Penn rode a large white horse, and had a coach, with a black man to drive it, and a "rattling leathern conveniency," probably smaller, and a sedan chair for Mrs. Penn. In the river lay the barge, of which William was so fond that he wrote from England to charge that it be carefully looked after. Somebody expressed surprise one day when Penn went out in it against wind and tide. "I have been sailing all my life against wind and tide," he said.
Much of the work of the estate was done by slaves. The fact troubled the proprietor's conscience. He laid it upon his own soul, as he did upon the souls of his brethren in the colony, "to be very careful in discharging a good conscience towards them in all respects, but more especially for the good of their souls, that they might, as frequent as may be, come to meeting on first-days." A special meeting was appointed for slaves once a month, and their masters were expected to come with them. Finally, Penn liberated all his slaves. In his will of 1701, "I give," he says, "to my blacks their freedom, as is under my hand already, and to old Sam 100 acres, to be his children's after he and his wife are dead, forever."
The Pennsbury house had a great hall in the midst, where the governor in an oak armchair received his neighbors, the Indians. Here they came, in paint and feathers,—"Connoondaghtoh, king of the Susquehannah Indians; Wopaththa, king of the Shawanese; Weewinjough, chief of the Ganawese; and Ahookassong, brother of the emperor of the five nations;" and many other humbler braves. John Richardson, a Yorkshire Quaker, visited Penn at Pennsbury and saw them. William gave them match-coats, he says, and "some other things," including a reasonable supply of rum, which the chiefs dispensed to the warriors severally in small portions: "So they came quietly, and in a solid manner, and took their draws." He did not smoke, a fact which the Indians must have noted as a curious eccentricity. Then they made a small fire out of doors, and the men sat about it in a ring, singing "a very melodious hymn," beating the ground between the verses with short sticks, and, after a circling dance, departed. Penn got on most happily with the Indians. The peaceful Quakers went about unarmed and were never in danger. The only disorderly folk thereabout were white men.
In the midst of these rural joys, news came that a movement was on foot to put an end to proprietary governments, thereby bringing all colonies under the immediate control of the crown. Penn felt that it was necessary for him to return to England to block this inconvenient legislation. On the 28th of October, he assembled the citizens of Philadelphia, and presented them with a charter for their city. In the Friends' meeting, he said that he "looked over all infirmities and outwards, and had an eye to the regions of the spirit, wherein was our sweetest tie." Then, says Norris, "in true love he took his leave of us." Thus, after two years wherein peace and quietness prevailed over all misunderstanding and opposition, he set sail in 1701, and never saw Pennsylvania again.
His house at Pennsbury fell into ruins,—due in large part to the leakage of a leaden reservoir on the roof,—and was taken down before the Revolution. The furniture was gradually dispersed. For some years it was "deemed a kind of pious stealth," among those who were most loyal to the proprietor, to carry away something out of the house when they chanced to visit its empty halls. One gentleman rejoiced in the possession of the mantelpiece; another had a pair of Penn's plush breeches.
William Penn's four years of actual residence gave him all the satisfaction which he ever got from his colonial possessions. All else was worry, labor, and expense. The province was a sore financial burden. As proprietor he was charged with the payment, in large part, of the expenses of government. The returns from rents and sales were slow and uncertain. The taxes on imports and exports, to which he had a charter right, he had generously declined. When he asked the assembly, in remembrance of that liberality, to send him money in his financial straits, they were not minded to respond. Penn belonged to that high fraternity of noble souls who do not know how to make bargains. His impulses were generous to a fault, and he had an invincible confidence that his neighbors would deal with him in the same spirit. The consequence was that year by year the expenses grew, and there was but a slender income. "O Pennsylvania," he cries, "what hast thou cost me? Above thirty thousand pounds more than I ever got by it; two hazardous and most fatiguing voyages, my straits and slavery here, and my child's soul, almost."
The last allusion is to Guli's son, William, whose dissipation Penn always attributed to a lack of fatherly care during his first visit to the province. Penn finally sent the boy to Pennsbury, hoping that the quiet, the absence of temptation, and the wholesome joys of a country life, might amend him. But William went from bad to worse, was arrested in Philadelphia in a tavern brawl, was formally excommunicated by the Quakers, and came home to England to give his father further pain.
To the financial burdens of the province were added the difficulties of government. Penn succeeded very well in keeping his colony,—he defended his boundaries against Lord Baltimore, and he defeated those who would have taken away his rule and given it to the king; but the governing of the colony across three thousand miles of sea was another matter. The moment he withdrew the restraining influence of his personal presence, all manner of contentions came into the light of day.
The question of the prudence of bearing arms was vigorously debated. James Logan, secretary of the province, and Penn's ablest counselor, urged the need of military defenses. Conservative Friends opposed it.
Churchmen had been settling in the province. One of William's oldest friends, George Keith, who had accompanied him on his religious mission to Holland, had gone into the Episcopal ministry. Logan says, in a letter to Penn, that "not suffering them to be superior" was accounted by the churchmen as the equivalent of persecution.