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Title: Robert Boyle
A biography
Author: Flora Masson
Release date: March 23, 2024 [eBook #73234]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Constable & Company Ltd, 1914
Credits: Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT BOYLE ***
ROBERT BOYLE
[Illustration: THE HONOURABLE ROBERT BOYLE
_From a painting by Kerseboom, in the rooms of the Royal Society._]
ROBERT BOYLE
_A BIOGRAPHY_
BY
FLORA MASSON
LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1914
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For permission to quote from the Lismore Papers (as edited by Grosart, 10
vols.), I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Duke of Devonshire.
I have also to thank Lady Verney for allowing me to quote from the
Verney Memoirs, and Sir William Ramsay for permission to quote from
his Presidential Address delivered to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, Portsmouth 1911. To the kindness of Sir Archibald
Geikie I owe the permission to reproduce the portrait of Robert Boyle in
possession of the Royal Society of London.
I remember with special gratitude the kind counsel given me, in the last
months of his life, by the late Professor Edward Dowden.
My thanks are due, for advice and help, to Miss Elizabeth Dowden, Mr.
Richard Bagwell, Mr. Irvine Masson, Mrs. Millar, Mrs. Townshend, and Mr.
James Penrose.
I gratefully acknowledge the unfailing courtesy and helpfulness of the
Librarians of the Edinburgh Public Library, the Signet Library, the
University Library, and the Library of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
FLORA MASSON.
_Edinburgh, March 1914._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I HIS BIRTH AND FAMILY 1
II AN IRISH CHILDHOOD 15
III SCHOOLDAYS AT ETON 34
IV THE MANOR OF STALBRIDGE 55
V THE HOUSE OF THE SAVOY 70
VI ROBYN GOES ABROAD 85
VII THE DEBACLE 99
VIII IN ENGLAND AGAIN 122
IX THE DEARE SQUIRE 140
X A KIND OF ELYSIUM 159
XI HERMETIC THOUGHTS 170
XII OXFORD: A LEARNED JUNTO 189
XIII POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY 206
XIV THE RESTORATION AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY 226
XV THE PLAGUE AND THE FIRE 246
XVI A NEW LONDON 267
XVII THE HOUSE IN PALL MALL 282
INDEX 311
ROBERT BOYLE
CHAPTER I
HIS BIRTH AND FAMILY
“... Not needlessly to confound the herald with the historian,
and begin a relation with a pedigree....”—ROBERT BOYLE’S
_Philaretus_.
“My wife, God ever be praised, was about 3 of the clock in thafternoon of
this day, the sign in gemini, libra, Safely delivered of her seaventh son
at Lismoor: God bless him, for his name is Robert Boyle.”[1]
So runs the entry, under the date January 25, 1626 (7), in the private
diary of the great Earl of Cork, a manuscript preserved at Lismore to
this day. When he wrote those words, the Earl was already a man of
sixty, who, after forty strenuous years, was nearing the zenith of his
great fortunes. The Countess—his second wife—was twenty years younger:
she had been just seventeen when he married her, and he a widower of
thirty-seven. They had been married three-and-twenty years, and in those
three-and-twenty years, at one or other of their roughly splendid Irish
homes, seven daughters and seven sons had been born to them.
Their earliest home had been the College house of Youghal, “re-edified”
to suit the Earl’s requirements; but in these later years they were
used to divide their time travelling in state, with coaches and horses
and a mounted retinue, between Youghal and the town house in Dublin
and this other house of Lismore, already “one of the noblest seats in
the province of Munster.”[2] And the Earl was still busy “re-edifying”
this also,—building stables and coach-houses, pigeon-houses and
slaughter-houses, storing the fishponds in his park with young carp and
tench from Amsterdam, and “compassing” his orchards and terraced gardens
with a huge turreted wall,—when this fourteenth child, the “Robyn” that
was to prove the greatest of all his children, was born at Lismore.
* * * * *
The story of how Mr. Richard Boyle became the great Earl of Cork is one
of the most brilliant romances of the British Peerage. It has been often
told, nowhere more graphically than by the Earl himself, in his brief
_True Remembrances_.[3] So triumphant and so circumstantial, indeed,
are the Earl’s “Remembrances,” that many generations of ordinary-minded
people have made the mistake of thinking they cannot possibly be true.
Only of recent years, since, in fact, the Earl’s own letters and the
Earl’s own private diary, kept to within a few days of his death, have
been given to the world under the title of the Lismore Papers, has the
cloud of incredulity rolled aside; and the character of this man stands
out to-day in its integrity, to use his own words, “as cleer as the son
at high noon.”[4]
It is the character of a great Englishman, one of Elizabeth’s
soldier-statesmen and merchant-adventurers: a man typically Elizabethan
in his virtues and his faults, though he was to live far into the
unhappy reign of Charles I. Passionately Protestant, passionately
Royalist, a fine blend of the astute and the ingenuous, with strong
family affections, splendid ambitions and schemes of statecraft, he was
relentless in his prejudices and enmities, indomitably self-sufficient,
and with as much vitality in his little finger as may be found in a whole
parliamentary Bench to-day. He raised himself from “very inconsiderable
beginnings” to be one of the greatest subjects of the realm, one of the
greatest Englishmen of his day.
He had been born at Canterbury, the second son of the second son of
a country squire—one of the Boyles of Herefordshire. His father had
migrated into Kent, married a daughter of Robert Naylor of Canterbury,
and settled at Preston, near Faversham. Here, when Richard was ten
years old, his father died, leaving his widow to bring up her family
of two daughters and three sons on a modest income as best she could.
Mrs. Boyle had managed very well. The eldest son, John, and Richard,
the second, were sent to the King’s School, Canterbury, and from there
(Richard with a scholarship) to Bennet College, Cambridge.[5] John Boyle
duly took Orders, while Richard, the cleverer younger brother, went up
to London to study law. At one-and-twenty he seems to have been settled
in chambers in the Middle Temple, clerk to Sir Richard Manwood, Chief
Baron of the Exchequer. At his mother’s death (Roger Boyle and Joan
Naylor his wife were buried in Preston Parish Church), Richard Boyle
decided that he would never “raise a fortune” in the Middle Temple, and
must “travel into foreign kingdoms,” and “gain learning, knowledge, and
experience abroad in the world.” And the foreign kingdom toward which
he turned his strenuous young face was Ireland: Ireland in the reign of
Elizabeth, in the year of the Armada. It was five-and-twenty years since
the Irish chieftain Shan O’Neil had presented himself at Elizabeth’s
Court, to be gazed at by peers and ambassadors and bishops as if he
were “some wild animal of the desert.”[6] Shan O’Neil had stalked into
the Queen’s presence, “his saffron mantle sweeping round and round him,
his hair curling on his back and clipped short below the eyes, which
gleamed under it with a grey lustre, burning fierce and cruel.”[7] And
behind him were his bare-headed, fair-haired Galloglasse, clad in their
shirts of mail and wolfskins, with their short, broad battle-axes in
their hands. The chieftain had flung himself upon his face before the
Queen with protestations of loyalty and fair intention; and all those
five-and-twenty years the attitude of Ireland had been one of submission
and protestation, flanked and backed by wolfskins, shirts of mail and
battle-axes. The Desmond Rebellion had been quelled amid horrors. It
was still a “savadge nation”[8] this, to which Mr. Richard Boyle was
setting forth: an Ireland of primeval forests and papal churchlands, of
vivid pastures and peel towers and untamed Erse-speaking tribes. With
its ores and timber, its grasslands and salmon-fishing, its fine ports,
and, above all, its proximity to Elizabethan England, it was a land
teeming with industrial possibilities; but it bristled and whispered with
race-hatred and creed-hatred, with persecution and conspiracy. This was
the Ireland that was being eagerly peopled and exploited and parcelled
out by Elizabethan Englishmen.
And so, on Midsummer Eve 1588, another clever young man arrived in
Dublin. He had twenty-seven pounds and three shillings[9] in his
possession, and on his wrist and finger he wore the two “tokens” left him
by his dead Kentish mother—the gold bracelet on his wrist, worth about
£10, and the diamond ring on his finger, the “happy, lucky and fortunate
stone” that was to stay there till his death, and be left an heirloom to
his son’s son and successive generations of the great Boyle family.
The Earl never forgot the accoutrements and the various suits of clothes
with which he started in life when, at two-and-twenty, he shut the door
of his chambers in the Middle Temple behind him: “A taffety doublet cut
with and upon taffety; a pair of black velvet breeches laced, a new Milan
fustian suit, laced and cut upon taffety, two cloaks, competent linen
and necessaries, with my rapier and dagger.” And he must have carried
letters of introduction also, which procured the young lawyer employment
and influential friends; for Mr. Richard Boyle was very soon launched
on Dublin society, and was on friendly terms with at least two men who
hailed from his own county of Kent, Sir Edward Moore, of Mellifont,
in Meath, and Sir Anthony St. Leger, who was living in Dublin. It is
more than possible that he met also at this time the poet Spenser;
for Dublin must have been Spenser’s headquarters since 1580, when he
came over to Ireland as Secretary to the Lord Deputy. Spenser, who it
is believed had been through all the horrors of the Desmond Rebellion,
was, in 1588, after having held various appointments, leaving Dublin to
take up his bachelor abode at Kilcolman, a peel tower abandoned by the
Desmonds and assigned, with some thousands of acres around it, to this
English poet-politician, already known as the author of the _Shepheard’s
Calendar_. At Kilcolman, in this peel tower in a wild wooded glen among
the Galtee Hills, about thirty miles south of Limerick, Sir Walter
Raleigh came to stay with Spenser when he too was in Ireland, inspecting
the vast Irish estates that had been assigned to him. It was there they
read their poems aloud to each other, and that Raleigh persuaded Spenser
to go back with him to London, together to offer their poems to the
Queen. During the first year or two, therefore, of Boyle’s sojourn in
Ireland, while he was working his way into the notice of Englishmen of
influence there, Spenser was in London, being lionised as the Poet of
Poets, the author of the first three books of the _Faerie Queene_.
When Spenser returned to Ireland with a royal pension as Clerk to the
Council of the Province of Munster, Richard Boyle was already clerk, or
deputy, to the “Escheator General,” busy adjusting the claims of the
Crown to “escheated” Irish lands and titles—travelling about, and making
enemies of all people who did not get exactly what they wanted out of the
Escheator or the Escheator’s clerk. Both Boyle’s sisters had joined him
in Ireland, and both were soon to marry husbands there; and somewhere
about this time his cousin, Elizabeth Boyle, daughter of James Boyle, of
the Greyfriars in Hereford, was in Ireland, and the poet Spenser, back
from his London visit, the literary hero of the hour, met and fell in
love with Boyle’s cousin Elizabeth. She is the lady of the _Amoretti_
and _Epithalamium_; “my beautifullest bride,” with the “sunshyny face,”
and the “long, loose, yellow locks lyke golden wyre,” whose name the
poet-lover was to trace in the yellow Irish sands, and of whom he sang so
proudly—
“Tell me, ye merchants’ daughters, did you see
So fayre a creature in your town before, ...?”
They were married in the Cathedral of Cork in the summer of 1594. A few
months later, Spenser turned his face Londonwards again, taking with him
presumably his English wife, and certainly the other three books of his
_Faerie Queene_. He was to return to Ireland once again.
In 1595, a year after Spenser’s marriage to Elizabeth Boyle, Mr. Richard
Boyle married a young Limerick lady, Joan Apsley, one of the two
daughters and co-heirs of Mr. William Apsley, a member of the Council of
Munster. Joan Apsley’s five hundred a year in Irish lands, “so goodly
and commodious a soyle,”[10] was to be the foundation of Mr. Boyle’s
fortunes. She left it all to him when she died, at Mallow, “in travail
with her first child,” and was buried in Buttevant Church with her little
stillborn son in her arms.
After his wife’s death, Richard Boyle, now a landowner and a man of
some importance in Munster, had his time full fighting his personal
enemies. There were powerful men among them, and by his own account they
“all joined together, by their lies, complaining against me to Queen
Elizabeth.” It was impossible, they said, he could have advanced so
rapidly by honest means. They accordingly accused him of embezzlement
and forgery, and, because some of his wife’s relations were well-known
Catholics, they accused him—staunch Protestant as he was—of acquiring
lands with Spanish gold, of harbouring priests, and being himself a
papist in disguise. They even accused him of stealing a horse. For a
time he was actually kept in a Dublin prison, and when by a kind of
fluke he found the prison doors opened to him, and was intending to
“take shipping,” and to “justify” himself before the Queen in London,
the General Rebellion of Munster broke out. In the debacle, Mr. Richard
Boyle—his wife’s lands wasted and his moneys gone—did manage to escape to
England. And so did the poet Spenser—Spenser, marked of the rebels, the
author not only of the _Faerie Queene_, but of the _View of the Present
State of Ireland_. Why did Spenser ever return to Ireland to undertake
the duties of Sheriff of Cork? Spenser and his wife and children were at
Kilcolman when the Rebellion broke out. They fled for their lives; and
the old peel tower of the Desmonds was burnt to the ground. One of their
babies, Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden, was left behind, and
perished in the flames.
Spenser was to die in poverty in London, to be buried near to Chaucer in
Westminster Abbey, the poet-mourners flinging their pens into his grave.
Spenser’s wife—Mr. Richard Boyle’s cousin—was to live on in Ireland, to
bring up her children (her son Peregrine was the “Joy of her Life”) and
to marry yet twice again. Twice her great kinsman saw his cousin’s hand
“given in marriage.” She had her compensations in life—but there never
was another _Epithalamium_.
Arrived in London, Mr. Richard Boyle, through the friendly offices of
Anthony Bacon, whom he had known at Cambridge, was presented to the
new Lord Deputy, the Earl of Essex, then just starting for Ireland.
Queen Elizabeth may have had her reasons for clapping Mr. Boyle so
unceremoniously into the gate-house of the Tower just as he was thinking
of going back to his old Chambers in the Middle Temple. It is possible
she was waiting for her new Deputy’s reports from Ireland. In due time
Richard Boyle was fetched before her, and he did “justify” himself to his
Sovereign. Her splendid royal words were burnt in upon his memory to the
last day of his life:[11]—
“By God’s death, these are but inventions against this young man.” And
again: “We find him to be a man fit to be employed by ourselves.”
Boyle was received at Court, and when he was sent back to Ireland it was
as Clerk to the Council of Munster, the very post that Spenser had held.
He bought Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship, the _Pilgrim_, freighted her with
victuals and ammunition, sailed in her, “by long seas” to Carrickfoyle,
and took up his new work under the splendid Presidentship of Sir George
Carew. His wife’s lands were recovered: “Richard Boyle of Galbaly in
the County of Limerick, Gent.,” waited on Carew through all the siege
of Kinsale, and was employed by him to carry the news of victory to
the Queen in London. There he was the guest of Sir Robert Cecil, “then
principal secretary,” in his house in the Strand, and was taken by Cecil
next morning to Court, and into the bedchamber of her Majesty, “who
remembered me, calling me by name, and giving me her hand to kiss.”[12]
Quickly back in Ireland, Richard Boyle became the Lord President’s
right hand in all his strenuous services to the Crown: in later years
one of the few literary treasures in the great Earl’s “studdie” was the
copy of Carew’s _Hibernia Pacata_ given him by his Chief. It was Carew
who sent him in 1602 to London, furnished with letters to Cecil and to
Sir Walter Raleigh, recommending him as a fit purchaser of the Raleigh
Estates in Ireland. The thousands of acres in the counties of Cork and
Waterford known as the “Raleigh-Desmond Estates” were then and there,
in London, bought from Sir Walter Raleigh “at a very low rate.” In
Richard Boyle’s hands, the waste lands that to Raleigh had been a source
of anxiety and money loss were to become the best “settled” and most
prosperous territory in Ireland, and a source of wealth and power to
him who made them so. For Richard Boyle was not only a great landowner,
he was a shrewd man of business, a capitalist and a large employer of
labour. It was, says Grosart, “his perseverance and governing faculty
and concentrated energy that transformed bleak mountain and creation-old
fallow moor and quaking bog into hives of population and industry.”[13]
Sir George Carew went a step further. He “dealt very nobly and
fatherlike” with Mr. Boyle in recommending him to marry again. And the
lady whom Carew had in view for his _protégé_ was Katharine Fenton,
the seventeen-year-old daughter of Sir Geoffrey Fenton, the wise and
enlightened Secretary of State. There is a pretty tradition handed
down in the Boyle family—the Earl’s own daughter used to tell it—that
Mr. Boyle first met his second wife when he was a very young man
newly arrived in Dublin. Calling one day on business at Sir Geoffrey
Fenton’s house, and waiting in an ante-room till the great man should be
disengaged, Mr. Boyle had “entertained himself” with a pretty child in
her nurse’s arms; and when Sir Geoffrey at last appeared and apologised
for having kept his visitor waiting, the young man “pleasantly told
him he had been courting a young lady for his wife.” This must have
been in 1588. The marriage took place fifteen years later, and a great
deal had happened in the interval. Joan Apsley and her baby were buried
in Buttevant Church, and “Richard Boyle of Galbaly in the County of
Limerick, Gent.” had purchased the vast Raleigh Estates. In July 1603 he
was a wealthy widower of thirty-seven, and Katharine Fenton was seventeen.
“I never demanded any marriage portion with her, neither promise of any,
it not being in my consideration; yet her father, after my marriage,
gave me one thousand pounds[14] in gold with her. But this gift of his
daughter to me I must ever thankfully acknowledge as the crown of all my
blessings; for she was a most religious, virtuous, loving, and obedient
wife to me all the days of her life, and the mother of all my hopeful
children.”[15]
Elizabeth was dead, and James I reigned in her stead. Sir George
Carew—the new Lord Deputy—had conferred a knighthood on Mr. Boyle on
his wedding day. Two years later he was made Privy Councillor for the
Province of Munster, and thenceforward there was to be no stop nor hitch
in the upbuilding of his great fortunes. In 1612, after another visit to
London and an audience of King James, he found himself Privy Councillor
of State for the Kingdom of Ireland. He was created Lord Boyle, Baron of
Youghal, in 1616, and Viscount of Dungarvan and Earl of Cork in 1620.
His home life had run parallel with his public services. “My Howses,”
“My deare Wife,” “the Children,” “my Famullye,” fill an important place
in the Earl’s life and diary and letters; while the wife’s few little
epistolary efforts to her husband have only one beginning: he was to her
always “My owne goode Selfe.”
Robert Boyle speaks of his mother’s “free and noble spirit”—which, he
adds, “had a handsome mansion to reside in”—and of her “kindness and
sweet carriage to her own.”[16] The hopeful children came quickly. Roger,
the first, born at Youghal in 1606, was sent at seven years old to
England, at first to his uncle John, then Dr. John Boyle, a prebendary
of Lichfield, and a year later to his mother’s relatives, the Brownes,
of Sayes Court, Deptford. There was an excellent day-school at Deptford,
to which Roger Boyle was sent; and a rather pathetic little figure he
must have cut, going to and from school, with “shining morning face”
in his baize gown trimmed with fur.[17] On high days and holidays he
wore an ash-coloured satin doublet and cloak, trimmed with squirrel
fur, and a ruff round his little neck; and his baby sword was scarfed
in green. Mrs. Townshend, in her _Life of the Great Earl_, points out
that the child wore out five pairs of shoes in a year, and that his book
of French verbs cost sixpence. He was to die at Deptford, after a very
short illness, when he was only nine years old. The Brownes were terribly
distressed, and did everything they could. Mrs. Browne moved him into her
own chamber, and nursed him in motherly fashion. His Uncle John was sent
for, and sat by the little fellow’s bed till he died. The physician and
apothecary came from London by boat and administered a “cordial powder of
unicornes’ horns,” and other weird “phisicks.” “Little Hodge” was very
patient, and said his prayers of his own accord; and after he was dead
Mrs. Browne found that in his little purse, which he called his “stock”
(he must have been very like his father in some ways), there was still
more than forty shillings unspent. All these details, and many more,
were sent in letters to the parents at Youghal, and to the grandparents,
Sir Geoffrey and Lady Fenton, in Dublin, after “my jewel Hodge,” as the
grandfather used to call him, was buried in Deptford Parish Church.
There were by this time four daughters, born in succession: Alice, Sarah,
Lettice, and Joan; a second son, Richard, born at Youghal in 1612; and
a fifth daughter, Katharine, who was a baby in arms when “little Hodge”
died. A few months after his death came Geoffrey; and then Dorothy
in 1617, and Lewis two years later. Another boy was born in 1621 and
christened Roger; Francis and Mary followed in 1623 and 1624; and then
came the fourteenth child, “my seaventh son”, and the Earl made that
memorable entry in his diary at Lismore: “God bless him, for his name is
Robert Boyle.”
CHAPTER II
AN IRISH CHILDHOOD
“He would ever reckon it amongst the chief misfortunes of his
life that he did never know her that gave it him.”—ROBERT
BOYLE’S _Philaretus_.
A fortnight later, there was a christening in the private chapel at
Lismore. The Earl’s chaplain and cousin, Mr. Robert Naylor, officiated,
and a large house-party gathered for the event. Lady Castlehaven, who was
to be the child’s godmother, arrived with her family and retinue just in
time, and the godfathers were Lord Digby and Sir Francis Slingsby. Lord
Digby was living in the house as a newly made son-in-law, and the boy was
to be named Robert after him.
The Earl’s large family of “hopeful children” were already growing up
and scattering when this fourteenth baby made its appearance among them.
Alice, the eldest daughter, at nineteen, had been for some years the
wife of young David Barry, the “Barrymore” who had been brought up in
the family almost like one of the Earl’s sons. Sarah, the second, at a
tender age, had been transferred to the care of the Earl’s old friend,
Lady Moore, at Mellifont, and was married, on the same day as her sister
Alice, to Lady Moore’s son. He died very soon afterwards; and Sarah, at
seventeen, had been a little widow for three years, living again under
her father’s roof; and on the Christmas Day before Robert Boyle’s birth,
Sarah had been married a second time—to Robert, Lord Digby, in her
father’s chapel at Lismore.
Lettice, the third daughter, had been intended for Lady Castlehaven’s
son, but the young man’s religious views were “not conformable”; and
she and her sister Joan were accordingly kept at home, with a London
season in view. “Dick,” the now eldest son and heir, already “my Lord
Dungarvan,” was at home, being mildly tutored by the Earl’s chaplain,
and living in a boy’s paradise of saddle-horses and “faier goshawks,”
with an “eyrie of falcons” and occasional “fatt bucks” and “junkettings”;
but little Katharine, who came next, had been sent away into England to
Lady Beaumont—at Coleorton in Leicestershire—mother of Sapcott Beaumont,
the little girl’s prospective husband. Geoffrey, who would have been ten
years old when Robert was born, had died as a baby. Tradition says he
tumbled into a well in the Earl’s Walk in Youghal; but the Earl’s diary,
in mentioning the death, makes no reference to the well. Dorothy, now
nine years old, was already destined for Arthur Loftus, Sir Adam Loftus’s
son; and in the autumn before Robert’s birth she had been fetched away
to be brought up in the Loftus family at Rathfarnham. Francis and Mary
were quite young children in the nursery; and now Robert, the fourteenth
baby, as soon as he “was able without danger to support the incommodities
of a remove,” was to be carried away from Lismore in the arms of his
“Country Nurse.”[18] The Earl, so Robert Boyle says, had a “perfect
aversion to the habit of bringing up children so nice and tenderly that
a hot sun or a good shower of rain as much endangers them as if they
were made of butter or of sugar.” Lady Cork’s opinions do not seem to
have been asked; perhaps, in those three-and-twenty years, she had taught
herself to think, if not to feel, in unison with her “owne goode selfe.”
And so Robert Boyle, like his brothers and sisters, was to be reared
during those first months of his life by a foster-mother, and owing to
the movements of his family at this time was to be left with her longer
than he would perhaps otherwise have been. He was to be rocked in an
Irish cradle, or rather nursed, Irish fashion, in a “pendulous satchell”
instead of a cradle, with a slit for the baby’s head to look out of.[19]
By slow degrees, this boy, born amid all the pomp and seventeenth-century
splendour of his father’s mansions, was to be inured to “a coarse but
cleanly diet,” and to what he afterwards so characteristically described
as “the passions of the air.” They gave him, he says, “so vigorous a
complexion” that ‘hardships’ were made easy to him by ‘custom,’ while the
delights and conveniences of ease were endeared to him by their ‘rarity.’
Happy months of babyhood, lulled in a cottage mother’s arms, or
suspended, between sleeping and waking, in that fascinating medium
that was to become afterwards his life-study! Wise little head of
Robert Boyle, looking out of that slit in the “pendulous satchell,”
baby-observer of the firelight, and the sunlight and the shadows,
enjoying, without theory, as he swung in it, the “spring of the air”! And
meantime the baby’s family was preparing for a season in London.
The House of Lismore was still being “re-edified” during the months
that followed the birth of “Robyn.” The gardens and terraces were being
laid out; the orchard wall was still building. Dick, the eldest son, and
Arthur Loftus, the destined son-in-law, had been allowed to go to Dublin
for the horse-races, with allowance for “wyne and extraordinaryes,”
“horse-meat,” “small sums,” and “idle expenses.” The Earl liked to give
presents: each New Year in his diary is a record of presents given and
received; and while he seems to have kept the laced shirts and nightcaps
made for him by his daughters, he had a habit of handing on the more
costly gifts to other people. He was at this time tipping his musicians
at Lismore, and commissioning his trusty emissary, Sir John Leeke, to buy
smock-petticoats for Lady Cork and her mother Lady Fenton, who, since Sir
Geoffrey’s death, had made her home for the most part with her daughter
and her great son-in-law. And the Earl had given his married daughters a
breeding mare apiece—each mare “with a colt at her feet,” while braces
of bucks and saddle-hackneys had been dispersed among various friends.
His daughter Sarah’s (Lady Digby’s) first child—a great event in the
family—was born at Lismore in October; and towards the end of 1627, with
the London visit in view, the Earl dispatched a footman with letters into
England. Early in the spring of 1628, Sarah, with her lord and baby,
left Lismore; in April, Mary Boyle was fetched away to be brought up
under Lady Clayton’s charge at Cork; Lady Fenton also left Lismore; and
little Francis was carried off to Youghal by Sir Lawrence Parson’s lady.
As the visit to England drew nearer, the Earl made his last will and
testament—in duplicate. “Thone” copy was to be locked up in his great
iron chest at Lismore, which was fitted with three keys, to be left with
three trusted kinsmen, who were to add to the chest the Earl’s moneys
as they accumulated; and “thother” copy was to be carried by the Earl
himself into England.
On April 21st a great cavalcade—the Earl and his wife, with their two
daughters, Lettice and Joan, and the rest of their party and retinue—set
out for Youghal, where on May 7th they took shipping (a captain had been
hired to “wafte them over”) and reached London on May 16th;—not without
adventures, for they were chased by a Dunkirker of 300 tons, and though
the family escaped, the footmen and horses following in another barque
were taken and carried off to sea.
That London season of 1628, when Charles I was the young King of England!
What a busy, self-important, gratifying time it was, and what an amount
of feeing and tipping and social engineering was requisite to carry it
through! The Earl was received by the Duke of Buckingham and presented
to the King. He engaged a steward for his household, and rented my Lord
Grandison’s house in Channell Row, Westminster.[20] In June Lady Cork
and her daughters were presented to the Queen, who kissed them all most
graciously. Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, a very well-known man among
the aristocracy as “the jerkin-maker of St. Martin’s”, was sent for to
receive his orders. The Earl must have had his mind fully occupied and
his purse-strings loose; for there were at least two troublesome lawsuits
going on at this time about his Irish estates and industries, and he was
employing the great Glanville as his legal adviser. But nothing seems
to have interfered with the somewhat stodgy gaieties of that London
season of 1628. And in preparation there were purchases of upholstery
and table-linen in Cheapside; of “wares” for the ladies of the family,
in Lombard Street; velvet, cloth of gold, and what-not. How different
all this from the old-young life in the shabby chambers in the Middle
Temple, or the weeks spent in the Gate-house, waiting to be called before
Queen Elizabeth! But the great self-made man had not forgotten the old
days. He had always given a helping hand to his own kith and kin: Ireland
was sprinkled with his “cozens.” His brother John, the poor parson of
Lichfield, had the good fortune to at least die Bishop of Cork. And now,
on this visit to London, the Earl had no intention of neglecting his
“cozen,” the lawyer Naylor of Gray’s Inn, or his “cozen” the vintner
Croone of the King’s Head Tavern in Fleet Street.[21]
The Earl of Bedford had offered his house of Northall for the autumn;
and visits were paid in state, with coaches and horses, to the Bedford
family and to the Earl’s old Chief, Carew. Carew, now Earl of Totness,
lived at Nonsuch, near Epsom, the wonderful house of Henry VIII’s reign,
set in its park of elms and walnuts, with its gilded and timbered
outside, ornamented with figures of stucco, and paintings by Rubens and
Holbein.[22] Little wonder, in the circumstances, that the Earl of
Cork’s coachmen and footmen all demanded new liveries.
In August the whole family removed to Northall, and later in the year
they visited Lord and Lady Digby at Coleshill in Warwickshire, and
Lady Beaumont at Coleorton in Leicestershire. Here the match between
“Katy” and Sapcott Beaumont was broken off, the money arrangements not
satisfying the Earl, and Katy was handed over to Lady Digby’s charge.
While the Cork cavalcade were moving about from one great house to
another, there came the news of the murder of Buckingham at Portsmouth;
but this tragic event did not interfere with a visit to Oxford in
September. The party that set out from Coleshill, on September 1st,
included Lady Digby, whose second baby was born inconveniently the day
after their arrival in Oxford, in the house of Dr. Weston, Lady Cork’s
uncle, in Christchurch. “Dick” was now at Christchurch, with Arthur
Loftus and the young Earl of Kildare; and Lettice and Joan both met
their fates during this visit, Lettice marrying, very soon after, George
Goring, handsome, plausible, dissolute and cold; while Joan was promised
to the wild young “Faerie Earle” of Kildare.
Back in London, after taking Eton on the way, the Earl of Cork and his
wife and daughters made a little pilgrimage. They all rode to “my Uncle
Browne’s to Deptford,” and visited little Roger’s grave in Deptford
parish church. They “viewed” the monument that the Earl had set up there,
and for which the “Tombe-maker” had sent in his bill. And the Earl was so
pleased with it that he employed the same man to make “a faier alabaster
tombe” over the grave of his parents, in the parish church of Preston in
Kent.
As the year drew to a close, the Earl’s moneys from his furnaces, forges,
ironworks, “tobackoe farms” and what-not, were added to the great iron
chest at Lismore; and Christmas and New Year gifts were showered among
his English friends. A manuscript Bible was sent to Dr. Weston for
Christchurch Library; “cane-apples” (variously described as the Arbutus
and the Espalier apples) and pickled scallops from Ireland, to other
friends; “a rare lyttle book” to the Earl of Arundel, and usquebaugh to
the Earl of Suffolk. Sir Edmund Verney’s new butler from Ireland came
in for the Earl’s own scarlet doublet with hose and cloak, while the
Archbishop of Canterbury[23] accepted a “ronlett of usquebaugh” and a
piece of black frieze for a cassock.
And then the Earl made an ominous entry in his diary: “I gave Dr. Moor
£5 and Dr. Gifford 20_s._ for visiting my wife in her sickness”; and “my
wife’s phisick” is an item in the Earl’s accounts. But they spent the
early spring at Langley Park near Windsor, and in April were back again
in Channell Row, where on April 15th Lady Cork’s fifteenth child—a little
girl—was born. In June they removed to Lord Warwick’s house in Lincoln’s
Inn; and in October 1629—the baby Margaret being left behind them with
her nurse and maid—they were back in Ireland again.
The return journey had been made with even more pomp and ceremony
than the setting forth eighteen months before. For one of the King’s
ships, the _Ninth Whelp_—one of the fleet of “Lion Whelps,” built at
Deptford—was at the last moment put at their disposal to “wafte them
over.” Lord Cork distributed presents among the ship’s company, and gave
the captain at parting a magnificent pair of fringed and embroidered
gloves, to which Lady Cork added a black silk night-cap, wrought with
gold. The men, horses and luggage, followed safely in two barques—no
Dunkirker being sighted on the way.
Before the Earl left Ireland, he and the Lord Chancellor[24] had not
been on the best of terms. But now, fresh from the civilisation of the
Metropolis, and with all the reflected glory of a crossing in the _Ninth
Whelp_, the Earl, by the King’s desire, made up his quarrel with the
Chancellor. Both were sworn Lords Justices for the joint government of
Ireland in the absence of a Deputy; and both resolved to “join really in
the King’s Service”—a resolution which they were, for a little while,
to keep. Meantime, Mr. Perkins, “my London Tailor,” had sent over to
Dublin an enormous trunk of magnificent wearing-apparel, and a very long
bill; and the retiring Lord Deputy[25] delivered up the King’s Sword and
government of Ireland to the Lord Chancellor and the Earl.
This was in October 1629. On the 16th of February following, 1630, Lady
Cork died at Dublin.[26] It had “pleased my mercifull God for my manifold
syns ... to translate out of this mortall world to his gloriows kingdome
of heaven the sowle of my deerest deer wife....”
The baby Peggie—ten months old—was still in England; and the ex-baby
Robyn, reared by his country nurse, was just three years old. Had the
lady of the “free and noble spirit,” in those short months spent in
Dublin, between October and February, been able to see Robyn again—to
hold him in her arms a little moment—before she died?
For a year or two after Lady Cork’s death, the Earl was very busy with
the government of Ireland and the management of his own family and
estates; and his migrations were for a time to be only from his Dublin
town house to the Council Chamber and Great Hall of Dublin Castle.
Lady Cork had been buried with solemn ceremonial in the Chancel of
St. Patrick’s Church, in the same tomb with her grandfather the Lord
Chancellor Weston and her father Sir Geoffrey Fenton, Secretary of State.
The business connected with “my deer wive’s ffunerals” occupied the
Earl for some time; and a splendid black marble monument was in course
of erection in the upper end of the chancel of St. Patrick’s. Meantime
the widower was surrounded by his children;—the Barrymores and their
children, and Lady Digby with her comfortable husband, while Lettice
Goring, with or without George Goring, was always coming to and fro from
England. Poor Lady Lettice Goring was not a happy woman. She had nearly
died of smallpox when she was thirteen, and perhaps on this account
her education had been woefully neglected. There was a certain amount
of cleverness in her of a small-natured type; but she was childless,
delicate, and discontented, with a continual “plaint.” Her younger
sister, Katherine, was of a very different nature. Handsome, intelligent,
and high-spirited, by far the finest character of all the Earl’s
daughters, Katherine, now that her engagement to Sapcott Beaumont had
been broken off, was at sixteen quickly affianced and married to Arthur
Jones, Lord Ranelagh’s son, and carried off to Athlone Castle, a gloomy
old Norman castle in Roscommon;—with how small a chance of happiness in
life she fortunately did not know.
The two boys, Lewis and Roger—Lord Kynalmeaky and Lord Broghill—were
fetched to Dublin and entered at Trinity College; and Joan was married to
the Earl of Kildare as soon as that young nobleman returned to Ireland in
company with her brother Dick. The baby Peggie was brought from England
with her nurse and maid; and sometime in 1631 the two youngest boys,
Francis and Robert, were brought home; and “my children,” their little
black satin doublets, and “Mownsier,” their French tutor, began to find a
place in the Earl’s diary. It was then, too, that the Earl began to make
those settlements, the first of many, in various counties, on “Robyn”,
and that a son of one of the Earl’s own old servants was engaged “to
attend Robert Boyle.” The minute philosopher, at five years old, had his
own valet.
Anxieties and triumphs jostled each other in the Dublin town house. Lady
Fenton did not long survive her daughter, and a great cavalcade, headed
by the Earl and his sons and sons-in-law, rode to her funeral at Youghal.
In November 1631 the Earl was made High Treasurer of Ireland[27]; that
winter, in leisure hours, he must have written his _True Remembrances_,
the manuscript of which was finished and “commended to posterity” in
June 1632—just after the Earl, the Lord Chancellor, and the young Earl of
Kildare, had been given the Freedom of the City of Dublin. Early in that
year, Dorothy had married Arthur Loftus and settled down at Rathfarnham,
and that same summer Dick, “my Lord Dungarvan,” in company with Mr. Fry
his tutor, set off on his foreign travels. Dungarvan’s marriage with
the daughter and heiress of Lord Clifford was already on the _tapis_.
Lord and Lady Clifford lived at Skipton, in Yorkshire; Dungarvan was
to be received in audience by King Charles, and to take Yorkshire on
his way abroad; and “thaffair,” so dear to the Earl’s heart, was very
soon to bring him home again. A husband was to be found for Peggie,
now that she was three years old; and the Lord Chancellor and the Lord
Primate were to have long confabulations with the Earl on this important
matter. Kynalmeaky was already proving himself an anxious, brilliant
young spendthrift, and was to be sent to sea in the _Ninth Whelp_ to
learn “navigacon” and “the mathematiques” from that same Captain who
wore the fringed gloves and embroidered night-cap. The sons-in-law were
a trial. George Goring was continually borrowing, Kildare perpetually
losing at dice and cards. He “battered and abused” with marrow-bones the
Earl’s best silver trenchers, and then won £5 from his father-in-law for
“discovering” to him the culprit! Lord Barrymore, after living eighteen
months with his wife and all his family under the Earl’s roof, went back
to Castle Lyons without so much as saying thank-you. As for the household
staff, the “servant trouble” existed then as now. That Christmas of 1632
one of the Earl’s scullerymen “did most unfortunately by jesting with
his knife run my undercook into the belly whereof he instantly died in my
house in Dublin”—a most unpleasant domestic episode; and it happened at
the very moment when the splendid black marble tomb in St Patrick’s had
been finished and paid for!
But all this was as nothing to the griefs of the next few months; the
premature birth of Lady Digby’s baby under the Earl’s roof, the hurried
christening before it died, and the death of the young mother,—that
little Sarah who, a widow at seventeen, had been married to Lord Digby,
the Earl’s most comfortable son-in-law, on the Christmas Day before Robyn
was born.[28]
It was a dark summer, the summer of 1633, in the Dublin town house;
and the Earl and his children were still in the first days of their
mourning, when Wentworth, the new Lord Deputy, arrived in Dublin: _A most
cursed man to all Ireland_, wrote the Earl in his diary, _and to me in
particular_.
The story of Wentworth’s government of Ireland, a government “hardly
paralleled in the annals of pro-consulship,”[29] has given material
for many books; but through all the chapters there runs the underplot
of Wentworth’s personal relations with the Earl of Cork. From the
first moment, on that July morning, 1633, when the Earl—the Lord High
Treasurer—set out in his coach to meet the Lord Deputy and his suite
“walking on foot towards the cytty”—a wall of enmity had stood up between
these two great men. There is no more human reading than the private
diary record of those uneasy years that followed; and unconsciously, by
mere enumeration of daily incidents, the Earl has made his own character
and the character of Wentworth stand out as clearly as if they were both
alive and facing each other in a Parliament of to-day. There is the
character of the strenuous old Elizabethan Protestant, with its angles
and its softnesses, the man of sixty-seven, who for five-and-forty years
had been the man on the spot. Royalist to the backbone, he had served
in Ireland three sovereigns in succession. It was the country of his
adoption. To a great extent, he felt he had made it what it was; and now,
in yielding up the sword and government to Wentworth, he was proudly
satisfied that Ireland was being yielded up in “generall peac and plenty.”
And there is the character of Wentworth, the man who had come—who had
been sent—to rule; the much younger man, of more recent education and
more cultivated tastes, of a different code of living. But he was
as obstinately masterful, and his energy and insolence were that of
manhood’s prime. He, too, was there to do the King’s service, none the
less fervently that he had been, not so long before, a leader of the
popular party in the English Parliament, and had only recently, so to
speak, crossed the floor of the House. Already, in that dark head of
his were schemes and purposes undreamed of in the old Earl’s homely
philosophy. They were to be unfolded in those confidential letters to
Laud—great schemes, known afterwards as his “policy of Thorough,” his
government of all men by “Reward and Punishment.” But in the meantime,
with all outward deference and ceremonial, the Earl of Cork hated
Wentworth and his government in advance, and Wentworth regarded the Earl
of Cork with personal dislike, for he knew him to be the most important
man in Ireland—a man who would not be subservient; a man in the Lord
Deputy’s path.
So the diary tells its own story: the story of the troublous official
life of the Council Chamber and of Wentworth’s Irish Parliaments; the
story of Wentworth’s sharp pursuit of the Earl’s titles to his Irish
lands; and the story of the private life in the Earl’s Dublin house,
with its social duties and family anxieties. Wentworth had married his
third wife privately, in England, a year after the death of his second
wife, and not long before his departure for Ireland. She had been sent
over to Dublin six months before him, to live rather mysteriously in
Dublin Castle, under her own unmarried name—as “Mistress Rhodes.” But
immediately on Wentworth’s arrival, her identity was revealed: the Lords
Justices were duly presented to the Lord Deputy’s lady, and permitted to
salute her with a kiss. And the diary records kind visits, and return
visits, between the Castle and the Earl of Cork’s Dublin town house;
little card-parties at the Castle, when the Chancellor and the Treasurer
both lost sums of money to the Lord Deputy; games of “Mawe,”[30] also
for money, and private theatricals acted by the Lord Deputy’s gentlemen.
The old Earl sat through a tragedy, on one occasion, which he found
“tragicall” indeed, because there was no time to have any supper. And
then, but six months after Wentworth’s arrival, there came the first hint
of the trouble about Lady Cork’s black marble tomb in St Patrick’s.
Mr. Bagwell has pointed out[31] how, to the old Elizabethan, whose
“Protestantism was not of the Laudian type,” there was nothing amiss in
the fact of a Communion-table standing detached in the middle of the
Church. The Earl, in erecting his monument, had indeed improved the
Chancel of St. Patrick’s, which had been earthen-floored, and often
in wet weather “overflown.” He had raised it, with three stone steps
and a pavement of hewn stones, “whereon,” the Earl wrote to Laud, “the
communion-table now stands very dry and gracefully.” Laud himself had
found it hard to interfere, in the face of general opinion supported by
two Archbishops.[32] But Wentworth was obdurate, and the King himself was
appealed to. It was considered a scandal that the Cork tomb should remain
“sett in the place where the high altar anciently stood.”[33] In the end,
the great black marble monument was taken down, stone by stone; and in
March 1635 Wentworth was able to write to Laud: “The Earl of Cork’s tomb
is now quite removed. How he means to dispose of it I know not; but up
it is put in boxes, as if it were marchpanes or banqueting stuffs, going
down to the christening of my young master in the country.”
The reference to “my young master” is evidently to Lady Kildare’s baby,
whose birth—and the fact that it was a boy—was the event of the moment
in the Cork household: indeed, the old Earl had a bet on with Sir James
Erskine, on the subject. In November 1635 the tomb had been re-erected
where it now stands, in the south side of the Choir, and outwardly,
at least, after a long struggle, the matter was ended. Lord Cork knew
nothing of that sneer in Wentworth’s letter to Laud about the marchpanes
and the banqueting stuffs; and when Wentworth arrived at the Earl’s
house one evening in December 1635—he was rather fond of dropping in
unexpectedly—and joined the Earl and his family at supper, the diary
records that the Lord Deputy “very nobly and neighbourlyke satt down
and took part of my super without any addicon.” But between July 1633
and that December evening of 1635, many things had happened in the Cork
family.
The captain of the _Ninth Whelp_ had been obliged to report that Lewis,
my Lord Kynalmeaky, had run badly into debt at Bristol. Dungarvan had
been recalled, and sent to England with his tutor, about “thaffair”
of his marriage with Mrs. Elizabeth Clifford. George Goring had been
assisted with money to buy a troop of horse; and “our colonel”—and poor
Lettice after him—had sailed for the Netherlands, and soon settled at The
Hague. Little Peggie, her prospective jointure and husband provided, had
been put meanwhile, with Mary, under the care of Sir Randall and Lady
Clayton at Cork; and Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had sent the Earl
his new Parliament robes of brocaded satin and cloth of gold. Dorothy
Loftus’s first baby had been born at Rathfarnham, and Katherine Jones’s
first baby at Athlone Castle. Both were girls; hence, that wager of the
Earl’s that his daughter Kildare’s next baby would be a boy. The Earl of
Kildare, with his dice and cards, had been causing everybody anxiety; and
there was a quarrel about family property going on between the Digby and
Offaley family and the “Faerie Earle.” Wentworth had interfered, and in
the autumn of 1634 Kildare, having taking offence, had “stolen privately
on shipboard,” leaving his wife and children and a household of about
sixty persons “without means or monies.” The delinquent was very soon to
come home again; but late in 1634 the old Earl had broken up the Kildare
establishment and settled his daughter and her children in his own newly
built house at Maynooth, riding there with her, and dining with her “for
the first time in the new parlour”, and sending her two fat oxen “to
begin her housekeeping there.”
Dick, “my Lord Dungarvan,” on the other hand, had been proving himself
a very satisfactory son: not very clever, perhaps, but eminently
good-natured and sensible. He had acquitted himself admirably in England,
writing comfortable letters to his father, who was much gratified to
hear that his boy had taken part in the Royal Masque. It must have been
the great Royal Masque in Whitehall, on Shrove Tuesday night, February
18th, 1634: the _Cælum Britannicum_, which followed on the still greater
Masque of the Inns of Court. The words were by the poet Carew, the music
by Henry Lawes, who had set Milton’s _Comus_; and the scenery was by
Inigo Jones. The King himself and fourteen of his chief nobles were
the Masquers, and the juvenile parts were taken by ten young lords and
noblemen’s sons. No wonder that the old Earl was proud of “Dick”.
And Dungarvan had made such good progress with his wooing that in July
a pretty little letter, neatly wax-sealed on floss-silk, had come to
the Earl of Cork, beginning: “My Lord,—Now I have the honour to be your
daughter.” In September 1634 the indefatigable _Ninth Whelp_ brought
Dungarvan and his bride to Ireland. The Earl met them at their landing,
and drove them back in triumph—three coaches full—to his town house in
Dublin. All the available members of the family, little Robert Boyle
included, were gathered to welcome the new sister-in-law. It was a
great alliance, in which Wentworth himself, by marriage a kinsman of
the Cliffords, had lent a hand. For the time being, it was to draw the
Lord Deputy into the circle of the Earl’s family, though the personal
relations between the Deputy and the Earl were to become even more
strained.
CHAPTER III
SCHOOLDAYS AT ETON
“Where the Provost at that time was Sir Henry Wotton, a
person that was not only a fine gentleman himself, but very
well skilled in the art of making others so.”—ROBERT BOYLE’S
_Philaretus_.
In December 1634, after nearly seven years’ absence, the Earl of Cork and
his family returned to the House of Lismore. They had not been gathered
there, as a family, since the April of 1628, when the Earl and his wife
and daughters set out on their journey to London. But Parliament was
adjourned, and Dungarvan and his wife were with them, and everything
pointed to their spending Christmas in their home of homes: “And there,
God willing, wee intend,” wrote the Earl the day before they left
Dublin to Lady Clifford at Skipton Castle in Yorkshire—“to keep a merry
Christmas among our neighbors, and to eate to the noble family of Skipton
in fatt does and Carps, and to drinke your healthe in the best wyne
wee can gett....” His new daughter-in-law, he says, “looks, and likes
Ireland, very well.” She was every day winning the affection and respect
of the “best sort of people”—her husband’s and her father-in-law’s most
of all. Incidentally—for he was treading on delicate ground owing to the
family connection between Wentworth and the Cliffords—the Earl mentions
that he is being “sharply persued” in his Majesty’s Court of the Star
Chamber about his titles to the college and lands of Youghal; and he is
only sorry that “this attempt” should be made upon him just at the time
of his daughter-in-law’s arrival in Ireland.
It is not two hundred miles by rail from Dublin to Lismore; but in those
days travelling was slow and difficult; and the Cork cavalcade—the family
coach and the gay company of horsemen surrounding it—were four days
upon the road. Robert Boyle never forgot that eventful journey.[34] The
English daughter-in-law and her attendant lady, and the old Earl and
all his five sons, were of the party, the youngest, Robert, not eight
years old. Each night they “lay” at hospitable houses on the road, and
all went well till, on the fourth day after passing Clonmell, as they
were crossing the “Four Miles Water”, their coach was overturned in
mid-stream. Robyn remembered every detail of the adventure: how he had
been left sitting alone in the coach, “with only a post-boy,” and how one
of his father’s gentlemen, “very well horsed,” recognising the danger,
rode alongside and insisted on carrying the little fellow—very unwilling
to leave the apparent safety of the inside of the coach—in his arms over
the rapid water; how the water proved so much swifter and deeper than
anybody had imagined that horses and riders were “violently hurried down
the stream,” and the unloaded and empty coach was quickly overturned.
The coach horses struggled till they broke their harnesses, and with
difficulty saved themselves by swimming.
So much for the memory of a little sensitive eight-year-old. The Earl’s
diary record is brief and to the point. His coach was “overthrown”,
his horses were “in danger of drowning”, but they all, God be praised,
arrived safely at Lismore, and the journey had cost him £24.
Christmas was kept at Lismore, and the last two days of the old year at
Castle Lyons, where the Earl’s son-in-law, Barrymore, feasted them most
liberally. He could scarcely have done less, after that eighteen-months’
visit to the Earl’s town house in Dublin. And so this year ended.
With the New Year 1635 came the Claytons from Cork, bringing Mary and
little Peggie on a visit to their father. A week or two later the
Earl went back alone to Dublin for the last session of Parliament,
leaving Dungarvan and his wife to keep house at Lismore; and the four
boys—Kynalmeaky, Broghill, Frank and little Robyn—were all left under the
charge of their tutor, Mr. Wilkinson, who was also the Earl’s chaplain.
It was a severe winter: the very day after the Earl set out from Lismore
there began to fall at Clonmell “the greatest snow that ever any man
now living did see in Ireland.” The House of Lismore must have stood,
very white and quiet, looking down over the precipice into the swirling
Blackwater below it. All about it, white and silent too, lay the gardens
and orchards, the fishponds and park lands, and the wooded wildernesses;
and the mountains beyond were hidden in falling snows. The roads could
not have been easy riding between Clonmell and Dublin, but the Earl and
his servants reached Dublin in safety, and he sent back by Dungarvan’s
man “two new books of Logick” for the versatile Kynalmeaky’s further
education.
Kildare had come back to Dublin also, and not too soon; for he and his
young wife were to make up their differences over a little grave. Early
in March their eldest little girl died under the Earl’s roof in Dublin;
and a few days later Lady Kildare’s boy was born—the “young master” of
Wentworth’s vindictive letter to Laud.
But spring was at hand, and the Lismore orchards were in blossom. The
Earl was busy buying more lands and manors to be settled on Robyn, and
writing to his English friends about a “ffrench gent” to accompany his
sons Kynalmeaky and Broghill as “governour” on their foreign travels.
Great sheet-winged hawks, also, were brought “to fflye for our sports”;
and in July Lord Clifford and his suite arrived from Yorkshire on
a visit to Lismore. The Earl of Cork was in his element. A great
hunting-party had been arranged, and the huntsmen filled the lodge in the
park. Dungarvan and his wife—Lord Clifford’s daughter and heiress—the
Barrymores, and Katharine and Arthur Jones, were all gathered at Lismore.
Lord Clifford was to see this Munster home at its very best; its terraces
and rose-gardens aflame with colour, its orchards heavy with fruit,
its pigeon-houses and watermills and fishponds and the great turreted
walls—all the “re-edifications” in fact, that had been the work of years.
And the seventeenth-century interior must have been as imposing; for
there was furniture of crimson velvet, fringed with silver, and furniture
of black and scarlet velvet brocade. The walls were hung with tapestry,
the floors were spread with Turkey rugs. There were high-backed chairs
and low-backed chairs, and Indian embroideries, and “long cushions” for
the embrasured window-seats. The Earl’s hospitable tables were furnished
with fish, beef, venison, and huge all-containing pies—to be washed
down by Bordeaux wine, usquebagh, and _aqua vitæ_; and they groaned
also beneath their burden of silver;—flagons and trenchers, “covered
salts,” “costerns,” kettles and ladles of silver and silver gilt; while
the “ewers and basons” in the bedrooms were of silver, the great gilded
beds hung with scarlet cloth and silver lace and the ceilings of the
children’s nursery and the Earl’s “studdie” were of “fretwork”—their
walls of “Spanish white”.
Katharine and Arthur Jones went back to Athlone early in September.
The hunting-party was dispersed, and the House of Lismore was emptying
again. It must have been on one of those autumn days before Katharine
left Lismore that there happened the little “foolish” incident about
Robyn and the plums: an incident which the elder sister would tell, long
afterwards, when Robert Boyle had made his world-wide reputation, and she
and he were growing old together in the house in Pall Mall.[35]
Dungarvan’s wife had already made a special pet of Francis, who was
indeed a lovable and happy-tempered boy. But it was Robyn who was his
sister Kate’s favourite. She seems to have felt a special tenderness
for this little fellow with a little independent character of his own,
so different from all his brothers: a little fellow with a stutter,
attributed by his family to his habit of mimicking some children with
whom he had been allowed to play; a little fellow who was “studious” at
eight years old, and so hopelessly and tactlessly truthful that the old
Earl—fond old disciplinarian that he was—had never been able to “find him
in a lie in all his life.”
And so with the plums. Lady Dungarvan, in delicate health, was being
petted by all the family; and Katharine Jones had given “strict orders”
that the fruit of a certain plum tree in the Lismore garden should be
preserved for Lady Dungarvan’s use. Robyn had gone into the garden, and,
“ignoring the prohibition,” had been eating the plums. And when his
sister Kate taxed him, “by way of aggravation,” with having eaten “half
a dozen plums,”—“Nay, truly, sister,” answered he simply to her, “I have
eaten half a score.”[36]
Mr. Wilkinson and a certain “Mownsier” had between them taught Robyn
to speak some French and Latin and to write a fair hand; and now that
he was in his ninth year, and Frank twelve years old, they were to be
sent to Eton. The Earl had been in correspondence for some time with his
old friend Sir Henry Wotton, not only about this matter, but about a
“governour” who should take Kynalmeaky and Broghill abroad. Accordingly
on September 9, 1635, a few days after their sister Katharine and Arthur
Jones had left Lismore, Francis and Robert, with Carew their personal
servant, under the charge of the Earl’s own confidential servant,
Mr. Thomas Badnedge, left Lismore for Youghal, there to embark for
England, “to be schooled and bredd at Eaton.” Badnedge was to carry
the purse, with £50 in it, and if he wanted any more was to draw upon
Mr. Burlamachy, the Lord Mayor of London. And the Earl gave the boys
at parting £3 between them: “the great God of Heaven”, he wrote in his
diary, “bless, guyde and protect them!”
It was not till September 24 that the little party actually sailed from
Youghal, for they waited a whole week for a wind, and then they were
“beat back again” by a storm. But at last, “though the Irish coasts were
then sufficiently infested with Turkish gallies,” they reached Bristol in
safety, having touched at Ilfracombe and Minehead on the way. There was a
short stay “to repose and refresh themselves” at Bristol, and then their
journey was “shaped” direct for Eton College. It was of course a journey
by coach-roads; and their first sight of English scenery was in late
September.
They arrived at Eton on October 2; and Mr. Badnedge delivered the two
boys safely into the charge of Sir Henry Wotton. Their “tuicon” was to be
undertaken by Mr. John Harrison, the “chief schoolmaster.”
Shortly after their arrival, Francis penned a little letter to his
father, the Earl of “Korke,” to be carried back to Ireland by one of
their escort. He began on bended knees with hearty prayers, and went on
to say that he had no news to tell except some things he had observed
on his travels, but these he would leave the bearer of his letter to
narrate, “in regard I am incited by my school exercise.” Sir “Hary
Wutton” had been very kind to them, entertaining them the first day of
their arrival at his own table. He had also put at their disposal “a
chamber of his owne with a bedd furnished afore our own wilbe furnished.”
The young lords at Eton had also been most friendly, especially the Earl
of Peterborough’s son, with whom Frank and Robyn were, for the present,
to dine and sup. And there was a postscript to say that Mr. Badnedge had
been very kind “in all our travels,” and had sent them a supply of linen
from London after their arrival, for which they were “much bound to him.”
A few days later Mr. John Harrison, the “chief schoolmaster,” also wrote
to the Earl of Cork, a letter concise, dignified, and satisfactory.
He confirmed the arrival at Eton of the Earl’s two sons, “whoe, as they
indured their journeye both by sea and land, beyond what a man would
expect from such little ones so, since their arrival, the place seemed to
be suiting them wonderfully well”. He tells the Earl that “Mr. Provost”
had been so kind as to put the boys under his care, and lets the Earl
know, in parenthesis, that he, John Harrison, is at present the “Rector”
of the school: “I will carefully see them supplyed with such things as
their occasions in the colledge shall require, and endeavour to sett them
forward in learninge the best I can.”
But it was from Carew,[37] the boys’ personal servant, that the Earl was
to hear all about everything. Carew’s first letter touched lightly on
the “long and tedious navigation and great travels by land,” and went
straight to the subject of subjects—“my two young masters.” They had been
there only a few days, but they were “very well beloved for their civill
and transparent carriage towards all sorts, and specially my sweet Mr.
Robert, who gained the love of all.” Sir Henry Wotton had been “much
taken with him for his discourse of Ireland and of his travails, and
he admired that he would observe or take notice of those things that he
discoursed off.”
Then followed an account of Sir Henry Wotton’s kind reception of the
boys, and the lending of his furnished chamber till their own should be
ready: “We injoy it yett,” says Carew, “which is a great favor.” The boys
had dined several times already with Sir Henry Wotton. They were very
“jocond”, although they showed a “studious desire”, and they had “very
carefull and reverend masters.” There is just a hint of home-sickness,
a longing for the sight of the old Earl and the brothers and sisters
and the roughly splendid Irish life; but Carew quickly goes on to tell
the “Order of the Colledge,” especially “touching my young masters’
essence.” The boys dine in hall, with the rest of the boarders;[38] and
the Earl of Northampton’s four sons, and the two sons of the Earl of
Peterborough, with other “Knights’ sons” are at the same table. “They
sitt permiscously—noe observing of place or qualitie”; and at night they
supped in their own rooms, Mr. Francis and Mr. Robert supping with the
Earl of Peterborough’s sons, providing, of course, their own commons.
Carew mentions the “fasting nights” and the fact that the College allows
no meat to be cooked on Fridays or Saturdays; and he hints that the
College commissariat requires a good deal of supplementing. Master Robert
is too busy with his lessons to write a letter, but sends his love and
duty: “They are upp every morning at half an hour afore 6, and soe to
scoole to prayers.”
Sir Henry Wotton, the Provost of Eton[39] of that day, was nearing the
end of his eventful, chequered life when Robert Boyle, not yet nine years
old, came under his care. He was indeed a contemporary of the old Earl,
and a Kentish man as well—one of a fine old Kentish stock; but no two men
could have been more unlike. He had taken his B.A. at Oxford, and with a
slender purse set out on his seven years’ wanderings in European cities,
the very same year in which Mr. Richard Boyle had turned the lucky ring
on his finger and landed on Irish shores. But that had been forty-seven
years before—back in the mists; and the years between those youthful
wanderings and this pleasant old age in the Provost’s lodging at Eton
had been years of risky secret missions and ill-paid political intrigue.
He had been private secretary to Essex in London, private correspondent
abroad, Ambassador at Venice. In those years, many a fine intellect with
big ambitions had gone under. Sir Henry had come off better than many,
in spite of his slender means and an undeniable weakness for libraries
and laboratories and picture galleries in the intervals of diplomacy. It
was he who had been sent by the Duke of Tuscany on the secret mission
to Edinburgh to tell James VI that he was going to be poisoned, and to
carry with him the little packet of Italian antidotes, not known at
that time in the Scottish pharmacopœia. He had stayed three months with
the Scottish King; and no wonder that when James ascended the throne of
England Sir Henry Wotton was one of the men then in London whom the King
desired to see. He was a favourite at Court; and his lifelong homage to
the Princess Elizabeth, the unhappy Queen of Bohemia, is well known.[40]
He had risen to great things, and might have risen to greater still if it
had not been for one brilliant Latin epigram written in an album. Even
King James, with pleasant memories of a packet of antidotes and a most
delightful guest in Stirling Castle, found it hard to forgive the Latin
epigram—“a merriment,” poor Wotton had called it—written in an album in
an indiscreet moment many years before, and officiously forwarded from
Augsburg to the Court of London: “_An Ambassador is an honest man sent to
lie abroad for the good of his country_.” It is said to have ruined Sir
Henry Wotton’s diplomatic chances; and when, after some other missions,
he came home in 1624, it was as a penniless man still, with plans of
literary work and a sufficient stock of memories grave and gay. He had
consorted with princes and statesmen, with artists, men of science, and
men of letters. He had worked for Essex and known Raleigh, and Francis
Bacon was his cousin. Among his friends abroad he had counted Beza,
Casaubon, Arminius and Kepler. He had watched Kepler at work in his
laboratory, and he had supplied Bacon with facts. And when Bacon sent him
three copies of his _Novum Organum_ when it first appeared, Sir Henry
sent one of the copies to Kepler.
When Thomas Murray died, and Sir Henry Wotton was selected, out of many
candidates, for the Provostship of Eton, he was so poor that he was
obliged to borrow money to enable him to settle down there. King James
would have granted him a dispensation, but he preferred to conform to the
rule that the Provost of Eton must be a man in Holy Orders. He had been
duly ordained deacon, and, being a man of liberal views, had steered “a
middle way between Calvinism and Arminianism.”[41]
When the two young sons of the Earl of Cork arrived at Eton, Sir Henry
Wotton had been Provost for ten years, and Eton could scarcely imagine
itself without him. With a royal pension in addition to his Provostship,
and assisted by a strong staff of Fellows of the College—the learned
Hales, John Harrison and the rest—he was taking life easily, in the
evening of his days, among his books and curios, his Italian pictures,
and those manuscripts—biographies of Donne and Luther, and the History
of England,—which he always meant to finish and never did. He was not
quite so active as when he had first come among them with his new views
of teaching, and had put up the picture of Venice, where he had lived
so long as Ambassador, and had hung on the wooden pillars of the lower
schools his “choicely drawn” portraits of Greek and Latin orators and
poets and historians, for the little Eton boys to gaze at with round
English eyes; but his familiar figure was still a daily presence, coming
and going amongst them in his furred and embroidered gown, “dropping
some choyce Greek or Latin apophthegm” for the benefit of the youngsters
in class. He was still a “constant cherisher” of schoolboyhood, taking
the “hopeful youths” into his own especial care, having them at his own
hospitable table, picking out the plodding boys and the boys of genius,
and himself teaching best in his own memorable talk. He liked to indulge
in reminiscences of Italy—“that delicat Piece of the Worlde”; and he
sometimes looked wistfully Londonwards, though in his gentle, deprecatory
way he spoke of it, especially in November, as a “fumie citie.” In his
last years he nursed hopes that he might succeed to the mastership of
the Savoy; meantime, from his Provost’s Lodging, he could look across
the “meandering Thames and sweete meadows,”[42] to the great pile of
Windsor Castle in its “antient magnificence”; and he read and ruminated
and smoked—he smoked a little too much, according to his friend Izaak
Walton—and counted his “idle hours not idly spent” when he could sit
quietly fishing with Izaak Walton in the river-bend above the shooting
fields, then, as now, known as Black Pots. When Robert Boyle went to Eton
in 1635, to be an Eton boy meant not only being “grounded in learning” by
such men as Hales and Harrison, but being “schooled and bred” under the
daily influence of this soft, rich, delightful personality.
The two boys were known in the school as Boyle _A_ and Boyle _I_: Robert
was Boyle _I_. According to Carew, they must have grown with astonishing
rapidity during their first months at Eton. Mr. Francis was not only
tall, but “very proportionable in his limbs,” and grew daily liker to
his brother, Lord Dungarvan. He was not so fond of his books as “my most
honoured and affectionate Mr. Robert, who was as good at his lessons as
boys double his age.” An usher, “a careful man”, was helping them with
their lessons, and Carew was keeping an eye on the usher. Versions and
dictamens in French and Latin filled their time, and Carew could not
persuade them to “affect the Irish,” though Robert seems to have shown a
faint, intermittent interest in that language.[43] As for Mr. Robert, he
was “very fatt, and very jovial, and pleasantly merry, and of ye rarest
memory that I ever knew. He prefers Learninge afore all other virtues and
pleasures. The Provost does admire him for his excellent genius.” They
had acted a play in the College, and Robert had been among those chosen
to take part in it. “He came uppon ye stage,” wrote Carew, exultant, to
the Earl of Cork; “he had but a mute part, but for the gesture of his
body and the order of his pace, he did bravely.”
The little fellow was not yet nine years old, and his stutter must
have made it highly desirable that the part should be “mute”; but “Mr.
Provost” had already made choice of a “very sufficient man” to teach
both the boys to play the viol and to sing, and also to “helpe my Master
Robert’s defect in pronontiation.” Carew was afraid the study of music,
which “elevats the spirits,” might hinder their more serious lessons;
though up to that time the conduct of both boys had been exemplary. They
had said their prayers regularly and been equally polite to everybody,
and were very neat in their “aparelling, kembing, and washing.” The elder
brother had been laid up with “a cowld that he tooke in the scoole,”
which Carew attributed entirely to the fact that he had outgrown his
clothes; and Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had been “mighty backward”
in sending their new suits. Even with a bad cold, Frank was his usual
pleasant, merry self; and when Mr. Provost, according to his custom,
prescribed “a little phisique,” the boy drank it cheerfully to the last
drop—and “rejected it immediately after.” Sir Henry Wotton wrote himself
to the Earl, describing the whole episode with an accuracy of detail
worthy of Kepler’s laboratory.
Meantime, Sir Henry himself had assured the Earl that the “spiritay
Robyn’s” voice and pronunciation had been taken in hand by the Master of
the Choristers. Robyn also had caught cold that first winter at Eton. He
had “taken a conceit against his breakfast, being alwaies curious of his
meat, and so going fasting to church.” But on this occasion, such was the
spiritay Robyn’s popularity, that the whole College seems to have risen
in protest against Mr. Provost’s prescription of “a little phisique.” And
Robert recovered without it, and “continued still increasing in virtues.”
It is somewhat surprising that the younger brother should have been the
favourite, for it was Francis Boyle who had the “quick, apprehensive
wit,” and whose delight was in hunting and horsemanship; and it was Robyn
who dissuaded him, exhorting his elder brother to learning in his youth,
“for,” says he, “there can be nothing more profitable and honourable.”
With his “fayre amiable countenance,” this child of nine, according to
the ebullient Carew, was “wise, discreet, learned and devout; and not
such devotion as is accustomed in children, but withall in Sincerity he
honours God and prefers Him in all his actions.”[44]
It is very certain that the spiritay Robyn was not fond of games. There
is no enthusiasm for active sports in his _Philaretus_, not even of a
certain sport that the boys engaged in on winter evenings in the hall,
for which every recent comer was obliged to “find the candles”; and a
very expensive time for candles it was, according to Carew. But Mr.
Robert learnt to “play on music and to sing”, and “to talk Latin he
has very much affected.” And it speaks very well for both Frank and
Robyn that, their tastes being so unlike, they remained such excellent
friends. “Never since they arrived,” according to Carew, had two ill
words passed between them; which he thought was rare to see, “specially
when the younger exceeds the elder in some qualities.” Some of the noble
brothers in the College were continually quarrelling; but “the peace of
God is with my masters.” It had been noticed even at the Fellows’ table:
“Never were sweeter and civiller gents seen in the Colledge than Mr.
Boyles.” The only thing in which they do not seem to have excelled was in
letter-writing. Master Frank could not write to the Earl because his hand
shook; and Master Robyn could not write because he had hurt his thumb.
And so winter and spring passed, and the summer came, and with it
“breaking-time” at Eton. Mr. Provost, Mr. Harrison, and everybody else
went away. The two boys, and Carew with them, spent their holidays with
their sister Lettice in Sussex. It could not have been a cheerful visit,
though Carew assured the Earl that there was “nothing wanting to afford
a good and pleasant entertainment if my honourable Lady had not been
visited with her continuall guest, griefe and melancholy.” So extremely
melancholy was the Lady Lettice Goring during this visit that it made
the two boys “cry often to looke upon her.” And yet they must have made
a pretty pair to gladden the eyes of an invalid woman. For Mr. Perkins,
the London tailor, had sent them some fine new clothes—little shirts
with laced bands and cuffs, two scarlet suits without coats, and two
cloth-of-silver doublets.
Robert Boyle’s own recollections of Eton were written a good many years
after he left it. He always remembered with gratitude the kindness
of Mr. John Harrison, in whose house, in that chamber that was so
long in furnishing, the two boys lived—except for some holidays at
“breaking-time,” usually spent in Sussex—from October 1635 to November
1638.
From the very beginning John Harrison must have recognised that in “Boyle
_I_” he had no ordinary boy to deal with. He saw a “spiritay” little
fellow, with a fair, amiable countenance, a slight stammer, which the
child did his best to amend, and the unstudied civilities of manner of a
little prince. According to Boyle himself, Mr. Harrison saw “some aptness
and much willingness” in him to learn; and this chief schoolmaster
resolved to teach his pupil by “all the gentlest ways of encouragement.”
He began by often dispensing with his attendance at school in ordinary
school hours, and taking the trouble to teach him “privately and
familiarly in his own chamber.”
“He would often, as it were, cloy him with fruit and sweetmeats, and
those little dainties that age is greedy of, that by preventing the want,
he might lessen both his value and desire of them. He would sometimes
give him, unasked, play-days, and oft bestow upon him such balls and tops
and other implements of idleness as he had taken away from others that
had unduly used them. He would sometimes commend others before him to
rouse his emulation, and oftentimes give him commendations before others
to engage his endeavours to deserve them. Not to be tedious, he was
careful to instruct him in such an affable, kind, and gentle way, that he
easily prevailed with him to consider studying not so much as a duty of
obedience to his superiors, but as a way to purchase for himself a most
delightsome and invaluable good.”[45]
All which means that Mr. Harrison was making a very interesting
experiment, and that his system happened to succeed in the case of Robert
Boyle. The boy learned his “scholar’s task” very easily; and his spare
hours were spent so absorbedly over the books he was reading that Mr.
Harrison was sometimes obliged to “force him out to play.” And what were
the books that were read with such zest? It was, Robert Boyle says, the
accidental perusal of _Quintus Curtius_ that first made him in love with
“other than pedantick books”; and in after life he used to assert that
he owed more to _Quintus Curtius_ than ever Alexander did: that he had
gained more from the history of Alexander’s conquests than ever Alexander
had done from the conquests themselves.[46]
His other recollections of his Eton schooldays are for the most part of
accidents that happened to him there. He was not so good a horseman as
his brother Frank. Once he fell from his horse, and the animal trod so
near to his throat as to make a hole in his neckband, “which he long
after preserved for a remembrance.” Another time his nag took fright
as he was riding through a town, and reared upright on his hinder feet
against a wall; and the boy just saved himself by slipping off. Yet
a third time he nearly met his death by a “potion” given him “by an
apothecary’s error”; and it is interesting, in the light of what happened
and did not happen in Boyle’s later life, to hear that “this accident
made him long after apprehend more from the physicians than the disease,
and was possibly the occasion that made him afterwards so inquisitively
apply himself to the study of physick, that he might have the less need
of them that profess it.”[47] The fourth and last of this almost Pauline
enumeration of disasters was the falling, one evening, of the greater
part of the wall of the boys’ bedroom in Mr. Harrison’s house. The two
brothers had gone early to their room; Robyn was already tucked into the
big four-post bed, with its “feather bedd, boulster, and two pillows,”
and the curtains of “blew perpetuana with lace and frenge”,[48] and Frank
was talking with some other boys round the fire when, without a moment’s
warning, the wall of the room fell in, the ceiling with it, carrying bed,
chairs, books and furniture from the room above. A bigger boy rescued
Frank from the debris and dust, the chair in which he had been sitting
broken to pieces, and his clothes torn off his back; and Robyn, the
future chemist, peeping from the blew-perpetuana curtains, remembered
to wrap his head in the sheet, so that it might serve “as a strainer,
through which none but the purer air could find a passage.”
It is observable that there is no mention of any of those accidents in
the letters to the Earl of Cork from either the Provost or the boys’
personal servant, Carew. Perhaps it was as well that the Earl, much
harassed at home, should not be told everything that was happening at
Eton. As it was, he knew too much. Some go-between—Mr. Perkins, the
tailor, or somebody equally officious—must have told the Earl in what
manner Carew—“poor unmeriting me”, as Carew called himself in one of
his fascinating letters to the Earl—had been utilising his idle hours
by the meandering Thames. Frank and Robyn, and Carew with them, were
spending their holidays with Lady Lettice Goring, when one morning Sir
Henry Wotton, sitting in his study at Eton, received a letter from
the Earl of Cork. The contents came as a thunderbolt. “Truly, my good
Lord,” Sir Henry Wotton wrote back to the Earl, “I was shaken with
such an amazement at the first percussion thereof, that, till a second
perusal, I was doubtfull whether I had readd aright.” For everybody in
the college was so persuaded of young Mr. Carew’s discretion and temper
and zeal in his charge, and “whole carriadge of himself,” that it would
be “harde to stamp us with any new impression.” However, Mr. Provost had
somewhat reluctantly put away his pipe and “bestowed a Daye in a little
Inquisitiveness.” And he had found that the Earl, in Dublin, was quite
right; that between Carew and a certain “yonge Mayed, dawghter to our
under baker—” and Mr. Provost could not but own that she was pretty—there
had passed certain civil, not to say amorous, language. The old Provost
was evidently disposed to look leniently on this particular foolish
pair. Had he not himself once, in his youth, written a little poem which
began—
O faithless world, and thy most faithless part
A woman’s heart!
...
Why was she born to please, or I to trust
Words writ in dust?[49]
However, Sir Henry told the Earl he was going to talk to Carew on his
return from Sussex, and warn him how careful, in his position, he ought
to be; and he would write again to the Earl after seeing Carew. But, in
the meantime he wished to reserve judgment: “For truely theare can not be
a more tender attendant about youre sweete children.”
And after all news travelled slowly. Those little love passages were
already six months old: “Tyme enough, I dare swere”—wrote the old
diplomatist, sitting alone in his study, with his Titian and his Bassanos
looking down upon him—“to refrigerat more love than was ever betweene
them.”
CHAPTER IV
THE MANOR OF STALBRIDGE
“... He would very often steal away from all company, and spend
four or five hours alone in the fields, and think at random:
making his delighted imagination the busy scene where some
romance or other was daily acted.”—ROBERT BOYLE’S _Philaretus_.
After the boys went to Eton, the Earl had very unpleasant things to
think about. Wentworth was pressing him hard. It is true that the little
dinner-parties and card-parties and private theatricals at the Castle
were going on as if there were no Star Chamber behind them. In January
1636 the Lord Deputy was inviting himself to supper at the Earl’s Dublin
house, and bringing Lady Wentworth with him. Lady Dungarvan’s baby was
born in March, a “ffair daughter”, to be christened Frances, and to
figure in the old Earl’s diary as “lyttle ffranck”; and the Lord Deputy
himself stood sponsor, though he had just lost his own little son, and
the Dungarvan christening had been postponed till the Wentworth baby had
been buried. But the Lord Deputy’s “sharp pursuit” of men was going on
all the same. In February, before the death of Wentworth’s child and the
Dungarvan christening, Lord Mountmorris had been degraded from the office
of Vice-Treasurer, “tried by a Commission and sentenced to be shot, for
no other crime than a sneer” against Wentworth’s government.[50] The
sentence was not to be carried out; but it became every day more evident
that “whatever man of whatever rank” opposed Wentworth, or even spoke
disrespectfully of his policy, “that man he pursued to punishment like a
sleuth-hound”.[51]
At the beginning of that year, the Earl of Cork had made his “Great
Conveighance,” by which he entailed all his lands upon his five sons.
Wentworth had taken exception to the conveyance of some of these lands to
the Earl’s eldest son, Lord Dungarvan; and in February a “sharp and large
discourse” had taken place between the Lord Deputy and the Earl. In April
the Star Chamber Bill against the Earl, dealing with his titles to the
churchlands of Youghal, was still under discussion; and Wentworth was now
pressing for the payment of money, by way of ransom, which was at first
to be £30,000, but was afterwards reduced to £15,000.
The Earl was still asserting his right to his lands, and unwilling to
compound—no-one had ever heard the Earl of Cork, he said, “enclyned to
offer anything.” Things were at this pass when at the end of April Lady
Dungarvan, six weeks after her baby’s birth, fell sick; and the next day,
“the smallpockes brake owt uppon her.” On that very day, under pressure
from his friends and from his son Dungarvan, who went down on his knees
before his father, the Earl of Cork gave way. Very unwillingly, on May
2, he agreed to pay the £15,000 “for the King’s use,” and for his own
“redemption out of Court”—though his “Innocencie and Intigritie” he
declared, writing in his own private diary, were “as cleer as the son
at high noon.” The old Royalist, even then, believed that if his King
only knew how undeservedly the mighty fine had him imposed, “he would not
accept a penny of it.” The Earl was hard hit, though his great Conveyance
was at last signed and sealed, and he could talk of drinking a cup of
sack “to wash away the care of a big debt.”[52] It is comforting to note
that he had meantime cash in hand not only to tip Archie Armstrong, the
King’s Jester, who seems to have passed through Dublin, but to pay for
two knitted silk waistcoats for his own “somer wearings.”
While all this was going on, Kynalmeaky and Broghill were enjoying
what the Earl called their “peregrination.” A tutor had been found
to accompany them on their foreign travels; a M. Marcombes, highly
recommended to the Earl by Sir Henry Wotton, as a man “borne for your
purpose.” Sir Henry wrote from London, where he had been spending a
week or two, and was returning next day “to my poore Cell agayne at
Eton”;[53] but he gave the Earl a careful account of Marcombes, whom he
had seen in London. He was “by birthe French; native in the Province of
Auvergne; bredd seaven years in Geneve, verie sounde in Religion, and
well conversant with Religious Men. Furnished with good literature and
languages, espetially with Italian, which he speaketh as promptly as his
owne. And wilbe a good guide for your Sonns in that delicat Piece of
the Worlde. He seemeth of himself neither of a lumpish nor of a light
composition, but of a well-fixed meane.”
M. Marcombes had already won golden opinions in the family of Lord
Middlesex, a former Lord Mayor of London; and was well known to the then
Lord Mayor, Mr. Burlamachy, who also wrote to the Earl about him. And Mr.
Perkins, the tailor, seems to have put in a word; for there had been a
meeting in the “fumie citie” between Sir Henry Wotton and M. Marcombes
and Mr. Perkins, at which Sir Henry had found the French tutor’s
conversation “very apposite and sweet.”
So in the early spring of 1636 Kynalmeaky and Broghill, with their
governor M. Marcombes, had set out from Dublin on their foreign travels,
stopping long enough in London to kiss the King’s and Queen’s hands, and
obtain the royal licence and passport to travel; and they took letters
also to Sir Henry Wotton at Eton, and to Frank and Robyn, and poor
unmeriting Carew.
The Earl of Cork himself, in the early stages of his struggle with
Wentworth, had thought of going to London, to “justify himself” once
again, as he had done when he was a young man, and Elizabeth was Queen.
But he was no longer a young man, and Charles I was not Queen Elizabeth,
and the Lord Deputy, when he found it out, had objected strongly to the
Earl’s little plan. On the contrary, the Lord Deputy had gone to England
himself, in the summer of 1636; and though Sir Henry Wotton was under “a
kind of hovering conceypt” that the Earl of Cork was coming over, and
there was even a rumour that he was to be offered the Lord Chancellorship
of England, the old Earl was to remain for two more years in Ireland. He
was busy as usual, moving about, on assize and other duties, between
Dublin and Lismore and Cork; paving the terrace at Lismore with hewn
stones, dedicating the free schools and almshouses there, setting up an
old servant in Dublin in a “tobacko” business, and paying Mr. Perkins’s
bill for those little scarlet suits and cloth-of-silver doublets that
Frank and Robyn were wearing in their Whitsuntide holidays. Sir Henry
Wotton was able to tell the Earl that Lady Lettice would see Frank in
better health and strength than he had been in either kingdom before,
while Robert would “entertayne her with his pretie conceptions, now a
greate deale more smoothely than he was wonte.”
The Earl had not given up his English project; on the contrary, it was
to mature into the purchase of a little bit of England for his very own;
and his choice had fallen on a “capitall howse, demesne, and lands” in
Dorsetshire. Accordingly in the autumn of 1636 he bought the Manor of
Stalbridge, and sent over a steward, Thomas Cross, to take possession. At
Stalbridge the Earl would be a near neighbour of the Earl of Bristol—his
son-in-law Digby’s uncle—at Sherborne Castle.
The year 1636 had been a trying year; and one of the first expenses in
the New Year 1637 was a fee to Mr. Jacob Longe, of Kinsale, “my Jerman
physician,” for plaisters and prescriptions, “to stay the encrease of
the dead palsy which hath seized uppon all the right side of my boddy
(God helpe me) £5.” And though the returns for the year shewed a “Lardge
Revenew,” and the diary record for the year ended in a note of triumph,
with a triple “Amen, Amen, Amen,” there was yet sorrow in store that no
revenue, however large, could avert. For Peggie, the Earl’s youngest
daughter, was ill. The Earl had paid £5 to Mr. Higgins, the Lismore
doctor, to give her “phisick, which he never did”; and either because of
this, or in spite of this, Little Peggie did not get well. She died in
June 1637, in Lady Clayton’s house in Cork, where she and Mary had lived
all this time together. The Lady Margaret Boyle, youngest daughter of the
Earl of Cork—eight years old when she died—was buried in the family tomb
at Youghal.
It was not till Midsummer 1638, when the last instalment of the mighty
fine had been paid, that the Earl began his preparations for a prolonged
visit to England. He revoked all other wills, and again made a last will
and testament; and at the end of July he actually set out for England,
taking with him his daughter Mary, Lord and Lady Barrymore, and several
of the grandchildren.
The parting was a sad one between Mary Boyle and Lady Clayton, who had
just lost her husband, and, a childless woman herself, had been a real
mother to “Moll” and “Peggie.” But the Earl had a grand marriage in
view for his daughter Mary; and he had yet to discover that Lady Mary
had a will of her own: that of all his daughters it was she who had
inherited his own indomitable pride. Hitherto, she had been a child,
brought up away from him; to be gladdened from time to time by a happy
visit or a New Year’s gift. But even these are indications of the little
lady’s tastes and character. It was to Mary the Earl gave the “ffether
of diamonds and rubies that was my wive’s,” long before he could have
known how defiantly she would toss that little head of hers. She must
have been a fair horsewoman already at nine years old; for it was to
her that the Earl sent the dead mother’s saddle and saddle-cloth of
green velvet, laced and fringed with silver and green silk; and it is
certain she inherited the Earl’s love of fine dressing, from the choice
of various small gowns of figured satins and rich stuffs of scarlet dye.
Of even more significance is the old Earl’s gift of Sir Philip Sidney’s
_Arcadia_, “To my daughter, Mary Boyle,” when this imperious young
creature was only twelve years old. Do little girls of twelve read Sir
Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ to-day? There was to come a moment when, if the
Earl had ever read it himself, he must have heard in “Moll’s” voice, as
she answered him, some echo of Sidney’s teaching—
“... but a soule hath his life
Which is held in loue: loue it is hath ioynd
Life to this our Soule.”
After the usual delays at starting, the _Ninth Whelp_ made a good
passage; and the Earl and his party reached Bristol safely on Saturday
August 4. As usual, presents were dispensed to the ship’s captain and
company, together with what remained of a hogshead of claret wine. Next
day, Sunday, the whole family went obediently to church; and on Monday
morning, leaving the others to follow with the servants and luggage, the
old Earl, riding a borrowed horse, set off by himself to find his way to
Stalbridge.[54]
A wonderful peace and stillness falls on the Dorsetshire uplands at
evening after a long, hot summer day. Up hill and down dale and up hill
again go the Dorsetshire lanes, between their tangled hedges, through a
country of undulating woods and downs and soft green pastures. The lark
sings, high up, invisible: a far-away, sleepy cock-crow or faint bark of
sheepdog breaks the silence; the grazing cattle bend their brown heads in
the fields.
The Earl was in England again, the land of his birth. It was perhaps not
altogether a prosperous and satisfied England, in August 1638. The heavy
hand of taxation was on even these pastoral uplands. The heart of England
was throbbing with political unrest. But on that evening, at least,
there could have been only the lark’s ecstasy, and the sweet smell of
wild thyme and woodsmoke in the air. Ireland, the distressful country of
his adoption, lay behind the old man, and with it the memories of fifty
strenuous years;—all that was hardest and proudest and tenderest in a
lifetime.
Lord and Lady Dungarvan were already at Stalbridge with “lyttle
ffrancke.” There was another baby-daughter now, but it had apparently
been left at Salisbury House, in London. Dungarvan had ridden some six
miles upon the road to meet his father. It was still daylight when,
riding together—the old man must have been pretty stiff in the saddle,
for he had ridden nearly sixty miles that day—they came in sight of the
Elizabethan manor standing among elms and chestnut trees, surrounded by
park lands and hayfields and orchards: “My owne house of Stalbridge in
Dorcetshier; this being the firste tyme that ever I sawe the place.”[55]
After this, the movements of the Earl and his family read rather like a
Court Circular. Not much is heard of the life that must have been going
on in the little town itself, with its Church and market Cross; but the
mere presence of this great Irish family among them must, by the laws of
supply and demand, have wrought many changes in the little market town.
The Earl paid his love and service to his neighbour and kinsman, the Earl
of Bristol, at Sherborne Castle, and the Earl and Countess of Bristol,
with all their house-party, immediately returned the visit; after which
the whole family at the Manor were “feasted” for two days at Sherborne
Castle. The Earl of Cork and his house-party rode to “the Bathe”, and
return visits were received at Stalbridge from friends at “the Bathe”.
And a week or two later the Earl, attended by Dungarvan and Barrymore,
rode to London, and was graciously received by the King and “all the
Lords at Whitehall.” The King praised the Earl’s government of Ireland,
and the Archbishop of Canterbury was particularly friendly.
Lady Barrymore and Lady Dungarvan had between them undertaken to ease
the Earl from the “trowble of hows-keeping,” and for this purpose were
allowed £50 a week, and more when they wanted it; and the cellars and
larders at Stalbridge were replenished from time to time with gifts. A
ton of claret wine and six gallons of aqua vitæ arrived as a New Year’s
gift from Munster, and “veary fatt does” from English friends; while
among his assets the Earl counted, besides the produce of his Stalbridge
lands and woods, the twenty stalled oxen, the powdered beef, the bacon
and salted salmon that were sent from his Irish estates.
Thomas Cross, his steward, became “seneschal”;—perhaps there was a
seneschal at Sherborne Castle; and there was a Clerk of the Kitchen and
a large staff of household servants, men and women, and a long list of
rules for the management of the household drawn up and signed by the Earl
himself.[56] And of course the “re-edification” of the Manor House began
at once. There was water to be carried in leaden pipes; new furniture
to hasten home from the London upholsterer, who dwelt at the sign of
the Grasshopper; a red embroidered bed, a tawny velvet carpet, couch
and chairs. There was a new coach to buy, and the paths and terraces at
Stalbridge were to be stone paved exactly like the paths and terraces
at Sherborne Castle. Stairs with a stone balustrade, and carved stone
chimney-pieces were to be added to the Manor;—one at least carved with
the Earl’s coat of arms “compleate,” and reaching nearly to the ceiling,
“fair and graceful in all respects.” There was a limekiln to build, and
pit coal to procure and cane apples[57] to be planted in the orchard.
But charity only began at home; and in this case it did not prevent
a subscription being sent—“a myte” of £100—to help the Archbishop of
Canterbury in his scheme of “re-edifying Pawle’s Church in London.”
Meantime, all the Earl’s daughters and sons-in-law, except Dorothy and
Arthur Loftus, who remained in Ireland, seem to have found their way,
separately or together, to the Manor of Stalbridge; while grandchildren,
nieces and nephews and even “cozens” were welcomed under its roof. The
Dungarvans made their headquarters there, and the Barrymores, and the
little Lady Mary, who was now fourteen, and to be considered a grown-up
young lady, with an allowance of £100 a year “to fynde herself.” And
they were presently joined by the Kildares, and Katharine and Arthur
Jones. Even the plaintive Lettice and her lord stayed for some time
under the Earl’s roof.[58] And in March 1639, after an absence of three
years, Kynalmeaky and Broghill, with M. Marcombes, returned from their
“peregrination”. They found Frank and Robyn already at Stalbridge, though
not in the great house itself. For their father had taken the boys away
from Eton on his return journey from London in November 1638, and since
then they had been boarded out with the Rev. Mr. Dowch at the Parsonage,
scarcely “above twice a musket-shot” distant from their father’s house.
Their three years at Eton had cost, “for diett, tutaradge and aparell,”
exactly £914 3_s._ 9_d._
When the Earl of Cork visited Eton and took his two boys away, Sir Henry
Wotton must have been already ill. Since his return after the summer
breaking-time of 1638 the old Provost had suffered from a feverish
distemper, which was to prove the beginning of the end.[59]
It is possible that during the Provost’s illness extra duties had fallen
on Mr. Harrison, the Rector; in any case the two boys had been removed
from the care of their “old courteous schoolmaster,” and handed over to
“a new, rigid fellow;” and things were not going quite so happily for
them at Eton as heretofore. Moreover, poor Carew, the romance of the
underbaker’s daughter nipped in the bud, had, from overmuch fondness for
cards and dice, come utterly to grief.
It was during this last year of Robert Boyle’s schooldays—in the April of
1638, before Sir Henry Wotton’s illness, and while all was going on as
usual at Eton—that Mr. Provost had entertained at his hospitable table
a guest whose life was to be strangely linked in after years with that
of some members of the great Boyle family. This was John Milton, then a
young poet, living with his father at Horton—not far from Eton—and just
about to set out on his Italian journey.[60] Was Robert Boyle one of the
“hopeful youths” selected by the Provost to dine at his table that day
when Milton dined there? And did Robert Boyle listen to the talk that
went on at table between Milton and his friend, the learned Hales, and
Sir Henry Wotton? It was very pleasant talk. When Milton returned to
Horton he ventured to send the Provost a little letter of thanks and a
copy of his _Comus_ as a parting gift; and Sir Henry sent his own footboy
post-haste to Horton, to catch Milton before he started, with a pretty
letter of acknowledgment and an introduction to the British Agent in
Venice. It is noteworthy that the advice Sir Henry Wotton gave to Milton,
and the advice he always gave to his own pupils when they were setting
out on a career of diplomacy abroad, showed that, while the old man had
not forgotten his experience of the Augsburg album, his kindly cynicism
remained unchanged. _I pensiori stretti_, was the advice he handed on in
his charming letter to Milton,—_ed il viso sciolto_; while to all young
Etonians travelling in diplomacy he used to say, _Always tell the truth;
for you will never be believed_.
It is hard to say how much Robert Boyle may have owed to the guidance and
talk of Sir Henry Wotton. Boyle remembered him as a fine gentleman who
possessed the art of making others so; and it was John Harrison’s methods
of teaching that had impressed the boy. Yet it must not be forgotten that
the Provost’s tastes were not only literary and scholarly; that he had
not only surrounded himself with a library of books that Robert Boyle in
his boyhood must have envied—Sir Henry Wotton was of a scientific turn
of mind: he was fond of experimenting. Ever since the days when he had
watched Kepler at work in his laboratory and supplied his cousin Lord
Bacon with facts, he had been accustomed to occupy himself, in more or
less dilletante fashion, with such little experiments as the distilling
of medicinal herbs and the measurement of time by allowing water to pass
through a filter, drop by drop; and it was Sir Henry Wotton whom Izaak
Walton consulted about the preparation of “seductive-smelling oils” in
the catching of little fishes. And who could it have been, in that last
year that Robyn spent at Eton, who lent him the books that “meeting in
him with a restless fancy” gave his thoughts such a “latitude of roving”?
Robyn had been away from school on a visit to London, and there had
fallen ill of a “tertian ague”, and had been sent back to Eton to see if
good air and diet might not do more for him than all “the Queen’s and
other doctors’ remedies” had done. His own phrase[61] is that “to divert
his melancholy they made him read the State Adventures of Amadis de
Gaule, and other fabulous and wandering stories.” Who was the “they” at
Eton? It could not have been the “new, rigid fellow”. Amadis de Gaule may
have been part of Mr. John Harrison’s system of education, but one would
like to believe that Sir Henry Wotton had some hand in fashioning Robert
Boyle—that his whole library was open to the boy, not only the books of
romance and adventure in it that gave Robyn’s thoughts such a “latitude
of roving.” One would like to believe that the torch was indeed passed on
from Kepler’s laboratory, and by the study of one of those three copies
of Bacon’s _Novum Organum_, into the hands of England’s first great
experimental chemist.
Be that as it may, Sir Henry Wotton was already ill when Frank and Robyn
were removed from Eton in November 1638; and it was Mr. Harrison who duly
sent after them to Stalbridge the furniture of their chamber—the blew
perpetuana curtains and all the other things so carefully inventoried by
poor Carew. And Carew himself no longer served his sweet young masters:
he had been succeeded by a manservant with the suggestive name of Rydowt,
who appears to have been a married man, and was accommodated with a
little cottage of his own at Stalbridge, with a garden which the Earl
planted with “cane apples” from Ireland. The boys were to live and learn
their lessons with Mr. Dowch at the Parsonage; and that “old divine”
was very soon to discover that Robyn had not learnt much Latin at Eton
after all, and “with great care and civility” to proceed to read with
him the Latin poets as well as the Latin prose-writers. And while the
Earl gave Frank a horse of his own, and knew him to be happy and gallant
in the saddle, it was Robyn who was the old Earl’s Benjamin, most loved
of all his sons. The family saw a likeness in Robyn to his father—a
likeness both in body and mind. It is difficult to credit the Earl of
Cork with any of his youngest son’s habit of “unemployed pensiviness,”
but there must have been something in Robyn when he was quite a little
fellow—a quiet self-reliance—that impressed the old Earl strangely. Robyn
was only twelve years old; he had as yet shown none of the traits of
character that the Earl so “severely disrelished” in some of his sons
and sons-in-law. And so, when he gave Frank the horse, the Earl listened
perhaps with some wonderment to Robyn’s “pretie conceptions” in excellent
language, spoken still not quite smoothly; and he was content to let the
boy wander as he liked. He gave his Benjamin the keys of his orchard, not
afraid to leave him in a very paradise of unplucked apples, “thinking at
random.”
CHAPTER V
THE HOUSE OF THE SAVOY
“You shall have all this winter att the Savoy, in Sʳ. Tho.
Stafford’s howse, the greatest familie that will be in London
(I pray God the ould man houlds out).”—Letter from Sir John
Leeke to Sir Edmund Verney, 1639: _Verney Memoirs_, vol. i.
The Earl’s gift of a horse to his son Frank had been made at a
psychological moment. For Frank, at sixteen, was not over robust, and
Robyn, not much more than twelve, was scarcely fitted to defend his
King and Country; and they must have just watched their three elder
brothers, Dungarvan, Kynalmeaky and Broghill, ride off in great spirits
from Stalbridge to join the King at Newcastle or York. War was in the
air, and rumours of war; and Stalbridge Manor and Sherborne Castle, and
the villages of Dorsetshire and all the great families in England, were
astir, as day by day and week by week the troops of English horse and
foot were moving northwards to engage against what the old Earl turned
off so lightly in his diary as the “Covenanting, rebelleows Skots.”
In January 1639 a circular letter had been sent out in King Charles’
name to all the English nobility, asking them to state how far and in
what manner they were ready to assist the Scottish Expedition; and week
by week, according to their means and their political inclinations, the
English nobles—Laudians and Puritans alike—had been sending in their
answers: £1000, and twenty horse; twenty horse and attendance in person
or by substitute; £1000 in lieu of horse; £500 and twelve horse; and
so on.[62] And some gave willingly, and some gave grudgingly, and some
evaded promising to give anything; and one or two were brave enough to
refuse—and to give their reasons why. Even at Court there was “much
contrarity”; it was a case of “soe many men soe many opinions.”[63]
Wentworth, over in Ireland, had written offering his King £2000, and if
necessary more to his “uttermost farthing”. And the Earl of Cork, at
Stalbridge, had not done badly either, though he seems to have had his
reservations about this levying of money and troops. His neighbour, the
Earl of Bristol, at Sherborne, was one of those who had evaded promising
anything in the meantime.
But in February and March Dungarvan and Barrymore had been in London,
and just at this time also Kynalmeaky and Broghill had arrived back in
London with M. Marcombes. During this visit to London Dungarvan had been
led into an undertaking to serve his King in the Scottish Expedition: a
rash undertaking, made without his father’s “privitie”; “an unadvised
engagement” is the Earl’s comment in his diary. But all the same the
Earl supplied his son and heir with £3000 to raise and arm a troop of a
hundred horse—a magnificent subscription, which at the time caused much
talk at the Court of Whitehall. Lord Barrymore, at the same time, had
been commissioned by the King to hurry across to Ireland with letters to
Wentworth, and to “raise and press” a thousand Irishmen, foot-soldiers,
into the King’s service against the Scots.
The very day that Barrymore set out for Ireland on this mission the Earl
of Bristol left Sherborne for the rendezvous at York. A day or two later
King Charles himself set out from London on his journey northwards, and
in April, Kynalmeaky and Broghill were being fitted out with arms and
saddles and “armors of prooff”, in order to accompany their brother
Dungarvan. In the beginning of May, Dungarvan’s wagons and carriages
began their journey from Stalbridge; and on May 9 the Earl’s three
sons, Dungarvan, Kynalmeaky, and Broghill, rode out of Stalbridge with
Dungarvan’s troop of one hundred horse. Three of his five sons! “God, I
beseech him,” wrote the Earl in his diary, “restore them safe, happy, and
victorious, to my comfort.” It was then that he gave Frank a horse for
his very own, and that the small philosopher was allowed to pocket the
orchard keys. And the family at the Manor settled down to wait for news
of their soldiers—so slow of coming in those old days. The ladies and the
children were left behind in the care of the old Earl, M. Marcombes, and
Mr. Dowch, the parson.
There were a good many ladies at the Manor during the summer of 1639. A
bevy of daughters had gathered about the old Earl, and were “exceeding
welcome unto” him. And it is not to be supposed that it was by any
means a doleful household while the men of the family were away. For
the women of the Boyle family, whatever their education had or had not
been, were every whit as clever by nature as the men: “Believe it,”
wrote the family friend, Sir John Leeke, to Sir Edmund Verney, about
the ladies of the Boyle family, “Ould Corke could not begett nothing
foolish.” Lady Dungarvan, his daughter-in-law, and his daughters Lady
Barrymore, Lady Lettice Goring, Lady Katharine Jones and the little Lady
Mary Boyle, were all at Stalbridge at this time, together with several
of the grandchildren and all the “retinues.” And in picturing this
family gathering it is strange to remember that at least three of these
noble women must have been marked by the scourge of the smallpox. Lady
Dungarvan had never been beautiful; and her recent attack of smallpox,
however it may have altered her pleasant face, had not left her any less
cheerful and good-natured than when she first came a bride amongst them,
and won, by her charming person and manner, the liking of the “best sort
of people” in Ireland. It was a charm that was to outlive her youth: “A
very fine-speaking lady,” wrote Samuel Pepys of her many years later;
“and a good woman, but old, and not handsome; but a brave woman.” And so
overcome was Mr. Pepys by his first sight and salutation of this noble
lady at Burlington House that he managed to set his periwig afire in the
candle that was brought for the sealing of a letter.[64]
Lady Barrymore had also suffered severely from smallpox soon after her
child-marriage, and at the same time with her sister Lettice. This
illness, and the subsequent disappointments of life, had left Lettice
Goring a querulous invalid. She was shockingly illiterate, and she was
small-minded, though she was not a stupid woman. But Lady Barrymore seems
to have kept all her charms—not the least of them her “brave hart”. She
was clever, very political and chatty; “very energetic and capable, very
amusing and very lovable.”[65] And then there was Lady Katharine—wife
of Arthur Jones;—the one of all the Earl’s daughters with the finest
intellect, the finest character, and, according to report, the most
beautiful face. Weighed down as she was by a miserable marriage, she
was to rise above all the trials of life, to be remembered by later
generations as “Milton’s Friend,” the “Incomparable Lady Ranelagh”, the
“dearest, dearest, dearest sister” of Robert Boyle. “A more brave wench
or a Braver Spiritt you have not often mett withall,” Sir John Leeke
wrote of her in the summer of 1639; “she hath a memory that will hear a
sermon and goe home and penn itt after dinner verbatim. I know not how
she will appeare in England, but she is most accounted of at Dublin.”
Sir John Leeke, who had married Sir Edmund Verney’s half-sister, was
related also to the Barrymore family, and lived with his wife and
children in a house on the Castle Lyons estates. It was Lady Barrymore
who figured in his delightful letters as “My deare Mustris”, and “the
worthiest of woemen”. But it was Katharine Jones, and the sorrow that
looked out of her sweet face, that had won all his chivalrous devotion.
“My pretious Katharine”, he wrote, “is somewhat decayed from the sweetest
face I ever saw (and surely I have seen good ones).”
The little Katy—who might have married young Sapcott Beaumont, and so
become one of a family known afterwards for its generous patronage of
art and literature, the family so kind to the Poet Wordsworth—had been
given, at fifteen, to “honest Arthur Jones”, who would some day be
Viscount Ranelagh. Her marriage portion had been duly paid down, as per
agreement, at Strongbow’s tomb in Christchurch, Dublin, on Midsummer
Day 1631. She had been carried off to Athlone Castle; and though she
had since lived a good deal under her father’s roof, and had evidently
always been a special object of her own family’s care and affection, she
had, none the less, ever since her marriage-day, been in legal bondage
to a man who was a gambler and a churl. In this summer of 1639, the old
Earl, writing to Lord Ranelagh, the father of Arthur Jones, was begging
him rather pathetically not to insist on his son’s return to Ireland,
but to allow Katharine and Arthur to spend the winter together in the
House of the Savoy: “They shalbe both lodged and dyeted in my house
and hartily welcome.” He seems to have hoped that a winter in London
might improve Arthur Jones, “now that he hath given over immoderate
play in Corners.”[66] But if the Earl was determined, for his favourite
daughter’s sake, to make the best of a miserable business, Sir John Leeke
in his letter to Sir Edmund Verney was more outspoken. “She is keapte and
long hath bine by the foulest churl in the worlde,” he wrote: “he hath
only one virtue that he seldome cometh sober to bedd....”[67]
It is scarcely to be wondered at if the youngest of this bevy of
sisters, the little Lady Mary Boyle, looked dubiously on the thing
called Husband, as she saw it in one or two types of brother-in-law that
presented themselves to her girlish scrutiny. With her own horses, her
own handsome allowance, and a great deal of her own way, this little
lady of fourteen was not disposed to “change her condition.” The stormy
romance of her life was to come all too soon; but in the meantime the
Beauty was still sleeping. In three of her sisters’ marriages, she could
have seen little of that “Heart Exchange” of which we may imagine her
to have been reading in her volume of Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_—an
opinionative little lady, probably in a scarlet gown, on some sequestered
seat in the manor garden.
“My true-love has my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given.”
Not of George Goring, handsome, plausible, dissolute and cold; nor of
Kildare, who deserted wife and children and pawned the family silver; nor
of Arthur Jones, who played immoderately in corners, and habitually went
tipsy to bed, could it ever have been said by any woman, however wifely
and compliant—
“His heart in me keeps me and him in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides.”
No: Mary Boyle, at fourteen, was not disposed to change her condition;
and so it was with a ready-made aversion to matrimony that, in the
summer of 1639, she received Mr. James Hamilton,[68] son and heir of
Lord Clandeboye, who arrived by paternal invitation at the Manor of
Stalbridge. The Earl of Cork and Lord Clandeboye had been for some
time in correspondence about this alliance; and Mr. James Hamilton,
immediately on his return from his foreign travels, which had included “a
general survey” of Italy and France, had sent his own man to Stalbridge
with letters heralding his arrival, and had followed a day or two later,
travelling in some state, with his tutor and other attendants. There
seems to have been no fault to find with the young man. According to Lord
Clandeboye, his son was “a hater of vice, and a Lover of Noble partes,
and of vertuous industries”; but all the same Mary Boyle expressed, in no
measured terms, “a very high averseness and contradicon” to her father’s
commands. She would have nothing to say to this suitor for her little
fourteen-year-old hand; and with much chagrin the Earl was obliged to
write in his diary, “being refused in marriadge by my unrewly daughter
Mary, he departed my hows the second of September to the Bathe.”
But between May and September many things of importance had happened
at the Manor of Stalbridge. The Scottish engagement had come quickly
to an end. It was May 9 when Dungarvan and his two brothers had left
Stalbridge; and from time to time letters had been coming to the old
Earl from his sons in camp near Berwick. But on Midsummer Day, about two
o’clock in the morning, Broghill had clattered into the courtyard of the
Manor, having ridden post-haste from the camp to bring his father the
first happy news of the “Honourable Peace” concluded with the Scots. It
was, of course, but a “seeming settlement,” and of short duration: the
beginning, indeed, and not the end of civil war. But Dungarvan’s troop
of horse was disbanded, and, according to the Earl’s diary, the English
army was dissolved before poor Barrymore landed out of Ireland with his
“yrish regiment of 1000 foot.” In July, George Goring joined his Lady
at the Manor, and they left together for “the Bathe”. Dungarvan and his
brothers were back at Stalbridge, and the King and Queen were in London
again. And early in August, Sir Thomas and Lady Stafford arrived on a
visit to the Earl of Cork; and the diary records “my Lady Stafford and
I conferred privately between ourselves towching our children, _and
concluded_.”
This private conference in the Stalbridge parlour decided the fate of the
sweet-spirited Frank. My Lady Stafford, when she married the Earl’s “trew
friend,” Sir Thomas Stafford, gentleman usher to the Queen,[69] was the
widow of Sir Robert Killigrew of Hanworth in Middlesex, and the mother of
several Killigrew children. One of them was the notorious Tom Killigrew,
page of honour to Charles I, court wit, playwright, and boon-companion
of Charles II; and another was the little Mistress Elizabeth Killigrew,
“both young and handsome,”[70] and at this time one of the Queen’s maids
of honour. And now Francis Boyle was to marry Elizabeth Killigrew.
It ought to be said that the old Earl, in the Stalbridge parlour
conference, “held it fitter” that a contract, rather than a marriage,
should be arranged; and that it was the King himself who intervened,
approving of the plan of foreign travel, but adding: “We conceave that a
compleate and perfect marriage wilbe most convenient & honorable for all
parties.”[71]
It was precisely at this juncture that Mr. James Hamilton arrived upon
the scene; and it was just two days later, as the family coaches were in
readiness to drive the whole house-party to Sherborne Castle, to “kill
a Buck” and dine with the Earl and Countess of Bristol, that Katharine
Jones’s third baby made its premature appearance in the family circle.
“But my daughter shall never be one of his Majestye’s Auditors,” said the
good-natured old Earl, “since she can keepe her reckoninge noe better.”
And he recalled how her sister Digby had served him the same way during
that long-ago visit to Oxford.
It must have been a trying time at the Manor, with match-making, and
buck-killing, and babies, and “re-edifications” all mixed up together
in most admired disorder. But everybody behaved beautifully in the
circumstances. Lady Stafford stood sponsor at the baby’s hurried
christening, and afterwards presented the Earl of Cork with a “lyttle
glass bottle of Spiritt of Amber for curing the palsy”; which looks as
if Frank’s marriage-negotiations, and the baby’s birth, and the unruly
Mary’s “averseness and contradicon” had altogether been a little too much
for the old man.
By September, however, the guests were all gone, and the Earl was
receiving letters from the King and Queen, expressing their “several
wishes” for the marriage of Frank and the little maid of honour. And
accordingly on September 19, Frank and Robert, under the charge of
M. Marcombes, and with forty shillings each for pocket-money, were
dispatched to London, on a visit to Sir Thomas and Lady Stafford. Frank,
God bless him! was at sixteen to “make his addresses to the Lady,” while
Robert Boyle, in his thirteenth year, looked on and philosophised.[72]
The old Earl had given Frank a letter, to be delivered into Lady
Stafford’s hands—
“I do now send this bearer to offer his service unto you, and to be
commanded and governed by you.”
It is a touching letter. The old man was obeying his King’s commands, but
he was full of fatherly anxiety; proud, fond and dubious. He intended
to spare neither care nor charge in giving Frank a noble breeding in
foreign kingdoms; he would have preferred a contract; the boy’s extreme
youth, his further education, the difficulty of sending him back after
his marriage “to be governed by a tutor”, were all in the old man’s mind
as he wrote; and he begged the prospective mother-in-law also to take
them into consideration: “ffor I send him unto you as a silken Thrid to
be wrought into what samples you please either flower or weed, and to be
knotted or untyed as god shalbe pleased to put into your noble hart. Yet,
in my best understanding, a good and sure contract is as bynding as a
marriage, espetially when all intenc̃ons are reall, as myne are, and ever
shalbe; which are accompanied with a strong assurance that this childe
of myne will prove religious, honest, and just, though he be modest and
somewhat over bashfull.... What he is, is with himself and yours....”
Early in October, the Manor of Stalbridge was dismantled, and the Earl
of Cork, with the rest of his family and retinue, set out in state for
London. Sir Thomas Stafford had arranged to lend his old friend his House
of the Savoy for the winter, “bravely furnished in all things except
linen and plate,” which were being brought from Stalbridge.
Lady Barrymore and Lady Katharine Jones “with their Lords and Children”
were to be lodged in the adjacent houses, but were to take their
meals with the Earl their father in the Savoy;[73] and, as the Lady
Mary expressed it many years later, “when we were once settled there,
my father, living extraordinarily high, drew a very great resort
thither.”[74]
Now that Kynalmeaky and Broghill were out of leading strings, their
“Governour” was transferred to the two younger boys; and it was arranged
that as soon as Frank and Mrs. Betty Killigrew were united in the bonds
of matrimony, M. Marcombes was to carry both the boys off on their
“peregrination”. Sir Henry Wotton had hinted at some such scheme when he
told the Earl that Marcombes was “borne for your purpose”; and indeed M.
Marcombes—the guide and teacher of Robert Boyle from his thirteenth to
his eighteenth year—was a remarkable man. “He was a man”—wrote Robert
Boyle in later years—“whose garb, his mien and outside, had very much
of his nation, having been divers years a traveller and a soldier. He
was well-fashioned, and very well knew what belonged to a gentleman....
Scholarship he wanted not, having in his greener years been a professed
student in Divinity; but he was much less read in books than men, and
hated pedantry as much as any of the seven deadly sins.”
Before company, the governor was “always very civil to his pupils, apt
to eclipse their failings, and set off their good qualities to the best
advantage;” but in his private conversation he was cynically disposed,
and “a very nice critic both of words and men.” His worst quality
seems to have been his “choler”; and Robyn soon learned that to avoid
“clashing” with his governor he must manage to keep his own quick young
temper in submission.
This was the man with whom, all the summer of 1639, Robert Boyle had
read the _Universal History_ in Latin, and carried on “a familiar kind
of conversation” in French. And this was the man in whose charge Frank
and Robyn were to set off on their travels when Frank’s wedding was
over. They were to go to Geneva, where Broghill and Kynalmeaky had
been before them, where there was now a Madame Marcombes in readiness
to receive them.[75] For during his previous peregrinations in France
and Switzerland with Kynalmeaky and Broghill, Marcombes, quite unknown
to the Earl, had met and married his wife. She was a Parisian lady, of
good civic connexions, and she was an excellent housewife. Marcombes had
actually run away from Kynalmeaky and Broghill for a day or two to tie
the nuptial knot. The Earl had at first been angry, but had forgiven
Marcombes; indeed the charge of Kynalmeaky and Broghill was not an easy
one; perhaps the Earl realised that Marcombes, under the circumstances,
required a _besseres Ich_; and, in any case, Marcombes would have been
difficult to replace. For he was—he says it himself—“an honest and
Carefull man”; and he told the Earl in plain words while he was acting as
governor to Kynalmeaky and Broghill that the title of governor was but “a
vaine name, specially when those yt a man has under his Charge have kept
so long Companie with hunters and players, and soe many Gentlemen that
will humour them in anything and will let them know their Greatnesse, as
my young Lords have been used in Ireland.”[76]
Marcombes had found no fault with my Lord Broghill: “I may assure your
Lordship yt you shall have both honour and comfort in him.... Every
one yt knows him Loves him and speakes well of him and without any
compliment”; but Kynalmeaky, the brilliant young libertine, though “a
young Lord of many good parts,” loved his pleasures too well. “I looke
at home very narrowly to his drinking and abroad to his borrowing”,
Marcombes had reported to the Earl. Moreover, both the boys had had
smallpox in Genoa; but he had brought them both safely back to Stalbridge
in time to join their brother Dungarvan’s troop of horse in the Scottish
engagement; and it must have been with a sigh of relief that he turned
his attention to the two younger boys, Frank and Robyn.
On the 24th of October, Francis Boyle was married to Mrs. Elizabeth
Killigrew, in the King’s Chapel of Whitehall. The King gave the lady away
with his own hand, and a royal feast in Court was made for the young
couple. The King and Queen were both present; and the old Earl and three
of his daughters (probably Lady Barrymore, Lady Katharine Jones, and Lady
Mary Boyle) sat at the royal table, “amongst all the great Lords and
Ladies.” The King himself “took the bride out to dance....”
And four days later, “to render this joy as short as it was great,”[77]
Frank was packed off to France with Robyn and M. Marcombes. Having kissed
their Majesties’ hands, the boys took a “differing farewell of all their
friends.” The bridegroom was “exceedingly afflicted” to have to leave his
little new-made wife; but the spiritay Robyn was on tip-toe of excitement
at the thought of foreign travel and adventure. On October 28, 1639,
they set out with their governor and two French servants from the House
of the Savoy. So far the sweet-spirited Frank had done everything that
was expected of him; but there was a scene at parting. For the bride was
to be left behind in the Savoy under the Earl of Cork’s care, with the
unruly Lady Mary as her “chamber-fellow.” And so unwilling was Frank to
tear himself away that the old Earl was incensed; and Frank, in those
last troubled moments of leave-taking, forgot to buckle on his sword—the
sword, as well as the lady, was left behind!
CHAPTER VI
ROBYN GOES ABROAD
O ye windes of God, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and magnifie
him for ever.
...
O ye fire and heat, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and magnifie
him for ever.
...
O ye ice and snow, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and magnifie
him for ever.
...
O ye lightnings and clouds, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and
magnifie him for ever.
...
O ye Children of men, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and
magnifie him for ever.
_Benedicite omnia opera: Black Letter Prayer Book of 1636._
The little party—five in all—Francis and Robert, and M. Marcombes, with
their two French servants, “took post for Rye in Sussex; and there,
though the sea was rather rough, they hired a ship,” and “a prosperous
puff of wind did safely, by next morning, blow them into France.”[78]
They were a day and night at sea, and “a little tossed att night”; they
had escaped the perils of the deep and of “yᵉ Donkirks”; and after
stopping for a short refreshment at Dieppe, they set off towards Rouen
and Paris.[79] They enjoyed the company of several French gentlemen on
the road, of which they were glad; for a robbery had been “freshly
committed in a wood” between Rouen and Paris, through which the
travellers would be obliged to pass by night. Marcombes sensibly observed
that the very next day after the robbery would be the very safest time to
ride through the wood; and accordingly they continued their journey. At
Rouen, Robyn was fascinated by the great floating bridge, which rose and
fell with the tide water; and in one of his “pretty conceits,” such as
had so amused Sir Henry Wotton at Eton, the boy compared this bridge at
Rouen to the “vain amorists of outward greatnesse, whose spirits resent”
(_i.e._ rise and fall with) “all the flouds and ebbs of that fortune it
is built on.” And this so soon after Frank’s gay wedding in Whitehall!
Arrived in Paris on November 4, unmolested by brigands on their journey,
Marcombes and the two boys spent some days in “that vast chaos of a
city,” where they were shown most of the “varieties,” and met several
English friends—among them one whom M. Marcombes heartily disliked,
Frank’s new brother-in-law, Tom Killigrew, with the honeyed tongue,
brother of the little bride who had been left behind in the House of the
Savoy. They also called on the English Ambassador; but the great event of
their visit to Paris has been described in Marcombes’s first letter to
the Earl.[80]
Mr. Francis, he says, had been so troubled at the moment of his departure
from the Savoy on account of his father’s anger against him, that he had
quite forgotten where he had put his own sword and the case of pistols
which the Earl had given the boys; and Marcombes had been obliged, when
they arrived at Paris, to buy them “a kaise of pistolles a piece”, not
only because of the dangerous state of the roads in France (witness the
robbery freshly committed in a wood), but because it was “yᵉ mode” in
France for every gentleman to ride with pistols; and people would “Laugh
att” the Earl’s hopeful sons if they were without them. A sword also
had been bought for Mr. Francis, and “when Mr. Robert saw it he did so
earnestly desire me to buy him one, because his was out of fashion, that
I could not refuse him that small request.”
They left Paris, with their new swords and pistols, a little company,
“all well-horsed,” numbering some twenty altogether, and including
two delightful “Polonian” Princes, who were “Princes by virtue and
education as well as birth.” It was a nine days’ journey to Lyons, and
on the way they rested, among other places, at Moulins, which the future
experimentalist remembered for its “fine tweezes.” But romance was at
this time nearer to the boy’s heart than chemistry; their way had lain
through a part of the French Arcadia, “the pleasant _Pays de Forest_,
where the Marquis d’Urfé had laid the scene of the adventures and amours
of that Astrea with whom so many gallants are still in love, long after
both his and her decease.”[81]
Lyons itself, where they stayed for a time, seemed to Robert Boyle
“a town of great resort and trading, but fitter for the residence of
merchants than of gentlemen.” They crossed the mountains that had
formerly belonged to the Duke of Savoy, but were now in the territory of
the French king, and they saw the Rhone in its narrowest part, between
the rocks, “where it is no such large stride to stand on both his banks”;
and after three days’ journey from Lyons, they reached Geneva, a little
Commonwealth whose quick and steady prosperity under the “reformed
religion” had made it the theme “not only of discourse but of some degree
of wonder.” There, for nearly two years, the boys were to board with M.
Marcombes and his wife and family, and to find themselves in a little
ready-made circle of friends; for Barrymore and Kynalmeaky had been
there together, and boarded at the Villa Diodati. Philip Burlamachy, the
former Lord Mayor of London, who did so much business with the Earl of
Cork, and who, it will be remembered, had recommended Marcombes to the
Earl, belonged to Geneva, and was related by marriage to the Diodati
family there; and Mr. Diodato Diodati, the banker, and Dr. John Diodati,
the famous Italian Protestant preacher, were among the chief Genevan
residents. “The church government,” wrote John Evelyn about Geneva, only
a year or two later, “is severely Presbyterian, after the discipline of
Calvin and Beza, who set it up; but nothing so rigid as either our Scots
or English sectaries of that denomination.”
Geneva was, as Marcombes had pointed out to the Earl when he took the
boys there, not only a very convenient place for himself—for his home
and family were there—but “by reason of the pure air and the notable
Strangers always passing through it, and the conveniences for all kinds
of Learning there, a very good place for the two boys to be educated
in.” They would be among those who though “farr from puritanisme” were
very orthodox and religious men, and they would be in no danger from
conversation with “Jesuits, friars, priests, or any persons ill-affected
to their religion, king or state.” In a word, Frank and Robyn were to be
bred in a commonwealth of educated toleration; and its fine influences
were to remain with Robert Boyle—who lived there a little longer than his
brother—all through his life.
From time to time, Marcombes wrote comfortable letters to the Earl in
London. Supplies of money had, so far, come regularly; but as yet no
letters had arrived from the Earl of Cork, who was, as will be seen
later, beset by family cares and public anxieties. Marcombes and the
boys had settled down to regular lessons at set hours. The lessons were
to include rhetoric and logic, arithmetic and Euclid, geography, the
doctrine of the spheres and globe, and fortification. They were to take
lessons with a fencing-master and a dancing-master, and they played at
mall and tennis—this last a sport that Robert Boyle “ever passionately
loved.” And they read together in a “voluminous but excellent work”
called _Le Monde_; but above all Robyn, if not Frank, was indulged in the
reading of romances, which not only “extreamely diverted” him, but also
taught him French. And as they talked no English, but “all and allwayes
French,” Robert became very soon “perfect” in the French tongue, while
Frank could “express himself in all companies.”[82]
Marcombes was evidently very proud of having a second batch of the Earl
of Cork’s sons put under his care; and Frank and Robyn proved pupils
more to his taste than Kynalmeaky and Broghill had been. For one thing,
they had come to him fresh from school; and he found the very young
bridegroom and the younger philosopher, “noble, virtuous, discreet
and disciplinable.” “I think”, he wrote to the Earl, “I neede not much
Rhetorike for to persuade your Lordship that Mr. Robert Loves his booke
with all his heart.” And Robert also danced extremely well; and so
anxious was he to excel in fencing, that the good-natured Marcombes was
“almost afraid yᵗ he should have left a quarell unperfect in England.” As
for Frank, he was taking to his lessons with a “facilitie and passion”
that surprised Marcombes, seeing that the boy had “tasted a little drope
of yᵉ Libertinage of yᵉ Court.” Francis had been well provided with
clothes in London; but Master Robert had been furnished in Geneva with a
complete black satin suit, the cloak lined with plush; and Marcombes gave
the boys every month “a piece yᵉ value of very neare two pounds sterlings
for their passe time.”
That first winter in Geneva was an exceptionally cold one, and a great
deal of snow had fallen “on yᵉ grounde.” The Governour’s letters to
the Earl reported the boys to be growing apace. Mr. Francis’s legs and
arms were considerably bigger than when he left England. The mountain
air and the dancing and fencing were doing both boys good, though Mr.
Robert still preferred sitting by himself, “with some book of history
or other”—the romances are not mentioned—and required some persuasion
“to playe at tennisse and to goe about.” He was, however, in excellent
health. “I never saw him handsomer,” wrote Marcombes to the Earl; “for
although he growes so much, yet he is very fatt and his cheeks as red as
vermilion.” The frosty air had brought them “to such a stomacke that your
Lordship should take a great pleasure to see them feed.
“I doe not give them Daintys,” he wrote: “but I assure your Lordship that
they have allwayes good bred and Good wine, good beef and mouton, thrice
a week, good capons and good fish, constantly disches of fruit and a Good
piece of cheese: all kind of cleane linen twice and thrice a weeke, and a
Constant fire in their chamber, where they have a good bedd for them and
another for their men.”
Marcombes describes in detail the order of their days in the Genevan
household. Every morning during their first months in Geneva he taught
them rhetoric and Latin; and after dinner they read two chapters of the
Old Testament—with “expositions” from Marcombes on those points they did
not understand; and before supper they read Roman history in French,
and repeated “yᵉ catechisme of Calvin with yᵉ most orthodox exposition”
of difficult points; and after supper they read two chapters of the New
Testament. And they said their prayers morning and evening, and twice a
week they went to church. “There is, my Lord,” ended Marcombes, with a
little flourish of self-satisfaction, “a Compendium of our employment!”
But all these months no answers to their various letters had come from
the Earl in London. They had left London on October 28, and it was
apparently the middle of February before the boys heard from their
father; and then two packets of his long-expected letters, both written
in January, arrived together. The formal, reverential little letters
which the boys were in the habit of penning to the Earl were letters
chiefly remarkable for their beginnings and endings. They usually began
“My most honoured Lord and Father,” and ended with some such peroration,
as “with my dayly prayers to God for your Lordship’s long life, health
and happiness, and with the desire to be esteemed all my life, My Lord,
your most dutiful and obedient Son and humblest Servant.”
A modern reader would scarcely credit, from such a peroration, the
existence of a deep natural affection; and there was certainly not the
kind of untrammelled love of the modern child for the modern parent. And
yet the ornate solemnity of these little seventeenth-century letters only
cloaked the tender humanity beneath. It was but a literary form; and
under it, in spite of the foster-parentage of babyhood, the subservience
of youth, and the rigour of parental authority, the strong human love
was there in the seventeenth century as now. When the long-expected
packets arrived at M. Marcombes’s house in Geneva, and the boys gathered
about their governour to receive their father’s letters, so overjoyed
and excited was the “Spiritay Robyn” that his hesitation of speech—which
had almost disappeared—returned in full force; and for some minutes he
stammered and stuttered so atrociously that Frank and Marcombes could
scarcely understand what he was saying, and had much ado to “forbeare
Laughing.”
And what was the Earl’s news? Much had been happening in London, both
inside and outside the House of the Savoy, since October 1639; but
evidently only an abridged edition reached Marcombes and the boys in
Geneva.
Lady Barrymore had been very ill, but was recovering. Lady Dungarvan,[83]
whose second little girl had died at Salisbury House, in London, before
the boys left London, had a little son at last; but “lyttle Franck,” the
Dublin-born daughter, remained the old Earl’s pet. The heir was born
on November 17 in the House of the Savoy, and christened in the Savoy
Chapel by the name of “Charles,” the King himself standing sponsor,
while the Countess of Salisbury was godmother, and the other godfather
was the Marquis of Hamilton. But the great news of all was the news of
Kynalmeaky’s marriage—a very splendid marriage it had been—with the Lady
Elizabeth Fielding, one of the ladies of the Queen’s privy chamber, and
daughter of the Earl and Countess of Denbigh. Their other daughter was
married to the Marquis of Hamilton, and the Countess of Denbigh herself
was a sister of the King’s favourite, the murdered Buckingham.
The marriage of Lord Kynalmeaky and the Lady Elizabeth Fielding had
been arranged under royal auspices. The King had dowered the lady, and
the wedding, like Frank’s, had been in the Royal Chapel of Whitehall.
The King had given away the bride, and “put about her neck” the Queen’s
gift of a rich pearl necklace, “worth £1500.” There was much revelling,
dancing and feasting afterwards, and the King and Queen “did the young
couple all honour and grace.” The Earl of Cork, always a strange mixture
of generosity and thrift, had supplied £100 for Kynalmeaky’s wedding
garments, and lent him “my son Franck’s wedding shoes” for the occasion.
Broghill also was to be married. “Your friend Broghill,” the Earl wrote
to Marcombes, “is in a fair way of being married to Mrs. Harrison, one of
the Queen’s maids of honour, about whom a difference happened yesterday
between Mr. Thomas Howard, the Earl of Berkshire’s son and him, which
brought them into the field; but thanks be to God, Broghill came home
without any hurt, and the other gentleman was not much harmed; and now
they have clashed swords together they are grown good friends. I think
in my next I shall advise you that my daughter Mary is nobly married, and
that in the spring I shall send her husband to keep company with my sons
in Geneva.”[84]
The old Earl, when he wrote to Marcombes in January 1640, did not guess
the sequels to these two little romances. For though the wedding clothes
were making, Broghill was never to marry Mrs. Harrison, whom he, like
many other gallants, had “passionately loved.” On the contrary, it was
Mr. Thomas Howard, “not much harmed,” who was to be the happy man; and
the lady whom Broghill was presently to marry was the Lady Margaret
Howard, the beautiful daughter of the Earl and Countess of Suffolk, and a
cousin of Mr. Thomas Howard. The two young men had clashed swords to some
purpose; but Lord Broghill’s marriage with Lady Margaret Howard comes
into another chapter.
Nobody exactly knows who was the noble suitor that was to marry
Mary Boyle and be packed off to Geneva like a schoolboy immediately
afterwards. For Mary Boyle had once more expressed her “very high
averseness and contradicon” to the Earl’s counsels and commands. She had
again refused Mr. James Hamilton, though all her brothers and sisters
and several of her brothers-in-law, and all her best friends—poor
little unruly Mary!—“did entreat and persuade,” and the old Earl “did
command.” Vanquished for once, the Earl of Cork had been in treaty with
more than one other youthful suitor for Mary’s hand. But Mary Boyle has
told her own story.[85] “Living so much at my ease,” she says, “I was
unwilling to change my condition.” After Frank’s marriage, his wife
Betty lived with the Earl in the House of the Savoy, where she and Mary
Boyle became close friends and “chamber fellows.” Betty obtained “a
great and ruling power” over Mary, “inticing her to spend” (as she did)
“her time in seeing and reading plays and romances, and in exquisite
and curious dressing.” Betty Boyle had many of the young gallants of
the Court at her beck and call, and one of them was Mr. Charles Rich,
second son of the Earl of Warwick. Charles Rich was “a very cheerful and
handsome, well-bred and fashioned person, and being good company, was
very acceptable to us all, and so became very intimate in our house,
visiting us almost every day.” Charles Rich also had been in love with
Mrs. Harrison, but not so deeply as to prevent his acting as Mr. Thomas
Howard’s second in the duel; and after that for a time he had considered
it only civil to absent himself from the House of the Savoy. When he
did come again it was to transfer his attentions to the Lady Mary; and
Frank’s wife played go-between. “A most diligent gallant to me,” says
Mary of Charles Rich, many long years after their forbidden love-making
and runaway marriage; “applying himself, when there were no other
beholders in the room but my sister, to me; but if any other person came
in he took no more than ordinary notice of me.” And every night when Mary
laid her little unruly head upon the pillow she resolved that Charles
Rich must be given his dismissal, and that Betty must be told never again
to mention him to her as a husband. And somehow every morning it seemed
impossible to carry out her resolution; and she made her toilet, and
put on her most exquisite and curious dress, and looked the proud and
charming little lady that she was.
But Marcombes and the boys in Geneva knew nothing of all this; and for
that matter neither as yet did the old Earl. The noble suitor about
whom he was in treaty when he wrote to Geneva was certainly not Charles
Rich—who was only a second son, “with £1300 or £1400 a year at the most”;
and who, if he dared to pay his court to the Earl of Cork’s youngest
daughter, must do it clandestinely with the connivance of Betty Boyle.
The spring and summer of 1640 passed uneventfully in the Marcombes
household. Spring and summer in Geneva; the peaceful little Calvinist
town, basking under a hot sun and a blue sky; the bluer waters of the
Lake with the big-winged boats upon it; the vivid greens of the middle
distances, and the far-away mountain-peaks white with the everlasting
snows! And the lessons went on as usual, the boys giving their governour
“all yᵉ satisfaction of yᵉ worlde”.... “I would I was as able to teache
as Mr. Robert is able to conceave and to Learne.” It is true that the
witty and wicked Tom Killigrew came down on them from Paris, and favoured
them with a little of his “sweet and delectable conversation”; but
Marcombes told the Earl that he did not think Mr. Killigrew would stay
long in Geneva, “which perhaps will be yᵉ better for your Sons.” When he
did depart, he left with Marcombes a fine watch and some ruby buttons to
be sent to his sister Betty in London. And the little household settled
down again—rhetoric and logic to be succeeded by mathematics, history
and geography, the chief points of religion, and more dancing-lessons.
Mr. Francis was learning to vault. He and Marcombes had received the
Sacrament at five o’clock on Easter morning; but Mr. Robert would not
receive it, “excusing himself upon his yonge age,” though Marcombes
assured the Earl he did not abstain “for want of good instruction upon yᵉ
matter.” In June they had gone a little jaunt into the Savoy country. “We
were two days abroad,” wrote Marcombes to the Earl, “and were never so
merry in our lives.”
But were the boys so merry? Frank, influenced perhaps by Tom Killigrew
and the letters which came from his little wife at home, was beginning to
be restive, and begging his father to allow them to go on into Italy, and
so be the sooner home again. And Robert Boyle?
It was in the very heat of that summer of 1640 that there happened
to Robert Boyle “an accident which he always used to mention as the
considerablest of his whole life.”
“To frame a right apprehension of this,” he says in his _Philaretus_,
“you must understand that though his inclinations were ever virtuous,
and his life free from scandal and inoffensive, yet had the piety he was
master of already so diverted him from aspiring unto more, that Christ,
who long had lain asleep in his conscience (as he once did in the ship)
must now, as then, be waked by a storm.”[86]
About the dead of night, after a long, hot summer day, he had suddenly
wakened to find himself in the midst of one of those thunderstorms so
indescribably grand and terrible among the Alps. He “thought the earth
would owe an ague to the air,” and every clap was both preceded and
attended with flashes of lightning so frequent and so dazzling that he
began to imagine them “the sallies of that fire that must consume the
world.”[87]
The winds almost drowned the noise of the thunder. The rains almost
quenched the flashes of lightning. The Day of Judgment seemed at hand;
and the consideration of his “unpreparedness to welcome it, and the
hideousness of being surprised by it in an unfit condition,” made the boy
“resolve and vow that if his fears were that night disappointed, all his
further additions to his life should be more religiously and watchfully
employed. The morning came, and a serener cloudless sky returned, when he
ratified his determination so solemnly that from that day he dated his
conversion; renewing, now he was past danger, the vow he had made whilst
he believed himself to be in it.”
Afterwards, Robyn blushed to remember that the vow had been made only
in fear; but he comforted himself by thinking that “the more deliberate
consecration of himself to piety had been made when the earth and sky had
regained their equanimity, and with no less motive than that of its own
excellence.” The hour of terror had been also the hour of realisation.
This trembling child, already a student of Nature, had begun amidst
the winds and lightnings to realise dimly the existence of Elemental
Mysteries which made the whole world tremble too. And yet, did not even
these atmospheric exacerbations flash and thunder out the command to
praise Him and magnify Him for ever? Were not the deepest, most terrible
of Elemental Mysteries but part of a Universal Benedicite?
CHAPTER VII
THE DEBACLE
“But (as when in summer we take up our grass-horses into the
stable, and give them store of oats, it is a sign that we mean
to travel them) our Philaretus, soon after he had received this
new strength, found a new weight to support.”—ROBERT BOYLE’S
_Philaretus_.
In the spring of 1641, some months after the thunderstorm episode,
Marcombes bought horses, and they set out on a three weeks’ tour in the
neighbouring country. The Earl had not yet given his permission for the
Italian tour, and Francis and Robert had been sixteen months at their
lessons, and were beginning to long for a holiday. Riding and walking,
they visited Chambéry, Aix, and Grenoble, and then found their way into
“the wild mountains where the first and chiefest of the Carthusian Abbies
does stand seated.” Robyn’s “conversion” by the thunderstorm appears to
have been quite unknown to Frank and Marcombes: they had no conception of
the thoughts that were churning in the boy’s head.
It was the Devil, so Robert Boyle says in his _Philaretus_, who, taking
advantage of the deep raving melancholy of the place, and the pictures
and stories to be found in the Monastery of Bruno,[88] the Father of
the Order, tempted him with “such hideous thoughts and such distracting
doubts of some of the fundamentals of Christianity, that, though his
looks did little betray his thoughts, nothing but the forbiddenness of
self-dispatch hindered his acting it.”
It was more probably an acute attack of home-sickness, following on a
prolonged diet of “yᵉ catechisme of Calvin”; but it was remembered, by
this sensitive boy, as a very real temptation. He wrote to his father
when they returned to Geneva, mentioning the little tour only as one
“wherein we have had some pleasure mingled with some paines.” It was a
sad little letter: “Your Lordship seems,” says Robyn, “to be angry with
my brother and I.” They had not written often, or fully enough; and
letters that are all beginnings and endings do not tell much. Marcombes,
on the other hand, wrote ebulliently to the Earl. He never forgot to
sing the praises of his pupils—Robyn, especially, was _semper idem_, and
“Capable of all good things”; while the nature and disposition of both
boys were “as good and sweete as any in the worlde.”
On their return to Geneva, they had found letters from the Earl, giving
them leave to travel into Italy; and during the summer of 1641 the boys
were “fincing”, and “dansing”, and learning Italian, and holding their
heads well and their bodies straight, and Mr. Francis was now taller than
my Lord Dungarvan, while as for Mr. Robert, he was “an Eale”, tall for
his age, and big proportionably. They rose betimes, loved to ride abroad,
and always came home with “a very good stomacke.” And as Marcombes
assured the Earl that they went regularly to church, and in private also
“sarved God very religiously”, it may be supposed that the months of
“tedious perplexity”, of which Robert Boyle speaks in his _Philaretus_
and of which Marcombes and Frank knew nothing, were drawing to a close.
There came a day, indeed, when Robyn no longer excused himself from
receiving the Sacrament by reason of his “yonge age.” It pleased God,
he says, one day that he had taken the Sacrament to restore to him “the
withdrawn sense of his favour.”
Although the Earl of Cork had given his permission, he was very dubious
about the wisdom of the Italian journey.
“For,” wrote the Earl in London to Marcombes in Geneva, “we have lately
had a popish priest hanged, drawn and quartered; and a many moe in prison
which I think wilbe brought to the like cloudy end, for that they did not
depart the Kingdome by the prefixed date lymited by the late statute.”
The Earl’s friends in London, “suspecting revenge,” had advised
him against the Italian journey, and drawn horrible pictures of an
Inquisition worse than death. But the old man was anxious to satisfy the
boys’ desires, and really wanted them to learn Italian, and to see “all
those brave Universities, States, Cities, Churches, and other remarkeable
things”[89] which only Italy could show them. And so they were to go; but
Marcombes was to take great care of them, and to remember that the Earl
was entrusting “these my Jewells” to him in a strange country.
In preparation for Italy, Madame Marcombes was making for them all kinds
of new linen; and Marcombes bought for them three suits of clothes
apiece, and they were to have more when they reached Florence—“where I
doe intend to keep them a coach, God willing.”
Marcombes was anxious that the Earl should obtain for them a letter (in
Latin) from the King, “to all Kings, Princes, Magistrates,” etc., in
which Marcombes himself should be named “by name and surname.” And they
ought also, he said, to have a special licence from the King to allow
them to travel in Rome, “least your Lordship or your sons should be
questioned hereafter.” The Genevan household were up in arms against Tom
Killigrew, who had gone home and reported, most untruly, that Marcombes
was keeping the boys short of clothes and pocket money.
In July 1641 Robyn wrote again to his father. The Earl seems to have been
still angry with “my brother and I”:—“My most honoured Lord and father,
I desire with passion and without any question to go into Italy, but I
protest unto your Lordship that I doe not desire it half so much as to
heare from your Lp; for the three moneths (or Thereabouts) that we have
been deprived of that sweet communication seem to me 3 long Ages, and
would to god that the interruption of that pleasing commerce may proceede
from your private and publique employments.”
Marcombes also had written to the Earl of Cork. He dared not be so bold,
he said, as to beg for some news of “yᵉ affaires of yᵉ Island.” They,
in Geneva, had heard of Strafford’s death, “yᵉ catastrophe of yᵉ last
Deputy of Ireland”; but they did not know who was his successor,[90] or
what had become of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of “yᵉ armys both of
England and Scotland.” In Geneva, by the grace of God, they were enjoying
a profound peace: “yᵉ storme having been driving another way.”
It was September 1641 when the boys and their governour, all “well
horsed”, bade good-bye to Madame and the children, and set off on their
long-talked-of Italian journey. Once more they crossed the “hideous
mountains”; they saw the source of the Rhine “but a brook,” and came down
in the valley of Valtollina, a little earthly paradise abounding “with
all that Ceres and Bacchus are able to present.”
Robert Boyle always remembered standing on the spot where the little
town of Piur, “once esteemed for its deliciousness,” had about a quarter
of a century before been suddenly submerged and buried so deep that “no
after search by digging has ever prevailed to reach it.” And still among
the Alps, but surrounded by higher mountains, “where store of crystal
is digged,” and which “like perpetual penitents do all the year wear
white,” the boy found himself, for the first time in his life, _above
the clouds_. He never forgot how, as they descended _la Montagna di
Morbegno_, he looked down on the clouds that darkened the middle of the
mountain below them, while he and his companions were above, in “clear
serenity.”
From the Grisons they passed into Venetian territory and the vast and
delicious plains of Lombardy, through Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Vincenza
and Padua, to Venice, Bologna, Ferrara and Florence. They were very
young; and their “peregrination” must not be compared in the matter
of sightseeing and adventure with John Evelyn’s tour taken over much
the same ground—only the reverse way—a year or two later. At Florence
they sold their horses, and settled down for the winter of 1641-2; and
there they resumed their lessons, Italian chiefly and “modern history”;
and Robyn read the _Lives of the Old Philosophers_, and became so
enamoured of the Stoics that he insisted on “enduring a long fit of the
toothache with great unconcernedness.”[91] In all his journeys, he had
carried his pet books with him. Frank laughed at his younger brother’s
inveterate habit of reading as he walked—“if they were upon the road, and
walking down a hill, or in a rough way, he would read all the way; and
when they came at night to their inn, he would still be studying till
supper, and frequently propose such difficulties as he met with, to his
governour.”[92]
While they were wintering at Florence, Galileo died “within a league of
it.” They never saw him; but they read and heard a great deal about the
“paradoxes of the great Star Gazer”; and Robert carried away with him
from Italy an undying memory of the attitude of the Romish Church to
scientific discovery. Galileo’s paradoxes had been “confuted” by a decree
from Rome, “perhaps because they could not be so otherwise”; and the Pope
had shown himself “loth to have the stability of that earth questioned,
in which he had established his kingdom.” It was in Florence that Robert
Boyle heard the story told of the friars who reproached Galileo with his
blindness, telling him it was “a just punishment of heaven”, and of the
sightless astronomer’s memorable answer: “He had the satisfaction of not
being blind till he had seen in heaven what never mortal eyes beheld
before.” In Florence, Marcombes and his pupils lodged in the same house
with some “Jewish Rabbins,” from whom Robyn learned a great deal about
pre-Christian “arguments and tenets.” Frank, perhaps, was more interested
in the carnaval, and the ducal tilts, and the gentlemen’s balls, to which
both the brothers were invited. And Marcombes took good care of the
Earl’s “jewells”, though they were allowed to look open-eyed upon all
the vice, as well as the splendour, of seventeenth-century Italy: “the
impudent nakedness of vice” Robert called it then and afterwards. He had
never found, he used to say, “any such sermons against the things he then
saw as they were against themselves.”[93]
In March 1642 they were in Rome, where it was thought safest for
Robert to pass for a Frenchman. English Protestants were at the moment
especially unpopular, and Master Robyn was less willing than his brother
Frank to “do at Rome as the Romans do.” Rome itself indeed seems to have
disappointed the young Puritan. After all his studies in Latin history
and literature, it was a disappointment to find Rome dominated, not
by victorious legions, but by what he called “present superstition.”
He found Modern Popes where the Ancient Cæsars should have been, and
“Barberine bees flying as high as did the Roman Eagle.” It was a
come-down, certainly; but the little party did a good deal of sightseeing
of the simple kind; and they saw the Pope and his Cardinals in chapel,
and Robyn’s observant eyes watched a young churchman after the service
“upon his knees carefully with his feet sweep into his handkerchief” the
dust that had been consecrated by his Holiness’s feet. Robert Boyle did
not gather up any dust; but he obtained and read the Latin and Tuscan
poems written by this same Pope. “A poet he was,” was Robyn’s verdict of
Pope Urban VIII; a poet—and some other things besides.
To escape the heat of Rome they returned to Florence, by Perugia and
Pistoia, and thence by the river Arno to Pisa and Livorno. From Livorno
they coasted in a felucca, drawing up their boat on shore every night
and sleeping in some Mediterranean townlet, to Genoa; and so, travelling
by slow degrees, by Monaco, Mentone, Nice and Antibes, they reached
Marseilles in May 1642.
At Marseilles, they expected to find letters from the Earl of Cork,
and bills of exchange to carry them on to Paris. Hitherto, though
difficulties of transit had now and then arisen, their quarterly
allowance had been punctually sent. The Earl had allowed them £500 a year
in Geneva, and £1000 a year while they were in Italy; and the money had
always come to hand, thanks to the combined activities of Mr. Perkins
the tailor, Mr. Philip Burlamachy, a certain Mr. Castell, “merchant
stranger,” who travelled between England and Geneva, and, last but not
least, Mr. Diodato Diodati, the Genevan banker. Once or twice while they
were in Italy letters had come from home, and they knew vaguely that
sinister things had been happening there. And Frank and Betty wrote
to each other: Betty was begging Frank to come back to her, and even
threatening to come to him; and so terror-struck was Marcombes at the
bare suggestion that he was looking “very narrowly” after poor Frank. He
had of late been keeping Frank very short of money, lest he might do “I
doe not kgnow what.”
And then at Marseilles, even while they were idly waiting for their bills
of exchange and watching the French King’s galleys put to sea with about
two thousand slaves tugging at the oars, there came to Francis and Robyn,
and to Marcombes too, for that matter, a rude awakening.
“Ye affaires of ye Island” had been going from bad to worse. Wentworth’s
tragic end was almost an old story in May 1642, so quickly had events
been hurrying on. He had got his earldom at last, in January 1640. For
one little year he was indeed Earl of Strafford and Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland; he had headed the loan to King Charles for the expenses of the
second “Bishops’” War. Strafford was in the King’s Cabinet, and the
Earl of Cork had been made a Privy Councillor. On April 13, 1640, the
“Short Parliament” had met, and it had been dissolved on May 5—“the
doleful Tuesday, when the Parliament was dissolved before any Act was
passed.”[94] The Earl and his family were back at Stalbridge in July; and
now it was Broghill’s turn to raise “a Hundred Horse for Scotland,” and
Kynalmeaky and Barrymore and George Goring were all bound for the North
in the second “Bishops’ War”. But by November the war was over, and the
Parliament (that was to be the Long Parliament) had met. On November 11,
Strafford was impeached and called to the Bar of the House on his knees
(“I sitting in my place covered,” wrote the Earl of Cork in his diary);
and on November 25 Strafford was in the Tower. All through the London
winter of 1640, and right on into the spring of 1641, Strafford and
Strafford’s trial filled the minds of all men, not in London only, but
throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. During those fateful months,
the diary gives one or two vivid glimpses of the Earl’s old enemy. There
is no description of the scenes in the Houses, or the trial itself in
Westminster Hall; the grim pageant of Lords and Commons; the plates of
meat and bottles of drink being handed from mouth to mouth; the royalties
in their little trellissed rooms; the King apart, “anxiously taking
notes”; the ladies also, moved by pity, with paper, pens and ink before
them, “discoursing upon the grounds of law and state”[95]. None of these
things finds a place in the diary. The Earl’s old eyes were fixed upon
Strafford, and Strafford only: Strafford on his knees before the Bar,
with his six attendant lawyers; Strafford bringing his answer—his “18
skins of parchment, close-written”—into the House of Peers; Strafford
attempting, in his own defence, to “blemish” the Earl of Cork with
“accusations....”[96]
It was a grim time. And yet, such is human life, while Strafford was in
the Tower and the Committee of the Commons preparing his indictment, all
London was talking of my Lord Broghill’s brilliant marriage with the
Lady Margaret Howard, daughter of the late Earl of Suffolk, in “the Lord
Daubigne’s house in Queenes street covent garden.”[97]
“At Charing Cross hard by the way
Where we (thou knowst) do sell our hay,
There is a house with stairs....”
There is no description of Broghill’s wedding from the Earl of Cork’s
pen; but Sir John Suckling has left a very graphic account of it in his
“Ballad upon a Wedding,” which, it is said, was hawked about the London
streets at the time.[98]
The bridegroom, “pestilent fine,” walked on before all the rest:—London
had not forgotten the duel with Mr. Thomas Howard.
“But wot you what? the youth was going
To make an end of all his wooing.”
And the bride was a beautiful creature: the blush on her cheek was like
a Catharine pear—“the side that’s next the sun”; while her red underlip
looked as if “some bee had stung it newly.”
“Her finger was so small the ring,
Would not stay on which they did bring,
...
Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out
As if they feared the light.”
This was the bride for whom Broghill had forgotten Mrs. Harrison and the
duel in which nobody was hurt. This was the beautiful “Lady Pegg,” who
was to prove herself a woman “beautiful in her person, very moderate
in her expences, and plain in her garb; serious and decent in her
behaviour, careful in her family, and tender of her lord”[99]—nay, more,
in Broghill’s after-life it is easy to see that he had not only a brave
helpmeet, but a clever one. Robert Boyle himself has called her the
“great support, ornament, and comfort of her Family.”[100]
The old Earl was in his place when, after many long debates and “sevral
heerings”, Strafford was sentenced to death—only eleven voices of all
the Lords declaring “not content”; and on May 12 Strafford—to whom
the King had pledged his word that not a hair of his head should be
touched—was beheaded on Tower Hill. “_As he well deserved_” is the brief
comment in the Earl of Cork’s diary.
And what had the Earl’s young daughter, the “unrewly Mary,” been doing?
She and Frank’s wife, Betty, having spent the summer at Stalbridge with
the Earl and his customary house-party, were now back in town, staying
with Lady Dungarvan in her house in Long Acre. Betty had taken the
measles, and Mary had promptly followed suit; and they had both been
packed off to another house in Holborn. Charles Rich had shown such
anxiety about Mary that the family’s suspicions were at last aroused;
and Betty’s mamma, very much afraid of the Earl of Cork, had threatened
to tell everything, “and in a great heat and passion did that very night
do it.”[101] Betty in the meantime contrived to give the lovers one more
chance. Charles Rich went down on his knees before the convalescent Mary,
and remained in that attitude for two hours, while Betty kept guard at
the door; and “so handsome did he express his passion” that Mary at last
said “yes.” The very next day Broghill—himself a married man—carried his
little sister off in disgrace to a very small house near Hampton Court
which belonged to Betty’s sister, Mrs. Katharine Killigrew; and there for
weeks Mary lived in exile, Charles Rich riding down daily to see her.
His father, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Goring interceded with the old
autocrat, and at last their combined influence carried the day The Earl
saw, “and was civil to,” Mr. Charles Rich, and Mary’s portion was to be
£7000. It was now Mary who went down on her knees before her father,
begging for his pardon. The old man upbraided her, shed some tears, and
told her to marry Charles Rich as soon as she liked.
It might be supposed that this was enough, but no;—Mary Boyle at sixteen
had been “always a great enemy to a public marriage.” She much preferred
running away. Charles Rich was quite willing, and the young people
were privately married on July 21, 1641, in the little parish church
of Shepperton, near Hampton Court. And a few days later, Mary’s elder
sister, the Lady Katharine Jones, too kind and too wise to be angry with
so rare a thing as a love-match, especially when the wedding was over,
accompanied the young couple in her carriage to the Earl of Warwick’s
house of Leeze in Essex, and handed them over to the care of that
patriarchal family.[102]
Some of the Cork family,—the Barrymores, and Kynalmeaky, without his
wife,—seem to have been already in Ireland in the autumn of 1641; and the
Earl of Cork was making his own preparations to return to Lismore. He had
been buying six black horses and harnesses for his new light travelling
coach, a sedan chair lined with carnation velvet, and a “horslytter,”
with two black stone coach-horses. August is a hot month for “feasting”
in any case, and the summer of 1641 had been particularly hot, and the
plague and smallpox were rife in London; but in August the old Earl had
entertained at his Cousin Croone’s at the Nag’s Head Tavern in Cheapside
all the Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen of the Committees of both Houses
of Parliament for Ireland; and a few days later, Cousin Croone, at the
Nag’s Head, had “feasted” his great kinsman the Earl of Cork.
During those last months also the Earl had been busy settling his
affairs: there was the purchase of Marston Bigot in Somersetshire for
Broghill and his wife, and the purchase of the smaller Devonshire estate
of Annarye, and the settling of Stalbridge on Robert, his Benjamin. There
was the paying of debts and bonds and jointure moneys, and the packing,
locking, sealing and lettering of “yron chestes” and “lyttle trunckes”
and “lyttle boxes,” to be left behind in the care of various trusted
friends. Among them were boxes of deeds and writings for Frank, to be
left with Betty’s stepfather, Sir Thomas Stafford; and at least two
other boxes, “fast sealed”, for Robert, one of them to be left with the
Earl’s friend, Lord Edward Howard of Escrick, and the other, containing
duplicates, with the Earl’s own cousin, Peter Naylor, the lawyer, of New
Inn. Stalbridge was to belong to Robert after the Earl’s death, besides
the Irish lands already settled on him, and a house specially built for
him at Fermoy. And the old man had set his match-making old heart on a
splendid marriage for Robyn—with the Lady Ann Howard, the very young
daughter of Lord Edward Howard of Escrick, first cousin of “Lady Pegg.”
One of the Earl’s last rides in England was with his son Dungarvan to
Hatfield to take leave of the Salisbury family; and there also he saw “my
Robyn’s yonge Mrs.,” to whom on this occasion the Earl presented “a small
gold ring with a diamond.”
The last visit of all was to Leeze in Essex—carried there in Charles
Rich’s own coach—to bid good-bye to the beloved “unrewly Mary”. The last
of the Earl’s many gifts in England appears to have been to an “infirme
cozyn” of his own—a welcome gift from one old man to another—“a pott of
Sir Walter Raleigh’s tobackoe.”[103]
There were a good many leavetakings with English friends and kinsfolk
between London and Stalbridge, and an almost royal progress from
Stalbridge by Marston Bigot—where he held a “Court”—to the coast. Lady
Kynalmeaky had been persuaded to accompany her father-in-law to Ireland,
and Broghill and his wife crossed with them. The Dungarvans were,
apparently, to follow shortly after. Youghal was reached on October 17,
and a day or two later the Earl and his family were at the House of
Lismore again.
The old biographers give a picturesque account of a great banquet at
Castle Lyons in honour of the Earl’s home-coming. They tell how, while
Lord Barrymore was feasting his guests, the old Earl was called out
of the banqueting hall to see a messenger, who, in a few breathless,
horror-stricken words, brought him tidings of the bloody outbreak of
rebellion in Munster. A week or two later Lord Barrymore—the only one
of the old Irish nobility to remain absolutely loyal to the Protestant
cause—was buying ordnance for the defence of Castle Lyons. Lismore
was being strengthened and stored with ordnance, carbynes, muskets,
Gascoigne wines and aqua vitæ. Gunpowder and match were being bought in
large quantities, money was being paid out on every hand—the Earl was
“maintaining” everything and everybody—and money was getting ominously
scarce. In December, Lady Kynalmeaky left Ireland for the Hague, and
Kynalmeaky took over the charge of Bandonbridge, with a troop of horse
and 500 foot, “all English Protestants.” In January 1642, Broghill was
defending Lismore with a troop of horse and 200 “good shot.” He was a
dependable son: “My lord,” he wrote to his father, “fear nothing for
Lismore, for if it be lost it shall be with the life of him that begs
your lordship’s blessing, and stiles him, my lord, your lordship’s most
humble, most obliged, and most dutiful son and servant, Broghill.” The
old Earl himself had undertaken to hold Youghal, to keep the command of
that harbour, and to “preserve that towne”; and he was never to leave
it. The sheet-lead on the “tarras” of the old college was to be torn
up to make “case-shott” for his ordnance. Pikes, muskets, halberds and
“brownbills”—everything in the shape of a weapon—were collected from
Devonshire and Dorsetshire and everywhere else, and the “Mortall Sowe”
was to play a great part in the defence of Bandonbridge and Lismore.
Dungarvan, at the head of 1200 foot, was with the Lord President.[104]
The Protestant ladies had left, or were leaving, for England or the
Hague; but Dungarvan’s wife and Broghill’s wife stayed as long as
possible on the spot.[105]
It was from Lismore—just before the Earl was sent to defend Youghal—that
he negotiated the bills of exchange to be sent through Perkins, the
London tailor, to Marcombes: the quarterly allowance of £250 for the
three months from March 1 to June 1, 1642. And it was from Youghal, on
March 9, that he sent the letter—one of the finest and saddest appeals
ever written by a father to his children—that was to greet Marcombes and
the boys on their arrival at Marseilles.[106]
It is a long letter. The Earl had received their news from Florence, and
was glad to hear of their health and proficiency; but the thought of
them, and how hereafter they were to subsist, was most grievous unto him—
“And now or never,” he wrote to Marcombes, “is the tyme for you to give
yourself honour, and to make me and them your faithfull friends for ever
hereafter. Necessitie compells me to make you and them know the dangerous
and poore estate whereunto, by God’s providence, I am at this instant
reduced.”
An account of the outbreak and course of the Rebellion follows; of
Dungarvan’s and Kynalmeaky’s and Broghill’s doings, and of the Earl’s
own position in Youghal. It was a case of about “200,000 in armes and
rebellion against a poor handful of British Protestants.”
He tells Marcombes how in January he had scraped together with much
difficulty—by selling of plate—the £250 for their quarterly allowance,
and made it over to be paid by Mr. Perkins to Mr. Castell. So far he
had punctually supplied them—“which longer to doe I am no waies able.”
The £250, when they should receive it, must be husbanded carefully, and
employed to bring both boys home again. They must land at Dublin, Cork,
or Youghal. If they cannot do this, they must go to Holland and serve
under the Prince of Orange. They must, in any case, manage to maintain
themselves: “for with inward greefe of soul I write this truth unto you
that I am no longer able to supply them ... but as I am compelled in my
age to doe, so must they in their younger yeares com̃end themselves....
“But if they serve God and be carefull and discreet in their carridge,
God will bless and provide for them as hitherto he hath done for me,
who began in the raising of my fortune by good endeavours; without any
assistance of parents and friends....” And he knows Marcombes is too
generous to leave the boys, “my two yong Sonnes that are soe deere unto
me,” till he can see them safely shipped for Ireland or “well entred in
the warres of Holland”—as they may desire and Marcombes advise.
This, then, was the letter that Marcombes and the two boys received at
Marseilles. It was then May, and the letter was dated March 9; it was
already two months old. They must have looked blankly at each other. How
were they to carry out the Earl’s wishes? How were they both, without
money, to make their way home? _No bill of exchange had reached them: Mr.
Perkins, the London tailor, had played them false._
It seems to have been arranged between them that Frank, the elder
brother, who at nineteen would be of some use at his father’s side,
should, with Marcombes’s assistance, make his way as quickly as he could
to Ireland and to Youghal. There is no mention of Betty in this moment
of decision. Marcombes was evidently able to scrape together enough
money out of what they still had to carry one of the boys home—and it
was to be Frank. And Robyn? Robyn at fifteen was an “Eale” still. Had
Marcombes sometimes exaggerated, in his letters to the Earl, Robyn’s
stature and strength? The sequel will show. Poor Carew, in the Eton days,
and Marcombes himself, wrote of Robyn as a boy of sedentary habits, and
a little “thicke.” If the truth must be told, there was not much of the
soldier in Robert Boyle. He was the student, thinker, dreamer; and he
knew himself to be unqualified, at fifteen, “to be received among the
troops.” And, without money, it was quite impossible to provide himself
with the necessary “equipage.”
Apparently they all three—Marcombes, Frank, and Robyn—went on as far as
Lyons; and there it seems likely they parted: Frank in the saddle, his
horse’s head turned towards Ireland, and Robyn and Marcombes returning in
deep melancholy to Geneva. There Robyn was to wait for further orders—to
employ his time in learning to make “an honourable living.” It is all
told in his sad little letter, written from Lyons to the Earl at Youghal:
a letter which may have been carried to Ireland in Frank’s pocket.
“My most honoured Lord and Father, Having according to your Lordship’s
order and directions seriously pondered and considered the present estate
of our affairs, we have not thought it expedient for divers reasons that
my Brother will tell your Lordship by word of mouth that I should goe
into Holland; for besides that I am already weary and broken with a long
journey of above eight hundred miles, I am as yet too weake to undertake
so long a voyage in a strange country, where when I arrive I know nobody
and have little hope by reason of my youth to be received among the
troops....” He explains that the money had not come; but M. Marcombes
had offered to keep him at Geneva till they should hear further from the
Earl, “or till it pleased God to change the face of the affaires”; and
Robyn had gratefully accepted this offer. He hoped to fit himself to
defend his religion, King, and country, “according to my little power....
“... If your Lordship hath need of me in Ireland, I beseech your Lordship
to acquaint me therewith and to believe that I have never beene taught to
abandon my parents in adversity, but that there and in all other places I
will always strive to shew myself an obedient sonne....”
Frank, he said, was ready to take horse to “goe towards Ireland, to
secoure your Lordship according to his power,” and would carry all their
news. And Robert ends his letter—
“I most humbly take my leave, commending your Lordship and him and us all
unto the protection of Almighty God, beseeching your Lordship to believe
that whatsoever misery or affliction it pleaseth God to send me I will
never doe the least action unworthy of the honor that I have to be, my
Lord, your Lordship’s most dutiful and obedient son, Robert Boyle.”[107]
Dr. Grosart, in editing the Lismore papers, found the original letter
much damaged, a large piece of it having been torn away in the breaking
of the seal. The Earl had evidently torn it open hastily in his anxiety
to know what “my Robyn” was going to do. Whether or no Frank delivered
the letter into his father’s hands, Frank was certainly quickly back in
Ireland, and very much on the spot. By August 1 Robyn had received a
letter from Frank, full of enthusiasm for Kynalmeaky’s conduct at home.
For Kynalmeaky was in his element at last. “I have left Sleeping in ye
afternoone,” wrote Kynalmeaky to his old father in Youghal. The son who
had shown “all the faults a prodigall inordinate young man can have,
which if he take not up in tyme will be his ruine and the breaking of my
hart”, was redeeming himself. Kynalmeaky’s wife (the Earl of Cork always
called her “my deare deare daughter-in-law”) had not been able to live
with her husband; even the younger brothers must long ago have known what
Kynalmeaky was. And now Frank had written to tell Robyn in Geneva that
Kynalmeaky was acting like a hero. And Robyn, so far away from home, had
written off on August 1 a little letter of tender admiration to this
elder brother, who had set them every bad example and yet had kept such a
place in their hearts. On the margin of this letter Robyn added a little
boyish postscript—only to say he could not express in words what he was
feeling, and ending with “Adieu, Dearest Lewis, idle Cosin. Bon Anné, Bon
Solé, bon Vespré. Adieue a Di vous commande.”
Did Kynalmeaky ever have this letter? It was dated from Geneva, Aug. 1,
and it was endorsed by the Earl of Cork himself, “from my sonn Robert
to his brother Kynal. Rec. 13 Oct.” Had it been sent to the Earl, with
Kynalmeaky’s papers—or had it indeed come too late? For the battle of
Liscarrol had been fought on Sept. 3. The Earl’s loyal son-in-law,
Lord Barrymore, and all the Earl’s sons except Robert, fought in that
battle.[108] And at the Battle of Liscarrol Kynalmeaky was killed;
killed on his horse, by a musket-shot through the head. It was Frank—the
“sweet-spirited Frank,” fresh from the fencing and dancing and vaulting
lessons in Geneva and Italy—who, “carrying himself with undaunted
resolution,” rescued his brother’s body and horse, and kept troop and
foot together.
The old man did not know then which of these two sons to be proudest
of. It was a grim satisfaction to the Earl, after all that had passed,
when “Kynal” had been buried in Lismore Church, to sit down and make
that entry in his diary: “Six of the rebell ensignes were carried to his
widdoe.”[109]
Robyn was to hear from his father once or twice after that. The Earl held
out brave hopes of being able to procure some “office” for his boy “at
his coming over.” And he sent his own “choice dun mare” to Lismore, with
orders that it was to be “kept and drest carefully” for Robyn, when God
should send him home again. And when Broghill’s wife, “Lady Pegg,” was at
last obliged to return to England, the old Earl gave her a commission to
buy for him a ring “besett rownd with diamonds,” and to present it, from
him, to her fair young cousin the little Lady Ann Howard, whom he thought
of always, even in those dark days, as “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.”
There is something Shakespearean in the mood in which this old fighter
lived his last months and drew his last breath. Shut up in Youghal,
“preserving” that town for his King, his sons away fighting, his
daughters and grandchildren scattered, Kynalmeaky and Barrymore dead,
and poor Lettice dying,[110] his lands despoiled, his fortune vanished,
he was still the great Earl of Cork, the head of a great family, the
old man of action and experience, the Elizabethan soldier-statesman to
whom the younger men, statesmen and kinsmen alike, turned in this hour
of extremity, and not in vain. There is nothing stronger or more human
of its kind, or more characteristic of the man, than the positively last
will and testament made by himself in Youghal so late as November 1642,
ten months before his death.[111]
The end came, nobody knows exactly when, but about the very time of the
signing of the truce at Sigginstown, in the middle of September 1643,
“from infirmities incident to old age, and the want of rest and quiet.”
He was buried in the great tomb at Youghal. All his life he had believed
in three things: in God’s Providence, his own integrity of purpose, and
the righteousness of a Cause. And in the debacle—in his and Ireland’s
darkest moment, when the clouds hung low over his native land and the
land of his adoption—his belief in these three things remained unmoved.
Shakespeare has told us how Faith and Uncertainty go hand in hand—
“If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now: if
it be not now, yet it will come....”
CHAPTER VIII
IN ENGLAND AGAIN
“And though his boiling youth did often very earnestly
solicit to be employed in those culpable delights that are
useful[112] in and seem so proper for that season, and have
repentance adjourned till old age, yet did its importunities
meet ever with denials, Philaretus ever esteeming that piety
was to be embraced not so much to gain heaven, as to serve God
with....”—ROBERT BOYLE’S _Philaretus_.
In the summer of 1644, a slim, sunburnt, foreign-looking youth came back
into the London he had left when he was quite a little fellow, nearly
five years before. Even now, he was not yet eighteen, and he was still an
“Eale”. None of his family expected his return; he had little or no money
in his purse, and but vague ideas as to what he was going to do next.
How things had changed! Where were the King and Queen, whose hands Frank
and he had kissed? And the gay Court that had clustered about them? And
his Father! There was no “Great Earl of Cork” any more; no “greatest
family in all London,” living “extraordinarily high,” in the House of
the Savoy; no child weddings in the royal chapel at Whitehall. What had
become of Frank’s wedding shoes, that had been lent afterwards to poor
Kynalmeaky?
There can have been little but troops, and talk of troops, on the dusty
summer roads, as Robert Boyle came towards London; and the quick, hot
jargon of names and phrases that was in all men’s mouths—the political
idiom of the moment—must have been doubly difficult to understand by the
boy who had so long been living in studious exile, speaking “all and
allwayes French,” and breathing an atmosphere of profound peace—“the
storme having been driving another way.”
As he neared London, Robyn’s thoughts must have been still with the
Marcombes household, till so recently his home, and the little circle of
learned and pleasant Genevan friends whom he had left behind him. For
Marcombes had more than fulfilled his trust. No remittances had come to
Robert Boyle since the old Earl wrote that letter to Marcombes in March
1642. The boy had been running up a big debt, of money and gratitude
alike, to his governour: “As for me,” he had written to his brother
Kynalmeaky about Marcombes (the old letter is scarcely decipherable
in parts), “he hath so much obliged me the ... despaire of ever being
able to desingage myselfe of so many and so greate ... that I have unto
him.”[113]
And when at last, eight or nine months after the Earl’s death, Robyn,
chafing in his idleness and exile, made up his mind to break from his
surroundings and find his way home somehow, Marcombes had used his own
interest in Geneva to “take up” for his pupil “some slight jewels at a
reasonable rate,” by the sale of which, from place to place, the boy
might pay his way back to London.
And now he was there; and the life of the little Swiss University town
lay behind him, too recent to be forgotten: the life of a “well-fortified
city,” with the great Gothic fabric of a Cathedral in its midst, on
one of whose four cannon-mounted turrets there stood “a continual
Sentinel.” It was a Cathedral, of course, no longer. It was there that
the celebrated Dr. John Diodati, and the brilliant young Professor
Morice better known as Alexander Morus, “poet and chief professor of the
University,” discoursed eloquently after the discipline of Calvin and
Beza.[114] Dr. Diodati preached on Thursdays in Italian to his Italian
Protestant Congregation, and on Sundays in French, with his hat on,
after the “French mode.” Dr. Diodati lived at the Villa Diodati, on the
south bank of the lake, two miles out of the city: the old Bishop’s
Palace was now the prison. The University was a “faire structure,”
with its class-rooms, its hall, and its excellent library. And Divines
and Professors, in their gowns and caps and hats, flitted about the
wooden-arcaded streets. There was an “aboundance of bookesellers”; and
good screwed guns and Geneva watches, pewter and cutlery, were to be
bought; and amongst the hoary relics of Julius Cæsar and a pagan Rome
there stood the Town Hall, with the Cross Keys, and the City Motto: _Post
Tenebras Lux_.[115]
The only _Campus Martius_ that Robyn had ever known had been the fields
outside Geneva, where every Sunday after the evening devotions the young
townsmen were allowed to exercise their arms, practising diligently with
the gun and the long and cross bows, for prizes of pewter plates and
dishes. Robert Boyle had brought his bows and arrows back with him to
London. He must have practised with the rest, as John Evelyn did two
years later, on that peaceful _Champs de Mars_, and played with the
rest on its “noble Pall Mall.” He had known the gardens of rare tulips
and other choice flowers outside the earthen fortifications, and he
must have seen Geneva also in its sterner moods. For that same “Mars’
Field” was the place of public execution; and in Geneva there was then
no hospitality of extradition-law. Capital crime in other countries was
capital crime there. Fugitives from other countries were put to death in
the sunshine of that spacious field; and for the Genevans, by Genevan
law, adultery was death.[116]
But Geneva and its Mars’ Field lay behind him. And in front? Robert Boyle
must have heard something of what had been happening at home. Accounts
had reached him from time to time of the “dreadful confusion of affairs”
in England, Ireland and Scotland. During those last two years in Geneva
he must have heard all kinds of rumours of the struggle that was going
on between the Parliament and the Crown, between the Prelates and the
Presbyterians. His friends in Geneva must have talked of the Solemn
League and Covenant, and the Great Assembly of Divines that was meeting
in Westminster; and of Archbishop Laud, then still alive, still in
prison, his trial still deferred.
But it takes seeing to realise civil war. When Robyn arrived in England
it was to find a kingdom in arms against itself, a nation divided into
two great opposing armies; husbands and wives taking different sides,
fathers and sons in opposite camps, brother against brother. The king’s
headquarters were at Oxford; Prince Rupert with his Royalist army was in
Lancashire. York was defended by the Marquis of Newcastle against the
combined Parliamentarian forces under Manchester, Fairfax and Cromwell.
Robert Boyle had arrived in England almost on the eve of the battle of
Marston Moor.
And what to do? There was only one thing at this moment that the great
Earl’s Benjamin could think of doing. He was no soldier, this dreamy
youth, with his books and his bows and arrows; but force of heredity—a
kind of force of inertia—would have carried him into the Royalist camp.
His brothers were all soldiers; though it is doubtful if he knew, when he
came home, where they were and what they were doing. The very politics
of the various members of this scattered family, the “sides” they were
taking in the quick march of political events, must have been a puzzle
to him. And so it was Robert Boyle’s intention to join the army, where
he told himself he would find, besides his brothers, “the excellent King
himself, divers eminent divines, and many worthy persons of several
ranks.” But he knew also that “the generality of those he would have
been obliged to converse with were very debauched, and apt, as well as
inclinable, to make others so.”
If Robert Boyle had joined the King’s army! It is difficult to think
of him in “armor of prooff,” and quite impossible to picture him as a
laughing Cavalier. He disliked “customary swearing”; he drank water; he
did not smoke; he dearly loved to point a moral; and he never adorned
a tale. It is certain no officers’ mess would have endured him for
ten minutes, in the rôle either of sceptical chymist or of Christian
virtuoso. And what would have become of the Invisible College, and the
Royal Society?
But, fortunately for them, for him, and for posterity, it was to be
ordered otherwise. It happened that his sister Katherine, now, since the
death of her father-in-law,[117] Lady Ranelagh, was in the summer of 1644
actually living in London, and “it was by an accident” that Robyn found
her out; an accident to which he used afterwards to ascribe “a good part
of his future happiness.”
In later years, when Robert Boyle was giving Bishop Burnet some of the
facts of his life for an intended biography, he did not mention what the
“accident” was. Perhaps, so soon after the Restoration, he had still
reason to be discreet in the use of names; for Lady Ranelagh, in the
summer of 1644, was very much among the Parliamentarians.
In the light of after events, one or two possibilities suggest
themselves, if it be forgivable in anything concerning an experimental
chemist to indulge in speculation. Marcombes must surely have furnished
Robyn with letters to persons in London who would be of practical help
to the boy on his arrival. Who were they? Mr. Perkins the tailor had
proved perfidious, and was out of the question. There were Peter Naylor,
the lawyer-cousin in New Inn, and Cousin Croone of the Nag’s Head, and
Philip Burlamachy, once Lord Mayor, with whom the old Earl had done so
much business, and who was also a relation of the Diodati family, Dr.
John Diodati’s wife being a Burlamachy. But it could scarcely be called
an accident if in a business call on any of these Robyn had obtained his
sister’s address. It must have been some chance meeting with, or news of,
her in some unexpected quarter.
Other men there were to whom the boy may well have carried letters from
Marcombes or his Genevan friends. There was Dr. Theodore Diodati, the
London physician—brother of Dr. John in Geneva,—who knew a great many
people in London; and there was Samuel Hartlib, the naturalised German,
the merchant-philanthropist who knew everybody and whom everybody knew.
And there was Milton himself, a friend of the Diodati family in Geneva,
and a friend also of Dr. Theodore Diodati and Mr. Hartlib. Dr. Theodore
Diodati lived in the parish of St. Bartholomew the Less, not far from
Milton’s house in Aldersgate Street, and Hartlib was living in Duke’s
Place, Aldgate. He was a man with many hobbies and interests, and a large
correspondence. He conducted, in fact, “a general news agency,” and must
have been as well known in Geneva as in London from his connexion with
Durie and the great project of a union of all the Protestant Churches
of Europe, and for his friendship with Comenius, and his active part
in the scheme which the English Parliament was then itself taking up
of a reform, on Baconian lines, of the English Universities and Public
Schools. It is certain that Hartlib was one of Robert Boyle’s earliest
friends in London; that Hartlib and Milton were intimate, and that Milton
had first addressed his _Tract on Education_ to Hartlib. And it is
difficult to believe that Milton was unknown—by name at least—to Robert
Boyle. For Milton had been in Geneva in the summer of 1639, just before
Frank and Robyn went there. Milton’s great friend Charles Diodati was the
son of Dr. Theodore in London and the nephew of Dr. John of Geneva; and
when Milton passed through Geneva on his way home from his Italian tour
Dr. John had been very hospitable to him. Milton had been an honoured
guest at the Villa Diodati, and it is supposed that he heard there the
news of Charles Diodati’s death. Even if Robyn had not met Milton at Sir
Henry Wotton’s table when Milton dined at Eton, he may well have heard
in Geneva all about Charles Diodati and John Milton, and the _Epitaphium
Damonis_—the Latin poem that Milton wrote on his return home, in memory
of his dead friend. And it is probable he knew of _Comus_, acted by the
Bridgewater family, and of _Lycidas_ also, and Milton’s friendship for
Edward King, the brilliant young Irishman, whose relatives in Ireland
must have been well known to the Boyle family. Robyn may well have read
the _Epitaphium Damonis_ in the Villa Diodati; and in the house of the
Italian teacher and refugee, Count Cerdogni, he may have looked through
the famous autograph album in which Milton had written the words (of
which Robyn would certainly have approved)—
“If Vertue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.”
It is not so certain that Milton’s prose would have pleased the boy;—the
church-politics, the anti-episcopal pamphlets, and the divorce tract that
had recently been the topic of conversation in London. There is no trace
of a personal friendship between Milton and Robert Boyle. Their paths
constantly crossed, but they were to walk apart. Boyle deplored religious
controversy, and did not sympathise with the sects and sectaries. And
yet it is here that the possibility of the “accident” comes in. For Lady
Ranelagh was a very progressive Puritan, whose interests were already
bound up with the Parliamentarian Party and its reforms. She must have
known Milton well personally or by reputation at this time, and she can
have had no bad opinion of him or his prose-writings, or she would not
have sent, as she did, her own nephew, young Lord Barrymore, to be one of
Milton’s pupils. Barrymore, only four years younger than Robert Boyle,
was one of Milton’s resident pupils when, in September 1645, Milton
removed from Aldersgate Street into a larger house in Barbican with the
purpose of being able to board a larger number of boys. Lady Ranelagh
was later on to send her own boy, Dick Jones, to be taught by Milton;
her friendship for Milton was to endure through many troublous years;
in his own words she stood “in place of all kith and kin”[118] to him
in his blindness and solitude; and her good offices seem not to have
stopped even there. May it have been through this Diodati-Milton-Hartlib
connexion that Robert Boyle and his sister Ranelagh were brought together?
But London was not so large a place in 1644. Cousin Croone was presumably
still at the Nag’s Head in Cheapside, and people met in Cheapside in
those days. Had not Dr. John Diodati himself, on his one visit to London
in 1627, run up against the very man he most wanted to meet—Mr. Bedell,
afterwards the Bishop—in Cheapside? Whatever the “accident” was, Lady
Ranelagh received her young brother with open arms. Her address in that
summer of 1644 still remains uncertain, though not long afterwards she
seems to have been living in the house in the Old Mall which was to be
her home to the end of her life.[119] It may have been in Pall Mall that
Robyn came knocking at his sister’s door. Lord Ranelagh—he had taken his
seat in the House of Peers in February 1644—was probably in Ireland, for
there is no mention of him as one of the family circle at this time;
and the husband and wife, as the years went on, had lived more and more
apart. Lord Ranelagh, who had run through his own and his wife’s money,
lived in Ireland, and Lady Ranelagh in London. She was in the receipt,
for some reason unexplained, of a pension from Government of £4 a week,
and was otherwise helped by the members of her own family.
For nearly five months, Robert Boyle lived with his sister and her young
children,[120] and a strongly Parliamentarian sister-in-law—wife of a
member of the House of Commons.[121] And Mary, “my Lady Molkin,” as Robyn
calls her, now Charles Rich’s wife, and daughter-in-law of the great Earl
of Warwick, was not far off, whether at Warwick House in Holborn, or at
“delicious Leeze” in Essex. Mary had had her troubles, since her romantic
marriage three years before. She had lost her first baby, a little girl,
when it was “one year and a quarter old,”[122] and her second child, a
boy, had been born just at the dark time of the old Earl’s death. Charles
Rich had kept back the bad news till his young wife was “up again.”[123]
In his sister’s house, Robert Boyle found himself in the very thick
of the Parliamentarian interests. She was still a young woman—only
thirty—and a very clever woman, highly educated for her time, and popular
by reason of her “universal affability.” In her house, Robyn came to
know, as real friends, “some of the great men of that Party, which
was then growing, and soon after victorious.”[124] Her house was, in
fact, even then, a rendezvous of the Parliamentarian Party. And what a
vehemently interesting time it was, in London! Both Houses were sitting:
the Westminster Assembly was busy with the new Directory of Worship and
the new frame of Church Government. In September, Essex was beaten by
the King’s forces in Cornwall; and Manchester and Cromwell were back in
London from the north. During the last weeks of Robert Boyle’s sojourn
under his sister’s roof, the talk must have been all of, if not with,
Manchester and Cromwell, and of Cromwell’s “Toleration Order” and the
abolition of the use of the Prayer Book. In October the King was moving
back to Oxford, and there was fought the second battle of Newbury. And
now the thoughts of the Parliament men were veering round from Church
Government to Army Reform; and towards the end of that year, the talk was
of Cromwell’s “Self-denying Ordinance” and the great changes it would
carry with it; and of the new modelling of the Army—the “new noddle”
as the scoffers called it. And all the time Hartlib, in Aldgate, was
immersed in his social and educational schemes; and Milton, in Aldersgate
Street, was teaching his boys and writing his second divorce tract and
his _Areopagitica_; and all the time Laud was lying in the Tower, his
trial dragging wearily on. What did Robert Boyle think of it all after
the profound peace of Geneva?
Whatever was in his thoughts at this time—and it is very certain Robert
Boyle had no intention of giving up the Book of Common Prayer, or any
book he might wish to keep—there was no more talk of joining the King’s
Army; and when at last, towards the end of the year, the state of the
roads south-west of London permitted it, it was under a Parliamentarian
escort that the young Squire found his way into Dorsetshire, to take
possession of his own Manor of Stalbridge. Through his sister’s influence
with her Parliamentarian friends, Robyn had got “early protection for his
English and Irish estates.”
Even with this protection, there were difficulties in front of him.
There must have been a sadness about his solitary return to the Manor,
empty except for the child-memories of five years before. The fair
chimney-pieces and carved balustrades, the beautiful rose-coloured
furniture “hastened home” for those great house-parties of 1639—must have
talked to him of a chapter of his life wiped out for ever. What things
had happened there! There was the arrival of Mary’s suitor, and Mary’s
high averseness and contradiction, and the young man’s discomfiture and
departure to the Bath: Mary was the same imperious little woman now,
as then; she now had a “high averseness” to Charles Rich’s “engaging
in the wars.” Here poor Lettice had drooped and complained, and George
Goring, with his wounded leg, had limped up and down stairs. Then
there was the “private discourse” in the Stalbridge parlour, that had
settled poor Frank’s fate: Betty had refused to live with the old
Earl after Mary’s marriage, and had gone her own way; she was now,
nominally with the Staffords, at The Hague, the gay little courtier
that she was, a Killigrew all over!... There were the paths where Mr.
Dowch had discoursed Latin Syntax, and where Robyn had first come to
know the cheerful and choleric Marcombes, as they talked in “familiar
French” about all the European cities they were going to see. Through
these gates Frank and Robyn had come “home” after the years at Eton—the
“blew-perpetuana” curtains following duly. Through these gates, he and
Frank and Marcombes had passed, on that memorable journey to London,
where Frank was to “make his addresses” to Betty in the Savoy. All round
him lay the fields where he had dreamed, and the orchards of which he had
been so proud to possess the keys. And it was all his own, now—all empty
and neglected: “my own ruined cottage in the country”:[125] a depressing
place for a boy of eighteen to return alone to. One of the first events
of the new year, 1645, the news of which could have reached Stalbridge
was the execution of Laud on Tower Hill.
Nobody could have been very glad to see Robert Boyle come back again;
least of all Tom Murray, whom the old Earl had left in charge, and who
proved himself to have been, during his reign there, as untrustworthy as
Mr. Perkins the London tailor. “The roguery of Tom Murray” was one of
the first difficulties that faced the young squire.
Two other pieces of business, however, could have admitted of no delay.
Marcombes was to be repaid; and partly to that end, apparently, in
August 1645, as soon as Robert Boyle could put his hands on some of his
own money, he set out from Stalbridge, “the necessities of my affairs,”
as he explained in a letter to his brother Broghill, “calling me away
(according to the leave the Parliament has given me) into France.”[126]
By August 1645, the New Model had done extraordinary things. In the
spring, Cromwell and Waller had been in the west of England. Naseby had
been fought in June, and the King’s private correspondence taken and
published. In July, George Goring had been badly beaten in the west;
Bath had surrendered on July 30. Was Robert Boyle still at Stalbridge
on August 15, when Sherborne Castle was stormed and battered—Sherborne
Castle, where the old Earl and his sons had killed that buck and dined
the very day that Lady Ranelagh’s baby had been born? Probably not. It
was probably wise that he should absent himself, “according to the leave
the Parliament had given him.” At any rate, he was well away from English
shores again when on September 10 there came “the splendid success of the
storming of Bristol.”[127]
It is not known if Robert Boyle went so far as Geneva, or whether he
actually saw his old governour again; but in any case his visit was a
brief one. His business was done, and he was back in London before the
end of that year, staying with Lady Ranelagh, and able to attend to the
other business that remained to be done—if indeed it had not been done
before he left Stalbridge in August.
There were, it will be remembered, certain deeds in a sealed box left by
the old Earl in the hands of Mr. Peter Naylor of New Inn. But they were
duplicates. The originals had been left with Lord Howard of Escrick, the
father of “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” and the uncle of Broghill’s wife, Lady
Pegg. They embodied the old Earl’s last effort in family match-making;
a fitting match for the youngest son of the great Earl of Cork, which
would further unite the families of Cecil, Howard, and Boyle; already
intermarried, as Broghill’s wife was a niece of Lord Edward Howard, Lady
Salisbury his sister, and Lady Dungarvan’s mother a Cecil. The old Earl
had done his very best for his Benjamin. And it is a mistake to suppose
it probable that the children had never met. They may very well have made
shy advances to one another during those weeks in the autumn of 1639
when Frank and Robyn were in London, just before Frank’s wedding. The
House of the Savoy and Salisbury House were very near each other; the
families were often together; and little Ann Howard—her mother dead—was
often with Lady Salisbury. The two children may even have made a pretty
and much-admired pair at Frank’s wedding in Whitehall, and hence may
have come the old Earl’s confident “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” But there it
had ended: the children, if they met then, had never seen each other
since; and in five years they had both grown up. It was in 1642 that the
old Earl commissioned Lady Pegg to carry to her little cousin the ring
“besett rownd with diamonds”; but now it was 1645, and many things had
happened. The vast Irish estates had been devastated in the Rebellion.
Dorsetshire had been scourged by civil war; and Robyn had come back
penniless and foreign-looking from Geneva, and was returning to his
“ruined cottage in the country” to examine and administer his disordered
affairs as best he could.
A boy of eighteen, Robert Boyle had come back heart-whole. Evelyn has
left it on record that there were very few fair ladies in Geneva, when he
and Captain Wray[128] and the poet Waller stopped there on their homeward
journey, in 1646. “This towne,” wrote Evelyn, “is not much celebrated
for beautifull women, for even at this distance from the Alps the
gentlewomen have something full throats; but our Captain Wray ... fell so
mightily in love with one of Mons. Saladine’s[129] daughters that with
much persuasion he could not be persuaded to think on his journey into
France.” Robert Boyle had not fallen in love with any of M. Saladine’s
daughters; and his views on the subject of marriage would scarcely have
been understood by Captain Wray. “Marriage,” wrote Robert Boyle from
Stalbridge when he was scarcely twenty, “is not a bare present, but a
legal exchange of hearts;—and the same contract that gives you right to
another’s, ties you to look upon your own as another’s goods, and too
surely made over to remain any longer in your gift.”
Curiously enough, “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” had already come, by an even
shorter process of reasoning, to the same conclusion.
The Lady Ann Howard was a particular girl-friend of Anne Murray[130]—a
daughter of that Murray who had been Provost of Eton before Sir Henry
Wotton. Lady Ann Howard often stayed with the widowed Mrs. Murray and
her daughter in their house in St. Martin’s Lane; and during the summer
months of 1644 the two girls were constantly together at the house of
Anne Murray’s elder sister, Lady Newton, at Charlton in Kent. It was
a house surrounded by a garden with quiet walks in it. Lord Howard of
Escrick’s eldest son, brother of “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.,” was often
there, for he was in love with Anne Murray; and Mr. Charles Howard—a
young cousin of the Howards—was often there too, for he was in love with
his cousin, Lady Ann. Anne Murray has left a pretty description of the
love-making that went on in that garden. They called it _amour_ in those
days, and they were all ridiculously young. Lord Howard of Escrick,
the father, was a Parliamentarian, and at this time very busy as one
of the ten Lords who were lay members of the Westminster Assembly; but
he was not too busy to come and fetch away his son and daughter when
he heard what was going on. The four young people had been very happy
in that garden. Anne Murray has described how once Charles Howard took
his fair cousin by the hand, and “led her into another walke, and left
him and I together.” “Him” was Lord Howard of Escrick’s son and heir,
who straightway proposed to “I.” But Anne Murray was not allowed to say
“yes”; her mother shut her up, and she was fed on bread and water. With
the Lady Ann and Charles Howard it was quite different. The boy-cousin
can have had no reason to conceal his feelings, unless indeed it were the
prior claim of the absent Robyn. Charles Howard’s brilliant career may
be read in any _Peerage_. He was a soldier and a man of parts at sixteen.
He was to serve Cromwell and to become one of Cromwell’s Lords, and to
be created Earl of Carlisle at the coronation of Charles II. He was the
“finest gentleman”; and he won his cousin Ann, who was “My Robyn’s yonge
Mrs.”
Robert Boyle also seems to have acted his part as became “a very parfit
gentle knight” and the old Earl’s Benjamin. There can be little doubt
that a passage in an undated letter from Lady Ranelagh to her brother
belongs to this period, and ends, for him, the episode. “You are now,”
she says, “very near the hour wherein your mistress is, by giving herself
to another, to set you at liberty from all the appearances you have put
on of being a lover; which, though they cost you some pains and use of
art, were easier, because they were but appearances.”[131]
The Howard cousins, Mr. Charles Howard and the Lady Ann, must have been
married very shortly after, if not before, Robert Boyle returned from his
flying visit to France at the end of 1645. The box of deeds left with
Lord Howard of Escrick must have come back into Robyn’s hands. The little
lady was to pass out of his life almost before she can be said to have
entered it. Twenty years afterwards the Lady Ann was still a young woman,
though she was the mother of grown-up children, when Mr. Pepys made the
entry in his diary: “I to church: and in our pew there sat a great lady,
whom I afterwards understood to be my Lady Carlisle, a very fine woman
indeed in person.”
CHAPTER IX
THE DEARE SQUIRE
“... When a Navigator suddenly spies an unknown Vessel afar
off, before he has hail’d her, he can scarcely, if at all,
conclude what he shall learn by her, and he may from a Ship
that he finds perhaps on some remoter coast of _Africa_, or the
_Indies_, meet with Informations concerning his own Country
and affairs; And thus sometimes a little Flower may point us
to the Sun, and by casting our eyes down to our feet, we may
in the water see those Stars that shine in the Firmament or
highest visible Heaven.”—ROBERT BOYLE: _Occasional Reflections
on Several Subjects_.
It was in March 1646 that Robert Boyle once more set out from London to
ride into Dorsetshire. The Manor of Stalbridge was to be his home for the
next five or six years.
What fate had overtaken the Earl’s choice dun mare that waited at Lismore
for Robyn’s home-coming? The old order had changed; and it was on a
borrowed courser, “none of the freest of his legs,” that Robert Boyle
made the journey. Lord Broghill was with him, and they had the company of
a States-Messenger, who was travelling the same way. The account of their
long ride, by Farnham and Winchester and over Salisbury Plain is a little
romance in itself.[132] The war was drawing to an end. The King was again
at Oxford:—it was not long before his escape, in disguise, to the Scots
at Newcastle. The new-modelled Army had very nearly completed its work
of conquest in the south-west. The Cavaliers were out between Egham and
Farnham, but the travellers dodged them.[133] Farnham was deserted—“all
the townsmen having gone to oppose the King’s Army.” Robert Boyle almost
lost himself in meditation, “invited by the coolness of the evening and
the freshness of the garden,” in which he walked up and down waiting for
his supper. The travellers supped, and retired quietly to bed; and it
was not till the dead of night that they were roused by a thundering at
the chamber door. Robyn slept in his clothes and stockings: “my usual
night-posture when I travel.” He produced his bilboa from under his
pillow, and a pistol from one of his holsters; his bows and arrows were
not far off. But it turned out to be only the town-constable with a group
of musketeers, in search of somebody else. “Away went my gentleman,”
wrote Robyn gaily to his sister, “in prosecution of his search; and I
even took my bows and arrows and went to sleep.”
They dined next day at Winchester, and lay that night at Salisbury; and
there Robyn overtook his trunks, which had been sent on in front of
him. In the middle of Salisbury Plain they were surrounded by a party
of horse, who would have searched them for “Malignant Letters” such as
“use to be about the King’s Picture in a Yellow-Boy.”[134] But the
States-Messenger carried them safely through, and they rode on, past
weary troops of foot, “poor pressed countrymen,” goaded on by the party
of horse. “Amongst them,” wrote Robert Boyle, “I saw one poor rogue,
lacqueyed by his wife, and carrying a child upon his shoulders.” Even
then, as now, “new models” leave much to be desired.
In spite of his bilboa and pistols, Robert Boyle hated the sight of war.
“Good God!” he wrote, “that reasonable creatures, that call themselves
Christians too, should delight in such an unnatural thing as war, where
cruelty at least becomes necessity....”
He reached Stalbridge in safety; but the weather had broken, and was
wretchedly cold. “We all suspect the almanac-maker of a mistake in
setting down March instead of January.” The bad weather kept him indoors,
and was “so drooping that it dulls me to all kinds of useful study.”
Even his country neighbours were prevented from making their usual
“visitations.” Robert Boyle was depressed: Stalbridge was not so lively
as London. “My stay here,” he says, “God willing, shall not be long.”
There were still troops in the neighbourhood, and the plague had
“begun to revive again”; there had been cases at Bristol, and at
Yeovil, only six miles off. Dorsetshire was suffering from “fits of the
Committee”;[135] and at the Manor itself there were many calls on the
Squire’s slender purse. This had for the time been replenished by one of
his brothers; and he was going to cut down some of his wood, to repay the
loan. He was arranging to make “my brother’s sixty trees bear him some
golden fruit”; but this was to be done by instalments—one third at May
Day next. And meantime he was trying to settle down to his “standish and
books”; but even writing did not come easily. “My Ethics,” he wrote to
his sister (of a little treatise he had begun, one of his first literary
attempts), “go very slowly on.”[136]
And the days must have passed slowly too. “I am grown so perfect a
villager, and live so removed,” runs a letter to Lady Ranelagh, “not
only from the roads, but from the very by-paths of intelligence, that to
entertain you with our country discourse, would have extremely puzzled
me, since your children have not the rickets nor the measles.”[137] He
was feeling the difficulties of his position, in being one of a family
so important to both political parties. “I have been forced to observe
a very great caution and exact evenness in my carriage, since I saw you
last,” he wrote to Marcombes in Geneva; “it being absolutely necessary
for the preservation of a person whom the unfortunate situation of his
fortune made obnoxious to the injuries of both parties and the protection
of neither.” And his money matters were still in disorder, as indeed were
everybody else’s. Out of his Irish estates he had not received “the worth
of a farthing.”
The roguery of Tom Murray at Stalbridge, however, had had one good
result: it had obliged Robyn to make “further discoveries into æconomical
knowledge” than he would otherwise have done. He had turned Tom Murray
away, “to let him know that I could do my business very well without
him”; and then, towards the end of 1646, Tom Murray was to be taken
back: “Having attained to a knowledge of my own small fortune beyond
the possibility of being cheated, I am likely to make use of him again,
to show my father’s servants that I wish no hurt to the man, but to the
knave.”
In October 1646, Robert Boyle was back on a visit to London, perhaps to
see the great Essex buried “in kingly state.” On that day, the solemn
pageant just over, he sat down to write a letter—a wonderful letter
for a boy not yet twenty—to Marcombes in Geneva. He wrote of the long
procession of four hundred officers, “not one so low as a captain,” the
House of Peers, the House of Commons, the City-Fathers, and the Assembly
of Divines, that had followed Essex to the grave. But to Robert Boyle the
“pageants of sorrow” had “eaten up the reality”; the “care of the blaze”
had “diverted men from mourning.”[138]
His letter to his old governour gives a vivid picture of the political
conditions of the time. In England there was “not one Malignant garrison
untaken”; in Wales “but two or three rocky places held out for the
King.” The Scots were about to deliver up their garrisons and return
into their own country, the Parliament having agreed to compound with
them for all their arrears. A sum of £300,000 had been agreed upon, but
“the first payment is yet in debate.” The King was still at Newcastle,
“both discontenting and discontented”; and the Scots would be obliged
to make up their minds how to “dispose of his person,” which the Houses
had “voted to remain in the disposition of both Houses of Parliament.”
People were flattering themselves with hopes of a speedy settlement of
things, but Robert Boyle was not so hopeful. He has, he says, “always
looked upon Sin as the chief incendiary of this war”; and yet, “by
careful experience,” he has observed that the war has “only multiplied
and heightened those sins to which it owes its being.” And his simile
is characteristic: “As water and ice,” he adds, “which by a reciprocal
generation beget one another.”
In Ireland the state of things was no more hopeful than nearer home. The
news of Lord Ormonde’s peace must have reached Geneva; but Robert Boyle
explains carefully to Marcombes the respective attitudes of the three
parties;—the Protestant English proper; the “mere natives,” who hoped by
rebellion “to exchange the Throne of England for St. Peter’s Chair,” or
“to shake off the English yoke for that of some Catholic foreign prince”;
and, thirdly, the Catholic Lords of the English Pale—“so we call the
counties about Dublin”—who are “by manners and inclination Irish, though
English by descent.”
In Inchiquin’s absence from Munster, Broghill, Governor of Youghal,
had been left in full command.[139] Robyn is very proud of Broghill,
not only as a gallant soldier, but as “none of the least wits of the
time.” Broghill had come to England to appeal for troops and supplies
for Munster;[140] but Parliament was so slow in granting them that “the
physic will not get thither before the patient be dead.”
And then Robert Boyle gives Marcombes a piece of his mind about the sects
and sectaries:—
“The Presbyterian Government is at last settled (though I can scarce
think it will prove long lived) after the great opposition of many, and
to their no less dislike.” But many people had begun to think it was high
time to “put a restraint upon the spreading impostures of the sectaries,”
who had made London their general rendezvous. The City “entertains at
present no less than 200 several opinions in point of religion.” Some
have been “digged out of the graves,” where they had been long condemned
to lie buried; others have been “newly fashioned in the forge of their
own brains”; most are but “new editions of old errors.”
“If the truth be anywhere to be found,” wrote the young philosopher, “it
is here sought so many several ways that one or other must needs light
upon it.” But he speaks with respect of that kind of tolerance that tries
to see even in impostures “glimpses and manifestations of obscure or
formerly concealed truths,” and that would not “aggravate very venial
errors into dangerous and damnable heresies.”
“The Parliament is now upon an ordinance for the punishment of many of
these supposed errors; but since their belief of their contrary truths
is confessedly a work of divine revelation, why a man should be hanged
because it has not yet pleased God to give him his Spirit, I confess I
am yet to understand....”
After this the letter goes off into domestic and personal matters.
Robert Boyle had been in company with the Archbishop of Armagh[141]—“our
Irish St. Austin”[142]—and had been telling him of Marcombes’s French
translation of a sermon of the Archbishop’s, “The Mystery of the
Incarnation.” “He seemed very willing that you should publish it, upon
the assurance I gave him of the fidelity of its translation.” Lady
Ranelagh and Broghill were anxious to find Marcombes some more pupils;
but all the great families of England were at present “standing at a
gaze.” Whether peace or war be the outcome of events, “it is probable
that a good many of them will make visits to foreign climates.”[143]
Robyn himself had seen a variety of fortune since he and his governour
had parted: “plenty and want, danger and safety, sickness and health,
trouble and ease.” He had actually once been a prisoner in London, “on
some groundless suspicion,” but had quickly got off with advantage. At
Stalbridge he was pursuing his studies by fits and starts. “Divers little
essays, both in prose and verse, I have taken the pains to scribble
upon several subjects”; and as soon as he can “lick them into some less
imperfect shape” he will send some of the “least bad” to Marcombes in
Geneva. He tells Marcombes about his study of ethics, and his desire to
“call them down from the brain into the breast, and from the school to
the house”; and he mentions his little treatise that goes on so slowly.
“The other humane studies I apply myself to are natural philosophy,
the mechanics, and husbandry, according to the principles of our new
philosophical college, that values no knowledge but as it hath a tendency
to use.” And he begs Marcombes to inquire for him into the “ways of
husbandry” practised about Geneva; “and when you intend for England, to
bring along with you what good receipts or good books of any of those
subjects you can procure, which will make you extremely welcome to our
_invisible college_.”
The “Invisible College,” the embryo of the Royal Society of London,
was then already in existence. Since some time in 1645, a little club
composed of a few “worthy persons inquisitive into natural philosophy”
had been holding its weekly meetings; sometimes in the lodging of the
physician, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, in Wood Street, Cheapside; sometimes
at a “convenient place” in Cheapside itself,—in fact, the Bull’s Head
Tavern; and sometimes in Gresham College, near by. Its originator
was Theodore Haak, who, like Hartlib, was a naturalised German; and
among its first members were Dr. John Wallis, clerk to the Westminster
Assembly; Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and
brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell; Foster, the professor of astronomy at
Gresham College; the young William Petty; Dr. Goddard himself; and one
or two other “doctors in physic” more or less well known in London. They
had their telescopes and microscopes and their attendant apothecaries,
etc.; and, “precluding theology and state-affairs,” they wandered at
will among the sciences,—the physics and chemics, and mechanics and
magnetics,—“as then cultivated at home and abroad.” Hartlib was from
the very first connected with this club: “The Invisible College of his
imagination seems to have been that enlarged future association of all
earnest spirits for the prosecution of real and fruitful knowledge of
which this club might be the symbol and promise.”[144]
His early letters to Robert Boyle at Stalbridge are full of the subjects
under discussion. And there is no doubt that it was to a great extent
the fascination of these weekly meetings in Wood Street, and the company
he met there, that drew Robert Boyle so often to London and kept him in
London as long as he could manage to stay there.
“I have been every day these two months,” he wrote to his friend Francis
Tallents, in February 1647,[145] “upon visiting my own ruined cottage
in the country; but it is such a labyrinth, this London, that all my
diligence could never yet find a way out on’t ... the best on’t is, that
the corner-stones of the _invisible_, or as they term themselves, the
_philosophical college_, do now and then honour me with their company
... men of so capacious and searching spirits, that school-philosophy is
but the lowest region of their knowledge; and yet, though ambitious to
lead the way to any generous design, of so humble and tractable a genius,
as they disdain not to be directed to the meanest, so he can but plead
reason for his opinion; persons that endeavour to put narrow-mindedness
out of countenance by the practice of so extensive a charity that it
reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than a universal
goodwill can content it. And indeed they are so apprehensive of the want
of good employment, that they take the whole body of mankind for their
care.”
And he concludes his panegyric with the recital of their chiefest fault,
“which is very incident to almost all good things; and that is, that
there is not enough of them.”
The London outside this pleasant coterie was not so congenial to Robert
Boyle. Above all, the sects and sectaries were his abomination. They were
coming over from Amsterdam like so many bills of exchange; they were like
“diurnals,” eagerly read, and then in a day or two torn up as not worth
keeping. They were “mushrooms of last night’s coming up.” “If any man
have lost his religion,” he wrote, “let him repair to London, and I’ll
warrant him he shall find it: I had almost said too, and if any man has
a religion, let him but come hither now, and he shall go near to lose
it.... For my part, I shall always pray God to give us _the unity of the
Spirit in the bond of peace_....”[146]
One immediate outcome of these club meetings in Wood Street was a little
scheme, evidently aided and abetted by Lady Ranelagh, which filled all
Robyn’s thoughts on his return to Stalbridge in the spring of 1647. He
was going to set up a laboratory of his own, in the empty manor-house. It
was a scheme not easy to carry out in those days; and his first efforts
were to result in dire failure. “That great earthen furnace,” he wrote
to Lady Ranelagh, “whose conveying hither has taken up so much of my
care, and concerning which I made bold very lately to trouble you, since
I last did so, has been brought to my hands crumbled into as many pieces
as we into sects; and all the fine experiments and castles in the air I
had built upon its safe arrival have felt the fate of its foundation.
Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the philosopher’s stone,
I have been so unlucky in my first attempts at chemistry. My limbecks,
recipients, and other glasses have escaped indeed the misfortune of
their incendiary, but are now, through the miscarriage of that grand
implement of Vulcan, as useless to me as good parts to salvation without
the fire of zeal. Seriously, Madam, after all the pains I have taken,
and the precautions I have used, to prevent this furnace the disasters
of its predecessors, to have it transported a thousand miles by land
that I may after all this receive it broken, is a defeat that nothing
could recompense, but that rare lesson it teaches me, how brittle that
happiness is that we build upon earth.”[147]
These words breathe the first hint of a melancholy in Robert Boyle’s
life, the causes of which—though he did his best to conceal and conquer
them—are not far to seek.
As early as 1646, when he was not yet twenty, there comes into his
letters the note of physical suffering. Like many scholars and thinkers,
Robert Boyle was very sensitive about physical pain, and the chances
of infection and disease. As a boy at Eton, it will be remembered, the
“potion” held more than ordinary terrors for the spiritay Robyn. Perhaps
he had heard about little Hodge, who had died at Deptford, after so
dutifully swallowing the powder of unicorns’ horns. But even if not,
he must have seen the same thing happening all about him; he must have
known well enough that medical treatment in his day was steeped in the
optimism of blackest ignorance. The plasters and powders and potions
and purges with which the Faculty “wrought” so boldly on every disease,
and the weird and melodramatic endings which were their usual results,
had given Robyn “a perfect aversion to all physick.” He believed that,
in most cases, it “did but exasperate the disease.” Had not he seen
“life itself almost disgorged together with a potion”? It was his own
childish experiences that inclined this experimentalist, all his life,
to “apprehend more from the physician than the disease,” and set him to
apply himself to the study of physic “that he might have the less need of
them that profess it.” And so, though he was to count among his friends
of the Philosophical College and elsewhere the most learned and eminent
physicians of his time, and as he grew older came to trusting very humbly
and gratefully to the skill of more than one of them, Robert Boyle’s
tendency, all through life, was to simplify medical treatment, and as far
as possible to doctor himself with the aid of an intelligent and obedient
“apothecary.”
If he had known that he was to live till he was sixty-five, and that the
five-and-forty years that lay before him were to be years of more or less
invalidism and suffering! But the long future was veiled; at twenty, the
months in front of him were all-important. And he must have known as
early as 1646 that his attacks of pain and “ague fits” were caused by
the existence of renal calculus—the “gravel of the kidneys” of his day.
He knew of it when he wrote the letter to Hartlib (a fellow sufferer) in
which he gratefully thanks good Mrs. Hartlib for a “receipt” or “sanative
remedy,” which she had sent him in one of her husband’s letters, against
a disease that Robyn calls “so cruel in its tortures and so fatal in its
catastrophe.”[148]
Stalbridge, with this fact realised, was no longer the home of glad
possibilities it may at first have promised to be; which the old Earl, in
leaving it to his Benjamin, had certainly intended it to be. But Robert
Boyle was making the best of it. “As for me,” he wrote to Hartlib—“during
my confinement to this melancholy solitude, I often divert myself at
leisure moments in trying such experiments as the unfurnishedness of the
place and the present distractedness of my mind will permit me.” Friends
and neighbours came about him; these were certain “young knights” and
young Churchmen and “travellers out of France,” who appear under fancy
names in his _Reflections_: Eusebius, “a Dr. of Divinity,” Eugenius and
Genorio, “Travellers and fine Gentlemen,” and Lindamor, “a learned youth,
both well born and well bred.” If they were not actually his guests at
Stalbridge, Robyn “took pleasure to imagine” them to “be present with me
at the occasion”; and poetic licence has suggested that Lindamor may have
been Robyn himself, in some of his moods, though he still figures in some
of them as Philaretus and speaks in others of them of “Mr. Boyle”—even
while he is using also the first personal pronoun. The Earl of Bristol’s
family at Sherborne Castle were pleasant neighbours, and the family of
Sir Thomas Mallet, at Poynington—Sir Thomas and his Lady, and Mr. John
Mallet their son, and the young lady whom John Mallet was to marry—“the
fair young lady you are happy in,” as Robert Boyle called her.
Robyn’s own family—scattered and busy as they were—came to see him
sometimes. He says himself that his sister, Lady Ranelagh, was “almost
always with him during his sickness”;[149] and his brother Frank seems
to have been a welcome and cheerful guest at Stalbridge; while Robyn
himself rode over now and then to Marston Bigot, when “dear Broghill”
and Lady Pegg were there. But his laboratory and his “standish” and
books, and especially his correspondence with Hartlib in London, were
a great resource. It was at this time that he was writing the little
essays he spoke of to Marcombes. Among them was his _Free Discourse
against Customary Swearing_, which in manuscript pleased his relations,
and was dedicated to his sister Kildare.[150] And it was then also that
he was writing his _Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects_, which
so delighted Lady Ranelagh.[151] They afford many glimpses into Robert
Boyle’s life during the years spent at Stalbridge. He is to be seen in
them as the young Squire of gentle, studious tastes and simple habits,
sitting, book in hand, over the slow-burning wood fire in the parlour
with the carved stone chimney-piece “fair and graceful in all respects”;
or riding his horse along the up-and-down-hill Dorset lanes; angling by
the side of a stream, or walking in his own meadows, with his spaniel
at his heels: philosophising as he goes; observing all things always;
dreaming, perhaps, a little too—within bounds. The very titles of his
_Reflections_ are an epitome of the life of those Stalbridge days. The
spaniel is a constant companion, in weal and woe:—
_Upon my Spaniel’s carefulness not to lose me in a Strange place_,
and _Upon his manner of giving Meat to his Dogg_, are two of these
_Reflections_.[152]
There is nothing very original in Robert Boyle’s method of feeding a dog,
except that it carries with it his inevitable moral conclusions; but the
youthful essay hands down the picture of master and dog to posterity:—
“For but observe this Dogg. I hold him out meat, and my inviting Voice
loudly encourages and invites him to take it. ’Tis held indeed higher
than he can leap, and yet, if he leap not at it, I do not give it him;
but if he do, I let it fall half-way into his mouth.”
Spaniels have fetched their masters’ gloves from time immemorial; but
none quite so graphically as Robert Boyle’s:—[153]
“How importunate is he to be imployed about bringing me this glove!
And with what Clamours and how many fawnings does he court me to fling
it him! I never saw him so eager for a piece of Meat as I find him
for a Glove. And yet he knows it is no Food for him, nor is it Hunger
that creates his Longings for it; for now I have cast it him, he does
nothing else with it but (with a kind of Pride to be sent for it, and a
satisfaction which his glad gestures make appear so great, that the very
use of Speech would not enable him to express it better) brings it me
back again....”
In the mere names of these _Reflections_ may be traced the manner in
which he spent his days: _Upon distilling the Spirit of Roses in a
Limbick_: _Upon two very miserable Beggars begging together by the
Highway_: _Upon the Sight of a Windmill standing still_: _Upon his
Coaches being stopt in a narrow Lane_: _Upon the Sight of a fair Milkmaid
Singing to her Cow_:[154] _Upon Talking to an Echo_: _Upon a Child that
Cri’d for the Stars_;—in which last are quoted Waller’s lines—
“Thus in a starry night fond children cry
For the rich spangles which adorn the sky.”
One of the _Reflections_, _Upon the Eating of Oysters_, possesses a
secondary interest: it is supposed to have suggested to Swift his
_Gulliver’s Travels_. Like others of the _Reflections_, it is written in
the form of conversation between _Eugenius_ and _Lindamor_.[155]
“EUG.—You put me in mind of a fancy of your Friend Mr. Boyle, who was
saying, that he had thoughts of making a short Romantick story, where
the Scene should be laid in some Island of the Southern Ocean, govern’d
by some such rational Laws and Customs as those of _Utopia_ or the _New
Atlantis_, and in the Country he would introduce an Observing Native,
that upon his return home from his Travels made in Europe should give an
account of our Countries and manners under feign’d Names, and frequently
intimate in his Relations (or in his Answers to Questions that should be
made him) the reasons of his wondring to find our Customs so extravagant,
and differing from those of his Country....”
The _Reflections_ show Robert Boyle as he lived and thought and felt;
as he rose early on a “fair morning,” and looked up at the “variously
coloured clouds,” and listened to the lark’s song overhead; as he picked
up a horse-shoe, watched boys at their games, or tried a prismatical
or triangular glass; as he fished with a “counterfeit fly” along the
river-banks, or let the fish run away with the more homely bait; as he
looked at his own shadow cast in the face of a pool, or his own face in a
looking-glass with a rich frame. What an opportunity was the magnetical
needle of a sundial, or the use of a burning-glass, or the drinking of
water out of the brims of one’s own hat! What food for reflection was a
syrup made of violets, or a glow-worm included in a crystal viol! What
thoughts fluttered about the tail of a paper kite flown on a windy day,
or about a lanthorn and candle carried by on a dark and windy night! And
Robert Boyle did once shoot something, as may be seen from the title of
one particular _Reflection_:
“Killing a Crow (out of a window) in a Hog’s trough, and immediately
tracing the ensuing _Reflection_ with a Pen made of one of his
Quills....”
Very early in his life there was, alas! the least touch of the
valetudinary about the “deare Squire.” It was not all fair mornings and
larks and roses. One section of his little book of essays is devoted to
“the accidents of an ague,” and deals with the invasion, the hot and cold
fits, the letting of blood, the taking of physick, the syrups and other
sweet things sent by the doctor, the want of sleep, the telling of the
strokes of an ill-going clock in the night, the thief in the candle, the
danger of death, the fear of relapse; and at the end, when Robyn is his
own man again—the “reviewing and tacking together the several bills filed
up in the Apothecary’s Shop.”
In the summer of 1647, Robert Boyle had been ill; but in the autumn
he paid some visits among his relations, and early in 1648 he went to
Holland, “partly to visit the country,” and partly to help his brother
Frank conduct his brilliant wife home from The Hague—a mission that must
have required all Frank’s sweetness of spirit and all Robyn’s philosophy.
In the summer of 1648, Robert Boyle was again in London;—this time, Lady
Ranelagh had taken rooms for him in St. James’s.
CHAPTER X
A KIND OF ELYSIUM
“This blessed plot, this Earth, this Realme, this England,
This Nurse, this teeming wombe of Royall Kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous for their birth,
Renowned for their deeds, as farre from home,
For Christian seruice, and true Chiualrie,
As is the sepulcher in stubborne Iury
Of the World’s ransome, blessed _Marie’s_ Sonne.
This Land of such deere soules, this deere-deere Land,
Deere for her reputation through the world....”
Shakespeare’s _Richard the Second_ (First Folio, 1623).
Shakespeare was a little out of date in the summer of 1648, when Robert
Boyle came to town from Stalbridge to the lodging in St. James’s taken
for him by his sister Ranelagh. “This England” was then still in the
throes of civil war; was, in fact, at the moment plunged in what is
known as the Second Civil War.[156] When Robert Boyle arrived in town,
everybody was talking of the risings in the English counties (Dorsetshire
itself among them), and the revolt of the fleet off the Kentish coast.
The King was in the Isle of Wight: since Robert Boyle had written his
letter to Marcombes in October 1646, the King had been bandied about from
the Scots to the English, from the Parliament to the Army, from Holmby
House to Hampton Court; and now, having escaped into the Isle of Wight
only to find himself virtually a prisoner in Carisbrooke Castle, he was
yet in secret negotiation with Ormonde in France, and with Hamilton and
the Royalists in Scotland. Just at this time, “in spite of Argyle and the
Scottish Clergy”, a Royalist army was marching into England. The Queen
and Prince and the Royalist Court at St. Germains were on tip-toe of
expectation; while the young Duke of York had escaped from London abroad,
disguised in girl’s clothes.[157] Ormonde was with the Court in France,
and Inchiquin in Ireland had declared himself a Royalist. There had been
also successive Royalist risings in Wales and in the English counties.
Of the Parliamentary Party, Lambert was in the north, Cromwell in Wales;
and Fairfax and Ireton—the Kentish rising crushed—were now besieging
Colchester.
And what was Robert Boyle doing during this London visit? After all,
London was in the circumstances the most civilised place to be in.
Robert Boyle was listening to the Earl of Warwick’s very full account
“from his own mouth” of his recent negotiations with the rebellious
fleet;—the Earl of Warwick, who was Mary Boyle’s father-in-law. And then,
when the Earl of Warwick himself was hurrying off to Portsmouth to deal
with the “disobedient ships” there, Robert Boyle was supping quietly
with the ladies of the Warwick family at Warwick House in Holborn, and
hearing from them all the latest gossip about the Essex rising, and the
behaviour of his brother-in-law Charles Rich. By their account, Charles
Rich had been the “grand agitator in this Essex business.” And the young
Squire was much amused to hear also that the newly chosen Admiral of the
revolting ships was none other than one Kemb, a minister,—“a mad, witty
fellow,” Robert Boyle calls him, “whom I have often been very merry with,
his wife being sister to the honest red-nosed blade that waits now on
me.”[158]
Times had changed, indeed, since England was the royal throne of Kings,
another Eden, and a demi-paradise. No doubt the Invisibles met as usual
in Wood Street, and Robert Boyle was often in congenial company with
Hartlib and the others there or at Gresham College. Young Lord Barrymore
was no longer with Milton in the Barbican. Milton had given up his
school, and he and his wife and their one little girl were living in High
Holborn—very near to Warwick House—and Milton was now leading a literary
life, but keenly watching the doings of Parliament and Army; it was some
months before he was made Secretary of Foreign Tongues to the Council of
State. The young philosopher in St. James’s, who had his own ideals, was
watching them too, as keenly; though exactly how Robert Boyle felt about
the trend of events it is very difficult to guess. His “exact evenness
of carriage” never deserted him: to use his own words, “The point of a
mariner’s needle shows its inclination to the Pole both by its wavering
and rest.” Royalists, Parliament-men, Army-men, Churchmen, Presbyterians,
and Independents,—he was in the midst of them all, bound to many of them
by ties of friendship and kinship, but steadfastly going his own way.
If he was in the company of Mary’s father-in-law, the Earl of Warwick,
he was also in Archbishop Usher’s study, listening to a very different
kind of exposition, and he was writing affectionately to “dear Broghill”
in his difficult position in Munster. If he spoke of “Our Masters” at
Westminster, he spoke also of “Our Brethren” across the Borders. On the
whole, like Milton in Holborn, but from quite another standpoint, Robert
Boyle seems to have fixed, if not his faith, his expectations, upon the
New Model. “Victory,” he wrote, “is as obedient as the very Parliament to
the Army.”[159]
And meantime Lady Ranelagh was doing her best to push her young brother’s
literary interests, and make his London visit a pleasant one. She had
been showing one of his manuscripts to her friend the Countess of
Monmouth. The Countess was the daughter of an old acquaintance of the
Earl of Cork, Lionel Cranfield, the clever merchant-adventurer, Lord
Mayor of London, High Treasurer, and first, Earl of Middlesex. It may be
remembered that Marcombes had been tutor in the Middlesex family before
he took Kynalmeaky and Broghill abroad. The Countess had read and liked
the manuscript, and had sent the young Squire a flattering message and
invitation in a note to his sister Ranelagh. And it was with more than
ordinary pleasure that Robert Boyle sat down to indite his little letter
of reply, a model of seventeenth-century epistolary homage, to the
Countess of Monmouth at Moore Park—
“Madam,” so runs the letter: “in your ladyship’s (imparted to me by my
sister Ranelagh) I find myself so confounded with civilities, that if
she that blessed me with the sight of your letter had not (for her own
discharge) exacted of me this acknowledgment of my having seen it, I must
confess I should scarce have ventured to return a verbal answer, deterred
by the impossibility of writing without wronging a resentment[160] which
I can express as little as I deserved the praises and the favours that
have produced it.”
And so on. The Countess had suggested the publication of his pamphlet.
But she did more: she had invited the young Squire to pay a visit to
Moore Park, and to bring his manuscript in his pocket—
“As for my pamphlet, Madam, had it expected the glory of entertaining
you, it should certainly have appeared in a less careless dress ... yet
my just sense of the smallness of the accession the Press can be to the
honour of your ladyship’s perusal makes me decline its publication. And
as that paper cannot have either a higher applause or nobler end than
the being liked and practised at Moore Park, so if it have either anyway
diverted your ladyship, or had the least influence upon my lord, I have
reached my desires and gone beyond my hopes. However, Madam, I am richly
rewarded for writing such a book by being enjoyned to fetch it where
you are. So welcome a command is very unlikely to be disobeyed; but my
obedience, Madam, must be paid to the order, not the motive. The fetching
of my book may be one effect of my remove, but not the errand of it; for
sure, Madam, your modesty cannot be so injurious, both to yourself and
me, as to persuade you that any inferior (that is, other) motive can be
looked upon by me as an invitation to a journey which will bless me with
so great a happiness as that of your ladyship’s conversation, and give
me the opportunity of assuring you, better than my present haste and my
disorder will now permit me, in how transcendent a degree I am, Madam,
your Ladyship’s humble and obliged servant, Robert Boyle.”
It was a particularly cold, wet July[161]; the confusions of the country
seemed to have infected the very air; and those people who were “wont
to make fires, not against winter but against cold,” had “generally
displac’d the florid and the verdant Ornaments in their chimneys,” where
“Vulcan” was more proper than “Flora.”[162]
But it must be taken for granted that the sun shone out one day, not long
after the folding and dispatching of this letter to the Countess; and
that Robert Boyle and his horse did find their way by the old coach-road
from London into Hertfordshire. And when they came to the little town of
Rickmansworth, lying sleepily in the valley, clustered about the huge
Church in its midst, horse and rider must have turned upwards to the
left, under spreading oak-trees. The “common way” still runs upwards
through the Park.
For Moore Park, that once belonged to Shakespeare’s Earl of Pembroke,
“stands on the side of a hill; but not very steep.” Sir William Temple
has described it, as it was in that day, when the Monmouth family owned
it, “the sweetest place, I think, that I have ever seen in my life,
either before or since, at home or abroad.” The length of the house lay
upon the breadth of the garden. The great parlour, where the Countess
would receive her guest, opened on the middle of a terraced gravel-walk,
set with standard laurels, which looked like orange-trees out of bloom.
There were fountains and statues and summer-houses in that garden—“the
perfectest figure of a garden”—and shady cloisters, upon arches of stone,
clustered over with vines. And beyond lay a wilderness, which was always
in the shade. Robert Boyle must have been a happy man that day, as he
alighted before those portals with his manuscript in his pocket.
Henry Cary, second Earl of Monmouth, was a Royalist peer: his younger
brother, Thomas Cary, was the faithful groom of the bedchamber to
Charles I. They were sons of the old Robert—the man who, the moment
Queen Elizabeth was dead, had started on his record ride from London to
Edinburgh to be the first to tell James VI that he was King of England.
The first Earl and his Countess—a Trevanion—lay buried in Rickmansworth
Church; and the second Earl and his Countess were, at the time of
Robert Boyle’s visit, living quietly at Moore Park, the Earl having of
late withdrawn into retirement among his books and manuscripts.[163]
For he was a scholar, skilled in modern languages, and a writer—though
not one of his manuscripts remains. And he and the Countess were still
passionately mourning the death of Lionel, their elder son and heir, who
had fallen in the battle of Marston Moor. The second son was married, in
London[164]; and the family at Moore Park must have consisted entirely
of daughters, though the eldest daughter had been married for some years
to Mary Boyle’s rejected suitor, Mr. James Hamilton.[165] Mr. Hamilton
had married the Lady Anne Cary a few weeks after the Lady Mary Boyle’s
runaway marriage with Charles Rich. But not any of the other daughters at
Moore Park—and there was a bevy of them—were married, or to be married,
for many years to come; which, in those days of early marriages, is a
matter for some wonder, especially as it is known, on Evelyn’s authority,
that one at least of these daughters was “beautifull and ingenious.”[166]
However pleasant the visit to Moore Park may have been, it was soon
over. Early in August Robert Boyle was staying with his sister Mary at
the Earl of Warwick’s house of Leeze, in Essex, and there finishing his
treatise on “Seraphick Love.” It purported to be written “by one young
gentleman to another”—to that _Lindamor_, in fact, the “learned youth
both well-born and well-bred,” who makes the fourth of the little quartet
in the _Reflections_. The manuscript was handed, “almost sheet by sheet,”
as it was written, to the enthusiastic Mary; and then, having been, after
the fashion of the day, circulated among a favoured few, it was laid
carefully by, among the young Squire’s other papers. And in September he
was back again at Stalbridge.
The last months of that fateful year must have been, in many a quiet
English manor, the most dismal and depressing ever lived through. In
his seclusion, with pen and ink, limbecks and recipients, Robert Boyle
was to employ the months as best he could. To his Manor, set among
its autumn orchards, reached by its stone-paved way between rows of
elm-trees, there must have come from week to week, by friend or messenger
or weekly news-sheet, the straggling tidings of those events that one
after the other were hurrying the Sovereign to his doom. The second
civil war had been trampled out; Cromwell’s great battle of Preston had
been fought and Hamilton taken prisoner, while Robert Boyle was still
at “delicious Leeze,” perfecting his treatise on “Seraphick Love.”
And before he left Leeze there had come the news of the surrender of
Colchester to Fairfax, and the shooting of the two Royalist leaders. In
September the Parliamentary Commissioners were in the Isle of Wight; and
through the shortening days of October and November even Dorsetshire and
its “bye-paths of intelligence” must have been stirred by the doings
of Parliament, the “high and fierce” debate that followed the Army
Remonstrance, and the _coup d’état_ of the King’s abduction from the Isle
of Wight to the melancholy Hurst Castle on the Hampshire mainland. And
then—Fairfax was at Whitehall; the Army was in possession of London.
December came, and with it the last grim struggle of Parliament and Army
for the disposition of the person of the Sovereign. The King was brought
to Windsor; and, Christmas over, Lords and Commons were in the last
hand-grips. The King’s trial had begun: the trial of “Charles Stuart,
King of England,” in Westminster Hall, where Strafford had been tried
and sentenced seven years before. How soon did the news of the King’s
sentence reach the Manor of Stalbridge? “This Court doth adjudge that the
said Charles Stuart, as a Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy,
shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.”
How soon did Robert Boyle hear the details of those last weeks and days
and hours, with all the little traits, so kingly and so human, as the
unhappy royal delinquent blindly approached his doom? How soon did some
pale-faced horseman bring the news to Stalbridge of that last scene of
all?—the King walking in procession through the Park, from St. James’s to
Whitehall; his stepping out of that Whitehall window on to the scaffold
hung with black; the block and axe, and men in black masks; the companies
of horse and foot below in the street; and from Charing Cross on the one
side to Westminster Abbey on the other, the close-packed crowds of the
populace, waiting....
“The axe descended, severing the head from the body at one blow. There
was a vast shudder through the mob, and then a universal groan.”[167]
* * * * *
Lord Broghill had given up his post in Munster under the Parliament;
and he and Lady Broghill and their young children were living quietly
at Marston Bigot. There Broghill amused himself by writing his
_Parthenissa_; and there, in the spring of 1649, Robert Boyle paid
a visit to his brother and Lady Pegg. He, too, was busy with his
manuscripts, and in pleasant enough correspondence with the Invisibles
in London. But in August he was at Bath. A letter to Lady Ranelagh,
dated from Bath, August 2, “late at night,” was written in by no means a
light-hearted vein. His “native disposition” had made him shy, he said,
of disclosing his afflictions where he could not expect their redress.
He was “too proud to seek a relief in the being thought to need it.”
Moreover, he had been ill again, of “a quotidian ague.” His manuscript
on “Public Spiritedness” had been laid aside, and his “vulcanian feats”
abandoned.
“The melancholy which some have been pleased to misrepresent to you as
the cause of my distempers is certainly much more the effect of them.” He
had only just arrived at Bath, having been carried there on a litter; and
there he was intending to stay till he could leave it on horseback. The
physicians had led him to hope he might be able to crawl to London before
very long.
But the end of August found him back in his laboratory among the
orchards—not very pleasantly occupied in “drawing,” for his own use, “a
quintessence of wormwood.” He had been too much occupied of late even to
write to his sister Ranelagh. There is in his letter the least little
suggestion that the events of this last year—personal, it may be, as well
as political—had kept even this brother and sister apart; but it was for
the time only.
“For Vulcan,” he wrote, “has so transported and bewitched me, that,
as the delights I taste in it make me fancy my laboratory a kind of
_Elysium_, so as if the threshold of it possessed the quality the poets
ascribed to that _Lethe_ their fictions made men taste of before their
entrance into those seats of bliss, I there forget my standish and my
books, and almost all things, but the unchangeable resolution I have made
of continuing till death, Sister, your
“R. B.”[168]
CHAPTER XI
HERMETIC THOUGHTS
“A Monarch may command my Life or Fortune but not my opinion: I
cannot command this myself; it arises only from the Nature of
the Thing I judge of.”—ROBERT BOYLE.
“... A general chemical council, not far from _Charing Cross_,
sits often, and hath so behaved itself hitherto, that things
seem now to hasten towards some settlement.... They are about
an universal laboratory, to be erected after such a manner as
may redound, not only to the good of this island, but also to
the health and wealth of all mankind.”—SAMUEL HARTLIB _to_
ROBERT BOYLE, _May 1654_.
Lord Broghill had laid aside his _Parthenissa_. The story goes that
in the autumn of 1649 he was meditating, under cover of a course of
treatment for the gout, a visit to Spa, which would take him into the
neighbourhood of the “royal orphan”; and one account, at least, of
how Cromwell intercepted Broghill in London is too picturesque to be
discarded.
Nobody—so runs the story—was in the secret of Broghill’s little plan
except his wife, Lady Pegg, and perhaps his sister Ranelagh, at whose
house, in the Old Mall, Broghill arrived on a certain day in the dusk,
with only four servants in attendance, to take leave of her before
setting out on his journey to Spa.
“My Lord came, and was no sooner housed but heard a voice ask for my Lord
Broghill: he thereupon charged his faithful sister with treachery; but
her protestation of being innocent tempered him.” The messenger proved
to be a “sightly Lieutenant,” sent by the Lord General to know when and
where he might interview Broghill; and, after a good deal of parleying,
a meeting was arranged for early next morning in St. James’s Garden.
Cromwell was there first, with a group of his officers about him, and
Broghill soon learnt that his correspondence with the “royal orphan” was
discovered, and that he must make his choice. “The dilemma is short,”
Cromwell is reported to have said; “if you go with me in this expedition
to reduce the Irish rebels, you may live, otherwise you certainly
die.”[169]
Whatever the details, the fact remains that Broghill accepted Cromwell’s
offer, and returned to Ireland with some sort of understanding that,
while he would serve Cromwell and the cause of Protestantism under the
Parliament, he was not to be required to fight against any but the
Irish.[170] Accordingly, in December 1649, “dear Broghill” was in Ireland
again, and Robert Boyle was writing to congratulate him on a brilliant
series of successes at Kinsale, Cork, Bandon and Youghal. “And truly that
which most endears your acquisitions to me is that they have cost you so
little blood.”[171] Cromwell had known his man; a veritable son of the
old soldier-statesman, whose name was alive yet in Munster. There could
have been no Rebellion in Ireland, said Cromwell, if every county had
contained an Earl of Cork.
Other members of the Boyle family were back in Ireland. The eldest
brother, Dungarvan, now Earl of Cork, the good-natured head of the
family, and his no less good-natured Countess were living at Lismore
or in Dublin. Frank and “black Betty,” as Robert Boyle had dubbed the
little sister-in-law, were living near Castle Lyons; and there also
was Lady Barrymore, whose “wild boy,” so lately Milton’s pupil in the
Barbican, was now a very young married man. To his mother’s discomfiture,
and sorely against her wishes, young Barrymore had married another of the
fascinating Killigrews; and the same batch of Irish letters that carried
Robert Boyle’s congratulations to Broghill took also a very wise letter,
written from London, to his eldest sister, Lady Barrymore.[172] He had
known nothing about the marriage till it was over.
“Without pretending to excuse or extenuate what is past, having minded
you that there is a difference betwixt seasonable and just, I shall
venture only to represent to you that the question is not now whether or
no the marriage be a thing fit to be done, but how it is to be suffered;
and that as the best gamesters have not the privilege of choosing their
own cards, but their skill consists in well playing the game that is
dealt them, so the discreetest persons are not allowed the choice of
conditions and events, but their wisdom consists in making the best of
those accidents that Providence is pleased to dispense them.” And he
reminds his sister that, as she has declared openly for the Royalist
party, the mediation of a “crowned intercessor” in this matter is not
to be disregarded. Moreover, some of her nearest friends, “though they
think the match very unhappy, think it unfit the married pair should be
so.”[173]
The letter heralds Robert Boyle’s own arrival in Ireland on a visit to
his sister at Castle Lyons, and to the various family homes in Munster.
His Irish estates were certainly calling for his attention; but the
visit was to be postponed. Broghill’s diplomatic victories were but the
beginning of bloody warfare. Broghill was to serve Cromwell through the
whole of the war with Ireland, in a series of brilliant engagements. “A’
Broghill! A’ Broghill!” was the battle-cry that led on his men; and he
narrowly escaped with his life in the last engagement of all—his victory
at Knockbrack. Broghill was the man aimed at. “Kill the fellow in the
gold-laced coat!” the Irish soldiers shouted to each other. But Broghill
was not killed, though “my boldest horse,” he wrote, “being twice
wounded, became so fearful that he was turned to the coach.”[174]
In the summer of 1650 Robert Boyle was still at Stalbridge, writing on
May Day to thank Hartlib for his gossip about _Utopia_ and _Breda_:[175]
“my inclinations as much concerning me in _Republicâ Literariâ_ as
my fortune can do in _Republicâ Anglicanâ_. Nor am I idle, though my
thoughts only are not at present useless to the advancement of learning;
for I can sometimes make shift to snatch from the importunity of my
affairs leisure to trace such plans and frame such models, etc., as,
if my Irish fortune will afford me quarries and woods to draw competent
materials from to construct after them, will fit me to build a pretty
house in Athens, where I may live to philosophy and Mr. Hartlib.”
At this time, Ireland and Athens were equally remote. Was there an
attraction, other than the Invisibles, that still kept Robert Boyle
within reach of London? Many years afterwards—after Robert Boyle was
dead—his old friend John Evelyn, writing about him to Dr. Wotton said:
“Tho’ amongst all his experiments he never made that of the maried life,
yet I have been told he courted a beautifull and ingenious daughter
of Carew,[176] Earl of Monmouth, to which is owing the birth of his
_Seraphick Love_.”
Was this, indeed, the love-story of Robert Boyle’s life? If so, it was
lived through between the years 1648 and 1650. As early as the cold
January of 1648, at Stalbridge, on the very day he came of age, in some
moment of depression or decision, the boy had made a little sacrifice
to Vulcan: he had resolutely burned most of the verses, “amorous,
merry and devout” that he had written in idle moments, and laid away
“uncommunicated.”[177] Then, when spring came, and the Stalbridge
orchards were white with blossom, he had set off on his visit to London,
and taken up his abode in those rooms in St. James’s that had been
engaged for him by his sister Ranelagh. Early in June, he was writing to
his friend Mrs. Hussey—presumably a Dorsetshire friend and neighbour—a
letter full of political gossip, written the very day after he had supped
with the ladies at Warwick House. But how does the letter end?
“But, Madam, since I began to write this letter, I had unexpectedly the
happiness of a long conversation with the fair lady, that people are
pleased to think my mistress; and truly, Madam, though I am as far from
being in love as most that are so are from being wise, yet my haste makes
me gladly embrace the old excuse of
‘Then to speak sense
Were an offence’
to extenuate my having hitherto written so dully, and my concluding
so abruptly; for whilst this amorous rapture does possess, I neither
could write sense without being injurious to my passion, nor can any
longer continue to write nonsense, without some violation of that
profound respect which is due to you from, and vowed you by, Madam, your
ladyship’s most faithful and most humble servant.”
If the fair lady who talked so delightfully, were indeed a “beautifull
and ingenious daughter” of the Earl of Monmouth, Robert Boyle’s
love-story goes into a nutshell. For just a month later came the Countess
of Monmouth’s letter to Lady Ranelagh, which so confounded the young
squire with its civilities, and contained the invitation to Moore Park.
The two young people had already met, and been attracted to one another:
the lady’s name had been already spoken of among their mutual friends as
that of a possible bride for the young Squire; Lady Ranelagh, at whose
house, it is probable, they had first met, and who was certainly anxious
to see Robyn with a wife of his own at Stalbridge, had been in private
conclave with Lady Monmouth; and the Countess herself, the mother of a
bevy of daughters, was disposed to look kindly on the young Squire, in
spite of his Geneva-bred philosophy, and his not very robust health.
For he was the youngest son of a very great family; cultured, amiable,
virtuous—and likely to be a moderately rich man, when once his Irish
affairs could be put in order. But there was the Earl of Monmouth to
deal with; a Churchman, and passionately Royalist. There is a sentence
in Robyn’s letter to the Countess which carries with it a suggestion
that she, rather than the Earl, was interested in the young suitor:
“If,” he says, of his precious manuscript, which she had asked him to
bring to Moore Park, “it have either any way diverted your Ladyship, _or
had the least influence upon my Lord_, I have reached my desires and
gone beyond my hopes.” Did the Earl of Monmouth look unfavourably upon
the young Puritan, or desire to extract from him promises—a statement
about his religious and political convictions—which Robert Boyle was
unwilling to make? And the fair lady herself—what amount of say had she
in the matter? If Robyn had joined the King’s Army would he have won
his _Hermione_?[178] In his _Seraphick Love_, he speaks of Hermione’s
“cold usage.” It is quite possible that this beautiful and ingenious
daughter of the Monmouth family may have merely looked shyly on Robert
Boyle, his manuscript treatises and his little valetudinary ways;
but it is also possible that, young as she was—she can scarcely have
been more than seventeen—she was a girl not only of strong hereditary
feelings, brought up a strict Churchwoman and Royalist, but of spirit and
conviction—a character as firm as Robert Boyle’s itself. _The Martyrdom
of Theodora and of Didymus_, Robert Boyle’s quaint and powerful prose
romance—of which only the second part was ever published, and that
not until 1687—was written in his early youth, and even more than his
_Seraphick Love_ seems as if it may hold the internal evidence of his
own love-story. If _Seraphick Love_ speaks of a woman’s “cold usage” the
story of Theodora and Didymus explains it. The character of Theodora is
worth studying, if this is indeed Robert Boyle’s ideal of womanhood.
It is the character of a woman young and beautiful, who is not only an
uncommonly good talker, but “declares her aversion for marriage.” Her
reasons are given to her friend Irene, who has “solicited favour for
Didymus.”
“Marriage,” says Theodora, “is one of the most important Things of Life;
and though I esteem it a mean Notion of Happiness to think that one
Person can make either of them the Portion of another, yet Discretion,
as well as Sincerity and Chastity, oblige a woman to have a great deal
of Care of that which concerns the Term of her Life; and a Woman that
designs to behave herself like a Wife, ought to take care in a Choice
she can make but once, and not carelessly to enter on a Voyage where
Shipwracks are so frequent, though she be offered a fine ship to make it
in. But since my dear _Irene_ takes this opportunity to know more of my
Thoughts than I should disclose to any other Person, I must tell her that
were I at my own disposal, and should be willing to make such a Change
as I have always been averse to, Didymus’s Virtues and Services would
influence me more than the Advantages of Titles, Riches or Dignities
of his Rivals could. But dear _Irene_, the times are such, and my
Circumstances too, that it would be very extravagant for me to engage
myself further in the World. For a Christian cannot think to be happy,
whilst the Church is miserable, and perplexed with outward Calamities....
When I think,” proceeds Theodora, “of the Church’s Desolation, and
that I should not only be content to be a Spectator, but an Actor in
the Tragedy, I cannot relish the Complements of a Lover, nor hope
for Contentment, except from a Place above the reach of Persecution.
And these Sentiments,” says she, “are warranted by the Apostle, who
Discouraged Women that were free, in much less troublesome times, from
entering into a Marriage State....”
* * * * *
And which of the bevy of Monmouth daughters was it that would not marry
Robert Boyle?—“a beautifull and ingenious daughter,” says Evelyn; that is
all that is known of her. Anne, the eldest, had in 1648 been some years
married to James Hamilton, Earl of Clanbrassil; and of the six other
daughters born to the Earl and Countess of Monmouth, only three seemed
to have reached maturity—Elizabeth, Mary and Martha—of whom Elizabeth
must have been seventeen in 1648. These three, with the Countess, his
widow, were left in the Earl’s will—dated July 1659—his co-heirs. They
were then all three unmarried; the Earl their father left some of the
property under certain conditions relating to their being, as he quaintly
expressed it, “in my life preferred in marriage or otherwise dead.” It
was not till some years after the Earl of Monmouth’s death that Mary and
Martha married—Mary becoming the second wife of the Earl of Desmond
and Martha the second wife of the Earl of Middleton. Elizabeth died
in December 1676, and was buried a few months before the Countess of
Monmouth, her mother, in Rickmansworth Church. The inscription on the
stone over her grave is not an ordinary one—
Sacred to the Memory
of yᵉ Right Honᵇˡᵉ yᵉ Lady Elizabeth
Cary one of yᵉ Davghters & Co-heirs
of the Right Honᵇˡᵉ Henry
Lord Cary Baron of Leppington
and Earle of Monmovth. Shee
dyed the 14ᵗʰ day of December in
the year of ovr Lord 1676 & in
the 46ᵗʰ year of her age having
livd all her time vnmarried bvt
now expecting A joyfvll Resvrrecᵗⁱᵒⁿ
and to be joynd to her onely
Spouse and Saviour Jesvs Christ,
lies here interd near the said
Earle her Father.
Was this the heroine of Boyle’s love story—the _Hermione_ whose “cold
usage” sent him to write his _Seraphick Love_ at Leeze?—the woman whose
views on a Marriage State found their way into his _Martyrdom of Theodora
and of Didymus_? It will probably never be known. Whoever the lady,
whatever the reason, the affair seems to have been, in modern parlance,
“off” before the end of 1648. And yet, a whole year later, in December
1649, Robert Boyle was in London again, scorching his wings at the flame.
“I know Frank will endeavour to persuade you,” he wrote to his sister
Barrymore, “that it is the thing called Love that keeps me here”; and
to Lord Broghill, at the same date, “My next shall give you an account
of my transactions, my studies, and my _amours_; of the latter of which
black Betty will tell you as many lies as circumstances; but hope you
know too well what she is and whence she comes not to take all her
stories for fictions....”
Some strong attraction, then, in or near London, there undoubtedly
was, and Robert Boyle’s family knew of it; but all their thrusts were
successfully parried in what Sir Henry Wotton had called Robyn’s “pretty
conceits.” In company Robert Boyle was to “prate” with “pure raillery” of
“matrimony and amours.” He was to pity those who “dote on red and white.”
He never could deplore the lover who “by losing his mistress recovers
himself.” He was to declare that he had “never known the infelicities
of love except by others’ sufferings”; to write exultantly about “this
untamed heart.” He had, he said, so seldom seen a happy marriage, that
he did not wonder “our Lawgivers should make marriage indesolvable to
make it lasting.” Marriage was “a Lottery, in which there are many blanks
to one prize.” And yet Robyn was as sensitive as he was proud. Not in
company which prated of “matrimony and amours,” he had his own ideal.
Love to him remained “the Noblest Passion of the Mind”; and at twenty-one
he acknowledged the existence of “a peculiar unrivaled sort of Love,
which constitutes the Conjugal Affections.” Lady Ranelagh, frustrated in
one attempt, might go on hoping. “If you are in the west,” she wrote at a
later date to this incorrigible brother, “let me beseech you to present
my humble service to my two Lady Bristols, and wish you would disappoint
Frank[179] by bringing a wife of your own to Stalbridge, a business I
must still mind you of, though you give me cause to doubt you will as
hardly pardon me those few words as the rest of the trouble given you
here by your K. R.”
But there was to be no other fair lady in Robyn’s letters or in Robyn’s
life—no lady whose conversational powers ever again produced in him
an “amorous rapture.” He returned to his “kind of Elysium,” and the
lethal chamber of chemical research. And when once a rumour reached
his relatives in Ireland that he was actually married, and his nephew
Barrymore’s wife[180] was foremost in her congratulations, there was a
touch of the philosopher-uncle in Robert Boyle’s superlatively polite
reply. “Alas! The little gentleman and I,” he assured her, “are still at
the old defiance.”
Not till 1652, after Cromwell’s campaign was over, and the war in Ireland
nearly at an end, did Robert Boyle revisit the land of his birth. And
then he did not like it. “I must sadly confess,” he wrote, in very
evident dejection, to his Dorsetshire friend, John Mallett, “that the
perpetual hurry I live in, my frequent journeys, and the necessary
trouble of endeavouring to settle my long-neglected and disjointed
fortune, has left me very little time to converse with any book save the
Bible, and scarce allowed me time to sew together some loose sheets that
contain my thoughts about the Scriptures.”
It must have been with a strange conflict of feelings that he found
himself at last in Youghal, standing before the tomb of his great father,
on the very scene of the old Earl’s last struggle in the Protestant and
Royalist cause. He wandered about the house and gardens of Lismore once
again, and found this home of his childhood, in his father’s day “one of
the noblest seats and greatest ornaments of the province of Munster,” now
“ruined by the sad fate of war.”[181] The fortunes of the Boyle family
were at this time at their lowest ebb, and everywhere that he went he was
in the track of the brutalities of war; the very bloodstains of those
last engagements could scarcely have been dried; the severed head and
limbs must still have been sticking on the poles. “About the years 1652
and 1653 ... the plague and famine had swept away whole counties, that a
man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature,
either man, beast, or bird, they being either all dead, or had quit those
desolate places.” And in the mountains so greatly had the number of
wolves increased, that rewards were being offered for wolves’ heads.[182]
But already, under Cromwell’s powerful lord-lieutenancy, and with
Fleetwood as head of the Irish Government, the work of settlement and
transplantation had been begun. It was in part, perhaps, the work of
transplantation in Connaught—for Robert Boyle had lands there as well as
in Munster—that called him to Ireland in 1652. He was back in London, on
a flying visit, in the autumn of 1653, just between Cromwell’s dismissal
of the _Rump_ and the sitting of the _Barebones_ Parliament; when, in
fact, “This House” was “to be let—now unfurnished.”[183]
But he was in Ireland again a month or two before Cromwell’s Protectorate
was proclaimed in London, and living in Dublin through the winter of
1653-4. William Petty, his fellow-Invisible, was also there, and Benjamin
Worsley, the old Army surgeon, a great friend of Hartlib and of the Boyle
family. Petty had been appointed by Ireton physician-general to the Army,
and was doing wonderful things in organisation, amongst other things
saving the Government several hundreds a year in their drug department
alone. Worsley, a delightful man in his way, full of the most astonishing
scientific projects for the benefit of seventeenth-century science,
had been appointed surveyor-general, to take in hand the land-survey
necessary in the process of transplantation. In Petty’s opinion Worsley
was a bit of a quack, whose “mountain-bellied conceptions” ended usually
in “abortive mice”; and when Worsley began his survey Petty thought it
could be better and quicker done, and said so. The Government backed
Petty, in whom they had got hold of a man of extraordinary genius and
energy; and while Worsley was kept on as surveyor-general, Petty was
allowed to contract to do the work of land-survey in thirteen months,
importing skilled labour and London-made instruments.[184] And meantime,
Robert Boyle, under Petty’s guidance, was working quietly in an
anatomical laboratory in Dublin. Petty, in his outspoken way, had written
to Boyle while Boyle was on his flying visit to London in 1653. Petty and
Robert Boyle’s own relations in Dublin were at this time a little anxious
about Boyle’s health and spirits; and urged by the relatives, Petty had
written in the character of physician and friend, offering Boyle some
sound advice. He wrote to “dissuade” him from “some things which my lord
of Cork, my lord of Broghill, and some others of your friends think
prejudicial to you; one of which is your continual reading.” Too much
reading, Petty thought, “weakens the brain,” which weakness “causeth
defluxions” and these “hurt the lungs.” In Petty’s opinion Boyle, who
knew so much already, could get but little advantage from the constant
study of books. Warming with his subject, Petty adventures a little more
advice.
“The next disease you labour under is your apprehension of many diseases,
and a continual fear that you are always inclining, or falling into, one
or other.” He reminds Boyle how “this is incident to all that begin the
study of diseases”; how “inward causes” may produce “different outward
signs,” and those “little rules of prognostication, found in our books,
need not always be so religiously believed.” And even if people do fall
ill, do they not also sometimes get well again? “Why may not a man as
easily recover of a disease, without much care, as fall into it?” And
then, to wind up with: “The last indictment that I lay against you
is, practising upon yourself with medicaments (though specifics) not
sufficiently tried by those that administer or advise them.”
Physician as he was, Petty did not put his faith in “medicaments”—witness
his savings in the Army drug department. “There is a conceit current in
the world,” he told Robert Boyle, “that a medicament may be physic and
physician alike.” What a mistake!
“Recommendations of medicaments do not make them useful, but do only
incite me to make them so by endeavouring experimentally to find out the
virtues and application of them.” And it is a hard matter to discover
their true virtues. “As I weep to consider,” says Petty, “so I dread to
use them, without my utmost endeavour first employed to that purpose.”
It is a manly, outspoken letter, though it may have seemed a little
caustic at the time. And it had its effect. Robert Boyle came back to
Dublin to work, under Petty’s direction, at anatomical dissection—and
possibly to read less. He was still ailing, still dejected, still longing
to be back in London; but, “that I may not live wholly useless,” he wrote
to Mr. Clodius, Hartlib’s doctor son-in-law in London, “or altogether a
stranger in the study of Nature, since I want glasses and furnaces to
make a chemical analysis of inanimate bodies, I am exercising myself in
making anatomical dissections of living animals, wherein (being assisted
by your father-in-law’s ingenious friend, Dr. Petty (our General’s
Physician)) I have satisfied myself of the circulation of the blood and
the (freshly discovered and hardly discoverable) _receptaculi chyli_,
made by the confluence of the _venæ lacteæ_, and have seen (especially
in the dissections of fishes) more of the variety and contrivances of
Nature and the majesty and wisdom of her Author than all the books I ever
read in my life could give me convincing notions of.” While he is kept a
prisoner in Ireland, he says, he will be delighted if there is anything
he can do to help Clodius in an anatomical way; if there is anything
“wherein my knives may give you any satisfaction, I shall be very proud
to employ them to so elevated an end.” Meantime he was doing as Clodius
had asked him—looking into the “mineral advantages of Ireland.” But “in
this illiterate country, I find all men so perfect strangers to matters
of that nature, that my inquiries have been as fruitless as diligent.”
He can hear nothing about antimony mines; “but for iron I may be able
to give you a good account of it, and to bring you over of the ore, my
eldest brother having upon his land an iron-work that now yields him
a good revenue, and I having upon my own land an iron-mine, to which,
before the wars, belonged a (since ruined) work, which I have thoughts
of resetting up. I am likewise told (but how truly I know not yet) of a
little silver-mine lying in some land of mine; and very lately in a place
which belongs to a brother of mine they have found silver ore very rich,
for, being tried, it is estimated (as he tells me that means to deal for
it) at between thirty and forty pounds a ton; but whether or no this be
a mine of proportionable value we do not yet know. I was yesterday with
an officer of the Army who farms a silver-mine for the State, who hath
promised me what assistance he can in my mineral inquiries, and told me
that a metallist and refiner whom he extolled with superlative elogies
assured him that there was no country in Europe so rich in mines as
Ireland, had but the inhabitants the industry to seek them, and the skill
to know them.”
But Robert Boyle was impatient to leave Ireland. “I live here in a
barbarous country,” he told Clodius in this letter, “where chemical
spirits are so misunderstood, and chemical instruments so unprocurable,
that it is hard to have any hermetic thoughts in it and impossible to
bring them to experiment.”
In the autumn of 1654 he was back in England. In the previous year,
during his flying visit to London, he had talked with Dr. Wilkins, of
Wadham, about Oxford, and had probably ridden down to Oxford to see
what it was like. Stalbridge was all very well, but it was removed from
the by-paths of intelligence; somehow, since his illnesses, there was a
sadness over its orchards which Vulcan himself could not dispel. London
was a fascinating labyrinth of interests, but in Oxford he believed
he could “live to philosophy.” Oxford was to be his Athens. Thither,
already, some of the Invisibles had migrated from London. For it was no
longer the old Royalist Oxford, where the sunburnt boy with the bow and
arrows had once thought of joining the King’s Army. It was Oxford six
years after the Parliament’s Visitation and Purgation; Oxford after the
imposition of the Covenant. The old Heads had conformed or been summarily
ejected, the new Heads were Commonwealth men; and Cromwell himself was
Chancellor. It was an Oxford where the use of the Liturgy was not openly
permitted. And yet, “speech is thrall, but thocht is free,” says the old
Scottish proverb. At Oxford a man could still fast quietly, if he was
so minded, for forty-one hours, without being sent down for it.[185] At
Oxford one might still study philosophy, and mathematics, and Oriental
languages unimpeded. And there was the Bodleian. Oxford was indeed “the
only place in England where, at that time, Mr. Boyle could have lived
with much satisfaction to himself.”[186]
His horse would carry him between Oxford and London at any time: each
night, on the road, he might lie under some hospitable roof of friend
or relative, in mansions set in shady parks, amid flower-gardens and
fishponds. And once in London, his sister Ranelagh’s door in the Old Mall
was always open to him. And Gresham College, and Mr. Hartlib, and Mr.
Clodius, and the rest of the Invisibles would receive him with ecstasy.
The Hartlib family had moved to Charing Cross; and Hartlib and his “very
chemical son” were excessively happy in their new abode.
“As for us, poor earthworms, we are crawling in my house about our
quondam back-kitchen, whereof my son hath made a goodly laboratory; yea,
such a one, as men (who have had the favour and privilege to see or be
admitted into it) affirm they have never seen the like for its several
advantages and commodiousnesses. It hath been employed days and nights
with no small success, God be praised, these many weeks together.”[187]
London was labyrinthine: there was an undeniable fascination about
Hartlib’s quondam back-kitchen; but Oxford beckoned. And so, at the age
of twenty-seven, Robert Boyle went to Oxford; a student always, already
known as a scholar and philosopher, one of the chief of the Invisibles,—a
ready-made Don.
CHAPTER XII
OXFORD: A LEARNED JUNTO
“... I see no cause to despair that, whether or no my writings
be protected, the truths they hold forth will in time, in spite
of opposition, establish themselves in the minds of men, as the
circulation of the blood, and other, formerly much contested,
truths have already done. My humour has naturally made me
too careful not to offend those I dissent from, to make it
necessary for any man to be my adversary upon the account of
personal injuries or provocations. And as for any whom either
judgment or envy may invite to contend, that the things I have
communicated to the world deserved not so much applause as they
have had the luck to be entertained with; that shall make no
quarrel betwixt us: for perhaps I am myself as much of that
mind as he; and however I shall not scruple to profess myself
one of those who is more desirous to spend his time usefully,
than to have the glory of leaving nothing that was ever written
against himself unanswered; and who is more solicitous to
pursue the ways of discovering truth than to have it thought
that he never was so much subject to human frailties as to
miss it.”—ROBERT BOYLE: Preface to _A Defence of the Doctrine
touching the Spring and Weight of the Air_.
Several of the original Philosophical Society had migrated to Oxford
before Robert Boyle joined them there. Dr. Wilkins had been appointed
Warden of Wadham at the _Visitation and Purgation_ of the University in
1648; Dr. Wallis, at the same time, had been made Savilian Professor of
Geometry; and Dr. Goddard, of Wood Street celebrity, had become Warden
of Merton. Robert Boyle does not seem to have been in Oxford during the
_Encænia_ in July 1654. There is, at least, no mention of him in Evelyn’s
description of “the civilities of Oxford” during that happy week; and
the friendship between Boyle and Evelyn, that was to last “neare fourty
yeares,” was not to begin till a little later. But Evelyn has described
Oxford society exactly as it was when Robert Boyle entered it.
Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn arrived in Oxford “on the eve of the Act,”[188] and
next day, after midday dinner, “the Proctor opened the Act at St. Marie’s
(according to custome) and the Prevaricators their drollery. Then the
Doctors disputed. We supp’d at Wadham College.” On Sunday, Dr. French,
Canon of Christ Church, the preacher at St. Mary’s, had his little fling
at the Philosophers. “True wisdom,” he said, “was not to be had in the
books of the Philosophers, but in the Scriptures alone.” He based his
observations on a text from St. Matthew xii. 42: “And, behold, a greater
than Solomon is here.” On Sunday afternoon the famous Independent, Dr.
Owen, now “Cromwell’s Vice-Chancellor,” preached a wonderful sermon,
“perstringing Episcopacy”—a sermon that Evelyn and some others present
must have found particularly trying to listen to. They dined that day
with Dr. Seth Ward, who had been one of the “Prevaricators” himself, when
he was at Cambridge, and was so alarmingly witty on the occasion that
he nearly lost his degree. And at night they supped in Balliol College
Hall—Evelyn’s own college.
On Monday they sat through the whole Act in St. Mary’s;[189]—the long
speeches of the Proctors, Vice-Chancellors and Professors, and the
creation of Doctors “by the cap, ring, kisse,” etc. The Inceptor[190]
made a most excellent oration, “abating his Presbyterian animosities
which he could not withhold.” And after all this paraphernalia “there
were but 4 in Theologie and 3 in Medicine,” which was thought not bad,
“the times considered.” And again there was a magnificent supper with
Evelyn’s “dear and excellent friend,” Dr. Wilkins of Wadham.
Happy days, two hundred and sixty years ago! There was music at All
Souls, “voices and theorbos,” performed by “ingenious scholars.” And Dr.
Barlow, the learned Librarian,[191] took them over the Bodleian, and
showed them all the treasures, including the 800-years-old manuscript
of the Venerable Bede. The Divinity School vied with the Physical and
Anatomical School in entertaining the visitors; and, at St. John’s,
the Library was almost eclipsed by poor Laud’s gift of mathematical
instruments, and by “2 skeletons, finely cleaned and put together.” New
College Chapel, much to Evelyn’s satisfaction, was still _in statu quo_,
“notwithstanding the scrupulosities of the times”; and at Christ Church
they saw the “Office of Henry VIII,” the gift of Cardinal Wolsey, with
its wonderful miniatures and gilding, and the famous painted windows
of the Cathedral, now “much abused.” In Magdalen Chapel, everything
was in its “pontificall order,” except that the Altar had been “turn’d
table-wise;” and there the famous musician, Mr. Gibbon, kindly played to
them upon the double organ. The Physick garden was visited, “where the
sensitive plant was shewed us for a greate wonder.” Canes, olives and
rhubarb grew there, “but no extraordinary curiosities, besides very good
fruit, which, when the ladys had tasted, we return’d in our coach to our
lodgings.”
And the _Encænia_ festivities wound up with midday dinner at Wadham. “We
all din’d at that most obliging and universally-curious Dr. Wilkins’s
at Wadham College.” There, after dinner, they were shown the Warden’s
new transparent beehives, from which the honey could be drawn without
destroying the bees, and Evelyn was presented with an empty hive to
carry back with him to his own garden at Deptford. Mr. Christopher Wren,
that “prodigious young scholar,” that “miracle of a youth,” was of the
company; and everybody wandered at will among Dr. Wilkins’s scientific
and mechanical curiosities, conic sections, magnets, thermometers,
“way-wisers,”[192] and all the rest, in the upper rooms and gallery of
the Warden’s lodging.
The Warden, it may be observed, was still a bachelor: it was not till two
years later that he married Cromwell’s sister. At the time of Mr. and
Mrs. Evelyn’s visit to Oxford, that lady was still Mrs. French, wife of
the worthy Canon of Christ Church, who had preached on the text, “Behold,
a greater than Solomon is here!”
This, then, was the Oxford of 1654 that was to welcome Robert Boyle. He
had evidently been there, looking about him, during his flying visit from
Ireland in 1653; and Lady Ranelagh—an experimentalist too in her own
way—had gone to Oxford afterwards to inspect the lodgings selected by her
brother.[193]
“MY BROTHER,
“It has pleased God to bring us safe to Oxford, and I am lodged
at Mr. Crosse’s, with design to be able to give you from
experience an account which is the warmer room; and indeed I am
satisfied with neither of them, as to that point, because the
doors are placed so just by the chimnies, that if you have the
benefit of the fire you must venture having the inconvenience
of the wind, which yet may be helped in either by a folding
skreen; and then I think that which looks into the garden
will be the more comfortable, though he have near hanged, and
intends to matt, that you lay in before. You are here much
desired, and I could wish you here as soon as you can: for I
think you would have both more liberty and more conversation
than where you are, and both these will be necessary, both for
your health and usefulness.”
Mr. Crosse was an apothecary, and his house was in the High Street,
adjoining University College. He seems to have been recommended to Boyle
as a convenient landlord, not only on account of Boyle’s own fickle
health, but as one who might be useful to him in laboratory work. He was
a staunch Churchman, and a particular friend of John Fell, the son of
the famous old Royalist Dean of Christ Church, who had been ejected at
the Visitation of 1648. Many scenes have been enacted in Christ Church
quadrangle, but none more melodramatic than the ejection of Mrs. Fell
and her family after the Dean himself had been carried off in custody to
London. Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn must have shaken their heads indeed if they
were shown the identical spot in the Quad where Mrs. Fell and her lady
friends had been deposited, having chosen to be forcibly carried out,
rather than voluntarily walk out, of the Deanery. John Fell, the son,
a student of Christ Church, had been ejected too, but he lived on in
Oxford; and one of his sisters married Dr. Willis, the physician, who set
up in practice in a house in Merton Street, opposite to Merton College.
In a room in this house, thanks to John Fell and his brother-in-law Dr.
Willis, with one or two more strong Churchmen, the Services of the Church
were to be privately maintained through all the years of the Commonwealth.
Did Robert Boyle, Geneva-bred, make one of the little semi-forbidden
congregation of men and women that gathered in Dr. Willis’s house for
service and Communion? It is doubtful. Boyle’s own letter to John Durie,
written in 1647, speaks his mind on denominational differences.[194]
“It has long been,” he says, “as well my wonder as my grief, to see such
comparatively petty differences in judgement make such wide breaches and
vast divisions in affection. It is strange that men should rather be
quarrelling for a few trifling opinions, wherein they dissent, than to
embrace one another for those many fundamental truths wherein they agree.
For my own part, in some two or three and forty months that I spent in
the very town of Geneva, as I never found that people discontented with
their own Church government (the gallingness of whose yoke is the grand
scarecrow that frights us here) so could I never observe in it any such
transcendent excellency as could oblige me either to bolt Heaven against,
or open Newgate for, all those that believe they may be saved under
another....”
Evelyn, who knew Robert Boyle intimately for nearly forty years, was of
opinion that he “held the same free thoughts,” in matters of religion
and religious discipline, “which he had of Philosophy.” He practised
Christianity “without noise, dispute, or determining.” He owned no master
in religion but the Divine Author of it; and, what is more, he owned “no
religion but primitive, no rule but Scripture, no law but right reason;
for the rest allways conformable to the present settlement, without any
sort of singularity.”[195]
Only once is Robert Boyle known to have been persuaded to enter a
conventicle. Curiosity led him, on one occasion, to Sir Henry Vane’s
house, to hear the great man preach “in a large thronged room a long
sermon.”[196] The text was from Daniel xii. 2: “And many of them that
sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and
some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Looking, from a modern point of
view, to the possibilities of such a text on the Resurrection, it is a
little disappointing to learn that Mr. Boyle stood up at the end of Sir
Henry Vane’s discourse and submitted, in his gentlest Oxford manner, that
the preacher had suffered the meaning to “_evaporate_ into Allegory.” Sir
Henry Vane was at this time at the very height of his authority in the
State; and Robert Boyle, telling the story to Sir Peter Pett, explained
that Sir Henry’s congregation that day was composed of “dependants
on him, and expectants from him,” who would never have dreamed of
questioning his interpretations of Scripture, whatsoever they might have
been. “But I,” said Boyle, “having no little awes of that kind upon me,
thought myself bound to enter the lists with him as I did, that the sense
of the Scriptures might not be depraved.”
According to Birch, Sir Henry Vane had the last word. He had recognised
in his critic the celebrated Mr. Robert Boyle; and when Mr. Boyle sat
down, Sir Henry assured him and the rest of his audience that he had
only intended his remarks on the words of Daniel to be in the way of
_occasional reflections_.[197]
But there was another little congregation, which met in an upper
room in Oxford; a room in the house of the obliging and universally
curious Dr. Wilkins of Wadham. This was the weekly meeting of the
Invisibles; the “learned Junto,” as Evelyn has dubbed them; a society
which may be described as non-militant and non-party, and was
certainly non-sectarian—the Oxford branch of the original Invisible
or Philosophical College, begun in London in 1645, before Wilkins and
Wallis and Goddard removed to Oxford. The Oxford branch kept up a regular
correspondence with the London Society; and after a time, when Wilkins
forsook Oxford for Cambridge, the weekly meetings of the Invisibles were
transferred from Wadham to Robert Boyle’s own rooms.
And what a brilliant little “learned Junto” it was, in spite of the
scrupulosities of the times! There was Wilkins himself, an Oxford man
by birth, son of the Oxford goldsmith with the “very mechanicall hands”
and a head that “ran much on perpetuall motion.” Wilkins was a man of
about forty, “lustie, strong-groune, well-sett and broad-shouldered.” His
manners were courteous, as became a man who had been Chaplain to Charles
I’s nephew, the Prince Palatine, elder brother of Prince Rupert. A
Parliament-man himself, Wilkins had taken the Covenant and the Wardenship
of Wadham, and his Theological Degree. Under his tolerant rule, Wadham
was flourishing, still patronised by some of the great “Malignant”
families of England: Dr. Wilkins’s cheerful tolerance was greasing all
wheels. And meanwhile the Warden himself was the life and spirit of the
New Philosophy at Oxford—known, not only for his universal curiosity and
irresistible manners, but as a writer of books. Had he not, as early as
1638, when still quite a young man, attempted to prove that the Moon
might be a habitable world? And had he not, to a third edition, added the
bold hypothesis, that the Moon might one day be reached “by volitation”?
And in 1640 he had propounded in print the probability that this Earth
itself was a planet. Clearly, the Warden was before his time; and many
things besides the consciences of young cavalier-manhood were safe in his
keeping.
And then there was Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, since 1649 Savilian
Professor of Geometry. Wallis was about thirty-eight; a man of “moderate
principles,” robust and energetic, with a serene temper that was “not
easily ruffled,” but all the same a man who could hit out from the
shoulder when he wanted to; as he did when he carried on his famous
controversy with Dr. Hobbes. Wallis, as a believer in the New Philosophy,
was to be among the first men to “maintain the circulation of the
blood.” But the particular feat which had made Wallis’s fortune, some
years before he went to Oxford, was a feat in “cryptologie.” In December
1642 he was private chaplain to a great family in London; and one
evening at supper a cypher letter had arrived, which brought important
political news. The Chaplain, in two hours, succeeded in deciphering
it; and after that he seems to have become “cryptologist-in-chief” to
the Parliamentarian Army: he is said to have had the deciphering of the
King’s private correspondence taken at the battle of Naseby. He held
successive City livings, was Secretary to the Westminster Assembly, and
one of the founders of the Invisible Society. And in 1649—a married man,
then—he went to Oxford as Savilian Professor of Geometry and one of the
most vigorous of the “learned Junto.”
Dr. Goddard of Wood Street was another of them. He was a Deptford man,
son of a ship-builder; in 1654 a man of about thirty-seven. He had been
a student at Oxford, but had left it to study medicine abroad; and on
his return he had taken his medical degrees at Cambridge. Since 1646
he had been in London, a Fellow of the College of Physicians, living
in Wood Street, where he entertained the Invisibles and manufactured
his _arcana_—the famous “Goddard’s drops” among them—in his own private
laboratory. As Cromwell’s physician, he had been with Cromwell in
the Irish and Scottish campaigns and in Cromwell’s severe illness in
Edinburgh; and on his return with him to London, after the battle of
Worcester, he had been appointed Warden of Merton.
And living just opposite to Merton College was the Oxford-bred Willis,
with his strong royalist and episcopal sympathies, son-in-law of the
stubborn old Dean of Christ Church and the lady who had been deposited
in the quadrangle. Willis was a greater man in his own profession than
the inventor of “Goddard’s drops.” A firm believer in the New Philosophy,
he was to dissect many brains: a little bit of our cerebral geography
is still known as the “Circle of Willis.” He is the man who discovered
_diabetes mellitus_, and he may be called our first specialist in
diseases of the nervous system.
These, with the “miracle of a youth” Christopher Wren, then Fellow of
All Souls, and Seth Ward, the dangerously witty Savilian Professor
of Astronomy, who lodged in the chamber over the gateway of Wadham,
formed the “learned Junto” that welcomed Robert Boyle to Oxford. But
the Librarian of the Bodleian, Dr. Barlow,[198] must not be forgotten,
though he was not an Invisible, and not at all in favour of the New
Philosophy. Boyle, like many men of his time, was a student of divinity
as well as of science; and he had come to Oxford partly, perhaps, on
account of the Orientalists there. For he was studying Hebrew, Greek,
Chaldee and Syriac, so as to be able to read the Scriptures for himself.
He had learnt by himself, he says, “as much Greek and Hebrew as sufficed
to read the Old and New Testaments,” merely that he might do so in the
Hebrew and Greek, and thereby free himself from the necessity of relying
on a translation. And “a Chaldee grammar I likewise took the pains of
learning, to be able to understand that part of Daniel, and those few
other portions of Scripture that were written in that tongue; and I have
added a Syriac grammar purely to be able one day to read the divine
discourses of our Saviour in His own language.” And he quotes the “known
saying”—
“Though we stream waters not unpleasant think,
Yet with more gusto of the Spring we drink.”[199]
Accordingly the Orientalists in Oxford—men like Pococke, Hyde and
Clarke—were to be among his new friends; but perhaps the most intimate
of all was Dr. Barlow of the Bodleian. Barlow, logician and casuist, the
man who saw both sides—to our modern ideas a bit of a trimmer—was yet “a
man of prodigious learning and proportionall memory.” He knew exactly
“what the fathers, schoolmen and casuists had said upon any question of
divinity or case of conscience”;[200] and with all his accomplishments,
and in spite of his limitations, he was a delightful companion—“very
communicative of his knowledge”—and Robert Boyle liked him.
One other man there was, a mere boy in 1654, but in a way, perhaps, the
most notable of them all: a little deformed man, with a pale, sharp,
clever face, and lank dark hair that hung about his eyes; a man with a
stooping figure and a quick step; a queer little solitary man who ate
little and slept less, and worked restlessly and incessantly; a man,
even in those young days, of a melancholy, jealous temper, warped by
ill-health. This was Robert Hooke, who had come to Oxford in 1653, when
he was eighteen, as servitor or chorister of Christ Church. He was the
sickly, gifted son of a country parson,[201] and, too delicate to learn
lessons, had used his little brain and fingers to make toy-ships that
would sail, toy-guns that would go off, and toy-clocks that would go
on. Then, for a time, he was with Dr. Busby at Westminster School; and
at Christ Church his restless genius brought him to the notice of the
Invisibles. Dr. Wilkins, with his pet dream of an excursion to the Moon,
must have been pleased to find a young man who could work out “thirty
ways of flying.” With Seth Ward’s help, Hooke studied mathematics and
astronomy; and he worked for Willis in Willis’s own laboratory. It was
Willis who recommended him to Boyle; and when Boyle set up a laboratory
at Oxford, Hooke became Boyle’s personal assistant. “Boyle’s Law”[202]
and “Hooke’s Law”[203] go together in the Handbooks of Physical Science.
The air-pump, the _Machina Boyleana_, invented for his own purposes by
Robert Boyle, was “perfected” for him by Hooke. “Mr. Hooke,” wrote Boyle
in the Introduction to his _Spring of the Air_,[204] “was with me when I
had these things under consideration.” The years spent working for and
with Robert Boyle were perhaps the happiest in Hooke’s life. His chatty
letters to Boyle, after the two parted company and Hooke became Curator
of the Royal Society, show real affection and trust. They begin “Ever
honoured Sir,” and end “Your Honour’s most affectionate, most faithful,
and most humble Servant.”
But these things were not the work of a day or a year. The air-pump was
only the beginning, to enable its inventor to make a “just theory of
the air.” By this he “demonstrated its elasticity” and “that property
alone was a means to find out abundance more.”[205] Boyle’s first
publication, _New Experiments, physico-mechanical, touching the Spring
of the Air and its Effects, made for the most part in a new Pneumatical
Engine_, was printed at Oxford, 1660.[206] The dedicatory letter to his
nephew, the young Lord Dungarvan, is dated from Beaconsfield, December
20, 1659—where, in all probability, Boyle was spending Christmas with
his friend Edmund Waller, the Poet, at his house, Hall Barn. The book
was attacked by Franciscus Linus and by Hobbes; and Boyle answered his
“objectors” in the _Defence of the Doctrine touching the Spring and
Weight of the Air_, published 1662, answering more especially Franciscus
Linus, as Dr. Wallis had taken Hobbes in hand.
Do people who are not scientifically employed ever realise the absorbing,
baffling, fascinating work that goes on inside a chemical or a physical
laboratory? The “painful patience in delays,” the “faithfulness in little
things,” the flash of success, the hard wall of “negative result”? Who
but the “Scepticall Chymist” himself understands the Spirit of his
Research?
“But it is scarce one day (or hour in the day) or night,” wrote Hartlib
to Boyle, in 1659, “but my soul is crying out—
“‘Phosphore! redde diem; quid gaudia nostra moraris.
Phosphore! redde diem!’”[207]
It was in this spirit that Robert Boyle worked in his Oxford laboratory,
through the years of the Protectorate and on to the coming of Charles
II. Slowly and laboriously, and very gently, careful not to offend those
from whom he dissented, he amassed and examined evidences that were to
break down the old mistaken notions of the Greek and mediæval philosophy,
and to build up—a very little way, perhaps, but on a new and sure
foundation—the mighty structure of physical and chemical science. Its
golden keys were to be handed over to Isaac Newton and Dalton, and a long
and brilliant line of workers in experimental science. What if Robert
Boyle, in the seventeenth century, spoke of phosphorus as “nocte-luca”
and of gaseous elasticity as “spring of the air?” Dr. Wilkins, of Wadham,
was only then preparing his treatise on a _Real Character_.[208] As
early as 1647, Boyle himself, then only twenty, wrote to Hartlib: “If
the design of the _Real Character_ take effect, it will in good part
make amends to mankind for what their pride lost them at the tower of
Babel.”[209] But even Dr. Wilkins’s _Real Character_ would scarcely
have been the vocabulary of to-day. Boyle’s Law, in whatever words he
expressed it, remains incontrovertible.[210] What if he just missed the
discovery of Hydrogen after actually collecting it in a receiver? The
oversights of science are the inevitable dear companions of research.
What if, after giving to science the definition of an element, as
distinguished from a mixture or compound, he could not go further, with
the means then at hand, by suggesting any one substance as elementary?
None the less, he had realised and stated a great natural fact, founding
thereby a new era in science. The “Elements” of the Ancients, that had
terrified him in childhood, were to be broken up; their secrets were to
be extorted from them, for the good of mankind. There is an echo of the
old Genevan thunderstorm, and the older _Benedicite_, in Boerhaave’s
eulogium of Boyle—“to him we owe the secrets of fire, air, water,
animals, vegetables and frosts”; but in modern times, and in modern
terms, Robert Boyle has had his recognition—
“In the days of the early Greeks, the word ‘element’ was applied rather
to denote a property of matter than one of its constituents. Thus, when
a substance was said to contain fire, air, water, and earth (of which
terms a childish game, doubtless once played by all of us, is a relic),
it probably meant that they partook of the nature of the so-called
elements. Inflammability showed the presence of concealed fire; the
escape of ‘airs’ when some substances are heated or when vegetable or
animal matter is distilled, no doubt led to the idea that these airs
were imprisoned in the matters from which they escaped; and hardness and
permanence were ascribed to the presence of earth, while liquidity and
fusibility were properties conveyed by the presence of concealed water.
At a later date the ‘Spagyrics’ added three ‘hypostatical principles’ to
the quadrilateral; these were ‘salt,’ ‘sulphur,’ and ‘mercury.’ The first
conveyed solubility, and fixedness in fire; the second, inflammability,
and the third, the power which some substances manifest of producing
a liquid, generally termed ‘phlegm,’ on application of heat, or of
themselves being converted into the liquid state by fusion.
“It was Robert Boyle, in his _Skeptical Chymist_, who first controverted
these ancient and medieval notions, and who gave to the word ‘element’
the meaning that it now possesses—the constituent of a compound.”[211]
So the truths that Robert Boyle’s writings held forth have, in spite of
opposition, established themselves, as he himself believed they would
establish themselves, in the minds of men.
CHAPTER XIII
POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY
“Died that arch rebell Oliver Cromwell, cal’d Protector.”—EVELYN’S
_Diary_, Sept. 3, 1658.
“And if the common charity allowed to dead men be exercised
towards him, in burying his faults in the grave with himself,
and keeping alive the memory of his virtues and great aims
and actions, he will be allowed to have his place amongst
the worthiest of men, ... I doubt his loss will be a growing
affliction upon these nations, and that we shall learn to value
him more by missing him—a perverseness of our nature that
teaches us, in every condition wherein we are, therewith to be
discontent, by undervaluing what we have, and overvaluing what
we have lost. I confess his performances reached not the making
good of his professions; but I doubt his performances may go
beyond the professions of those who may come after him.”—LADY
RANELAGH to LORD BROGHILL, from Youghal, Sept. 17, 1658.
“O human glory vain! O death! O wings!
O worthless world! O transitory things!
Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed
That still, though dead, greater than death he laid,
And in his altered face you something feign
That threatens Death he yet will live again.”
ANDREW MARVELL, “A Poem upon the Death
of his Late Highness the Lord Protector.”
“My Lady Molkin,” Charles Rich’s wife, now lived almost always at
delicious Leeze. For Mary had long ago become devout, and was surrounded
by the Earl of Warwick’s chaplains. The story of her conversion has been
told by herself.[212] When she was scarcely more than one-and-twenty,
her little son, her only child—“which I then doated on with great
fondness”—had fallen dangerously ill. In her agony of mind, Mary, like
her brother Robyn in the thunderstorm, had made a vow to God. If he would
restore her child to her, she would become “a new creature.” The little
boy recovered, and Mary “began to find in myselfe a greate desire to go
into the country, which I never remember before to have had, thinking
it allways the saddest thing that could be when we were to remove.” It
was indeed a great change for the little lady who had lived in “constant
crowds of company” ever since she had left the care of Lady Clayton
in Cork. Even after her marriage with Charles Rich and her separation
from Frank’s frivolous little wife Betty, Mary had remained “stedfastly
set against being a Puritan.” But after hearing the great Usher preach
“against Plays,” she had given up going to see them acted, and her sister
Ranelagh had encouraged her in her new course of life. Moreover, Dr.
Walker, the household chaplain at Leeze, had preached “very awakingly and
warmly”; and though some of the Warwick family were inclined to laugh at
her, Mary pursued her own way, stealing from them into the wilderness at
Leeze, and keeping to her quiet life of reading, meditation, and prayer.
She was, however, at Warwick House in Holborn towards the end of
1648, after Robert Boyle had finished writing his _Seraphick Love_ at
Leeze; and in Holborn Mary fell ill of the smallpox. Lady Ranelagh
was then at her house in Pall Mall. She had been fortunate enough to
escape smallpox, but she was not afraid to sit with her little sister,
who had been isolated in Warwick House. The great Dr. Wright was in
attendance—“Cromwell’s Physician,” the man afterwards chosen by the
Council to be sent, with Dr. Bates and an apothecary, to consult with
Dr. Goddard when Cromwell was so ill in Edinburgh. Mary was scarcely
convalescent when the news was brought to her sick-room of “that
barbarous and unheard-of wicked action of beheading Charles I.”[213]
A year or two later, while Robert Boyle was in Ireland, Mary fell ill
again; this time “strangely and extremely ill” at delicious Leeze.
Poor Charles Rich once more sent post-haste for Lady Ranelagh, who set
out from London the very next morning. She found My Lady Molkin in an
extraordinary condition, to all appearances well enough, but, “her
disease lying more in stupidness than pain,” she was “no more joyed” to
see her sister. It was “a mortifying encounter”; Mary was “the carcase
of a friend,” her “soul gone as to any rational use she had of it”; her
“kindness was dead.”
Nerves were little understood in those days. The Essex doctor diagnosed
Mary’s illness as “a spice of the palsy.” The Warwick family talked of
“fumes of the spleen.” Dr. Wright held a more modern opinion, which
he confided to Lady Ranelagh; but he agreed with the opinion of the
country doctor that the disease was “very inward and hidden”; and Lady
Ranelagh wrote to her brother Robert in Ireland that they were “all going
blindfold towards a cure.”[214] Charles Rich and Mary’s mother-in-law had
been “very obligingly careful of, and kind to, her”; and as soon as Mary
was well enough Lady Ranelagh carried her off to London, where, under
her sister’s care and Dr. Wright’s, she was once more restored to health.
Lady Ranelagh was, in Mary’s own words, “the most useful and best friend
for soul and body that ever any person, I think, had.”[215]
Somebody else thought so too. In 1655 Lady Ranelagh had known Milton
for ten years. For the last six years Milton had been Latin Secretary
to the Council of State; and he was now living in the “pretty garden
house” in Petty France, Westminster, next door to my Lord Scudamore,
and not far from Lady Ranelagh’s house in the Old Mall. If only as the
great Republican pamphleteer, one of the chief State officials under
the Protectorate, Milton was a very eminent and important man, visited
by many “persons of quality” besides Lady Ranelagh, and by all the
learned foreigners of note who passed through London. Some of the old
Hartlib-Durie circle of the Aldersgate and Barbican days, with Milton’s
pupils, Henry Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner, came about Milton almost
daily; and among his more recent friends was the Agent for Bremen, Mr.
Henry Oldenburg. Durie himself, who was Keeper of the library at St.
James’s, was a near neighbour. Milton’s wife, poor Mary Powell, and
their little son had been about three years dead; and the widower had
been left with three little girls, the youngest but a month or two old
at the mother’s death. In 1655 they were nine, seven, and three years
old, and were being brought up, in strange, motherless fashion, in the
house in Petty France; while Milton himself, with the help of readers
and amanuenses, pursued his work for the Council through all the
difficulties of his blindness. For Milton was now quite blind.[216]
It was to visit this Milton—the Latin Secretary, blind among his
books—that Lady Ranelagh used so frequently to knock at the door of the
pretty garden-house in Petty France. Her boy, Dick Jones, who was now
fifteen, had, like his cousin young Lord Barrymore, been one of Milton’s
pupils, and was probably at this very time taking his private lessons
with Mr. Milton in preparation for a year at Oxford—to be followed by
a foreign tour—with Henry Oldenburg as his tutor. And Lady Ranelagh
herself, fired, perhaps, by her brother Robert’s study of Oriental
languages, and under Milton’s influence, was taking lessons in Hebrew of
a Scottish divine who lodged in Holborn.
A year later—some time in October 1656—Dick Jones and Henry Oldenburg
were settled at Oxford, where Dick’s cousins, the Earl of Cork’s two
sons, were already at the University,[217] with their tutor, Peter
du Moulin, in attendance on them; and all five were basking in the
personality of the virtuoso-uncle, Mr. Robert Boyle. Henry Oldenburg and
Peter du Moulin were both to become _protégés_ of Robert Boyle.[218]
Henry Oldenburg especially was to link himself with the Invisibles and
the future Royal Society; and it was probably in the Oxford laboratory
that Henry Oldenburg won Robert Boyle’s admiration, and that Dick Jones
first learned to dabble in experimental science and earned for himself
his uncle’s _sobriquet_, “Pyrophilus.”[219]
Meantime, Henry Oldenburg and Dick Jones had kept up a correspondence
with Mr. Milton in London, and Milton had written kindly to his
“well-beloved Richard.” Milton’s letters to Dick Jones are in Latin,
and there is more than a touch of the pedagogue in their tone. It seems
likely, in the light of after events, that the brilliant Dick had already
caused his mother some uneasiness of mind, and that she hoped much from
this year at Oxford, with her brother Robert Boyle as mentor, before Dick
and Henry Oldenburg set out on their foreign tour. In October 1656 Lady
Ranelagh was herself in Oxford: she had taken it on her way to Ireland,
whither she was bound on a long visit, with her daughters, servants, and
eight horses.[220] And she had brought with her to Oxford a letter from
Mr. Milton to her son Dick. The blind secretary, left behind in London,
was missing Lady Ranelagh’s frequent kindly knock at the door of the
garden-house in Petty France—
“And now your most excellent mother,” Milton wrote to Dick Jones at
Oxford, “on her way to Ireland, whose departure ought to be a matter of
no ordinary regret to both of us (for to me also she has stood in the
place of all kith and kin), carries you this letter herself.”
As a matter of fact Milton must have been thinking of his own domestic
affairs when he wrote to Dick Jones, for he was to marry his second wife,
Katharine Woodcock, shortly after Lady Ranelagh’s departure. But the
words “to me also” carry a special meaning; for Lord Ranelagh, between
whom and his wife there had long been estrangement, can have taken little
part in his son’s upbringing. The mother had been left to bring up her
children—to stand for them, as for Milton, in the place of “all kith and
kin.” And, after all, Dick was not a good boy—he was but the son of his
father.[221]
Lord Broghill had been quartered lately in Edinburgh. He had remained
in Ireland for some time after Cromwell had re-conquered it. He had sat
in Cromwell’s Parliament of 1654 as Member for Cork, and he was Member
for Cork and Edinburgh in the Parliament of 1656. In 1655 he had been
appointed President of Council (Head of the Civil Establishment of the
new Government in Scotland), with his headquarters in Edinburgh; and
according to Baillie he was more popular in Scotland than “all the
English that ever were among us.” But the Scottish atmosphere was not to
Broghill’s liking, and in 1657 he was back in London, where he was to
prove himself one of the most energetic of Cromwell’s supporters in the
last stage of the Protectorate.
His philosopher-brother, all this time, had held himself studiously
aloof from political parties and “affairs.” Cromwell was approaching his
zenith when Robert Boyle went to Oxford. The great warship, newly built
in the spring of 1655—a ship of 1000 tons burthen, carrying 96 brass
guns—had for the figurehead in her prow Oliver on horseback, trampling
six nations underfoot. Scot, Irishman, Dutchman, Frenchman, Spaniard, and
Englishman, in their several national garbs, lay under his horse’s hoofs.
“A Fame,” wrote Evelyn in his _Diary_, after inspecting the ship as she
lay in the dock, “held a laurel over his insulting head: the word, _God
with us_.”
Poor Evelyn, bereft of his Church services, lamenting that there was
“no more notice taken of Christmas Day in our Churches,” smuggling a
Clergyman into his house at Deptford to administer the Sacrament, or
stealing up to receive it in Dr. Wild’s lodging in Fleet Street, could
yet not resist going to look at the new warship in the dock; to hear Dr.
Wilkins preach before the Lord Mayor in St. Paul’s, a very common-sense
sermon on the superiority of obedience to sacrifice; to stare at the
proud and melancholy Quakers who were hunger-striking in prison; and even
to peep into Whitehall itself, now “very glorious and well-furnished” for
the Protector. It was no doubt Evelyn’s many-sidedness that made life
bearable in what to him was “a dangerous and treacherous time.” Ships
and prisons and persecuted clergy, rare jewels, miniatures, “achates
and intalias,” carved wood, other people’s houses and gardens and
picture-galleries, the “incomparable pieces” that he loved to look at,
and the incomparable performances of violin and theorbo and human voice
that he loved to listen to—these were the things that made Evelyn happy,
and his _Diary_ so fascinating. Above all, perhaps, his passion was for
“curiosities.” He was almost as “universally curious” as Dr. Wilkins of
Wadham himself. Those were red-letter days when he could examine a clock,
whose sole balance was a crystal ball sliding on parallel wires, or a
_Terrella_, showing all the magnetical deviations, or an elixir, or a
perspective, or a way-wiser, or the charring of sea-coal; or when he had
a glimpse into the “elaboratory” of an aristocratic friend, or a gossip
about all and sundry with worthy Mr. Hartlib or Dr. Wilkins himself. It
may have been Wilkins or it may have been Hartlib who, in the spring of
1656, brought Boyle and Evelyn together.[222] The good Hartlib was a
friend of both. Robert Boyle was then in London; but whether or no to
hear Wilkins’s sermon in St. Paul’s on the Superiority of Conformity
to Sacrifice, is not recorded. In April, at any rate, the acquaintance
between Evelyn and Boyle had begun, and Boyle and Wilkins were guests
at a little dinner-party given by Evelyn at Sayes Court. It was then
that Evelyn presented Wilkins with his “rare burning-glass,” in return,
probably, for the beehive that Wilkins had given him during that visit to
Oxford in 1654. And after dinner, the little company adjourned to look at
Colonel Blount’s “new-invented plows.”
The friendship so pleasantly begun was to last for nearly forty years.
It is to be remembered that Robert Boyle’s mother and Mrs. Evelyn’s
family[223] were related; that Sayes Court had belonged to the Brownes,
and had come to Evelyn through his wife; and that little Hodge, Robert
Boyle’s eldest brother, had many years before died at Sayes Court,
and been buried in Deptford Church. Boyle and Evelyn were men of very
different natures; but they had memories, sympathies, and friends in
common. Their intercourse soon grew “reciprocal and familiar”; and it is
to Evelyn we owe the finest and most intimate description that exists
of Robert Boyle.[224] Boyle was to return to Experimental Philosophy at
Oxford, where the lion and the lamb proverbially lay down together then
as now;—the lion, as it has been wittily said, sometimes with the lamb in
its inside. And Evelyn and his family at Sayes Court were to live on as
pleasantly as possible, “the times considered.”
In 1657 the Protectorate was in its last stage. In June, Cromwell was
“his Highness,” a monarch in arbitrariness and splendour, with all the
formalities of purple velvet, Bible, sword, and sceptre—everything,
indeed, except the Crown, and a good many things that the Crown itself
might not have had. Lord Broghill, back in London, and one of Cromwell’s
House of Lords, had been one of the prime movers in the _Petition and
Advice_, which pressed Cromwell to accept the Kingship; and report says,
that when that failed, Broghill’s “well-armed head” was filled with an
even bolder project, an alliance between Cromwell’s youngest daughter
Frances and Charles II. This, too, came to nothing; and in November 1657
Cromwell’s daughter Frances was married to the old Earl of Warwick’s
grandson, son of Charles Rich’s elder brother. This boy died in the
sickly spring of 1658, four months after his wedding; and the old Earl
of Warwick’s death in April left Charles Rich heir-presumptive to the
Earldom of Warwick.
The winter of 1657-8 had been, according to Evelyn, the severest winter
that any man alive had known in England. “The crowes feete were frozen
to their prey, Islands of ice inclos’d both fish and fowl frozen....” It
was on Christmas Day that Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn went into London to receive
the Communion in Exeter Chapel, and that the Chapel was surrounded by
soldiers and the communicants surprised and taken prisoners—the soldiers’
muskets pointed at them as they knelt before the Altar. The Evelyns
were allowed to go home; and a month after this memorable Communion, in
January 1658, they lost their little prodigy of an eldest son—just five
years old—who died of a quartan ague. “Such a child I never saw: For such
a child I blesse God in whose bosome he is!” He was buried in Deptford
Church; and a week or two later their youngest child followed him, “after
7 weeks languishing at nurse, breeding teeth, and ending in a dropsie.”
The season was still very cold and sickly, and in May a public Fast was
ordered “to avert an epidemical sicknesse, very mortal this Spring.”
But in spite of the Fast, June came in with an extraordinary storm of
hail and rain, “the season as cold as winter, the wind Northerly nere 6
moneths.” It may have been in consequence of this epidemic, following
on an unhealthy winter, that Hartlib was even more than usually curious
about the ingredients of certain _arcana_—or medical “secrets” as he
always called them. He mentioned one, in particular, in a letter to
Robert Boyle, dated February 2, 1658. Hartlib himself had been a sufferer
from the “extremity of the frosty weather.”
It appears from Hartlib’s letter to Boyle that Mr. Milton had in his
possession a “secret” which Hartlib, and apparently Boyle also, was at
this time anxious to obtain. “I shall not be wanting,” wrote Hartlib to
Boyle, “to obtain that secret which hath been imparted to Mr. Milton.
It may be the public gentleman, that sent it unto him, will let me
have a copy, in case the other should not come off readily with the
communication of it. But if yours[225] would ask it from Mr. Milton, I am
confident he would not deny it.”
If by “yours” Hartlib meant Lady Ranelagh, that lady was still in
Ireland, on difficult domestic business of her own, and far away from the
garden-house in Petty France; and Dick Jones and Henry Oldenburg were on
their “peregrination” abroad. Whether or no Mr. Milton was induced to
part with his prescription remains unrelated. Hartlib’s letter to Boyle
was written on February 2, and only a few days later Milton’s second
wife died—the baby girl she had borne him in October was to live on into
March. That spring, in his darkness and solitude, Milton’s mind was
turning once more to his scheme of a _Paradise Lost_. It was not exactly
a time for Mr. Hartlib to trouble him about a prescription.
The news of Cromwell’s illness fell like a thunderbolt on the nation. The
people about him had known that all through that cold, unhealthy summer
of 1658 the burdens of State, heavy as they were, were not for Cromwell
so hard to bear as the sight of a much-loved daughter’s sufferings. The
Cromwell family were gathered round Lady Claypole’s couch when she died
at Hampton Court on August 6. Cromwell himself was ill, even then, though
for another fortnight his illness was as much as possible concealed, and
he was able intermittently to attend to State business, and on some days
even to show himself, riding with his Life Guards in the Park at Hampton
Court. On August 21 it became known that the Protector was very ill of an
ague, which his Physicians called a “bastard tertian”; but on the 24th
they were able to remove their patient from Hampton Court to Whitehall,
where again, between the ague-fits, till August 28, the Iron Man
transacted public business. On that day the fits of ague changed their
character; the “bastard tertian” had changed to “double tertian”—with
two very exhausting ague-fits in the twenty-four hours: His Highness’s
strength was failing. Next day, Sunday the 29th, prayers were offered up
in the Churches.
“And then came that extraordinary Monday (August 30, 1658) which lovers
of coincidence have taken care to remember as the day of most tremendous
hurricane that ever blew over London and England. From morning to night
the wind raged and howled, emptying the streets, unroofing houses,
tearing up trees in the parks, foundering ships at sea, and taking even
Flanders and the coasts of France within its angry whirl. The storm was
felt, within England, as far as Lincolnshire, where, in the vicinity of
an old manor house, a boy of fifteen years of age, named Isaac Newton,
was turning it to account, as he afterwards remembered, by jumping first
with the wind, and then against it, and computing its force by the
difference of the distances....”[226]
Cromwell died on September 3, and the news had reached Ireland by
September 17. On September 17 Lady Ranelagh, in Youghal, wrote the long
letter to her brother Lord Broghill, an extract from which stands at
the head of this chapter. The man who a few days before “shooke all
Europe by his fame and forces” was dead; and with his death the face
of British history was changed. In Cromwell Lady Ranelagh herself had
lost a generous and powerful friend; and in the last part of her letter
she reverts, sadly enough, to what she calls “the penny half-penny of
my own particular.” For Cromwell had helped her not only with her Irish
estates, but with her recalcitrant husband. “His now Highness,” she says
of Richard Cromwell, “seems not to me so proper a person to summon my
lord[227] or to deal with him in such an affair as his father did, from
whose authority and severety against such practices as my lord’s are, I
thought the utmost would be done that either persuasions or advice would
have effected upon my lord ... soe, as there being little hopes left of
bringing him to reason either here or there, I thinke my present work is
to seeke a maintenance for me and my children without him.”
She had consented, she says, some time before, to “retyre” among her own
friends from “my lord’s oppressions”; and she can now “remove lightly”,
not having much wealth to gather together. Owing to “the unreasonableness
of my lord” her children “are neither like to be preferred in marriage
nor prepared for the narrow condition their father’s obstinacy condemns
them to live in.” She wishes people to know that “I left not my lord
upon humour, but necessety, and that in soe doing I sought privacy and
submitted to scarsety than persued a croud or designed aboundance to
myselfe.”[228]
The friendship between Boyle and Evelyn was at this time ripening in
letters—letters about books, and the shapes of fruits, and recipes for
varnish, and many other things—which passed between Evelyn at Sayes
Court, and Boyle at Oxford. In one of these letters[229] Evelyn imparted
to Boyle his pet scheme of a resident “philosophic mathematic college,”
to be built some five-and-twenty miles out of London, where “some
gentlemen whose geniuses are greatly suitable might form themselves into
a Society,” and live “somewhat after the manner of Carthusians.” Evelyn
had planned it out to the smallest detail—the thirty or forty acres
of land to be acquired, with “tall wood” and upland pasture, “sweetly
irrigated.” The house itself was to be a “goodly pavilion” containing
gallery, refectory, library, withdrawing-room, kitchen, larders,
service-rooms and what-not, all “well and nobly furnished”; and opposite
to the house “towards the wood” was to be erected a “pretty chapel”
and “six apartments or cells for members of the Society.” And then
Evelyn, prince of gardeners, goes on to describe the “elaboratory” in
the grounds, with “a repository for rarities and things of nature”; the
aviary, dove-house, physic-garden, kitchen-garden, plantation of orchard
fruit, stalls for one or two horses, and conservatory for tender plants.
The philosophers were to be allowed to play at bowls and chess, and
walk—presumably two and two—in the garden paths. And Mrs. Evelyn, paragon
of wives, had cheerfully consented to go and live there, and allow her
husband to be a Carthusian, while she, located apparently in solitary
glory in the Pavilion, reigned over the refectory and the domestic staff.
This last was to consist of “a chaplain well qualified,” an “ancient
woman to dress the meat,” a man to buy provisions and keep the garden and
stable, and a boy to run about doing everything else.
Robert Boyle must have smiled as he read Evelyn’s enthusiastic letter,
culminating in its pseudo-Carthusian _Orders_—
“At six in summer prayers in chapel. To study till half-an-hour after
eleven. Dinner in the refectory till one. Retire till four. Then called
to conversation (if the weather invite) abroad, else in the refectory.
This never omitted but in case of sickness. Prayers at seven. To bed
at nine. In the winter the same, with some abatements for the hours;
because the nights are tedious, and the evening’s conversation more
agreeable. This in the refectory. All Play interdicted, _sans_ bowls,
chess, etc. Everyone to cultivate his own garden. One month in spring a
course in the elaboratory on vegetables, etc. In the winter a month on
other experiments. Every man to have a key of the elaboratory, pavilion,
library, repository, etc. Weekly fast. Communion once every fortnight, or
month, at least. No stranger to be easily admitted to visit any of the
Society, but upon certain days weekly, and that only after dinner....
Every Thursday shall be a music-meeting at conversation hours....”
And once a week every philosopher was to “render a public account of his
studies,” and every man was to wear “a decent habit or uniform”; and,
oh bliss! “one month in the year may be spent in London, or any of the
Universities, or in a perambulation for the public benefit.” How the
Philosophers would prance!
This was on September 3, 1659, the first anniversary of Cromwell’s
death. A week or two later, Evelyn wrote again.[230] He had been reading
Boyle’s _Seraphick Love_, probably in manuscript, since it did not
appear in print till 1660. The “incomparable book” seemed to Evelyn to
have been “indicted with a pen snatched from the wing of a seraphim.” “I
extremely loved you before,” he wrote, “but my heart is infinitely knit
to you now.” And yet, the pity of it! There is a cry of appeal in poor
Evelyn’s letter to his friend, and there is no further mention of any
Carthusian College. The little cells, and the chess, and the bowls, and
the philosophers walking two and two along the garden paths are for the
moment forgotten; and in their places comes a shadowy procession of fair
and virtuous women—
“What think you, Sir, of _Alceste_, that ran into the funeral pile of her
husband? The goodness of _Aemilia_, the chastity of _Lucretia_, the faith
of _Furia_, of _Portia_?... Take away this love, and the whole earth is
but a desert!”
As for St. Paul’s remarks, Evelyn thinks very little of them; they
were all very well for an itinerant apostle in a time of persecution,
but “he confesses he had no command from the Lord.” And what pious and
studious wives some of the philosophers have had! Take, for example,
_Pudentilla_, who “held the lamp to her husband’s lucubrations.” And good
Madame Grotius, and others; while, not to go abroad, in London itself,
“the committee-chambers, the parliament-lobby,[231] are sad but evident
testimonies of the patience, and the address, the love, and the constancy
of those gentle creatures....”
Is there no hope that Mr. Boyle may relent, and realise that if Love be
virtuous it is seraphic? At least he may remember that in paradise, and
in the ark, “there were but couples there, and every creature was in
love.”
* * * * *
Manuscript copies of _Seraphick Love_ were evidently in circulation.
A pirated and incorrect copy had been offered for sale to a London
stationer, who had communicated with Mr. Boyle; and Boyle, who had
long refused, was persuaded at last to publish it himself. It may
have been in proof-form that Evelyn, in September 1659, read the
little treatise—written eleven years before by a very sad young man at
delicious Leeze. Eleven years had not altered Mr. Boyle’s convictions;
and _Seraphick Love_ was to be one of the most notable, if the least
characteristic, publications of the “Annus Mirabilis.”[232]
Meantime the year 1659 was to be memorable to another branch of the
Boyle family. On May 30, Charles Rich’s elder brother, who had so
recently succeeded to the earldom, died; and Charles Rich and my Lady
Molkin found themselves Earl and Countess of Warwick. Five days before,
Richard Cromwell had abdicated. The months of Richard’s Protectorate
had been, as all the world knows, months of dire confusion. With one
man’s death, the whole fabric of a great Republic had crumbled into
dust. Lady Ranelagh came back to her house in the Mall to find a very
different London from the London she had left three years before. “The
nation,” Evelyn has recorded in his _Diary_, “was in extreame confusion
and unsettl’d, between the Armies and the Sectaries.” “Several Pretenders
and Parties,” he wrote, “strive for the Government: all anarchy and
confusion; Lord, have mercy on us!”[233]
As long as it was possible, Lord Broghill seems to have supported
Richard’s protectorate;[234] but before Richard’s abdication Broghill and
Coote were back in Ireland, and Broghill in command of Munster and Coote
in Connaught were both working for Charles II’s return. Early in 1660,
Monk in England and Coote and Broghill in Ireland were in communication
with the Royal Orphan. Broghill’s letter to Charles was carried to Breda
by the sweet-spirited Frank: it is said to have been in Charles’s hands
before Monk’s emissary had done his work.[235] Broghill’s proposal,
however, that Charles should land in Ireland proved superfluous. Monk’s
offers were eagerly accepted. Sir Edward Montagu—afterwards Earl of
Sandwich—was sent to The Hague to bring back Charles II; and on May
8, 1660, “after a most bloudy and unreasonable rebellion of neere 20
years,”[236] Charles II was proclaimed in London. On May 29, he was
there. Amid the blare of trumpets, 20,000 horse and foot brandished
their swords and shouted aloud for joy. The pavements were strewn with
flowers, the bells of the City rang out, the fountains poured out wine
among the people. Ladies leaned over the windows and balconies: the
Lords and Gentlemen made a brave show in their rich velvets and cloth of
gold. “I stood,” says Evelyn, “in the Strand, and beheld it, and bless’d
God!”[237]
CHAPTER XIV
THE RESTORATION AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY
“Thence to Whitehall; where, in the Duke’s chamber, the King
come and stayed an hour or two laughing at Sir W. Petty, who
was there about his boate,[238] and at Gresham College in
general; at which poor Petty was, I perceive, at some loss, but
did argue discreetly, and bear the unreasonable follies of the
King’s objections and other bystanders with great discretion;
and offered to take oddes against the King’s best boates,
but the King would not lay, but cried him down with words
only. Gresham College he mightily laughed at, for spending
time in weighing of ayre, and doing nothing else since they
sat.”—PEPYS’S _Diary_, February 1, 1664.
“Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last,
The barren wilderness he past,
Did on the very border stand
Of the blest promis’d Land,
And from the Mountains-top of his Exalted Wit
Saw it himself and shew’d us it.
But life did never to one man allow
Time to discover Worlds and Conquer too:
...
For who on things remote can fix his sight
That’s always in a Triumph or a Fight?”
_Lines to the Royal Society_, by ABRAHAM COWLEY.
(Prefixed to the _History of the Royal Society of London_, by
THOS. SPRAT, 1667.)
Two of the Boyle brothers were among the recipients of King’s Honours at
the Restoration: the old Earl would have been proud of his sons. “Dear
Broghill,” who, with each shake of the political kaleidoscope, showed
himself like a bright central bit of glass, about which the smaller
pieces fell together into a new combination,—was created Earl of Orrery,
with a brilliant career of soldier-politician and dramatist before him.
As President of Munster, and one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, he
was to make his headquarters at Charleville, with frequent visits to
England. And the sweet-spirited Frank, the boy hero of Liscarrol, became
Viscount Shannon, and a Privy Councillor. Not much is known of Frank’s
after life, except that he lived and brought up his family on his Irish
estate at Shannon Park. He seems, following the example set by his
literary brothers, to have ventured, at least once, into print.[239] His
wife, the “black Betty” of the letters, is better known to posterity than
her husband, for she is remembered not only as Viscountess Shannon, the
mother of Frank’s children, but as the brilliant sister of Tom Killigrew,
the wit and profligate, and as the mother of one of Charles II’s natural
daughters.[240]
The fortunes of the Royalist elder brother, Lord Cork, who had been
diligently nursing the family fortunes through the Protectorate, were
now so far reinstated that he was able to do for Charles II what the
Great Earl had done for Charles I. He assisted an impecunious king with
sums of money; and in recognition of his services he was, in 1663, to
be created Earl of Burlington in the English Peerage. Presently, the
great town house—Burlington House in Piccadilly—was being built, next
door to the Lord Chancellor’s.[241] The families of Cork and Clarendon
were to be further united by the marriage of Lord Clarendon’s son and
Lord Burlington’s daughter; and another daughter was to marry Lord
Hinchinbroke, son of the Earl of Sandwich, who, as Admiral of the Fleet
(with Pepys as his secretary), had brought Charles back from The Hague.
The prosperous and good-natured Earl of Burlington, treading softly with
his compeers in the Matted Gallery at Whitehall, or making one of the
group of courtiers about my Lord Duke in his Chamber, was of all the Cork
family the likest to the great Earl in his ingenuous love of comfort and
display. He thoroughly enjoyed his position as head of the family. It
is told of him that, sailing down the Thames in some gay barge-load of
noble company, he would never forget to raise his hat when he came in
sight of Deptford Church. “Have I not reason?” he would say; and he would
tell how there, in Deptford Church, little Hodge, the first-born, lay
buried, and how by this child’s death, so many years before, he, Richard
Boyle, the second son, had come to be Earl of Cork. Lady Ranelagh, back
from Ireland, had her reservations about the luxurious living at “my
brother Corke’s.” “Alas!” she wrote to Robert Boyle, not long before
the Restoration, “the Entertainment of Lords, Ladies, and Reasonable
Creatures are yet several things, to the great grief of your K. R.”[242]
But the Earl and his Countess had always been popular people. After the
Restoration, when their daughter Anne married young Lord Hinchinbroke,
the Earl of Sandwich’s son, Lady Sandwich’s gratification in this
alliance knew no bounds: “They are very good condition, wise and
chearfull people,” she wrote just after the wedding. “She” (the bride)
“hath a very fine free kind way of writing soe have they all, something
Mr. Boiles styll.”[243] And poor Pepys, much hurt by not having received
“a favour” after the Hinchinbroke wedding, was mollified when he met my
Lord of Burlington at Whitehall; for Lord Burlington, “first by hearing
the Duke of York call me by my name did come to me and with great respect
take notice of me and my relation to my Lord Sandwich, and express
great kindness to me.” And not long after this little interview Pepys
was at Burlington House, burning his periwig in the candle out of sheer
nervousness. Little wonder; for he had just seen for the first time and
saluted my Lady Burlington—the Lady Dungarvan of the old Dublin days,
for whom the plums on the Lismore plum tree had been kept when she was
expecting her first baby.[244] “A very fine-speaking lady, and a good
woman,” says Pepys; “but old and not handsome, but a brave woman.” He
was to see more of her daughter, young Lady Hinchinbroke. “I cannot
say she is a beauty, nor ugly,” wrote the truthful Pepys; but he had
saluted her too, and she had been “mighty civil” on the occasion; a very
good-humoured young niece, this of Robert Boyle’s, “a lover of books and
pictures and of good understanding.” In honour of the young couple, Mr.
and Mrs. Pepys ventured on a little dinner-party, which Pepys had “much
in his head” till it was successfully over, and for which he purchased
his new “pewter sesterne.” The dinner was good and plentiful, and the
company mighty merry. “Most of the discourse,” Pepys adds naïvely,
“was of my Lord Sandwich and his family, as being all of us of the
family.”[245]
* * * * *
Burlington—Orrery—Shannon. Robert Boyle, in Oxford, was, of all the
great Earl’s sons surviving, to remain “Mr. Boyle”—a virtuoso and an
“Honourable Person.” He could have been a peer, he could have been a
bishop, he could have been Provost of Eton. It is said he repeatedly
refused a peerage. He certainly, not long after the Restoration, declined
to take Orders with a view to a Bishopric. “He was treated with great
civility and respect,” says Birch, “by the King as well as by the Earl
of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl of Clarendon, Lord
Chancellor of England.” But to Robert Boyle the heirdom of a great family
was “but a glittering kind of slavery,” and “titular greatness” seemed
to him “an impediment to the knowledge of many retired truths.”[246] He
believed that the less he participated in the patrimonies of the Church
the more influence he should have in things religious. And besides—as
he explained in after years to Bishop Burnet—he had felt “no inward
motion to it by the Holy Ghost.” For the same reason he would not be
Provost of Eton. How little Sir Henry Wotton, sitting on the bank by
Black Pots in the company of Izaak Walton, could have foreseen that the
“Spiritay Robyn” would one day be asked to be his successor as Provost
of Eton! Robert Boyle had chosen his way of life: he desired to be free
to pursue knowledge for the good of mankind in the service of God. He
would not fetter himself by tests and oaths; he could not alter his
character. He had, as he himself expresses it, “a great (and perhaps
peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths.”[247] And so there is no record
of him in the Matted Gallery, no glimpse of him in lawn sleeves, or with
diamond hatband among the Courtiers, or among the nice critics of the
Restoration Drama, who no longer cared for Shakespeare: “I saw Hamlet
Prince of Denmark played,” says Evelyn,[248] “but now the old plays begin
to disgust this refined age, since his Majesties being so long abroad.”
It is extremely doubtful if Robert Boyle ever witnessed a performance of
“dear Broghill’s” _Mustapha_, even when Betterton and Ianthe took the
chief parts, and the King and Lady Castlemaine, and “pretty witty Nell”
were there to see it.[249]
Glimpses of Robert Boyle there are, however, in those first years of
the Restoration. Up to the very end of 1659 he had been living in
Oxford, making the journey by coach now and then between Oxford and the
London of his tastes. He was busy with his air-pump and his laboratory
experiments and the publication of his _Seraphick Love_, and he was in
correspondence with Dick Jones and Henry Oldenberg in Paris, and with
Evelyn and Hartlib in London. “Your most noble letter,” writes Hartlib to
Boyle at Oxford; but Boyle’s letters of this date to Hartlib do not seem
to be extant. Hartlib’s to Boyle were full of all sorts of gossip, home
and foreign, and political even more than scientific. For Hartlib, in his
old character of universal newsagent, was still able to pick up little
bits of information at Westminster and in the City; and he sent Boyle a
good deal of gossip about the intrigues and factions of those last months
of anarchy under Monk’s dictatorship; about Bradshaw’s death, and the
movements of Lambert, Desborough, Fleetwood, Vane, and Monk himself; and
the mysterious person of whom he wrote as “C. S.,” over the water. And
when “C. S.” was actually back in London and the Restoration was a _fait
accompli_, Robert Boyle and his air-pump were in London also, both to
be received with open arms by the Invisibles, and especially by Evelyn
and the good Hartlib, now old and ill, and very poor, since his pension
under a Commonwealth Government had stopped.
“I went to Chelsey to visit Mr. Boyle,” writes Evelyn,[250] “and see
his pneumatic engine perform divers experiments.” And, “To visite Mr.
Boyle in Chelsey, and saw divers effects of the Eolipile for weighing
aire.”[251]
But, meantime, the weeks and months that followed immediately on the
Restoration—weeks and months occupied with the passage of the Indemnity
Bill through the Convention Parliament and with the trial of the
Regicides—must have been a painful time for Robert Boyle and for his
sister Ranelagh. Lord Broghill, Cromwell’s right-hand man in Ireland and
in Scotland, was, it is true, safe, and to come off with honours; but
some other people—old family friends and political comrades—were not so
happily placed. Robert Boyle had held aloof from sectaries and armies,
though some of his best friendships had been among the Puritans; but Lady
Ranelagh, whose house ever since the early days of the Long Parliament
had been a rendezvous of the Parliamentarian Party, and whose personal
sympathies and fortunes had been bound up with Cromwell’s Protectorate,
must have followed with a heavy heart the deliberations of the Houses
which were to determine the fates of many political and personal friends.
_The Regicides_: why, in the last ten years England and Ireland had been
governed by Regicides! Some of them, it is true, were beyond reach.
Cromwell—chief graves; but there were to be a great many exceptions
to the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion. There were those who were to be
excepted as actual “Regicides”; and those who were to be excepted as
“Non-regicides,” and those classed as “miscellaneous exceptions.” There
were men to be excepted “absolutely”—which meant their execution; and men
to be excepted “non-capitally,” which meant everything but execution;
and men to be excepted “for incapacitation only,” which meant a lifelong
obscurity. There were men who had absconded, and men who had remained on
the spot; men who had pleaded and extenuated, and men who steadfastly
maintained the righteousness of their acts. How was it to fare with all
and each of these? What was to be the fate of Richard Cromwell, so lately
“his now Highness,” and Henry Cromwell, the broadminded and melancholy
young Lord Lieutenant of Ireland—poor Henry, who had been in love with
Dorothy Osborne, who was in love with Sir William Temple? And what was
to become of Cromwell’s widow—“Old Noll’s wife,” the Londoners called
her now: the voice of the people had strangely changed its tone. And the
great men of the Party—so many of whom had been among Lady Ranelagh’s
personal friends—how was it to fare with Lambert, Ludlow, St. John,
Fleetwood, Haselrig, Lenthall, Whitlocke, Vane, Desborough, Pennington,
Thurloe, and President Lawrence? Henry Lawrence, the President’s son,
had been young Lord Barrymore’s friend ever since they were pupils
together with Milton, in the Barbican. And Henry Lawrence was still one
of Milton’s disciples—a constant visitor to the garden-house in Petty
France. And young Lord Barrymore’s second wife was a Lawrence—Martha
Lawrence. How is it possible to unravel the cruel intricacies of civil
war?[252] And what would be done with Goodwin and Hugh Peters, and the
blind Milton himself, whose _Eikonoklastes_ and _Pro Populo Defensio_
were by order of the House—issued within a week or two after the
Restoration—to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman?
Hangings, drawings and quarterings were not extraordinary events in those
days; but it would be interesting to know how the sentence pronounced
on Major-General Harrison—first sentenced of the Regicides—affected so
humane and sensitive a man as Robert Boyle. His sister Ranelagh, woman
as she was, had more of the old soldier-earl in her composition, and
perhaps, like her Elizabethan father, looked upon such a death as an
inevitable “cloudy end.”
“... The Court doth award that you ... be drawn upon a hurdle to the
place of execution and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and, being
alive, shall be cut down and ... your entrails to be taken out of your
body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your
head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and head
and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty; and
the Lord have mercy upon your soul!”[253]
Was Boyle weighing the air with his Eolipile on October 13 when Pepys set
off to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and
quartered? “Which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could
do in that condition.”[254] But in that hungry crowd Pepys could scarcely
have been near enough to hear Harrison’s last words, which sometimes seem
to echo in Charing Cross to this day: “He hath covered my head many times
in the day of battle. By God I have leaped over a wall; by God I have
run through a troop; and by my God I will go through this death, and He
will make it easy to me.... Now unto thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commit my
Spirit....”
Nor could Mr. Pepys have seen Harrison strike out at the hangman half-way
through the horrible, bloody work.
Mr. Evelyn did not go out purposely to see any of the executions of the
Regicides;[255] but on the 17th he chanced to meet “their quarters,
mangl’d and cutt and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in
baskets on the hurdle. O the miraculous Providence of God!”[256]
But what of Milton all this time—the blind Republican, to whom Lady
Ranelagh had been more than all kith and kin? Had Boyle and Hartlib ever
got from Mr. Milton that prescription they so much wanted?
Milton’s escape from punishment at the Restoration is one of the puzzles
of English history. How was it effected—by what combination of political
influences—who, in fact, pulled the wires? Parliament has always been
very clever in engineering itself, more or less constitutionally, out
of its own tight corners; but there has never been a cleverer piece of
parliamentary engineering than the way in which Milton was brought off
at the Restoration. When, after Cromwell’s death, Lady Ranelagh returned
from Ireland to her house in the Mall, Milton was still living, almost a
neighbour, in his garden-house in Petty France; still in correspondence
with her boy Dick Jones and his tutor Oldenburg, in Paris; still Latin
Secretary to the Council, with Andrew Marvell as his loyal assistant;
and the uneasy dawn of the New Year 1660 had found him, despondent but
undaunted, still fighting hard, by tract-warfare, for a doomed Republic.
Milton the Pamphleteer and Lambert the General are to be remembered
together as the last two opponents of the Restoration. But in March,
after Milton’s printed exhortations to the Council and to Monk himself,
the blind secretary had been discharged from his office, and an order
issued for the arrest of Milton’s publisher. And on May 7—the very day
before Charles II was proclaimed in London—Milton had disappeared from
the garden-house in Petty France. Nobody knows what had been done about
his children, or whose friendly hand guided the blind man’s steps into
his hiding-place. “In the house of a friend in Bartholomew Close”—a
narrow passage, entered from West Smithfield under an archway that was
very old even in Milton’s day[257]—Milton was to lie concealed for more
than three months. His case and Goodwin’s[258] came up together before
the House on June 16, and it was ordered that their books were to be
called in and burnt, and that the men themselves were to be “forthwith
sent for in custody.” But both men were in hiding, and somehow it was
August 13 before the two names came up again; and at that moment the
Indemnity Bill was hanging in mid-air between the Lords and Commons.
Neither of the two men had been found; and though the Proclamation
calling in all copies of their books for burning by the hangman was
then duly placarded all over London, there was no further order for the
arrest of the two men themselves. On August 28 the Indemnity Bill had
passed both Houses; on August 29 it had received the King’s assent, the
Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was on the Statute Book, _and there was no
mention of Milton in it from first to last_. Goodwin’s name appeared;
he was incapacitated for life for any public trust. But of Milton, the
Republican pamphleteer, Cromwell’s Latin secretary, who had done so
incalculably much more, nothing—his name had somehow dropped out. Milton
was saved—“to the surprise of all people,” says Bishop Burnet.[259]
If Milton had been hanged with the Regicides at Charing Cross, or carted
to Tyburn! And more than once during the passage of the Bill it seemed
possible that it might be so. As it was, with the passing of this Act of
Oblivion, and the emerging of a blind Puritan into the murky sunshine of
the old London streets, Milton drops out of the story of Lady Ranelagh
and the Boyle family. For a little while after the passing of the Act
(his hiding-place having apparently been discovered) he seems to have
been detained in custody by the Sergeant-at-Arms. Perhaps he was safer
so. His offending tracts were duly burnt; his regicide comrades were
duly hanged, drawn and quartered; and in December Milton was at large.
Staunch friends he had had; Andrew Marvell was perhaps bravest and most
indefatigable of them all; but it must have required more powerful
influence than Marvell’s and Davenant’s to save John Milton. Had Lady
Ranelagh done him one more service greater than all before? Had she
enlisted the interest of her powerful brother Broghill, and of such
Privy Councillors as she knew best—men like Sandwich and Manchester,
and Annesley[260] and Morrice, and the old Lord Goring, poor Lettice’s
father-in-law,[261] and the young Charles Howard, who had married
“Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” and was going to be first Earl of Carlisle? Had
Lady Ranelagh’s silken strings reached the little private Junto about
the King himself—Hyde, and Ormonde, and Southampton? One remembers that
Mr. Boyle had been “treated with great civility and respect by the King,
as well as by the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl
of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England.” And it is good to think that
the Boyle family—perhaps Boyle himself, whose memories went back to the
Milton of _Comus_ and Eton, the Milton of the _Epitaphium Damonis_ and
the Villa Diodati in Geneva, may have had a hand in saving Milton, the
blind Republican,—to write _Paradise Lost_. But if to any of them, it was
certainly to Lady Ranelagh that Milton owed his life and freedom. There
is no record of any further visits from Lady Ranelagh to Milton after
that date, but it is difficult to believe her friendship for Milton ended
with the Restoration. The garden-house in Petty France was to be no more
his home: his blind steps turned eastward, to Holborn again, and Jewin
Street, and then to Artillery Walk, near Bunhill Fields, where he was to
resume and finish his great poem, and where he was to end his days. It is
difficult to believe that Lady Ranelagh never again knocked at the blind
man’s door; and it must be taken for granted that one day in late August
or early September 1667 a presentation-copy of _Paradise Lost_ arrived at
the house in Pall Mall.
* * * * *
On a November afternoon—Nov. 28, 1660—the usual little audience of
philosophers had assembled to listen to one of Dr. Christopher Wren’s
astronomy lectures at Gresham College, in Basinghall Street.[262] Wren,
who had been astronomy professor there since 1657, lectured on Wednesday
afternoons during Term-time from two to three—and it was a custom for the
little company to stay on after the lecture, adjourning to another room
for “mutuall converse.” The political disasters of the last year or two
had somewhat interrupted the advancement of learning; the soldiers had,
in fact, for a time, been quartered in Gresham College. But by the end
of November 1660 things were settling down again, and the lectures were
going on as usual. At this particular lecture the _virtuosi_ present were
Lord Brouncker, Mr. Boyle, Mr. Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paule Neile,
Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Goddard, Dr. Petty, Mr. Ball, Mr. Rooke, Mr. Wren,
and Mr. Hill; and their “mutuall converse” turned on the formation of a
scientific society, on a broader basis than had been hitherto attempted—a
society “for the promoting of Physico-Mathematicall-Experimentall
Learning,” to consist of weekly meetings, which were to be held every
Wednesday from that date onwards.
This, it must be remembered, was no outcome of the Restoration. It
was fifteen years since the Invisibles had begun their meetings,
“precluding matters of theology and state affairs,” sometimes at Gresham
College, oftener in Dr. Goddard’s house in Wood Street, or at the
Bull’s Head Tavern in Cheapside. Robert Boyle at that time had been a
boy of eighteen, just back from Geneva, and introduced into the little
Hartlib-Durie-Comenius circle to find that the Parliament men were
already interested in a scheme of “Verulamian education.” In November
1660 the Invisibles were fifteen years wiser than they had been in 1645.
And what a fifteen years it had been! Had there ever been such a fifteen
years in English History? Some of them, after the visitation of Oxford,
had migrated there, taking posts vacated by Royalists, and forming the
Oxford branch of the Invisible Society; and now again these same men,
removed at the Restoration from their posts in Oxford University, were
turning back to London. It was the old Invisible College of 1645 that was
to merge itself in the Royal Society.
So, on that November afternoon 1660, in Gresham College, a new Society
was formed. It was arranged that its “original members” were to be
those present, with some others then and there proposed as eligible,
thirty-nine names being suggested and written down. Among them were
John Evelyn, Dr. Wallis, Dr. Seth Ward, Dr. Willis, Dr. Bathurst, Sir
Kenelm Digby, Abraham Cowley, John Denham, Mr. William Croone, Mr.
Richard Jones, and Henry Oldenburg. Robert Boyle’s influence was already
making itself felt. Most of these men were Oxford colleagues, personal
friends, and old Invisibles. The last three must have been his special
nominations, and two of them were his own kinsmen. Dick Jones, his
hopeful nephew, had just returned with Henry Oldenburg from their foreign
tour. William Croone, who was nominated _in absentia_ for the post of
Registrar of the Society, was presumably a son of the old Earl of Cork’s
“Cozen Croone”, the vintner of the King’s Head in Cheapside;[263] because
the “Croonian Lecture Fund,” long afterwards bequeathed to the Royal
Society by Mr. Croone’s widow, was derived from “one fifth of the clear
rent of the King’s Head Tavern in or near old Fish Street, London, at
the corner of Lambeth Hill.”[264] This makes William Croone a cousin of
Robert Boyle’s; and he was a creditable relative, this heir of old Cozen
Croone the vintner, for he was afterwards Doctor of Physic and Gresham
Professor of Rhetoric; and the Royal Society owes its Croonian Lecture
Fund to his and his widow’s generosity, and to the takings at the old
King’s Head in Cheapside.
Other original members—they were afterwards “Fellows”—were added at later
meetings. And what a list it was! There was Aubrey of the “Lives,” and
Ashmole, of museum celebrity, and Dryden and Waller the poets, and old
Haak the originator of the Invisible College, and Robert Hooke, whose
services at Oxford Boyle amiably dispensed with so that he might be
Curator,[265] and Peter Pett the Naval Commissioner, and Thomas Sprat,
the Society’s enthusiastic first biographer, and Governor Winthrop from
Connecticut, and Isaac Barrow the scholarly divine,[266] and John Graunt,
the “tradesman” who drew up the Bills of Mortality. Peers there were in
plenty,—the Duke of Buckingham and the Earls of Devonshire, Northampton,
and Sandwich, among them; and Bishops—present and future. Doctors of
Physic, of course, and Lawyers of the Temple; Churchmen, Statesmen,
Army-men, Navy-men, and City-men. “It is to be noted,” says Sprat, “that
they have freely admitted men of different Religions, Countries, and
Professions of Life. This they were obliged to do, or else they would
come far short of the largeness of their own declarations. For they
openly profess not to lay the foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish,
Popish, or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of _Mankind_.”[267]
Sir Robert Moray, a Scotsman and a favourite at Whitehall, had quickly
“brought in word from the Court” that the King approved of the aims
of the Society. Moray, who had a laboratory of his own at Whitehall,
acted for a time as interim-President, and was certainly the life and
soul of the infant Society; and on May 3, 1661—not many days after his
coronation, Charles II was shown, through his own great telescope,
Saturn’s rings and Jupiter and his satellites. His Majesty became really
interested, and began to discourse astronomy as he sat at supper in
Whitehall.[268] And a few weeks later—Sir Robert Moray still acting as
go-between—the King granted the Society’s petition for a Royal Charter,
and was “pleased to offer himselfe to be entered one of the Society.”
On July 15, 1662, the Charter of Incorporation passed what Evelyn calls
the “Broade Seale.” Lord Brouncker was elected first President and
Henry Oldenburg Secretary.[269] The King presented the Society with
its mace,[270] on which were emblematically embossed the Crown and
Royal Arms, the rose, harp, thistle, and fleur de lys. In April 1663,
however, a second and improved Charter passed the Great Seal.[271] The
King in this declared himself Founder and Patron; Arms were granted to
the Society, and a motto from Horace was chosen—_Nullius in Verba_. And
the Royal Society kept its first anniversary on November 30, 1663, St.
Andrew’s Day having been selected partly as nearest to November 28, the
day of its first meeting, but also in compliment, it is believed, to Sir
Robert Moray, the popular Scotsman who from the very beginning had been
one of its most energetic members.
Strange times! It has been rightly said that the foundation of the Royal
Society was one of the few creditable events of the Restoration. Exactly
a month before the Charter of Incorporation passed the Great Seal, Sir
Henry Vane had been beheaded on Tower Hill, “the trumpets brought under
the scaffold that he might not be heard”; and little more than a month
later came the dreaded St. Bartholomew’s Day, which turned nearly two
thousand rectors and vicars—one-fifth of the English clergy—out of their
parishes. The doings of “Our Society”, meantime, read like a little oasis
in a desert of intolerance. The old Earl of Cork, who had sent his sons
to fight the “rebelleows” Presbyterian Scots, and spent the last days
of his own life in fighting the rebellious Irish Papists, would have
rubbed his eyes if he could have seen his Robyn walking in procession,
side by side with the Roman Catholic Sir Kenelm Digby, each wearing a St.
Andrew’s Cross pinned into his hat!
“It being St. Andrew’s Day, who was our patron,” says Evelyn
complacently, “each fellow wore a St. Andrew’s Crosse of ribbon on the
crowne of his hatt. After the election we din’d together, his Majesty
sending us venison.”[272]
Some difference of opinion, however, there seems to have been among the
philosophers about the choice of their patron saint. Pepys did not care
much who the saint was, but he grumbled at having to pay two shillings
for the badge.[273] Aubrey once confided to Sir William Petty that
he would have preferred St. George, or, failing him, St. Isidore—“a
philosopher canonised.”
“No,” said the irrepressible Petty, “I had rather have had it been St.
Thomas’s Day, for he would not believe till he had seen and putt his
finger into the holes, according to the motto, _Nullius in Verba_.”[274]
CHAPTER XV
THE PLAGUE AND THE FIRE
“It hath commonly been looked upon as very strange that a
diligent Cultivator of Experimental Philosophy should be a
zealous Embracer of the Christian Religion; and that a great
Esteem of Experience and a High Veneration for Religion should
be compatible in the same Person; but....”—ROBERT BOYLE, _The
Christian Virtuoso_.
“The hottest day that ever I felt in my life ... I did in Drury
Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the
doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there....”—PEPYS’S
_Diary_, June 7, 1665.
“... it still encreasing, and the wind great ... and all over
the Thames, with one’s faces in the wind, you were almost
burned with a shower of fire-drops ... saw the fire grow; and
as it grew darker appeared more and more, and in corners and
upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we
could see up the hill of the city, in a most horrid malicious
bloody flame ... one entire arch of fire from this to the other
side of the bridge.... The churches, houses and all on fire
and flaming at once ... and a horrid noise the flames made and
the cracking of houses at their ruine....”—PEPYS’S _Diary_,
September 2, 1666.
The year 1661 saw the publication not only of Boyle’s _Physiological
Essays_[275] already mentioned, but of his epoch-making _Scepticall
Chymist_.[276] It was the first year of “Our Society’s” existence; a year
of immense interest and activity among its members; but Boyle himself was
not always in London, and not indeed wholly occupied with the claims of
experimental science. In 1662 he found himself unexpectedly in possession
of more Irish land, a grant of “forfeited impropriations” having been
obtained from the King in Robert Boyle’s name, though without his
knowledge. To Boyle, the gift seems to have been somewhat in the nature
of a white elephant, and he applied for advice in the matter to his
friend the Bishop of Lincoln.[277] He was not sure if he ought to take
the grant at all, and still less decided as to what he ought to do with
the proceeds. He did not wish to “reflect upon those persons of honour”
who had done him the kindness unasked, and he would dearly have liked
to spend the proceeds, if he did take the grant, in “the advancement of
real knowledge.” Ultimately he did decide to accept it, and to spend
two-thirds of the proceeds in Ireland on the relief of the poor and the
maintenance of the Protestant religion; while the other third was to go
to the purposes of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in
New England, of which the King had lately appointed him governor. This,
too, had been done without Boyle’s knowledge.
“So that the main benefit I intend to derive from the King’s bounty,”
says Boyle laconically, “is the opportunity of doing some good with what,
if my friends had not obtained it, might have been begged by others, who
would have otherwise employed it.”[278]
The matter settled—to nobody’s entire satisfaction—Boyle went on with
his work in Oxford, sending his communications to the Royal Society
through the secretary, Henry Oldenburg. Present or absent, Mr. Boyle
was the hero of the hour at Gresham College, and his air-pump the chief
attraction of its meetings.[279]
“I waited on Prince Rupert to our assembly,” says Evelyn, “where we tried
severall experiments in Mr. Boyle’s _vacuum_. A man thrusting in his arm
upon exhaustion of the air had his flesh immediately swelled so as the
blood was neare bursting the veins: he drawing it out we found it all
speckled.”[280]
Mr. Boyle, Mr. Boyle’s air-pump, and Mr. Boyle’s books—especially that
on the _Spring and Weight of the Air_—were the talk of the Court as well
as of the College. It is quite true that “the weighing of ayre” was, in
those early days of the Society’s existence, its favourite occupation.
A great change had come over the Philosophers. They found themselves
invited into a kind of scientific _Kindergarten_, where knowledge was
to be gained, not through their old black-letter books, but out of
pots and pans and pendulums, and shining ores, and precious stones,
and “anatomes” and “curiosities” and “things of nature.” And the most
fascinating thing of nature at this moment—just because, perhaps, it was
intangible, invisible, elusive—was “the ayre.” These men had discovered
that “the ayre” possessed properties, obeyed laws; in fact, they had
suddenly realized that they were all going about under an atmosphere. Mr.
Boyle had shown it to be so; and there, in their midst, was the _machina
Boyleana_.
But there were other “transactions” of the infant Royal Society. In
Oldenburg’s letters, and Hooke’s letters, and in the diaries of Pepys
and Evelyn, there are vivid contemporary glimpses of what went on at
Gresham College. Poor old Hartlib was dead, and Oldenburg seems to have
taken Hartlib’s place as Boyle’s London Correspondent. He gave Boyle
the latest gossip, not only of “Our Society,” but of “State affairs”
at home and abroad. From him Boyle, at Oxford, heard of the visits
of distinguished foreigners—Huygens, Sorbière, and others—to Gresham
College. Even when the attendances were “thin,” and there was not much
being shown, these men were struck with admiration of “our experimental
method,” our “sedate and friendly way of conference,” and “the gravity
and majestickness of our order.”
The indefatigable Secretary, overworked and underpaid as he undoubtedly
was, and asking in vain for an “amanuensis,” had soon put himself in
touch with experimentalists in France, Holland, Germany, Italy, the
Bermudas, Poland, Sweden, New England, and the East Indies. A new
governor of “Bombaia” had offered his services to the Society “for
philosophical purposes”: “We have taken to taske the whole universe,”
wrote Oldenburg to Governor Winthrop in Connecticut.
There was really no form of “curiosity” of earth, or sea, or sky,
that was not grist to the Gresham College mill. Chariots and watches,
masonry, ores, “the nature of salts,” injection into the veins and the
transfusion of blood, the velocity of bullets, mine-damp, musical sounds
and instruments, thermometers and barometers, fossils, shooting stars,
and double keels were all mixed up in most admired disorder; and Mr.
Boyle at Oxford was doing his best to interest the “Oxonians” in the
work going on at Gresham College; he himself being equally interested
in the experiments of transfusion of blood carried on in London and the
“musical experiments” made under his direction in the Oxford colleges.
Oldenburg reported everything to him, and Hooke, too, his old assistant,
who was now curator of Our Society. Winthrop had written about the ores
to be found in New England, and an enthusiastic young Londoner had been
planting a “Virginian garden.” At one meeting of the Society there had
been “a good store of discourse concerning star-shoots”; at another all
the experiments were of “the descent of bodies in water.” On more than
one occasion a party of the philosophers—Sir Robert Moray, Dr. Wilkins,
Dr. Goddard, Hooke, and others—had climbed to the top of the steeple of
St. Paul’s “to make the ‘Torricellian experiments’ of falling bodies
and of pendulums.” And after the Correspondence Committee had met at
Mr. Povy’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for the purpose of collecting
evidence from “all parts of the world,” Oldenburg wrote to Boyle: “This
was our entertainment above ground, I leave you to guess what our
correspondence was underground in the grotto, and near the well, that is
the conservatory of so many dozen of wine-bottles of all kinds.”[281]
So the letters came and went between London and Oxford; and Boyle’s
manuscripts and proof-sheets were sent to Oldenburg by coach or
carrier, or by Boyle’s own servant. “These coachmen and carriers are
incorrigible,” wrote Oldenburg, when parcels were charged double and
letters went astray; and there was, in particular, a “she-porter” who
specially annoyed Mr. Oldenburg. Presently, Mr. Sprat was writing the
Society’s history—as far as it went; and Samuel Butler was satirising
Gresham College up and down the town. Everybody knew that the King kept
a copy of _Hudibras_ in his pocket: might not the young Society suffer
from Butler’s sarcasm? The Secretary was ruffled and anxious; and he
owned to Boyle that he could have done a good deal more in pushing and
popularising certain investigations for the Society “if I had not been
afraid of _Hudibras_.”[282]
But while Hudibras was ridiculing the experimentalists, and
Restoration-orthodoxy was shaking its head over the new philosophy, the
Society had its votaries—a good many of them, it is true, on the other
side of the channel.[283] If Butler made fun of the Philosophers—
“Their learned speculations,
And all their constant occupations
To measure and to weigh the air
And turn a circle to a square”[284]—
a certain Italian enthusiast composed twenty-six stanzas of unqualified
praise, one of which Oldenburg committed to memory and sent triumphantly
to Boyle—
“Heroic constellations dispense
One ray of your celestial influence
That with the telescope I may descry
The sacred treasures of your Pansophy!”
Perhaps the prettiest compliment of all came from a Parisian friend
of Oldenburg’s, who was so charmed with Mr. Boyle’s writings, and
so desolated to hear of Mr. Boyle’s delicate health, that he begged
Oldenburg to suggest to Mr. Boyle that he should migrate into the sweet
air of France. “Proposez-luy la chose: il pourra philosopher par tout, et
faire provision de santé pour philosopher plus longtemps.”
The message was duly delivered; but Boyle’s philosophising was to go on
at home, and praise and blame seem to have had small effect upon him. “I
freely confess,” he wrote, “that the great difficulty of things, and the
little abilities I find myself furnished with to surmount it, do often,
in general, beget in me a _great_ distrust even of things, whereof my
adversary’s objections give me not _any_.”[285]
The year 1663 saw the publication of three of Robert Boyle’s books.
_Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural
Philosophy_, collected from the work of the previous year or two, was
published at Oxford. _Some Experiments and Considerations touching
Colour_ was published in London; and in the same year he published,
also in London, _Some Considerations touching the Style of the Holy
Scriptures_. This last, originally suggested to him by Broghill at
Marston Bigot, had been the work of some years; and at the time of its
publication he was interesting himself in a scheme for the translation
of the New Testament for use in Turkey. Oldenburg “rejoiced hugely”
over this scheme. “I confess,” says the Puritan secretary of the Royal
Society, “it will be troublesome and dangerous to spread such a book as
the Bible in Turkey; but yet it ought to be attempted.”
The summer vacations, when Oxford was deserted, seem to have been spent
by Boyle partly in London with Lady Ranelagh and among the _virtuosi_,
and partly in the various family country houses, where he was always
welcomed as at once the hero, the puzzle, and the pet of this great
family. Delicious Leeze, in Essex, where Charles and Mary lived, was
not far from London. “You shall be absolute master of your own time,”
Mary assured him—conscious, no doubt, that Charles did not know much
about the New Philosophy. And at Marston Bigot, in Somersetshire, dear
Broghill and Lady Pegg, when they were in England, were most excellent
company. Marston was not far from Stalbridge, and though Boyle did not
now often stay at his manor-house, he liked to keep it in perfect order,
for Frank’s sake, who might have it after him. The “fruit-nurseries” of
Stalbridge, especially, were well known in the neighbourhood. “I hear you
have that way also a large charity for the public good of England,” wrote
Dr. John Beale of Yeovil, in one of his delightful screeds to Boyle.
In the summer of 1664, Boyle had been suffering with his eyes; and on
his journey to the west—he was apparently that summer at Stalbridge and
Marston Bigot—he stayed at Salisbury, to consult his friend and oculist,
Dr. Turberville.[286]
That autumn, State affairs were almost of more interest at the moment
than the transactions of the Society; and war-gossip and Court-gossip
occupied a considerable portion of Oldenburg’s letters to Boyle. Hooke,
the Curator, wrote also, but his letters were of “the conjunction of
Mercury and Sol.” Boyle was back in Oxford in October; and on October 24,
when Evelyn paid a visit to Oxford, he found Boyle “with Dr. Wallis and
Dr. Christopher Wren in the Tower of the Scholes with an inverted tube or
telescope, observing the discus of the Sunn for the passing of Mercury
that day before it; but the latitude was so great that nothing appeared.”
The little party, disappointed, went on to the Bodleian, and to look at
the Sheldonian, then building by the generosity of the Archbishop, and
the great picture with too many “nakeds” in it, over the Altar in the
chapel of All Souls.[287]
Boyle was still in Oxford in November, when the Duke of York and “many
gallants” were going off to join the Fleet; and in December, when the
“mighty vote” of £2,500,000 was passed, that Charles II might “be
possessed of the dominion at sea, and the disposal of Trade.”[288]
Everybody in London was feeling very rich and belligerent—the exact
methods by which the money was to be raised not having been yet
decided upon. That same November, Oldenburg was begging for Boyle’s
communications to the Society on the _History of Cold_. They would
come, as he said, very seasonably, “Our Society having already, by the
late Frost, excited one another to the prosecution of experiments of
freezing.” The frost lasted long enough to please the little London boys
and the Philosophers alike. January came in, with “excessive sharp frost
and snow.”[289] The London streets were full of snowballs on January
2, when Mr. Pepys dined in the Piazza, Covent Garden, with my Lord
Brouncker—who was a great many other things besides President of the
Royal Society,—and occasioned such mirth by reading aloud to the company
the “ballet” lately made “by the men at sea to the ladies in town.” Who
does not remember Buckhurst’s—
“To all ye ladies now on land
We men at sea indite;
But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write.
The Muses now, and Neptune too,
We must implore to write to you,
With a fa la la la la!”
And it is very certain Lord Brouncker and his company laughed loudest
over the second verse—
“For though the Muses should prove kind
And fill our empty brain,
Yet if rough Neptune rouse the wind
To wave the azure main,
Our paper, pen, and ink, and we
Roll up and down our ships at sea,
With a fa la la la la!”
Robert Boyle was in town during that winter of 1664-5. There were
several fixtures in December, January and February, which may have
drawn him there. In December he had been elected into the Company of
the Royal Mines, “and into that of Battery.” On December 22, Petty’s
double-bottomed boat, the _Experiment_, was at last launched, in the
presence of the King.[290] On January 9, the Royal Society carried their
new Charter Book and Laws to the King at Whitehall, for the King to
write “Founder” after his name, and the Duke of York to enter himself as
a Fellow. Gresham College was particularly active in February and March,
and Hooke was lecturing there on the Comet which had lately been the talk
of London. “Mighty talk there is of the Comet that is seen a’ nights;
and the King and Queen did sit up last night to see it, and did, it
seems.”[291] Lord Sandwich, who was with the fleet at Portsmouth, thought
it was “the most extraordinary thing he ever saw.” And Robert Hooke,
the little deformed chorister of Christchurch, was trying to explain
this phenomenon to the London of 1665: “Among other things, proving very
probably that this is the very same Comet that appeared before, in the
year 1618, and that in such a time probably will appear again, which is a
very new opinion; but all will be in print.”[292] And on February 15, the
day on which Mr. Pepys was admitted a member of the Royal Society, the
discussion and experiments had been on Fire: “how it goes out in a place
where the ayre is not free, and sooner out where the ayre is exhausted,
which they shewed by an engine on purpose.”[293]
It was after this meeting that some of the philosophers adjourned to the
Crown Tavern, behind the Exchange, for a “club supper”; but though Pepys
expressly mentions having seen Mr. Boyle at the afternoon meeting of the
Society, he does not make it clear whether Mr. Boyle was at the club
supper afterwards. He may have been: “Here excellent discourse, till ten
at night,” records Pepys—“and then home.”
In February, Boyle brought out at last his little volume of _Occasional
Reflections on Several Subjects_; youthful essays, written long before,
in the Dorset lanes or by the slow-burning wood fire in his manor-house:
“the mislaid scribbles which I drew up in my infancy,” he calls them. The
book was published by Herringman at his shop at the Anchor in the Lower
Walk in the New Exchange. It was not intended to occasion the mirth that
Buckhurst’s “ballet” had produced: it was criticised, rather sharply, by
some people at the time; but it gained an extraordinary popularity, and
it was to be ridiculed as only the books that have been very popular ever
are. And its appearance gave great pleasure to Lady Ranelagh, who had
long begged him to collect and publish these fugitive pieces, and now at
last held in her hand a little volume containing a dedicatory letter to
herself—to _Sophronia_, “my dearest sister.”
The spring of 1665 in London was, as everybody knows—in spite of
impending war, and the absence of “many gallants” at sea—one of the
gayest of gay London seasons. The theatres were full; the great
“noon-hall” at Whitehall had been turned into a playhouse. Another
comet, every bit as bright as the last, was reported in the April sky.
The Park was filled with fair women; chief among them, according to
Pepys, was the “very great beauty,” Mrs. Middleton, for whom Boyle’s
hopeful young nephew—Milton’s pupil—Mr. Dick Jones, had quite forsaken
the Philosophers.[294] And while the bees in Evelyn’s garden at Deptford
were making their honey and combs “mighty pleasantly,” and Evelyn himself
was immersed in the provision of hospital accommodation for sick and
wounded seamen, in the coffee-houses the talk was all of the Dutch fleet,
and of the Plague that was growing in London. Everybody was ready with a
remedy, “some saying one thing and some another.” On June 3, all London
was on the river, listening to the guns of the opposing Dutch and English
fleets;[295] and on June 7, the day before the news of the great victory
arrived in London, Mr. Pepys, much to his discomfiture, saw those red
crosses on the doors in Drury Lane, and the poor human appeal, “Lord,
have mercy on us!”[296]
While the Plague raged in London, Lady Ranelagh and her two daughters—“my
girls” she always calls them—were at delicious Leeze. It was not the same
patriarchal Leeze to which the romantic runaways had been carried in Lady
Ranelagh’s coach. The husband and wife, who were Charles and Mary Rich in
those days, were Earl and Countess of Warwick now. It was four-and-twenty
years since they had been obliged to run away to be married, because
Charles Rich was only a younger son. Charles Rich was “my Lord of
Warwick” now. It was six years since he had succeeded to the earldom; and
a great deal can happen in six years. Their son—their only child—whose
illness in babyhood had so changed Mary’s outlook on life, had been
reared to manhood, and had been married—a girl and boy marriage it was—to
my Lord of Devonshire’s very young daughter. For the sake of her boy, and
to arrange this alliance satisfactorily, Mary had gone to London, leaving
“the sweet quiet of the country for the horrid confusion of the town”;
and from there she had written to Robert Boyle at Oxford, whom she still
always called her “dearest, dearest squire,” in great spirits: “We are
like to be very great,” she said, “for the lad is like to be a successful
lover.”
After the marriage, the bridegroom had been sent to travel in France,
and the bride taken home by her husband’s parents to Leeze; and after
the boy husband came back to her, for a very little while they had all
lived together, and Mary had seen her son with a wife of his own. But in
May 1664 he fell ill of smallpox. They were all in London at the time,
at Warwick House, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Mary herself had had
smallpox in 1648. The little wife was removed, out of the infection, to
her father’s house. The “young ladies,” Charles Rich’s nieces, who lived
with them, daughters of the dead elder brother, were packed off to Leeze.
“My Lord” himself was persuaded to go to his sister-in-law Ranelagh’s
house in Pall Mall. And then—
“I shut up myself with him,” says Mary, the mother, “doing all I could
both for his soul and body.” But the boy died in eight days: “He wanted
about four months of being of age.” Mary sent the Earl of Manchester to
Lady Ranelagh’s house to break the news to my Lord of Warwick, who, when
he heard it, “cried out so terribly that his cry was heard a great way.”
But Mary was “unrewly” no longer; she had made her vow and she had found
her Master: “I was dumb,” she says, “and held my peace, because God did
it.”
For the second time Lady Ranelagh fetched Mary away to her own house. The
great Warwick House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was put up for sale—Mary
never entered it again. Later she went to drink the waters at Epsom and
Tonbridge, “to remove the great pain I had constantly at my heart after
my son’s death.” And Dr. Walker, the worthy chaplain who had preached so
awakingly to Mary twenty years before, after her child recovered, did his
best to comfort her after her child was dead.
A year had passed since then, and now, in the summer of 1665, with the
Plague raging in London, the childless pair were at Leeze again with
the young ladies and the very young widow, and Lady Ranelagh and her
girls; and my Lord of Warwick—much in the minority—was not quite so
good-tempered as he used to be in the old-young days before he was so
tormented by gout.[297]
They had left London only just in time; for early in July several of the
houses in Pall Mall were infected, and one “almost emptied.”[298] The
meetings of the Royal Society had been adjourned. The King and Court were
gone:[299] people were rapidly leaving town. Hooke and Petty and Wilkins
were thinking of removing to Nonsuch, taking an operator with them in
order to carry on their experiments out of range of infection.[300]
Oldenburg and his family remained in London. He had carefully separated
his papers—Mr. Boyle’s, the Society’s, and his own—into bundles, and had
written instructions what should be done with them should he succumb to
the Plague. Robert Boyle was back in Oxford before the end of June, but
before leaving town he had sent Oldenburg a “receipt for the Sickness.”
Pepys, it is known, went about with a bottle of “Plague-water” presented
to him by Lady Carteret, of which he took a sip when he felt particularly
depressed. Whether Oldenburg drank Mr. Boyle’s medicine or not is
unrecorded, but he escaped infection; and the Transactions of the Royal
Society, and some of Boyle’s papers with them, went safely through the
Plague only to suffer havoc in the Fire.
In July Lady Ranelagh was writing to her brother at Oxford, begging him
to join the family-party at Leeze, and to bring any number more of his
_Occasional Meditations_ with him, which the ladies of the family would
help him to transcribe for a second edition of his delightful book. At
Leeze they were all taking “palsy-balsam.” “Our palsy-balsam does wonders
here,” she wrote. “Crip,” who seems to have been the family apothecary,
major-domo, and factotum, had been very careful of them all, she says.
The palsy-balsam, Crip’s “jealousy,” and God’s providence together had
kept, not only the family at Leeze itself, but the entire neighbourhood,
free of infection. And all the ladies, and the Countess, and “my girls”
were at Robert Boyle’s service.[301]
And yet he did not go. He was still at Oxford in August, much tied in
attendance on Lady Clarendon and the Lord Chancellor and their new
daughter-in-law.[302] He had declined the Provostship of Eton, vacant by
Dr. Meredith’s death, and had accepted the degree of Doctor of Physic
at the hands of the University. And he was still in Oxford early in
September, when Lady Ranelagh wrote again—this time in more sombre mood,
for the weekly Bills of Mortality had been grim reading. She could
not help seeing a Nemesis over London: a connexion—as awful as it was
inscrutable—between “what was going on there before we left it and what
has been suffered there since.”[303] Would not her brother still seek a
shelter at delicious Leeze?
“For my Lord of Warwick, I can assure you, as he does me, that he is not
only not afraid, but desirous of your company here; he advises your lying
at Kimbolton, my Lord Chamberlain’s house, a day’s journey from Oxford;
and from thence at Audley End, another day’s journey, and thence hither,
but to Mr. Waller’s,[304] which I hope is uninfected ... and thence to
Parkhall,[305] which is also clear for aught I know, and thence hither is
your nearest way, and Crip would send a man to guide you....”
And she leaves her strongest argument for the postscript—
“_If you make not haste, the Court will overtake you at Oxford._”
Robert Boyle was no courtier. He did run away from Oxford, but not,
it seems, to Leeze. He disappeared almost as effectively as Milton
disappeared at the Restoration. For a time his friends did not know
his retreat, and sent letters to him haphazard “by way of London.” In
November the Plague was decreasing, and Lady Ranelagh could report that
at Leeze they were still all well—“Crip only excepted, who had lately
a roaring fit of the gout, but a very short one, in respect of those
he used to have at this time of year, which he attributes much to his
chewing of scurvy-grass.” Lady Ranelagh herself was reading all her
brother’s books over again to comfort herself for his absence, and was
lending them, one after the other, to the “few studious persons” whom
she met at Leeze. And her fingers were itching to open a sealed roll of
papers belonging to him, labelled “About Religious Matters.”
It was January 22 before the Royal Society met again. “The first
meeting of Gresham College since the Plague,” says Pepys, who had, with
exceptional bravery, remained in London through it all. “Dr. Goddard did
fill us with talk, in defence of his and his fellow-physicians going out
of town in the plague-time, saying that their particular patients were
most all gone out of town, and they left at liberty, and a great deal
more, etc. But what, among other fine discourse pleased me most, was
Sir G. Ent[306] about Respiration; that it is not to this day known, or
concluded on among physicians, nor to be done, either, how the action is
managed by nature, or for what use it is.”
April came; and the brilliant, wanton Court was back in London; and
Robert Boyle had come, not into London itself, but to a lodging found for
him in the village of Newington, on the Surrey Side. Oldenburg had walked
out to Newington one day in March, before Boyle arrived, and inspected
the house and its surroundings—
“It seems to be very convenient for you,” he wrote to Boyle, “there
being a large orchard, a walk for solitary meditations, a dry ground
round about, and in all appearance a good air”; advantages which were
accompanied by “a civil Landlord and fair Landlady.”[307]
The immediate object of Boyle’s visit to London was probably to
be present at some of the performances of Valentine Greatrakes,
the “Stroaker,” who was making a great sensation in London by his
semi-miraculous cures. Greatrakes had originally been a lieutenant in
Lord Broghill’s regiment in Munster, and had more recently—having felt
an “impulse”—practised his cures in county Cork. He had come to England
by Lord Broghill’s advice, and had made his _début_ in an attempt to
cure Lady Conway’s violent headaches. In this he failed; but he was more
successful with other patients, and the King sent for him to Whitehall,
and he was patronised by Prince Rupert. Of course, the Faculty was
divided, and the Royal Society cautious. Mr. Stubbe, a worthy doctor of
Stratford-on-Avon, went so far as to publish in Oxford a tract, “The
Miraculous Conformist”, addressed, without permission, to Mr. Boyle—to
which, very naturally, Mr. Boyle took exception. It was followed by a
London-published tract, “Wonders no Miracles”; and the controversy still
waged about the “Stroaker” when Boyle went to London and was present at
some of his “stupendous performances.” Mr. Boyle made careful notes, and
submitted to Mr. Greatrakes a series of written questions—which do not
seem to have been answered. But in the end, Robert Boyle was one of those
who, having seen the “Stroaker” at work, gave him a testimonial before
he left London. The Greatrakes episode stands on the threshold of a whole
realm of medical treatment undreamed of in 1666.
Meantime, Boyle’s treatise, _Hydrostatical Paradoxes_, that had been
slowly printing for several months, appeared early in that year. This
was shortly followed by his _Origin of Forms_; and a good many of his
philosophical transactions also belong to this year. Later in the summer,
when the London season was over, he was living in his Chelsea lodging;
but he had been ill again; and Lady Ranelagh was back in her house in
Pall Mall.
Was Boyle in London from the second of September to the fifth? Did
he watch, as it grew dark on the eve of Cromwell’s “lucky day”, from
Chelsea, or from Pall Mall, that arc of fire over the poor blazing
City—so lately pestilence-stricken that its burial-grounds were choked
with lime, its bells still tolling, and almost every house was in
mourning? Did he see the Fire of London? Probably Boyle _was_ in London,
for on September 10, Oldenburg was writing as if Boyle had just left
town, and he says nothing in his letter to Boyle of the Fire itself,
but begins, as it were, when the Fire left off. Boyle had called at
Oldenburg’s house to say good-bye, and Oldenburg was much disappointed
that he had been out, but was glad that Boyle had been well enough to
make the journey: “I cannot omit acquainting you,” he goes on, “that
never a calamity—and such a one—was borne so well as this is. It is
incredible how little the sufferers, though great ones, do complain
of their losses. I was yesterday in many meetings of the principal
citizens whose houses are laid in ashes, who, instead of complaining,
discoursed almost of nothing but of a Survey of London, and a design for
rebuilding....”[308]
Two days later, Lady Ranelagh also wrote to Boyle; and again it is
noticeable that she gives him no account of the Fire itself. She reports
her own household to be as safe as it was when he left them—
“I have since taken to myself the mortification of seeing the desolations
that God, in his just and dreadful judgment, has made in the poor City,
which is thereby now turned indeed into a ruinous heap, and gave me
the most amazing spectacle that ever I beheld in my progress about and
into this ruin. I dispensed your Charity amongst some poor families and
persons that I found yet in the fields unhoused....”
And the end of her letter is equally characteristic: “Gresham College is
now Guildhall, and the Exchange, and all. If the philosophers and the
citizens become one corporation henceforward, it may be hoped our affairs
may be better managed than they have been, unless the citizens should
prove the prevailing party, which, as the worst, it is most like to do in
this world, according to the small observation of your K. R.”[309]
CHAPTER XVI
A NEW LONDON
“In the meane time the King and Parliament are infinitely
zealous for the rebuilding of our ruines; and I believe it
will universally be the employment of the next spring. They
are now busied with adjusting the claims of each proprietor,
that so they may dispose things for the building after the
noblest model: Everybody brings in his idea, amongst the rest
I presented his Majestie my own Conceptions, with a Discourse
annex’d. It was the second that was seene within 2 Dayes after
the Conflagration: but Dr. Wren had got the start of me.”—JOHN
EVELYN to _Sir Samuel Tuke_, September 27, 1666.
Christopher Wren had not let the ashes cool under his feet. Evelyn
was picking his way among the debris—“the ground ... so hot that it
even burnt the soles of my shoes”—and mourning over the ninety burnt
City Churches, and the ruins of St. Paul’s, “one of the most antient
pieces of piety in the Christian World.” He was thinking of the “poore
Bookesellers,” who, having trusted all their “noble impressions” to the
insides of the Churches, had “ben indeede ill-treated by Vulcan.” Two
hundred thousand pounds’ worth of books had been burnt: “an extraordinary
detriment,” says Evelyn, “to the whole Republiq of Learning.”[310] Pepys,
after the grimy fatigues of the past few days, had been “trimmed,” and
had gone to Church, in his Sunday best, and listened to a bad, poor
sermon by the Dean of Rochester: “nor eloquent, in saying at this time
that the City is reduced from a large folio to a decimo-tertio”:—the
Dean, too, must have been among the booksellers. Lady Ranelagh was
dispensing Robert Boyle’s charity among the houseless Londoners huddled
in the fields; and Henry Oldenburg was writing to Robert Boyle in Oxford.
“The Stationers of Paul’s,” he wrote, “had suffered greatly.” All their
books, carried by them into St. Faith’s Church, under St. Paul’s, had
been burnt; and amongst them were the “hitherto printed Transactions.”
“Dr. Wren,” he continued, “has, since my last, drawn a model for a New
City, and presented it to the King, who produced it himself before the
Council, and manifested much approbation of it. I was yesterday morning
with the Doctor, and saw the model, which methinks does so well provide
for security, conveniency, and beauty, that I can see nothing wanting
as to those three main articles; but whether it has consulted with the
populousness of a great City, and whether reason of state would have that
consulted with, is a query to me. I then told the Doctor that, if I had
had an opportunity to speak with him sooner, I should have suggested to
him that such a model, contrived by him and received and approved by the
Royal Society or a Committee thereof, before it had come to the view of
his Majesty, would have given Our Society a name, and made it popular,
and availed not a little to silence those who ask continually, what have
they done?”
Wren explained to Oldenburg that he had been obliged to act quickly,
“before other designs came in.” And Oldenburg, in his letter to Boyle,
took comfort in remembering that, after all, “it was a Member that had
done it,” and that, when Wren’s design was accepted—as it undoubtedly
would be—all the world would know that the model of a New London was the
work of a Member of the Royal Society.[311]
Robert Boyle, in his Oxford arm-chair, with his books and instruments
about him, must have listened sadly to such war news, and news of Court
and Parliament, as found its way to him in letters out of an anxious and
distracted London. All the talk of late had been of the Navy muddle; the
huge sums of money required; the poverty of the Exchequer; the mutinous
and “pressed” men, and the “natural expression of passion” of the women
left behind, who had “looked after the ships as far as they could see
them by moonlight”: a most sad state, truly, of public affairs. Distrust
and anger filled the hearts of men and women, and strange rumours were
afloat. During the summer, before the fire broke out, the war with the
Dutch had been the one thing thought of and talked about. In June, Monk,
Duke of Albemarle, and the Dutch de Ruyter had engaged in a fight “the
longest and most stubborn that the seas have ever seen.”[312] The English
fleet had been ruined, but the English were not conquered, and in July
the two fleets, refitted, had met again. This time it was the Dutch fleet
that was destroyed and the Dutch who refused to be conquered. And just
before the Fire of London broke out in Pudding Lane the French fleet had
joined the Dutch fleet, and the English, with a weakened navy and an
exhausted exchequer, were at a standstill. After the fire, when London
was in ruins from the Tower to the Temple, strange rumours ran from mouth
to mouth. There was “some kind of plot in this”; it was “a proper time
for discontents”; it was the French who did it; it was the Dutch who did
it; it was the Papists who did it; it was the old Republicans—a dire
revenge on the eve of Cromwell’s Lucky Day. The prophecies in _Booker’s
Almanack_ for the year were the topics of conversation at dinner-tables;
and Lady Carteret told Pepys that pieces of charred paper had been blown
by the wind as far as Cranborne,[313] and that she herself had picked up,
or been given, a little bit of paper on which the words were printed:
“_Time is, it is done._”
In the spring of 1667, a Peace Congress was sitting at Breda, but an
armistice had been refused; and then it was that de Witt had seized his
moment and that the Dutch fleet sailed for the mouth of the Thames. The
English were unready, their seamen mutinous, their coffers empty, their
big ships laid up, for economy’s sake, in dock. Everybody knows the
panic and confusion that followed—the impotent rage of a people that
felt itself betrayed: Ruyter and de Witt were at hand, coming up our own
beloved Thames with “a fine and orderly fleet of sixty sail.” And Monk,
the Duke of Albemarle, in his shirt-sleeves, at Gravesend, was doing his
best to “choke the channel.”
But the Dutch were not intending to land. After they had burnt the
English ships in the river, they were content to sail away again,
carrying with them, as an insolent trophy, the half-burnt hull of the
ship that had once been the _Naseby_, and was now the _Royal Charles_.
The rage of the Londoners knew no bounds. England was undone;—with a
debauched and lazy Prince and a licentious court; “no council, no money,
no reputation at home or abroad.”[314] The very men who had stood in the
Strand and blessed God at the Restoration now wished Cromwell back again:
“Everybody nowadays,” says Pepys, “reflect upon Oliver and commend him,
what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour Princes fear him.”
Towards the end of 1666 Lady Ranelagh was expecting her brother from
Oxford to make her a prolonged visit in the house in Pall Mall. And where
Robert Boyle was, there must some kind of chemical laboratory be also.
“I have ordered Thomas,” she wrote, “to look out for charcoal; and should
gladly receive your orders to put my back house in posture to be employed
by you, against your coming, that you may lose no time after.”[315]
The Royal Society was again holding its meetings;—still, at first,
under difficulties, in Gresham College, which was now the Exchequer.
Hooke and Croone were both enthusiastic over the “pretty experiments”
of transfusion of blood: “one dog filled with another dog’s blood,” is
Pepys’s way of expressing it. Croone told Pepys that the performances at
Gresham College had given occasion for “many pretty wishes, as of the
blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such-like.” The City
was still in a melancholy condition; it was difficult and dangerous to
walk about the ruins, with a link, after dark; but the “Greate Streetes”
were now being “marked out with piles, drove into the ground”; and people
were wondering why so many of the new Churches were to be built “in a
cluster about Cornhill.” In January 1667, Gresham College being occupied
by the Exchequer, Mr. Henry Howard, one of the Society’s most generous
members, put rooms in Arundel House in the Strand at the disposal of the
Royal Society—
“To the Royal Society,” says Evelyn, “which since the sad conflagration
were invited by Mr. Howard to sit at Arundel House in the Strand, who
at my instigation likewise bestow’d on the Society that noble library
which his grandfather especially and his ancestors had collected.
This gentleman had so little inclination to bookes, that it was the
preservation of them from imbezzlement.”[316]
In May, the meetings of the Society were in full swing: May 30,
especially, must have been a gala occasion—
“To London,” says Evelyn, “to wait on the Dutchess of Newcastle (who was
a mighty pretender to learning, poetrie and philosophie, and had in both
publish’d divers bookes) to the Royal Society, whither she came in greate
pomp, and being receiv’d by our Lord President at the Dore of our meeting
roome, the mace, etc., carried before him, had several experiments shewed
to her. I conducted her Grace to her coach, and return’d home.”
Pepys gives a better account: The Duchess had invited herself; and there
had been “much debate, pro and con, it seems many being against it, and
we do believe the town will be full of ballads of it.” In the end,
gallantry prevailed among the Philosophers; and when Pepys arrived at
Arundel House on foot, after his noonday dinner—it was a very hot and
dusty day—he found “very much company” in decorous expectation of her
Grace. She came, with her attendant women—among them the “Ferabosco,” of
whose beauty there had been so much talk among the gallants. The Duchess
herself, in her “antick” dress, disappointed Pepys: “nor did I hear her
say anything that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration,
all admiration.”
The Philosophers showed her all their best experiments—“of colours,
loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors.” The _chef d’œuvre_ seems to
have been the turning of a piece of roasted mutton into pure blood,
“which was very rare,” says Pepys; and then the Duchess and her suite
were escorted to her coach again, her Grace still crying that she was
“full of admiration.”
That was in May. Before the end of June poor Henry Oldenburg was suddenly
clapped into the Tower. The news must have fallen like a thunderbolt at
the next Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Society. Their Secretary was
in jail.
“I was told yesterday,” wrote Pepys, on June 25th, “that Mr. Oldenburg,
our Secretary at Gresham College, is put into the Tower, for writing
news to a virtuoso in France, with whom he constantly corresponds on
philosophical matters: which makes it very unsafe at this time to write,
or almost to do anything.”[317]
Oldenburg was still in custody on August 8 when Evelyn called at the
Tower.
“Visited Mr. Oldenburg, now close prisoner in the Tower, being suspected
of writing intelligence. I had an order from Lord Arlington, Secretary of
State, which caus’d me to be admitted. This Gentleman was Secretary to
our Society, and I am confident will prove an innocent person.”
And indeed Oldenburg was soon to be set free. On September 3 he was once
more in his own home and writing to Robert Boyle at Oxford—
“I was so stifled by the prison air,” says Oldenburg, “that as soon as
I had my enlargement from the _Tower_ I widened it, and took it from
_London_ into the Country, to fan myself for some days in the good air of
_Craford_ in _Kent_. Being now returned, and having recovered my stomach,
which I had in a manner quite lost, I intend, if God will, to fall to my
old trade,[318] if I have any support to follow it.”
Once again, evidently, the Boyle family had done their best for a Puritan
friend in trouble. “I have learnt during this Commitment,” says Oldenburg
to Boyle, “to know my real friends. God Almighty bless them, and enable
me to convince them all of my gratitude. Sir, I acknowledge and beg
pardon for the importunities I gave you at the beginning; assuring you
that you cannot lay any commands on me that I shall not cheerfully obey
to the best of my power.”
But the news of Oldenburg’s release—though Boyle must have been glad to
hear of it—had come at an anxious time. A few days before Boyle received
Oldenburg’s letter the Lord Chancellor Clarendon had been required to
resign the Seals. The Boyle family must have known something of what was
happening: the Burlingtons and the Clarendons were next-door neighbours
in the two great palaces in Piccadilly, and their children were
married,—“Lory Hide” to Henrietta Boyle.
“Dear Broghill”—now my Lord Orrery—had been in England by the King’s
wish for some little time, having left Munster under the care of a
Vice-President. “Lord Orrery,” says his chaplain, Dr. Morrice, quaintly,
“saw thoroughly into the tempers of people and the consequences of
things.” And he had foreseen Clarendon’s fall, and had already warned
Clarendon in vain. In August, Lady Clarendon had died: “the mother of
all his children and the companion in all his banishment, and who had
made all his former calamities less grievous by her company and courage.”
Lady Clarendon had been buried in Westminster Abbey; and alone, in his
new palace, among his pictures and books, the widower had received his
Majesty’s visit of condolence. And then, only a few days later, had come
the King’s message, carried by the Chancellor’s son-in-law the Duke of
York. It was desirable “on various grounds, but especially for his own
safety,” that Clarendon should resign the Seals.
During the next day or two the Duke of York, the Duchess—Clarendon’s
daughter—and Archbishop Sheldon, and various other people, interceded for
Clarendon with the King. And on the morning of August 26 Clarendon was
sent for to Whitehall. The audience lasted two hours, in the King’s own
chamber, and then the Chancellor was dismissed and departed, “looking
sad,” through the private garden of Whitehall, which was “full of people”
waiting to see him come out. Lady Castlemaine, in her smock, looked down
upon the garden from her aviary window, laughing with the gallants below,
and “blessing herself at the old man’s going.”
Next day Evelyn called on the Chancellor at his house in Piccadilly. “I
found him,” says Evelyn, “in his bedchamber, very sad.” The tide had
turned against him: the Parliament had accused him, and he had enemies
at Court; “especialy the buffoones and ladies of pleasure, because he
thwarted some of them and stood in their way.”
All this is old reading: the fall of Clarendon is a chapter of British
history. But it is not quite so well known that Lord Orrery, “dear
Broghill,” the uncle of “Lory Hide’s” wife, was asked to take the seals
that Clarendon had been forced to give up. According to Morrice, the
Duchess of York appealed to Lord Orrery to take the seals and heal the
breach between the King and the Duke, whose suspected papacy was “against
him.” And then the Duke tried to persuade Lord Orrery; and lastly the
King himself offered him the Chancellorship. But Broghill’s had always
been a “well-armed head”; and now that he was Lord Orrery he knew his
King—and he knew his gout; and he made his gout serve as an excuse for
declining the honour offered him by his King. “I am a decrepit man,” he
said to the Duchess of York; but he took a turn or two in his coach,
in the park, planning what could be done to make the King and the Duke
agree, and thinking what a pity it was that Clarendon had been so
imperious—even towards the King himself.
So far Morrice. Lord Orrery went back to Ireland, and Sir Orlando
Bridgeman was the new Chancellor: “the man of the whole nation that is
best spoken of, and will please most people,” says the fickle Pepys, who
had himself, such a little while before, been “mad in love with my Lord
Chancellor.”
In October Lord Orrery’s new play, _The Black Prince_, was produced at
the King’s Theatre. The house was “infinite full,” the King and Duke
there, and not a seat to be got by Mr. Pepys in the pit, so that he was
obliged to pay four shillings for a seat in the upper boxes, “the first
time ever I sat in a box in my life.” In November and December both
Houses were “very busy about my Lord Chancellor’s impeachment,” and Lory
Hide was going about saying that if he thought his father had done only
one of the things that were being said against him, he, Lory Hide, would
be “the first that should call for judgment against him”, which Mr.
Waller, the poet, “did say was spoke like the old Roman—like Brutus—for
its greatness and worthiness.”
On December 3, Henry Oldenburg, back at his work as Secretary of the
Royal Society, was writing to Boyle of the “grand affair,” the wrangle of
Lords and Commons over the terms of Clarendon’s impeachment. And the same
letter announced that the Royal Society had “greatly applauded” Boyle’s
recently communicated _Experiments of Light_; and that at the Anniversary
Meeting of the Society, on St. Andrew’s Day, Boyle had been elected one
of the new Council—“a very numerous meeting ... never so great a one
before.” Boyle was then still in Oxford; but Evelyn, the Chancellor’s
old friend, had been calling again at the great house in Piccadilly: “To
visit the late Lord Chancellor. I found him in his garden at his new
built Palace, sitting in his gowt wheele-chayre, and seeing the gates
setting up towards the North and the fields. He look’d and spoke very
disconsolately ... next morning I heard he was gon....”
Clarendon, by the King’s orders, had hurriedly escaped to France, to
be followed into exile by an Act of Parliament banishing him for life.
Clarendon was gone; and the “Cabal” administration had begun.[319]
If the year 1667 ended anxiously for the Boyle family, the year 1668
was to prove more anxious still. Lord Orrery had returned to Ireland to
take up his presidency of Munster, and was living in great splendour at
Charleville; but he and the Lord Lieutenant, Ormonde, disagreed; and in
the autumn of 1668 Lord Orrery had resigned the presidency and was back
in England. He had “been advised,” says Morrice, “that his credit at
Court had begun to decline,” and that it would be wise for him to be on
the spot.
He was very much on the spot when Pepys met him, in October, at Lord
Arlington’s house. In spite of his gout, the urbanity of the Boyle family
had not forsaken him. He “took notice” of Pepys, and began a “discourse
of hangings, and of the improvement of shipping”; and Pepys presently
discovered that Lord Orrery was paying “a mighty compliment” to his
abilities and ingenuity, “which I am mighty proud of, and he do speak
most excellently.”
But later in November came a rude awakening. It was now my Lord Orrery’s
turn to be impeached in the House of Commons, “for raising of moneys by
his own authority upon his Majesty’s subjects.”
When the summons came, Lord Orrery was laid up with a severe attack
of gout; and when he was well enough, a few days later, to answer the
summons in person, he could scarcely manage to get up the steps from
Westminster Hall to the Court of Request. A friend, passing by, remarked
that my Lord of Orrery walked with difficulty and pain. “Yes, sir,” said
Orrery, “my feet are weak; but if my heels will serve to carry me up, I
promise you my head shall bring me safe down again.”
And it did. He made an able defence—sitting, because of his gout; and
at the psychological moment, so the story runs, the King put an end to
the proceedings by proroguing both Houses.[320] Impeachments might be
as thick as blackberries; Lord Orrery might discourse cheerfully of
“hangings” at a dinner party at Lord Arlington’s house; but, after all,
it was only five-and-twenty years since the old Earl of Cork had died in
harness with all his sons in the field. It would have been inconvenient
to overlook such services and such sacrifices as the great Boyle family
in Ireland had rendered to their Kings.
No further steps were to be taken against Lord Orrery. “I am glad the
House dismissed that foolish impeachment against my Lord Orrery,” wrote
Mr. Stubbe, of Warwick, to Robert Boyle. Morrice says that, while the
affair was in progress, Lady Pegg had been sent by her husband to Ireland
“to secure the estates.” She had performed her mission “with great
dexterity and expedition,” so that “if he had been impeached, his family
would have been safe.” As it was, Lord Orrery returned to Ireland and
Lady Pegg—to occupy himself with repairing his last great home of Castle
Martyr, and to write his _Art of War_. And in December 1668 another new
play—_Tryphon_—a tragedy taken from the First Book of Maccabees, was
produced with great success at the Duke’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Pepys,
on this occasion, “put a bit of meat in their mouths” and hurried off,
to find the theatre crowded, and to sit out the performance in the
eighteenpenny seats above-stairs—“mighty hot.”
So ended 1668. During the last half of the year, at any rate, Robert
Boyle had been away from Oxford and in the family circle. It is probable
that he was not far from “dear Broghill” in his hour of trial. After the
family anxiety on this brother’s account had quieted down, there came
news from Ireland that Lord Ranelagh was dead. His death can have brought
little outward change to the house in the Mall. Dick Jones—whose life
at Court with Grammont and the rest of the gallants must have caused
Lady Ranelagh many a heartache, had been for some time employed in Irish
politics and in Ireland. Ormonde had brought about a reconciliation
between Lord Ranelagh and his son; and the young Pyrophilus had been
member for the county of Roscommon in the Irish Parliament before his
father’s death raised him to the Upper House. It is suggestive that
Lord Ranelagh’s nuncupative Will left the two unmarried daughters,
Elizabeth and Frances, a sum of money, subject to their marrying with
the consent of the eldest sister, Lady Mount-Alexander. It is a question
whether “the girls” received any money as a result of these nuncupative
paternal intentions. Elizabeth, who became Mrs. Melster, must have
been the heroine of a humble love-story, for her husband is described
in the old peerages as a _valet de pé_. This did not mean exactly in
those times what it means to-day, nor was it exactly what might have
been expected for a granddaughter of the Great Earl of Cork. And yet,
it must be remembered that the old Elizabethan Peer had always about
him a little _entourage_ of cousin-commoners, as staunch as they were
unobtrusive,—Naylors of Gray’s Inn and Croones of Cheapside.
Frances, the delicate daughter—the baby born prematurely at the manor
of Stalbridge—does not seem to have married at all. Lady Ranelagh had
nursed “my poor Franck” through many illnesses—smallpox, of course, among
them. She suffered from headaches; and nothing did them so much good
as the little packets of tea—a costly luxury in those days—that Lady
Ranelagh was able to procure for her by the kindness of the Oxford uncle.
Elizabeth and Frances were both probably still “the girls,” and living
with their mother, when Robert Boyle, in 1669, left Oxford for good.
Their uncle Robyn, the “deare Squire”—was long ago turned philosopher;
something of a valetudinary; a virtuoso of an European fame. Philosophers
of all nations flocked to see Mr. Boyle’s experiments. The Royal
Society—all intellectual London—was waiting for his coming.
With his books and instruments and standish—but, alas! no longer his bows
and arrows—he once more, as in the old-young days of 1644, took up his
residence with Lady Ranelagh in the house in Pall Mall.
CHAPTER XVII
THE HOUSE IN PALL MALL
“... Only this methinks I am sure of, that it is a brave thing
to be one of those, that shall lift up their heads with joy
in expectation of a present redemption, when all these ruins
and confusions shall be upon the Earth; and such brave men and
women are only true Christians. Therefore, my dear brother, let
us endeavour for that dignity, though in maintaining it we take
courses, that have the contempt of the world heaped upon them;
for to be contemned by the contemptible is glorious in the
opinion of your K. R.”—LADY RANELAGH to ROBERT BOYLE, September
14 (1653?).
“The Book of Nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry
rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but
must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty and
symmetry, little by little, as it gradually comes to be more
and more unfolded or displayed.”—ROBERT BOYLE, Second Part of
the _Christian Virtuoso_, Aphorism xxi.
The intellectual atmosphere of Oxford, when Robert Boyle said good-bye to
it, was not the same “ayre” that he had weighed so pleasantly in 1659.
Indeed, he must have been rather glad to be out of it before the great
occasion of the opening of the Sheldonian at the _Encænia_ of 1669.
Evelyn, who was present, was scandalised, not only by the University
Orator’s “malicious and indecent reflections on the Royal Society as
undermining of the University,” but by the performance of the University
Buffoone, “which, unless it be suppressed,” he says, “it will be of ill
consequences, as I afterwards plainly expressed my sense of it both to
the Vice-Chancellor[321] and severall heads of houses, who were perfectly
ashamed of it and resolved to take care of it in future.” The “old
facetious way” had given place to ribald and libellous attacks: “In my
life,” says Evelyn, “I was never witnesse of so shamefull entertainment.”
Boyle’s old friend, Dr. Wallis, Professor of Mathematics, was equally
distressed. In fact, he wrote about it to Mr. Boyle in London. Wallis
had been one of those who objected to the fulsome wording of the
proposed letter of thanks from the University to the Archbishop—a letter
acknowledging Sheldon as their “Creator and Redeemer”: _non tantus
condere, hoc est creare, sed etiam redimere_.[322] And he was as angry
with the University Orator’s attack on “Cromwell, fanatics, the Royal
Society and the New Philosophy,” as he was at the abominable scurrilities
of the University Buffoone. Real stage-plays, too, imported from the
Duke’s House, had been acted in the Oxford Town Hall—and were less
objectionable than what had gone on in the Sheldonian.
But even Wallis seems to have been infected by the summer madness of
that _Encænia_ of 1669. He had been entertaining some of the guests at
his own house; Sir James Langham and his Lady, and other “persons of
quality”; and in an after-dinner chat Sir James had been expatiating on
the qualities of “an excellent lady,” Lady Mary Hastings, sister to the
Earl of Huntingdon—a lady for whom Sir James had a very great esteem.
So highly, indeed, did he think of “her temper, her parts, her worth,
her virtue, her piety and everything else,” that he would have been
quite willing to marry her himself except that she was his deceased
wife’s sister, and that he was already married again. But Sir James
thought—and Wallis concurred with him—that Lady Mary would make “not only
an excellent wife, but an excellent wife for Esquire Boyle.” And Wallis
wrote then and there to Boyle to offer to be “the happy instrument of
making two so excellent persons happy in each other.”
Wallis may in his youth have studied cryptology; but in his middle age
he did not understand Robert Boyle. Lady Mary Hastings probably never
knew of the future that had been so neatly mapped out for her in that
after-dinner chat. She married Sir William Joliffe, of Caverswell Castle,
in Staffordshire. The Manor of Stalbridge stood empty; and Mr. Boyle went
on living in Pall Mall.
But if Oxford was changed of late years, so also was Pall Mall—very much
changed indeed since a certain dark evening of 1649, when Cromwell’s
“sightly lieutenant,” carrying the message to Broghill, rode up to Lady
Ranelagh’s door. One of the first things that Charles II had done was to
make a new Mall in St. James’s Park, and to improve the Park itself—“now
every day more and more pleasant by the new works upon it,” wrote Pepys
in January 1662. A river was made through the Park; and there on frosty
winter days Pepys stood to watch the gay groups “sliding with their
skeates—which is a very pretty art.” The Duke of York was an accomplished
skater, and the King was a great hand at the game of Mall.
“Here a well-polished Mall gives us the joy
To see our Prince his matchless force employ.
No sooner had he touch’d the flying ball
But ’tis already more than half the Mall.”[323]
When Pepys stopped to have a talk with the keeper of the Mall—who was
“sweeping of it” at the moment—he examined with interest its earthen
flooring, spread with powdered cockle-shells. Evelyn, on the other hand,
cared more about the birds and beasts that inhabited the Park—the “deare
of severall countries,” the guinea-fowl and Arabian sheep; the pelican,
and the melancholy waterfowl brought by the Russian Ambassador from
Astracan; the Solan geese, and the pet crane with a real wooden leg—“made
by a soldier.” Waller has described St. James’s Park “as lately improved
by his Majesty”—
“Methinks I see the love that shall be made,
The lovers walking in that amorous shade;
The Gallants dancing by the riverside—
They bathe in summer and in winter slide.
Methinks I hear the music in the boats,
And the loud echo which returns the notes.
...
The ladies angling in the crystal lake
Feast on the waters with the prey they take;
At once victorious with their lines and eyes
They make the fishes and the men their prize.”
Mr. Waller saw everything _couleur de rose_. “I know his calling as a
Poet,” wrote Lady Ranelagh once to Robert Boyle, when Waller had been
paying her one of his elaborate compliments, “gives him license to say
as great things as he can without intending that they should signify
anything more than that he said them.”[324] And it is possible some
of the older inhabitants of Pall Mall did not look so kindly on the
“improvements” in St. James’s Park.
The old Mall, and the old game that was played there, dated back to James
I. There was a “Pell Mell Close” planted with apple-trees that gave the
name to Apple-Tree Yard, St. James’s Square. The houses had been built on
both sides of the Old Mall;—“The Pall Mall,” as it was called, or “Pall
Mall Walk,” or “The Pavement.” Its double row of seventy elm trees—140
trees in all—running its length, from the Haymarket to St. James’s, may
well have been the “living gallery of aged trees,” in Waller’s poem of
1661. Lady Ranelagh’s house was one of those on the south side, at the
west end, of the Mall; houses advertised as “on the Park side, with
Gardens or Mounts adjoining to the Royal Gardens.” There were various
interesting inhabitants of the Mall about the time that Boyle went to
live there with Lady Ranelagh. Dr. Sydenham, the fashionable London
physician, had been living there since 1658—an old friend of theirs:
one of the great Dorsetshire Puritan family of Sydenhams, of whom
the doctor’s brother, the Parliamentarian Colonel Sydenham, was the
chief. Mrs. Knight the singer, and Dr. Isaac Barrow the divine, and the
notorious Countess of Southesk who figures in the Memoirs of Grammont,
were all living in the Mall. There were taverns, too, and shops, with
signboards: “The King’s Head,” and “The Two Golden Balls.” And Pall Mall
was Clubland, even then: “Wood’s at the Pell Mell, our old house for
clubbing,” wrote Pepys in 1660. But in 1670, after Boyle went to live
there, it was still a rural, leafy little suburb of fashionable London,
between Whitehall and St. James’s Palace, nestled among the old trees,
under the very shadow of Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace; the
Painted Chamber, and the Star Chamber, and St. Stephen’s Chapel—“_That
house where all our ills were shaped_,” as Waller called it,—after the
Restoration. So rural was the Old Mall, that Dr. Sydenham used to sit
smoking his pipe at his open window looking on to the Pavement, with a
silver tankard of ale on the window-sill; and when once a thief ran off
with the doctor’s tankard, thief and tankard alike were lost “in the
bushes of Bond Street.”[325]
In 1669, Nell Gwynne was living on the north side, and at the east end,
of the Mall, next door to Lady Mary Howard; but in 1671, she crossed
over to a house on the Park side of Pall Mall, the leasehold of which
had been given her by Charles II; and there, from this time till her
death in 1687, “Maddam Elinor Gwyn” was living, only two doors off from
Lady Ranelagh and Robert Boyle. Those strips of back gardens, with
“raised mounts” in them looking over to the Royal Gardens, were very near
together. Did Boyle, whose laboratory was at the back of Lady Ranelagh’s
house, see Mrs. Nellie on her mount, talking to the King who stood
looking up at her from the green walk below? Evelyn was in attendance
that day. “I both saw and heard,” wrote Evelyn afterwards in his diary,
“a very familiar discourse between [the King] and Mrs. Nellie, as they
cal’d an impudent comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace
at the top of the wall, and [the King] standing on yᵉ greene walke under
it....”[326]
But that was in May 1671; and by that time Robert Boyle had been very
ill for eleven months, and was only beginning to recover. The year
1669, and part of 1670, had been very busy. Besides his contributions
to the Royal Society’s _Transactions_, he had published further work
on the _Spring and Weight of the Air_, and a second edition of his
_Physiological Essays_. Du Moulin’s translation of the _Devil of Mascon_,
with Boyle’s introduction, had appeared; and Boyle was using all his
influence, personal and literary, to heal the feud between the Royal
Society and the Universities, in which Sprat and Glanville, Stubbe,
Crosse, and others, were taking sides. And in 1670 there appeared
Boyle’s _Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things_, better known by
the delightful title of “Cosmical Suspicions.” Boyle was at this time
at the height of his scientific and literary popularity: “Mr. Boiles
Styll” meant very much to the intellectual London of that day. It had
its disciples, and it had its critics. Evelyn has spoken of “those
incumbrances” in it “which now and then render the way a little tedious”;
and there were people who thought that in his literary style Mr. Boyle
was not quite so happy as in his experiments.[327]
And even in these experiments, one pair of eyes, at least, was fixed
upon Robert Boyle; eyes that saw as far as, and perhaps a little further
than, even Boyle’s. Isaac Newton—the boy who had jumped against the
wind in that terrific storm that raged over England when Cromwell lay
dying—was only twenty-nine in 1671; but he was already professor of
mathematics at Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. It was six
years since he had noticed the traditional apple fall to earth in his
mother’s orchard in Lincolnshire. He himself had been tempted to seek
after the philosopher’s stone; and when in 1676 Isaac Newton read in the
_Transactions_ of Boyle’s “uncommon experiment about the incalescence
of gold and mercury,” it was in the finest spirit, as one of Boyle’s
sincerest “honourers,” that Newton wrote to Oldenburg, the secretary.
He felt that “the fingers of many will itch to have the knowledge of
the preparation of such a mercury; and for that end some may not be
wanting to move for the publishing of it, by urging the good it may
do in the world. But, in my simple judgment, the noble author, since
he has thought fit to reveal himself so far, does prudently in being
reserved in the rest.” Newton gave his reasons for doubting this theory
of the transmutation of metals: he foreshadowed the “immense damage to
the world” that might come from proceeding further with it. “I question
not,” he says of Boyle’s experiments, “but that the great wisdom of the
noble author will _sway him to silence_ till he shall be resolved of what
consequence they may be.” It was because Boyle himself seemed “desirous
of the sense of others in this point” that Newton had “been so free as to
shoot my bolt.”
Isaac Newton’s “bolt” took effect, though it must have cost Boyle
something to give up that little bit of research; for he had been, so to
speak, rolling a little ball of quicksilver and gold-dust in the palm
of his hand ever since the year 1652, when he was only five-and-twenty;
pressing it a little with the fingers of the other hand, till it grew
“sensibly and considerably hot,” and timing the “incalescence” by a
minute clock. He was to hover about the subject for a time, but in the
end, he was to follow Newton’s advice. If these two men could be present
at a meeting of the Royal Society in Burlington House to-day! Their
two portraits are on its walls. Their two faces look down on modern
experimental science. Their self-restraint has had its reward.
Already, in 1670, Boyle was at the height of his literary and scientific
popularity, the acknowledged chief of the circle of New Philosophers
in London. He had long been a valetudinary, saving his strength for
his work, and holding himself aloof from uncongenial company. And he
was now beginning to enjoy the ease and dignity of home life, a clever
woman’s ministrations and companionship, and the thousand-and-one little
amenities of a home that his bachelor life in his Oxford lodgings must
have lacked. But in June 1670 he had been taken suddenly ill; “a severe
paralytic distemper”, it was called; and eleven months later, in May
1671, he was writing a pathetic little letter to his old Dorsetshire
friend, John Mallet of Poynington, describing in his own gentle words his
invalid condition. “I have taken so many medicines,” he wrote, “and found
the relief they awarded me so very slow, that it is not easy for me to
tell you what I found most good by. The things which to me seem fittest
to be mentioned on this occasion are that cordial medicines, especially
such as peculiarly befriend the _genus nervosum_, were very frequently
and not unsuccessfully administered ... that the dried flesh of vipers
seemed to be one of the usefullest cordials I took; but then I persevered
in taking it daily for a great while. That I seldom missed a day without
taking the air, at least once, and that even when I was at the weakest,
and was fain to be carried in men’s arms from my chair into the coach.
That the best thing I found to strengthen my feet and legs, and which I
still use, was sack turned to a brine with sea-salt and well rubbed upon
the parts every morning and night with a warm hand....”
Boyle’s own doctor was Edmund King—not then Sir Edmund and the King’s
Physician, but a London practitioner of repute, living in Hatton Gardens;
a year or two younger than Boyle; a member of the Royal Society; a friend
of Willis and Petty, and a great man for dissections and experiments.
It was Edmund King who was so interested in the first transfusion
experiments on human subjects, and who, “with my best microscope,”
noticed the appearance of living organisms in “things left in water.”
And it is to be remembered that in a list of Boyle’s lost manuscripts
there is one with the title “Spontaneous Generation.” It is possible that
he and Dr. King may have been working together with the microscope. The
“viper powder” was one of Dr. King’s prescriptions, though he is said to
have preferred the “volatile salt.” It was not till some years later that
Dr. King gained such celebrity by his prompt action in bleeding Charles
II after his apoplectic seizure. He had a lancet in his pocket; and no
other doctor was at hand.
Boyle recovered from his paralytic distemper, though very slowly. Whether
it was the cordial of viper’s flesh, or the ministration of a warm human
hand, he did regain strength, and was able once more to take up his work
and resume his London life—always afterwards more or less the life of
a studious invalid. “It has plainely astonish’d me,” says Evelyn, “to
have seene him so often recover, when he has not been able to move, or
bring his hand to his mouth: and indeede the contexture of his body,
during the best of his health, appear’d to me so delicate, that I have
frequently compar’d him to a chrystal or Venice glasse which, tho’
wrought never so thin and fine, being carefully set up, would outlive the
harder metals of daily use: And he was with all as clear and candid: not
a blemish or spot to tarnish his reputation.”
The mere number of Boyle’s publications during these years is remarkable,
even though much of the work for them had been done before, and had
only to be arranged for publication. They dealt with the Usefulness of
Experimental Natural Philosophy; the Origin and Virtue of Gems; Fire,
Flame, and Effluviums; the Pressure of Solids and Fluids, and the
Weighing of Water; the Properties of Sea Water, and its Distillation;
the Mechanical Causes of Heat and Cold, Volatility and Precipitation
and Corrosiveness; the Production of Tastes; the Hypothesis of Alkali
and Acidum, and the effects of atmospheric conditions “even on men’s
sickness and health.” And there was always the other _facet_ to Boyle’s
intellectual nature. While he was writing of all these and other things,
while he was wrapped up in Suspicions—about the hidden qualities of
air, celestial magnets and attraction by suction, statical hygroscopes,
laudanum, and air-bladders, and “quicksilver turning hot with gold,”—he
was also deep in meditations of the “Excellence of Theology compared with
Natural Philosophy.” Both had always seemed to him to be the “Objects of
Men’s Study.” He held tenaciously to the “Reconcilableness of Reason and
Religion”; and his theological treatises were to run parallel with his
philosophical transactions.
The later chapters of biography are of necessity a chronicle of losses.
The death of the great admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, at the battle
of Solebay, on May 28, 1672, removed the other splendid father-in-law
of the Burlington family. His funeral, “by water to Westminster, in
solemn pomp,” must have affected the inmates of the house in Pall Mall
as well as the families in the two Piccadilly palaces. “They will not
have me live,” Lord Sandwich had said sadly to Evelyn, before he sailed.
It is very certain that the whole trend of politics at this time—the
crypto-catholic movement, burrowing its way into Protestant England;
the _capuchins_ flitting about between Whitehall and St. James’s; the
alliance with the French against the Dutch, and the prolonged war with
Holland; the plottings and placings of the _Cabal_, and the quarrels and
changes in the royal harem, which had pushed up to the very door of the
house in Pall Mall—must have been utterly distasteful to Robert Boyle and
his passionately Puritan sister.
Poor Charles Rich, my Lord of Warwick, who had been ill for a long time,
died at Leeze in 1673, leaving Mary, a childless great lady, still
surrounded by chaplains, to administer her husband’s property and to see
all the three “sweet young ladies,” her nieces, married to satisfactory
husbands of her own choosing.
A more personal loss to Robert Boyle was the sudden death of Henry
Oldenburg in September 1677. He and another old friend, Dr. Worsley
of the “mountain-bellied conceptions” for the good of mankind, died
almost at the same time. Oldenburg had worked hard for the Royal Society
since he came out of the Tower in the autumn of 1667. He had carried
the Society through the troublesome time that followed the Fire of
London, after the loss of its _Transactions_ and during its sojourn in
Arundel House. He had seen it reinstated in Gresham College, and a great
collation given in its honour by the Mayor and Aldermen of the City of
London. He had been overworked and underpaid, and had added to the small
gains he made out of the Society’s _Transactions_[328] by doing a good
deal of work for Boyle personally, in proof-correcting and in translating
Boyle’s books into Latin. And Boyle had tried to obtain for him the Latin
Secretaryship—the very post that Milton had held—but in this he had
failed. One of the last glimpses of Oldenburg and Boyle together is at
a little scientific supper-party in February 1676, given by Sir Joseph
Williamson, who later became President of the Royal Society when Lord
Brouncker resigned. Boyle was well enough to be at this supper-party;
and Evelyn and Wren and Petty and one or two others were there, and “our
Secretary, Mr. Oldenburg.”[329] Lady Ranelagh was away from home on a
visit when the news of Oldenburg’s death reached her; and, knowing how
much her brother would feel his death, she wrote Boyle one of her most
comfortable letters, and made arrangements to return home at once.[330]
And as Oldenburg had died without making a will, and his wife (his second
wife, daughter of John Durie) died just before or just after him, Robert
Boyle himself took care of their children, left poorly provided for and
without relations in this country. The boy had been named “Rupert,” after
the scientific Prince.
Mary, Countess of Warwick, survived her husband just five years. Her
death at Leeze, in 1678, must have closed a chapter in the life of the
sister and brother in Pall Mall. Lady Ranelagh had been with Mary in
all her hours of trial—and they had been so many—the little, “unrewly”
sister! Lady Ranelagh had been at Stalbridge when the Earl of Cork was so
angry because Mary dismissed Mr. James Hamilton; it was Lady Ranelagh who
had accompanied Charles and Mary to Leeze after their runaway marriage,
and stayed with them there till Mary had found her place in that
patriarchal family. It was Lady Ranelagh who had tended Mary in all her
illnesses, and had taken Mary and Charles under her own roof after their
son’s death. And Robert Boyle, too;—how tenderly romantic Mary had been
when the “deare Squire” took refuge at delicious Leeze in the summer of
1648, and she sat beside him while he wrote his _Seraphick Love_! How she
had wept over the pages as they were handed to her, the ink scarcely dry!
But an even greater loss was to come in Broghill’s, my Lord of Orrery’s,
death in 1679. He had been ill for a year or two, and back and forward
between Ireland and England, in the hands of the physicians; but
otherwise he had been living the life of a great landowner on his Irish
estates at Charleville and at Castle Martyr. His _Art of War_, dedicated
to Charles II, had been published in 1677, and had met with a certain
success. He was to have written a continuation of it, if the first volume
had proved sufficiently popular. But warfare, like other things, has its
fashions; and even warriors grow old: it was nearly forty years since the
“Mortall Sowe” had done such good service on the walls of Lismore.
Lady Pegg was with her husband, his strong friend and helpmate, to the
last. The beautiful bride of Suckling’s wedding-ballad, with the slender
ring-finger and the bee-stung lip, was now surrounded by children, grown
up and married, some of them, and with great homes of their own. But Lady
Pegg was beautiful and comfortable still. “A rose in autumn,” as old Lord
Goring used to say, “is as sweet as a rose in June.” There is no doubt
that Broghill, the soldier-statesman and dramatist—“my dearest Governor,”
as Robert Boyle called him—was the favourite brother, and that Lady
Pegg was the chief of sisters-in-law, “the great support, ornament and
comfort” of her family.
On St. Andrew’s Day 1680 Boyle was elected President of the Royal
Society. The anniversary meeting and the dinner that followed it had
brought a large gathering of the philosophers together. Evelyn was
there, and his diary records the election of “that excellent person and
greate Philosopher Mr. Robert Boyle, who indeede ought to have been the
very first; but neither his infirmities nor his modestie could now any
longer excuse him.” But Evelyn omits to mention that Boyle declined
the presidency. He had an insuperable objection to tests and oaths. He
took Counsel’s opinion in the matter, and he wrote to his old assistant
Hooke,[331] explaining his “great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in
point of oaths”; asking Hooke to convey his thanks to the Society, but
begging them to “proceed to a new election.”
Less and less able now to attend the meetings of the Society, Boyle was
gradually to withdraw also from the meetings of the East India Company,
of which he was a Director, and of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel, of which he was Governor. More and more did he retire into his
quiet home-life in the house in Pall Mall, which had been enlarged to
suit his purposes. There is no mention of him at the famous supper-party
of the Royal Society, at which everything was cooked in Monsieur Papin’s
Digestors—that “philosophical supper” which caused so much mirth and
“exceedingly pleas’d all the company.” He is more likely to have been
present a week or two later to see the Morocco Ambassador subscribe his
name and titles in Arabic, on the occasion of his being admitted honorary
member of the Royal Society.
Boyle lived, indeed, much among his books and manuscripts, and in his
laboratory. With the help of an amanuensis, he carried on a large
correspondence among the new philosophers of the Old World, and the
Christian missionaries in the New. The New Englanders wrote to him as
their fount of charity: “Right Honourable, charitable, indefatiguable,
nursing father.” He had tried to spread the knowledge of the Bible in
the East, in Turkish and Arabic, and in the Malayan tongue; and the
publication of the Irish Bible was one of the great interests of his
later years. While Narcissus Marsh[332] and others did the actual work
of translation and dissemination in Ireland, Robert Boyle in Pall Mall
promoted it “with his influence and purse”; and Boyle’s Irish Bible was
to find its way into Gaelic Scotland also, before Scotland had a Gaelic
Bible of her own.[333]
But Boyle spent his money also in helping individual cases—people whose
lots were less happy than he thought they deserved; poor hard-worked
clergy; the “distress’d refugees of France and Ireland”; and “learned men
who were put to wrestle with necessities.” He did this, very quietly,
for many years—usually by the hands of one or two personal friends in
whose discretion he could trust. Gilbert Burnet, in those latter years,
was one of these friends; and Burnet’s own _History of the Reformation_
would never have been published without Boyle’s assistance. So quietly
did Boyle dispense his charities that sometimes the very men so helped
did not know from whence the help came; but Burnet says that for years
Boyle spent on this form of charity more than £1000 a year, which would
mean more than three times that sum to-day. And he gave impartially,
without thought of race or creed, holding himself to be “a part of the
human nature, a debtor to the whole race of men.” Perhaps his especial
_protégés_ were those who had suffered for their religious and political
convictions. A story of any kind of persecution would bring a flush
of anger and distress to his gentle face, and words of the deepest
indignation to lips which rarely opened to “speak against men.”
Each year saw the publication of new tracts and treatises, and revised
editions. They follow each other almost too quickly for enumeration.
His _Discourse of Things above Reason: inquiring whether a philosopher
should admit there are any such_, appeared in 1681; his _Memoirs of the
Natural History of the Human Blood_, in 1684. That was the winter of the
Great Frost, 1683-4, when all London bivouacked and made merry on the
frozen Thames, and the smallpox was “very mortall.” It must have been
a trying winter for the invalid philosopher; for London “by reason of
the excessive coldnesse of the aire hindering the ascent of the smoke,
was so fill’d with the fuliginous steame of the sea-coale that hardly
could one see crosse the streetes, and thro’ filling the lungs with its
grosse particles exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one could
scarcely breathe.”[334] And there was no water to be had from pipes or
engines; the birds and beasts died in the parks, the breweries were at a
standstill, and fuel was exorbitantly dear.
The treatise _Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God_
appeared in 1685, and _A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion
of Nature_ in 1686. _The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus_, written
in his youth, was revised and printed in 1687; and about this time
Boyle was advertising among the _virtuosi_ for his lost and plagiarised
manuscripts, evidently with some intention of bringing out a collected
edition of his works. The only collection hitherto had been a very
incomplete Latin edition, published without his knowledge in Geneva, in
1677. In 1690 he published his _Medicina Hydrostatica_, and the first
part of _The Christian Virtuoso_;[335] and in 1691—the last year of his
life—his _Experimenta Observationes Physicæ_. Some of his writings, left
with his executors, were to appear posthumously; and he had deposited
with the secretaries of the Royal Society a sealed packet containing
his account of the making of phosphorus—not to be opened till after his
death.[336]
A busy life, to the last; but what a quiet life it was for the sister and
brother during those last momentous years, in the house in Pall Mall!
History swept past them: Kings came and went, Cabinets changed, beautiful
faces faded, Parliaments were dissolved, creeds and parties wrangled and
plotted, brave men—and women too—died on scaffolds and the gallows-tree
and at the stake for political crimes. All the world knows about Lord
Russell and Algernon Sidney; but it is sometimes forgotten that Mrs.
Lisle, the wife of a regicide, laid her head on the block for “harbouring
a rebel”, and that Elizabeth Gaunt, for the same political crime, was
burned at Tyburn.[337] A new London grew up over the old ruins—new
steeples on old foundations—and fashionable new squares were built where
green fields had been. And all the time a great and cumbrous Constitution
was raising itself over centuries of abuse and sacrifice—a nation’s blood
and tears.
Events crowded the canvas: Charles II’s melodramatic ending; the
accession of the bigot James II; Monmouth’s rising and execution; the
“Bloody Assizes” of Judge Jeffreys, in Dorset and Somerset; James’s
league with the French; the revoking of the Edict of Nantes and the
horrible atrocities that followed. Catholicism spread its fibres
throughout England, permeating Army, Law Courts, Parliament and
University. Priests—Carmelites, Benedictines and Franciscans—walked about
the streets of London, and a huge Jesuit school was set up in the Savoy.
In Scotland, a Catholic was in command at Edinburgh Castle: in Ireland,
a Catholic was at the head of the Army, and thousands of Catholic Irish
were drafted into its ranks.[338]
A boy was born to James II and Mary of Modena, and there were whispered
stories of imposture and the historic warming-pan. Then Protestantism
closed up its ranks, the State Church and the Nonconformists combined in
face of a common danger, and the hopes of Protestant England were fixed
upon William and Mary. Another message carried from England to The Hague
brought another Prince to English shores, but this time “to intervene
in arms for the restoration of English liberty and the protection of
the Protestant religion”. Another proclamation in London, but this time
of an Anglo-Dutch Prince, and a Princess who was not only the daughter
of James II but the granddaughter of Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Another
bloody rebellion in Ireland, another chapter of massacre and terrorism;
but this time it was Ulster, and the Ulster Scots, who were fighting
for Protestantism. Robert Boyle and Lady Ranelagh, growing old in the
house in the Mall—two children of the great Elizabethan Puritan Earl of
Cork—had watched Munster pass again into the hands of the Catholic Irish;
but they lived just long enough to see William and Mary Sovereigns of
England, and to have the tidings of the Siege of Londonderry and the
Battle of the Boyne. One of the last reports of the Rebellion that can
have reached Lady Ranelagh was the taking of Athlone by the English:
it must have brought back to her the early days of her married life,
when Arthur Jones had carried her off to Athlone Castle, a beautiful,
high-spirited girl of sixteen.
And now she was seventy-six. To her, if to nobody else in the world,
her philosopher brother, twelve years her junior, was still “Robyn”—the
“Deare Squire.” There were some empty rooms and many memories in the
house in Pall Mall; but the sister and brother were together, and it was
a hospitable and pleasant house, and open to many friends. Distinguished
strangers from many parts of the world came to pay their respects to
Mr. Boyle, the celebrated Sceptical Chymist and Christian _Virtuoso_,
and his incomparable sister, the Lady Ranelagh, who for fifty years had
lived “on the most public scene,” and “made the greatest figure in all
the revolutions of these kingdoms of any woman of that age.”[339] The
London _virtuosi_—and there were bishops as well as mathematicians among
them—brought their latest literary and scientific gossip to the house in
the Mall. The elder brother, old Lord Burlington, was sometimes to be
found there, with a conversational statesman or two in tow, who could
successfully dodge the politics of the moment by indulging in such a
pleasant and safe topic as the _amours_ of Mary, Queen of Scots, with
“the Italian favourite.”[340] Gilbert Burnet—that eloquent and happy
Scotsman south of the Tweed—sat at Mr. Boyle’s feet and took notes:
his bishopric was to come with the accession of William and Mary. Even
Pyrophilus must have looked in upon his mother and uncle now and then.
Dick’s fortunes were up; he was an important man, had grown fat and
very witty, and was building himself a fine house in Chelsea.[341] His
mother’s portrait was to hang on the wall of his private closet, looking
at him long after she was dead; outliving other loves.[342]
Men and women of the younger generation of this great family were living
round about Piccadilly, St. James’s, and Pall Mall. One niece especially,
my Lady Thanet, a married daughter of Lord and Lady Burlington, was a
“greate virtuosa,” known in London Society as one who “used to speak much
of her uncle.”[343] And Evelyn, the friend of nearly forty years, though
he was a good deal older than Boyle, still found his way from Deptford to
Pall Mall to visit the philosopher and his sister.
In the afternoons, Boyle was seldom without company; “neither did his
severer studys,” says Evelyn, “soure his conversation in the least.” He
had “the most facetious and agreeable conversation in the world among
the ladys, whenever he happen’d to be engag’d; and yet so very serious,
compos’d and contemplative at all other times; tho’ far from moroseness,
for indeede he was affable and civil rather to excesse, yet without
formality.”[344]
So popular were Mr. Boyle’s cosmopolitan receptions that about the
year 1689 he was obliged to put a “board” on the door in Pall Mall,
mentioning the days on which he was “at home.” And he actually printed an
announcement, beginning “Mr. Boyle finds himself obliged to intimate to
those of his friends and acquaintances who are wont to do him the honour
of visiting him,” and going on to explain that his “skilful and friendly
physician, seconded by his best friends”, had strongly advised him not to
see quite so many people.[345]
The forenoons of Tuesdays and Fridays, therefore, “both foreign
post-days,” and the afternoons of Wednesdays and Saturdays, he proposed
in future to reserve for himself, “that he might have some time, both
to recruit his spirits, to range his papers and fill up the _lacunæ_
of them, and to take some care of his affairs in Ireland, which are
very much disordered, and have their face often changed by the public
calamities there.”[346]
The announcement seems to have had the desired effect. “The mornings,”
says Evelyn in his description of the daily routine of Boyle’s last
years, “after his private devotions, he usually spent in philosophic
studys and in his laboratory, sometimes extending them to night.” But he
told Evelyn he had quite given up reading by candle-light, on account
of his eyes. His amanuensis used to read to him, and write from notes,
or at his dictation; and “that so often in loose papers, pack’d up
without method, as made him sometimes to seeke upon occasion, as himself
confesses in divers of his works.” And apparently Boyle was not more
tidy than other learned men. “Glasses, potts, chymical and mathematical
instruments, books and bundles of papers, did so fill and crowd his
bedchamber, that there was but just room for a few chaires, so as his
whole equipage was very philosophical, without formality.” Among the
other rooms in the house there was a small library. Boyle did not want
more: “as learning more from men, real experiments, and in his laboratory
(which was ample and well furnished) than from books.”[347]
And the man himself, in these last years? He was “rather tall, and
slender of stature, pale, and much emaciated.” Owing to his delicacy
of constitution, “he had divers sorts of cloaks to put on when he
went abroad, and in this he governed himself by his thermometer.” His
little difficulty of speech had never quite forsaken him. “In his first
addresses, being to speake or answer,” says Evelyn, “he did sometimes
a little hesitate, rather than stam’er or repeate the same word;
imputable to an infirmity which, since my remembrance, he had exceedingly
overcome. This, as it made him somewhat slow and deliberate, so after
the first effort, he proceeded without the least interruption in his
discourse.”[348]
In diet and in habit, Robert Boyle was “extreamely temperate and plaine”;
nor could Evelyn, in all their friendship, ever discover in him “the
least passion, transport, or censoriousnesse, whatever discourse, or the
times, suggested:
“All was tranquil, easy, serious, discreete and profitable, so as besides
Mr. Hobbes, whose hand was against everybody and admired nothing but his
owne, Francis Linus excepted (who yet with much civility wrote against
him), I do not remember he had the least antagonist.”[349]
The brother and sister had both been ill in the late autumn of 1691,
when Boyle wrote to Dr. Turberville at Salisbury, begging for a further
prescription for his eyes. “Sight is a thing dear to all men,” he wrote,
almost apologetically, “and especially to studious persons.” His eyes
had been troubling him very much of late, especially by candle-light.
“When the candles are newly snuffed,” wrote this great experimental
philosopher, “I see far better for a little while:” but they very soon
wanted snuffing again.[350]
Evelyn was out of town on December 23, when Lady Ranelagh died; and
he did not hear of her death, or of her brother’s serious illness
immediately after it, till it was too late. “For it was then,” says
Evelyn, “he began evidently to droope apace.” When Evelyn returned
to town, it was to stand by his old friend’s grave. Robert Boyle had
survived his sister only seven days: he died on December 30, 1691.
He was buried near to Lady Ranelagh, in the Chancel of St.
Martin’s-in-the-Fields.[351] Burnet, now Bishop of Salisbury, preached
the funeral sermon “with that eloquence natural to him on such and all
other occasions,” taking for his text the words, “For God giveth to a
man that is good in His sight, wisdom, and knowledge, and joy.”[352]
“Something too,” says Evelyn, “was touched of his sister, the Lady
Ranelagh.” But indeed it was not necessary. Her intellect and character
were known to all those who stood about the grave. Her high standards
and strong judgment would have been a gain to the statecraft of her day.
But she was a woman; and if for more than twenty years her life had been
a rich and beautiful thing as the sister of Robert Boyle, for nearly
forty years before that she had been the brave but unhappy wife of Arthur
Jones—“the foulest churl in the Worlde.”
By Boyle’s own direction, his funeral was “without the least pomp”; but
round his grave there stood, besides his own many relatives, “a greate
appearance of persons of the best and noblest quality.”
Most of his Irish lands were entailed, and went to the eldest brother,
the Earl of Burlington and Cork. “It does not afflict me,” so runs the
will, “that I have not children of my own to inherit my entailed lands,
since they are, by that defect, to return to him, the truly honoured head
of our house and family.” The Manor of Stalbridge went to Frank, the Lord
Viscount Shannon, together with Robyn’s best watch and an affectionate
message. Frank would notice that the Manor House had been kept up “for
his sake,” though Robyn had had no mind to live in it. Mrs. Melster,
the niece who had married the _valet de pé_, is included among Boyle’s
“honoured and dear nieces,” and is remembered more sumptuously than the
others, not because there is any difference of affection, but because of
her “peculiar circumstances.” There were other lands in Ireland, and many
bequests and legacies to relatives, friends, and servants besides the
charitable bequests left in the hands of trustees.[353] “Our Society”
and the happy days at Gresham College were not forgotten. Dr. King was
to have a silver standish, and to Robert Hooke, the “perfecter” of the
beloved air-pump, was left “my best microscope, and my best loadstone.”
When Robert Boyle made his will in the summer of 1691 he evidently had
not thought it possible that Lady Ranelagh would die before him. He had
made her one of his executors, and he had left her all his manuscripts
and his “collections of receipts.” But he had left her something else.
At the very beginning of his will, first and foremost of all his worldly
possessions, Robert Boyle puts a small ring:
“And as touching my temporal estate, wherewith God of His goodness hath
been pleased to endow me, I dispose thereof in manner and form following;
that is to say—
“I give and bequeathe unto my dear sister, the Lady Katharine,
Viscountess Ranelagh, a small ring, usually worn by me on my left hand,
having in it two small diamonds with an emerald in the middle, which ring
being held by me, ever since my youth, in great esteem, and worn for
many years for a particular reason, not unknown to my said sister, the
Lady Ranelagh, I do earnestly beseech her, my said sister, to wear it in
remembrance of a brother that truly honoured and most dearly loved her.”
But Lady Ranelagh was dead—seven days before Robert Boyle. What became
of the small ring? And what was its story? Why had Boyle worn it on his
left hand ever since his youth, holding it in great esteem? Lady Ranelagh
knew—and Lady Ranelagh was dead. What was the “particular reason”? The
story of the little ring, if not the ring itself, is buried in the
Chancel of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Lismore Papers, first series, vol. i.
[2] _Philaretus._ Robert Boyle left a fragment of Autobiography, _An
Account of Philaretus (~i.e.~ Mr. R. Boyle) during his Minority_. See
_Works_, ed. Birch, 6 vols., 1774.
[3] For a delightful modern biography, see the _Life and Letters of the
Great Earl of Cork_, by Dorothea Townshend (Duckworth).
[4] See the Lismore Papers (referred to throughout as L. P.), edited by
the late Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, D.D., LL.D., from the original MSS.
belonging to the Duke of Devonshire, and preserved in Lismore Castle (10
vols.).
[5] Corpus Christi.
[6] Froude’s _History_, vol. vii. (1562).
[7] _Ibid._
[8] Edmund Spenser’s _View of the Present State of Ireland_.
[9] Then worth about five times as much.
[10] Spenser’s _View of the Present State of Ireland_.
[11] _True Remembrances._
[12] _True Remembrances._
[13] Life of the Earl of Cork in the L. P., second series, vol. v.
[14] Equal to about £5000 now.
[15] _True Remembrances._
[16] _Philaretus._
[17] L. P., first series, vol. i.
[18] _Philaretus._
[19] Aubrey’s Account.
[20] Oliver St. John, High Treasurer for Ireland.
[21] This celebrated tavern, “haunted by roysterers and famous for its
wine” in Ben Jonson’s day, and dating back into the 15th century, was in
New Fish Street (Cunningham’s _London_). Croone must have moved into “new
and enlarged premises,” for he will be found in 1641 at the Nag’s Head
Tavern, in Cheapside.
[22] See Evelyn’s _Diary_ and Pepys’s _Diary_.
[23] Abbott.
[24] Loftus, Earl of Ely. He and Sir Adam Loftus of Rathfarnham were
cousins.
[25] Falkland.
[26] The Earl’s house is mentioned as “my Lord Caulfield’s.”
[27] In succession to Lord Grandison, whose house in Channell Row the
Earl had rented.
[28] She was buried with her mother in the tomb in St. Patrick’s.
[29] _Life of Milton_, by David Masson.
[30] Mall.
[31] _Ireland under the Stuarts_, vol i.
[32] Bulkeley and Usher.
[33] Charles I to Lord Deputy, 1634. L. P., second series, vol. iii.
[34] Though, in his _Philaretus_, he dates it a little earlier. It is,
however, evidently the same that is recorded in the Earl’s _Diary_ under
the date Dec. 17, 1634.
[35] _Philaretus._
[36] _Philaretus._
[37] See L. P., second series, Carew’s letters from Eton to Earl of Cork.
[38] They were “commensals” at the second table. See Lyte’s _History of
Eton_.
[39] See the masterly biography of Wotton in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_. Also Izaak Walton’s _Life of Wotton_, and Masson’s _Milton_,
vol. i.
[40] See his lines on “His Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia,” Percy Society
Publications, vol. vi.
[41] See Masson’s _Milton_, vol. i. p. 531.
[42] Evelyn’s _Diary_.
[43] Was “Irish” part of the Eton curriculum in 1635?
[44] L. P., second series, Carew’s letters to the Earl.
[45] _Philaretus._
[46] _Ibid._
[47] _Philaretus._
[48] L. P., second series, Carew’s letters to Earl.
[49] See _A Poem written by Sir Henry Wotton in his Youth_, Percy Society
Publications, vol. vi.
[50] Masson’s _Life of Milton_, vol. i. p. 665.
[51] _Ibid._
[52] It was payable in three instalments, the third to be paid on
Midsummer Day 1638.
[53] Compare Prospero in _The Tempest_: “To my poor cell”.
[54] L. P., first series, vol. v.
[55] L. P., first series, vol. v.
[56] Lady Warwick’s _Autobiography_ (Percy Society).
[57] Variously explained as being the arbutus, and espalier apples.
[58] George Goring was now Governor of Portsmouth. He had been wounded in
the leg at the siege of Breda, had been going about London on crutches,
and was still lame.
[59] He died, after a long illness, in December 1639. See his Hymn,
written “in a night of my late sickness” (Percy Society, vol. vi.).
[60] See Masson’s _Milton_, vol. i.
[61] _Philaretus._
[62] See Masson’s _Milton_, vol. ii.: First and second Bishops’ Wars.
[63] L. P., second series, vol. iv.: Letter from Lord Barrymore to the
Earl of Cork, 1639.
[64] Pepys’s _Diary_, Sept. 28, 1668.
[65] _Verney Memoirs_, vol. i.
[66] L. P., second series, vol. v.
[67] _Verney Memoirs_, vol. i.
[68] Afterwards Earl of Clanbrassil.
[69] Son of Sir George Carew, Earl of Totness.
[70] _Philaretus._
[71] L. P., second series, vol. iv.
[72] _Philaretus._
[73] _Philaretus._
[74] Countess of Warwick’s _Autobiography_ (Percy Society).
[75] Broghill and Kynalmeaky had boarded with the celebrated Dr. Diodati,
at the Villa Diodati, outside Geneva.
[76] L. P., second series, vol. iv.
[77] _Philaretus._
[78] _Philaretus._
[79] L. P., second series, vol. iv.
[80] L. P., second series, vol. iv.
[81] _Philaretus._
[82] L. P., second series, vol. iv.
[83] Lady Dungarvan’s mother was a Cecil.
[84] Earl’s letter quoted in Collins’ _Peerage_.
[85] _Autobiography of the Countess of Warwick_ (Percy Society).
[86] _Philaretus._
[87] _Philaretus._
[88] St. Bernard.
[89] L. P., second series, vol. iv.
[90] It was the Earl of Leicester.
[91] Birch’s “Life of Boyle,” in Boyle’s _Works_, vol. i.
[92] _Ibid._
[93] _Philaretus._
[94] L. P., first series, vol. v.
[95] See Masson’s _Milton_, vol. ii.
[96] L. P., first series, vol. v.
[97] L. P., first series, vol. v. Daubigne’s = Dunbar’s. Lady Suffolk was
daughter and heiress of the Earl of Dunbar.
[98] Suckling died in 1641.
[99] Morrice’s account of her in his “Life of the Earl of Orrery,”
prefixed to the _Orrery State Papers_.
[100] Boyle to Lady Orrery: Birch, vol. i.
[101] Countess of Warwick’s _Autobiography_.
[102] Countess of Warwick’s _Autobiography_ (Percy Society).
[103] L. P., first series, vol. v.
[104] St. Leger.
[105] L. P., first and second series, vol. v. For a masterly account of
the Rebellion of 1641, read Bagwell’s _Ireland under the Stuarts_.
[106] L. P., second series, vol. v.
[107] L. P., second series, vol. v.
[108] Lord Barrymore died on Sept. 29. It was thought he had been wounded
at Liscarrol.
[109] L. P., first series, vol. v.
[110] She died in England in July 1643.
[111] See Mrs. Townshend’s _Life of the Great Earl of Cork_.
[112] Usual.
[113] Letter to Kynalmeaky, L. P., second series, vol. v. The original
letter in the Lismore Papers is much mutilated (“apparently mice-eaten”).
(Grosart.)
[114] Evelyn’s _Diary_ for 1646.
[115] Evelyn’s _Diary_ for 1646. Masson’s _Milton_, vol. iii.
[116] Evelyn’s _Diary_ in 1646.
[117] February 1644.
[118] Milton’s Latin letter to Dick Jones. See Masson’s _Milton_.
[119] Cunningham’s _London; Pall Mall_. Account of Lord Broghill’s visit
to Lady Ranelagh (Morrice & Budgell).
[120] _Catherine_, _m._ (1) Sir William Parsons, (2) Hugh, Lord
Mount-Alexander; _Elizabeth_, _m._ Mr. Melster; _Frances_, _d. unm._;
_Richard_, 2nd Visc. Ranelagh.
[121] Identity not known.
[122] Countess of Warwick’s _Autobiography_.
[123] _Ibid._
[124] Robert Boyle: _Philaretus_.
[125] Robert Boyle’s Letter to Mr. Tallents: Birch’s _Life_.
[126] Lord Broghill, who was Governor of Youghal, returned to England
in 1645 (bringing with him his wife and Lady Barrymore and young Lord
Barrymore) to obtain further assistance of English troops. See Bagwell’s
_History of Ireland under the Stuarts_, vol. ii.
[127] Masson’s _Milton_, vol. iii. p. 338.
[128] Sir William Wray, member of House of Commons in Long Parliament.
[129] Tutor in Geneva to the little Lord Carnarvon.
[130] See _Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett_ (Camden Society).
[131] Birch’s _Life_, vol. vi. p. 534.
[132] Letter to Lady Ranelagh, March 1646: Birch’s _Life_.
[133] Broghill seems to have been more anxious to avoid them than Robert
Boyle himself. “Strange that so well-armed an head should be fearful!”
says Robert Boyle in his letter to Lady Ranelagh.
[134] There is a little touch of sarcasm in this letter, which may
well be a sly thrust at Lord Howard of Escrick, in his place among the
Divines, as a lay elder of the Westminster Assembly. At Winchester the
little party were “as nicely catechised concerning our ways as if we were
to be elected in the number of the new lay elders.” Lord Edward Howard’s
subsequent career—his expulsion from the House for receiving bribes, and
his betrayal of Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, are matters of history.
[135] The Committee of the Two Kingdoms, very active after the
organisation of the New Model. It sat in, and issued its orders from,
Derby House, Cannon Row, Westminster.
[136] Letter to Lady Ranelagh, March 1646: Birch’s _Life_.
[137] Early letter, undated, Birch, vol. vi.
[138] It was Essex who had spoken the words that sealed Strafford’s doom:
“Stone dead hath no fellow.”
[139] Inchiquin and Broghill had both declared for the Parliament.
[140] Bringing, it will be remembered, Lady Pegg, Lady Barrymore, and
young Lord Barrymore home with him. Young Barrymore must have gone
straight to Milton in the Barbican.
[141] Usher.
[142] Augustine.
[143] In due time Lord Broghill was to send his own sons to Marcombes in
Geneva. The old governour was much gratified at having a batch of the
second generation of the Boyle family put under his charge.
[144] David Masson’s _Milton_, iii. 662.
[145] Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and former tutor to Lady
Pegg’s brothers.
[146] Letter to John Durie about a Union of the Churches, Birch’s Ed.
_Works_.
[147] To Lady Ranelagh: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[148] Robert Boyle to Hartlib, May 1647: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[149] “Marginal Note” in _Occasional Reflections_, Section II, ed. 1665,
p. 187.
[150] Not published till after his death.
[151] After lying many years in manuscript they were published at her
entreaty—dedicated to her—after the Restoration.
[152] _Occasional Reflections_, ed. 1665, pp. 245, 161.
[153] _Ibid._ p. 256: _Upon my Spaniel’s fetching me my glove_.
[154] Written after 1648.
[155] See p. 194. Lindamor, the scholarly youth, well born and well
bred, seems often in his writings to represent Boyle himself. The direct
reference to “Mr. Boyle” is a favourite device of the author. Swift
has satirised the _Reflections_ in his “Occasional Meditations on a
Broomstick,” but he has not acknowledged “The Eating of Oysters” as the
inspiration of his _Gulliver’s Travels_.
[156] For historical accounts see Masson’s _Milton_, vol. iii, and
Bagwell’s _Ireland under the Stuarts_, vol. ii.
[157] It was Anne Murray, the girl-friend of “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.,”
who was entrusted with the dressing-up of the young Prince. See _Diary_
of Anne, Lady Halkett (Camden Society) for pretty description of the
dressing-up, and the “Wood Street cake” given to the boy at parting.
[158] Robert Boyle’s letter to Mrs. Hussey: Birch’s _Life_.
[159] Letter to Mrs. Hussey.
[160] Sentiment.
[161] _Vide_ Robert Boyle’s _Reflections_ written in that month: “Upon
the prodigiously wet weather which happened the summer that Colchester
was besieged (1648).”
[162] _Ibid._
[163] The family seem to have had their town house in Soho, and were
“distinguished parishioners” of St. Giles in the Fields (see Cunningham’s
_London_). The Earl, when he died in 1661, left property in Long Acre and
St. Martin’s Lane, etc.
[164] He died of smallpox, 1649, and was buried in the Savoy.
[165] Afterwards Earl of Clanbrassil.
[166] Evelyn’s letter to Dr. Wotton about Robert Boyle.
[167] Masson’s _Milton_, vol. iii.
[168] Letter to Lady Ranelagh, August 1649: Birch’s Ed. of _Works_, vol.
vi.
[169] Compare Budgell’s and Morrice’s accounts.
[170] Bagwell’s _Ireland under the Stuarts_.
[171] Robert Boyle’s letter: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[172] Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[173] This wife died young. The second wife was a daughter of Henry
Lawrence, presumably a sister of young Barrymore’s friend and
fellow-pupil at Milton’s house in the Barbican.
[174] Broghill’s letter to Lenthall, quoted by Bagwell. For the whole
account of Broghill’s part in the war, see Bagwell’s _Ireland under the
Stuarts_.
[175] Charles II was then at Breda, and so were the Scottish
Commissioners. Montrose was executed in Edinburgh on May 21st, 1650,
and the Treaty of Breda had been signed on May 3rd, pledging Charles to
uphold the Covenant; but at this very time he was still using the Service
Book, and Breda itself was the gay scene of nightly “balling and dancing.”
[176] Cary.
[177] _Philaretus._
[178] The heroine of _Seraphick Love_.
[179] Robert Boyle’s brother Francis was his heir presumptive.
[180] This may have been young Lord Barrymore’s second wife, daughter of
Henry Lawrence.
[181] _Philaretus._
[182] Colonel Lawrence’s account, quoted by Bagwell.
[183] Chalked up on the door of the House of Commons.
[184] Bagwell.
[185] _Some Worthies of the Irish Churches_, by G. T. Stokes, D.D., ed.
by Dr. Lawlor, p. 74.
[186] Birch’s _Life_.
[187] Letter from Hartlib to Boyle; Birch’s ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[188] The _Encænia_.
[189] The _Sheldonian_ was not then in existence.
[190] Kendal.
[191] Afterwards Bishop of Lincoln.
[192] Cp. Evelyn’s _Diary_, August 6, 1657: “I went to see Col. Blount,
who shewed me the application of a _way-wiser_ to a coach, exactly
measuring the miles and shewing them by an index as we went on ... very
pretty and useful.”
[193] Birch’s _Life_. Lady Ranelagh’s letter is dated merely “Oct. 12.”
It must have been written in October 1653, after Boyle was back in
Ireland, or so late as 1654, before Boyle left Ireland for good.
[194] Birch’s _Life_.
[195] Evelyn’s letter to Dr. Wotton, 1703.
[196] Birch’s _Life_.
[197] Boyle’s _Occasional Reflections_ were not published till 1665, but
it is probable they were well known in manuscript.
[198] Bishop of Lincoln, after the Restoration.
[199] Robert Boyle to Lord Broghill: Birch’s _Life_; afterwards used as
_Epistle Dedicatory to the Considerations on the Style of the Scriptures_.
[200] Birch’s _Life_.
[201] Of Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight.
[202] Boyle’s Law, confirmed by Mariotte in 1676: “The volume of any
given sample of a gas at constant temperature is inversely proportional
to the pressure.”
[203] Hooke’s Law, 1676: _Ut tensio, sic vis_; “Strain is proportional to
stress.”
[204] Published Oxford, 1660.
[205] Birch’s _Life_.
[206] Attacked by Hobbes and Franciscus Linus; 2nd ed. London, 1662; 3rd
ed. London, 1682.
[207]
Oh Morning Star! give back the Day;
Why dost thou delay our joys?
Oh Morning Star! give back the Day!
[208] _An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language_,
published in folio, 1668. (The MS. was lost in the Fire of London.)
[209] Birch’s ed. _Works_.
[210] Boyle’s Law is not _strictly_ applicable, if all modern refinements
of experiment are used, to any gases except an “ideal” gas; but for all
practical purposes it is exact, because the corrections to it are only
minute additions, and not alterations.
[211] Professor Sir William Ramsay, K.C.B., F.R.S., etc., in his
_Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of
Science_, Portsmouth, 1911.
[212] _Autobiography of the Countess of Warwick_ (Percy Society).
[213] _Autobiography._
[214] Lady Ranelagh to Robert Boyle, Birch’s ed. _Works_.
[215] _Autobiography of the Countess of Warwick._
[216] Edward Phillips’s account.
[217] Richard Jones was not at any college.
[218] Peter du Moulin, Royalist and Episcopalian, had been private tutor
to the second Earl of Cork’s family in Ireland. He translated the _Devil
of Mascon_, a French story of authenticated spirit-rapping, published
in 1658, with an introductory letter by Robert Boyle, to whom it was
dedicated; and in 1670 du Moulin dedicated a volume of Latin poems to
Boyle. He was the author of the _Regii Sanguinis Clamor_. His brother, on
the other hand—Lewis du Moulin, Doctor of Physic—was a Parliamentarian
and Independent, and, after the Visitation, was Camden Professor of
History at Oxford.
[219] Name given by Boyle to that “hopeful young gentleman,” Mr. Richard
Jones, to whom Boyle addressed his _Physiological Essays_, etc.
[220] Passport granted in September 1656. See Masson’s _Milton_, vol.
v. Her eldest daughter, Catherine, was possibly then already married
and already in Ireland. She married (1) Sir William Parsons, (2) Lord
Mount-Alexander. The two other daughters, Elizabeth and Frances, were
with their mother (see later).
[221] Milton’s letters to Mr. Richard Jones. See Masson’s _Milton_, vol.
v.
[222] Evelyn’s letter to Wotton, 1703.
[223] Mrs. Evelyn was the daughter of Sir Richard Browne, English
Ambassador at Paris, where Evelyn married her.
[224] See later. Evelyn’s _Diary_ and letters.
[225] We still say “you and yours,” though not “yours” alone.
[226] David Masson. _Life of Milton_, vol. v, p. 358.
[227] Lord Ranelagh.
[228] Letter to Lord Broghill, Thurloe’s _State Papers_.
[229] Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[230] Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[231] “Virile government” was apparently assailed in 1659 as it is to-day.
[232] There were nine editions between 1660 and 1708, and it was
translated into Latin.
[233] Evelyn’s _Diary_, May 5, and May 25, 1659.
[234] He was one of the chief of the “Dynastic” or “Court” Cromwellians,
in opposition to the “Army” Cromwellians.
[235] Morrice; but Pepys mentions “Mr. Boyle” receiving a passport on
April 11, and on board Montagu’s ship, where he was treated as “a person
of honour,” on April 20.
[236] Evelyn.
[237] See Pepys’s graphic account of the crossing of Charles II from The
Hague, and Evelyn’s account of his reception in London.
[238] Petty’s invention of a “double-bottomed boat,” which made a great
talk at the time.
[239] _Discourses Useful for the Vain Modish Ladies and their Gallants._
1696.
[240] Charlotte Jemima Henrietta-Maria Boyle, who married a Howard
(nephew of Lord Broghill’s wife). Their child, “Stuarta Howard,” died
unmarried.
[241] Evelyn’s _Diary_, October 15, 1664. The first house, built by Sir
John Denham, to be succeeded by the later house (Cunningham’s _London_).
[242] Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[243] _Life of Edward Mountagu, K.G., First Earl of Sandwich_, by F. R.
Harris, vol. ii. p. 179.
[244] “Lyttle Francke” _m._ (1) Colonel Courtenay, and (2) Wentworth
Dillon, Earl of Roscommon. There were several daughters, and it was the
fourth daughter who married Lord Hinchinbroke. The fifth daughter married
Laurence Hyde, son of the Earl of Clarendon; and the third daughter
became Lady Thanet, the “virtuosa,” who used to speak much of her uncle
Robert Boyle, _vide_ Evelyn’s letter to Wotton.
[245] _Diary_, 1668.
[246] _Philaretus._
[247] Letter to Hooke in 1680, when Boyle declined to be President of the
Royal Society (see later).
[248] _Diary_, November 26, 1661.
[249] “Ianthe” was the name given to Mrs. Mary Saunderson, after her part
in Davenant’s _Siege of Rhodes_. She married Betterton and lived till
1712, having in her time played almost all Shakespeare’s great female
characters—“Nell” is, of course, Nell Gwynne.
[250] September 7, 1660 (two days after Broghill had been created Earl of
Orrery).
[251] March 9, 1661 (five weeks after the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and
Bradshaw had been exhumed and hanged at Tyburn).
[252] Robert Boyle’s nephew, young Lord Barrymore, had lost his first
wife, Susan Killigrew, and married again in 1656, “Martha, daughter of
Henry Lawrence, Esq.,” presumably a daughter of the President and sister
of his friend and fellow-pupil in the Barbican.
[253] Quoted from Masson’s _Milton_, vol. vi. p. 85.
[254] Pepys’s _Diary_, October 13, 1660.
[255] October 13, 14, and 17, 1660.
[256] Evelyn’s _Diary_.
[257] Part of the Church of the Old Priory of St. Bartholomew.
[258] John Goodwin, author of the Regicide pamphlet, _The Obstructors of
Justice_.
[259] Masson’s _Milton_, vol. vi. pp. 184-5.
[260] Afterwards Earl of Anglesey.
[261] George Goring, Lettice’s unkind husband, was dead. He was last seen
in 1657, in Madrid, ill and destitute,—disguised, it is said, in the
habit of a Dominican Friar.
[262] The old brick-and-timber house with its piazzas and “green court,”
called after the founder, Sir Thomas Gresham, whose dwelling-house it was
(1597).
[263] See previous mentions from diary of Earl of Cork, and King’s Head
Tavern in Cunningham’s _London_.
[264] See the _Record of the Royal Society of London_, third edition,
1912 (Printed for the Royal Society).
[265] Oldenburg to Boyle, June 1663 (Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vi.).
[266] Who preached the celebrated sermon that lasted three-and-a-half
hours, and then said he felt tired from _standing_ so long.
[267] Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society of London_, 1667.
[268] Evelyn’s _Diary_, May 1661.
[269] Dr. Wilkins and Oldenburg were Joint-Secretaries, but Oldenburg did
all the work.
[270] Still in constant use.
[271] By which the Society is still governed.
[272] Evelyn’s _Diary_, November 30, 1663.
[273] Pepys’s _Diary_, November 30, 1668.
[274] Record of the Royal Society of London, 1912.
[275] London, 1661.
[276] Oxford, 1661.
[277] Dr. Saunderson. It is to be remembered that Lord Broghill, as one
of the Lords Justices, had the drawing up of the Act of Settlement, and
that the Boyle family were already great Irish landowners, and with
hereditary claims on the country for personal service and sacrifice in
the Protestant and Royalist cause.
[278] Boyle to the Bishop of Cork, May 27, 1662: Birch, vi.
[279] Now among the relics of the Royal Society at Burlington House.
[280] Evelyn’s _Diary_, May 7, 1662.
[281] Evelyn speaks of Mr. Povy’s “well contrived cellar and other
elegancies,” and again of his “pretty cellar and the ranging of his
wine-bottles.”
[282] Oldenburg to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[283] Sorbière, _Relation d’un voyage en Angleterre_, 1664. Oldenburg’s
correspondents in various countries.
[284] Butler’s _The Elephant in the Moon_.
[285] _An Examen of Mr. Hobbes’ Dialogus Physicus de Naturâ Æris._
[286] Daubigney Turberville, of Oriel College: M.D. Oxford, 1660, the
well-known oculist, who, at Boyle’s suggestion, later practised in London
(see Pepys’s _Diary_).
[287] Evelyn’s _Diary_, October 24, 1664.
[288] Oldenburg to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[289] Evelyn, January 1665.
[290] The boat foundered in the Bay of Biscay, and Petty was censured for
“rashness,” but he persisted in believing in his invention. See Evelyn,
March 22, 1675. Petty’s invention is one of the relics of the Royal
Society in Burlington House.
[291] Pepys, December 17, 1664.
[292] Pepys, March 1, 1665.
[293] Pepys, February 15, 1665.
[294] _Memoirs of the Comte de Grammont._
[295] The great victory over the Dutch, June 3, 1665. Lord Burlington’s
second son, Mr. Richard Boyle, was killed on the _Royal Charles_.
[296] See Evelyn and Pepys for 1665-6.
[297] _Autobiography of the Countess of Warwick_ (Percy Society).
[298] Hooke to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[299] From Hampton Court to Salisbury, and then to Oxford.
[300] Nonsuch was selected for the offices of the Exchequer, and they
seem to have gone to Durdans, Lord Berkeley’s house near Epsom.
[301] Lady Ranelagh to Mr. Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[302] Boyle’s niece, Lord Burlington’s daughter.
[303] Lady Ranelagh to Boyle, September 9, 1665: Birch’s Ed. _Works_,
vol. vi.
[304] The poet Waller’s house, Hall Barn, Beaconsfield.
[305] Lady Anglesey’s house, near Epping.
[306] F.R.S., President of the Royal College of Physicians.
[307] Oldenburg to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[308] Oldenburg to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[309] Lady Ranelagh to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[310] Evelyn’s _Diary_, and Letter to Sir Samuel Tuke.
[311] The model is preserved in All Souls’ College, Oxford.
[312] J. R. Green, writing in 1882: _History of the English People_, vol.
iii. p. 382.
[313] Near Windsor.
[314] Evelyn’s _Diary_.
[315] Lady Ranelagh to Robert Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vol. vi.
[316] Evelyn: January 9, 1667.
[317] _Diary_, June 25, 1667.
[318] Which he called “Philosophical Commerce.”
[319] Morrice: _Earl of Orrery’s State Papers_. Evelyn, Pepys, Oldenburg
to Boyle (Birch); Green’s _History_; Masson’s _Milton_.
[320] Morrice.
[321] The pious royalist, Dr. John Fell, who himself preached in blank
verse, and was perhaps not a disciplinarian.
[322] Wallis to Boyle, 1669: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vi.
[323] Waller, 1661.
[324] Lady Ranelagh to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vi.
[325] See account in Cunningham’s _London_.
[326] Evelyn’s _Diary_, May 1671.
[327] Evelyn to Wotton.
[328] About £40 a year, which would mean about £140 now.
[329] Evelyn’s _Diary_.
[330] Lady Ranelagh to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vi.
[331] Now a great man, not only in the Society of which he had so long
been Curator. He had blossomed out as an architect, and had achieved
Montague House, afterwards the British Museum.
[332] Afterwards Archbishop of Armagh.
[333] Letters of Marsh to Boyle: Birch’s Ed. _Works_, vi. _Bedell’s
Life_, by T. Wharton Jones, F.R.S. (Camden Society). _Some Worthies of
the Irish Church_, by G. T. Stokes, D.D., ed. by H. F. Lawlor, D.D.
Appendix to Boyle’s _Life_: Birch, vol. i.
[334] Evelyn, January 1684.
[335] The second part appeared after his death.
[336] _Transactions_, 1692.
[337] J. R. Green’s _History of the English People_, vol. iv.
[338] J. R. Green’s _History of the English People_, vol. iv.
[339] See Burnet’s Sermon, preached at the funeral of Robert Boyle, and
Birch’s _Life_.
[340] Evelyn, Oct. 30, 1688.
[341] Ranelagh House, afterwards sold and turned into the famous Ranelagh
Gardens.
[342] Left to his daughter in his will.
[343] Evelyn to Wotton.
[344] _Ibid._
[345] Birch’s _Life_.
[346] Boyle dictated a good deal to Burnet, and the use of the Scottish
word “forenoon” suggests that Burnet assisted in the drawing up of this
announcement. Evelyn, the Englishman, uses the word “morning.”
[347] Evelyn to Wotton.
[348] _Ibid._
[349] Evelyn to Wotton.
[350] Birch’s _Life_.
[351] Where, also, Nell Gwynne had been buried in 1687.
[352] Eccles. ii. 26. The sermon was published and may be read.
[353] Among these was one to found and endow in perpetuity the Boyle
Lectures—a course of eight lectures, which are still delivered yearly—“In
Defence of Christianity.”
INDEX
Abbot, George, Archbishop of Canterbury, 22
Act of Oblivion. _See_ Indemnity Bill
_Air, the Spring and Weight of the_, 189, 202, 248, 288
Aix, 99
Albemarle, George Monk, Duke of, 224, 232, 237, 269, 270
Aldersgate Street, 128, 130, 133
Aldgate, 128, 133
All Souls’ College, Oxford, 199, 254
_Amadis de Gaule_, 67, 68
_Amoretti_, Spenser’s, 7
Anglesey, Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of, 239
⸺, Lady, 262 _note_
Annarye, 112
Antibes, 106
Apple-Tree Yard, 286
Apsley, Joan, 7, 11
⸺, William, 7
Arcadia, the French, 87
_Arcadia_, Sir Philip Sidney’s, 61, 76
Argyle, Archibald Campbell, 8th Earl of, 160
Arlington, Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of, 274, 278
Armagh, 147
Arminianism, 45
Arminius, 44
Armstrong, Archie, 57
_Army Remonstrance, The_, 167
Arno, the, 106
_Art of War, The_, 280, 295
Artillery Walk, 240
Arundel, Earl of, 22
⸺ House, 272, 273, 294
Ashmole, Elias, 242
Astrea, 87
Athlone Castle, 25, 31, 38, 75, 302
Aubrey, John, 242
Audley End, 262
Augsburg, 44, 66
Auvergne, 57
Bacon, Anthony, 9
⸺, Francis, Lord, 44, 67
Badnedge, Mr. Thomas, 39, 40, 41
Baillie, Robert, 212
Ball, William, 241
Balliol College, Oxford, 190
Bandon, 171
Bandonbridge, 114
Barbican, 130, 146 _note_, 161, 172 and _note_, 234
Barebones Parliament, 182
Barlow, Dr., 191, 199 and _note_, 200
Barrow, Dr. Isaac, 243 and _note_, 286
Barrymore, Alice Boyle, Countess of, 13, 15, 23, 24, 37, 60, 63, 74,
81, 83, 92, 111, 135, 146 _note_, 172
⸺, David Barry, 1st Earl of, 15, 24, 26, 36, 37, 60, 63, 64, 71,
72, 78, 88, 107, 111, 113, 119, 120 and _note_
⸺, Richard, 2nd Earl of, 130, 135, 146 _note_, 161, 172 and
_note_, 210, 234, 235 and _note_
⸺, Susan Killigrew, first wife of 2nd Earl, 172 and _note_, 235
and _note_
⸺, Martha Lawrence, second wife of 2nd Earl, 235 and _note_
Bartholomew Close, 237
Basinghall Street, 240
Bates, Dr., 208
Bath, 63, 77, 78, 133, 135, 168, 169
Bathurst, Dr., 242
Beaconsfield, 202, 262 and _note_
Beale, Dr. John, 253
Beaumont, Lady, 16, 21
⸺, Sapcott, 16, 21, 25, 75
Bede, the Venerable, 191
Bedell, Bishop, 130
Bedford, Francis Russell, 4th Earl of, 20
Ben Jonson, 8
Bennet College, Cambridge (Corpus Christi), 3
Bergamo, 103
Berkeley, Lord, 260 _note_
Berwick, 77
Betterton, Thomas, 231, 232 and _note_
Beza, 44, 88, 124
“Black Pots,” 46
_Black Prince, The_, 277
Blackwater, the, 36
Blount, Colonel, 214
Bodleian Library, the, 187, 191, 199, 200
Bohemia, Queen of, 44
Bologna, 103
Bond Street, 287
_Booker’s Almanack_, 270
Boyle, Alice. _See_ Barrymore, Countess of
⸺, Anne. _See_ Hinchinbroke, Lady
⸺, Charles, e.s. of Earl of Burlington, 93, 202
⸺, Charlotte Jemima Henrietta-Maria, 277 _note_
⸺, Dorothy. _See_ Loftus
⸺, Elizabeth. _See_ Spenser
⸺, Frances, e.d. of Earl of Burlington, 62, 92, 229 _note_
⸺, Francis. _See_ Shannon, Viscount
⸺, Geoffrey, 13, 16
⸺, Henrietta. _See_ Hyde
⸺, James of Hereford, 7
⸺, Joan. _See_ Kildare, Countess of
⸺, John, Bishop of Cork, 12, 13, 20
⸺, Katherine. _See_ Ranelagh, Viscountess
⸺, Lettice. _See_ Goring
⸺, Lewis. _See_ Kynalmeaky, Lord
⸺, Margaret, 22, 24, 25, 26, 31, 36, 59, 60
⸺, Mary. _See_ Warwick, Countess of
⸺, Richard. _See_ Cork, 1st Earl of, “The great Earl”
⸺, Richard, Lord Dungarvan, 2nd Earl of Cork, and Earl of
Burlington. _See_ Burlington, Earl of
⸺, Richard, son of Earl of Burlington, 258 _note_
Boyle, Robert: Birth and infancy, 1, 2, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 24;
in Dublin, 25, 33;
at Lismore, 35-39;
at Eton, 40-54, 58, 59, 65, 66, 67;
at Stalbridge, 68, 69, 70, 72;
at the House of the Savoy, 79-84;
goes abroad, 85-88;
in Geneva, 88-92, 96, 97, 99;
in Italy, 100-107;
after the debacle, 117, 120;
in England again, 122-139;
at the Manor of Stalbridge, laboratory and literary work, the
Invisible College, ill health, 140-158;
visits to London, Moore Park and Leeze, 159-166;
at Stalbridge again, 167-169;
“the Thing called Love,” 171-181;
visits Ireland, 181-188;
one of the Learned Junto at Oxford, 189-205, 212, 213, 214, 215,
217, 220, 223;
after the Restoration, 230-236, 239;
one of the founders of the Royal Society, 240-245;
science and politics in London and Oxford, 246-257;
during the Plague and the Fire, 260-266, 268;
Oxford and London, 271, 274, 277, 279, 280;
leaves Oxford and settles in Pall Mall, 281-288;
paralytic seizure, 290, 291, 292;
a series of publications, 299, 300;
last years, 300-309
Boyle, Roger, father of 1st Earl of Cork, 3
⸺, Mrs. Roger, mother of 1st Earl of Cork, 3
⸺, Roger, “Little Hodge,” eldest Son of 1st Earl of Cork, 12, 13,
21, 152, 228
⸺, Roger, Lord Broghill, 1st Earl of Orrery. _See_ Orrery, Earl of
⸺, Sarah. _See_ Digby, Lady
Boyne, Battle of the, 302
Bradshaw, John, 232, 233 _note_
Breda, 65 _note_, 173 _note_, 224, 270
Brescia, 103
Bridgeman, Sir Orlando, 276
Bristol, Countess of, 79
⸺, John Digby, 1st Earl of, 59, 61, 63, 71, 72, 79
⸺ family, 154, 180
British Museum, 296 _note_
Broghill, Lord. _See_ Orrery
⸺, Margaret Howard, Lady. _See_ Orrery
Brouncker, Lord, 240, 244, 255, 294
Browne, Mr. and Mrs., of Sayes Court, Deptford, 12, 13, 21, 215
⸺, Sir Richard, 214 _note_, 215
Bruce, Mr., 240
Buckhurst, Lord, 255, 257
Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of, 19, 21, 93
Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of, 243
Bull’s Head Tavern, the, 148, 241
Bunhill Fields, 240
Burlamachy, Philip, 40, 58, 88, 106, 127, 128
Burlington, Elizabeth Clifford, Lady Dungarvan, Countess of Cork,
Countess of, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 55, 56, 63, 64, 73,
92, 110, 113, 114, 136, 171, 229, 230
⸺, Richard Boyle, Lord Dungarvan, 2nd Earl of Cork, Earl of
Burlington, 13, 16, 18, 21, 25, 26, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 46,
56, 62, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 77, 78, 83, 100, 112, 114, 115,
171, 184, 227
⸺ House, 73, 226, 228, 229, 290
Burnet, Gilbert, 127, 231, 238, 298, 302, 303, 304 _note_, 306
Busby, Dr., 200
Butler, Samuel, 251
Buttevant Church, 7, 11
“C. S.” _See_ Charles I
Cabal, the, 278
_Cælum Britannicum_, 32
Calvin, 88, 100, 124
Calvinism, 45
Cambridge, 3, 9, 149 _note_, 190, 196
Cannon Row, Westminster. _See_ Channel Row
Canterbury, 3
Carew, servant to Frank and Robert Boyle, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49,
53, 58, 65, 68, 117
⸺ the Poet, 32
⸺, Sir George, Earl of Totness, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 78 _note_
Carisbrooke Castle, 160
Carlisle, Charles Howard, 1st Earl of, 138, 139, 239
Carrickfoyle, 9
Carteret, Lady, 261, 270
Carthusians, 99
Cary, Anne, Countess of Clanbrassil, 178
⸺, Elizabeth, d. of Henry, Earl of Monmouth, 178, 179
⸺, Henry. _See_ Monmouth, 2nd Earl of
⸺, Lionel, e.s. of Henry, Earl of Monmouth, 165
⸺, Martha, d. of Henry, Earl of Monmouth, 178
⸺, Mary, d. of Henry, Earl of Monmouth, 178
⸺, Thomas, 165
Casaubon, 44
Castell, Mr., 106, 115
Castlehaven, Lady, 15, 16
Castle Lyons, 26, 36, 74, 113, 172, 173
Castlemaine, Lady, 231, 275
Castle Martyr, 280, 295
Catherine of Braganza, Queen of Charles II, 256
Cavendish, Lady Mary, d. of Earl of Devonshire, 258, 259
Caverswell Castle, 284
Cecil family, the, 136.
_See_ also Salisbury
⸺, Sir Robert, 10
Cerdogni, Count, 129
Chambéry, 99
Channel Row, Westminster, 19, 22, 142 _note_
Chapel Royal, Whitehall, 83, 93
Charing Cross, 108, 168, 170, 188, 236
Charles I, 3, 19, 26, 58, 63, 70, 72, 78, 79, 80, 83, 93, 102, 107,
132, 135, 140, 144, 145, 159, 165, 167, 168, 196, 208
⸺ II, 139, 160, 173 _note_, 202, 215, 224, 225 and _note_, 226
and _note_, 227 and _note_, 228, 231, 232, 237, 243, 244, 245,
254, 256, 260, 267, 268, 275, 276, 277, 279, 284, 285, 287,
291, 295, 300
Charleville, 227, 278, 295
Charlton, in Kent, 138
Chaucer, 8
Cheapside, 20, 111, 130, 131, 148, 241, 242
Chelsea, 233, 265, 303
_Christian Virtuoso, The_, 246, 282, 299
Clanbrassil, James Hamilton, Earl of, 76, 77, 78, 79, 94, 166, 178,
245
Clandeboye, Lord, 76, 77
Clarendon family, the, 275
⸺, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 228, 229 _note_, 230, 239, 261, 276, 277,
278, 301
Clarke, Dr., 200
Claypole, Lady, 218
Clayton, Lady, 18, 31, 36, 60, 207
⸺, Sir Randall, 31, 36
Clifford, Elizabeth. _See_ Burlington, Countess of
⸺, Lady, 26, 33, 34
⸺, Lord, 26, 33, 34, 37
Clodius, Mr., 185, 186, 188
Clonmell, 36
Clubs, 286
Colchester, Siege of, 160, 167
Coleorton, in Leicestershire, 16, 21
Coleshill in Warwickshire, 21
Comenius, 128
“Commensals,” at Eton, 42 _note_
“Committee of the Two Kingdoms,” 142 _note_
_Comus_, 32, 96, 129, 239
Connaught, 182, 224
Conway, Lady, 264
Coote, Sir Charles, 224
Cork, 8, 59, 60, 115, 171, 212
⸺ Cathedral, 7
⸺, Katherine Fenton, Countess of, 11, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 214,
215
⸺, Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of, “The Great Earl,” 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7,
8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27,
28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45,
47, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 77,
78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96,
97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 117,
118, 119, 120, 121, 136, 171, 279, 295, 301
Cornhill, 272
Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel, 247
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 3 _note_
_Cosmical Suspicions_. _See_ Tracts
Court of Request, the, 279
Courtenay, Colonel, 229 _note_
Covent Garden, 108
Cowley, Abraham, 226, 242
Cranborne, 270
Cranfield, Lionel. _See_ Middlesex, Earl of
Crayford, in Kent, 274
“Crip,” 261, 262, 263
Cromwell, Frances, daughter of Oliver Cromwell, 215
⸺, Henry, 234
⸺, Mrs., 234
⸺, Oliver, 126, 132, 135, 139, 148, 160, 167, 170, 171, 181, 182,
183, 198, 206, 208, 212, 213, 215, 218, 219, 222, 233 and
_note_, 271, 283
⸺ Richard, 219, 224, 234
Croone, the Vintner, 20 _note_, 111, 112, 127, 130
⸺, William, F.R.S., 242, 271
Croonian Lecture Fund, the, 242
Cross, Thomas, steward, 59, 63, 193, 288
Crown, Tavern, the, 256
Dalton, 203
Daubigne. _See_ Dunbar
Davenant, Sir William, 232 _note_, 239
Denbigh, Earl and Countess of, 93
Denham, Sir John, 228 _note_
Deptford, 12, 13, 21, 23, 192, 198, 257, 303
⸺ Church, 215, 216, 228
Derby House, Westminster, 142
De Ruyter, 269
Desborough, John, 232, 234
Desmond Rebellion, the, 4, 6
⸺, Earl of, 179
Desmonds, the, 8
_Devil of Mascon, The_, 288
Devonshire, Earl of, 243, 258, 259
De Witt, 270
Dieppe, 85
Digby, Sir Kenelm, 242, 245
⸺, Robert, Lord, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24, 27, 59
⸺, Sarah Boyle, Lady, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24, 27 and _note_, 79
⸺ family, the, 31
Diodati, Charles, 129
⸺, Diodato, 88, 106
⸺, Dr. John, 82 _note_, 88, 124, 128, 130
⸺, Dr. Theodore, 128, 129
⸺ family, the, 88, 127, 128, 129, 130
_Discourse of Things above Reason_, 299
Donne, John, 45
Dowch, Mr., the Parson, 65, 68, 72, 134
Drummond of Hawthornden, 8
Drury Lane, 258
Dryden, 242
Dublin, 2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 17, 25, 26, 27, 29, 33, 35, 36, 37, 55, 57,
59, 74, 75, 115, 171, 183, 185
⸺ Castle, 24, 29
Duke’s Theatre, the, 280
Du Moulin, Lewis, 210 _note_
⸺, Peter, 210 _note_, 288
Dunbar, Earl of, 108 _note_
Dungarvan, Lord and Lady. _See_ Burlington
“Dunkirkers,” 19, 23, 85
Durdans, 260 _note_
D’Urfé, Marquis, 87
Durie, John, 128, 150 _note_, 194, 209, 294
East India Company, 297
Edict of Nantes, 301
Edinburgh, 43, 198, 212
Egham, 141
_Eikonoklastes_, 235
Elizabeth, Princess. _See_ Bohemia, Queen of
⸺, Queen of England, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 165
_Elephant in the Moon, The_, 251 _note_
_Encænia_, the, 189, 192, 282
Ent, Sir George, 263
_Epitaphium Damonis_, 129, 239
_Epithalamium_, Spenser’s, 7, 9
Epsom, 260 and _note_
Erskine, Sir James, 30
Escheator-General, 6
Essex, Earl of (Elizabeth’s), 9, 44
⸺, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of, 132, 144 and _note_
Eton, 34, 39, 40, 65, 66, 129, 134
_Eugenius_, 153, 156
_Eusebius_, 153
Evelyn, John, 88, 103, 137, 166, 174, 178, 189, 190, 192 and _note_,
193, 195, 206, 213, 214, 215, 216, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225,
226, 232, 233, 236, 242, 244, 245, 248, 249, 250 _note_, 254,
257, 267, 272, 273, 276, 277, 282, 283, 288, 291, 292, 293,
294, 296, 303, 304, 305
Evelyn, Mrs., 190, 192, 193, 214 and _note_, 215, 216, 221
Exchange, the, 256, 257, 266
Exeter Chapel, 216
_Experiment, The_, 226, 255
_Experimenta observationes physicæ_, 300
_Experiments of Light_, 277
_Faerie Queene, The_, 6, 7, 8
Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 126, 160, 167
Farnham, 140, 141
Faversham, 3
Fell, John, Dean of Christchurch, 193
⸺ John, son of the Dean, 193, 194, 283 _note_
⸺, Mrs., wife of the Dean, 193, 194
Fenton, Sir Geoffrey, 11, 13, 24
⸺, Katherine. _See_ Cork, Countess of
⸺, Lady, 13, 18, 25
Ferabosco, the, 273
Fermoy, 112
Ferrara, 103
Fielding, Lady Elizabeth. _See_ Kynalmeaky
Fire of London, 246, 261, 265, 269, 294
Fish Street, 242
Fleet Street, 213
Fleetwood, Charles, 182, 232, 234
Florence, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 115
Foster, Professor of Astronomy, 148
“Four Miles Water,” 35
_Free Discourse against Customary Swearing, A_, 154
French, Dr., 190, 192
⸺, Mrs., 192
Fry, Mr., tutor, 26
Galbaly, 9, 11
Galileo, 104
Galtee Hills, 6
Gaunt, Elizabeth, 300
Geneva, 82 and _note_, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102,
106, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 133, 137, 144, 145, 147
_note_, 148, 194
Genoa, 83, 106
_Genorio_, 153
Gibbon, Mr., the musician, 191
Gifford, Dr., 22
Glanville, the lawyer, 20
⸺, Mr. (Royal Society), 288
Goddard, Dr., 148, 189, 196, 198, 208, 241, 250, 263
Goodwin, John, 235, 237 and _note_, 238
Goring, George, 21, 24, 26, 31, 65 and _note_, 76, 78, 107, 134, 135,
239 _note_
⸺, Lettice Boyle, wife of George Goring, 13, 16, 19, 21, 24, 31,
49, 50, 65, 73, 78, 121 and _note_, 134, 239 and _note_
⸺, Lord, 110, 239, 296
Grammont, Comte de, 280, 286
Grandison, Lord, 19, 25 _note_
Graunt, John, 243
Gravesend, 270
Greatrakes, Valentine, 264, 265
Grenoble, 99
Gresham College, 148, 161, 188, 226, 240, 241, 248, 249, 250, 251,
256, 263, 266, 271, 272, 273, 294, 308
⸺, Sir Thomas, 240 _note_
Grisons, the, 103
Guildhall, 266
Gulliver’s Travels, 156, 157 _note_
Gwynne, Nell, 232 and _note_, 287
Haak, Theodore, 148, 243
Hague, the, 31, 134, 158, 225 and _note_, 228, 301
Hales, John, 45, 46, 66
Halkett, Anne, Lady. _See_ Murray
Hall Barn, 202, 262 and _note_
Hamilton, Marquis of, 93, 160, 167
⸺, Mr. James. _See_ Clanbrassil
Hamlet, 231
Hampton Court, 110, 111, 159, 218, 260 _note_
Hanworth in Middlesex, 78
Harrison, Mrs. Frances, 93, 94, 95, 109
⸺, John, 40, 41, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 65, 67, 68
⸺, Major-General, 235, 236
Hartlib, Samuel, 128, 133, 148, 149, 153, 154, 161, 173, 174, 183,
188, 202 and _note_, 203, 209, 214, 216, 217, 232, 236, 249
⸺, Mrs., 153
Haselrig, Sir Arthur, 234
Hastings, Lady Mary, 283, 284
Hatfield, 112
Hatton Gardens, 291
Haymarket, 286
Henrietta-Maria, Queen, 19, 58, 78, 79, 83, 93, 160
Henry VIII, 191
Hereford, 7
_Hermione_, 176, 179
Herringman, the publisher, 257
_Hibernia Pacata_, 10
Higgins, Mr., 60
Hill, Mr., 241
Hinchinbroke, Anne Boyle, Lady, 228, 229 and _note_, 230
⸺, Lord, 228, 229 and _note_
_History of Cold, The_, 254
_History of the Reformation_, 298
Hobbes, Dr., 197, 202, 305
Hodge, Little. _See_ Boyle, Roger
Holborn, 110, 131, 160, 161, 162, 207, 240
Holmby House, 159
Hooke, Robert, 200, 201, 243, 249, 250, 254, 256, 260, 296 and
_note_, 297, 308
Horton, 66
Howard, Lady Ann, 112, 120, 136, 137, 138
⸺, Charles. _See_ Carlisle, 1st Earl of
⸺, Lord Edward, of Escrick, 112, 136, 138, 139, 141 _note_
⸺, Mr. (son of Lord Edward), 138
⸺, Mr. Henry, 272
⸺, Lady Mary, 287
⸺, Stuarta, 227 _note_
⸺, Mr. Thomas, 93, 94, 95, 109
_Hudibras_, 251
Huntingdon, Earl of, 283
Hurst Castle, 167
Hussey, Mrs., 174
Huygens, 249
Hyde, Anne, Duchess of York, 275, 276
⸺, Dr., 200
⸺, Laurence, son of Clarendon, 229, 275, 276, 277
⸺, Henrietta Boyle, wife of Laurence Hyde, 228, 229 _note_, 261
and _note_
_Hydrostatical Paradoxes_, 265
_Ianthe_, 231, 232 and _note_
Ilfracombe, 40
Inchiquin, Earl of, 145 and _note_, 160
Indemnity and Oblivion, Bill of, 234, 236, 237, 238
Inns of Court, 32
Invisible College, the, 127, 148, 149, 189, 196, 243
Invisibles, the, 168, 174, 188, 196, 200, 241, 242
Ireton, Henry, 160, 183, 233 _note_
Irish Bible, the, 298
Isle of Wight, 159, 167
James I and VI, 12, 43, 44, 45, 165
⸺, Duke of York, James II, 160 and _note_, 226, 228, 229, 254,
256, 275, 276, 277, 284, 300, 301
Jeffreys, Judge, 300
Jewin Street, 240
Joliffe, Sir William, 284
Jones, Arthur. _See_ Ranelagh, 2nd Viscount
⸺, Catherine. _See_ Mount-Alexander, Lady
⸺, Elizabeth. _See_ Melster, Mrs.
⸺, Frances, 211 _note_, 258, 280, 281
⸺, Inigo, 32
⸺, Richard. _See_ Ranelagh, 3rd Viscount and 1st Earl of
“Kemb,” a minister, Admiral of revolting ships, 161
Kepler, 44, 67, 68
Kilcolman, 6, 8
Kildare, George Fitzgerald, 16th Earl of, 21, 25, 26, 31, 32, 37, 65,
76
⸺, Joan Boyle, Countess of, 13, 16, 19, 21, 30, 31, 32, 37, 65, 154
Killigrew, Mrs. Elizabeth. _See_ Shannon, Viscountess
⸺, Katharine, 110
⸺, Sir Robert, 78
⸺, Susan. _See_ Barrymore
⸺, Thomas, 78, 86, 96, 97, 102, 227
Kimbolton, 262
King, Sir Edmund, 291, 308
⸺, Edward, 129
King’s Head Tavern in Fleet Street, 20 and _note_, 242 and _note_
⸺ ⸺, the, in Pall Mall, 286
⸺ School, Canterbury, 3
⸺ Theatre, the, 277
Kinsale, 9, 10, 59, 171
Knight, Mrs., 286
Knockbrack, 173
Kynalmeaky, Lewis Boyle, Lord, 14, 25, 26, 31, 36, 37, 39, 57, 58,
65, 70, 71, 72, 81, 82 and _note_, 83, 88, 89, 93, 107, 111,
114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 162
⸺, Elizabeth Fielding, Lady, 93, 113, 114
Lambert, Colonel John, 160, 232, 234, 237
Lambeth Hill, 242
Langham, Sir James, 283, 284
Langley Park, 22
Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 28, 30, 31, 37, 63, 64, 102,
125, 133, 134, 191
Lawrence, President, 172 _note_, 234, 235 _note_
⸺, Henry, son of President, 172 _note_, 209, 234, 235 _note_
⸺, Martha. _See_ Barrymore
Leeke, Sir John, 17, 23, 70, 74, 75
Leeze, in Essex, 111, 112, 131, 166, 167, 206, 207, 208, 223, 253,
258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 293, 295
Leicester, Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of, 102
_Le Monde_, 89
Lenthall, William (Speaker), 234
Lichfield, 12, 20
Limerick, 6, 7, 9, 11
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 250, 259
_Lindamor_, 153, 156 and _note_, 166
Linus, Franciscus, 202, 306
“Lion Whelps,” fleet of, 22
Liscarrol, battle of, 119, 120 and _note_, 227
Lisle, Mrs., 300
Lismore, 14, 15, 16, 22, 37, 39, 59, 111, 114, 171, 296
⸺, Church of, 120
⸺, the House of, 1, 2, 17, 18, 19, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 113, 182
_Lismore Papers_, the, 1, 2
Livorno, 106
Loftus, Sir Adam, 16, 23 _note_
⸺, Arthur, 16, 18, 21, 26, 64
⸺, Dorothy Boyle, wife of Arthur Loftus, 14, 16, 26, 31, 64
⸺, Lord Chancellor, 23 and _note_, 26
Lombard Street, 20
Lombardy, 103
Londonderry, siege of, 202
Long Acre, 110, 165 _note_
⸺ Parliament, 107
Longe, Jacob, 59
Ludlow, Colonel Edmund, 234
Luther, 45
_Lycidas_, 129
Lyons, 87, 88, 117
_Maccabees_, 280
_Machina Boyleana_, 201, 248
Magdalen College Chapel, Oxford, 191
Magdalene College, Cambridge, 149 _note_
Mall, the game of, 29 and _note_, 284, 285, 286
Mallet, John, 154, 181, 290
⸺, Lady, 154
⸺, Sir Thomas, 154
Mallow, 7
Manchester, Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of, 126, 132, 239, 259
Manwood, Sir Richard, 3
Marcombes, M., 57, 58, 65, 71, 72, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,
88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104,
105, 106, 107, 114, 115, 116, 117, 123, 127, 134, 135, 143,
144, 145, 146, 147 and _note_, 148, 154, 159, 162
⸺, Madame, 82, 101, 103
Marseilles, 106, 115, 116
Marsh, Narcissus, 297, 298
Marston Bigot, 112, 113, 154, 168, 252, 253
Marston Moor, battle of, 126, 165
_Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus, The_, 176, 179, 299
Marvell, Andrew, 206, 237, 239
Mary II, Queen, wife of William III, 303
⸺ of Modena, wife of James II, 301
⸺ Queen of Scots, 301, 302
Masques, 32
Maynooth, 32
Meath, 5
_Medicina Hydrostatica_, 299
Mellifont, 5
Melster, Elizabeth Jones, Mrs., 211 and _note_, 258, 280, 281, 307
_Memoirs of the Natural History of the Human Blood_, 299
Mentone, 106
Meredith, Dr., 261
Merton College, Oxford, 189, 194, 198
Middlesex, Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of, 58, 162
Middle Temple, 3, 4, 5, 9, 20
Middleton, Earl, 179
⸺, Mrs., 257
Milton, John, 66, 74, 128, 129, 130, 133, 146 _note_, 161, 162, 172
and _note_, 209, 210, 211, 212, 217, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238,
239, 240, 294
Minehead, 40
_Miraculous Conformist, The_, 264
Morus, Alexander, 124 and _note_
Monaco, 106
Monk, General. _See_ Albemarle, Duke of
Monmouth, Duke of, 300
⸺, Robert Cary, 1st Earl of, 165
⸺, Henry Cary, 2nd Earl of, 165, 174, 175, 178
⸺, Countess of, wife of 1st Earl, 165
⸺, Countess of, wife of 2nd Earl, 162, 163, 164, 165, 175, 178, 179
_Montagna di Morbegno, la_, 103
Montague House, 296 _note_
Montrose, Marquis of, 173 _note_
Moor, Dr., 22
Moore, Sir Edward, of Mellifont, 3
⸺, Lady, of Mellifont, 15
⸺ Park, in Hertfordshire, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 175, 176
Moray, Sir Robert, 240, 243, 250
Morrice, Dr. Chaplain, 275, 276, 278, 279
Morrice, Sir William, 239
Moulins, 87
Mount-Alexander, Catherine Jones, Lady, 211 _note_, 280.
_See_ also Parsons, Lady
⸺, Lord, 211 _note_
Mountmorris, Lord, 55
Munster, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 37, 63, 113, 145, 146, 168, 171, 173,
182, 224, 227, 264, 275, 278, 301
Murray, Thomas, Provost of Eton, 44, 138
⸺, Mrs., widow of Provost, 138
⸺, Anne (Lady Halkett), daughter of Provost, 138, 139, 160 and
_note_
⸺, Tom, 134, 135, 144
_Mustapha_, 231
Nag’s Head Tavern, in Cheapside, 20 _note_, 111, 112, 127, 130
Naseby, battle of, 135, 198
_Naseby, The_, 271
Naylor, Joan, mother of the 1st Earl of Cork. _See_ Boyle, Mrs. Roger
⸺, Peter, lawyer, 20, 112, 127, 136
⸺, Robert, father-in-law of the 1st Earl of Cork, 3
⸺, Robert, chaplain, 15
Neile, Sir Paule, 240, 241
Newcastle, 70, 140
⸺, Duchess of, 272, 273
⸺, Marquis of, 126
New College Chapel, Oxford, 191
_New Experiments_, 201, 202
New Fish Street, 20
Newington, 263
New Inn, 112, 127, 136
“New Model,” The, 140, 162
Newton, Isaac, 203, 218, 288, 289, 290
⸺, Lady, 138
Nice, 106
_Ninth Whelp, The_, 22, 23, 26, 31, 32, 61
Nonsuch, 20, 260 and _note_
Northall, 20, 21
Northampton, 2nd Earl of, 42
⸺, 3rd Earl of, 243
_Novum Organum_, 44, 68
_Obstructors of Justice, The_, 237 _note_
_Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects_, 140, 153, 154, 155,
156, 157, 158, 164 _note_, 166, 196 and _note_, 257, 261
Offaley, 31
_Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God_, 299
Old Mall, The. _See_ Pall Mall
Oldenburg, Henry, 209, 210, 211, 217, 232, 237, 242, 244 and _note_,
248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 268,
269, 273, 274, 277, 289, 293, 294, 295
⸺, Rupert, 295
O’Neil, Shan, 4
_Origin of Forms, The_, 265
Ormonde, James Butler, Marquis and 1st Duke of, 145, 160, 239, 278,
280
Orrery, Lady Margaret Howard, Countess of, 94, 108, 109, 112, 113,
114, 120, 136, 146 _note_, 154, 168, 170, 253, 279, 280, 296,
303
⸺, Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, 1st Earl of, 14, 25, 36, 37, 39,
57, 58, 65, 70, 71, 72, 77, 81, 82 and _note_, 83, 89, 93, 94,
107, 108, 110, 112, 114, 115, 135 and _note_, 140, 141 and
_note_, 145 and _note_, 146 and _note_, 147 and _note_, 154,
162, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 179, 184, 206, 212, 215, 219,
224, 227, 228, 233 and _note_, 239, 247 and _note_, 252, 253,
264, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 295, 296, 303
Osborne, Dorothy, 234
Owen, John, 190
Oxford, 21, 126, 132, 140, 148, 187, 188, 189, 190-205, 210, 211,
220, 232, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 261, 262, 269, 271, 274,
277, 281, 282, 283, 284, 290
Padua, 103
“Painted Chamber,” The, 287
Palatine, Prince, 196, 197
Pall Mall, 38, 131, 170, 188, 207, 209, 224, 237, 259, 260, 265,
271, 281, 284, 285, 286, 287, 293, 295, 297, 300
“Papin’s Digestors,” 297
_Paradise Lost_, 217, 239
Paris, 85, 86, 106
Parkhall, 262
Parliaments. _See_ Short, Long, Rump, and Barebones.
Parsons, Sir Lawrence and Lady, 18
⸺, Sir William, 211 _note_
⸺, Lady, wife of Sir William. _See_ Mount-Alexander
_Parthenissa_, 168, 170
Pavement, the. _See_ Pall Mall
_Pays de Forest_, 87
“Pegg,” Lady. _See_ Orrery, Countess of
Pembroke, Shakespere’s Earl of, 164
Pennington, Isaac, 234
Pepys, Samuel, 73, 139, 226, 228, 229, 230, 236, 245, 246, 249, 255,
256, 257, 258, 261, 263, 267, 271, 272, 273, 277, 278, 280,
284, 285, 286
⸺, Mrs., 230, 280
Perkins, Mr., the London tailor, 19, 23, 31, 47, 50, 53, 58, 59, 106,
114, 115, 116, 127, 134
Perugia, 106
Peterborough, 1st Earl of, 41, 42
Peters, Hugh, 235
_Petition and Advice_, 215
Pett, Sir Peter, 195, 243
Petty France, Westminster, 209, 210, 211, 217, 235, 237, 240
Petty, Sir William, 148, 183, 184, 185, 226 and _note_, 241, 245,
260, 291, 294
_Philaretus_, 1, 2, 15, 34, 35 _note_, 49, 55, 97, 99, 100, 122
Philosophical College. _See_ Invisible College
Physick Garden, Oxford, 191
_Physiological Essays_, 211 _note_, 246, 288
Piazza, Covent Garden, the, 255
Piccadilly, 228, 276, 277, 293, 303
_Pilgrim, The_, 9
Pisa, 106
Pistoia, 106
Piur, 103
Plague, the Great, 246, 257, 260, 261, 262, 263
Pococke, Dr., 200
Portsmouth, 21, 65 _note_, 160
Povy, 250 and _note_
Powell, Mary, 209
Poynington, 154, 290
Prayer Book, abolition of the, 132
Preston, in Kent, 3, 20, 22
⸺, battle of, 167
_Pro Populo Defensio Anglicano_, 235
Pudding Lane, 269, 270
_Pyrophilus_, 211 and _note_, 280, 303
Queen Street, Covent Garden, 108
_Quintus Curtius_, 51
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 6, 9, 10, 44, 113
Raleigh-Desmond Estates, 10, 11
Ranelagh, 1st Viscount, 75
⸺, Arthur Jones, 2nd Viscount, 25, 37, 38, 65, 74, 75, 76, 131,
212, 280, 302, 307
⸺, Katherine Boyle, Viscountess, 13, 16, 21, 24, 25, 31, 37, 38,
39, 65, 73, 74, 75, 79, 81, 83, 111, 127, 130, 131, 132, 135,
136, 139, 143, 147, 150, 154 and _note_, 159, 162, 168, 170,
174, 175, 188, 192 and _note_, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211,
212, 217, 219, 224, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240,
258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 268, 271, 280, 281,
282, 284, 285, 286, 287, 294, 295, 300, 301, 302, 303, 306,
307, 308, 309
Ranelagh, Richard Jones, 3rd Viscount and 1st Earl of, 130, 210, 211
and _note_, 212, 217, 232, 237, 242, 257, 280, 303
⸺ Gardens, 303 _note_
Rathfarnham, 16, 26, 31
_Real Character: An Essay towards a_, 203 and _note_
Rebellions, Irish, 4, 8, 113, 302
_Regii Sanguinis Clamor_, 210 _note_
_Relation d’un Voyage en Angleterre_, 251 and _note_
Rich, Charles. _See_ Warwick, 4th Earl of
⸺, Mr. Robert, son of 3rd Earl of Warwick, 215, 216
⸺, Lord, son of Charles and Mary Rich, 4th Earl and Countess of
Warwick, 258, 259
_Richard II_, 159
Rhodes, Mrs., Lady Wentworth, 29, 55
Rhone, the, 88
Rickmansworth, 164, 165, 179
Rochester, Dean of, 268
Rome, 102, 105, 106
Rooke, Mr., 241
Roscommon, 25, 280
⸺, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of, 229 _note_
Rouen, 85, 86
_Royal Charles, The_, 271, 258 _note_.
_See_ also _Naseby_
Royal Mines, the Company of the, 255
Royal Society, the, 127, 148, 201, 211, 226-245, 246, 248, 249, 256,
260, 261, 263, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 277, 281, 283, 288-291,
294, 297, 300, 307
Rump Parliament, the, 182
Rupert, Prince, 126, 197, 248, 264, 295
Russell, Lord William, 142 _note_, 300
Rydowt, servant, 68
Rye, in Sussex, 85
St. Bartholomew the Less, parish of, 128
St. Bernard, Monastery of, 99 and _note_
St. Faith’s Church, under St. Paul’s, 268
St. Germains, 160
St. Giles in the Fields, 165 _note_
St. James’s, 158, 168, 174, 303
⸺ Garden, 171
⸺ Palace, 286, 293
⸺ Park, 284, 285, 286, 287
⸺ Square, 286
St. John, Oliver, 234
St. John’s College, Oxford, 191
St. Leger, Sir Anthony, 5
⸺, Lord President, 114
St. Martin’s in the Fields, 19, 306, 309
⸺ Lane, 138, 165 _note_
St. Mary’s, Oxford, 190
St. Patrick’s, Dublin, 24, 27 _note_, 29, 30
St. Paul’s Cathedral, 64, 213, 214, 250, 267, 268
St. Stephen’s Chapel, 287
Saladine, M., 137
Salisbury, 141, 253, 260 _note_, 306
⸺, Countess of, 93, 112, 136
⸺ House, 62, 92, 136
⸺ Plain, 140, 141
Sandwich, Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of, 224, 225, 228, 229 and _note_,
230, 239, 243, 256, 293
Saunderson, Dr., Bishop of Lincoln, 247 and _note_
⸺ Mrs. Mary, actress, 231, 232 and _note_
Savoy, the (in London), 46, 165 _note_
⸺, the House of the, 70, 80, 81, 84, 86, 92, 93, 95, 136
⸺ Duke of, 87
Sayes Court, Deptford, 12, 214, 215, 222
Scudamore, Lord, 209
_Self-denying Ordinance_, the, 132
_Seraphick Love_, 166, 167, 174, 176, 177, 207, 222, 223 and _note_,
232, 295
Shannon, Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess, 78, 81, 83, 84, 95, 96,
106, 110, 112, 116, 134, 171, 180, 207, 227 and _note_
⸺ Park, 227
Sheldon, Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, 254, 275, 283
“Sheldonian,” the, Oxford, 254, 282
Shepperton, parish church of, 111
Sherborne Castle, 59, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 79, 135, 154
Short Parliament, 107
Sidney, Algernon, 142 _note_, 300
⸺ Sir Philip, 61, 76
Sigginstown, 121
_Siege of Rhodes, The_, 232 _note_
_Skeptical Chymist, The_, 205, 209, 246
Skinner, Cyriack, 209
Skipton Castle, 26, 34
Slingsby, Sir Francis, 15
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 297
Soho, 165 _note_
Solebay, battle of, 293
_Some Considerations Touching the Style of The Holy Scriptures_, 252
_Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental
Philosophy_, 252
_Some Experiments and Considerations Touching Colour_, 252
_Sophronia_, 257
Sorbière, 249, 251 _note_
Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of, 230, 239
Southesk, Countess of, 286
Spa, 170
Spenser, Edmund, the Poet, 6, 7, 8
⸺, Elizabeth Boyle, wife of the Poet, 7, 8
⸺, Peregrine, 9
Sprat, Thomas, 226, 243, 251, 288
_Spring and Weight of the Air, The._ _See_ Air
Stafford, Lady, 78, 79, 80, 110, 134
⸺, Sir Thomas, 70, 78 and _note_, 79, 80, 112, 134
Star Chamber, 34, 55, 56, 287
Stalbridge, the Manor of, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 78,
80, 81, 83, 107, 110, 112, 113, 133, 135, 136, 140, 142, 144,
147, 149, 153, 154, 166, 167, 168, 173, 174, 175, 181, 253,
284, 295, 307
Stirling Castle, 44
Strand, the, 225, 272
Strafford, Thomas, 1st Viscount Wentworth, Earl of, 27, 28, 29, 30,
31, 33, 34, 37, 55, 56, 58, 71, 72, 102, 107, 108, 109 _note_,
110, 167
Stratford-on-Avon, 264
Strongbow’s Tomb, Dublin, 75
Stubbe, Mr., 264, 279, 288
Suckling, Sir John, 108, 109 _note_
Suffolk, Countess of, 94, 108
⸺, Earl of, 22, 94, 108
Swift, Dean, 156, 157 _note_
Sydenham, Colonel, 286
⸺, Dr., 286, 287
Tallents, Mr. Francis, 34, 149 and _note_
Temple, Sir William, 164, 234
Thames, the, 270
Thanet, Lady, 229 _note_, 303
“Thorough,” policy of, 27
Thurloe, John, 234
“Toleration Order,” Cromwell’s, 132
Tonbridge, 260
“Torricellian experiments,” 240
Tower of London, 20, 107, 108, 133, 273, 274, 294
⸺ Hill, 110, 134, 244, 245
_Tract on Education_, 128
_Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things_, 288
Treaty of Breda, 173 _note_
Trevanion, family of, 165
Trinity College, Dublin, 25
_True Remembrances_, 2, 25
_Tryphon_, 280
Tuke, Sir Samuel, 267
Turberville, Dr., 253 and _note_, 306
Tuscany, Duke of, 43
Two Golden Balls, the, in Pall Mall, 286
Tyburn, 233 _note_, 300
_Universal History, The_, 82
University College, Oxford, 193
Urban VIII, Pope, 104, 105, 106
Usher, James, Archbishop of Armagh, 26, 147 and _note_, 162, 207
Valtollina, 103
Vane, Sir Henry (younger), 195, 196, 232, 234, 244, 245
Venice, 45, 103
Verona, 103
Verney, Sir Edmund, 22, 70, 73, 74, 75
_View of the Present State of Ireland_, 8
Villa Diodati, 82 _note_, 88, 124, 239
Vincenza, 103
Wadham College, Oxford, 148, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 196, 197, 203
Walker, Dr., chaplain, 207, 260
Waller, Edmund, 137, 156, 202, 243, 262 and _note_, 277, 285, 286, 287
Waller, Sir William, 135
Wallis, Dr., 148, 189, 196, 197, 202, 242, 254, 283, 284
Walton, Izaak, 46, 67, 231
Ward, Dr. Seth, 190, 199, 201, 242
Warwick, Charles Rich, 4th Earl of, 95, 96, 110, 111, 113, 131, 132,
134, 161, 166, 206, 207, 208, 215, 216, 224, 253, 258, 260,
262, 293, 295
⸺, Mary Boyle, Countess of, 14, 16, 18, 31, 36, 60, 64, 73, 76,
77, 79, 81, 83, 84, 93, 95, 110, 111, 113, 131, 132, 133, 134,
160, 162, 166, 206, 207, 208, 209, 224, 253, 258, 259, 260,
293, 295
⸺, Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of, 22, 110, 111, 160, 162, 206, 215, 216
⸺, Lord Rich, 3rd Earl of, 215, 216, 224
⸺ House, Holborn, 131, 160, 174, 207, 259, 260
Wentworth, Thomas, 1st Viscount. _See_ Strafford
Westminster, 293
⸺ Abbey, 8, 168, 275, 287
⸺ Assembly, 141 _note_, 148
⸺ Hall, 108, 167, 279
⸺ Palace, 287
⸺ School, 200
Weston, Dr., of Christ Church, Oxford, 21, 22
⸺, Lord Chancellor, 24
Whitehall, 63, 71, 93, 167, 168, 213, 218, 226, 228, 229, 243, 244,
256, 257, 264, 275, 286, 293
Whitlocke, Bulstrode, 234
Wild, Dr., 213
Wilkins, Dr., 148, 187, 189, 191, 192, 196, 197, 200, 203, 213, 214,
241, 244 _note_, 250, 260
⸺, Mrs., 192
Wilkinson, Mr., tutor and chaplain, 39
William III, 116, 301, 303
Williamson, Sir Joseph, 294
Willis, Dr., 194, 198, 201, 242, 291
Winchester, 140, 141 and _note_
Windsor, 46, 167
Winthrop, Governor, 243, 249, 250
Woburn, 20
Wolsey, Cardinal, 191
_Wonders no Miracles_, 264
Woodcock, Katherine, 212
“Wood’s” in Pall Mall, 286
Wood Street, 148, 149, 150, 161, 189, 198
“Wood Street Cake,” 160 _note_
Worcester, battle of, 198
Wordsworth, William, 75
Worsley, Dr., 183, 293
Wotton, Sir Henry, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 53, 54,
57, 58, 65 and _note_, 66, 67, 68, 81, 86, 129, 174, 231
Wotton, Dr. William, 174
Wray, Sir William, 137 and _note_
Wren, Christopher, 192, 199, 240, 241, 254, 267, 268, 269, 294
Wright, Dr., 207, 208, 209
Yeovil, 142, 253
York, 70, 72, 126
Youghal, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 35, 39, 40, 60, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117,
119, 120, 121, 135 and _note_, 145, 171, 181, 219
⸺, College House of, 1, 2
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
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