This had been the severest winter that any man alive had known in England. The crows' feet were frozen to their prey. Islands of ice inclosed both fish and fowl frozen, and some persons in their boats.
15th May, 1658, was a public fast, to avert an epidemical sickness, very mortal this spring.
20th May, 1658. I went to see a coach race in Hyde Park, and collationed in Spring Garden.
23d May, 1658. Dr. Manton, the famous Presbyterian, preached at Covent Garden, on Matthew vi. 10, showing what the kingdom of God was, how pray for it, etc.
There was now a collection for persecuted and sequestered Ministers of the Church of England, whereof divers are in prison. A sad day! The Church now in dens and caves of the earth.
31st May, 1658. I went to visit my Lady Peterborough, whose son, Mr. Mordaunt, prisoner in the Tower, was now on his trial, and acquitted but by one voice; but that holy martyr, Dr. Hewer, was condemned to die without law, jury, or justice, but by a mock Council of State, as they called it. A dangerous, treacherous time!
2d June, 1658. An extraordinary storm of hail and rain, the season as cold as winter, the wind northerly near six months.
3d June, 1658. A large whale was taken between my land abutting on the Thames and Greenwich, which drew an infinite concourse to see it, by water, horse, coach, and on foot, from London, and all parts. It appeared first below Greenwich at low water, for at high water it would have destroyed all the boats, but lying now in shallow water encompassed with boats, after a long conflict, it was killed with a harping iron, struck in the head, out of which spouted blood and water by two tunnels; and after a horrid groan, it ran quite on shore, and died. Its length was fifty-eight feet, height sixteen; black skinned, like coach leather; very small eyes, great tail, only two small fins, a peaked snout and a mouth so wide, that divers men might have stood upright in it; no teeth, but sucked the slime only as through a grate of that bone which we call whalebone; the throat yet so narrow, as would not have admitted the least of fishes. The extremes of the cetaceous bones hang downward from the upper jaw, and are hairy toward the ends and bottom within side: all of it prodigious; but in nothing more wonderful than that an animal of so great a bulk should be nourished only by slime through those grates.
8th June, 1658. That excellent preacher and holy man, Dr. Hewer, was martyred for having intelligence with his Majesty, through the Lord Marquis of Ormond.
9th June, 1658. I went to see the Earl of Northumberland's pictures, whereof that of the Venetian Senators was one of the best of Titian's and another of Andrea del Sarto, viz, a Madonna, Christ, St. John, and an Old Woman; a St. Catherine of Da Vinci, with divers portraits of Vandyck; a Nativity of Georgioni; the last of our blessed Kings (Charles I.), and the Duke of York, by Lely, a Rosary by the famous Jesuits of Brussels, and several more. This was in Suffolk House: the new front toward the gardens is tolerable, were it not drowned by a too massy and clumsy pair of stairs of stone, without any neat invention.