sore need of money, that his constituents had subscribed 21,000
pounds to a loan, which the members of the House then raised to
90,000 pounds, by rising, one after another, to give their personal
bonds each for a thousand pounds. Isaac Penington the son, whom
Ellwood loved as a friend and reverenced as a father, became a
foremost worker and writer in the Society of Friends. In a note
upon him, written after his death, Thomas Ellwood said that "in his
family he was a true pattern of goodness and piety; to his wife he
was a most affectionate husband; to his children, a loving and
tender father; to his servants, a mild and gentle master; to his
friends, a firm and fast friend; to the poor, compassionate and
open-hearted; and to all, courteous and kind?' In 1661 he was
committed to Aylesbury gaol for worshipping God in his own house
(holding a conventicle), "where," says Ellwood in that little
testimony which he wrote after his friend's death, "for seventeen
weeks, great part of it in winter, he was kept in a cold and very
incommodious room, without a chimney; from which hard usage his
tender body contracted so great and violent a distemper that, for
several weeks after, he was not able to turn himself in bed." "His
second imprisonment," says Ellwood, "was in the year 1664, being
taken out of a meeting, when he with others were peaceably waiting
on the Lord, and sent to Aylesbury gaol, where he again remained a
prisoner between seventeen and eighteen weeks.

"His third imprisonment was in the year 1665, being taken up, with
many others, in the open street of Amersham, as they were carrying
and accompanying the body of a deceased Friend to the grave. From
hence he was sent again to Aylesbury gaol; but this commitment being
in order to banishment, was but for a month, or thereabouts.