Cromwell's state residence in London was Whitehall. With much less of splendor and show than had been exhibited by the former occupants of that palace, the protector maintained a degree of magnificence and dignity befitting the chief ruler of a great country.[1] He had around him his court--composed of his family, some leading officers of the army, and a slight sprinkling of the nobility; but what interests posterity the most, it included Milton, Marvell, Waller, and Dryden. Foreign ambassadors and other distinguished personages were entertained at his table in sober state, the dinner being brought in by the gentlemen of his guard, clothed in gray coats, with black velvet collars and silver lace trimmings. "His own diet was spare and not curious, except in public treatments, which were constantly given the Monday in every week to all the officers in the army not below a captain, when he used to dine with them. A table was likewise spread every day of the week for such officers as should casually come to court. Sometimes he would, for a frolic, before he had half dined, give order for the drum to beat, and call in his foot-guards, who were permitted to make booty of all they found on the table. Sometimes he would be jocund with some of the nobility, and would tell them what company they had kept, when and where they had drunk the king's health and the royal family's, bidding them when they did it again to do it more privately; and this without any passion, and as festivous, droll discourse."[2] In the neighboring parks, the protector was often seen taking the air in his sedan, on horseback, and in his coach. On one occasion he turned coachman, with a rather disastrous result, which is amusingly told by Ludlow, whose genuine republicanism prejudiced him against Cromwell after he had assumed the supreme power. "The duke of Holstein made Cromwell a present of a set of gray Friesland coach-horses, with which taking the air in the park, attended only by his secretary Thurloe and a guard of janizaries, he would needs take the place of the coachman, not doubting but the three pair of horses he was about to drive would prove as tame as the three nations which were ridden by him, and, therefore, not content with their ordinary pace, he lashed them very furiously; but they, unaccustomed to such a rough driver, ran away in a rage, and stopped not till they had thrown him out of the box, with which fall his pistol fired in his pocket, though without any hurt to himself: by which he might have been instructed how dangerous it was to meddle with those things wherein he had no experience." In connection with these anecdotes of Cromwell may be introduced an extract from the Moderate Intelligencer, illustrative of the public amusements in London at that time:--