[Illustration: Castrum Royale Londinense, vulgo the Tower. _The Tower in the time of Charles II._ _(from an etching by Hollar.)_] Three years after the Great Fire, Pepys gives an account of a visit he paid to his friend Sir William Coventry on the 11th of March 1669, when he went to see him in what was then called “My Lord of Northumberland’s Walk,” a place not now to be identified, which had at its end an iron shield with the Earl’s arms engraved upon it and holes in which to place a peg for every turn made by the pedestrian during his walk: this must have been the prison exercise of the so-called “Wizard Earl,” Raleigh’s friend. Pepys visited his friend Sir William Coventry very frequently when the latter was imprisoned in the Tower. Sir William had, through the medium of Henry Savile, challenged the Duke of Buckingham to a duel in March 1669, and three days after the challenge Savile was committed to the Gate House Prison, and Coventry to the Tower. Savile was a gentleman of the Duke of York’s, who, being indignant at the slight put upon him by being sent to the Gate House, asked if he might not be sent to the Tower, and his wish was granted. Pepys was unremitting in his attentions to his old friend Coventry, although by constantly seeing him he was placing himself in the black books of Charles and the Duke of York. We find him calling, on March 4th, upon Coventry in his prison in the Brick Tower when he was in charge of a son of “Major Bayly’s, one of the officers of the Ordnance,” again on the following day he visits him and finds Coventry, “with abundance of company with him.” The visits were continued on the following days until the 16th of the same month, after which Coventry was liberated. The stir his imprisonment had made, and the number of visitors who called upon him—in one day some sixty coaches stood waiting outside the Tower Gates for those who called on Sir William—had much annoyed the King, the Duke of York, and Buckingham. Sir William Coventry, of whom Bishop Burnet writes that he was “a man of great notions and eminent virtue; the best speaker in the House of Commons, and capable of bearing the chief ministry, as it was once thought he was very near it, and deserved it more than all the rest did,” after this quarrel with Buckingham and his imprisonment in the Tower retired from public affairs, going to Minster Lovel in Oxfordshire, and dying at the age of sixty, in 1686. He had been Secretary of the Admiralty, and twice member for Yarmouth, and in 1667 had been one of the Commission of the Treasury. [Illustration: _Colonel Blood._ _(From a Contemporary Engraving.)_]