No: Mary Boyle, at fourteen, was not disposed to change her condition; and so it was with a ready-made aversion to matrimony that, in the summer of 1639, she received Mr. James Hamilton,[68] son and heir of Lord Clandeboye, who arrived by paternal invitation at the Manor of Stalbridge. The Earl of Cork and Lord Clandeboye had been for some time in correspondence about this alliance; and Mr. James Hamilton, immediately on his return from his foreign travels, which had included “a general survey” of Italy and France, had sent his own man to Stalbridge with letters heralding his arrival, and had followed a day or two later, travelling in some state, with his tutor and other attendants. There seems to have been no fault to find with the young man. According to Lord Clandeboye, his son was “a hater of vice, and a Lover of Noble partes, and of vertuous industries”; but all the same Mary Boyle expressed, in no measured terms, “a very high averseness and contradicon” to her father’s commands. She would have nothing to say to this suitor for her little fourteen-year-old hand; and with much chagrin the Earl was obliged to write in his diary, “being refused in marriadge by my unrewly daughter Mary, he departed my hows the second of September to the Bathe.” But between May and September many things of importance had happened at the Manor of Stalbridge. The Scottish engagement had come quickly to an end. It was May 9 when Dungarvan and his two brothers had left Stalbridge; and from time to time letters had been coming to the old Earl from his sons in camp near Berwick. But on Midsummer Day, about two o’clock in the morning, Broghill had clattered into the courtyard of the Manor, having ridden post-haste from the camp to bring his father the first happy news of the “Honourable Peace” concluded with the Scots. It was, of course, but a “seeming settlement,” and of short duration: the beginning, indeed, and not the end of civil war. But Dungarvan’s troop of horse was disbanded, and, according to the Earl’s diary, the English army was dissolved before poor Barrymore landed out of Ireland with his “yrish regiment of 1000 foot.” In July, George Goring joined his Lady at the Manor, and they left together for “the Bathe”. Dungarvan and his brothers were back at Stalbridge, and the King and Queen were in London again. And early in August, Sir Thomas and Lady Stafford arrived on a visit to the Earl of Cork; and the diary records “my Lady Stafford and I conferred privately between ourselves towching our children, _and concluded_.”