CHAPTER XVI. A New London

A NEW LONDON

“In the meane time the King and Parliament are infinitely zealous for the rebuilding of our ruines; and I believe it will universally be the employment of the next spring. They are now busied with adjusting the claims of each proprietor, that so they may dispose things for the building after the noblest model: Everybody brings in his idea, amongst the rest I presented his Majestie my own Conceptions, with a Discourse annex’d. It was the second that was seene within 2 Dayes after the Conflagration: but Dr. Wren had got the start of me.”—JOHN EVELYN to Sir Samuel Tuke, September 27, 1666.

Christopher Wren had not let the ashes cool under his feet. Evelyn was picking his way among the debris—“the ground ... so hot that it even burnt the soles of my shoes”—and mourning over the ninety burnt City Churches, and the ruins of St. Paul’s, “one of the most antient pieces of piety in the Christian World.” He was thinking of the “poore Bookesellers,” who, having trusted all their “noble impressions” to the insides of the Churches, had “ben indeede ill-treated by Vulcan.” Two hundred thousand pounds’ worth of books had been burnt: “an extraordinary detriment,” says Evelyn, “to the whole Republiq of Learning.” Pepys, after the grimy fatigues of the past few days, had been “trimmed,” and had gone to Church, in his Sunday best, and listened to a bad, poor sermon by the Dean of Rochester: “nor eloquent, in saying at this time that the City is reduced from a large folio to a decimo-tertio”:—the Dean, too, must have been among the booksellers. Lady Ranelagh was dispensing Robert Boyle’s charity among the houseless Londoners huddled in the fields; and Henry Oldenburg was writing to Robert Boyle in Oxford. “The Stationers of Paul’s,” he wrote, “had suffered greatly.” All their books, carried by them into St. Faith’s Church, under St. Paul’s, had been burnt; and amongst them were the “hitherto printed Transactions.”

“Dr. Wren,” he continued, “has, since my last, drawn a model for a New City, and presented it to the King, who produced it himself before the Council, and manifested much approbation of it. I was yesterday morning with the Doctor, and saw the model, which methinks does so well provide for security, conveniency, and beauty, that I can see nothing wanting as to those three main articles; but whether it has consulted with the populousness of a great City, and whether reason of state would have that consulted with, is a query to me. I then told the Doctor that, if I had had an opportunity to speak with him sooner, I should have suggested to him that such a model, contrived by him and received and approved by the Royal Society or a Committee thereof, before it had come to the view of his Majesty, would have given Our Society a name, and made it popular, and availed not a little to silence those who ask continually, what have they done?”

Wren explained to Oldenburg that he had been obliged to act quickly, “before other designs came in.” And Oldenburg, in his letter to Boyle, took comfort in remembering that, after all, “it was a Member that had done it,” and that, when Wren’s design was accepted—as it undoubtedly would be—all the world would know that the model of a New London was the work of a Member of the Royal Society.

Robert Boyle, in his Oxford arm-chair, with his books and instruments about him, must have listened sadly to such war news, and news of Court and Parliament, as found its way to him in letters out of an anxious and distracted London. All the talk of late had been of the Navy muddle; the huge sums of money required; the poverty of the Exchequer; the mutinous and “pressed” men, and the “natural expression of passion” of the women left behind, who had “looked after the ships as far as they could see them by moonlight”: a most sad state, truly, of public affairs. Distrust and anger filled the hearts of men and women, and strange rumours were afloat. During the summer, before the fire broke out, the war with the Dutch had been the one thing thought of and talked about. In June, Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and the Dutch de Ruyter had engaged in a fight “the longest and most stubborn that the seas have ever seen.” The English fleet had been ruined, but the English were not conquered, and in July the two fleets, refitted, had met again. This time it was the Dutch fleet that was destroyed and the Dutch who refused to be conquered. And just before the Fire of London broke out in Pudding Lane the French fleet had joined the Dutch fleet, and the English, with a weakened navy and an exhausted exchequer, were at a standstill. After the fire, when London was in ruins from the Tower to the Temple, strange rumours ran from mouth to mouth. There was “some kind of plot in this”; it was “a proper time for discontents”; it was the French who did it; it was the Dutch who did it; it was the Papists who did it; it was the old Republicans—a dire revenge on the eve of Cromwell’s Lucky Day. The prophecies in Booker’s Almanack for the year were the topics of conversation at dinner-tables; and Lady Carteret told Pepys that pieces of charred paper had been blown by the wind as far as Cranborne, and that she herself had picked up, or been given, a little bit of paper on which the words were printed: “Time is, it is done.”

In the spring of 1667, a Peace Congress was sitting at Breda, but an armistice had been refused; and then it was that de Witt had seized his moment and that the Dutch fleet sailed for the mouth of the Thames. The English were unready, their seamen mutinous, their coffers empty, their big ships laid up, for economy’s sake, in dock. Everybody knows the panic and confusion that followed—the impotent rage of a people that felt itself betrayed: Ruyter and de Witt were at hand, coming up our own beloved Thames with “a fine and orderly fleet of sixty sail.” And Monk, the Duke of Albemarle, in his shirt-sleeves, at Gravesend, was doing his best to “choke the channel.”

But the Dutch were not intending to land. After they had burnt the English ships in the river, they were content to sail away again, carrying with them, as an insolent trophy, the half-burnt hull of the ship that had once been the Naseby, and was now the Royal Charles.

The rage of the Londoners knew no bounds. England was undone;—with a debauched and lazy Prince and a licentious court; “no council, no money, no reputation at home or abroad.” The very men who had stood in the Strand and blessed God at the Restoration now wished Cromwell back again: “Everybody nowadays,” says Pepys, “reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour Princes fear him.”

Towards the end of 1666 Lady Ranelagh was expecting her brother from Oxford to make her a prolonged visit in the house in Pall Mall. And where Robert Boyle was, there must some kind of chemical laboratory be also.

“I have ordered Thomas,” she wrote, “to look out for charcoal; and should gladly receive your orders to put my back house in posture to be employed by you, against your coming, that you may lose no time after.”

The Royal Society was again holding its meetings;—still, at first, under difficulties, in Gresham College, which was now the Exchequer. Hooke and Croone were both enthusiastic over the “pretty experiments” of transfusion of blood: “one dog filled with another dog’s blood,” is Pepys’s way of expressing it. Croone told Pepys that the performances at Gresham College had given occasion for “many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such-like.” The City was still in a melancholy condition; it was difficult and dangerous to walk about the ruins, with a link, after dark; but the “Greate Streetes” were now being “marked out with piles, drove into the ground”; and people were wondering why so many of the new Churches were to be built “in a cluster about Cornhill.” In January 1667, Gresham College being occupied by the Exchequer, Mr. Henry Howard, one of the Society’s most generous members, put rooms in Arundel House in the Strand at the disposal of the Royal Society—

“To the Royal Society,” says Evelyn, “which since the sad conflagration were invited by Mr. Howard to sit at Arundel House in the Strand, who at my instigation likewise bestow’d on the Society that noble library which his grandfather especially and his ancestors had collected. This gentleman had so little inclination to bookes, that it was the preservation of them from imbezzlement.”

In May, the meetings of the Society were in full swing: May 30, especially, must have been a gala occasion—

“To London,” says Evelyn, “to wait on the Dutchess of Newcastle (who was a mighty pretender to learning, poetrie and philosophie, and had in both publish’d divers bookes) to the Royal Society, whither she came in greate pomp, and being receiv’d by our Lord President at the Dore of our meeting roome, the mace, etc., carried before him, had several experiments shewed to her. I conducted her Grace to her coach, and return’d home.”

Pepys gives a better account: The Duchess had invited herself; and there had been “much debate, pro and con, it seems many being against it, and we do believe the town will be full of ballads of it.” In the end, gallantry prevailed among the Philosophers; and when Pepys arrived at Arundel House on foot, after his noonday dinner—it was a very hot and dusty day—he found “very much company” in decorous expectation of her Grace. She came, with her attendant women—among them the “Ferabosco,” of whose beauty there had been so much talk among the gallants. The Duchess herself, in her “antick” dress, disappointed Pepys: “nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration, all admiration.”

The Philosophers showed her all their best experiments—“of colours, loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors.” The chef d’œuvre seems to have been the turning of a piece of roasted mutton into pure blood, “which was very rare,” says Pepys; and then the Duchess and her suite were escorted to her coach again, her Grace still crying that she was “full of admiration.”

That was in May. Before the end of June poor Henry Oldenburg was suddenly clapped into the Tower. The news must have fallen like a thunderbolt at the next Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Society. Their Secretary was in jail.

“I was told yesterday,” wrote Pepys, on June 25th, “that Mr. Oldenburg, our Secretary at Gresham College, is put into the Tower, for writing news to a virtuoso in France, with whom he constantly corresponds on philosophical matters: which makes it very unsafe at this time to write, or almost to do anything.”

Oldenburg was still in custody on August 8 when Evelyn called at the Tower.

“Visited Mr. Oldenburg, now close prisoner in the Tower, being suspected of writing intelligence. I had an order from Lord Arlington, Secretary of State, which caus’d me to be admitted. This Gentleman was Secretary to our Society, and I am confident will prove an innocent person.”

And indeed Oldenburg was soon to be set free. On September 3 he was once more in his own home and writing to Robert Boyle at Oxford—

“I was so stifled by the prison air,” says Oldenburg, “that as soon as I had my enlargement from the Tower I widened it, and took it from London into the Country, to fan myself for some days in the good air of Craford in Kent. Being now returned, and having recovered my stomach, which I had in a manner quite lost, I intend, if God will, to fall to my old trade, if I have any support to follow it.”

Once again, evidently, the Boyle family had done their best for a Puritan friend in trouble. “I have learnt during this Commitment,” says Oldenburg to Boyle, “to know my real friends. God Almighty bless them, and enable me to convince them all of my gratitude. Sir, I acknowledge and beg pardon for the importunities I gave you at the beginning; assuring you that you cannot lay any commands on me that I shall not cheerfully obey to the best of my power.”

But the news of Oldenburg’s release—though Boyle must have been glad to hear of it—had come at an anxious time. A few days before Boyle received Oldenburg’s letter the Lord Chancellor Clarendon had been required to resign the Seals. The Boyle family must have known something of what was happening: the Burlingtons and the Clarendons were next-door neighbours in the two great palaces in Piccadilly, and their children were married,—“Lory Hide” to Henrietta Boyle.

“Dear Broghill”—now my Lord Orrery—had been in England by the King’s wish for some little time, having left Munster under the care of a Vice-President. “Lord Orrery,” says his chaplain, Dr. Morrice, quaintly, “saw thoroughly into the tempers of people and the consequences of things.” And he had foreseen Clarendon’s fall, and had already warned Clarendon in vain. In August, Lady Clarendon had died: “the mother of all his children and the companion in all his banishment, and who had made all his former calamities less grievous by her company and courage.” Lady Clarendon had been buried in Westminster Abbey; and alone, in his new palace, among his pictures and books, the widower had received his Majesty’s visit of condolence. And then, only a few days later, had come the King’s message, carried by the Chancellor’s son-in-law the Duke of York. It was desirable “on various grounds, but especially for his own safety,” that Clarendon should resign the Seals.

During the next day or two the Duke of York, the Duchess—Clarendon’s daughter—and Archbishop Sheldon, and various other people, interceded for Clarendon with the King. And on the morning of August 26 Clarendon was sent for to Whitehall. The audience lasted two hours, in the King’s own chamber, and then the Chancellor was dismissed and departed, “looking sad,” through the private garden of Whitehall, which was “full of people” waiting to see him come out. Lady Castlemaine, in her smock, looked down upon the garden from her aviary window, laughing with the gallants below, and “blessing herself at the old man’s going.”

Next day Evelyn called on the Chancellor at his house in Piccadilly. “I found him,” says Evelyn, “in his bedchamber, very sad.” The tide had turned against him: the Parliament had accused him, and he had enemies at Court; “especialy the buffoones and ladies of pleasure, because he thwarted some of them and stood in their way.”

All this is old reading: the fall of Clarendon is a chapter of British history. But it is not quite so well known that Lord Orrery, “dear Broghill,” the uncle of “Lory Hide’s” wife, was asked to take the seals that Clarendon had been forced to give up. According to Morrice, the Duchess of York appealed to Lord Orrery to take the seals and heal the breach between the King and the Duke, whose suspected papacy was “against him.” And then the Duke tried to persuade Lord Orrery; and lastly the King himself offered him the Chancellorship. But Broghill’s had always been a “well-armed head”; and now that he was Lord Orrery he knew his King—and he knew his gout; and he made his gout serve as an excuse for declining the honour offered him by his King. “I am a decrepit man,” he said to the Duchess of York; but he took a turn or two in his coach, in the park, planning what could be done to make the King and the Duke agree, and thinking what a pity it was that Clarendon had been so imperious—even towards the King himself.

So far Morrice. Lord Orrery went back to Ireland, and Sir Orlando Bridgeman was the new Chancellor: “the man of the whole nation that is best spoken of, and will please most people,” says the fickle Pepys, who had himself, such a little while before, been “mad in love with my Lord Chancellor.”

In October Lord Orrery’s new play, The Black Prince, was produced at the King’s Theatre. The house was “infinite full,” the King and Duke there, and not a seat to be got by Mr. Pepys in the pit, so that he was obliged to pay four shillings for a seat in the upper boxes, “the first time ever I sat in a box in my life.” In November and December both Houses were “very busy about my Lord Chancellor’s impeachment,” and Lory Hide was going about saying that if he thought his father had done only one of the things that were being said against him, he, Lory Hide, would be “the first that should call for judgment against him”, which Mr. Waller, the poet, “did say was spoke like the old Roman—like Brutus—for its greatness and worthiness.”

On December 3, Henry Oldenburg, back at his work as Secretary of the Royal Society, was writing to Boyle of the “grand affair,” the wrangle of Lords and Commons over the terms of Clarendon’s impeachment. And the same letter announced that the Royal Society had “greatly applauded” Boyle’s recently communicated Experiments of Light; and that at the Anniversary Meeting of the Society, on St. Andrew’s Day, Boyle had been elected one of the new Council—“a very numerous meeting ... never so great a one before.” Boyle was then still in Oxford; but Evelyn, the Chancellor’s old friend, had been calling again at the great house in Piccadilly: “To visit the late Lord Chancellor. I found him in his garden at his new built Palace, sitting in his gowt wheele-chayre, and seeing the gates setting up towards the North and the fields. He look’d and spoke very disconsolately ... next morning I heard he was gon....”

Clarendon, by the King’s orders, had hurriedly escaped to France, to be followed into exile by an Act of Parliament banishing him for life. Clarendon was gone; and the “Cabal” administration had begun.

If the year 1667 ended anxiously for the Boyle family, the year 1668 was to prove more anxious still. Lord Orrery had returned to Ireland to take up his presidency of Munster, and was living in great splendour at Charleville; but he and the Lord Lieutenant, Ormonde, disagreed; and in the autumn of 1668 Lord Orrery had resigned the presidency and was back in England. He had “been advised,” says Morrice, “that his credit at Court had begun to decline,” and that it would be wise for him to be on the spot.

He was very much on the spot when Pepys met him, in October, at Lord Arlington’s house. In spite of his gout, the urbanity of the Boyle family had not forsaken him. He “took notice” of Pepys, and began a “discourse of hangings, and of the improvement of shipping”; and Pepys presently discovered that Lord Orrery was paying “a mighty compliment” to his abilities and ingenuity, “which I am mighty proud of, and he do speak most excellently.”

But later in November came a rude awakening. It was now my Lord Orrery’s turn to be impeached in the House of Commons, “for raising of moneys by his own authority upon his Majesty’s subjects.”

When the summons came, Lord Orrery was laid up with a severe attack of gout; and when he was well enough, a few days later, to answer the summons in person, he could scarcely manage to get up the steps from Westminster Hall to the Court of Request. A friend, passing by, remarked that my Lord of Orrery walked with difficulty and pain. “Yes, sir,” said Orrery, “my feet are weak; but if my heels will serve to carry me up, I promise you my head shall bring me safe down again.”

And it did. He made an able defence—sitting, because of his gout; and at the psychological moment, so the story runs, the King put an end to the proceedings by proroguing both Houses. Impeachments might be as thick as blackberries; Lord Orrery might discourse cheerfully of “hangings” at a dinner party at Lord Arlington’s house; but, after all, it was only five-and-twenty years since the old Earl of Cork had died in harness with all his sons in the field. It would have been inconvenient to overlook such services and such sacrifices as the great Boyle family in Ireland had rendered to their Kings.

No further steps were to be taken against Lord Orrery. “I am glad the House dismissed that foolish impeachment against my Lord Orrery,” wrote Mr. Stubbe, of Warwick, to Robert Boyle. Morrice says that, while the affair was in progress, Lady Pegg had been sent by her husband to Ireland “to secure the estates.” She had performed her mission “with great dexterity and expedition,” so that “if he had been impeached, his family would have been safe.” As it was, Lord Orrery returned to Ireland and Lady Pegg—to occupy himself with repairing his last great home of Castle Martyr, and to write his Art of War. And in December 1668 another new play—Tryphon—a tragedy taken from the First Book of Maccabees, was produced with great success at the Duke’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Pepys, on this occasion, “put a bit of meat in their mouths” and hurried off, to find the theatre crowded, and to sit out the performance in the eighteenpenny seats above-stairs—“mighty hot.”

So ended 1668. During the last half of the year, at any rate, Robert Boyle had been away from Oxford and in the family circle. It is probable that he was not far from “dear Broghill” in his hour of trial. After the family anxiety on this brother’s account had quieted down, there came news from Ireland that Lord Ranelagh was dead. His death can have brought little outward change to the house in the Mall. Dick Jones—whose life at Court with Grammont and the rest of the gallants must have caused Lady Ranelagh many a heartache, had been for some time employed in Irish politics and in Ireland. Ormonde had brought about a reconciliation between Lord Ranelagh and his son; and the young Pyrophilus had been member for the county of Roscommon in the Irish Parliament before his father’s death raised him to the Upper House. It is suggestive that Lord Ranelagh’s nuncupative Will left the two unmarried daughters, Elizabeth and Frances, a sum of money, subject to their marrying with the consent of the eldest sister, Lady Mount-Alexander. It is a question whether “the girls” received any money as a result of these nuncupative paternal intentions. Elizabeth, who became Mrs. Melster, must have been the heroine of a humble love-story, for her husband is described in the old peerages as a valet de pé. This did not mean exactly in those times what it means to-day, nor was it exactly what might have been expected for a granddaughter of the Great Earl of Cork. And yet, it must be remembered that the old Elizabethan Peer had always about him a little entourage of cousin-commoners, as staunch as they were unobtrusive,—Naylors of Gray’s Inn and Croones of Cheapside.

Frances, the delicate daughter—the baby born prematurely at the manor of Stalbridge—does not seem to have married at all. Lady Ranelagh had nursed “my poor Franck” through many illnesses—smallpox, of course, among them. She suffered from headaches; and nothing did them so much good as the little packets of tea—a costly luxury in those days—that Lady Ranelagh was able to procure for her by the kindness of the Oxford uncle. Elizabeth and Frances were both probably still “the girls,” and living with their mother, when Robert Boyle, in 1669, left Oxford for good. Their uncle Robyn, the “deare Squire”—was long ago turned philosopher; something of a valetudinary; a virtuoso of an European fame. Philosophers of all nations flocked to see Mr. Boyle’s experiments. The Royal Society—all intellectual London—was waiting for his coming.

With his books and instruments and standish—but, alas! no longer his bows and arrows—he once more, as in the old-young days of 1644, took up his residence with Lady Ranelagh in the house in Pall Mall.