In England's Pennsylvania

“Guarding in sylvan shades the name of Penn the apostle.” — Evangeline.

I

PENN VILLAGE, STOKE POGIS, AND CHALFONT

WHEN Charles the Second insisted on William Penn’s new territory of Sylvania on the virgin shores of America being called Pennsylvania, he coined one of the sweetest place-names in colonial history. Unlike Boston and Plymouth, and many other historic names common to both countries, the name of Pennsylvania may not be found on the map of England; but I love to think of the little tableland of beechen woods in South Buckinghamshire, extending, say, from Penn Village to Jordans and the Chalfonts and from Amersham to Stoke Pogis, as the Pennsylvania of England. It is a stretch of thickly wooded country, dear to every lover of English history and literature, associated with Milton, Hampden, Gray, Waller, Burke, Isaac Disraeli, and, in our own time, Lord Beaconsfield. Above all, this particular district is revered by every American as the ancestral home of the Penns, and as containing the sacred soil in which the great Founder of Pennsylvania was laid to rest after his labors.

From the windows of my home in Scotland I daily look across the Water of Leith to the Pentland Hills, while “ the river at my garden’s end ” flows on past Scotia’s capital, only to rest when it reaches the waters of the misty Forth. But

to the south as well as to the north, and thus it was during a glorious September holiday that I feasted my eyes every morning on the sunlit Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire beyond the tiny Thame that flowed so gently on to meet the greater river of a still greater capital. From an old seventeenth-century farmhouse, around which the golden grain had been garnered, I rambled into a land of beechcrowned hills, storied churches, and ancient Elizabethan manor-houses. Just over yon sleepy down-like hills to the southeast, where at nightfall one can sometimes see the gleam of distant lamplit London, lies the Penn-land of England. To me it had all the charm of an undiscovered country over the hills and far away. For my Penn-land rambles I always started from Amersham, sometimes over the hills to Penn itself, now by way of Beaconsfield to Stoke Pogis, or at another time by Chalfont St. Giles to Jordans. Amersham, I may add, was practically more distant to me at my remote farmhouse among the hills than it is to the literary pilgrim who starts from London.

I have frequently praised the lanes of Hertfordshire, but they do not surpass those of South Buckinghamshire. The road from Amersham to Penn winds through beech woods, within which there are signs of violets and wood-sorrel, reminiscent of spring. The dog-rose, the bracken, and the gorse are always present, and here and there clumps of pines add strength to the character of the landscape. On the border of a wood I passed the church of the village of Penn Street, a modern church with a steeple, unusual in a locality where square embattled towers are the rule. It is a picturesque village with its little alehouse, “The Squirrel,” suggestive of beechnuts, and another that bears the suggestive name of the “Hit or Miss.” My path leads me past Penn House, a red brick mansion-house, all ivy-clad gables and chimneys, one gable bearing the date 1536. One of the delights connected with rambles in England is that in the most out-of-the-way places you stumble across manor-houses that, in themselves or on account of the families with which they are associated, have become famous in England’s history. So it is with this old manor-house. The Penns became extinct in the elder branch by the death of Roger Penn in 1735, when the estate passed by the marriage of his sister and heir to Sir Nathaniel Curzon, Baronet. Later still, a Curzon married the daughter of Admiral Howe, and to this circumstance the present family owes its triple name, representing the Penns, Curzons, and Howes. With the Penns we are more immediately interested. The Howes not only link Penn House with the admiral, but also with General Howe, who was with Wolfe at Quebec, and who is still better known in connection with the War of Independence. In our own time the alliance of a daughter of America with the brilliant cadet of the Curzon family, who became vice-roy and his wife vice-reine of India, occurs to one’s mind as with reverent foot we tread this interesting corner of England’s Pennsylvania.

From Penn Bottom the path ascends to the weather-beaten village of Penn itself, on the top of the hill. Penn Church is a plain old structure of rubble and flint, originally early English in style and dating from 1213. The chancel added in 1736 contains the only stained-glass window, filled in during the following year. This parish church, however, is interesting in other memorials of the dead, mural monuments by Cliantoy, old hatchments, and ancient brasses. The pilgrim who has no access to family archives can here muse over the historic names of Penn, Howe, and Curzon. It should be stated that William Penn’s father, Admiral Penn, belonged to a branch of the Penn family which removed to Wiltshire. They had hived off from the old stock. Admiral Penn himself was buried at St. Mary Redclyffe, Bristol. But the old district had a magnetic attraction for his family, and thus it happens that some of the grandchildren of William Penn are buried here, while his son, Thomas Penn of Stoke Pogis, and his descendants are buried in the church of the famous Elegy. In the south chancel chapel at Penn still remain splendid brasses fixed on blue stone. One is a finely cut brass to the memory of John Pen of Pen who died in 1597, aged 63. He and his lady are dressed in Elizabethan court dress. Other brasses are dedicated to the memory of a later John Pen, his wife Sarah, five sons and five daughters, dating from 1641, and to a William Pen and Martha his wife, a son, and two daughters, also of the seventeenth century.

From Penn to Stoke Pogis is only some seven or eight miles, — nine, perhaps, if you follow the windings of the highways and byways of this sylvan country. The church and churchyard of Stoke Pogis can never be described too often. Throughout the length and breadth of England there are many more beautiful shrines. One thinks, for example, of the noble chancel of the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakespeare lies: the great and beautiful church of St. Mary Redclyffe, in which Admiral Penn was interred; and the parish church of Berkhampstead just across the border into Hertfordshire, where the poet Cowper’s father was rector, and in the pastoral house of which the gentle bard was born. But Gray has thrown around this old parish church a spell that is all its own. Stoke Pogis has no longdrawn isles, nor fretted vaults, where pealing anthems swell the note of praise. Rather has it old-fashioned pews in which the Sir Roger de Coverleys of the eighteenth century might gently slumber while the eighteenth-century divines, as Gray puts it, were “chopping logic.” Such a delightful nook is Gray’s own pew in the southwest corner of the church. Such, too, is the great pew of the Penn family, with its rows of Queen Anne chairs — the Penn chairs they are called — and its modern Gothic corridor leading to Stoke Park. It was while I was seated in Gray’s pew that I observed a slab recording the fact that in a vault in this church are deposited the remains of Thomas Penn of Stoke Park, son of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. Thomas Penn, it appeared, had returned to the bosom of the Church of England. He visited Pennsylvania in 1732, and was presented with an address by the Assembly. In 1760 he purchased Stoke Park, The classic modern mansion was built by John Penn, grandson of the great governor, and it was he also who erected the monument to Gray in the meadow beyond the churchyard. The last of the Penns of Stoke was buried at Stoke Pogis in 1869. It is pleasing to think that Thomas Penn spent his declining years only some six miles distant from the sacred spot where rests his illustrious father, beside the old Quaker meeting-house among the beechen woods of Jordans.

Situated as I was in North Buckinghamshire, I preferred to visit Jordans, not from Stoke Pogis, but by way of Chalfont St. Giles, so that I might pass Milton’s cottage; for was not John Milton one of the links in the chain that bound William Penn to this corner of Buckinghamshire ? My practice in making these literary pilgrimages is to find out “the foot-path way,” and stick to it. In Scotland these paths are practically non-existent, and so I appreciate the more the luxury of wandering from village to village through the fields. From Amersham to Chalfont the foot-path is parallel to the King’s highway, following the course of a lowland stream, a gently-flowing, clear-bottomed chalk-stream, called the Misbourne, lined with water-cress and sedge. Near Stratton Chase I passed a mill whose millstream was alive with white ducks, and from there I obtained my first glimpse of the square embattled church tower of Chalfont St. Giles. The village consists of a single street of old-timbered, green - lichened cottages, old-fashioned alehouses and signposts, with the inevitable duck-pond. A great elm halfway down the village street looked as if it had been an ancient tree even in Milton’s time. At the church I was so shadowed by an old verger that I have but a dim impression of its features, dim as the faded frescoes on its walls. In visiting such churches the indefinable charm, the holy calm, the awe-inspiring beauty vanish entirely when an officious official turns the building into a mediæval museum; but when the door of the porch is open, or when I have only to lift the latch of the wire screen intended to keep the birds from entering and building their nests in the sanctuaries of the Lord, when I may step silently and alone to the altar-rails, then I bless the vicar of the parish for this sweet solitude, this haven of rest, this “haunt of ancient peace.” Yet Charles Lamb, in that most sympathetic essay on the Quakers, would have it that theirs was the greater peace, the silence of communion, spirit with spirit, seated together at their meeting-house. “To pace alone,” he says, “to pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, timestricken . . . is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those enjoy, who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude.” I shall return to this charming paper when I come to record my visit to Jordans.

Leaving the churchyard on his way to Jordans, the pilgrim must needs pass Milton’s cottage on his left at the south end of the village of Chalfont St. Giles. One room only is open to the public, but in that room I could sit undisturbed and think of him who was the great Puritan poet of England, and at the same time the poet, next to Shakespeare and Spenser, whose works glow with all the richness of the Elizabethans, fifty years after their time. There is little to distinguish Milton’s cottage from many another in the district, but it must have been a delightful retreat from the plague-haunted metropolis. Milton knew the lanes of Buckinghamshire. They had already inspired his verse when, as a young man at Horton some thirteen miles distant, he wrote his “ L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso;” and so when Ellwood the Quaker took the " pretty box for him in Giles Chalfont,” Milton was doubtless revisiting familiar ground in the best of company, familiar, and yet with this terrible difference, that to him, like his own Samson, the sun was now “ dark and silent as the Moon when she deserts the night.” The faithful Ellwood lived close at hand, the Penningtons occupied Chalfont Grange, and with them dwelt the beautiful Gulielma Maria Springett, daughter of Sir William Springett, whose widow had married Isaac Pennington. It was this charming circle that young William Penn entered and there met his future wife. Hepworth Dixon in his picturesque way has happily described the scene in his biography of Penn.

“Guli was fond of music. Music was Milton’s second passion. In the cottage of the poet, in the Grange of the philosopher, how one can fancy the hours flying past, between psalms of love, high converse from the lips of the inspired bard, old stories of the Revolution in which the elder people had each had a prominent share, and probably the recitation of favorite passages from that stupendous work which was to crown the blind and aged poet, and become one of the grandest heirlooms of mankind! It was to these favored friends that Milton first made known that he had been engaged in writing ‘Paradise Lost;’ and it was also in their society that Ellwood suggested to him the theme of his ‘Paradise Regained.’ Immortal Chalfont!”

As you enter the low-roofed room with its great cross-beam, you wonder how much of the old atmosphere is left, the atmosphere of the dainty Priscilla, for Guli belonged to the same charming sisterhood as Longfellow’s ancestress. The porch has gone, but you can look out from Milton’s latticed window into the little garden beyond. At the back of the iron grate in the great open fireplace, a Scottish thistle, oddly enough, is the chief ornament. A few Chippendale chairs, small oak stools, a table and bookcase containing various editions of Milton’s works, and other Miltoniana, constitute the furnishings of the Poet’s Room at the present day. A small book-closet off this room, with its tiny window and shelves contemporary with the age of the cottage, seems somehow to suggest more of the poet than the well-kept little museum. What books were stored on those shelves would be an interesting speculation. How eagerly we would scan their titles if we could, just as in a later age the literary pilgrim to Abbotsford, in passing through the library and study, loves to run his or her eyes along the screened bookshelves and to identify here and there the old “classics” from which in his “Notes” the good Sir Walter used to quote so copiously. But to return. One loves to think that Guli (or should we not say “Miss Springett”?) sometimes sat in this room, waiting perhaps until young William Penn called to escort her back to the Grange. All this is so delightfully English that we would fain forget the other side of the story, the cruel persecutions that were helping to drain Old England of its best blood and to build up a New England across the Atlantic. Leaving the cottage, I lingered for a moment in the little garden in which grapes and tomatoes ripened in the warm September sunshine, amid the resplendent autumnal glories of sunflowers, asters, and dahlias.

II

JORDANS AND WILLIAM PENN: AN APPRECIATION

To the memories of Penn, Stoke Pogis, and Chalfont, I was now to add that of Jordans, the innermost sanctuary, shall I say, of England’s Pennsylvania. The earlier Penns are sleeping beneath their Elizabethan memorials in old Penn Church; the later Penns, Squires of Stoke Park, built themselves a lordly manorhouse and sought to share with the poet Gray the immortality of Stoke Pogis; but Jordans differs from either. As a shrine, it is unique in its simplicity, this little meeting-house and burying-ground with its plain headstones. Yet here rests William Perm, “the apostle,” as Longfellow lovingly calls him; here too rest Guli Penn, the gentle Ellwood to whom the Friends owe this burying-ground, the persecuted Penningtons, and all that goodly company of heroes and heroines, martyrs in the cause of truth and peace.

Leaving Chalfont St. Giles, the road winds past old farm-houses whose roofs, in relief against the sky, curve like switchbacks. These wonderful lanes with their high hedges are still my companions. Here is one of holly, gay with clusters of berries, reminding one in these late autumn days that Christmastide is not so very far off; and now the road widens out into sun-bathed grassy open spaces decked with bracken and with the last of the trailing bridal-like garlands of wild clematis, so happily named “traveler’s joy.” Beyond the hedgerows, as usual in this pleasant land, the landscape is bounded by the glorious vista of woods.

Suddenly, on my left, as I descended into a cuplike hollow in this tableland. I came upon the historic meeting-house. There was no mistaking it, a plain oldfashioned building embosomed in beech woods, lonely save for Jordans farmhouse, which I had just passed. Owing to the fall in the ground, there was ample stabling accommodation underneath the meeting-house for the Friends, who, in those seventeenth and eighteenth-century days, must perforce ride many a long mile before they could reach this secluded spot. It was not so long since there was not a single headstone in this primitive burying-ground. From 1671 the Quakers slept in nameless graves. Penn’s biographer, Dixon, says that when he visited Jordans in 1851 with Granville Penn, the great grandson of the state-founder, they had some difficulty in identifying the particular spot “ where heaves the turf ” over his sacred remains. Mr. Dixon adds that Granville Penn “is disposed to mark the spot by some simple but durable record, — a plain stone or block of granite; and if this be not done, the neglect will only hasten the day on which his ancestor’s remains wall be carried off to America — their proper and inevitable home! ” Twelve years later, at the heads of such graves as had been identified were placed the simple memorial stones, with name and date of burial only, that we see today. Penn still rests at Jordans. Made welcome by the kindly caretaker, I lingered long in the old meeting-room, poring over the old-world names recorded on its walls. These names included a list of some 385 burials between 1671 and 1845. The first entry I looked for read as follows : —

“Penn, William, Esquire, 1718, the illustrious founder of Pennsylvania, died at his residence at Ruscombe, near Twyford, Berks, 4th day [Wednesday] 30th of 5th mo. [July] 1718 aged 74, buried at Jordans, 3rd day [Tuesday] 5th of 6th mo. [August] 1718 when some 30 Quaker ministers attended the funeral including Thomas Story and a vast concourse of Friends and others.”

Story was the faithful friend of his later years. Gulielma’s name was recorded under date 1693. Our gentle Guli had died at the age of 50, “one of ten thousand,” broken in spirit. Weary and heavyladen, the sorrows of her husband, which she insisted in sharing, had brought her to a premature grave. At least two other Gulielmas are inscribed on this roll, one a daughter who died in 1689, and the other a Gulielma Pitt who died in 1746. The names of the Penningtons and the Ellwoods complete the revered circle that sat around John Milton in the old Chalfont days. Less-known names are the Zacharys and the Lovelaces, surely more Cavalier than Quaker; and as illustrating the seventeenth and eighteenthcentury fashion of adopting the old Hebrew nomenclature, I could not refrain from noting the record of the burials of the Sutterfield family, of Abraham and Rebecca Sutterfield, whose children had been named respectively Josuah, Luke, Abiah, Kezia, Jacob, and Luke (the second of the name). Rebecca Sutterfield ! How Hawthorne could have woven a Puritan romance around such a name!

“ Every Quakeress,” says Charles Lamb, “is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the Metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.” So thought our most beloved of English essayists as he met them amid the bustle of London; but Jordans, though so near the metropolis, reckoned by miles, — some twenty or thereabout, — is yet “far from the madding crowd,” and, as you rest on one of the homely benches of the meeting-house, you cannot but feel how charmingly Lamb interpreted the undefinable glamourie of this place. “You go away with a sermon not made with hands . . . you have bathed with stillness. O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half-hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!” Reader, if thou wouldst experience this peace, a peace that truly and literally passeth understanding, make a pilgrimage to Jordans.

Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the career of William Penn and this his last resting-place. The story of his life is, to a great extent, the history of the later Stuart period. It was full of contrasts. Penn played many parts. He combined the man of thought, the idealist, the poet, with the man of action. The son of one of England’s greatest admirals (for Sir William Penn’s services to his country have never had full justice done to them), the founder of a great colony, the patrician, courtier, personal friend of King James the Second, William Penn was yet withal a man who, through all his long career as leader and protector of the Quakers, never ceased to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, a man who often had no certain dwellingplace save the prison-house. How very human were the relations between father and son. Admiral Sir William Penn (we cannot call him the old admiral, for he died after a full and strenuous life at the age of forty-nine) had built up hopes of a brilliant future for his son. William, however, was a serious-minded youth, somewhat of a visionary. At fifteen, he was entered as a gentleman commoner at Christ Church, Oxford; but the spell fell upon him early in life, and when Charles the Second in 1660 ordered that surplices should once more be worn at divine service, young Penn, joined by some kindred spirits, attacked the surpliced students, and tore the prelatic vestments over their heads. Oxford, however, was not Edinburgh, nor Penn a Jenny Geddes, and so, instead of another revolution, all that happened was that the admiral’s young hopeful was expelled from college. A mere matter of temperament, some will say, but it hurt Sir William to the quick. Contrast the feeling of Sir Thomas Browne, for example, who rejoiced “to see the return of the comely Anglican order in old Episcopal Norwich.”

Sir William next sent his son to France. He returned, ’t is true, with the polished manners of a gentleman, but his mind was made up, and, to his father’s great grief, it was not long before young Penn decided to throw preferment to the winds and to link his fortunes with that humble sect, the Quakers. Notwithstanding his ultraPuritanism, he retained the distinguished manners of a cavalier, or of what was then called “a gentleman of quality.” Samuel Pepys thus notes his return from France: “Mr. Pen, Sir William’s son, is come back from France, and come to visit my wife; a most modish person grown, she says, a fine gentleman.”Pepys, who missed nothing, noticed that there was something wrong between the admiral and his son. “All things, I fear, do not go well with them. They look discontentedly, but I know not what ails them.” Later, he understood that these were religious differences “which I now perceive is one thing that hath put Sir William so long off the hookes.” At last the secret is out. Writing in his diary under date December 29, 1667, Pepys says, “At night comes Mrs. Turner to see us; and there, among other talk, she tells me that Mr. William Pen, who is lately come from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing; that he cares for no company, nor comes into any, which is a pleasant thing, after his being abroad so long.” It was said that the admiral was to have been raised to the peerage, and well he deserved the honor, but William was his heir, and the Quaker would have no such “worldly title or patent.”

We are glad to know that father and son were reconciled before Sir William’s death, and that, knowing the perils with which young Penn would be beset in an age that could not tolerate dissent, the admiral on his deathbed asked the Duke of York to protect his son so far as he consistently could. The duke, it will be remembered, was Lord High Admiral, while Sir William was Vice-Admiral of England; hence the bond of friendship between these two men, that never was broken. How faithfully James carried out the dying man’s request is now a matter of history. Indeed, the intimacy between Charles II, James II, and the Penns, father and son, is one of the most pleasing episodes in their annals. No one can say that William Penn had not the courage of his convictions. What he said, he said; and to know that the last of the Stuart kings were faithful friends of Penn the Quaker reveals a trait of character in these two men that should not be forgotten. Put while Penn’s access to the royal presence enabled him to do much towards softening the sufferings of the persecuted Quakers, it was the cause of his own later troubles, when over and over again the cry arose that Penn was a Papist and Jesuit.

I have already referred to the naming of Pennsylvania by Charles II, after the admiral. More interesting, too, than any romance is the history of that settlement. Well might Penn exclaim, as he does, in one of his letters, “Oh, how sweet is the quiet of these parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome solicitations, hurries, and perplexities of woeful Europe!” Sweet indeed! to be away from the bigotry of the old world, a world that could not distinguish between Quakers and Papists, a world that could accuse the man who tore the surplices at Oxford of being a Jesuit! Nothing illustrates more strikingly Penn’s extraordinary versatility and manifold gifts, than his wonderful letter to the Free Society of Traders of Pennsylvania, dated August 16, 1683, in which he describes the fertility of his province, the serenity of its climate, its natural resources, its fauna, and the nobility of its aboriginal inhabitants. When he leaves again for England in 1684, it is thus he apostrophizes Philadelphia: —

“And thou Philadelphia, the virgin settlement of this province, named before thou wert born, what love, what care, what service, and what travail, has there been to bring thee forth and preserve thee from such as would abuse and defile thee!

“Oh, that thou mayest be kept from the evil that would overwhelm thee; that faithful to the God of thy mercies, in the life of righteousness thou mayest be preserved to the end ! My soul prays to God for thee, that thou mayest stand in the day of trial, that thy children may be blessed of the Lord, and thy people saved by his power. My love to thee has been great, and the remembrance of thee affects my heart and mine eye. — The God of eternal strength keep and preserve thee to His glory and peace.”

How we seem to see in these lines the workings of Penn’s mind. In seeking to give written expression to his feelings towards Philadelphia, Penn models his apostrophe on the words of the Master Himself. Knowing the character of the man, there can be no doubt as to his sincerity.

Over and over again the great colonist longed to return to his retreat at Pennsbury, Pennsylvania, and was as often prevented by arrestments on the old charges, and so it was not until 1699 that he made his second voyage. He returned to England in 1701, in connection with proposed changes in the government of North America. Penn never saw his colony again. Troubles at home, that told on his health, showered fast upon him. In 1712 he was seized with apoplectic fits, and on July 30, 1718, he died, as the memorial on the wall there shows, and left behind him an imperishable name.

But I have lingered all too long at Jordans, too long at least for a September day, if I wish to be home before nightfall. In the gloaming, as I pass through Amersham once more, a single bell is tolling for evensong, and very impressive the parish church looks with its chancel only alight. I cannot remain to the service, for I have still to retrace my steps to the distant farmhouse among the hills. It was a peaceful impression that I carried away with me. The song of the aged Simeon, so appropriately incorporated in the Order for Evening Prayer in that time-hallowed liturgy, seemed somehow to become associated in my mind with the passing of William Penn. During his lifetime the Quakers had experienced their de profundis. They had sounded the depths. They had passed through the valley. They were now climbing the sunny side of the hill, on whose slopes Charles Lamb saw “the Shining Ones;” and so in 1718 their apostle also might now depart in peace, for his eyes had seen their salvation “prepared before the face of all people.”

Since these thoughts and memories prompted this paper, I have returned to my home in Scotland; but sometimes, when the half-moon dimly lights the southern horizon and brings out in relief a row of beeches whose tapering branches point towards the sky; sometimes, at such an hour, I fancy that these Pentland Hills of mine are the distant Chilterns, and that my beeches are akin to those that shelter the graves of the Penns and Penningtons, the beeches that Thomas Gray loved so well, “ dreaming out their old stories to the winds.”