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.
Pen'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 Hart 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," 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 her on one side to make her draw little
water: and so carried her away safe. They being gone, by and by comes
Sir W. Pen home, and he and I together talking. He hath been at Court;
and in the first place, I hear the Duke of Cambridge is dead; a which is
a great loss to the nation, having, I think, never an heyre male now of
the King's or Duke's to succeed to the Crown. He tells me that they do
begin already to damn the Dutch, and call them cowards at White Hall,
and think of them and their business no better than they used to do;
which is very sad.