CHAPTER X. A Kind of Elysium

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Shakespeare was a little out of date in the summer of 1648, when Robert Boyle came to town from Stalbridge to the lodging in St. James’s taken for him by his sister Ranelagh.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. 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. 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.”

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.”

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 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; 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.”

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. 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; 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. 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.”

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.”

* * * * *

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.”