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.

In the matter of the maids of Taunton, William seems clearly to have had
no part. A company of little schoolgirls, led by their teacher, had
marched in procession to celebrate the landing of Monmouth. For this
offense their parents were heavily fined, and the fines were given to
the queen's maids of honor. These ladies wrote to a "Mr. Penne" to get
him to collect them. Macaulay thought that this pardon-broker was
William Penn. It is flagrantly inconsistent with his character, and he
has been adequately vindicated