The friendship so pleasantly begun was to last for nearly forty years. It is to be remembered that Robert Boyle’s mother and Mrs. Evelyn’s family[223] were related; that Sayes Court had belonged to the Brownes, and had come to Evelyn through his wife; and that little Hodge, Robert Boyle’s eldest brother, had many years before died at Sayes Court, and been buried in Deptford Church. Boyle and Evelyn were men of very different natures; but they had memories, sympathies, and friends in common. Their intercourse soon grew “reciprocal and familiar”; and it is to Evelyn we owe the finest and most intimate description that exists of Robert Boyle.[224] Boyle was to return to Experimental Philosophy at Oxford, where the lion and the lamb proverbially lay down together then as now;—the lion, as it has been wittily said, sometimes with the lamb in its inside. And Evelyn and his family at Sayes Court were to live on as pleasantly as possible, “the times considered.” In 1657 the Protectorate was in its last stage. In June, Cromwell was “his Highness,” a monarch in arbitrariness and splendour, with all the formalities of purple velvet, Bible, sword, and sceptre—everything, indeed, except the Crown, and a good many things that the Crown itself might not have had. Lord Broghill, back in London, and one of Cromwell’s House of Lords, had been one of the prime movers in the _Petition and Advice_, which pressed Cromwell to accept the Kingship; and report says, that when that failed, Broghill’s “well-armed head” was filled with an even bolder project, an alliance between Cromwell’s youngest daughter Frances and Charles II. This, too, came to nothing; and in November 1657 Cromwell’s daughter Frances was married to the old Earl of Warwick’s grandson, son of Charles Rich’s elder brother. This boy died in the sickly spring of 1658, four months after his wedding; and the old Earl of Warwick’s death in April left Charles Rich heir-presumptive to the Earldom of Warwick.