Sir John Leeke, who had married Sir Edmund Verney’s half-sister, was related also to the Barrymore family, and lived with his wife and children in a house on the Castle Lyons estates. It was Lady Barrymore who figured in his delightful letters as “My deare Mustris”, and “the worthiest of woemen”. But it was Katharine Jones, and the sorrow that looked out of her sweet face, that had won all his chivalrous devotion. “My pretious Katharine”, he wrote, “is somewhat decayed from the sweetest face I ever saw (and surely I have seen good ones).”
The little Katy—who might have married young Sapcott Beaumont, and so become one of a family known afterwards for its generous patronage of art and literature, the family so kind to the Poet Wordsworth—had been given, at fifteen, to “honest Arthur Jones”, who would some day be Viscount Ranelagh. Her marriage portion had been duly paid down, as per agreement, at Strongbow’s tomb in Christchurch, Dublin, on Midsummer Day 1631. She had been carried off to Athlone Castle; and though she had since lived a good deal under her father’s roof, and had evidently always been a special object of her own family’s care and affection, she had, none the less, ever since her marriage-day, been in legal bondage to a man who was a gambler and a churl. In this summer of 1639, the old Earl, writing to Lord Ranelagh, the father of Arthur Jones, was begging him rather pathetically not to insist on his son’s return to Ireland, but to allow Katharine and Arthur to spend the winter together in the House of the Savoy: “They shalbe both lodged and dyeted in my house and hartily welcome.” He seems to have hoped that a winter in London might improve Arthur Jones, “now that he hath given over immoderate play in Corners.”[66] But if the Earl was determined, for his favourite daughter’s sake, to make the best of a miserable business, Sir John Leeke in his letter to Sir Edmund Verney was more outspoken. “She is keapte and long hath bine by the foulest churl in the worlde,” he wrote: “he hath only one virtue that he seldome cometh sober to bedd....”[67]
It is scarcely to be wondered at if the youngest of this bevy of sisters, the little Lady Mary Boyle, looked dubiously on the thing called Husband, as she saw it in one or two types of brother-in-law that presented themselves to her girlish scrutiny. With her own horses, her own handsome allowance, and a great deal of her own way, this little lady of fourteen was not disposed to “change her condition.” The stormy romance of her life was to come all too soon; but in the meantime the Beauty was still sleeping. In three of her sisters’ marriages, she could have seen little of that “Heart Exchange” of which we may imagine her to have been reading in her volume of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia—an opinionative little lady, probably in a scarlet gown, on some sequestered seat in the manor garden.
“My true-love has my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given.”
Not of George Goring, handsome, plausible, dissolute and cold; nor of Kildare, who deserted wife and children and pawned the family silver; nor of Arthur Jones, who played immoderately in corners, and habitually went tipsy to bed, could it ever have been said by any woman, however wifely and compliant—
“His heart in me keeps me and him in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides.”
No: Mary Boyle, at fourteen, was not disposed to change her condition; and so it was with a ready-made aversion to matrimony that, in the summer of 1639, she received Mr. James Hamilton,[68] son and heir of Lord Clandeboye, who arrived by paternal invitation at the Manor of Stalbridge. The Earl of Cork and Lord Clandeboye had been for some time in correspondence about this alliance; and Mr. James Hamilton, immediately on his return from his foreign travels, which had included “a general survey” of Italy and France, had sent his own man to Stalbridge with letters heralding his arrival, and had followed a day or two later, travelling in some state, with his tutor and other attendants. There seems to have been no fault to find with the young man. According to Lord Clandeboye, his son was “a hater of vice, and a Lover of Noble partes, and of vertuous industries”; but all the same Mary Boyle expressed, in no measured terms, “a very high averseness and contradicon” to her father’s commands. She would have nothing to say to this suitor for her little fourteen-year-old hand; and with much chagrin the Earl was obliged to write in his diary, “being refused in marriadge by my unrewly daughter Mary, he departed my hows the second of September to the Bathe.”