CHAPTER XV. The Plague and the Fire

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 already mentioned, but of his epoch-making Scepticall Chymist. 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. 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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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. 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”—

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.”

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.

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.

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.” 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.” 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. 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.” 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.” 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.”

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. 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; 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!”

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.

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.” The meetings of the Royal Society had been adjourned. The King and Court were gone: 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. 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.

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. 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.” 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, which I hope is uninfected ... and thence to Parkhall, 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 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.”

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....”

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.”