th him about the sufferings of the Friends.
"Before I came to him, as he rode at the head of his life-guard,"
says Fox, "I saw and felt a waft of death go forth, against him; and,
when I came to him, he looked like a dead man." Fox, nevertheless,
had his conversation with the Protector, who told him to come again,
but does not seem to have mentioned the inquiry he had been making,
through his secretary Mr. Malyn, about the state of Fox's
fellow-Quaker, poor James Nayler. Next day, Saturday, Aug. 21, when
Fox went to Hampton Court Palace to keep his appointment, he could
not be admitted. Harvey, the groom of the bedchamber, told him that
his Highness was very ill, with his physicians about him, and must
be kept quiet. That morning his distemper had developed itself
distinctly into "an ague"; which ague proved, within the next few
days, to be of the kind called by the physicians "a bastard tertian,"
i.e. an ague with the cold and hot shivering fits recurring most
violently every third day, but with the intervals also troublesome.
Yet it was on this first day of his ague that he signed a warrant for
a patent to make Bulstrode Whitlocke a Viscount. Whitlocke himself,
though he afterwards declined the honour as inconvenient, is precise
as to the date. The physicians thinking the London air better for the
malady than that of Hampton Court, his Highness was removed to
Whitehall on Tuesday the 24th. That was one of the intervals of his
fever, and he seems to have come up easily enough in his coach, and
to have been quite able to take an interest in what he found going on
at Whitehall. Six days before (Aug. 18) the Duke of Buckingham, who
had been for some time in London undisturbed, living in his mansion
of York House with his recently wedded wife, and with Lord and Lady
Fairfax in their society, had been apprehended on the high-road some
miles from Canterbury; and, whether on the old grounds, or from new
suspicions, the Council, by a warrant issued on the 19th, doubtless
with Cromwell's sanction intimated from Hampton Court, had committed
him to the Tower. On the very day of Cromwell's return to Whitehall
this business of the Duke was again before the Council, in
consequence of a petition from the young Duchess that he might be
permitted to remain at York House on sufficient security. Fairfax
himself had gone to Whitehall to urge his daughter's request and to
tender the security, and Cromwell, though unable to be in the
Counci