Chatham this 10 April, 1603.
Your Servant,
Phineas Pett.
To the worshipful and my loving friend Mr. Mathew Baker, one of his Majesty's Master Shipwrights, give this at Woolwich or elsewhere.
This expression of opinion upon Baker's capacity was evidently quite genuine, for many years after, when the old man was dead and there was nothing to be feared from his enmity, Phineas wrote of him as 'the most famous artist of his time.'[101]
Preferment.
Phineas did not rely on his professional skill alone to gain him preferment. When in his brother Joseph's employment, he laid out his earnings in clothing himself 'in very good fashion, always endeavouring to keep company with men of good rank, far better than myself.' By means of a friend thus gained, he obtained an introduction to the Lord Admiral, which was 'the very first beginning' of his rising. No doubt Nottingham had known his father, and it is certain that he was well acquainted with his brother Peter; it is probably to this that the 'extraordinary respect' and the later favours of the Admiral were due. These favours brought upon him the 'malicious envy' of the Master Shipwrights, who were no doubt aggrieved at seeing employment that might have provided them or their friends with 'pickings,' handed to a newcomer.
The post of a purveyor of timber was not without its perquisites, and Pett's thankfulness that 'nothing could be proved against him' when the accounts of his doings in Suffolk and Norfolk were scrutinised, indicates that his labours had not been without some profit to himself; indeed his association with Trevor, who became an able disciple of the arch-thief Mansell, leads one to suspect that Fulke Greville's action in 'wrongfully' cutting off twenty pounds was not the high-handed injustice that Phineas would have one believe. It is true that Mr. Oppenheim[102] dates the 'administrative degeneracy' of the Navy Office from Greville's treasurership, but it is probable that this arose from Greville's incapacity to exercise the strict control which had characterised his predecessor Hawkyns, and not from want of integrity. Three years later Phineas affirms that Greville continued his 'heavy enemy' because the Treasurer could not win him 'to such conditions as he laboured me in' against the Surveyor, a state of affairs that seems to indicate a half-hearted attempt at reform on Greville's part, rather than any underhand conspiracy.
In an anonymous account of the quarrel at Chatham in 1602 preserved in Pepys' Miscellanea,[103] written evidently by George Collins, 'the principal informer and stirrer in this business,'[104] it is stated that the writer told Sir Henry Palmer that Pett
had sold away the Repulse's foretopmast, and that through his negligence the Crane was bilged in the Dock, which cost the Queen 100l.