Sir Peter had seven sons and five daughters.  There were only three sons living in 1653; the others died young, one laying down his life for the King at Hartland in Devonshire, in some skirmish, we must now suppose, of which no trace remains.  Of those living, Sir John, the eldest son and the first baronet, married his cousin Eleanor Danvers, and lived in Gloucestershire during his father’s life.  Henry, afterwards knighted, was probably the jealous brother who lived at Chicksands with Dorothy and her father, with whom she had many skirmishes, and who wished in his kind fraternal way to see his sister well—­that is to say, wealthily—­married.  Robert is a younger brother, a year older than Dorothy, who died in September 1653, and who did not apparently live at Chicksands.  Dorothy herself was born in 1627; where, it is impossible to say.  Sir Peter was presumably at Castle Cornet at that date, but it is doubtful if Lady Osborne ever stayed there, the accommodation within its walls being straitened and primitive even for that day.  Dorothy was probably born in England, maybe at Chicksands.  Her other sisters had married and settled in various parts of England before 1653.  Her eldest sister (not Anne, as Wotton conjectures) married one Sir Thomas Peyton, a Kentish Royalist of some note.  What little could be gleaned of his actions from amongst Kentish antiquities and history, and such letters of his as lie entombed in the MSS. of the British Museum, is set down hereafter.  He appears to have acted, after her father’s death, as Dorothy’s guardian, and his name occurs more than once in the pages of her letters.

So much for the Osbornes of Chicksands; an obstinate, sturdy, quick-witted race of Cavaliers; linked by marriage to the great families of the land; aristocrats in blood and in spirit, of whom Dorothy was a worthy descendant.  Let us try now and picture for ourselves their home.  Chixon, Chikesonds, or Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, as it now stands,—­what a pleasing various art was spelling in olden time,—­was, in the reign of Edward III., a nunnery, situated then, as now, on a slight eminence, with gently rising hills at a short distance behind, and a brook running to join the river Ivel, thence the German Ocean, along the valley in front of the house.  The neighbouring scenery of Bedfordshire is on a humble scale, and concerns very little those who do not frequent it and live among it, as we must do for the next year or more.

The Priory is a low-built sacro-secular edifice, well fitted for its former service.  Its priestly denizens were turned out in Henry VIII.’s monk-hunting reign (1538).  To the joy or sorrow of the neighbourhood,—­who knows now?  Granted then to one Richard Snow, of whom the records are silent; by him sold, in Elizabeth’s reign, to Sir John Osborne, Knt., thus becoming the ancestral home of our Dorothy.  There is a crisp etching of the house in Fisher’s Collections of Bedfordshire.  The very exterior of it