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 20_s._ 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.