The new Council having been constituted, and having begun to hold its meetings twice or thrice a week, the administration of affairs, home and foreign, was free to go on, in his Highness's hands and the Council's, without farther Parliamentary interruption till Jan. 20, 1657-8. Foreign affairs may here have the precedence. Blake's grand blow at the Spaniard in Santa Cruz Bay was still in all people's minds, and they were looking for the return of that hero, recalled as he had been, June 10, either for honourable repose in his battered and enfeebled state after three years at sea, or for further employment nearer home in connexion with the French-English alliance and the Flanders expedition. He was never, alas! to set foot in England. Off Plymouth, as his fleet was touching the shores, he died, utterly worn out with scurvy and dropsy, Aug. 7, 1657, aged fifty-eight. As the news spread, there was great sorrow; and on the 13th of August it was ordered by the Council, "That the Commissioners for the Admiralty and Navy do forthwith give order for the interment of General Blake in the Abbey Church at Westminster, and for all things requisite to be prepared for the funeral of General Blake in such sort as was done for the funeral of General Deane, and that they give direction for the preparing of Greenwich House for the reception of the body of General Blake, in order to his funeral." The body, having been embalmed, lay at Greenwich till Sept. 4, when it was brought up the Thames with all funereal pomp, mourning hangings on the barges and the wherries all the way, and so buried in Henry the Seventh's chapel, the Council, the great Army officers, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, and other dignitaries standing round, while a multitude thronged outside. It was observed that Lord Lambert had made a point of being present, as if to signify that the great sailor and he had always understood each other. How Blake would have farther comported himself had he lived no one really knows. At sea he had made it a principle to abstain from party-politics. "When news was brought him of a metamorphosis in the State at home, he would then encourage the seamen to be most vigilant abroad; for, said he, 'tis not our duty to mind State-affairs, but to keep foreigners from fooling us." The idea among the ultra-Republicans of using Blake's popularity to undermine Cromwell had long come to nothing.[1] [Footnote 1: Council Order Books, Aug. 13, 1657: Godwin, IV. 420-421; Wood's Fasti, I. 371.]