much ado gone, and I pray God bless her, but it seems she was to the last
unwilling to go, but would not say so, but put it off till she lost her
place in the coach, and was fain to ride in the waggon part. After dinner
to the office again till night, very busy, and so home not very late to
supper and to bed.

23rd. Up and to White Hall to a Committee for Tangier, where his Royal
Highness was. Our great design was to state to them the true condition of
this Committee for want of money, the want whereof was so great as to need
some sudden help, and it was with some content resolved to see it supplied
and means proposed towards the doing of it. At this Committee, unknown to
me, comes my Lord of Sandwich, who, it seems, come to towne last night.
After the Committee was up, my Lord Sandwich did take me aside, and we
walked an hour alone together in the robe-chamber, the door shut, telling
me how much the Duke and Mr. Coventry did, both in the fleete and here,
make of him, and that in some opposition to the Prince; and as a more
private message, he told me that he hath been with them both when they
have made sport of the Prince and laughed at him: yet that all the
discourse of the towne, and the printed relation, should not give him one
word of honour my Lord thinks mighty strange; he assuring me, that though
by accident the Prince was in the van the beginning of the fight for the
first pass, yet all the rest of the day my Lord was in the van, and
continued so. That notwithstanding all this noise of the Prince, he had
hardly a shot in his side nor a man killed, whereas he hath above 30 in
her hull, and not one mast whole nor yard; but the most battered ship of
the fleet, and lost most men, saving Captain Smith of "The Mary." That
the most the Duke did was almost out of gun-shot; but that, indeed, the
Duke did come up to my Lord's rescue after he had a great while fought
with four of them. How poorly Sir John Lawson performed, notwithstanding
all that was said of him; and how his ship turned out of the way, while