CHAPTER VII. The Debacle

THE DEBACLE

“But (as when in summer we take up our grass-horses into the stable, and give them store of oats, it is a sign that we mean to travel them) our Philaretus, soon after he had received this new strength, found a new weight to support.”—ROBERT BOYLE’S Philaretus.

In the spring of 1641, some months after the thunderstorm episode, Marcombes bought horses, and they set out on a three weeks’ tour in the neighbouring country. The Earl had not yet given his permission for the Italian tour, and Francis and Robert had been sixteen months at their lessons, and were beginning to long for a holiday. Riding and walking, they visited Chambéry, Aix, and Grenoble, and then found their way into “the wild mountains where the first and chiefest of the Carthusian Abbies does stand seated.” Robyn’s “conversion” by the thunderstorm appears to have been quite unknown to Frank and Marcombes: they had no conception of the thoughts that were churning in the boy’s head.

It was the Devil, so Robert Boyle says in his Philaretus, who, taking advantage of the deep raving melancholy of the place, and the pictures and stories to be found in the Monastery of Bruno, the Father of the Order, tempted him with “such hideous thoughts and such distracting doubts of some of the fundamentals of Christianity, that, though his looks did little betray his thoughts, nothing but the forbiddenness of self-dispatch hindered his acting it.”

It was more probably an acute attack of home-sickness, following on a prolonged diet of “yᵉ catechisme of Calvin”; but it was remembered, by this sensitive boy, as a very real temptation. He wrote to his father when they returned to Geneva, mentioning the little tour only as one “wherein we have had some pleasure mingled with some paines.” It was a sad little letter: “Your Lordship seems,” says Robyn, “to be angry with my brother and I.” They had not written often, or fully enough; and letters that are all beginnings and endings do not tell much. Marcombes, on the other hand, wrote ebulliently to the Earl. He never forgot to sing the praises of his pupils—Robyn, especially, was semper idem, and “Capable of all good things”; while the nature and disposition of both boys were “as good and sweete as any in the worlde.”

On their return to Geneva, they had found letters from the Earl, giving them leave to travel into Italy; and during the summer of 1641 the boys were “fincing”, and “dansing”, and learning Italian, and holding their heads well and their bodies straight, and Mr. Francis was now taller than my Lord Dungarvan, while as for Mr. Robert, he was “an Eale”, tall for his age, and big proportionably. They rose betimes, loved to ride abroad, and always came home with “a very good stomacke.” And as Marcombes assured the Earl that they went regularly to church, and in private also “sarved God very religiously”, it may be supposed that the months of “tedious perplexity”, of which Robert Boyle speaks in his Philaretus and of which Marcombes and Frank knew nothing, were drawing to a close. There came a day, indeed, when Robyn no longer excused himself from receiving the Sacrament by reason of his “yonge age.” It pleased God, he says, one day that he had taken the Sacrament to restore to him “the withdrawn sense of his favour.”

Although the Earl of Cork had given his permission, he was very dubious about the wisdom of the Italian journey.

“For,” wrote the Earl in London to Marcombes in Geneva, “we have lately had a popish priest hanged, drawn and quartered; and a many moe in prison which I think wilbe brought to the like cloudy end, for that they did not depart the Kingdome by the prefixed date lymited by the late statute.”

The Earl’s friends in London, “suspecting revenge,” had advised him against the Italian journey, and drawn horrible pictures of an Inquisition worse than death. But the old man was anxious to satisfy the boys’ desires, and really wanted them to learn Italian, and to see “all those brave Universities, States, Cities, Churches, and other remarkeable things” which only Italy could show them. And so they were to go; but Marcombes was to take great care of them, and to remember that the Earl was entrusting “these my Jewells” to him in a strange country.

In preparation for Italy, Madame Marcombes was making for them all kinds of new linen; and Marcombes bought for them three suits of clothes apiece, and they were to have more when they reached Florence—“where I doe intend to keep them a coach, God willing.”

Marcombes was anxious that the Earl should obtain for them a letter (in Latin) from the King, “to all Kings, Princes, Magistrates,” etc., in which Marcombes himself should be named “by name and surname.” And they ought also, he said, to have a special licence from the King to allow them to travel in Rome, “least your Lordship or your sons should be questioned hereafter.” The Genevan household were up in arms against Tom Killigrew, who had gone home and reported, most untruly, that Marcombes was keeping the boys short of clothes and pocket money.

In July 1641 Robyn wrote again to his father. The Earl seems to have been still angry with “my brother and I”:—“My most honoured Lord and father, I desire with passion and without any question to go into Italy, but I protest unto your Lordship that I doe not desire it half so much as to heare from your Lp; for the three moneths (or Thereabouts) that we have been deprived of that sweet communication seem to me 3 long Ages, and would to god that the interruption of that pleasing commerce may proceede from your private and publique employments.”

Marcombes also had written to the Earl of Cork. He dared not be so bold, he said, as to beg for some news of “yᵉ affaires of yᵉ Island.” They, in Geneva, had heard of Strafford’s death, “yᵉ catastrophe of yᵉ last Deputy of Ireland”; but they did not know who was his successor, or what had become of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of “yᵉ armys both of England and Scotland.” In Geneva, by the grace of God, they were enjoying a profound peace: “yᵉ storme having been driving another way.”

It was September 1641 when the boys and their governour, all “well horsed”, bade good-bye to Madame and the children, and set off on their long-talked-of Italian journey. Once more they crossed the “hideous mountains”; they saw the source of the Rhine “but a brook,” and came down in the valley of Valtollina, a little earthly paradise abounding “with all that Ceres and Bacchus are able to present.”

Robert Boyle always remembered standing on the spot where the little town of Piur, “once esteemed for its deliciousness,” had about a quarter of a century before been suddenly submerged and buried so deep that “no after search by digging has ever prevailed to reach it.” And still among the Alps, but surrounded by higher mountains, “where store of crystal is digged,” and which “like perpetual penitents do all the year wear white,” the boy found himself, for the first time in his life, above the clouds. He never forgot how, as they descended la Montagna di Morbegno, he looked down on the clouds that darkened the middle of the mountain below them, while he and his companions were above, in “clear serenity.”

From the Grisons they passed into Venetian territory and the vast and delicious plains of Lombardy, through Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Vincenza and Padua, to Venice, Bologna, Ferrara and Florence. They were very young; and their “peregrination” must not be compared in the matter of sightseeing and adventure with John Evelyn’s tour taken over much the same ground—only the reverse way—a year or two later. At Florence they sold their horses, and settled down for the winter of 1641-2; and there they resumed their lessons, Italian chiefly and “modern history”; and Robyn read the Lives of the Old Philosophers, and became so enamoured of the Stoics that he insisted on “enduring a long fit of the toothache with great unconcernedness.” In all his journeys, he had carried his pet books with him. Frank laughed at his younger brother’s inveterate habit of reading as he walked—“if they were upon the road, and walking down a hill, or in a rough way, he would read all the way; and when they came at night to their inn, he would still be studying till supper, and frequently propose such difficulties as he met with, to his governour.”

While they were wintering at Florence, Galileo died “within a league of it.” They never saw him; but they read and heard a great deal about the “paradoxes of the great Star Gazer”; and Robert carried away with him from Italy an undying memory of the attitude of the Romish Church to scientific discovery. Galileo’s paradoxes had been “confuted” by a decree from Rome, “perhaps because they could not be so otherwise”; and the Pope had shown himself “loth to have the stability of that earth questioned, in which he had established his kingdom.” It was in Florence that Robert Boyle heard the story told of the friars who reproached Galileo with his blindness, telling him it was “a just punishment of heaven”, and of the sightless astronomer’s memorable answer: “He had the satisfaction of not being blind till he had seen in heaven what never mortal eyes beheld before.” In Florence, Marcombes and his pupils lodged in the same house with some “Jewish Rabbins,” from whom Robyn learned a great deal about pre-Christian “arguments and tenets.” Frank, perhaps, was more interested in the carnaval, and the ducal tilts, and the gentlemen’s balls, to which both the brothers were invited. And Marcombes took good care of the Earl’s “jewells”, though they were allowed to look open-eyed upon all the vice, as well as the splendour, of seventeenth-century Italy: “the impudent nakedness of vice” Robert called it then and afterwards. He had never found, he used to say, “any such sermons against the things he then saw as they were against themselves.”

In March 1642 they were in Rome, where it was thought safest for Robert to pass for a Frenchman. English Protestants were at the moment especially unpopular, and Master Robyn was less willing than his brother Frank to “do at Rome as the Romans do.” Rome itself indeed seems to have disappointed the young Puritan. After all his studies in Latin history and literature, it was a disappointment to find Rome dominated, not by victorious legions, but by what he called “present superstition.” He found Modern Popes where the Ancient Cæsars should have been, and “Barberine bees flying as high as did the Roman Eagle.” It was a come-down, certainly; but the little party did a good deal of sightseeing of the simple kind; and they saw the Pope and his Cardinals in chapel, and Robyn’s observant eyes watched a young churchman after the service “upon his knees carefully with his feet sweep into his handkerchief” the dust that had been consecrated by his Holiness’s feet. Robert Boyle did not gather up any dust; but he obtained and read the Latin and Tuscan poems written by this same Pope. “A poet he was,” was Robyn’s verdict of Pope Urban VIII; a poet—and some other things besides.

To escape the heat of Rome they returned to Florence, by Perugia and Pistoia, and thence by the river Arno to Pisa and Livorno. From Livorno they coasted in a felucca, drawing up their boat on shore every night and sleeping in some Mediterranean townlet, to Genoa; and so, travelling by slow degrees, by Monaco, Mentone, Nice and Antibes, they reached Marseilles in May 1642.

At Marseilles, they expected to find letters from the Earl of Cork, and bills of exchange to carry them on to Paris. Hitherto, though difficulties of transit had now and then arisen, their quarterly allowance had been punctually sent. The Earl had allowed them £500 a year in Geneva, and £1000 a year while they were in Italy; and the money had always come to hand, thanks to the combined activities of Mr. Perkins the tailor, Mr. Philip Burlamachy, a certain Mr. Castell, “merchant stranger,” who travelled between England and Geneva, and, last but not least, Mr. Diodato Diodati, the Genevan banker. Once or twice while they were in Italy letters had come from home, and they knew vaguely that sinister things had been happening there. And Frank and Betty wrote to each other: Betty was begging Frank to come back to her, and even threatening to come to him; and so terror-struck was Marcombes at the bare suggestion that he was looking “very narrowly” after poor Frank. He had of late been keeping Frank very short of money, lest he might do “I doe not kgnow what.”

And then at Marseilles, even while they were idly waiting for their bills of exchange and watching the French King’s galleys put to sea with about two thousand slaves tugging at the oars, there came to Francis and Robyn, and to Marcombes too, for that matter, a rude awakening.

“Ye affaires of ye Island” had been going from bad to worse. Wentworth’s tragic end was almost an old story in May 1642, so quickly had events been hurrying on. He had got his earldom at last, in January 1640. For one little year he was indeed Earl of Strafford and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; he had headed the loan to King Charles for the expenses of the second “Bishops’” War. Strafford was in the King’s Cabinet, and the Earl of Cork had been made a Privy Councillor. On April 13, 1640, the “Short Parliament” had met, and it had been dissolved on May 5—“the doleful Tuesday, when the Parliament was dissolved before any Act was passed.” The Earl and his family were back at Stalbridge in July; and now it was Broghill’s turn to raise “a Hundred Horse for Scotland,” and Kynalmeaky and Barrymore and George Goring were all bound for the North in the second “Bishops’ War”. But by November the war was over, and the Parliament (that was to be the Long Parliament) had met. On November 11, Strafford was impeached and called to the Bar of the House on his knees (“I sitting in my place covered,” wrote the Earl of Cork in his diary); and on November 25 Strafford was in the Tower. All through the London winter of 1640, and right on into the spring of 1641, Strafford and Strafford’s trial filled the minds of all men, not in London only, but throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. During those fateful months, the diary gives one or two vivid glimpses of the Earl’s old enemy. There is no description of the scenes in the Houses, or the trial itself in Westminster Hall; the grim pageant of Lords and Commons; the plates of meat and bottles of drink being handed from mouth to mouth; the royalties in their little trellissed rooms; the King apart, “anxiously taking notes”; the ladies also, moved by pity, with paper, pens and ink before them, “discoursing upon the grounds of law and state”. None of these things finds a place in the diary. The Earl’s old eyes were fixed upon Strafford, and Strafford only: Strafford on his knees before the Bar, with his six attendant lawyers; Strafford bringing his answer—his “18 skins of parchment, close-written”—into the House of Peers; Strafford attempting, in his own defence, to “blemish” the Earl of Cork with “accusations....”

It was a grim time. And yet, such is human life, while Strafford was in the Tower and the Committee of the Commons preparing his indictment, all London was talking of my Lord Broghill’s brilliant marriage with the Lady Margaret Howard, daughter of the late Earl of Suffolk, in “the Lord Daubigne’s house in Queenes street covent garden.”

“At Charing Cross hard by the way Where we (thou knowst) do sell our hay, There is a house with stairs....”

There is no description of Broghill’s wedding from the Earl of Cork’s pen; but Sir John Suckling has left a very graphic account of it in his “Ballad upon a Wedding,” which, it is said, was hawked about the London streets at the time.

The bridegroom, “pestilent fine,” walked on before all the rest:—London had not forgotten the duel with Mr. Thomas Howard.

“But wot you what? the youth was going To make an end of all his wooing.”

And the bride was a beautiful creature: the blush on her cheek was like a Catharine pear—“the side that’s next the sun”; while her red underlip looked as if “some bee had stung it newly.”

“Her finger was so small the ring, Would not stay on which they did bring, ... Her feet beneath her petticoat, Like little mice, stole in and out As if they feared the light.”

This was the bride for whom Broghill had forgotten Mrs. Harrison and the duel in which nobody was hurt. This was the beautiful “Lady Pegg,” who was to prove herself a woman “beautiful in her person, very moderate in her expences, and plain in her garb; serious and decent in her behaviour, careful in her family, and tender of her lord”—nay, more, in Broghill’s after-life it is easy to see that he had not only a brave helpmeet, but a clever one. Robert Boyle himself has called her the “great support, ornament, and comfort of her Family.”

The old Earl was in his place when, after many long debates and “sevral heerings”, Strafford was sentenced to death—only eleven voices of all the Lords declaring “not content”; and on May 12 Strafford—to whom the King had pledged his word that not a hair of his head should be touched—was beheaded on Tower Hill. “As he well deserved” is the brief comment in the Earl of Cork’s diary.

And what had the Earl’s young daughter, the “unrewly Mary,” been doing? She and Frank’s wife, Betty, having spent the summer at Stalbridge with the Earl and his customary house-party, were now back in town, staying with Lady Dungarvan in her house in Long Acre. Betty had taken the measles, and Mary had promptly followed suit; and they had both been packed off to another house in Holborn. Charles Rich had shown such anxiety about Mary that the family’s suspicions were at last aroused; and Betty’s mamma, very much afraid of the Earl of Cork, had threatened to tell everything, “and in a great heat and passion did that very night do it.” Betty in the meantime contrived to give the lovers one more chance. Charles Rich went down on his knees before the convalescent Mary, and remained in that attitude for two hours, while Betty kept guard at the door; and “so handsome did he express his passion” that Mary at last said “yes.” The very next day Broghill—himself a married man—carried his little sister off in disgrace to a very small house near Hampton Court which belonged to Betty’s sister, Mrs. Katharine Killigrew; and there for weeks Mary lived in exile, Charles Rich riding down daily to see her. His father, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Goring interceded with the old autocrat, and at last their combined influence carried the day The Earl saw, “and was civil to,” Mr. Charles Rich, and Mary’s portion was to be £7000. It was now Mary who went down on her knees before her father, begging for his pardon. The old man upbraided her, shed some tears, and told her to marry Charles Rich as soon as she liked.

It might be supposed that this was enough, but no;—Mary Boyle at sixteen had been “always a great enemy to a public marriage.” She much preferred running away. Charles Rich was quite willing, and the young people were privately married on July 21, 1641, in the little parish church of Shepperton, near Hampton Court. And a few days later, Mary’s elder sister, the Lady Katharine Jones, too kind and too wise to be angry with so rare a thing as a love-match, especially when the wedding was over, accompanied the young couple in her carriage to the Earl of Warwick’s house of Leeze in Essex, and handed them over to the care of that patriarchal family.

Some of the Cork family,—the Barrymores, and Kynalmeaky, without his wife,—seem to have been already in Ireland in the autumn of 1641; and the Earl of Cork was making his own preparations to return to Lismore. He had been buying six black horses and harnesses for his new light travelling coach, a sedan chair lined with carnation velvet, and a “horslytter,” with two black stone coach-horses. August is a hot month for “feasting” in any case, and the summer of 1641 had been particularly hot, and the plague and smallpox were rife in London; but in August the old Earl had entertained at his Cousin Croone’s at the Nag’s Head Tavern in Cheapside all the Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen of the Committees of both Houses of Parliament for Ireland; and a few days later, Cousin Croone, at the Nag’s Head, had “feasted” his great kinsman the Earl of Cork.

During those last months also the Earl had been busy settling his affairs: there was the purchase of Marston Bigot in Somersetshire for Broghill and his wife, and the purchase of the smaller Devonshire estate of Annarye, and the settling of Stalbridge on Robert, his Benjamin. There was the paying of debts and bonds and jointure moneys, and the packing, locking, sealing and lettering of “yron chestes” and “lyttle trunckes” and “lyttle boxes,” to be left behind in the care of various trusted friends. Among them were boxes of deeds and writings for Frank, to be left with Betty’s stepfather, Sir Thomas Stafford; and at least two other boxes, “fast sealed”, for Robert, one of them to be left with the Earl’s friend, Lord Edward Howard of Escrick, and the other, containing duplicates, with the Earl’s own cousin, Peter Naylor, the lawyer, of New Inn. Stalbridge was to belong to Robert after the Earl’s death, besides the Irish lands already settled on him, and a house specially built for him at Fermoy. And the old man had set his match-making old heart on a splendid marriage for Robyn—with the Lady Ann Howard, the very young daughter of Lord Edward Howard of Escrick, first cousin of “Lady Pegg.” One of the Earl’s last rides in England was with his son Dungarvan to Hatfield to take leave of the Salisbury family; and there also he saw “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.,” to whom on this occasion the Earl presented “a small gold ring with a diamond.”

The last visit of all was to Leeze in Essex—carried there in Charles Rich’s own coach—to bid good-bye to the beloved “unrewly Mary”. The last of the Earl’s many gifts in England appears to have been to an “infirme cozyn” of his own—a welcome gift from one old man to another—“a pott of Sir Walter Raleigh’s tobackoe.”

There were a good many leavetakings with English friends and kinsfolk between London and Stalbridge, and an almost royal progress from Stalbridge by Marston Bigot—where he held a “Court”—to the coast. Lady Kynalmeaky had been persuaded to accompany her father-in-law to Ireland, and Broghill and his wife crossed with them. The Dungarvans were, apparently, to follow shortly after. Youghal was reached on October 17, and a day or two later the Earl and his family were at the House of Lismore again.

The old biographers give a picturesque account of a great banquet at Castle Lyons in honour of the Earl’s home-coming. They tell how, while Lord Barrymore was feasting his guests, the old Earl was called out of the banqueting hall to see a messenger, who, in a few breathless, horror-stricken words, brought him tidings of the bloody outbreak of rebellion in Munster. A week or two later Lord Barrymore—the only one of the old Irish nobility to remain absolutely loyal to the Protestant cause—was buying ordnance for the defence of Castle Lyons. Lismore was being strengthened and stored with ordnance, carbynes, muskets, Gascoigne wines and aqua vitæ. Gunpowder and match were being bought in large quantities, money was being paid out on every hand—the Earl was “maintaining” everything and everybody—and money was getting ominously scarce. In December, Lady Kynalmeaky left Ireland for the Hague, and Kynalmeaky took over the charge of Bandonbridge, with a troop of horse and 500 foot, “all English Protestants.” In January 1642, Broghill was defending Lismore with a troop of horse and 200 “good shot.” He was a dependable son: “My lord,” he wrote to his father, “fear nothing for Lismore, for if it be lost it shall be with the life of him that begs your lordship’s blessing, and stiles him, my lord, your lordship’s most humble, most obliged, and most dutiful son and servant, Broghill.” The old Earl himself had undertaken to hold Youghal, to keep the command of that harbour, and to “preserve that towne”; and he was never to leave it. The sheet-lead on the “tarras” of the old college was to be torn up to make “case-shott” for his ordnance. Pikes, muskets, halberds and “brownbills”—everything in the shape of a weapon—were collected from Devonshire and Dorsetshire and everywhere else, and the “Mortall Sowe” was to play a great part in the defence of Bandonbridge and Lismore. Dungarvan, at the head of 1200 foot, was with the Lord President. The Protestant ladies had left, or were leaving, for England or the Hague; but Dungarvan’s wife and Broghill’s wife stayed as long as possible on the spot.

It was from Lismore—just before the Earl was sent to defend Youghal—that he negotiated the bills of exchange to be sent through Perkins, the London tailor, to Marcombes: the quarterly allowance of £250 for the three months from March 1 to June 1, 1642. And it was from Youghal, on March 9, that he sent the letter—one of the finest and saddest appeals ever written by a father to his children—that was to greet Marcombes and the boys on their arrival at Marseilles.

It is a long letter. The Earl had received their news from Florence, and was glad to hear of their health and proficiency; but the thought of them, and how hereafter they were to subsist, was most grievous unto him—

“And now or never,” he wrote to Marcombes, “is the tyme for you to give yourself honour, and to make me and them your faithfull friends for ever hereafter. Necessitie compells me to make you and them know the dangerous and poore estate whereunto, by God’s providence, I am at this instant reduced.”

An account of the outbreak and course of the Rebellion follows; of Dungarvan’s and Kynalmeaky’s and Broghill’s doings, and of the Earl’s own position in Youghal. It was a case of about “200,000 in armes and rebellion against a poor handful of British Protestants.”

He tells Marcombes how in January he had scraped together with much difficulty—by selling of plate—the £250 for their quarterly allowance, and made it over to be paid by Mr. Perkins to Mr. Castell. So far he had punctually supplied them—“which longer to doe I am no waies able.” The £250, when they should receive it, must be husbanded carefully, and employed to bring both boys home again. They must land at Dublin, Cork, or Youghal. If they cannot do this, they must go to Holland and serve under the Prince of Orange. They must, in any case, manage to maintain themselves: “for with inward greefe of soul I write this truth unto you that I am no longer able to supply them ... but as I am compelled in my age to doe, so must they in their younger yeares com̃end themselves....

“But if they serve God and be carefull and discreet in their carridge, God will bless and provide for them as hitherto he hath done for me, who began in the raising of my fortune by good endeavours; without any assistance of parents and friends....” And he knows Marcombes is too generous to leave the boys, “my two yong Sonnes that are soe deere unto me,” till he can see them safely shipped for Ireland or “well entred in the warres of Holland”—as they may desire and Marcombes advise.

This, then, was the letter that Marcombes and the two boys received at Marseilles. It was then May, and the letter was dated March 9; it was already two months old. They must have looked blankly at each other. How were they to carry out the Earl’s wishes? How were they both, without money, to make their way home? No bill of exchange had reached them: Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had played them false.

It seems to have been arranged between them that Frank, the elder brother, who at nineteen would be of some use at his father’s side, should, with Marcombes’s assistance, make his way as quickly as he could to Ireland and to Youghal. There is no mention of Betty in this moment of decision. Marcombes was evidently able to scrape together enough money out of what they still had to carry one of the boys home—and it was to be Frank. And Robyn? Robyn at fifteen was an “Eale” still. Had Marcombes sometimes exaggerated, in his letters to the Earl, Robyn’s stature and strength? The sequel will show. Poor Carew, in the Eton days, and Marcombes himself, wrote of Robyn as a boy of sedentary habits, and a little “thicke.” If the truth must be told, there was not much of the soldier in Robert Boyle. He was the student, thinker, dreamer; and he knew himself to be unqualified, at fifteen, “to be received among the troops.” And, without money, it was quite impossible to provide himself with the necessary “equipage.”

Apparently they all three—Marcombes, Frank, and Robyn—went on as far as Lyons; and there it seems likely they parted: Frank in the saddle, his horse’s head turned towards Ireland, and Robyn and Marcombes returning in deep melancholy to Geneva. There Robyn was to wait for further orders—to employ his time in learning to make “an honourable living.” It is all told in his sad little letter, written from Lyons to the Earl at Youghal: a letter which may have been carried to Ireland in Frank’s pocket.

“My most honoured Lord and Father, Having according to your Lordship’s order and directions seriously pondered and considered the present estate of our affairs, we have not thought it expedient for divers reasons that my Brother will tell your Lordship by word of mouth that I should goe into Holland; for besides that I am already weary and broken with a long journey of above eight hundred miles, I am as yet too weake to undertake so long a voyage in a strange country, where when I arrive I know nobody and have little hope by reason of my youth to be received among the troops....” He explains that the money had not come; but M. Marcombes had offered to keep him at Geneva till they should hear further from the Earl, “or till it pleased God to change the face of the affaires”; and Robyn had gratefully accepted this offer. He hoped to fit himself to defend his religion, King, and country, “according to my little power....

“... If your Lordship hath need of me in Ireland, I beseech your Lordship to acquaint me therewith and to believe that I have never beene taught to abandon my parents in adversity, but that there and in all other places I will always strive to shew myself an obedient sonne....”

Frank, he said, was ready to take horse to “goe towards Ireland, to secoure your Lordship according to his power,” and would carry all their news. And Robert ends his letter—

“I most humbly take my leave, commending your Lordship and him and us all unto the protection of Almighty God, beseeching your Lordship to believe that whatsoever misery or affliction it pleaseth God to send me I will never doe the least action unworthy of the honor that I have to be, my Lord, your Lordship’s most dutiful and obedient son, Robert Boyle.”

Dr. Grosart, in editing the Lismore papers, found the original letter much damaged, a large piece of it having been torn away in the breaking of the seal. The Earl had evidently torn it open hastily in his anxiety to know what “my Robyn” was going to do. Whether or no Frank delivered the letter into his father’s hands, Frank was certainly quickly back in Ireland, and very much on the spot. By August 1 Robyn had received a letter from Frank, full of enthusiasm for Kynalmeaky’s conduct at home.

For Kynalmeaky was in his element at last. “I have left Sleeping in ye afternoone,” wrote Kynalmeaky to his old father in Youghal. The son who had shown “all the faults a prodigall inordinate young man can have, which if he take not up in tyme will be his ruine and the breaking of my hart”, was redeeming himself. Kynalmeaky’s wife (the Earl of Cork always called her “my deare deare daughter-in-law”) had not been able to live with her husband; even the younger brothers must long ago have known what Kynalmeaky was. And now Frank had written to tell Robyn in Geneva that Kynalmeaky was acting like a hero. And Robyn, so far away from home, had written off on August 1 a little letter of tender admiration to this elder brother, who had set them every bad example and yet had kept such a place in their hearts. On the margin of this letter Robyn added a little boyish postscript—only to say he could not express in words what he was feeling, and ending with “Adieu, Dearest Lewis, idle Cosin. Bon Anné, Bon Solé, bon Vespré. Adieue a Di vous commande.”

Did Kynalmeaky ever have this letter? It was dated from Geneva, Aug. 1, and it was endorsed by the Earl of Cork himself, “from my sonn Robert to his brother Kynal. Rec. 13 Oct.” Had it been sent to the Earl, with Kynalmeaky’s papers—or had it indeed come too late? For the battle of Liscarrol had been fought on Sept. 3. The Earl’s loyal son-in-law, Lord Barrymore, and all the Earl’s sons except Robert, fought in that battle. And at the Battle of Liscarrol Kynalmeaky was killed; killed on his horse, by a musket-shot through the head. It was Frank—the “sweet-spirited Frank,” fresh from the fencing and dancing and vaulting lessons in Geneva and Italy—who, “carrying himself with undaunted resolution,” rescued his brother’s body and horse, and kept troop and foot together.

The old man did not know then which of these two sons to be proudest of. It was a grim satisfaction to the Earl, after all that had passed, when “Kynal” had been buried in Lismore Church, to sit down and make that entry in his diary: “Six of the rebell ensignes were carried to his widdoe.”

Robyn was to hear from his father once or twice after that. The Earl held out brave hopes of being able to procure some “office” for his boy “at his coming over.” And he sent his own “choice dun mare” to Lismore, with orders that it was to be “kept and drest carefully” for Robyn, when God should send him home again. And when Broghill’s wife, “Lady Pegg,” was at last obliged to return to England, the old Earl gave her a commission to buy for him a ring “besett rownd with diamonds,” and to present it, from him, to her fair young cousin the little Lady Ann Howard, whom he thought of always, even in those dark days, as “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.”

There is something Shakespearean in the mood in which this old fighter lived his last months and drew his last breath. Shut up in Youghal, “preserving” that town for his King, his sons away fighting, his daughters and grandchildren scattered, Kynalmeaky and Barrymore dead, and poor Lettice dying, his lands despoiled, his fortune vanished, he was still the great Earl of Cork, the head of a great family, the old man of action and experience, the Elizabethan soldier-statesman to whom the younger men, statesmen and kinsmen alike, turned in this hour of extremity, and not in vain. There is nothing stronger or more human of its kind, or more characteristic of the man, than the positively last will and testament made by himself in Youghal so late as November 1642, ten months before his death.

The end came, nobody knows exactly when, but about the very time of the signing of the truce at Sigginstown, in the middle of September 1643, “from infirmities incident to old age, and the want of rest and quiet.”

He was buried in the great tomb at Youghal. All his life he had believed in three things: in God’s Providence, his own integrity of purpose, and the righteousness of a Cause. And in the debacle—in his and Ireland’s darkest moment, when the clouds hung low over his native land and the land of his adoption—his belief in these three things remained unmoved.

Shakespeare has told us how Faith and Uncertainty go hand in hand—

“If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come....”