l-room, gave him a private interview. According to the story in
the Fairfax family, it must have been an unpleasant one. Cromwell
could be stern on such a subject even at such a time and to his old
commander, and so Fairfax "turned abruptly from him in the gallery at
Whitehall, cocking his hat, and throwing his cloak under his arm, as
he used to do when he was angry." Nor was this the last piece of
public business of which the Protector, though never more in the
Council-room, must have been directly cognisant. Whitlocke says he
visited him and was kept to dine with him on the 26th, and that he
was then able to discourse on business; but, as Whitlocke makes
Hampton Court the place, there must be an error as to the day. The
last baronetcy he conferred was made good on Saturday the 28th, four
days after the interview with Fairfax; and even after that, between
his fever-fits, he kept some grasp of affairs, and received and sent
messages. But that Saturday of the last baronetcy was a day of marked
crisis. The ague had then changed into a "double tertian," with two
fits in the twenty-four hours, both extremely weakening. So Sunday
passed, with prayers in all the churches; and then came that
extraordinary Monday (Aug. 30, 1658) which lovers of coincidence have
taken care to remember as the day of most tremendous hurricane that
ever blew over London and England. From morning to night the wind
raged and howled, emptying the streets, unroofing houses, tearing up
trees in the parks, foundering ships at sea, and taking even Flanders
and the coasts of France within its angry whirl. The storm was felt,
within England, as far as Lincolnshire, where, in the vicinity of an
old manor-house, a boy of fifteen years of age, named Isaac Newton,
was turning it to account, as he afterwards remembered, by jumping
first with the wind, and then against it, and computing its force by
the difference of the distances. Through all this storm, as it
shuddered round Whitehall, shaking the doors and windows, the
sovereign patient had lain on, passing from fit to fit, but talking
in the intervals with the Lady Protectress or with his physicians,
while Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Sterry, or some other of the preachers
that were in attendance, went and came between the chamber and an
adjoining room. A certain belief that he would recover, which he had
several times before expressed to the Lady Protectress and others,
had not yet left him, and had communicated its