Not to be outdone by his Royal brother, James threw in the Province of Delaware to which he held the fee, "out of a special regard to the memory and many faithful and eminent services heretofore performed by the said Sir William Penn to his Majesty and Royal Highness." This under date of August 21st, 1682.
It was Penn's purpose to call his Paradise Sylvania, because of its wooded vales, but the King, with his obligation to the Admiral well in mind neatly prefixed "Penn" to the fanciful selection and it became justly and rightly "Pennsylvania" not in memory of William, but of his valiant father.
Charles II was an able politician and understood human nature. Often accused of ingratitude and seldom deserving the charge, with a willingness to perform a good action as readily as a bad one, he acted perhaps in languid memory of the mistake made by his heedless father when he stayed the departure of Cromwell for the New World, where he had resolved to go "and never see England more,"—determining that there should be no repetition of history so far as he was concerned by repressing a zealot in narrow quarters near home.
Thus Charles for once at least, belied the couplet scrawled upon his chamber door by the ribald Earl of Rochester:
Here lies our sovereign lord the King
Whose word no man relies on;
He never says a foolish thing
Nor ever does a wise one.
His sayings, Charles aptly replied, were his own; his acts those of his ministers. He ordered well indeed when he placed Penn where he did in the New World and he meant wisely when he decreed that the red races should possess, free and forever, the lands beyond the Alleghanies. With Penn's venture we need have no more to do than to recall that so long as his control lasted or his wishes extended, the Pennsylvania Indians and their cousins of New York and Ohio, were at peace with the whites; that his words and those of his agents were trusted; that Pennsylvania sheltered the persecuted Palatines and that the Liberty Bell first rang in the city he had named Philadelphia—the City of Brotherly Love!
The Trial here recited began in London, on the first of September, 1670, a fortnight before his father's death, while the disturbance of which it was the outgrowth, occurred on the fourth of August preceding.
The text is repeated from the report embedded in the second volume of the four great folios, comprising "A Compleat Collection of State Tryals," covering the period of English justice and injustice from the reign of King Henry the Fourth to the end of that of Anne, printed for six venturesome London booksellers, Timothy Goodwin, John Walthoe, Benjamin Tooke, John Darby, Jacob Tonson, and John Walthoe, Junior, in 1719, where is found this first record of a legal effort to punish free speech among the English race—and by the same token to vindicate it. Reported by the accused, it no less reads fair. The "Observer" whose comments interlard and conclude the "Tryal" was Penn. It was a rare proceeding in which both prisoners and jury ended up in jail for their obduracy in maintaining that right to speak as we may, which is still one of the most difficult to maintain, and yet remains the foundation of human liberty.
D. C. S.
COS COB, CONN.,