The Earl was in England again, the land of his birth. It was perhaps not altogether a prosperous and satisfied England, in August 1638. The heavy hand of taxation was on even these pastoral uplands. The heart of England was throbbing with political unrest. But on that evening, at least, there could have been only the lark’s ecstasy, and the sweet smell of wild thyme and woodsmoke in the air. Ireland, the distressful country of his adoption, lay behind the old man, and with it the memories of fifty strenuous years;—all that was hardest and proudest and tenderest in a lifetime.
Lord and Lady Dungarvan were already at Stalbridge with “lyttle ffrancke.” There was another baby-daughter now, but it had apparently been left at Salisbury House, in London. Dungarvan had ridden some six miles upon the road to meet his father. It was still daylight when, riding together—the old man must have been pretty stiff in the saddle, for he had ridden nearly sixty miles that day—they came in sight of the Elizabethan manor standing among elms and chestnut trees, surrounded by park lands and hayfields and orchards: “My owne house of Stalbridge in Dorcetshier; this being the firste tyme that ever I sawe the place.”[55]
After this, the movements of the Earl and his family read rather like a Court Circular. Not much is heard of the life that must have been going on in the little town itself, with its Church and market Cross; but the mere presence of this great Irish family among them must, by the laws of supply and demand, have wrought many changes in the little market town. The Earl paid his love and service to his neighbour and kinsman, the Earl of Bristol, at Sherborne Castle, and the Earl and Countess of Bristol, with all their house-party, immediately returned the visit; after which the whole family at the Manor were “feasted” for two days at Sherborne Castle. The Earl of Cork and his house-party rode to “the Bathe”, and return visits were received at Stalbridge from friends at “the Bathe”. And a week or two later the Earl, attended by Dungarvan and Barrymore, rode to London, and was graciously received by the King and “all the Lords at Whitehall.” The King praised the Earl’s government of Ireland, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was particularly friendly.
Lady Barrymore and Lady Dungarvan had between them undertaken to ease the Earl from the “trowble of hows-keeping,” and for this purpose were allowed £50 a week, and more when they wanted it; and the cellars and larders at Stalbridge were replenished from time to time with gifts. A ton of claret wine and six gallons of aqua vitæ arrived as a New Year’s gift from Munster, and “veary fatt does” from English friends; while among his assets the Earl counted, besides the produce of his Stalbridge lands and woods, the twenty stalled oxen, the powdered beef, the bacon and salted salmon that were sent from his Irish estates.
Thomas Cross, his steward, became “seneschal”;—perhaps there was a seneschal at Sherborne Castle; and there was a Clerk of the Kitchen and a large staff of household servants, men and women, and a long list of rules for the management of the household drawn up and signed by the Earl himself.[56] And of course the “re-edification” of the Manor House began at once. There was water to be carried in leaden pipes; new furniture to hasten home from the London upholsterer, who dwelt at the sign of the Grasshopper; a red embroidered bed, a tawny velvet carpet, couch and chairs. There was a new coach to buy, and the paths and terraces at Stalbridge were to be stone paved exactly like the paths and terraces at Sherborne Castle. Stairs with a stone balustrade, and carved stone chimney-pieces were to be added to the Manor;—one at least carved with the Earl’s coat of arms “compleate,” and reaching nearly to the ceiling, “fair and graceful in all respects.” There was a limekiln to build, and pit coal to procure and cane apples[57] to be planted in the orchard. But charity only began at home; and in this case it did not prevent a subscription being sent—“a myte” of £100—to help the Archbishop of Canterbury in his scheme of “re-edifying Pawle’s Church in London.”
Meantime, all the Earl’s daughters and sons-in-law, except Dorothy and Arthur Loftus, who remained in Ireland, seem to have found their way, separately or together, to the Manor of Stalbridge; while grandchildren, nieces and nephews and even “cozens” were welcomed under its roof. The Dungarvans made their headquarters there, and the Barrymores, and the little Lady Mary, who was now fourteen, and to be considered a grown-up young lady, with an allowance of £100 a year “to fynde herself.” And they were presently joined by the Kildares, and Katharine and Arthur Jones. Even the plaintive Lettice and her lord stayed for some time under the Earl’s roof.[58] And in March 1639, after an absence of three years, Kynalmeaky and Broghill, with M. Marcombes, returned from their “peregrination”. They found Frank and Robyn already at Stalbridge, though not in the great house itself. For their father had taken the boys away from Eton on his return journey from London in November 1638, and since then they had been boarded out with the Rev. Mr. Dowch at the Parsonage, scarcely “above twice a musket-shot” distant from their father’s house. Their three years at Eton had cost, “for diett, tutaradge and aparell,” exactly £914 3s. 9d.
When the Earl of Cork visited Eton and took his two boys away, Sir Henry Wotton must have been already ill. Since his return after the summer breaking-time of 1638 the old Provost had suffered from a feverish distemper, which was to prove the beginning of the end.[59]
It is possible that during the Provost’s illness extra duties had fallen on Mr. Harrison, the Rector; in any case the two boys had been removed from the care of their “old courteous schoolmaster,” and handed over to “a new, rigid fellow;” and things were not going quite so happily for them at Eton as heretofore. Moreover, poor Carew, the romance of the underbaker’s daughter nipped in the bud, had, from overmuch fondness for cards and dice, come utterly to grief.
It was during this last year of Robert Boyle’s schooldays—in the April of 1638, before Sir Henry Wotton’s illness, and while all was going on as usual at Eton—that Mr. Provost had entertained at his hospitable table a guest whose life was to be strangely linked in after years with that of some members of the great Boyle family. This was John Milton, then a young poet, living with his father at Horton—not far from Eton—and just about to set out on his Italian journey.[60] Was Robert Boyle one of the “hopeful youths” selected by the Provost to dine at his table that day when Milton dined there? And did Robert Boyle listen to the talk that went on at table between Milton and his friend, the learned Hales, and Sir Henry Wotton? It was very pleasant talk. When Milton returned to Horton he ventured to send the Provost a little letter of thanks and a copy of his Comus as a parting gift; and Sir Henry sent his own footboy post-haste to Horton, to catch Milton before he started, with a pretty letter of acknowledgment and an introduction to the British Agent in Venice. It is noteworthy that the advice Sir Henry Wotton gave to Milton, and the advice he always gave to his own pupils when they were setting out on a career of diplomacy abroad, showed that, while the old man had not forgotten his experience of the Augsburg album, his kindly cynicism remained unchanged. I pensiori stretti, was the advice he handed on in his charming letter to Milton,—ed il viso sciolto; while to all young Etonians travelling in diplomacy he used to say, Always tell the truth; for you will never be believed.
It is hard to say how much Robert Boyle may have owed to the guidance and talk of Sir Henry Wotton. Boyle remembered him as a fine gentleman who possessed the art of making others so; and it was John Harrison’s methods of teaching that had impressed the boy. Yet it must not be forgotten that the Provost’s tastes were not only literary and scholarly; that he had not only surrounded himself with a library of books that Robert Boyle in his boyhood must have envied—Sir Henry Wotton was of a scientific turn of mind: he was fond of experimenting. Ever since the days when he had watched Kepler at work in his laboratory and supplied his cousin Lord Bacon with facts, he had been accustomed to occupy himself, in more or less dilletante fashion, with such little experiments as the distilling of medicinal herbs and the measurement of time by allowing water to pass through a filter, drop by drop; and it was Sir Henry Wotton whom Izaak Walton consulted about the preparation of “seductive-smelling oils” in the catching of little fishes. And who could it have been, in that last year that Robyn spent at Eton, who lent him the books that “meeting in him with a restless fancy” gave his thoughts such a “latitude of roving”? Robyn had been away from school on a visit to London, and there had fallen ill of a “tertian ague”, and had been sent back to Eton to see if good air and diet might not do more for him than all “the Queen’s and other doctors’ remedies” had done. His own phrase[61] is that “to divert his melancholy they made him read the State Adventures of Amadis de Gaule, and other fabulous and wandering stories.” Who was the “they” at Eton? It could not have been the “new, rigid fellow”. Amadis de Gaule may have been part of Mr. John Harrison’s system of education, but one would like to believe that Sir Henry Wotton had some hand in fashioning Robert Boyle—that his whole library was open to the boy, not only the books of romance and adventure in it that gave Robyn’s thoughts such a “latitude of roving.” One would like to believe that the torch was indeed passed on from Kepler’s laboratory, and by the study of one of those three copies of Bacon’s Novum Organum, into the hands of England’s first great experimental chemist.