the man's life, so I did take the other as a very good fortune to us; for
if Turpin had been found guilty, it would have sounded very ill in the
ears of all the world, in the business between Field and us. So home with
my mind at very great ease, over the water to the Tower, and thence, there
being nobody at the office, we being absent, and so no office could be
kept. Sir W. Batten and I to my Lord Mayor's, where we found my Lord with
Colonel Strangways and Sir Richard Floyd, Parliament-men, in the cellar
drinking, where we sat with them, and then up; and by and by comes in Sir
Richard Ford. In our drinking, which was always going, we had many
discourses, but from all of them I do find Sir R. Ford a very able man of
his brains and tongue, and a scholler. But my Lord Mayor I find to be a
talking, bragging Bufflehead, a fellow that would be thought to have led
all the City in the great business of bringing in the King, and that
nobody understood his plots, and the dark lanthorn he walked by; but led
them and plowed with them as oxen and asses (his own words) to do what he
had a mind when in every discourse I observe him to be as very a coxcomb
as I could have thought had been in the City. But he is resolved to do
great matters in pulling down the shops quite through the City, as he hath
done in many places, and will make a thorough passage quite through the
City, through Canning-street, which indeed will be very fine. And then
his precept, which he, in vain-glory, said he had drawn up himself, and
hath printed it, against coachmen and carrmen affronting of the gentry in
the street; it is drawn so like a fool, and some faults were openly found
in it, that I believe he will have so much wit as not to proceed upon it
though it be printed. Here we staid talking till eleven at night, Sir R.
Ford breaking to my Lord our business of our patent to be justices of the
Peace in the City, which he stuck at mightily; but, however, Sir R. Ford
knows him to be a fool, and so in his discourse he made him appear, and
cajoled him into a consent to it: but so as I believe when he comes to his
right mind tomorrow he will be of another opinion; and though Sir R. Ford