THE DEARE SQUIRE
“... When a Navigator suddenly spies an unknown Vessel afar
off, before he has hail’d her, he can scarcely, if at all,
conclude what he shall learn by her, and he may from a Ship
that he finds perhaps on some remoter coast of _Africa_, or the
_Indies_, meet with Informations concerning his own Country
and affairs; And thus sometimes a little Flower may point us
to the Sun, and by casting our eyes down to our feet, we may
in the water see those Stars that shine in the Firmament or
highest visible Heaven.”—ROBERT BOYLE: _Occasional Reflections
on Several Subjects_.
It was in March 1646 that Robert Boyle once more set out from London to
ride into Dorsetshire. The Manor of Stalbridge was to be his home for the
next five or six years.
What fate had overtaken the Earl’s choice dun mare that waited at Lismore
for Robyn’s home-coming? The old order had changed; and it was on a
borrowed courser, “none of the freest of his legs,” that Robert Boyle
made the journey. Lord Broghill was with him, and they had the company of
a States-Messenger, who was travelling the same way. The account of their
long ride, by Farnham and Winchester and over Salisbury Plain is a little
romance in itself.[132] The war was drawing to an end. The King was again
at Oxford:—it was not long before his escape, in disguise, to the Scots
at Newcastle. The new-modelled Army had very nearly completed its work
of conquest in the south-west. The Cavaliers were out between Egham and
Farnham, but the travellers dodged them.[133] Farnham was deserted—“all
the townsmen having gone to oppose the King’s Army.” Robert Boyle almost
lost himself in meditation, “invited by the coolness of the evening and
the freshness of the garden,” in which he walked up and down waiting for
his supper. The travellers supped, and retired quietly to bed; and it
was not till the dead of night that they were roused by a thundering at
the chamber door. Robyn slept in his clothes and stockings: “my usual
night-posture when I travel.” He produced his bilboa from under his
pillow, and a pistol from one of his holsters; his bows and arrows were
not far off. But it turned out to be only the town-constable with a group
of musketeers, in search of somebody else. “Away went my gentleman,”
wrote Robyn gaily to his sister, “in prosecution of his search; and I
even took my bows and arrows and went to sleep.”
They dined next day at Winchester, and lay that night at Salisbury; and
there Robyn overtook his trunks, which had been sent on in front of
him. In the middle of Salisbury Plain they were surrounded by a party
of horse, who would have searched them for “Malignant Letters” such as
“use to be about the King’s Picture in a Yellow-Boy.”[134] But the
States-Messenger carried them safely through, and they rode on, past
weary troops of foot, “poor pressed countrymen,” goaded on by the party
of horse. “Amongst them,” wrote Robert Boyle, “I saw one poor rogue,
lacqueyed by his wife, and carrying a child upon his shoulders.” Even
then, as now, “new models” leave much to be desired.
In spite of his bilboa and pistols, Robert Boyle hated the sight of war.
“Good God!” he wrote, “that reasonable creatures, that call themselves
Christians too, should delight in such an unnatural thing as war, where
cruelty at least becomes necessity....”
He reached Stalbridge in safety; but the weather had broken, and was
wretchedly cold. “We all suspect the almanac-maker of a mistake in
setting down March instead of January.” The bad weather kept him indoors,
and was “so drooping that it dulls me to all kinds of useful study.”
Even his country neighbours were prevented from making their usual
“visitations.” Robert Boyle was depressed: Stalbridge was not so lively
as London. “My stay here,” he says, “God willing, shall not be long.”
There were still troops in the neighbourhood, and the plague had
“begun to revive again”; there had been cases at Bristol, and at
Yeovil, only six miles off. Dorsetshire was suffering from “fits of the
Committee”;[135] and at the Manor itself there were many calls on the
Squire’s slender purse. This had for the time been replenished by one of
his brothers; and he was going to cut down some of his wood, to repay the
loan. He was arranging to make “my brother’s sixty trees bear him some
golden fruit”; but this was to be done by instalments—one third at May
Day next. And meantime he was trying to settle down to his “standish and
books”; but even writing did not come easily. “My Ethics,” he wrote to
his sister (of a little treatise he had begun, one of his first literary
attempts), “go very slowly on.”[136]
And the days must have passed slowly too. “I am grown so perfect a
villager, and live so removed,” runs a letter to Lady Ranelagh, “not
only from the roads, but from the very by-paths of intelligence, that to
entertain you with our country discourse, would have extremely puzzled
me, since your children have not the rickets nor the measles.”[137] He
was feeling the difficulties of his position, in being one of a family
so important to both political parties. “I have been forced to observe
a very great caution and exact evenness in my carriage, since I saw you
last,” he wrote to Marcombes in Geneva; “it being absolutely necessary
for the preservation of a person whom the unfortunate situation of his
fortune made obnoxious to the injuries of both parties and the protection
of neither.” And his money matters were still in disorder, as indeed were
everybody else’s. Out of his Irish estates he had not received “the worth
of a farthing.”
The roguery of Tom Murray at Stalbridge, however, had had one good
result: it had obliged Robyn to make “further discoveries into æconomical
knowledge” than he would otherwise have done. He had turned Tom Murray
away, “to let him know that I could do my business very well without
him”; and then, towards the end of 1646, Tom Murray was to be taken
back: “Having attained to a knowledge of my own small fortune beyond
the possibility of being cheated, I am likely to make use of him again,
to show my father’s servants that I wish no hurt to the man, but to the
knave.”
In October 1646, Robert Boyle was back on a visit to London, perhaps to
see the great Essex buried “in kingly state.” On that day, the solemn
pageant just over, he sat down to write a letter—a wonderful letter
for a boy not yet twenty—to Marcombes in Geneva. He wrote of the long
procession of four hundred officers, “not one so low as a captain,” the
House of Peers, the House of Commons, the City-Fathers, and the Assembly
of Divines, that had followed Essex to the grave. But to Robert Boyle the
“pageants of sorrow” had “eaten up the reality”; the “care of the blaze”
had “diverted men from mourning.”[138]
His letter to his old governour gives a vivid picture of the political
conditions of the time. In England there was “not one Malignant garrison
untaken”; in Wales “but two or three rocky places held out for the
King.” The Scots were about to deliver up their garrisons and return
into their own country, the Parliament having agreed to compound with
them for all their arrears. A sum of £300,000 had been agreed upon, but
“the first payment is yet in debate.” The King was still at Newcastle,
“both discontenting and discontented”; and the Scots would be obliged
to make up their minds how to “dispose of his person,” which the Houses
had “voted to remain in the disposition of both Houses of Parliament.”
People were flattering themselves with hopes of a speedy settlement of
things, but Robert Boyle was not so hopeful. He has, he says, “always
looked upon Sin as the chief incendiary of this war”; and yet, “by
careful experience,” he has observed that the war has “only multiplied
and heightened those sins to which it owes its being.” And his simile
is characteristic: “As water and ice,” he adds, “which by a reciprocal
generation beget one another.”
In Ireland the state of things was no more hopeful than nearer home. The
news of Lord Ormonde’s peace must have reached Geneva; but Robert Boyle
explains carefully to Marcombes the respective attitudes of the three
parties;—the Protestant English proper; the “mere natives,” who hoped by
rebellion “to exchange the Throne of England for St. Peter’s Chair,” or
“to shake off the English yoke for that of some Catholic foreign prince”;
and, thirdly, the Catholic Lords of the English Pale—“so we call the
counties about Dublin”—who are “by manners and inclination Irish, though
English by descent.”
In Inchiquin’s absence from Munster, Broghill, Governor of Youghal,
had been left in full command.[139] Robyn is very proud of Broghill,
not only as a gallant soldier, but as “none of the least wits of the
time.” Broghill had come to England to appeal for troops and supplies
for Munster;[140] but Parliament was so slow in granting them that “the
physic will not get thither before the patient be dead.”
And then Robert Boyle gives Marcombes a piece of his mind about the sects
and sectaries:—
“The Presbyterian Government is at last settled (though I can scarce
think it will prove long lived) after the great opposition of many, and
to their no less dislike.” But many people had begun to think it was high
time to “put a restraint upon the spreading impostures of the sectaries,”
who had made London their general rendezvous. The City “entertains at
present no less than 200 several opinions in point of religion.” Some
have been “digged out of the graves,” where they had been long condemned
to lie buried; others have been “newly fashioned in the forge of their
own brains”; most are but “new editions of old errors.”
“If the truth be anywhere to be found,” wrote the young philosopher, “it
is here sought so many several ways that one or other must needs light
upon it.” But he speaks with respect of that kind of tolerance that tries
to see even in impostures “glimpses and manifestations of obscure or
formerly concealed truths,” and that would not “aggravate very venial
errors into dangerous and damnable heresies.”
“The Parliament is now upon an ordinance for the punishment of many of
these supposed errors; but since their belief of their contrary truths
is confessedly a work of divine revelation, why a man should be hanged
because it has not yet pleased God to give him his Spirit, I confess I
am yet to understand....”
After this the letter goes off into domestic and personal matters.
Robert Boyle had been in company with the Archbishop of Armagh[141]—“our
Irish St. Austin”[142]—and had been telling him of Marcombes’s French
translation of a sermon of the Archbishop’s, “The Mystery of the
Incarnation.” “He seemed very willing that you should publish it, upon
the assurance I gave him of the fidelity of its translation.” Lady
Ranelagh and Broghill were anxious to find Marcombes some more pupils;
but all the great families of England were at present “standing at a
gaze.” Whether peace or war be the outcome of events, “it is probable
that a good many of them will make visits to foreign climates.”[143]
Robyn himself had seen a variety of fortune since he and his governour
had parted: “plenty and want, danger and safety, sickness and health,
trouble and ease.” He had actually once been a prisoner in London, “on
some groundless suspicion,” but had quickly got off with advantage. At
Stalbridge he was pursuing his studies by fits and starts. “Divers little
essays, both in prose and verse, I have taken the pains to scribble
upon several subjects”; and as soon as he can “lick them into some less
imperfect shape” he will send some of the “least bad” to Marcombes in
Geneva. He tells Marcombes about his study of ethics, and his desire to
“call them down from the brain into the breast, and from the school to
the house”; and he mentions his little treatise that goes on so slowly.
“The other humane studies I apply myself to are natural philosophy,
the mechanics, and husbandry, according to the principles of our new
philosophical college, that values no knowledge but as it hath a tendency
to use.” And he begs Marcombes to inquire for him into the “ways of
husbandry” practised about Geneva; “and when you intend for England, to
bring along with you what good receipts or good books of any of those
subjects you can procure, which will make you extremely welcome to our
_invisible college_.”
The “Invisible College,” the embryo of the Royal Society of London,
was then already in existence. Since some time in 1645, a little club
composed of a few “worthy persons inquisitive into natural philosophy”
had been holding its weekly meetings; sometimes in the lodging of the
physician, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, in Wood Street, Cheapside; sometimes
at a “convenient place” in Cheapside itself,—in fact, the Bull’s Head
Tavern; and sometimes in Gresham College, near by. Its originator
was Theodore Haak, who, like Hartlib, was a naturalised German; and
among its first members were Dr. John Wallis, clerk to the Westminster
Assembly; Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and
brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell; Foster, the professor of astronomy at
Gresham College; the young William Petty; Dr. Goddard himself; and one
or two other “doctors in physic” more or less well known in London. They
had their telescopes and microscopes and their attendant apothecaries,
etc.; and, “precluding theology and state-affairs,” they wandered at
will among the sciences,—the physics and chemics, and mechanics and
magnetics,—“as then cultivated at home and abroad.” Hartlib was from
the very first connected with this club: “The Invisible College of his
imagination seems to have been that enlarged future association of all
earnest spirits for the prosecution of real and fruitful knowledge of
which this club might be the symbol and promise.”[144]
His early letters to Robert Boyle at Stalbridge are full of the subjects
under discussion. And there is no doubt that it was to a great extent
the fascination of these weekly meetings in Wood Street, and the company
he met there, that drew Robert Boyle so often to London and kept him in
London as long as he could manage to stay there.
“I have been every day these two months,” he wrote to his friend Francis
Tallents, in February 1647,[145] “upon visiting my own ruined cottage
in the country; but it is such a labyrinth, this London, that all my
diligence could never yet find a way out on’t ... the best on’t is, that
the corner-stones of the _invisible_, or as they term themselves, the
_philosophical college_, do now and then honour me with their company
... men of so capacious and searching spirits, that school-philosophy is
but the lowest region of their knowledge; and yet, though ambitious to
lead the way to any generous design, of so humble and tractable a genius,
as they disdain not to be directed to the meanest, so he can but plead
reason for his opinion; persons that endeavour to put narrow-mindedness
out of countenance by the practice of so extensive a charity that it
reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than a universal
goodwill can content it. And indeed they are so apprehensive of the want
of good employment, that they take the whole body of mankind for their
care.”
And he concludes his panegyric with the recital of their chiefest fault,
“which is very incident to almost all good things; and that is, that
there is not enough of them.”
The London outside this pleasant coterie was not so congenial to Robert
Boyle. Above all, the sects and sectaries were his abomination. They were
coming over from Amsterdam like so many bills of exchange; they were like
“diurnals,” eagerly read, and then in a day or two torn up as not worth
keeping. They were “mushrooms of last night’s coming up.” “If any man
have lost his religion,” he wrote, “let him repair to London, and I’ll
warrant him he shall find it: I had almost said too, and if any man has
a religion, let him but come hither now, and he shall go near to lose
it.... For my part, I shall always pray God to give us _the unity of the
Spirit in the bond of peace_....”[146]
One immediate outcome of these club meetings in Wood Street was a little
scheme, evidently aided and abetted by Lady Ranelagh, which filled all
Robyn’s thoughts on his return to Stalbridge in the spring of 1647. He
was going to set up a laboratory of his own, in the empty manor-house. It
was a scheme not easy to carry out in those days; and his first efforts
were to result in dire failure. “That great earthen furnace,” he wrote
to Lady Ranelagh, “whose conveying hither has taken up so much of my
care, and concerning which I made bold very lately to trouble you, since
I last did so, has been brought to my hands crumbled into as many pieces
as we into sects; and all the fine experiments and castles in the air I
had built upon its safe arrival have felt the fate of its foundation.
Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the philosopher’s stone,
I have been so unlucky in my first attempts at chemistry. My limbecks,
recipients, and other glasses have escaped indeed the misfortune of
their incendiary, but are now, through the miscarriage of that grand
implement of Vulcan, as useless to me as good parts to salvation without
the fire of zeal. Seriously, Madam, after all the pains I have taken,
and the precautions I have used, to prevent this furnace the disasters
of its predecessors, to have it transported a thousand miles by land
that I may after all this receive it broken, is a defeat that nothing
could recompense, but that rare lesson it teaches me, how brittle that
happiness is that we build upon earth.”[147]
These words breathe the first hint of a melancholy in Robert Boyle’s
life, the causes of which—though he did his best to conceal and conquer
them—are not far to seek.
As early as 1646, when he was not yet twenty, there comes into his
letters the note of physical suffering. Like many scholars and thinkers,
Robert Boyle was very sensitive about physical pain, and the chances
of infection and disease. As a boy at Eton, it will be remembered, the
“potion” held more than ordinary terrors for the spiritay Robyn. Perhaps
he had heard about little Hodge, who had died at Deptford, after so
dutifully swallowing the powder of unicorns’ horns. But even if not,
he must have seen the same thing happening all about him; he must have
known well enough that medical treatment in his day was steeped in the
optimism of blackest ignorance. The plasters and powders and potions
and purges with which the Faculty “wrought” so boldly on every disease,
and the weird and melodramatic endings which were their usual results,
had given Robyn “a perfect aversion to all physick.” He believed that,
in most cases, it “did but exasperate the disease.” Had not he seen
“life itself almost disgorged together with a potion”? It was his own
childish experiences that inclined this experimentalist, all his life,
to “apprehend more from the physician than the disease,” and set him to
apply himself to the study of physic “that he might have the less need of
them that profess it.” And so, though he was to count among his friends
of the Philosophical College and elsewhere the most learned and eminent
physicians of his time, and as he grew older came to trusting very humbly
and gratefully to the skill of more than one of them, Robert Boyle’s
tendency, all through life, was to simplify medical treatment, and as far
as possible to doctor himself with the aid of an intelligent and obedient
“apothecary.”
If he had known that he was to live till he was sixty-five, and that the
five-and-forty years that lay before him were to be years of more or less
invalidism and suffering! But the long future was veiled; at twenty, the
months in front of him were all-important. And he must have known as
early as 1646 that his attacks of pain and “ague fits” were caused by
the existence of renal calculus—the “gravel of the kidneys” of his day.
He knew of it when he wrote the letter to Hartlib (a fellow sufferer) in
which he gratefully thanks good Mrs. Hartlib for a “receipt” or “sanative
remedy,” which she had sent him in one of her husband’s letters, against
a disease that Robyn calls “so cruel in its tortures and so fatal in its
catastrophe.”[148]
Stalbridge, with this fact realised, was no longer the home of glad
possibilities it may at first have promised to be; which the old Earl, in
leaving it to his Benjamin, had certainly intended it to be. But Robert
Boyle was making the best of it. “As for me,” he wrote to Hartlib—“during
my confinement to this melancholy solitude, I often divert myself at
leisure moments in trying such experiments as the unfurnishedness of the
place and the present distractedness of my mind will permit me.” Friends
and neighbours came about him; these were certain “young knights” and
young Churchmen and “travellers out of France,” who appear under fancy
names in his _Reflections_: Eusebius, “a Dr. of Divinity,” Eugenius and
Genorio, “Travellers and fine Gentlemen,” and Lindamor, “a learned youth,
both well born and well bred.” If they were not actually his guests at
Stalbridge, Robyn “took pleasure to imagine” them to “be present with me
at the occasion”; and poetic licence has suggested that Lindamor may have
been Robyn himself, in some of his moods, though he still figures in some
of them as Philaretus and speaks in others of them of “Mr. Boyle”—even
while he is using also the first personal pronoun. The Earl of Bristol’s
family at Sherborne Castle were pleasant neighbours, and the family of
Sir Thomas Mallet, at Poynington—Sir Thomas and his Lady, and Mr. John
Mallet their son, and the young lady whom John Mallet was to marry—“the
fair young lady you are happy in,” as Robert Boyle called her.
Robyn’s own family—scattered and busy as they were—came to see him
sometimes. He says himself that his sister, Lady Ranelagh, was “almost
always with him during his sickness”;[149] and his brother Frank seems
to have been a welcome and cheerful guest at Stalbridge; while Robyn
himself rode over now and then to Marston Bigot, when “dear Broghill”
and Lady Pegg were there. But his laboratory and his “standish” and
books, and especially his correspondence with Hartlib in London, were
a great resource. It was at this time that he was writing the little
essays he spoke of to Marcombes. Among them was his _Free Discourse
against Customary Swearing_, which in manuscript pleased his relations,
and was dedicated to his sister Kildare.[150] And it was then also that
he was writing his _Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects_, which
so delighted Lady Ranelagh.[151] They afford many glimpses into Robert
Boyle’s life during the years spent at Stalbridge. He is to be seen in
them as the young Squire of gentle, studious tastes and simple habits,
sitting, book in hand, over the slow-burning wood fire in the parlour
with the carved stone chimney-piece “fair and graceful in all respects”;
or riding his horse along the up-and-down-hill Dorset lanes; angling by
the side of a stream, or walking in his own meadows, with his spaniel
at his heels: philosophising as he goes; observing all things always;
dreaming, perhaps, a little too—within bounds. The very titles of his
_Reflections_ are an epitome of the life of those Stalbridge days. The
spaniel is a constant companion, in weal and woe:—
_Upon my Spaniel’s carefulness not to lose me in a Strange place_,
and _Upon his manner of giving Meat to his Dogg_, are two of these
_Reflections_.[152]
There is nothing very original in Robert Boyle’s method of feeding a dog,
except that it carries with it his inevitable moral conclusions; but the
youthful essay hands down the picture of master and dog to posterity:—
“For but observe this Dogg. I hold him out meat, and my inviting Voice
loudly encourages and invites him to take it. ’Tis held indeed higher
than he can leap, and yet, if he leap not at it, I do not give it him;
but if he do, I let it fall half-way into his mouth.”
Spaniels have fetched their masters’ gloves from time immemorial; but
none quite so graphically as Robert Boyle’s:—[153]
“How importunate is he to be imployed about bringing me this glove!
And with what Clamours and how many fawnings does he court me to fling
it him! I never saw him so eager for a piece of Meat as I find him
for a Glove. And yet he knows it is no Food for him, nor is it Hunger
that creates his Longings for it; for now I have cast it him, he does
nothing else with it but (with a kind of Pride to be sent for it, and a
satisfaction which his glad gestures make appear so great, that the very
use of Speech would not enable him to express it better) brings it me
back again....”
In the mere names of these _Reflections_ may be traced the manner in
which he spent his days: _Upon distilling the Spirit of Roses in a
Limbick_: _Upon two very miserable Beggars begging together by the
Highway_: _Upon the Sight of a Windmill standing still_: _Upon his
Coaches being stopt in a narrow Lane_: _Upon the Sight of a fair Milkmaid
Singing to her Cow_:[154] _Upon Talking to an Echo_: _Upon a Child that
Cri’d for the Stars_;—in which last are quoted Waller’s lines—
“Thus in a starry night fond children cry
For the rich spangles which adorn the sky.”
One of the _Reflections_, _Upon the Eating of Oysters_, possesses a
secondary interest: it is supposed to have suggested to Swift his
_Gulliver’s Travels_. Like others of the _Reflections_, it is written in
the form of conversation between _Eugenius_ and _Lindamor_.[155]
“EUG.—You put me in mind of a fancy of your Friend Mr. Boyle, who was
saying, that he had thoughts of making a short Romantick story, where
the Scene should be laid in some Island of the Southern Ocean, govern’d
by some such rational Laws and Customs as those of _Utopia_ or the _New
Atlantis_, and in the Country he would introduce an Observing Native,
that upon his return home from his Travels made in Europe should give an
account of our Countries and manners under feign’d Names, and frequently
intimate in his Relations (or in his Answers to Questions that should be
made him) the reasons of his wondring to find our Customs so extravagant,
and differing from those of his Country....”
The _Reflections_ show Robert Boyle as he lived and thought and felt;
as he rose early on a “fair morning,” and looked up at the “variously
coloured clouds,” and listened to the lark’s song overhead; as he picked
up a horse-shoe, watched boys at their games, or tried a prismatical
or triangular glass; as he fished with a “counterfeit fly” along the
river-banks, or let the fish run away with the more homely bait; as he
looked at his own shadow cast in the face of a pool, or his own face in a
looking-glass with a rich frame. What an opportunity was the magnetical
needle of a sundial, or the use of a burning-glass, or the drinking of
water out of the brims of one’s own hat! What food for reflection was a
syrup made of violets, or a glow-worm included in a crystal viol! What
thoughts fluttered about the tail of a paper kite flown on a windy day,
or about a lanthorn and candle carried by on a dark and windy night! And
Robert Boyle did once shoot something, as may be seen from the title of
one particular _Reflection_:
“Killing a Crow (out of a window) in a Hog’s trough, and immediately
tracing the ensuing _Reflection_ with a Pen made of one of his
Quills....”
Very early in his life there was, alas! the least touch of the
valetudinary about the “deare Squire.” It was not all fair mornings and
larks and roses. One section of his little book of essays is devoted to
“the accidents of an ague,” and deals with the invasion, the hot and cold
fits, the letting of blood, the taking of physick, the syrups and other
sweet things sent by the doctor, the want of sleep, the telling of the
strokes of an ill-going clock in the night, the thief in the candle, the
danger of death, the fear of relapse; and at the end, when Robyn is his
own man again—the “reviewing and tacking together the several bills filed
up in the Apothecary’s Shop.”
In the summer of 1647, Robert Boyle had been ill; but in the autumn
he paid some visits among his relations, and early in 1648 he went to
Holland, “partly to visit the country,” and partly to help his brother
Frank conduct his brilliant wife home from The Hague—a mission that must
have required all Frank’s sweetness of spirit and all Robyn’s philosophy.
In the summer of 1648, Robert Boyle was again in London;—this time, Lady
Ranelagh had taken rooms for him in St. James’s.