HKB
present at that execrable wickednesse, receiving the sad account of it from my Brother George and Mr. Owen, who came to visite me this afternoone, and recounted all the circumstances.’
While he ‘went through a course of chymestrie at Sayes Court,’ and otherwise engaged in study and in the examination of works of art, he became disquieted about the condition of affairs in Paris. Communications with his wife appear to have been very few and far between, although with his father-in-law he ‘kept up a political correspondence’ in cipher ‘with no small danger of being discovered.’ In April he touched ‘suddaine resolutions’ of going to France, before he received the news that Condé’s siege of Paris had ended by peace being concluded. The immediate carrying out of this intention was hindered by a rush of blood to the brain. ‘I fell dangerously ill of my head: was blistered and let blood behind ye ears and forehead: on the 23rd. began to have ease by using the fumes of a cammomile on embers applied to my eares after all the physicians had don their best.’ On 17th June, however, he ‘got a passe from the rebell Bradshaw, then in greate power,’ and on 12th July went viâ Gravesend to Dover and Calais, arriving at Paris on 1st. August. Curiously enough his Diary makes no mention of the child-wife, from whom he had ‘been absent.... about a yeare and a halfe,’ save that on ‘Sept. 7th. Went with my Wife and dear cosin to St. Germains, and kissed the Queene-mother’s hand.’ He remained in Paris till the end of June, 1650, when he made a flying visit to England, and again obtained a pass from Bradshaw to proceed to France. On 30th August, he was back again in Paris, where he stayed till his final return to England in February 1652. His life in Paris at this time was that of a cultured dilletante. He studied, or at any rate dabbled in, chemistry, philosophy, theology, and music; and he found amusement in examining gardens and collections of all sorts of virtuosities and antiquities. He had ‘much discourse of chymical matters’ with Sir Kenelm Digby; ‘but the truth is, Sir Kenelm was an arrant mountebank.’ Here, too, he wrote his second literary composition, The State of France, as it stood in the IXth yeer of this present monarch Lewis XIIII, which was published in England in 1652. Apart from these occupations, his time was chiefly spent in the pleasures and amusements common to the court of France and to the throng of exiles from Britain who formed the Court of the uncrowned monarch, Charles II.