Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/199

 Lieutenant upon your, and my lady as I think upon my own interest,' he wrote to Southwell, 'I believe would be glad I had some reasonable reliefe; but my Lord dreads either the trouble or the danger of doing it, (though I think nothing of either in the case) for when he has gone about it, there come the Chief Judges of each Bench and the King's whole learned counsel, all armed with prongs and pitchforks. They all agree in a deep sense of my sufferings; but breake up in irresolution and in some oblique expediente, without any direct remedy, soe as nothing is yett done.' The exorbitant quit-rent on his estate was, however, reduced; a judgment entered against the farmers, and his principal antagonist among them, one Sheridan, replaced by a friend, Dr. Robert Wood. In the same year he was appointed Judge of the Court of Admiralty, a post which, amongst other reasons, he was glad to occupy, because it relieved him of the onerous duty of serving the office of Sheriff, a post which, from his ownership of land in more counties than one, he was constantly liable to being called upon to accept.

The peace with the farmers, however, proved but a truce. Fresh quarrels soon arose, for the farmers appear to have resisted the execution of judgment in his favour by an appeal to the intervention of the King. Even in England it had not been unusual before the Civil War to stay legal proceedings by the issue of a writ rege inconsulto, which practically asserted the right of the King to interfere in private causes. One of the most discreditable chapters in the career of Bacon is that of his efforts to maintain this practice, which like other abuses lingered on in Ireland when it had ceased to exist in England. 'I say nothing now,' Sir William writes to Southwell in May 1677, 'of Poems and Scales of Creatures; you see now what these Farmers are; how they abuse the Chancellors of both kingdoms; how they fly to prerogative for protection. They have done all that knaves and fools, and that sharks and beggars could devise to do; all is nought. The