At a gathering held at the Shanagarry Design Centre, overlooking Ballycotton Bay, University College Cork's CELT Project announced the launch online of William Penn's pocket diary from his 1669–70 visit to Ireland. The contents of the diary first turned up in the late nineteenth century. The original notebook consists of quickly-scribbled entries. These required considerable deciphering by Isabel Grubb, the mid-twentieth century Irish Quaker historian, who identified the many places and people in precise notes to the text. Her edition is now published online with the permission of Pearson Education.
This text displays many of the traits that made William Penn (1644–1718) such a signal success later on. He comes across as an exceptional lobbyist and activist, a great propagandist and promoter of his cause and a shrewd businessman whose word was his bond. He never set out to be an important humanitarian, yet his practical pursuit of religious liberty for Protestant Dissenters ended up conferring universal civil rights. Penn was sent over to Ireland by his father to re-organize the leases on his Irish estates in County Cork. However, he spent most of his time working on behalf of the Quakers who, much to his father's chagrin, he had recently joined. Immediately on landing in Cork, he went to see Quakers imprisoned by the authorities of the town where he himself had been imprisoned two years before. They were there for holding illegal meetings and refusing to swear oaths when arrested. Afterwards, he travelled to Dublin to lobby on their behalf. With his father a Cromwellian admiral who made a timely move to the royalist side at the Restoration, Penn knew everybody from King Charles II down and was particularly well connected to ruling Protestant elite in Ireland with whom he had been raised. The list of people he met and wined and dined in Dublin is a veritable Who's Who of the period. He went to Irish Council in Dublin Castle on behalf of his co-religionists, he did not meet the Lord Lieutenant who was ill but he records handing over 'six cobbs', i.e. pieces of eight; on November 29th the Dublin Friends were released. The entry for the day before states 'I was at meeting, it was large. I declared 1-and-a-half hours, prayed twice' but one would have thought the douceur of the week before was equally instrumental.
Penn was constantly on the move by horseback. Such travel could be perilous, not least when crossing the Blackwater, 'a river of great note, rapidity and depth' near Cappoquin on 4 December 1669 he, his party, their horses and baggage nearly got swept away. The meetings that Penn held or was involved in are described in terms such as 'heavenly' or 'precious'; but they were also deliberatively provocative. News of a Quaker meeting would not only attract adherents and sympathizers but also opponents and the officers of the law. Debates, controversies and often arrests would follow. Failure to arrest Penn himself would leave authorities looking impotent and if the Friends themselves were arrested then there were ugly court scenes with otherwise law-abiding Protestants being hauled off to the town gaol. All in all, Penn, like subsequent civil activists, was showing the law up to be an ass. He who had famously and fearlessly flouted social convention by refusing to doff his hat in the presence of the king. Penn was also a relentless propagandist. A number of his diary entries mention him writing tracts, and also mention him delivering copy to the press. The journal provides evidence that two of his tracts were printed in Cork even though the tracts themselves give no place of publication. Most famously during this period, he wrote, partly as a result of the Quaker experience in Ireland, his frequently reprinted Great Case of the Liberty of Conscience, which first came off Joshua Winter's press in Dublin in 1670. Penn's skill at lobbying and publicity later came into its own when he promoted the Pennsylvania colony in the early 1680s, but so too did his deal making.
The diary shows him, with the assistance of Philip Ford, driving hard bargains in relation to the tenanting of his lands made around the New Year (i.e. 25th March) 1670. In this way he let 500 acres to 24 tenants securing rents of £1,100 a year at 2s an acre. He would take distresses, i.e. exercise the legal right of distraint of goods—to force the payment of arrears or settle on the terms of lease he preferred. The diary shows him belabouring William Berry, a Protestant tenant at Clonakilty, into submission by impounding his cattle. On the other hand, he was pleased to note his Protestant tenants and neighbours draining bogs, setting hedges, measuring and mapping their lands after the civilised and more profitable English manner. At the end of his nine months in Ireland Penn managed to have his fellow Cork Quakers released. But the interesting thing about Penn's Irish Journal is that the native Catholic whose lands he now occupied hardly get a look in. They are rarely surnamed, let alone first-named and they are the subject of passing derogatory remarks about their barbarous, superstitious customs. Indeed one of the tracts he published in Cork was an anti-Papist one. However a deal is a deal, and Penn's attitudes changed significantly in 1680–1 with the deal he made with James Duke of York. In this he obtained the extensive lands south of James's recently acquired New York colony by switching support from exclusionist Popish Plotters to the future Catholic king. As a result he ended up only keeping his word in these advantageous deals he made not only with Indians but also with James, even to the point of nearly losing all during the Glorious Revolution and subsequent Williamite conquest of Ireland'. Penn's Irish Journal, which is now online, brings CELT to a total of 16,000,000 words, available free worldwide on Ireland's longest running Humanities Computing project.
The following is a modernised version of 'My Irish Journall' by William Penn. I have used modernised spelling and punctuation and wherever possible have given what I believe to be the correct full names in place of the initials which Penn wrote. The usual names of the months have been inserted instead of the numerals used by the Quakers. Where I am in doubt about a reading or a name I have put a query mark. Square brackets indicate my own suggestions.
To show how this version differs from the original manuscript would produce a most unsightly script, difficult and unpleasant to read. I have based my version on the copy published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 40, 1916, and on many emendations and corrections of it kindly supplied by Professor Henry J. Cadbury from the original manuscript. Without his suggestion and much valuable advice and help this work would not have been undertaken nor completed.
Acknowledgement should be made to the Friends Historical Association which kindly undertook either to advance or to secure the funds necessary for the publication of this book.