Towards the close of a long and eventful career, in 1653 Robert Hammond purchased the manor of Willen. Born in 1621, he married Mary, the sixth and youngest daughter of the famed ‘Patriot’, John Hampden, and during the Civil War became a Colonel in the Parliamentary army. In fact he took an active part in many of the military engagements, and at the close of hostilities in 1647 he was appointed Governor of the Isle of Wight. There he would be entrusted with the custody of the captured King Charles I at Carisbrooke Castle, and to this appointment the monarch seemed quite agreeable, writing that ‘I am daily more and more satisfied with this governor.’ Yet chiefly because Hammond was obliged to keep the King in a close confinement, this accord would not endure, and by the following year Charles had penned a revised opinion, stating that ‘the devil cannot outgo him neither in malice nor cunning.’ On November 29th, 1648, Hammond’s responsibilities then came to an end, and following the monarch’s execution he accompanied Oliver Cromwell on a visit to Ireland. There he was made a Parliamentary Commissioner, but shortly after his purchase of the Willen estate in 1654 he died from a violent fever in Dublin, the city in which he had settled. He was buried with great pomp and ceremony, and Willen duly passed to his widow who, in 1656, married Sir John Hobart, of Blickling. It was by her three daughters that Willen was then sold in 1672 to Dr. Richard Busby, the famed headmaster of Westminster School.