However pleasant the visit to Moore Park may have been, it was soon over. Early in August Robert Boyle was staying with his sister Mary at the Earl of Warwick’s house of Leeze, in Essex, and there finishing his treatise on “Seraphick Love.” It purported to be written “by one young gentleman to another”—to that _Lindamor_, in fact, the “learned youth both well-born and well-bred,” who makes the fourth of the little quartet in the _Reflections_. The manuscript was handed, “almost sheet by sheet,” as it was written, to the enthusiastic Mary; and then, having been, after the fashion of the day, circulated among a favoured few, it was laid carefully by, among the young Squire’s other papers. And in September he was back again at Stalbridge. The last months of that fateful year must have been, in many a quiet English manor, the most dismal and depressing ever lived through. In his seclusion, with pen and ink, limbecks and recipients, Robert Boyle was to employ the months as best he could. To his Manor, set among its autumn orchards, reached by its stone-paved way between rows of elm-trees, there must have come from week to week, by friend or messenger or weekly news-sheet, the straggling tidings of those events that one after the other were hurrying the Sovereign to his doom. The second civil war had been trampled out; Cromwell’s great battle of Preston had been fought and Hamilton taken prisoner, while Robert Boyle was still at “delicious Leeze,” perfecting his treatise on “Seraphick Love.” And before he left Leeze there had come the news of the surrender of Colchester to Fairfax, and the shooting of the two Royalist leaders. In September the Parliamentary Commissioners were in the Isle of Wight; and through the shortening days of October and November even Dorsetshire and its “bye-paths of intelligence” must have been stirred by the doings of Parliament, the “high and fierce” debate that followed the Army Remonstrance, and the _coup d’état_ of the King’s abduction from the Isle of Wight to the melancholy Hurst Castle on the Hampshire mainland. And then—Fairfax was at Whitehall; the Army was in possession of London. December came, and with it the last grim struggle of Parliament and Army for the disposition of the person of the Sovereign. The King was brought to Windsor; and, Christmas over, Lords and Commons were in the last hand-grips. The King’s trial had begun: the trial of “Charles Stuart, King of England,” in Westminster Hall, where Strafford had been tried and sentenced seven years before. How soon did the news of the King’s sentence reach the Manor of Stalbridge? “This Court doth adjudge that the said Charles Stuart, as a Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.”