ROBERT BOYLE

THE HONOURABLE ROBERT BOYLE

From a painting by Kerseboom, in the rooms of the Royal Society.

ROBERT BOYLE

A BIOGRAPHY

BY
FLORA MASSON

LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1914

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For permission to quote from the Lismore Papers (as edited by Grosart, 10 vols.), I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Duke of Devonshire. I have also to thank Lady Verney for allowing me to quote from the Verney Memoirs, and Sir William Ramsay for permission to quote from his Presidential Address delivered to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Portsmouth 1911. To the kindness of Sir Archibald Geikie I owe the permission to reproduce the portrait of Robert Boyle in possession of the Royal Society of London.

I remember with special gratitude the kind counsel given me, in the last months of his life, by the late Professor Edward Dowden.

My thanks are due, for advice and help, to Miss Elizabeth Dowden, Mr. Richard Bagwell, Mr. Irvine Masson, Mrs. Millar, Mrs. Townshend, and Mr. James Penrose.

I gratefully acknowledge the unfailing courtesy and helpfulness of the Librarians of the Edinburgh Public Library, the Signet Library, the University Library, and the Library of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Flora Masson.

Edinburgh, March 1914.

CONTENTS

ROBERT BOYLE

CHAPTER I
HIS BIRTH AND FAMILY

“... Not needlessly to confound the herald with the historian, and begin a relation with a pedigree....”—Robert Boyle’s Philaretus.

“My wife, God ever be praised, was about 3 of the clock in thafternoon of this day, the sign in gemini, libra, Safely delivered of her seaventh son at Lismoor: God bless him, for his name is Robert Boyle.”[1]

So runs the entry, under the date January 25, 1626 (7), in the private diary of the great Earl of Cork, a manuscript preserved at Lismore to this day. When he wrote those words, the Earl was already a man of sixty, who, after forty strenuous years, was nearing the zenith of his great fortunes. The Countess—his second wife—was twenty years younger: she had been just seventeen when he married her, and he a widower of thirty-seven. They had been married three-and-twenty years, and in those three-and-twenty years, at one or other of their roughly splendid Irish homes, seven daughters and seven sons had been born to them.

Their earliest home had been the College house of Youghal, “re-edified” to suit the Earl’s requirements; but in these later years they were used to divide their time travelling in state, with coaches and horses and a mounted retinue, between Youghal and the town house in Dublin and this other house of Lismore, already “one of the noblest seats in the province of Munster.”[2] And the Earl was still busy “re-edifying” this also,—building stables and coach-houses, pigeon-houses and slaughter-houses, storing the fishponds in his park with young carp and tench from Amsterdam, and “compassing” his orchards and terraced gardens with a huge turreted wall,—when this fourteenth child, the “Robyn” that was to prove the greatest of all his children, was born at Lismore.

The story of how Mr. Richard Boyle became the great Earl of Cork is one of the most brilliant romances of the British Peerage. It has been often told, nowhere more graphically than by the Earl himself, in his brief True Remembrances.[3] So triumphant and so circumstantial, indeed, are the Earl’s “Remembrances,” that many generations of ordinary-minded people have made the mistake of thinking they cannot possibly be true. Only of recent years, since, in fact, the Earl’s own letters and the Earl’s own private diary, kept to within a few days of his death, have been given to the world under the title of the Lismore Papers, has the cloud of incredulity rolled aside; and the character of this man stands out to-day in its integrity, to use his own words, “as cleer as the son at high noon.”[4]

It is the character of a great Englishman, one of Elizabeth’s soldier-statesmen and merchant-adventurers: a man typically Elizabethan in his virtues and his faults, though he was to live far into the unhappy reign of Charles I. Passionately Protestant, passionately Royalist, a fine blend of the astute and the ingenuous, with strong family affections, splendid ambitions and schemes of statecraft, he was relentless in his prejudices and enmities, indomitably self-sufficient, and with as much vitality in his little finger as may be found in a whole parliamentary Bench to-day. He raised himself from “very inconsiderable beginnings” to be one of the greatest subjects of the realm, one of the greatest Englishmen of his day.

He had been born at Canterbury, the second son of the second son of a country squire—one of the Boyles of Herefordshire. His father had migrated into Kent, married a daughter of Robert Naylor of Canterbury, and settled at Preston, near Faversham. Here, when Richard was ten years old, his father died, leaving his widow to bring up her family of two daughters and three sons on a modest income as best she could. Mrs. Boyle had managed very well. The eldest son, John, and Richard, the second, were sent to the King’s School, Canterbury, and from there (Richard with a scholarship) to Bennet College, Cambridge.[5] John Boyle duly took Orders, while Richard, the cleverer younger brother, went up to London to study law. At one-and-twenty he seems to have been settled in chambers in the Middle Temple, clerk to Sir Richard Manwood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. At his mother’s death (Roger Boyle and Joan Naylor his wife were buried in Preston Parish Church), Richard Boyle decided that he would never “raise a fortune” in the Middle Temple, and must “travel into foreign kingdoms,” and “gain learning, knowledge, and experience abroad in the world.” And the foreign kingdom toward which he turned his strenuous young face was Ireland: Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth, in the year of the Armada. It was five-and-twenty years since the Irish chieftain Shan O’Neil had presented himself at Elizabeth’s Court, to be gazed at by peers and ambassadors and bishops as if he were “some wild animal of the desert.”[6] Shan O’Neil had stalked into the Queen’s presence, “his saffron mantle sweeping round and round him, his hair curling on his back and clipped short below the eyes, which gleamed under it with a grey lustre, burning fierce and cruel.”[7] And behind him were his bare-headed, fair-haired Galloglasse, clad in their shirts of mail and wolfskins, with their short, broad battle-axes in their hands. The chieftain had flung himself upon his face before the Queen with protestations of loyalty and fair intention; and all those five-and-twenty years the attitude of Ireland had been one of submission and protestation, flanked and backed by wolfskins, shirts of mail and battle-axes. The Desmond Rebellion had been quelled amid horrors. It was still a “savadge nation”[8] this, to which Mr. Richard Boyle was setting forth: an Ireland of primeval forests and papal churchlands, of vivid pastures and peel towers and untamed Erse-speaking tribes. With its ores and timber, its grasslands and salmon-fishing, its fine ports, and, above all, its proximity to Elizabethan England, it was a land teeming with industrial possibilities; but it bristled and whispered with race-hatred and creed-hatred, with persecution and conspiracy. This was the Ireland that was being eagerly peopled and exploited and parcelled out by Elizabethan Englishmen.

And so, on Midsummer Eve 1588, another clever young man arrived in Dublin. He had twenty-seven pounds and three shillings[9] in his possession, and on his wrist and finger he wore the two “tokens” left him by his dead Kentish mother—the gold bracelet on his wrist, worth about £10, and the diamond ring on his finger, the “happy, lucky and fortunate stone” that was to stay there till his death, and be left an heirloom to his son’s son and successive generations of the great Boyle family.

The Earl never forgot the accoutrements and the various suits of clothes with which he started in life when, at two-and-twenty, he shut the door of his chambers in the Middle Temple behind him: “A taffety doublet cut with and upon taffety; a pair of black velvet breeches laced, a new Milan fustian suit, laced and cut upon taffety, two cloaks, competent linen and necessaries, with my rapier and dagger.” And he must have carried letters of introduction also, which procured the young lawyer employment and influential friends; for Mr. Richard Boyle was very soon launched on Dublin society, and was on friendly terms with at least two men who hailed from his own county of Kent, Sir Edward Moore, of Mellifont, in Meath, and Sir Anthony St. Leger, who was living in Dublin. It is more than possible that he met also at this time the poet Spenser; for Dublin must have been Spenser’s headquarters since 1580, when he came over to Ireland as Secretary to the Lord Deputy. Spenser, who it is believed had been through all the horrors of the Desmond Rebellion, was, in 1588, after having held various appointments, leaving Dublin to take up his bachelor abode at Kilcolman, a peel tower abandoned by the Desmonds and assigned, with some thousands of acres around it, to this English poet-politician, already known as the author of the Shepheard’s Calendar. At Kilcolman, in this peel tower in a wild wooded glen among the Galtee Hills, about thirty miles south of Limerick, Sir Walter Raleigh came to stay with Spenser when he too was in Ireland, inspecting the vast Irish estates that had been assigned to him. It was there they read their poems aloud to each other, and that Raleigh persuaded Spenser to go back with him to London, together to offer their poems to the Queen. During the first year or two, therefore, of Boyle’s sojourn in Ireland, while he was working his way into the notice of Englishmen of influence there, Spenser was in London, being lionised as the Poet of Poets, the author of the first three books of the Faerie Queene.

When Spenser returned to Ireland with a royal pension as Clerk to the Council of the Province of Munster, Richard Boyle was already clerk, or deputy, to the “Escheator General,” busy adjusting the claims of the Crown to “escheated” Irish lands and titles—travelling about, and making enemies of all people who did not get exactly what they wanted out of the Escheator or the Escheator’s clerk. Both Boyle’s sisters had joined him in Ireland, and both were soon to marry husbands there; and somewhere about this time his cousin, Elizabeth Boyle, daughter of James Boyle, of the Greyfriars in Hereford, was in Ireland, and the poet Spenser, back from his London visit, the literary hero of the hour, met and fell in love with Boyle’s cousin Elizabeth. She is the lady of the Amoretti and Epithalamium; “my beautifullest bride,” with the “sunshyny face,” and the “long, loose, yellow locks lyke golden wyre,” whose name the poet-lover was to trace in the yellow Irish sands, and of whom he sang so proudly—

“Tell me, ye merchants’ daughters, did you see

So fayre a creature in your town before, ...?”

They were married in the Cathedral of Cork in the summer of 1594. A few months later, Spenser turned his face Londonwards again, taking with him presumably his English wife, and certainly the other three books of his Faerie Queene. He was to return to Ireland once again.

In 1595, a year after Spenser’s marriage to Elizabeth Boyle, Mr. Richard Boyle married a young Limerick lady, Joan Apsley, one of the two daughters and co-heirs of Mr. William Apsley, a member of the Council of Munster. Joan Apsley’s five hundred a year in Irish lands, “so goodly and commodious a soyle,”[10] was to be the foundation of Mr. Boyle’s fortunes. She left it all to him when she died, at Mallow, “in travail with her first child,” and was buried in Buttevant Church with her little stillborn son in her arms.

After his wife’s death, Richard Boyle, now a landowner and a man of some importance in Munster, had his time full fighting his personal enemies. There were powerful men among them, and by his own account they “all joined together, by their lies, complaining against me to Queen Elizabeth.” It was impossible, they said, he could have advanced so rapidly by honest means. They accordingly accused him of embezzlement and forgery, and, because some of his wife’s relations were well-known Catholics, they accused him—staunch Protestant as he was—of acquiring lands with Spanish gold, of harbouring priests, and being himself a papist in disguise. They even accused him of stealing a horse. For a time he was actually kept in a Dublin prison, and when by a kind of fluke he found the prison doors opened to him, and was intending to “take shipping,” and to “justify” himself before the Queen in London, the General Rebellion of Munster broke out. In the debacle, Mr. Richard Boyle—his wife’s lands wasted and his moneys gone—did manage to escape to England. And so did the poet Spenser—Spenser, marked of the rebels, the author not only of the Faerie Queene, but of the View of the Present State of Ireland. Why did Spenser ever return to Ireland to undertake the duties of Sheriff of Cork? Spenser and his wife and children were at Kilcolman when the Rebellion broke out. They fled for their lives; and the old peel tower of the Desmonds was burnt to the ground. One of their babies, Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden, was left behind, and perished in the flames.

Spenser was to die in poverty in London, to be buried near to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, the poet-mourners flinging their pens into his grave. Spenser’s wife—Mr. Richard Boyle’s cousin—was to live on in Ireland, to bring up her children (her son Peregrine was the “Joy of her Life”) and to marry yet twice again. Twice her great kinsman saw his cousin’s hand “given in marriage.” She had her compensations in life—but there never was another Epithalamium.

Arrived in London, Mr. Richard Boyle, through the friendly offices of Anthony Bacon, whom he had known at Cambridge, was presented to the new Lord Deputy, the Earl of Essex, then just starting for Ireland. Queen Elizabeth may have had her reasons for clapping Mr. Boyle so unceremoniously into the gate-house of the Tower just as he was thinking of going back to his old Chambers in the Middle Temple. It is possible she was waiting for her new Deputy’s reports from Ireland. In due time Richard Boyle was fetched before her, and he did “justify” himself to his Sovereign. Her splendid royal words were burnt in upon his memory to the last day of his life:[11]—

“By God’s death, these are but inventions against this young man.” And again: “We find him to be a man fit to be employed by ourselves.”

Boyle was received at Court, and when he was sent back to Ireland it was as Clerk to the Council of Munster, the very post that Spenser had held. He bought Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship, the Pilgrim, freighted her with victuals and ammunition, sailed in her, “by long seas” to Carrickfoyle, and took up his new work under the splendid Presidentship of Sir George Carew. His wife’s lands were recovered: “Richard Boyle of Galbaly in the County of Limerick, Gent.,” waited on Carew through all the siege of Kinsale, and was employed by him to carry the news of victory to the Queen in London. There he was the guest of Sir Robert Cecil, “then principal secretary,” in his house in the Strand, and was taken by Cecil next morning to Court, and into the bedchamber of her Majesty, “who remembered me, calling me by name, and giving me her hand to kiss.”[12]

Quickly back in Ireland, Richard Boyle became the Lord President’s right hand in all his strenuous services to the Crown: in later years one of the few literary treasures in the great Earl’s “studdie” was the copy of Carew’s Hibernia Pacata given him by his Chief. It was Carew who sent him in 1602 to London, furnished with letters to Cecil and to Sir Walter Raleigh, recommending him as a fit purchaser of the Raleigh Estates in Ireland. The thousands of acres in the counties of Cork and Waterford known as the “Raleigh-Desmond Estates” were then and there, in London, bought from Sir Walter Raleigh “at a very low rate.” In Richard Boyle’s hands, the waste lands that to Raleigh had been a source of anxiety and money loss were to become the best “settled” and most prosperous territory in Ireland, and a source of wealth and power to him who made them so. For Richard Boyle was not only a great landowner, he was a shrewd man of business, a capitalist and a large employer of labour. It was, says Grosart, “his perseverance and governing faculty and concentrated energy that transformed bleak mountain and creation-old fallow moor and quaking bog into hives of population and industry.”[13]

Sir George Carew went a step further. He “dealt very nobly and fatherlike” with Mr. Boyle in recommending him to marry again. And the lady whom Carew had in view for his protégé was Katharine Fenton, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Sir Geoffrey Fenton, the wise and enlightened Secretary of State. There is a pretty tradition handed down in the Boyle family—the Earl’s own daughter used to tell it—that Mr. Boyle first met his second wife when he was a very young man newly arrived in Dublin. Calling one day on business at Sir Geoffrey Fenton’s house, and waiting in an ante-room till the great man should be disengaged, Mr. Boyle had “entertained himself” with a pretty child in her nurse’s arms; and when Sir Geoffrey at last appeared and apologised for having kept his visitor waiting, the young man “pleasantly told him he had been courting a young lady for his wife.” This must have been in 1588. The marriage took place fifteen years later, and a great deal had happened in the interval. Joan Apsley and her baby were buried in Buttevant Church, and “Richard Boyle of Galbaly in the County of Limerick, Gent.” had purchased the vast Raleigh Estates. In July 1603 he was a wealthy widower of thirty-seven, and Katharine Fenton was seventeen.

“I never demanded any marriage portion with her, neither promise of any, it not being in my consideration; yet her father, after my marriage, gave me one thousand pounds[14] in gold with her. But this gift of his daughter to me I must ever thankfully acknowledge as the crown of all my blessings; for she was a most religious, virtuous, loving, and obedient wife to me all the days of her life, and the mother of all my hopeful children.”[15]

Elizabeth was dead, and James I reigned in her stead. Sir George Carew—the new Lord Deputy—had conferred a knighthood on Mr. Boyle on his wedding day. Two years later he was made Privy Councillor for the Province of Munster, and thenceforward there was to be no stop nor hitch in the upbuilding of his great fortunes. In 1612, after another visit to London and an audience of King James, he found himself Privy Councillor of State for the Kingdom of Ireland. He was created Lord Boyle, Baron of Youghal, in 1616, and Viscount of Dungarvan and Earl of Cork in 1620. His home life had run parallel with his public services. “My Howses,” “My deare Wife,” “the Children,” “my Famullye,” fill an important place in the Earl’s life and diary and letters; while the wife’s few little epistolary efforts to her husband have only one beginning: he was to her always “My owne goode Selfe.”

Robert Boyle speaks of his mother’s “free and noble spirit”—which, he adds, “had a handsome mansion to reside in”—and of her “kindness and sweet carriage to her own.”[16] The hopeful children came quickly. Roger, the first, born at Youghal in 1606, was sent at seven years old to England, at first to his uncle John, then Dr. John Boyle, a prebendary of Lichfield, and a year later to his mother’s relatives, the Brownes, of Sayes Court, Deptford. There was an excellent day-school at Deptford, to which Roger Boyle was sent; and a rather pathetic little figure he must have cut, going to and from school, with “shining morning face” in his baize gown trimmed with fur.[17] On high days and holidays he wore an ash-coloured satin doublet and cloak, trimmed with squirrel fur, and a ruff round his little neck; and his baby sword was scarfed in green. Mrs. Townshend, in her Life of the Great Earl, points out that the child wore out five pairs of shoes in a year, and that his book of French verbs cost sixpence. He was to die at Deptford, after a very short illness, when he was only nine years old. The Brownes were terribly distressed, and did everything they could. Mrs. Browne moved him into her own chamber, and nursed him in motherly fashion. His Uncle John was sent for, and sat by the little fellow’s bed till he died. The physician and apothecary came from London by boat and administered a “cordial powder of unicornes’ horns,” and other weird “phisicks.” “Little Hodge” was very patient, and said his prayers of his own accord; and after he was dead Mrs. Browne found that in his little purse, which he called his “stock” (he must have been very like his father in some ways), there was still more than forty shillings unspent. All these details, and many more, were sent in letters to the parents at Youghal, and to the grandparents, Sir Geoffrey and Lady Fenton, in Dublin, after “my jewel Hodge,” as the grandfather used to call him, was buried in Deptford Parish Church.

There were by this time four daughters, born in succession: Alice, Sarah, Lettice, and Joan; a second son, Richard, born at Youghal in 1612; and a fifth daughter, Katharine, who was a baby in arms when “little Hodge” died. A few months after his death came Geoffrey; and then Dorothy in 1617, and Lewis two years later. Another boy was born in 1621 and christened Roger; Francis and Mary followed in 1623 and 1624; and then came the fourteenth child, “my seaventh son”, and the Earl made that memorable entry in his diary at Lismore: “God bless him, for his name is Robert Boyle.”

CHAPTER II
AN IRISH CHILDHOOD

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

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

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

Lettice, the third daughter, had been intended for Lady Castlehaven’s son, but the young man’s religious views were “not conformable”; and she and her sister Joan were accordingly kept at home, with a London season in view. “Dick,” the now eldest son and heir, already “my Lord Dungarvan,” was at home, being mildly tutored by the Earl’s chaplain, and living in a boy’s paradise of saddle-horses and “faier goshawks,” with an “eyrie of falcons” and occasional “fatt bucks” and “junkettings”; but little Katharine, who came next, had been sent away into England to Lady Beaumont—at Coleorton in Leicestershire—mother of Sapcott Beaumont, the little girl’s prospective husband. Geoffrey, who would have been ten years old when Robert was born, had died as a baby. Tradition says he tumbled into a well in the Earl’s Walk in Youghal; but the Earl’s diary, in mentioning the death, makes no reference to the well. Dorothy, now nine years old, was already destined for Arthur Loftus, Sir Adam Loftus’s son; and in the autumn before Robert’s birth she had been fetched away to be brought up in the Loftus family at Rathfarnham. Francis and Mary were quite young children in the nursery; and now Robert, the fourteenth baby, as soon as he “was able without danger to support the incommodities of a remove,” was to be carried away from Lismore in the arms of his “Country Nurse.”[18] The Earl, so Robert Boyle says, had a “perfect aversion to the habit of bringing up children so nice and tenderly that a hot sun or a good shower of rain as much endangers them as if they were made of butter or of sugar.” Lady Cork’s opinions do not seem to have been asked; perhaps, in those three-and-twenty years, she had taught herself to think, if not to feel, in unison with her “owne goode selfe.” And so Robert Boyle, like his brothers and sisters, was to be reared during those first months of his life by a foster-mother, and owing to the movements of his family at this time was to be left with her longer than he would perhaps otherwise have been. He was to be rocked in an Irish cradle, or rather nursed, Irish fashion, in a “pendulous satchell” instead of a cradle, with a slit for the baby’s head to look out of.[19] By slow degrees, this boy, born amid all the pomp and seventeenth-century splendour of his father’s mansions, was to be inured to “a coarse but cleanly diet,” and to what he afterwards so characteristically described as “the passions of the air.” They gave him, he says, “so vigorous a complexion” that ‘hardships’ were made easy to him by ‘custom,’ while the delights and conveniences of ease were endeared to him by their ‘rarity.’

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

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

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

That London season of 1628, when Charles I was the young King of England! What a busy, self-important, gratifying time it was, and what an amount of feeing and tipping and social engineering was requisite to carry it through! The Earl was received by the Duke of Buckingham and presented to the King. He engaged a steward for his household, and rented my Lord Grandison’s house in Channell Row, Westminster.[20] In June Lady Cork and her daughters were presented to the Queen, who kissed them all most graciously. Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, a very well-known man among the aristocracy as “the jerkin-maker of St. Martin’s”, was sent for to receive his orders. The Earl must have had his mind fully occupied and his purse-strings loose; for there were at least two troublesome lawsuits going on at this time about his Irish estates and industries, and he was employing the great Glanville as his legal adviser. But nothing seems to have interfered with the somewhat stodgy gaieties of that London season of 1628. And in preparation there were purchases of upholstery and table-linen in Cheapside; of “wares” for the ladies of the family, in Lombard Street; velvet, cloth of gold, and what-not. How different all this from the old-young life in the shabby chambers in the Middle Temple, or the weeks spent in the Gate-house, waiting to be called before Queen Elizabeth! But the great self-made man had not forgotten the old days. He had always given a helping hand to his own kith and kin: Ireland was sprinkled with his “cozens.” His brother John, the poor parson of Lichfield, had the good fortune to at least die Bishop of Cork. And now, on this visit to London, the Earl had no intention of neglecting his “cozen,” the lawyer Naylor of Gray’s Inn, or his “cozen” the vintner Croone of the King’s Head Tavern in Fleet Street.[21]

The Earl of Bedford had offered his house of Northall for the autumn; and visits were paid in state, with coaches and horses, to the Bedford family and to the Earl’s old Chief, Carew. Carew, now Earl of Totness, lived at Nonsuch, near Epsom, the wonderful house of Henry VIII’s reign, set in its park of elms and walnuts, with its gilded and timbered outside, ornamented with figures of stucco, and paintings by Rubens and Holbein.[22] Little wonder, in the circumstances, that the Earl of Cork’s coachmen and footmen all demanded new liveries.

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

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

As the year drew to a close, the Earl’s moneys from his furnaces, forges, ironworks, “tobackoe farms” and what-not, were added to the great iron chest at Lismore; and Christmas and New Year gifts were showered among his English friends. A manuscript Bible was sent to Dr. Weston for Christchurch Library; “cane-apples” (variously described as the Arbutus and the Espalier apples) and pickled scallops from Ireland, to other friends; “a rare lyttle book” to the Earl of Arundel, and usquebaugh to the Earl of Suffolk. Sir Edmund Verney’s new butler from Ireland came in for the Earl’s own scarlet doublet with hose and cloak, while the Archbishop of Canterbury[23] accepted a “ronlett of usquebaugh” and a piece of black frieze for a cassock.

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

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

Before the Earl left Ireland, he and the Lord Chancellor[24] had not been on the best of terms. But now, fresh from the civilisation of the Metropolis, and with all the reflected glory of a crossing in the Ninth Whelp, the Earl, by the King’s desire, made up his quarrel with the Chancellor. Both were sworn Lords Justices for the joint government of Ireland in the absence of a Deputy; and both resolved to “join really in the King’s Service”—a resolution which they were, for a little while, to keep. Meantime, Mr. Perkins, “my London Tailor,” had sent over to Dublin an enormous trunk of magnificent wearing-apparel, and a very long bill; and the retiring Lord Deputy[25] delivered up the King’s Sword and government of Ireland to the Lord Chancellor and the Earl.

This was in October 1629. On the 16th of February following, 1630, Lady Cork died at Dublin.[26] It had “pleased my mercifull God for my manifold syns ... to translate out of this mortall world to his gloriows kingdome of heaven the sowle of my deerest deer wife....”

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

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

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

Anxieties and triumphs jostled each other in the Dublin town house. Lady Fenton did not long survive her daughter, and a great cavalcade, headed by the Earl and his sons and sons-in-law, rode to her funeral at Youghal. In November 1631 the Earl was made High Treasurer of Ireland[27]; that winter, in leisure hours, he must have written his True Remembrances, the manuscript of which was finished and “commended to posterity” in June 1632—just after the Earl, the Lord Chancellor, and the young Earl of Kildare, had been given the Freedom of the City of Dublin. Early in that year, Dorothy had married Arthur Loftus and settled down at Rathfarnham, and that same summer Dick, “my Lord Dungarvan,” in company with Mr. Fry his tutor, set off on his foreign travels. Dungarvan’s marriage with the daughter and heiress of Lord Clifford was already on the tapis. Lord and Lady Clifford lived at Skipton, in Yorkshire; Dungarvan was to be received in audience by King Charles, and to take Yorkshire on his way abroad; and “thaffair,” so dear to the Earl’s heart, was very soon to bring him home again. A husband was to be found for Peggie, now that she was three years old; and the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Primate were to have long confabulations with the Earl on this important matter. Kynalmeaky was already proving himself an anxious, brilliant young spendthrift, and was to be sent to sea in the Ninth Whelp to learn “navigacon” and “the mathematiques” from that same Captain who wore the fringed gloves and embroidered night-cap. The sons-in-law were a trial. George Goring was continually borrowing, Kildare perpetually losing at dice and cards. He “battered and abused” with marrow-bones the Earl’s best silver trenchers, and then won £5 from his father-in-law for “discovering” to him the culprit! Lord Barrymore, after living eighteen months with his wife and all his family under the Earl’s roof, went back to Castle Lyons without so much as saying thank-you. As for the household staff, the “servant trouble” existed then as now. That Christmas of 1632 one of the Earl’s scullerymen “did most unfortunately by jesting with his knife run my undercook into the belly whereof he instantly died in my house in Dublin”—a most unpleasant domestic episode; and it happened at the very moment when the splendid black marble tomb in St Patrick’s had been finished and paid for!

But all this was as nothing to the griefs of the next few months; the premature birth of Lady Digby’s baby under the Earl’s roof, the hurried christening before it died, and the death of the young mother,—that little Sarah who, a widow at seventeen, had been married to Lord Digby, the Earl’s most comfortable son-in-law, on the Christmas Day before Robyn was born.[28]

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

The story of Wentworth’s government of Ireland, a government “hardly paralleled in the annals of pro-consulship,”[29] has given material for many books; but through all the chapters there runs the underplot of Wentworth’s personal relations with the Earl of Cork. From the first moment, on that July morning, 1633, when the Earl—the Lord High Treasurer—set out in his coach to meet the Lord Deputy and his suite “walking on foot towards the cytty”—a wall of enmity had stood up between these two great men. There is no more human reading than the private diary record of those uneasy years that followed; and unconsciously, by mere enumeration of daily incidents, the Earl has made his own character and the character of Wentworth stand out as clearly as if they were both alive and facing each other in a Parliament of to-day. There is the character of the strenuous old Elizabethan Protestant, with its angles and its softnesses, the man of sixty-seven, who for five-and-forty years had been the man on the spot. Royalist to the backbone, he had served in Ireland three sovereigns in succession. It was the country of his adoption. To a great extent, he felt he had made it what it was; and now, in yielding up the sword and government to Wentworth, he was proudly satisfied that Ireland was being yielded up in “generall peac and plenty.”

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

So the diary tells its own story: the story of the troublous official life of the Council Chamber and of Wentworth’s Irish Parliaments; the story of Wentworth’s sharp pursuit of the Earl’s titles to his Irish lands; and the story of the private life in the Earl’s Dublin house, with its social duties and family anxieties. Wentworth had married his third wife privately, in England, a year after the death of his second wife, and not long before his departure for Ireland. She had been sent over to Dublin six months before him, to live rather mysteriously in Dublin Castle, under her own unmarried name—as “Mistress Rhodes.” But immediately on Wentworth’s arrival, her identity was revealed: the Lords Justices were duly presented to the Lord Deputy’s lady, and permitted to salute her with a kiss. And the diary records kind visits, and return visits, between the Castle and the Earl of Cork’s Dublin town house; little card-parties at the Castle, when the Chancellor and the Treasurer both lost sums of money to the Lord Deputy; games of “Mawe,”[30] also for money, and private theatricals acted by the Lord Deputy’s gentlemen. The old Earl sat through a tragedy, on one occasion, which he found “tragicall” indeed, because there was no time to have any supper. And then, but six months after Wentworth’s arrival, there came the first hint of the trouble about Lady Cork’s black marble tomb in St Patrick’s.

Mr. Bagwell has pointed out[31] how, to the old Elizabethan, whose “Protestantism was not of the Laudian type,” there was nothing amiss in the fact of a Communion-table standing detached in the middle of the Church. The Earl, in erecting his monument, had indeed improved the Chancel of St. Patrick’s, which had been earthen-floored, and often in wet weather “overflown.” He had raised it, with three stone steps and a pavement of hewn stones, “whereon,” the Earl wrote to Laud, “the communion-table now stands very dry and gracefully.” Laud himself had found it hard to interfere, in the face of general opinion supported by two Archbishops.[32] But Wentworth was obdurate, and the King himself was appealed to. It was considered a scandal that the Cork tomb should remain “sett in the place where the high altar anciently stood.”[33] In the end, the great black marble monument was taken down, stone by stone; and in March 1635 Wentworth was able to write to Laud: “The Earl of Cork’s tomb is now quite removed. How he means to dispose of it I know not; but up it is put in boxes, as if it were marchpanes or banqueting stuffs, going down to the christening of my young master in the country.”

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III
SCHOOLDAYS AT ETON

“Where the Provost at that time was Sir Henry Wotton, a person that was not only a fine gentleman himself, but very well skilled in the art of making others so.”—Robert Boyle’s Philaretus.

In December 1634, after nearly seven years’ absence, the Earl of Cork and his family returned to the House of Lismore. They had not been gathered there, as a family, since the April of 1628, when the Earl and his wife and daughters set out on their journey to London. But Parliament was adjourned, and Dungarvan and his wife were with them, and everything pointed to their spending Christmas in their home of homes: “And there, God willing, wee intend,” wrote the Earl the day before they left Dublin to Lady Clifford at Skipton Castle in Yorkshire—“to keep a merry Christmas among our neighbors, and to eate to the noble family of Skipton in fatt does and Carps, and to drinke your healthe in the best wyne wee can gett....” His new daughter-in-law, he says, “looks, and likes Ireland, very well.” She was every day winning the affection and respect of the “best sort of people”—her husband’s and her father-in-law’s most of all. Incidentally—for he was treading on delicate ground owing to the family connection between Wentworth and the Cliffords—the Earl mentions that he is being “sharply persued” in his Majesty’s Court of the Star Chamber about his titles to the college and lands of Youghal; and he is only sorry that “this attempt” should be made upon him just at the time of his daughter-in-law’s arrival in Ireland.

It is not two hundred miles by rail from Dublin to Lismore; but in those days travelling was slow and difficult; and the Cork cavalcade—the family coach and the gay company of horsemen surrounding it—were four days upon the road. Robert Boyle never forgot that eventful journey.[34] The English daughter-in-law and her attendant lady, and the old Earl and all his five sons, were of the party, the youngest, Robert, not eight years old. Each night they “lay” at hospitable houses on the road, and all went well till, on the fourth day after passing Clonmell, as they were crossing the “Four Miles Water”, their coach was overturned in mid-stream. Robyn remembered every detail of the adventure: how he had been left sitting alone in the coach, “with only a post-boy,” and how one of his father’s gentlemen, “very well horsed,” recognising the danger, rode alongside and insisted on carrying the little fellow—very unwilling to leave the apparent safety of the inside of the coach—in his arms over the rapid water; how the water proved so much swifter and deeper than anybody had imagined that horses and riders were “violently hurried down the stream,” and the unloaded and empty coach was quickly overturned. The coach horses struggled till they broke their harnesses, and with difficulty saved themselves by swimming.

So much for the memory of a little sensitive eight-year-old. The Earl’s diary record is brief and to the point. His coach was “overthrown”, his horses were “in danger of drowning”, but they all, God be praised, arrived safely at Lismore, and the journey had cost him £24.

Christmas was kept at Lismore, and the last two days of the old year at Castle Lyons, where the Earl’s son-in-law, Barrymore, feasted them most liberally. He could scarcely have done less, after that eighteen-months’ visit to the Earl’s town house in Dublin. And so this year ended.

With the New Year 1635 came the Claytons from Cork, bringing Mary and little Peggie on a visit to their father. A week or two later the Earl went back alone to Dublin for the last session of Parliament, leaving Dungarvan and his wife to keep house at Lismore; and the four boys—Kynalmeaky, Broghill, Frank and little Robyn—were all left under the charge of their tutor, Mr. Wilkinson, who was also the Earl’s chaplain.

It was a severe winter: the very day after the Earl set out from Lismore there began to fall at Clonmell “the greatest snow that ever any man now living did see in Ireland.” The House of Lismore must have stood, very white and quiet, looking down over the precipice into the swirling Blackwater below it. All about it, white and silent too, lay the gardens and orchards, the fishponds and park lands, and the wooded wildernesses; and the mountains beyond were hidden in falling snows. The roads could not have been easy riding between Clonmell and Dublin, but the Earl and his servants reached Dublin in safety, and he sent back by Dungarvan’s man “two new books of Logick” for the versatile Kynalmeaky’s further education.

Kildare had come back to Dublin also, and not too soon; for he and his young wife were to make up their differences over a little grave. Early in March their eldest little girl died under the Earl’s roof in Dublin; and a few days later Lady Kildare’s boy was born—the “young master” of Wentworth’s vindictive letter to Laud.

But spring was at hand, and the Lismore orchards were in blossom. The Earl was busy buying more lands and manors to be settled on Robyn, and writing to his English friends about a “ffrench gent” to accompany his sons Kynalmeaky and Broghill as “governour” on their foreign travels. Great sheet-winged hawks, also, were brought “to fflye for our sports”; and in July Lord Clifford and his suite arrived from Yorkshire on a visit to Lismore. The Earl of Cork was in his element. A great hunting-party had been arranged, and the huntsmen filled the lodge in the park. Dungarvan and his wife—Lord Clifford’s daughter and heiress—the Barrymores, and Katharine and Arthur Jones, were all gathered at Lismore. Lord Clifford was to see this Munster home at its very best; its terraces and rose-gardens aflame with colour, its orchards heavy with fruit, its pigeon-houses and watermills and fishponds and the great turreted walls—all the “re-edifications” in fact, that had been the work of years. And the seventeenth-century interior must have been as imposing; for there was furniture of crimson velvet, fringed with silver, and furniture of black and scarlet velvet brocade. The walls were hung with tapestry, the floors were spread with Turkey rugs. There were high-backed chairs and low-backed chairs, and Indian embroideries, and “long cushions” for the embrasured window-seats. The Earl’s hospitable tables were furnished with fish, beef, venison, and huge all-containing pies—to be washed down by Bordeaux wine, usquebagh, and aqua vitæ; and they groaned also beneath their burden of silver;—flagons and trenchers, “covered salts,” “costerns,” kettles and ladles of silver and silver gilt; while the “ewers and basons” in the bedrooms were of silver, the great gilded beds hung with scarlet cloth and silver lace and the ceilings of the children’s nursery and the Earl’s “studdie” were of “fretwork”—their walls of “Spanish white”.

Katharine and Arthur Jones went back to Athlone early in September. The hunting-party was dispersed, and the House of Lismore was emptying again. It must have been on one of those autumn days before Katharine left Lismore that there happened the little “foolish” incident about Robyn and the plums: an incident which the elder sister would tell, long afterwards, when Robert Boyle had made his world-wide reputation, and she and he were growing old together in the house in Pall Mall.[35]

Dungarvan’s wife had already made a special pet of Francis, who was indeed a lovable and happy-tempered boy. But it was Robyn who was his sister Kate’s favourite. She seems to have felt a special tenderness for this little fellow with a little independent character of his own, so different from all his brothers: a little fellow with a stutter, attributed by his family to his habit of mimicking some children with whom he had been allowed to play; a little fellow who was “studious” at eight years old, and so hopelessly and tactlessly truthful that the old Earl—fond old disciplinarian that he was—had never been able to “find him in a lie in all his life.”

And so with the plums. Lady Dungarvan, in delicate health, was being petted by all the family; and Katharine Jones had given “strict orders” that the fruit of a certain plum tree in the Lismore garden should be preserved for Lady Dungarvan’s use. Robyn had gone into the garden, and, “ignoring the prohibition,” had been eating the plums. And when his sister Kate taxed him, “by way of aggravation,” with having eaten “half a dozen plums,”—“Nay, truly, sister,” answered he simply to her, “I have eaten half a score.”[36]

Mr. Wilkinson and a certain “Mownsier” had between them taught Robyn to speak some French and Latin and to write a fair hand; and now that he was in his ninth year, and Frank twelve years old, they were to be sent to Eton. The Earl had been in correspondence for some time with his old friend Sir Henry Wotton, not only about this matter, but about a “governour” who should take Kynalmeaky and Broghill abroad. Accordingly on September 9, 1635, a few days after their sister Katharine and Arthur Jones had left Lismore, Francis and Robert, with Carew their personal servant, under the charge of the Earl’s own confidential servant, Mr. Thomas Badnedge, left Lismore for Youghal, there to embark for England, “to be schooled and bredd at Eaton.” Badnedge was to carry the purse, with £50 in it, and if he wanted any more was to draw upon Mr. Burlamachy, the Lord Mayor of London. And the Earl gave the boys at parting £3 between them: “the great God of Heaven”, he wrote in his diary, “bless, guyde and protect them!”

It was not till September 24 that the little party actually sailed from Youghal, for they waited a whole week for a wind, and then they were “beat back again” by a storm. But at last, “though the Irish coasts were then sufficiently infested with Turkish gallies,” they reached Bristol in safety, having touched at Ilfracombe and Minehead on the way. There was a short stay “to repose and refresh themselves” at Bristol, and then their journey was “shaped” direct for Eton College. It was of course a journey by coach-roads; and their first sight of English scenery was in late September.

They arrived at Eton on October 2; and Mr. Badnedge delivered the two boys safely into the charge of Sir Henry Wotton. Their “tuicon” was to be undertaken by Mr. John Harrison, the “chief schoolmaster.”

Shortly after their arrival, Francis penned a little letter to his father, the Earl of “Korke,” to be carried back to Ireland by one of their escort. He began on bended knees with hearty prayers, and went on to say that he had no news to tell except some things he had observed on his travels, but these he would leave the bearer of his letter to narrate, “in regard I am incited by my school exercise.” Sir “Hary Wutton” had been very kind to them, entertaining them the first day of their arrival at his own table. He had also put at their disposal “a chamber of his owne with a bedd furnished afore our own wilbe furnished.” The young lords at Eton had also been most friendly, especially the Earl of Peterborough’s son, with whom Frank and Robyn were, for the present, to dine and sup. And there was a postscript to say that Mr. Badnedge had been very kind “in all our travels,” and had sent them a supply of linen from London after their arrival, for which they were “much bound to him.”

A few days later Mr. John Harrison, the “chief schoolmaster,” also wrote to the Earl of Cork, a letter concise, dignified, and satisfactory.

He confirmed the arrival at Eton of the Earl’s two sons, “whoe, as they indured their journeye both by sea and land, beyond what a man would expect from such little ones so, since their arrival, the place seemed to be suiting them wonderfully well”. He tells the Earl that “Mr. Provost” had been so kind as to put the boys under his care, and lets the Earl know, in parenthesis, that he, John Harrison, is at present the “Rector” of the school: “I will carefully see them supplyed with such things as their occasions in the colledge shall require, and endeavour to sett them forward in learninge the best I can.”

But it was from Carew,[37] the boys’ personal servant, that the Earl was to hear all about everything. Carew’s first letter touched lightly on the “long and tedious navigation and great travels by land,” and went straight to the subject of subjects—“my two young masters.” They had been there only a few days, but they were “very well beloved for their civill and transparent carriage towards all sorts, and specially my sweet Mr. Robert, who gained the love of all.” Sir Henry Wotton had been “much taken with him for his discourse of Ireland and of his travails, and he admired that he would observe or take notice of those things that he discoursed off.”

Then followed an account of Sir Henry Wotton’s kind reception of the boys, and the lending of his furnished chamber till their own should be ready: “We injoy it yett,” says Carew, “which is a great favor.” The boys had dined several times already with Sir Henry Wotton. They were very “jocond”, although they showed a “studious desire”, and they had “very carefull and reverend masters.” There is just a hint of home-sickness, a longing for the sight of the old Earl and the brothers and sisters and the roughly splendid Irish life; but Carew quickly goes on to tell the “Order of the Colledge,” especially “touching my young masters’ essence.” The boys dine in hall, with the rest of the boarders;[38] and the Earl of Northampton’s four sons, and the two sons of the Earl of Peterborough, with other “Knights’ sons” are at the same table. “They sitt permiscously—noe observing of place or qualitie”; and at night they supped in their own rooms, Mr. Francis and Mr. Robert supping with the Earl of Peterborough’s sons, providing, of course, their own commons. Carew mentions the “fasting nights” and the fact that the College allows no meat to be cooked on Fridays or Saturdays; and he hints that the College commissariat requires a good deal of supplementing. Master Robert is too busy with his lessons to write a letter, but sends his love and duty: “They are upp every morning at half an hour afore 6, and soe to scoole to prayers.”

Sir Henry Wotton, the Provost of Eton[39] of that day, was nearing the end of his eventful, chequered life when Robert Boyle, not yet nine years old, came under his care. He was indeed a contemporary of the old Earl, and a Kentish man as well—one of a fine old Kentish stock; but no two men could have been more unlike. He had taken his B.A. at Oxford, and with a slender purse set out on his seven years’ wanderings in European cities, the very same year in which Mr. Richard Boyle had turned the lucky ring on his finger and landed on Irish shores. But that had been forty-seven years before—back in the mists; and the years between those youthful wanderings and this pleasant old age in the Provost’s lodging at Eton had been years of risky secret missions and ill-paid political intrigue. He had been private secretary to Essex in London, private correspondent abroad, Ambassador at Venice. In those years, many a fine intellect with big ambitions had gone under. Sir Henry had come off better than many, in spite of his slender means and an undeniable weakness for libraries and laboratories and picture galleries in the intervals of diplomacy. It was he who had been sent by the Duke of Tuscany on the secret mission to Edinburgh to tell James VI that he was going to be poisoned, and to carry with him the little packet of Italian antidotes, not known at that time in the Scottish pharmacopœia. He had stayed three months with the Scottish King; and no wonder that when James ascended the throne of England Sir Henry Wotton was one of the men then in London whom the King desired to see. He was a favourite at Court; and his lifelong homage to the Princess Elizabeth, the unhappy Queen of Bohemia, is well known.[40]

He had risen to great things, and might have risen to greater still if it had not been for one brilliant Latin epigram written in an album. Even King James, with pleasant memories of a packet of antidotes and a most delightful guest in Stirling Castle, found it hard to forgive the Latin epigram—“a merriment,” poor Wotton had called it—written in an album in an indiscreet moment many years before, and officiously forwarded from Augsburg to the Court of London: “An Ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” It is said to have ruined Sir Henry Wotton’s diplomatic chances; and when, after some other missions, he came home in 1624, it was as a penniless man still, with plans of literary work and a sufficient stock of memories grave and gay. He had consorted with princes and statesmen, with artists, men of science, and men of letters. He had worked for Essex and known Raleigh, and Francis Bacon was his cousin. Among his friends abroad he had counted Beza, Casaubon, Arminius and Kepler. He had watched Kepler at work in his laboratory, and he had supplied Bacon with facts. And when Bacon sent him three copies of his Novum Organum when it first appeared, Sir Henry sent one of the copies to Kepler.

When Thomas Murray died, and Sir Henry Wotton was selected, out of many candidates, for the Provostship of Eton, he was so poor that he was obliged to borrow money to enable him to settle down there. King James would have granted him a dispensation, but he preferred to conform to the rule that the Provost of Eton must be a man in Holy Orders. He had been duly ordained deacon, and, being a man of liberal views, had steered “a middle way between Calvinism and Arminianism.”[41]

When the two young sons of the Earl of Cork arrived at Eton, Sir Henry Wotton had been Provost for ten years, and Eton could scarcely imagine itself without him. With a royal pension in addition to his Provostship, and assisted by a strong staff of Fellows of the College—the learned Hales, John Harrison and the rest—he was taking life easily, in the evening of his days, among his books and curios, his Italian pictures, and those manuscripts—biographies of Donne and Luther, and the History of England,—which he always meant to finish and never did. He was not quite so active as when he had first come among them with his new views of teaching, and had put up the picture of Venice, where he had lived so long as Ambassador, and had hung on the wooden pillars of the lower schools his “choicely drawn” portraits of Greek and Latin orators and poets and historians, for the little Eton boys to gaze at with round English eyes; but his familiar figure was still a daily presence, coming and going amongst them in his furred and embroidered gown, “dropping some choyce Greek or Latin apophthegm” for the benefit of the youngsters in class. He was still a “constant cherisher” of schoolboyhood, taking the “hopeful youths” into his own especial care, having them at his own hospitable table, picking out the plodding boys and the boys of genius, and himself teaching best in his own memorable talk. He liked to indulge in reminiscences of Italy—“that delicat Piece of the Worlde”; and he sometimes looked wistfully Londonwards, though in his gentle, deprecatory way he spoke of it, especially in November, as a “fumie citie.” In his last years he nursed hopes that he might succeed to the mastership of the Savoy; meantime, from his Provost’s Lodging, he could look across the “meandering Thames and sweete meadows,”[42] to the great pile of Windsor Castle in its “antient magnificence”; and he read and ruminated and smoked—he smoked a little too much, according to his friend Izaak Walton—and counted his “idle hours not idly spent” when he could sit quietly fishing with Izaak Walton in the river-bend above the shooting fields, then, as now, known as Black Pots. When Robert Boyle went to Eton in 1635, to be an Eton boy meant not only being “grounded in learning” by such men as Hales and Harrison, but being “schooled and bred” under the daily influence of this soft, rich, delightful personality.

The two boys were known in the school as Boyle A and Boyle I: Robert was Boyle I. According to Carew, they must have grown with astonishing rapidity during their first months at Eton. Mr. Francis was not only tall, but “very proportionable in his limbs,” and grew daily liker to his brother, Lord Dungarvan. He was not so fond of his books as “my most honoured and affectionate Mr. Robert, who was as good at his lessons as boys double his age.” An usher, “a careful man”, was helping them with their lessons, and Carew was keeping an eye on the usher. Versions and dictamens in French and Latin filled their time, and Carew could not persuade them to “affect the Irish,” though Robert seems to have shown a faint, intermittent interest in that language.[43] As for Mr. Robert, he was “very fatt, and very jovial, and pleasantly merry, and of ye rarest memory that I ever knew. He prefers Learninge afore all other virtues and pleasures. The Provost does admire him for his excellent genius.” They had acted a play in the College, and Robert had been among those chosen to take part in it. “He came uppon ye stage,” wrote Carew, exultant, to the Earl of Cork; “he had but a mute part, but for the gesture of his body and the order of his pace, he did bravely.”

The little fellow was not yet nine years old, and his stutter must have made it highly desirable that the part should be “mute”; but “Mr. Provost” had already made choice of a “very sufficient man” to teach both the boys to play the viol and to sing, and also to “helpe my Master Robert’s defect in pronontiation.” Carew was afraid the study of music, which “elevats the spirits,” might hinder their more serious lessons; though up to that time the conduct of both boys had been exemplary. They had said their prayers regularly and been equally polite to everybody, and were very neat in their “aparelling, kembing, and washing.” The elder brother had been laid up with “a cowld that he tooke in the scoole,” which Carew attributed entirely to the fact that he had outgrown his clothes; and Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had been “mighty backward” in sending their new suits. Even with a bad cold, Frank was his usual pleasant, merry self; and when Mr. Provost, according to his custom, prescribed “a little phisique,” the boy drank it cheerfully to the last drop—and “rejected it immediately after.” Sir Henry Wotton wrote himself to the Earl, describing the whole episode with an accuracy of detail worthy of Kepler’s laboratory.

Meantime, Sir Henry himself had assured the Earl that the “spiritay Robyn’s” voice and pronunciation had been taken in hand by the Master of the Choristers. Robyn also had caught cold that first winter at Eton. He had “taken a conceit against his breakfast, being alwaies curious of his meat, and so going fasting to church.” But on this occasion, such was the spiritay Robyn’s popularity, that the whole College seems to have risen in protest against Mr. Provost’s prescription of “a little phisique.” And Robert recovered without it, and “continued still increasing in virtues.”

It is somewhat surprising that the younger brother should have been the favourite, for it was Francis Boyle who had the “quick, apprehensive wit,” and whose delight was in hunting and horsemanship; and it was Robyn who dissuaded him, exhorting his elder brother to learning in his youth, “for,” says he, “there can be nothing more profitable and honourable.” With his “fayre amiable countenance,” this child of nine, according to the ebullient Carew, was “wise, discreet, learned and devout; and not such devotion as is accustomed in children, but withall in Sincerity he honours God and prefers Him in all his actions.”[44]

It is very certain that the spiritay Robyn was not fond of games. There is no enthusiasm for active sports in his Philaretus, not even of a certain sport that the boys engaged in on winter evenings in the hall, for which every recent comer was obliged to “find the candles”; and a very expensive time for candles it was, according to Carew. But Mr. Robert learnt to “play on music and to sing”, and “to talk Latin he has very much affected.” And it speaks very well for both Frank and Robyn that, their tastes being so unlike, they remained such excellent friends. “Never since they arrived,” according to Carew, had two ill words passed between them; which he thought was rare to see, “specially when the younger exceeds the elder in some qualities.” Some of the noble brothers in the College were continually quarrelling; but “the peace of God is with my masters.” It had been noticed even at the Fellows’ table: “Never were sweeter and civiller gents seen in the Colledge than Mr. Boyles.” The only thing in which they do not seem to have excelled was in letter-writing. Master Frank could not write to the Earl because his hand shook; and Master Robyn could not write because he had hurt his thumb.

And so winter and spring passed, and the summer came, and with it “breaking-time” at Eton. Mr. Provost, Mr. Harrison, and everybody else went away. The two boys, and Carew with them, spent their holidays with their sister Lettice in Sussex. It could not have been a cheerful visit, though Carew assured the Earl that there was “nothing wanting to afford a good and pleasant entertainment if my honourable Lady had not been visited with her continuall guest, griefe and melancholy.” So extremely melancholy was the Lady Lettice Goring during this visit that it made the two boys “cry often to looke upon her.” And yet they must have made a pretty pair to gladden the eyes of an invalid woman. For Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had sent them some fine new clothes—little shirts with laced bands and cuffs, two scarlet suits without coats, and two cloth-of-silver doublets.

Robert Boyle’s own recollections of Eton were written a good many years after he left it. He always remembered with gratitude the kindness of Mr. John Harrison, in whose house, in that chamber that was so long in furnishing, the two boys lived—except for some holidays at “breaking-time,” usually spent in Sussex—from October 1635 to November 1638.

From the very beginning John Harrison must have recognised that in “Boyle I” he had no ordinary boy to deal with. He saw a “spiritay” little fellow, with a fair, amiable countenance, a slight stammer, which the child did his best to amend, and the unstudied civilities of manner of a little prince. According to Boyle himself, Mr. Harrison saw “some aptness and much willingness” in him to learn; and this chief schoolmaster resolved to teach his pupil by “all the gentlest ways of encouragement.” He began by often dispensing with his attendance at school in ordinary school hours, and taking the trouble to teach him “privately and familiarly in his own chamber.”

“He would often, as it were, cloy him with fruit and sweetmeats, and those little dainties that age is greedy of, that by preventing the want, he might lessen both his value and desire of them. He would sometimes give him, unasked, play-days, and oft bestow upon him such balls and tops and other implements of idleness as he had taken away from others that had unduly used them. He would sometimes commend others before him to rouse his emulation, and oftentimes give him commendations before others to engage his endeavours to deserve them. Not to be tedious, he was careful to instruct him in such an affable, kind, and gentle way, that he easily prevailed with him to consider studying not so much as a duty of obedience to his superiors, but as a way to purchase for himself a most delightsome and invaluable good.”[45]

All which means that Mr. Harrison was making a very interesting experiment, and that his system happened to succeed in the case of Robert Boyle. The boy learned his “scholar’s task” very easily; and his spare hours were spent so absorbedly over the books he was reading that Mr. Harrison was sometimes obliged to “force him out to play.” And what were the books that were read with such zest? It was, Robert Boyle says, the accidental perusal of Quintus Curtius that first made him in love with “other than pedantick books”; and in after life he used to assert that he owed more to Quintus Curtius than ever Alexander did: that he had gained more from the history of Alexander’s conquests than ever Alexander had done from the conquests themselves.[46]

His other recollections of his Eton schooldays are for the most part of accidents that happened to him there. He was not so good a horseman as his brother Frank. Once he fell from his horse, and the animal trod so near to his throat as to make a hole in his neckband, “which he long after preserved for a remembrance.” Another time his nag took fright as he was riding through a town, and reared upright on his hinder feet against a wall; and the boy just saved himself by slipping off. Yet a third time he nearly met his death by a “potion” given him “by an apothecary’s error”; and it is interesting, in the light of what happened and did not happen in Boyle’s later life, to hear that “this accident made him long after apprehend more from the physicians than the disease, and was possibly the occasion that made him afterwards so inquisitively apply himself to the study of physick, that he might have the less need of them that profess it.”[47] The fourth and last of this almost Pauline enumeration of disasters was the falling, one evening, of the greater part of the wall of the boys’ bedroom in Mr. Harrison’s house. The two brothers had gone early to their room; Robyn was already tucked into the big four-post bed, with its “feather bedd, boulster, and two pillows,” and the curtains of “blew perpetuana with lace and frenge”,[48] and Frank was talking with some other boys round the fire when, without a moment’s warning, the wall of the room fell in, the ceiling with it, carrying bed, chairs, books and furniture from the room above. A bigger boy rescued Frank from the debris and dust, the chair in which he had been sitting broken to pieces, and his clothes torn off his back; and Robyn, the future chemist, peeping from the blew-perpetuana curtains, remembered to wrap his head in the sheet, so that it might serve “as a strainer, through which none but the purer air could find a passage.”

It is observable that there is no mention of any of those accidents in the letters to the Earl of Cork from either the Provost or the boys’ personal servant, Carew. Perhaps it was as well that the Earl, much harassed at home, should not be told everything that was happening at Eton. As it was, he knew too much. Some go-between—Mr. Perkins, the tailor, or somebody equally officious—must have told the Earl in what manner Carew—“poor unmeriting me”, as Carew called himself in one of his fascinating letters to the Earl—had been utilising his idle hours by the meandering Thames. Frank and Robyn, and Carew with them, were spending their holidays with Lady Lettice Goring, when one morning Sir Henry Wotton, sitting in his study at Eton, received a letter from the Earl of Cork. The contents came as a thunderbolt. “Truly, my good Lord,” Sir Henry Wotton wrote back to the Earl, “I was shaken with such an amazement at the first percussion thereof, that, till a second perusal, I was doubtfull whether I had readd aright.” For everybody in the college was so persuaded of young Mr. Carew’s discretion and temper and zeal in his charge, and “whole carriadge of himself,” that it would be “harde to stamp us with any new impression.” However, Mr. Provost had somewhat reluctantly put away his pipe and “bestowed a Daye in a little Inquisitiveness.” And he had found that the Earl, in Dublin, was quite right; that between Carew and a certain “yonge Mayed, dawghter to our under baker—” and Mr. Provost could not but own that she was pretty—there had passed certain civil, not to say amorous, language. The old Provost was evidently disposed to look leniently on this particular foolish pair. Had he not himself once, in his youth, written a little poem which began—

O faithless world, and thy most faithless part

A woman’s heart!

...

Why was she born to please, or I to trust

Words writ in dust?[49]

However, Sir Henry told the Earl he was going to talk to Carew on his return from Sussex, and warn him how careful, in his position, he ought to be; and he would write again to the Earl after seeing Carew. But, in the meantime he wished to reserve judgment: “For truely theare can not be a more tender attendant about youre sweete children.”

And after all news travelled slowly. Those little love passages were already six months old: “Tyme enough, I dare swere”—wrote the old diplomatist, sitting alone in his study, with his Titian and his Bassanos looking down upon him—“to refrigerat more love than was ever betweene them.”

CHAPTER IV
THE MANOR OF STALBRIDGE

“... He would very often steal away from all company, and spend four or five hours alone in the fields, and think at random: making his delighted imagination the busy scene where some romance or other was daily acted.”—Robert Boyle’s Philaretus.

After the boys went to Eton, the Earl had very unpleasant things to think about. Wentworth was pressing him hard. It is true that the little dinner-parties and card-parties and private theatricals at the Castle were going on as if there were no Star Chamber behind them. In January 1636 the Lord Deputy was inviting himself to supper at the Earl’s Dublin house, and bringing Lady Wentworth with him. Lady Dungarvan’s baby was born in March, a “ffair daughter”, to be christened Frances, and to figure in the old Earl’s diary as “lyttle ffranck”; and the Lord Deputy himself stood sponsor, though he had just lost his own little son, and the Dungarvan christening had been postponed till the Wentworth baby had been buried. But the Lord Deputy’s “sharp pursuit” of men was going on all the same. In February, before the death of Wentworth’s child and the Dungarvan christening, Lord Mountmorris had been degraded from the office of Vice-Treasurer, “tried by a Commission and sentenced to be shot, for no other crime than a sneer” against Wentworth’s government.[50] The sentence was not to be carried out; but it became every day more evident that “whatever man of whatever rank” opposed Wentworth, or even spoke disrespectfully of his policy, “that man he pursued to punishment like a sleuth-hound”.[51]

At the beginning of that year, the Earl of Cork had made his “Great Conveighance,” by which he entailed all his lands upon his five sons. Wentworth had taken exception to the conveyance of some of these lands to the Earl’s eldest son, Lord Dungarvan; and in February a “sharp and large discourse” had taken place between the Lord Deputy and the Earl. In April the Star Chamber Bill against the Earl, dealing with his titles to the churchlands of Youghal, was still under discussion; and Wentworth was now pressing for the payment of money, by way of ransom, which was at first to be £30,000, but was afterwards reduced to £15,000.

The Earl was still asserting his right to his lands, and unwilling to compound—no-one had ever heard the Earl of Cork, he said, “enclyned to offer anything.” Things were at this pass when at the end of April Lady Dungarvan, six weeks after her baby’s birth, fell sick; and the next day, “the smallpockes brake owt uppon her.” On that very day, under pressure from his friends and from his son Dungarvan, who went down on his knees before his father, the Earl of Cork gave way. Very unwillingly, on May 2, he agreed to pay the £15,000 “for the King’s use,” and for his own “redemption out of Court”—though his “Innocencie and Intigritie” he declared, writing in his own private diary, were “as cleer as the son at high noon.” The old Royalist, even then, believed that if his King only knew how undeservedly the mighty fine had him imposed, “he would not accept a penny of it.” The Earl was hard hit, though his great Conveyance was at last signed and sealed, and he could talk of drinking a cup of sack “to wash away the care of a big debt.”[52] It is comforting to note that he had meantime cash in hand not only to tip Archie Armstrong, the King’s Jester, who seems to have passed through Dublin, but to pay for two knitted silk waistcoats for his own “somer wearings.”

While all this was going on, Kynalmeaky and Broghill were enjoying what the Earl called their “peregrination.” A tutor had been found to accompany them on their foreign travels; a M. Marcombes, highly recommended to the Earl by Sir Henry Wotton, as a man “borne for your purpose.” Sir Henry wrote from London, where he had been spending a week or two, and was returning next day “to my poore Cell agayne at Eton”;[53] but he gave the Earl a careful account of Marcombes, whom he had seen in London. He was “by birthe French; native in the Province of Auvergne; bredd seaven years in Geneve, verie sounde in Religion, and well conversant with Religious Men. Furnished with good literature and languages, espetially with Italian, which he speaketh as promptly as his owne. And wilbe a good guide for your Sonns in that delicat Piece of the Worlde. He seemeth of himself neither of a lumpish nor of a light composition, but of a well-fixed meane.”

M. Marcombes had already won golden opinions in the family of Lord Middlesex, a former Lord Mayor of London; and was well known to the then Lord Mayor, Mr. Burlamachy, who also wrote to the Earl about him. And Mr. Perkins, the tailor, seems to have put in a word; for there had been a meeting in the “fumie citie” between Sir Henry Wotton and M. Marcombes and Mr. Perkins, at which Sir Henry had found the French tutor’s conversation “very apposite and sweet.”

So in the early spring of 1636 Kynalmeaky and Broghill, with their governor M. Marcombes, had set out from Dublin on their foreign travels, stopping long enough in London to kiss the King’s and Queen’s hands, and obtain the royal licence and passport to travel; and they took letters also to Sir Henry Wotton at Eton, and to Frank and Robyn, and poor unmeriting Carew.

The Earl of Cork himself, in the early stages of his struggle with Wentworth, had thought of going to London, to “justify himself” once again, as he had done when he was a young man, and Elizabeth was Queen. But he was no longer a young man, and Charles I was not Queen Elizabeth, and the Lord Deputy, when he found it out, had objected strongly to the Earl’s little plan. On the contrary, the Lord Deputy had gone to England himself, in the summer of 1636; and though Sir Henry Wotton was under “a kind of hovering conceypt” that the Earl of Cork was coming over, and there was even a rumour that he was to be offered the Lord Chancellorship of England, the old Earl was to remain for two more years in Ireland. He was busy as usual, moving about, on assize and other duties, between Dublin and Lismore and Cork; paving the terrace at Lismore with hewn stones, dedicating the free schools and almshouses there, setting up an old servant in Dublin in a “tobacko” business, and paying Mr. Perkins’s bill for those little scarlet suits and cloth-of-silver doublets that Frank and Robyn were wearing in their Whitsuntide holidays. Sir Henry Wotton was able to tell the Earl that Lady Lettice would see Frank in better health and strength than he had been in either kingdom before, while Robert would “entertayne her with his pretie conceptions, now a greate deale more smoothely than he was wonte.”

The Earl had not given up his English project; on the contrary, it was to mature into the purchase of a little bit of England for his very own; and his choice had fallen on a “capitall howse, demesne, and lands” in Dorsetshire. Accordingly in the autumn of 1636 he bought the Manor of Stalbridge, and sent over a steward, Thomas Cross, to take possession. At Stalbridge the Earl would be a near neighbour of the Earl of Bristol—his son-in-law Digby’s uncle—at Sherborne Castle.

The year 1636 had been a trying year; and one of the first expenses in the New Year 1637 was a fee to Mr. Jacob Longe, of Kinsale, “my Jerman physician,” for plaisters and prescriptions, “to stay the encrease of the dead palsy which hath seized uppon all the right side of my boddy (God helpe me) £5.” And though the returns for the year shewed a “Lardge Revenew,” and the diary record for the year ended in a note of triumph, with a triple “Amen, Amen, Amen,” there was yet sorrow in store that no revenue, however large, could avert. For Peggie, the Earl’s youngest daughter, was ill. The Earl had paid £5 to Mr. Higgins, the Lismore doctor, to give her “phisick, which he never did”; and either because of this, or in spite of this, Little Peggie did not get well. She died in June 1637, in Lady Clayton’s house in Cork, where she and Mary had lived all this time together. The Lady Margaret Boyle, youngest daughter of the Earl of Cork—eight years old when she died—was buried in the family tomb at Youghal.

It was not till Midsummer 1638, when the last instalment of the mighty fine had been paid, that the Earl began his preparations for a prolonged visit to England. He revoked all other wills, and again made a last will and testament; and at the end of July he actually set out for England, taking with him his daughter Mary, Lord and Lady Barrymore, and several of the grandchildren.

The parting was a sad one between Mary Boyle and Lady Clayton, who had just lost her husband, and, a childless woman herself, had been a real mother to “Moll” and “Peggie.” But the Earl had a grand marriage in view for his daughter Mary; and he had yet to discover that Lady Mary had a will of her own: that of all his daughters it was she who had inherited his own indomitable pride. Hitherto, she had been a child, brought up away from him; to be gladdened from time to time by a happy visit or a New Year’s gift. But even these are indications of the little lady’s tastes and character. It was to Mary the Earl gave the “ffether of diamonds and rubies that was my wive’s,” long before he could have known how defiantly she would toss that little head of hers. She must have been a fair horsewoman already at nine years old; for it was to her that the Earl sent the dead mother’s saddle and saddle-cloth of green velvet, laced and fringed with silver and green silk; and it is certain she inherited the Earl’s love of fine dressing, from the choice of various small gowns of figured satins and rich stuffs of scarlet dye. Of even more significance is the old Earl’s gift of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, “To my daughter, Mary Boyle,” when this imperious young creature was only twelve years old. Do little girls of twelve read Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia to-day? There was to come a moment when, if the Earl had ever read it himself, he must have heard in “Moll’s” voice, as she answered him, some echo of Sidney’s teaching—

“... but a soule hath his life

Which is held in loue: loue it is hath ioynd

Life to this our Soule.”

After the usual delays at starting, the Ninth Whelp made a good passage; and the Earl and his party reached Bristol safely on Saturday August 4. As usual, presents were dispensed to the ship’s captain and company, together with what remained of a hogshead of claret wine. Next day, Sunday, the whole family went obediently to church; and on Monday morning, leaving the others to follow with the servants and luggage, the old Earl, riding a borrowed horse, set off by himself to find his way to Stalbridge.[54]

A wonderful peace and stillness falls on the Dorsetshire uplands at evening after a long, hot summer day. Up hill and down dale and up hill again go the Dorsetshire lanes, between their tangled hedges, through a country of undulating woods and downs and soft green pastures. The lark sings, high up, invisible: a far-away, sleepy cock-crow or faint bark of sheepdog breaks the silence; the grazing cattle bend their brown heads in the fields.

The Earl was in England again, the land of his birth. It was perhaps not altogether a prosperous and satisfied England, in August 1638. The heavy hand of taxation was on even these pastoral uplands. The heart of England was throbbing with political unrest. But on that evening, at least, there could have been only the lark’s ecstasy, and the sweet smell of wild thyme and woodsmoke in the air. Ireland, the distressful country of his adoption, lay behind the old man, and with it the memories of fifty strenuous years;—all that was hardest and proudest and tenderest in a lifetime.

Lord and Lady Dungarvan were already at Stalbridge with “lyttle ffrancke.” There was another baby-daughter now, but it had apparently been left at Salisbury House, in London. Dungarvan had ridden some six miles upon the road to meet his father. It was still daylight when, riding together—the old man must have been pretty stiff in the saddle, for he had ridden nearly sixty miles that day—they came in sight of the Elizabethan manor standing among elms and chestnut trees, surrounded by park lands and hayfields and orchards: “My owne house of Stalbridge in Dorcetshier; this being the firste tyme that ever I sawe the place.”[55]

After this, the movements of the Earl and his family read rather like a Court Circular. Not much is heard of the life that must have been going on in the little town itself, with its Church and market Cross; but the mere presence of this great Irish family among them must, by the laws of supply and demand, have wrought many changes in the little market town. The Earl paid his love and service to his neighbour and kinsman, the Earl of Bristol, at Sherborne Castle, and the Earl and Countess of Bristol, with all their house-party, immediately returned the visit; after which the whole family at the Manor were “feasted” for two days at Sherborne Castle. The Earl of Cork and his house-party rode to “the Bathe”, and return visits were received at Stalbridge from friends at “the Bathe”. And a week or two later the Earl, attended by Dungarvan and Barrymore, rode to London, and was graciously received by the King and “all the Lords at Whitehall.” The King praised the Earl’s government of Ireland, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was particularly friendly.

Lady Barrymore and Lady Dungarvan had between them undertaken to ease the Earl from the “trowble of hows-keeping,” and for this purpose were allowed £50 a week, and more when they wanted it; and the cellars and larders at Stalbridge were replenished from time to time with gifts. A ton of claret wine and six gallons of aqua vitæ arrived as a New Year’s gift from Munster, and “veary fatt does” from English friends; while among his assets the Earl counted, besides the produce of his Stalbridge lands and woods, the twenty stalled oxen, the powdered beef, the bacon and salted salmon that were sent from his Irish estates.

Thomas Cross, his steward, became “seneschal”;—perhaps there was a seneschal at Sherborne Castle; and there was a Clerk of the Kitchen and a large staff of household servants, men and women, and a long list of rules for the management of the household drawn up and signed by the Earl himself.[56] And of course the “re-edification” of the Manor House began at once. There was water to be carried in leaden pipes; new furniture to hasten home from the London upholsterer, who dwelt at the sign of the Grasshopper; a red embroidered bed, a tawny velvet carpet, couch and chairs. There was a new coach to buy, and the paths and terraces at Stalbridge were to be stone paved exactly like the paths and terraces at Sherborne Castle. Stairs with a stone balustrade, and carved stone chimney-pieces were to be added to the Manor;—one at least carved with the Earl’s coat of arms “compleate,” and reaching nearly to the ceiling, “fair and graceful in all respects.” There was a limekiln to build, and pit coal to procure and cane apples[57] to be planted in the orchard. But charity only began at home; and in this case it did not prevent a subscription being sent—“a myte” of £100—to help the Archbishop of Canterbury in his scheme of “re-edifying Pawle’s Church in London.”

Meantime, all the Earl’s daughters and sons-in-law, except Dorothy and Arthur Loftus, who remained in Ireland, seem to have found their way, separately or together, to the Manor of Stalbridge; while grandchildren, nieces and nephews and even “cozens” were welcomed under its roof. The Dungarvans made their headquarters there, and the Barrymores, and the little Lady Mary, who was now fourteen, and to be considered a grown-up young lady, with an allowance of £100 a year “to fynde herself.” And they were presently joined by the Kildares, and Katharine and Arthur Jones. Even the plaintive Lettice and her lord stayed for some time under the Earl’s roof.[58] And in March 1639, after an absence of three years, Kynalmeaky and Broghill, with M. Marcombes, returned from their “peregrination”. They found Frank and Robyn already at Stalbridge, though not in the great house itself. For their father had taken the boys away from Eton on his return journey from London in November 1638, and since then they had been boarded out with the Rev. Mr. Dowch at the Parsonage, scarcely “above twice a musket-shot” distant from their father’s house. Their three years at Eton had cost, “for diett, tutaradge and aparell,” exactly £914 3s. 9d.

When the Earl of Cork visited Eton and took his two boys away, Sir Henry Wotton must have been already ill. Since his return after the summer breaking-time of 1638 the old Provost had suffered from a feverish distemper, which was to prove the beginning of the end.[59]

It is possible that during the Provost’s illness extra duties had fallen on Mr. Harrison, the Rector; in any case the two boys had been removed from the care of their “old courteous schoolmaster,” and handed over to “a new, rigid fellow;” and things were not going quite so happily for them at Eton as heretofore. Moreover, poor Carew, the romance of the underbaker’s daughter nipped in the bud, had, from overmuch fondness for cards and dice, come utterly to grief.

It was during this last year of Robert Boyle’s schooldays—in the April of 1638, before Sir Henry Wotton’s illness, and while all was going on as usual at Eton—that Mr. Provost had entertained at his hospitable table a guest whose life was to be strangely linked in after years with that of some members of the great Boyle family. This was John Milton, then a young poet, living with his father at Horton—not far from Eton—and just about to set out on his Italian journey.[60] Was Robert Boyle one of the “hopeful youths” selected by the Provost to dine at his table that day when Milton dined there? And did Robert Boyle listen to the talk that went on at table between Milton and his friend, the learned Hales, and Sir Henry Wotton? It was very pleasant talk. When Milton returned to Horton he ventured to send the Provost a little letter of thanks and a copy of his Comus as a parting gift; and Sir Henry sent his own footboy post-haste to Horton, to catch Milton before he started, with a pretty letter of acknowledgment and an introduction to the British Agent in Venice. It is noteworthy that the advice Sir Henry Wotton gave to Milton, and the advice he always gave to his own pupils when they were setting out on a career of diplomacy abroad, showed that, while the old man had not forgotten his experience of the Augsburg album, his kindly cynicism remained unchanged. I pensiori stretti, was the advice he handed on in his charming letter to Milton,—ed il viso sciolto; while to all young Etonians travelling in diplomacy he used to say, Always tell the truth; for you will never be believed.

It is hard to say how much Robert Boyle may have owed to the guidance and talk of Sir Henry Wotton. Boyle remembered him as a fine gentleman who possessed the art of making others so; and it was John Harrison’s methods of teaching that had impressed the boy. Yet it must not be forgotten that the Provost’s tastes were not only literary and scholarly; that he had not only surrounded himself with a library of books that Robert Boyle in his boyhood must have envied—Sir Henry Wotton was of a scientific turn of mind: he was fond of experimenting. Ever since the days when he had watched Kepler at work in his laboratory and supplied his cousin Lord Bacon with facts, he had been accustomed to occupy himself, in more or less dilletante fashion, with such little experiments as the distilling of medicinal herbs and the measurement of time by allowing water to pass through a filter, drop by drop; and it was Sir Henry Wotton whom Izaak Walton consulted about the preparation of “seductive-smelling oils” in the catching of little fishes. And who could it have been, in that last year that Robyn spent at Eton, who lent him the books that “meeting in him with a restless fancy” gave his thoughts such a “latitude of roving”? Robyn had been away from school on a visit to London, and there had fallen ill of a “tertian ague”, and had been sent back to Eton to see if good air and diet might not do more for him than all “the Queen’s and other doctors’ remedies” had done. His own phrase[61] is that “to divert his melancholy they made him read the State Adventures of Amadis de Gaule, and other fabulous and wandering stories.” Who was the “they” at Eton? It could not have been the “new, rigid fellow”. Amadis de Gaule may have been part of Mr. John Harrison’s system of education, but one would like to believe that Sir Henry Wotton had some hand in fashioning Robert Boyle—that his whole library was open to the boy, not only the books of romance and adventure in it that gave Robyn’s thoughts such a “latitude of roving.” One would like to believe that the torch was indeed passed on from Kepler’s laboratory, and by the study of one of those three copies of Bacon’s Novum Organum, into the hands of England’s first great experimental chemist.

Be that as it may, Sir Henry Wotton was already ill when Frank and Robyn were removed from Eton in November 1638; and it was Mr. Harrison who duly sent after them to Stalbridge the furniture of their chamber—the blew perpetuana curtains and all the other things so carefully inventoried by poor Carew. And Carew himself no longer served his sweet young masters: he had been succeeded by a manservant with the suggestive name of Rydowt, who appears to have been a married man, and was accommodated with a little cottage of his own at Stalbridge, with a garden which the Earl planted with “cane apples” from Ireland. The boys were to live and learn their lessons with Mr. Dowch at the Parsonage; and that “old divine” was very soon to discover that Robyn had not learnt much Latin at Eton after all, and “with great care and civility” to proceed to read with him the Latin poets as well as the Latin prose-writers. And while the Earl gave Frank a horse of his own, and knew him to be happy and gallant in the saddle, it was Robyn who was the old Earl’s Benjamin, most loved of all his sons. The family saw a likeness in Robyn to his father—a likeness both in body and mind. It is difficult to credit the Earl of Cork with any of his youngest son’s habit of “unemployed pensiviness,” but there must have been something in Robyn when he was quite a little fellow—a quiet self-reliance—that impressed the old Earl strangely. Robyn was only twelve years old; he had as yet shown none of the traits of character that the Earl so “severely disrelished” in some of his sons and sons-in-law. And so, when he gave Frank the horse, the Earl listened perhaps with some wonderment to Robyn’s “pretie conceptions” in excellent language, spoken still not quite smoothly; and he was content to let the boy wander as he liked. He gave his Benjamin the keys of his orchard, not afraid to leave him in a very paradise of unplucked apples, “thinking at random.”

CHAPTER V
THE HOUSE OF THE SAVOY

“You shall have all this winter att the Savoy, in Sʳ. Tho. Stafford’s howse, the greatest familie that will be in London (I pray God the ould man houlds out).”—Letter from Sir John Leeke to Sir Edmund Verney, 1639: Verney Memoirs, vol. i.

The Earl’s gift of a horse to his son Frank had been made at a psychological moment. For Frank, at sixteen, was not over robust, and Robyn, not much more than twelve, was scarcely fitted to defend his King and Country; and they must have just watched their three elder brothers, Dungarvan, Kynalmeaky and Broghill, ride off in great spirits from Stalbridge to join the King at Newcastle or York. War was in the air, and rumours of war; and Stalbridge Manor and Sherborne Castle, and the villages of Dorsetshire and all the great families in England, were astir, as day by day and week by week the troops of English horse and foot were moving northwards to engage against what the old Earl turned off so lightly in his diary as the “Covenanting, rebelleows Skots.”

In January 1639 a circular letter had been sent out in King Charles’ name to all the English nobility, asking them to state how far and in what manner they were ready to assist the Scottish Expedition; and week by week, according to their means and their political inclinations, the English nobles—Laudians and Puritans alike—had been sending in their answers: £1000, and twenty horse; twenty horse and attendance in person or by substitute; £1000 in lieu of horse; £500 and twelve horse; and so on.[62] And some gave willingly, and some gave grudgingly, and some evaded promising to give anything; and one or two were brave enough to refuse—and to give their reasons why. Even at Court there was “much contrarity”; it was a case of “soe many men soe many opinions.”[63] Wentworth, over in Ireland, had written offering his King £2000, and if necessary more to his “uttermost farthing”. And the Earl of Cork, at Stalbridge, had not done badly either, though he seems to have had his reservations about this levying of money and troops. His neighbour, the Earl of Bristol, at Sherborne, was one of those who had evaded promising anything in the meantime.

But in February and March Dungarvan and Barrymore had been in London, and just at this time also Kynalmeaky and Broghill had arrived back in London with M. Marcombes. During this visit to London Dungarvan had been led into an undertaking to serve his King in the Scottish Expedition: a rash undertaking, made without his father’s “privitie”; “an unadvised engagement” is the Earl’s comment in his diary. But all the same the Earl supplied his son and heir with £3000 to raise and arm a troop of a hundred horse—a magnificent subscription, which at the time caused much talk at the Court of Whitehall. Lord Barrymore, at the same time, had been commissioned by the King to hurry across to Ireland with letters to Wentworth, and to “raise and press” a thousand Irishmen, foot-soldiers, into the King’s service against the Scots.

The very day that Barrymore set out for Ireland on this mission the Earl of Bristol left Sherborne for the rendezvous at York. A day or two later King Charles himself set out from London on his journey northwards, and in April, Kynalmeaky and Broghill were being fitted out with arms and saddles and “armors of prooff”, in order to accompany their brother Dungarvan. In the beginning of May, Dungarvan’s wagons and carriages began their journey from Stalbridge; and on May 9 the Earl’s three sons, Dungarvan, Kynalmeaky, and Broghill, rode out of Stalbridge with Dungarvan’s troop of one hundred horse. Three of his five sons! “God, I beseech him,” wrote the Earl in his diary, “restore them safe, happy, and victorious, to my comfort.” It was then that he gave Frank a horse for his very own, and that the small philosopher was allowed to pocket the orchard keys. And the family at the Manor settled down to wait for news of their soldiers—so slow of coming in those old days. The ladies and the children were left behind in the care of the old Earl, M. Marcombes, and Mr. Dowch, the parson.

There were a good many ladies at the Manor during the summer of 1639. A bevy of daughters had gathered about the old Earl, and were “exceeding welcome unto” him. And it is not to be supposed that it was by any means a doleful household while the men of the family were away. For the women of the Boyle family, whatever their education had or had not been, were every whit as clever by nature as the men: “Believe it,” wrote the family friend, Sir John Leeke, to Sir Edmund Verney, about the ladies of the Boyle family, “Ould Corke could not begett nothing foolish.” Lady Dungarvan, his daughter-in-law, and his daughters Lady Barrymore, Lady Lettice Goring, Lady Katharine Jones and the little Lady Mary Boyle, were all at Stalbridge at this time, together with several of the grandchildren and all the “retinues.” And in picturing this family gathering it is strange to remember that at least three of these noble women must have been marked by the scourge of the smallpox. Lady Dungarvan had never been beautiful; and her recent attack of smallpox, however it may have altered her pleasant face, had not left her any less cheerful and good-natured than when she first came a bride amongst them, and won, by her charming person and manner, the liking of the “best sort of people” in Ireland. It was a charm that was to outlive her youth: “A very fine-speaking lady,” wrote Samuel Pepys of her many years later; “and a good woman, but old, and not handsome; but a brave woman.” And so overcome was Mr. Pepys by his first sight and salutation of this noble lady at Burlington House that he managed to set his periwig afire in the candle that was brought for the sealing of a letter.[64]

Lady Barrymore had also suffered severely from smallpox soon after her child-marriage, and at the same time with her sister Lettice. This illness, and the subsequent disappointments of life, had left Lettice Goring a querulous invalid. She was shockingly illiterate, and she was small-minded, though she was not a stupid woman. But Lady Barrymore seems to have kept all her charms—not the least of them her “brave hart”. She was clever, very political and chatty; “very energetic and capable, very amusing and very lovable.”[65] And then there was Lady Katharine—wife of Arthur Jones;—the one of all the Earl’s daughters with the finest intellect, the finest character, and, according to report, the most beautiful face. Weighed down as she was by a miserable marriage, she was to rise above all the trials of life, to be remembered by later generations as “Milton’s Friend,” the “Incomparable Lady Ranelagh”, the “dearest, dearest, dearest sister” of Robert Boyle. “A more brave wench or a Braver Spiritt you have not often mett withall,” Sir John Leeke wrote of her in the summer of 1639; “she hath a memory that will hear a sermon and goe home and penn itt after dinner verbatim. I know not how she will appeare in England, but she is most accounted of at Dublin.”

Sir John Leeke, who had married Sir Edmund Verney’s half-sister, was related also to the Barrymore family, and lived with his wife and children in a house on the Castle Lyons estates. It was Lady Barrymore who figured in his delightful letters as “My deare Mustris”, and “the worthiest of woemen”. But it was Katharine Jones, and the sorrow that looked out of her sweet face, that had won all his chivalrous devotion. “My pretious Katharine”, he wrote, “is somewhat decayed from the sweetest face I ever saw (and surely I have seen good ones).”

The little Katy—who might have married young Sapcott Beaumont, and so become one of a family known afterwards for its generous patronage of art and literature, the family so kind to the Poet Wordsworth—had been given, at fifteen, to “honest Arthur Jones”, who would some day be Viscount Ranelagh. Her marriage portion had been duly paid down, as per agreement, at Strongbow’s tomb in Christchurch, Dublin, on Midsummer Day 1631. She had been carried off to Athlone Castle; and though she had since lived a good deal under her father’s roof, and had evidently always been a special object of her own family’s care and affection, she had, none the less, ever since her marriage-day, been in legal bondage to a man who was a gambler and a churl. In this summer of 1639, the old Earl, writing to Lord Ranelagh, the father of Arthur Jones, was begging him rather pathetically not to insist on his son’s return to Ireland, but to allow Katharine and Arthur to spend the winter together in the House of the Savoy: “They shalbe both lodged and dyeted in my house and hartily welcome.” He seems to have hoped that a winter in London might improve Arthur Jones, “now that he hath given over immoderate play in Corners.”[66] But if the Earl was determined, for his favourite daughter’s sake, to make the best of a miserable business, Sir John Leeke in his letter to Sir Edmund Verney was more outspoken. “She is keapte and long hath bine by the foulest churl in the worlde,” he wrote: “he hath only one virtue that he seldome cometh sober to bedd....”[67]

It is scarcely to be wondered at if the youngest of this bevy of sisters, the little Lady Mary Boyle, looked dubiously on the thing called Husband, as she saw it in one or two types of brother-in-law that presented themselves to her girlish scrutiny. With her own horses, her own handsome allowance, and a great deal of her own way, this little lady of fourteen was not disposed to “change her condition.” The stormy romance of her life was to come all too soon; but in the meantime the Beauty was still sleeping. In three of her sisters’ marriages, she could have seen little of that “Heart Exchange” of which we may imagine her to have been reading in her volume of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia—an opinionative little lady, probably in a scarlet gown, on some sequestered seat in the manor garden.

“My true-love has my heart, and I have his,

By just exchange one for the other given.”

Not of George Goring, handsome, plausible, dissolute and cold; nor of Kildare, who deserted wife and children and pawned the family silver; nor of Arthur Jones, who played immoderately in corners, and habitually went tipsy to bed, could it ever have been said by any woman, however wifely and compliant—

“His heart in me keeps me and him in one,

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides.”

No: Mary Boyle, at fourteen, was not disposed to change her condition; and so it was with a ready-made aversion to matrimony that, in the summer of 1639, she received Mr. James Hamilton,[68] son and heir of Lord Clandeboye, who arrived by paternal invitation at the Manor of Stalbridge. The Earl of Cork and Lord Clandeboye had been for some time in correspondence about this alliance; and Mr. James Hamilton, immediately on his return from his foreign travels, which had included “a general survey” of Italy and France, had sent his own man to Stalbridge with letters heralding his arrival, and had followed a day or two later, travelling in some state, with his tutor and other attendants. There seems to have been no fault to find with the young man. According to Lord Clandeboye, his son was “a hater of vice, and a Lover of Noble partes, and of vertuous industries”; but all the same Mary Boyle expressed, in no measured terms, “a very high averseness and contradicon” to her father’s commands. She would have nothing to say to this suitor for her little fourteen-year-old hand; and with much chagrin the Earl was obliged to write in his diary, “being refused in marriadge by my unrewly daughter Mary, he departed my hows the second of September to the Bathe.”

But between May and September many things of importance had happened at the Manor of Stalbridge. The Scottish engagement had come quickly to an end. It was May 9 when Dungarvan and his two brothers had left Stalbridge; and from time to time letters had been coming to the old Earl from his sons in camp near Berwick. But on Midsummer Day, about two o’clock in the morning, Broghill had clattered into the courtyard of the Manor, having ridden post-haste from the camp to bring his father the first happy news of the “Honourable Peace” concluded with the Scots. It was, of course, but a “seeming settlement,” and of short duration: the beginning, indeed, and not the end of civil war. But Dungarvan’s troop of horse was disbanded, and, according to the Earl’s diary, the English army was dissolved before poor Barrymore landed out of Ireland with his “yrish regiment of 1000 foot.” In July, George Goring joined his Lady at the Manor, and they left together for “the Bathe”. Dungarvan and his brothers were back at Stalbridge, and the King and Queen were in London again. And early in August, Sir Thomas and Lady Stafford arrived on a visit to the Earl of Cork; and the diary records “my Lady Stafford and I conferred privately between ourselves towching our children, and concluded.”

This private conference in the Stalbridge parlour decided the fate of the sweet-spirited Frank. My Lady Stafford, when she married the Earl’s “trew friend,” Sir Thomas Stafford, gentleman usher to the Queen,[69] was the widow of Sir Robert Killigrew of Hanworth in Middlesex, and the mother of several Killigrew children. One of them was the notorious Tom Killigrew, page of honour to Charles I, court wit, playwright, and boon-companion of Charles II; and another was the little Mistress Elizabeth Killigrew, “both young and handsome,”[70] and at this time one of the Queen’s maids of honour. And now Francis Boyle was to marry Elizabeth Killigrew.

It ought to be said that the old Earl, in the Stalbridge parlour conference, “held it fitter” that a contract, rather than a marriage, should be arranged; and that it was the King himself who intervened, approving of the plan of foreign travel, but adding: “We conceave that a compleate and perfect marriage wilbe most convenient & honorable for all parties.”[71]

It was precisely at this juncture that Mr. James Hamilton arrived upon the scene; and it was just two days later, as the family coaches were in readiness to drive the whole house-party to Sherborne Castle, to “kill a Buck” and dine with the Earl and Countess of Bristol, that Katharine Jones’s third baby made its premature appearance in the family circle. “But my daughter shall never be one of his Majestye’s Auditors,” said the good-natured old Earl, “since she can keepe her reckoninge noe better.” And he recalled how her sister Digby had served him the same way during that long-ago visit to Oxford.

It must have been a trying time at the Manor, with match-making, and buck-killing, and babies, and “re-edifications” all mixed up together in most admired disorder. But everybody behaved beautifully in the circumstances. Lady Stafford stood sponsor at the baby’s hurried christening, and afterwards presented the Earl of Cork with a “lyttle glass bottle of Spiritt of Amber for curing the palsy”; which looks as if Frank’s marriage-negotiations, and the baby’s birth, and the unruly Mary’s “averseness and contradicon” had altogether been a little too much for the old man.

By September, however, the guests were all gone, and the Earl was receiving letters from the King and Queen, expressing their “several wishes” for the marriage of Frank and the little maid of honour. And accordingly on September 19, Frank and Robert, under the charge of M. Marcombes, and with forty shillings each for pocket-money, were dispatched to London, on a visit to Sir Thomas and Lady Stafford. Frank, God bless him! was at sixteen to “make his addresses to the Lady,” while Robert Boyle, in his thirteenth year, looked on and philosophised.[72]

The old Earl had given Frank a letter, to be delivered into Lady Stafford’s hands—

“I do now send this bearer to offer his service unto you, and to be commanded and governed by you.”

It is a touching letter. The old man was obeying his King’s commands, but he was full of fatherly anxiety; proud, fond and dubious. He intended to spare neither care nor charge in giving Frank a noble breeding in foreign kingdoms; he would have preferred a contract; the boy’s extreme youth, his further education, the difficulty of sending him back after his marriage “to be governed by a tutor”, were all in the old man’s mind as he wrote; and he begged the prospective mother-in-law also to take them into consideration: “ffor I send him unto you as a silken Thrid to be wrought into what samples you please either flower or weed, and to be knotted or untyed as god shalbe pleased to put into your noble hart. Yet, in my best understanding, a good and sure contract is as bynding as a marriage, espetially when all intenc̃ons are reall, as myne are, and ever shalbe; which are accompanied with a strong assurance that this childe of myne will prove religious, honest, and just, though he be modest and somewhat over bashfull.... What he is, is with himself and yours....”

Early in October, the Manor of Stalbridge was dismantled, and the Earl of Cork, with the rest of his family and retinue, set out in state for London. Sir Thomas Stafford had arranged to lend his old friend his House of the Savoy for the winter, “bravely furnished in all things except linen and plate,” which were being brought from Stalbridge.

Lady Barrymore and Lady Katharine Jones “with their Lords and Children” were to be lodged in the adjacent houses, but were to take their meals with the Earl their father in the Savoy;[73] and, as the Lady Mary expressed it many years later, “when we were once settled there, my father, living extraordinarily high, drew a very great resort thither.”[74]

Now that Kynalmeaky and Broghill were out of leading strings, their “Governour” was transferred to the two younger boys; and it was arranged that as soon as Frank and Mrs. Betty Killigrew were united in the bonds of matrimony, M. Marcombes was to carry both the boys off on their “peregrination”. Sir Henry Wotton had hinted at some such scheme when he told the Earl that Marcombes was “borne for your purpose”; and indeed M. Marcombes—the guide and teacher of Robert Boyle from his thirteenth to his eighteenth year—was a remarkable man. “He was a man”—wrote Robert Boyle in later years—“whose garb, his mien and outside, had very much of his nation, having been divers years a traveller and a soldier. He was well-fashioned, and very well knew what belonged to a gentleman.... Scholarship he wanted not, having in his greener years been a professed student in Divinity; but he was much less read in books than men, and hated pedantry as much as any of the seven deadly sins.”

Before company, the governor was “always very civil to his pupils, apt to eclipse their failings, and set off their good qualities to the best advantage;” but in his private conversation he was cynically disposed, and “a very nice critic both of words and men.” His worst quality seems to have been his “choler”; and Robyn soon learned that to avoid “clashing” with his governor he must manage to keep his own quick young temper in submission.

This was the man with whom, all the summer of 1639, Robert Boyle had read the Universal History in Latin, and carried on “a familiar kind of conversation” in French. And this was the man in whose charge Frank and Robyn were to set off on their travels when Frank’s wedding was over. They were to go to Geneva, where Broghill and Kynalmeaky had been before them, where there was now a Madame Marcombes in readiness to receive them.[75] For during his previous peregrinations in France and Switzerland with Kynalmeaky and Broghill, Marcombes, quite unknown to the Earl, had met and married his wife. She was a Parisian lady, of good civic connexions, and she was an excellent housewife. Marcombes had actually run away from Kynalmeaky and Broghill for a day or two to tie the nuptial knot. The Earl had at first been angry, but had forgiven Marcombes; indeed the charge of Kynalmeaky and Broghill was not an easy one; perhaps the Earl realised that Marcombes, under the circumstances, required a besseres Ich; and, in any case, Marcombes would have been difficult to replace. For he was—he says it himself—“an honest and Carefull man”; and he told the Earl in plain words while he was acting as governor to Kynalmeaky and Broghill that the title of governor was but “a vaine name, specially when those yt a man has under his Charge have kept so long Companie with hunters and players, and soe many Gentlemen that will humour them in anything and will let them know their Greatnesse, as my young Lords have been used in Ireland.”[76]

Marcombes had found no fault with my Lord Broghill: “I may assure your Lordship yt you shall have both honour and comfort in him.... Every one yt knows him Loves him and speakes well of him and without any compliment”; but Kynalmeaky, the brilliant young libertine, though “a young Lord of many good parts,” loved his pleasures too well. “I looke at home very narrowly to his drinking and abroad to his borrowing”, Marcombes had reported to the Earl. Moreover, both the boys had had smallpox in Genoa; but he had brought them both safely back to Stalbridge in time to join their brother Dungarvan’s troop of horse in the Scottish engagement; and it must have been with a sigh of relief that he turned his attention to the two younger boys, Frank and Robyn.

On the 24th of October, Francis Boyle was married to Mrs. Elizabeth Killigrew, in the King’s Chapel of Whitehall. The King gave the lady away with his own hand, and a royal feast in Court was made for the young couple. The King and Queen were both present; and the old Earl and three of his daughters (probably Lady Barrymore, Lady Katharine Jones, and Lady Mary Boyle) sat at the royal table, “amongst all the great Lords and Ladies.” The King himself “took the bride out to dance....”

And four days later, “to render this joy as short as it was great,”[77] Frank was packed off to France with Robyn and M. Marcombes. Having kissed their Majesties’ hands, the boys took a “differing farewell of all their friends.” The bridegroom was “exceedingly afflicted” to have to leave his little new-made wife; but the spiritay Robyn was on tip-toe of excitement at the thought of foreign travel and adventure. On October 28, 1639, they set out with their governor and two French servants from the House of the Savoy. So far the sweet-spirited Frank had done everything that was expected of him; but there was a scene at parting. For the bride was to be left behind in the Savoy under the Earl of Cork’s care, with the unruly Lady Mary as her “chamber-fellow.” And so unwilling was Frank to tear himself away that the old Earl was incensed; and Frank, in those last troubled moments of leave-taking, forgot to buckle on his sword—the sword, as well as the lady, was left behind!

CHAPTER VI
ROBYN GOES ABROAD

O ye windes of God, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and magnifie him for ever.

...

O ye fire and heat, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and magnifie him for ever.

...

O ye ice and snow, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and magnifie him for ever.

...

O ye lightnings and clouds, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and magnifie him for ever.

...

O ye Children of men, blesse ye the Lord: praise him and magnifie him for ever.

Benedicite omnia opera: Black Letter Prayer Book of 1636.

The little party—five in all—Francis and Robert, and M. Marcombes, with their two French servants, “took post for Rye in Sussex; and there, though the sea was rather rough, they hired a ship,” and “a prosperous puff of wind did safely, by next morning, blow them into France.”[78] They were a day and night at sea, and “a little tossed att night”; they had escaped the perils of the deep and of “yᵉ Donkirks”; and after stopping for a short refreshment at Dieppe, they set off towards Rouen and Paris.[79] They enjoyed the company of several French gentlemen on the road, of which they were glad; for a robbery had been “freshly committed in a wood” between Rouen and Paris, through which the travellers would be obliged to pass by night. Marcombes sensibly observed that the very next day after the robbery would be the very safest time to ride through the wood; and accordingly they continued their journey. At Rouen, Robyn was fascinated by the great floating bridge, which rose and fell with the tide water; and in one of his “pretty conceits,” such as had so amused Sir Henry Wotton at Eton, the boy compared this bridge at Rouen to the “vain amorists of outward greatnesse, whose spirits resent” (i.e. rise and fall with) “all the flouds and ebbs of that fortune it is built on.” And this so soon after Frank’s gay wedding in Whitehall!

Arrived in Paris on November 4, unmolested by brigands on their journey, Marcombes and the two boys spent some days in “that vast chaos of a city,” where they were shown most of the “varieties,” and met several English friends—among them one whom M. Marcombes heartily disliked, Frank’s new brother-in-law, Tom Killigrew, with the honeyed tongue, brother of the little bride who had been left behind in the House of the Savoy. They also called on the English Ambassador; but the great event of their visit to Paris has been described in Marcombes’s first letter to the Earl.[80]

Mr. Francis, he says, had been so troubled at the moment of his departure from the Savoy on account of his father’s anger against him, that he had quite forgotten where he had put his own sword and the case of pistols which the Earl had given the boys; and Marcombes had been obliged, when they arrived at Paris, to buy them “a kaise of pistolles a piece”, not only because of the dangerous state of the roads in France (witness the robbery freshly committed in a wood), but because it was “yᵉ mode” in France for every gentleman to ride with pistols; and people would “Laugh att” the Earl’s hopeful sons if they were without them. A sword also had been bought for Mr. Francis, and “when Mr. Robert saw it he did so earnestly desire me to buy him one, because his was out of fashion, that I could not refuse him that small request.”

They left Paris, with their new swords and pistols, a little company, “all well-horsed,” numbering some twenty altogether, and including two delightful “Polonian” Princes, who were “Princes by virtue and education as well as birth.” It was a nine days’ journey to Lyons, and on the way they rested, among other places, at Moulins, which the future experimentalist remembered for its “fine tweezes.” But romance was at this time nearer to the boy’s heart than chemistry; their way had lain through a part of the French Arcadia, “the pleasant Pays de Forest, where the Marquis d’Urfé had laid the scene of the adventures and amours of that Astrea with whom so many gallants are still in love, long after both his and her decease.”[81]

Lyons itself, where they stayed for a time, seemed to Robert Boyle “a town of great resort and trading, but fitter for the residence of merchants than of gentlemen.” They crossed the mountains that had formerly belonged to the Duke of Savoy, but were now in the territory of the French king, and they saw the Rhone in its narrowest part, between the rocks, “where it is no such large stride to stand on both his banks”; and after three days’ journey from Lyons, they reached Geneva, a little Commonwealth whose quick and steady prosperity under the “reformed religion” had made it the theme “not only of discourse but of some degree of wonder.” There, for nearly two years, the boys were to board with M. Marcombes and his wife and family, and to find themselves in a little ready-made circle of friends; for Barrymore and Kynalmeaky had been there together, and boarded at the Villa Diodati. Philip Burlamachy, the former Lord Mayor of London, who did so much business with the Earl of Cork, and who, it will be remembered, had recommended Marcombes to the Earl, belonged to Geneva, and was related by marriage to the Diodati family there; and Mr. Diodato Diodati, the banker, and Dr. John Diodati, the famous Italian Protestant preacher, were among the chief Genevan residents. “The church government,” wrote John Evelyn about Geneva, only a year or two later, “is severely Presbyterian, after the discipline of Calvin and Beza, who set it up; but nothing so rigid as either our Scots or English sectaries of that denomination.”

Geneva was, as Marcombes had pointed out to the Earl when he took the boys there, not only a very convenient place for himself—for his home and family were there—but “by reason of the pure air and the notable Strangers always passing through it, and the conveniences for all kinds of Learning there, a very good place for the two boys to be educated in.” They would be among those who though “farr from puritanisme” were very orthodox and religious men, and they would be in no danger from conversation with “Jesuits, friars, priests, or any persons ill-affected to their religion, king or state.” In a word, Frank and Robyn were to be bred in a commonwealth of educated toleration; and its fine influences were to remain with Robert Boyle—who lived there a little longer than his brother—all through his life.

From time to time, Marcombes wrote comfortable letters to the Earl in London. Supplies of money had, so far, come regularly; but as yet no letters had arrived from the Earl of Cork, who was, as will be seen later, beset by family cares and public anxieties. Marcombes and the boys had settled down to regular lessons at set hours. The lessons were to include rhetoric and logic, arithmetic and Euclid, geography, the doctrine of the spheres and globe, and fortification. They were to take lessons with a fencing-master and a dancing-master, and they played at mall and tennis—this last a sport that Robert Boyle “ever passionately loved.” And they read together in a “voluminous but excellent work” called Le Monde; but above all Robyn, if not Frank, was indulged in the reading of romances, which not only “extreamely diverted” him, but also taught him French. And as they talked no English, but “all and allwayes French,” Robert became very soon “perfect” in the French tongue, while Frank could “express himself in all companies.”[82]

Marcombes was evidently very proud of having a second batch of the Earl of Cork’s sons put under his care; and Frank and Robyn proved pupils more to his taste than Kynalmeaky and Broghill had been. For one thing, they had come to him fresh from school; and he found the very young bridegroom and the younger philosopher, “noble, virtuous, discreet and disciplinable.” “I think”, he wrote to the Earl, “I neede not much Rhetorike for to persuade your Lordship that Mr. Robert Loves his booke with all his heart.” And Robert also danced extremely well; and so anxious was he to excel in fencing, that the good-natured Marcombes was “almost afraid yᵗ he should have left a quarell unperfect in England.” As for Frank, he was taking to his lessons with a “facilitie and passion” that surprised Marcombes, seeing that the boy had “tasted a little drope of yᵉ Libertinage of yᵉ Court.” Francis had been well provided with clothes in London; but Master Robert had been furnished in Geneva with a complete black satin suit, the cloak lined with plush; and Marcombes gave the boys every month “a piece yᵉ value of very neare two pounds sterlings for their passe time.”

That first winter in Geneva was an exceptionally cold one, and a great deal of snow had fallen “on yᵉ grounde.” The Governour’s letters to the Earl reported the boys to be growing apace. Mr. Francis’s legs and arms were considerably bigger than when he left England. The mountain air and the dancing and fencing were doing both boys good, though Mr. Robert still preferred sitting by himself, “with some book of history or other”—the romances are not mentioned—and required some persuasion “to playe at tennisse and to goe about.” He was, however, in excellent health. “I never saw him handsomer,” wrote Marcombes to the Earl; “for although he growes so much, yet he is very fatt and his cheeks as red as vermilion.” The frosty air had brought them “to such a stomacke that your Lordship should take a great pleasure to see them feed.

“I doe not give them Daintys,” he wrote: “but I assure your Lordship that they have allwayes good bred and Good wine, good beef and mouton, thrice a week, good capons and good fish, constantly disches of fruit and a Good piece of cheese: all kind of cleane linen twice and thrice a weeke, and a Constant fire in their chamber, where they have a good bedd for them and another for their men.”

Marcombes describes in detail the order of their days in the Genevan household. Every morning during their first months in Geneva he taught them rhetoric and Latin; and after dinner they read two chapters of the Old Testament—with “expositions” from Marcombes on those points they did not understand; and before supper they read Roman history in French, and repeated “yᵉ catechisme of Calvin with yᵉ most orthodox exposition” of difficult points; and after supper they read two chapters of the New Testament. And they said their prayers morning and evening, and twice a week they went to church. “There is, my Lord,” ended Marcombes, with a little flourish of self-satisfaction, “a Compendium of our employment!”

But all these months no answers to their various letters had come from the Earl in London. They had left London on October 28, and it was apparently the middle of February before the boys heard from their father; and then two packets of his long-expected letters, both written in January, arrived together. The formal, reverential little letters which the boys were in the habit of penning to the Earl were letters chiefly remarkable for their beginnings and endings. They usually began “My most honoured Lord and Father,” and ended with some such peroration, as “with my dayly prayers to God for your Lordship’s long life, health and happiness, and with the desire to be esteemed all my life, My Lord, your most dutiful and obedient Son and humblest Servant.”

A modern reader would scarcely credit, from such a peroration, the existence of a deep natural affection; and there was certainly not the kind of untrammelled love of the modern child for the modern parent. And yet the ornate solemnity of these little seventeenth-century letters only cloaked the tender humanity beneath. It was but a literary form; and under it, in spite of the foster-parentage of babyhood, the subservience of youth, and the rigour of parental authority, the strong human love was there in the seventeenth century as now. When the long-expected packets arrived at M. Marcombes’s house in Geneva, and the boys gathered about their governour to receive their father’s letters, so overjoyed and excited was the “Spiritay Robyn” that his hesitation of speech—which had almost disappeared—returned in full force; and for some minutes he stammered and stuttered so atrociously that Frank and Marcombes could scarcely understand what he was saying, and had much ado to “forbeare Laughing.”

And what was the Earl’s news? Much had been happening in London, both inside and outside the House of the Savoy, since October 1639; but evidently only an abridged edition reached Marcombes and the boys in Geneva.

Lady Barrymore had been very ill, but was recovering. Lady Dungarvan,[83] whose second little girl had died at Salisbury House, in London, before the boys left London, had a little son at last; but “lyttle Franck,” the Dublin-born daughter, remained the old Earl’s pet. The heir was born on November 17 in the House of the Savoy, and christened in the Savoy Chapel by the name of “Charles,” the King himself standing sponsor, while the Countess of Salisbury was godmother, and the other godfather was the Marquis of Hamilton. But the great news of all was the news of Kynalmeaky’s marriage—a very splendid marriage it had been—with the Lady Elizabeth Fielding, one of the ladies of the Queen’s privy chamber, and daughter of the Earl and Countess of Denbigh. Their other daughter was married to the Marquis of Hamilton, and the Countess of Denbigh herself was a sister of the King’s favourite, the murdered Buckingham.

The marriage of Lord Kynalmeaky and the Lady Elizabeth Fielding had been arranged under royal auspices. The King had dowered the lady, and the wedding, like Frank’s, had been in the Royal Chapel of Whitehall. The King had given away the bride, and “put about her neck” the Queen’s gift of a rich pearl necklace, “worth £1500.” There was much revelling, dancing and feasting afterwards, and the King and Queen “did the young couple all honour and grace.” The Earl of Cork, always a strange mixture of generosity and thrift, had supplied £100 for Kynalmeaky’s wedding garments, and lent him “my son Franck’s wedding shoes” for the occasion.

Broghill also was to be married. “Your friend Broghill,” the Earl wrote to Marcombes, “is in a fair way of being married to Mrs. Harrison, one of the Queen’s maids of honour, about whom a difference happened yesterday between Mr. Thomas Howard, the Earl of Berkshire’s son and him, which brought them into the field; but thanks be to God, Broghill came home without any hurt, and the other gentleman was not much harmed; and now they have clashed swords together they are grown good friends. I think in my next I shall advise you that my daughter Mary is nobly married, and that in the spring I shall send her husband to keep company with my sons in Geneva.”[84]

The old Earl, when he wrote to Marcombes in January 1640, did not guess the sequels to these two little romances. For though the wedding clothes were making, Broghill was never to marry Mrs. Harrison, whom he, like many other gallants, had “passionately loved.” On the contrary, it was Mr. Thomas Howard, “not much harmed,” who was to be the happy man; and the lady whom Broghill was presently to marry was the Lady Margaret Howard, the beautiful daughter of the Earl and Countess of Suffolk, and a cousin of Mr. Thomas Howard. The two young men had clashed swords to some purpose; but Lord Broghill’s marriage with Lady Margaret Howard comes into another chapter.

Nobody exactly knows who was the noble suitor that was to marry Mary Boyle and be packed off to Geneva like a schoolboy immediately afterwards. For Mary Boyle had once more expressed her “very high averseness and contradicon” to the Earl’s counsels and commands. She had again refused Mr. James Hamilton, though all her brothers and sisters and several of her brothers-in-law, and all her best friends—poor little unruly Mary!—“did entreat and persuade,” and the old Earl “did command.” Vanquished for once, the Earl of Cork had been in treaty with more than one other youthful suitor for Mary’s hand. But Mary Boyle has told her own story.[85] “Living so much at my ease,” she says, “I was unwilling to change my condition.” After Frank’s marriage, his wife Betty lived with the Earl in the House of the Savoy, where she and Mary Boyle became close friends and “chamber fellows.” Betty obtained “a great and ruling power” over Mary, “inticing her to spend” (as she did) “her time in seeing and reading plays and romances, and in exquisite and curious dressing.” Betty Boyle had many of the young gallants of the Court at her beck and call, and one of them was Mr. Charles Rich, second son of the Earl of Warwick. Charles Rich was “a very cheerful and handsome, well-bred and fashioned person, and being good company, was very acceptable to us all, and so became very intimate in our house, visiting us almost every day.” Charles Rich also had been in love with Mrs. Harrison, but not so deeply as to prevent his acting as Mr. Thomas Howard’s second in the duel; and after that for a time he had considered it only civil to absent himself from the House of the Savoy. When he did come again it was to transfer his attentions to the Lady Mary; and Frank’s wife played go-between. “A most diligent gallant to me,” says Mary of Charles Rich, many long years after their forbidden love-making and runaway marriage; “applying himself, when there were no other beholders in the room but my sister, to me; but if any other person came in he took no more than ordinary notice of me.” And every night when Mary laid her little unruly head upon the pillow she resolved that Charles Rich must be given his dismissal, and that Betty must be told never again to mention him to her as a husband. And somehow every morning it seemed impossible to carry out her resolution; and she made her toilet, and put on her most exquisite and curious dress, and looked the proud and charming little lady that she was.

But Marcombes and the boys in Geneva knew nothing of all this; and for that matter neither as yet did the old Earl. The noble suitor about whom he was in treaty when he wrote to Geneva was certainly not Charles Rich—who was only a second son, “with £1300 or £1400 a year at the most”; and who, if he dared to pay his court to the Earl of Cork’s youngest daughter, must do it clandestinely with the connivance of Betty Boyle.

The spring and summer of 1640 passed uneventfully in the Marcombes household. Spring and summer in Geneva; the peaceful little Calvinist town, basking under a hot sun and a blue sky; the bluer waters of the Lake with the big-winged boats upon it; the vivid greens of the middle distances, and the far-away mountain-peaks white with the everlasting snows! And the lessons went on as usual, the boys giving their governour “all yᵉ satisfaction of yᵉ worlde”.... “I would I was as able to teache as Mr. Robert is able to conceave and to Learne.” It is true that the witty and wicked Tom Killigrew came down on them from Paris, and favoured them with a little of his “sweet and delectable conversation”; but Marcombes told the Earl that he did not think Mr. Killigrew would stay long in Geneva, “which perhaps will be yᵉ better for your Sons.” When he did depart, he left with Marcombes a fine watch and some ruby buttons to be sent to his sister Betty in London. And the little household settled down again—rhetoric and logic to be succeeded by mathematics, history and geography, the chief points of religion, and more dancing-lessons. Mr. Francis was learning to vault. He and Marcombes had received the Sacrament at five o’clock on Easter morning; but Mr. Robert would not receive it, “excusing himself upon his yonge age,” though Marcombes assured the Earl he did not abstain “for want of good instruction upon yᵉ matter.” In June they had gone a little jaunt into the Savoy country. “We were two days abroad,” wrote Marcombes to the Earl, “and were never so merry in our lives.”

But were the boys so merry? Frank, influenced perhaps by Tom Killigrew and the letters which came from his little wife at home, was beginning to be restive, and begging his father to allow them to go on into Italy, and so be the sooner home again. And Robert Boyle?

It was in the very heat of that summer of 1640 that there happened to Robert Boyle “an accident which he always used to mention as the considerablest of his whole life.”

“To frame a right apprehension of this,” he says in his Philaretus, “you must understand that though his inclinations were ever virtuous, and his life free from scandal and inoffensive, yet had the piety he was master of already so diverted him from aspiring unto more, that Christ, who long had lain asleep in his conscience (as he once did in the ship) must now, as then, be waked by a storm.”[86]

About the dead of night, after a long, hot summer day, he had suddenly wakened to find himself in the midst of one of those thunderstorms so indescribably grand and terrible among the Alps. He “thought the earth would owe an ague to the air,” and every clap was both preceded and attended with flashes of lightning so frequent and so dazzling that he began to imagine them “the sallies of that fire that must consume the world.”[87]

The winds almost drowned the noise of the thunder. The rains almost quenched the flashes of lightning. The Day of Judgment seemed at hand; and the consideration of his “unpreparedness to welcome it, and the hideousness of being surprised by it in an unfit condition,” made the boy “resolve and vow that if his fears were that night disappointed, all his further additions to his life should be more religiously and watchfully employed. The morning came, and a serener cloudless sky returned, when he ratified his determination so solemnly that from that day he dated his conversion; renewing, now he was past danger, the vow he had made whilst he believed himself to be in it.”

Afterwards, Robyn blushed to remember that the vow had been made only in fear; but he comforted himself by thinking that “the more deliberate consecration of himself to piety had been made when the earth and sky had regained their equanimity, and with no less motive than that of its own excellence.” The hour of terror had been also the hour of realisation. This trembling child, already a student of Nature, had begun amidst the winds and lightnings to realise dimly the existence of Elemental Mysteries which made the whole world tremble too. And yet, did not even these atmospheric exacerbations flash and thunder out the command to praise Him and magnify Him for ever? Were not the deepest, most terrible of Elemental Mysteries but part of a Universal Benedicite?

CHAPTER VII
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,[88] 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”[89] 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,[90] 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.”[91] 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.”[92]

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.”[93]

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.”[94] 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”[95]. 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....”[96]

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.”[97]

“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.[98]

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”[99]—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.”[100]

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.”[101] 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.[102]

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.”[103]

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.[104] 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.[105]

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.[106]

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.”