Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/272

 Fortune now seemed to smile. He was again offered a peerage, but he declined it, unless it was accompanied by a seat at the Privy Council. 'There are both conveniencys and the contrary in being of the Council,' Lady Petty wrote to her connection, Edmund Waller, the poet, through whom a communication on the subject had been made from the Crown, 'for we designed that point as a public sign of His Majesty's heartiness in the other; for a bare Title without some trust might seem to the world a Body without soul or spirit. Now, having said all this, I fear we have said just nothing, for you can't gather from it what we would be at. The truth is that our belief that you believed the thing to have been already and cheerfully granted by the King for us, was the reason of our forwardness, instead of that indifferency which you found in the first part of one of our letters.'

'Though your Privy Council in England be named,' Petty wrote to Southwell, 'yett I have sent you over a list of such as I think worthy of preferment. They are strangers to most of our statesmen, nor have they many friends; however pray use your interest to get them in, and endeavour to get yourself made Clerk of the Councill, and make hay therein while the sun shineth.'

His prospects also in Kerry seemed to improve. 'We have our fore top sail loose and our anchors a-peeke to sail again,' he wrote to Southwell. 'I hope we shall at last find the North West Passage into the India of Kerry; altho' all the while I continue sailing about the Cape of the Law; and it is the Cape of Good Hope I am now doubling; and truly, Cousin, though I have been unkindly and unequally and absurdly dealt with, yett I goe on without fear of the French, of Popery, nor even of death itself.' 'Our children and whole family are now (blessed bee God) very well,' he tells Lady Petty. 'I have this day on my back my flower'd velvett suit, which I doe not find of half the substance and weight of what I have hitherto worne. Soe that wee need dig no deeper for the cause of my Lameness, for certainely wearing