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of Saxony. The notes by Sir Thomas Larcom to his edition of the Down Survey and the studies on the Irish Surveys, by Mr. Harding, also contain many interesting details on Petty's life. A list of his published works appears in Wood's Athenæ Oxon., and a full and valuable bibliography, by Professor Charles H. Hull, appeared in Notes and Queries in September 1895. A full biography was published in 1895 by the present writer, a descendant, with full extracts from Petty's papers and correspondence now at Bowood.]

E. F.

PETTY, WILLIAM, first Marquis of Landsdowne, better known as Lord Shelburne (1737–1805), was the elder son of the Hon. John Fitzmaurice, who assumed the name of Petty in 1751, and was subsequently created Earl of Shelburne, by his wife Mary, daughter of Colonel the Hon. William Fitzmaurice of Gallane, co. Kerry. He was born in Dublin on 20 May 1737, and spent the first four years of his life in a remote part of the south of Ireland with his grandfather, Thomas Fitzmaurice, first earl of Kerry, whose wife was the only daughter of Sir William Petty [q. v.] According to his own account of his youthful days, his early education was ‘neglected to the greatest degree.’ He was first ‘sent to an ordinary publick school,’ and was afterwards ‘shut up with a private tutor’ while his father and mother were in England. At the age of seventeen he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he matriculated on 11 March 1755, and ‘had again the misfortune to fall under a narrow-minded tutor’ (Life, i. 14, 17; Alumni Oxon. 1715–1886, ii. 467). Receiving a commission in the 20th regiment of foot, he left the university in 1757 without taking a degree, and served in the expedition to Rochefort. In June 1758 he exchanged into the 3rd regiment of foot-guards, and subsequently served under Prince Ferdinand and Lord Granby in Germany, where he distinguished himself at the battle of Minden and at Kloster Kampen. While abroad he was returned to the House of Commons for the family borough of High Wycombe, in the place of his father, who was created a peer of Great Britain on 17 May 1760. On 4 Dec. 1760 he was rewarded for his military services with the rank of colonel in the army and the post of aide-de-camp to the king. At the general election in 1761 he was again returned for High Wycombe, and was also elected to the Irish parliament for the county of Kerry. The death of his father in May 1761 prevented him from sitting in either House of Commons, and on 3 Nov. 1761 he took his seat in the English House of Lords as Baron Wycombe (Journals of the House of Lords, xxx. 108). During this year he was employed by Bute in his negotiations for an alliance with Henry Fox [q. v.] Disgusted, however, with Bute's hesitation, Shelburne, in a maiden speech on 6 Nov., pronounced boldly in the House of Lords for the withdrawal of the troops from Germany. On 5 Feb. 1762 he again urged their withdrawal, and signed a protest against the rejection of the Duke of Bedford's amendment to the address (Rogers, Protests of the House of Lords. 1875, ii. 62–65). Preferring to maintain an independent course of action, Shelburne refused to accept office under Bute, though he undertook the task of inducing Fox to accept the leadership of the House of Commons, and was entrusted with the motion approving of the preliminaries of peace on 9 Dec. 1762. Fox, on claiming his reward for gaining the consent of the house to the peace, accused Shelburne of having secured his services by a misstatement of the terms [see Fox, Henry, first Baron Holland], a charge which has been satisfactorily refuted by Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice in his account of the so-called ‘pious fraud’ (Life, i. 153–229). Bute continued to show his undiminished confidence in Shelburne as a negotiator by employing him as his intermediary with Lord Gower, the Duke of Bedford, and others during the formation of Grenville's ministry. Shelburne was to have been secretary of state in the new administration, but, owing to Grenville's opposition, he was obliged to content himself with the inferior office of president of the board of trade and foreign plantations, with a seat in the cabinet (Grenville Papers, 1852–3, ii. 35–8, 41). He was sworn a member of the privy council on 20 April 1763, but soon found himself at variance with his colleagues. A few days after he had taken office Shelburne exposed the blunder which Halifax had made in issuing a general warrant for the arrest of the author of the famous No. 45 of the ‘North Briton.’ With Egremont he was frequently in collision on questions both of policy and of administration. So dissatisfied did Shelburne become with his position that he was with difficulty persuaded by Bute to remain in office. In August he was employed by Bute in an intrigue, the object of which was to displace Grenville and to bring back Pitt, with the Bedford connection (Chatham Correspondence, 1830–40, ii. 235 n). On the failure of the negotiations between Pitt and the king, Shelburne resigned the board of trade (2 Sept.), but at the same time assured the king that he still meant to support the government. He, however, soon afterwards attached himself to Pitt, and joined the ranks