At the trial Penn entered the court-room wearing his hat. A constable
promptly pulled it off, and was ordered by the judge to replace it in
order that he might fine the Quaker forty marks for keeping it on. Thus
the proceedings appropriately began. William tried in vain to learn the
terms of the law under which he was arrested, maintaining that he was
innocent of any illegal act. Finally, after an absurd and unjust
hearing, the jury, who appreciated the situation, brought in a verdict
of "guilty of speaking in Gracious Street." The judges refused to accept
the verdict, and kept the jury without food or drink for two days,
trying to make them say, "guilty of speaking in Gracious Street to an
unlawful assembly." At last the jury brought in a formal verdict of "not
guilty," which the court was compelled to accept. Thereupon the judges
fined every juryman forty marks for contempt of court; and Penn and the
jurors, refusing to pay their fines, were all imprisoned in Newgate. The
Court of Common Pleas presently reversed the judges' decision and
released the jury. Penn was also released, against his own protest, by
the payment of his fine by his father.
The admiral was in his last sickness. He was weary, he said, of the
world. It had not proved, after all, to be a satisfactory world. He did
not grieve now that his son had renounced it. At the same time, he could
not help but feel that the friendship of the world was a valuable
possession; and he had therefore requested his patron, the Duke of York,
to be his son's friend. Both the duke and the king had promised their
good counsel and protection. Thus "with a gentle and even gale," as it
says on his tombstone, "in much peace, [he] arrived and anchored in his
last and best port, at Wanstead in the county of Essex, the 16th of
September, 1670, being then but forty-nine years and four months old."
The admiral's death left his son with an annual income of about fifteen
hundred pounds. This wealth, however, made no stay in his Quaker zeal.
Before the year was ended, he was again in prison.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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