in the full belief that the Fellows of Magdalene College, however mutinous they might be, would not dare to disobey a command uttered by his own lips, directed his course towards Oxford. By the way he made some little excursions to places which peculiarly interested him, as a King, a brother, and a son. He visited the hospitable roof of Boscobel, and the remains of the oak so conspicuous in the history of his house. He rode over the field of Edgehill, where the Cavaliers first crossed swords. with the soldiers of the Parliament. On the third of September he dined in great state at the palace of Woodstock, an ancient and renowned mansion, of which not a stone is now to be seen, but of which the site is still marked on the turf of Blenheim Park by two sycamores which grow near the stately bridge. In the evening he reached Oxford. He was received there with the wonted honours. The students in their academical garb were ranged to welcome him on the right hand and on the left, from the entrance of the city to the great gate of Christ Church. He lodged at the deanery, where, among other accommodations, he found a chapel fitted up for the celebration of the mass. On the day after his arrival, the Fellows of Magdalene College were ordered to attend Magdalene. him. When they appeared before him, The King at He reprimands the Fellows of * he treated them with an insolence such as had never been shown to their predecessors by the Puritan visitors. "You have not dealt with me like gentlemen," he exclaimed. "You have been unmannerly as well as undutiful." They fell on their knees and tendered a petition. He would not look at it. "Is this your Church of England loyalty? I could not have believed that so many clergymen of the Church of England would have been concerned in such a * London Gazette of Sept. 5. and Sept. 8. 1687. business. Go home. Get you gone. I am King. I will be obeyed. Go to your chapel this instant; and admit the Bishop of Oxford. Let those who refuse look to it. They shall feel the whole weight of my hand. They shall know what it is to incur the displeasure of their Sovereign." The Fellows, still kneeling before him, again offered him their petition. He angrily flung it down. "Get you gone, tell you. I will receive nothing from you till you have admitted the Bishop." I They retired and instantly assembled in their chapel. The question was propounded whether they would comply with His Majesty's command. Smith was absent. Charnock alone answered in the affirmative. The other Fellows who were at the meeting declared that in all things lawful they were ready to obey the King, but that they would not violate their statutes and their oaths. The King, greatly incensed and mortified by his defeat, quitted Oxford and rejoined the Queen at Bath. His obstinacy and violence had brought him into an embarrassing position. He had trusted too much to the effect of his frowns and angry tones, and had rashly staked, not merely the credit of his administration, but his personal dignity, on the issue of the contest. Could he yield to subjects whom he had menaced with raised voice and furious gestures? Yet could he venture to eject in one day a crowd of respectable clergymen from their homes, because they had discharged what the whole nation regarded as a sacred duty? Perhaps there might be an escape from this dilemma. Perhaps the college might still be terrified, caressed, or bribed into submission. The agency of Penn was employed. He had too much good feeling to approve of the violent and unjust proceedings of the government, and even ventured to express part of what he thought. James was, as usual, obstinate in the wrong. Penn attempts to mediate. The courtly Quaker, therefore, did his best to seduce the college from the path of right. He first tried intimidation. Ruin, he said, impended over the society. The King was highly incensed. The case might be a hard one. Most people thought it so. But every child knew that His Majesty loved to have his own way and could not bear to be thwarted. Penn, therefore, exhorted the Fellows not to rely on the goodness of their cause, but to submit, or at least to temporise.* Such counsel came strangely from one * See Penn's Letter to Bailey, one of the Fellows of the College, in the Impartial Relation printed at Oxford in 1688. It has lately been asserted that Penn most certainly did not write this letter. Now, the evidence which proves the letter to be his is irresistible. Bailey, to whom the letter was addressed, ascribed it to Penn, and sent an answer to Penn. In a very short time both the letter and the answer appeared in print. Many thousands of copies were circulated. Penn was pointed out to the whole world as the author of the letter; and it is not pretended that he met this public accusation with a public contradiction. Everybody therefore believed, and was perfectly warranted in believing, that he was the author. The letter was repeatedly quoted as his, during his own lifetime, not merely in fugitive pamphlets, such as the History of the Ecclesiastical Commission, published in 1711, but in grave and elaborate books which were meant to descend to posterity. Boyer, in his History of William the Third, printed immediately after that King's death, and reprinted in 1703, pronounced the letter to be Penn's, and added some severe reflections on the writer. Kennet, in the bulky History of England published in 1706, a history which had a large sale and produced a great sensation, adopted the very words of Boyer. When these works appeared, Penn was not only alive, but in the full enjoyment of his faculties. He cannot have been ignorant of the charge brought against him by writers of so much note; and it was not his practice to hold his peace when unjust charges were brought against him even by obscure scribblers. In 1695, a pamphlet on the Exclusion Bill was falsely imputed to him in an anonymous libel. Contemptible as was the quarter from which the calumny proceeded, he hastened to vindicate himself. His denial, distinct, solemn, and indignant, speedily came forth in print. Is it possible to doubt that he would, if he could, have confounded Boyer and Kennet by a similar denial? He however silently suffered them to tell the whole nation, during many years, that this letter was written by "William Penn the head of the Quakers, or, as some then thought, an ambitious, crafty Jesuit, who under a phanatical outside, pro who had himself been expelled from the University for raising a riot about the surplice, who had run the risk of being disinherited rather than take off his hat to the princes of the blood, and who had been more than once sent to prison for haranguing in conventicles. He did not succeed in frightening the Magdalene men. In answer to his alarming hints he was reminded that in the last generation thirty four out of the forty Fellows had cheerfully left their beloved cloisters and gardens, their hall and their chapel, and had gone forth not knowing where they should find a meal or a bed, rather than violate the oath of allegiance. The King now wished them to violate another oath. He should find that the old spirit was not extinct. Then Penn tried a gentler tone. He had an interview with Hough and with some of the Fellows, and, after many professions of sympathy and friendship, began to hint at a compromise. The King could not bear to be crossed. The college must give way. Parker must be admitted. But he was in very bad health. All his preferments would soon be vacant. "Doctor Hough," said Penn, "may then be Bishop of Oxford. How should you like that, gentlemen?”* moted King James's designs." He died without attempting to clear himself. In the year of his death appeared Eachard's huge volume, containing the History of England from the Restoration to the Revolution; and Eachard, though often differing with Boyer and Kennet, agreed with them in unhesitatingly ascribing the letter to Penn. Such is the evidence on one side. I am not aware that any evidence deserving a serious answer has been produced on the other. (1857.) *Here again I have been accused of calumniating Penn; and some show of a case has been made out by suppression amounting to falsification. It is asserted that Penn did not "begin to hint at a compromise ;" and in proof of this assertion, a few words, quoted from the letter in which Hough gives an account of the interview, are printed in italics. These words are, "I thank God, he did not offer any proposal by way of accommodation." These words, taken by themselves, undoubtedly seem to prove that Penn had passed his life in declaiming against a hireling ministry. He held that he was bound to refuse the payment of tithes, and this even when he had bought land chargeable with tithes, and had been allowed the value of the tithes in the purchase money. According to his own principles, he would have committed a great sin if he had interfered for the purpose of obtaining a benefice on the most honourable terms for the most pious divine. Yet to such a degree had his manners been corrupted by evil communications, and his understanding obscured by inordinate zeal for a single object, that he did not scruple to become a broker in simony of a peculiarly discreditable kind, and to use a bishopric as a bait to tempt a divine to perjury. Hough replied with civil contempt that he wanted nothing from the Crown but common justice. "We stand," he said, “on our statutes and our oaths: but, even setting aside our statutes and oaths, we feel that we have our religion to defend. The Papists have robbed us of University Penn did not begin to hint at a 6 with except that. Instances will readily occur to all who are well acquainted with the English Bible, a book from the authority of which there is no appeal when the question is about the force of an English word. We read in the Book of Genesis, to go no further, that every living thing was destroyed; and Noah only remained, and they that were with him in the ark; and that Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; only the land of the priests bought he not. The defenders of Penn reason exactly like a commentator who should construe these passages to mean that Noah was drowned in the flood, and that Joseph bought the land of the priests for Pharaoh. (1857.) |