CHAPTER XIII. Politics and Philosophy

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. 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.”

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.” 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.”

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.

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, 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. 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.”

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. 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.

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. 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 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. 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 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....”

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 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.”

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 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. 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, 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.”

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!”

As long as it was possible, Lord Broghill seems to have supported Richard’s protectorate; 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. 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,” 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!”