Coventry; a man of great notions and eminent vertues, 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.  The Duke found, all the great seamen had a deep tincture from their education:  They both hated Popery, and loved liberty:  They were men of severe tempers, and kept good discipline.  But in order to the putting the fleet into more confident hands, the Duke began a method of sending pages of honour, and other young persons of quality, to be bred to the sea.  And these were put in command, as soon as they were capable of it, if not sooner.  This discouraged many of the old seamen, when they saw in what a channel advancement was like to go; who upon that left the service, and went and commanded merchantmen.  By this means the vertue and discipline of the navy is much lost.  It is true, we have a breed of many gallant men, who do distinguish themselves in action.  But it is thought, the Nation has suffered much by the vices and disorders of those Captains, who have risen by their quality, more than by merit or service.

76.

By BURNET.

He was a Prince that seemed made for greater things, than will be found in the course of his Life, more particularly of his Reign:  He was esteemed in the former parts of his Life, a Man of great Courage, as he was quite thro’ it a man of great application to business:  He had no vivacity of thought, invention or expression:  But he had a good judgment, where his Religion or his Education gave him not a biass, which it did very often:  He was bred with strange Notions of the Obedience due to Princes, and came to take up as strange ones, of the Submission due to Priests:  He was naturally a man of truth, fidelity, and justice:  But his Religion was so infused in him, and he was so managed in it by his Priests, that the Principles which Nature had laid in him, had little power over him, when the concerns of his Church stood in the way:  He was a gentle Master, and was very easy to all who came near him:  yet he was not so apt to pardon, as one ought to be, that is the Vicegerent of that God, who is slow to anger, and ready to forgive:  He had no personal Vices but of one sort:  He was still wandring from one Amour to another, yet he had a real sense of Sin, and was ashamed of it:  But Priests know how to engage Princes more entirely into their interests, by making them compound for their Sins, by a great zeal for Holy Church, as they call it.  In a word, if it had not been for his Popery, he would have been, if not a great yet a good Prince.  By what I once knew of him, and by what I saw him afterwards carried to, I grew more confirmed in the very bad opinion, which I was always apt to have, of the Intrigues of the Popish Clergy, and of the Confessors of Kings:  He was undone by them, and was their Martyr, so that they ought to bear the chief load of all the errors of his inglorious Reign, and of its fatal Catastrophe.  He had the Funeral which he himself had desired, private, and without any sort of Ceremony.