me. I began with a small prologue; among other things telling him that I never accepted of any trust out of desire or designe to do him harm; nor had I ever broken any to do him service. But the King seeming little to mind apologies, as needless, replied: "But, Doctor, why have you left off your inquiries into the mechanics of shipping?" In brief, he held me half an hour before the forty Lords, upon the philosophy of shipping, loadstones, guns, &c, feathering of arrows, vegetation of plants, the history of trades, &c, about all of which I discoursed intrépide and I hope not contemptibly. In fine we parted faire, and not without clear signes of future good acceptances. Since I began this letter, the Marquis of Ormonde met me and told me he had express orders to bring me to the King, saying that the King's head and mine lay directly one way.'[1]
It is possible that Dr. Petty had made the acquaintance of the Marquis, now Duke of Ormonde, when with Hobbes in Paris, The wish he shared with Vincent Gookin, to protect the 'ancient Protestants,' had made him do what he could to protect the Duke's interest in Ireland during the Commonwealth,[2] and he was probably able to do so in connection with the claims of the Countess of Ormonde, who succeeded in continuing possessed of her own property though that of the Duke had been confiscated.[3] 'I have a little interest in my Lord of Ormonde,' Dr. Petty wrote to John Petty, 'inasmuch as he was pleased voluntarily to say that he had espoused me for his friend, and would make me the King's servant, &c.'[4] 'I am making a projection for the King,' he writes a few days after, 'and am of the famous Club of all the Vertuosi, and am operative amongst them: and thus by little and little my life will crumble away.'[5]
Aubrey describes the King 'as mightily pleased with his discourse.'[6] 'I think,' Dr. Petty himself writes after the King
- ↑ February 5, 1660.
- ↑ Sir W. Petty to Southwell, 1663. See ch. v. p. 140.
- ↑ The Marquis of Ormonde was the only Protestant of his family by the accident of being made a King's ward on his father's death. He was brought up in the family of Doctor Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury. See Prendergast, p. 125.
- ↑ August 8, 1660.
- ↑ January 22, 1660.
- ↑ Bodleian Letters, ii. 485.
