CHAPTER XI. Hermetic Thoughts

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.”

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. 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.” 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. 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.”

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.”

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: “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, 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.” 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? 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 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 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.” 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.

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.”

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. 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. 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.”

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.”

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.