[223] A plan, with front and side elevations of the Hill-house as it was in 1698, is in King’s MS. 43. The ground on which it stood is now included in the Marine Barracks.--C. P.
[229] Dummer was Assistant to the Surveyor of the Navy when he designed these works. The improvement of Portsmouth and the foundation of a dockyard at Plymouth were called for by the political changes arising out of the Revolution. Previously our great naval wars had been waged against the Dutch, and the Thames and Medway were then the most convenient localities for fitting and repairing ships of war. After the Revolution, the Dutch became our allies, and the French our most formidable enemies. The naval ports on the Channel then became more important than those on the east coast.--C. P.
[230] King’s MS. 43 (Brit. Mus.) contains plans of all the dockyards in 1688 and 1698, and detailed drawings of the principal buildings as they were in the latter year, as well as of the Navy Office in Seething Lane, and the Hill-house at Chatham.--C. P.
[232] Campbell’s “Naval History,” 1818, vol. ii. p. 217.
[233] “Evelyn’s Diary,” ed. 1879, vol. iii. p. 414. (Letter dated Sept. 19, 1682.)
[241] Lister’s “Life of Clarendon,” vol. iii. p. 107.
[243] Aubrey’s “Lives,” 1813, vol. ii. p. 260.
“And when he was beat, He still made his retreat To his Clevelands, his Nells, and his Carwells.”
MARVELL’S _Ballad on the Lord Mayor and Aldermen_.
The Court of Charles II. was not unlike that of Comus, for drunkenness and vice reigned supreme in both. Pepys’s “Diary” forms a valuable antidote to the Grammont “Memoirs,” because in the latter work the pictures are drawn in rose colour, while in the former we see the squalid poverty that accompanied the wasteful extravagance. In the courts of most of our sovereigns statesmen have borne an important part, but at the Restoration the court was formed of wits and beautiful women only. Then statesmen moved in the outer circles, and were laughed at by those who dwelt in the inner ones. Grammont relates that the Earl of Arlington was one day offering his humble services and best advice to Miss Stewart, to assist her in conducting herself as King’s mistress, a situation “to which it had pleased God and her virtue to raise her!” He had only just begun his speech, “when she recollected that he was at the head of those whom the Duke of Buckingham used to mimic; and as his presence and his language exactly revived the ridiculous ideas that had been given her of him, she could not forbear bursting out into a fit of laughter in his face, so much the more violent as she had for a long time struggled to suppress it.” It is not to be supposed that Pepys could know much of the inner circle of the court, but still there was much gossip about those who composed it, and he sets down many tales in his “Diary” respecting the doings of the too celebrated ladies. Several of the stories which were supposed to have owed much to the lively imaginations of Counts Hamilton and Grammont, are corroborated by Pepys.[244] The wild frolic of Miss Jennings and Miss Price, to which allusion will be made later on in this chapter, is not overlooked by Pepys.[245] Miss Jennings was not singular in her freak, and Bishop Burnet relates that about the year 1668, the King and Queen and all the court went about disguised in sedan chairs to houses where they were not known. On one occasion the Queen’s chairmen, not knowing who she was, left her alone, and she had to get back to Whitehall as best she could in a hackney coach or in a cart. The same masqueradings went on in the country as in town; and in 1670 the Queen, the Duchess of Richmond, the Duchess of Buckingham, and some others, disguised themselves as country lasses, in red petticoats, waistcoats, &c., in order to visit the fair at Audley End. The grand ladies and their companions overacted their parts, and were soon discovered, so that they were glad to escape as best they could from the crowd that gathered round them.