19 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN living, inward, spiritual religion."* He avowed in the broadest sense and most sweeping scope the doctrine of supremacy, even absolutism, of the individual conscience sanctified by the Inner Light. Though he claimed that God had become manifest to him in a way amounting to revelation, he did not assume for himself the personal apostolic character, but broadly granted to every one who listened to him similar freedom of conscience, equal ac- cessibility to the Inner Light, and like liberty to be each one's own judge. In short, he held that every man might have a revelation of his own, that there might be as many manifestations of God in the conscience as there were converts — a doctrine which may perhaps, without irreverence, be described as "every man his own Moses!" This doctrine was by no means original with Saltmarsh as an ideal, nor peculiar to George Pox in sectarian prac- tise. With modifications to suit time, place, and racial conditions, it was and is the doctrine of the North Ameri- can Indians, the Arab dervishes of the Soudan — and of every freethinker from Plato to Robert IngersoU. Fox was not a man to rest his case upon doctrinal points alone. His strong sense of the practical, the tangible, and the visible taught him the need of observance as well as of faith; of outward manifestation as well as the Inner Light. So he formulated what might be called "canons of his church." Some of his precepts were sound and salutary in law and morals, some were visionary and chimerical, while others were frivolous and whimsical. The sound and salutary precepts of Fox were not new. * Fox's Journal, vol. i, pp. 103-104. 20 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH On the contrary, they were the commonplaces of a correct life, involving ordinary uprightness in worldly affairs, sim- ple honesty, and common decency — precepts that had been inculcated and enforced by pagans long before the name of Christ was known. But the new canons of Fox were either visions or whims or chimeras. He proceeded to flout the old decalogue, if for no worse or better reason than that God had revealed it to Moses instead of to George Fox ; or because there were commandments in the old deca- logue that might be obnoxious to the Inward Light. And then he proceeded to formulate a decalogue of his own. We say "decalogue" simply for convenience, though as a matter of fact the commandments that Fox declared the Lord had directed him to promulgate were not exactly ten in number. Indeed, in number they were somewhat in- definite. They were not proclaimed at any one time, but now and then, from time to time, as the Inward Light seemed to move him. The result was that, after a while, when Fox's commandments multiplied with his sermons, they began to conflict one with another, until it became hard to tell which was which — law or heresy, the true faith or all ungodliness. Chief among the articles of Fox's faith were certain affectations which we may let him de- scribe in his own words, as recorded on page 114 of the first volume of his Journal : The Lord gently led me along and let me see His love, which surpasseth all knowledge that men can get by his- tory or books. . . . And the Lord sent me forth to awaken the people and turn them from Darkness to the Light. . . . Moreover, when the Lord sent me forth into the world He 21 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low ; and He required me to "thee and thou" all men and women, with- out any respect to rich or poor, great or small. And, as I traveled up and down I was not to bid people good mor- row or good evening; neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. He also advised — though we can not find that he rigidly prescribed — a peculiar style of dress for each sex which he himself designed and set the example of wearing as "an emblem of equality among men and a token of humility before God." Fox is doubtless the only one who ever be- lieved that dress could make men equal or that God takes account of fashion-plates ! Whatever significance these canons may have had in the fanatical fancy that conceived, or in the simple, credulous minds that obeyed them, they impressed mankind at large as whims, none the less ridiculous because harmless. The "hat canon" was viewed simply as a boorish denial of com- mon politeness; the "thee and thou" usage as an unwar- ranted familiarity when addressed to strangers. The sin- gularity of garb we may let a contemporary describe: "Af- fecting to despise all affectation," said Thomas Croxton, a Puritan preacher, "these Quakers regulate unto them- selves a livery which, since it be not the uniform cloth of soldiery, can be naught else but the quintessence of affecta- tion itself." Among the tenets that were visionary and chimerical was that of "universal peace" in an age and under condi- tions of universal war, an age in which, but for the fight- ing of Gustav Adolf's Lutherans and of Cromwell's Puri- 22 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH tans, Quakerism itself could never have had a chance to breathe, and George Fox's sermons had likely been silenced by the gibbet or the stake! However beautiful in fancy or theory, primitive Quakerism was utterly impracticable, and though it had warrant in some teachings of the Bible, it exposed its devotees to the contempt of their fellow men in that era wholly and, to some extent, ever since. There is a fundamental trait of human nature — a trait than which none other lies nearer the foundation of all truth, right, and manhood — that may be described as an instinctive distrust of any doctrine or any principle which its devotees are not willing to fight for. There were many aspects of the Puritan creed and many idiosyncrasies of its believers quite as grotesque as anything in Quakerism, according to George Fox. But, un- like the Quaker, the Puritan would fight for his faith ; and when he did feel that the spirit of God moved him to "smite abomination in the sight of the Lord hip and thigh," he made the climate torrid for his adversaries — ^whereunto Marston and Naseby, Dunbar and Worcester had already borne bloody witness. He was always ready to show forth his faith by his works and to argue his points of doctrine with the point of the sabre. Many years ago there was, at Old Litchfield, in Con- necticut, a family gathered from the four quarters of the continent to celebrate the bicentenary of their ancestor's settlement there. The ancestor was a sergeant in Ireton's Ironsides * with whom the climate of England disagreed * It seems to be a common belief that only Cromwell's own regiment of cavalry — or " horse," as mounted troops were then called — was known 23 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN very soon after Charles II was restored. It was an old- fashioned Puritan Thanksgiving afiEair, in which, as a rule, the grace of God before dinner and acute indigestion afterward figured with relatively equal prominence. There was, however, one event in that bicentenary which seems apropos to this context. It was in the form of a few lines composed and written by a great-granddaughter of the old ancestor in the sixth generation, and she recited them. They have never been printed. Perhaps they never ought to be. But they embody such a perfect description of the Conquering Puritan, as contrasted with the Suffering Quaker, that we can not refrain from offering here an ex- tract from them : The great religion he professed Was stern faith of unflinching breast. The gospel that he preached and prayed Was but three words : Be not afraid ! He knew no sin for which alone Faith's courage could not all atone. His creed held mortal but one vice : He forgave all but cowardice. To him the faith was life and light ; He prayed and fought in God's own sight, as " Ironsides." As a matter of fact all the regiments of horse in the Parliamentary army, or " New Model " in military phrase, were called by that name, because they wore cuirass and helmet of sheet iron. The CaTaliers also wore similar armor, but it was of brass and ornamented ; whereas that of the Puritans was, like their own natures, of iron, luster- less, unpolished, and grim. Their other epithet, " Roundheads," was pro- voked by the shape of their helmets, which were hemispherical and per- fectly plain. 24 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH And ever, as the battle grew. His prayer found faith and hope anew. And when his foes lay cold and grim, He humbly sang thanksgiving hymn ; And, bending knee on blood-stained sod, Breathed victor's praise to battle's God! Achilles in his maddened joy Dragged Hector dead round walls of Troy. Not so the man of stalwart might Who strove for freedom, truth, and right. He only fought for leave to pray And worship God his simple way. And when his battle waged was won, He meekly said, " God's will be done." Ah, Cavaliers of Romish cross. Ye called him " Caitiff I " " Hind 1 " and "Dross I " Pray tell me, held ye him so poor At red sunset on Marston Moor ? Ah, Puritan, thy fame is young ; Thy hero epic all unsung ; But in far future's misty dream Shall shine thy glory's sunrise beam.* No Quaker maiden will ever have occasion to write in that strain about an ancestor in the seventeenth century — or any other. The Puritan's faith was austere, his ob- servances were somber, and his daily walk and conversation full of what the less drastic religions consider cant if not hypocrisy. But whatever the Catholics with their in- * Written by Miss Anna Buell. 25 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN dulgences or the Episcopalians over their wine-bottles might think of "Praise-God Barebones," all had to confess that there was no hypocrisy in the destruction of twenty thousand Cavaliers by eight thousand Puritans at Preston ; no "cant" in the charge of Cromwell's Ironsides at Marston Moor ! One hour of Puritan victory on the battle-field was worth more to the cause of religious freedom than could have been a cycle of stoical Quaker fortitude in jail. That this "non-combatant canon" in Quakerism was not due to deficiency in courage goes without saying. The Quakers were Englishmen — a remark which sufficiently covers that part of the ground. It must then be ascribed to the same cause as the other peculiarities noted — a fanat- ical purpose to be not like other men. It is a singular fact and almost unique, that the desig- nation of the sect itself as commonly received, as historic- ally approved, and tacitly adopted by its devotees, is not the one its founder chose for it. Fox called his proselytes "Friends." The word "Quaker" was applied by their adversaries as a term of derision, an epithet of contempt. The best description we have seen of the origin of the epithet is that offered by the Puritan preacher Croxton : They are called "Quakers" — a name they do much pro- test and wish to pass to and fro in the title of "Friends." But the describing them "Quakers" is an invention of some who, from curiosity or mischief, stand about their preachings in the highways. It comes of their fashion of speaking with tremulous voice, shaking of the head, and making the body and limbs to quake violently like one in ague ; their object being no doubt to press upon the mind of listener or beholder a sense that they be possessed and 26 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH almost torn and riven by the throes of the Spirit within them. Bradford, another Puritan writer — related to Bradford of Plymouth Eock — speaking of the neighborhood of Leeds about 1657, or in the tenth year of Fox's preaching, says: The sect called "Friends" by their own tongue and "Quakers" by all other mankind doth grow and flourish grievously here. They are not like unto any kind or man- ner of men and women ever seen or known in this Com- monwealth since the memory of man. They wear a kind of livery they call the livery of the Lord their Master, than whom they own no other. Their mode of address is un- couth and insolent ; the same to their betters as to their own kind. They profess to a light of particular revelation unto themselves alone, and that without which, as their preachers say, no one in all the world may be saved. They refuse to make the oaths of justice; their marriages are concubinous except as their offspring may be saved from bastardy by the common law; they defy the law, saying each one that his own conscience with the Inward Light of God's Grace be above all law, scripta or non-scripta; and altogether they are a pest unto the true servants of the Lord. When apprehended and lodged in jail for viola- tions of the law forbidding riotous assembly and blas- phemy, they endure without complaint, pretending to be- lieve that they be suffering for righteousness' sake and proclaiming that they be persecuted by a wicked and adulterous generation. ... It is hard to understand why such blasphemy should be heard in the name of the Lord. Some say they are bewitched ! Whatever may be one's opinion of George Fox's preten- sions as the medium of revelation from God through him- 27 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN self to mankind, and howsoever one may view the canons and observances which he declared the Lord had enjoined him to prescribe for the guidance and conduct of his disci- ples and converts, there was one thing about him which closely approached the miraculous : that was his command of language, a facility of expression both with tongue and pen. He acquired this early in his career. While not wholly illiterate, he had never attended any institution of learning more pretentious than the humblest of parish schools, and there his education stopped with learning to read. It is said that his mother taught him to write. But it is more probable that he learned to write from printed books, because his earlier manuscripts were a labored initia- tion of italic print, exhibiting great painstaking and re- markable accuracy. In later life he learned by practise to write faster and his penmanship more and more took the form of script. So far as reading was concerned, there is no evidence that before his twentieth year he had read anything beyond the New Testament and Saltmarsh's Sparkles of Glory. In his writings one constantly detects evidences of effort to imitate Saltmarsh's imagery — efforts naturally attended with scant success ; and his best and most forceful writings were those in which he gave his own practical and analytical mind free rein in his own rugged style. As an orator he was marvelously magnetic, fluent in words, and overwhelm- ing in power of expression. He never seemed at loss for a word or phrase, and he had an art possessed by hardly any learned man or scholar of his day or any other — the art of analyzing and interpreting into plain English that any 28 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH one could understand the most involved sentences and the most abstruse propositions to be found in the transcendental religio-metaphysics that formed the theological literature of the seventeenth century. Finding a knowledge of the classics requisite in conducting discussions mth the highly educated clergymen who assailed him, he mastered Greek and Latin in the first three years of his ministry; and George Whitefield says that before he reached the age of thirty (seventh year of his ministry) he could read and write Hebrew with more facility than the average scholar of the universities. In these studies, it must be said, he enjoyed the melancholy advantage of considerable enforced leisure and undisturbed privacy in various jails. It can not be denied that the early Quakers owed most of their persecutions to the eccentricities and asperities of speech, dress, and deportment which they cherished, and very little to the doctrines they proclaimed or the language in which they put them forth. For all these peculiarities, trivial in themselves but important in their consequences, George Fox was responsible. In fact, he laid more stress on the whimsical "hat canon" and on the frivolous "thee and thou" than upon doctrinal points in theology. Born in the humblest circumstances, nurtured in poverty, plainly bred, and yet feeling even amid his most untoward sur- roundings the mighty power of his own mind, he hated the rich, the polite, and the well-bred, and embraced the first opportunities to exhibit his resentment toward them. This was the impulse that found expression in the "revela- tion" already quoted, in which, according to his own version, the Lord "required him" to direct his followers to dispense 29 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN with all ordinary and every-day forms of the commonest politeness and most primitive courtesy. Some of Fox's biographers or apologists — notably Dr. Stoughton in his Life of Penn — make labored efforts to show that he must have been sincere in these whims and earnestly believed that they entered into the substance of his faith. It may be so. But, even if this be so, such explanation stamps him as a much lower type of fanatic than those who admire his wonderful intellect like to believe. It is easy enough to comprehend such a policy as an artifice intended to sub- serve a particular purpose,* but to conceive it as a part of the teachings of Christ is to deny the first tenet of Christ's religion — ^the Golden Rule — which, in a dozen words, ex- hausts all laws of gentleness, politeness, courtesy, and con- cern for the feelings of others. Be that as it may, the early Quakers suffered ten times more persecution for Fox's whims than for their actual doctrines, beliefs, or modes of worship. Such a review of Fox at this point in the present work has seemed necessary to a proper understanding of William Penn's youthful environment, the influences which deter- mined his mental and moral tendencies, and thereby shaped the development of his character and the history of his career. * What we mean by " particular purpose" here is a design to inflame the resentment of his hearers — mostly people of narrow, untrained minds and lowly station— against the rich, the well-bred, and the polite. No more effective way to accomplish this could be devised than by persuading them that the Lord had commanded them, by revelation through him (Fox), to be rude in manner, insolent in speech, and uncouth in dress as a visible protest against such " vanities of the world," as courtesy, polite- ness, and attire of the fashion in vogue. 30 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH Judged by his antecedents, by the natural or normal sur- roundings of his youth, and by the ambitions of his parents in his behalf, he was almost the last man to be reasonably regarded as a possible convert to Quakerism. But he was among the earliest ; and he rose to a rank in the sect which, for real importance in his own time and for permanent im- press upon human affairs, far surpassed that of the founder himself. Four years had passed, and he was now sixteen years old. The time had arrived when the completion of his studies must be arranged for and the course of his future definitely marked out. He had already exhausted the capa- bilities of the Free Grammar-school of Chigwell, had proba- bly enjoyed some desultory tuition by private tutors, had traveled far enough to visit his father, who during that period lived mostly in Ireland, dividing his time between his estate there and the duties of Governor of Kinsale and commander of the coast-guard, to which he had been appointed by Richard Cromwell after the death of Oliver. But, so far as his future was concerned, these events were of trivial importance in comparison with the facts that he had read Saltmarsh's Sparkles of Glory, and had heard the preaching of Thomas Loe. Moreover, during this period, as described by himself in subsequent writings — though without exact mention of the time — ^he had ex- perienced when alone in his chamber "an inward com- fort"; and he thought there was "an external glory in the room, which gave rise to religious emotions"; and during which he "had the strongest conviction of the being of a 31 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN God and that the soul of man was capable of enjoying com- munion with him"; and then he "believed also that the seal of divinity had been put upon him and that he had at this moment been awakened or called to a holy life." According to the chronological arrangement of the work in which the confession of this experience appears, it must have occurred somewhere between the age of thirteen and fifteen. He considered it his "first spiritual experi- ence." It may not, however, be amiss to remark that the language in which he describes it is in many respects a close copy of one of Saltmarsh's rhapsodies in Sparkles of Glory. That he had heard Thomas Loe preach is attested by an old manuscript of 1727, from the pen of Thomas Harvey, who states that he received the story from Penn himself. This manuscript is freely and approvingly quoted by the authoress of The Penns and Penningtons ; though it is full of statements likely to impress its reader with a sense of Harvey's lively imagination, if not, indeed, with occasional distrust as to its genuineness. It must be borne constantly in mind that the age was one of imagination and fantasy — and that, too, more notably in religious than in any other line of thought. The substance of Harvey's story is that Penn, when about fourteen, was visiting his father at Cork, when Thomas Loe happened to be preaching there, and that the boy heard one of his sermons in the market-place. Young Penn was so impressed that he invited Loe to come with him to his father's house; and when he arrived there, Loe preached in the presence of the admiral and other inmates 32 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH of the household, causing them — ^the admiral included — to weep and inquire what they should do to be saved. The intrinsically improbable thing about this is that Admiral Penn should have listened to a strolling street- preacher of any faith. The admiral was a Presbyterian in Cromwell's time and an Episcopalian whenever the Stuarts ruled. The ease with which he could accommodate his faith to his policy for the time being indicates that the admiral's religious impressions were not of the burning kind. Even if, to humor a whim of his favorite son and heir, he might admit a street-preacher to his house and listen to him courteously, it is in the last degree improbable that he could have been moved to tears or made to cry out for salvation. However, the story — of which the above is only a brief synopsis — was related by Harvey with vast imction in his Manuscript of 1727, and it caught the fervid fancy of Maria Webb, who, in her Penns and Penningtons, gives it an importance that a less emotional author might have reserved for something approaching the character of revelation. Be this as it may, we have Penn's own testimony that his ultimate conversion to Quakerism and his "call to preach" were due to the fact that "the Lord visited me with a certain sound and testimony of his eternal "Word, through one of those the world calls a Quaker, namely, Thomas Loe."* Thus, as in a progression, we observe that Penn's youth- ful mind was first prepared by the mysticism of Saltmarsh for the seed of Quakerism to be sown by Thomas Loe's * Penn's Journal, p. 102. 4 33 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN preaching; and as his conversion was the most important event in his career — that upon which all other events were consequent — it seems worth while to know who and what Thomas Loe was. Born at Lichfield — some accounts say Oxford — about 1625, of a well-to-do and well-connected family, young Loe was sent to Oxford University when about seventeen. This was in 1642, or at the time when the control of the institu- tion was passing from Episcopal to Presbyterian hands. Indeed, one sketch of Loe that we have seen — Trials and Triumphs of the Primitive Friends — describes him as the son of a Presbyterian clergyman. Loe, too, was a disciple of Saltmarsh. At the beginning of his third year in Ox- ford he was arraigned for blasphemy and expelled. Two years afterward, or in 1647, he became one of Fox's earliest converts and began preaching about 1649. Early in his ministry Loe went to Ireland, and that country continued to be the field of his labors — or the principal field — for several years. He was the first to preach the Quaker faith in the Gaelic tongue; and it is said of him that he learned that difficult language, from its rudiments to perfect fluency, in eight months! His style of oratory was much more polished than that of Fox. His forte was pathos, where Pox's was invective. His appeals were to the sym- pathies of his hearers, while Fox appealed to their resent- ments. He held out the promise of salvation as the reward of repentance, while Pox preached damnation as the penalty of unrepentanee. In a word, Loe played upon the strings of human tenderness, while Fox hammered upon men's passions and their fears. 34 Digitized by Microsoft® ENVIRONMENT OF HIS YOUTH There is no recorded evidence that Penn heard Fox preach at any time prior to his own conversion, though he had undoubtedly read some of his epistles before that. Under such conditions and a mind so "prepared for the seed," as he himself expresses it, William Penn matricu- lated as a fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford, Michael- mas-tide, 1660, at the age of sixteen. 35 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER II 1660-1662. UNDER THE RESTORATION Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER II 1660-1662. UNDEE THE EESTOEATION Simultaneously with Penn's entry at Oxford occurred an event quite as important in his temporal history as reading of Saltmarsh and the preaching of Thomas Loe were in his spiritual. That was the restoration of the Stuarts. The effect on the fortunes of Penn was at first indirect. It began with the renewal of his father's per- sonal prestige and professional standing. The fact that Admiral Penn never fully regained Cromwell's confidence after the abortive West Indian expedition of 1655- '56 has been noted. Eichard Cromwell, after the death of the great Protector, in 1658, appointed the admiral Governor of Kinsale and Commandant of the Coast-guard District for the Southwest of Ireland, but that was little more than a sinecure. Probably Admiral Penn was at the time the ablest officer in the British navy. But Cromwell as early as 1656 had begun to doubt his fidelity to the Commonwealth, and did not trust him with any important sea command, though fully exonerating him from personal responsibility for the failure of the expedition against the Spanish "West Indies. The admiral, as already noted, abundantly justified Cromwell's suspicions. At least two months before Charles 39 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN II landed in England (say in March, 1660) Admiral Penn, still holding his position in Ireland under Richard Crom- well, threw off all disguise and declared for the restoration of the Stuart dynasty. It afterward became known that for some time preceding this he had been corresponding secretly with James, Duke of York, younger brother of Charles II, and also with General Monk. The precise date at which the correspondence began can not be determined ; but it was probably in 1659, when the inability of Richard Cromwell to fill his father's place had been amply demon- strated. It is not probable that Admiral Penn, ardent royalist though he was, would have ventured so far during the lifetime of Oliver Cromwell; because the great Pro- tector had means of finding out things not known to all men, and he also had a mode of dealing with such practises as secret correspondence with the exiled Stuarts which few men liked to tempt. But in the brief and troubled reign of Richard this peril did not exist. Be this as it may, there was a personal as well as a political reason for close fellowship between Admiral Penn and the Duke of York. The latter had in early youth manifested a predilection for the sea. In 1643, when only ten years old, he had received instruction in the rudiments of navigation, and among his tutors had been Penn, then a captain — though only twenty-two years old. During the long exile of the surviving Stuarts in France and Holland there had been some opportunity for keeping up this ac- quaintance. Naturally, therefore, when with the Restora- tion the Duke of York was made Lord High Admiral, the star of Penn also rose. 40 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER THE EESTORATION One of the duke's first acts was to appoint Penn captain-general of the fleet, and the King confirmed him in the title of baronet. About two years afterward the King, through the influence of the Duke of York, proposed to raise Sir William Penn to the peerage as Earl of Wey- mouth; but for reasons to be hereafter explained this proposition was not carried into effect.* At this point, in view of the intimate relation of religious affairs to the secular career of William Penn, it becomes necessary to survey the effect of the Restoration upon spiritual conditions in England. Charles II, like all the Stuarts, was at heart a Catholic. Although when restored to the throne of his father he made a covenant to uphold and defend the Church of Eng- land — ^that is, the Episcopal creed — ^this was wholly politi- cal and had no personal significance whatever. Charles, though a Catholic by baptism and confession, was by no means a bigot. He was too clever a fellow and too fond of the good things of this world for that. He swore to uphold and defend the Episcopal Church simply because the English people would not restore him under any other conditions, and he was not the kind of man to weigh a faith against a throne, a church against a crown. * Regarding Admiral Penn's royalism, Pepys makes a quaint entry in his diary under date of March 12, 1662 : " Sir W. Pen told me of a speech he' had made to the Low States of Holland telling them to their faces that he observed he was not received with the respect and obseryance now (coming to them from the King) as when he came from the Kebel and Traitor, Cromwell — by whom I am sure be got all he hath in the world and the Dutch knew it too ! " This speech was probably made in 1661, when Admiral Penn was sent as the bearer of a message from King Charles to William of Orange, then Stadtholder. 41 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Now it happened that the Anglican Church of that day differed from the Church of Eome chiefly, if not wholly, in the fact that it lacked a Pope and an Inquisition. In Cromwell's time the "dissenters" and "non-conformists" who ruled the state were not very careful or precise in observance of the distinction above noted. In their estima- tion the only "doctrinal points" of importance on which the papacy and the episcopacy differed were that the latter did not openly grant indulgences and did accord less prom- inence to the Virgin Mary as an object of worship. For the rest, from the non-conformist point of view, both creeds were alike. They "prayed out of books" — the Puritans said — "and wore gowns and surplices and cassocks, and kissed the altar and turned their backs on the congregation and had holy candles and all kinds of idolatrous abomina- tions in the sight of the Lord!" And, if we may accept non-conformist testimony on other and more practical points, the Episcopalians were not far behind the Catholics in proscription, intolerance, and persecution. Among the manuscript sermons of Elder John Buel, a Puritan preacher of that period, we find the declaration that "they who exchanged Popery for Episcopy made a sorry trade. There was as much real liberty of conscience under Papist Mary as now under Church-of-England Charles ; save that burnings be not in vogue now as then. But the jails are full, and the pillory and cart-tail busy with victims whose crime is worshiping God without idols, candles, or Latin screeds ! "Verily, the little finger of Episcopy is become thicker than the thigh of Popery, and it has come to pass that 'Dis- 42 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER THE EESTOEATION senter' be now a stronger word upon the tongue than 'Heretic' ever was." Possibly, in the stoutness of his Puritan heart, old Elder John's lament was more bitter than the actual conditions justified. Less liberty of conscience than existed in the brief reign of Bloody Mary is inconceivable. And while the prompting spirit might be similar, there was yet a vast difference between the stake and the pillory ; between death and a few weeks or months in jail; between the deadly flames and even the severest "whipping at the cart-tail." If, therefore, we desire to draw a perfectly just distinction between English popery in the middle of the sixteenth century and English episcopacy in the latter half of the seventeenth, we must make due note of the wide differences in ecclesiastical discipline above set forth. This would, of course, exhibit commendable progress on the part of the Established Church as compared with its immediate prede- cessor. Progress of all kinds was slow in those days as compared with our own times ; and from such point of view the fact that in the course of one century the English Epis- copalians had ameliorated religious persecution from burn- ing heretics at the stake to mere whipping of dissenters at the cart-tail, must be accepted as a most gratifying growth of toleration. There was much more practical sense in another sermon of Elder John about the same time : If Grodliness be decreed a crime and the realm given over to Priestliness for once and all, so be it. What signi- fies a name, be it Popery or Episcopy, so the sum of it be alike priestliness at either end? 43 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN If all that came to pass in the last twenty years [mean- ing from 1640 to 1660] could not free the people's conscience and save their sanctuaries from the constable or the hired soldier, surely then naught in England can, now or ever- more. It is hard to yield our birthright in the soil. Hard to go away from the places we have known and cherished to places we have never seen and know naught of. But as it appears our fair England is given over to abomina- tion beyond our power, under God, to cure, then we must seek another land and make for ourselves new homes. For this the Lord hath provided America, whither a goodly stem of our faith is already planted. It is a wilderness, like unto that of the Forty Days; but the trees do not persecute! Men are there, but they are pagan savages only; not savages like unto our own, with racks and roasting-chairs and Nuremberg Maidens and Latin screed-worships! No Pope have they, nor in- quisition nor lords-spiritual of bishoprics and Archbish- oprics ; nor prebendaries, nor any other kind of holy leech fastened upon the body of the people to suck their blood ! Let us, therefore, forsake in the Lord's name this be- sotten land and go across the seas, where after much toil and great tribulation we may yet build a new abode of the Faith that shall glorify Him ! Elder John was as good as his word. During "the last twenty years" mentioned in his discourse he had manfully born musketoon and broadsword in Ireton's regiment. He had fought in those battles which the Puritan soldiers used to open with prayer and finish with butchery. Not only had he fought, but he had also preached and prayed. Now it seemed all for naught. So the veteran of Marston Moor and Dunbar gathered about him his family and little flock, 44 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER THE RESTORATION and though Time had begun to plow furrows in his cheeks and sift snow upon his hair, he and they sailed away from the placid vales and the level meadows of Huntingdon for the untrodden wilds of Connecticut! Landing at Say- brook just twenty years before William Penn saw the capes of the Delaware, they forthwith plunged thence into the savage fastnesses of what we now call Litchfield, to hew out new homes and plant new sanctuaries far beyond the reach of pope or prelate. We have given so much space to the experience of stout old Elder John and his flock because they were the type of many, and because of our knowledge of him and them is more intimately personal than of any others. The type was universal among English non-conformists after the Restoration. The milder or more tactful sects, such as the Orthodox Presbyterians, the General Baptists, and the plain Lutherans, managed to get along fairly well with the Established Church, but had to content themselves with the practise of infinite prudence and a good deal of silence. For the more radical Puritans — and a little later the Quakers — there was no refuge from the storm but in flight to other shores. However, for persecution of the Puritans there was a reason in the philosophy of the house of Stuart that did not exist with other creeds. They were no more dissenters or non-conformists than the Presbyterians, the Baptists, or the Lutherans. Their mode of propagating the Gospel may have been a little more vigorous or less circumspect, but that was not the bottom cause for the singling of them out to be pimished. The great and unforgivable oflfense of the 45 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Puritans in Stuart eyes was that they had been the bone and sinew of the revolution; that, though numerically a minority in the parliamentary party as compared with all the other revolting sects in sum total, they were the pre- dominant faction by sheer force of intellect, audacity, and desperate resolution. "With Cromwell at their head they overbore all opposition, all doubt, and all conservatism. They were the ultra-Radicals of the English revolution, alike in war and in peace, on the battle-field and in Parlia- ment. To borrow a simile from the politics of our own times, Cromwell was the most colossal "Boss" and his Puritans the most devoted and daring "henchmen" the world has ever seen! It was the superlative nerve of Cromwell and the desperate fidelity of his Puritans that enabled him and them, though but a handful in the total population of England, to overturn a monarchy and rule upon its ruins with utter absolutism and no little downright despotism for a generation. Moreover, the "court," so-called, that condemned the King, the soldiers who guarded his execution-block, and the butcher who beheaded him, were all Puritans of the deepest dye. Charles II was indeed the "Merry Monarch." We like to believe that he would always rather have been kind than cruel. But he must have been something more — or less — than human had he failed in resentment toward those whom he considered his father's murderers — a view of them which was then and is yet shared by many who never drew a Catholic or royalist breath and who sjrm- pathized then or sympathize now wholly with the political aims of the Puritans and their gigantic chieftain. 46 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER THE RESTORATION In connection with this matter it should be noted that the persecution of the Quakers was totally distinct in cause and provocation from that visited upon the Puritans. Quakerism came iato being under Puritan rule — not earlier than 1647. The converts of George Fox were first perse- cuted by the Puritans themselves. And they suffered more in the reign of Oliver than in those of the two Stuart mon- archs who followed him. In a word, the Stuarts punished the Puritans because the Puritans had hurt the Stuarts and were formidable foes. Everybody seemed to persecute the Quakers for no better reason than that they never hurt any- body and were ridiculous. The usual Episcopal accusation against the Puritans was "sedition" or "seditious heresy," which was made a felony by the Conformity Act of 1662. But it was not customary to accuse the Quakers of "sedition." The common charge against them was "blasphemy" or "disorderly assem- blage." In some cases, spies or informers would contrive to be present at their weddings, the peculiar mode of which is well known. Then the bride and groom would be arrested for "unlawful cohabitation," or "adultery" or any similar charge the informers might choose to make. Men and women were publicly stripped and flogged for ' ' Quaker marriages ! ' ' The "Quaker marriage" in the seventeenth century was much like the cognate ceremony among the North American Indians or primitive times, or of the Mormons of Nauvoo, according to the gospel of Joseph Smith. The contracting parties simply joined hands in the presence of witnesses, declared their devotion to each other, announced 47 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN their intention to cohabit, and then made record of the agreement in a book provided for the purpose. This was exactly the Mormon ceremony of Nauvoo and Deseret, alike for wives and for concubines ; and it differed from the abo- riginal rites only in the fact that the Indians did not keep records in books. Yet the common law, as expounded by Coke and Little- ton, provided for protection from illegitimacy of the off- spring of marriages ' ' by common consent and public notori- ety," which, liberally interpreted, would have saved the Quaker weddings from the charge of "adulterous agree- ments" and their fruit from the stain of bastardy. But the blind zealotry and the prescriptive bigotry of the Epis- copal Church in the last days of the Stuart dynasty simply grinned at the common law, and forced its own sacerdotal decrees upon helpless mankind with as little compunction as Romanism had ever shown in its darkest days — and with less common sense than popery had exhibited at its worst ! Proscription and ostracism did not have long to wait. Hardly had the restored King warmed his throne-seat when heads on pikestaffs began to adorn London Bridge. The fury spread. It is not the province of this work to trace in detail the events immediately consequent upon the Restoration except in so far as they affected the career of our subject. Naturally, among the first things the Estab- lished Church struck at were the fountains of learning. No Puritan or Presbyterian or Baptist was left in control of any school, college, or university that the powers of the state could reach. At Oxford and Cambridge the heads first began to fall. Charles had not been King three months 48 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER THE RESTORATION when the great, learned, and conservative Dr. Owen was forced to give place to Dr. Reynolds as dean of Christ Church. But the High Church cried out against Dr. Rey- nolds that he was too mild, and forced him to make way for Mr. Morley— plain George at first, but promptly manufac- tured into a doctor of divinity to meet the emergency. Honor be to Dr. George Morley that he did not in all things prove the pliant tool of proscription that the exultant Epis- copalians who urged his nomination hoped and expected he would. On the contrary, he proved in the long run so just, broad, and wisely conservative that those who had been ardent to set him up soon tried in vain to pull him down. They seemed to think that, because he had been chaplain to Charles I, he would be quick to inoculate the veins of English learning with the virus of state Chureh- ism, and convert the ancient temple of universal thought into chambers of a sectarian inquisition. As in Christ Church, so in Magdalen and throughout the colleges of the grand old university. The venerable Dr. Goodwin, the mildest of Puritans — so mild, indeed, that during the Cromwellian reign many "barebones" petitions had gone up to the Protector for his removal — ^this benig- nant old man was displaced for Dr. Oliver. In this, how- ever, there might have been a shade of poetic justice, be- cause Dr. Oliver had been displaced by Cromwell for Dr. Goodwin thirteen years before ! So radical and sweeping were these sectarian changes, so wholesale was the state Church raid upon English learn- ing, that in the two great universities alone the supply of Episcopal doctors of divinity ran short, and it was found 5 49 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN necessary, as Dr. Stoughton tells us, to manufacture to order seventy brand-new D. D.s for educational purposes in the first twelvemonth of the restored monarchy and re- established state Church. History by no means records that all these new-fledged doctors of divinity were un- worthy. On the other hand, most of them proved capable instructors and, in the general sense, safe guides for the young minds intrusted to their care. We have already remarked that the literature of the seventeenth century, with a few very illustrious exceptions, such as Milton, Dr. Johnson, and Dryden, was a seething mass of polemical theology or spiritual mysticism long since consigned to kindly oblivion. But we must also bear in mind that the wonderful renaissance of practical thought and robust realism which illuminated the dawn of the eighteenth century was the product of brains trained under the educational auspices of England in the last days of the Stuart dynasty, of minds developed under the sway of the improvised faculties which the frantic rapacity of the state Church fairly "conscripted" into the service of the great English schools at the beginning of the Restoration. 50 Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER III 1661-1670. UNDER HIS FATHER'S DISPLEASURE Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER III 1661-1670. UNDER HIS father's DISPLEASURE Naturally, young William Penn, as a freshman at Christ Church, was among the first to feel the effects of such all-pervading change, such complete bouleversement. He was not yet a Quaker. If anything, he was as much Puritan as the thoroughly barebones environment of Wan- stead and Chigwell could make of one so young and of such searching mind. But, in any event, he was far from the fold of the state Church, and every day's growth of obser- vation and experience increased that distance. He had not been in Christ Church College a year when it became a total certainty that, whatever he might be, there were two things neither of which he ever would be— papist or Episcopalian. There is no historical record to show what his standing in classes was during his two years at Oxford. About all vouchsafed on that score is that he was well grown for his age, full of physical life and muscle, fond of college sports, and, in general, duly mindful of the monitory pealings of "Big Tom" night and morning. Meantime the academic paraphernalia and ecclesiastical forms of the state Church control were gradually recover- ing their hold on the university. The set prayer-book was 53 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN substituted for the extempore petition of chapel exercise, and liturgy displaced the Bible chapter. Against this re- vival of what many of the young dons called popish mum- mery there was vigorous protest ending in a very consider- able secession from the regular exercises, and the seceders soon began to meet for exercises of their own and in their own way. Of course, in the estimation of the state Church authori- ties these secession meetings were nothing more nor less than riotous assemblages to be put down by the strong hand of college law. The seceders were warned to attend the regular exercises. Then the new state Church faculty found that the spirit which but little more than a score of years before had led to revolution was still alive and strong within the Oxonian walls. But Dr. Morley and Dr. Oliver were not men to be trifled with by a set of unruly boys. The recalcitrant dons were fined and otherwise pun- ished by curtailment of privileges. A few succumbed, but a great majority held out. Among these William Penn was a leader. He seems to have construed the Saltmarsh doctrine literally as he under- stood it. He held that so long as the faculty required a form of religious observance repugnant to the conscience of the student, the college authorities had no moral right to enforce it. He admitted their rightful power to make and enforce regulations pertaining to the secular discipline of the institution, but he denied in toto their prerogative to force upon any one ecclesiastical canons odious to the con- science and repugnant to the faith of any one, for no better reason than that he happened to be a fellow of the univer- 54 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE sity. In this he drew a sharp and clear distinction between secular and spiritual discipline ; and in that contention he was perfectly right, as all candid historians have long since admitted — besides some uncandid ones, including Macaulay. But the faculty did not stop at prayer-book and liturgy. They next required the canonical surplice to be worn on certain occasions. This produced undisguised revolt — open mutiny. Young Penn had now become the acknowledged leader of the liberty-of-conscience clan. He and his follow- ers not only refused to wear the despised livery of Episco- pacy themselves, but violently tore the surplices from the persons of those willing to wear them. Penn, in justifica- tion of such conduct, is said to have denounced the surplices as ' ' popish rags ! ' ' This, of course, was a violation of his own professed principle. Any person has both moral and legal right to wear any garment that may please him, and to refuse to wear any that may be repugnant to him, the> sole limitation being the statute relating to exposure of per- son. Thus Penn and his followers exhausted their own right when they refused to wear the surplices. And they violated the right of those from whom they tore them. These transactions terminated William Penn's schooling at Oxford when he was eighteen years old. The common version is that he was expelled. But Dr. Stoughton, him- self an Oxonian, was unable to find any such record. Dr. Anthony "Wood, in his Annals of Oxford, has a good deal to say about Penn. His sole comment on this event is the merest passing remark that "after two years, he traveled into France." But Penn himself, in his Journal of Travels on the Con- 55 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN tinent in 1677, uses the phrase "my being banished from college." Expulsion from college is not necessarily an event of decisive importance in the history of a man. As already observed, there is no record of expulsion except Penn 's own phrase, and he uses the word ' ' banished. ' ' The inference is — ^though no direct evidence can be found! — ^that the faculty gave Penn the alternative of submission with apology or leaving the institution. This was then, and remains to this day, a common expedient in such cases. Penn would not submit or apologize, and so left the col- lege, without express record of the transaction. It is safe to assume that had so prominent a student as Penn was in college and so eminent a man in after-life been formally expelled, Anthony Wood must have made some note of it ; because his Annals in the History and Antiquities of Ox- ford and Athense Oxonienses together bring the record down to 1694, when Penn was in the zenith of his fame. Some time prior to the trouble above discussed, the ad- miral contemplated removing his son from Oxford to Cam- bridge and consulted his friend Sir Samuel Pepys about it. (See Pepys 's Diary for January 25 and February 1, 1662.) Sir William Penn blamed Dr. Owen for "pervert- ing his son. ' ' Under date of April 28, 1662, Pepys says : Sir W. Pen much troubled upon letters come last night. Shewed me one of Dr. Owen's to his son, whereby it appears that his son is much perverted in his opinion by him ; which I now perceive is one thing that hath put Sir William so long off the hooks. The particular direction in which Dr. Owen's influence was exerted does not appear ; but it could hardly have been 56 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE encouragement of revolt and mutiny against the proper discipline of the college. It may have been, and probably was, encouragement to be steadfast against the encroach- ments of formalist religion upon the domain of conscience and, maybe, advice to leave the institution if he could not reconcile its spiritual administration with his sense of re- ligious liberty. Be this as it may — and it is more interesting than im- portant — Penn left Oxford and returned to the parental roof in the fall of 1662. Sir William was now a State Churchman, having, as previously intimated, dropped his free-conscience doctrines upon the downfall of Cromwell- ism and resumed his formalist communion upon the Res- toration. The common story was that he became very angry with his son when the latter came home from Ox- ford, and, after an altercation in which young Penn de- fended his conduct from what Sir William considered the Quaker point of view, the admiral turned him out of doors. The authority for this story is found in Penn's Journal of 1677. In that journal he records a Quaker meeting at Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands, which he addressed, and he states the substance of his remarks. In this occurs the following : ' ' The bitter usage I underwent when I returned to my father ; whipping, beating, and turning out of doors in 1662, etc." This would seem to be conclusive on the subject, for that journal was in Penn's handwriting and the copy from which it was printed was undoubtedly accurate. The story proceeds that the admiral was soon reconciled to his son through the mother's intercession, and early in 1663 young 57 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN William was sent to visit Paris, where, the admiral hoped, he might find social influences calculated to wean him from Quaker predilections. About the only record of his visit to the French capital is an apocryphal story, resting on the testimony of the Harvey manuscript. This tale is to the effect that Penn, who, conformably to the fashion of the period, wore a small sword or rapier, was attacked on the street by "a haughty desperado," whom he "at once dis- armed by his keenness of fence!" And then, having the haughty desperado "wholly at his mercy, Penn not only spared his life, but picked up and courteously handed back to him his rapier, which had fallen to the ground!" As William Penn was only eighteen at this time, his precocity as a swordsman must have been equal at least, if not superior, to his remarkable progress as a religious reformer in such callow years. In view of the extent to which Thomas Harvey has been enabled to impress his lucubrations upon William Penn's history, mainly through that somewhat widely read book with a distinctively feminine title, The Penns and the Pen- ningtons, it may be worth while briefly to examine Mr. Harvey's pretensions. He was the son of a non-conform- ist preacher of the Presbyterian sect and became a convert to Quakerism about 1700. His "manuscript" — never printed except in the extracts made by the authoress of The Penns and the Penningtons — consists mainly of purported Conversations with William Penn. Harvey undoubtedly saw Penn and conversed with him toward the end of the latter 's life. He was a fanatical Quaker and his aim was to glorify Penn, at that time the head of the sect. But the 58 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE general result of his eflEorts was to make his hero ridiculous, or to pose him in situations either wholly at variance with his character or intrinsically improbable. He was a zealot, filled with mistaken zeal. At this point it seems proper to digress, as briefly as may be, from the main thread of our theme. Penn was in France, and the reign was that of Louis XIV. Everything was Roman Catholic, except here and there an oasis of lib- erated thought, where the teachings of John Calvin, of Noyon — a whilom pupil of Melchior Wolmar, and Wolmar an "understudy" of Martin Luther himself — had weaned the simple, honest peasants of Picardy, Normandy, and Bretagne from the saintism and the icons of Rome. It may not be out of place for the author to remark here that his study of the theology of the seventeenth cen- tury has been wholly historical, practical, secular, political ; not in the slightest degree sectarian, schismatical, doctrinal, or spiritual. To go a step further, the author would rever- ently say that, in these studies, he has held Christ in view as the greatest and most enduring teacher the world has ever seen or ever shall see; inventor and expounder of a school and system of the ethics and philosophy of human being and action as impregnable as it is imperishable, as eternal as it is irrefragable, and as sound in reason as any one can possibly believe it to be true in divinity. From this point of view we have long been convinced that the most perfect development of reformed religion in the seventeenth century existed among the Lutherans of Scandinavia and the Netherlands and the Huguenots of France. Among them was found to all intents and pur- 59 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN poses a common faith and a uniformity of observance quite as distinctive as those of papacy and the episcopacy — which latter, in that age at least, was little more or less than a sort of illicit offspring of popery itself. But this com- munity of faith and uniformity of observance were based not upon canons, not upon bulls of the pope, not upon the set laws of hierarchy, not upon images, candles, vestments, or holy water ; but upon the consensus of free minds and the intercommunion of consciences not enslaved. In this respect the early Protestantism of northern France and the north of Europe generally was out of all comparison purer, healthier, more glad, more cheerful, and altogether more trustable and more believable than that of England. In France and Sweden there was a single faith, clear, logical, practical, simple, and strong in works as well as in profession. In England there was, as we have already remarked, a babel of beliefs, a storm of sects, a cyclone of creeds, a raging tornado of theologies, and a howling hurricane of heterodoxies. In France and Sweden there were no Protestant sects; there were simply Protes- tants. In England there were almost as many sects as preachers, well-nigh as many creeds as chapels ! In Prance and Sweden every Protestant minister preached the same doctrines, counseled the same faith, besought the same pious behavior. In England it seemed that almost every preacher who could write a book had a theology of his own. Among the French and Swedish Protestants no fanatic could find voice — or if he could find voice he found none to listen. The Catholics were not without their ultra- zealots. Neither were the Protestants of England. And 60 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE viewed as mere zealotry, it is difficult at this distance to draw much distinction between one bigot school that was crazy and another that was cruel — ^whether the founder of one was Loyola or of the other George Fox ! Penn's visit to France was in the halcyon days of French Protestantism. It was twenty-two years before the Revo- cation of the Edict of Nantes. The great Amyraut was nearing the end of his illustrious and useful life at the head of Saumur Seminary, center of Huguenot learning in France. Penn's stay in Paris was limited to about four months. Thence, desiring to perfect himself in the French language, he went to Saumur. This seems to have been with the full approbation of his father. The seminary was, of course, theological; but the doctrines and observances taught there by Amyraut were those of a refined and soft- ened Calvinism — in a word, the Huguenot faith as we know it to-day. It was non-conformist from either Catholic or Episcopal point of view ; but it was a beautiful, cheerful faith, full of all human tenderness and domestic virtues, as near the true character and inspiration of Christ's actual teaching as any human creed has ever been. It had all the strength, consistency, and courage of Puritanism without any of its asperity, its austerity, or its gloom. It was indeed a Church militant, but not, like Puritanism, aggressive, in- tolerant or defiant. In other words, the Huguenots were Frenchmen, while the Puritans were Englishmen ; one cour- teous where the other would be gruff ; one gently regardful of the feelings of fellow men where the other would be rough-shod ; one polite where the other would be rude. About the only trait the Huguenot and the Puritan had in com- 61 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN mon was that both stood alwqjs ready to fight for the faith. And even in this there was a difference: the Huguenot would always wait to be assailed; the Puritan was always inclined to meet his foe half-way — and sometimes a little more. Probably Admiral Penn did not altogether draw these fine distinctions. But he knew at least that his son would hear no Quaker preaching at Saumur, see no hat worship, hear no theeing and thouing in the name of the Lord, be taught no doctrine that condemned politeness, deified dis- courtesy, or apotheosized the boor. In short, Sir William knew that in no part, article, or "convincement" of the religion inculcated at Saumur would be found the whims, the visions, or the chimeras of George Pox. Young William Penn spent nearly two years at Sau- mur — stayed there, in fact, until the death of the great and good Amyraut, whom he grew to revere with all the in- tensity of his fervid nature. During this period he mas- tered the French language and acquired the French man- ners so completely that, when he returned to England in 1664, his father's old friend, Sir Samuel Pepys, loudly lamented in his diary about it : Comes to visit me [says Sir Samuel, under date of August 30, 1664] Mr. W. Pen. I perceive something of learning he hath got, but a great deal, if not too much of the vanity of the French garb, and affected manner of speech and gait. I fear all real profit he hath made of his travel will signify little. Sir William was, however, more favorably impressed. He is recorded as rejoicing that his son had come back to 62 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE him, after two years in France, "dressed in the garb and displaying the manners of a gentleman!" After a brief rest at home, young Penn, now in his twenty-first year, entered Lincoln's Inn as a student of law, at the admiral's suggestion. This was not with any intention of a career in the legal profession. Sir William's ambition was that his gifted son should become a states- man. He himself at that time was member of Parliament for Weymouth, and his purpose was to vacate the seat — a pocket borough — in favor of young William as soon as the latter should have completed a general study of the prin- ciples and philosophy of law and legislation. That stout Sir William was wise in his generation when he aspired to make a statesman of his precocious son is sufficiently attested by the later career of the son himself. The William Penn of history was a statesman. He was born to be one. But he did not become one until he could riot help it — until he could no longer deny the claim of his birthright. His intermediate career as Quaker preacher, semimartyr, and almost fanatic is forgotten in his imfa- ding light as the founder of a great commonwealth; in his immortal eminence as the pioneer of equal rights, universal suffrage, and unqualified popular sovereignty. William Penn as a Quaker preacher and Quaker tract- writer, and William Penn as a world statesman and a uni- versal lawgiver, must be always held in wide contrast. He was preacher and tract-writer because of George Pox and Thomas Loe; he was statesman and enlightened law- giver in spite of them. Had he remained through life in the narrow trail they blazed for him, he must have sunk 63 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN into the oblivion that has engulfed a myriad of fanatic doctrinaires and a host of polemic theologians of the cen- tury in which he lived. But when he broke away from their market-place proselytism and their mock martyrdom of parish jails in England, he forthwith achieved immortal fame as a substantial benefactor of mankind. For an apt illustration of the natural fatherly ambition Admiral Penn may have cherished for his remarkable son, his heir, or of the chagrin and despair that must have over- taken him when he saw what, from his point of view, were the fatal effects of Fox's tracts and Loe's hypnotism, we need not go far from home or much into the past. Let us suppose that a great American admiral — Farragut, for example — had rejoiced in a brilliant son and had exhausted all his powers and resources to put him en train for the highest honors our republic can bestow. Then let us sup- pose that such son, instead of treading the path to power, usefulness, and fame pointed out by his brave and saga- cious father, had fallen under the sinister hypnotism of Joseph Smith and embraced the seductive gospel embodied in the Book of Mormon ! Eeflect now that, with polygamy left out, there was not much spiritual or moral or legal difference between the George-Foxism of the seventeenth century and the Joe-Smithism of the nineteenth! It is not our intention to enter here upon an analjiiical comparison or contrast as between Quakerism and Mormon- ism doctrinally or as creeds. Our comparison is purely historical, not at all spiritual — an affair of relation to the time and place. From this point of view it can not be gainsaid that the Quakerism of Fox in the seventeenth cen- 64 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE tury was as obnoxious to religious opinion at large and as abhorrent to all received moral tenets as the Mormonism of Joseph Smith in the nineteenth. Each in its time was the one creed which all other creeds united to condemn, to denounce, and to persecute. And the persecution of Joseph Smith in this free republic of the nineteenth century was far more terribly drastic than that of George Fox in the Stuart-ridden England of the seventeenth; for nothing worse than durance ever happened to Fox ; but Smith was assassinated in Carthage jail by a masked mob of citizens belonging to the great, free, and enlightened Commonwealth of Illinois. From this purely historical and chronological point of view we do not see how the comparison, so far as Admiral Penn was concerned, can be viewed as far-fetched or inept. Soon after young Penn was fairly installed in chambers of Lincoln's Inn, war broke out between England and Hol- land. The admiral, appointed Captain-General of the Fleet, took the sea as second in command and chief of staff to the Lord High Admiral, his old friend, the Duke of York. The result of this campaign was the signal defeat of the Dutch off the Dogger Bank, which permanently terminated the pretensions of the Netherlands to rank as a first-class sea power. Sir William Penn returned to England the foremost naval commander of his time, and enjoying fame and honors hardly second to those lavished in later years upon Hawke, Rodney, and Nelson. But he returned also to find his son "relapsing into Quakerism," as he expressed it. He now, as a last resort, sent young William to Ireland 6 65 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN and placed him under the care and tutelage of James But- ler, Duke of Ormond, the admiral's intimate friend and then Viceroy or Lord Lieutenant. The vice-regal court was brilliant. Penn was only twenty-one, and he was de- veloped physically and mentally alike to the stature of twenty-five. Under the influence of the Duke of Ormond and the court entourage, the young man soon resumed the ways of polite society; and the duke, who was well aware of the admiral's purpose in sending him to Ireland, congratulated Sir William upon his son's evident abandon- ment of the visions which had affected his earlier youth. So marked was this tendency that young Penn joined a local military organization and participated in the siege of Car- rickfergus, whose garrison had risen in mutiny. During this experience the glamor of military life so profoundly impressed the young volunteer that he asked for a com- mission on the permanent establishment of the royal army, and the Duke of Ormond proposed to give him the captaincy of a company in the then local organization, which in 1689, upon the organization of the British regular army by Will- iam III, became the Eighteenth or Royal Irish Regiment of Foot, which it is now. The admiral, however, adhered to his purpose of train- ing young William for the career of a statesman, and per- emptorily vetoed the military proposition. It is worthy of remark that during this period William Penn sat for the only portrait ever painted of him from life. It represents him in the style and uniform of a royalist soldier — or sub- altern ofScer — ^with uniform and cuirass, flowing locks, and redundant scarf, exceedingly handsome, and of port and 66 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE mien as martial as any cavalier. "It is a curious fact," says one of Penn's biographers, "that the only genuine portrait of the great apostle of peace existing represents him armed and accoutered as a soldier ! ' ' Sir William had by this time (1667) neglected the in- terests of his estate in Ireland nearly three years. His duties as member of Parliament and member of the Navy Board kept him busy. The machinations of his political enemies also troubled him. About this time they even tried to impeach him from the Navy Board, but so signally failed that there was no division of the Commons, and the House adjourned without action upon the question. Besides all these occupations, the health of Admiral Penn began to give way in the fall of 1667. The Irish estate — Shanningarry, County Cork — was a principal source of his income, and it was in sore need of intelligent and honest management. He therefore, in Sep- tember, 1667, wrote to young William, appointing him Clerk of the Cheque, in his sinecure office as Governor of Kinsale, and placing him in control of the Shanningarry estate with full power to reorganize and reform its man- agement. This he seems to have done with energy and ability sufficient to elicit praise from the admiral, who now believed that his ambitions and hopes for his son were in a fair way to be realized. But Sir William's gratification was short-lived. The estate was near the city of Cork, and young Penn soon heard that Thomas Loe was preaching there again. This exhorter seems to have possessed a marvelous fascination in Penn's eyes, an occult influence which in these days would likely 67 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN be described as "hypnotic." We have seen, in an old tract printed during the reign of William and Mary, the declara- tion that it was Fox's custom to "aim at conversion of per- sons of note, men of rank and possessed of substantial estate. Convincement of the poor and lowly was always a light task, but Fox saw that such added not strength to his sect ; only weakness, for that they were a burden to their prosperous brethren and often brought discredit by their misbehavior. ' ' We hesitate to introduce this old tract as evidence; it was avowedly anti-Quaker; but some of its statements are of historical interest and well-known collateral facts sustain them by very strong inference, if not by positive corroboration. The author, speaking of Fox's methods, goes on to say in substance that, whenever he heard of any person above common station or possessed of some fortune displaying interest or even curiosity as to the preachings of Quakerism, he would find out if any particular preacher had special influence over such person, and then, to quote the language of the tract, "set that preacher upon that person ; to follow him, to make opportunity of being heard by him, and to labor privately with that person whensoever chance might throw them together." There is no lack of the "evidence of appearances" — to use a mild phrase — that Thomas Loe was set upon William Penn. Conversion of the son of an admiral and baronet would naturally challenge Fox's generalship from the social point of view; while the large property to which he was heir-apparent would be a good thing to have in the sect. At any rate, if Fox did not specifically set Loe upon Penn, 68 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE a series of remarkable coincidences occurred. We have already given Thomas Harvey's version of Penn's listen- ing to Loe in Ireland when only thirteen years old, or thereabouts. Singularly Loe preached in Oxford, four years later, when Penn was in college there. And less than three years after that we find Loe preaching in Lon- don hard by Lincoln's Inn, where Penn was reading law. And now, when Penn was living on his father's estate, near Cork, Loe suddenly returns to that city, begins preach- ing there, and informs him of the fact through a Quakeress who made clothes for the young man. Thomas Harvey is, indeed, the authority for this last statement, but his version is generally corroborated by Penn himself in the Journal of 1677. If all this was coincidence, it would be in the last degree remarkable. If it was a case of "setting upon, following," etc., its processes were characterized by keen strategy, and its success was all that Fox, in his most san- guine moment, could have conceived possible. However, as we said at the outset, this testimony comes from an anti-Quaker source and is to be received with only such credibility as it may derive from corroborating facta and circumstances that are beyond dispute. The author of the tract declares that the setting of Loe upon Penn was not the only case of the kind ; that Fox set James Naylor in a similar way upon ' ' a rich merchant of Bristol * and other noteworthy persons in the west of England," but names none of them; also that he "set Edward Burroughs upon Isaac Penington and others"; and that he even "had the effrontery to dog with Thomas Watson the footsteps of Lord * Thomas Callowhill, father of Penn's second wife. 69 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Coventry, but this last with the ill success such a churlish impudence deserved!" Of William Penn's final conversion — or "convince- ment," to use the Quaker phrase — ^there have been many accounts, all or nearly all written by members of his own sect and varying in detail according to the intensity of the Inward Light inspiring the writer for the time being. Among these the quaintest is that of Thomas Harvey, who says in his manuscript of 1727 : Penn, on his second coming to Cork, being the only one of the family there and requiring some articles of clothing, went to the shop of a woman Friend in the city to procure them. He expected she would have known him, but she did not. He was too much altered from the days of his boyhood, when the Friend had seen him, to be recognized by her now. However, he told her who he was, and spoke to her of Thomas Loe and of the meeting at his father's house ten or twelve years before. She admired at his re- membering, but he told her he should never forget it; also that, if he only knew where that person was, if 'twere a hundred miles off, he would go to hear him again. She said he need not go so far, for that Friend had lately come thither and would be at meeting the next day. So he went to the meeting, and when Thomas Loe stood up to preach he was exceedingly reached and wept much. Another and intrinsically more probable version is that Loe sent word by this woman to Penn, or prompted her to advise him, that he had returned to Cork and intended to preach there. However, Penn has written an account of his own conversion, which, of course, must supersede all 70 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASUEE others. We have already referred to it. The full text may be found on pages 102-103 of his Journal of Travels, 1677. We offer only an extract sufficient to cover the main facts : I let them know how and when the Lord first appeared unto me, which was about the twelfth year of my age, 1656. How, at times betwixt that and the fifteenth year, the Lord visited me and the divine impressions He gave me of Him- self ; of my persecution at Oxford, and how the Lord sus- tained me in the midst of that hellish darkness and de- bauchery ; of my being banished the college, the bitter usage I underwent when I returned to my father; whipping, beating, and turning out of doors in 1662; of the Lord's dealings with me in Prance, and in the time of the great plague in London. In fine, the deep sense He gave me of the vanity of this world and of the irreUgiousness of the religions of it. Then of my mournful and bitter cries to Him that He would show me His own way of life and salvation and my resolution to follow Him, whatever reproaches or sufferings should attend me; and that with great reverence and bro- kenness of spirit. How, after all this the glory of the world overtook me and I was even ready to give myself up unto it ; seeing as yet no such things as the primitive spirit and Church on the earth ; and being ready to faint concerning my hope of the restitution of all things, it was at this time that the Lord visited me with a certain sound and testimony of His eternal Word through one of those the world calls a Quaker, namely, Thomas Loe. I related to him the bitter mockings and scornings that fell upon me, the displeasure of my parents, the invectiveness and cruelty of the priests, the strangeness of all my companions, what a sign and wonder they made of me; but, above all, that great cross of resisting and -patching against my own inward vain 71 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN affections and thoughts, . . . and the snares and pitfalls laid for my feet in every path, etc. This might not be believed to have been uttered by the man who afterward framed the great law of Pennsylvania. It is a strange melange of the mysticism of Saltmarsh and the rant of Fox. Yet there can be no doubt that Penn was perfectly sincere in it, or that his words — almost frenzied as they might seem at this distance — really failed to blazon forth the glow that filled his imagination. Glow of what? Spiritualists alone can answer. No one who has never fallen under that weird spell, that mysterious psychological spasm that Methodists commonly describe as "the power," can form the remotest conception of it. The author has seen men and women at revivals pass utterly beyond self-control, give voice to bursts of eloquence they would never dream of in normal moments, and then fall into mental stupor or muscular convulsion from which the most heroic application of medical skill was required to rescue them. In some cases when the patients came to their senses they had not the least recollection of the visions of their trance. In a few cases dementia supervened. It may be a serious question whether such phenomena are not always a fitter subject for the neurologist than for the the- ologian. But it seems indisputable that, while under the influence of Thomas Loe, William Penn had what old-fash- ioned Methodists call "the power." His new-found eonvincement of faith had not long to wait for the "crown of martyrdom." A few days after Thomas Loe had converted him, Penn attended a meeting 72 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE of Friends at the house of a shopkeeper. A drunken sol- dier came in and proceeded to disturb the assembly. Penn, a stalwart man of twenty-four, seized the soldier and was about to throw him out, when other Quakers interfered, told Penn that physical violence was contrary to their tenets, and induced him to let the soldier alone. The latter then went to a magistrate, lodged a complaint, and a force was sent which broke up the meeting and arrested several of the principal Quakers, including Penn, and they were put in jail. Penn at once wrote a letter to the Lord Presi- dent of Munster, the Earl of Orrery. This letter was an able review of the laws and orders under which the magis- trate had acted. It summed up as follows : I leave your lordship to judge whether that proclama-- tion (that of 1660) relates to this concernment ; that which was only designed to suppress Fifth Monarchy murderers. And since the King's Lord Lieutenant and yourself are fully persuaded the intention of these called Quakers by their meetings was really the service of God, and you have virtually repealed that other law [meaning the first Con- venticle Act] by a long continuance of freedom, I hope j'our lordship will not now begin an unwonted severity by suffering any one to indulge so much malice with his near- est neighbors ; but that there may be a speedy releasement of all to attend their honest callings and the enjoyment of their families. Though to dissent from a national system imposed by authority renders men heretics in the eyes of some, yet I dare believe your lordship is better read in reason and theology than to subscribe a maxim so vulgar and untrue. It is not long since you were a solicitor for the liberty I now crave,* when you concluded there was * Lord Orrery had been imprisoned by Cromwell under the Common- wealth. 73 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN no way so effectual to improve this country as to dispense freedom in relation to conscience. A curious feature of this petition is the use of the ordi- nary "you," "your," etc., instead of the Quaker "thee" and "thou." But Penn was at that date the merest neo- phyte in the external observances of Foxism. However, the petition immediately caused the release of Penn and his "fellow martyrs." As soon as he was free again Penn was summoned to England by his father, who had learned with despair of the "relapse into Quakerism." Harvey, in his manuscript, records that Penn sailed from .Cork to Bristol, and at the latter place "attended Friends' meetings for strengthening of the faith to meet the re- proachings and tryals he knew his father would put upon him." At last he arrived home and met his father. The ad- miral was confined to the house with acute gout and was unable to walk, though he could sit up in an easy chair. There are various accounts of the interview, but they sub- stantially agree upon the following details : Young Penn frankly said he was finally and perma- nently converted to Quakerism. They then discussed its various tenets, spiritual beliefs, and outward observances. The admiral, albeit then a State Churchman, had always cherished liberal views. On questions of religion and con- science he was, for that age at least, a pronounced free- thinker. After a long discussion with his son, he declared that, so far as spiritual doctrine was concerned, he could 74 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE tolerate all the Quaker beliefs except that which denied the right of physical self-defense, and at the same time refused the obligation of manliness that necessarily pertained to it. As for outward forms and observances, he could endure all except those which denied the virtue of common courtesy and made ordinary politeness a sin in the sight of God. He declared that there was nothing in the teachings of Christ or of any apostle which prohibited the customary conduct of a gentleman, and that no one had ever set up such a monstrous doctrine until the advent of George Fox. How- ever, he was willing to even ignore the "non-combatant canon," folly though it might be, if his son conscientiously believed that the salvation of his soul depended upon ad- herence to it. But he would not tolerate boorishness of manner or rudeness of personal behavior, such as the silly hat worship and the coarse vulgarity of "thee" and "thou," which George Fox considered the pillar of faith and the heart's core of his creed, the central dogma of his alleged "direct revelation from God." "Theeing" and "thouing," he argued, reduced society at large to the status of servants or menials, because it was to such and such only that those forms of the second personal pronoun were addressed. Young Penn rejoined that it was the "will of God"; but the admiral compelled him to admit that the only authority for that was the alleged special revelation to Fox which rested on the unsupported assertion of Fox himself. Finally the admiral said : You may "thee" and "thou" whomsoever you please except the King, the Duke of York, and myself. As for your hat, you can worship it to your heart's content and 75 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN be as boorish with it as you please, except in the house of your father, who is a gentleman, and in the presence of the King and the Duke of York, your sovereign and his heir apparent. On all else, which may be spiritual and of the inner conscience, I yield. But on these things, which are affairs of outward gentleness and decency, I will stand ! Upon this young Penn desired time for prayer and communion with God. The admiral suggested that when a belief or faith was firmly established in a man's con- science deliberation ought not to be needed in arriving at a judgment based upon it. However, the young man took his time and reserved his decision until the next day. As a result of about twenty-four hours of prayer and divine communion, William Penn informed his father that he could not conscientiously remove his hat or address the word "you" to any individual. It is doubtless a historical misfortune that, with a single exception, all accounts, recollections, and biographies of William Penn written in his own period or a century and a half thereafter, were by Quakers; who — with a saving clause in favor of Clarkson (at the beginning of the nine- teenth century) — convert their books into Quaker tracts and Perm's career into a sort of apostolic succession to George Fox. This is natural enough. Though the sect is at this writing (1903) two hundred and sixty years old, it has never produced a man Tvho made any permanent impress upon human affairs or accomplished anything worth endur- ing record except William Penn. Fortunately he was great enough to monopolize the earthly grandeur of a sect never very large itself, and his life glorifies the sect far more than 76 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE sectarian biographers can exalt him. All the Quaker wri- ters say that Admiral Penn expelled William from his house again on this occasion, and some of them declare that he also began proceedings to disinherit him. Granville Penn, in his Life of Admiral Penn, says noth- ing of this. He dismisses the whole episode as " a warm de- bate, resulting in temporary estrangement. ' ' And his sub- sequent references to William Penn indicate that, during the two years of life yet remaining to the admiral, his house was the home of his son, though the latter seldom availed himself of its privileges. In fact, William Penn spent that two years — as he did the seven or eight next ensuing — in travels up and down as an itinerant exhorter or as a polemical tract-writer in jail. That Sir William Penn mourned what he viewed as the degeneracy of his son may be true. Harvey records him as reproaching his son in these words: "What can you think of yourself, after being so well-born and carefully trained up in learning and courtly accomplishments to fit you for the place of ambassador at a foreign court or min- ister of the Government at home, that you should sink all in a Quaker preacher and make your association of prefer- ence with outcasts!" Whether Sir William employed such language or not, the feeling so expressed was natural enough' — in the seven- teenth century at least. But there is not the least authority for the disinheritance story. Sir William died in Septem- ber, 1670, in the old home at Wanstead, and his son William succeeded to all his estate by the law of primogeniture with- out let or hindrance. 77 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN In the second edition of Penn's best theological work,* published some years after the admiral's death, he gives a touching account of that event which indicates perfect reconciliation between them. But William Penn could not inherit the baronetcy at that time, had it been heredi- tary, because such succession involved an oath of fealty to the Crown which his devotion to the whims of Fox would have forbidden him to make. However, the succession to the estate gave him command of an income of about 1,600 guineas a year — or say, $8,000 — which the vastly greater purchasing power of money in those days made equivalent to three times that sum now. Besides this, it made him a creditor of the King to the amount of about £16,000, with considerable accumulated interest ; an inheritance destined to be the basis of the real, practical greatness he soon afterward attained as a states- man, lawgiver, and human benefactor; when, in a lucid interval, he temporarily quit Quaker preaching to found an American commonwealth. This relation of creditor to the King may be succinctly explained: Between the parsimony of Parliament and the extravagance of the King in those days, Charles II was always poor in purse and a constant borrower. He bor- rowed of all whom his royal favor could convert into money- makers and money-lenders, from prince to pawnbroker; from minister of Government to maker of periwigs, from admiral to apple-vender. He helped Admiral Penn to make prize money, in order that he might borrow from the admiral ashore the guilders the admiral * No Cross, No Crown. 78 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER DISPLEASURE afloat had wrung from the defeated Dutch. However, Charles was honest and would pay his debts when he could. When he could not pay he would borrow more. In the case of Admiral Penn, he had borrowed more and paid noth- ing. By that means — providential as it turned out — he owed the dying admiral £16,000, with accumulated inter- est, and he paid the debt to the admiral's heir with Penn- sylvania. 79 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER IV 1668-1678 QUAKER PREACHER AND FOUNDER OF WEST JERSEY Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER IV 1668-1678 QUAKER PREACHER AND FOUNDER OF WEST JERSEY This, as remarked at the outset, is a secular and not a spiritual, a temporal and not a religious, history of William Penn; the story of his statesmanship, not of his sectarian- ism. From this view-point, and in pursuit of this purpose, his life from 1668 to 1678 may be quickly reviewed. Those years he spent in rambling up and down England and the Continent, now preaching Quakerism, now printing Quaker tracts, and again as a martyr in Newgate or the Tower. Of his preaching little can be said that would be either instruc- tive or even interesting to those who read by the electric lights of this material age. Of his printing, even less. As to the volume of his preaching or the number of his sermons there is no exact record; but their name was myriad. As to his authorship, twenty-six books are extant ; they require little review beyond the remark that no Quaker library is complete without them'— and they are seldom found in any other. Two of them, however, may be viewed as possessing some permanent historical value not wholly sectarian. They are The Present Interest of England Con- sidered and The Peace of Europe. The first named is a treatise on religious toleration, a terse history of religious 83 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN persecution, and an argument in favor of universal liberty of conscience, from the view-point of national self-interest alone. It abounds in truisms which, though always trite, are ever new. Its literary execution leaves much to be de- sired, but in the main it must stand as a fair effort to apply sound religious principles in progressive political practise for the common weal and the general betterment of worldly conditions. The second named is a labored treatise against war and in favor of arbitration. In this Penn has some claim to originality of conception. So far as our reading enables us to judge, he originated the idea that nations might agree upon a system whereby issues commonly referred to arbi- tration of the sword might be adjusted by international litigation. In his Peace of Europe Penn brings out this idea quite crudely, but as intelligibly as any one has since advocated it. The essence of his theory was a sort of inter- national Quakerism, and later-day dreamers of the mil- lennium have not improved upon his logic. The experiment of "arbitration between nations" has, indeed, been tried since Penn's day; but the result has invariably been that the nation having all the cunning and none of the right cheats the eye-teeth out of the nation that has all the right and none of the cunning. The trouble is wholly that of human nature. No nation probably would offer to "arbi- trate" a cause that seemed worth fighting for. This is as fundamentally true as that no nation ever has adopted or ever will adopt the Quaker doctrine of absolute non-com- batantism. The full title of Penn's work is An Essay toward the 84 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDER OF WEST JEESEY Present and Future Peace of Europe. After formulating an elaborate plan for creating an "International Court of Arbitration," Penn provides that "its judgment should be made so binding that, if any government offer its case for decision and do not then abide by it, the other governments parties to the tribunal should compel it." These words have a familiar sound. They seem quite as much like the nineteenth century as the seventeenth; and they might as well be dated from "Boston" as from "Worminghurst." The theory was no more Utopian then than now. But riper experience among nations, as well as among individuals, has made ideas appear ludicrous now that were only novel then. "With these two exceptions, Penn's voluminous literature was as ephemeral as the spiritual polemics of the century in which it appeared. Its most notable peculiarity from the purely literary view-point was its total lack of settled or sustained style. In the best of his theological books — No Cross, No Crown — we find abundant traces of Salt- marsh, or of efforts to imitate his inimitable mysticism. In the worst of them — The Sandy Foundation Shaken — may be found echoes of the rugged and verbose speech of Fox. Penn never seemed able to cultivate a style of his own in theological writing. But whenever he touched upon practical questions of law, administration, or statecraft he wrote smoothly, clearly, and often masterfully. During this period occurred Penn's marriage with Guli- elma Maria Springett in May, 1672. She was the daughter of Colonel Sir William Springett, who died during the siege of Arundel Castle, from the reopening of a wound received at Naseby. He was the youngest officer of his grade in 85 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Cromwell 's army, and his daughter was born three months after his death. His widow married Isaac Penington be- fore Gulielma was two years old. Penington was the son and heir of the famous alderman of London in Cromwell's time, sturdiest of Puritans and stanchest of Roundheads. The doughty alderman had quelled Westminster riots, arrested "seditious bishops," handed into Parliament the Monster Petition of the People to the Commons demanding that justice be meted out to the deposed King, and was a member of the high court of justice ordained for the King's trial. His son Isaac was of different mold. When the alderman died Isaac inherited his comfortable estate of Chalfont St. Peters, in Buckinghamshire, and soon after- ward became, like Penn, a Quaker preacher. A miniature or small portrait of Miss Springett, painted during Penn's courtship, shows her to have been remark- ably beautiful. Her life indicates rich endowment of do- mestic virtues and strength of character. Such of her let- ters as have been preserved exhibit a fertile and highly trained intellect together with perfect constancy of purpose and amiability of disposition. The atmosphere of the Penington home in which she had been reared was pure, wholesome, and devout. Her principal tutor was Thomas Bllwood, a classical scholar, who for a long time enjoyed the rare opportunities of culture afforded by the station of amanuensis and reader to Milton in his blindness. Miss Springett herself had often seen and conversed with the great Puritan poet dur- ing her girlhood while he lived in a neighboring village of Buckinghamshire, and one tradition (in Gibson's Life of 86 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDEE OF WEST JERSEY Penn.) says that she had written from Milton's dictation after he became totally blind. In 1672, when Penn mar- ried her, she was past twenty-five, and doubtless had no superior among her sex in England for charms of person and mind. That she was greatly helpful to her husband in the most trying period of his career is abundantly attested by his letters to her and others while she lived, and by his eloquent and affecting tribute to her memory when she died. She brought to him not only her own virtues and graces, but a substantial property inherited from her father, whose only child she was. This was a small but very productive estate, and a neat country house at Worminghurst, Sussex, and there Penn made his home after the marriage. As we have already passed briefly over his religious work as preacher and author, so we need not dwell at length upon the trials and persecutions to which that work sub- jected him. No subject can be so dismal to either writer or reader as the annals of religious persecution. Whatever may be said of the idiosyncrasies of the Qua- kers or the peculiarities of their doctrines and observances, they were a harmless people ; they did not disturb the peace, they committed no crime ; and the only laws they infringed were such outrages upon common humanity as the infamous Conventicle Acts and similar statutes conceived in the bigotry, enacted in the intolerance and executed in the cowardly cruelty of the Episcopal Church of England two hundred years ago ; laws which were in themselves crimes, and the enforcement of which, in a more enlightened age, would be viewed as a felony. The complete account of 87 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Perm's "trial" at Old Bailey on an indictment accusing him of "riotous conduct" for "preaching in Grace Street Church" would form an interesting chapter in the history of the jury system if other demands upon our space did not exclude it. Suffice to say here that it was among the most important cases on record, involving as it did the last attempt ever made by an English judge to terrorize a jury with a view to extort from them a verdict contrary to the facts, the law, and their own oaths. The jury declared Penn not guilty, after the court had imprisoned them forty-eight hours without food or light in the vain effort to make them convict the accused. And then, after they persisted in rendering a verdict of not guilty, fined them forty shillings each and sent them to Newgate prison along with the defendant they had declared innocent. This farce of a trial has handed down the names of Samuel Starling, Mayor of London, and John Howell, Recorder of Old Bailey, to a disgusting obloquy and an unspeakable infamy that must endure so long as men who talk the English language shall love justice and hate despotism. It has consigned them to an immortal shame as much meaner and more despicable than that of Jef- f eries, as his judicial crimes were greater in enormity than theirs. Prom this imprisonment, and subsequently from an in- carceration in the Tower under conditions of almost equal atrocity, Penn was liberated by the intervention of the King, at the instance of the Earl of Arlington in one case and of the Duke of York in the other. But the persecutions Penn suffered were only a single case in thousands during that 88 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDEli OF WEST JERSEY period. The Quakers kept careful and accurate records of their sufferings for conscience sake. These records show that in a single twelvemonth about three thousand were imprisoned or punished in the pillory or publicly flogged through the streets ; and this in most cases by utter mockery of trial, when pretense was made of trial at all. And the record shows also that over three hundred died in prison or from the effects of hardships and privations suffered there. This was the year following the revision of the Conventicle Acts by which provision was made for arrest, imprison- ment, and fines upon information and without even the pretense of jury trial. The Church of England had at- tained complete control of the House of Commons, and its first use of that control was to pass the most infamous acts for promotion of sacerdotal despotism and sectarian felony that ever blotted the statutes of England. But the disease wrought its own cure. The enormities committed by the Episcopal Church and its servile minions were so appalling that the good-natured King intervened by order in Council, the effect of which was to compel all such cases to be regularly tried, with right of appeal, which, though it did not wholly stop the persecution, quite distinctly curtailed the powers of zealot constables and bigot magistrates. Among other things, the King required the bishops to grant licenses to non-conformist clergymen un- der certain conditions easily fulfilled. Such licenses pro- vided that preaching should not be disturbed, and in other ways protected the licentiates from persecution. In some cases arrests were made in spite of these licenses, but the constables themselves came to grief, together with the mag- 89 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN istrates who issued the process. However, the story is too long and its details are too dismal for these pages. Well may the historian pass them over. But it is not so easy to refrain from the inevitable deduction that the Church of England in the seventeenth century was fit suc- cessor to the Church of Rome in the sixteenth. It is not easy to repress the fact that the Catholic butchers of Bloody Mary's time had little to repent of in excess of the blind bigotry and savage intolerance of the Church of England or the brutal and cowardly cruelty of its prelates, priests, and prebendaries two hundred years ago. These horrors fol- lowed naturally in the train of an Established Church. Take any sect or creed, munify it by statute and support it by taxation, and you will have provided for enormities in the name of religion. A creed set up by law and main- tained by public money must always add human cupidity to sectarian zeal, thereby stifling what should be the noblest of motives in the basest of vices. It was knowledge of this fundamental truth that impelled the framers of our institu- tions to prohibit a State Church and to make aU sects equal before the law. The Church of England still exists as an "establishment." But it is a comparatively harmless an- achronism. It still plunders the English treasury in a small way, but, so far as real power is concerned, it is held in subjection by forces of public opinion that stand ready to overwhelm it should it offer the slightest symptom of re- lapse into its former crimes. In 1674 Penn had reached the age of thirty. He had given no signs of purpose or ambition to be anything else than an itinerant Quaker preacher and tract-writer. The 90 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDER OF WEST JERSEY fortune inherited from his father, coupled with that which his marriage brought him, was sufScient to release him from the hard task of earning a livelihood. He was not avari- cious, and, considering the extent of his income, lived frugally. So far as concerned the expenses of himself and his family, he should have had a good annual surplus. But he did not. His income was expended as fast as it accrued — and often a little faster. This was due to his benefices toward his needy brethren. With few exceptions the early Quakers were people of humble station and small means, mostly shopkeepers or artisans, depending on personal industry for a living. Necessarily, fines and imprisonment bore heavily upon them, reducing many to penury. These unfortunates Will- iam Penn was always ready to help with his last farthing, and when he had no ready resource of his own at hand he would exhaust his credit borrowing for their benefit. These outlays and the expenses of his own missionary work, to- gether with the cost of his numerous publications, kept his purse constantly drained.* Moreover, while he was so zealous in his ministry of Quakerism his income itself fell away. Bad crops in Ireland made his Irish tenants fall into arrears. Penn had not the heart — or maybe, and more * Penn did not sell his books. He considered them part of his ministry. Not satisfied with serving the Lord by word of mouth, he served Him also in type. Therefore he paid the printer's bills, and then gave the books free and broadcast to whomsoever might wish to read them. Possibly there would not have been much sale for them when printed. But the author of this little book has seen a copy of the original edition of No Cross, No Crown, as written in the Tower (1669), with Penn's autograph on the fly-leaf, sold at a sale of rare books in London for forty-five guineas ! Perhaps it had, like the best vintages, " improved with age." 91 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN likely, he had too much heart — to distrain them. He evicted no tenant. Whenever compromise could be made it was done and the tenant paid whatsoever he could — or said he could — and Penn charged the balance to profit and loss. After a few years he began to be straitened for funds. By the end of 1677 his main reliance had come to be the Springett estate of Worminghurst, which his wife brought to him. But he still held the debt of £16,000 or so that Charles II owed to his father. During the period just referred to he had but once, so far as record shows, taken active part in worldly affairs. That was in 1674-75. When the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was conquered in 1664 and became New York, that part of the province lying between the Hudson and the Delaware Rivers was granted or conveyed by the Duke of York to Earl Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. The boundaries of this tract were not well defined, but generally speaking it included all the present State of New Jersey north of a line drawn from Staten Island southwest to the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. No set- tlements of any importance had been made in this tract prior to 1664. It was inhabited by Indians, and the only white people found within its borders were a few Dutch traders from New Amsterdam. But by 1675 a few settle- ments had been made on the west side of the region, chief among which was a little trading-post on the left bank of the Delaware, then known as New Beverly.* Sir George Carteret sold his half of the territory to John * Now Burlington, N. J. 92 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDEE OF WEST JEESEY Penwick, in trust for Edward Byllinge, both of whom were Quakers. Fenwiek and Byllinge quarreled about their joint possession, much to the scandal of the Society of Friends, who declared them "covetous and carnally minded." The Quakers desired above all things to avoid lawsuits, which, they said, "put it in the mouths of the un- godly to revile them for the hankerings of the flesh after the things of this world ! ' ' The dispute between Fenwiek and Byllinge became so acute that nothing short of an appeal to Westminster Hall seemed possible. To avoid such scandal the matter was taken up in the church. Fenwiek and Byllinge were "dis- ciplined," and finally William Penn was chosen arbitrator. He made a sort of compromise, by which Fenwiek received 1,000 guineas cash and one-tenth of the territory. Byllinge received the rest of the land. He was, however, insolvent, and Penn, with two others, were chosen trustees for Byl- linge 's creditors under an assignment. Fenwiek at first refused to accept the award. Penn wrote to him : It behooveth me, sore against my wish, to tell thee, John Fenwiek, that the present, difference between thee and Ed- ward Byllinge fills the hearts of Friends with grief, and with a resolution to take into consideration and make a public denial of the person that offers violence to the award made, or that will not end the dispute without bringing it upon the public stage. God, the Righteous Judge, will visit him that standeth out ! . . . Opprest as I am with business, I will find an afternoon to-morrow or next day to determine and so prevent the mischief that will certainly follow divulging it in Westminster Hall. Let me knov? by the bearer thy mind. Oh ! John, let truth and the honor of it 93 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN in this day prevail. Woe to him that causeth offense. I am an impartial man. Fenwick seems to have heeded these plain threats of "ehureh discipline." Though he still "stood out" for a few weeks, he ultimately acquiesced in Penn's award and deeded nine-tenths of the land to the trustees of the Byl- linge creditors. Penn's cotrustees were unable to give the time required and withdrew from active connection with the trust, leaving the management of the Byllinge territory wholly in Penn's hands. For two years or more little was done beyond laying the foundation of a new colony. About a hundred families, mostly Quakers, were aided to cross the ocean. The little trading-post of New Beverly was made the nucleus of a permanent settlement and renamed "Bridlington," afterward changed to Burlington. The colony was named West Jersey. In the summer of 1677 Penn made a tour on the Con- tinent of Europe, visiting Holland and the Palatinate, which two years before had been ravaged by Turenne's army. During this journey he visited the Princess Pala- tine and William of Orange, then Stadtholder of Holland. The latter was engaged in war with Louis XIV, which ended the next year in the peace of Nymwegen. Prince William had just married Princess Mary, daughter of the Duke of York. Mary shared her father's regard for Ad- miral Penn, and, like him, was disposed to transfer the good-will to his son. William of Orange also took a fancy to Penn, whose maternal grandfather, 'John Jasper, of Rotterdam, had befriended him in his boyhood. William, 94 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDER OF WEST JERSEY however, did not like the Quakers— or at all events he had no respect for the non-combatant doctrine they professed. He is recorded by Dr. Montanus, in Leven van Willem III, as saying to Penn that he "believed in equal toleration of all creeds, except the Catholic, whose cardinal doctrine was the duty of murdering heretics, and the Quakers, who held cowardice to be a prime article of Christian faith!" Prince William said he did not believe in persecuting any one. But he would disqualify Catholics from holding any power in the state because they held that an oath to sup- port a Protestant government was not binding; and he would also exclude Quakers from office because no man ought to have any share in a government he was not willing to defend against aggression. He believed that much of the persecution suffered by the Quakers was due to the contempt in which all other creeds held them, because of their pusillanimous peace doctrine. William Penn returned from this trip filled with new aspirations. There is no positive evidence that the project of founding a free-conscience colony in the New World was suggested to him, but his first acts after he returned to England tended to that end. In Biographic des Femmes Celebres, the statement is given that the Princess Palatine suggested such a scheme to Penn while he was her guest at Heervorden in 1677. Penn, however, does not men- tion anything of the kind in his Journal of that year, which was quite copious and of which many pages are devoted to the Princess Palatine. Be this as it may, Penn at once began to prepare a scheme of government for the new colony, of which he was 95 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN not proprietor but only trustee. At this point a new and, it would seem, an unexpected view of Penn's character con- fronts us. For the moment at least he had dropped the role of itinerant Quaker preacher to assume that of the universal statesman; ceased, at least temporarily, the wri- ting of Quaker tracts, and begun to write fundamental laws ; stopped echoing the whims, the chimeras, and the vagaries of George Fox in theology, and begun his own original utterance of imperishable truths in the constitution of human self-government. This was in 1677- '78. William Penn was thirty-three years old. As we have already intimated, his career up to the age of thirty had been wholly that of student, theo- logian, and sectarian. The time now under consideration may be described as the third year of his awakening to the great fact that there were such things as temporal interests in this world; that God made the earth for other purposes than an arena for sectarian polemics, and that there was really something for men to do besides preach and write tracts. It is, perhaps, quite as well for mankind that Penn made these temporal discoveries or woke up to these ma- terial facts at a somewhat mature age. It is possible that, had these practical revelations reached him ten years sooner, he might have tried to strain them through the mysticism of Saltmarsh or measure them by the standard of Fox. At any rate, his very first efifort as a lawgiver showed that he had grasped at least one great truth, namely, that while a man might be Quaker to-day and statesman to- morrow, he could not be both on the same day. 96 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDER OF WEST JERSEY Penn drew up, in his own handwriting, a code for the uew colony. He called it A Preamble of Concessions. The latter word was used because it would have to be ap- proved by the King in Council. Charles II was a humane man and a clever fellow personally, but Penn knew him and his entourage well enough to know that he would approve under the title of "royal concessions" a great many things which he would not yield as popular rights. That was a way the Stuarts had. For example, Charles I wanted to "concede" several things to Parliament. In the end he yielded his head to Oliver Cromwell. James II afterward was willing to "concede" universal toleration, etc., on his own terms. He yielded his crown and throne to William of Orange on no terms whatever but those of headlong flight. However, Penn had now to deal with a Stuart, and so he called his pioneer declaration of fundamental and im- perishable principles "royal concessions." The whole cor- poration of diplomatists from Nicolo di Bernardo Machia- velli to Benjamin Disraeli could not have been more adroit. The King approved it. There were some things in this scheme of "royal concessions" that would never do in England — ^the Merry Monarch thought — but almost any- thing would do in West Jersey. It was a simple code. Yet it was, crudely, the greatest code in popular government that has fallen from the pen of mortal man. It was the pioneer of all codes that now express, under various conditions and in diverse forms, the essential doctrine of self-government, "of the people, by 8 97 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN the people, and for the people." And of this Penn was pioneer. The boundary between East Jersey, which Carteret retained, and West Jersey, which he conveyed to Byllinge, was rather indefinite. By the terms of the transfer it was "a line drawn from the east of Little Egg Harbor straight north through the country to the utmost branch of Dela- ware Kiver." However, the main purpose was to leave to Carteret the settlements along the west side of the Hud- son and the seashore, and to give Byllinge the east bank of the Delaware. To this domain Penwick added the present counties of Salem and Cumberland, which he bought from the Indians for merchandise valued at about seventy-four guineas. It does not seem necessary to introduce here the full text of the constitution Penn framed for the free-conscience colony of West Jersey. In brief, its main provisions were : 1. Universal and unqualified suffrage. 2. Perfect freedom of conscience and complete religious equality before the law. (It is noteworthy that the word "equality" was used, not "toleration.") 3. A governing assembly to be chosen by ballot, any voter being eligible; pay in actual session one shilling per diem. 4. An executive commission of ten members to be ap- pointed by the assembly. 5. Magistrates and constables to be elected by the people of each of the magisterial districts into which the assembly might from time to time subdivide the colony. 6. No sentence in criminal cases without trial by jury, 98 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDER OF WEST JERSEY except minor forms of disorderly conduct such as drunk- enness, the use of riotous or obscene language, etc., which might be corrected by the magistrate on prima facie evi- dence; and all cases might be appealed to the executive council on points of law. 7. No judgment in civil cases involving over five shil- lings, without verdict of a jury, unless the parties should agree to trial before a magistrate. 8. Additional articles to be submitted to popular vote, but no article to be adopted in conflict with the foregoing. 9. Summary: All and every person in the province shall, by the help of the Lord and these fundamentals, be forever free from oppression and slavery. In his letter forwarding the draft of these "conces- sions" (which were brought over by John Fenwick) Penn said: In the fear of the Lord and in true sense of his Divine Will we try here to lay foundations for after ages to un- derstand liberty as Christians and as men, that they may not be brought into bondage but by their own consent. We put all power in the people. This was, of course, an absolute democracy, the climax of home rule. Among Penn's most intimate friends at this time were John Locke and Algernon Sidney, the one leading the lib- eral philosophy, the other the advanced statesmanship of the period. But William Penn went ahead of both. Locke had his doubts about admitting papists to a share in the government. He feared it might be made a loophole for the introduction of French influence. The indefatiga- 99 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN ble Jesuits he thought might easily make their way from Canada into West Jersey, or from the Catholic colony of Maryland. Even if they could not subvert the institu- tions, they would manage to keep the colony itself in tur- moil, causing scandal and distrust on the part of the home Government. Less than ten years prior to the time under consideration Locke had drawn up, at the request of the Earl of Shaftesbury, a charter for Carolina. This charter created a "peerage" of eight men — to begin with — whose powers were to be hereditary and whose functions were modeled after the House of Lords. Two-fifths of all the land in the colony was to be set apart as estates for the hereditary nobility. The other three-fifths might be ac- quired by the common people. Representatives or "mem- bers of the Commons" were to be chosen by the people and these, coordinately with the hereditary "peers," were to form a colonial parliament. To these Lord Shaftesbury added an article providing for appointment of a governor by the Crown, but without veto power, and an article making the Church of England the established religion — this last against Locke's protest. For the rest there was to be entire freedom of conscience and "toleration" — not as Penn provided, "equality" — of all religious faiths. This was, of course, a limited aristocracy not essentially differing from the system in England itself. Clearly Penn's ideas of liberty were more advanced than those of Locke. Possibly he legislated in advance of the age in which he lived. Subsequent events might be construed to argue in that direction. Sidney agreed with Penn's ideas as far as they went. 100 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDER OF WEST JERSEY But he distrusted what he called the "hydra-headed execu- tive of ten persons, all having equal power and equal lack of responsibility." He contended that no scheme of gov- ernment would be found practicable that did not possess a single executive head, visible, tangible, and responsible. He also condemned Penn's total lack of provision for de- fense, saying, among other things, that no body of men could govern themselves unless able and willing to defend themselves. It is noteworthy that the two elements of Penn's scheme which Algernon Sidney disapproved were the two which embodied the essence of Foxite Quakerism — the non-com- batant canon and the "hydra-headed executive." The latter was a clear concession to Pox's fundamental whim that there ought to be no "single high dignitary." The vesting of executive power in a "Council of Ten" had the flavor of a Quaker church committee. As a matter of fact, this fault wrought its own cure, for the Council of Ten, af- ter a very brief experience, delegated its practical authority to a chairman, who became an individual executive de facto if not de jure. But the cure was not radical or permanent. And there was no cure for the lack of defense, or refusal to provide for it. No matter how just and right Penn's scheme of religious equality and popular home rule by universal suffrage might be, the effort to incorporate with it two dis- tinctively Quaker whims proved fatal. Penn's form of government for West Jersey endured a quarter of a century — 1677 to 1702. Then upon the outbreak of what we usually call "Queen Anne's War" in the latter year the 101 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN exigencies of public defense compelled the British Govern- ment to suppress the Quaker regime, and West Jersey as a whole was made a Crown colony with a royal governor and council and an elective assembly. Suffrage was limited to freeholders, Catholics were disfranchised, and the Church of England was favored, though not regularly established by statute. The royal governor had the veto power and could call or prorogue the assembly at will. This review of Penn's connection with West Jersey is an essential part of his history. It antedated his founding of Pennsylvania by four years. In some things it proved a lesson. It taught him at least what ought to be avoided. The "great law" of Pennsylvania, which Penn also framed, and which the first Assembly adopted at Upland (now Chester) in 1682, was more practical and less Quakerish than the original West Jersey "concessions" of 1677. Though Penn was the real founder of West Jersey be- fore he founded Pennsylvania, he had no personal interest in the province and derived no profit from it except his fee as trustee, which was small. But he spent a good deal of his own money aiding his persecuted brethren to migrate from England to the new land of peace and promise. What was more important than all else, it is beyond question that Penn's experience with West Jersey led him to the meas- ures which culminated in the great achievement upon which his fame rests. In 1679 Penn made his first appearance on the public stage as a politician. Algernon Sidney was the Liberal can- didate for the House of Commons from Guildford. Though Sidney was not a Quaker, but a Puritan, he was an ad- 102 Digitized by Microsoft® FOUNDER OF WEST JERSEY vanced Liberal, and he and Penn agreed on that point if on no other. Penn "stumped the borough" for Sidney and wrote "campaign documents" advocating his election. He was elected, but the House refused to seat him — seat- ing instead his defeated rival, Colonel Delamahoy, on a technicality. Sidney then stood again for Bramber — a good deal of a rotten borough — was again elected, and again refused the seat by the House. This treatment of his friend discouraged Penn more than all his own sufferings had done. ' ' There is no hope in England, ' ' he said bitterly. ' ' The deaf adder can not be charmed." As if to add insult to injury, just about this time the "Popish Plot" of Titus Gates 's perjury was at its height as a sensation, and the Established Church declared the Quakers to be "Jesuits in disguise." So hotly was this absurd charge urged that Penn found it necessary to have a hearing before the com- mittee of the Commons appointed to investigate it. In- deed, the committee heard him twice. His sole aim was to show the ridiculous fallacy and cruel imposture of trying to connect the Society of Friends with papal intrigues. The tenor of his addresses to the committee may be inferred from the conclusion of the second and last one : We choose no suffering, for God knows how much we have suffered and how many families are reduced to pov- erty by it. We think ourselves a useful people; yet, if we must suffer, let us suffer not as Popish recusants but as Protestant dissenters. Penn seems to have carried his point with the com- mittee, for the clause he advocated was incorporated in the 103 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN bill to suppress popish plots as it passed the Commons ; but the King prorogued Parliament before it could be consid- ered in the Lords and the measure fell between the two houses. 104 Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER V 1680 THE PENNSYLVANIA CHARTER Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER V 1680 THE PENNSYLVANIA CHARTER Just when the thought of asking the King to pay the debt of £16,000 by grant of territory in America first oc- curred to William Penn is a question that he himself left no data to determine. The records of his contemporaries are almost equally silent. The sole inkling we have been able to find occurs in Clarke's Life of James II. We have already adverted to the friendship which existed between that prince, when Duke of York, and Admiral Penn, and to the fact that the admiral's son inherited the duke's good- will. Clarke intimates that William Penn was first em- boldened to petition King Charles II for a grant of Ameri- can land in payment of the debt, by advice of the Duke of York and by the prince's assurance that he would do every- thing in his power to bring about a favorable result. This is probably true. The duke was opposed to religious per- secution. He had no sympathy with the Established Church. He. was as much in favor of universal toleration as Penn was — only from the opposite extreme, for the duke at heart was quite as much Catholic as Penn was Quaker. Moreover, the duke himself was interested in the colonies of New York and West Jersey, and naturally desired to 107 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN see the eomitry contiguous to them developed. Penn's efforts to build up West Jersey were beginning to show good fruits. Between 1677 and 1680 over three thousand emigrants had settled there, mainly under Penn's manage- ment or by his advice. The duke thought he could do vastly more as the actual head of a new colony than as mere trustee for other owners. Penn, on his part, may have had misgivings as to the fate his petition would meet if addressed to the King with no influence or "backing" be- yond the justice of the claim itself. But with the earnest support of the Duke of York assured this source of doubt might be removed. If the duke did promise Penn his good ofi&ces he kept it confidential. When Penn sent up his peti- tion early in the summer of 1680, it was referred by the King to the ' ' Committee of the Privy Council for the Affairs of Trade and Plantations. ' ' * This committee notified the agent of the Duke of York — Sir John Werden — and asked him to report whether the tract described in the petition was consistent with the boundaries of New York. Sir John, in his reply, objected to Penn's proposed southern boundary on the ground that all territory west of the Delaware, which had been settled by the Swedes and Finns in 1632, and then conquered by the Dutch, had been annexed by the latter to New York, and was therefore part of that colony when conquered from the Dutch by the English in 1664. Therefore, as the whole of the conquered Dutch colony had been given to the Duke of York, his grant must include the settlements of the * A designation changed to " The Lords of Trade and the Colonies " in a later reign. 108 Digitized by Microsoft® THE PENNSYLVANIA CHARTER Swedes and Finns on the west bank of the Delaware River, which extended from the sea to Upland.* For these reasons Sir John Werden protested in behalf of the Duke of York against the transfer of this territory to Penn. The committee referred Sir John's letter to Penn, who at once laid it before the Duke of York in person. The duke immediately instructed Sir John "to withdraw the letter of objection and to inform the committee that his Royal Highness commands me to let you know . . . that he is very willing Mr. Penn's request may meet with suc- cess. . . . And H. R. H. also bids me inform their lord- ships that in his opinion questions of exact boundary or prior right may be determined upon more particular ex- amination and survey of the domain." This would indi- cate a prior understanding between the duke and Penn. It is a curious fact that, almost alone of all the impor- tant documents connected with the grant of Pennsylvania, the original petition should not have been preserved. Hazard, in his Annals of Pennsylvania, says that "the peti- tion existed, in a mutilated state, in 1735. It was then adduced in evidence during a trial at law to determine the proper boundaries of the possessions actually granted to "William Penn. As far as the fragment could be made out, it recited the royal debt, to the embarrassments caused to the heir of Sir William Penn through its non-payment, and then humbly prays that his Majesty, in his compassion for the afflicted, will be pleased to grant land in America north of some territory, the name of which was defaced, and bounded by a river on the west, also left without a name. ' ' *Now Chester, Pa., twelve miles below Philadelphia 109 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN The committee of the Privy Council consisted of the Duke of Albemarle — son of General Monk, who had restored Charles II — the Bishop of London — Henry Compton — ^with Sir Lionel Jenkyns as secretary. The first meeting to con- sider Penn's petition was held June 24, 1680. They called Penn before them and asked him to explain the geography of his proposed grant. "To be bounded on the east by the Delaware River," he said, as reported in the minutes of the Council, "on the south by the grant to Lord Baltimore; to run west as far as the latter grant, and northward to the forty-third paral- lel of latitude — it being assumed that latitude 40° should be the northern limit of Lord Baltimore's grant." As the map now stands, the boundary suggested by Penn was sixteen miles north of the existing State line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. But the committee did not approve the forty-third parallel as the proposed northern limit of Penn's grant. That question was, in fact, left indeterminate, with the understanding that it should be "settled by a more particular survey respecting the rights of the Duke of York west of the Delaware River." As it turned out, the forty-second parallel was adopted as the northern boundary of Penn's grant. After much investigation and a great deal of epistolary discussion chiefly remarkable for ignorance on all hands as to the actual geography of "the region west of the Dela- ware," King Charles II signed the patent on March 4, 1681. "This venerable document," says Hazard in his Annals, "which is still preserved and now hung up in the office of 110 Digitized by Microsoft® THE PENNSYLVANIA CHARTER the Secretary of State at Harrisburg, is written on strong parchment in the old English handwriting, each line under- scored with red ink and the borders gorgeously decorated with heraldic devices. ' ' The next day Penn wrote a letter to Robert Turner ex- plaining the origin of the name of the new colony. He said he at first proposed to call it New Wales, to which objection was made in the Council. He then suggested "Sylvania." But the King prefixed the syllable "Penn" — making it "Pennsylvania." William Penn was apprehensive that Fox and other Quakers would view this as a lack of humility on his part — a yearning after the fame of this world, or something of that sort — so he explained that the King prefixed the "Penn" in honor of the admiral's memory and his services to the coimtry, and not in any degree as a compliment to himself. Having thus purged himself of any lurking suspicion that he had been guilty of vanity, Penn proceeded to draw up a form of government to be expressed in the charter. Between this charter and the system Penn had drawn up for West Jersey three years before fundamental differences appear. The governorship is vested in a single head, that head is Penn, and the oflSee is made hereditary, saving only allegiance to the Crown, with "an annual rental of two beaver-skins delivered at Windsor Castle and one-fifth of all the gold and silver ore which shall be found within the limits of the grant aforesaid. ' ' The proprietary governor, with the assent of the free men of the colony, to make all laws not inconsistent with 111 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN the laws of England; to appoint magistrates and judges; to grant pardons, except for murder and treason, and in these to grant reprieves until the pleasure of the King should be known. The exports of the colony to be sent into English ports only ; but a year after being landed in England they might be reshipped to any foreign port, subject to the duties im- posed upon British subjects. Penn and his heirs were bound to levy no tax in the province except such as might be agreed to by the popular assembly, or by Act of Parliament appointed. And the King was to levy no tax upon the inhabitants of the province without consent of the proprietary or assembly or by Act of Parliament. The proprietary governor was made captain-general and authorized to levy, muster, and train all sorts of men ; to make war upon sea and land against barbarous nations, pirates, and robbers. The Bishop of London had a clause inserted — after fail- ing to secure establishment of the Church of England — requiring that, when twenty or more of the inhabitants might so request, an Episcopal clergyman should be per- mitted to reside in the colony. For the rest, the charter of Pennsylvania embodied the substantial elements and principles of representative gov- ernment foreshadowed in the "concessions" of "West Jer- sey. Penn's original draft was revised by Chief-Justice North and the Attorney-General, Sir William Jones. The only material changes they made in it were the provision for defense and the reservation of the right to "tax the in- 112 Digitized by Microsoft® THE PENNSYLVANIA CHARTER habitants by Act of Parliament. ' ' In this latter clause the Pennsylvania charter differed from all others.* But there was a reason for this. An explanation of it may be found in the papers of Algernon Sidney. He had seen Penn's first draft. He knew that it did not contain either the clause providing for defense or the reservation of the right to tax by. Act of Parliament. Those were in- serted by Chief -Justice North (Lord Guildford) and Sir William Jones, the Attorney-General. In this Sidney — Puritan and republican though he was — sustained the law officers. This colony, he said, differed from all others. It was a Quaker colony. Occasion for self-defense against aggression might arise — ^must, in fact, arise. The Quakers would not defend themselves. Nor would an assembly hav- ing a Quaker majority vote supplies for defense by others. Therefore, in time of war the Quaker colony must either be defended by the mother country or left to its fate, which, of course, would be absurd. Now, as the Quakers would not defend themselves or pay for defense by others, it was perfectly just for the mother country to reserve the right to make them pay the cost whenever it became necessary to defend them. The only way by which this could be done was through Act of Par- liament, enforced by English troops, if necessary. In other words, the blind adherence of the Quakers to the strangest * When Dr. Franklin went to London as colonial agent just before the Revolution, Lord Shelburne jocosely told him that Pennsylvania had no|; the same grievance that 'New England and other colonies alleged, be- cause the right of Parliament to tai Pennsylvania was reserved expressly in the charter. Franklin's retort was that " the relations between Eng- land and her American colonies had got beyond the scope of a Quaker meeting ! " 9 113 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN of all Pox's whims made it justifiable to withhold from them the greatest right that Englishmen ever claimed — ^the right of "no taxation without representation." It is, at this distance and in the light of our time, impossible to comprehend how a man of Penn's general wisdom and breadth of view could be held in such mental subjec- tion by the vagaries of George Pox. He must have known — a half-witted man not crazed by sectarian fanat- icism or hypnotized by a canting zealot could not have helped knowing — that a prosperous and rich colony could not be created on a basis of universal peace in an era of universal rapine. Therefore, he must have realized the need of provision for defense. But he seems to have been so abjectly enslaved by Pox that he preferred to surrender the greatest of rights rather than assert the commonest prin- ciple of manhood. This is the only real blot upon Penn's character as a statesman. It was a tremendous price to pay for nothing better than a heritage of ridicule and a birth- right of contempt. The sequel proved that the law officers of the Crown were wise. When the charter was signed there were about a thou- sand — some authorities say twelve hundred — white inhab- itants already in the territory granted to Penn. They were mostly Swedes, together with some Pinlanders — ^the pioneers of 1632 — and a few Dutch traders who had chosen to stay on the Delaware after the English conquered New Amster- dam and called it New York. To these Penn, under date of April 8, 1681, addressed the following : Mt Peiends: I wish you all happiness here and here- after. These are to let you know that it hath pleased God, 114 Digitized by Microsoft® — ^^BS ^HB K-^ mf!M ^^' A ^^sjUpiEiyjt PI 1^ J ^^ 1^1^^ ^^ ~-^ Hi ^) ^^5 E ^^^^^^^ ^^^iZ._ifcj ^^p HjJ'^Stf^^^ — 1 ^u^^ -^-:-"--^ - ^ ^IHIHUHI THE SWEDES' CHUECH AND SVEN SENEE'S HOUSE. Prom Watson's Annals of Philadelphia. TEEATY TEEE AND FAIEMAN'S MANSION. From Watson's Annals of Philadelpliia. Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® THE PENNSYLVANIA CHARTER in His Providence, to cast you within my lot and care. It is a business that, though I never undertook before, yet God hath given me an understanding of my duty and an honest mind to do it uprightly. I hope you will not be troubled at the change and the King's choice, for you are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great; you shall be governed by laws of your own making, and live a free, and, if you will, a sober and industrious people. [The italics are Penn's.] I shall not usurp the rights of any, or oppress his person. God hath furnished me with a better resolution and hath given me His grace to keep it. In short, whatever sober and free men can reasonably desire for the security and improvement of their own happiness, I shall heartily com- ply with; and in five months resolve, if it please God, to see you. In the meantime, pray submit to the commands of my deputy, so far as they are consistent with the law, and pay him those dues (that formerly you paid to the Governor of New York) for my use and benefit ; and so I wish God to direct you in the way of righteousness and therein prosper you and your children after you. I am your true friend, William Penn. London, 8th of the month called April, 1681. The deputy mentioned was William Markham, Penn's cousin. He at once embarked, carrying the foregoing let- ter, a copy of the King's proclamation, and specific orders to the Governor of New York and to Lord Baltimore re- quiring them to observe the terms of the royal grant and to adjust boundaries without delay. Markham arrived in New York June 21st, and at once obtained from the acting or lieutenant-governor of that colony an order for the transfer of all territory on the west 115 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN bank of the lower Delaware hitherto under control of New York to the authority of William Penn. Markham went from New York to Upland, the most northerly settlement of the Swedes. There he met Lord Baltimore, and the question of boundaries was taken up. It was found by observation (made by Captain Markham, who understood the art of surveying) that Penn had made a geographical error of about seventeen miles in his location of a southern boundary. The fortieth parallel, which he had stipulated, ran north of the confluence of the Delaware and Schuyl- kill, which he had already selected as the site of his new city.* In his selection of this parallel for his southern boundary Penn had been guided by the representations of John Fen- wiek mainly, and the error, as Captain Markham at once perceived, must derange his whole plan of settlement. The conference with Lord Baltimore was adjourned, Markham wrote to Penn, and the latter forthwith appealed to the Duke of York to use his influence for rectification. The duke then defined his part of the cession to mean practi- cally the present State of Delaware, and Lord Baltimore was advised that the boundary must be so adjusted as to make Penn's south line at least fifteen minutes of latitude below the confluence of the two rivers. The exact delimita- tion of these boundaries was not effected until many years afterward. In fact, the question was not finally settled until the running of "Mason and Dixon's Line." Mean- * The fortieth parallel runs through the north part of Germantown, leaving the whole of modern Philadelphia south of Peon's original bound- ary. H6 Digitized by Microsoft® THE PENNSYLVANIA CHAETER time, it was a source of constant litigation between Lord Baltimore and Penn, it survived them and was waged by their descendants or assigns long after they departed. The details of these disputes can not be reproduced here. They are of no interest to the general public of to-day and, in extenso, would fill another volume as large as this. Markham, confident that Penn would succeed in recti- fying the boundary, proceeded to carry out his original in- structions. They were as follows: "(1) To call a council of nine, he (Markham) presiding. (2) That he does there read my letter to the inhabitants and the King's declara- tion of subjection; then take the inhabitants' acknowledg- ment of my authority and proprietary. (3) To settle bounds between me and my neighbors, to survey, set out, sell, or rent lands according to my instructions dated April 8, 1681. (4) To erect courts, appoint sheriffs, magistrates, and other necessary officers. (5) To call to his aid any of the inhabitants of those provinces for the legal suppression of tumults." The conditions of acquiring land, appended to Mark- ham's instructions, were as follows: Those who wish to buy shares in the province can have 5,000 acres for £500, and to pay annually one shilling quit- rent for each 100 acres ; the quit-rent not to begin till 1684. Those who only rent are to pay one penny per acre, not to exceed 200 acres. Those who take over servants — that is, laborers — are to be allowed fifty acres per head and fifty acres to every servant when his time is expired. . . . The passage will come, for masters and mistresses, at most, £6 a head ; for servants £5 a head, and for children under seven years of age fifty shillings. 117 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN From these rates it would appear that there was much less difference between cabin and steerage accommodations in the transatlantic passenger service of 1681 than now. Penn concludes by exhorting all emigrants to "under- stand that they must look for a winter before a summer comes ; they must be willing to be two or three years with- out some of the conveniences they enjoy at home." But he considers it his duty also to inform them that "America is another thing now than it was at the first planting of New England and Virginia. ' ' The circumstances and conditions of Penn's grant were soon noised about the three kingdoms by the means of ad- vertisement usual in that day. His prospectus embodying the propositions above set forth was read at Quaker meet- ings and explained orally at fairs and market-places by Penn's agents. The first results were two ship-loads of emigrants, nearly all Quakers, who sailed in September of 1681. The total number was about a hundred families, or, say, 350 to 400 souls. In one of the ships — the John and Sarah, of London — sailed three commissioners appointed and instructed by Penn to Locate and lay out a great town on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware, . . . where it is most navigable, and the land high, dry and healthy; that is, where most ships may best ride, of deepest draft of water, and if possible to load or unload at the bank or key-side, without boating or lighterage. Such a place being found, lay out ten thousand acres contiguous to it in the best manner you can, as the bounds and extent of the liberties of the said town. 118 Digitized by Microsoft® THE PENNSYLVANIA CHARTER Every share of 5,000 acres [of farming land] shall have one hundred acres of land out of the ten thousand [in town and liberties] . Pitch upon the very middle of the plot, where the town or line of houses is to be laid or run, facing the harbor and great river, for the situation of my house, and let it be, not the tenth part of the town as the conditions say, viz. : that out of every hundred thousand acres shall be reserved to me ten [thousand] , but I shall be content with less than a thirtieth part, to wit : Three Hundred Acres, whereas sev- eral will have two [hundred] by purchasing two shares; that is, ten thousand acres, and it may be fitting for me to exceed a little. . . . Let every house be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of its plot as to the breadthway of it, so that there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a green country town which will never be burnt and always wholesome ! . . . Be sure to keep the conditions hereunto affixed, and see that no vice or evil conversation go uncomplained of or un- punished in any, that God be not provoked to wrath against the country. These instructions were signed "William Penn, 30th of September, 1681"; and were directed to "Nathaniel Allen, John Bezar, and William Crispin, Commissioners to ar- range for a settlement, lay out a town, and treat with the Indians." On. this last-mentioned point Penn emphatically in- structed his commissioners to "be tender of offending the Indians and hearken by honest spies if you can hear that anybody inveigles them not to sell or to stand out and raise the value upon you. . . . Let my letter and conditions with 119 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN purchasers about just dealing with them be read in their own tongue. ... Be grave ; they love not to be smiled on ! " The ship bearing the commissioners arrived late in November. They found that, so far as concerned selection of a site for the "great town," they had been anticipated by Markham. Soon after his arrival, and after his confer- ence with Lord Baltimore at Upland (Chester), the ener- getic deputy had proceeded up the Delaware to reconnoiter. In August — before the date of Penn's instructions to Allen, Bezar, and Crispin — Markham had selected that part of the Philadelphia river-front now bounded by the foot of Pine Street on the south and the foot of Race Street on the north as the most available site for a town afforded by the west bank of the Delaware anywhere near its confluence with the Schuylkill. He had also begun to clear land and had built several small houses, including a log tavern or ian, and a number of "caves" had been excavated in the bluff bank of the river for temporary shelter. Thus, whatever the commissioners may have intended to do, it turned out that the man who actually selected the site and determined the practical foundation of Philadelphia was William Markham. At this point we may briefly survey the system of gov- ernment embodied in Penn's charter: 1. It created a proprietary executive, hereditary in his family, in feoffment. This was feudal. 2. It reserved to the proprietary executive the power to appoint judicial officers. This was, in itself, monarchical, but limited by the power of the people to impeach; and it survives in the Federal Constitution of to-day. 120 Digitized by Microsoft® e3 t 1 w 'oj 1-1 H cS w m 3 PL, !>H 1 J M 13 < fd > a CO P 5 -1 w "^ CS is !?; g U) ,?? m ft H .2 ^ ,0 o ,13 C'J 5? fl M R t£ W rf> S aj )^ -<] O M O i-j Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® PENN'S LAST DAYS children a vast estate so hopelessly entangled in every kind of complication that ruin seemed inevitable. When Hannah Penn died in 1727 she left the same estate to her three sons— the most magnificent domain on earth owned by pri- vate individuals. 343 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER XIII 1717-1776 PENNSYLVANIA UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CHAPTER XIII 1717-1776 PENNSYLVANIA UNDEE PENN'S DESCENDANTS About 1722 Governor Keith had begun to antagonize Hannah Penn, and he covertly advised the popular leaders to organize a party having for its object abolition of the Proprietary system. Penn's will had given the English and Irish estates to Gulielma Springett's children and the Pennsylvania Proprietary to those of Hannah Callowhill. Keith did not like the latter 's eldest son, John Penn, who had then reached the age of twenty-three, and did not be- lieve he would be acceptable to the people — an apprehension which subsequently proved well founded. This made his situation unpleasant. But that was not the worst. In 1720 Keith's father died, leaving to him the baronetcy and a heavily encumbered estate in Aberdeenshire. In hope of making money to pay off these obligations Keith embarked heavily in colonial speculations, not hesitating to use his official position to further private ends. His speculations were not fortunate. In June, 1726, Hannah Penn appointed Patrick Gordon to succeed Keith. This was her last act as executrix. Pinal settlement of the estate under the will soon followed and 347 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN John Penn became chief Proprietary,* though, as appears from the Logan correspondence, she continued to be the real head or directing mind until her death, seven years later. Gordon's term was barren of historical events. Its most noteworthy occurrence was the visit of Thomas Penn In 1732, followed by John Penn in 1734. Thomas Penn was the originator of the famous — or infamous — "walking pur- chase" of September, 1733, to which reference has been made in a preceding page. The impression made by both these sons of Penn and Hannah Callowhill was extremely unpleasant. Those who remembered the courteous manners and gentle bearing of young William Penn, despite his unfortunate adventures, compared his half-brothers most unfavorably with him. Benjamin Franklin was editor and proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette during the visit of Thomas and John Penn. He had never seen young William Penn, but became acquainted with the two other sons. On a certain occasion he remarked to Dr. Read that "according to all accounts there was more of the gentleman in Billy Penn drunk than in both of these Penns sober." John and Thomas were much alike. Neither possessed an atom of William Penn's goodness of heart or breadth of character. They were sordid, unscrupulous, overbearing, and dishonest. John had more sense than Thomas. The latter was little better than a common blockhead in all except money-getting and money-keeping. He was greedy, stingy, and cruel, and withal dull, repellent, and morose. * John Penn's interest in the Proprietary was one-half. His younger brothers, Thomas and Bichard, had each one-fourth. 348 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS John was more presentable socially, and could be agree- able when it suited his fancy. But he was supercilious, and never failed to give the air of condescension to his good graces. He remained in the province but little over a year. During his stay he assumed the Proprietary right to a seat in the council, but there is no record of anything he did, except to propose that the assembly pass an act creating a special court for the collection of arrears of quit-rents; to be independent of the regular courts, and to have power of distraint without appeal. He was reminded by James Logan that the question of quit-rents had been settled by the Carpenter case * many years before, and that an attempt to revive it would doubtless result in a popular movement en masse to abolish the Proprietary. John Penn returned to England in 1736, and was fol- lowed by Thomas in 1741. Neither ever returned. Both went away much disgusted with the colony, a feeling which the colony reciprocated with compound interest, f * This case occurred in 1706. Penn, driven to desperation by his debts in general and the demands of the Fords (see Chapter XII) in particular, had directed Governor Evans to take legal steps for collection of arrears in quit-rents. Joshua Carpenter, whilom bosom-friend of Penn and one of the richest Quakers in the colony, made a test case, with David Lloyd as counsel. Penn's complaint was thrown out of court, and Carpenter recovered damages for the distraint made on his property. f Hardly had Thomas Penn boarded the ship for England, when a bill was introduced in the assembly providing for taxation upon the private estates or " manors " of the Penns, hitherto exempt. The author of this bill was a Quaker named Wharton. It gave rise to a struggle between the popular assembly and the Proprietary which lasted until 1764, when the assembly almost unanimously petitioned the Crown to abolish the Pro- prietary and assume control of the province ; and at the same time framed a representative charter similar to that of New York, which was submitted for approval of the home Government. Nothing was done, however, until twelve years later. 349 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Governor Gordon was generally popular, and his ad- ministration, apart from the scandals brought on by the greed and dishonesty of the two Penns, forms a pleasant interlude in the otherwise troublous history of Proprietary Pennsylvania. He died in June, 1736. James Logan then discharged the chief executive functions ad interim as president of the council until June, 1738, when George Thomas was appointed by the Penn brothers. Thomas was enthusiastically loyal to the Crown. In 1745, when the news of the defeat of the pretender by the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden reached the colony, he gave a grand public dinner in honor of the event and asked the assembly to foot the bills. They quite properly re- fused, on the ground that they could not reasonably be held to pay for a dinner they had not ordered. He then de- frayed the expense out of his own pocket, but the affair stung him deeply. He asked to be relieved shortly after- ward. His request was "taken under advisement," but nothing was done. He waited over a year, and then, on June 17, 1747, peremptorily resigned, leaving Anthony Palmer, president of the council, governor ad interim, and sailed for England a few days afterward. In June, 1748, James Hamilton * was appointed to suc- * James Hamilton was the son of Andrew Hamilton, a Scotchman, who emigrated to Virginia about 1697, and settled in what is now Accomac County, " Eastern Shore," where the son was born in June, 1709. Hamil- ton was not his (Andrew's) real name, which, in fact, was never revealed. He was, in his time, popularly beUered to be a natural son of the Duke of York (James II), to whom his physical resemblance was most striking. When James Hamilton was seren years old, his father, Andrew, removed to Philadelphia, and was appointed attorney-general of the province the next year (1717). He held successively the offices of clerk of the Supreme 350 Digitized by Microsoft® JOHN PENN. Son of William Penn. Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS ceed Thomas. He was the first Pennsylvania governor of American birth and breeding. His administration was the most harmonious and salutary the province had ever en- joyed, excepting, perhaps, the two brief terms of William Penn himself (1682 to 1684 and 1699 to 1701). There was no friction between him and the popular branch. He had no fads and attempted no "reforms." He considered the system as good as a Proprietary government could be, and exerted himself to make it as beneficial to the public as possible. In 1752, on the occasion of the King's birthday, he gave a grand public banquet, ordered a general holiday, and illuminated the city, paying the bills himself. But he was promptly reimbursed by the corporation without request on his part, and the assembly afterward, of its own motion, refunded half the amount to the city cor- poration. Governor Hamilton also popularized himself exceed- Court (1727); member of assembly and speaker (1729-'37); and judge of the Admiralty Court — an appointment of the Crown — which he held until his death, in 1741. James was elected to the assembly at the age of twenty-three, and served six consecutiye terms; mayor of Philadelphia 174:5-'46, and declined reelection to enter the provincial council, of which he was a member ; and in England on public business in 1748, when he was appointed deputy-governor. After Braddock's defeat in 1755 he went to the frontier (being then president of the council) and most strenuously devoted himself to rallying and encouraging the hardy settlers to defend their homes. No public funds being available, he supplied them with rifles, knives, hatchets, ammunition, blankets, and other necessaries out of his private means, which were ample. Among other things, he bought all the rifles then on hand in the gun-shops of Lancaster, at a cost of nearly £2,000. To him more than to any one else the colony was indebted for the chain of forts from the west branch of the Susquehanna to the Mary- land iine at Fort Cumberland. In 1777 he was arrested as a Tory and held on parole nearly two years. 351 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN ingly by personal attention to the needs of the poor. The population of the province had then (1752) reached two hundred thousand, and Philadelphia was a city of forty-odd thousand. Governor Hamilton lent his official influence to the foundation of a seaman's hospital and a general charity hospital for the poor of the city, contributing to them liber- ally from his own private means. His popularity seems to have excited the suspicions or resentment of the Proprie- taries (then Thomas and Richard Penn, John having died in 1746) . They knew, in fact, that Hamilton did not believe the proprietary system ought to be perpetuated, and they suspected him of secretly cooperating with Dr. Franklin and others in the popular movement against it. They did not dare to attempt his removal. However, he disliked them more than they him, and in October, 1754, he resigned per- emptorily, without assigning any reason, and was at once elected president of the council — a position independent of Proprietary appointment or control. He was succeeded by Colonel Robert Hunter Morris, who held office from 1754 to 1756, when he was succeeded by William Denny. Both these administrations were stormy and both governors extremely unpopular, Denny in particular. This fact, however, can hardly be ascribed to fault of theirs. The period was that of the old French War, which, for the first time in the history of the colony, brought the pressure of Indian warfare on a large scale home to her own frontiers. The Quaker peace policy had vanished with Thomas Penn's "walking purchase" of 1733. And now, twenty-odd years later, Pennsylvania was made to feel what had so long been familiar to the frontiers- 352 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS men of New York and New England — the sinister power of French influence upon the Indians. Robert Hunter Morris was a son of Lewis Morris, of New York, and grandson of Richard Morris,* who com- manded Ireton's regiment of horse in Cromwell's army after Ireton became a general. He was therefore of the fighting Puritan stock, and as such ill constituted to govern a Quaker province. Governor Morris had to deal with Pennsylvania and the peculiarities of its Quaker population during the crisis brought on by Braddock's expedition and defeat. The history of his quarrel with the assembly on the subject of defense has been ably written by Winthrop Sargeant. It exhibits him in a light honorable to himself and creditable to his station; and it exhibits the Quakers in an attitude scarcely less pusillanimous and contemptible than that of Governor Evans's "false alarm," forty years before. After several vain efforts to persuade the assembly to adopt a vigorous and manly policy in the general system of defense, Morris resigned. In the letter accompanying his resignation he declared, among other things, that no man of honor, patriotism, or courage could act in concert with such a concourse. * Richard Morris ivas one of those proscribed and condemned on the restoration of Charles II. He went to the West Indies, where he lived in seclusion for a time. Then he came to New York and settled a tract of land (about 3,000 acres) near Haarlem, which he had bought from the In- dians in 1650. This was the manor of Morrisania. He was the founder of the American family which produced, in succeeding generations, Rob- ert Hunter Morris, Lewis Morris, signer of the Declaration, GouTerneur Morris, and many other eminent men, including Colonel Lewis Morris, killed at the head of his regiment in the capture of Monterey, and his son, Colonel Lewis O. Morris, killed in the assault at Cold Harbor in the civil war. 24 353 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN William Denny fell heir to all the troubles of his prede- cessor. But his task was lightened by the action of the frontier settlers, who, after Braddock's defeat, formed in- dependent companies of riflemen and began fighting the Indians in their own way. These settlers were all Scotch- Irish, Germans, or Swiss, with a few Huguenots; but no Quaker was ever known to get — or stay — near such a dan- ger-line as the Pennsylvania border was from 1755 to 1759. The few Quakers on the frontier — mostly traders — fled to Philadelphia at the first sign of war.* In 1756, shortly after Governor Denny assumed office and the refusal of the assembly to grant supplies for de- fense became known along the frontier, the rough moun- taineers assembled in Philadelphia to the number of four hundred or five hundred. Clad in buckskin, wearing long hair, and armed with long rifles, accoutered with powder- horns, tomahawks, bullet-pouches, and hunting-knives, they terrorized the town. There is no record of any overt act on their part, though they openly announced their intention — if the assembly did not vote the supplies they needed — to take them wherever they could be found. Though they numbered not more than one to the hundred of the city's population, every one knew that if they once began they * In 1755, just after Braddock's defeat, two Quakers trading at Loyal Hanna asked Captain James Brady to escort them with a squad of his men — the famous independent company of " Brady's Kangers " — to a place of safety. Brady detailed seyenteen men, under Sergeant McGil- very, to " escort the Quakers." The detachment marched with them one day, then seized their pack-horses, confiscated their goods, and told the Quakers to run for their lives — which they did. The feeling among the frontiersmen was almost as bitter toward the Quakers as toward the Indians. 354 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS would ravage the town in spite of any civic force that could oppose them. The Quakers, finding themselves between the devil and the deep sea — with Indians on one hand and angry moun- taineers on the other — began in a niggardly way to vote supplies. A historian * of Quaker sympathies says of this period : The assemblies always offended by trying to spare the purses of the people, and the governors always got provoked because they had not lavish supplies for the King's serv- ice. ... It was really pitiable to see what levies were perpetually put upon the poor province to help them [the English] out of the squabbles generated by the courts of Europe. A contest for the ejnpire of North America seems to have been nothing more imposing than ' ' a squabble, ' ' from the Quaker point of view. In a special message dated September 8, 1757, Governor Denny says : To your puerile plaints and subterfuges of excuse un- worthy of men or of manhood I offer no answer. Moderation is agreeable to me. But you might have had another governor candid enough to tell you, what I keenly feel, that the whole tenor of your memorial of remonstrance is evasive, frivolous, and indecent. And another governor might also be frank enough to say that your attitude is more likely the dictate of cowardice than the prompting of conscience. ... If detraction and personal abuse of your governor were worthy of notice in this more than in former instances, it might be said a governor of Pennsylvania soon gets accus- * Watson's Annals, vol. ii, p. 275. 355 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN tomed to such in a degree that leaves your censure without sting. ... I have the less reason to regret such usage, since it is obvious, from your similar conduct toward those gone before me, that you are not so much displeased with the person governing as impatient of being governed at all. However, under various kinds of pressure, but chiefly fear of another and more earnest visit from the moun- taineers, the assembly during the years 1757-1759 granted supplies amounting to £218,000, about half of which was for General Forbes 's expedition against Fort Duquesne.* To raise the amount necessary for the Forbes expedition the assembly found it necessary to tax the property o,f the Penns. Governor Denny 's signature to this bill gave mortal offense to Richard and Thomas Penn, who forthwith re- moved him. This foolish act, the reasons for which soon became public, was the last nail in the cofiBn of proprietary government. The next assembly repeated and increased the tax. The Penns tried to resist it, but yielded when the assembly, council, and judiciary joined in a system of dis- traint which the governor could not control. Denny said to Dr. Franklin that he was glad to escape, and that three years of the governorship as he had held it would turn any sane man against the proprietary system. "Particularly with Tom and Dick Penn for Proprietors!" was the sar- donic rejoinder of the philosopher. James Hamilton was now reappointed governor and held the office from November 17, 1759, to October 31, 1763, * For this appropriation General Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in- chief, thanked the assembly in person, saying, among other things, that he appreciated their sacrifice of conscientious scruples to the public good. 356 Digitized by Microsoft® THOMAS PENN. Son of William Peun. Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS without special incident. He was then relieved by John Penn second, son of Richard. John Penn held the govern- ment until October 16, 1771. His "reign," as Franklin called it, was the stormiest in all the Proprietary annals. In the first year a formidable revolt of the mountaineers occurred, known as the "revolution of the Paxton boys." They defied a battalion of British regulars at Lancaster, informing them that "if they fired so much as one shot their scalps would ornament every cabin from the Susque- hanna to the Ohio." The regulars did not fire. The Paxton boys then helped themselves to all the horses and supplies they wanted — including the ammunition-wagons of the regulars — and started for Philadelphia. They appeared on the heights of Germantown nearly a thousand strong, and demanded that certain Indians then guarded in the Northern Liberties be given to them or they would sack the city. Finding that the regulars could not be depended on to face them, a deputa- tion of the most influential citizens parleyed with the insur- gents. Finally, by agreeing to everything they demanded — except the privilege of massacring the Indians— the citizens succeeded in persuading the mountaineers to return to their homes. Soon after this the assembly petitioned the Crown and Parliament to abolish the Proprietary. John Penn went to England in 1771, leaving his brother Richard acting gov- ernor. He returned and resumed the office in August, 1773. It seemed a coincidence of fate that the last Proprietary governor of Pennsylvania should have been, like the first, a Penn, grandson of his grandfather, and that — with the 357 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN brief exception of Eiehard, hardly worth mention — ^they were the only Penns who ever governed in person. The grandson eame only to attend the funeral and witness the burial of the system his grandfather founded. He tried hard to carry water on both shoulders, but the spirit then moving the people knew no middle ground. The most cruel and sordid episode of John Penn's ab- horrent "reign" is known in history as "the Pennamite War ' ' — or ' ' Wars. ' ' This is now an almost forgotten page of history, and might have gone to oblivion altogether but for its association with the story of Wyoming. Francis W. Halsey, in 1901, in his vivid history The Old New York Frontier, gave it a new lease upon memory. He says (pp. 217-218) : Wyoming had been settled from Connecticut, and under the charter granted by the King was claimed as a township of that State, with the name of Westmoreland. But it was also claimed by the heirs of William Penn. For many years before the Revolution there had been bitter, and even armed, controversy over this disputed ownership. During these Pennamite Wars the settlement on three occasions had virtually been destroyed. As early as 1750 men from Con- necticut had visited this beautiful wilderness valley and made report on its extraordinary fertility. But it was not until 1762 that any from that State arrived to cultivate the soil, and not until after the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 that they came in large numbers to establish homes upon it. . . . From the Pennamite Wars had survived at Wyoming a stockade called Forty Fort. . . . It is to be regretted that Halsey should have treated the Pennamite Wars as a simple incident in the history of 358 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS Wyoming, and even then merely by way of explaining the existence of the only defensive work it possessed in 1778. His book, however, deals specifically with New York State history, with which during the Revolution the Wyoming massacre of 1778 had close relations. The settlement of 1762 which he mentions consisted of about fifty families. The husbands and fathers had come from Connecticut in the previous year, made clearings, raised a little corn, built some humble log cabins, and the next summer brought on their families — mostly from Litch- field. John Penn heard of this settlement in 1764, the second year of his "reign," and he sent constables to order them off, claiming that they were within the territory cov- ered by the treaty and deed of Governor Dongan on behalf of his grandfather in 1686.* Meantime the Wyoming settlement had grown to a popu- lation of nearly 3,000 — a blooming oasis in the wilderness. An association of Quakers, called the Delaware Company, was formed in Philadelphia, who proposed to buy the lands of John Penn and pay cash, at a valuation about four times that of William Penn's original terms. They expected thereby to get at comparatively small cost the benefit of the improvements made by the Connecticut pioneers. But a condition of their purchase was that John Penn should oust the settlers. In 1770 John Penn hired a gang of ruffians, mainly discharged British soldiers, to invade Wyoming and * For particulars of this transaction see Colonial Records, Penna., Tol. ii; also Janney, pp. 427, 428. The deed from Dongan to Penn is dated January 13, 1696, and the consideration named is £100. It prcrrides for cession of " all lands of the Susquehannah south of the colony bound- ary of New York." 359 Digitized by Microsoft® 360 Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS drive the pioneers from their homes. Then they defied him and built the- famous Forty Fort. The settlers, after many vicissitudes and some fighting, held their ground. It is amazing that John Penn, with the distant thunders of the American Revolution muttering in his ears, and the foundations of his absurd and obsolete Proprietary crumbling under him, should have attempted such an atrocity upon the brink of his own ruin. But what shall be said of the association of Quakers who so cunningly and so cruelly devised a scheme of profit from the misery and murder of the Wyoming settlers? The darkest chapter in all the history of Quakerdom is that one. Never before or since did the Inward Light of Quakerism shine so balef uUy. It was the Spiritualization of Self into a Gospel of Greed; of Avarice into a Religion of Rapine; the Prayer for Money that had Murder for its Answer. The Quakers of Philadelphia would not take up arms themselves against the Wyoming settlers; but they stood ready to grasp the profits of their improvements whenever John Penn's ruffianly mercenaries might drive the pioneers from their humble homes. In the Delaware Land Company are to be found such Quaker names as Carpenter, Shippen, Norris, Story, Griscom, Pemberton, Wharton, Pusey, Hill, Barker, Bailey, et al., all leading "Friends," all pious, all devout, all rich, and yet all ready and anxious to swell their coffers with the plunder torn from a feeble settlement of pioneers in a wilderness which was no man's property, but the prize of every man brave enough to invade and subdue it. Well may the student of history search Quaker writers in vain for a true story of the "Pennamite Wars." 361 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN It was the last gasp. In the fall of 1775 the Continental Congress passed the act creating a navy and giving Paul Jones a lieutenant's commission. At the same time the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety considered the abroga- tion of the Penn charter and abolition of the Proprietary. In September, 1776, two months after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Committee of Safety resolved itself into the " Supreme Executive Council," deposed John Penn, took control of the province of Pennsylvania, made it a State in the Revolutionary Confederation, and the rule of Penn and the Penns became a tradition. But though the visible form of Proprietary government disappeared, a good deal of its virus lingered. To this day it has not been wholly extirpated. The boundaries of the Pennsylvania territory covered by the original grant to William Penn in 1681 had never been definitively fixed until the Fort Stanwix treaty of 1768, which gave to Pennsylvania the Susquehanna Valley as far north as the mouth of Towanda Creek and the land west that lay south of a line drawn from the head of Towan- da Creek to a point on the Alleghany River several miles above Port Pitt. This delimitation gave the Proprietary under the original grant jurisdiction over about twenty million acres — or, say, thirty-one thousand square miles of land — of territory that has since become the richest in- dustrial State of the Union. When the Proprietary was finally abolished in 1779, the interest of the Penn family in the soil was vested in the State. The Act of 1779, however, appropriated £130,000 to be paid out of the treasury to the heirs of William Penn 362 Digitized by Microsoft® AEEEST OF THE CONNECTICUT SETTLEES IN WYOMING. From a drawing by Howard Pyle. Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS in full of all claims and damages. It also secured to them all private estates, lands, or manors owned by them in fee simple at the date of the act. The State held the lands — or sold them to actual settlers — until 1789, when such as remained unsold were trans- ferred to the Federal Government as public lands. The books of the comptroller-general's office show that from 1780 to 1789 the State received from sales of the es- cheated or sequestrated lajids of the Penn Proprietary the sum of £825,000 in round figures (say $4,225,000). In addition to the amount paid by the State of Penn- sylvania— £130,000 (say $650,000)— the Penn heirs made a claim for damages amounting to £945,000, under the Act of Parliament "to indemnify loyal subjects of his Britan- nic Majesty for losses suffered in the American War." The Penn heirs were all Tories — in common with most of the Quakers of Pennsylvania — and therefore entitled to the benefits of the act mentioned. Their claim was reviewed by a select committee of the House of Commons, who reported in favor of granting £500,000 to the Penn heirs, which was paid in consols at par. It thus appears that the heirs of William Penn by Han- nah Callowhill realized from the governments of Pennsyl- vania and Great Britain together £630,000, or, say, $3,- 150,000 in money, besides securing their private estates in Pennsylvania. In conclusion we shall not attempt any general survey or analysis of the character of William Penn. If, with the facts we have deployed before him, the reader is unable to form an estimate of his own, nothing within our power to 363 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN say furtHer could help him. But we are confident all will agree that William Penn, in every aspect of character and in every relation of life, was a good man. It is, we think, equally apparent that he was a great man. Sometimes he was a great statesman; at other times he was a great Quaker ; but he was never both at the same time. 364 Digitized by Microsoft® INDEX A DOLF, GUSTAV. 1. American Philosophical Society, 295. Annals of Oxford, 55. Annals, Watson 's, 355. Anne, Queen, 258 et seq. Aubrey, William, 256. B ISHOP OF LONDON, 112. Blackwell, Captain John, deputy-gov- ernor of Pennsylvania, 224, 225. Blake. Admiral, Private Circular to Officers of Rank, 6, 10. Boundary-lines, of Penn's grant, 110; of Pennsylvania, diflSculty of locating, 253; definitely fixed, 1768, 361. Buel, John, 42, 45. Byng, Admiral, 8. Byrd, William, deputy-governor of Virginia, 124. Byrd Manuscripts, 124; extracts from, slandering Fenn, 125. CALLOWHILL, HANNAH, second wife of Penn, 231; her character and influence, 232, 235. Calvin, John 59. Captain Pipe. Indian chief, 143. Charles II, 40, 41, 46, 78, 97. Charter, Penn's, provisions of, 120 et seq; amended, 308. Chigwell Free Grammar-school, 8, 31. Church of England. 41, 87, 89, 90. Code of Discipline, 132. Colonial Records, 359. Colonies, population of, in 1703, 268. Colony of Pennsylvania, charter of, 107, 112. Commissioners to colonies, 119, 123. Comte de Frontenac, 210. 36 Conformity Act, 47. Constitution of West Jersey, 98. Conventicle Acts, 87, 185. Conversations of William of Orange, quotation from, concerning Quakers, 187, 213. Council of Ten, 101. Croese, Gerard, author of Historia Quakeriana, 181, 206. Cromwell, Oliver, accession to power, 6; mentioned, 8, 9, 10, 11; his des- potism, 46. Cromwell, Richard, 31, 39, 40. Croxton, Thomas, 22, 26. DE BUADE, COMTE DE FRON- TENAC, 210. De Castries, cruise and capture of Eng- lish vessels, 271. Delaware Indians, 142. Denny, William, 352. Dissenters, 42. Duke of York, 40, 41, 108, 179. Dutch colony, 92. XpARL OF RANELAGH, 254. Earl of Romney, 216. Emigration to Pennsylvania, 118, 185, 253, 286. Episcopal Church, its bigotry, 48; its cruelty, 87, 89, 90. Evans, John, deputy-governor of Penn- sylvania, 266; his success in the colony, 269, 270, 271; his removal, 275; his character, 280; death, 284. FENWICK, JOHN, 93, 94, 116, 144, 165. Fenwick's island, 165. 6 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Fletcher, Benjamin, Governor of New York, 213, 214. 215. Ford, PhUip, 316, 320. Forster, William, E,, vindication of Penn, 194. Fort Stanwix treaty, 361. Fox, George, his doctrines, 19, 34, 133, 168, 170,214, 252 et aeq. Fox's Code of Church Discipline, 132. Franklin, Benjamin, 348. Free Society of Traders, organized by Penn, 133. "Friends," 26, 27. Frontenac, Comte de, 210. plOOKIN, COLONEL CHARLES, ^^ deputy-governor for Penn, 282 et aeq. Government by correspondence, 263. Grant of land to William Penn, bounda- ries of, 110, "Great Law," 121. TTAMILTON, ANDREW, appointed -■ — ■- deputy-governor by Penn, 257; his death, 266. Hamilton, James, 350, 356. Harcourt, Sir Simon, 318. Harvey, Thomas, 32, 58, 69, 70. Hazard's Annals of Pennsylvania, 109. Historia Quakeriana, 181, 207. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 139. House of Commons, 186. Huguenots, 61. IMMIGRATION to Pennsylvania, 253, 286. Indians, 141, 143, 145, 148; description of, by Penn, 152 et seq., 161. " Inner Light," 17. Ironsides, Ireton's, 23. Iroquois Indians, 161. TAMES II, DUKE OF YORK, ^ Clarke's Life of, 107; accession to the throne, 179; not responsible for judicial murders, 191 ; his brief reign, 199. Janney, Quaker historian, 225. Jasper, Margaret, mother of Penn, 5. Johnson, Sir William, 141; opinions of the Iroquois, 161. Journal of Travels, 55, 71. K EITH, GEORGE, 229, 230, 231. Keith, Sir William, successor of Charles Gookin, 289, 290, 291. King William III, his coalition against France and Spain, 249 ; his death, 258. Kirke, Percy, 190, 191. " Kirke's Lambs," 191. T EE, ARTHUR, 160. Literature, theological, during the early life of William Penn, 13. Lloyd, David, hostility to Penn, 243, 263. Lloyd, Thomas, 223. Locke, John, 99. Loe, Thomas, 31, 32, 33, 34, 67. Logan, Deborah, 295, 296. Logan, James, representative of Penn, 244, 263. Lord Baltimore, 116, 117, 146; claims all sovereignty south of the fortieth parallel, 164, 169; patent to, 177. Louis XIV, 200, 202, 208, 209, 210. Luther, Martin, 13, 15. Lutherans, 22. MACAULAY, characterization of, 193. Manor of Williamstadt, 277, 279. Markham, Captain William, deputy- governor of Pennsylvania, 115, 116, 117; selected site of Philadelphia, 120, 228, 241. Maryland, settlement of, 268. Mason-Dixon line, 116, 253. " Merry Monarch," 46. Mompesson, Roger, appointed chief justice of Pennsylvania by Penn, 309, Morley, George, 49, 54. Morris, Colonel Robert Hunter, 352. Morris, Richard, 353. NO CROSS, NO CROWN, by Will- iam Penn, 78, 91. Non-conformists, 42. North American colonies, 210. r\LD elm-tree, 144. Old Lichfield, 23. 366 Digitized by Microsoft® INDEX Oldmixon, John, refers to Penn's return to England in 1684, 171 ; quoted, 194; his life of Queen Anne, 259. Orthodox Quakers, 229. P •EACE of Ryswick, 239. Pemberton MSS., 316. Penn Charter School, 229. Penn, Hannah, made executrix of Penn's private estate, 288, 340, 342; death, 343. Penn, John, 348, 349. Penn, Lffititia, daughter of William Penn, 255; her marriage to William Aubrey, 256. Penn, Thomas, originator of the "walking purchase," 348, 350. Penn, William, Jr., 267, 275. Penn, Sir William, early experience as a sailor, 5; promotion to rear-admiral, 6; commander of fleet as vice-admiral, 1654, 7; failure of expedition, and thrown into prison by Cromwell, 8; his release, 10, 12; declared for restora- tion of the Stuart dynasty, 40, 56, 57, 62, 64, 65, 67; Life of, 77; his death, 77. Penn, William, place of birth and en- vironment of his youth, 4; his charac- ter and predecessors, 5 ; early educa^ tion at Chigwell school, 8, 12; his pre- cociousness, 12; influence of John Saltmarsh's, writings, 18; his first spiritual experience, 32 ; matricula^ tion at Christ Church College, 35 under his father's displeasure, 53 leaves Oxford, 55; visit to Paris, 61 as student of law, 63 ; portrait of, 66 as Governor of Kinsale, 67; final conversion, 70 ; his Journal of Travels, 71; letter to Earl of Orrery, 73; bi- ographies of, 76; his father's estate, 78; Quaker preacher and founder of West Jersey, 83; as author, 83; his marriage, 85; trial at Old Bailey, 88; his travels in Europe, 94; prepares scheme of government for new colony, 95; first appearance in politics, 102; petitions to King for grant in America, 107; his instructions to commission- ers for settlement of colony, 119; his land system, 122; his detractors, 124; his first year in Pennsylvania, 131; partiality for Quakers, 132; organizes Free Society of Traders, 133; his first voyage to the New World, 134; on the verge of insolvency, 135; founder of the ship-building industry on the Delaware, 136; meeting with Lord Baltimore, 146; explores his domains, 148; his description of the Indians, 152 et aeq.; described by a contemporary, 163; his letter to Duke of York, 166; returns to England, 1684, 169; aversion to statistics, 170; at the court of James II, 175; reasons for his long absence from colony, 175; his memorial to the court, 177 ; visits Holland, 185 ; ground for Macaulay's charge against him, 192; summoned before secret council for treasonable correspondence, 206; his arrest for conspiracy, 208; three years in seclusion, 219 ; letter to Thomas Lloyd describing his release, 219; illness and death of his wife, 220; his instructions to Governor Black- well, 226, 227; second marriage, 231; visits Ireland, 1698, 232; returns to his province, 1699, 240; his house in Philadelphia. 242; residence at Penns- bury Manor, 244; evasive behavior toward the King, 250; councils with the Indians, 252; second visit to England, 1701, 257; financial em- barrassments, 263, 278 ; weakening of mental faculties, 283; his connection with the government of Pennsylvania ceases, 289; his last official act, 289; his last days, and letters to Logan, 295; his career in England, 1702 to 1712, 296; his diplomacy, 301; causes of his troubles, 304; imprisoned for debt, 319; fareweU address, 329; his last letters and final illness, 335; his death, 341. Penn's charter signed, 110, 114; its pro- visions for system of government, 120 ; estimate of its value, 121 ; Penn's own views, 124; amended, 308. Penn's grant, 110, 165. Penn's treaty, 139, 141. Penns and Pennington, 33, 58. Pennsbury Manor, 138; description of, 244. 367 Digitized by Microsoft® WILLIAM PENN Pennsylvania, origin of name, 111 ; charter of, 107, 112; in Penn's ab- sence, 219 et seq.; Gordon's History of, 223; under Penn's descendants, 347; boundary-lines fixed, 361. Pennsylvania charter, 107. Pennsylvania colony, growing dissen- sions and confusion in Penn's absence, 221. ** Pennsylvania Dutch," 189. Pennsylvania province, population in 1704, 267. Pepys, Sir Samuel, Diary of, 41, 56, 62. Philadelphia, settlement of, 137; popu- lation in 1704, 267. Population of colonies, 1703, 268. Praise-God Barebones, 26. Preamble of Concessions, 97. Proprietary finally abolished, 361. Proprietary governor of Pennsylvania, 319. Protector, the great, 4, 9, 39. Protestantism in northern Europe and England, 60. Proud's History of Pennsylvania, 137. Puritan creed, 23, 25. Puritans, 22, 24, 45, 46, 47, 61. /QUAKER MARRIAGES, 47. Quakers, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 45, 73, 87, 95, 103; as non-combatants, 113, 118, 132; their commerce with In- dians, 140, 144, 179, 214,225; dress of. 233, 265; tendency toward liberal- ism, 267, 269; their panic and flight from Philadelphia, 272, 277, 278, 360. Quaker calendar, 219. Queen Anne's War, 101; her friendship for Penn, 258, 259, 260. Queen Mary, 204, 205, 208. "DESTORATION, its effect upon the -*-^ spiritual conditions in England, 41. Revivals, psychological effects, 72. Roundheads, 24. SALTMARSH, JOHN, writings of, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. Selected writings, 323. Shanningarry, 67, Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 15, 16. Ship-building in Philadelphia, beginning of, 147. Sidney, Algernon, 99, 101, 102, 113. Sign of the Blue Anchor, 137. Smith, Joseph, 65. Society of Friends, 19, 259. Sparkles of Glory, 15, 18, 28, 31. Springett, Gulielma Maria, wife of William Penn, 85; her death, 220. Standish, Myles, 141, 144. Story, John, 132. Story, Thomas, journal of, 338. Stuyvesant, Peter, 177. npA NGIER LAMBS, 190. Ten Eyck, Cornelius, 211. "The Great Law," 146. Theology in the seventeenth century, 14, 59. "Treaty Elm," picture of, by Benjamin West, 139. Trenchard, John, 220. u NDER the Restoration, 39. YAN ALSTYNE, CAPTAIN BA- RENT, 211. Vane, Sir Harry, 11. Venables, General, 7. Virginia Historical Society, 124. Virginia, map of, 165; settlement of, 268. "VTTANSTEAD, 8. War of Spanish succession, 268. Watson's Annals, 355. Webb, Maria, 33. Welcome, voyage of, 136. Werden, Sir John, agent of Duke of York, 108. West Indian expedition, 39. West Jersey Colony, constitution of, 98. White settlers, primitive, Penn's de- scription of, 162. Wilkinson, John. 132. William and Mary, 186, 188, 204 et seq. William of Orange, 199; how his reign affected Penn's interests, 204, 206 et seq., 227, 233. Wood, Anthony, Annals of Oxford 56. 368 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® 'U^i 'I' ij ,nl"' "■filial Mk ' ' J' . fiMfjai^M'.^ s' -.1,1- r n 1 p ? ■ -'3, t ^ 1^ " J < J- ^ < V