After some time Fox was transferred from Lancaster to the castle at Scarborough, where, during his incarceration, he was visited by the widow of General Fairfax. His condition there was no better than at Lancaster. The room in which he was placed, he says, "being to the seaside, and lying much open, drove in the wind forcibly, so that the rain came over my bed and ran over the room, that I was fain to skim it up with a platter. And when my clothes were wet I had no fire to dry them; so that my body was benumbed with cold and my fingers swelled, that one was grown as big as two." His friends were forbidden to supply him with any comforts, and he remarks, "Commonly a threepenny loaf served me three weeks and sometimes longer, and most of my drink was water with wormwood steeped or bruised in it." After he had been two years in confinement an order for his release was obtained from the King, procured, as it would seem, through the influence of a friend at Court, one "Esquire Marsh," to whom he had been long known, and who declared that, if necessary, "he would go a hundred miles barefoot for the liberty of George Fox." He was set at liberty on Saturday, the 1st of September, 1666, and he notes in his _Journal_ that "the very next day after my release (Sunday, September 3), the fire broke out in London and the report of it came quickly down into the country." The date is confirmed by the gossiping Secretary of the Navy, Samuel Pepys, who, as he tells us in his "Diary," on that said Sunday morning rose at three o'clock, slipped on his nightgown, and looked out of the window of his house in Seething Lane, at the east end of the city, but, thinking the fire far enough off, "went to bed again and to sleep." After his release from a severe imprisonment of two years and nine months, Fox was greatly weakened in body, and it seemed at the time unlikely he could long survive the hardships he had had to endure. On his release, he thus moralises upon his oppressors:--"And, indeed, I could not but take notice how the hand of the Lord turned against those of my persecutors who had been the cause of my imprisonment, or had been abusive or cruel to me in it. For the officer that fetched me to Howlker Hall wasted his estate, and very soon after fled into Ireland. And most of the justices that were upon the bench at the sessions when I was sent to prison died in a while after," and, he adds, "when I came into that country again, most of those that dwelt in Lancashire were dead, and others ruined in their estates. So that, though I did not seek revenge upon them for their acting against me contrary to law, yet the Lord had executed his judgments upon many of them."