CHAPTER VIII. In England Again

IN ENGLAND AGAIN

“And though his boiling youth did often very earnestly solicit to be employed in those culpable delights that are useful in and seem so proper for that season, and have repentance adjourned till old age, yet did its importunities meet ever with denials, Philaretus ever esteeming that piety was to be embraced not so much to gain heaven, as to serve God with....”—ROBERT BOYLE’S Philaretus.

In the summer of 1644, a slim, sunburnt, foreign-looking youth came back into the London he had left when he was quite a little fellow, nearly five years before. Even now, he was not yet eighteen, and he was still an “Eale”. None of his family expected his return; he had little or no money in his purse, and but vague ideas as to what he was going to do next.

How things had changed! Where were the King and Queen, whose hands Frank and he had kissed? And the gay Court that had clustered about them? And his Father! There was no “Great Earl of Cork” any more; no “greatest family in all London,” living “extraordinarily high,” in the House of the Savoy; no child weddings in the royal chapel at Whitehall. What had become of Frank’s wedding shoes, that had been lent afterwards to poor Kynalmeaky?

There can have been little but troops, and talk of troops, on the dusty summer roads, as Robert Boyle came towards London; and the quick, hot jargon of names and phrases that was in all men’s mouths—the political idiom of the moment—must have been doubly difficult to understand by the boy who had so long been living in studious exile, speaking “all and allwayes French,” and breathing an atmosphere of profound peace—“the storme having been driving another way.”

As he neared London, Robyn’s thoughts must have been still with the Marcombes household, till so recently his home, and the little circle of learned and pleasant Genevan friends whom he had left behind him. For Marcombes had more than fulfilled his trust. No remittances had come to Robert Boyle since the old Earl wrote that letter to Marcombes in March 1642. The boy had been running up a big debt, of money and gratitude alike, to his governour: “As for me,” he had written to his brother Kynalmeaky about Marcombes (the old letter is scarcely decipherable in parts), “he hath so much obliged me the ... despaire of ever being able to desingage myselfe of so many and so greate ... that I have unto him.”

And when at last, eight or nine months after the Earl’s death, Robyn, chafing in his idleness and exile, made up his mind to break from his surroundings and find his way home somehow, Marcombes had used his own interest in Geneva to “take up” for his pupil “some slight jewels at a reasonable rate,” by the sale of which, from place to place, the boy might pay his way back to London.

And now he was there; and the life of the little Swiss University town lay behind him, too recent to be forgotten: the life of a “well-fortified city,” with the great Gothic fabric of a Cathedral in its midst, on one of whose four cannon-mounted turrets there stood “a continual Sentinel.” It was a Cathedral, of course, no longer. It was there that the celebrated Dr. John Diodati, and the brilliant young Professor Morice better known as Alexander Morus, “poet and chief professor of the University,” discoursed eloquently after the discipline of Calvin and Beza. Dr. Diodati preached on Thursdays in Italian to his Italian Protestant Congregation, and on Sundays in French, with his hat on, after the “French mode.” Dr. Diodati lived at the Villa Diodati, on the south bank of the lake, two miles out of the city: the old Bishop’s Palace was now the prison. The University was a “faire structure,” with its class-rooms, its hall, and its excellent library. And Divines and Professors, in their gowns and caps and hats, flitted about the wooden-arcaded streets. There was an “aboundance of bookesellers”; and good screwed guns and Geneva watches, pewter and cutlery, were to be bought; and amongst the hoary relics of Julius Cæsar and a pagan Rome there stood the Town Hall, with the Cross Keys, and the City Motto: Post Tenebras Lux.

The only Campus Martius that Robyn had ever known had been the fields outside Geneva, where every Sunday after the evening devotions the young townsmen were allowed to exercise their arms, practising diligently with the gun and the long and cross bows, for prizes of pewter plates and dishes. Robert Boyle had brought his bows and arrows back with him to London. He must have practised with the rest, as John Evelyn did two years later, on that peaceful Champs de Mars, and played with the rest on its “noble Pall Mall.” He had known the gardens of rare tulips and other choice flowers outside the earthen fortifications, and he must have seen Geneva also in its sterner moods. For that same “Mars’ Field” was the place of public execution; and in Geneva there was then no hospitality of extradition-law. Capital crime in other countries was capital crime there. Fugitives from other countries were put to death in the sunshine of that spacious field; and for the Genevans, by Genevan law, adultery was death.

But Geneva and its Mars’ Field lay behind him. And in front? Robert Boyle must have heard something of what had been happening at home. Accounts had reached him from time to time of the “dreadful confusion of affairs” in England, Ireland and Scotland. During those last two years in Geneva he must have heard all kinds of rumours of the struggle that was going on between the Parliament and the Crown, between the Prelates and the Presbyterians. His friends in Geneva must have talked of the Solemn League and Covenant, and the Great Assembly of Divines that was meeting in Westminster; and of Archbishop Laud, then still alive, still in prison, his trial still deferred.

But it takes seeing to realise civil war. When Robyn arrived in England it was to find a kingdom in arms against itself, a nation divided into two great opposing armies; husbands and wives taking different sides, fathers and sons in opposite camps, brother against brother. The king’s headquarters were at Oxford; Prince Rupert with his Royalist army was in Lancashire. York was defended by the Marquis of Newcastle against the combined Parliamentarian forces under Manchester, Fairfax and Cromwell. Robert Boyle had arrived in England almost on the eve of the battle of Marston Moor.

And what to do? There was only one thing at this moment that the great Earl’s Benjamin could think of doing. He was no soldier, this dreamy youth, with his books and his bows and arrows; but force of heredity—a kind of force of inertia—would have carried him into the Royalist camp. His brothers were all soldiers; though it is doubtful if he knew, when he came home, where they were and what they were doing. The very politics of the various members of this scattered family, the “sides” they were taking in the quick march of political events, must have been a puzzle to him. And so it was Robert Boyle’s intention to join the army, where he told himself he would find, besides his brothers, “the excellent King himself, divers eminent divines, and many worthy persons of several ranks.” But he knew also that “the generality of those he would have been obliged to converse with were very debauched, and apt, as well as inclinable, to make others so.”

If Robert Boyle had joined the King’s army! It is difficult to think of him in “armor of prooff,” and quite impossible to picture him as a laughing Cavalier. He disliked “customary swearing”; he drank water; he did not smoke; he dearly loved to point a moral; and he never adorned a tale. It is certain no officers’ mess would have endured him for ten minutes, in the rôle either of sceptical chymist or of Christian virtuoso. And what would have become of the Invisible College, and the Royal Society?

But, fortunately for them, for him, and for posterity, it was to be ordered otherwise. It happened that his sister Katherine, now, since the death of her father-in-law, Lady Ranelagh, was in the summer of 1644 actually living in London, and “it was by an accident” that Robyn found her out; an accident to which he used afterwards to ascribe “a good part of his future happiness.”

In later years, when Robert Boyle was giving Bishop Burnet some of the facts of his life for an intended biography, he did not mention what the “accident” was. Perhaps, so soon after the Restoration, he had still reason to be discreet in the use of names; for Lady Ranelagh, in the summer of 1644, was very much among the Parliamentarians.

In the light of after events, one or two possibilities suggest themselves, if it be forgivable in anything concerning an experimental chemist to indulge in speculation. Marcombes must surely have furnished Robyn with letters to persons in London who would be of practical help to the boy on his arrival. Who were they? Mr. Perkins the tailor had proved perfidious, and was out of the question. There were Peter Naylor, the lawyer-cousin in New Inn, and Cousin Croone of the Nag’s Head, and Philip Burlamachy, once Lord Mayor, with whom the old Earl had done so much business, and who was also a relation of the Diodati family, Dr. John Diodati’s wife being a Burlamachy. But it could scarcely be called an accident if in a business call on any of these Robyn had obtained his sister’s address. It must have been some chance meeting with, or news of, her in some unexpected quarter.

Other men there were to whom the boy may well have carried letters from Marcombes or his Genevan friends. There was Dr. Theodore Diodati, the London physician—brother of Dr. John in Geneva,—who knew a great many people in London; and there was Samuel Hartlib, the naturalised German, the merchant-philanthropist who knew everybody and whom everybody knew. And there was Milton himself, a friend of the Diodati family in Geneva, and a friend also of Dr. Theodore Diodati and Mr. Hartlib. Dr. Theodore Diodati lived in the parish of St. Bartholomew the Less, not far from Milton’s house in Aldersgate Street, and Hartlib was living in Duke’s Place, Aldgate. He was a man with many hobbies and interests, and a large correspondence. He conducted, in fact, “a general news agency,” and must have been as well known in Geneva as in London from his connexion with Durie and the great project of a union of all the Protestant Churches of Europe, and for his friendship with Comenius, and his active part in the scheme which the English Parliament was then itself taking up of a reform, on Baconian lines, of the English Universities and Public Schools. It is certain that Hartlib was one of Robert Boyle’s earliest friends in London; that Hartlib and Milton were intimate, and that Milton had first addressed his Tract on Education to Hartlib. And it is difficult to believe that Milton was unknown—by name at least—to Robert Boyle. For Milton had been in Geneva in the summer of 1639, just before Frank and Robyn went there. Milton’s great friend Charles Diodati was the son of Dr. Theodore in London and the nephew of Dr. John of Geneva; and when Milton passed through Geneva on his way home from his Italian tour Dr. John had been very hospitable to him. Milton had been an honoured guest at the Villa Diodati, and it is supposed that he heard there the news of Charles Diodati’s death. Even if Robyn had not met Milton at Sir Henry Wotton’s table when Milton dined at Eton, he may well have heard in Geneva all about Charles Diodati and John Milton, and the Epitaphium Damonis—the Latin poem that Milton wrote on his return home, in memory of his dead friend. And it is probable he knew of Comus, acted by the Bridgewater family, and of Lycidas also, and Milton’s friendship for Edward King, the brilliant young Irishman, whose relatives in Ireland must have been well known to the Boyle family. Robyn may well have read the Epitaphium Damonis in the Villa Diodati; and in the house of the Italian teacher and refugee, Count Cerdogni, he may have looked through the famous autograph album in which Milton had written the words (of which Robyn would certainly have approved)—

“If Vertue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her.”

It is not so certain that Milton’s prose would have pleased the boy;—the church-politics, the anti-episcopal pamphlets, and the divorce tract that had recently been the topic of conversation in London. There is no trace of a personal friendship between Milton and Robert Boyle. Their paths constantly crossed, but they were to walk apart. Boyle deplored religious controversy, and did not sympathise with the sects and sectaries. And yet it is here that the possibility of the “accident” comes in. For Lady Ranelagh was a very progressive Puritan, whose interests were already bound up with the Parliamentarian Party and its reforms. She must have known Milton well personally or by reputation at this time, and she can have had no bad opinion of him or his prose-writings, or she would not have sent, as she did, her own nephew, young Lord Barrymore, to be one of Milton’s pupils. Barrymore, only four years younger than Robert Boyle, was one of Milton’s resident pupils when, in September 1645, Milton removed from Aldersgate Street into a larger house in Barbican with the purpose of being able to board a larger number of boys. Lady Ranelagh was later on to send her own boy, Dick Jones, to be taught by Milton; her friendship for Milton was to endure through many troublous years; in his own words she stood “in place of all kith and kin” to him in his blindness and solitude; and her good offices seem not to have stopped even there. May it have been through this Diodati-Milton-Hartlib connexion that Robert Boyle and his sister Ranelagh were brought together?

But London was not so large a place in 1644. Cousin Croone was presumably still at the Nag’s Head in Cheapside, and people met in Cheapside in those days. Had not Dr. John Diodati himself, on his one visit to London in 1627, run up against the very man he most wanted to meet—Mr. Bedell, afterwards the Bishop—in Cheapside? Whatever the “accident” was, Lady Ranelagh received her young brother with open arms. Her address in that summer of 1644 still remains uncertain, though not long afterwards she seems to have been living in the house in the Old Mall which was to be her home to the end of her life. It may have been in Pall Mall that Robyn came knocking at his sister’s door. Lord Ranelagh—he had taken his seat in the House of Peers in February 1644—was probably in Ireland, for there is no mention of him as one of the family circle at this time; and the husband and wife, as the years went on, had lived more and more apart. Lord Ranelagh, who had run through his own and his wife’s money, lived in Ireland, and Lady Ranelagh in London. She was in the receipt, for some reason unexplained, of a pension from Government of £4 a week, and was otherwise helped by the members of her own family.

For nearly five months, Robert Boyle lived with his sister and her young children, and a strongly Parliamentarian sister-in-law—wife of a member of the House of Commons. And Mary, “my Lady Molkin,” as Robyn calls her, now Charles Rich’s wife, and daughter-in-law of the great Earl of Warwick, was not far off, whether at Warwick House in Holborn, or at “delicious Leeze” in Essex. Mary had had her troubles, since her romantic marriage three years before. She had lost her first baby, a little girl, when it was “one year and a quarter old,” and her second child, a boy, had been born just at the dark time of the old Earl’s death. Charles Rich had kept back the bad news till his young wife was “up again.”

In his sister’s house, Robert Boyle found himself in the very thick of the Parliamentarian interests. She was still a young woman—only thirty—and a very clever woman, highly educated for her time, and popular by reason of her “universal affability.” In her house, Robyn came to know, as real friends, “some of the great men of that Party, which was then growing, and soon after victorious.” Her house was, in fact, even then, a rendezvous of the Parliamentarian Party. And what a vehemently interesting time it was, in London! Both Houses were sitting: the Westminster Assembly was busy with the new Directory of Worship and the new frame of Church Government. In September, Essex was beaten by the King’s forces in Cornwall; and Manchester and Cromwell were back in London from the north. During the last weeks of Robert Boyle’s sojourn under his sister’s roof, the talk must have been all of, if not with, Manchester and Cromwell, and of Cromwell’s “Toleration Order” and the abolition of the use of the Prayer Book. In October the King was moving back to Oxford, and there was fought the second battle of Newbury. And now the thoughts of the Parliament men were veering round from Church Government to Army Reform; and towards the end of that year, the talk was of Cromwell’s “Self-denying Ordinance” and the great changes it would carry with it; and of the new modelling of the Army—the “new noddle” as the scoffers called it. And all the time Hartlib, in Aldgate, was immersed in his social and educational schemes; and Milton, in Aldersgate Street, was teaching his boys and writing his second divorce tract and his Areopagitica; and all the time Laud was lying in the Tower, his trial dragging wearily on. What did Robert Boyle think of it all after the profound peace of Geneva?

Whatever was in his thoughts at this time—and it is very certain Robert Boyle had no intention of giving up the Book of Common Prayer, or any book he might wish to keep—there was no more talk of joining the King’s Army; and when at last, towards the end of the year, the state of the roads south-west of London permitted it, it was under a Parliamentarian escort that the young Squire found his way into Dorsetshire, to take possession of his own Manor of Stalbridge. Through his sister’s influence with her Parliamentarian friends, Robyn had got “early protection for his English and Irish estates.”

Even with this protection, there were difficulties in front of him. There must have been a sadness about his solitary return to the Manor, empty except for the child-memories of five years before. The fair chimney-pieces and carved balustrades, the beautiful rose-coloured furniture “hastened home” for those great house-parties of 1639—must have talked to him of a chapter of his life wiped out for ever. What things had happened there! There was the arrival of Mary’s suitor, and Mary’s high averseness and contradiction, and the young man’s discomfiture and departure to the Bath: Mary was the same imperious little woman now, as then; she now had a “high averseness” to Charles Rich’s “engaging in the wars.” Here poor Lettice had drooped and complained, and George Goring, with his wounded leg, had limped up and down stairs. Then there was the “private discourse” in the Stalbridge parlour, that had settled poor Frank’s fate: Betty had refused to live with the old Earl after Mary’s marriage, and had gone her own way; she was now, nominally with the Staffords, at The Hague, the gay little courtier that she was, a Killigrew all over!... There were the paths where Mr. Dowch had discoursed Latin Syntax, and where Robyn had first come to know the cheerful and choleric Marcombes, as they talked in “familiar French” about all the European cities they were going to see. Through these gates Frank and Robyn had come “home” after the years at Eton—the “blew-perpetuana” curtains following duly. Through these gates, he and Frank and Marcombes had passed, on that memorable journey to London, where Frank was to “make his addresses” to Betty in the Savoy. All round him lay the fields where he had dreamed, and the orchards of which he had been so proud to possess the keys. And it was all his own, now—all empty and neglected: “my own ruined cottage in the country”: a depressing place for a boy of eighteen to return alone to. One of the first events of the new year, 1645, the news of which could have reached Stalbridge was the execution of Laud on Tower Hill.

Nobody could have been very glad to see Robert Boyle come back again; least of all Tom Murray, whom the old Earl had left in charge, and who proved himself to have been, during his reign there, as untrustworthy as Mr. Perkins the London tailor. “The roguery of Tom Murray” was one of the first difficulties that faced the young squire.

Two other pieces of business, however, could have admitted of no delay. Marcombes was to be repaid; and partly to that end, apparently, in August 1645, as soon as Robert Boyle could put his hands on some of his own money, he set out from Stalbridge, “the necessities of my affairs,” as he explained in a letter to his brother Broghill, “calling me away (according to the leave the Parliament has given me) into France.” By August 1645, the New Model had done extraordinary things. In the spring, Cromwell and Waller had been in the west of England. Naseby had been fought in June, and the King’s private correspondence taken and published. In July, George Goring had been badly beaten in the west; Bath had surrendered on July 30. Was Robert Boyle still at Stalbridge on August 15, when Sherborne Castle was stormed and battered—Sherborne Castle, where the old Earl and his sons had killed that buck and dined the very day that Lady Ranelagh’s baby had been born? Probably not. It was probably wise that he should absent himself, “according to the leave the Parliament had given him.” At any rate, he was well away from English shores again when on September 10 there came “the splendid success of the storming of Bristol.”

It is not known if Robert Boyle went so far as Geneva, or whether he actually saw his old governour again; but in any case his visit was a brief one. His business was done, and he was back in London before the end of that year, staying with Lady Ranelagh, and able to attend to the other business that remained to be done—if indeed it had not been done before he left Stalbridge in August.

There were, it will be remembered, certain deeds in a sealed box left by the old Earl in the hands of Mr. Peter Naylor of New Inn. But they were duplicates. The originals had been left with Lord Howard of Escrick, the father of “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” and the uncle of Broghill’s wife, Lady Pegg. They embodied the old Earl’s last effort in family match-making; a fitting match for the youngest son of the great Earl of Cork, which would further unite the families of Cecil, Howard, and Boyle; already intermarried, as Broghill’s wife was a niece of Lord Edward Howard, Lady Salisbury his sister, and Lady Dungarvan’s mother a Cecil. The old Earl had done his very best for his Benjamin. And it is a mistake to suppose it probable that the children had never met. They may very well have made shy advances to one another during those weeks in the autumn of 1639 when Frank and Robyn were in London, just before Frank’s wedding. The House of the Savoy and Salisbury House were very near each other; the families were often together; and little Ann Howard—her mother dead—was often with Lady Salisbury. The two children may even have made a pretty and much-admired pair at Frank’s wedding in Whitehall, and hence may have come the old Earl’s confident “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” But there it had ended: the children, if they met then, had never seen each other since; and in five years they had both grown up. It was in 1642 that the old Earl commissioned Lady Pegg to carry to her little cousin the ring “besett rownd with diamonds”; but now it was 1645, and many things had happened. The vast Irish estates had been devastated in the Rebellion. Dorsetshire had been scourged by civil war; and Robyn had come back penniless and foreign-looking from Geneva, and was returning to his “ruined cottage in the country” to examine and administer his disordered affairs as best he could.

A boy of eighteen, Robert Boyle had come back heart-whole. Evelyn has left it on record that there were very few fair ladies in Geneva, when he and Captain Wray and the poet Waller stopped there on their homeward journey, in 1646. “This towne,” wrote Evelyn, “is not much celebrated for beautifull women, for even at this distance from the Alps the gentlewomen have something full throats; but our Captain Wray ... fell so mightily in love with one of Mons. Saladine’s daughters that with much persuasion he could not be persuaded to think on his journey into France.” Robert Boyle had not fallen in love with any of M. Saladine’s daughters; and his views on the subject of marriage would scarcely have been understood by Captain Wray. “Marriage,” wrote Robert Boyle from Stalbridge when he was scarcely twenty, “is not a bare present, but a legal exchange of hearts;—and the same contract that gives you right to another’s, ties you to look upon your own as another’s goods, and too surely made over to remain any longer in your gift.”

Curiously enough, “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” had already come, by an even shorter process of reasoning, to the same conclusion.

The Lady Ann Howard was a particular girl-friend of Anne Murray—a daughter of that Murray who had been Provost of Eton before Sir Henry Wotton. Lady Ann Howard often stayed with the widowed Mrs. Murray and her daughter in their house in St. Martin’s Lane; and during the summer months of 1644 the two girls were constantly together at the house of Anne Murray’s elder sister, Lady Newton, at Charlton in Kent. It was a house surrounded by a garden with quiet walks in it. Lord Howard of Escrick’s eldest son, brother of “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.,” was often there, for he was in love with Anne Murray; and Mr. Charles Howard—a young cousin of the Howards—was often there too, for he was in love with his cousin, Lady Ann. Anne Murray has left a pretty description of the love-making that went on in that garden. They called it amour in those days, and they were all ridiculously young. Lord Howard of Escrick, the father, was a Parliamentarian, and at this time very busy as one of the ten Lords who were lay members of the Westminster Assembly; but he was not too busy to come and fetch away his son and daughter when he heard what was going on. The four young people had been very happy in that garden. Anne Murray has described how once Charles Howard took his fair cousin by the hand, and “led her into another walke, and left him and I together.” “Him” was Lord Howard of Escrick’s son and heir, who straightway proposed to “I.” But Anne Murray was not allowed to say “yes”; her mother shut her up, and she was fed on bread and water. With the Lady Ann and Charles Howard it was quite different. The boy-cousin can have had no reason to conceal his feelings, unless indeed it were the prior claim of the absent Robyn. Charles Howard’s brilliant career may be read in any Peerage. He was a soldier and a man of parts at sixteen. He was to serve Cromwell and to become one of Cromwell’s Lords, and to be created Earl of Carlisle at the coronation of Charles II. He was the “finest gentleman”; and he won his cousin Ann, who was “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.”

Robert Boyle also seems to have acted his part as became “a very parfit gentle knight” and the old Earl’s Benjamin. There can be little doubt that a passage in an undated letter from Lady Ranelagh to her brother belongs to this period, and ends, for him, the episode. “You are now,” she says, “very near the hour wherein your mistress is, by giving herself to another, to set you at liberty from all the appearances you have put on of being a lover; which, though they cost you some pains and use of art, were easier, because they were but appearances.”

The Howard cousins, Mr. Charles Howard and the Lady Ann, must have been married very shortly after, if not before, Robert Boyle returned from his flying visit to France at the end of 1645. The box of deeds left with Lord Howard of Escrick must have come back into Robyn’s hands. The little lady was to pass out of his life almost before she can be said to have entered it. Twenty years afterwards the Lady Ann was still a young woman, though she was the mother of grown-up children, when Mr. Pepys made the entry in his diary: “I to church: and in our pew there sat a great lady, whom I afterwards understood to be my Lady Carlisle, a very fine woman indeed in person.”