be absent from his service in the College till the first Day of June next, a which Time they would very cheerfully receive him again as their Provost, and on this occasion they thought it incumbent on them to do Mr Smith the Justice to testify their Sense of his great abilities and the Satisfaction he had given them in the faithful Discharge of his office.
Furnished with this diplomatic but kindly action of the Trustees for they forebore using any word or phrase which might seem to befriend the subject of it as endangering the notice of the Assembly, Mr. Smith took passage for England about i December, arriving in London on New Year's Day, 1759. He prosecuted his appeal with success, and on 26 June the Privy Council granted him the relief he sought, " declaring his Majesty's high displeasure at the unwarrantable behaviour of the House of Representatives of Pennsylvania in assuming to themselves powers which do not belong to them, and invading both his Majesty's Royal Prerogative, and the Liberties of the Subject"; and with the order in his pocket to the Governor to signify the same to the Assembly, he set his face homeward and arrived in Philadelphia on 8 October. He also brought with him the Degree Sacrosanctae Theologiae Doctor et Magister from the University of Aberdeen, dated 10 March, 1759, and that of Doctor in Sacra Theologia of the University of Oxford, of seventeen days later. His visit to England was singularly favorable, as the influence of the Penns, of whose cause in Pennsylvania he was perhaps the ablest advocate, befriended him and enabled him with more readiness to prosecute his appeal. This was helped in turn by the Oxford Degree; and at a time when the Assembly's representative was pleading without success for relief from Proprietary restrictions, to mark with signal favor, by college and royalty, the man who was in fact combating that complaint, was an opportunity that might not be lost at this critical political juncture. The Penn family were now Church of England people, and had lost the personal sympathies of their great ancestor's co-religionists who were quite free to join the popular party who were combating the Proprietary selfishness. Thus on every hand, the Penns would welcome the man whose trenchant pen was maintaining their authority
