As a matter of fact Milton must have been thinking of his own domestic affairs when he wrote to Dick Jones, for he was to marry his second wife, Katharine Woodcock, shortly after Lady Ranelagh’s departure. But the words “to me also” carry a special meaning; for Lord Ranelagh, between whom and his wife there had long been estrangement, can have taken little part in his son’s upbringing. The mother had been left to bring up her children—to stand for them, as for Milton, in the place of “all kith and kin.” And, after all, Dick was not a good boy—he was but the son of his father.[221] Lord Broghill had been quartered lately in Edinburgh. He had remained in Ireland for some time after Cromwell had re-conquered it. He had sat in Cromwell’s Parliament of 1654 as Member for Cork, and he was Member for Cork and Edinburgh in the Parliament of 1656. In 1655 he had been appointed President of Council (Head of the Civil Establishment of the new Government in Scotland), with his headquarters in Edinburgh; and according to Baillie he was more popular in Scotland than “all the English that ever were among us.” But the Scottish atmosphere was not to Broghill’s liking, and in 1657 he was back in London, where he was to prove himself one of the most energetic of Cromwell’s supporters in the last stage of the Protectorate. His philosopher-brother, all this time, had held himself studiously aloof from political parties and “affairs.” Cromwell was approaching his zenith when Robert Boyle went to Oxford. The great warship, newly built in the spring of 1655—a ship of 1000 tons burthen, carrying 96 brass guns—had for the figurehead in her prow Oliver on horseback, trampling six nations underfoot. Scot, Irishman, Dutchman, Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman, in their several national garbs, lay under his horse’s hoofs. “A Fame,” wrote Evelyn in his _Diary_, after inspecting the ship as she lay in the dock, “held a laurel over his insulting head: the word, _God with us_.”