CHAPTER II. An Irish Childhood

AN IRISH CHILDHOOD

“He would ever reckon it amongst the chief misfortunes of his life that he did never know her that gave it him.”—ROBERT BOYLE’S Philaretus.

A fortnight later, there was a christening in the private chapel at Lismore. The Earl’s chaplain and cousin, Mr. Robert Naylor, officiated, and a large house-party gathered for the event. Lady Castlehaven, who was to be the child’s godmother, arrived with her family and retinue just in time, and the godfathers were Lord Digby and Sir Francis Slingsby. Lord Digby was living in the house as a newly made son-in-law, and the boy was to be named Robert after him.

The Earl’s large family of “hopeful children” were already growing up and scattering when this fourteenth baby made its appearance among them. Alice, the eldest daughter, at nineteen, had been for some years the wife of young David Barry, the “Barrymore” who had been brought up in the family almost like one of the Earl’s sons. Sarah, the second, at a tender age, had been transferred to the care of the Earl’s old friend, Lady Moore, at Mellifont, and was married, on the same day as her sister Alice, to Lady Moore’s son. He died very soon afterwards; and Sarah, at seventeen, had been a little widow for three years, living again under her father’s roof; and on the Christmas Day before Robert Boyle’s birth, Sarah had been married a second time—to Robert, Lord Digby, in her father’s chapel at Lismore.

Lettice, the third daughter, had been intended for Lady Castlehaven’s son, but the young man’s religious views were “not conformable”; and she and her sister Joan were accordingly kept at home, with a London season in view. “Dick,” the now eldest son and heir, already “my Lord Dungarvan,” was at home, being mildly tutored by the Earl’s chaplain, and living in a boy’s paradise of saddle-horses and “faier goshawks,” with an “eyrie of falcons” and occasional “fatt bucks” and “junkettings”; but little Katharine, who came next, had been sent away into England to Lady Beaumont—at Coleorton in Leicestershire—mother of Sapcott Beaumont, the little girl’s prospective husband. Geoffrey, who would have been ten years old when Robert was born, had died as a baby. Tradition says he tumbled into a well in the Earl’s Walk in Youghal; but the Earl’s diary, in mentioning the death, makes no reference to the well. Dorothy, now nine years old, was already destined for Arthur Loftus, Sir Adam Loftus’s son; and in the autumn before Robert’s birth she had been fetched away to be brought up in the Loftus family at Rathfarnham. Francis and Mary were quite young children in the nursery; and now Robert, the fourteenth baby, as soon as he “was able without danger to support the incommodities of a remove,” was to be carried away from Lismore in the arms of his “Country Nurse.” The Earl, so Robert Boyle says, had a “perfect aversion to the habit of bringing up children so nice and tenderly that a hot sun or a good shower of rain as much endangers them as if they were made of butter or of sugar.” Lady Cork’s opinions do not seem to have been asked; perhaps, in those three-and-twenty years, she had taught herself to think, if not to feel, in unison with her “owne goode selfe.” And so Robert Boyle, like his brothers and sisters, was to be reared during those first months of his life by a foster-mother, and owing to the movements of his family at this time was to be left with her longer than he would perhaps otherwise have been. He was to be rocked in an Irish cradle, or rather nursed, Irish fashion, in a “pendulous satchell” instead of a cradle, with a slit for the baby’s head to look out of. By slow degrees, this boy, born amid all the pomp and seventeenth-century splendour of his father’s mansions, was to be inured to “a coarse but cleanly diet,” and to what he afterwards so characteristically described as “the passions of the air.” They gave him, he says, “so vigorous a complexion” that ‘hardships’ were made easy to him by ‘custom,’ while the delights and conveniences of ease were endeared to him by their ‘rarity.’

Happy months of babyhood, lulled in a cottage mother’s arms, or suspended, between sleeping and waking, in that fascinating medium that was to become afterwards his life-study! Wise little head of Robert Boyle, looking out of that slit in the “pendulous satchell,” baby-observer of the firelight, and the sunlight and the shadows, enjoying, without theory, as he swung in it, the “spring of the air”! And meantime the baby’s family was preparing for a season in London.

The House of Lismore was still being “re-edified” during the months that followed the birth of “Robyn.” The gardens and terraces were being laid out; the orchard wall was still building. Dick, the eldest son, and Arthur Loftus, the destined son-in-law, had been allowed to go to Dublin for the horse-races, with allowance for “wyne and extraordinaryes,” “horse-meat,” “small sums,” and “idle expenses.” The Earl liked to give presents: each New Year in his diary is a record of presents given and received; and while he seems to have kept the laced shirts and nightcaps made for him by his daughters, he had a habit of handing on the more costly gifts to other people. He was at this time tipping his musicians at Lismore, and commissioning his trusty emissary, Sir John Leeke, to buy smock-petticoats for Lady Cork and her mother Lady Fenton, who, since Sir Geoffrey’s death, had made her home for the most part with her daughter and her great son-in-law. And the Earl had given his married daughters a breeding mare apiece—each mare “with a colt at her feet,” while braces of bucks and saddle-hackneys had been dispersed among various friends. His daughter Sarah’s (Lady Digby’s) first child—a great event in the family—was born at Lismore in October; and towards the end of 1627, with the London visit in view, the Earl dispatched a footman with letters into England. Early in the spring of 1628, Sarah, with her lord and baby, left Lismore; in April, Mary Boyle was fetched away to be brought up under Lady Clayton’s charge at Cork; Lady Fenton also left Lismore; and little Francis was carried off to Youghal by Sir Lawrence Parson’s lady. As the visit to England drew nearer, the Earl made his last will and testament—in duplicate. “Thone” copy was to be locked up in his great iron chest at Lismore, which was fitted with three keys, to be left with three trusted kinsmen, who were to add to the chest the Earl’s moneys as they accumulated; and “thother” copy was to be carried by the Earl himself into England.

On April 21st a great cavalcade—the Earl and his wife, with their two daughters, Lettice and Joan, and the rest of their party and retinue—set out for Youghal, where on May 7th they took shipping (a captain had been hired to “wafte them over”) and reached London on May 16th;—not without adventures, for they were chased by a Dunkirker of 300 tons, and though the family escaped, the footmen and horses following in another barque were taken and carried off to sea.

That London season of 1628, when Charles I was the young King of England! What a busy, self-important, gratifying time it was, and what an amount of feeing and tipping and social engineering was requisite to carry it through! The Earl was received by the Duke of Buckingham and presented to the King. He engaged a steward for his household, and rented my Lord Grandison’s house in Channell Row, Westminster. In June Lady Cork and her daughters were presented to the Queen, who kissed them all most graciously. Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, a very well-known man among the aristocracy as “the jerkin-maker of St. Martin’s”, was sent for to receive his orders. The Earl must have had his mind fully occupied and his purse-strings loose; for there were at least two troublesome lawsuits going on at this time about his Irish estates and industries, and he was employing the great Glanville as his legal adviser. But nothing seems to have interfered with the somewhat stodgy gaieties of that London season of 1628. And in preparation there were purchases of upholstery and table-linen in Cheapside; of “wares” for the ladies of the family, in Lombard Street; velvet, cloth of gold, and what-not. How different all this from the old-young life in the shabby chambers in the Middle Temple, or the weeks spent in the Gate-house, waiting to be called before Queen Elizabeth! But the great self-made man had not forgotten the old days. He had always given a helping hand to his own kith and kin: Ireland was sprinkled with his “cozens.” His brother John, the poor parson of Lichfield, had the good fortune to at least die Bishop of Cork. And now, on this visit to London, the Earl had no intention of neglecting his “cozen,” the lawyer Naylor of Gray’s Inn, or his “cozen” the vintner Croone of the King’s Head Tavern in Fleet Street.

The Earl of Bedford had offered his house of Northall for the autumn; and visits were paid in state, with coaches and horses, to the Bedford family and to the Earl’s old Chief, Carew. Carew, now Earl of Totness, lived at Nonsuch, near Epsom, the wonderful house of Henry VIII’s reign, set in its park of elms and walnuts, with its gilded and timbered outside, ornamented with figures of stucco, and paintings by Rubens and Holbein. Little wonder, in the circumstances, that the Earl of Cork’s coachmen and footmen all demanded new liveries.

In August the whole family removed to Northall, and later in the year they visited Lord and Lady Digby at Coleshill in Warwickshire, and Lady Beaumont at Coleorton in Leicestershire. Here the match between “Katy” and Sapcott Beaumont was broken off, the money arrangements not satisfying the Earl, and Katy was handed over to Lady Digby’s charge. While the Cork cavalcade were moving about from one great house to another, there came the news of the murder of Buckingham at Portsmouth; but this tragic event did not interfere with a visit to Oxford in September. The party that set out from Coleshill, on September 1st, included Lady Digby, whose second baby was born inconveniently the day after their arrival in Oxford, in the house of Dr. Weston, Lady Cork’s uncle, in Christchurch. “Dick” was now at Christchurch, with Arthur Loftus and the young Earl of Kildare; and Lettice and Joan both met their fates during this visit, Lettice marrying, very soon after, George Goring, handsome, plausible, dissolute and cold; while Joan was promised to the wild young “Faerie Earle” of Kildare.

Back in London, after taking Eton on the way, the Earl of Cork and his wife and daughters made a little pilgrimage. They all rode to “my Uncle Browne’s to Deptford,” and visited little Roger’s grave in Deptford parish church. They “viewed” the monument that the Earl had set up there, and for which the “Tombe-maker” had sent in his bill. And the Earl was so pleased with it that he employed the same man to make “a faier alabaster tombe” over the grave of his parents, in the parish church of Preston in Kent.

As the year drew to a close, the Earl’s moneys from his furnaces, forges, ironworks, “tobackoe farms” and what-not, were added to the great iron chest at Lismore; and Christmas and New Year gifts were showered among his English friends. A manuscript Bible was sent to Dr. Weston for Christchurch Library; “cane-apples” (variously described as the Arbutus and the Espalier apples) and pickled scallops from Ireland, to other friends; “a rare lyttle book” to the Earl of Arundel, and usquebaugh to the Earl of Suffolk. Sir Edmund Verney’s new butler from Ireland came in for the Earl’s own scarlet doublet with hose and cloak, while the Archbishop of Canterbury accepted a “ronlett of usquebaugh” and a piece of black frieze for a cassock.

And then the Earl made an ominous entry in his diary: “I gave Dr. Moor £5 and Dr. Gifford 20s. for visiting my wife in her sickness”; and “my wife’s phisick” is an item in the Earl’s accounts. But they spent the early spring at Langley Park near Windsor, and in April were back again in Channell Row, where on April 15th Lady Cork’s fifteenth child—a little girl—was born. In June they removed to Lord Warwick’s house in Lincoln’s Inn; and in October 1629—the baby Margaret being left behind them with her nurse and maid—they were back in Ireland again.

The return journey had been made with even more pomp and ceremony than the setting forth eighteen months before. For one of the King’s ships, the Ninth Whelp—one of the fleet of “Lion Whelps,” built at Deptford—was at the last moment put at their disposal to “wafte them over.” Lord Cork distributed presents among the ship’s company, and gave the captain at parting a magnificent pair of fringed and embroidered gloves, to which Lady Cork added a black silk night-cap, wrought with gold. The men, horses and luggage, followed safely in two barques—no Dunkirker being sighted on the way.

Before the Earl left Ireland, he and the Lord Chancellor had not been on the best of terms. But now, fresh from the civilisation of the Metropolis, and with all the reflected glory of a crossing in the Ninth Whelp, the Earl, by the King’s desire, made up his quarrel with the Chancellor. Both were sworn Lords Justices for the joint government of Ireland in the absence of a Deputy; and both resolved to “join really in the King’s Service”—a resolution which they were, for a little while, to keep. Meantime, Mr. Perkins, “my London Tailor,” had sent over to Dublin an enormous trunk of magnificent wearing-apparel, and a very long bill; and the retiring Lord Deputy delivered up the King’s Sword and government of Ireland to the Lord Chancellor and the Earl.

This was in October 1629. On the 16th of February following, 1630, Lady Cork died at Dublin. It had “pleased my mercifull God for my manifold syns ... to translate out of this mortall world to his gloriows kingdome of heaven the sowle of my deerest deer wife....”

The baby Peggie—ten months old—was still in England; and the ex-baby Robyn, reared by his country nurse, was just three years old. Had the lady of the “free and noble spirit,” in those short months spent in Dublin, between October and February, been able to see Robyn again—to hold him in her arms a little moment—before she died?

For a year or two after Lady Cork’s death, the Earl was very busy with the government of Ireland and the management of his own family and estates; and his migrations were for a time to be only from his Dublin town house to the Council Chamber and Great Hall of Dublin Castle. Lady Cork had been buried with solemn ceremonial in the Chancel of St. Patrick’s Church, in the same tomb with her grandfather the Lord Chancellor Weston and her father Sir Geoffrey Fenton, Secretary of State. The business connected with “my deer wive’s ffunerals” occupied the Earl for some time; and a splendid black marble monument was in course of erection in the upper end of the chancel of St. Patrick’s. Meantime the widower was surrounded by his children;—the Barrymores and their children, and Lady Digby with her comfortable husband, while Lettice Goring, with or without George Goring, was always coming to and fro from England. Poor Lady Lettice Goring was not a happy woman. She had nearly died of smallpox when she was thirteen, and perhaps on this account her education had been woefully neglected. There was a certain amount of cleverness in her of a small-natured type; but she was childless, delicate, and discontented, with a continual “plaint.” Her younger sister, Katherine, was of a very different nature. Handsome, intelligent, and high-spirited, by far the finest character of all the Earl’s daughters, Katherine, now that her engagement to Sapcott Beaumont had been broken off, was at sixteen quickly affianced and married to Arthur Jones, Lord Ranelagh’s son, and carried off to Athlone Castle, a gloomy old Norman castle in Roscommon;—with how small a chance of happiness in life she fortunately did not know.

The two boys, Lewis and Roger—Lord Kynalmeaky and Lord Broghill—were fetched to Dublin and entered at Trinity College; and Joan was married to the Earl of Kildare as soon as that young nobleman returned to Ireland in company with her brother Dick. The baby Peggie was brought from England with her nurse and maid; and sometime in 1631 the two youngest boys, Francis and Robert, were brought home; and “my children,” their little black satin doublets, and “Mownsier,” their French tutor, began to find a place in the Earl’s diary. It was then, too, that the Earl began to make those settlements, the first of many, in various counties, on “Robyn”, and that a son of one of the Earl’s own old servants was engaged “to attend Robert Boyle.” The minute philosopher, at five years old, had his own valet.

Anxieties and triumphs jostled each other in the Dublin town house. Lady Fenton did not long survive her daughter, and a great cavalcade, headed by the Earl and his sons and sons-in-law, rode to her funeral at Youghal. In November 1631 the Earl was made High Treasurer of Ireland; that winter, in leisure hours, he must have written his True Remembrances, the manuscript of which was finished and “commended to posterity” in June 1632—just after the Earl, the Lord Chancellor, and the young Earl of Kildare, had been given the Freedom of the City of Dublin. Early in that year, Dorothy had married Arthur Loftus and settled down at Rathfarnham, and that same summer Dick, “my Lord Dungarvan,” in company with Mr. Fry his tutor, set off on his foreign travels. Dungarvan’s marriage with the daughter and heiress of Lord Clifford was already on the tapis. Lord and Lady Clifford lived at Skipton, in Yorkshire; Dungarvan was to be received in audience by King Charles, and to take Yorkshire on his way abroad; and “thaffair,” so dear to the Earl’s heart, was very soon to bring him home again. A husband was to be found for Peggie, now that she was three years old; and the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Primate were to have long confabulations with the Earl on this important matter. Kynalmeaky was already proving himself an anxious, brilliant young spendthrift, and was to be sent to sea in the Ninth Whelp to learn “navigacon” and “the mathematiques” from that same Captain who wore the fringed gloves and embroidered night-cap. The sons-in-law were a trial. George Goring was continually borrowing, Kildare perpetually losing at dice and cards. He “battered and abused” with marrow-bones the Earl’s best silver trenchers, and then won £5 from his father-in-law for “discovering” to him the culprit! Lord Barrymore, after living eighteen months with his wife and all his family under the Earl’s roof, went back to Castle Lyons without so much as saying thank-you. As for the household staff, the “servant trouble” existed then as now. That Christmas of 1632 one of the Earl’s scullerymen “did most unfortunately by jesting with his knife run my undercook into the belly whereof he instantly died in my house in Dublin”—a most unpleasant domestic episode; and it happened at the very moment when the splendid black marble tomb in St Patrick’s had been finished and paid for!

But all this was as nothing to the griefs of the next few months; the premature birth of Lady Digby’s baby under the Earl’s roof, the hurried christening before it died, and the death of the young mother,—that little Sarah who, a widow at seventeen, had been married to Lord Digby, the Earl’s most comfortable son-in-law, on the Christmas Day before Robyn was born.

It was a dark summer, the summer of 1633, in the Dublin town house; and the Earl and his children were still in the first days of their mourning, when Wentworth, the new Lord Deputy, arrived in Dublin: A most cursed man to all Ireland, wrote the Earl in his diary, and to me in particular.

The story of Wentworth’s government of Ireland, a government “hardly paralleled in the annals of pro-consulship,” has given material for many books; but through all the chapters there runs the underplot of Wentworth’s personal relations with the Earl of Cork. From the first moment, on that July morning, 1633, when the Earl—the Lord High Treasurer—set out in his coach to meet the Lord Deputy and his suite “walking on foot towards the cytty”—a wall of enmity had stood up between these two great men. There is no more human reading than the private diary record of those uneasy years that followed; and unconsciously, by mere enumeration of daily incidents, the Earl has made his own character and the character of Wentworth stand out as clearly as if they were both alive and facing each other in a Parliament of to-day. There is the character of the strenuous old Elizabethan Protestant, with its angles and its softnesses, the man of sixty-seven, who for five-and-forty years had been the man on the spot. Royalist to the backbone, he had served in Ireland three sovereigns in succession. It was the country of his adoption. To a great extent, he felt he had made it what it was; and now, in yielding up the sword and government to Wentworth, he was proudly satisfied that Ireland was being yielded up in “generall peac and plenty.”

And there is the character of Wentworth, the man who had come—who had been sent—to rule; the much younger man, of more recent education and more cultivated tastes, of a different code of living. But he was as obstinately masterful, and his energy and insolence were that of manhood’s prime. He, too, was there to do the King’s service, none the less fervently that he had been, not so long before, a leader of the popular party in the English Parliament, and had only recently, so to speak, crossed the floor of the House. Already, in that dark head of his were schemes and purposes undreamed of in the old Earl’s homely philosophy. They were to be unfolded in those confidential letters to Laud—great schemes, known afterwards as his “policy of Thorough,” his government of all men by “Reward and Punishment.” But in the meantime, with all outward deference and ceremonial, the Earl of Cork hated Wentworth and his government in advance, and Wentworth regarded the Earl of Cork with personal dislike, for he knew him to be the most important man in Ireland—a man who would not be subservient; a man in the Lord Deputy’s path.

So the diary tells its own story: the story of the troublous official life of the Council Chamber and of Wentworth’s Irish Parliaments; the story of Wentworth’s sharp pursuit of the Earl’s titles to his Irish lands; and the story of the private life in the Earl’s Dublin house, with its social duties and family anxieties. Wentworth had married his third wife privately, in England, a year after the death of his second wife, and not long before his departure for Ireland. She had been sent over to Dublin six months before him, to live rather mysteriously in Dublin Castle, under her own unmarried name—as “Mistress Rhodes.” But immediately on Wentworth’s arrival, her identity was revealed: the Lords Justices were duly presented to the Lord Deputy’s lady, and permitted to salute her with a kiss. And the diary records kind visits, and return visits, between the Castle and the Earl of Cork’s Dublin town house; little card-parties at the Castle, when the Chancellor and the Treasurer both lost sums of money to the Lord Deputy; games of “Mawe,” also for money, and private theatricals acted by the Lord Deputy’s gentlemen. The old Earl sat through a tragedy, on one occasion, which he found “tragicall” indeed, because there was no time to have any supper. And then, but six months after Wentworth’s arrival, there came the first hint of the trouble about Lady Cork’s black marble tomb in St Patrick’s.

Mr. Bagwell has pointed out how, to the old Elizabethan, whose “Protestantism was not of the Laudian type,” there was nothing amiss in the fact of a Communion-table standing detached in the middle of the Church. The Earl, in erecting his monument, had indeed improved the Chancel of St. Patrick’s, which had been earthen-floored, and often in wet weather “overflown.” He had raised it, with three stone steps and a pavement of hewn stones, “whereon,” the Earl wrote to Laud, “the communion-table now stands very dry and gracefully.” Laud himself had found it hard to interfere, in the face of general opinion supported by two Archbishops. But Wentworth was obdurate, and the King himself was appealed to. It was considered a scandal that the Cork tomb should remain “sett in the place where the high altar anciently stood.” In the end, the great black marble monument was taken down, stone by stone; and in March 1635 Wentworth was able to write to Laud: “The Earl of Cork’s tomb is now quite removed. How he means to dispose of it I know not; but up it is put in boxes, as if it were marchpanes or banqueting stuffs, going down to the christening of my young master in the country.”

The reference to “my young master” is evidently to Lady Kildare’s baby, whose birth—and the fact that it was a boy—was the event of the moment in the Cork household: indeed, the old Earl had a bet on with Sir James Erskine, on the subject. In November 1635 the tomb had been re-erected where it now stands, in the south side of the Choir, and outwardly, at least, after a long struggle, the matter was ended. Lord Cork knew nothing of that sneer in Wentworth’s letter to Laud about the marchpanes and the banqueting stuffs; and when Wentworth arrived at the Earl’s house one evening in December 1635—he was rather fond of dropping in unexpectedly—and joined the Earl and his family at supper, the diary records that the Lord Deputy “very nobly and neighbourlyke satt down and took part of my super without any addicon.” But between July 1633 and that December evening of 1635, many things had happened in the Cork family.

The captain of the Ninth Whelp had been obliged to report that Lewis, my Lord Kynalmeaky, had run badly into debt at Bristol. Dungarvan had been recalled, and sent to England with his tutor, about “thaffair” of his marriage with Mrs. Elizabeth Clifford. George Goring had been assisted with money to buy a troop of horse; and “our colonel”—and poor Lettice after him—had sailed for the Netherlands, and soon settled at The Hague. Little Peggie, her prospective jointure and husband provided, had been put meanwhile, with Mary, under the care of Sir Randall and Lady Clayton at Cork; and Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had sent the Earl his new Parliament robes of brocaded satin and cloth of gold. Dorothy Loftus’s first baby had been born at Rathfarnham, and Katherine Jones’s first baby at Athlone Castle. Both were girls; hence, that wager of the Earl’s that his daughter Kildare’s next baby would be a boy. The Earl of Kildare, with his dice and cards, had been causing everybody anxiety; and there was a quarrel about family property going on between the Digby and Offaley family and the “Faerie Earle.” Wentworth had interfered, and in the autumn of 1634 Kildare, having taking offence, had “stolen privately on shipboard,” leaving his wife and children and a household of about sixty persons “without means or monies.” The delinquent was very soon to come home again; but late in 1634 the old Earl had broken up the Kildare establishment and settled his daughter and her children in his own newly built house at Maynooth, riding there with her, and dining with her “for the first time in the new parlour”, and sending her two fat oxen “to begin her housekeeping there.”

Dick, “my Lord Dungarvan,” on the other hand, had been proving himself a very satisfactory son: not very clever, perhaps, but eminently good-natured and sensible. He had acquitted himself admirably in England, writing comfortable letters to his father, who was much gratified to hear that his boy had taken part in the Royal Masque. It must have been the great Royal Masque in Whitehall, on Shrove Tuesday night, February 18th, 1634: the Cælum Britannicum, which followed on the still greater Masque of the Inns of Court. The words were by the poet Carew, the music by Henry Lawes, who had set Milton’s Comus; and the scenery was by Inigo Jones. The King himself and fourteen of his chief nobles were the Masquers, and the juvenile parts were taken by ten young lords and noblemen’s sons. No wonder that the old Earl was proud of “Dick”.

And Dungarvan had made such good progress with his wooing that in July a pretty little letter, neatly wax-sealed on floss-silk, had come to the Earl of Cork, beginning: “My Lord,—Now I have the honour to be your daughter.” In September 1634 the indefatigable Ninth Whelp brought Dungarvan and his bride to Ireland. The Earl met them at their landing, and drove them back in triumph—three coaches full—to his town house in Dublin. All the available members of the family, little Robert Boyle included, were gathered to welcome the new sister-in-law. It was a great alliance, in which Wentworth himself, by marriage a kinsman of the Cliffords, had lent a hand. For the time being, it was to draw the Lord Deputy into the circle of the Earl’s family, though the personal relations between the Deputy and the Earl were to become even more strained.