But between May and September many things of importance had happened at the Manor of Stalbridge. The Scottish engagement had come quickly to an end. It was May 9 when Dungarvan and his two brothers had left Stalbridge; and from time to time letters had been coming to the old Earl from his sons in camp near Berwick. But on Midsummer Day, about two o’clock in the morning, Broghill had clattered into the courtyard of the Manor, having ridden post-haste from the camp to bring his father the first happy news of the “Honourable Peace” concluded with the Scots. It was, of course, but a “seeming settlement,” and of short duration: the beginning, indeed, and not the end of civil war. But Dungarvan’s troop of horse was disbanded, and, according to the Earl’s diary, the English army was dissolved before poor Barrymore landed out of Ireland with his “yrish regiment of 1000 foot.” In July, George Goring joined his Lady at the Manor, and they left together for “the Bathe”. Dungarvan and his brothers were back at Stalbridge, and the King and Queen were in London again. And early in August, Sir Thomas and Lady Stafford arrived on a visit to the Earl of Cork; and the diary records “my Lady Stafford and I conferred privately between ourselves towching our children, and concluded.”
This private conference in the Stalbridge parlour decided the fate of the sweet-spirited Frank. My Lady Stafford, when she married the Earl’s “trew friend,” Sir Thomas Stafford, gentleman usher to the Queen,[69] was the widow of Sir Robert Killigrew of Hanworth in Middlesex, and the mother of several Killigrew children. One of them was the notorious Tom Killigrew, page of honour to Charles I, court wit, playwright, and boon-companion of Charles II; and another was the little Mistress Elizabeth Killigrew, “both young and handsome,”[70] and at this time one of the Queen’s maids of honour. And now Francis Boyle was to marry Elizabeth Killigrew.
It ought to be said that the old Earl, in the Stalbridge parlour conference, “held it fitter” that a contract, rather than a marriage, should be arranged; and that it was the King himself who intervened, approving of the plan of foreign travel, but adding: “We conceave that a compleate and perfect marriage wilbe most convenient & honorable for all parties.”[71]
It was precisely at this juncture that Mr. James Hamilton arrived upon the scene; and it was just two days later, as the family coaches were in readiness to drive the whole house-party to Sherborne Castle, to “kill a Buck” and dine with the Earl and Countess of Bristol, that Katharine Jones’s third baby made its premature appearance in the family circle. “But my daughter shall never be one of his Majestye’s Auditors,” said the good-natured old Earl, “since she can keepe her reckoninge noe better.” And he recalled how her sister Digby had served him the same way during that long-ago visit to Oxford.
It must have been a trying time at the Manor, with match-making, and buck-killing, and babies, and “re-edifications” all mixed up together in most admired disorder. But everybody behaved beautifully in the circumstances. Lady Stafford stood sponsor at the baby’s hurried christening, and afterwards presented the Earl of Cork with a “lyttle glass bottle of Spiritt of Amber for curing the palsy”; which looks as if Frank’s marriage-negotiations, and the baby’s birth, and the unruly Mary’s “averseness and contradicon” had altogether been a little too much for the old man.
By September, however, the guests were all gone, and the Earl was receiving letters from the King and Queen, expressing their “several wishes” for the marriage of Frank and the little maid of honour. And accordingly on September 19, Frank and Robert, under the charge of M. Marcombes, and with forty shillings each for pocket-money, were dispatched to London, on a visit to Sir Thomas and Lady Stafford. Frank, God bless him! was at sixteen to “make his addresses to the Lady,” while Robert Boyle, in his thirteenth year, looked on and philosophised.[72]
The old Earl had given Frank a letter, to be delivered into Lady Stafford’s hands—
“I do now send this bearer to offer his service unto you, and to be commanded and governed by you.”
It is a touching letter. The old man was obeying his King’s commands, but he was full of fatherly anxiety; proud, fond and dubious. He intended to spare neither care nor charge in giving Frank a noble breeding in foreign kingdoms; he would have preferred a contract; the boy’s extreme youth, his further education, the difficulty of sending him back after his marriage “to be governed by a tutor”, were all in the old man’s mind as he wrote; and he begged the prospective mother-in-law also to take them into consideration: “ffor I send him unto you as a silken Thrid to be wrought into what samples you please either flower or weed, and to be knotted or untyed as god shalbe pleased to put into your noble hart. Yet, in my best understanding, a good and sure contract is as bynding as a marriage, espetially when all intenc̃ons are reall, as myne are, and ever shalbe; which are accompanied with a strong assurance that this childe of myne will prove religious, honest, and just, though he be modest and somewhat over bashfull.... What he is, is with himself and yours....”