be referred to the Committee of Priviledges to consider So I away by coach to the ’Change, and there do hear that a Jew hath put in a policy of four per cent to any man, to insure him against a Dutch warr for four months I could find in my heart to take him at this offer To Hide Park, where I have not been since last year where I saw the King with his periwigg, but not altered at all, and my Lady Castlemaine in a coach by herself, in yellow satin and a pinner on, and many brave persons And myself being in a hackney and full of people, was ashamed to be seen by the world, many of them knowing me.

19th To the Physique Garden in St James’s Parke, where I first saw orange-trees, and other fine trees.

20th Mr Coventry told me how the Committee for Trade have received now all the complaints of the merchants against the Dutch, and were resolved to report very highly the wrongs they have done us, (when God knows! it is only our own negligence and laziness that hath done us the wrong) and this to be made to the House to-morrow.

21st At the Lords’ House heard that it is ordered, that, upon submission upon the knee both to the House and my Lady Peters, W Joyce shall be released I forthwith made him submit, and ask pardon upon his knees, which he did before several Lords But my Lady would not hear it, but swore she would post the Lords, that the world might know what pitifull Lords the King hath and that revenge was sweeter to her than milk, and that she would never be satisfied unless he stood in a pillory, and demand pardon there But I perceive the Lords are ashamed of her I find that the House this day have voted that the King be desired to demand right for the wrong done us by the Dutch, and that they will stand by him with their lives and fortunes which is a very high vote, and more than I expected What the issue will be, God knows!

23rd I met with Mr Coventry, who himself is now full of talk of a Dutch war for it seems the Lords have concurred in the Commons’ vote about it, and so the next week it will be presented to the King.

26th Saw W Joyce and the late business hath cost the poor man above £40, besides, he is likely to lose his debt Lady Peters, Creed says, is a drunken jade, he himself having seen her drunk in the lobby of their House My wife gone this afternoon to the buriall of my shecosen Scott, a good woman and it is a sad consideration how the Pepys’s decay, and nobody almost that I know in a present way of encreasing them.

27th This day the Houses attended the King, and delivered their votes to him upon the business of the Dutch, and he thanks them, and promises an answer in writing.

May 3rd To Westminster Hall, and there in the Lords’ house, did in a great crowd, from ten o’clock till almost three, hear the cause of Mr Roberts,³² my Lord Privy Seale’s son, against Win, who by false ways did get the father of Mr Roberts’s wife (Mr Bodvill) to give him the estate and disinherit his daughter The cause was managed for my Lord Privy Seale by Finch the solicitor, but I do really think that he is a man of as great eloquence as ever I heard, or ever hope to hear in all my life Mr Cutler told me how for certain Lawson hath proclaimed war again with Argier, though they had at his first coming given back the ships which they had taken, and all their men, though they refused afterwards to make him restitution for the goods which they had taken out of them.

5th My eyes beginning every day to grow less and less able to bear with long reading or writing, though it be by daylight, which I never observed till now.

13th In the Painted Chamber I heard a fine conference between some of the two Houses upon the Bill for Conventicles The Lords would be freed from having their houses searched by any but the Lord Lieutenant of the County and upon being found guilty, to be tried only by their peers, and thirdly, would have it added, that whereas the Bill says, ‘That that, among other things, shall be a conventicle wherein any such meeting is found doing any thing contrary to the Liturgy of the Church of England,’ they would have it added, ‘or practice’ The Commons to the Lords said, that they knew not what might hereafter be found out which might be called the practice of the Church of England for there are many things may be said to be the