what sort of person
they wished to employ. If their first application had been made to
some obscure pettifogger or needy gambler, we should be warranted in
believing that the Penne to whom their second application was made was
George. If, on the other hand, their first application was made to a
gentleman of the highest consideration, we can hardly be wrong in saying
that the Penne to whom their second application was made must have been
William. To whom, then, was their first application made? It was to Sir
Francis Warre of Hestercombe, a Baronet and a Member of Parliament. The
letters are still extant in which the Duke of Somerset, the proud Duke,
not a man very likely to have corresponded with George Penne, pressed
Sir Francis to undertake the commission. The latest of those letters
is dated about three weeks before Sunderland's letter to Mr. Penne.
Somerset tells Sir Francis that the town clerk of Bridgewater, whose
name, I may remark in passing, is spelt sometimes Bird and sometimes
Birde, had offered his services, but that those services had been
declined. It is clear, therefore, that the Maids of Honour were desirous
to have an agent of high station and character. And they were right. For
the sum which they demanded was so large that no ordinary jobber could
safely be entrusted with the care of their interests.---- As Sir Francis
Warre excused himself from undertaking the negotiation, it became
necessary for the Maids of Honour and their advisers to choose somebody
who might supply his place; and they chose Penne. Which of the two
Pennes, then, must have been their choice, George, a petty broker to
whom a percentage on sixty-five pounds was an object, and whose highest
ambition was to derive an infamous livelihood from cards and dice, or
William, not inferior in social position to any commoner in the kingdom?
Is it possible to believe that the ladies, who, in January, employed the
Duke of Somerset to procure for them an agent in the first rank of the
English gentry, and who did not think an attorney, though occupying a
respectable post in a respectable corporation, good enough for their
purpose, would, in February, have resolved to trust everything to a
fellow who was as much below Bird as Bird was below Warre?---- But, it
is said, Sunderland's letter is dry and distant; and he never would have
written in such a style to William Penn with whom he was on friendly
terms. Can it be necessary for me to reply that the of