In October, 1666, there was a rumour that Sir Jeremy Smith had killed Sir Robert Holmes in a duel, and Pepys was not sorry to hear it, although he soon found that report did not tell true.[307] Holmes was very unpopular, and Andrew Marvell called him the “cursed beginner of the two Dutch wars;” describing him as “first an Irish livery boy, then a highwayman, now Bashaw of the Isle of Wight,” who had “got in bonds and by rapine £100,000.”[308]

Sir Jeremy Smith was befriended by the Duke of Albemarle, when Holmes delivered articles of accusation against him to the King and Cabinet, and he suffered no ill from the vengeance of his enemy, for in 1669 he was appointed a Commissioner of the Navy in place of Sir William Penn. Pepys was able to find an epithet for him, and although he liked him fairly well, he called him “an impertinent fellow.”[309]

This slight notice of some of the sailors of the Restoration period may well be closed by a relation of the remarkable action of certain seamen at the funeral of Sir Christopher Mings. Mings, like Lawson, was of poor extraction, and, like him, grew up a worthy captain. He was wounded in the face and leg in an engagement with the Dutch, and shortly afterwards died of his wounds. Pepys and Sir William Coventry attended the funeral, and on their going away, “about a dozen able, lusty, proper men came to the coach side with tears in their eyes, and one of them that spoke for the rest begun and said to Sir W. Coventry, ‘We are here a dozen of us that have long known and loved and served our dead commander, Sir Christopher Mings, and have now done the last office of laying him in the ground. We would be glad we had any other to offer after him, and revenge of him. All we have is our lives; if you will please to get His Royal Highness to give us a fireship among us all, here is a dozen of us, out of all which choose you one to be commander, and the rest of us, whoever he is, will serve him; and if possible do that that shall show our memory of our dead commander and our revenge.’” When this speech was finished Coventry was much moved, and Pepys could scarcely refrain from tears.[310] What became of these worthy men we are not told.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XI.