THE TLRF TO THE RESTORATION. 8 1 



A man so various that he seemed to be 

 Not one but all mankind's epitome. 

 Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong 

 Was everything by turns and nothing long." 



In that glittering company Tom Thynne of Longleat (Poor " Tom of Ten 

 Thousand " who was shot in Pall Mall, later on, by Count Konigsmarck's assassins) 

 might be seen, too, leaning on a window of the grand stand to make a bet with Tom 

 Killigrew, or with his friend the Duke of Monmonth, who was inside it ; while the 

 Duke of York (afterwards James II.) was trying to get a moment's quiet in a 

 shady corner for talking over Pepys' last report of the Navy with Ashley Cooper, 

 the first Earl of Shaftesbury. No doubt the King enjoyed being free from even 

 those slight restraints of etiquette which his easy-going Court was compelled to 

 observe in public at Whitehall ; for when the Grand Duke of Tuscany came to 

 meet him one morning on the heath, " he met his Majesty, who returned home 

 in a plain and simple country dress, without any finery, but wearing the badges 

 of the Order of St. George and of the Garter." They spent the rest of the morning 

 in coursing, and after the midday meal the King and Prince Rupert had a game 

 of tennis, which proved almost as good a resource as cock-fighting when the 

 weather did not serve for racing. It must have been on some such " off-day " as 

 this that the conversation, which is reported by Grammont's friend and counsellor 

 St. Kvremond, occurred between Charles II. and a baronet from Worcestershire, 

 who entered the Royal presence bearing a " branch of that blessed oak which 

 preserved your Majesty's blessed life." There was some reference to a rosy-cheeked 

 farmer's wife who had been met " out woodcutting with Farmer Penderell," and 

 the interview was closed in an explosion of kingly laughter on the offer of a loyal 

 present of nine fat oxen from the worthy squire, who left his Sovereign hard at work 

 lecturing his companions on their lack of similar generosity in the respect of 

 burnt offerings of beef for the dining-tables of the Court. They would have done 

 better, perhaps, to spend their money so, than in such astonishing escapades ae 

 that with which Rochester and Buckingham scandalised the whole of a generally 

 complacent countryside, by hiring the Green Man Inn at Six Mile Bottom and 

 luring every pretty woman in the district into it. Charles's own letters to his 

 sister, the Duchess of Orleans, contain many references to such scenes at Newmarket, 

 and are sometimes written from the town itself. One of these contains a characteristic 

 piece of humour. I^ate in 1668 Louis the Fourteenth had sent over a secret agent 

 in the person of the Abbe Pregnani, whose ostensible business in life was the study 

 VOL. i. M 



