ANDREW MARVELL, “A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector.” “My Lady Molkin,” Charles Rich’s wife, now lived almost always at delicious Leeze. For Mary had long ago become devout, and was surrounded by the Earl of Warwick’s chaplains. The story of her conversion has been told by herself.[212] When she was scarcely more than one-and-twenty, her little son, her only child—“which I then doated on with great fondness”—had fallen dangerously ill. In her agony of mind, Mary, like her brother Robyn in the thunderstorm, had made a vow to God. If he would restore her child to her, she would become “a new creature.” The little boy recovered, and Mary “began to find in myselfe a greate desire to go into the country, which I never remember before to have had, thinking it allways the saddest thing that could be when we were to remove.” It was indeed a great change for the little lady who had lived in “constant crowds of company” ever since she had left the care of Lady Clayton in Cork. Even after her marriage with Charles Rich and her separation from Frank’s frivolous little wife Betty, Mary had remained “stedfastly set against being a Puritan.” But after hearing the great Usher preach “against Plays,” she had given up going to see them acted, and her sister Ranelagh had encouraged her in her new course of life. Moreover, Dr. Walker, the household chaplain at Leeze, had preached “very awakingly and warmly”; and though some of the Warwick family were inclined to laugh at her, Mary pursued her own way, stealing from them into the wilderness at Leeze, and keeping to her quiet life of reading, meditation, and prayer. She was, however, at Warwick House in Holborn towards the end of 1648, after Robert Boyle had finished writing his _Seraphick Love_ at Leeze; and in Holborn Mary fell ill of the smallpox. Lady Ranelagh was then at her house in Pall Mall. She had been fortunate enough to escape smallpox, but she was not afraid to sit with her little sister, who had been isolated in Warwick House. The great Dr. Wright was in attendance—“Cromwell’s Physician,” the man afterwards chosen by the Council to be sent, with Dr. Bates and an apothecary, to consult with Dr. Goddard when Cromwell was so ill in Edinburgh. Mary was scarcely convalescent when the news was brought to her sick-room of “that barbarous and unheard-of wicked action of beheading Charles I.”[213]