ROBERT BOYLE
[Illustration: 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
CHAP. PAGE
I HIS BIRTH AND FAMILY 1
II AN IRISH CHILDHOOD 15
III SCHOOLDAYS AT ETON 34
IV THE MANOR OF STALBRIDGE 55
V THE HOUSE OF THE SAVOY 70
VI ROBYN GOES ABROAD 85
VII THE DEBACLE 99
VIII IN ENGLAND AGAIN 122
IX THE DEARE SQUIRE 140
X A KIND OF ELYSIUM 159
XI HERMETIC THOUGHTS 170
XII OXFORD: A LEARNED JUNTO 189
XIII POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY 206
XIV THE RESTORATION AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY 226
XV THE PLAGUE AND THE FIRE 246
XVI A NEW LONDON 267
XVII THE HOUSE IN PALL MALL 282
INDEX 311
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.”