"I am so surprised with joy in the assurance of your safe arrival in these parts that I cannot tell you how great it is; nor can I consider any misfortunes or accidents which have happened, now I know that your person is in safety. If I could receive the like comfort in a reasonable hope of your brother's, I need not tell you how important it would be to my affairs. While my affection makes me impatient to see you I know the same desire will incline you, (after you have done what can only be done by your presence there,) to make what haste to me your health can endure, of which I must conjure you to have such a care as it shall be in no danger."[1] Hyde expressed himself with almost equal warmth. "For God's sake, Sir, in the first place look to your health, and then to the safety of what you have there, and lose no minute of coming away. I do not doubt you will find the welcome that will please you with the King, the Queen, and the Duke of York."[2] And Jermyn added the assurance of his own "infinite joy," and the Queen's constant friendship, concluding with {266} the appropriate prayer: "God of Heaven keep you in all your dangers, and give you at length some quiet, and the fruits of them."[3] The King gave proof of his affection by the zeal with which he prepared for his cousin's reception in Paris; an honour apparently disputed with him by Rupert's brother Edward. "The King is very active in preparing a lodging for you," writes one of the Prince's friends. "If I be not deceived he would have liked well to have it left to him, of which the Prince, your brother, as I understand, gives you some account. I will send you more by the next, knowing no more as yet, but that the King hath it in his love for you to have you near him, which certainly is fitter than to have thought of another lodging, without his knowledge."[4] But, alas! the Rupert who returned was not the Rupert who had sailed away three years before! He had, as Hyde expressed it, "endured strange hardness,"[5] and the "hardness" had left its mark upon him. He came back from his long voyage a changed and broken-hearted man. "His Highness's fire was pretty much decayed, and his judgment ripened," says Campbell; but the change went deeper than that. The Prince had failed in his undertaking; he had lost the greater part of his hard-won treasure, his ships, his men, above all his best-loved brother--and these losses had carried with them a part of his old self. The high spirits and buoyant hopefulness of earlier days were gone for ever. Gone too was something of the youthful generosity; Rupert was embittered now, harder, colder, more sardonic; a man, said Colbert, "with a natural inclination to believe evil!"[6]