Intercepted Correspondence of William Penn, 1670
William "Penn^ 1670 In connection with the recent William Penn Tercentenary I learned by chance of some letters addressed to Penn in the Public Record Office, London, and secured photostats of them which are here transcribed and published. They do not appear to have been used by his biographers and they were not included in the Extracts from State "Papers Inflating to Friends 1654-1672 {Journal of Friends Historical Society , Supplements 8-11, 1913), though that volume has some other Penn items, notably his letter from the Tower to Lord Arlington in a form more original and much longer than the printed edition.1 Like various other Quaker letters in that volume these have been apparently intercepted by the censor. The young Penn was obviously suspect, and one of the letters, that from Philip Ford, with its reference to Friends' meetings held or to be held and to the shipment of Quaker books from Cork to Bristol, evidently aroused enough suspicion to be filed with a pr?cis endorsed by Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson. Otherwise the letters are inoffensive enough, purely personal, and with all their variety are of no small interest to the student of Penn or of early Quakerism. The letters all date from July or August, 1670, and hence belong to an important period of Penn's life and near other well-known episodes. Except the last they are addressed to him in Ireland, and should be studied with the Irish Journal2 in which he records his every day's doings from October 23, 1669, when he sailed from