“But (as when in summer we take up our grass-horses into the stable, and give them store of oats, it is a sign that we mean to travel them) our Philaretus, soon after he had received this new strength, found a new weight to support.”—Robert Boyle’s Philaretus.
In the spring of 1641, some months after the thunderstorm episode, Marcombes bought horses, and they set out on a three weeks’ tour in the neighbouring country. The Earl had not yet given his permission for the Italian tour, and Francis and Robert had been sixteen months at their lessons, and were beginning to long for a holiday. Riding and walking, they visited Chambéry, Aix, and Grenoble, and then found their way into “the wild mountains where the first and chiefest of the Carthusian Abbies does stand seated.” Robyn’s “conversion” by the thunderstorm appears to have been quite unknown to Frank and Marcombes: they had no conception of the thoughts that were churning in the boy’s head.
It was the Devil, so Robert Boyle says in his Philaretus, who, taking advantage of the deep raving melancholy of the place, and the pictures and stories to be found in the Monastery of Bruno,[88] the Father of the Order, tempted him with “such hideous thoughts and such distracting doubts of some of the fundamentals of Christianity, that, though his looks did little betray his thoughts, nothing but the forbiddenness of self-dispatch hindered his acting it.”
It was more probably an acute attack of home-sickness, following on a prolonged diet of “yᵉ catechisme of Calvin”; but it was remembered, by this sensitive boy, as a very real temptation. He wrote to his father when they returned to Geneva, mentioning the little tour only as one “wherein we have had some pleasure mingled with some paines.” It was a sad little letter: “Your Lordship seems,” says Robyn, “to be angry with my brother and I.” They had not written often, or fully enough; and letters that are all beginnings and endings do not tell much. Marcombes, on the other hand, wrote ebulliently to the Earl. He never forgot to sing the praises of his pupils—Robyn, especially, was semper idem, and “Capable of all good things”; while the nature and disposition of both boys were “as good and sweete as any in the worlde.”
On their return to Geneva, they had found letters from the Earl, giving them leave to travel into Italy; and during the summer of 1641 the boys were “fincing”, and “dansing”, and learning Italian, and holding their heads well and their bodies straight, and Mr. Francis was now taller than my Lord Dungarvan, while as for Mr. Robert, he was “an Eale”, tall for his age, and big proportionably. They rose betimes, loved to ride abroad, and always came home with “a very good stomacke.” And as Marcombes assured the Earl that they went regularly to church, and in private also “sarved God very religiously”, it may be supposed that the months of “tedious perplexity”, of which Robert Boyle speaks in his Philaretus and of which Marcombes and Frank knew nothing, were drawing to a close. There came a day, indeed, when Robyn no longer excused himself from receiving the Sacrament by reason of his “yonge age.” It pleased God, he says, one day that he had taken the Sacrament to restore to him “the withdrawn sense of his favour.”
Although the Earl of Cork had given his permission, he was very dubious about the wisdom of the Italian journey.
“For,” wrote the Earl in London to Marcombes in Geneva, “we have lately had a popish priest hanged, drawn and quartered; and a many moe in prison which I think wilbe brought to the like cloudy end, for that they did not depart the Kingdome by the prefixed date lymited by the late statute.”
The Earl’s friends in London, “suspecting revenge,” had advised him against the Italian journey, and drawn horrible pictures of an Inquisition worse than death. But the old man was anxious to satisfy the boys’ desires, and really wanted them to learn Italian, and to see “all those brave Universities, States, Cities, Churches, and other remarkeable things”[89] which only Italy could show them. And so they were to go; but Marcombes was to take great care of them, and to remember that the Earl was entrusting “these my Jewells” to him in a strange country.
In preparation for Italy, Madame Marcombes was making for them all kinds of new linen; and Marcombes bought for them three suits of clothes apiece, and they were to have more when they reached Florence—“where I doe intend to keep them a coach, God willing.”