The Diary by Samuel Pepys (children's ebooks online TXT) 📕

to send for it away. Here dined Mercer with us, and after dinner she cut my hair, and then I into my closet and there slept a little, as I do now almost every day after dinner; and then, after dallying a little with Nell, which I am ashamed to think of, away to the office. Busy all the afternoon; in the evening did treat with, and in the end agree; but by some kind of compulsion, with the owners of six merchant ships, to serve the King as men-of-war. But, Lord! to see how against the hair it is with these men and everybody to trust us and the King; and how unreasonable it is to expect they should be willing to lend their ships, and lay out 2 or £300 a man to fit their ships for new voyages, when we have not paid them half of what we owe them for their old services! I did write so to Sir W. Coventry this night. At night my wife and I to walk and talk again about our gold, which I am not quiet in my mind to be safe, and therefore will think of some way to remove it, it troubling me very much. So home with my wife to supper and to bed, miserable hot weather all night it was.

21st. Up and by water to Whitehall, there to discourse with [Sir] G. Carteret and Mr. Fenn about office business. I found them all aground, and no money to do anything with. Thence homewards, calling at my Tailor’s to bespeak some coloured clothes, and thence to Hercules Pillars, all alone, and there spent 6d. on myself, and so home and busy all the morning. At noon to dinner, home, where my wife shows me a letter from her father, who is going over sea, and this afternoon would take his leave of her. I sent him by her three Jacobuses in gold, having real pity for him and her. So I to my office, and there all the afternoon. This day comes news from Harwich that the Dutch fleet are all in sight, near 100 sail great and small, they think, coming towards them; where, they think, they shall be able to oppose them; but do cry out of the falling back of the seamen, few standing by them, and those with much faintness. The like they write from Portsmouth, and their letters this post are worth reading. Sir H. Cholmly come to me this day, and tells me the Court is as mad as ever; and that the night the Dutch burned our ships the King did sup with my Lady Castlemayne, at the Duchess of Monmouth’s, and there were all mad in hunting of a poor moth. All the Court afraid of a Parliament; but he thinks nothing can save us but the King’s giving up all to a Parliament. Busy at the office all the afternoon, and did much business to my great content. In the evening sent for home, and there I find my Lady Penn and Mrs. Lowther, and Mrs. Turner and my wife eating some victuals, and there I sat and laughed with them a little, and so to the office again, and in the evening walked with my wife in the garden, and did give Sir W. Penn at his lodgings (being just come from Deptford from attending the dispatch of the fire-ships there) an account of what passed the other day at Council touching Commissioner Pett, and so home to supper and to bed.

22nd. Up, and to my office, where busy, and there comes Mrs. Daniel⁠ ⁠… At the office I all the morning busy. At noon home to dinner, where Mr. Lewes Phillips, by invitation of my wife, comes, he coming up to town with her in the coach this week, and she expected another gentleman, a fellow-traveller, and I perceive the feast was for him, though she do not say it, but by some mistake he come not, so there was a good dinner lost. Here we had the two Mercers, and pretty merry. Much talk with Mr. Phillips about country business, among others that there is no way for me to purchase any severall lands in Brampton, or making any severall that is not so, without much trouble and cost, and, it may be, not do it neither, so that there is no more ground to be laid to our Brampton house. After dinner I left them, and to the office, and thence to Sir W. Penn’s, there to talk with Mrs. Lowther, and by and by we hearing Mercer and my boy singing at my house, making exceeding good musique, to the joy of my heart, that I should be the master of it, I took her to my office and there merry a while, and then I left them, and at the office busy all the afternoon, and sleepy after a great dinner. In the evening come Captain Hart3477 and Haywood to me about the six merchant-ships now taken up for men-of-war; and in talk they told me about the taking of The Royal Charles; that nothing but carelessness lost the ship, for they might have saved her the very tide that the Dutch come up, if they would have but used means and had had but boats: and that the want of boats plainly lost all the other ships. That the Dutch did take her with a boat of nine men, who found not a man on board her, and her laying so near them was a main temptation to them to come on; and presently a man went up and struck her flag and jacke, and a trumpeter sounded upon her “Joan’s placket is torn,”3478 that they did carry her down at a time, both for tides and wind, when the best pilot in Chatham would not have undertaken it, they heeling