Historic Philadelphia

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Historians tend to pooh-pooh the Penn treaty
at Shackamaxon as legend because no
official record exists. But after the massive
Treaty Elm blew down in a hurricane in
1810, sentimental Philadelphians placed a
monument on the spot in 1824. Today the
site is a public park.
COURTESY OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA,
DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS, CITY ARCHIVES.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
16
Pastorius, came to Pennsylvania in 1683.
He soon moved to Germantown and became
a Quaker.
Welsh Quakers also formed land companies,
some with the intent to buy large tracts and
subdivide acreage among poorer Welshmen.
In May 1684, the ship Isabella out of Bristol
arrived from Africa with 150 slaves for sale. It
was the only known slave ship to enter the
Philadelphia port in the 1680s. The cargo sold
out. Nicholas More bought four men; two ran
away almost immediately. Dr. More, newly
appointed by Penn as chief of the five justices of
the provincial court, was busy dealing with a
crime wave. “There is heare mutch robrey in
City and Countrey,” he reported to Penn,
“Breaking of houses, and stealing of Hoggs.” An
Indian sachem named Nannecheschan was giving
More a hard time over the case of a slave
who, while drunk, snatched the sachem’s crown
from his head on the street and ran away with
pieces of it, which he sold to a Dutch baker.
When Penn sailed back to England in August
1684, there were 357 houses in Philadelphia.
BACK IN ENGLAND
William Penn arrived in London in
October of 1684, rented a mansion in the
Kensington section, and spent much time
lobbying at court, hoping for favorable
settlement of a boundary dispute with Lord
Baltimore of Maryland. The following
February, King Charles II had a stroke while
shaving. His majesty was given the most upto-date
medical treatment, including the
application of red hot frying pans to his head,
but he died anyway. His brother, the Duke of
York, was proclaimed King James II.
In 1686 Penn toured Europe, and in Holland
he conferred secretly with Prince William of
Orange, son-in-law of King James and the
acknowledged Protestant leader of Western
Europe. Two years later, William and his wife,
Mary, landed in England and took over the
throne. James II fled to France. The new rulers
didn’t trust the rebellious Quaker: within a
month, Penn was stopped by troops on a
London street and hauled in for questioning. In
1690 he was thrown into the Tower of London
briefly “for some practices against the
government.” In 1692 William and Mary took
away Penn’s rights to Pennsylvania, and turned
the administration over to the governor of New
York. It took Penn thirty months of persuasion
at court to regain control of his province.
In the midst of all this, his wife, Gulielma,
died in February 1694, at age fifty. He
consoled himself by working, writing and
preaching. On a preaching tour in 1695, he
stopped at the house of Thomas Callowhill, a
Quaker merchant in Bristol, England. Penn,
then fifty-four, was smitten with Callowhill’s
daughter, Hannah, who was twenty-four. He
corresponded with Hannah and sent her gifts,
and they were married in March 1696.
Five weeks after the wedding, Penn’s oldest
son, Springett, died. He was twenty. Of the
seven children born to Guli Penn, only three
had lived more than a year. Remaining in
1696 were Letitia, seventeen, and William Jr.,
fifteen. In January of 1699, not yet eighteen,
Billy Jr. married Mary Jones of Bristol, the day
after her twenty-second birthday.
And William Sr. was preparing to sail back
to Pennsylvania and spend the rest of his days
at his manor house on the Delaware.
TROUBLE IN
PENNSYLVANIA
Before Penn left for England in 1684, he
appointed Dr. Thomas Lloyd as deputy