Evelyn was, however, not to have much longer to wait for regular official employment, as on 28 February, 1671, ‘The Treasurer acquainted me that his Majesty was graciously pleas’d to nominate me one of the Council of Forraine Plantations, and give me a salary of £500 per ann. to encourage me’. He was pleased with his appointment in connection with our Colonies, ‘a considerable honour, the others in the Council being chiefly Noblemen, and Officers of State’. In the following year the scope of this department was increased by adding the Council of Trade to its duties. He at once went to thank the Treasurer and Lord Arlington, Secretary of State, whose favour he possessed though he ‘cultivated neither of their friendships by any meane submissions’. And he failed not, of course, to kiss the King’s hand on being made one of that newly established Council. But Royalist though he was, he could not be blind to the profligacy of the Court and of the King, to whose Majesty his works were so grandiloquently dedicated. On one occasion after submitting progress of his History to the King, he says ‘thence walk’d with him thro’ St. James’s Parke to the garden, where I both saw and heard a very familiar discourse between... and Mrs. Nellie as they cal’d an impudent comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall, and... standing on ye greene walke under it. I was heartily sorry at the scene. Thence the King walked to the Dutchess of Cleaveland, another lady of pleasure, and curse of our nation’. Evelyn is usually so strict about any reference to the proprieties that it is hard to understand why this particular interview between King Charles and Nell Gwynne should be mentioned so circumstantially. As for the Court, when it went abroad, say to Newmarket, one might have ‘found ye jolly blades racing, dauncing, feasting, and revelling, more resembling a luxurious and abandon’d rout, than a Christian Court.’