I’ll write again before I leave the town, and should have writ more now, but company is come in.  Adieu, my dearest.

Letter 61.—­Lady Talmash was the eldest daughter of Mr. Murray, Charles I.’s page and whipping boy.  She married Sir Lionel Talmash of Suffolk, a gentleman of noble family.  After her father’s death, she took the title of Countess of Dysart, although there was some dispute about the right of her father to any title.  Bishop Burnet says:  “She was a woman of great beauty, but of far greater parts.  She had a wonderful quickness of apprehension, and an amazing vivacity in conversation.  She had studied not only divinity and history, but mathematics and philosophy.  She was violent in everything she set about,—­a violent friend, but a much more violent enemy.  She had a restless ambition, lived at a vast expense, and was ravenously covetous; and would have stuck at nothing by which she might compass her ends.  She had been early in a correspondence with Lord Lauderdale, that had given occasion to censure.  When he was a prisoner after Worcester fight, she made him believe he was in great danger of his life, and that she saved it by her intrigues with Cromwell, which was not a little taken notice of.  Cromwell was certainly fond of her, and she took care to entertain him in it; till he, finding what was said upon it, broke it off.  Upon the King’s Restoration she thought that Lord Lauderdale made not those returns she expected.  They lived for some years at a distance.  But upon her husband’s death she made up all quarrels; so that Lord Lauderdale and she lived so much together that his Lady was offended at it and went to Paris, where she died about three years after.”  This was in 1672, and soon afterwards Lady Dysart and Lord Lauderdale were married.  She had great power over him, and employed it in trafficking with such State patronage as was in Lord Lauderdale’s power to bestow.

Cousin Hammond, who was going to take Ludlow’s place in Ireland, would be the Colonel Robert Hammond who commanded Carisbrooke when the King was imprisoned there.  He was one of a new council formed in August and sent into Ireland about the end of that month.

Lady Vavasour was Ursula, daughter of Walter Gifford of Chillington, Staffordshire.  Her husband was Sir Thomas Vavasour, Bart.  The Vavasours were a Roman Catholic family, and claimed descent from those who held the ancient office of King’s Valvasour; and we need not therefore be surprised to find Lady Vavasour engaged in one of the numerous plots that surrounded and endangered the Protector’s power.  The plot itself seems to have created intense excitement in the capital, and resulted in three persons being tried for high treason, and two executed,—­John Gerard, gentleman, Peter Vowel, schoolmaster of Islington, and one Summerset Fox, who pleaded guilty, and whose life was spared.  “Some wise men,” writes one Thomas Gower in a contemporary letter (still unprinted), “believe that a couple of coy-ducks