David Lloyd and Chester

DAVID LLOYD AND CHESTER71 ment to the greatness and broadness of William Penn ; it is equally a confirmation of his faith in the people of Pennsylvania as rulers and legislators. The Assembly adjourned after sitting four days, although there was still much business to be transacted. No press of legislation could prevail against the wish of the members from the lower counties to return to their homes. Accordingly, the session was declared to be adjourned, with the provision for re-convening within the next fortnight. This was never done, and the remainder of the business was postponed until the meeting of the Second Assembly in the next year. Time has seen the disappearance of most of the traces of this first meeting of the Assembly of Pennsylvania. The House of Defence was demolished in 1793; Sandelands' house had fallen into ruin before that. Not one of the laws passed at that first brief session still stands upon the statute book. The relic of which we possess the latest record is mentioned by Watson in his inexhaustible Annals, as follows : " The oaken chair in which William Penn sat as chief of that Assembly, is said to be now in the possession of the aged and respectable widow of Colonel (Persifor) Frazer." And so the chair from which the great Founder directed the work of his first democratic legislature may still survive, a symbol of the noble and significant work which Penn and his yeomen legislators did so well. DAVID LLOYD AND CHESTER By Burton Alva Konkle 1 David Lloyd, or to translate into English, " David Gray," the greatest statesman of Pennsylvania's first half-century, was thirty years old, when, on July 15th, 1686, he and his wife, Sarah, an Englishwoman, arrived in Philadelphia. He presented his commission as Attorney General from William Penn to his second cousin " kinsman," President Thomas Lloyd. For President 1 A paper read at Chester, Pennsylvania, 5 mo. 21, 1932, at the summer meeting of Friends' Historical Association in observance of the 250th anniversary of the first arrival of William Penn in America, 1682-1932. 72 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Thomas was a son of Charles Lloyd of Dolobran, and David was the son of Thomas of Manafon Parish, whose father was David of Meifod, both of Wales. The new Attorney General was not a Friend at this time, nor for his first five years in the colony, as the first mention of him as such is on May 29, 1691, when he was thirty-five years old. However, during the remaining forty years of his life, he was one of the leaders in all the activities of Friends, and easily first in their political and legal control of the colony. That he was Attorney General, the ablest lawyer on the American shores, Chief Justice and Speaker of the Assembly during his life, is well known ; but it is by no means so well known that, while the Founder was harassed all his years by enemies of his people and because of his relation to the Stuarts and varying English colonial policies, almost to his ruin, David Lloyd, with amazing skill and courage, led the people into permanent constitution and laws and almost republican freedom. What the great Founder would have favored in government we have no means of knowing, because, for the sake of holding his colonies against the Stuart following and the parliamentary element after them, he was compelled to keep as near to their interpretation of his charter as would as much as possible prevent their attacks. But when it did not prevent their attacks, as in the Blackwell and Fletcher occupations, he secretly, in an anonymous publication—The Excellent Priviledge of Liberty and Property—urged them to stand fast for English rights. Under David Lloyd's leadership they did stand so vigorously, that the Lord Chancellor compelled Penn to remove him, very much against the Founder's will. But this was only temporary, for Lloyd led Pennsylvania from that time on to secure the fruits of the great revolution of 1688, just as Parliament had secured them for England, even though that body refused on its own motion to pass them...