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!