And which of the bevy of Monmouth daughters was it that would not marry Robert Boyle?—“a beautifull and ingenious daughter,” says Evelyn; that is all that is known of her. Anne, the eldest, had in 1648 been some years married to James Hamilton, Earl of Clanbrassil; and of the six other daughters born to the Earl and Countess of Monmouth, only three seemed to have reached maturity—Elizabeth, Mary and Martha—of whom Elizabeth must have been seventeen in 1648. These three, with the Countess, his widow, were left in the Earl’s will—dated July 1659—his co-heirs. They were then all three unmarried; the Earl their father left some of the property under certain conditions relating to their being, as he quaintly expressed it, “in my life preferred in marriage or otherwise dead.” It was not till some years after the Earl of Monmouth’s death that Mary and Martha married—Mary becoming the second wife of the Earl of Desmond and Martha the second wife of the Earl of Middleton. Elizabeth died in December 1676, and was buried a few months before the Countess of Monmouth, her mother, in Rickmansworth Church. The inscription on the stone over her grave is not an ordinary one— Sacred to the Memory of yᵉ Right Honᵇˡᵉ yᵉ Lady Elizabeth Cary one of yᵉ Davghters & Co-heirs of the Right Honᵇˡᵉ Henry Lord Cary Baron of Leppington and Earle of Monmovth. Shee dyed the 14ᵗʰ day of December in the year of ovr Lord 1676 & in the 46ᵗʰ year of her age having livd all her time vnmarried bvt now expecting A joyfvll Resvrrecᵗⁱᵒⁿ and to be joynd to her onely Spouse and Saviour Jesvs Christ, lies here interd near the said Earle her Father. Was this the heroine of Boyle’s love story—the _Hermione_ whose “cold usage” sent him to write his _Seraphick Love_ at Leeze?—the woman whose views on a Marriage State found their way into his _Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus_? It will probably never be known. Whoever the lady, whatever the reason, the affair seems to have been, in modern parlance, “off” before the end of 1648. And yet, a whole year later, in December 1649, Robert Boyle was in London again, scorching his wings at the flame. “I know Frank will endeavour to persuade you,” he wrote to his sister Barrymore, “that it is the thing called Love that keeps me here”; and to Lord Broghill, at the same date, “My next shall give you an account of my transactions, my studies, and my _amours_; of the latter of which black Betty will tell you as many lies as circumstances; but hope you know too well what she is and whence she comes not to take all her stories for fictions....”