Robert Boyle

CHAPTER I. His Birth and Family

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.”

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.” 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.

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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. 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.”

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. 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.” 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.” 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” 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 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—

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