bly, to the office of Chief Justice. The Assembly, jealous of its prerogatives, disregarded the fundamental laws of the colony in enacting statutes without previously publishing them as required by the Constitution. Moore, by opposing some of the measures of the Assembly and more particularly their attempt to alter the organization of the courts of justice, had incurred the enmity of the House, which proceeded to impeach him. "He was charged with violence, partiality and negligence, in a cause in which the Society of Free Traders was interested.1 Ten articles were preferred against him, which he refused to answer, though frequently summoned by the Council, and he was saved from conviction by some technical obstacle in the form of proceeding. But this did not protect him from punishment. He was expelled from the Assembly, and was interdicted all places of trust by the Council, until he should be tried upon the articles of impeachment, or should give satisfaction to the board. His offence was not of an heinous character, since he retained the confidence of the proprietary: and, in noticing his punishment, we should remark, that he had incurred the displeasure of the House by having entered thrice in one day his single protest upon its minutes against the passage of bills, which had been introduced without the publication directed by the charter. The anger of the Assembly was extended to Patrick Robinson, clerk of the provincial court, who had refused to produce before them the minutes of that court. They voted him to be a public enemy and a violator of their privileges, and ordered him into the custody of the sheriff. When brought before the House he complained of arbitrary and illegal treatment, refused to answer the questions put to him, and, in a fit of sullenness, cast himself at full length upon the floor. An address was presented to the Council requesting that the prisoner might be disqualified to hold any public office within the province or territories; but this punishment was not inflicted, as Robinson subsequently held the clerkship of the Council and other offices. Neither Moore nor Robinson were Quakers; they were charged with enmity to that sect, or, in the language of Penn, 'were esteemed the most unquiet and cross to Friends.' There were other disturbances at this time in the province. A certain John Curtis, a justice of the peace, was charged with uttering treasonable and dangerous words against the King. He was ordered to be tried by commissioners from the Council, and, though no bill was found against him, he was dismissed from his office and compelled to give surety of the peace, in the sum of three hundred pounds. Charges were made against several officers of government for extortion; and gross immoralities were practised among the lower class of people inhabiting the cayes on the banks of the Delaware. These things were reported with great exaggeration in England, by the enemies of Penn

1 Gordon. Proud. Ebeling. Votes.

and the Quakers; they prevented emigration, and greatly affected the reputation of the society of Friends and the proprietary."

Penn changed the form of executive government to a board of five commissioners, any three of whom were empowered to act [1686.] The board consisted of Thomas Lloyd, Nicholas Moore, James Claypoole, Robert Turner and John Eckley.

The next session of the legislature [1688] was marked by the usual want of unanimity and the objectionable acts of the Assembly laying on its members a solemn injunction of secrecy. This measure was not without an exhibition of undignified violence, resisted by the Council, and the lack of harmony greatly obstructed legislation. Lloyd, in consequence, requested to be released from the public affairs of government. His request was reluctantly granted, and on his recommendation, the proprietary changed the plural executive into a single deputy, making choice of Captain John Blackwell, formerly an officer of Cromwell, under whom he had earned a distinguished reputation in England and Ireland. He was in New England when he received his commission dated July 25, 1688.1

"Blackwell met the Assembly in the third month, 1689; but, by reason of some misunderstanding or dissension between him and some of the Council, the public affairs were not managed with the desired harmony and satisfaction; and but little done during his administration, which continued only till the twelfth-month this year, when he returned to England and the government of the province, according to charter, devolved again on the Council, Thomas Lloyd, President.

"The appointment of Blackwell, who was no Quaker, to be Deputy Governor, appears, by the proprietary's letters to his friends, in the province, to have been because no suitable person, who was of that society, would undertake the office."2

"By the revolution of 1688, which drove James from the throne, the proprietary lost all influence in the English court. His intimacy with that unhappy monarch covered him with dark suspicion. His religious and political principles were misrepresented; he was denounced as a Catholic, a jesuit of St. Omers, and a self-devoted slave to despotism, and was charged with conspiring the restoration of James. It is now unnecessary to disprove these accusations; for though his enemies caused him to be thrice examined before the privy council, and to give bail for his appearance in the king's bench, he was discharged by that court, no evidence appearing against him. The ties which bound him to Europe having been thus broken, he prepared to revisit his province, accompanied by another colony of five hundred persons, which he had assembled by publication of new proposals. A convoy was appointed by

1 Proud. Gordon.

2 Proud.

3 Gordon.

government for his protection, and he was on the eve of sailing, when his enterprise was marred by another persecution. A wretch, named Fuller, subsequently declared infamous by parliament, and pilloried, accused him, on oath, with being engaged in a conspiracy of the papists in Lancashire to raise a rebellion, and restore James to the crown. He narrowly escaped arrest on his return from the funeral of George Fox, the celebrated founder of the society of Friends. Hitherto he had met his accusers with a courage worthy of his character and his innocence, yet such was his dread of the profligacy of the witness who now appeared against him, that he deemed it prudent to seek retirement and privacy. His contemplated colony failed, and the expenses of its outfit were lost." After Blackwell's departure the Council elected Thomas Lloyd, their president, and according to the constitution, assumed executive functions [1690.] But six counsellors from the lower counties, without the knowledge of the president, formed themselves into a separate Council, [1691] appointed judges for those counties and made ordinances.

The President and Council of Pennsylvania forthwith published a proclamation declaring all the acts of the six seceding members illegal. The latter made proposals towards an accommodation, in which they principally required that the judges and all officers of the Government should be appointed by the nine counsellors from the lower counties. But this was not allowed them. On the other hand, Penn tried to restore a good understanding between the two colonies, between whom the breach was widening, by giving them the choice of three modes of executive government, viz: by a joint council, by five commissioners, or by a lieutenant-governor. The majority favored the last mode, but seven of the members for the lower counties protested against it, and declared for the commissioners, which form of government, in case the members for Pennsylvania should persist in favor of a lieutenant-governor, they meant to introduce into their territories until the will of the proprietary should be known. Their principal objections against a lieutenant-governor were the expense of his support and the fear lest the officers should be arbitrarily dismissed. The efforts on the part of the Council of Pennsylvania to effect a good understanding proving fruitless, the three upper counties choose Lloyd for their Governor, while the lower counties rejected him. Penn, therefore, perceiving it impossible to bring about a union, confirmed the appointment of Lloyd, and conferred the government of the lower counties on William Markham, the former Secretary of the province, who had joined with the protesting members. This was done by William Penn much against his will and had the consequence he predicted, viz: that the King, as will presently appear, annexed the two colonies to the Government of New York.1

1 Ebeling. Proud.

The schism among the Quakers, occasioned by George Keith, deserves to be briefly noticed. The first public school in the city of Philadelphia was established in 1689, and placed under the direction of George Keith, a Scotchman by birth and a surveyor in the colony of New Jersey. He was much respected among the Quakers as a talented and scholarly man, who had distinguished himself as a writer and as the companion of William Penn in his travels in Germany. But he had an overbearing disposition and irascible temper, and was fond of disputation. He held it unlawful for the civil authority to use force in the execution of the law and fell off from the principles of his sect, maintaining among other things that the inward light was not necessary to salvation. This was very galling to the Quakers with whom he had been connected for eight and twenty years. They arraigned him before the monthly meeting, with the only result of increasing his exasperation, to which he gave vent in bitter and disrespectful language. The cause was referred to the yearly meeting at Burlington, and to the general meeting at London. Keith, waxing more wrathful and vituperative, and gathering separate meetings, he was at last formally disowned in 1692, while he succeeded in forming a considerable party of adherents in Pennsylvania, and in making his ecclesiastical difficulties a matter of civil concern.

In the preceding year [1692] a small sloop had been stolen by a pirate from the wharf in Philadelphia, and a warrant of hue and cry had been issued to take the criminal, who was seized and brought into the city. Keith denounced this act of the magistracy as violating the principles of the Quakers against carrying arms and the employment of force. He actually indulged in insulting and menacing language against the Governor, and sought in printed pamphlets to bring the magistrates and the government into contempt. The printer (William Bradford, who had set up the first printing press in Philadelphia) was brought into court, and treating the court contemptuously, he was ordered to be imprisoned, although the sentence was not carried into effect; his printing press had been some time before taken from him. Keith also, and one of his friends, in consequence of a printed defence entitled "Plea of the Innocent," in which they personally abused Samuel Jennings, one of the judges, were brought into court, fined in the sum of five pounds each, but the fines were never exacted.

it

Keith and his adherents now made a great outcry, complaining of religious persecution; but the numerous publications which appeared at the time show it to have been unfounded; the judges, however, deemed necessary in August, 1692, to issue a declaration setting forth Keith's illegal conduct in slandering and insulting the Governor and other authorities, declaring him to have only been punished for those parts of his writings which contained these offences, and not for any of his

expressed opinions, and that they had only in view to protect the magistracy from insult and abuse.

Keith remained two years longer in the colony with his separate congregation, and then went to England, where, unable to justify himself before the Quakers, he took orders in the Church of England. In 1702 he was sent to America as a Missionary, by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the heathen, although he labored not among the Indians, but sought to win converts to the Church of England among the Quakers. He remained here two years, which he employed in travelling through the colonies, but chiefly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, preaching with indefatigable zeal and denouncing his former coreligionists with the unrelenting bitterness of a renegade. His mission being ended, Keith returned to England, was settled in a living in Sussex, continuing to fulminate in his pamphlets against the Quakers.1

William Penn foresaw that these dissensions would furnish the crown a pretext for depriving him of his province. His fears were soon verified. William and Mary seized with avidity this opportunity to punish him for his attachment to the late king; and they were well pleased to clothe an act of naked power with such justification as the disorders of the province presented.

Their majesties' commission to Benjamin Fletcher, governor-general of New York, constituting him governor of Pennsylvania and the territories, was notified to Thomas Lloyd on the 19th of April, [1693.] There was no notice, in this commission, of William Penn, nor of the provincial constitution. Fletcher was empowered to summon the General Assembly elected by the freeholders, to require its members to take the oaths and subscribe the tests prescribed by act of parliament, and to make laws in conjunction with the assembly, he having a veto upon their acts; and was directed to transmit copies of such laws, for the approbation of the crown, within three months from their enactment. Official information of this change was not given to the constituted authorities of the province, either by the king or proprietary; yet on the arrival of Colonel Fletcher at Philadelphia, the government was surrendered to him without objection; but most of the Quaker magistrates refused to accept from him the renewal of their commissions. The proprietary condemned this ready abandonment of his rights, and addressed a cautionary letter to Fletcher, warning him of the illegality of his appointment; which might have restrained the latter from exercising his authority, had it been timely received, as he was attached to Penn by personal favors.2

At the very beginning a misunderstanding arose between the Governor and the Assembly who attempted the introduction of a mode of summoning and electing the representatives at variance with the fundamental 1 Ebeling. Proud.

2 Gordon. Proud. Min. of Council.