It must have been with a strange conflict of feelings that he found himself at last in Youghal, standing before the tomb of his great father, on the very scene of the old Earl’s last struggle in the Protestant and Royalist cause. He wandered about the house and gardens of Lismore once again, and found this home of his childhood, in his father’s day “one of the noblest seats and greatest ornaments of the province of Munster,” now “ruined by the sad fate of war.”[181] The fortunes of the Boyle family were at this time at their lowest ebb, and everywhere that he went he was in the track of the brutalities of war; the very bloodstains of those last engagements could scarcely have been dried; the severed head and limbs must still have been sticking on the poles. “About the years 1652 and 1653 ... the plague and famine had swept away whole counties, that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature, either man, beast, or bird, they being either all dead, or had quit those desolate places.” And in the mountains so greatly had the number of wolves increased, that rewards were being offered for wolves’ heads.[182] But already, under Cromwell’s powerful lord-lieutenancy, and with Fleetwood as head of the Irish Government, the work of settlement and transplantation had been begun. It was in part, perhaps, the work of transplantation in Connaught—for Robert Boyle had lands there as well as in Munster—that called him to Ireland in 1652. He was back in London, on a flying visit, in the autumn of 1653, just between Cromwell’s dismissal of the _Rump_ and the sitting of the _Barebones_ Parliament; when, in fact, “This House” was “to be let—now unfurnished.”[183]