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 3_s._ 9_d._
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.”