Hannah Penn and the Proprietorship of Pennsylvania (review)

Book Reviews67 Meeting at Friends House on Euston Road. He has now retired from the care of over 50,000 books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and pictures bearing on Quakerism of the past and present. For his presidential address, delivered at London in Twelfth Month 1957, John Nickalls shared with his listeners the results of his researches into tradition versus truth in Quaker portraiture. This lecture has now been printed as another of the Supplements to the fournal of the Friends' Historical Society, issued as a joint undertaking with the Friends Historical Association. Happily it is illustrated with sixteen reproductions so that the reader may understand clearly John Nickalls' comments especially on the three early Friends James Nayler, George Fox, and William Penn. A careful consideration of the provenance of the familiar representations of this trio constitutes the major part of John Nickalls' study. The conclusion of the author is that "There must certainly be further evidence to be gathered; and no claim is made that these pages are the last word." Portraiture of early Friends remains a wide open field for historical discovery and research. John Nickalls maintains that until more certain evidence is uncovered , none of the likenesses of Nayler, Fox, and Penn that are now known may be classified as other than uncertain. Overbrook, PhiladelphiaRichmond P. Miller Hannah Penn and the Proprietorship of Pennsylvania. By Sophie Hutchinson Drinker. Philadelphia. Privately printed under the auspices of The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. 1958. iv, 207 pages. $4.50 This book makes available fifty-eight letters of a little-known but effective figure in American colonial history: Hannah Callowhill Penn, second wife of the Founder of Pennsylvania. The letters, selected from some 115 documents, cover the period from 1700 to 1726. They are given narrative continuity by a running text, by quotations from letters addressed to Hannah Penn by James Logan, Secretary of the Province, and by passages from pertinent letters written by other men in the government and members of Hannah's family. The correspondence is filled with fascinating information: the growth of that bevy of small children that Penn left when he died, the liquidating of the mortgage that Quakers raised to extricate Penn from his involvement with the Fords, the continuing border dispute with Maryland, the strife amongst government men in the colony. Most important of all, the collection forms a documentary biography of Hannah Penn. Her letters reveal a stable, devoted, amiable, deeply moral, and capable person. She was a woman who in our own times could have held a high government post. That she displayed so much leadership and executive capacity three hundred years ago makes her all the more remarkable. Hannah came from a rather ordinary background. When she married William Penn, he was already a prominent international figure and in his world of higher station her ability found both the stimulation and the 68Bulletin of Friends Historical Association opportunity to flower. She and Penn were married for sixteen years before his health finally broke down and he became incompetent, and for the next six years she administered the Proprietorship without legal authorization , depending heavily upon the devoted James Logan. They were years filled with anguish and pressures, pointed up by the resentment and jealousy of William Penn, Jr., the Proprietor's son and heir by his first marriage. Calmly Hannah accepted whatever destiny befell her, giving painstaking thought to affairs of both government and family. "Loving Friend," she wrote to James Logan about a year before her husband's death, "I have already written to thee by the new Governor [Sir William Keith], who by the character given of him we have accepted; and hope our family and the country in the end will reap the advantage. ..." And later on in the same letter: "My poor Dearest's life is yet continued to us, but I know not how long that may be, for he is very weakly." Upon William Penn's death in 1718 Hannah Penn became his sole executrix, and on that more solid footing guided Pennsylvania's destiny for another eight years. There can be no question that Governor Keith, James Logan, and...