A NEW LONDON
“In the meane time the King and Parliament are infinitely
zealous for the rebuilding of our ruines; and I believe it
will universally be the employment of the next spring. They
are now busied with adjusting the claims of each proprietor,
that so they may dispose things for the building after the
noblest model: Everybody brings in his idea, amongst the rest
I presented his Majestie my own Conceptions, with a Discourse
annex’d. It was the second that was seene within 2 Dayes after
the Conflagration: but Dr. Wren had got the start of me.”—JOHN
EVELYN to _Sir Samuel Tuke_, September 27, 1666.
Christopher Wren had not let the ashes cool under his feet. Evelyn
was picking his way among the debris—“the ground ... so hot that it
even burnt the soles of my shoes”—and mourning over the ninety burnt
City Churches, and the ruins of St. Paul’s, “one of the most antient
pieces of piety in the Christian World.” He was thinking of the “poore
Bookesellers,” who, having trusted all their “noble impressions” to the
insides of the Churches, had “ben indeede ill-treated by Vulcan.” Two
hundred thousand pounds’ worth of books had been burnt: “an extraordinary
detriment,” says Evelyn, “to the whole Republiq of Learning.”[310] Pepys,
after the grimy fatigues of the past few days, had been “trimmed,” and
had gone to Church, in his Sunday best, and listened to a bad, poor
sermon by the Dean of Rochester: “nor eloquent, in saying at this time
that the City is reduced from a large folio to a decimo-tertio”:—the
Dean, too, must have been among the booksellers. Lady Ranelagh was
dispensing Robert Boyle’s charity among the houseless Londoners huddled
in the fields; and Henry Oldenburg was writing to Robert Boyle in Oxford.
“The Stationers of Paul’s,” he wrote, “had suffered greatly.” All their
books, carried by them into St. Faith’s Church, under St. Paul’s, had
been burnt; and amongst them were the “hitherto printed Transactions.”
“Dr. Wren,” he continued, “has, since my last, drawn a model for a New
City, and presented it to the King, who produced it himself before the
Council, and manifested much approbation of it. I was yesterday morning
with the Doctor, and saw the model, which methinks does so well provide
for security, conveniency, and beauty, that I can see nothing wanting
as to those three main articles; but whether it has consulted with the
populousness of a great City, and whether reason of state would have that
consulted with, is a query to me. I then told the Doctor that, if I had
had an opportunity to speak with him sooner, I should have suggested to
him that such a model, contrived by him and received and approved by the
Royal Society or a Committee thereof, before it had come to the view of
his Majesty, would have given Our Society a name, and made it popular,
and availed not a little to silence those who ask continually, what have
they done?”
Wren explained to Oldenburg that he had been obliged to act quickly,
“before other designs came in.” And Oldenburg, in his letter to Boyle,
took comfort in remembering that, after all, “it was a Member that had
done it,” and that, when Wren’s design was accepted—as it undoubtedly
would be—all the world would know that the model of a New London was the
work of a Member of the Royal Society.[311]
Robert Boyle, in his Oxford arm-chair, with his books and instruments
about him, must have listened sadly to such war news, and news of Court
and Parliament, as found its way to him in letters out of an anxious and
distracted London. All the talk of late had been of the Navy muddle; the
huge sums of money required; the poverty of the Exchequer; the mutinous
and “pressed” men, and the “natural expression of passion” of the women
left behind, who had “looked after the ships as far as they could see
them by moonlight”: a most sad state, truly, of public affairs. Distrust
and anger filled the hearts of men and women, and strange rumours were
afloat. During the summer, before the fire broke out, the war with the
Dutch had been the one thing thought of and talked about. In June, Monk,
Duke of Albemarle, and the Dutch de Ruyter had engaged in a fight “the
longest and most stubborn that the seas have ever seen.”[312] The English
fleet had been ruined, but the English were not conquered, and in July
the two fleets, refitted, had met again. This time it was the Dutch fleet
that was destroyed and the Dutch who refused to be conquered. And just
before the Fire of London broke out in Pudding Lane the French fleet had
joined the Dutch fleet, and the English, with a weakened navy and an
exhausted exchequer, were at a standstill. After the fire, when London
was in ruins from the Tower to the Temple, strange rumours ran from mouth
to mouth. There was “some kind of plot in this”; it was “a proper time
for discontents”; it was the French who did it; it was the Dutch who did
it; it was the Papists who did it; it was the old Republicans—a dire
revenge on the eve of Cromwell’s Lucky Day. The prophecies in _Booker’s
Almanack_ for the year were the topics of conversation at dinner-tables;
and Lady Carteret told Pepys that pieces of charred paper had been blown
by the wind as far as Cranborne,[313] and that she herself had picked up,
or been given, a little bit of paper on which the words were printed:
“_Time is, it is done._”
In the spring of 1667, a Peace Congress was sitting at Breda, but an
armistice had been refused; and then it was that de Witt had seized his
moment and that the Dutch fleet sailed for the mouth of the Thames. The
English were unready, their seamen mutinous, their coffers empty, their
big ships laid up, for economy’s sake, in dock. Everybody knows the
panic and confusion that followed—the impotent rage of a people that
felt itself betrayed: Ruyter and de Witt were at hand, coming up our own
beloved Thames with “a fine and orderly fleet of sixty sail.” And Monk,
the Duke of Albemarle, in his shirt-sleeves, at Gravesend, was doing his
best to “choke the channel.”
But the Dutch were not intending to land. After they had burnt the
English ships in the river, they were content to sail away again,
carrying with them, as an insolent trophy, the half-burnt hull of the
ship that had once been the _Naseby_, and was now the _Royal Charles_.
The rage of the Londoners knew no bounds. England was undone;—with a
debauched and lazy Prince and a licentious court; “no council, no money,
no reputation at home or abroad.”[314] The very men who had stood in the
Strand and blessed God at the Restoration now wished Cromwell back again:
“Everybody nowadays,” says Pepys, “reflect upon Oliver and commend him,
what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour Princes fear him.”
Towards the end of 1666 Lady Ranelagh was expecting her brother from
Oxford to make her a prolonged visit in the house in Pall Mall. And where
Robert Boyle was, there must some kind of chemical laboratory be also.
“I have ordered Thomas,” she wrote, “to look out for charcoal; and should
gladly receive your orders to put my back house in posture to be employed
by you, against your coming, that you may lose no time after.”[315]
The Royal Society was again holding its meetings;—still, at first,
under difficulties, in Gresham College, which was now the Exchequer.
Hooke and Croone were both enthusiastic over the “pretty experiments”
of transfusion of blood: “one dog filled with another dog’s blood,” is
Pepys’s way of expressing it. Croone told Pepys that the performances at
Gresham College had given occasion for “many pretty wishes, as of the
blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such-like.” The City
was still in a melancholy condition; it was difficult and dangerous to
walk about the ruins, with a link, after dark; but the “Greate Streetes”
were now being “marked out with piles, drove into the ground”; and people
were wondering why so many of the new Churches were to be built “in a
cluster about Cornhill.” In January 1667, Gresham College being occupied
by the Exchequer, Mr. Henry Howard, one of the Society’s most generous
members, put rooms in Arundel House in the Strand at the disposal of the
Royal Society—
“To the Royal Society,” says Evelyn, “which since the sad conflagration
were invited by Mr. Howard to sit at Arundel House in the Strand, who
at my instigation likewise bestow’d on the Society that noble library
which his grandfather especially and his ancestors had collected.
This gentleman had so little inclination to bookes, that it was the
preservation of them from imbezzlement.”[316]
In May, the meetings of the Society were in full swing: May 30,
especially, must have been a gala occasion—
“To London,” says Evelyn, “to wait on the Dutchess of Newcastle (who was
a mighty pretender to learning, poetrie and philosophie, and had in both
publish’d divers bookes) to the Royal Society, whither she came in greate
pomp, and being receiv’d by our Lord President at the Dore of our meeting
roome, the mace, etc., carried before him, had several experiments shewed
to her. I conducted her Grace to her coach, and return’d home.”
Pepys gives a better account: The Duchess had invited herself; and there
had been “much debate, pro and con, it seems many being against it, and
we do believe the town will be full of ballads of it.” In the end,
gallantry prevailed among the Philosophers; and when Pepys arrived at
Arundel House on foot, after his noonday dinner—it was a very hot and
dusty day—he found “very much company” in decorous expectation of her
Grace. She came, with her attendant women—among them the “Ferabosco,” of
whose beauty there had been so much talk among the gallants. The Duchess
herself, in her “antick” dress, disappointed Pepys: “nor did I hear her
say anything that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration,
all admiration.”
The Philosophers showed her all their best experiments—“of colours,
loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors.” The _chef d’œuvre_ seems to
have been the turning of a piece of roasted mutton into pure blood,
“which was very rare,” says Pepys; and then the Duchess and her suite
were escorted to her coach again, her Grace still crying that she was
“full of admiration.”
That was in May. Before the end of June poor Henry Oldenburg was suddenly
clapped into the Tower. The news must have fallen like a thunderbolt at
the next Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Society. Their Secretary was
in jail.
“I was told yesterday,” wrote Pepys, on June 25th, “that Mr. Oldenburg,
our Secretary at Gresham College, is put into the Tower, for writing
news to a virtuoso in France, with whom he constantly corresponds on
philosophical matters: which makes it very unsafe at this time to write,
or almost to do anything.”[317]
Oldenburg was still in custody on August 8 when Evelyn called at the
Tower.
“Visited Mr. Oldenburg, now close prisoner in the Tower, being suspected
of writing intelligence. I had an order from Lord Arlington, Secretary of
State, which caus’d me to be admitted. This Gentleman was Secretary to
our Society, and I am confident will prove an innocent person.”
And indeed Oldenburg was soon to be set free. On September 3 he was once
more in his own home and writing to Robert Boyle at Oxford—
“I was so stifled by the prison air,” says Oldenburg, “that as soon as
I had my enlargement from the _Tower_ I widened it, and took it from
_London_ into the Country, to fan myself for some days in the good air of
_Craford_ in _Kent_. Being now returned, and having recovered my stomach,
which I had in a manner quite lost, I intend, if God will, to fall to my
old trade,[318] if I have any support to follow it.”
Once again, evidently, the Boyle family had done their best for a Puritan
friend in trouble. “I have learnt during this Commitment,” says Oldenburg
to Boyle, “to know my real friends. God Almighty bless them, and enable
me to convince them all of my gratitude. Sir, I acknowledge and beg
pardon for the importunities I gave you at the beginning; assuring you
that you cannot lay any commands on me that I shall not cheerfully obey
to the best of my power.”
But the news of Oldenburg’s release—though Boyle must have been glad to
hear of it—had come at an anxious time. A few days before Boyle received
Oldenburg’s letter the Lord Chancellor Clarendon had been required to
resign the Seals. The Boyle family must have known something of what was
happening: the Burlingtons and the Clarendons were next-door neighbours
in the two great palaces in Piccadilly, and their children were
married,—“Lory Hide” to Henrietta Boyle.
“Dear Broghill”—now my Lord Orrery—had been in England by the King’s
wish for some little time, having left Munster under the care of a
Vice-President. “Lord Orrery,” says his chaplain, Dr. Morrice, quaintly,
“saw thoroughly into the tempers of people and the consequences of
things.” And he had foreseen Clarendon’s fall, and had already warned
Clarendon in vain. In August, Lady Clarendon had died: “the mother of
all his children and the companion in all his banishment, and who had
made all his former calamities less grievous by her company and courage.”
Lady Clarendon had been buried in Westminster Abbey; and alone, in his
new palace, among his pictures and books, the widower had received his
Majesty’s visit of condolence. And then, only a few days later, had come
the King’s message, carried by the Chancellor’s son-in-law the Duke of
York. It was desirable “on various grounds, but especially for his own
safety,” that Clarendon should resign the Seals.
During the next day or two the Duke of York, the Duchess—Clarendon’s
daughter—and Archbishop Sheldon, and various other people, interceded for
Clarendon with the King. And on the morning of August 26 Clarendon was
sent for to Whitehall. The audience lasted two hours, in the King’s own
chamber, and then the Chancellor was dismissed and departed, “looking
sad,” through the private garden of Whitehall, which was “full of people”
waiting to see him come out. Lady Castlemaine, in her smock, looked down
upon the garden from her aviary window, laughing with the gallants below,
and “blessing herself at the old man’s going.”
Next day Evelyn called on the Chancellor at his house in Piccadilly. “I
found him,” says Evelyn, “in his bedchamber, very sad.” The tide had
turned against him: the Parliament had accused him, and he had enemies
at Court; “especialy the buffoones and ladies of pleasure, because he
thwarted some of them and stood in their way.”
All this is old reading: the fall of Clarendon is a chapter of British
history. But it is not quite so well known that Lord Orrery, “dear
Broghill,” the uncle of “Lory Hide’s” wife, was asked to take the seals
that Clarendon had been forced to give up. According to Morrice, the
Duchess of York appealed to Lord Orrery to take the seals and heal the
breach between the King and the Duke, whose suspected papacy was “against
him.” And then the Duke tried to persuade Lord Orrery; and lastly the
King himself offered him the Chancellorship. But Broghill’s had always
been a “well-armed head”; and now that he was Lord Orrery he knew his
King—and he knew his gout; and he made his gout serve as an excuse for
declining the honour offered him by his King. “I am a decrepit man,” he
said to the Duchess of York; but he took a turn or two in his coach,
in the park, planning what could be done to make the King and the Duke
agree, and thinking what a pity it was that Clarendon had been so
imperious—even towards the King himself.
So far Morrice. Lord Orrery went back to Ireland, and Sir Orlando
Bridgeman was the new Chancellor: “the man of the whole nation that is
best spoken of, and will please most people,” says the fickle Pepys, who
had himself, such a little while before, been “mad in love with my Lord
Chancellor.”
In October Lord Orrery’s new play, _The Black Prince_, was produced at
the King’s Theatre. The house was “infinite full,” the King and Duke
there, and not a seat to be got by Mr. Pepys in the pit, so that he was
obliged to pay four shillings for a seat in the upper boxes, “the first
time ever I sat in a box in my life.” In November and December both
Houses were “very busy about my Lord Chancellor’s impeachment,” and Lory
Hide was going about saying that if he thought his father had done only
one of the things that were being said against him, he, Lory Hide, would
be “the first that should call for judgment against him”, which Mr.
Waller, the poet, “did say was spoke like the old Roman—like Brutus—for
its greatness and worthiness.”
On December 3, Henry Oldenburg, back at his work as Secretary of the
Royal Society, was writing to Boyle of the “grand affair,” the wrangle of
Lords and Commons over the terms of Clarendon’s impeachment. And the same
letter announced that the Royal Society had “greatly applauded” Boyle’s
recently communicated _Experiments of Light_; and that at the Anniversary
Meeting of the Society, on St. Andrew’s Day, Boyle had been elected one
of the new Council—“a very numerous meeting ... never so great a one
before.” Boyle was then still in Oxford; but Evelyn, the Chancellor’s
old friend, had been calling again at the great house in Piccadilly: “To
visit the late Lord Chancellor. I found him in his garden at his new
built Palace, sitting in his gowt wheele-chayre, and seeing the gates
setting up towards the North and the fields. He look’d and spoke very
disconsolately ... next morning I heard he was gon....”
Clarendon, by the King’s orders, had hurriedly escaped to France, to
be followed into exile by an Act of Parliament banishing him for life.
Clarendon was gone; and the “Cabal” administration had begun.[319]
If the year 1667 ended anxiously for the Boyle family, the year 1668
was to prove more anxious still. Lord Orrery had returned to Ireland to
take up his presidency of Munster, and was living in great splendour at
Charleville; but he and the Lord Lieutenant, Ormonde, disagreed; and in
the autumn of 1668 Lord Orrery had resigned the presidency and was back
in England. He had “been advised,” says Morrice, “that his credit at
Court had begun to decline,” and that it would be wise for him to be on
the spot.
He was very much on the spot when Pepys met him, in October, at Lord
Arlington’s house. In spite of his gout, the urbanity of the Boyle family
had not forsaken him. He “took notice” of Pepys, and began a “discourse
of hangings, and of the improvement of shipping”; and Pepys presently
discovered that Lord Orrery was paying “a mighty compliment” to his
abilities and ingenuity, “which I am mighty proud of, and he do speak
most excellently.”
But later in November came a rude awakening. It was now my Lord Orrery’s
turn to be impeached in the House of Commons, “for raising of moneys by
his own authority upon his Majesty’s subjects.”
When the summons came, Lord Orrery was laid up with a severe attack
of gout; and when he was well enough, a few days later, to answer the
summons in person, he could scarcely manage to get up the steps from
Westminster Hall to the Court of Request. A friend, passing by, remarked
that my Lord of Orrery walked with difficulty and pain. “Yes, sir,” said
Orrery, “my feet are weak; but if my heels will serve to carry me up, I
promise you my head shall bring me safe down again.”
And it did. He made an able defence—sitting, because of his gout; and
at the psychological moment, so the story runs, the King put an end to
the proceedings by proroguing both Houses.[320] Impeachments might be
as thick as blackberries; Lord Orrery might discourse cheerfully of
“hangings” at a dinner party at Lord Arlington’s house; but, after all,
it was only five-and-twenty years since the old Earl of Cork had died in
harness with all his sons in the field. It would have been inconvenient
to overlook such services and such sacrifices as the great Boyle family
in Ireland had rendered to their Kings.
No further steps were to be taken against Lord Orrery. “I am glad the
House dismissed that foolish impeachment against my Lord Orrery,” wrote
Mr. Stubbe, of Warwick, to Robert Boyle. Morrice says that, while the
affair was in progress, Lady Pegg had been sent by her husband to Ireland
“to secure the estates.” She had performed her mission “with great
dexterity and expedition,” so that “if he had been impeached, his family
would have been safe.” As it was, Lord Orrery returned to Ireland and
Lady Pegg—to occupy himself with repairing his last great home of Castle
Martyr, and to write his _Art of War_. And in December 1668 another new
play—_Tryphon_—a tragedy taken from the First Book of Maccabees, was
produced with great success at the Duke’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Pepys,
on this occasion, “put a bit of meat in their mouths” and hurried off,
to find the theatre crowded, and to sit out the performance in the
eighteenpenny seats above-stairs—“mighty hot.”
So ended 1668. During the last half of the year, at any rate, Robert
Boyle had been away from Oxford and in the family circle. It is probable
that he was not far from “dear Broghill” in his hour of trial. After the
family anxiety on this brother’s account had quieted down, there came
news from Ireland that Lord Ranelagh was dead. His death can have brought
little outward change to the house in the Mall. Dick Jones—whose life
at Court with Grammont and the rest of the gallants must have caused
Lady Ranelagh many a heartache, had been for some time employed in Irish
politics and in Ireland. Ormonde had brought about a reconciliation
between Lord Ranelagh and his son; and the young Pyrophilus had been
member for the county of Roscommon in the Irish Parliament before his
father’s death raised him to the Upper House. It is suggestive that
Lord Ranelagh’s nuncupative Will left the two unmarried daughters,
Elizabeth and Frances, a sum of money, subject to their marrying with
the consent of the eldest sister, Lady Mount-Alexander. It is a question
whether “the girls” received any money as a result of these nuncupative
paternal intentions. Elizabeth, who became Mrs. Melster, must have
been the heroine of a humble love-story, for her husband is described
in the old peerages as a _valet de pé_. This did not mean exactly in
those times what it means to-day, nor was it exactly what might have
been expected for a granddaughter of the Great Earl of Cork. And yet,
it must be remembered that the old Elizabethan Peer had always about
him a little _entourage_ of cousin-commoners, as staunch as they were
unobtrusive,—Naylors of Gray’s Inn and Croones of Cheapside.
Frances, the delicate daughter—the baby born prematurely at the manor
of Stalbridge—does not seem to have married at all. Lady Ranelagh had
nursed “my poor Franck” through many illnesses—smallpox, of course, among
them. She suffered from headaches; and nothing did them so much good
as the little packets of tea—a costly luxury in those days—that Lady
Ranelagh was able to procure for her by the kindness of the Oxford uncle.
Elizabeth and Frances were both probably still “the girls,” and living
with their mother, when Robert Boyle, in 1669, left Oxford for good.
Their uncle Robyn, the “deare Squire”—was long ago turned philosopher;
something of a valetudinary; a virtuoso of an European fame. Philosophers
of all nations flocked to see Mr. Boyle’s experiments. The Royal
Society—all intellectual London—was waiting for his coming.
With his books and instruments and standish—but, alas! no longer his bows
and arrows—he once more, as in the old-young days of 1644, took up his
residence with Lady Ranelagh in the house in Pall Mall.