Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

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HAMPTON COURT
to the place of sad memories, made no change in the
gaiety of their life at Hampton Court ; and the
months they had spent there were concluded by a
" triumphal progress " down the Thames to Whitehall
on the 23rd of August 1662. From that time
Charles did not live there constantly, but he often
paid visits, and the royal apartments were always
ready for him in case of a sudden appearance. During
the plague the court remained there for a month,
during which Pepys in his diary records a visit.
Charles's court here kept up something of the old
stateliness, with all the modern frivolity. Many of
the officers of the household were persons who had
suffered during the war and the proscription, and were
full of memories of the old court ceremonial, and of
the antique fashions that the young Cavaliers mocked
at. Tobie Rustat, famous as a benefactor to the
Universities, — not least to S. John's College, Oxford,
where the " loyal lectures " he founded for Royal Oak
day and the martyrdom of King Charles were continued
till the present century — was under-housekeeper
of the Palace, as well as yeoman of the robes to the
King. Old Cavaliers, men who had fought at Edgehill
and at Naseby, still came, though so often in vain,
to make obeisance to the sovereign and to wonder at
the new Frenchified manners, and the sad laxity of
morals which my Lord Chancellor Clarendon,himself
the martyred King's adviser twenty years ago, so much
deplored.