A KIND OF ELYSIUM
“This blessed plot, this Earth, this Realme, this England,
This Nurse, this teeming wombe of Royall Kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous for their birth,
Renowned for their deeds, as farre from home,
For Christian seruice, and true Chiualrie,
As is the sepulcher in stubborne Iury
Of the World’s ransome, blessed _Marie’s_ Sonne.
This Land of such deere soules, this deere-deere Land,
Deere for her reputation through the world....”
Shakespeare’s _Richard the Second_ (First Folio, 1623).
Shakespeare was a little out of date in the summer of 1648, when Robert
Boyle came to town from Stalbridge to the lodging in St. James’s taken
for him by his sister Ranelagh. “This England” was then still in the
throes of civil war; was, in fact, at the moment plunged in what is
known as the Second Civil War.[156] When Robert Boyle arrived in town,
everybody was talking of the risings in the English counties (Dorsetshire
itself among them), and the revolt of the fleet off the Kentish coast.
The King was in the Isle of Wight: since Robert Boyle had written his
letter to Marcombes in October 1646, the King had been bandied about from
the Scots to the English, from the Parliament to the Army, from Holmby
House to Hampton Court; and now, having escaped into the Isle of Wight
only to find himself virtually a prisoner in Carisbrooke Castle, he was
yet in secret negotiation with Ormonde in France, and with Hamilton and
the Royalists in Scotland. Just at this time, “in spite of Argyle and the
Scottish Clergy”, a Royalist army was marching into England. The Queen
and Prince and the Royalist Court at St. Germains were on tip-toe of
expectation; while the young Duke of York had escaped from London abroad,
disguised in girl’s clothes.[157] Ormonde was with the Court in France,
and Inchiquin in Ireland had declared himself a Royalist. There had been
also successive Royalist risings in Wales and in the English counties.
Of the Parliamentary Party, Lambert was in the north, Cromwell in Wales;
and Fairfax and Ireton—the Kentish rising crushed—were now besieging
Colchester.
And what was Robert Boyle doing during this London visit? After all,
London was in the circumstances the most civilised place to be in.
Robert Boyle was listening to the Earl of Warwick’s very full account
“from his own mouth” of his recent negotiations with the rebellious
fleet;—the Earl of Warwick, who was Mary Boyle’s father-in-law. And then,
when the Earl of Warwick himself was hurrying off to Portsmouth to deal
with the “disobedient ships” there, Robert Boyle was supping quietly
with the ladies of the Warwick family at Warwick House in Holborn, and
hearing from them all the latest gossip about the Essex rising, and the
behaviour of his brother-in-law Charles Rich. By their account, Charles
Rich had been the “grand agitator in this Essex business.” And the young
Squire was much amused to hear also that the newly chosen Admiral of the
revolting ships was none other than one Kemb, a minister,—“a mad, witty
fellow,” Robert Boyle calls him, “whom I have often been very merry with,
his wife being sister to the honest red-nosed blade that waits now on
me.”[158]
Times had changed, indeed, since England was the royal throne of Kings,
another Eden, and a demi-paradise. No doubt the Invisibles met as usual
in Wood Street, and Robert Boyle was often in congenial company with
Hartlib and the others there or at Gresham College. Young Lord Barrymore
was no longer with Milton in the Barbican. Milton had given up his
school, and he and his wife and their one little girl were living in High
Holborn—very near to Warwick House—and Milton was now leading a literary
life, but keenly watching the doings of Parliament and Army; it was some
months before he was made Secretary of Foreign Tongues to the Council of
State. The young philosopher in St. James’s, who had his own ideals, was
watching them too, as keenly; though exactly how Robert Boyle felt about
the trend of events it is very difficult to guess. His “exact evenness
of carriage” never deserted him: to use his own words, “The point of a
mariner’s needle shows its inclination to the Pole both by its wavering
and rest.” Royalists, Parliament-men, Army-men, Churchmen, Presbyterians,
and Independents,—he was in the midst of them all, bound to many of them
by ties of friendship and kinship, but steadfastly going his own way.
If he was in the company of Mary’s father-in-law, the Earl of Warwick,
he was also in Archbishop Usher’s study, listening to a very different
kind of exposition, and he was writing affectionately to “dear Broghill”
in his difficult position in Munster. If he spoke of “Our Masters” at
Westminster, he spoke also of “Our Brethren” across the Borders. On the
whole, like Milton in Holborn, but from quite another standpoint, Robert
Boyle seems to have fixed, if not his faith, his expectations, upon the
New Model. “Victory,” he wrote, “is as obedient as the very Parliament to
the Army.”[159]
And meantime Lady Ranelagh was doing her best to push her young brother’s
literary interests, and make his London visit a pleasant one. She had
been showing one of his manuscripts to her friend the Countess of
Monmouth. The Countess was the daughter of an old acquaintance of the
Earl of Cork, Lionel Cranfield, the clever merchant-adventurer, Lord
Mayor of London, High Treasurer, and first, Earl of Middlesex. It may be
remembered that Marcombes had been tutor in the Middlesex family before
he took Kynalmeaky and Broghill abroad. The Countess had read and liked
the manuscript, and had sent the young Squire a flattering message and
invitation in a note to his sister Ranelagh. And it was with more than
ordinary pleasure that Robert Boyle sat down to indite his little letter
of reply, a model of seventeenth-century epistolary homage, to the
Countess of Monmouth at Moore Park—
“Madam,” so runs the letter: “in your ladyship’s (imparted to me by my
sister Ranelagh) I find myself so confounded with civilities, that if
she that blessed me with the sight of your letter had not (for her own
discharge) exacted of me this acknowledgment of my having seen it, I must
confess I should scarce have ventured to return a verbal answer, deterred
by the impossibility of writing without wronging a resentment[160] which
I can express as little as I deserved the praises and the favours that
have produced it.”
And so on. The Countess had suggested the publication of his pamphlet.
But she did more: she had invited the young Squire to pay a visit to
Moore Park, and to bring his manuscript in his pocket—
“As for my pamphlet, Madam, had it expected the glory of entertaining
you, it should certainly have appeared in a less careless dress ... yet
my just sense of the smallness of the accession the Press can be to the
honour of your ladyship’s perusal makes me decline its publication. And
as that paper cannot have either a higher applause or nobler end than
the being liked and practised at Moore Park, so if it have either anyway
diverted your ladyship, or had the least influence upon my lord, I have
reached my desires and gone beyond my hopes. However, Madam, I am richly
rewarded for writing such a book by being enjoyned to fetch it where
you are. So welcome a command is very unlikely to be disobeyed; but my
obedience, Madam, must be paid to the order, not the motive. The fetching
of my book may be one effect of my remove, but not the errand of it; for
sure, Madam, your modesty cannot be so injurious, both to yourself and
me, as to persuade you that any inferior (that is, other) motive can be
looked upon by me as an invitation to a journey which will bless me with
so great a happiness as that of your ladyship’s conversation, and give
me the opportunity of assuring you, better than my present haste and my
disorder will now permit me, in how transcendent a degree I am, Madam,
your Ladyship’s humble and obliged servant, Robert Boyle.”
It was a particularly cold, wet July[161]; the confusions of the country
seemed to have infected the very air; and those people who were “wont
to make fires, not against winter but against cold,” had “generally
displac’d the florid and the verdant Ornaments in their chimneys,” where
“Vulcan” was more proper than “Flora.”[162]
But it must be taken for granted that the sun shone out one day, not long
after the folding and dispatching of this letter to the Countess; and
that Robert Boyle and his horse did find their way by the old coach-road
from London into Hertfordshire. And when they came to the little town of
Rickmansworth, lying sleepily in the valley, clustered about the huge
Church in its midst, horse and rider must have turned upwards to the
left, under spreading oak-trees. The “common way” still runs upwards
through the Park.
For Moore Park, that once belonged to Shakespeare’s Earl of Pembroke,
“stands on the side of a hill; but not very steep.” Sir William Temple
has described it, as it was in that day, when the Monmouth family owned
it, “the sweetest place, I think, that I have ever seen in my life,
either before or since, at home or abroad.” The length of the house lay
upon the breadth of the garden. The great parlour, where the Countess
would receive her guest, opened on the middle of a terraced gravel-walk,
set with standard laurels, which looked like orange-trees out of bloom.
There were fountains and statues and summer-houses in that garden—“the
perfectest figure of a garden”—and shady cloisters, upon arches of stone,
clustered over with vines. And beyond lay a wilderness, which was always
in the shade. Robert Boyle must have been a happy man that day, as he
alighted before those portals with his manuscript in his pocket.
Henry Cary, second Earl of Monmouth, was a Royalist peer: his younger
brother, Thomas Cary, was the faithful groom of the bedchamber to
Charles I. They were sons of the old Robert—the man who, the moment
Queen Elizabeth was dead, had started on his record ride from London to
Edinburgh to be the first to tell James VI that he was King of England.
The first Earl and his Countess—a Trevanion—lay buried in Rickmansworth
Church; and the second Earl and his Countess were, at the time of
Robert Boyle’s visit, living quietly at Moore Park, the Earl having of
late withdrawn into retirement among his books and manuscripts.[163]
For he was a scholar, skilled in modern languages, and a writer—though
not one of his manuscripts remains. And he and the Countess were still
passionately mourning the death of Lionel, their elder son and heir, who
had fallen in the battle of Marston Moor. The second son was married, in
London[164]; and the family at Moore Park must have consisted entirely
of daughters, though the eldest daughter had been married for some years
to Mary Boyle’s rejected suitor, Mr. James Hamilton.[165] Mr. Hamilton
had married the Lady Anne Cary a few weeks after the Lady Mary Boyle’s
runaway marriage with Charles Rich. But not any of the other daughters at
Moore Park—and there was a bevy of them—were married, or to be married,
for many years to come; which, in those days of early marriages, is a
matter for some wonder, especially as it is known, on Evelyn’s authority,
that one at least of these daughters was “beautifull and ingenious.”[166]
However pleasant the visit to Moore Park may have been, it was soon
over. Early in August Robert Boyle was staying with his sister Mary at
the Earl of Warwick’s house of Leeze, in Essex, and there finishing his
treatise on “Seraphick Love.” It purported to be written “by one young
gentleman to another”—to that _Lindamor_, in fact, the “learned youth
both well-born and well-bred,” who makes the fourth of the little quartet
in the _Reflections_. The manuscript was handed, “almost sheet by sheet,”
as it was written, to the enthusiastic Mary; and then, having been, after
the fashion of the day, circulated among a favoured few, it was laid
carefully by, among the young Squire’s other papers. And in September he
was back again at Stalbridge.
The last months of that fateful year must have been, in many a quiet
English manor, the most dismal and depressing ever lived through. In
his seclusion, with pen and ink, limbecks and recipients, Robert Boyle
was to employ the months as best he could. To his Manor, set among
its autumn orchards, reached by its stone-paved way between rows of
elm-trees, there must have come from week to week, by friend or messenger
or weekly news-sheet, the straggling tidings of those events that one
after the other were hurrying the Sovereign to his doom. The second
civil war had been trampled out; Cromwell’s great battle of Preston had
been fought and Hamilton taken prisoner, while Robert Boyle was still
at “delicious Leeze,” perfecting his treatise on “Seraphick Love.”
And before he left Leeze there had come the news of the surrender of
Colchester to Fairfax, and the shooting of the two Royalist leaders. In
September the Parliamentary Commissioners were in the Isle of Wight; and
through the shortening days of October and November even Dorsetshire and
its “bye-paths of intelligence” must have been stirred by the doings
of Parliament, the “high and fierce” debate that followed the Army
Remonstrance, and the _coup d’état_ of the King’s abduction from the Isle
of Wight to the melancholy Hurst Castle on the Hampshire mainland. And
then—Fairfax was at Whitehall; the Army was in possession of London.
December came, and with it the last grim struggle of Parliament and Army
for the disposition of the person of the Sovereign. The King was brought
to Windsor; and, Christmas over, Lords and Commons were in the last
hand-grips. The King’s trial had begun: the trial of “Charles Stuart,
King of England,” in Westminster Hall, where Strafford had been tried
and sentenced seven years before. How soon did the news of the King’s
sentence reach the Manor of Stalbridge? “This Court doth adjudge that the
said Charles Stuart, as a Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy,
shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.”
How soon did Robert Boyle hear the details of those last weeks and days
and hours, with all the little traits, so kingly and so human, as the
unhappy royal delinquent blindly approached his doom? How soon did some
pale-faced horseman bring the news to Stalbridge of that last scene of
all?—the King walking in procession through the Park, from St. James’s to
Whitehall; his stepping out of that Whitehall window on to the scaffold
hung with black; the block and axe, and men in black masks; the companies
of horse and foot below in the street; and from Charing Cross on the one
side to Westminster Abbey on the other, the close-packed crowds of the
populace, waiting....
“The axe descended, severing the head from the body at one blow. There
was a vast shudder through the mob, and then a universal groan.”[167]
* * * * *
Lord Broghill had given up his post in Munster under the Parliament;
and he and Lady Broghill and their young children were living quietly
at Marston Bigot. There Broghill amused himself by writing his
_Parthenissa_; and there, in the spring of 1649, Robert Boyle paid
a visit to his brother and Lady Pegg. He, too, was busy with his
manuscripts, and in pleasant enough correspondence with the Invisibles
in London. But in August he was at Bath. A letter to Lady Ranelagh,
dated from Bath, August 2, “late at night,” was written in by no means a
light-hearted vein. His “native disposition” had made him shy, he said,
of disclosing his afflictions where he could not expect their redress.
He was “too proud to seek a relief in the being thought to need it.”
Moreover, he had been ill again, of “a quotidian ague.” His manuscript
on “Public Spiritedness” had been laid aside, and his “vulcanian feats”
abandoned.
“The melancholy which some have been pleased to misrepresent to you as
the cause of my distempers is certainly much more the effect of them.” He
had only just arrived at Bath, having been carried there on a litter; and
there he was intending to stay till he could leave it on horseback. The
physicians had led him to hope he might be able to crawl to London before
very long.
But the end of August found him back in his laboratory among the
orchards—not very pleasantly occupied in “drawing,” for his own use, “a
quintessence of wormwood.” He had been too much occupied of late even to
write to his sister Ranelagh. There is in his letter the least little
suggestion that the events of this last year—personal, it may be, as well
as political—had kept even this brother and sister apart; but it was for
the time only.
“For Vulcan,” he wrote, “has so transported and bewitched me, that,
as the delights I taste in it make me fancy my laboratory a kind of
_Elysium_, so as if the threshold of it possessed the quality the poets
ascribed to that _Lethe_ their fictions made men taste of before their
entrance into those seats of bliss, I there forget my standish and my
books, and almost all things, but the unchangeable resolution I have made
of continuing till death, Sister, your
“R. B.”[168]