HKB
which I got home, not being very well in health.’ It certainly was such ridiculously insincere treatment that it might well have caused immediate sickening in one of robust health.
It was, forsooth, only in very minor matters that Evelyn profited by the royal favour or by his courtiership. In April, 1666, Charles informed him that he must now be sworn for a Justice of the Peace, (‘the office in the world I had most industriously avoided, in regard of the perpetual trouble thereoff in these numerous parishes’), and he only escaped this infliction by humbly desiring to be excused from fresh duties inconsistent with the other service he was engaged in. So excused he was, by royal favour, for which he ‘rendered his Majesty many thanks.’ And on that same day he declined re-election to the Council of the Royal Society for the following year on ‘earnest suite’ of other affairs; for he had to be consistent in such different matters that would have engaged a portion of his time.
Besides his work in connection with prisoners and the Mint he was shortly afterwards nominated one of the Commissioners for regulating the farming and making of saltpetre and gunpowder throughout Britain, an appointment which was all the more appropriate from the fact that his grandfather, George Evelyn of Long Ditton and Wotton (1530-1603), had been the first to introduce the manufacture of gunpowder into England, when he established mills on both of his properties. He was also appointed one of the three Surveyors of the repairs of St. Paul’s Cathedral, ‘and to consider of a model for the new building, or, if it might be, repairing of the steeple, which was most decay’d.’
With hands and head fully occupied with business affairs he found time for other work of a useful nature, while still having plenty of leisure for social duties and enjoyments. In this respect he forms a good example of the well-known truth that it is always the busiest men who can spare most time for matters lying outside of their special grooves of work. Thus in September, 1665, he drew up a scheme for erecting an infirmary at Chatham, in which he was supported by his friend Pepys, then a high official in the Navy Department and like himself a shrewd man of business and method, and therefore finding time for other than purely routine official work; while in August, 1666, he entreated the Lord Chancellor ‘to visite the Hospital of the Savoy, and reduce it (after ye greate abuse that had been continu’d) to its original institution for ye benefit of the poore, which he promis’d to do.’