POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY
“Died that arch rebell Oliver Cromwell, cal’d Protector.”—EVELYN’S
_Diary_, Sept. 3, 1658.
“And if the common charity allowed to dead men be exercised
towards him, in burying his faults in the grave with himself,
and keeping alive the memory of his virtues and great aims
and actions, he will be allowed to have his place amongst
the worthiest of men, ... I doubt his loss will be a growing
affliction upon these nations, and that we shall learn to value
him more by missing him—a perverseness of our nature that
teaches us, in every condition wherein we are, therewith to be
discontent, by undervaluing what we have, and overvaluing what
we have lost. I confess his performances reached not the making
good of his professions; but I doubt his performances may go
beyond the professions of those who may come after him.”—LADY
RANELAGH to LORD BROGHILL, from Youghal, Sept. 17, 1658.
“O human glory vain! O death! O wings!
O worthless world! O transitory things!
Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed
That still, though dead, greater than death he laid,
And in his altered face you something feign
That threatens Death he yet will live again.”
ANDREW MARVELL, “A Poem upon the Death
of his Late Highness the Lord Protector.”
“My Lady Molkin,” Charles Rich’s wife, now lived almost always at
delicious Leeze. For Mary had long ago become devout, and was surrounded
by the Earl of Warwick’s chaplains. The story of her conversion has been
told by herself.[212] When she was scarcely more than one-and-twenty,
her little son, her only child—“which I then doated on with great
fondness”—had fallen dangerously ill. In her agony of mind, Mary, like
her brother Robyn in the thunderstorm, had made a vow to God. If he would
restore her child to her, she would become “a new creature.” The little
boy recovered, and Mary “began to find in myselfe a greate desire to go
into the country, which I never remember before to have had, thinking
it allways the saddest thing that could be when we were to remove.” It
was indeed a great change for the little lady who had lived in “constant
crowds of company” ever since she had left the care of Lady Clayton
in Cork. Even after her marriage with Charles Rich and her separation
from Frank’s frivolous little wife Betty, Mary had remained “stedfastly
set against being a Puritan.” But after hearing the great Usher preach
“against Plays,” she had given up going to see them acted, and her sister
Ranelagh had encouraged her in her new course of life. Moreover, Dr.
Walker, the household chaplain at Leeze, had preached “very awakingly and
warmly”; and though some of the Warwick family were inclined to laugh at
her, Mary pursued her own way, stealing from them into the wilderness at
Leeze, and keeping to her quiet life of reading, meditation, and prayer.
She was, however, at Warwick House in Holborn towards the end of
1648, after Robert Boyle had finished writing his _Seraphick Love_ at
Leeze; and in Holborn Mary fell ill of the smallpox. Lady Ranelagh
was then at her house in Pall Mall. She had been fortunate enough to
escape smallpox, but she was not afraid to sit with her little sister,
who had been isolated in Warwick House. The great Dr. Wright was in
attendance—“Cromwell’s Physician,” the man afterwards chosen by the
Council to be sent, with Dr. Bates and an apothecary, to consult with
Dr. Goddard when Cromwell was so ill in Edinburgh. Mary was scarcely
convalescent when the news was brought to her sick-room of “that
barbarous and unheard-of wicked action of beheading Charles I.”[213]
A year or two later, while Robert Boyle was in Ireland, Mary fell ill
again; this time “strangely and extremely ill” at delicious Leeze.
Poor Charles Rich once more sent post-haste for Lady Ranelagh, who set
out from London the very next morning. She found My Lady Molkin in an
extraordinary condition, to all appearances well enough, but, “her
disease lying more in stupidness than pain,” she was “no more joyed” to
see her sister. It was “a mortifying encounter”; Mary was “the carcase
of a friend,” her “soul gone as to any rational use she had of it”; her
“kindness was dead.”
Nerves were little understood in those days. The Essex doctor diagnosed
Mary’s illness as “a spice of the palsy.” The Warwick family talked of
“fumes of the spleen.” Dr. Wright held a more modern opinion, which
he confided to Lady Ranelagh; but he agreed with the opinion of the
country doctor that the disease was “very inward and hidden”; and Lady
Ranelagh wrote to her brother Robert in Ireland that they were “all going
blindfold towards a cure.”[214] Charles Rich and Mary’s mother-in-law had
been “very obligingly careful of, and kind to, her”; and as soon as Mary
was well enough Lady Ranelagh carried her off to London, where, under
her sister’s care and Dr. Wright’s, she was once more restored to health.
Lady Ranelagh was, in Mary’s own words, “the most useful and best friend
for soul and body that ever any person, I think, had.”[215]
Somebody else thought so too. In 1655 Lady Ranelagh had known Milton
for ten years. For the last six years Milton had been Latin Secretary
to the Council of State; and he was now living in the “pretty garden
house” in Petty France, Westminster, next door to my Lord Scudamore,
and not far from Lady Ranelagh’s house in the Old Mall. If only as the
great Republican pamphleteer, one of the chief State officials under
the Protectorate, Milton was a very eminent and important man, visited
by many “persons of quality” besides Lady Ranelagh, and by all the
learned foreigners of note who passed through London. Some of the old
Hartlib-Durie circle of the Aldersgate and Barbican days, with Milton’s
pupils, Henry Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner, came about Milton almost
daily; and among his more recent friends was the Agent for Bremen, Mr.
Henry Oldenburg. Durie himself, who was Keeper of the library at St.
James’s, was a near neighbour. Milton’s wife, poor Mary Powell, and
their little son had been about three years dead; and the widower had
been left with three little girls, the youngest but a month or two old
at the mother’s death. In 1655 they were nine, seven, and three years
old, and were being brought up, in strange, motherless fashion, in the
house in Petty France; while Milton himself, with the help of readers
and amanuenses, pursued his work for the Council through all the
difficulties of his blindness. For Milton was now quite blind.[216]
It was to visit this Milton—the Latin Secretary, blind among his
books—that Lady Ranelagh used so frequently to knock at the door of the
pretty garden-house in Petty France. Her boy, Dick Jones, who was now
fifteen, had, like his cousin young Lord Barrymore, been one of Milton’s
pupils, and was probably at this very time taking his private lessons
with Mr. Milton in preparation for a year at Oxford—to be followed by
a foreign tour—with Henry Oldenburg as his tutor. And Lady Ranelagh
herself, fired, perhaps, by her brother Robert’s study of Oriental
languages, and under Milton’s influence, was taking lessons in Hebrew of
a Scottish divine who lodged in Holborn.
A year later—some time in October 1656—Dick Jones and Henry Oldenburg
were settled at Oxford, where Dick’s cousins, the Earl of Cork’s two
sons, were already at the University,[217] with their tutor, Peter
du Moulin, in attendance on them; and all five were basking in the
personality of the virtuoso-uncle, Mr. Robert Boyle. Henry Oldenburg and
Peter du Moulin were both to become _protégés_ of Robert Boyle.[218]
Henry Oldenburg especially was to link himself with the Invisibles and
the future Royal Society; and it was probably in the Oxford laboratory
that Henry Oldenburg won Robert Boyle’s admiration, and that Dick Jones
first learned to dabble in experimental science and earned for himself
his uncle’s _sobriquet_, “Pyrophilus.”[219]
Meantime, Henry Oldenburg and Dick Jones had kept up a correspondence
with Mr. Milton in London, and Milton had written kindly to his
“well-beloved Richard.” Milton’s letters to Dick Jones are in Latin,
and there is more than a touch of the pedagogue in their tone. It seems
likely, in the light of after events, that the brilliant Dick had already
caused his mother some uneasiness of mind, and that she hoped much from
this year at Oxford, with her brother Robert Boyle as mentor, before Dick
and Henry Oldenburg set out on their foreign tour. In October 1656 Lady
Ranelagh was herself in Oxford: she had taken it on her way to Ireland,
whither she was bound on a long visit, with her daughters, servants, and
eight horses.[220] And she had brought with her to Oxford a letter from
Mr. Milton to her son Dick. The blind secretary, left behind in London,
was missing Lady Ranelagh’s frequent kindly knock at the door of the
garden-house in Petty France—
“And now your most excellent mother,” Milton wrote to Dick Jones at
Oxford, “on her way to Ireland, whose departure ought to be a matter of
no ordinary regret to both of us (for to me also she has stood in the
place of all kith and kin), carries you this letter herself.”
As a matter of fact Milton must have been thinking of his own domestic
affairs when he wrote to Dick Jones, for he was to marry his second wife,
Katharine Woodcock, shortly after Lady Ranelagh’s departure. But the
words “to me also” carry a special meaning; for Lord Ranelagh, between
whom and his wife there had long been estrangement, can have taken little
part in his son’s upbringing. The mother had been left to bring up her
children—to stand for them, as for Milton, in the place of “all kith and
kin.” And, after all, Dick was not a good boy—he was but the son of his
father.[221]
Lord Broghill had been quartered lately in Edinburgh. He had remained
in Ireland for some time after Cromwell had re-conquered it. He had sat
in Cromwell’s Parliament of 1654 as Member for Cork, and he was Member
for Cork and Edinburgh in the Parliament of 1656. In 1655 he had been
appointed President of Council (Head of the Civil Establishment of the
new Government in Scotland), with his headquarters in Edinburgh; and
according to Baillie he was more popular in Scotland than “all the
English that ever were among us.” But the Scottish atmosphere was not to
Broghill’s liking, and in 1657 he was back in London, where he was to
prove himself one of the most energetic of Cromwell’s supporters in the
last stage of the Protectorate.
His philosopher-brother, all this time, had held himself studiously
aloof from political parties and “affairs.” Cromwell was approaching his
zenith when Robert Boyle went to Oxford. The great warship, newly built
in the spring of 1655—a ship of 1000 tons burthen, carrying 96 brass
guns—had for the figurehead in her prow Oliver on horseback, trampling
six nations underfoot. Scot, Irishman, Dutchman, Frenchman, Spaniard, and
Englishman, in their several national garbs, lay under his horse’s hoofs.
“A Fame,” wrote Evelyn in his _Diary_, after inspecting the ship as she
lay in the dock, “held a laurel over his insulting head: the word, _God
with us_.”
Poor Evelyn, bereft of his Church services, lamenting that there was
“no more notice taken of Christmas Day in our Churches,” smuggling a
Clergyman into his house at Deptford to administer the Sacrament, or
stealing up to receive it in Dr. Wild’s lodging in Fleet Street, could
yet not resist going to look at the new warship in the dock; to hear Dr.
Wilkins preach before the Lord Mayor in St. Paul’s, a very common-sense
sermon on the superiority of obedience to sacrifice; to stare at the
proud and melancholy Quakers who were hunger-striking in prison; and even
to peep into Whitehall itself, now “very glorious and well-furnished” for
the Protector. It was no doubt Evelyn’s many-sidedness that made life
bearable in what to him was “a dangerous and treacherous time.” Ships
and prisons and persecuted clergy, rare jewels, miniatures, “achates
and intalias,” carved wood, other people’s houses and gardens and
picture-galleries, the “incomparable pieces” that he loved to look at,
and the incomparable performances of violin and theorbo and human voice
that he loved to listen to—these were the things that made Evelyn happy,
and his _Diary_ so fascinating. Above all, perhaps, his passion was for
“curiosities.” He was almost as “universally curious” as Dr. Wilkins of
Wadham himself. Those were red-letter days when he could examine a clock,
whose sole balance was a crystal ball sliding on parallel wires, or a
_Terrella_, showing all the magnetical deviations, or an elixir, or a
perspective, or a way-wiser, or the charring of sea-coal; or when he had
a glimpse into the “elaboratory” of an aristocratic friend, or a gossip
about all and sundry with worthy Mr. Hartlib or Dr. Wilkins himself. It
may have been Wilkins or it may have been Hartlib who, in the spring of
1656, brought Boyle and Evelyn together.[222] The good Hartlib was a
friend of both. Robert Boyle was then in London; but whether or no to
hear Wilkins’s sermon in St. Paul’s on the Superiority of Conformity
to Sacrifice, is not recorded. In April, at any rate, the acquaintance
between Evelyn and Boyle had begun, and Boyle and Wilkins were guests
at a little dinner-party given by Evelyn at Sayes Court. It was then
that Evelyn presented Wilkins with his “rare burning-glass,” in return,
probably, for the beehive that Wilkins had given him during that visit to
Oxford in 1654. And after dinner, the little company adjourned to look at
Colonel Blount’s “new-invented plows.”
The friendship so pleasantly begun was to last for nearly forty years.
It is to be remembered that Robert Boyle’s mother and Mrs. Evelyn’s
family[223] were related; that Sayes Court had belonged to the Brownes,
and had come to Evelyn through his wife; and that little Hodge, Robert
Boyle’s eldest brother, had many years before died at Sayes Court,
and been buried in Deptford Church. Boyle and Evelyn were men of very
different natures; but they had memories, sympathies, and friends in
common. Their intercourse soon grew “reciprocal and familiar”; and it is
to Evelyn we owe the finest and most intimate description that exists
of Robert Boyle.[224] Boyle was to return to Experimental Philosophy at
Oxford, where the lion and the lamb proverbially lay down together then
as now;—the lion, as it has been wittily said, sometimes with the lamb in
its inside. And Evelyn and his family at Sayes Court were to live on as
pleasantly as possible, “the times considered.”
In 1657 the Protectorate was in its last stage. In June, Cromwell was
“his Highness,” a monarch in arbitrariness and splendour, with all the
formalities of purple velvet, Bible, sword, and sceptre—everything,
indeed, except the Crown, and a good many things that the Crown itself
might not have had. Lord Broghill, back in London, and one of Cromwell’s
House of Lords, had been one of the prime movers in the _Petition and
Advice_, which pressed Cromwell to accept the Kingship; and report says,
that when that failed, Broghill’s “well-armed head” was filled with an
even bolder project, an alliance between Cromwell’s youngest daughter
Frances and Charles II. This, too, came to nothing; and in November 1657
Cromwell’s daughter Frances was married to the old Earl of Warwick’s
grandson, son of Charles Rich’s elder brother. This boy died in the
sickly spring of 1658, four months after his wedding; and the old Earl
of Warwick’s death in April left Charles Rich heir-presumptive to the
Earldom of Warwick.
The winter of 1657-8 had been, according to Evelyn, the severest winter
that any man alive had known in England. “The crowes feete were frozen
to their prey, Islands of ice inclos’d both fish and fowl frozen....” It
was on Christmas Day that Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn went into London to receive
the Communion in Exeter Chapel, and that the Chapel was surrounded by
soldiers and the communicants surprised and taken prisoners—the soldiers’
muskets pointed at them as they knelt before the Altar. The Evelyns
were allowed to go home; and a month after this memorable Communion, in
January 1658, they lost their little prodigy of an eldest son—just five
years old—who died of a quartan ague. “Such a child I never saw: For such
a child I blesse God in whose bosome he is!” He was buried in Deptford
Church; and a week or two later their youngest child followed him, “after
7 weeks languishing at nurse, breeding teeth, and ending in a dropsie.”
The season was still very cold and sickly, and in May a public Fast was
ordered “to avert an epidemical sicknesse, very mortal this Spring.”
But in spite of the Fast, June came in with an extraordinary storm of
hail and rain, “the season as cold as winter, the wind Northerly nere 6
moneths.” It may have been in consequence of this epidemic, following
on an unhealthy winter, that Hartlib was even more than usually curious
about the ingredients of certain _arcana_—or medical “secrets” as he
always called them. He mentioned one, in particular, in a letter to
Robert Boyle, dated February 2, 1658. Hartlib himself had been a sufferer
from the “extremity of the frosty weather.”
It appears from Hartlib’s letter to Boyle that Mr. Milton had in his
possession a “secret” which Hartlib, and apparently Boyle also, was at
this time anxious to obtain. “I shall not be wanting,” wrote Hartlib to
Boyle, “to obtain that secret which hath been imparted to Mr. Milton.
It may be the public gentleman, that sent it unto him, will let me
have a copy, in case the other should not come off readily with the
communication of it. But if yours[225] would ask it from Mr. Milton, I am
confident he would not deny it.”
If by “yours” Hartlib meant Lady Ranelagh, that lady was still in
Ireland, on difficult domestic business of her own, and far away from the
garden-house in Petty France; and Dick Jones and Henry Oldenburg were on
their “peregrination” abroad. Whether or no Mr. Milton was induced to
part with his prescription remains unrelated. Hartlib’s letter to Boyle
was written on February 2, and only a few days later Milton’s second
wife died—the baby girl she had borne him in October was to live on into
March. That spring, in his darkness and solitude, Milton’s mind was
turning once more to his scheme of a _Paradise Lost_. It was not exactly
a time for Mr. Hartlib to trouble him about a prescription.
The news of Cromwell’s illness fell like a thunderbolt on the nation. The
people about him had known that all through that cold, unhealthy summer
of 1658 the burdens of State, heavy as they were, were not for Cromwell
so hard to bear as the sight of a much-loved daughter’s sufferings. The
Cromwell family were gathered round Lady Claypole’s couch when she died
at Hampton Court on August 6. Cromwell himself was ill, even then, though
for another fortnight his illness was as much as possible concealed, and
he was able intermittently to attend to State business, and on some days
even to show himself, riding with his Life Guards in the Park at Hampton
Court. On August 21 it became known that the Protector was very ill of an
ague, which his Physicians called a “bastard tertian”; but on the 24th
they were able to remove their patient from Hampton Court to Whitehall,
where again, between the ague-fits, till August 28, the Iron Man
transacted public business. On that day the fits of ague changed their
character; the “bastard tertian” had changed to “double tertian”—with
two very exhausting ague-fits in the twenty-four hours: His Highness’s
strength was failing. Next day, Sunday the 29th, prayers were offered up
in the Churches.
“And then came that extraordinary Monday (August 30, 1658) which lovers
of coincidence have taken care to remember as the day of most tremendous
hurricane that ever blew over London and England. From morning to night
the wind raged and howled, emptying the streets, unroofing houses,
tearing up trees in the parks, foundering ships at sea, and taking even
Flanders and the coasts of France within its angry whirl. The storm was
felt, within England, as far as Lincolnshire, where, in the vicinity of
an old manor house, a boy of fifteen years of age, named Isaac Newton,
was turning it to account, as he afterwards remembered, by jumping first
with the wind, and then against it, and computing its force by the
difference of the distances....”[226]
Cromwell died on September 3, and the news had reached Ireland by
September 17. On September 17 Lady Ranelagh, in Youghal, wrote the long
letter to her brother Lord Broghill, an extract from which stands at
the head of this chapter. The man who a few days before “shooke all
Europe by his fame and forces” was dead; and with his death the face
of British history was changed. In Cromwell Lady Ranelagh herself had
lost a generous and powerful friend; and in the last part of her letter
she reverts, sadly enough, to what she calls “the penny half-penny of
my own particular.” For Cromwell had helped her not only with her Irish
estates, but with her recalcitrant husband. “His now Highness,” she says
of Richard Cromwell, “seems not to me so proper a person to summon my
lord[227] or to deal with him in such an affair as his father did, from
whose authority and severety against such practices as my lord’s are, I
thought the utmost would be done that either persuasions or advice would
have effected upon my lord ... soe, as there being little hopes left of
bringing him to reason either here or there, I thinke my present work is
to seeke a maintenance for me and my children without him.”
She had consented, she says, some time before, to “retyre” among her own
friends from “my lord’s oppressions”; and she can now “remove lightly”,
not having much wealth to gather together. Owing to “the unreasonableness
of my lord” her children “are neither like to be preferred in marriage
nor prepared for the narrow condition their father’s obstinacy condemns
them to live in.” She wishes people to know that “I left not my lord
upon humour, but necessety, and that in soe doing I sought privacy and
submitted to scarsety than persued a croud or designed aboundance to
myselfe.”[228]
The friendship between Boyle and Evelyn was at this time ripening in
letters—letters about books, and the shapes of fruits, and recipes for
varnish, and many other things—which passed between Evelyn at Sayes
Court, and Boyle at Oxford. In one of these letters[229] Evelyn imparted
to Boyle his pet scheme of a resident “philosophic mathematic college,”
to be built some five-and-twenty miles out of London, where “some
gentlemen whose geniuses are greatly suitable might form themselves into
a Society,” and live “somewhat after the manner of Carthusians.” Evelyn
had planned it out to the smallest detail—the thirty or forty acres
of land to be acquired, with “tall wood” and upland pasture, “sweetly
irrigated.” The house itself was to be a “goodly pavilion” containing
gallery, refectory, library, withdrawing-room, kitchen, larders,
service-rooms and what-not, all “well and nobly furnished”; and opposite
to the house “towards the wood” was to be erected a “pretty chapel”
and “six apartments or cells for members of the Society.” And then
Evelyn, prince of gardeners, goes on to describe the “elaboratory” in
the grounds, with “a repository for rarities and things of nature”; the
aviary, dove-house, physic-garden, kitchen-garden, plantation of orchard
fruit, stalls for one or two horses, and conservatory for tender plants.
The philosophers were to be allowed to play at bowls and chess, and
walk—presumably two and two—in the garden paths. And Mrs. Evelyn, paragon
of wives, had cheerfully consented to go and live there, and allow her
husband to be a Carthusian, while she, located apparently in solitary
glory in the Pavilion, reigned over the refectory and the domestic staff.
This last was to consist of “a chaplain well qualified,” an “ancient
woman to dress the meat,” a man to buy provisions and keep the garden and
stable, and a boy to run about doing everything else.
Robert Boyle must have smiled as he read Evelyn’s enthusiastic letter,
culminating in its pseudo-Carthusian _Orders_—
“At six in summer prayers in chapel. To study till half-an-hour after
eleven. Dinner in the refectory till one. Retire till four. Then called
to conversation (if the weather invite) abroad, else in the refectory.
This never omitted but in case of sickness. Prayers at seven. To bed
at nine. In the winter the same, with some abatements for the hours;
because the nights are tedious, and the evening’s conversation more
agreeable. This in the refectory. All Play interdicted, _sans_ bowls,
chess, etc. Everyone to cultivate his own garden. One month in spring a
course in the elaboratory on vegetables, etc. In the winter a month on
other experiments. Every man to have a key of the elaboratory, pavilion,
library, repository, etc. Weekly fast. Communion once every fortnight, or
month, at least. No stranger to be easily admitted to visit any of the
Society, but upon certain days weekly, and that only after dinner....
Every Thursday shall be a music-meeting at conversation hours....”
And once a week every philosopher was to “render a public account of his
studies,” and every man was to wear “a decent habit or uniform”; and,
oh bliss! “one month in the year may be spent in London, or any of the
Universities, or in a perambulation for the public benefit.” How the
Philosophers would prance!
This was on September 3, 1659, the first anniversary of Cromwell’s
death. A week or two later, Evelyn wrote again.[230] He had been reading
Boyle’s _Seraphick Love_, probably in manuscript, since it did not
appear in print till 1660. The “incomparable book” seemed to Evelyn to
have been “indicted with a pen snatched from the wing of a seraphim.” “I
extremely loved you before,” he wrote, “but my heart is infinitely knit
to you now.” And yet, the pity of it! There is a cry of appeal in poor
Evelyn’s letter to his friend, and there is no further mention of any
Carthusian College. The little cells, and the chess, and the bowls, and
the philosophers walking two and two along the garden paths are for the
moment forgotten; and in their places comes a shadowy procession of fair
and virtuous women—
“What think you, Sir, of _Alceste_, that ran into the funeral pile of her
husband? The goodness of _Aemilia_, the chastity of _Lucretia_, the faith
of _Furia_, of _Portia_?... Take away this love, and the whole earth is
but a desert!”
As for St. Paul’s remarks, Evelyn thinks very little of them; they
were all very well for an itinerant apostle in a time of persecution,
but “he confesses he had no command from the Lord.” And what pious and
studious wives some of the philosophers have had! Take, for example,
_Pudentilla_, who “held the lamp to her husband’s lucubrations.” And good
Madame Grotius, and others; while, not to go abroad, in London itself,
“the committee-chambers, the parliament-lobby,[231] are sad but evident
testimonies of the patience, and the address, the love, and the constancy
of those gentle creatures....”
Is there no hope that Mr. Boyle may relent, and realise that if Love be
virtuous it is seraphic? At least he may remember that in paradise, and
in the ark, “there were but couples there, and every creature was in
love.”
* * * * *
Manuscript copies of _Seraphick Love_ were evidently in circulation.
A pirated and incorrect copy had been offered for sale to a London
stationer, who had communicated with Mr. Boyle; and Boyle, who had
long refused, was persuaded at last to publish it himself. It may
have been in proof-form that Evelyn, in September 1659, read the
little treatise—written eleven years before by a very sad young man at
delicious Leeze. Eleven years had not altered Mr. Boyle’s convictions;
and _Seraphick Love_ was to be one of the most notable, if the least
characteristic, publications of the “Annus Mirabilis.”[232]
Meantime the year 1659 was to be memorable to another branch of the
Boyle family. On May 30, Charles Rich’s elder brother, who had so
recently succeeded to the earldom, died; and Charles Rich and my Lady
Molkin found themselves Earl and Countess of Warwick. Five days before,
Richard Cromwell had abdicated. The months of Richard’s Protectorate
had been, as all the world knows, months of dire confusion. With one
man’s death, the whole fabric of a great Republic had crumbled into
dust. Lady Ranelagh came back to her house in the Mall to find a very
different London from the London she had left three years before. “The
nation,” Evelyn has recorded in his _Diary_, “was in extreame confusion
and unsettl’d, between the Armies and the Sectaries.” “Several Pretenders
and Parties,” he wrote, “strive for the Government: all anarchy and
confusion; Lord, have mercy on us!”[233]
As long as it was possible, Lord Broghill seems to have supported
Richard’s protectorate;[234] but before Richard’s abdication Broghill and
Coote were back in Ireland, and Broghill in command of Munster and Coote
in Connaught were both working for Charles II’s return. Early in 1660,
Monk in England and Coote and Broghill in Ireland were in communication
with the Royal Orphan. Broghill’s letter to Charles was carried to Breda
by the sweet-spirited Frank: it is said to have been in Charles’s hands
before Monk’s emissary had done his work.[235] Broghill’s proposal,
however, that Charles should land in Ireland proved superfluous. Monk’s
offers were eagerly accepted. Sir Edward Montagu—afterwards Earl of
Sandwich—was sent to The Hague to bring back Charles II; and on May
8, 1660, “after a most bloudy and unreasonable rebellion of neere 20
years,”[236] Charles II was proclaimed in London. On May 29, he was
there. Amid the blare of trumpets, 20,000 horse and foot brandished
their swords and shouted aloud for joy. The pavements were strewn with
flowers, the bells of the City rang out, the fountains poured out wine
among the people. Ladies leaned over the windows and balconies: the
Lords and Gentlemen made a brave show in their rich velvets and cloth of
gold. “I stood,” says Evelyn, “in the Strand, and beheld it, and bless’d
God!”[237]