cut off good profits from my Lord Lieutenant; which
will make a new enemy, but he cares not. He tells
me that Townsend, of the Wardrobe, is the eeriest
knave and bufflehead that ever he saw in his life,
and wonders how my Lord Sandwich come to trust such
a fellow, and that now Reames and--------are put in
to be overseers there, and do great things, and have
already saved a great deal of money in the King’s
liverys, and buy linnen so cheap, that he will have
them buy the next cloth he hath, for shirts.
But then this is with ready money, which answers
all. He do not approve of my letter I drew and
the office signed yesterday to the Commissioners of
Accounts, saying that it is a little too submissive,
and grants a little too much and too soon our bad
managements, though we lay on want of money, yet that
it will be time enough to plead it when they object
it. Which was the opinion of my Lord Anglesey
also; so I was ready to alter it, and did so presently,
going from him home, and there transcribed it fresh
as he would have it, and got it signed, and to White
Hall presently and shewed it him, and so home, and
there to dinner, and after dinner all the afternoon
and till 12 o’clock at night with Mr. Gibson
at home upon my Tangier accounts, and did end them
fit to be given the last of them to the Auditor to-morrow,
to my great content. This evening come Betty
Turner and the two Mercers, and W. Batelier, and they
had fiddlers, and danced, and kept a quarter,—[A
term for making a noise or disturbance.]—which
pleased me, though it disturbed me; but I could not
be with them at all. Mr. Gibson lay at my house
all night, it was so late.
30th. Up, it being fast day for the King’s
death, and so I and Mr. Gibson by water to the Temple,
and there all the morning with Auditor Wood, and I
did deliver in the whole of my accounts and run them
over in three hours with full satisfaction, and so
with great content thence, he and I, and our clerks,
and Mr. Clerke, the solicitor, to a little ordinary
in Hercules-pillars Ally—the Crowne, a
poor, sorry place, where a fellow, in twelve years,
hath gained an estate of, as he says, L600 a-year,
which is very strange, and there dined, and had a
good dinner, and very good discourse between them,
old men belonging to the law, and here I first heard
that my cozen Pepys, of Salisbury Court, was Marshal
to my Lord Cooke when he was Lord Chief justice; which
beginning of his I did not know to be so low:
but so it was, it seems. After dinner I home,
calling at my bookbinder’s, but he not within.
When come home, I find Kate Joyce hath been there,
with sad news that her house stands not in the King’s
liberty, but the Dean of Paul’s; and so, if her
estate be forfeited, it will not be in the King’s
power to do her any good. So I took coach and
to her, and there found her in trouble, as I cannot
blame her. But I do believe this arises from
somebody that hath a mind to fright her into a composition
for her estate, which I advise her against; and, indeed,