The spring of 1665 in London was, as everybody knows—in spite of impending war, and the absence of “many gallants” at sea—one of the gayest of gay London seasons. The theatres were full; the great “noon-hall” at Whitehall had been turned into a playhouse. Another comet, every bit as bright as the last, was reported in the April sky. The Park was filled with fair women; chief among them, according to Pepys, was the “very great beauty,” Mrs. Middleton, for whom Boyle’s hopeful young nephew—Milton’s pupil—Mr. Dick Jones, had quite forsaken the Philosophers.[294] And while the bees in Evelyn’s garden at Deptford were making their honey and combs “mighty pleasantly,” and Evelyn himself was immersed in the provision of hospital accommodation for sick and wounded seamen, in the coffee-houses the talk was all of the Dutch fleet, and of the Plague that was growing in London. Everybody was ready with a remedy, “some saying one thing and some another.” On June 3, all London was on the river, listening to the guns of the opposing Dutch and English fleets;[295] and on June 7, the day before the news of the great victory arrived in London, Mr. Pepys, much to his discomfiture, saw those red crosses on the doors in Drury Lane, and the poor human appeal, “Lord, have mercy on us!”[296] While the Plague raged in London, Lady Ranelagh and her two daughters—“my girls” she always calls them—were at delicious Leeze. It was not the same patriarchal Leeze to which the romantic runaways had been carried in Lady Ranelagh’s coach. The husband and wife, who were Charles and Mary Rich in those days, were Earl and Countess of Warwick now. It was four-and-twenty years since they had been obliged to run away to be married, because Charles Rich was only a younger son. Charles Rich was “my Lord of Warwick” now. It was six years since he had succeeded to the earldom; and a great deal can happen in six years. Their son—their only child—whose illness in babyhood had so changed Mary’s outlook on life, had been reared to manhood, and had been married—a girl and boy marriage it was—to my Lord of Devonshire’s very young daughter. For the sake of her boy, and to arrange this alliance satisfactorily, Mary had gone to London, leaving “the sweet quiet of the country for the horrid confusion of the town”; and from there she had written to Robert Boyle at Oxford, whom she still always called her “dearest, dearest squire,” in great spirits: “We are like to be very great,” she said, “for the lad is like to be a successful lover.”