From 1591 on, the Bishop was experiencing the alternate "smiles and frowns of royalty" in London; about the time that John left college more particularly the frowns. For, John's mother having died about the end of 1592, the Bishop had, in 1595, most unwisely married Maria (daughter of John Giffard of Weston-under-Edge in Gloucestershire), the relict of a few months' standing of Sir Richard Baker of Sissinghurst in Kent. The Bishop's acquaintance with this second wife, as well as with the first, probably derived from his father's incumbency as Vicar of the church in Cranbrook, Kent, which began in 1555 and was still existing as late as 1574. The young Richard would often have shuddered as a child before Bloody Baker's Prison with its iron-barred windows glowering from the parish church, for Sir John hated the primitive and pious Anabaptists who had taken up their abode about Cranbrook, and he hunted them down;[40] and Richard would, as a lad, have walked the two miles across the clayey fields and through the low-lying woods with his father to the stately manor house, built by old Sir John Baker himself in the time of Edward VI, and have seen that distinguished personage who had been Attorney-General and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Henry VIII,--and who as may be recalled was one of that Council of State, in 1553, which ratified and signed Edward VI's 'devise for the succession' making Lady Jane Grey inheritress of the crown. And when young Richard returned from his presidency of Bene't College, in 1573, to Cranbrook to marry Elizabeth Holland, he would have renewed acquaintance with Sir Richard, who had succeeded the "bloody" Sir John as master of Sissinghurst, sixteen years before. He may for all we know have been present at the entertainment which that same year Sir Richard made for Queen Elizabeth. Maria Giffard was twenty-four years old, then. Whether she was yet Lady Baker we do not know--but it is probable; and we may be sure that on his various visits to Cranbrook, the rising dean and bishop had frequent opportunity to meet her at Sissinghurst before his own wife's death, or the death of Sir Richard in 1594. Since the sister of Sir Richard Baker, Cicely, was already the wife of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, when, in 1586-7, Buckhurst and Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, were thrown together at Fotheringay, it is not unlikely that the closer association between the Fletchers and Lady Buckhurst's sister-in-law of Sissinghurst grew out of this alliance of the Sackvilles with the Bakers. [Illustration: THOMAS SACKVILLE, FIRST EARL OF DORSET From the portrait in the possession of Lord Sackville, at Knole Park]