The Chancellor, Earl of Peterborough, and divers others taken. The Earl of Sunderland flies; Sir Edward Hales, Walker, and others, taken and secured.

All the world go to see the Prince at St. James's, where there is a great Court. There I saw him, and several of my acquaintance who came over with him. He is very stately, serious, and reserved. The English soldiers sent out of town to disband them; not well pleased.

24th December. The King passes into France, whither the Queen and child were gone a few days before.1

26th. The Peers and such Commoners as were members of the Parliament at Oxford, being the last of Charles II. meeting, desire the Prince of Orange to take on him the disposal of the public revenue till a convention of Lords and Commons should meet in full body, appointed by his circular letters to the shires and boroughs, 22nd January. I had now quartered upon me a Lieutenant-Colonel and eight horses.

30th. This day prayers for the Prince of Wales were first left off in our church.

1688-9: 7th January. A long frost and deep snow; the Thames almost frozen over.

15th. I visited the Archbishop of Canterbury, where I found the Bishops of St. Asaph, Ely, Bath and Wells, Peterborough," and Chichester, the Earls of Aylesbury and Clarendon, Sir George Mackenzie Lord-Advocate of Scotland, and then came in a Scotch Archbishop, etc. After prayers and dinner, divers serious matters were discoursed,

7

1 [See ante, p. 247. Louis XIV. gave the fugitives asylum at St. Germain. There is an account of their reception in a letter of Mme. de Sévigné to her daughter early in 1689.]

2 Lloyd. 3 Turner.

7 See ante, vol. ii. p. 268.

4 Ken. 5 White. 6 Lake.

concerning the present state of the Public, and sorry I was to find there was as yet no accord in the judgments of those of the Lords and Commons who were to convene; some would have the Princess made Queen without any more dispute, others were for a Regency; there was a Tory party (then so called), who were for inviting his Majesty again upon conditions; and there were Republicarians who would make the Prince of Orange like a Stadtholder. The Romanists were busy among these several parties to bring them into confusion: most for ambition or other interest, few for conscience and moderate resolutions. I found nothing of all this in this assembly of Bishops, who were pleased to admit me into their discourses; they were all for a Regency, thereby to salve their oaths, and so all public matters to proceed in his Majesty's name, by that to facilitate the calling of a Parliament, according to the laws in being. Such was the result of this meeting.

My Lord of Canterbury gave me great thanks for the advertisement I sent him in October,1 and assured me they took my counsel in that particular, and that it came very seasonably.

2

I found by the Lord-Advocate that the Bishops of Scotland (who were indeed little worthy of that character, and had done much mischief in that Church) were now coming about to the true interest, in this conjuncture which threatened to abolish the whole hierarchy in that kingdom; and therefore the Scottish Archbishop and Lord-Advocate requested the Archbishop of Canterbury to use his best endeavours with the Prince to maintain the Church there in the same state, as by law at present settled. It now growing late, after some private discourse with his Grace, I took my leave, most of the Lords being gone.

1 See ante, p. 241.

2 [Sir George Mackenzie.]

The trial of the bishops was now printed.

The great convention being assembled the day before, falling upon the question about the Government, resolved that King James having by the advice of the Jesuits and other wicked persons endeavoured to subvert the laws of Church and State, and deserted the kingdom, carrying away the seals,1 etc., without any care for the management of the government, had by demise abdicated himself and wholly vacated his right; they did therefore desire the Lords' concurrence to their vote, to place the crown on the next heir, the Prince of Orange, for his life, then to the Princess, his wife, and if she died without issue, to the Princess of Denmark, and she failing, to the heirs of the Prince, excluding for ever all possibility of admitting a Roman Catholic.

27th January. I dined at the Admiralty, where was brought in a child not twelve years old, the son of one Dr. Clench, of the most prodigious maturity of knowledge, for I cannot call it altogether memory, but something more extraordinary.' Mr. Pepys and myself examined him, not in any method, but with promiscuous questions, which required judgment and discernment to answer so readily and pertinently. There was not anything in chronology, history, geography, the several systems of astronomy, courses of the stars, longitude, latitude, doctrine of the spheres, courses and sources of rivers, creeks, harbours, eminent cities, boundaries and bearings of countries, not only in Europe, but in any other part of the earth, which he did

[The Great Seal was thrown into the Thames upon the King's first attempt to escape (see ante, p. 248 n.).]

2 See a similar account of the afterwards celebrated William Wotton, ante, p. 31. Dr. Andrew Clench was murdered in a hackney-coach in 1692, and a man named Henry Harrison was convicted and hanged for the murder although he denied his guilt (see post, p. 291).