again before the Council, in consequence of a petition from the young Duchess that he might be permitted to remain at York House on sufficient security.  Fairfax himself had gone to Whitehall to urge his daughter’s request and to tender the security, and Cromwell, though unable to be in the Council-room, gave him a private interview.  According to the story in the Fairfax family, it must have been an unpleasant one.  Cromwell could be stern on such a subject even at such a time and to his old commander, and so Fairfax “turned abruptly from him in the gallery at Whitehall, cocking his hat, and throwing his cloak under his arm, as he used to do when he was angry.”  Nor was this the last piece of public business of which the Protector, though never more in the Council-room, must have been directly cognisant.  Whitlocke says he visited him and was kept to dine with him on the 26th, and that he was then able to discourse on business; but, as Whitlocke makes Hampton Court the place, there must be an error as to the day.  The last baronetcy he conferred was made good on Saturday the 28th, four days after the interview with Fairfax; and even after that, between his fever-fits, he kept some grasp of affairs, and received and sent messages.  But that Saturday of the last baronetcy was a day of marked crisis.  The ague had then changed into a “double tertian,” with two fits in the twenty-four hours, both extremely weakening.  So Sunday passed, with prayers in all the churches; and then came that extraordinary Monday (Aug. 30, 1658) which lovers of coincidence have taken care to remember as the day of most tremendous hurricane that ever blew over London and England.  From morning to night the wind raged and howled, emptying the streets, unroofing houses, tearing up trees in the parks, foundering ships at sea, and taking even Flanders and the coasts of France within its angry whirl.  The storm was felt, within England, as far as Lincolnshire, where, in the vicinity of an old manor-house, a boy of fifteen years of age, named Isaac Newton, was turning it to account, as he afterwards remembered, by jumping first with the wind, and then against it, and computing its force by the difference of the distances.  Through all this storm, as it shuddered round Whitehall, shaking the doors and windows, the sovereign patient had lain on, passing from fit to fit, but talking in the intervals with the Lady Protectress or with his physicians, while Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Sterry, or some other of the preachers that were in attendance, went and came between the chamber and an adjoining room.  A certain belief that he would recover, which he had several times before expressed to the Lady Protectress and others, had not yet left him, and had communicated itself to the preachers as an assurance that their prayers were heard.  Writing to Henry Cromwell at nine o’clock that night, Thurloe could say, “The doctors are yet hopeful that he may struggle through it, though their hopes are mingled with much fear.”