It is a touching letter. The old man was obeying his King’s commands, but he was full of fatherly anxiety; proud, fond and dubious. He intended to spare neither care nor charge in giving Frank a noble breeding in foreign kingdoms; he would have preferred a contract; the boy’s extreme youth, his further education, the difficulty of sending him back after his marriage “to be governed by a tutor”, were all in the old man’s mind as he wrote; and he begged the prospective mother-in-law also to take them into consideration: “ffor I send him unto you as a silken Thrid to be wrought into what samples you please either flower or weed, and to be knotted or untyed as god shalbe pleased to put into your noble hart. Yet, in my best understanding, a good and sure contract is as bynding as a marriage, espetially when all intenc̃ons are reall, as myne are, and ever shalbe; which are accompanied with a strong assurance that this childe of myne will prove religious, honest, and just, though he be modest and somewhat over bashfull.... What he is, is with himself and yours....” Early in October, the Manor of Stalbridge was dismantled, and the Earl of Cork, with the rest of his family and retinue, set out in state for London. Sir Thomas Stafford had arranged to lend his old friend his House of the Savoy for the winter, “bravely furnished in all things except linen and plate,” which were being brought from Stalbridge. Lady Barrymore and Lady Katharine Jones “with their Lords and Children” were to be lodged in the adjacent houses, but were to take their meals with the Earl their father in the Savoy;[73] and, as the Lady Mary expressed it many years later, “when we were once settled there, my father, living extraordinarily high, drew a very great resort thither.”[74] Now that Kynalmeaky and Broghill were out of leading strings, their “Governour” was transferred to the two younger boys; and it was arranged that as soon as Frank and Mrs. Betty Killigrew were united in the bonds of matrimony, M. Marcombes was to carry both the boys off on their “peregrination”. Sir Henry Wotton had hinted at some such scheme when he told the Earl that Marcombes was “borne for your purpose”; and indeed M. Marcombes—the guide and teacher of Robert Boyle from his thirteenth to his eighteenth year—was a remarkable man. “He was a man”—wrote Robert Boyle in later years—“whose garb, his mien and outside, had very much of his nation, having been divers years a traveller and a soldier. He was well-fashioned, and very well knew what belonged to a gentleman.... Scholarship he wanted not, having in his greener years been a professed student in Divinity; but he was much less read in books than men, and hated pedantry as much as any of the seven deadly sins.”