CHAPTER IV
THE MANOR OF STALBRIDGE
“... He would very often steal away from all company, and spend four or five hours alone in the fields, and think at random: making his delighted imagination the busy scene where some romance or other was daily acted.”—Robert Boyle’s Philaretus.
After the boys went to Eton, the Earl had very unpleasant things to think about. Wentworth was pressing him hard. It is true that the little dinner-parties and card-parties and private theatricals at the Castle were going on as if there were no Star Chamber behind them. In January 1636 the Lord Deputy was inviting himself to supper at the Earl’s Dublin house, and bringing Lady Wentworth with him. Lady Dungarvan’s baby was born in March, a “ffair daughter”, to be christened Frances, and to figure in the old Earl’s diary as “lyttle ffranck”; and the Lord Deputy himself stood sponsor, though he had just lost his own little son, and the Dungarvan christening had been postponed till the Wentworth baby had been buried. But the Lord Deputy’s “sharp pursuit” of men was going on all the same. In February, before the death of Wentworth’s child and the Dungarvan christening, Lord Mountmorris had been degraded from the office of Vice-Treasurer, “tried by a Commission and sentenced to be shot, for no other crime than a sneer” against Wentworth’s government.[50] The sentence was not to be carried out; but it became every day more evident that “whatever man of whatever rank” opposed Wentworth, or even spoke disrespectfully of his policy, “that man he pursued to punishment like a sleuth-hound”.[51]
At the beginning of that year, the Earl of Cork had made his “Great Conveighance,” by which he entailed all his lands upon his five sons. Wentworth had taken exception to the conveyance of some of these lands to the Earl’s eldest son, Lord Dungarvan; and in February a “sharp and large discourse” had taken place between the Lord Deputy and the Earl. In April the Star Chamber Bill against the Earl, dealing with his titles to the churchlands of Youghal, was still under discussion; and Wentworth was now pressing for the payment of money, by way of ransom, which was at first to be £30,000, but was afterwards reduced to £15,000.
The Earl was still asserting his right to his lands, and unwilling to compound—no-one had ever heard the Earl of Cork, he said, “enclyned to offer anything.” Things were at this pass when at the end of April Lady Dungarvan, six weeks after her baby’s birth, fell sick; and the next day, “the smallpockes brake owt uppon her.” On that very day, under pressure from his friends and from his son Dungarvan, who went down on his knees before his father, the Earl of Cork gave way. Very unwillingly, on May 2, he agreed to pay the £15,000 “for the King’s use,” and for his own “redemption out of Court”—though his “Innocencie and Intigritie” he declared, writing in his own private diary, were “as cleer as the son at high noon.” The old Royalist, even then, believed that if his King only knew how undeservedly the mighty fine had him imposed, “he would not accept a penny of it.” The Earl was hard hit, though his great Conveyance was at last signed and sealed, and he could talk of drinking a cup of sack “to wash away the care of a big debt.”[52] It is comforting to note that he had meantime cash in hand not only to tip Archie Armstrong, the King’s Jester, who seems to have passed through Dublin, but to pay for two knitted silk waistcoats for his own “somer wearings.”
While all this was going on, Kynalmeaky and Broghill were enjoying what the Earl called their “peregrination.” A tutor had been found to accompany them on their foreign travels; a M. Marcombes, highly recommended to the Earl by Sir Henry Wotton, as a man “borne for your purpose.” Sir Henry wrote from London, where he had been spending a week or two, and was returning next day “to my poore Cell agayne at Eton”;[53] but he gave the Earl a careful account of Marcombes, whom he had seen in London. He was “by birthe French; native in the Province of Auvergne; bredd seaven years in Geneve, verie sounde in Religion, and well conversant with Religious Men. Furnished with good literature and languages, espetially with Italian, which he speaketh as promptly as his owne. And wilbe a good guide for your Sonns in that delicat Piece of the Worlde. He seemeth of himself neither of a lumpish nor of a light composition, but of a well-fixed meane.”
M. Marcombes had already won golden opinions in the family of Lord Middlesex, a former Lord Mayor of London; and was well known to the then Lord Mayor, Mr. Burlamachy, who also wrote to the Earl about him. And Mr. Perkins, the tailor, seems to have put in a word; for there had been a meeting in the “fumie citie” between Sir Henry Wotton and M. Marcombes and Mr. Perkins, at which Sir Henry had found the French tutor’s conversation “very apposite and sweet.”
So in the early spring of 1636 Kynalmeaky and Broghill, with their governor M. Marcombes, had set out from Dublin on their foreign travels, stopping long enough in London to kiss the King’s and Queen’s hands, and obtain the royal licence and passport to travel; and they took letters also to Sir Henry Wotton at Eton, and to Frank and Robyn, and poor unmeriting Carew.