Life
1623-1687 [1st Marquis of Lansdowne]; b. Romsey, Hampshire; went to sea, deserted ship, entered Jesuit
Coll., Caen; studied Utrecht and Amsterdam, and matriculated at Leiden,
1644; studied at Paris, friend of Hobbes; Doct. in physics, Brasenose
Coll., Oxford, 1649; Oxford professor of anatomy, 1651, after famous case
in which he resuscitated one Anne Green, ‘a poore wench that had
ben hanged for felonie’ [acc. John Aubrey; var. murder]; came to
Ireland 1652 as physician gen. of parliamentary army; served as surveyor
gen. with control of forfeited lands, haveing offered to take the place
of Benjamin Worseley, whose inefficiency appalled him; thereafter prepared
the first large-scale attempt at scientific survey, known as the Down
Survey, William Petty’s Down Survey, 1649-54, so called because of
the laying down of measures (publ. 1654); sec. to Henry Cromwell; returned
to Oxford, 1659, but was repudiated by Brasenose; later acquiesced in
Restoration and was knighted, 1662; orig. member of Royal Society, incorporated
in that year, 1662; his Irish estates protected by Charles II; his second
cousin John became surveyor-gen. of Ireland, also 1662; gained large Irish
estates in Kerry under Acts of Settlement and Explanation, and resided
on them, 1676-85; fnd. member and first President of Dublin Philosophical
Society, 1683; served in Irish Parliament, and as Admiralty Judge; his
‘Down Survey’ declared official reference for land disputes;
issued Petty’s General Mapp of Ireland (Hiberniae delineatio,
1685; fol. Wing P1928), engraved in Amsterdam and printed in London,
showing 12 Irish miles/ inch; favoured administrative reform and wished
to include Catholics in political system, envisaging a union of Ireland
and England; his Political Arithmetic (1690) is a founding work
of economic statistics, tracing the source of wealth to labour and land;
refuted current notions of national decay; his inventions included the
unsuccessful ‘double-Bottom’d ship’ or catamaran; lived
in [St. Gt. George’s St.], Dublin, with a pew in St. Bride’s;
d. London 1687; his maps and notes for the Down Survey were destroyed
by fire in Dublin Castle in 1711; a map by Petty was incl. in Sir Richard
Cox, History of Ireland (2 vols., 1689). OCEL FOST FDA OCIL
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Works
Contemporary & older editions, Reflections Upon Some
Persons and Things in Ireland (Lon 1660); Political Arithmetic
(London 1690); The Political Anatomy of Ireland (Lon 1691); also
Sir Thomas Larcom, ed., History of the Down Survey (Irish Archaeol.
Soc. 1851); E. Strauss, Sir William Petty, Portrait (Bodley Head
1954), 260pp; index; also T. W. Moody, F.X. Martin, and Francis Byrne,
eds., New History of Ireland III (OUP 1976), and Moody with W.
E. Vaughan, eds., A New History of Ireland, VI. Also, Marquis of
Lansdowne, ed., Unpublished Papers from the Writings of William Petty
[from Bowood Coll.] 2vols (NY Kelly 1967), 480pp.
Rep. Editions, Petty, William, Sir, 1623-1687 [sic COPAC] Hiberniae delineatio, with an introduction by J.H. Andrews (shannon: IUP 1969), folio with 36 maps (part fold.), 54 cm.
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Notes
Douglas Hyde, Literary History of Ireland (1901 edn.), remarks
that Sir William Petty, writing in 1672, has an interesting passage on
the people of Wexford and of Fingal, and quotes: ‘The language of
Ireland is like that of the North of Scotland, in many things like the
Welsh and Manques, but in Ireland the Fingallians [on coast some miles
north of Dublin] speak neither English, Irish, nor Welsh, and the people
of Wexford, though they speak in a language different from English, Welsh,
and Irish, yet it is not the same with that of the Fingallians near Dublin.
Both these sorts of people are honest and laborious members of the kingdom.’
Petty’s strictures upon the Irish language, of which he was utterly
ignorant, and which he ludicrously asserts ‘to have few words’
need not here be noticed. He appears to show, however, that the Irish
had already begun to borrow some words from English, and expressed many
of the ‘names of artificial things’ in ‘the language of
their conquerors by altering the terminations and language only.’
(Hyude, op. cit., p.618.)
Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1957): Detailed surveys and censuses were prepared for the Ulster plantations of the early seventeenth century, but it was left to Sir William Petty ( 162587) to make the most celebrated and exhaustive study of the island. His Political Anatomy of Ireland, in reality a human and economic geography, only serves to remind us what was lost when the maps and notes of his larger Down Survey perished in a fire in Dublin Castle in 1711. Petty aimed at a comprehensive survey which would form the basis of a reconstructed Ireland. One of his proposals, perhaps the most original of all the varied suggestions for solving ‘the Irish problem’, was to import a further 200.000 English settlers so as to bring the total English population to half a million, and then to remove the 20,000 unmarried Irish girls and marry them off’one in every English parish’, replacing them by 20,000 English girls to be married to Irishmen. In this way the Irish language, food, clothing and customs would be replaced by English modes. (The Political Anatomy of Ireland, 1691, p.30.) Petty’s scientific approach was devoid of sentiment and left him without sympathy for the Irish past. Other seventeenth-century writers, however, interested themselves in the ancient forts and towers, and Sir James Ware, who published his Irish Antiquities in 1654, also collected Irish manuscripts. This antiquarianism was continued by the brothers Molyneux,whose essays were the first of countless misguided speculations on Danish Mounts and Round Towers.’ (p.7.)
Geoffrey Keynes, Kt., A Bibliography of Sir William Petty FRS and of Observations on the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt FRS (OUP 1971), 103pp.; port. mezzotint after painting by Closterman at Bowood; Petty, ob. 16 Dec. 1687.; ded. to George Mercer Nairne Petty-Fitzmaurice, 8th Marquis of Lansdowne. The Introduction cites Petty’s work as cartographer, Hiberniae Delineatio, 1685, and remarks that perfect copies are very hard to find; his economic writings edited for Cambridge UP in 1899 by Professor Charles Henry Hull of Cornell University. Other titles cited are: The History of the Survey of Ireland, not printed until 1851 and among his MSS at Bowood; Reflections upon Things and persons in Ireland (1660), as showing his vigorous and amusing pen; Two Essays in Political Arithmatick (1687); and Essay Concerning the Multiplication of Mankind (1686) - copies of both being held in Marx’s library. Petty’s papers and works here number 63 items.
J. H. Andrews, History of the Ordnance Map (Dublin: Ordnance Survey Office [Stationary Office] 1974), notes Strafford Survey of the 1630s, the first Irish survey; William Petty’s Down Survey, 1649-54, the best known; need for modern survey recognised in regard to equal imposition of cess (tax) for roads and bridges on townlands; British admiralty pressed for maps when sloop was wrecked on uncharted sandbank off Wexford in 1822; a report prepared by a committee centred on Thomas Spring Rice [Mounteagle] led to authorisation of survey at scale of six inches to one mile; Lieutenant Col. Thomas Colby appointed 22 June 1824, creating Irish Ordnance Survey; occupied Mountjoy House in the Phoenix Park; assisted by Lieut. William Drummond, and inventor; Richard Griffin, the Irish engineer, appointed to effect valuation and delimiting of townlands for an equitable tax system; liaised with Colby, espec. after 1835 when Colby ordered that leading fences should appear; Lieut. Thomas Aishew Larcom, RE, made effort in 1830 to broaden terms of survey to include details of history, commerce, geology, and natural history; Ordnance survey office divided at 1922; when started in the 1820s, the survey employed some 2,100 people, locals as well as military, slogging the country; Petty’s General Mapp of Ireland, 1685, engraved in Amsterdam and printed in London; employs measure of 12 Irish miles to an inch. Note: this source poss. W.A. Seymour, A History of the Ordnance Survey,. with contribs. by J. H. Andrews [ed al.] (Folkestone: Dawson 1980), xiv, 394pp, ill. [28pp. pls. maps & plans]
Joseph Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael (Amsterdam 1986), Sir William Petty’s remarks in his Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672), on ‘The Inconvenience of Not-Union’, and canvassing for a Union of Ireland and Great Britain, as follows, ‘It is absurd that Englishmen born, sent over into Ireland by commission of their own King, and there sacrificing their lives for the King’s interest, and succeeding in his service, should therefore be accounted aliens, foreigners, and also enemies, such as were the Irish before Henry the Seventh’s time [...] It is absurd that the inhabitants of Ireland, naturally and necessarily bound to obey their Sovereign, should not be permitted to know who, or what the same is, i.e., whether the parliament of England or that of Ireland; and in what case the one, and in what the other. Which uncertainty is or may be made a pretence for any disobedience.’ [340-41]
Maureen Wall, Catholic Ireland in the 18th c., ed. Gerard O’Brien (1989), Sir William Petty, ‘Nor is it to be denied but that in Ireland, where the said Roman religion is not authorised, there the professors thereof have a great part of the trade.’ (‘Essays in political arithmetic’, in Tracts relating chiefly to Ireland, Dublin 1769, p.229.) Petty quotes as further instances of the rule Jews and Christians among the Turks, Jews and non-Papist merchant-strangers in Venice, Naples, Leghorn, Genoa, and Lisbon. (p.228).
Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody (1992), William Petty (1612-87), founder of the Shelburne family fortunes, acquired enormous wealth and vast estates in Co. Kerry through services to Cromwell. Lord Shelburne, the premier in 1782, recorded his own self-esteem in his Memoirs, cited in Fitzmaurice, Shelburne, vol. I, ‘Good-breeding within my own family, which made part of the feudal system, but out of it nothing but those uncultivated undisciplined manners which make all Irish society so justly odious all over England.’ [235]
Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature (OUP 1986), remarks that he ‘traces source of wealth to land.’
Dictionary of National Biography, published economic treatises, 1662-90, in which he rejected old ‘prohibitory’ system and showed the error of supporters of the ‘mercantile’ system in regarding the abundance of precious metals as the standard of prosperity; analysed the sources of wealth as being labour and land.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1, selects Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672, publ. 1691), the best known account of Ireland in the reign of Charles II [864]. E.g., Chap. V, ‘Of the future Settlement of Ireland, Prorogation of Rebellions, and its Union with England’, ‘There is at this Day no Monument or real Argument that, when the Irish were first invaded, they had any Stone-Housing at all, any Money, any Foreign Trade, nor any Learning but the Legend of the Saints, Psalters, Missals, Rituals, &c viz. nor Geometry, Astronomy, Anatomy, Architecture, Enginery [sic], Painting, Carving, nor any kind of Manufacture, nor the least use of Navigation; or the Art Military. ... the Irish will not easily rebel again, I believe from the memory of their former Successes, especially of the last ... and withal from the consideration of the following particulars [he lists 1-6] 1. That the British Protestants and Church have three Fourths of all the Lands; five Sixths of all the Housing; nine tenths of all the Housing in wall’d Towns and Places of Strength, two Thirds of the Foreign Trade. That 6 of 8 of all the Irish live in a brutish, nasty Condition, as in Cabins, with neither chimney, Door, Stairs, nor Window, feeding chiefly upon Milk and Potatoes, whereby their Spirits are not dispos’d to War. And that although there be in Ireland 8 Papists for 3 others; yet there are far more Soldiers, and Soldier-like Men of this latter and lesser Number, than of the former’ [cf. Swift, ‘one man in his shirt, &c.’]. [865] FDA1, BIBL 955, & COMM, refs. to Moody and Martin, A New History of Ireland, vols. III and IV. Chief works incl. Reflections upon Some Persons and Things in Ireland (Lon. 1660). Political Arithmetic (Lon. 1690), and The Pol. Anatomy of Ireland (1691); see also Sir Thomas Larcom, History of the Down Survey (Dublin Irish Archaeol. Soc. 1851). SEE also FDA1, 477n5, Sir William Petty’s experiments with a double-keeled boat or catamaran in Dublin Bay in 1684 ended in disaster - this fact cited in connection with Swift’s poem Verse Said to be Written on the Union [‘...our vessel with a double Keel/ ... The Pilot knew not how to guide./So tossing Faction will o’erwhelm/Our crazy double-bottom’d Realm.’]; REMS at 387n [ed. note to Modest Proposal, ‘for cold and calculating assessment of Ireland’s population, see Petty’s Treatise on Ireland, 1687’ (SEARCH bibl.; poss. ed. of Anatomy issued in year of his death)]; 855 [Petty’s ‘Down Survey’ and Anatomy the most discriminating response to the new situation, Ireland mapped and analysed so that it might be incorporated the more efficiently to the new scheme of things; Petty, like many others after him, supported a moderate line towards the Catholics of Ireland because he recognised the advantages that would be gain from their conciliation and the equally great disadvantages, that their hostility might create; yet his writings like those of Richard Cox, are generally free from any hint of such emollient policy; if there was to be conciliation, it would be thinkable only after a harsh and well-organised campaign of dispossession, eds., Carpenter, Deane, McCormack]; 858 [MacCurtin, O’Conor, Nary, aligned against Petty, Cox; same eds.]; 967 [Dublin Philosophical Society founded 1683 by William Molyneux and Petty, encouraging Dublin academics and churchmen to turn their minds to experimental or natural philosophy; weekly papers on aspects of the new learning; climate, geography, and geology of Ireland considered, and scientific and technological topics including transport; bibl, see K. T. Hoppen, The Common Scientist in the 17th century: A Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683-1708 (Routledge KP 1970)]; 1073n [McCormack, ed., writes, ‘The "Protestant interest" was a phrase used in the late seventeenth c. and throughout the eighteenth, to indicate without ambiguity the connection between economic interest and social formation. Its definition can be traced back at least to William Petty, and its displacement now by the ‘protestant ascendancy’ [sic] enacts the process of concealment inherent in all ideological constructs’]; BIOG, 955 [as supra]. Note also, Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, notes that Ronan Sheehan’s "Paradise" (1991; here pp.1107-21), concerns concerns Anne Greene [sic] and Petty William Petty [‘two portraits of William Petty survive. ... [&c.]’].
Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988), p.106: bio-note records that he came to Ireland as Physician General, 1652; undertook the ‘Down Survey,’ 1652; acquiesced in Restoration and knighted, 1662; father of political economy, his most notable tract being The Political Anatomy of Ireland (written 1672, published 1691) describing land, people, and politics, and analysing potential resources, in favour of Legislative Union to preserve industry in Ireland from a hostile English parliament; fnd. Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683.
COPAC, Hiberniae delineatio [rep. of 1st edn.], intro. by J. H. Andrews (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press [1969]), 1 portfolio ([2] l., 36 maps - part fold.), 54 cm. Accompanied by facsim. of undated 1st edn., London, of "Geographical description of ye kingdom of Ireland," by W. Petty and Fr[ancis] Lamb (32pp.; 15x22 cm.), and "Introduction to Hiberniae delineatio ... and Geographical description of ye kingdom of Ireland," by J. H. Andrews (26 p. 22 cm.) in pocket facs. of 1st edn. (Dublin 1685); Introd. includes bibliography (pp.21-23) Cover label: Hiberniae delineatio quoad hactenus licuit, perfectissima studio Guilielmi Petty, Eqtis. Aurati, and Geographical description of ye kingdom of Ireland. [&c.]
Marsh’s Library, Dublin, holds a a copy of Hibernia delineata lacking engraved title-page and port.; prob. collated from separate sheets by owner.
Hyland Books (Cat. 214) list Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, The Life of Sir William Petty 1623-1687 (1895), maps and ports. [£85]; Hyland Cat. 224) lists another copy with map, lacking 2 ports. See also W. H. Hardinge, Observations on an Unpublished Essay on Ireland by Sir W. Petty, A.D. 1687 (Trans. RIA [offprint] 1866], 17pp. in Hyland (Cat. 220; 1995).
Belfast Public Library holds Political Survey of Ireland (1719); Reflections upon some Persons and Things in Ireland (1790). MORRIS holds The Petty Papers, some unpublished writings ..., 2 vols. (1927). Belfast Linen Hall holds Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691); other eds. 1719, 1899.
John Aubrey (Brief Lives) wrote of him after a supper meeting, ‘In my life having never known such a Genius [...], followed by an
account of his career, and comments: ‘there were not in the whole
world his equal for a superintendent of Manufacturs, & improvement
of Trade; or for to govern a Plantation: If I were a Prince, I should
make him my second Counselor at least [...]’; cited in Muriel McCarthy
and Caroline Sherwood-Smith, Hibernia Resurgens, Marsh’s Library
(1994).
Lord Shelburne’s response to Lord Portland’s intimation that a Bill in Westminster enjoining that Ireland will share the expense of army protection, ‘I have lived in the most anxious expectation of some such measure offering itself ... No matter who has the merit, let the two kingdoms be one, which can only be by Ireland now acknowledging the superintending power and supremacy to be where nature has placed it, in precise and unambiguous terms.’ Quoted in John Mitchel, History of Ireland, p.147, and cited in Rosamund Jacob, The Rise of the United Irishmen 1791-94 (1927), p.33.
William J. Maguire, Irish Literary Figures (1945), writes of Petty: ‘[In] his Political Anatomy of Ireland (1670, published anon. 1672), he estimate the population at that time as rather over a million, of whom more than half were very poor, dwelling in wretched cabins, sleeping on straw, and living, as a rule on milk and potatoes. Wages were low, but necessaries were so cheap that a family of six persons could live on about £16 a year. Many were well educated. French was not unknown, and the Latin tongue was ‘very frequent amongst the poorest Irish, and chiefly in Kerry’ (p.14).
Quotations from his works and commentary thereon to be found in ‘"Cheap and Common Animals", The English Anatomy of Ireland in The Seventeenth Century’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday, Literature and the English War (Cambridge UP 1990).
Corrig. date: errata obit. 1676 in this file corrected against COPAC &c.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)