INTRODUCTION li 



or appointment, in study, literary work, and retirement. 

 He did not like the new regime, with its * Court offices 

 distributed amongst Parliament men. . . . Things far from 

 settled as was expected, by reason of the slothfull, sickly 

 temper of the new King, and the Parliament's unmindfull- 

 ness of Ireland, which is likely to prove a sad omission. ' 

 He even seems to have regretted that his son was in March 

 1692 made ' one of the Commissioners of the Revenue 

 and Treasury of Ireland, to which employment he had a 

 mind far from my wishes. ' This son contracted serious 

 illness in Ireland, and died * after a tedious languishing 

 sickness ' early in 1699, aged 44 years, leaving one son, then 

 a student at Oxford. 



Some time before this his elder brother, George, having 

 lost his last son and heir, had settled the Wotton estate upon 

 John Evelyn. In May 1904, yielding to the request to 

 make Wotton his home, he went to Wotton, leaving Sayes 

 Court in charge of his daughter Susanna and her husband 

 William Draper, whose marriage had been celebrated about 

 a year previously. In 1696 it was let for three years to 

 Admiral Benbow, who sublet it in 1698 to Peter the Great, 

 then visiting the Deptford Dockyards for three months as 

 his Majesty's guest. So great was the destruction done to 

 the gardens, trees, and holly-hedges, that Wren was asked 

 to report on the compensation suitable, and 162-7-0 were 

 paid to Evelyn for damage to the house and garden. 



Early in 1695 Evelyn accepted the offer of the Treasurer- 

 ship of Greenwich Hospital, then about to be rebuilt and 

 endowed for the maintainence of decayed seamen, which was 

 made to him by Lord Godolphin, who had been the husband 

 of his former friend Miss Blagg. During the days of 

 Charles II. some such transformation of the Palace had been 

 under consideration, but it was the 3oth June 1696 before 

 Evelyn and Sir Christopher Wren ' laid the first stone of the 

 intended foundation, precisely at 5 o'clock in the evening, 

 after we had din'd together. ' This appointment carried with 

 it * the salary of 200 per ann. of which I have never yet 

 receiv'd one penny of the tallies assign'd for it, now two 

 years at Lady-day ; my son-in-law Draper is my substitute. ' 

 When the new Commission for Greenwich Hospital was 



