Up, and going out of doors, I understand that Sir W. Batten is gone to bed on a sudden again this morning, being struck very ill, and I confess I have observed him for these last two months to look very ill and to look worse and worse. I to St. James’s (though it be a sitting day) to the Duke of York, about the Tangier Committee, which met this morning, and he come to us, and the Charter for the City of Tangier was read and the form of the Court Merchant. That being done Sir W. Coventry took me into the gallery, and walked with me an hour, discoursing of Navy business, and with much kindness to, and confidence in, me still; which I must endeavour to preserve, and will do; and, good man! all his care how to get the Navy paid off, and that all other things therein may go well. He gone, I thence to my Lady Peterborough, who sent for me; and with her an hour talking about her husband’s pension, and how she hath got an order for its being paid again; though, I believe, for all that order, it will hardly be; but of that I said nothing; but her design is to get it paid again: and how to raise money upon it, to clear it from the engagement which lies upon it to some citizens, who lent her husband money, without her knowledge, upon it, to vast loss. She intends to force them to take their money again, and release her husband of those hard terms. The woman is a very wise woman, and is very plain in telling me how her plate and jewels are at pawne for money, and how they are forced to live beyond their estate, and do get nothing by his being a courtier. The lady I pity, and her family. Having done with her, and drunk two glasses of her meade, which she did give me, and so to the Treasurer’s Office, and there find my Lord Bruncker and W. Pen at dinner with Sir G. Carteret about his accounts, where I dined and talked and settled some business, and then home, and there took out my wife and Willet, thinking to have gone to a play, but both houses were begun, and so we to the ’Change, and thence to my tailor’s, and there, the coachman desiring to go home to change his horses, we went with him into a nasty end of all St. Giles’s, and there went into a nasty room, a chamber of his, where he hath a wife and child, and there staid, it growing dark too, and I angry thereat, till he shifted his horses, and then home apace, and there I to business late, and so home, to supper, and walk in the garden with my wife and girle, with whom we are mightily pleased, and after talking and supping, to bed. This noon, going home, I did call on Will Lincolne and agree with him to carry me to Brampton.
sitting still
I endeavor to care
for nothing
vast as a drunk
in the nasty end
of a nasty room
growing dark
till supper and
the garden call
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 3 October 1667.