This private conference in the Stalbridge parlour decided the fate of the sweet-spirited Frank. My Lady Stafford, when she married the Earl’s “trew friend,” Sir Thomas Stafford, gentleman usher to the Queen,[69] was the widow of Sir Robert Killigrew of Hanworth in Middlesex, and the mother of several Killigrew children. One of them was the notorious Tom Killigrew, page of honour to Charles I, court wit, playwright, and boon-companion of Charles II; and another was the little Mistress Elizabeth Killigrew, “both young and handsome,”[70] and at this time one of the Queen’s maids of honour. And now Francis Boyle was to marry Elizabeth Killigrew. It ought to be said that the old Earl, in the Stalbridge parlour conference, “held it fitter” that a contract, rather than a marriage, should be arranged; and that it was the King himself who intervened, approving of the plan of foreign travel, but adding: “We conceave that a compleate and perfect marriage wilbe most convenient & honorable for all parties.”[71] It was precisely at this juncture that Mr. James Hamilton arrived upon the scene; and it was just two days later, as the family coaches were in readiness to drive the whole house-party to Sherborne Castle, to “kill a Buck” and dine with the Earl and Countess of Bristol, that Katharine Jones’s third baby made its premature appearance in the family circle. “But my daughter shall never be one of his Majestye’s Auditors,” said the good-natured old Earl, “since she can keepe her reckoninge noe better.” And he recalled how her sister Digby had served him the same way during that long-ago visit to Oxford. It must have been a trying time at the Manor, with match-making, and buck-killing, and babies, and “re-edifications” all mixed up together in most admired disorder. But everybody behaved beautifully in the circumstances. Lady Stafford stood sponsor at the baby’s hurried christening, and afterwards presented the Earl of Cork with a “lyttle glass bottle of Spiritt of Amber for curing the palsy”; which looks as if Frank’s marriage-negotiations, and the baby’s birth, and the unruly Mary’s “averseness and contradicon” had altogether been a little too much for the old man. By September, however, the guests were all gone, and the Earl was receiving letters from the King and Queen, expressing their “several wishes” for the marriage of Frank and the little maid of honour. And accordingly on September 19, Frank and Robert, under the charge of M. Marcombes, and with forty shillings each for pocket-money, were dispatched to London, on a visit to Sir Thomas and Lady Stafford. Frank, God bless him! was at sixteen to “make his addresses to the Lady,” while Robert Boyle, in his thirteenth year, looked on and philosophised.[72] The old Earl had given Frank a letter, to be delivered into Lady Stafford’s hands— “I do now send this bearer to offer his service unto you, and to be commanded and governed by you.”