Be that as it may, Sir Henry Wotton was already ill when Frank and Robyn were removed from Eton in November 1638; and it was Mr. Harrison who duly sent after them to Stalbridge the furniture of their chamber—the blew perpetuana curtains and all the other things so carefully inventoried by poor Carew. And Carew himself no longer served his sweet young masters: he had been succeeded by a manservant with the suggestive name of Rydowt, who appears to have been a married man, and was accommodated with a little cottage of his own at Stalbridge, with a garden which the Earl planted with “cane apples” from Ireland. The boys were to live and learn their lessons with Mr. Dowch at the Parsonage; and that “old divine” was very soon to discover that Robyn had not learnt much Latin at Eton after all, and “with great care and civility” to proceed to read with him the Latin poets as well as the Latin prose-writers. And while the Earl gave Frank a horse of his own, and knew him to be happy and gallant in the saddle, it was Robyn who was the old Earl’s Benjamin, most loved of all his sons. The family saw a likeness in Robyn to his father—a likeness both in body and mind. It is difficult to credit the Earl of Cork with any of his youngest son’s habit of “unemployed pensiviness,” but there must have been something in Robyn when he was quite a little fellow—a quiet self-reliance—that impressed the old Earl strangely. Robyn was only twelve years old; he had as yet shown none of the traits of character that the Earl so “severely disrelished” in some of his sons and sons-in-law. And so, when he gave Frank the horse, the Earl listened perhaps with some wonderment to Robyn’s “pretie conceptions” in excellent language, spoken still not quite smoothly; and he was content to let the boy wander as he liked. He gave his Benjamin the keys of his orchard, not afraid to leave him in a very paradise of unplucked apples, “thinking at random.”
CHAPTER V
THE HOUSE OF THE SAVOY
“You shall have all this winter att the Savoy, in Sʳ. Tho. Stafford’s howse, the greatest familie that will be in London (I pray God the ould man houlds out).”—Letter from Sir John Leeke to Sir Edmund Verney, 1639: Verney Memoirs, vol. i.
The Earl’s gift of a horse to his son Frank had been made at a psychological moment. For Frank, at sixteen, was not over robust, and Robyn, not much more than twelve, was scarcely fitted to defend his King and Country; and they must have just watched their three elder brothers, Dungarvan, Kynalmeaky and Broghill, ride off in great spirits from Stalbridge to join the King at Newcastle or York. War was in the air, and rumours of war; and Stalbridge Manor and Sherborne Castle, and the villages of Dorsetshire and all the great families in England, were astir, as day by day and week by week the troops of English horse and foot were moving northwards to engage against what the old Earl turned off so lightly in his diary as the “Covenanting, rebelleows Skots.”
In January 1639 a circular letter had been sent out in King Charles’ name to all the English nobility, asking them to state how far and in what manner they were ready to assist the Scottish Expedition; and week by week, according to their means and their political inclinations, the English nobles—Laudians and Puritans alike—had been sending in their answers: £1000, and twenty horse; twenty horse and attendance in person or by substitute; £1000 in lieu of horse; £500 and twelve horse; and so on.[62] And some gave willingly, and some gave grudgingly, and some evaded promising to give anything; and one or two were brave enough to refuse—and to give their reasons why. Even at Court there was “much contrarity”; it was a case of “soe many men soe many opinions.”[63] Wentworth, over in Ireland, had written offering his King £2000, and if necessary more to his “uttermost farthing”. And the Earl of Cork, at Stalbridge, had not done badly either, though he seems to have had his reservations about this levying of money and troops. His neighbour, the Earl of Bristol, at Sherborne, was one of those who had evaded promising anything in the meantime.
But in February and March Dungarvan and Barrymore had been in London, and just at this time also Kynalmeaky and Broghill had arrived back in London with M. Marcombes. During this visit to London Dungarvan had been led into an undertaking to serve his King in the Scottish Expedition: a rash undertaking, made without his father’s “privitie”; “an unadvised engagement” is the Earl’s comment in his diary. But all the same the Earl supplied his son and heir with £3000 to raise and arm a troop of a hundred horse—a magnificent subscription, which at the time caused much talk at the Court of Whitehall. Lord Barrymore, at the same time, had been commissioned by the King to hurry across to Ireland with letters to Wentworth, and to “raise and press” a thousand Irishmen, foot-soldiers, into the King’s service against the Scots.
The very day that Barrymore set out for Ireland on this mission the Earl of Bristol left Sherborne for the rendezvous at York. A day or two later King Charles himself set out from London on his journey northwards, and in April, Kynalmeaky and Broghill were being fitted out with arms and saddles and “armors of prooff”, in order to accompany their brother Dungarvan. In the beginning of May, Dungarvan’s wagons and carriages began their journey from Stalbridge; and on May 9 the Earl’s three sons, Dungarvan, Kynalmeaky, and Broghill, rode out of Stalbridge with Dungarvan’s troop of one hundred horse. Three of his five sons! “God, I beseech him,” wrote the Earl in his diary, “restore them safe, happy, and victorious, to my comfort.” It was then that he gave Frank a horse for his very own, and that the small philosopher was allowed to pocket the orchard keys. And the family at the Manor settled down to wait for news of their soldiers—so slow of coming in those old days. The ladies and the children were left behind in the care of the old Earl, M. Marcombes, and Mr. Dowch, the parson.
There were a good many ladies at the Manor during the summer of 1639. A bevy of daughters had gathered about the old Earl, and were “exceeding welcome unto” him. And it is not to be supposed that it was by any means a doleful household while the men of the family were away. For the women of the Boyle family, whatever their education had or had not been, were every whit as clever by nature as the men: “Believe it,” wrote the family friend, Sir John Leeke, to Sir Edmund Verney, about the ladies of the Boyle family, “Ould Corke could not begett nothing foolish.” Lady Dungarvan, his daughter-in-law, and his daughters Lady Barrymore, Lady Lettice Goring, Lady Katharine Jones and the little Lady Mary Boyle, were all at Stalbridge at this time, together with several of the grandchildren and all the “retinues.” And in picturing this family gathering it is strange to remember that at least three of these noble women must have been marked by the scourge of the smallpox. Lady Dungarvan had never been beautiful; and her recent attack of smallpox, however it may have altered her pleasant face, had not left her any less cheerful and good-natured than when she first came a bride amongst them, and won, by her charming person and manner, the liking of the “best sort of people” in Ireland. It was a charm that was to outlive her youth: “A very fine-speaking lady,” wrote Samuel Pepys of her many years later; “and a good woman, but old, and not handsome; but a brave woman.” And so overcome was Mr. Pepys by his first sight and salutation of this noble lady at Burlington House that he managed to set his periwig afire in the candle that was brought for the sealing of a letter.[64]
Lady Barrymore had also suffered severely from smallpox soon after her child-marriage, and at the same time with her sister Lettice. This illness, and the subsequent disappointments of life, had left Lettice Goring a querulous invalid. She was shockingly illiterate, and she was small-minded, though she was not a stupid woman. But Lady Barrymore seems to have kept all her charms—not the least of them her “brave hart”. She was clever, very political and chatty; “very energetic and capable, very amusing and very lovable.”[65] And then there was Lady Katharine—wife of Arthur Jones;—the one of all the Earl’s daughters with the finest intellect, the finest character, and, according to report, the most beautiful face. Weighed down as she was by a miserable marriage, she was to rise above all the trials of life, to be remembered by later generations as “Milton’s Friend,” the “Incomparable Lady Ranelagh”, the “dearest, dearest, dearest sister” of Robert Boyle. “A more brave wench or a Braver Spiritt you have not often mett withall,” Sir John Leeke wrote of her in the summer of 1639; “she hath a memory that will hear a sermon and goe home and penn itt after dinner verbatim. I know not how she will appeare in England, but she is most accounted of at Dublin.”