Three Hundred Years Ago: The Penn-Meade Trial and its Sequel

THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO: THE PENN-MEADE TRIAL AND ITS SEQUEL By Alfred W. Braithwaite* Those who have poked about the City of London in search of Quaker antiquities will no doubt have penetrated into the entrance hall of the Central Criminal Court, commonly called the Old Bailey, and seen there the tablet commemorating this trial which was erected in 1907 on the initiative of Horace J. Smith, of Philadelphia and Birmingham. Horace Smith belonged to the great literary family, well-known both in America and England, of which Elizabeth Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith were members.1 He was disowned by his meeting for marrying out, but remained, as it is termed, "a Friend at heart," and it is appropriate that this cosmopolitan Quaker should have been the chief mover in commemorating an event which is of equal interest on both sides of the Atlantic. The Penn-Meade trial took place in September, 1670, its sequel extending into 1671, three hundred years ago, and it is perhaps the most famous trial in all Quaker annals. It was on an indictment of William Penn, then a young man of 26, and William Meade,2 the future son-in-law of Margaret Fell, for conspiring to take part in an unlawful assembly in the middle of Gracechurch Street, London . The adjacent meetinghouse had been forcibly closed, under the Conventicle Act passed a few months earlier, and Friends were therefore meeting in the street. The fame of the trial did not arise primarily from the charge itself—many Quakers had been indicted before in connection with their meetings, and would be so again—but from two other circumstances. The first was that the fining and imprisonment of the jury for acquitting Penn and Meade led to the celebrated habeas corpus appeal known as Bushell's Case, in which the illegality of punishing juries for their verdict was triumphantly, and finally, established. *London solicitor and co-editor of the Journal of the Friends' Historical Society. This paper was read at the Spring Meeting of Friends Historical Association, May 9, 1971, at the Westfield Meetinghouse, Riverton, New Jersey. 1.Journal of the Friends' Historical Society, IV (1907), 2. 2.Also often spelled, "Mead." 4 QUAKER HISTORY The second circumstance was that the trial was made the subject of one of the most devastating pieces of polemical writing ever produced, The People's Antient and Just Liberties Asserted, which was published by Friends a few weeks later. The main part of this consisted of a verbatim report of the proceedings, taken down by Friends who were present; the behavior of the Bench, when thus recorded, was so manifestly outrageous as to need little further comment. This pamphlet has been frequently reprinted, most recently in America perhaps, in The Witness of William Penn (1957) by Frederick Tolles and Gordon Alderfer. Anyone reading it (and it is very good reading) will obtain a far better picture of the trial than any description can give, and I will not do more than mention a few salient points that I have found of particular interest. The indictment of Penn and Meade was not for the breach of any statute, but for committing the somewhat vague common-law offense known as unlawful assembly. This method of procedure, under the common law, had certain advantages from the point of view of the prosecution. These are dealt with, in a very entertaining and informative way, in an "Appendix" to another pamphlet, The Second Part of the People's Antient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670), the account by Thomas Rudyard, the Quaker lawyer, of the trial and conviction for various offenses of himself and ten other Friends, which followed immediately after the trial of Penn and Meade. This second pamphlet is not nearly so effective, either as record or as propaganda, as the first part, partly because a verbatim transcript of the proceedings could not in this case be given; the justices, fearing further damaging publicity, had on this occasion prohibited the taking of notes by Friends and had confiscated those that were taken. But the Appendix compensates for this. It takes the form of its subtitle, a "Dialogue, in a Plain...