Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/114

 the chances of detection slight; that General Fleetwood, the predecessor of Henry Cromwell, had as steadily defended his reputation as Henry Cromwell himself; that the world was asked to believe that he had been guilty of corruption in matters where detection was almost certain, and had not been guilty of it where detection was improbable; and that he had succeeded not only in deceiving his colleague, Sir Thomas Herbert, Clerk to the Council, but also his colleagues on the Commission.

In regard to the charge of arbitrarily withholding lands from the army, which was the principal count, his reply was the simple and obvious one: that the decision to withhold the lands in question from the general distribution was a decision of the Council, and not his own; and was made in conformity with law; and that he personally had no kind of responsibility for it. As to his having chosen his own satisfaction from these lands, he again asserts his own right to be paid somehow for the immense work he had done, and that the decision to pay him in land and in this manner was also an act of the Council done in conformity with the Statute, and one highly convenient to the State, at a moment when there was an absolute dearth of ready money in the Treasury, while land was going a-begging. At that time indeed men bought as much land for ten shillings in real money as at a later date yielded the same sum annually above the quit rent. As to his having subsequently bought debentures and bought them under market rates, which Sir Hierome had mentioned to prejudice him in the eyes of the House, he points out that, in the first place, it did not lie with either Sir Hierome or Worsley to complain, because they had themselves dealt largely in purchases of land from the distressed soldiers at very low rates, contrary to the express provisions of the Act of 1653; while he had himself not entered the market till after those prohibitions were no longer operative, and as a rule had dealt with the debenture brokers, and not with the original allottees of land, so as to place himself beyond the