Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/273

 Hoare, belongs to the Duke of Newcastle; another, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, is among the Kit-Cat Club portraits at Bayfordbury, Hertfordshire.



PELL, JOHN (1611–1685), mathematician, was born at Southwick in Sussex on 1 March 1611. His father, John Pell, was incumbent of that place, whither his grandfather, another John Pell, had migrated from Lincolnshire. He came of a good old family, one of his ancestors having been lord of a manor in Lincolnshire in 1368. He married Mary Holland of Halden, Kent, and died at Southwick in 1616, one year before his wife. His daughter, [q. v.], is separately noticed.

Pell, the younger of his two sons, was educated at the free school of Steyning in Sussex, and progressed so rapidly that he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of thirteen, being then, Wood relates, ‘as good a scholar as some masters of arts.’ He worked indefatigably. A ‘strong and good habit of body’ enabling him to dispense with recreations, ‘he plied his studies while others played.’ Yet he never became a candidate for college honours. He graduated B.A. in 1628, proceeded M.A. in 1630, and in 1631 was incorporated of the university of Oxford. By this time, at the age of twenty, he was already ‘in great reputation and esteem for his literary accomplishments,’ which included the mastery, not only of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but of Arabic, Italian, French, Spanish, High and Low Dutch. He was ‘also much talked of for his skill in the mathematics,’ the taste for which continually grew upon him. He was, moreover, remarkably handsome, with dark hair and eyes, and a good voice. In 1628 he corresponded with [q. v.] about logarithms, and drew up papers on the use of the quadrant and on sundials, which, however, remained unpublished. Lansberg's ‘Everlasting Tables’ were translated by him from the Latin in 1634. His ‘Eclipse Prognosticator’ was written about the same time. On 3 July 1632 he married Ithumaria, daughter of Henry Reginolles of London, by whom he had four sons and four daughters; and in 1643, through the interest of Sir [q. v.], he became the successor of Hortensius in the chair of mathematics at Amsterdam. A course of lectures on Diophantus, delivered by him there, excited much applause, and his colleague, Gerard John Vossius, styled him ‘a person of various erudition and a most acute mathematician’ (De Scientiis Mathematicis, cap. x.) In 1646 he was induced by the Prince of Orange to remove to the new college of Breda, where he enjoyed a salary of one thousand guilders; and, returning to England in 1652, was appointed by Cromwell to lecture on mathematics at 200l. a year. Two years later he was despatched as Cromwell's political agent to the protestant cantons of Switzerland, in which capacity he acquitted himself so well that he was continued as resident at Zürich with a yearly salary of 600l. The real object of his mission was to detach the cantons from France, and to draw them into a continental protestant league headed by England. Interminable negotiations ensued. ‘They move so slowly here,’ Pell wrote to Thurloe from the Swiss Baden in May 1656, ‘that it is hard to discern whether they go forward or backward’ (, Protectorate of Cromwell, i. 396). Recalled in 1658, he reached London on 13 Aug., three weeks before Cromwell's death. Some obscure services, however, rendered by him to the royalist party and to the church of England secured his position at the Restoration. Having taken orders, he was presented by Charles II in 1661 to the rectory of Fobbing in Essex, and by