Ere long, however, the hopeless, weary struggle reached its end. The king threw himself on the mercy of his Scottish army, who for £400,000 gave him up to Parliament, and he was made a prisoner. Rupert found his way to France, and later on he joined the Prince of Wales in getting together a small fleet which it was proposed to send to Ireland. He entered enthusiastically into this new career. "The royal cause," he said, "is now at sea." Far and wide on the ocean he was to be heard of with his ships, round Spain, Portugal, in the Mediterranean and the West Indies, near Azores and Cape Verde, seizing wherever he could find them the treasure-ships belonging to the English Parliament. His name was a terror by sea as it had been by land, and the adventurous life was quite according to his liking. With the Restoration he came back to England, and Charles settled on him an allowance of £4000 a year, besides giving him an important command in the fleet. But no real scope was allowed him for his powers, and Charles, with all his foreign intrigues, found Rupert too inconveniently straightforward and resolute. So the end of his life was a disappointment, though when action of one sort was denied him, his eager brain turned to science, chemistry, and inventions. Most of his old friends had vanished; his mother had died many years before, protected and comforted to the last by Lord Craven, who had taken for a motto the words "For God and for Her;" and of his sisters, one was an abbess, the other married to the Elector of Hanover. He lived alone and quietly at his house in Spring Gardens at the top of Whitehall, and when he died, comparatively young, he was "generally lamented for an honest, brave, true-hearted man, whose life had embraced innumerable toils, and a variety of noble actions by land and by sea." "It is an infinite pity he is not employed according to his genius," a friend of his mother’s had written to her long years before. "He is full of spirit and action, and may be compared to steel, which is the commanding metal if it be rightly tempered and disposed. Whatever he wills, he wills vehemently." And this criticism, which was true of him up to the day he died, contains the essence of his successes and of his failures.