All this is old reading: the fall of Clarendon is a chapter of British history. But it is not quite so well known that Lord Orrery, “dear Broghill,” the uncle of “Lory Hide’s” wife, was asked to take the seals that Clarendon had been forced to give up. According to Morrice, the Duchess of York appealed to Lord Orrery to take the seals and heal the breach between the King and the Duke, whose suspected papacy was “against him.” And then the Duke tried to persuade Lord Orrery; and lastly the King himself offered him the Chancellorship. But Broghill’s had always been a “well-armed head”; and now that he was Lord Orrery he knew his King—and he knew his gout; and he made his gout serve as an excuse for declining the honour offered him by his King. “I am a decrepit man,” he said to the Duchess of York; but he took a turn or two in his coach, in the park, planning what could be done to make the King and the Duke agree, and thinking what a pity it was that Clarendon had been so imperious—even towards the King himself. So far Morrice. Lord Orrery went back to Ireland, and Sir Orlando Bridgeman was the new Chancellor: “the man of the whole nation that is best spoken of, and will please most people,” says the fickle Pepys, who had himself, such a little while before, been “mad in love with my Lord Chancellor.” In October Lord Orrery’s new play, _The Black Prince_, was produced at the King’s Theatre. The house was “infinite full,” the King and Duke there, and not a seat to be got by Mr. Pepys in the pit, so that he was obliged to pay four shillings for a seat in the upper boxes, “the first time ever I sat in a box in my life.” In November and December both Houses were “very busy about my Lord Chancellor’s impeachment,” and Lory Hide was going about saying that if he thought his father had done only one of the things that were being said against him, he, Lory Hide, would be “the first that should call for judgment against him”, which Mr. Waller, the poet, “did say was spoke like the old Roman—like Brutus—for its greatness and worthiness.” On December 3, Henry Oldenburg, back at his work as Secretary of the Royal Society, was writing to Boyle of the “grand affair,” the wrangle of Lords and Commons over the terms of Clarendon’s impeachment. And the same letter announced that the Royal Society had “greatly applauded” Boyle’s recently communicated _Experiments of Light_; and that at the Anniversary Meeting of the Society, on St. Andrew’s Day, Boyle had been elected one of the new Council—“a very numerous meeting ... never so great a one before.” Boyle was then still in Oxford; but Evelyn, the Chancellor’s old friend, had been calling again at the great house in Piccadilly: “To visit the late Lord Chancellor. I found him in his garden at his new built Palace, sitting in his gowt wheele-chayre, and seeing the gates setting up towards the North and the fields. He look’d and spoke very disconsolately ... next morning I heard he was gon....”