Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/408

Sharman-Crawford was examined several times in the Tower during January and February; at first he denied his frauds and all knowledge of Seymour's designs, but made full confessions on 2, 11, and 16 Feb. A bill for his attainder passed all its stages in both houses of parliament between 11 Feb. and 7 March. Seymour's connivance at Sharington's frauds was made one of the counts in his indictment (, State Trials, i. 501–2); but Sharington, who threw himself on the king's mercy, was pardoned, and an act restoring him in blood was passed, 30 Dec. 1549–13 Jan. 1550.

In the following April he was again in employment, being commissioned to go to Calais and receive an instalment of the French purchase-money for Boulogne. He was also able to buy back his forfeited estates for 12,000l.; he seems in addition to have made a voluntary restitution of some property to the king, and Latimer, in a sermon preached before the king in the same year, extolled his example and described him as ‘an honest gentilman and one that God loveth’ (Frutefull Sermons, 1575, f. 115b). In 1552 he served as sheriff of Wiltshire. He died in 1553 (Acts of the Privy Council, 1552–4, p. 370). His portrait among the Holbein drawings in the royal library, Windsor Castle (Cat. Tudor Exhib. p. 148), has been engraved by Dalton (, p. 11). He married (1) Ursula, natural daughter of John Bourchier, second baron Berners [q. v.]; (2) Eleanor, daughter of William Walsingham; (3) Grace, daughter of one Farington of Devonshire, and widow of Robert Paget, alderman of London. He left no issue, and was succeeded in his estates by his brother Henry.

[Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, ed. Gairdner, vols. xi–xv.; Haynes's Burleigh Papers; Cal. Hatfield MSS. pt. i.; Cat. Harl. MSS.; Acts of the Privy Council, ed. Dasent; Lords' Journals, vol. i. passim; Lit. Remains of Edward VI (Roxburghe Club); Strype's Eccl. Mem. vol. ii. pts. i–ii.; Ruding's Annals of the Coinage, i. 313–4; Burnet's Hist. of the Reformation, ed. Pocock; Spelman's Hist. of Sacrilege; Tytler's Edward VI and Mary, i. 139; Froude's Hist. vol. iv.; Common Weal of England, ed. E. Lamond, 1893, xxiii. 117, 191; Wilts Archæol. Mag. xviii. 260; Visitation of Wiltshire, 1623, printed by Sir T. Phillips, 1828; Bowles and Nichols's Annals of Lacock Abbey, pp. 297–8.]  SHARMAN-CRAWFORD, WILLIAM (1781–1861), politician. [See .]

SHARP. [See also .]

SHARP, ABRAHAM (1651–1742), mathematician, younger son of John Sharp of Little Horton, by Mary, daughter of Robert Clarkson of Bradford (married 12 Dec. 1632), was born in 1651 at Little Horton, near Bradford, and baptised 1 June 1653 (pedigree in Leeds, 1816, p. 37). After attending Bradford grammar school he was apprenticed to William Shaw, mercer of York, and then to a merchant at Manchester, but he gave up his business and moved to Liverpool, where he taught and devoted himself to mathematics. Here he met John Flamsteed [q. v.], by whom he was recommended to a post in Chatham dockyard. From about 1684 he seems to have been employed by Flamsteed in the newly founded Greenwich observatory. In 1688 he was employed to make a mural arc, the first of Flamsteed's instruments that proved satisfactory (cf., Flamsteed, 1835, p. 55; Prolegomena  to vol. iii. of the Historia Celestis, 1725, p. 108). The mural was finished in fourteen months, costing Flamsteed 120l.; it was 79 inches in radius, and contained 140 degrees on the limb. Sharp left the observatory in August 1690, so that he might teach mathematics in London (cf. Flamsteed MSS. vol. iv. 4 Nov. 1690). Early in 1691, however, he removed to Portsmouth to take ‘a clerk's place in the king's shipyard.’ He retired in 1694 to Little Horton, calculating and making astronomical instruments and models, and in correspondence with scientific men (cf. Gent. Mag. 1781, p. 461). In a report on astronomical instruments (Phil. Trans. lxxvi. 1786) John Smeaton says: ‘I look upon Mr. Sharp as having been the first person that cut accurate and delicate divisions upon astronomical instruments.’ He calculated π to 72 places of decimals (, Diction.) His book, ‘Geometry Improved (1) by a Table of Segments of Circles, (2) a Concise Treatise of Polyedra, by A. S. Philomath,’ London, 1717, is remarkable for the great number of its calculations, among other things the logarithms of the numbers from 1 to 100, and of all the primes up to 1100, each calculated to 61 figures of decimals; and for the plates of solid figures cut by his own hand, which are very clear. From his correspondence, beginning 6 Feb. 1701 (noticed in Flamsteed) it appears that he continued to help Flamsteed. It was to Sharp and Crosthwait that the world was indebted for the final publication of the ‘British Catalogue’ (l. c. p. 410). On 31 Aug. 1714 Flamsteed wrote to Sharp: ‘I would desire you to calculate the eclipses of the [Jupiter's] satellites for the next year.’ On 11 Oct. 1715 Flamsteed wrote him: ‘Yours brought the eclipses of ♃ satellites for the next year, 1716. I thank you heartily for them.’ After Flamsteed's death (4 June 1720), Crosthwait wrote to Sharp: ‘Yours of the 20th May