time I think I have done so this
winter, and a coach being got over night, I to Sir W. Coventry's, the
first time I have seen him at his new house since he come to lodge
there. He tells me of the vote for none of the House to be of the
Commission for the Bill of Accounts; which he thinks is so great a
disappointment to Birch and others that expected to be of it, that he
thinks, could it have been [fore]seen, there would not have been any
Bill at all. We hope it will be the better for all that are to account;
it being likely that the men, being few, and not of the House, will
hear reason. The main business I went about was about. Gilsthrop, Sir
W. Batten's clerk; who, being upon his death-bed, and now dead, hath
offered to make discoveries of the disorders of the Navy and of L65,000
damage to the King: which made mighty noise in the Commons' House;
and members appointed to go to him, which they did; but nothing to the
purpose got from him, but complaints of false musters, and ships being
refitted with victuals and stores at Plymouth, after they come fitted
from other ports; but all this to no purpose, nor more than we know, and
will owne. But the best is, that this loggerhead should say this, that
understands nothing of the Navy, nor ever would; and hath particularly
blemished his master by name among us. I told Sir W. Coventry of my
letter to Sir R. Brookes, and his answer to me. He advises me, in what
I write to him, to be as short as I can, and obscure, saving in things
fully plain; for all that he do is to make mischief; and that the
greatest wisdom in dealing with the Parliament in the world is to say
little, and let them get out what they can by force: which I shall
observe. He declared to me much of his mind to be ruled by his own
measures, and not to go so far as many would have him to the ruin of
my Lord Chancellor, and for which they do endeavour to do what they can
against [Sir] W. Coventry. "But," says he, "I have done my do in helping
to get him out of the administration of things, for which he is not fit;
but for his life or estate I will have nothing to say to it: besides
that, my duty to my master the Duke of York is such, that I will perish
before I will do any thing to displease or disoblige him, where the very
necessity of the kingdom do not in my judgment call me." Thence I home
and to the office, where my Lord Anglesey, and all the discourse was
yesterday's vote in the Commons, wherein he told us that,