On reaching their once pleasant abode on the banks of the Thames, they found it dismantled and in part dilapidated. While abroad, silvering his old warming-pan and dreaming dreams of inexhaustible wealth, Dee had little dreamed of what was going on at home. Scarcely had he and his quondam associate reached the castle of Count Lasque than Nicholas Fromonds, his brother-in-law, who had been left in charge of the old house, and was to occupy it as tenant, “imbezeled,” sold, and “unduly made away” his furniture and “household stuff;” and a noisy rabble, believing that the old man had dealings with the devil, broke in, ransacked the whole place, and destroyed nearly everything that remained. Scarcely anything was left. 4,000 volumes, including the precious manuscripts, that had taken more than 40 years to get together, and had cost him £2,000, an enormous sum if we consider the value of money at that time, were scattered; though, through the efforts of his friends, some of them were afterwards recovered, as he said, “in manner out of a dunghill, in the corner of a church, wherein very many were utterly spoyled by rotting, through the raine continually for many years before falling on them, through the decayed roof of that church, lying desolate and wast at this houre.” The “rare and exquisitely-made instruments mathematicall,” the “strong and faire quadrant of five foote semi-diameter;” the two globes, on one of which “were set down divers comettes, their places and motions;” the sea compasses; the magnet-stone “of great vertue;” the “watch clock,” which measured the “360th part of an hour,” were all purloined, “piecemeal divided,” or “barbarously spoyled and with hammers smit in pieces.” Harland and Wilkinson, in their “Lancashire Folk-Lore,” say that when the house was attacked, “it was with difficulty Dee and his family escaped the fury of the rabble;” but this is a mistake, for, as previously stated, they were at the time beyond the seas, and in blissful ignorance of what was taking place.