n 1710, the name of the Quaker will be found spelt in all
the three ways, Penn in the index, Pen in page 197, and Penne in page
311. The name is Penne in the Commission which the Admiral carried out
with him on his expedition to the West Indies. Burchett, who became
Secretary to the Admiralty soon after the Revolution, and remained in
office long after the accession of the House of Hannover, always, in his
Naval History, wrote the name Penne. Surely it cannot be thought strange
that an old-fashioned spelling, in which the Secretary of the Admiralty
persisted so late as 1720, should have been used at the office of the
Secretary of State in 1686. I am quite confident that, if the letter
which we are considering had been of a different kind, if Mr. Penne had
been informed that, in consequence of his earnest intercession, the King
had been graciously pleased to grant a free pardon to the Taunton girls,
and if I had attempted to deprive the Quaker of the credit of that
intercession on the ground that his name was not Penne, the very persons
who now complain so bitterly that I am unjust to his memory would
have complained quite as bitterly, and, I must say, with much more
reason.---- I think myself, therefore perfectly justified in considering
the names, Penn and Penne, as the same. To which, then, of the two
persons who bore that name George or William, is it probable that the
letter of the Secretary of State was addressed?---- George was evidently
an adventurer of a very low class. All that we learn about him from the
papers of the Pinney family is that he was employed in the purchase of a
pardon for the younger son of a dissenting minister. The whole sum
which appears to have passed through George's hands on this occasion was
sixty-five pounds. His commission on the transaction must therefore have
been small. The only other information which we have about him, is that
he, some time later, applied to the government for a favour which was
very far from being an honour. In England the Groom Porter of the Palace
had a jurisdiction over games of chance, and made some very dirty gain
by issuing lottery tickets and licensing hazard tables. George appears
to have petitioned for a similar privilege in the American colonies.----
William Penn was, during the reign of James the Second, the most active
and powerful solicitor about the Court. I will quote the words of his
admirer Crose. "Quum autem Pennus tanta gratia plurinum apud regem