Robert Boyle, in his Oxford arm-chair, with his books and instruments about him, must have listened sadly to such war news, and news of Court and Parliament, as found its way to him in letters out of an anxious and distracted London. All the talk of late had been of the Navy muddle; the huge sums of money required; the poverty of the Exchequer; the mutinous and “pressed” men, and the “natural expression of passion” of the women left behind, who had “looked after the ships as far as they could see them by moonlight”: a most sad state, truly, of public affairs. Distrust and anger filled the hearts of men and women, and strange rumours were afloat. During the summer, before the fire broke out, the war with the Dutch had been the one thing thought of and talked about. In June, Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and the Dutch de Ruyter had engaged in a fight “the longest and most stubborn that the seas have ever seen.”[312] The English fleet had been ruined, but the English were not conquered, and in July the two fleets, refitted, had met again. This time it was the Dutch fleet that was destroyed and the Dutch who refused to be conquered. And just before the Fire of London broke out in Pudding Lane the French fleet had joined the Dutch fleet, and the English, with a weakened navy and an exhausted exchequer, were at a standstill. After the fire, when London was in ruins from the Tower to the Temple, strange rumours ran from mouth to mouth. There was “some kind of plot in this”; it was “a proper time for discontents”; it was the French who did it; it was the Dutch who did it; it was the Papists who did it; it was the old Republicans—a dire revenge on the eve of Cromwell’s Lucky Day. The prophecies in _Booker’s Almanack_ for the year were the topics of conversation at dinner-tables; and Lady Carteret told Pepys that pieces of charred paper had been blown by the wind as far as Cranborne,[313] and that she herself had picked up, or been given, a little bit of paper on which the words were printed: “_Time is, it is done._” In the spring of 1667, a Peace Congress was sitting at Breda, but an armistice had been refused; and then it was that de Witt had seized his moment and that the Dutch fleet sailed for the mouth of the Thames. The English were unready, their seamen mutinous, their coffers empty, their big ships laid up, for economy’s sake, in dock. Everybody knows the panic and confusion that followed—the impotent rage of a people that felt itself betrayed: Ruyter and de Witt were at hand, coming up our own beloved Thames with “a fine and orderly fleet of sixty sail.” And Monk, the Duke of Albemarle, in his shirt-sleeves, at Gravesend, was doing his best to “choke the channel.” But the Dutch were not intending to land. After they had burnt the English ships in the river, they were content to sail away again, carrying with them, as an insolent trophy, the half-burnt hull of the ship that had once been the _Naseby_, and was now the _Royal Charles_.