CHAPTER IX. The Deare Squire

THE DEARE SQUIRE

“... When a Navigator suddenly spies an unknown Vessel afar off, before he has hail’d her, he can scarcely, if at all, conclude what he shall learn by her, and he may from a Ship that he finds perhaps on some remoter coast of Africa, or the Indies, meet with Informations concerning his own Country and affairs; And thus sometimes a little Flower may point us to the Sun, and by casting our eyes down to our feet, we may in the water see those Stars that shine in the Firmament or highest visible Heaven.”—ROBERT BOYLE: Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects.

It was in March 1646 that Robert Boyle once more set out from London to ride into Dorsetshire. The Manor of Stalbridge was to be his home for the next five or six years.

What fate had overtaken the Earl’s choice dun mare that waited at Lismore for Robyn’s home-coming? The old order had changed; and it was on a borrowed courser, “none of the freest of his legs,” that Robert Boyle made the journey. Lord Broghill was with him, and they had the company of a States-Messenger, who was travelling the same way. The account of their long ride, by Farnham and Winchester and over Salisbury Plain is a little romance in itself. The war was drawing to an end. The King was again at Oxford:—it was not long before his escape, in disguise, to the Scots at Newcastle. The new-modelled Army had very nearly completed its work of conquest in the south-west. The Cavaliers were out between Egham and Farnham, but the travellers dodged them. Farnham was deserted—“all the townsmen having gone to oppose the King’s Army.” Robert Boyle almost lost himself in meditation, “invited by the coolness of the evening and the freshness of the garden,” in which he walked up and down waiting for his supper. The travellers supped, and retired quietly to bed; and it was not till the dead of night that they were roused by a thundering at the chamber door. Robyn slept in his clothes and stockings: “my usual night-posture when I travel.” He produced his bilboa from under his pillow, and a pistol from one of his holsters; his bows and arrows were not far off. But it turned out to be only the town-constable with a group of musketeers, in search of somebody else. “Away went my gentleman,” wrote Robyn gaily to his sister, “in prosecution of his search; and I even took my bows and arrows and went to sleep.”

They dined next day at Winchester, and lay that night at Salisbury; and there Robyn overtook his trunks, which had been sent on in front of him. In the middle of Salisbury Plain they were surrounded by a party of horse, who would have searched them for “Malignant Letters” such as “use to be about the King’s Picture in a Yellow-Boy.” But the States-Messenger carried them safely through, and they rode on, past weary troops of foot, “poor pressed countrymen,” goaded on by the party of horse. “Amongst them,” wrote Robert Boyle, “I saw one poor rogue, lacqueyed by his wife, and carrying a child upon his shoulders.” Even then, as now, “new models” leave much to be desired.

In spite of his bilboa and pistols, Robert Boyle hated the sight of war. “Good God!” he wrote, “that reasonable creatures, that call themselves Christians too, should delight in such an unnatural thing as war, where cruelty at least becomes necessity....”

He reached Stalbridge in safety; but the weather had broken, and was wretchedly cold. “We all suspect the almanac-maker of a mistake in setting down March instead of January.” The bad weather kept him indoors, and was “so drooping that it dulls me to all kinds of useful study.” Even his country neighbours were prevented from making their usual “visitations.” Robert Boyle was depressed: Stalbridge was not so lively as London. “My stay here,” he says, “God willing, shall not be long.”

There were still troops in the neighbourhood, and the plague had “begun to revive again”; there had been cases at Bristol, and at Yeovil, only six miles off. Dorsetshire was suffering from “fits of the Committee”; and at the Manor itself there were many calls on the Squire’s slender purse. This had for the time been replenished by one of his brothers; and he was going to cut down some of his wood, to repay the loan. He was arranging to make “my brother’s sixty trees bear him some golden fruit”; but this was to be done by instalments—one third at May Day next. And meantime he was trying to settle down to his “standish and books”; but even writing did not come easily. “My Ethics,” he wrote to his sister (of a little treatise he had begun, one of his first literary attempts), “go very slowly on.”

And the days must have passed slowly too. “I am grown so perfect a villager, and live so removed,” runs a letter to Lady Ranelagh, “not only from the roads, but from the very by-paths of intelligence, that to entertain you with our country discourse, would have extremely puzzled me, since your children have not the rickets nor the measles.” He was feeling the difficulties of his position, in being one of a family so important to both political parties. “I have been forced to observe a very great caution and exact evenness in my carriage, since I saw you last,” he wrote to Marcombes in Geneva; “it being absolutely necessary for the preservation of a person whom the unfortunate situation of his fortune made obnoxious to the injuries of both parties and the protection of neither.” And his money matters were still in disorder, as indeed were everybody else’s. Out of his Irish estates he had not received “the worth of a farthing.”

The roguery of Tom Murray at Stalbridge, however, had had one good result: it had obliged Robyn to make “further discoveries into æconomical knowledge” than he would otherwise have done. He had turned Tom Murray away, “to let him know that I could do my business very well without him”; and then, towards the end of 1646, Tom Murray was to be taken back: “Having attained to a knowledge of my own small fortune beyond the possibility of being cheated, I am likely to make use of him again, to show my father’s servants that I wish no hurt to the man, but to the knave.”

In October 1646, Robert Boyle was back on a visit to London, perhaps to see the great Essex buried “in kingly state.” On that day, the solemn pageant just over, he sat down to write a letter—a wonderful letter for a boy not yet twenty—to Marcombes in Geneva. He wrote of the long procession of four hundred officers, “not one so low as a captain,” the House of Peers, the House of Commons, the City-Fathers, and the Assembly of Divines, that had followed Essex to the grave. But to Robert Boyle the “pageants of sorrow” had “eaten up the reality”; the “care of the blaze” had “diverted men from mourning.”

His letter to his old governour gives a vivid picture of the political conditions of the time. In England there was “not one Malignant garrison untaken”; in Wales “but two or three rocky places held out for the King.” The Scots were about to deliver up their garrisons and return into their own country, the Parliament having agreed to compound with them for all their arrears. A sum of £300,000 had been agreed upon, but “the first payment is yet in debate.” The King was still at Newcastle, “both discontenting and discontented”; and the Scots would be obliged to make up their minds how to “dispose of his person,” which the Houses had “voted to remain in the disposition of both Houses of Parliament.” People were flattering themselves with hopes of a speedy settlement of things, but Robert Boyle was not so hopeful. He has, he says, “always looked upon Sin as the chief incendiary of this war”; and yet, “by careful experience,” he has observed that the war has “only multiplied and heightened those sins to which it owes its being.” And his simile is characteristic: “As water and ice,” he adds, “which by a reciprocal generation beget one another.”

In Ireland the state of things was no more hopeful than nearer home. The news of Lord Ormonde’s peace must have reached Geneva; but Robert Boyle explains carefully to Marcombes the respective attitudes of the three parties;—the Protestant English proper; the “mere natives,” who hoped by rebellion “to exchange the Throne of England for St. Peter’s Chair,” or “to shake off the English yoke for that of some Catholic foreign prince”; and, thirdly, the Catholic Lords of the English Pale—“so we call the counties about Dublin”—who are “by manners and inclination Irish, though English by descent.”

In Inchiquin’s absence from Munster, Broghill, Governor of Youghal, had been left in full command. Robyn is very proud of Broghill, not only as a gallant soldier, but as “none of the least wits of the time.” Broghill had come to England to appeal for troops and supplies for Munster; but Parliament was so slow in granting them that “the physic will not get thither before the patient be dead.”

And then Robert Boyle gives Marcombes a piece of his mind about the sects and sectaries:—

“The Presbyterian Government is at last settled (though I can scarce think it will prove long lived) after the great opposition of many, and to their no less dislike.” But many people had begun to think it was high time to “put a restraint upon the spreading impostures of the sectaries,” who had made London their general rendezvous. The City “entertains at present no less than 200 several opinions in point of religion.” Some have been “digged out of the graves,” where they had been long condemned to lie buried; others have been “newly fashioned in the forge of their own brains”; most are but “new editions of old errors.”

“If the truth be anywhere to be found,” wrote the young philosopher, “it is here sought so many several ways that one or other must needs light upon it.” But he speaks with respect of that kind of tolerance that tries to see even in impostures “glimpses and manifestations of obscure or formerly concealed truths,” and that would not “aggravate very venial errors into dangerous and damnable heresies.”

“The Parliament is now upon an ordinance for the punishment of many of these supposed errors; but since their belief of their contrary truths is confessedly a work of divine revelation, why a man should be hanged because it has not yet pleased God to give him his Spirit, I confess I am yet to understand....”

After this the letter goes off into domestic and personal matters. Robert Boyle had been in company with the Archbishop of Armagh—“our Irish St. Austin”—and had been telling him of Marcombes’s French translation of a sermon of the Archbishop’s, “The Mystery of the Incarnation.” “He seemed very willing that you should publish it, upon the assurance I gave him of the fidelity of its translation.” Lady Ranelagh and Broghill were anxious to find Marcombes some more pupils; but all the great families of England were at present “standing at a gaze.” Whether peace or war be the outcome of events, “it is probable that a good many of them will make visits to foreign climates.”

Robyn himself had seen a variety of fortune since he and his governour had parted: “plenty and want, danger and safety, sickness and health, trouble and ease.” He had actually once been a prisoner in London, “on some groundless suspicion,” but had quickly got off with advantage. At Stalbridge he was pursuing his studies by fits and starts. “Divers little essays, both in prose and verse, I have taken the pains to scribble upon several subjects”; and as soon as he can “lick them into some less imperfect shape” he will send some of the “least bad” to Marcombes in Geneva. He tells Marcombes about his study of ethics, and his desire to “call them down from the brain into the breast, and from the school to the house”; and he mentions his little treatise that goes on so slowly.

“The other humane studies I apply myself to are natural philosophy, the mechanics, and husbandry, according to the principles of our new philosophical college, that values no knowledge but as it hath a tendency to use.” And he begs Marcombes to inquire for him into the “ways of husbandry” practised about Geneva; “and when you intend for England, to bring along with you what good receipts or good books of any of those subjects you can procure, which will make you extremely welcome to our invisible college.”

The “Invisible College,” the embryo of the Royal Society of London, was then already in existence. Since some time in 1645, a little club composed of a few “worthy persons inquisitive into natural philosophy” had been holding its weekly meetings; sometimes in the lodging of the physician, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, in Wood Street, Cheapside; sometimes at a “convenient place” in Cheapside itself,—in fact, the Bull’s Head Tavern; and sometimes in Gresham College, near by. Its originator was Theodore Haak, who, like Hartlib, was a naturalised German; and among its first members were Dr. John Wallis, clerk to the Westminster Assembly; Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell; Foster, the professor of astronomy at Gresham College; the young William Petty; Dr. Goddard himself; and one or two other “doctors in physic” more or less well known in London. They had their telescopes and microscopes and their attendant apothecaries, etc.; and, “precluding theology and state-affairs,” they wandered at will among the sciences,—the physics and chemics, and mechanics and magnetics,—“as then cultivated at home and abroad.” Hartlib was from the very first connected with this club: “The Invisible College of his imagination seems to have been that enlarged future association of all earnest spirits for the prosecution of real and fruitful knowledge of which this club might be the symbol and promise.”

His early letters to Robert Boyle at Stalbridge are full of the subjects under discussion. And there is no doubt that it was to a great extent the fascination of these weekly meetings in Wood Street, and the company he met there, that drew Robert Boyle so often to London and kept him in London as long as he could manage to stay there.

“I have been every day these two months,” he wrote to his friend Francis Tallents, in February 1647, “upon visiting my own ruined cottage in the country; but it is such a labyrinth, this London, that all my diligence could never yet find a way out on’t ... the best on’t is, that the corner-stones of the invisible, or as they term themselves, the philosophical college, do now and then honour me with their company ... men of so capacious and searching spirits, that school-philosophy is but the lowest region of their knowledge; and yet, though ambitious to lead the way to any generous design, of so humble and tractable a genius, as they disdain not to be directed to the meanest, so he can but plead reason for his opinion; persons that endeavour to put narrow-mindedness out of countenance by the practice of so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than a universal goodwill can content it. And indeed they are so apprehensive of the want of good employment, that they take the whole body of mankind for their care.”

And he concludes his panegyric with the recital of their chiefest fault, “which is very incident to almost all good things; and that is, that there is not enough of them.”

The London outside this pleasant coterie was not so congenial to Robert Boyle. Above all, the sects and sectaries were his abomination. They were coming over from Amsterdam like so many bills of exchange; they were like “diurnals,” eagerly read, and then in a day or two torn up as not worth keeping. They were “mushrooms of last night’s coming up.” “If any man have lost his religion,” he wrote, “let him repair to London, and I’ll warrant him he shall find it: I had almost said too, and if any man has a religion, let him but come hither now, and he shall go near to lose it.... For my part, I shall always pray God to give us the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace....”

One immediate outcome of these club meetings in Wood Street was a little scheme, evidently aided and abetted by Lady Ranelagh, which filled all Robyn’s thoughts on his return to Stalbridge in the spring of 1647. He was going to set up a laboratory of his own, in the empty manor-house. It was a scheme not easy to carry out in those days; and his first efforts were to result in dire failure. “That great earthen furnace,” he wrote to Lady Ranelagh, “whose conveying hither has taken up so much of my care, and concerning which I made bold very lately to trouble you, since I last did so, has been brought to my hands crumbled into as many pieces as we into sects; and all the fine experiments and castles in the air I had built upon its safe arrival have felt the fate of its foundation. Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the philosopher’s stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts at chemistry. My limbecks, recipients, and other glasses have escaped indeed the misfortune of their incendiary, but are now, through the miscarriage of that grand implement of Vulcan, as useless to me as good parts to salvation without the fire of zeal. Seriously, Madam, after all the pains I have taken, and the precautions I have used, to prevent this furnace the disasters of its predecessors, to have it transported a thousand miles by land that I may after all this receive it broken, is a defeat that nothing could recompense, but that rare lesson it teaches me, how brittle that happiness is that we build upon earth.”

These words breathe the first hint of a melancholy in Robert Boyle’s life, the causes of which—though he did his best to conceal and conquer them—are not far to seek.

As early as 1646, when he was not yet twenty, there comes into his letters the note of physical suffering. Like many scholars and thinkers, Robert Boyle was very sensitive about physical pain, and the chances of infection and disease. As a boy at Eton, it will be remembered, the “potion” held more than ordinary terrors for the spiritay Robyn. Perhaps he had heard about little Hodge, who had died at Deptford, after so dutifully swallowing the powder of unicorns’ horns. But even if not, he must have seen the same thing happening all about him; he must have known well enough that medical treatment in his day was steeped in the optimism of blackest ignorance. The plasters and powders and potions and purges with which the Faculty “wrought” so boldly on every disease, and the weird and melodramatic endings which were their usual results, had given Robyn “a perfect aversion to all physick.” He believed that, in most cases, it “did but exasperate the disease.” Had not he seen “life itself almost disgorged together with a potion”? It was his own childish experiences that inclined this experimentalist, all his life, to “apprehend more from the physician than the disease,” and set him to apply himself to the study of physic “that he might have the less need of them that profess it.” And so, though he was to count among his friends of the Philosophical College and elsewhere the most learned and eminent physicians of his time, and as he grew older came to trusting very humbly and gratefully to the skill of more than one of them, Robert Boyle’s tendency, all through life, was to simplify medical treatment, and as far as possible to doctor himself with the aid of an intelligent and obedient “apothecary.”

If he had known that he was to live till he was sixty-five, and that the five-and-forty years that lay before him were to be years of more or less invalidism and suffering! But the long future was veiled; at twenty, the months in front of him were all-important. And he must have known as early as 1646 that his attacks of pain and “ague fits” were caused by the existence of renal calculus—the “gravel of the kidneys” of his day. He knew of it when he wrote the letter to Hartlib (a fellow sufferer) in which he gratefully thanks good Mrs. Hartlib for a “receipt” or “sanative remedy,” which she had sent him in one of her husband’s letters, against a disease that Robyn calls “so cruel in its tortures and so fatal in its catastrophe.”

Stalbridge, with this fact realised, was no longer the home of glad possibilities it may at first have promised to be; which the old Earl, in leaving it to his Benjamin, had certainly intended it to be. But Robert Boyle was making the best of it. “As for me,” he wrote to Hartlib—“during my confinement to this melancholy solitude, I often divert myself at leisure moments in trying such experiments as the unfurnishedness of the place and the present distractedness of my mind will permit me.” Friends and neighbours came about him; these were certain “young knights” and young Churchmen and “travellers out of France,” who appear under fancy names in his Reflections: Eusebius, “a Dr. of Divinity,” Eugenius and Genorio, “Travellers and fine Gentlemen,” and Lindamor, “a learned youth, both well born and well bred.” If they were not actually his guests at Stalbridge, Robyn “took pleasure to imagine” them to “be present with me at the occasion”; and poetic licence has suggested that Lindamor may have been Robyn himself, in some of his moods, though he still figures in some of them as Philaretus and speaks in others of them of “Mr. Boyle”—even while he is using also the first personal pronoun. The Earl of Bristol’s family at Sherborne Castle were pleasant neighbours, and the family of Sir Thomas Mallet, at Poynington—Sir Thomas and his Lady, and Mr. John Mallet their son, and the young lady whom John Mallet was to marry—“the fair young lady you are happy in,” as Robert Boyle called her.

Robyn’s own family—scattered and busy as they were—came to see him sometimes. He says himself that his sister, Lady Ranelagh, was “almost always with him during his sickness”; and his brother Frank seems to have been a welcome and cheerful guest at Stalbridge; while Robyn himself rode over now and then to Marston Bigot, when “dear Broghill” and Lady Pegg were there. But his laboratory and his “standish” and books, and especially his correspondence with Hartlib in London, were a great resource. It was at this time that he was writing the little essays he spoke of to Marcombes. Among them was his Free Discourse against Customary Swearing, which in manuscript pleased his relations, and was dedicated to his sister Kildare. And it was then also that he was writing his Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects, which so delighted Lady Ranelagh. They afford many glimpses into Robert Boyle’s life during the years spent at Stalbridge. He is to be seen in them as the young Squire of gentle, studious tastes and simple habits, sitting, book in hand, over the slow-burning wood fire in the parlour with the carved stone chimney-piece “fair and graceful in all respects”; or riding his horse along the up-and-down-hill Dorset lanes; angling by the side of a stream, or walking in his own meadows, with his spaniel at his heels: philosophising as he goes; observing all things always; dreaming, perhaps, a little too—within bounds. The very titles of his Reflections are an epitome of the life of those Stalbridge days. The spaniel is a constant companion, in weal and woe:—

Upon my Spaniel’s carefulness not to lose me in a Strange place, and Upon his manner of giving Meat to his Dogg, are two of these Reflections.

There is nothing very original in Robert Boyle’s method of feeding a dog, except that it carries with it his inevitable moral conclusions; but the youthful essay hands down the picture of master and dog to posterity:—

“For but observe this Dogg. I hold him out meat, and my inviting Voice loudly encourages and invites him to take it. ’Tis held indeed higher than he can leap, and yet, if he leap not at it, I do not give it him; but if he do, I let it fall half-way into his mouth.”

Spaniels have fetched their masters’ gloves from time immemorial; but none quite so graphically as Robert Boyle’s:—

“How importunate is he to be imployed about bringing me this glove! And with what Clamours and how many fawnings does he court me to fling it him! I never saw him so eager for a piece of Meat as I find him for a Glove. And yet he knows it is no Food for him, nor is it Hunger that creates his Longings for it; for now I have cast it him, he does nothing else with it but (with a kind of Pride to be sent for it, and a satisfaction which his glad gestures make appear so great, that the very use of Speech would not enable him to express it better) brings it me back again....”

In the mere names of these Reflections may be traced the manner in which he spent his days: Upon distilling the Spirit of Roses in a Limbick: Upon two very miserable Beggars begging together by the Highway: Upon the Sight of a Windmill standing still: Upon his Coaches being stopt in a narrow Lane: Upon the Sight of a fair Milkmaid Singing to her Cow: Upon Talking to an Echo: Upon a Child that Cri’d for the Stars;—in which last are quoted Waller’s lines—

“Thus in a starry night fond children cry For the rich spangles which adorn the sky.”

One of the Reflections, Upon the Eating of Oysters, possesses a secondary interest: it is supposed to have suggested to Swift his Gulliver’s Travels. Like others of the Reflections, it is written in the form of conversation between Eugenius and Lindamor.

“EUG.—You put me in mind of a fancy of your Friend Mr. Boyle, who was saying, that he had thoughts of making a short Romantick story, where the Scene should be laid in some Island of the Southern Ocean, govern’d by some such rational Laws and Customs as those of Utopia or the New Atlantis, and in the Country he would introduce an Observing Native, that upon his return home from his Travels made in Europe should give an account of our Countries and manners under feign’d Names, and frequently intimate in his Relations (or in his Answers to Questions that should be made him) the reasons of his wondring to find our Customs so extravagant, and differing from those of his Country....”

The Reflections show Robert Boyle as he lived and thought and felt; as he rose early on a “fair morning,” and looked up at the “variously coloured clouds,” and listened to the lark’s song overhead; as he picked up a horse-shoe, watched boys at their games, or tried a prismatical or triangular glass; as he fished with a “counterfeit fly” along the river-banks, or let the fish run away with the more homely bait; as he looked at his own shadow cast in the face of a pool, or his own face in a looking-glass with a rich frame. What an opportunity was the magnetical needle of a sundial, or the use of a burning-glass, or the drinking of water out of the brims of one’s own hat! What food for reflection was a syrup made of violets, or a glow-worm included in a crystal viol! What thoughts fluttered about the tail of a paper kite flown on a windy day, or about a lanthorn and candle carried by on a dark and windy night! And Robert Boyle did once shoot something, as may be seen from the title of one particular Reflection:

“Killing a Crow (out of a window) in a Hog’s trough, and immediately tracing the ensuing Reflection with a Pen made of one of his Quills....”

Very early in his life there was, alas! the least touch of the valetudinary about the “deare Squire.” It was not all fair mornings and larks and roses. One section of his little book of essays is devoted to “the accidents of an ague,” and deals with the invasion, the hot and cold fits, the letting of blood, the taking of physick, the syrups and other sweet things sent by the doctor, the want of sleep, the telling of the strokes of an ill-going clock in the night, the thief in the candle, the danger of death, the fear of relapse; and at the end, when Robyn is his own man again—the “reviewing and tacking together the several bills filed up in the Apothecary’s Shop.”

In the summer of 1647, Robert Boyle had been ill; but in the autumn he paid some visits among his relations, and early in 1648 he went to Holland, “partly to visit the country,” and partly to help his brother Frank conduct his brilliant wife home from The Hague—a mission that must have required all Frank’s sweetness of spirit and all Robyn’s philosophy. In the summer of 1648, Robert Boyle was again in London;—this time, Lady Ranelagh had taken rooms for him in St. James’s.