^>!!/fcC>^v^ ' wowo.»o ' w ' o^w'cy^evmcy. 
 
 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 Chap. .. Fj.^.?^.. 
 
 ■7- 
 Shelf _:_.pr_LL.- 
 
 % UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
/ 
 
 y>, 
 
 DEFENCE 
 
 WILLIAM PENN, 
 
 FROM THE 
 
 CHARGES CONTAINED IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 Et. Hon. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 
 
 ^ 
 
 BY HENRY FAIRBAIRN. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 PRINTED BY JOSEPH RAKESTRAW, APPLE-TREE ALLEY, 
 
 FIRST DOOR ABOVE FOURTH ST. 
 
 1849. 
 
A DEFENCE OF 
 
 WILLIAM PENN. 
 
 In the news papers which have been received recently from 
 England, there is an account of a deputation from ihe Society of 
 Friends in London, to the Right Honorable Thomas Babington 
 Macaulay, the author of the new History of England, on the 
 subject of the charges which appear in that publication, against 
 the moral and political reputation of William Penn. 
 
 The same news papers describe the argument between this 
 deputation and Mr. Macaulay, as remaining still in favour of the 
 author of the History of England — whose statements are there- 
 fore to be taken as incapable of being now overthrown by any 
 evidence which remains in vindication of the fair fame of Penn. 
 
 All this may be only a news paper paragraph, with little 
 foundation in the truth that any such a deputation may have 
 waited upon the author of the new political novel, called a His- 
 tory of England ; or that the result of the argument was con- 
 firmatory of the charges which Mr. Macaulay has brought 
 against the founder of the Colony of Pennsylvania: — for these 
 charges rest upon no other than a sandy foundation, and they 
 can be shaken with great ease. 
 
 The principal charges now brought against William Penn, 
 would appear to be resolvable into the general one — that 
 his fanatical devotion to the advancement of the interests of 
 Quakerism, rendered him indifferent to the means by which the 
 end could be gained ; that he was therefore Jesuitical in his 
 principles, and a willing political instrument in the hands of those 
 two tyrannical princes — Charles and James, — in whose reigns 
 
he did act an undoubtedly distinguished part in the English po- 
 Htical world. 
 
 But when the proper light may be thrown upon the scenes in 
 which William Penn is here described as moving so honour- 
 ably at the courts of Charles II., and of James the II., it will be 
 found that every part of his character has been falsified by 
 the author of the new History of England. And although 
 two centuries have intervened to increase the difficulty of 
 tracing out the bearings of charges so contrary to all that has 
 been supposed to be established in favor of a great name for the 
 founder of the Colony of Pennsylvania ; — yet all these imputa- 
 tions can be shown to be without any foundation whatever in 
 historical truth — to be the grossest of libels upon the great and 
 good name of William Penn — for misrepresentation, exaggera- 
 tion, distortion, suppression of circumstances, false statements, 
 false inferrences, and language beneath the dignity of the pages 
 of history — form the compound of these charges, now brought 
 against the Socrates of modern times. They are the charges of 
 sophistry alone, and Macaulay is the modern Melitus of a Wil- 
 liam Penn. 
 
 The introduction of Penn upon the scene of this History of 
 England, takes place at the execution of Alderman Cornish ; 
 and therefore, in the latter part of the reign of James II.; 
 for the execution of Cornish was one of the judicial murders of 
 the time of the infamous Judge Jeffreys, and arose out of the 
 discovery, or the pretended discovery, of the Rye House Plot. 
 " William Penn, who stood near the gallows," says the histori- 
 an, " and whose prejudices were all in favour of the government, 
 said that he could see in the demeanor of Cornish, nothing but 
 the natural indignation of a man, who was unjustly slain under 
 forms of law." 
 
 Here is the first, but the cardinal, and all-important misre- 
 presentation of the political character and opinions of William 
 Penn. He is represented as a sycophant to the government, 
 which was then advancing with rapid strides to the establishment 
 of arbitrary power in England; — as siding with the court in 
 
these infamous executions of the best and the most enlightened 
 patriots of the time — and as bearing an unwilling testimony to 
 the iieroic demeanour of Cornish, in the scene of his most infa- 
 mously unjust death. These assertions are in direct violation 
 of all historical truth. 
 
 The Rye House Plot, had furnished the pretence which the 
 court had long been in search of, for the i-emoval and destruc- 
 tion of the leaders of the liberal party in England, of whom 
 Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney, had been the most 
 powerful in abilities, as in reputation and in rank in life. 
 
 After the executions of Russell and Sidney, another important 
 life was required to be sworn away, for the purpose of terrify- 
 ing the city, or the mercantile part of the metropolis of Eng- 
 land, into the same submission to the establishment of arbitrary 
 power, which the trunkless heads of Sidney and Russell would 
 produce at the court end of the town; and Cornish, who had been 
 an Alderman of London, and was a merchant of wealth and 
 abilities, but a strong opponent of the arbitrary measures of 
 the government of Charles II., for this purpose was selected 
 to be murdered, on a similar pretended participation in the Rye- 
 House Plot. His name is with those of Russell and Sidney, 
 in the History of England, and when Mr. Macaulay gives the 
 words " unjustly slain under forms of law," he quotes the un- 
 doubted opinion of William Penn respecting this very barbarous 
 murder of one of the best, and most enlightened, and valuable 
 citizens of London, at that time. But it is most false to assert 
 that he beheld this murder with prejudices in favor of the royal 
 murderer, by whose judges these scenes were then being 
 brought about, with a frequency so great, that the reign of 
 Charles II. now ranks in historical infamy, with the reign of 
 that of Tiberius, of whose similar murderous proscriptions so 
 appalling a picture has been drawn by Tacitus, in his 
 Annals of the Empire of Rome. William Penn did not witness 
 the execution of Cornish with prejudices in favour of the govern- 
 ment, but with prejudices in the most violent opposition to the 
 government, his sympathies were with the murdered man, and 
 not with the murderers concerned in this most truly diabolical 
 
P 6 
 
 scene. It can be shown, that the whole heart and soul of Penn 
 were on the side of Cornish, and with the liberal party in po- 
 litics, of whom Cornish was now one of the leaders in the act 
 of destruction, and in direct co-operation with which leaders 
 of the party in opposition to the government of Charles II., 
 himself was this same William Penn. 
 
 His connexion with the liberal party, and his very intimate 
 connexion with its principal leader, Algernon Sidney, has been 
 rendered clear by the correspondence in the hand-writing of 
 William Penn, which remains in the library of the castle of 
 Penshurst, in the County of Kent; this being the seat of the fam- 
 ily of Sidney at the present time. These letters of William Penn, 
 are of a very energetic political tendency, they are all written in 
 the most direct opposition to the measures of the government of 
 Charles II., and are addressed to one, to whom Penn could speak 
 freely in those dangerous political times. Some of these letters 
 come down to a time almost immediately before the fall of this 
 great opponent of the government of Charles II., and therefore, 
 to the time of the execution of Cornish, when William Penn is 
 described in this History of England, as thinking and as acting 
 in favour of the government and in opposition to his own poli- 
 tical friends and party in the state. 
 
 The most remarkable of these letters, as published by the 
 Rev. Mr. Blencow, in one of his works on the House of Sidney, 
 is that written by William Penn immediately before the time of 
 the election for the borough of Guilford, at which place Algernon 
 Sidney was about to stand for its representative in Parliament; 
 but against the opposition of the whole influence of the govern- 
 ment of Charles II., for the eloquence, the learning, and the 
 known incorruptibility of Algernon Sidney, were not more the 
 causes of his defeat on every occasion of his attempting to 
 find his way into the House of Commons, than of his judicial 
 murder, which followed very soon after the time of the latest 
 of these letters from William Penn. The letter on the subject 
 of the Guilford election, leaves no doubt whatever, of the truly 
 patriotic sentiments of William Penn ; for we see his despond- 
 ency at the sight of the fast approaching slavery of his country, 
 
by means of the Parliamentary corruption which the court had 
 extended over the greater part of the kingdom at that time. 
 He urges Sidney to exertion at the borough of Guilford, al- 
 though almost despairing of success, and observes, " if it can 
 be done, thou hast the eloquence to persuade, and the energy to 
 undertake," with other expressions, which prove the entire 
 soul of William Penn to have been with Algernon Sidney, and 
 with the party in direct opposition to the government, which 
 now was murdering its leaders on the pretended participation 
 in the scheme of assassination of the King, which has been 
 called the Rye House Plot. 
 
 When we reflect that Algernon Sidney had just fallen mur- 
 dered by the court, whose aims and policy they both so vehem- 
 ently opposed, that murder was then following upon murder, 
 and that Cornish was another of the same republican party 
 with whom Penn was in direct alliance and co-operation, the 
 which are shown in the Penshurst correspondence — how can it 
 be possible that he witnessed the execution of Cornish with pre- 
 jucices in favour of the destroyers of his own political party 
 in the state ? And when we find, from the Memoirs of Sir John 
 Dalrymple, that William Penn was seen openly and anxiously 
 canvassing the electors of the borough of Guilford, in favour of 
 Algernon Sidney, speaking from the hustings in his favour on the 
 same memorable occasion, and acting with all zeal with this most 
 formidable enemy of the King, the monarchy, and the arbitrary 
 power which was in the course of establishment in the reign of 
 this infamous prince ; who will believe the inference of Macau- 
 lay, that William Penn possessed no political independence of 
 character, — but was a sycophant, who would side with any 
 crime which royalty might commit upon the lives and the liber- 
 ties of all beyond the pale of his own particular sect of the 
 Society of Friends. Yet in this slavish and disgraceful man- 
 ner is he first introduced upon the scene of this History of 
 England ; as witnessing the noblest exhibition of firmness in the 
 hour of the martyrdom of the virtuous Cornish, and as viewing 
 these infamous outrages upon the liberties of his country with 
 
8 
 
 prejudices in favour of a Jeffreys, a Charles, and a James, the 
 most infamous of mankind. 
 
 And it is clear that Mr. Macaulay well knew of the exist- 
 ence of the correspondence between Algernon Sidney and 
 William Penn ; for the publication of the Rev. Mr. Blencow, is 
 mentioned by him in a note, at page 261 of the History of Eng- 
 land, as the "interesting Memoirs of Col. Henry Sidney." — 
 This was the older brother of Algernon Sidney, and the Col. 
 Sidney mentioned by William Penn, in the letter to the Earl of 
 Sunderland, which is dated at Philadelphia, in 1683, and pub- 
 lished in the second volume of the Transactions of the Histori- 
 cal Society of Pennsylvania ; — a letter which is replete with 
 interesting descriptions of the country from which it is written, 
 and in which, observes William Penn, " I had hoped to have 
 seen your Lordship on some evening, at the house of Col. Henry 
 Sidney, &c." Moreover, the publication of the letters from 
 William Penn to Algernon Sidney, have been amongst the 
 most prominent of the recently discovered MSS. relating to the 
 times of the Commonwealth and the reign of Charles II., the 
 Penshurst correspondence being usually considered as a most 
 solid testimony to the enlightened and independent political 
 opinions of WiUiam Penn. 
 
 He is seen from this correspondence to have been struggling 
 for the preservation of the liberties of his country, and not with 
 those who were religionists exclusively in their political move- 
 ments against the measures of the government of Charles II.; 
 but who were the defenders of liberty in the broadest republican 
 meaning of the word. 
 
 A martyr in this same republican cause was Cornish, of the 
 city of London ; the entire metropolis was horrified at the infa- 
 mous trial and the barbarous execution of this virtuous, enlight- 
 ened and honourable opponent of the attempts of the govern- 
 ment to establish a system of civil and religious slavery in 
 England ; and William Penn adds only the expression of his 
 own indignation at the scene of this execution, when he pro- 
 claims Cornish to have died *' with the natural indignation of a 
 man unjustly slain under forms of law." 
 
9 
 
 But here follows the enquiry, why such a man remained 
 about the court. Might not Mr. Macaulay have reasonably 
 'nferred that a courtier must be in favour of the measures of 
 the court ; and was it not hypocrisy in Penn to have been on 
 terms of intimacy with Charles II., when he was moving 
 against his government in the energetic manner which is proved 
 by his own handwriting, as now remaining at Penshurst? Here 
 the circumstances are to be taken into view. 
 
 Respecting his presence, at all, at the court of England, it 
 must be remembered, that William Penn had been born in a 
 high rank in life ; that he was the son of a distinguished naval 
 commander, and possessor of the estate of Stoke Pogis, in Berk- 
 shire, with the Elizabethan mansion, which is seen to this day 
 from the Great Western Railway, about four miles from Windsor 
 Castle, the country residence of the Queen. Besides the pos- 
 session of a very considerable fortune, he possessed the advan- 
 tages of a fine person and courtly manners, and a very wide 
 range of accomplishments in literature and learning; and was 
 at the time of these events, in the important position of the Gov- 
 ernor of Pennsylvania, from which colony William Penn had 
 recently returned, at the time of the discovery of the Rye House 
 Plot. The court was therefore a place which was regularly 
 in the way of a person in the private and the political station 
 in life then occupied by William Penn ; and whilst he does not 
 appear to have sought, so he does not seem to have avoided, 
 the company and the favours of the King. 
 
 When sent for by the court, he seems to have obeyed the 
 summons to attend; but he was not the mere courtier and sy- 
 cophant, which is the general character intended to be given to 
 William Penn, by the writer of this new History of England ; 
 for he never sacrificed a real principle in all his intercourse with 
 the courts of Charles and of James. Neither is it true that all 
 are courtiers who are sometimes seen about a court ; nor that 
 all truth, independence, and sincerity of purpose, must be left 
 behind at the gates of the palaces of Kings. As Plato was a 
 visitor to the court of Dionysius, councilling mild measures to 
 
 2 
 
10 
 
 the terrified tyrant of Sicily, and showing how his own self- 
 preservation would be better obtained by the conciliation, than by 
 the destruction, of the enemies of his government, so did the 
 modern Philosopher of Quakerism urge mild measures of 
 government upon the two Kings of England, Charles and James; 
 nor would the English Dionysius, James II. have died in a 
 despicable obscurity in a foreign nation, if he had listened 
 to the councils of Penn, in the midst of the closing spenes 
 of his vindictive and most arbitrary reign. Even the usual 
 titles of royalty would appear to have not been given to 
 these princes by William Penn, who called them only by 
 the familiar names of "Charles" and of "James;" whilst 
 the independence with which he was accustomed to ex- 
 press his opinions to royalty, may be seen in the account ot one 
 of these interviews with Charles II., when his opposition to the 
 royal will was carried to so great a height, that the King was 
 almost on the point of ejecting him from the royal closet, and 
 said, that "six such men would be sufficient to set my kingdom 
 in a blaze." 
 
 That William Penn remained about the court, whose policy 
 he opposed, is in no manner derogatory to his good name, for 
 he was not guilty of the hypocricy of professing opinions which 
 he did not entertain. And though he could not alter the whole 
 monarchical system of government, he yet could alleviate the 
 sufferings of those who were oppressed in the cause of the 
 civil and religious liberties of his native land. He is shown to 
 have done infinite good by his personal influence with Charles 
 and with James — to have opened, by the Act of Indulgence, 
 the doors of the jails to thousands of Quakers and of Catholics; 
 to have mitigated the amounts of ruinous fines imposed upon 
 the unsuccessful party of the Duke of Monmouth, and to have 
 ever been moving in the business of charity, in those dark po- 
 litical times. Although familiar with princes, William Penn was 
 a republican of the noblest classical mould. 
 
 With these views of the general position of William Penn at 
 the court of England, let us now examine the rest of the mis- 
 
11 
 
 representations of Mr. Macaulay, m his account of the affair 
 of the young ladies of Devonshire, who had been convicted of 
 treason, in the presentation of a banner to the Duke of Mon- 
 mouth, when in rebelHon against King James. 
 
 This affair is represented by the historian, as one in which 
 Wilham Penn was employed as a broker by the ladies of the 
 court, who had obtained the power to liberate these convicted fe- 
 males, but were about to proceed to outlawry, unless upon the 
 payment of the sum of £7000; "They requested Penn to act 
 for them," observes Mr. Macaulay, " and Penn accepted the 
 commission, yet it should seem that a little of the pertinaceous 
 scrupulosity, which he had so often shown about not taking off 
 his hat would not have been altogether out of place on this 
 occasion. He probably silenced the remonstrances of his own 
 conscience, by repeating to himself, that none of the money 
 which he extracted would go into his own pocket — that if he 
 refused to be the agent of the ladies — they would find agents 
 less humane; that by complying he should increase his influence 
 at court, and that his influence at court had already enabled 
 him, and might still enable him, to render great service to his 
 oppressed brethren. The ladies, at last, were forced to content 
 themselves with a third part of the money which they had ori- 
 ginally demanded." 
 
 These are very heavy charges against the reputation of Wil- 
 liam Penn; for no Jesuit could have gone by a round of greater 
 criminality for the purpose of promoting the interests of his own 
 particular order in religion ; whilst the words " money which 
 he extracted" are those which describe some villain whom the 
 ladies of the court had employed for purposes the most merci- 
 less and the most vile. 
 
 Let us enquire into the truth of these important imputations, 
 and how it came to pass that William Penn should have been 
 concerned at all, in the compounding of the treason of the 
 females who were then in imprisonment in Devonshire. 
 
 We have already seen the direct connexion of Penn with the 
 leaders of the popular party, in the reign of Charles II.; and 
 
12 
 
 now the death of Charles had taken place, and the rebellion of 
 the Duke of Monmouth had been another movement of the 
 liberal party in England, against the still more rapidly ad- 
 vancing establishment of arbitrary power, in the person of King 
 James. The Duke of Monmouth was now the only remaining 
 leader of the popular cause — he had been long in the midst of 
 all the movements of the liberal party, and had been accused of 
 a participation in the Rye House Plot of the preceding reign, 
 and would have fallen with Sidney, Russell, Cornish and others 
 at that time, but that he was the acknowledged illegitimate son 
 of the King. He had been banished the kingdom at the time 
 of the Rye House Plot — he had returned at the head of an in- 
 surrection against the government of King James — he had 
 been unsuccessful in this rebellion, and had been himself be- 
 headed, and all his followers had been scattered to the winds. 
 
 But the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth possessed the good 
 wishes of all the liberal part of the community, and particu- 
 larly of the Quakers, and of other religious sectarians, who 
 were suffering in the jails of the kingdom, under the govern- 
 ment of the bigotted King James. One eminent Quaker writer, 
 who was in the prison of Ilchester, at the time of the passing 
 of the rebel army through the western counties, describes the 
 visit of the Duke of Monmouth to the religious prisoners, and 
 says " he was a handsome man and kindly spoken, and we re- 
 gretted his fall, the news of which arrived some weeks after- 
 wards." This was the universal feeling of the nation on the 
 failure of the enterprise which had been expected to overthrow 
 the government of the tyrant, who was proceeding to the en- 
 slavement of the country by more direct and unhesitating mea- 
 sures, than were those of the more indolent and more cunning 
 and cowardly King Charles — nor would the success of the Duke 
 of Monmouth have been hailed as less glorious an event, than 
 was the subsequent successful enterprise of the Prince of Orange, 
 with the glorious revolution of the year 1688. All who had 
 participated in the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth were 
 the objects of popular sympathy, the Duke himself had been 
 
13 
 
 the idol of the people, and his execution had been lamented and 
 execrated, as had been those of Russell, Sidney, Cornish and 
 the other martyrs in the cause of the liberties of England ; nor 
 was it any other than a continuation of his efforts to aid this 
 cause by every unwearied exertion, and at every possible oppor- 
 tunity, which could have procured the interference of William 
 Penn in the negotiation for the pardon of the young ladies in 
 the prisons of Devonshire, and for the relief and consolation of 
 their parents, relations and connexions, who were all, with him- 
 self, embarked in the general liberal cause. 
 
 For amongst those who fell under the vengeance of the vic- 
 torious party on the failure of the Monmouth rebellion, were 
 these young ladies, of whom Mr. Macaulay has given an 
 account so unfavourable to the reputation of William Penn. 
 They had been arrested in Devonshire on a charge of misprision 
 of treason, and being tried, had been convicted of the presen- 
 tation of the banner to the Duke of Monmouth, in the market 
 place of the town of Taunton, at the time of the passing of the rebel 
 army through that place. The consequences of this conviction 
 were, that these females were then under orders of transporta- 
 tion to the colonies, and that all the property possessed by any 
 of them, or which might have descended on entail, or in any 
 other manner, or at any future time, had become forfeited to 
 the Crown. In this position of the young ladies, a pardon under 
 the broad seal would appear to have fallen into the hands of 
 certain of the ladies about the person of the Queen, and the ne- 
 gotiation of the terms of the pardon would appear to have been 
 recommended by the Earl of Sunderland, to the attention of 
 William Penn. 
 
 First then — it is to be borne in mind, that these young ladies 
 had been guilty of a very imprudent action in having formed 
 any such a procession, for the ceremonious presentation of the 
 banner to the Duke of Monmouth ; and though the paintings 
 which Sir Peter Lely has handed down to us of this remarkably 
 handsome courtier, may render it probable, that these young 
 ladies had only been engaged in the ceremony from motives of 
 
14 
 
 frivolity, yet it must not be forgotten, that much importance 
 was attached to the movement, by reason of the connexion of 
 all of these ladies with families of rank in the West of England, 
 and that the effect of the ceremony had been to increase the 
 excitement of the rebellion amongst the rural population, as 
 showing that the gentry were favourable to the cause of the 
 Duke. 
 
 In this conviction of the females, the royal pardon was offered 
 for the sum of £7000; and yet one-third part only of this 
 money was obtained by William Penn for the ladies of the 
 court. " Agents less humane," undoubtedly would have been 
 found in times when every demonish villany was in the ascend- 
 ant in England ; and the last acre of land would too probably 
 have been extorted from the families of these ladies, who now 
 were in the power of the law ; since personal ruin must be 
 preferred to the transportation of their daughters as convicts and 
 slaves. 
 
 The inference of Mr. Macaulay that William Penn was endea- 
 vouring to keep up his influence at court, by means of this nego- 
 tiation, cannot have any foundation in the truth, when it is seen 
 that he disappointed the expectations of the ladies by not less 
 than two-thirds of the sum which they had demanded for the 
 pardons ; nor is there the shadow of a reason for such a supposi- 
 tion as that William Penn had any such purposes in view, in 
 procuring the liberation of females in danger of destruction, 
 from a participation in the same liberal cause to which he was 
 himself devoted, and the promotion of which was at that time 
 the principal business of his life. 
 
 The pardons of the Devonshire ladies, were a part of one 
 hundred, which had been obtained by the Queen of James II., 
 for the purpose of procuring money by their sale. This was a 
 degrading mode of raising money for the expences of a court ; 
 but it shows us the true position of Mary of Modena, as " de- 
 serted and insulted for such a rival as Catherine Sedley," which 
 are the words of Mr. Macaulay, and on the supreme ascendency 
 of which mistress of James II., he has filled five columns of this 
 
15 
 
 History of England, with an almost indecently too circumstan- 
 tial an account. The Queen is shown clearly to have 
 possessed no influence with her profligate husband and aged 
 debauchee, but to have lived in the indignant and retiring manner 
 of an injured gentlewoman. And when writing for these 
 pardons, by way of procuring money for the expences of 
 her state and condition, it is to be assumed that the pay- 
 ment of the salaries of the waiting women about her person, 
 was the purpose for which the pardons had been distributed 
 amongst these " ladies of the court." And if the Queen herself 
 possessed no influence of a political description, the unpaid serv- 
 ing women of such a mistress could assuredly have possessed 
 none, and consequently the females, with whom William Penn 
 is described as ingratiating himself for the purpose of procuring 
 future patronage for himself and " his oppressed brethren," had 
 no more true power to assist the cause of the Quakers, than 
 had so many strangers in the street. 
 
 But whilst the position of the Queen and her servants is thus 
 seen to have been that of imperative contempt and isolation, 
 that of William Penn, on the other hand, was one of the great- 
 est prominence and power, at this particular period of the reign 
 of James. He is described by Macaulay, and the description 
 agrees with that of many other writers, as possessing more in- 
 fluence with the King than almost any other person in the 
 kingdom ; he was daily called into the royal closet, whilst whole 
 crowds of noblemen and gentlemen were left behind in the wait- 
 ing rooms; his house at Kensington presented a levee of crowds 
 of suitors for favours through his influence, and William Penn 
 was in the zenith of his power at the time of the occurrence 
 of the afiair of the young ladies in Devonshire, and the Maids 
 of Honour to the Queen. 
 
 It was about this time that the similar affair of the estates of 
 Sir Patrick Hume and other patriots of Scotland, was under- 
 taken by William Penn. The Duke of Gordon had ob- 
 tained a grant of the forfeited estates of these gentlemen in 
 Scotland, but subject to the payment of certain annuities to the 
 
16 
 
 female branches of the families, in the manner which was usu- 
 al in grants of confiscated estates. These allowances could 
 not be obtained by the families of the refugees — and Sir Patrick 
 Hume having become known to William Penn, whilst upon a 
 journey in France, would appear to have represented to him 
 the condition of his family and friends as melancholy in the 
 extreme, by reason of the refusal of these payments by the 
 Duke of Gordon, and to have solicited the interference of 
 William Penn. Penn applied accordingly to the Duke of 
 Gordon, with the observation, that it would be better to pay 
 these unfortunate people the few hundreds which are their due, 
 or otherwise " I will make it as many thousands out of thy way 
 with the King." The arrears were immediately paid. 
 
 When he could deal thus with one of the most powerful noble- 
 men in Scotland, it is not very probable that William Penn 
 would submit to the base occupation of an agent in extortion, 
 for the benefit of the patronage to be obtained from these ob- 
 scure waiting women about the person of the Queen. 
 
 The circumstance of the interference of the Earl of Sunder- 
 land, in the affair of these ladies, is also in favour of an honour- 
 able construction of the purpose for which this Minister could 
 have written the letter, which is the authority of Mr. Macaulay 
 for his statement of the case. The Earl of Sunderland had 
 been the intimate and the steadfast friend of William Penn 
 through a long course of years ; and notwithstanding the 
 abusive character which Macaulay has drawn of this eminent 
 nobleman, yet when he is judged by his actions, it is not possi- 
 ble to discover any thing beyond the most generous exercise of 
 his power, throughout the career of this distinguished Minister 
 of these two English Kings. The only objection to the charac- 
 ter of Sunderland, is the ordinary one, that he was too fond of 
 power to retire into the shades of private life when the mea- 
 sures of the government were contrary to his principles ; but 
 otherwise, he certainly must be acknowledged to have remained 
 in power for purposes of the most honourable kind. All the 
 
17 
 
 royal proclamations for liberty of conscience bear the signature 
 of the Earl of Sunderland; not the more important general Acts 
 of Indulgence only, but the State Papers contain a long suc- 
 cession of orders under his signature for the relief of individual 
 Quakers in comparatively humble circumstances, men who had 
 been imprisoned by the Mayors and the Magistrates of pro- 
 vincial towns. That such persons should have found attention 
 from the Earl of Sunderland, who was Lord President of the 
 Council at this period, is in favour of the probability that he 
 was now interfering in favour of these Devonshire ladies from 
 motives of benevolence alone ; and that he had referred the 
 affair on some petition to the king from the families of the pri- 
 soners, to the investigation and the arbitration of William 
 Penn. 
 
 But in the narrative of Macaulay, a circumstance is intro- 
 duced in aggravation against William Penn in this composition 
 oFthe treason of the Devonshire females, that the negociation 
 had been refused by Sir Francis W^arre, the Tory Member for 
 Bridgewater; and thence the inference is drawn that William 
 Penn would unscrupulously be employed in transactions' which 
 Sir Francis Warre was too honourable to undertake as the 
 agent of the ladies of the Court. 
 
 There is not in the United States the opportunity of tracing 
 out these illustriously obscure personages in the byepaths of 
 the history of England, and we cannot therefore ascertain the 
 true character of Sir Francis Warre ; but there is no difficulty 
 in perceiving that the Tory Member for Bridgewater was the 
 direct enemy of the fathers and the families of the females in pri- 
 son for the presentation of the banner to the Duke of Mon- 
 mouth. They were all of the Whig, or liberal, party in politics, 
 and the member from Bridgewater would think that their estates 
 were very justly visited with the heaviest of fines for the crime 
 of having allowed their children to appear in what he would 
 view as the foul and unholy rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth 
 against the Lord's annointed in the person of King James. 
 The negociation was one having reference only to the amount 
 of the fines to be paid in composition of the treason, the con- 
 viction having not reached to the lives of the females of Devon- 
 3 
 
18 
 
 shire; and that Sir Francis Warre had refused to interfere for 
 the reduction of the extortion attempted by the Court ladies, 
 is the only meaning of a passage in which magnanimity is as 
 falsely attributed to him, as meanness and criminality of pur- 
 pose, with an equal degree of calumnious misrepresentation, are 
 charged against the character of William Penn. 
 
 We see, then, that the sum of .£7000 had been originally 
 demanded for the pardons, and that this sum was reduced by 
 two-thirds, or by the large amount of ^64333, and that this 
 reduction took place whilst the affair was in the hands of Wil- 
 liam Penn ; we therefore conclude that as Mr. Macaulay says 
 that the court ladies were " compelled" to be satisfied with 
 only two-thirds of the money which had been demanded, that 
 the compulsion was exercised by Penn, and these court ladies 
 were intimidated, as the Duke of Gordon had been in the pre- 
 vious case of Sir Patrick Hume, by the apprehension of the 
 representations of William Penn and his known great influence 
 with the king. 
 
 The true result of this affair of the ladies of Devonshire would 
 therefore appear to be, that William Penn did not interfere in 
 favour of the ladies of the court, but in favour of the impri- 
 soned females and of their families and friends in the political 
 world ; that he did not extract money, according to the disgrace- 
 ful imputation of this History of England, but that he prevented 
 its extraction by a very considerable amount ; that he had no 
 motives in view for the advancement of his own religious So- 
 ciety in interfering in such a negociation, for that the court 
 ladies were not only possessed of no political influence whatever, 
 but William Penn never did advance his purposes by any such 
 circuitous rounds as the secret agency of women, for he was in 
 continual personal intercourse with the king; and that the true 
 view of this affair of the Devonshire ladies must consequently be, 
 that they and all their families and connexions were under no 
 other than eternal obligations to the man who had brought them 
 out of a position so dangerous as that in which they had become 
 involved by their own imprudence in interfering in the cause 
 of the Duke of Monmouth, and thus hazarding the dangers 
 •which always accompany the losing side in war. 
 
19 
 
 Let us now turn to the next charge which Macaulay produces 
 against William Penn, one less filled with Jesuitical criminality 
 undoubtedly, but still more degrading, and insuhing, and equally 
 false and unfounded, as that which has gone before. 
 
 In the account of the execution of Elizabeth Gaunt, which 
 was another of the inhuman tragedies of those times, the histo- 
 rian says, " William Penn, /or ichom those scenes appear to have 
 presented an attraction, vhlch huma7ie men usually avoidy 
 who hurried from Cheapside, where he had seen Cornish 
 hanged, to Tyburn, in order to see Elizabeth Gaunt burned. 
 He afterwards said that when she arranged the straw around 
 her person, so that the flames should the sooner terminate her 
 sufferings, all the spectators burst into tears." 
 
 This unhappy female was burned at the stake for no greater 
 crime than that of giving refuge to one of the persons accused of 
 a connexion with the Rye House Plot, and the presence of Wil- 
 liam Penn at the execution, will be found to have been con- 
 nected with the same political purposes as was his attendance 
 at the execution of Cornish ; but in no manner for the dis- 
 graceful purpose of witnessing from curiosity alone, this most 
 inhuman scene. 
 
 As it was the purpose of the court to strike terror through 
 the nation by these barbarous executions, so it was the custom 
 of the liberal party to attend in numbers and in respectability, 
 for the contrary purpose of sympathizing with the victims of 
 arbitrary power, and to show that they were not to be viewed 
 as criminals, but as martyrs, in the liberal cause. Such exe- 
 cutions we know to have been thus attended by the flocks of 
 the dissenting clergy, and by the members of the political party of 
 the very numerous patriots who fell under the tyranny of these 
 two most infamous reigns of Charles and of James. Very 
 affecting accounts remain respecting the execution of Twing, 
 when so surrounded by his companions in religion ; whilst the 
 executions of the regicides, of Lord W^illiam Russel, of Alger- 
 non Sidney, of Sir Henry Vane, and of Alderman Cornish — all 
 have been described as conveying to the court the deepest 
 mortification, by reason of the respectful sympathy and the pro- 
 
20 
 
 found silence and sorrow of the crowds in attendance at the 
 scenes. 
 
 Political executions never have been viewed as the same 
 disgraceful exhibitions with those which are attended by the 
 crowds of prostitutes and pickpockets of the metropolis of 
 England ; nor have mobs been observed in any country, to be 
 deficient in perceiving the wide difference between the unjust 
 execution of patriotic citizens, and the just punishment of the 
 murderers and burglars of ordinary crime. Nor could a man in 
 the garb and in the known high position, of William Penn, 
 have attended at ordinary executions with safety from the 
 insults and the violence of the mob ; whilst, contrarywise, his 
 presence would be respectfully noticed by the people at such 
 executions as those of Alderman Cornish and of Elizabeth 
 Gaunt. It was favouring the popular cause in a well under- 
 stood mode of silent sympathy with the victims in the cause 
 of popular liberty ; and it was an equally well understood 
 silent condemnation of the measures of the Court. The very 
 words in which Macaulay makes William Penn describe the 
 executions of Cornish and of Gaunt, shew that he had been 
 present in the hope that scenes of firmness in death would be 
 exhibited by these victims of arbitrary power ; that in so far the 
 repetition of these enormities would be prevented by the disap- 
 pointment of the tyrants that the effect of intimidation had not 
 been produced upon the people ; but on the other hand, that 
 an exhibition had taken place of general popular sympathy with 
 the martyrs murdered by the Court, and " unjustly slain under 
 forms of law." The hurried passing of William Penn from 
 Cheapside to Tyburn, was the eagerness of a good citizen 
 to be present at a post of duty, though undoubtedly a most 
 harrowing duty, to a man who so abhorred all bloodshed in either 
 the forms of war, or of the unjust criminal laws which filled the Sta- 
 tute Book of England at that time ; and whose entire existence is 
 an answer to the gross assertion of Macauley that he could wit- 
 ness with pleasure the scene of the execution of females in the 
 most melancholy position of Elizabeth Gaunt. He attended at 
 her execution, as at the funeral of an innocent female who was 
 falling, however indirectly, in the general cause of civil and 
 
21 
 
 religious liberty, arid towards so humble an individual as Eli- 
 beth Gaunt, undoubtedly his presence was for the performance 
 of the works of mercy which were the never ceasing occupa- 
 tion of William Penn ; for the comfort of the afflicted sur- 
 viving relatives and friends, by sympathy, by council and by 
 money, and to see the tragedy to its termination in the decent 
 burial of the dead. Thus did Socrates in the time of the reign 
 of the Thirty -Tyrants of Athens, and thus did the transmigra- 
 tion of Socrates in the reign of terror in England, which his 
 calumniator now would represent as a time of pleasure to be 
 found in the spectacle of the burning of an aged and an inno- 
 cent female such as the unfortunate Elizabeth Gaunt; the most 
 horrid judicial murder which has been known in modern 
 times. 
 
 Having thus noticed the more gross and disgraceful of these 
 charges against the good name of William Penn, let us now 
 turn to the scene in which he is next introduced by this historian 
 as moving in the affair of the Presidency of Magdalen College, 
 Oxford, in which he was the messenger and agent of the 
 king. 
 
 Here every characteristic of practised villainy is attributed 
 to the most open-minded and the least deceitful of mankind. 
 He is called by Macaulay "the tool of the King and the Jesuits ;" 
 he is made to threaten and to cajole, by turns, the President 
 and Fellows of Magdalen College; wading through any agency, 
 how infamous soever it may be, so that he shall please the 
 tyrant by whom he is employed ; and even assisting in the 
 overthrow of that religious liberty, which it had been hitherto 
 the struggle of his entire existence to defend from the arbitrary 
 power of kings. 
 
 The connexion of William Penn with this affair of the Presi- 
 dency of Magdalen College, Oxford, was slight and transient ; 
 for he seems to have been selected by James as having been 
 accidentally in that part of England at the time ; nor is it pro- 
 bable that he might have thought himself justified in refusing to 
 bear any message or to render any other service which was 
 not against his conscience, when directly commanded by the 
 king. 
 
22 
 
 And there was nothing against his conscience in the first part 
 of his message and commission, nor until the principle involved 
 in the oath of office had been brought before his mind, in the 
 course of the interview with the authorities of the college, of 
 which Macaulay has given so calumnious an account. It is 
 clear that William Penn had no conscientious preference of 
 Protestants over Catholics, for the possession of the revenues 
 of the University of Oxford ; for he stated in the course of the 
 interview, that " It no longer is to be, that sons of members of 
 the Church of England alone shall have a learned education ;" 
 neither did he consider the interest of religion and learning in 
 any manner involved in the particular individuals who were 
 struggling for the good things of a place so celebrated as the 
 University of Oxford has been through all ages for its sumptu- 
 ous feastings, its sloth, "fat slumbers of the Church." There 
 is an air almost of jocularity about the observations of "William 
 Penn on the fine buildings, with the beautiful walks and the 
 rich revenues of the Colleges of Oxford ; whilst the reply of the 
 President of Magdalen College is entirely in a worldly strain : 
 " The Catholics have ' robbed' us of Christ Church, and now 
 the ' battle' is for Magdalen. They soon will have the rest." 
 
 The truth quite evidently is that William Penn from early 
 education in a University from which he had been expelled for 
 exposing its corruptions — from long subsequent knowledge of 
 the hireling character of all connected with the government of 
 the place — from the recent instance of gross subserviency and 
 of prostrate political baseness, by which the philosopher Locke 
 had been expelled from the same University without charge 
 and without trial, but only for the crime of entertaining the 
 noblest principles of religious toleration and of the civil liberties 
 of mankind, and he having been the intimate personal friend of 
 William Penn, as of all the other great minds in advance of that 
 very barbarous age — and considering that darkness and corrup- 
 tion could not reign more completely under any other religious 
 denomination than under the then governors of the University 
 of Oxford, he might have been indifferent to the success of the 
 Catholic over the Protestant combatants for the rich revenues of 
 the colleges, and might have proposed the division of the spoils 
 
23 
 
 of learning in the manner of which Macaulay has given so cir- 
 cumstantial an account. As it has come down to these more 
 enlightened times, the University of Oxford is a mere monas- 
 tery of the dark ages still remaining in England — its surplices, 
 Puseyism, and tractarianism are all so many remains of Catholic 
 ceremonial and Catholic superstition; whilst in the Duke of 
 Wellington, who is the present Chancellor of the University of 
 Oxford, a most illiterate soldier is seen in possession of all the 
 enormous patronage of an institution wdiich is ages behind the 
 religion and the learning of the time. When the inauguration 
 speech of the Duke of Wellington was placed in his hands, 
 this military Chancellor proved to be unable to read the Latin 
 language, in which the speech was compelled to be delivered 
 according to the ancient rules of the University ; and its deli- 
 yery was gone through amidst the roars of laughter of all the 
 spectators of a scene of which there remains an engraving, from 
 which posterity will see how the brightest honours of learning 
 •were won in the time of that Queen Victoria whose reign Mr. 
 Macaulay has written this History of England to show to have 
 been the commencement of the millenium upon earth. Such 
 being the condition of the University of Oxford in these times 
 of comparative reforms of ancient abuse, it must have been 
 still more Augean in the times of William Penn ; and by letting 
 in the stream of competition and of the energy and labour of 
 the rival religion to that of the Church of England, he had un- 
 doubtedly in view the removal of the accumulations of ages of 
 abuse of the rich revenues of the place. It is the proposal now 
 very generally made for the regeneration of the University of 
 Oxford ; nor will the next important movement in the reform of 
 the government of England, pass without the admission of the 
 dissenters of the country to a share of the revenue which is 
 wasted upon generation after generation of an aristocracy edu- 
 cated in every prejudice in favour of the barbarisms of a 
 feudal antiquity, and who become the unyielding legislators 
 who curse England by a system of refusal to give way in time 
 to the changes required by the altered condition of the world. 
 
 But whatever might have been the intended proposals of 
 William Penn for the future government of the University of 
 
24 
 
 Oxford, it is certain that his agency had been so far inconse- 
 quential in the affair of the Presidency of Magdalen College, 
 until the principle involved in the oath of office had been men- 
 tioned in the course of the memorable interview with the autho- 
 rities of the University ; when equally certain it is that he aban- 
 doned his mission forthwith and turned instantly round against 
 the king. It had then become apparent that James was breaking 
 not only through all the laws of thS nation and of the University, 
 but through all the obligations of an oath; and William Penn at 
 once displayed the incorruptible uprightness of his character in 
 a noble letter to the king, in which he stated, that " such 
 mandates are a force upon the conscience and not very agreeable 
 to your other gracious indulgencies. By the general Liberty of 
 Conscience, none can he deprived of their proferty who do what 
 they ought to do, and this the Master and Fellows of Magdalen 
 College appear to have done.^^ With this letter, he seems to 
 have gone on his way in the business of the pastoral visit which 
 had taken him into that part of England ; thus having haz- 
 arded everything with the king, who was in the height of exas- 
 peration at the time of these events. The authorities for this 
 letter are Sykes, Sewell and Creech ; and its suppression is the 
 more difficult to be attributed to ignorance of its existence, as 
 every source of information is seen to have been known to the 
 writer of this History of England ; and this letter has been 
 always amongst the most prominent and most honourable of all 
 the events in the political career of William Penn. 
 
 Connected with the affair of Magdalen College, there are 
 two other charges brought against William Penn ; that he did 
 not scruple to be " a broker in simony of a particularly disrepu- 
 table kind, to tempt a bishop to commit perjury;" and that "he 
 had bought land subject to tithes, on which the purchase money- 
 had been allowed to him." 
 
 The crime of simony consists in the sale of church prefer- 
 ment for lucre and gain ; but William Penn was not proposing 
 to sell the bishopric of Oxford, nor in any other manner to gain 
 money by the proposed changes in the arrangements of the church. 
 He was only the messenger of the king, and withdrew from 
 his coramission when the moral iniquity of the measures of the 
 
25 
 
 government had been brought clearly into view. He was fol- 
 lowed to Windsor by Dr. Hough and a deputation of five of the 
 fellows of Magdalen College — his continued good offices were 
 rendered to the cause of the college to the last, and until the 
 commission had been issued by the king; and on the authority 
 of Hough himself, all this is well known to have been the con- 
 duct of William Penn. Simony is therefore a futile charge. 
 
 That he "bought land on which the value of the tithes had 
 been allowed to him," may seem to American readers of this 
 History of England to have reference to some dispute in con- 
 nexion with the tithes of the patrimonial estate of William Penn. 
 But there is no foundation for such a supposition ; for William 
 Penn did not at any time purchase land in England, where his 
 patrimonial estate was in a state of continual sale and diminution, 
 by reason of the losses on the colony of Pennsylvania and of his 
 entire neglect of that lucre and gain of which he here is as 
 erroneously accused as of simony and of fraudulent refusal to pay 
 tithes. His estate at Stoke Pogis was at no time the subject of 
 dispute with reference to tithes : the property at Worminghurst 
 he obtained with his first wife ; and the various residences at 
 Rickmanworth, Kensington, Barn Elms, and other places in 
 the vicinity of London, would all appear to have been rented 
 only, by the family of William Penn. But though he bought no 
 land at any time subject to tithes, yet the moral obligation to pay 
 tithes on land which he might have purchased was not greater 
 than to pay tithes on the lands derived from his ancestors, to 
 whom the purchase money had equally been allowed ; and this 
 is likewise a vague and futile charge. 
 
 Those who are conversant with the tithe system of England, 
 will perceive that it is only the general argument of the 
 modern political economy of tithes, brought forward against 
 William Penn as one of the Society of Friends, — the case 
 being supposititious with regard to the purchase of land. It is 
 reasoned by the tithe owners, that all persons are dishonest who 
 refuse to pay the tenth part of their agricultural productions to 
 the established Church of England : since tithes have existed 
 from time immemorial, the owners of land have bought their 
 estates for one-tenth part less money than though the claims of 
 4 
 
26 
 
 the church had not existed at the time of the purchase and sale 
 of such estate ; thence, that the church possesses a perpetual mort- 
 gage on the produce of the soil of England ; that all who refuse to 
 pay the interest of this mortgage, in the form of tithes, are guilty 
 of fraud upon the just rights of the established church of Eng- 
 land ; and William Penn, who was a Quaker, was also guilty of 
 a crime in refusing to pay tithes. Divested of the obscurity of 
 the terms in which Macaulay has brought forward this charge, it 
 is merely included in the general accusation which falls upon 
 Quakers and upon all other persons — of whom there are many 
 legions in number — who will not pay tithes to a church in which 
 they do not believe, but who answer the political economists 
 that the mortgage of the Church of England is void from the 
 beginning ; for that tithes are collected by an unscriptural and 
 an unjust law. 
 
 It is a deceptive and sophisticated application of the general 
 principle to the particular circumstances of the individual, and it 
 is quite assuredly false in the circumstance which is stated respect- 
 ing the purchase of land which was subject to tithes, for no land 
 would appear to have been purchased at any time in England 
 by William Penn. 
 
 Such is the falsehood of these charges of sycophancy, of 
 Jesuitism, of simony and of fraud upon the Church of England, 
 as arising out of the affair of Magdalen College, and the employ- 
 ment of William Penn as a messenger and agent of the king. 
 
 But the newspaper paragraph describes Mr. Macauley as prov- 
 ing to the deputation of Quakers that William Penn is con- 
 demned in the records of their own Society ; for that he was 
 expelled " for courtier-like compliances," although he was after- 
 wards admitted again into the Society of Friends. 
 
 The writer of these observations has not the opportunity of 
 knowing the arrangements of the Society of Friends, but it is 
 clear that though it were true that he had been expelled from 
 the Society, this would not be of any very material importance 
 in an historical view of the character of William Penn. What 
 the Quakers of that time considered to be courtier-like compli- 
 ances, may have been only the most consummate prudence, in 
 the midst of so many religious and political enemies as those 
 
27 
 
 who must have surrounded such a person as Wllliani Penn 
 at the courts of Charles and of James ; neither might his 
 Quaker contemporaries, who were principally farmers scat- 
 tered throughout the kingdom, have been the best of all 
 possible judges of the manners and the management which 
 were requisite in a William Penn. But though he had been 
 expelled from the Society of Friends — and even this is said to 
 have no foundation in the truth — he was expelled only on a 
 point of manners, and not of morals ; and his re-admission as 
 mentioned in the newspaper paragraph, implies an explanation 
 which removed the courtier-like compliances from the minds 
 of his brethren of the Society of Friends. However he may 
 have been yielding in the slighter points of manners and eti- 
 quette — and it has been thought that continual intercourse with 
 the court did gradually unbend the original rigidity of his 
 address towards people of high rank — yet has the suaviter in 
 modo, fortiter in re, been ever held to be the mark and 
 distinction of the perfect human being ; nor would a true prin- 
 ciple appear to have been ever yielded amidst all the tempta- 
 tions and dangers of the lengthened intercourse of William Penn 
 with those historically infamous two English kings. The letter 
 to James on the subject of the Presidency of Magdalen College, 
 replies for ever to all such charges as that of sycophancy ; for 
 William Penn very nobly shines out from amongst the crowds of 
 flatterers and villains who were siding with the king in this ini- 
 quitous and dangerous proceeding, and which so largely contri- 
 buted to his loss of the throne of England, an event which took 
 place almost immediately after that time. 
 
 These are the principal charges which appear in this History 
 of England, but there is a general summary of the character of 
 William Penn ; and in this he is described as deficient in know- 
 ledge of the characters of men ; his remaining literary works 
 are undervalued by Mr. Macaulay, and though William Penn 
 might have been a man of good intentions, he was always " the 
 dupe of persons less honest than himself." 
 
 These would be only misfortunes, and not crimes of character, 
 ■were it even apparent on what part of his career the charge of 
 folly can be shown to have been visible in the character of 
 
28 
 
 William Penn. That which appeared to be folly, proved to be 
 wisdom the most profound, in the man who ventured into the 
 wildernesses of America, armed only with kettles and with bales 
 of cloth ; and the day is believed to be not far distant when 
 the glory of that conquest will be more fully acknowledged by 
 mankind. Soldiers are by many persons believed to be des- 
 tined to figure for a short time only longer as the most promi- 
 nent characters on the theatre of the world ; nor will it be in 
 the pages of philosophy alone, in the Spirit of Laws, and by 
 great Montesquieu, but by the world at large, that an immortal 
 fame will be awarded to the only true conqueror of the Western 
 world. 
 
 Neither could his penetration of individual character have 
 been so deficient as Macaulay represents, for the correspond- 
 ence with Algernon Sidney, which has been brought out of its 
 burial place at Penshurst, shows William Penn to have been in 
 advance of many very eminent judges of men in his estimate 
 of the character and accomplishments of Algernon Sidney ; — 
 in advance of Burnett, of Evelyn, of Ludlow, of Barillion, of 
 Dalrymple, of Hume, of the poet Thomson, and of whole hosts 
 of others who have concurred in the same estimate of the charac- 
 ter and accomplishments of this high minded and most truly illus- 
 trious and extraordinary man : neither do we find him in connexion 
 with any who have not descended in honour historically to the 
 present times. Deceived, Penn certainly was not, in the charac- 
 ters of his political associates, for he never deceived any, and 
 this was the principal reason of his success with so many states- 
 men and princes with whom he was connected in the course of 
 a long political life. 
 
 Respecting the literary merits of William Penn, it might 
 have been good to have deferred to the opinions of Mr. Macaulay 
 on a subject so immediately within his province as a Reviewer, 
 were there not throughout this History of England so determined 
 a series of falsifications of every good attribute of the charac- 
 ter of William Penn. Apart, then, from his religious writings, 
 there is no estimate too high for the merits of the greater and 
 the later, productions of William Penn ; nor is there in all the 
 classical learning which has been incorporated into the litera- 
 
29 
 
 ture of England, any nobler assemblage of the great sayings 
 and the great thoughts from the farthest fountains of the learn-' 
 ing of Greece and Rome, than appear in the Maxims and Re- 
 flections of William Penn and in the second part of his No Cross 
 No Crown. This renders the more to be regretted the present 
 contempt which is thrown over all that concerns William Penn 
 in a publication which will be so far diffused as will this History 
 of England, and through which, the public already too generally 
 ignorant of the existence of these accumulations of practical wis- 
 dom, now will be still more indifferent to the works of a man 
 who has left in his later literary productions, such treasures of 
 untold gold. 
 
 Nor can the projector of the city of Philadelphia be denied 
 a high place amongst the solid benefactors of mankind. Famous 
 as had been the many cities of antiquity, none had been com- 
 menced on a comprehensive and mathematical system of build- 
 ing ; and when we see so many rising cities on this continent, 
 St. Louis, Cincinnati, and others in imitation of the model city 
 of Philadelphia, it must be allowed that these are so many monu- 
 ments to the genius, the mathematical learning, and the solid 
 utility of the changes which were founded by William Penn. 
 
 We have thus gone through the false charges of all kinds 
 wTiich this History of England offers against the reputation of 
 William Penn, and it seems only to remain that a clue should 
 be found to the motives for which these imputations should 
 have been made upon a name which has been hitherto so high 
 amongst the founders of systems for the future benefit of man- 
 kind. 
 
 The work which Mr. Macaulay has now written is not a His- 
 tory of England in anything but the name. It has been under- 
 taken for a particular purpose and at a particular time ; it is writ- 
 ten in a rapid and a very brilliant style, and was ushered into 
 the world amidst the sounding of all the trumpets in the British 
 dominions, in advance of the coming and the conquering Mars 
 of the English throne. The book has been written since the 
 establishment of the present republic of France. 
 
 The conqueror has hastily buckled on his armour — the thunder 
 of war is heard in the political world, and says Mr. Macaulay, 
 
30 
 
 " All around us the world is convulsed with the agonies of 
 great nations ; governments which lately seemed likely to stand 
 for ages, have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. The 
 proudest capitals of Western Europe have streamed with civil 
 blood. All evil passions — the thirst of gain, and the thirst of 
 vengeance — the antipathy of class to class — of race to race, 
 have broken loose from the control of divine and human laws. 
 Fear and severity have clouded the faces and depressed the 
 hearts of millions. Trade has been suspended and industry 
 paralized. The rich have become poor and the poor have be- 
 come poorer. Doctrines hostile to all science, to all arts, to all 
 industry, to all domestic charities — doctrines which, if carried 
 into effect, would in thirty years undo all that thirty centuries 
 have done for mankind, and would make the fairest provinces 
 of France and Germany as savage as Congo or Patagonia — have 
 been avowed from the tribune and defended by the sword. 
 Europe has been threatened with subjugation by barbarians, 
 compared with whom, the barbarians who marched under Attila 
 and Alboin, were enlightened and humane." 
 
 This magniloquent exhibition of political raving, means merely 
 that the French nation have overthrown the government of a 
 tyrant and an impostor, and have founded a republic within 
 only twenty-one miles from the coast of Kent. 
 
 " The truest friends of the people," he further says, "have 
 with deep sorrow owned that interests more precious than any 
 political privileges were in jeopardy, and that it might be neces- 
 sary to sacrifice even liberty, in order to save civilization." 
 
 The interests which were, and which still are, in jeopardy, are 
 such interests as the interest of the Marquis of Lansdowne, in 
 a landed estate of .£120,000 a year, obtained in a late reign on 
 a job lease under the crown. The Marquis of Lansdowne is 
 the patron of Mr. Macaulay, and can re-open the road to the seat 
 in Parliament and the place under the government of England, 
 which he had recently and suddenly lost when the revolution 
 took place in France. 
 
 The sacrifice of liberty which he proposes in order to save 
 civilization, means that reformation in the church, the uni- 
 versities, the chancery, the army, the navy, the revenue and 
 
31 
 
 the colonies of England shall be resisted, to whatever nunnbers 
 the standing array may be increased, or if the Habeas Corpus 
 Act be suspended, and all other tyrannical measures be resorted 
 to by the party who were in power at the time of this second 
 revolution in France. 
 
 Mr. Macaulay is in the same position with Edmund Burke, on 
 the breaking out of the first revolution of France. His circum- 
 stances are unhappily similar, the times are similar, and the 
 work of Burke on the first revolution, and the concludinsT 
 observations of the present volume of the History of England, 
 are in a similar style of magniloquent rhodomontade. Thrones 
 are falling, altars are profaned, universities are plundered, murder 
 is abroad in the land, and all is war and sudden death. Republi- 
 canism does all these crimes, and republicanism must be con- 
 quered in England, on its first appearance in the land. As 
 Macaulay possesses the most brilliant pen in the nation, on 
 him devolves the mighty labour of defending the institutions of 
 England, and of slaying all the enemies of altars and of thrones 
 and of all the most venerable abuses in church and state. 
 
 In this vocation of champion of monarchy and of aristocracy, 
 he has attacked the republicans of the seventeenth century in 
 the first volume of his work. For all are republicans who are 
 reformers of abuses ; and though Penn, Sunderland, Hume, 
 and Algernon Sidney might not favour the overthrow of kings, 
 they nevertheless were men who would have reduced the expen- 
 sive bauble of monarchy ; would no longer have preserved pal- 
 aces for bishops, nor universities for monastic styes of gluttony 
 and sloth. They were in favour of governments founded on 
 the good of the whole of the people existing in the country, 
 and not on the pleasure of the few who have the privilege 
 of dining amongst the paintings and statutes of Lansdowne 
 House. This shows us why all the rancour of party spirit is 
 displayed in the malignant account of the afl!air of Magdalen 
 College ; for the reform of the University of Oxford, would have 
 been the immediate consequence of the proposals of William 
 Penn ; and that a Quaker should have been seen in the Univer- 
 sity of Oxford, and discussing freely its uses, its abuses, and 
 its reformation, is gall and wormwood to Macaulay, as it seems 
 
32 
 
 to have been humiliating and enraging to that pompous digni- 
 tary, Dr. Hough. Oxford is a place for lords alone. 
 
 All republicanism is the object of the attack of Mr. Macau- 
 lay, — and it is his business to represent republicans as robbers, 
 murderers, sycophants, jesuists, atheists, simonists, and fraudu- 
 lent debtors to the only one true church. There is no other 
 mode of terrifying the middle classes of England into a continu- 
 ation of the junction with the aristocracy against the mass of 
 the people ; and this is the purpose which the writer of this 
 History of England has now immediately in view. 
 
 On the other hand, all is sunshine and happiness in his pic- 
 tures of the interior of the courts. The mistresses of Charles 
 and of James are described in full length pictures of the warm- 
 est colouring. A constellation of these beauties is assembled 
 at the court of Charles ; we have all the details of the persons, 
 dress, lineage, and connexions of these females — the Italian 
 greyhound, the spinnet, the silver ornaments in boundless profu- 
 sion, are seen in the magnificent apartments of the Dutchess of 
 Portsmouth ; Catharine Sedley is described with still greater 
 minuteness and delicacy of colouring ; Sir Charles, the 
 father of this celebrated demirep, is produced in all the pro- 
 priety of the window in Covent Garden, and many other 
 persons and scenes here move in a royal panorama which is 
 usually supposed to be in place in the pages of some Decame- 
 ronian novel alone. Is not this the temple of history — the 
 august temple of the wise, the great, and the good, embalmed 
 from ages gone by ? and are not these women as so many 
 painted prostitutes ? what do they here ? They fill up plea- 
 santly the intervals between the slanders of the characters of 
 the liberal actors in the historical scene. 
 
 For William Penn suffers death in his reputation with all the 
 great and the good public characters of the reigns of Charles 
 and of James. What Mr. Macaulay calls the " character of 
 Sunderland," and the " fall of Sunderland," are so many elab- 
 orate falsehoods, which are seen through in the words " he had 
 a speculative liking for republican institutions." 
 
 Thus it certainly was, for Sunderland was enlightened be- 
 yond any statesman of his time ; at the University of Oxford 
 
33 
 
 he had been the intimate friend of William Penn ; they had 
 engaged in a similar course of classical learning — they had de- 
 spised and opposed the superstitious ceremonies of the Univer- 
 sity, and Sunderland was expelled for assisting in the same oppo- 
 sition to the surplice which caused the expulsion of William Penn. 
 
 And Algernon Sidney is a " pensioner of France." 
 
 Not a person in all broad England, better knows than does 
 Mr. Macaulay, that this charge is false ; that it has been refuted 
 a thousand times. A republican was Algernon Sidney, and famous 
 through all ages will be the history of his life and of his glori- 
 ous death in the cause of the republican liberties of mankind. 
 
 Here follows Sir Patrick Hume. " The chief of this party 
 was a lowland gentleman, who had been implicated in the 
 Whig plot, and had with difficulty eluded the vengeance of the 
 court: Sir Patrick Hume of Polwath, in Berwickshire: — he 
 was a man incapable alike of leading and of following ; con- 
 ceited, captious, and wrong-headed; an endless talker; a slug- 
 gard in action against the enemy, and active only against his 
 own allies." 
 
 Sir Patrick Hume was a man whose superior abilities are 
 seen in every page of the Narrative which he has left of the 
 events of the expedition of the Duke of Monmouth. The failure 
 of the expedition he foresaw, by reason of the incapacity of 
 the generals ; in England, of Monmouth ; and in Scotland, of 
 Argyle. In the subsequent expedition of the Prince of Orange 
 he was actively employed ; and after the revolution he reco- 
 vered his estate of Polwath from the Duke of Gordon, was 
 created Earl of Marchmont by William the 3rd ; was afterwards 
 Lord High Commissioner of Scotland, and died with the name 
 of a man, than whom Scotland has produced few who have 
 fought, suffered, or triumphed, more nobly in the cause of the 
 free Presbyterian faith and of the civil liberties of his native 
 land. 
 
 Here may be noticed the assertion of Macaulay, that Sir Pat- 
 rick Hume '' had been implicated in the Whig plot." This is 
 the Rye House Plot, the same on account of which so many 
 judicial murders were committed in the reigns of Charles and 
 of James ; and which was not a plot against the government, 
 5 
 
31 
 
 but a plot by the government against all the lives of all the 
 most enlightened and honourable political characters of the time. 
 To reiterate the charge of plotting against the government in 
 the manner of assassination, is only another mode of throwing 
 odium on all liberal and republican minded men ; for certain it 
 is, that the crime of murder would never have been engaged in 
 by such men as a Russel, Sidney, or a Hume ; they openly opposed 
 the measures of the government at the elections and on all other 
 legal occasions ; but on the charge of murder, it is certain that 
 the lives and fortunes of these great patriots were most unjustly 
 and infamously sworn away by the emissaries of the court. It 
 is of historical importance that William Penn should be seen 
 subsequently moving so frequently in sympathy and in active 
 assistance to the parties accused of this plot — for he lived at 
 the time, and was the friend of many of the parties, and his judg- 
 ment could not have been deceived ; and yet he is seen sympa- 
 thizing with the fate of Cornish and of Gaunt, and hazarding 
 the malice of the Duke of Gordon, in behalf of Sir Patrick 
 Hume. Certain we therefore are, that there was no truth in the 
 Rye House Plot, for the projectors of murder would never have 
 been thus countenanced by a man of the character of William 
 Penn. 
 
 But now we shall see what description of politician obtains 
 the admiration of Mr. Macaulay. 
 
 " A far higher character belonged to Andrew Fletcher, of 
 Salton, a man distinguished by learning and eloquence; dis- 
 tinguished also by courage, disinterestedness, and public spirit, 
 but of an irritable and impracticable temper. He was the head 
 of an ancient Norman house, and was proud of his descent. 
 He was a fine speaker and a fine writer, and was proud of his 
 intellectual superiority. Like many of his most illustrious con- 
 temporaries — Milton, for example — Harrington — Marvel, and 
 Sidney — Fletcher had, from the misgovernment of several suc- 
 cessive princes, conceived a strong aversion to monarchy ; yet 
 he was no democrat. Both in his character of gentleman, and 
 in his character of scholar, he looked down with disdain upon 
 the common people ; and even so little disposed to entrust them 
 with political power, that he thought them unfit even to enjoy 
 
35 
 
 personal freedom. It is a curious circumstance, that this man, 
 the most honest, fearless, and uncompromising republican of 
 his time, should have been the author of a plan for reducing 
 a large part of the working classes of Scotland to slavery." 
 
 Undoubtedly to employ his classical learning for the purpose 
 of reducing his countrymen to slavery, was good in the eyes of 
 Mr. Macaulay, as a parvenu of the Whig aristocracy, than 
 whom never men have abused their power for more selfish pur- 
 poses, have practised so much hypocrisy towards the people of 
 England, or acted upon the worst principles of Nicholas Macchi- 
 avelli, in the base art of dividing and of governing the multi- 
 tudes of their fellow men. Through seventeen years of power 
 obtained on the pretence of liberalism, have these men been 
 steadily engaged in the business of their own enrichment and 
 further elevation in the ranks of the aristocracy, every political 
 abuse has been continued and encreased — the corn laws — the 
 master evil of manufacturing England — were continued until 
 famine forced open the ports, the reform of the Parliament was 
 converted into a nullity by the corruption of the manufacturing 
 members, the naval and military expenditure has been raised 
 to seventeen millions sterling per year, and the British islands 
 present the appearance of one vast camp in a time of declining 
 commerce, and where beggary stalks about the length and the 
 breadth of the land. All this has been done by the arts which 
 are brought from the worst remains of classical antiquity, and 
 for which such characters as Fletcher of Salton are admired by 
 Macaulay, a man who has grown grey in the harness of the 
 English nobility of the party which has for its oracle the 
 pages of the Edinburgh Review. 
 
 But the literary merits of Fletcher are magnified to a folly, in 
 this account of his productions; he is the author of no one 
 great literary work, nor of any one important concatenation of 
 any description, and when compared with the Discourses on 
 Government by Algernon Sidney, or the second part of the No 
 Cross No Crown, by William Penn, all the writings of Fletcher 
 of Salton are no more than as Ossa to a wart. And the disgusting 
 temper of Fletcher of Salton, ruined him as a private gentleman ; 
 he fled for the manslaughter of a brother officer and served 
 
36 
 
 against the Turks for many years, because unable to appear in 
 his own country with the consequence of the crime suspended 
 over his head, and he died in obscurity at last, and despised by 
 all the world. 
 
 Mr. Macaulay might well take a lesson from the history of 
 this man ; he displays an admiration for the character of Fletcher 
 of Salton which shows us the cause of his own downfall in 
 the political world. Elected a member of Parliament for Edin- 
 burgh, Mr. Macaulay found himself in the office of paymaster 
 of the forces, with a large salary, a seat in the cabinet, and the 
 Right Honourable Thomas Babington Macaulay, becoming then 
 his high sounding name. But in an evil hour " he looked 
 down with disdain upon the common people," the unendurable 
 pomposity, arrogance, and insolence of his demeanour amongst 
 his constituents in Scotland, caused the people to say. Is not 
 this the son of Zachary Macaulay ? and thereupon and from 
 that cause alone was the brilliant reviewer turned out of the 
 representation of Edinburgh, and Mr. Cowen, the paper-maker, 
 elevated into his seat. This occurred within two years from 
 this time, and is the cause of the writing of a History of Eng- 
 land, in which he returns to the unhappy error of indulging in 
 this qualification of disdain and self destructive self conceit. 
 
 He overrates his power to sustain thrones and drive back the 
 waves of democracy. The institutions of England must be 
 reviewed on the popular principle, and before any long time 
 shall have passed away; for England has not been revolution- 
 ized by sympathy with the progress of republican movement only 
 because of the circumstance that every second man in England 
 is not yet " only just not dying of hunger ;" which in the words 
 of Chevalier, has been the cause of the late revolution in France. 
 But still in Great Britain misery infinite walks about through 
 the land ; every tenth person receives parish relief, and this 
 numbers three millions of souls to whom existence is a curse 
 in the workhouses of modern England — other four or five mil- 
 lions are only just above this condition and in eternal dread of 
 its approach — other millions are descending lower and lower 
 towards the regions of poverty; and it is estimated that full ten 
 millions of persons in the British islands are without property 
 
37 
 
 of any kindand dependent on the chances of the day for bread 
 and for remaining in the world. " Oppression," says William 
 Penn, in his Maxims, " makes a poor country, and a discon- 
 tented people, who are always waiting for a change." 
 
 Instead, then, of persevering in the present system of fraudu- 
 lent writing and of military force and violence in the support 
 of a monstrous pile of ancient abuse, let it be hoped that a 
 contrary policy will prevail in England, and that justice may be 
 substituted for the sword, which may not always be successful 
 against multitudes of men and against the course of events. 
 The true policy to be pursued, let Mr. Macaulay and his patrons 
 then learn from the example of William Penn. " I give you 
 no soldiers, William, for your colony." " I want none of thy 
 soldiers, Charles ; I depend upon something better than any 
 soldiers of thine." 
 
 To do justice to all, is the policy to be found in the example 
 of W^illiam Penn. If he ventured amongst the Indians of Ame- 
 rica without soldiers and without swords, let Englishmen now 
 venture to trust one another with the votes which are the natu- 
 ral right of all existing in a free State. 
 
 Let the government of England then disband the standing 
 army of England — save the enormous sum of seventeen millions 
 sterling now expended on the military system of the country; 
 and by yielding the elective franchise, which is the right of all 
 the people, satisfy the discontented and convert the hatred into 
 the gratitude, of millions of their fellow men. Then the throne, 
 the lords, the church, and the universities would be saved for 
 a long period of time, though reduced probably from the pre- 
 sent overgrown plethoric condition of institutions which are 
 overloaded with the abuses of ages gone by. 
 
 And let us hope that Macaulay will not persevere in his hith- 
 erto strain of abuse of the best friends of mankind in former 
 ages; for in his forthcoming volumes the judgment of the 
 public w^ill be more easily formed as the history comes down 
 to the times of the establishment of the republics of the United 
 States and of France. To these times it is to be perceived that 
 the historian is hurrying, as the more important ground for the 
 contest with the dreaded republican principle ; and it is to be 
 
38 
 
 expected that the same misrepresentations and calumnies will 
 be directed against the noblest of the modern republicans — a 
 Carnot in France, and a Jefferson in the United States. But 
 prejudice and imposture will be the more easily detected as 
 the events approach our own time. 
 
 Truth is the cardinal virtue of the historian ; without truth, the 
 almanac is superior to the most flowery historical composition. 
 Truth is the beginning, the middle, and the end; — the truth, 
 the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Yet is there not 
 one word of truth in all the allusions which this History 
 of England has made to the name and the fame of William 
 Penn, and of his fellow-labourers in the cause of the liberties 
 of England in the times of the darkest hours of danger and 
 distress. 
 
 For we have seen clearly that William Penn did not 
 attend at the executions of Cornish or of Elizabeth Gaunt wnth 
 the slavish prejudices and for the ignoble purposes which this 
 writer has represented; but for purposes and with sentiments of 
 the most nobly opposite description — he did not extort money 
 from females in distress, but he prevented its extortion and put 
 down the cruelty and criminality of the ladies of the court; he 
 was not a Jesuit in his principles and practice in the affair of 
 Magdalen College, for he opposed the king and the Jesuits in 
 the noblest manner which has been seen at any court in modern 
 times ; neither was he guilty of simony nor of fraud upon the 
 Church of England, nor of any of the other criminalities and 
 follies which this History of England has brought against his 
 hitherto unostentatiously great name. 
 
 It is a " book of grossest infamy," in the words of Milton, 
 on the buffoon who ridiculed Socrates on the Athenian stage. 
 The general purpose for which it has been produced at this 
 time of struggle for the liberties of nations, renders the work 
 very despicable in the eyes of those who wish well to the pro- 
 gress of freedom in foreign nations ; and all future honourable 
 citizenship is discouraged in the success which a dazzling style 
 of composition has been supposed to have secured for the so- 
 phist who has brought forward these calumnious insults to the 
 memory of a William Penn. 
 
WILLIAM PENN, 
 
 FROM THE 
 
 CHARGES CONTAINED IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 Et. Hon. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 1 
 
 &s 
 
 BY HENRY FAIRBAIRN. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 PRINTED BY JOSEPH RAKESTRAW, APPLE-TREE ALLEY, 
 
 FIRST DOOR ABOVE FOURTH ST. 
 
 1849. 
 
LIBRARY OF 
 
 CONGRESS 
 
 014 310 920 3^