id="Page_64" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[64]"/> transferred to Penn as receiver for the benefit of the creditors. Thus William had come into a position of importance in the affairs of West Jersey. Presently, in 1679, East Jersey came also into the market, and Penn and eleven others bought it at auction. These twelve took in other twelve, and the twenty-four appointed a Quaker governor, Robert Barclay.

Now, in 1680, having had his early interest in America thus renewed and strengthened, Penn found that the king was in his debt to the amount of sixteen thousand pounds. Part of this money had been loaned to the king by William's father, the admiral; part of it was the admiral's unpaid salary. Mr. Pepys has recorded in his diary how scandalously Charles left his officers unpaid. The king, he says, could not walk in his own house without meeting at every hand men whom he was ruining, while at the same time he was spending money prodigally upon his pleasures. Pepys himself fell into poverty in his old age, accounting the king to be in debt to him in the sum of twenty-eight thousand pounds.

Penn considered his account collectible. "I have been," he wrote, "these thirteen years the servant of Truth and Friends, and for my testimony's sake lost much,—not only the greatness and preferment of the world, but sixteen thousand pounds of my estate which, had I not been what I am, I had long ago obtained." It is doubtful, however, if the king would have ever paid a penny. It is certain that when William offered to exchange the money for a district in America, Charles agreed to the bargain with great joy.