Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker | Page 6

the quicking seed of life; we cannot alsoe but bemoan the want of his company, for that in difficult occasion he was sted-fast--nor was one to be turned aside. He is now seasonable in intention for the Plantations, in order into finding his way clear, and freedom in the truth according to the measure manifested unto him," etc. And so the strong-minded man is commended to Friends across the seas. In the records of the meetings for sufferings in England are certain of his letters from the jail. How his character descended to my sterner parent, and, through another generation, to me, and how the coming in of my mother's gentler blood helped in after-days, and amid stir of war, to modify in me, this present writer, the ruder qualities of my race, I may hope to set forth.
William died suddenly in 1679 without children, and was succeeded by the third brother, Owen. This gentleman lived the life of his time, and, dying in 1700 of much beer and many strong waters, left one son, Owen, a minor. What with executors and other evils, the estate now went from ill to worse. Owen Wynne 2d was in no haste, and thus married as late as somewhere about 1740, and had issue, William, and later, in 1744, a second son, Arthur, and perhaps others; but of all this I heard naught until many years after, as I have already said.
It may seem a weak and careless thing for a man thus to cast away his father's lands as my ancestor did; but what he gave up was a poor estate, embarrassed with mortgages and lessened by fines, until the income was, I suspect, but small. Certain it is that the freedom to worship God as he pleased was more to him than wealth, and assuredly not to be set against a so meagre estate, where he must have lived among enmities, or must have diced, drunk, and hunted with the rest of his kinsmen and neighbours.
I have a faint memory of my aunt, Gainor Wynne, as being fond of discussing the matter, and of how angry this used to make my father. She had a notion that my father knew more than he was willing to say, and that there had been something further agreed between the brothers, although what this was she knew not, nor ever did for many a day. She was given, however, to filling my young fancy with tales about the greatness of these Wynnes, and of how the old homestead, rebuilded in James I.'s reign, had been the nest of Wynnes past the memory of man. Be all this as it may, we had lost Wyncote for the love of a freer air, although all this did not much concern me in the days of which I now write.
Under the mild and just rule of the proprietary, my grandfather Hugh prospered, and in turn his son John, my father, to a far greater extent. Their old home in Wales became to them, as time went on, less and less important. Their acres here in Merion and Bucks were more numerous and more fertile. I may add that the possession of many slaves in Maryland, and a few in Pennsylvania, gave them the feeling of authority and position, which the colonial was apt to lose in the presence of his English rulers, who, being in those days principally gentlemen of the army, were given to assuming airs of superiority.
In a word, my grandfather, a man of excellent wits and of much importance, was of the council of William Penn, and, as one of his chosen advisers, much engaged in his difficulties with the Lord Baltimore as to the boundaries of the lands held of the crown. Finally, when, as Penn says, "I could not prevail with my wife to stay, and still less with Tishe," which was short for Laetitia, his daughter, an obstinate wench, it was to men like Logan and my grandfather that he gave his full confidence and delegated his authority; so that Hugh Wynne had become, long before his death, a person of so much greater condition than the small squires to whom he had given up his estate, that he was like Joseph in this new land. What with the indifference come of large means, and disgust for a country where he had been ill treated, he probably ceased to think of his forefathers' life in Wales as of a thing either desirable or in any way suited to his own creed.
Soon the letters, which at first were frequent, that is, coming twice a year, when the London packet arrived or departed, became rare; and if, on the death of my great-uncle William, they ceased, or if any passed later between us