Curiously enough, “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” had already come, by an even shorter process of reasoning, to the same conclusion. The Lady Ann Howard was a particular girl-friend of Anne Murray[130]—a daughter of that Murray who had been Provost of Eton before Sir Henry Wotton. Lady Ann Howard often stayed with the widowed Mrs. Murray and her daughter in their house in St. Martin’s Lane; and during the summer months of 1644 the two girls were constantly together at the house of Anne Murray’s elder sister, Lady Newton, at Charlton in Kent. It was a house surrounded by a garden with quiet walks in it. Lord Howard of Escrick’s eldest son, brother of “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.,” was often there, for he was in love with Anne Murray; and Mr. Charles Howard—a young cousin of the Howards—was often there too, for he was in love with his cousin, Lady Ann. Anne Murray has left a pretty description of the love-making that went on in that garden. They called it _amour_ in those days, and they were all ridiculously young. Lord Howard of Escrick, the father, was a Parliamentarian, and at this time very busy as one of the ten Lords who were lay members of the Westminster Assembly; but he was not too busy to come and fetch away his son and daughter when he heard what was going on. The four young people had been very happy in that garden. Anne Murray has described how once Charles Howard took his fair cousin by the hand, and “led her into another walke, and left him and I together.” “Him” was Lord Howard of Escrick’s son and heir, who straightway proposed to “I.” But Anne Murray was not allowed to say “yes”; her mother shut her up, and she was fed on bread and water. With the Lady Ann and Charles Howard it was quite different. The boy-cousin can have had no reason to conceal his feelings, unless indeed it were the prior claim of the absent Robyn. Charles Howard’s brilliant career may be read in any _Peerage_. He was a soldier and a man of parts at sixteen. He was to serve Cromwell and to become one of Cromwell’s Lords, and to be created Earl of Carlisle at the coronation of Charles II. He was the “finest gentleman”; and he won his cousin Ann, who was “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” Robert Boyle also seems to have acted his part as became “a very parfit gentle knight” and the old Earl’s Benjamin. There can be little doubt that a passage in an undated letter from Lady Ranelagh to her brother belongs to this period, and ends, for him, the episode. “You are now,” she says, “very near the hour wherein your mistress is, by giving herself to another, to set you at liberty from all the appearances you have put on of being a lover; which, though they cost you some pains and use of art, were easier, because they were but appearances.”[131]