Individual Details

Marriage

At the Church of St. George, Hanover Square, London, on 22 August 1751, Thomas Penn married LADY JULIANA FERMOR, born in 1729, daughter of Thomas, Earl of Pomfret. They entertained some thoughts of coming to Pennsylvania the following year, but the birth of their first child in 1752 prevented it, and they never came to the province.

Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Charlotte, later Governess to the daughters of George III.
(Her sister Anne's widower Thomas Dawson - Viscount Cremorne - remarried Philadelphia Freame, who was also a Lady-in-Waiting.)

Thomas Penn married, August 22, 1751, Lady Juliana Fermor, fourth daughter of Thomas, first Earl of Pomfret. The Gentleman's Magazine for September, 1751, reports the marriage:

" Aug. 22. Hon. Thos. Penn (one of the two proprietors of Pennsylvania) was married to Lady Juliana Fermor, youngest1 daughter to the E. of Pomfret."

And the Pennsylvania Gazette, November 14,1751, has the following paragraph :

" By Capt. Hinton [ship "Philadelphia," John Hinton, from London] there is advice that the Honourable Thomas Penn Esq; one of our Proprietaries, was married the 22nd of August last, to the Lady Juliana Fermor, youngest daughter of the Right Honourable the late2 Earl of Pomfret."

In a letter to Richard Peters, September 29,1751, Thomas Penn wrote,—

" As some of your letters are of a private nature, I shal now reply to such of them as I have not taken notice of in my letter of business, but first I shall tell you that for some time before I met with that unfortunate, and what had like to have been fatal accident, I had determined on a change of life, and had settled all the necessary points and made visits to the lady, which I resumed on my return to Berkshire, and wee consummated our marriage the 22nd of hist month. This necessarily engaged my mind as well as person til finished, that I could not sit down to write, but as my grand business is now finished, and I am happily settled with a companion possessed with those qualities that must render a reasonable man happy as well as of a Family remarkable for their affection to each other, and into which I have been received with marks of the greatest regard, I shall now sit down as a correspondent to answer all my friends' letters. "... Wee are turning our thoughts toward Pennsylvania, and if I should be prevented from embarking the very next summer, if I live till the spring after, I make no doubt of being ready then." 1

The " unfortunate" and nearly " fatal accident" alluded to above I have not found described in the Penn papers, though it is, I am told, referred to in some of them. It is said that Thomas and his brother Richard were riding in a coach out of London, and having pistols with them,—for fear of highwaymen, probably,—one of the weapons, in handling, was accidentally discharged, causing a peculiar and serious wound upon Thomas's person. Evidently this occurrence was a few months earlier than August, 1751.

Lady Juliana Fernior was born in 1729, and was therefore much younger—some twenty-seven years—than her husband, being, in fact, a woman in her youth at the time of her marriage. There are several portraits of her preserved,2 and one of these, a small full-length, painted by Peter Van Dyck (a descendant, it is said, of the great Van Dyck) about the time of the marriage, represents her as a well-looking lady, in her wedding-dress of white silk, made in a style which illustrates strikingly the fashion of the time, the skirt being spread out by hoops to enormous dimensions sidewise. She stands near the fireplace of a handsome room, presumed to be in her father's house in Albemarle Street, London.

This marriage was an event of high importance to Thomas Penn and to all of his family, most of whom, we may feel sure, had theretofore regarded him as a confirmed bachelor, —he was nearly fifty,—and had been not inconsiderate how his valuable estate as well as his present bounties would be ultimately bestowed.