Whatever was in his thoughts at this time—and it is very certain Robert Boyle had no intention of giving up the Book of Common Prayer, or any book he might wish to keep—there was no more talk of joining the King’s Army; and when at last, towards the end of the year, the state of the roads south-west of London permitted it, it was under a Parliamentarian escort that the young Squire found his way into Dorsetshire, to take possession of his own Manor of Stalbridge. Through his sister’s influence with her Parliamentarian friends, Robyn had got “early protection for his English and Irish estates.” Even with this protection, there were difficulties in front of him. There must have been a sadness about his solitary return to the Manor, empty except for the child-memories of five years before. The fair chimney-pieces and carved balustrades, the beautiful rose-coloured furniture “hastened home” for those great house-parties of 1639—must have talked to him of a chapter of his life wiped out for ever. What things had happened there! There was the arrival of Mary’s suitor, and Mary’s high averseness and contradiction, and the young man’s discomfiture and departure to the Bath: Mary was the same imperious little woman now, as then; she now had a “high averseness” to Charles Rich’s “engaging in the wars.” Here poor Lettice had drooped and complained, and George Goring, with his wounded leg, had limped up and down stairs. Then there was the “private discourse” in the Stalbridge parlour, that had settled poor Frank’s fate: Betty had refused to live with the old Earl after Mary’s marriage, and had gone her own way; she was now, nominally with the Staffords, at The Hague, the gay little courtier that she was, a Killigrew all over!... There were the paths where Mr. Dowch had discoursed Latin Syntax, and where Robyn had first come to know the cheerful and choleric Marcombes, as they talked in “familiar French” about all the European cities they were going to see. Through these gates Frank and Robyn had come “home” after the years at Eton—the “blew-perpetuana” curtains following duly. Through these gates, he and Frank and Marcombes had passed, on that memorable journey to London, where Frank was to “make his addresses” to Betty in the Savoy. All round him lay the fields where he had dreamed, and the orchards of which he had been so proud to possess the keys. And it was all his own, now—all empty and neglected: “my own ruined cottage in the country”:[125] a depressing place for a boy of eighteen to return alone to. One of the first events of the new year, 1645, the news of which could have reached Stalbridge was the execution of Laud on Tower Hill.