ich was this
Admiralty Court. That being done, and the jury called, they broke up,
and to dinner to a tavern hard by, where a great dinner, and I with
them; but I perceive that this Court is yet but in its infancy (as
to its rising again), and their design and consultation was, I could
overhear them, how to proceed with the most solemnity, and spend time,
there being only two businesses to do, which of themselves could not
spend much time. In the afternoon to the court again, where, first,
Abraham, the boatswain of the King's pleasure boat, was tried for
drowning a man; and next, Turpin, accused by our wicked rogue Field, for
stealing the King's timber; but after full examination, they were both
acquitted, and as I was glad of the first, for the saving the man's
life, so I did take the other as a very good fortune to us; for if
Turpin had been found guilty, it would have sounded very ill in the ears
of all the world, in the business between Field and us. So home with my
mind at very great ease, over the water to the Tower, and thence, there
being nobody at the office, we being absent, and so no office could be
kept. Sir W. Batten and I to my Lord Mayor's, where we found my Lord
with Colonel Strangways and Sir Richard Floyd, Parliament-men, in the
cellar drinking, where we sat with them, and then up; and by and by
comes in Sir Richard Ford. In our drinking, which was always going, we
had many discourses, but from all of them I do find Sir R. Ford a very
able man of his brains and tongue, and a scholler. But my Lord Mayor
I find to be a talking, bragging Bufflehead, a fellow that would be
thought to have led all the City in the great business of bringing in
the King, and that nobody understood his plots, and the dark lanthorn he
walked by; but led them and plowed with them as oxen and asses (his own
words) to do what he had a mind when in every discourse I observe him to
be as very a coxcomb as I could have thought had been in the City.
But he is resolved to do great matters in pulling down the shops quite
through the City, as he hath done in many places, and will make a
thorough passage quite through the City, through Canning-street, which
indeed will be very fine. And then his precept, which he, in vain-glory,
said he had drawn up himself, and hath printed it, against coachmen and
carrmen affronting of the gentry in the street; it is drawn so like a
fool, and some faults were openly found in it, that I believe he will
ha