Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/129

 ; he was not a Cavalier, he was not a Presbyterian. Neither on the one hand was he a soldier,' nor was he an 'adventurer;' but he held Irish land on a title practically founded upon theirs. A weaker man would only have seen the risk of losing all, and might have welcomed a compromise. With characteristic boldness, and undeterred by the tumult around him, Sir William determined to contend for what he held; and also to claim to be paid in full for the debt which he considered was still due to him for the work performed in connection with the distribution of the adventurers' lands. He saw that he was being attacked from the most opposite quarters. 'They say,' he writes to his cousin John, 'that I must be sequestered in Ireland as an Anabaptist; so that sometimes I must be of no religion and sometimes of all successively: viz. of that which pro tempore is esteemed worst.' Under the circumstances, to fight was the best course open, and on January 28, 1661, he memorialised the Privy Council for the payment of his still outstanding claims for the survey and distribution of the adventurers' lands.

The party which, with a firm hold on the House of Commons, continued from this date, with the briefest of intervals, to dominate the administration of the country till the Revolution, was Protestant against the Church of Rome, and Catholic against the Puritans. It was far less liberal than the King himself; and the broad latitudinarian views of Sir William Petty, if distasteful to the theologians of the Sankey type, were equally so to the upholders of a system of government based on the narrow orthodoxy of the Caroline divines in spiritual affairs and the doctrines of Clarendon in matters of State. At this moment a discovery was made which it was hoped by them might at once have deprived Sir William of the royal favour. In consequence of having been the friend and secretary of Henry Cromwell, Dr. Petty had become a trustee in some of the family arrangements of the Cromwell family, and held a power of attorney to act for Henry Cromwell and his wife. 'The Lord Henry Cromwell,' he had said in his reply to Sir Hierome Sankey,