to the place of sad memories, made no change in the gaiety of their life at Hampton Court; and the months they had spent there were concluded by a "triumphal progress" down the Thames to Whitehall on the 23rd of August 1662. From that time Charles did not live there constantly, but he often paid visits, and the royal apartments were always ready for him in case of a sudden appearance. During the plague the court remained there for a month, during which Pepys in his diary records a visit.
Charles's court here kept up something of the old stateliness, with all the modern frivolity. Many of the officers of the household were persons who had suffered during the war and the proscription, and were full of memories of the old court ceremonial, and of the antique fashions that the young Cavaliers mocked at. Tobie Rustat, famous as a benefactor to the Universities,—not least to S. John's College, Oxford, where the "loyal lectures" he founded for Royal Oak day and the martyrdom of King Charles were continued till the present century—was under-housekeeper of the Palace, as well as yeoman of the robes to the King. Old Cavaliers, men who had fought at Edgehill and at Naseby, still came, though so often in vain, to make obeisance to the sovereign and to wonder at the new Frenchified manners, and the sad laxity of morals which my Lord Chancellor Clarendon, himself the martyred King's adviser twenty years ago, so much deplored.
