(Lord’s day). To White Hall on foot, calling at my father’s to change my long black cloak for a short one (long cloaks being now quite out); but he being gone to church, I could not get one, and therefore I proceeded on and came to my Lord before he went to chapel and so went with him, where I heard Dr. Spurstow preach before the King a poor dry sermon; but a very good anthem of Captn. Cooke’s afterwards.
Going out of chapel I met with Jack Cole, my old friend (whom I had not seen a great while before), and have promised to renew acquaintance in London together. To my Lord’s and dined with him; he all dinner time talking French to me, and telling me the story how the Duke of York hath got my Lord Chancellor’s daughter with child, and that she, do lay it to him, and that for certain he did promise her marriage, and had signed it with his blood, but that he by stealth had got the paper out of her cabinet. And that the King would have him to marry her, but that he will not. So that the thing is very bad for the Duke, and them all; but my Lord do make light of it, as a thing that he believes is not a new thing for the Duke to do abroad. Discoursing concerning what if the Duke should marry her, my Lord told me that among his father’s many old sayings that he had wrote in a book of his, this is one—that he that do get a wench with child and marry her afterwards is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it on his head.
I perceive my Lord is grown a man very indifferent in all matters of religion, and so makes nothing of these things.
After dinner to the Abbey, where I heard them read the church- service, but very ridiculously, that indeed I do not in my mind like it at all. A poor cold sermon of Dr. Lamb’s, one of the prebends, in his habit, came afterwards, and so all ended, and by my troth a pitiful sorry devotion that these men pay.
So walked home by land, and before supper I read part of the Marian persecution in Mr. Fuller. So to supper, prayers, and to bed.
I preach a dry sermon:
how the Lord did promise with his blood
to marry the light.
I believe not.
What if the Lord told me an old saying?
A man should shit in his hat
and make nothing of the mind?
A pitiful devotion.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 7 October 1660.