Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/121

  Rep. pp. 139, 377, 378, 381, 382, 383, 387, 7th Rep. p. 796, 9th Rep. pt. ii. p. 89, 11th Rep. App. iv. 26; Thurloe State Papers, iv. 277; Nalson's Collection, ii. 680; Loveday's Letters, Dom. and For.; Memoirs of the Verney Family, iii. 208; Luttrell's Brief Relation of State Affairs, i. 534, iv. 444; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, ii. 402; Suckling's Hist. of Suffolk, ii. 198; Gardner's Historical Account of Dunwich, pp. 41, 91; Page's Supplement to the Suffolk Traveller, p. 215; Prior's Poems, 1718, p. 13; Granger's Biogr. Hist. iv. 91; Gurney's Record of the House of Gurney, pt. iii. p. 534; Donaldson's Agricultural Biogr. p. 34; Return of Members of Parl. pt. i. p. 528; Metcalfe's Book of Knights, p. 197; Collins's Peerage, ix. 225; Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, p. 407; Boase and Courtney's Bibl. Cornub. ii. 478.]

 PETTY, WILLIAM (1623–1687), political economist, born at Romsey in Hampshire on 26 May 1623, was son of a clothier. As a child he showed a marked taste for mathematics and applied mechanics, ‘his principal amusement,’ according to Aubrey, ‘being to look on the artificers, e.g. smyths, the watchmakers, carpenters, joiners, &c.; and at twelve years old he could have worked at any of these trades’ (Bodleian Letters, ii. 482). He went to sea at an early age; but his precocious talents excited the envy of the seamen, and they deserted him on the coast of France, with a broken leg. Instead of trying to return to England, he raised some money by teaching English and navigation, and entered himself as a student at the Jesuit College at Caen, where he received a good general education, and became an accomplished French linguist. He is next heard of in the royal navy, but on the outbreak of the civil war again retired to the continent. He studied at Utrecht and Amsterdam, and matriculated as a student of medicine at Leyden on 26 May 1644. He subsequently passed to Paris, and joined the coterie which met at the house of Father Mersenne, the mathematician, in the French capital. He there became the friend of Hobbes, whose influence on his subsequent philosophical and political opinions may be clearly traced in his writings. He also carried on a correspondence with Dr. John Pell [q. v.], the mathematician, at Amsterdam, and made the acquaintance of the Marquis of Newcastle and Sir Charles Cavendish, who were refugees at Paris. On his return to England in 1646, he for a time took up his father's business as a clothier, and devoted himself to the study of mechanical improvements in textile processes. He soon gained some reputation by the invention of a manifold letter-writer, and a ‘Tractate on Education;’ in the latter he sketched out the idea of a scientific society on the lines on which the Royal Society was afterwards founded. In order to continue his medical studies, he left Romsey and removed to Oxford. He took the degree of doctor of physic in 1649, and became a member of a scientific and philosophical club which used to meet at his own rooms and those of Dr. Wilkins; this club may be regarded as the parent of the Royal Society, of which Petty lived to be one of the founders.

On the reorganisation of the university by the commissioners of the Commonwealth, Petty was appointed a fellow of Brasenose and deputy to the professor of anatomy, Dr. Clayton, whom he succeeded in 1651, having in the interval obtained a wide reputation by reviving the supposed corpse of one Ann Green [q. v.], who had been hanged for murder and pronounced dead by the sheriff. In the following year he was appointed physician-general to the army in Ireland, and greatly added to his reputation by reorganising the medical services and terminating the waste and confusion which existed. But his combination of mathematical knowledge and organising power designated him for a more important task. The government of the Commonwealth was engaged in the resettlement of Ireland, and contemplated the division of the forfeited estates of the Irish landowners among the numerous creditors of the Commonwealth in payment of their claims. These creditors fell into three classes: (1) the army, which had large arrears of pay due to it; (2) the ‘adventurers,’ who had advanced large sums to equip that army; and (3) a large number of miscellaneous claimants. It was proposed to confiscate the properties of all the native proprietors, whether Irish or Anglo-Irish, whether catholic or protestant, who could not prove what was termed ‘constant good affection’ to the English government during the recent troubles, and to pay all the creditors of the Commonwealth with the confiscated estates. But, in order to carry out this plan, it was first necessary to survey the country, and measure and map out these estates. Petty soon after his arrival impugned the accuracy of the plans of Benjamin Worsley, the surveyor-general, and offered to carry out the necessary operations more quickly, cheaply, and thoroughly. In the dispute which followed Worsley was supported by the fanatical or anabaptist section of the army, while Petty was supported by the party of the Protector, who, at this juncture, sent over Henry Cromwell on a mission of inquiry [see, and ]. Finally, Worsley's plan—known as ‘the Grosse survey’—which had been put into operation in some places, was rejected.

Another survey, known as the ‘Civil 