Turner ran no serious risk; for the government was most unwilling to send to the scaffold one of the Seven who had signed the memorable petition. A warrant was however issued for his apprehension; and his friends had little hope that he would escape; for his nose was such as none who had seen it could forget; and it was to little purpose that he put on a flowing wig and that he suffered his beard to grow. The pursuit was probably not very hot; for, after skulking a few weeks in England, he succeeded in crossing the Channel, and remained some time in France.[1]
A warrant was issued against Penn; and he narrowly escaped the messengers. It chanced that, on the day on which they were sent in search of him, he was attending a remarkable ceremony at some distance from his home. An event had taken place which a historian, whose object is to record the real life of a nation, ought not to pass unnoticed. While London was agitated by the news that a plot had been discovered, George Fox, the founder of the sect of Quakers, died.
More than forty years had elapsed since Fox had begun to see visions and to cast out devils.[2] He was then a youth of pure morals and grave deportment, with a perverse temper, with the education of a labouring man, and with an intellect in the most unhappy of all states, that is to say, too much disordered for liberty, and not sufficiently disordered for Bedlam. The circumstances in which he was placed were such as could scarcely fail to bring out in the strongest form the constitutional diseases of his mind. At the time when his faculties were ripening, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, were striving for
- ↑ Burnet, ii. 71; Evelyn's Diary, Jan. 4 and 18, 1690; Letter from Turner to Sancroft, Jan. 19, 1690/1; Letter from Sancroft to Lloyd of Norwich, April 2, 1692. These two letters are among the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library, and are printed in the Life of Ken by a Layman. Turner's escape to France is mentioned in Narcissus Luttrell's Diary for February 1690. See also a Dialogue between the Bishop of Ely and his Conscience, 16th February 1690/1. The dialogue is interrupted by the sound of trumpets. The Bishop hears himself proclaimed a traitor, and cries out,
"Come, brother Pen, 'tis time we both were gone."
- ↑ For a specimen of his visions, see his Journal, page 13; for his casting out of devils, page 26. I quote the folio edition of 1765.
