Indeed, he was losing money; for the expenses of life at court were
great. Worse still, he was losing his good name. His Quaker friends
found him hard to understand. It was true that he had cast in his lot
with them, and had suffered for their cause,--he was their great
theologian and preacher; but he seemed, nevertheless, to be still a
cavalier and a worldly person. They heard--though there was no truth in
the report--that he had set up a military company in Pennsylvania. They
saw with their own eyes that he lived in a style which must have seemed
to them altogether inconsistent with simplicity, and that he consorted
with courtiers. And they did not like it,--they said so frankly.
As for enemies, the king's favorite had many, inevitably. The lords who
waited in the antechamber while Penn was closeted with James did not
look pleasantly at him when he came out. The stout Protestants, who
hated the king's ways, and suspected the king's designs, could not
easily think well of one who was so closely in his counsels. One of
Penn's friends told him what these people said of him: "Your post is too
considerable for a Papist of an ordinary form, and therefore you must be
a Jesuit; nay, to confirm that suggestion, it must be accompanied with
all the circumstances that may best give it an air of probability,--as
that you have been bred at St. Omer's in the Jesuit College; that you
have taken orders at Rome, and there obtained a dispensation to marry;
and that you have since then frequently officiated as a priest in the
celebration of the mass, at Whitehall, St. James's, and other places."
It seems absurd enough to us, but many intelligent persons, even
Archbishop Tillotson of Canterbury, believed it. The detail of St. Omer
came, probably, from a confusion of the name with Saumur. The other
suspicions grew out of Penn's place in the favor of the king.
It seemed as if nothing could prejudice the king's matters in the eyes
of Penn. Monmouth's rebellion came, and the king's revenge followed.
Judge Jeffreys went on his bloody circuit. "About three hundred hanged,"
Penn wrote, "in divers towns of the west; about one thousand to be
transported. I begged twenty of the king." It was all bad, and one
regrets to find Penn concerned in it. Still, his twenty probably fared
better than their neighbors. It is likely that he sent them to be
colonists in Pennsylvania.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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