Penn in Disfavor

Penn In Disfavor 

by Rupert Sargent Holland

The new king of England, William III., was an honest, upright man, and made a fine ruler, in many ways one of the very finest that England has ever had. The government had been very corrupt under the last two Stuart kings; under William and Mary it became respectable. William had already made the small country of the Netherlands a power in the world, and had fought valiantly to defend the Protestant cause. When he became king of the much stronger country of England, he said to a friend, "At last I have a weapon whose blows will hurt!" He meant that he could now do more than ever for religious freedom.

And he did more for religious freedom than any king of England ever had done. He did not make promises only to break them, nor play off one party against another for his own selfish aims. He found the country a very network of intrigue and plotting, and he straightened it out as speedily as he could. He was a colder, more reserved man than either Charles, the "Merry Monarch," or James II. had been, and he had of course to make a great many changes in the government, so that it followed quite naturally that those men who were used to the two Stuart kings were not altogether pleased with William. Penn was one of those men; having been fond of Charles and James, he did not take kindly to William; and he allowed himself to appear almost an enemy to the new ruling house.

Now King William, although he had no particular affection for the Quaker leader, was quite ready to be perfectly fair with him. He would probably have been glad to ask Penn's advice in regard to matters that concerned the Quakers, had not an unfortunate accident happened which placed Penn under suspicion. The exiled King James wrote a letter to Penn from France; and, as King William's spies were careful to trace all the letters James sent to England, it soon became known that Penn had been receiving messages from the exiled king. The first thing Penn knew he was served with an order to appear before the Privy Council and answer to a charge of carrying on a treasonable correspondence. He was not frightened. He went at once to the Council, surrendered himself, and asked that he might be allowed to make his answer in the presence of the king. This was agreed to, and the meeting was set for the next day.

William was gracious and kindly when the Quaker, hat in hand, appeared before him; and the king alluded to the pleasure he had had in meeting Mr. Penn at the Hague. Then he drew out the letter from King James that his spies had intercepted, and handed it to Penn, saying that the signature was undoubtedly that of James Stuart. He then asked Penn to read the letter aloud. This Penn did, and found that the letter reminded Penn of James's friendship for his father and for himself, and hoped that in its hour of need he would come to the aid of the Stuart cause.

Penn handed the letter back to the king, who asked what King James meant by requesting Penn to come to his aid, and why James had written to him. Penn answered that it was impossible for him to prevent James writing to him, if the late king wished to do so. He then went on to admit that he had loved King James in his prosperity, and could not hate him now in his adversity; that he was willing to repay his kindness in any private way he could; but that he had no thought of disloyalty to the new sovereign, and had never been guilty of any disloyal act. His defense was so manly and frank that William was willing to discharge Penn at once, but, as some of his Council objected, the king ordered William Penn to give bail to appear at the next "Trinity term" of court, which began on May 22 and ended on June 12. When Penn furnished this bail, he was given his liberty.

Soon afterward King William went to Ireland to put down a rebellion that was being led by James and his followers, and in his absence Queen Mary took charge of the affairs of state. She listened to the stories of some men who were doubtless trying to gain her favor by slandering others, and caused the arrest of eighteen prominent men who were charged with conspiring "to restore James Stuart to the throne of England." One of the names on the list was that of William Penn. He was arrested, and again released on bail. The case never came to trial, but these two charges were sufficient to keep him under the eye of the law, and force him to lead a secluded and careful life. Once let a man who had been as prominent and popular as William Penn fall into disfavor and scores of enemies will spring up to steal away his good name. So it was then, and many a time in the years that were to come he must have longed for the free, outdoor life of his colony across the seas where he had been so happy.

After a time he began to plan to return to Pennsylvania, and advertised for more settlers to go out there with him. He was on the point of sailing when he learned by chance that another warrant had been issued for his arrest, and that already the officers were looking for him. Probably he now despaired of clearing his name to the satisfaction of the government; in any event he decided on a new course; he did not give himself up, but instead went into hiding, disappearing as if he were really afraid of trying to prove his innocence.

No one knows exactly what became of Penn during those next three years. Some say that he took private lodgings in London, and explain that the great city was so full of little, hidden courts and narrow, twisting alleys that it was easy for a man to conceal himself there for a long time. Others say that he spent part of that time in France, and it seems likely that much of the time he was on the move, for he himself wrote in a letter, "I have been above these three years hunted up and down, and could never be allowed to live quietly in city or country."

It was a most unfortunate situation for a man who had lived the upright life that William Penn had, and one who had done so much for liberty of conscience. It seems as if Penn must have been afraid of the lying statements of enemies, and feared that their false words would outweigh the truth. There were then a number of men in England who made a good living by being "informers," making up their charges out of whole cloth. Unscrupulous persons sometimes sought the help of such informers to put enemies out of the way. Penn wrote to a meeting of Quakers in London, "My privacy is not because men have sworn truly, but falsely, against me; 'for wicked men have laid in wait for me and false witnesses have laid to my charge things that I knew not.'" He also sent a letter to his friends in Pennsylvania, saying,

"By this time thou wilt have heard of the renewal of my troubles, the only hinderance of my return, being in the midst of my preparations with a great company of adventurers when they came upon me. The jealousies of some and unworthy dealings of others have made way for them; but under and over it all the ancient Rock has been my shelter and comfort; and I hope yet to see your faces with our ancient satisfaction."

It hardly seems credible that Penn could have actually conspired against the new king and queen, and yet plots were much in the air in those days, and, as we have already seen, the Quaker leader could be rather easily influenced by people of whom he was fond. In any event, he seems at that time to have been treated as an object of suspicion, and at this distant date it cannot be said positively whether he deserved this suspicion or whether he was the unhappy victim of unscrupulous "informers."

King William left England on a visit to the Hague, and in his absence another plot was discovered, this time to bring James over from France in the king's absence and seize London before the army could be ready to defend it. The plot was discovered before it had made any real headway. Bishop Burnet said, "The men who laid this design were the Earl of Clarendon, the Bishop of Ely, the Lord Preston, and his brother Mr. Graham, and Penn, the famous Quaker."

The first four of these men were really guilty, and one of them, Preston, being actually caught with the papers in his possession, saved his life by turning state's evidence, and in his confession named William Penn as one of the conspirators. So Penn was included in the order for the arrest of all the traitors.

There was nothing to prove Penn guilty, so he simply kept up his policy of hiding. He did, however, send his brother-in-law to Henry Sydney, an old friend of his who was high in favor with King William. Sydney agreed to meet Penn and hear his side of the matter. The two men met, and afterward Sydney wrote to the king and told him what Penn had said. The sum of this was that Penn was really a loyal subject of William's. He said that he was not plotting and knew of no plot, and only asked that the king would grant him an interview so that he might clear himself.

Being busy in Ireland, the king could not see him at that time, and so Penn kept in concealment. A little later he wrote again to Sydney, urging him to beg the king not to believe all the unjust stories that were being spread concerning him. He said that he only desired to be allowed to live quietly in England or America, and added that the Quakers would vouch for his keeping quiet and doing no harm. He ended by saying that he felt that he had been very much mistreated, and that a less peaceable subject might almost have been driven to conspiracies by such hard usage.

He did not dare, however, to give himself up for trial on any of the charges against him. He felt certain that he could explain away those charges if he might meet the king privately, but he would not stand an open trial in court. He said to Sydney, "Let me be believed and I am ready to appear; but when I remember how they began to use me in Ireland upon corrupt evidence before this business, and what some ill people have threatened here, besides those under temptation, and the providences that have successively appeared for my preservation under this retirement, I can not, without unjustifiable presumption, put myself into the power of my enemies." It is a very strange and mixed-up situation, it being clear that Penn was afraid of what his enemies might show against him, though whether there was actually any good ground for their charges no one can positively say.

He must have felt uneasy even when hiding in England, for presently he went to France. History does not tell us what he did there, nor how long he remained. In the meantime King William took away from him the government of his province of Pennsylvania, and the rents of his estates in Ireland were declared confiscated.

After some time the fugitive must have thought that the government might have become more friendly to him, for he tried to get Lord Rochester to make his peace with King William. He said that if the king would dismiss the charges against him, he would go back to Pennsylvania, although he would like first to go to Ireland and try to recover some of bis ruined estates. There was now less fear of conspiracies of followers of James II.; moreover, the government may well have thought that there was little danger to be feared from Penn; and that they would be well rid of him if he would go to Pennsylvania and use his energies in straightening out matters there. Three noblemen, Lords Rochester, Ranelagh, and Romney, the new title of his friend Henry Sydney, saw the king on Penn's behalf. William was willing to be lenient. So Penn was able to write this interesting letter to his friends in his American colony:

"This comes by the Pennsylvania Merchant, — Harrison, commander, and C. Saunders, merchant. By them and this know, that it hath pleased God to work my enlargement, by three Lords representing my case as not only hard, but oppressive; that there was nothing against me but what impostors, or those that are fled, or that have, since their pardon refused to verify (and asked me pardon for saying what they did), alleged against me; that they had long known me, some of them thirty years, and had never known me to do an ill thing, but many good offices; and that for not being thought to go abroad in defiance of the Government, I might and would have done it two years ago; and that I was, therefore, willing to wait to go about my affairs, as before, with leave; that I might be the better respected in the liberty I took to follow it.

"King William answered, 'That I was his old acquaintance, as well as theirs; and that I might follow my business as freely as ever; and that he had nothing to say to me,' — upon which they pressed him to command one of them to declare the same to the Secretary of State, Sir John Trenchard, that if I came to him, or otherwise, he might signify the same to me, which he also did. The Lords were Rochester, Ranelagh, and Sydney; and the last, as my greatest acquaintance, was to tell the Secretary; accordingly he did; and the Secretary, after speaking himself, and having it from Ring William's own mouth, appointed me a time to meet him at home; and did with the Marquis of Winchester, and told me I was as free as ever; and as he doubted not my prudence about my quiet living, for he assured me I should not be molested or injured in any of my affairs, at least while he held that post. The Secretary is my old friend, and one I served after the D. of Monmouth and Lord Russel's business; I carried him in my coach to Windsor, and presented him to Ring James; and when the Revolution came, he bought my four horses that carried us. It was about three or four months before the Revolution. The Lords spoke the 25th of November, and he discharged me on the 30th.

"From the Secretary I went to our meeting, at the Bull and Mouth; thence to visit the sanctuary of my solitude; and after that to see my poor wife and children; the eldest being with me all this while. My wife is yet weakly; but I am not without hopes of her recovery, who is of the best of wives and women."

So Penn came out of his hiding and appeared again in the full light of London. We find a man named Narcissus Luttrell writing in his diary for December 5, 1693: "Wm. Penn, the Quaker, having for some time absconded, and having compromised the matters against him, appears now in public, and on Friday last held forth at the Bull and Mouth in St. Martin's."

As he was always an active, energetic man, William Penn had been busy writing during the time of his concealment. He had written a number of new Quaker pamphlets, and also his famous collection of maxims called "Fruits of Solitude." In a wider and more interesting field he had also written "An Essay towards the Present Peace of Europe," in which he urged that all disputes between governments be settled by a court of arbitration, and that a United States of Europe, with a general council containing representatives of each nation, should be formed.

It is said that Penn's devoted wife had gone to King James and his queen in France every year since he had lost his throne, and carried them tokens of devotion from their friends in England. She was always well received, and even the supporters of William could find little fault in so gracious an act. But Guli Penn said that she did this from friendship for the exiles, and not through any opposition to the new rulers of her land.

Soon after Penn was free to live as he pleased his gentle wife died, leaving three children, Springett, William, and Letitia. They had been a devoted couple, and Penn found this loss a very hard one to bear. Difficulties of many sorts beset him. His fortune had been spent in various ways during the troubled days of his fall from favor, and he now looked across the sea, in the hope that he might find in his province of Pennsylvania some of the peace and satisfaction he had known there on his first visit, and had dreamed of from time to time ever since.

       

Penn Goes To America Again 

King William had taken the government of Pennsylvania away from William Penn probably because he thought that a colony governed by a Quaker friend of James Stuart might easily become a prey to French greed. But when the king and Penn became reconciled, the province was given back to Penn, in August, 1694. Although he was anxious to see his new city of Philadelphia again, it was not until five years later that Penn was able to cross the Atlantic. This was largely due to the fact that he had very little money left.

His colony of Pennsylvania had cost him a great deal of money; and, although he had expected large returns from the land and natural products there, he found that the colony caused greater and greater leakage to his purse. The settlers would not pay even the very small quit-rent of one shilling a year for each hundred acres, and were constantly calling on Penn to help them. His estates in Ireland brought in no profits, and the property at Worminghurst that had belonged to Mrs. Penn had been left in trust for her oldest son, Springett Penn, who was then about nineteen years old. All that Penn received from that property was enough to support and educate the three children.

While he stayed in England he began preaching again, and found that now, under William and Mary, the Quakers were allowed the fullest liberty to hold their meetings, and that religious persecution was a thing of the past. His preaching was very successful. Wherever he spoke great crowds gathered to hear the words of a man who had had such a remarkable history, who had been a close friend of King James, and who had been in hiding for some years. Penn was unquestionably a very eloquent speaker, and his many experiences must have added very much to the interest of what he had to tell the quiet-living Quakers of the English countryside.

Three years after his first wife died Penn married again, this time Hannah Callowhill, of Bristol. Soon afterward he lost his oldest child, Springett, a boy of great charm and a close companion of his father. Of Guli Penn's two other children, William became dissipated and was a great disappointment to Penn, and Letitia married William Aubrey, who turned out to be a very disagreeable son-in-law. By his second wife Penn had six children, four of whom, John, Thomas, Margaret, and Richard, ultimately became the joint owners of Pennsylvania.

Penn now moved to the English city of Bristol, where he continued making plans for his province, and preaching and arguing with people who did not approve of his religion. The Quakers were then doing a certain amount of missionary work, and the story goes that Penn sought out a young Russian prince who was studying shipbuilding in England, and gave him Quaker books which he explained to him. In time this prince became the Emperor Peter the Great of Russia, and he is said always to have taken great interest in the Quakers because of what Penn had taught him.

Meantime, much had happened in Pennsylvania. The history of the province had been full of ups and downs, many of its difficulties being due to the fact that for fifteen years Penn/had been obliged to stay away from it. There had been many squabbles between the settlers and the men appointed to govern the province, but in spite of disagreements the colony had grown until now there were nearly twenty thousand settlers there.

When Penn left his colony in 1684, he had placed the power in the charge of a Council of eighteen men, and each of the eighteen had felt that it was his duty to do all the governing. When he learned that this system did not work well, Penn had tried to mend matters by doing away with the Council and appointing five commissioners. But this did not work very well, either, and in less than a year Penn appointed an old soldier of Cromwell's army, Captain John Blackwell, to replace the commissioners, and act as a deputy governor. The Quakers, however, did not like being in charge of a soldier, and made matters so difficult for Captain Blackwell that he resigned his post. Then followed another Council, and then another deputy governor, so that in ten years the form of government was changed no less than six times.

When William III. took the province away from Penn, he appointed a captain general, Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, who served until the colony was given back to Penn, a year and ten months later. Then Penn appointed his cousin, Markham, to be deputy governor, with two assistants. Markham, although he had a troubled time of it, managed to keep charge until William Penn was able to join him in 1699. All this time Penn had been paying salaries and spending money on his home at Pennsbury, and had been receiving nothing in return.

There was another reason for Penn's returning to his colony as soon as he could, and that was that King William was growing impatient at the stories he heard of the misgovernment of Pennsylvania, and was determined that something should be done to put things on a more stable footing. So, under the urging of friends at court who knew the king's mind, Penn collected what money he could, and on September 9, 1699, embarked with his wife and his daughter Letitia on the ship Canterbury at Southampton. The voyage was long and stormy, but three months later — toward the end of November — the ship reached the mouth of the Delaware River. The ship was so slow in sailing up the river that when New Castle was reached, Penn left her and was rowed to Chester.

Many settlers, hearing of the arrival of the proprietor of the province, flocked to Chester to greet him. Among them was a Quaker who had been well known in England, Thomas Story, who had traveled extensively in America. Penn and Story spent the night together at the house of Lydia Wade, near Chester, and Story told the proprietor all that had been happening in the province, including the scourge of yellow fever, or "Barbadoes distemper," as it was often called, that had visited Philadelphia a short time before and proved fatal to more than two hundred people.

Next day Penn returned to the Canterbury and sailed on up to Philadelphia. Here he landed, paid a short visit to Markham, the deputy governor, and then went to the Quaker meetinghouse, where he preached to a great congregation.

He brought with him to Philadelphia a young man named James Logan, who acted as his secretary; in time Logan became Penn's chief representative, and one of the wisest of those who helped to govern the province.

Penn had no house of his own in Philadelphia, so he, with his wife, his daughter Letitia, and James Logan, stayed for a month at the house of Edward Shippen, and then moved to one of the largest houses of the town, then known as "the slate-roof house"; it stood on the east side of Second Street between Chestnut and Walnut. There his son John was born, and the boy was always affectionately known as "John the American."

Most of the people of Pennsylvania, and particularly the Quakers, were very glad to have Penn with them again. He was a man well able to govern, but not generally successful in choosing others to govern for him. There was one man, Colonel Quarry, who had been sowing dissension and distrust of Penn in the province, but Penn sent for him, and after a talk, Quarry admitted that he had been wrong and the two became friends. One of the things Penn soon learned, a thing that seems strange enough to us, was that there was a good deal of piracy going on in the neighborhood of his province, and that many of the pirates were actually living in comfort in Philadelphia! It did not take Penn long to get after these men, and he soon had them arrested and punished in a way that spoke well for his energy and zeal. Other crimes and wrongs he punished or corrected, and the Quakers soon found they were right in believing that their governor was as good an executive as he was a preacher.

He was very busy that winter, holding meetings of his Council and passing new laws, preaching to Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, surveying a manor of ten thousand acres at Rockhill, in Bucks County, for his son John, and overseeing repairs to his country place at Pennsbury. Incidentally, it is interesting to recall that, liberal and freedom-loving as he was, it had not occurred to him to oppose the custom of holding negro slaves, for he himself had many slaves in his own employment.

He urged the settlers to make their prisons not merely places of restraint but workhouses and reformatories, and as a result Pennsylvania prisons were far better managed than those in other colonies. He introduced the custom of having a night watchman go through the streets, calling out the hour, the state of the weather, and any news of interest. In many ways he improved conditions, showing that he had a real genius for governing and an intense desire to make his province an ideal place in which to live.

Early in the spring of 1700 he moved to his mansion at Pennsbury, twenty miles up the river. It was built of bricks, most of which had been brought from England, and it stood about one hundred rods from the bank of the Delaware.

Back of it were deep forests, penetrated by only a few roads and trails. It was said to have cost £5000 to build, a very large sum for a house in the wilderness, but it was the most imposing residence to be found anywhere between the Hudson and Potomac rivers, and had few equals in New York or Virginia.

The house had two stories, with a high attic for servants' rooms, and the main walls were eighteen inches thick. There was a large hall on the first floor, where Penn held meetings of his Council, gave entertainments, and welcomed the Indian chiefs who frequently came to see him. A parlor and a drawing-room were to the north of the hall, a library and a dining-room to the south. As was the custom then, the kitchen was a separate building, but connected with the mansion by a covered passageway. Back of the kitchen was a building called "the brewhouse," where ale and "strong beer" were brewed. There was also a laundry and a stable for twelve horses, and at either end of the main house were small buildings, one of which was Penn's office for the transaction of the affairs of his province, the other for the business of his private estate. This was the way in which the large landowners of colonial times planned their homes and business offices.

When Penn visited Philadelphia, he usually went down the Delaware in his private barge, rowed by six oarsmen. He seems to have enjoyed this mode of travel, and to have taken great pleasure in the scenery along the broad river. Gardens stretched from his house to the water front, and he transplanted many native wild flowers to his own grounds, besides setting out walnuts, hawthorns, hazels, and fruit trees that he brought from England.

He lived in fine style; for William Penn, in spite of his urging simplicity in all things, could always appreciate and enjoy luxury.  He had very handsome oak and walnut chairs and tables, satin curtains, a wine cellar well stocked, and six large cisterns for holding water or beer. Frequently he played the part of host to many Indians, and it is said that he once entertained them at a long table spread out-of-doors, serving a hundred turkeys and a large quantity of venison.

While the provincial Assembly was in session in Philadelphia Penn was very busy directing its business, but when it adjourned, he usually turned his attention to questions concerning the Indians, whom he regarded as almost as much his own people as the white settlers. When he made his first treaty with them, he planned to call them together twice each year to renew their treaty of friendship, to adjust any matters of trade that might have arisen, and to smoke the pipe of peace with them. His absence in England had for a long time made these meetings impossible, but he now resumed them, and called the chiefs into conference with him.

The Delaware and Susquehanna tribes, who had now enjoyed his fair treatment for almost twenty years, were anxious to have Penn make agreements with other tribes, more especially those who lived in the country along the Potomac River. So they went to Onas, as Penn was usually called, and he agreed to meet their allies in April, 1701. At this meeting there came to see him many leading Indians, — three kings, and the brother of the Emperor of the Five Nations, as well as forty other chiefs. With all these Penn made treaties of peace and trade, by which the Indians were to be protected from the greed and cunning of white traders, and were, on their part, to sell their furs and skins only to Pennsylvanians. In this way he contrived to keep the red men friendly to the whites in his province, and gained the great benefit of having a bulwark of friendly Indians to protect his colony from enemies. When he made one of these treaties, he sent word of it to the government in England, and so increased his already well-deserved reputation of knowing how to deal with the Indians better than any other governor of an English colony.

At Pennsbury the family lived much like a family of high rank in England. The ladies dressed in silk and wore elaborate caps and buckles and golden ornaments. Penn himself bought no less than four wigs in one year at a cost of nearly twenty pounds. But if he was indulgent to his family and himself, he was always looking after the poor and the sick. When he heard of men or women in prison for debt, he contrived to get them out and start them afresh; he was always ready to listen to and help those who came to him in any distress, and he gave pensions of three shillings a week to many old people who were no longer able to support themselves. His private cash books show a long list of generous giving that far outstrips the sums he spent for his own household use.

Besides his barge on the river he had a coach, a calash, and a sedan chair. He was very fond of good horses, and had a number in his stables. Often, however, he found it easier to explore the neighboring country on foot than on horseback, and he was very fond of taking long walks through the woods. Once he was lost on a hill near Valley Forge, and wandered about for some time when he came to another height from which he saw the Schuylkill River. The first hill he named Mount Misery, and the second Mount Joy, and these names stuck to the hills for some time.

A pleasant little incident is told of how, as William Penn was riding one day to the Quaker meetinghouse at Haverford, outside Philadelphia, he overtook a little barefooted girl, Rebecca Wood, who was also going to the meeting. He took her up behind him on the horse, and the two rode on to the meetinghouse, the little girl's bare legs making an odd constrast to the tall governor in his long coat and knee breeches.

William and Hannah Penn entertained continually at their country home, preferring Pennsbury to the town. Penn's daughter Letitia, however, who was twenty years old, and a very lively, handsome girl, did not care so much for the quiet of the country, and spent most of her time in Philadelphia with the Markhams, the Logans, or the Shippens.

Penn always dealt fairly with the Indians, and they trusted him far more than they did most of the white men. He traveled through New Jersey, New York, and Maryland, being eager to see the country and also to spread Quaker influence as widely as he could in the new world. The life of a country gentleman suited him to perfection, and he was undoubtedly much happier in Pennsylvania than he had been when a courtier at Whitehall in London, or striving to make other people believe that King James was as worthy a king as he himself thought him.

Still, the government of Pennsylvania did not run smoothly even while Penn was there. Quakers and Church of England people were constantly wrangling, and the Assembly would not pass the laws that Penn thought it ought to. He was not making money from his province; he still had to pay large salaries, and he was constantly being asked for money for various purposes. Once he declared that the province had meant a loss to him of £20,000. Occasionally he received payment from the sale of land or for rent, but the settlers were hard people to deal with and paid out their money grudgingly.

The limits of Pennsylvania were still very indefinite, and for the most part were not settled until years later. The province was said to be bounded on the north by the southern limits of New York, and on the south by the northern limits of Maryland. Neither of these boundaries was actually settled until 1768. Westward the boundary was yet more vague, being defined by the words "as far to the westward as Maryland extends." But boundaries were not of great importance then, when there was so much vacant land, although by 1702 great numbers of Germans, Swiss, Huguenots, and Scotch-Irish were" coming into the province and taking up homesteads west and north of the little Quaker settlement on the Delaware.

The Pennsylvania Assembly refused to grant certain supplies that were asked by King William in 1701, and at the same time a bill was presented in the English Parliament to change the government of the English colonies in America. By this bill West and East Jersey were to be annexed to New York, and Penn's charter was to be revoked, he being paid a certain sum in return, and his province turned into a Crown colony similar to New York. When Penn heard of this, he thought that he ought to return to England and fight it. This he expected would take him only a short time, and he planned to return to Pennsbury at the end of a year. He wanted to make his home there, and expected his wife and Letitia to stay there until he returned. But his family thought otherwise about being left behind. Penn wrote to James Logan: "I can not prevail on my wife to stay: still less Tishe. I know not what to do." And in another letter he wrote:

"The going of my wife and Tishe will add greatly to the expense; more of living in London than of the passage. But they will not be denied."

Both Mrs. Penn and Letitia were probably homesick for their native England. Letitia in particular missed her gay friends at home, and found the Quakers of the province a poor substitute. It happened that later, when she did return to England, she gave up the Quaker faith and became a member of the Church of England. Mrs. Penn, in addition to other reasons for returning home, had already seen that her husband required the help of her firm will and clear insight when he was beset with political troubles in England, and believed she could be of great assistance to him. So when Penn did return, he took his family with him.

He made Andrew Hamilton deputy governor of the province, and James Logan secretary; and on November 4, 1701, sailed from Philadelphia in the ship Dalmahoy. The ship made a very quick run, in fact one of the fastest voyages recorded at that time, taking only thirty-six days to cross; and by the middle of December Penn was again in London. He took apartments in Kensington, that he might be close to the king and Parliament in looking after his title to his province.

It turned out that Penn never went back to Pennsylvania again, although some of his children did. Politics were to take all his attention; he was to have no more of the country life in America that he had grown so fond of, and that seemed to bring out all the best qualities in his many-sided nature.

      

At Court And In Prison 

William Penn still had many friends at court, and it was doubtless largely through their efforts that he succeeded in having the bill to take Pennsylvania away from him withdrawn from Parliament. There were a number of prominent men in the government, however, who thought that none of the American colonies should be owned by private persons, but that all should be directly under the Crown, and these men soon offered another bill much like the earlier one. To defeat this, Penn and Lord Baltimore joined hands and ceased to wrangle over the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. A few days after this bill was presented in Parliament, however, King William died from injuries resulting from the fall of a horse he was riding. The king had been influential in urging the change in the government of Penn's province, but his successor, Queen Anne, was much more friendly to Penn. The matter was therefore allowed to drop.

Although the daughter of James Stuart, Queen Anne was a Protestant, and had married a Protestant, Prince George of Denmark. She was liberal to all religions, and soon after she became queen the Quakers asked Penn to present her with an address thanking her for the toleration toward all sects that she had promised to observe. Perm read the address. Queen Anne then answered graciously enough, "Mr. Penn, I am so well pleased that what I have said is to your satisfaction, that you and your friends may be assured of my protection, and I sincerely hope for your welfare and happiness."

She kept her word to the Quakers, and also proved the constant friend of Penn. She had seen him much at court when her father was king, and knew of the old friendship between,her father and the Quaker leader. Therefore Penn became in a way a courtier again, and held somewhat the same prominent position he had held before William came to the throne.

He spent much of his time in London, where he now had friends in both the Whig and Tory parties. The leading statesmen thought so highly of his abilities that they frequently asked him to arrange political and personal matters that required tact and diplomatic skill. Sometimes he tried to exercise these qualities by correspondence with the lawmakers of Pennsylvania, and one of his latest efforts was on behalf of the negro slaves in the province. Ten years before he had tried to get justice done to these people, but in vain. Now he felt more strongly than ever that it was wrong to import negroes into the new country as slaves. He worked for this object until he induced the colonial Assembly to try to discourage that traffic by placing a duty on the importing of slaves. In 1711 they prohibited such importation in the future, but no sooner had word of this good law reached England than the government there, in spite of Penn's efforts, canceled the Pennsylvania act. Yet the wisest statesmen in England realized that Penn was right, and that the course he was urging his colony to adopt, not only in regard to negro slavery but in all matters that dealt with human liberty and enlightenment, was the best for the new world to follow.

Of Penn's children by his first wife, the lively Letitia married William Aubrey, who was harsh and overbearing to her father and tyrannical toward her. His son William had married, but had become very dissipated during his father's visit to Pennsylvania, and was now the black sheep of the family. He owed a great many debts and was in danger of being put into prison for them, so Penn decided he would be better off in Pennsylvania, and sent him out to Pennsbury. He was to be encouraged to live a healthy outdoor life, and have horses and hounds for hunting foxes, deer, and wolves. The son went out to Pennsbury, and James Logan tried to keep a watchful and restraining eye on him, but he managed to get into almost as much trouble there as he had in London, in spite of all efforts to keep him straight.

A great change had come over England since the days when the Stuarts were sovereigns. The old brutal laws had been abolished for the most part, and there was far less cruelty and violence. Instead of the dissolute Charles and the treacherous James, the rulers were honorable and virtuous. There were no longer constant rumors of plots and conspiracies, and all religions were treated fairly. William Penn found that he was no longer needed to help some poor Quaker who had fallen under the disfavor of officers of the law. Now his difficulties were mainly those connected with trying to provide a decent government for his province, and to get enough money from it to pay expenses.

Before Penn left Pennsylvania the Assembly there had voted to pay him £2000, but that was soon spent, and the settlers were so economical that they did not wish to give him anything more. Again and again he wrote to James Logan about his financial difficulties in managing Pennsylvania. In one letter he said: "Never had poor man my task, with neither men nor money to assist me. I therefore strictly charge thee that thou represent to Friends there, that I am forced to borrow money, and add debts to debts, instead of paying them off. . . . Make return with all speed or I'm undone." He tried many ways to make his province pay him something in return for the work and money he had already bestowed on it. He urged Logan to buy and send him as many furs as he could get, knowing that they would bring a good price in England. At one time he thought of selling his government directly to the English Crown for a sum sufficient to pay off all his debts. There was considerable haggling about the price and the sale was never made. Meantime his son William was getting into more trouble at Pennsbury and in Philadelphia. One night he and a dissipated comrade began to beat the night watch. He received a thrashing, and was afterwards treated as a common rioter. The son had been given a manor in the hope that he would look after it, but instead he sold it and squandered all the money. At last Penn sent for him to come home, and when William the younger finally reached England, he took to his former way of living, and incurred fresh debts for his already impoverished and indulgent parent.

Penn figured that he had lost £30,000 by his province. "O Pennsylvania," he wrote, "what hast thou cost me 1 Above £30,000 more than I ever got by it, two hazardous and most fatiguing voyages, my straits and slavery here, and my child's soul almost. ... In short, I must sell all or be undone, and disgraced into the bargain."

The man who was now acting as deputy governor of Pennsylvania was proving a poor makeshift, and conditions in the province seemed to be going from bad to worse. Opposition to Penn himself also was increasing, and presently the Assembly passed a set of resolutions that were sent to him in London. These resolutions made many complaints against his government of the province, charging him with having sided with enemies of the colony, with having extorted money from settlers in the sale of lands, with having failed to pay a former governor's salary, and ended by stating that something must be done to suppress lawlessness in the province. When it became known that the Assembly had sent such a note to Penn, the colonists at once objected to the offensiveness of its tone. Orders were given to recall the resolutions, and, in an attempt to straighten the matter out, the Assembly voted £1200 for the support of Penn's government. All might now have gone smoothly had not the deputy governor, John Evans, tried to scare the Quakers by a foolish trick. He had been wanting to build up a militia for the province, but the Quakers had objected to this. So, on the day of the annual fair, Evans arranged to have a messenger ride into Philadelphia, bringing the exciting news that a force of French soldiers had been seen on the Delaware heading toward Philadelphia. Then Evans buckled on his sword and rode up and down before the people, urging them to arm and defend their province.

There was a brief alarm, during which the larger ships on the Delaware were hurried up the river while the smaller craft were concealed in creeks. Silverware and valuables were hidden, but only four men came to the meeting-place Evans had appointed to enroll as militiamen. When it was discovered how Evans had tried to trick them, the settlers were highly indignant, and sent a complaint to Penn in England. Penn also heard that there was much criticism of his friend and secretary, James Logan.

A few of the men in whom Penn trusted, like James Logan, were entirely worthy of his trust, but there were many who were not. Among these latter was a man named Philip Ford, a Quaker, who had for some time been acting as steward of Penn's estates in England and Ireland. Penn grew very fond of Ford, as he had been very fond of James Stuart, and at length made him a present of ten thousand acres in Pennsylvania, a city lot in Philadelphia, and one hundred and fifty acres in the suburbs.

Ford sent accounts to Penn from time to time, but Penn was not a good business man, and did not bother to look into the accounts. Finally, when he did, he found the surprising fact that although Ford had received from Penn £17,000 and had only spent £16,000, nevertheless Penn owed him £10,500. Ford brought about this result by charging very large commissions, adding compound interest every six months to all money advanced, and claiming an exceedingly large salary, to say nothing of sometimes failing to credit Penn with money actually received from him.

Yet Penn, although surprised at this new debt, made no investigation into the crooked accounts, and at length, when Ford kept urging him to pay the debt, Penn was so foolish as to give Ford a deed of the province of Pennsylvania as security for this claim that he did not really owe. To make matters worse, a little later Penn accepted from Ford a lease of the province, so that it appeared that he had actually transferred the province to this corrupt steward and was now leasing it from him.

None of this strange transaction was made public until Ford died, but then his widow and son declared how the matter stood and announced that they were the legal owners of Pennsylvania. Penn, they said, was merely their tenant, and they sued him for rent amounting to £3000. They got judgment against him, and then, when he failed to pay it, had him arrested and put in prison for the debt. So now we find the owner of the great province of Pennsylvania not only shorn of his title to his property, but actually in jail on a charge of failing to pay his rent.

When the officers came to arrest him, they found him at the Quaker meeting in Gracechurch Street in London, strange to say the very place where he had first been arrested thirty-seven years before for preaching to the Quakers.

For nine months Penn had to stay in prison, while the suit against him dragged slowly through the courts of chancery. The fact that he had paid so little attention to Ford's accounts, and had made no complaint about the figures in them, made it look as if the claim against him might be just. His friends tried to straighten out the tangled matter, and meantime Penn, who was allowed fairly comfortable quarters, held small religious meetings, and kept himself as serene and untroubled as in the heyday of his fortunes. In this again the strong character of William Penn appears, for he was not cast down by misfortune. His friend Isaac Norris bore witness to this quality. "After all," said Norris, "I think the fable of the palm good in him — 'the more he is pressed, the more he rises.' He seems a spirit fit to bear and rub through difficulties, and as thou observes his foundation remains. I have been at some meetings with him, and have been much comforted in them, and particularly last First-day."

Gradually public sympathy, especially among the Quakers, began to be aroused by the fact of Penn's imprisonment. He had done so much for the Quaker cause, and had tried so hard to give his province a good government, that people were indignant that he should now be so set upon by such people as the Fords. So friends raised the sum of £7600, and gave this to the Fords in settlement of their claim, and in return Penn gave his friends a mortgage on Pennsylvania to secure the repayment of the money they had lent him.

Meantime, while he was still in prison, his deputy governor Evans had been behaving so badly that the people of the province decided they would stand him no longer. Penn, having once felt a strong friendship for this man, would have put up with almost any injustice from him. Three prominent Quakers went to him in the Fleet Prison, however, and told him that unless he removed Evans from the governorship the people would appeal to Queen Anne to settle the matter. This might result in taking the province from him; so, reluctantly, Penn agreed to dismiss Evans from his position. Even then, however, he was so fond of Evans that he would not let him know that he disapproved of his acts. He wrote to James Logan, asking him to explain the matter to his deputy governor, and said, "Pray break it to him and that the reason why I chose to change, rather than contest with the complaints before the queen in council, is, that he may stand the fairer for any employment elsewhere; which would be very doubtful if those blemishes were aggravated in such a presence."

In place of Evans, Penn sent out as the new governor another friend of his, Colonel Charles Gookin. He wrote very flattering accounts of this new governor to the people of Philadelphia.

Stanchness in standing by his friends, even when it was shown that those friends were utterly untrustworthy, had proved nearly as disastrous to William Penn in the government of his province as it had proved to his fortunes in England in the days when he had supported James Stuart against King William. It may have been a fine fault, but a fault it was, nevertheless.Penn's Work Completed 

When Penn left the Fleet Prison, he went to his home at Brentford, nine miles out of London, and stayed there for a short time, after which he moved with his family to a country place in the Berkshire Hills called Ruscombe. While he was here he kept up his efforts to sell Pennsylvania to the English Crown, and, as that matter dragged along with little result, he tried his best to straighten out the tangled government of his colony by sending long letters to James Logan and other officers in Philadelphia. In its early days the province had been a great pleasure to him, but now it seemed to be only a source of continual misunderstandings and debts. He felt that, however much the colony might have profited others, it had proved almost a thankless burden to himself. He wrote to some of the colonists just what his feelings were in regard to Pennsylvania. "The many combats I have engaged in," he said, "the great pains and incredible expense to your welfare and ease, to the decay of my former estate, of which (however some there would represent it) I too sensibly feel the effects, with the undeserved opposition I have met with from thence, sink me into sorrow, that if not supported by a superior hand, might have overwhelmed me long ago. And I cannot but think it hard measure, that, while that has proved a land of freedom and flourishing, it should become to me, by whose means it was principally made a country, the cause of grief, trouble, and poverty."

Although the English Crown was anxious to take over the province of Pennsylvania, there were many obstacles to their coming to an agreement with Penn. Some of these obstacles he at length compromised; for example, he agreed that he and his family should have only 8oo,oop acres in fee, in place of all the rights to real estate that had been granted him under the original charter. He insisted that there should be no official establishing of the Church of England in Pennsylvania, that no public money should be used for one sect in preference to others, and that public offices should be open to all settlers. After much controversy the English government drew up a new charter or constitution, modeled after those in New York and New Jersey, except that nothing whatever was said in the charter about establishing the Church of England; while the question of the right to vote on public matters was left for the people themselves to decide.

By 1710 the arrangements to take over Pennsylvania from Penn were about completed. He then wrote a long letter to the people of his province, addressing them as "My Old Friends," and setting forth what he had tried to do for them, and how of late they had pained him by their continual squabbles. His writing showed his surprise that Pennsylvania had not been the home of peace he expected it would be. In one part of the letter he said, "Friends! the eyes of many are upon you; the people of many nations of Europe look on that country as a land of ease and quiet, wishing to themselves in vain the same blessings they conceive you may enjoy; but to see the use you make of them is no less the cause of surprise to others, while such bitter complaints and reflections are seen to come from you, of which it is difficult to conceive either the sense or meaning. What are the distresses, grievances, and oppressions, that the papers, sent from thence, so often say you languish under, while others have cause to believe you have hitherto lived, or might live, the happiest of any in the Queen's dominions?" He graciously closed his letter in these words: "God give you his wisdom and fear to direct you, that yet our poor country may be blessed with peace, love, and industry, and we may once more meet good friends, and live so to the end, our relation in the Truth having but the same true interest. I am, with great truth and most sincere regard, your real friend, as well as just Proprietor and Governor, William Penn."

The English Crown was to pay Penn £12,000 in four annual installments. Before the matter could be finally settled it had to be ratified by an Act of Parliament; however, there seemed little reason to doubt but that the affair was practically settled, and so Penn considered it. Although he was now almost seventy years old, he made many journeys through England in order to spread the Quaker doctrines. In his leisure moments he added many maxims to the collection he had made, and did other writing as well. He seems to have given up the idea of returning to his house at Pennsbury, although he sometimes spoke as if he should like to return, if only his affairs in London would let him do so.

Some time before he had been taken ill, having what appeared to be a stroke of paralysis. He recovered from this, but a second recurrence of his illness came, and then a third. This last made him a complete invalid, and even affected his mind to a certain degree. Although calm and serene, he could not transact business intelligently. This prevented the completion of the sale of his title to Pennsylvania; for, his mind being impaired, he could not give a valid deed to the government. As a result the title to the province stayed in his family until the American Revolution in 1776.

When he could not attend to matters in Pennsylvania, his wife took charge, and she managed them very capably. It was she who discharged a deputy governor who was quarreling with the Assembly there, and appointed in his place an excellent governor, Sir William Keith, who proved a popular and very successful officer. Also, trade in Pennsylvania was now beginning to boom, so that in a short time the province became much more valuable, and it turned out well for Penn's wife and children that he had not sold his title to the English Crown.

Perm remained an invalid until his death on July 30,1718, and during this time, freed from care concerning his province, he delighted in the quiet country life at Ruscombe, and in the company of his devoted wife and younger children. Many friends came to visit him, and on Sundays he was driven to the meetinghouse, where he would sometimes speak briefly, always proclaiming his faith in the religion that had been the guide and mainstay of his eventful life.

William Penn was always a deeply religious and honorable man, thoroughly sincere, and indomitable in his defense of what he believed to be the truth. He was a great man, for he led the new sect of Quakers through their early trials; he had the vision to build them a new home beyond the seas and to set them standards of liberty and government that were far in advance of his time. His faults of judgment were many; he too often trusted the wrong men, and frequently he showed himself a child in caring for money matters. These faults, however, were never faults of character, but rather of a nature too generous and confiding. We usually think of him as a quiet, simple Quaker, wearing plain clothes and caring little or nothing for luxury or display. In reality he was quite different. He was a man of action, a man who was naturally fond of court life, who liked power, who was restless and eager, and who would have made a better soldier than a statesman. While he lived in Pennsylvania he lived up to his idea of a great landed proprietor and governor, and he liked to be regarded as the leading man among the Quakers both in Pennsylvania and in England.

His province of Pennsylvania was at once the delight and the torment of his existence. He liked his ideal of what such a colony ought to be, but he found the actual management of it one long series of quarrels and money difficulties. He dealt fairly with settlers and Indians, probably more fairly than any other governor of an American colony, and the Indians seemed to appreciate his fair dealing more than did the white men. The colony owed something to his guidance, but a great deal more to the noble spirit of liberty of religion in which he founded it. There is to be found what has made the name of William Penn illustrious and beloved, for he had a great vision of human liberty and he worked mightily to make that vision become a reality. In the light of his splendid ambitions his mistakes count for little. He tried to do great good, which is the best that can be said of any man.

Pennsylvania Under Penn's Descendants

William Penn's son by bis first wife, named for himself, the one who had been sent to Pennsylvania in the hope that he would give over his wild way of living, inherited the property in England and Ireland, most of which had belonged to his mother. Letitia, who had married William Aubrey, had already received a dower, and later received ten thousand acres of land in Pennsylvania, as did each of the younger William's children, Gulielma, Maria, Springett, and William. The remainder of Penn's estate went to his second wife, Hannah Penn, and her five children, John, Thomas, Margaret, Richard, and Dennis. Hannah Penn had practically all the powers over the province that her husband had wielded, and she used them capably, proving a most excellent business woman. She arranged that her eldest son, John, should become the principal Proprietary of the province, as he was called, and his brothers Thomas and Richard his associates. The youngest son, Dennis, died very young.

From 1712 to 1727 Hannah Penn managed the affairs of Pennsylvania, and far more successfully than her husband had done. He had left his province in such a debt-ridden condition that it had seemed as if it would have to be sold to the Crown to straighten it out, but Hannah Penn left it to her three sons in such excellent shape that it was generally considered to be one of the finest domains in the world owned by private individuals.

Sir William Keith, the governor who had been appointed by Hannah Penn, managed affairs with success for some time, but finally came disagreements with Mrs. Penn. He believed that her son John would not make a good manager of the province, and secretly advised the popular leaders in the colony to try to abolish the Proprietary system of government. This caused Hannah Penn to appoint Patrick Gordon to succeed Governor Keith in 1726.

In 1732 Thomas Penn made a visit to Pennsylvania, and he was followed by his older brother John in 1734. Neither of these sons of William Penn made a good impression in Philadelphia, and it is said that the people there even preferred young William Penn, with all his bad manners and wildness, to these two half-brothers of his. Neither John nor Thomas seem to have had the broadmindedness and kindly disposition of their father, but to have been unscrupulous, overbearing, and too eager to make all the money they could out of the colony. John was somewhat better liked than Thomas, who seemed to have little sense about anything but money-getting. Benjamin Franklin, who was editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette during the visit of the two sons of Penn to Philadelphia, but who had never met the roystering young William, is reported to have said to a friend that "according to all accounts there was more of the gentleman in Billy Penn drunk than in both of these Penns sober."

John Penn returned to England in 1736, and Thomas in 1741, and neither ever returned to Pennsylvania, having about as much affection for their father's province as the province had for them.

Governor Gordon, who had been appointed by Hannah Penn, had a successful administration and held the office until his death in 1736. The Penn brothers then chose George Thomas to the place, and he proved a most loyal adherent of England until he resigned in 1747. James Hamilton, the first governor of Pennsylvania who was born and bred in America, succeeded him, and proved the most popular governor since William Penn had made his second visit to his province. Governor Hamilton felt that Pennsylvania would be better off as an English colony than under the proprietorship of the Penn family, and most of the people agreed with him, but no definite steps in that direction were taken. John Penn had died, and the two brothers who survived him, Thomas and Richard, knew that Hamilton was too popular with the Pennsylvanians to be removed from office. After a while, however, disagreements developed to such a degree that Hamilton resigned, and the governors who followed had to face new difficulties arising from the fact that the French were influencing the Indians against the English colonists, in Pennsylvania no less than in New England and New York. William Penn's policy of fair dealing with the Indians had been abandoned by his sons, and the frontiersmen were made to feel the result in constant attacks on their outlying settlements.

The Quakers did not believe in warfare, but the men on the Pennsylvania frontiers, Scotch-Irish, Swiss, and Germans, had to arm and form companies for self-protection after General Braddock's defeat by the French and Indians. They felt that they ought to have some help, financial if no other, from the wealthy people in the eastern part of the province; and at length they succeeded in getting the Assembly to vote for supplies. When it came to raising this money, the property of the Penns had to be taxed, and this gave the greatest offense to Thomas and Richard Penn in England. They removed the governor, and tried to fight the tax, but the colonists replied by voting the tax again and even increasing the amount the Penns had to pay. The governor who had been removed told Franklin that he was glad to be rid of the job, adding that three years of the governorship as he had held it would turn any man against the Proprietary system. To which Franklin answered, "Particularly with Tom and Dick Penn for Proprietors!"

In 1763 John Penn, the son of Richard, and grandson of William Penn, became governor, and his term of office was the stormiest and least creditable of all the governorships that the province had known. During his first year in office a revolt took place in the mountains which became known as the "revolution of the Paxton boys." A crowd of mountaineers defied a battalion of British regulars in the town of Lancaster, and announced that if the regulars dared to fire "so much as one shot, their scalps would ornament every cabin from the Susquehanna to the Ohio."

The soldiers did not fire, and the Paxton boys thereupon helped themselves to all. the horses they wanted, took the ammunition wagons belonging to the regulars, and set out for Philadelphia. There were almost a thousand of them when they arrived on the high ground of Germantown, and there demanded that certain Indians who were being kept under guard in the Northern Liberties1 should be given to them on pain of their sacking the city otherwise.

The citizens found that the regular troops could not be relied on, and sent some deputies to treat with the rebels. By agreeing to all the latter demanded, except the massacre of the Indians, the deputies were finally able to induce the mountaineers to return to their homes.

Very soon afterward the Assembly petitioned the English Parliament to abolish the Proprietary government. Before Parliament did this, however, another misadventure had occurred in the province. About 1762 fifty families from Connecticut had moved to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, and believing the country there to be very productive, they had made some clearings, built log cabins, and grown some fields of corn. John Penn, the governor, heard of this, and in 1764 he sent constables to this settlement to order the pioneers off, claiming that they were on land that had been granted to his grandfather.

The Wyoming settlement now numbered about three thousand persons, and naturally they were unwilling to give up their lands. Then a company was formed in Philadelphia to buy that section of the country from John Penn, and, making use of the improvements of the Connecticut settlers, market it as the company saw fit. They would only buy it, however, on condition that John Penn should first drive out the settlers.

So John Penn, in 1770, hired a crowd of rascals to go into the Wyoming Valley and drive the pioneers away from their cabins and fields. The settlers answered Penn's demands by building a fort which they christened Forty Fort, in honor of the first settlers, who were forty in number. They were always referred to as the First Forty, and were held in high esteem. They had been sent by the Susquehanna Company of Connecticut into the Wyoming Valley.

After some fighting the settlers managed to hold their ground. This became known as the Pennamite War; and, although the governor was backed by some of the leading men of Philadelphia, his attempts to oust the settlers made his rule more distasteful than ever to a people who were growing more and more fond of liberty.

The American Revolution was now at hand, and the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety decided that it was time to annul the charter that had been granted to William Penn, and abolish the Proprietary government. Therefore, two months after the Declaration of Independence was signed, in 1776, the Committee of Safety, now calling itself the "Supreme Executive Council," deposed John Penn from his office, and decreed that what had been the province of Pennsylvania should become a state in the new American Union.

The boundaries of Pennsylvania were by that time definitely settled, and incidentally those boundaries included the rich Wyoming Valley, where now stands the prosperous city of WilkesBarre. The title that had belonged to the Penn family was now vested in the state, and the state appropriated £130,000 to be paid to the heirs of William Penn. In addition to this amount the heirs of William Penn, having sided with the Tories during the Revolution, claimed a large sum from the English government after the Revolution, basing their claim on the Act of Parliament that agreed "to indemnify loyal subjects of his Britannic Majesty for losses suffered in the American War." The English government settled this claim by paying William Penn's heirs £500,000. As a result these heirs secured from Pennsylvania and from England more than three million dollars, besides retaining the private estates in Pennsylvania that they had always owned.

Eventually, therefore, Penn's province proved of very great value to his children and grandchildren, although the people who had opened up and settled that new country had gained little from those descendants; they had to look back to the great founder, William Penn, the noble and steadfast Quaker, for the liberty-loving ideas and wise principles of government that helped to make Pennsylvania one of the greatest of the new union of states. It is well that his name should forever be associated with that state, for it is the name of a man of noble character and a fearless champion of liberty.

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