[1] In 1614 Viscount Lisle acknowledged Thomas Bruce as a matchmaker in a marriage planned between his son, Robert Sidney, and Elizabeth Cecil.

The house was built by architects John Thorpe and Inigo Jones in the Jacobean and Classical styles for Mary Herbert, Dowager Countess of Pembroke.

The year after performing in Thomas Carew's masque, Coelum Britannicum, Bruce received the degree of Master of Arts from the University of Oxford in 1636.

The move was successful in helping protect Murray's ownership of the estate by making sequestration by the Parliamentarians both more difficult and, given Elgin's influential position with the Scottish Presbyterians, politically undesirable.

He recounted how Bruce expressed some uneasy regret for his actions, that he had tried to avoid parliament when he could and denied having been one of the handful of lords that condemned Archbishop Laud to death.