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CHAPTER XVII. The House in Pall Mall

Robert Boyle · Flora Masson — chapter 17 of 17 · ~17,188 words · public domain

THE HOUSE IN PALL MALL

“... Only this methinks I am sure of, that it is a brave thing to be one of those, that shall lift up their heads with joy in expectation of a present redemption, when all these ruins and confusions shall be upon the Earth; and such brave men and women are only true Christians. Therefore, my dear brother, let us endeavour for that dignity, though in maintaining it we take courses, that have the contempt of the world heaped upon them; for to be contemned by the contemptible is glorious in the opinion of your K. R.”—LADY RANELAGH to ROBERT BOYLE, September 14 (1653?).

“The Book of Nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty and symmetry, little by little, as it gradually comes to be more and more unfolded or displayed.”—ROBERT BOYLE, Second Part of the Christian Virtuoso, Aphorism xxi.

The intellectual atmosphere of Oxford, when Robert Boyle said good-bye to it, was not the same “ayre” that he had weighed so pleasantly in 1659. Indeed, he must have been rather glad to be out of it before the great occasion of the opening of the Sheldonian at the Encænia of 1669. Evelyn, who was present, was scandalised, not only by the University Orator’s “malicious and indecent reflections on the Royal Society as undermining of the University,” but by the performance of the University Buffoone, “which, unless it be suppressed,” he says, “it will be of ill consequences, as I afterwards plainly expressed my sense of it both to the Vice-Chancellor and severall heads of houses, who were perfectly ashamed of it and resolved to take care of it in future.” The “old facetious way” had given place to ribald and libellous attacks: “In my life,” says Evelyn, “I was never witnesse of so shamefull entertainment.”

Boyle’s old friend, Dr. Wallis, Professor of Mathematics, was equally distressed. In fact, he wrote about it to Mr. Boyle in London. Wallis had been one of those who objected to the fulsome wording of the proposed letter of thanks from the University to the Archbishop—a letter acknowledging Sheldon as their “Creator and Redeemer”: non tantus condere, hoc est creare, sed etiam redimere. And he was as angry with the University Orator’s attack on “Cromwell, fanatics, the Royal Society and the New Philosophy,” as he was at the abominable scurrilities of the University Buffoone. Real stage-plays, too, imported from the Duke’s House, had been acted in the Oxford Town Hall—and were less objectionable than what had gone on in the Sheldonian.

But even Wallis seems to have been infected by the summer madness of that Encænia of 1669. He had been entertaining some of the guests at his own house; Sir James Langham and his Lady, and other “persons of quality”; and in an after-dinner chat Sir James had been expatiating on the qualities of “an excellent lady,” Lady Mary Hastings, sister to the Earl of Huntingdon—a lady for whom Sir James had a very great esteem. So highly, indeed, did he think of “her temper, her parts, her worth, her virtue, her piety and everything else,” that he would have been quite willing to marry her himself except that she was his deceased wife’s sister, and that he was already married again. But Sir James thought—and Wallis concurred with him—that Lady Mary would make “not only an excellent wife, but an excellent wife for Esquire Boyle.” And Wallis wrote then and there to Boyle to offer to be “the happy instrument of making two so excellent persons happy in each other.”

Wallis may in his youth have studied cryptology; but in his middle age he did not understand Robert Boyle. Lady Mary Hastings probably never knew of the future that had been so neatly mapped out for her in that after-dinner chat. She married Sir William Joliffe, of Caverswell Castle, in Staffordshire. The Manor of Stalbridge stood empty; and Mr. Boyle went on living in Pall Mall.

But if Oxford was changed of late years, so also was Pall Mall—very much changed indeed since a certain dark evening of 1649, when Cromwell’s “sightly lieutenant,” carrying the message to Broghill, rode up to Lady Ranelagh’s door. One of the first things that Charles II had done was to make a new Mall in St. James’s Park, and to improve the Park itself—“now every day more and more pleasant by the new works upon it,” wrote Pepys in January 1662. A river was made through the Park; and there on frosty winter days Pepys stood to watch the gay groups “sliding with their skeates—which is a very pretty art.” The Duke of York was an accomplished skater, and the King was a great hand at the game of Mall.

“Here a well-polished Mall gives us the joy To see our Prince his matchless force employ. No sooner had he touch’d the flying ball But ’tis already more than half the Mall.”

When Pepys stopped to have a talk with the keeper of the Mall—who was “sweeping of it” at the moment—he examined with interest its earthen flooring, spread with powdered cockle-shells. Evelyn, on the other hand, cared more about the birds and beasts that inhabited the Park—the “deare of severall countries,” the guinea-fowl and Arabian sheep; the pelican, and the melancholy waterfowl brought by the Russian Ambassador from Astracan; the Solan geese, and the pet crane with a real wooden leg—“made by a soldier.” Waller has described St. James’s Park “as lately improved by his Majesty”—

“Methinks I see the love that shall be made, The lovers walking in that amorous shade; The Gallants dancing by the riverside— They bathe in summer and in winter slide. Methinks I hear the music in the boats, And the loud echo which returns the notes. ... The ladies angling in the crystal lake Feast on the waters with the prey they take; At once victorious with their lines and eyes They make the fishes and the men their prize.”

Mr. Waller saw everything couleur de rose. “I know his calling as a Poet,” wrote Lady Ranelagh once to Robert Boyle, when Waller had been paying her one of his elaborate compliments, “gives him license to say as great things as he can without intending that they should signify anything more than that he said them.” And it is possible some of the older inhabitants of Pall Mall did not look so kindly on the “improvements” in St. James’s Park.

The old Mall, and the old game that was played there, dated back to James I. There was a “Pell Mell Close” planted with apple-trees that gave the name to Apple-Tree Yard, St. James’s Square. The houses had been built on both sides of the Old Mall;—“The Pall Mall,” as it was called, or “Pall Mall Walk,” or “The Pavement.” Its double row of seventy elm trees—140 trees in all—running its length, from the Haymarket to St. James’s, may well have been the “living gallery of aged trees,” in Waller’s poem of 1661. Lady Ranelagh’s house was one of those on the south side, at the west end, of the Mall; houses advertised as “on the Park side, with Gardens or Mounts adjoining to the Royal Gardens.” There were various interesting inhabitants of the Mall about the time that Boyle went to live there with Lady Ranelagh. Dr. Sydenham, the fashionable London physician, had been living there since 1658—an old friend of theirs: one of the great Dorsetshire Puritan family of Sydenhams, of whom the doctor’s brother, the Parliamentarian Colonel Sydenham, was the chief. Mrs. Knight the singer, and Dr. Isaac Barrow the divine, and the notorious Countess of Southesk who figures in the Memoirs of Grammont, were all living in the Mall. There were taverns, too, and shops, with signboards: “The King’s Head,” and “The Two Golden Balls.” And Pall Mall was Clubland, even then: “Wood’s at the Pell Mell, our old house for clubbing,” wrote Pepys in 1660. But in 1670, after Boyle went to live there, it was still a rural, leafy little suburb of fashionable London, between Whitehall and St. James’s Palace, nestled among the old trees, under the very shadow of Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace; the Painted Chamber, and the Star Chamber, and St. Stephen’s Chapel—“That house where all our ills were shaped,” as Waller called it,—after the Restoration. So rural was the Old Mall, that Dr. Sydenham used to sit smoking his pipe at his open window looking on to the Pavement, with a silver tankard of ale on the window-sill; and when once a thief ran off with the doctor’s tankard, thief and tankard alike were lost “in the bushes of Bond Street.”

In 1669, Nell Gwynne was living on the north side, and at the east end, of the Mall, next door to Lady Mary Howard; but in 1671, she crossed over to a house on the Park side of Pall Mall, the leasehold of which had been given her by Charles II; and there, from this time till her death in 1687, “Maddam Elinor Gwyn” was living, only two doors off from Lady Ranelagh and Robert Boyle. Those strips of back gardens, with “raised mounts” in them looking over to the Royal Gardens, were very near together. Did Boyle, whose laboratory was at the back of Lady Ranelagh’s house, see Mrs. Nellie on her mount, talking to the King who stood looking up at her from the green walk below? Evelyn was in attendance that day. “I both saw and heard,” wrote Evelyn afterwards in his diary, “a very familiar discourse between [the King] and Mrs. Nellie, as they cal’d an impudent comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall, and [the King] standing on yᵉ greene walke under it....”

But that was in May 1671; and by that time Robert Boyle had been very ill for eleven months, and was only beginning to recover. The year 1669, and part of 1670, had been very busy. Besides his contributions to the Royal Society’s Transactions, he had published further work on the Spring and Weight of the Air, and a second edition of his Physiological Essays. Du Moulin’s translation of the Devil of Mascon, with Boyle’s introduction, had appeared; and Boyle was using all his influence, personal and literary, to heal the feud between the Royal Society and the Universities, in which Sprat and Glanville, Stubbe, Crosse, and others, were taking sides. And in 1670 there appeared Boyle’s Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things, better known by the delightful title of “Cosmical Suspicions.” Boyle was at this time at the height of his scientific and literary popularity: “Mr. Boiles Styll” meant very much to the intellectual London of that day. It had its disciples, and it had its critics. Evelyn has spoken of “those incumbrances” in it “which now and then render the way a little tedious”; and there were people who thought that in his literary style Mr. Boyle was not quite so happy as in his experiments.

And even in these experiments, one pair of eyes, at least, was fixed upon Robert Boyle; eyes that saw as far as, and perhaps a little further than, even Boyle’s. Isaac Newton—the boy who had jumped against the wind in that terrific storm that raged over England when Cromwell lay dying—was only twenty-nine in 1671; but he was already professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. It was six years since he had noticed the traditional apple fall to earth in his mother’s orchard in Lincolnshire. He himself had been tempted to seek after the philosopher’s stone; and when in 1676 Isaac Newton read in the Transactions of Boyle’s “uncommon experiment about the incalescence of gold and mercury,” it was in the finest spirit, as one of Boyle’s sincerest “honourers,” that Newton wrote to Oldenburg, the secretary. He felt that “the fingers of many will itch to have the knowledge of the preparation of such a mercury; and for that end some may not be wanting to move for the publishing of it, by urging the good it may do in the world. But, in my simple judgment, the noble author, since he has thought fit to reveal himself so far, does prudently in being reserved in the rest.” Newton gave his reasons for doubting this theory of the transmutation of metals: he foreshadowed the “immense damage to the world” that might come from proceeding further with it. “I question not,” he says of Boyle’s experiments, “but that the great wisdom of the noble author will sway him to silence till he shall be resolved of what consequence they may be.” It was because Boyle himself seemed “desirous of the sense of others in this point” that Newton had “been so free as to shoot my bolt.”

Isaac Newton’s “bolt” took effect, though it must have cost Boyle something to give up that little bit of research; for he had been, so to speak, rolling a little ball of quicksilver and gold-dust in the palm of his hand ever since the year 1652, when he was only five-and-twenty; pressing it a little with the fingers of the other hand, till it grew “sensibly and considerably hot,” and timing the “incalescence” by a minute clock. He was to hover about the subject for a time, but in the end, he was to follow Newton’s advice. If these two men could be present at a meeting of the Royal Society in Burlington House to-day! Their two portraits are on its walls. Their two faces look down on modern experimental science. Their self-restraint has had its reward.

Already, in 1670, Boyle was at the height of his literary and scientific popularity, the acknowledged chief of the circle of New Philosophers in London. He had long been a valetudinary, saving his strength for his work, and holding himself aloof from uncongenial company. And he was now beginning to enjoy the ease and dignity of home life, a clever woman’s ministrations and companionship, and the thousand-and-one little amenities of a home that his bachelor life in his Oxford lodgings must have lacked. But in June 1670 he had been taken suddenly ill; “a severe paralytic distemper”, it was called; and eleven months later, in May 1671, he was writing a pathetic little letter to his old Dorsetshire friend, John Mallet of Poynington, describing in his own gentle words his invalid condition. “I have taken so many medicines,” he wrote, “and found the relief they awarded me so very slow, that it is not easy for me to tell you what I found most good by. The things which to me seem fittest to be mentioned on this occasion are that cordial medicines, especially such as peculiarly befriend the genus nervosum, were very frequently and not unsuccessfully administered ... that the dried flesh of vipers seemed to be one of the usefullest cordials I took; but then I persevered in taking it daily for a great while. That I seldom missed a day without taking the air, at least once, and that even when I was at the weakest, and was fain to be carried in men’s arms from my chair into the coach. That the best thing I found to strengthen my feet and legs, and which I still use, was sack turned to a brine with sea-salt and well rubbed upon the parts every morning and night with a warm hand....”

Boyle’s own doctor was Edmund King—not then Sir Edmund and the King’s Physician, but a London practitioner of repute, living in Hatton Gardens; a year or two younger than Boyle; a member of the Royal Society; a friend of Willis and Petty, and a great man for dissections and experiments. It was Edmund King who was so interested in the first transfusion experiments on human subjects, and who, “with my best microscope,” noticed the appearance of living organisms in “things left in water.” And it is to be remembered that in a list of Boyle’s lost manuscripts there is one with the title “Spontaneous Generation.” It is possible that he and Dr. King may have been working together with the microscope. The “viper powder” was one of Dr. King’s prescriptions, though he is said to have preferred the “volatile salt.” It was not till some years later that Dr. King gained such celebrity by his prompt action in bleeding Charles II after his apoplectic seizure. He had a lancet in his pocket; and no other doctor was at hand.

Boyle recovered from his paralytic distemper, though very slowly. Whether it was the cordial of viper’s flesh, or the ministration of a warm human hand, he did regain strength, and was able once more to take up his work and resume his London life—always afterwards more or less the life of a studious invalid. “It has plainely astonish’d me,” says Evelyn, “to have seene him so often recover, when he has not been able to move, or bring his hand to his mouth: and indeede the contexture of his body, during the best of his health, appear’d to me so delicate, that I have frequently compar’d him to a chrystal or Venice glasse which, tho’ wrought never so thin and fine, being carefully set up, would outlive the harder metals of daily use: And he was with all as clear and candid: not a blemish or spot to tarnish his reputation.”

The mere number of Boyle’s publications during these years is remarkable, even though much of the work for them had been done before, and had only to be arranged for publication. They dealt with the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy; the Origin and Virtue of Gems; Fire, Flame, and Effluviums; the Pressure of Solids and Fluids, and the Weighing of Water; the Properties of Sea Water, and its Distillation; the Mechanical Causes of Heat and Cold, Volatility and Precipitation and Corrosiveness; the Production of Tastes; the Hypothesis of Alkali and Acidum, and the effects of atmospheric conditions “even on men’s sickness and health.” And there was always the other facet to Boyle’s intellectual nature. While he was writing of all these and other things, while he was wrapped up in Suspicions—about the hidden qualities of air, celestial magnets and attraction by suction, statical hygroscopes, laudanum, and air-bladders, and “quicksilver turning hot with gold,”—he was also deep in meditations of the “Excellence of Theology compared with Natural Philosophy.” Both had always seemed to him to be the “Objects of Men’s Study.” He held tenaciously to the “Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion”; and his theological treatises were to run parallel with his philosophical transactions.

The later chapters of biography are of necessity a chronicle of losses. The death of the great admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, at the battle of Solebay, on May 28, 1672, removed the other splendid father-in-law of the Burlington family. His funeral, “by water to Westminster, in solemn pomp,” must have affected the inmates of the house in Pall Mall as well as the families in the two Piccadilly palaces. “They will not have me live,” Lord Sandwich had said sadly to Evelyn, before he sailed. It is very certain that the whole trend of politics at this time—the crypto-catholic movement, burrowing its way into Protestant England; the capuchins flitting about between Whitehall and St. James’s; the alliance with the French against the Dutch, and the prolonged war with Holland; the plottings and placings of the Cabal, and the quarrels and changes in the royal harem, which had pushed up to the very door of the house in Pall Mall—must have been utterly distasteful to Robert Boyle and his passionately Puritan sister.

Poor Charles Rich, my Lord of Warwick, who had been ill for a long time, died at Leeze in 1673, leaving Mary, a childless great lady, still surrounded by chaplains, to administer her husband’s property and to see all the three “sweet young ladies,” her nieces, married to satisfactory husbands of her own choosing.

A more personal loss to Robert Boyle was the sudden death of Henry Oldenburg in September 1677. He and another old friend, Dr. Worsley of the “mountain-bellied conceptions” for the good of mankind, died almost at the same time. Oldenburg had worked hard for the Royal Society since he came out of the Tower in the autumn of 1667. He had carried the Society through the troublesome time that followed the Fire of London, after the loss of its Transactions and during its sojourn in Arundel House. He had seen it reinstated in Gresham College, and a great collation given in its honour by the Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London. He had been overworked and underpaid, and had added to the small gains he made out of the Society’s Transactions by doing a good deal of work for Boyle personally, in proof-correcting and in translating Boyle’s books into Latin. And Boyle had tried to obtain for him the Latin Secretaryship—the very post that Milton had held—but in this he had failed. One of the last glimpses of Oldenburg and Boyle together is at a little scientific supper-party in February 1676, given by Sir Joseph Williamson, who later became President of the Royal Society when Lord Brouncker resigned. Boyle was well enough to be at this supper-party; and Evelyn and Wren and Petty and one or two others were there, and “our Secretary, Mr. Oldenburg.” Lady Ranelagh was away from home on a visit when the news of Oldenburg’s death reached her; and, knowing how much her brother would feel his death, she wrote Boyle one of her most comfortable letters, and made arrangements to return home at once. And as Oldenburg had died without making a will, and his wife (his second wife, daughter of John Durie) died just before or just after him, Robert Boyle himself took care of their children, left poorly provided for and without relations in this country. The boy had been named “Rupert,” after the scientific Prince.

Mary, Countess of Warwick, survived her husband just five years. Her death at Leeze, in 1678, must have closed a chapter in the life of the sister and brother in Pall Mall. Lady Ranelagh had been with Mary in all her hours of trial—and they had been so many—the little, “unrewly” sister! Lady Ranelagh had been at Stalbridge when the Earl of Cork was so angry because Mary dismissed Mr. James Hamilton; it was Lady Ranelagh who had accompanied Charles and Mary to Leeze after their runaway marriage, and stayed with them there till Mary had found her place in that patriarchal family. It was Lady Ranelagh who had tended Mary in all her illnesses, and had taken Mary and Charles under her own roof after their son’s death. And Robert Boyle, too;—how tenderly romantic Mary had been when the “deare Squire” took refuge at delicious Leeze in the summer of 1648, and she sat beside him while he wrote his Seraphick Love! How she had wept over the pages as they were handed to her, the ink scarcely dry!

But an even greater loss was to come in Broghill’s, my Lord of Orrery’s, death in 1679. He had been ill for a year or two, and back and forward between Ireland and England, in the hands of the physicians; but otherwise he had been living the life of a great landowner on his Irish estates at Charleville and at Castle Martyr. His Art of War, dedicated to Charles II, had been published in 1677, and had met with a certain success. He was to have written a continuation of it, if the first volume had proved sufficiently popular. But warfare, like other things, has its fashions; and even warriors grow old: it was nearly forty years since the “Mortall Sowe” had done such good service on the walls of Lismore.

Lady Pegg was with her husband, his strong friend and helpmate, to the last. The beautiful bride of Suckling’s wedding-ballad, with the slender ring-finger and the bee-stung lip, was now surrounded by children, grown up and married, some of them, and with great homes of their own. But Lady Pegg was beautiful and comfortable still. “A rose in autumn,” as old Lord Goring used to say, “is as sweet as a rose in June.” There is no doubt that Broghill, the soldier-statesman and dramatist—“my dearest Governor,” as Robert Boyle called him—was the favourite brother, and that Lady Pegg was the chief of sisters-in-law, “the great support, ornament and comfort” of her family.

On St. Andrew’s Day 1680 Boyle was elected President of the Royal Society. The anniversary meeting and the dinner that followed it had brought a large gathering of the philosophers together. Evelyn was there, and his diary records the election of “that excellent person and greate Philosopher Mr. Robert Boyle, who indeede ought to have been the very first; but neither his infirmities nor his modestie could now any longer excuse him.” But Evelyn omits to mention that Boyle declined the presidency. He had an insuperable objection to tests and oaths. He took Counsel’s opinion in the matter, and he wrote to his old assistant Hooke, explaining his “great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths”; asking Hooke to convey his thanks to the Society, but begging them to “proceed to a new election.”

Less and less able now to attend the meetings of the Society, Boyle was gradually to withdraw also from the meetings of the East India Company, of which he was a Director, and of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, of which he was Governor. More and more did he retire into his quiet home-life in the house in Pall Mall, which had been enlarged to suit his purposes. There is no mention of him at the famous supper-party of the Royal Society, at which everything was cooked in Monsieur Papin’s Digestors—that “philosophical supper” which caused so much mirth and “exceedingly pleas’d all the company.” He is more likely to have been present a week or two later to see the Morocco Ambassador subscribe his name and titles in Arabic, on the occasion of his being admitted honorary member of the Royal Society.

Boyle lived, indeed, much among his books and manuscripts, and in his laboratory. With the help of an amanuensis, he carried on a large correspondence among the new philosophers of the Old World, and the Christian missionaries in the New. The New Englanders wrote to him as their fount of charity: “Right Honourable, charitable, indefatiguable, nursing father.” He had tried to spread the knowledge of the Bible in the East, in Turkish and Arabic, and in the Malayan tongue; and the publication of the Irish Bible was one of the great interests of his later years. While Narcissus Marsh and others did the actual work of translation and dissemination in Ireland, Robert Boyle in Pall Mall promoted it “with his influence and purse”; and Boyle’s Irish Bible was to find its way into Gaelic Scotland also, before Scotland had a Gaelic Bible of her own.

But Boyle spent his money also in helping individual cases—people whose lots were less happy than he thought they deserved; poor hard-worked clergy; the “distress’d refugees of France and Ireland”; and “learned men who were put to wrestle with necessities.” He did this, very quietly, for many years—usually by the hands of one or two personal friends in whose discretion he could trust. Gilbert Burnet, in those latter years, was one of these friends; and Burnet’s own History of the Reformation would never have been published without Boyle’s assistance. So quietly did Boyle dispense his charities that sometimes the very men so helped did not know from whence the help came; but Burnet says that for years Boyle spent on this form of charity more than £1000 a year, which would mean more than three times that sum to-day. And he gave impartially, without thought of race or creed, holding himself to be “a part of the human nature, a debtor to the whole race of men.” Perhaps his especial protégés were those who had suffered for their religious and political convictions. A story of any kind of persecution would bring a flush of anger and distress to his gentle face, and words of the deepest indignation to lips which rarely opened to “speak against men.”

Each year saw the publication of new tracts and treatises, and revised editions. They follow each other almost too quickly for enumeration. His Discourse of Things above Reason: inquiring whether a philosopher should admit there are any such, appeared in 1681; his Memoirs of the Natural History of the Human Blood, in 1684. That was the winter of the Great Frost, 1683-4, when all London bivouacked and made merry on the frozen Thames, and the smallpox was “very mortall.” It must have been a trying winter for the invalid philosopher; for London “by reason of the excessive coldnesse of the aire hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so fill’d with the fuliginous steame of the sea-coale that hardly could one see crosse the streetes, and thro’ filling the lungs with its grosse particles exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one could scarcely breathe.” And there was no water to be had from pipes or engines; the birds and beasts died in the parks, the breweries were at a standstill, and fuel was exorbitantly dear.

The treatise Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God appeared in 1685, and A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature in 1686. The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus, written in his youth, was revised and printed in 1687; and about this time Boyle was advertising among the virtuosi for his lost and plagiarised manuscripts, evidently with some intention of bringing out a collected edition of his works. The only collection hitherto had been a very incomplete Latin edition, published without his knowledge in Geneva, in 1677. In 1690 he published his Medicina Hydrostatica, and the first part of The Christian Virtuoso; and in 1691—the last year of his life—his Experimenta Observationes Physicæ. Some of his writings, left with his executors, were to appear posthumously; and he had deposited with the secretaries of the Royal Society a sealed packet containing his account of the making of phosphorus—not to be opened till after his death.

A busy life, to the last; but what a quiet life it was for the sister and brother during those last momentous years, in the house in Pall Mall! History swept past them: Kings came and went, Cabinets changed, beautiful faces faded, Parliaments were dissolved, creeds and parties wrangled and plotted, brave men—and women too—died on scaffolds and the gallows-tree and at the stake for political crimes. All the world knows about Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney; but it is sometimes forgotten that Mrs. Lisle, the wife of a regicide, laid her head on the block for “harbouring a rebel”, and that Elizabeth Gaunt, for the same political crime, was burned at Tyburn. A new London grew up over the old ruins—new steeples on old foundations—and fashionable new squares were built where green fields had been. And all the time a great and cumbrous Constitution was raising itself over centuries of abuse and sacrifice—a nation’s blood and tears.

Events crowded the canvas: Charles II’s melodramatic ending; the accession of the bigot James II; Monmouth’s rising and execution; the “Bloody Assizes” of Judge Jeffreys, in Dorset and Somerset; James’s league with the French; the revoking of the Edict of Nantes and the horrible atrocities that followed. Catholicism spread its fibres throughout England, permeating Army, Law Courts, Parliament and University. Priests—Carmelites, Benedictines and Franciscans—walked about the streets of London, and a huge Jesuit school was set up in the Savoy. In Scotland, a Catholic was in command at Edinburgh Castle: in Ireland, a Catholic was at the head of the Army, and thousands of Catholic Irish were drafted into its ranks.

A boy was born to James II and Mary of Modena, and there were whispered stories of imposture and the historic warming-pan. Then Protestantism closed up its ranks, the State Church and the Nonconformists combined in face of a common danger, and the hopes of Protestant England were fixed upon William and Mary. Another message carried from England to The Hague brought another Prince to English shores, but this time “to intervene in arms for the restoration of English liberty and the protection of the Protestant religion”. Another proclamation in London, but this time of an Anglo-Dutch Prince, and a Princess who was not only the daughter of James II but the granddaughter of Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Another bloody rebellion in Ireland, another chapter of massacre and terrorism; but this time it was Ulster, and the Ulster Scots, who were fighting for Protestantism. Robert Boyle and Lady Ranelagh, growing old in the house in the Mall—two children of the great Elizabethan Puritan Earl of Cork—had watched Munster pass again into the hands of the Catholic Irish; but they lived just long enough to see William and Mary Sovereigns of England, and to have the tidings of the Siege of Londonderry and the Battle of the Boyne. One of the last reports of the Rebellion that can have reached Lady Ranelagh was the taking of Athlone by the English: it must have brought back to her the early days of her married life, when Arthur Jones had carried her off to Athlone Castle, a beautiful, high-spirited girl of sixteen.

And now she was seventy-six. To her, if to nobody else in the world, her philosopher brother, twelve years her junior, was still “Robyn”—the “Deare Squire.” There were some empty rooms and many memories in the house in Pall Mall; but the sister and brother were together, and it was a hospitable and pleasant house, and open to many friends. Distinguished strangers from many parts of the world came to pay their respects to Mr. Boyle, the celebrated Sceptical Chymist and Christian Virtuoso, and his incomparable sister, the Lady Ranelagh, who for fifty years had lived “on the most public scene,” and “made the greatest figure in all the revolutions of these kingdoms of any woman of that age.” The London virtuosi—and there were bishops as well as mathematicians among them—brought their latest literary and scientific gossip to the house in the Mall. The elder brother, old Lord Burlington, was sometimes to be found there, with a conversational statesman or two in tow, who could successfully dodge the politics of the moment by indulging in such a pleasant and safe topic as the amours of Mary, Queen of Scots, with “the Italian favourite.” Gilbert Burnet—that eloquent and happy Scotsman south of the Tweed—sat at Mr. Boyle’s feet and took notes: his bishopric was to come with the accession of William and Mary. Even Pyrophilus must have looked in upon his mother and uncle now and then. Dick’s fortunes were up; he was an important man, had grown fat and very witty, and was building himself a fine house in Chelsea. His mother’s portrait was to hang on the wall of his private closet, looking at him long after she was dead; outliving other loves.

Men and women of the younger generation of this great family were living round about Piccadilly, St. James’s, and Pall Mall. One niece especially, my Lady Thanet, a married daughter of Lord and Lady Burlington, was a “greate virtuosa,” known in London Society as one who “used to speak much of her uncle.” And Evelyn, the friend of nearly forty years, though he was a good deal older than Boyle, still found his way from Deptford to Pall Mall to visit the philosopher and his sister.

In the afternoons, Boyle was seldom without company; “neither did his severer studys,” says Evelyn, “soure his conversation in the least.” He had “the most facetious and agreeable conversation in the world among the ladys, whenever he happen’d to be engag’d; and yet so very serious, compos’d and contemplative at all other times; tho’ far from moroseness, for indeede he was affable and civil rather to excesse, yet without formality.”

So popular were Mr. Boyle’s cosmopolitan receptions that about the year 1689 he was obliged to put a “board” on the door in Pall Mall, mentioning the days on which he was “at home.” And he actually printed an announcement, beginning “Mr. Boyle finds himself obliged to intimate to those of his friends and acquaintances who are wont to do him the honour of visiting him,” and going on to explain that his “skilful and friendly physician, seconded by his best friends”, had strongly advised him not to see quite so many people.

The forenoons of Tuesdays and Fridays, therefore, “both foreign post-days,” and the afternoons of Wednesdays and Saturdays, he proposed in future to reserve for himself, “that he might have some time, both to recruit his spirits, to range his papers and fill up the lacunæ of them, and to take some care of his affairs in Ireland, which are very much disordered, and have their face often changed by the public calamities there.”

The announcement seems to have had the desired effect. “The mornings,” says Evelyn in his description of the daily routine of Boyle’s last years, “after his private devotions, he usually spent in philosophic studys and in his laboratory, sometimes extending them to night.” But he told Evelyn he had quite given up reading by candle-light, on account of his eyes. His amanuensis used to read to him, and write from notes, or at his dictation; and “that so often in loose papers, pack’d up without method, as made him sometimes to seeke upon occasion, as himself confesses in divers of his works.” And apparently Boyle was not more tidy than other learned men. “Glasses, potts, chymical and mathematical instruments, books and bundles of papers, did so fill and crowd his bedchamber, that there was but just room for a few chaires, so as his whole equipage was very philosophical, without formality.” Among the other rooms in the house there was a small library. Boyle did not want more: “as learning more from men, real experiments, and in his laboratory (which was ample and well furnished) than from books.”

And the man himself, in these last years? He was “rather tall, and slender of stature, pale, and much emaciated.” Owing to his delicacy of constitution, “he had divers sorts of cloaks to put on when he went abroad, and in this he governed himself by his thermometer.” His little difficulty of speech had never quite forsaken him. “In his first addresses, being to speake or answer,” says Evelyn, “he did sometimes a little hesitate, rather than stam’er or repeate the same word; imputable to an infirmity which, since my remembrance, he had exceedingly overcome. This, as it made him somewhat slow and deliberate, so after the first effort, he proceeded without the least interruption in his discourse.”

In diet and in habit, Robert Boyle was “extreamely temperate and plaine”; nor could Evelyn, in all their friendship, ever discover in him “the least passion, transport, or censoriousnesse, whatever discourse, or the times, suggested:

“All was tranquil, easy, serious, discreete and profitable, so as besides Mr. Hobbes, whose hand was against everybody and admired nothing but his owne, Francis Linus excepted (who yet with much civility wrote against him), I do not remember he had the least antagonist.”

The brother and sister had both been ill in the late autumn of 1691, when Boyle wrote to Dr. Turberville at Salisbury, begging for a further prescription for his eyes. “Sight is a thing dear to all men,” he wrote, almost apologetically, “and especially to studious persons.” His eyes had been troubling him very much of late, especially by candle-light. “When the candles are newly snuffed,” wrote this great experimental philosopher, “I see far better for a little while:” but they very soon wanted snuffing again.

Evelyn was out of town on December 23, when Lady Ranelagh died; and he did not hear of her death, or of her brother’s serious illness immediately after it, till it was too late. “For it was then,” says Evelyn, “he began evidently to droope apace.” When Evelyn returned to town, it was to stand by his old friend’s grave. Robert Boyle had survived his sister only seven days: he died on December 30, 1691.

He was buried near to Lady Ranelagh, in the Chancel of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. Burnet, now Bishop of Salisbury, preached the funeral sermon “with that eloquence natural to him on such and all other occasions,” taking for his text the words, “For God giveth to a man that is good in His sight, wisdom, and knowledge, and joy.” “Something too,” says Evelyn, “was touched of his sister, the Lady Ranelagh.” But indeed it was not necessary. Her intellect and character were known to all those who stood about the grave. Her high standards and strong judgment would have been a gain to the statecraft of her day. But she was a woman; and if for more than twenty years her life had been a rich and beautiful thing as the sister of Robert Boyle, for nearly forty years before that she had been the brave but unhappy wife of Arthur Jones—“the foulest churl in the Worlde.”

By Boyle’s own direction, his funeral was “without the least pomp”; but round his grave there stood, besides his own many relatives, “a greate appearance of persons of the best and noblest quality.”

Most of his Irish lands were entailed, and went to the eldest brother, the Earl of Burlington and Cork. “It does not afflict me,” so runs the will, “that I have not children of my own to inherit my entailed lands, since they are, by that defect, to return to him, the truly honoured head of our house and family.” The Manor of Stalbridge went to Frank, the Lord Viscount Shannon, together with Robyn’s best watch and an affectionate message. Frank would notice that the Manor House had been kept up “for his sake,” though Robyn had had no mind to live in it. Mrs. Melster, the niece who had married the valet de pé, is included among Boyle’s “honoured and dear nieces,” and is remembered more sumptuously than the others, not because there is any difference of affection, but because of her “peculiar circumstances.” There were other lands in Ireland, and many bequests and legacies to relatives, friends, and servants besides the charitable bequests left in the hands of trustees. “Our Society” and the happy days at Gresham College were not forgotten. Dr. King was to have a silver standish, and to Robert Hooke, the “perfecter” of the beloved air-pump, was left “my best microscope, and my best loadstone.”

When Robert Boyle made his will in the summer of 1691 he evidently had not thought it possible that Lady Ranelagh would die before him. He had made her one of his executors, and he had left her all his manuscripts and his “collections of receipts.” But he had left her something else. At the very beginning of his will, first and foremost of all his worldly possessions, Robert Boyle puts a small ring:

“And as touching my temporal estate, wherewith God of His goodness hath been pleased to endow me, I dispose thereof in manner and form following; that is to say—

“I give and bequeathe unto my dear sister, the Lady Katharine, Viscountess Ranelagh, a small ring, usually worn by me on my left hand, having in it two small diamonds with an emerald in the middle, which ring being held by me, ever since my youth, in great esteem, and worn for many years for a particular reason, not unknown to my said sister, the Lady Ranelagh, I do earnestly beseech her, my said sister, to wear it in remembrance of a brother that truly honoured and most dearly loved her.”

But Lady Ranelagh was dead—seven days before Robert Boyle. What became of the small ring? And what was its story? Why had Boyle worn it on his left hand ever since his youth, holding it in great esteem? Lady Ranelagh knew—and Lady Ranelagh was dead. What was the “particular reason”? The story of the little ring, if not the ring itself, is buried in the Chancel of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.

FOOTNOTES

Lismore Papers, first series, vol. i.

Philaretus. Robert Boyle left a fragment of Autobiography, An Account of Philaretus (~i.e.~ Mr. R. Boyle) during his Minority. See Works, ed. Birch, 6 vols., 1774.

For a delightful modern biography, see the Life and Letters of the Great Earl of Cork, by Dorothea Townshend (Duckworth).

See the Lismore Papers (referred to throughout as L. P.), edited by the late Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, D.D., LL.D., from the original MSS. belonging to the Duke of Devonshire, and preserved in Lismore Castle (10 vols.).

Corpus Christi.

Froude’s History, vol. vii. (1562).

Ibid.

Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland.

Then worth about five times as much.

Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland.

True Remembrances.

Life of the Earl of Cork in the L. P., second series, vol. v.

Equal to about £5000 now.

True Remembrances.

Philaretus.

L. P., first series, vol. i.

Philaretus.

Aubrey’s Account.

Oliver St. John, High Treasurer for Ireland.

This celebrated tavern, “haunted by roysterers and famous for its wine” in Ben Jonson’s day, and dating back into the 15th century, was in New Fish Street (Cunningham’s London). Croone must have moved into “new and enlarged premises,” for he will be found in 1641 at the Nag’s Head Tavern, in Cheapside.

See Evelyn’s Diary and Pepys’s Diary.

Abbott.

Loftus, Earl of Ely. He and Sir Adam Loftus of Rathfarnham were cousins.

Falkland.

The Earl’s house is mentioned as “my Lord Caulfield’s.”

In succession to Lord Grandison, whose house in Channell Row the Earl had rented.

She was buried with her mother in the tomb in St. Patrick’s.

Life of Milton, by David Masson.

Mall.

Ireland under the Stuarts, vol i.

Bulkeley and Usher.

Charles I to Lord Deputy, 1634. L. P., second series, vol. iii.

Though, in his Philaretus, he dates it a little earlier. It is, however, evidently the same that is recorded in the Earl’s Diary under the date Dec. 17, 1634.

Philaretus.

See L. P., second series, Carew’s letters from Eton to Earl of Cork.

They were “commensals” at the second table. See Lyte’s History of Eton.

See the masterly biography of Wotton in the Dictionary of National Biography. Also Izaak Walton’s Life of Wotton, and Masson’s Milton, vol. i.

See his lines on “His Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia,” Percy Society Publications, vol. vi.

See Masson’s Milton, vol. i. p. 531.

Evelyn’s Diary.

Was “Irish” part of the Eton curriculum in 1635?

L. P., second series, Carew’s letters to the Earl.

Philaretus.

Ibid.

Philaretus.

L. P., second series, Carew’s letters to Earl.

See A Poem written by Sir Henry Wotton in his Youth, Percy Society Publications, vol. vi.

Masson’s Life of Milton, vol. i. p. 665.

Ibid.

It was payable in three instalments, the third to be paid on Midsummer Day 1638.

Compare Prospero in The Tempest: “To my poor cell”.

L. P., first series, vol. v.

Lady Warwick’s Autobiography (Percy Society).

Variously explained as being the arbutus, and espalier apples.

George Goring was now Governor of Portsmouth. He had been wounded in the leg at the siege of Breda, had been going about London on crutches, and was still lame.

He died, after a long illness, in December 1639. See his Hymn, written “in a night of my late sickness” (Percy Society, vol. vi.).

See Masson’s Milton, vol. i.

Philaretus.

See Masson’s Milton, vol. ii.: First and second Bishops’ Wars.

L. P., second series, vol. iv.: Letter from Lord Barrymore to the Earl of Cork, 1639.

Pepys’s Diary, Sept. 28, 1668.

Verney Memoirs, vol. i.

L. P., second series, vol. v.

Verney Memoirs, vol. i.

Afterwards Earl of Clanbrassil.

Son of Sir George Carew, Earl of Totness.

Philaretus.