Society on St Andrew's day. He went home ill. His foot gangrened and on December 16 he died at his house in Piccadilly.
On Trinity Sunday, June 2, 1667, Petty had married Elizabeth, daughter of his old friend Sir Hardress Waller, and widow of Sir Maurice Fenton. Though Lady Petty, "a very beautifull and ingeniose lady, browne, with glorious eies[1]," was much younger than her husband and of a taste as magnificent as his was simple[2], their married life was most happy. Nowhere does Petty appear to greater advantage than in his letters to his wife, and her letters to him fully bear out Evelyn's judgment, "she was an extraordinary wit as well as beauty and a prudent woman."
Three of Petty's contemporaries, men of different temperaments and attainments, have put on record their impressions of him. John Aubrey says that he was a proper handsome man, measured six-foot high, with a good head of brown hair moderately turning up. His eyes were a kind of goose-grey, very short sighted and as to aspect beautiful; they promised sweetness of nature and they did not deceive, for he was a marvellous good natured person. His eyebrows were thick, dark and straight, his head very large. Evelyn declared him so exceeding nice in sifting and examining all possible contingencies that he ventured at nothing which is not demonstration. There was not in the whole world his equal for a superintendent of manufactures and improvement of trade, or to govern a plantation. "If I were a prince, I should make him my second counsellor at least. There is nothing difficult to him... Sir William was, with all this, facetious and of easy conversation, friendly and courteous, and had such a faculty of imitating others that he would take a text and preach, now like a grave orthodox divine, then falling into the Presbyterian way, then to the fanatical, the Quaker, the monk and friar, the Popish priest, with such admirable action and alteration of voice and tone, as it was not possible to abstain from wonder, and one would swear to hear several persons, or forbear to think he was not in good earnest an enthusiast and almost beside himself; then,
- ↑ Aubrey, ii. 142.
- ↑ "When I who knew him in mean circumstances, have been in his splendid palace, he would himself be in admiration how he arrived at it; nor was it his value and inclination for splendid furniture or the curiosities of the age; but his elegant lady could endure nothing mean, or that was not magnificent. He was very negligent himself, and rather so of his own person, and of a philosophic temper. What a to do is here he would say, I can lie in straw with as much satisfaction." Evelyn, Diary, 22 March, 1675.
