Although much had altered in England during his tour abroad, Rochester had seen enough contrivances and changes of fortune in 1660–61 to alert him that he must make his own way with the Stuarts and their ministers when he returned home. In the two years before his departure, his mother had become a mistress of manipulation, setting an example for him. While her unlucky brother, Sir Walter St. John, dallied in 1660 between his old Puritan alliances and the incoming Royalists, affecting delight at “Joyous May Day” and belatedly panicked and sending a “present” of money to Lord Clarendon, the Countess of Rochester was swiftly using every resource to assure the political and financial future of the Lees and Wilmots.

She saw to it that her son, Frank Lee, sent £500 to the King before his return in May; only a month later, in June 1660, the Lees were granted all of their former rights in Cornbury and Wychwood despite their interim associations with Cromwell and the Parliamentarians. At his mother’s bidding, Frank stood for Parliament in 1661, and he was returned by the borough of Malmesbury to sit in the Cavalier Parliament where expectations were great that Loyalists would be rewarded through the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion.

Under this Act, such traitors as Lord Saye, Oliver St. John, and Sir John Danvers (deceased) lost all of their rights and possessions. Undaunted at her close ties with Danvers, who was branded a “regicide,” Lady Rochester claimed her late son Harry and his wife had lent money to Danvers that he never repaid and their heirs were thus entitled to his estates. On October 21, 1661, the King gave Danvers’s Chelsea estate in trust to Sir Ralph Verney to be held for Eleonora and Anne Lee, “the remainder of the property to be for their use, under direction of the Countess of Rochester, their grandmother and guardian.” The Countess’s family thereby controlled a vast tract of land west of London on both sides of the Thames, reaching south from Chelsea to Battersea to Wandsworth.