Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/119

 or presbyter? ' Henry Cromwell asked Fleetwood. 'Were they not placed,' he asked his brother in the secret letter of which Dr. Petty had been the bearer, 'between two almost equal dangers, on one side the Cavaliers, on the other a combination of pragmatical men?' The answer to these questions was unfortunately only too clear. 'It may be the best way,' Thurloe had bitterly observed, a short time before the death of the Protector, 'to fancy ourselves in the condition of Israel in the wilderness.... Truly I should rejoice to be in this condition, if these gentlemen had as sure a guide as the Israelites.' But that guide was not now forthcoming.

Dr. Petty had served the Cromwell family, not the Commonwealth. Himself, up to a certain point, a political disciple of Hobbes, he had recognised in the Protector and in Henry Cromwell men who could govern; but he had seen their efforts thwarted and finally destroyed by the wranglings of the fanatics, who, having got the control of the army, had made all government impossible since the month of September 1658. They had singled him out as one of the special objects of their animosity, and their success would have meant his ruin. The violence of the sects was odious to him. In theology his views were large and liberal, and his mind was that of a disciple, not of Calvin, but of Bacon; though the theologian and the philosopher nearly always touched each other in the scientific men of the seventeenth century. With reference to the problem of government, it may be clearly inferred from his subsequent writings that he desired to see the executive authority placed in the hands of a single person, whether King or Protector; and he wished radically to reform the composition of the House of Commons, and 'to set up two Grand Committees as might equally represent the Empire, one to be chosen by the King, the other by the people.' But what he dreaded most was anarchy, and by the end of 1659 England was fast drifting into it.