Marcombes was anxious that the Earl should obtain for them a letter (in Latin) from the King, “to all Kings, Princes, Magistrates,” etc., in which Marcombes himself should be named “by name and surname.” And they ought also, he said, to have a special licence from the King to allow them to travel in Rome, “least your Lordship or your sons should be questioned hereafter.” The Genevan household were up in arms against Tom Killigrew, who had gone home and reported, most untruly, that Marcombes was keeping the boys short of clothes and pocket money.
In July 1641 Robyn wrote again to his father. The Earl seems to have been still angry with “my brother and I”:—“My most honoured Lord and father, I desire with passion and without any question to go into Italy, but I protest unto your Lordship that I doe not desire it half so much as to heare from your Lp; for the three moneths (or Thereabouts) that we have been deprived of that sweet communication seem to me 3 long Ages, and would to god that the interruption of that pleasing commerce may proceede from your private and publique employments.”
Marcombes also had written to the Earl of Cork. He dared not be so bold, he said, as to beg for some news of “yᵉ affaires of yᵉ Island.” They, in Geneva, had heard of Strafford’s death, “yᵉ catastrophe of yᵉ last Deputy of Ireland”; but they did not know who was his successor,[90] or what had become of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of “yᵉ armys both of England and Scotland.” In Geneva, by the grace of God, they were enjoying a profound peace: “yᵉ storme having been driving another way.”
It was September 1641 when the boys and their governour, all “well horsed”, bade good-bye to Madame and the children, and set off on their long-talked-of Italian journey. Once more they crossed the “hideous mountains”; they saw the source of the Rhine “but a brook,” and came down in the valley of Valtollina, a little earthly paradise abounding “with all that Ceres and Bacchus are able to present.”
Robert Boyle always remembered standing on the spot where the little town of Piur, “once esteemed for its deliciousness,” had about a quarter of a century before been suddenly submerged and buried so deep that “no after search by digging has ever prevailed to reach it.” And still among the Alps, but surrounded by higher mountains, “where store of crystal is digged,” and which “like perpetual penitents do all the year wear white,” the boy found himself, for the first time in his life, above the clouds. He never forgot how, as they descended la Montagna di Morbegno, he looked down on the clouds that darkened the middle of the mountain below them, while he and his companions were above, in “clear serenity.”
From the Grisons they passed into Venetian territory and the vast and delicious plains of Lombardy, through Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Vincenza and Padua, to Venice, Bologna, Ferrara and Florence. They were very young; and their “peregrination” must not be compared in the matter of sightseeing and adventure with John Evelyn’s tour taken over much the same ground—only the reverse way—a year or two later. At Florence they sold their horses, and settled down for the winter of 1641-2; and there they resumed their lessons, Italian chiefly and “modern history”; and Robyn read the Lives of the Old Philosophers, and became so enamoured of the Stoics that he insisted on “enduring a long fit of the toothache with great unconcernedness.”[91] In all his journeys, he had carried his pet books with him. Frank laughed at his younger brother’s inveterate habit of reading as he walked—“if they were upon the road, and walking down a hill, or in a rough way, he would read all the way; and when they came at night to their inn, he would still be studying till supper, and frequently propose such difficulties as he met with, to his governour.”[92]
While they were wintering at Florence, Galileo died “within a league of it.” They never saw him; but they read and heard a great deal about the “paradoxes of the great Star Gazer”; and Robert carried away with him from Italy an undying memory of the attitude of the Romish Church to scientific discovery. Galileo’s paradoxes had been “confuted” by a decree from Rome, “perhaps because they could not be so otherwise”; and the Pope had shown himself “loth to have the stability of that earth questioned, in which he had established his kingdom.” It was in Florence that Robert Boyle heard the story told of the friars who reproached Galileo with his blindness, telling him it was “a just punishment of heaven”, and of the sightless astronomer’s memorable answer: “He had the satisfaction of not being blind till he had seen in heaven what never mortal eyes beheld before.” In Florence, Marcombes and his pupils lodged in the same house with some “Jewish Rabbins,” from whom Robyn learned a great deal about pre-Christian “arguments and tenets.” Frank, perhaps, was more interested in the carnaval, and the ducal tilts, and the gentlemen’s balls, to which both the brothers were invited. And Marcombes took good care of the Earl’s “jewells”, though they were allowed to look open-eyed upon all the vice, as well as the splendour, of seventeenth-century Italy: “the impudent nakedness of vice” Robert called it then and afterwards. He had never found, he used to say, “any such sermons against the things he then saw as they were against themselves.”[93]
In March 1642 they were in Rome, where it was thought safest for Robert to pass for a Frenchman. English Protestants were at the moment especially unpopular, and Master Robyn was less willing than his brother Frank to “do at Rome as the Romans do.” Rome itself indeed seems to have disappointed the young Puritan. After all his studies in Latin history and literature, it was a disappointment to find Rome dominated, not by victorious legions, but by what he called “present superstition.” He found Modern Popes where the Ancient Cæsars should have been, and “Barberine bees flying as high as did the Roman Eagle.” It was a come-down, certainly; but the little party did a good deal of sightseeing of the simple kind; and they saw the Pope and his Cardinals in chapel, and Robyn’s observant eyes watched a young churchman after the service “upon his knees carefully with his feet sweep into his handkerchief” the dust that had been consecrated by his Holiness’s feet. Robert Boyle did not gather up any dust; but he obtained and read the Latin and Tuscan poems written by this same Pope. “A poet he was,” was Robyn’s verdict of Pope Urban VIII; a poet—and some other things besides.
To escape the heat of Rome they returned to Florence, by Perugia and Pistoia, and thence by the river Arno to Pisa and Livorno. From Livorno they coasted in a felucca, drawing up their boat on shore every night and sleeping in some Mediterranean townlet, to Genoa; and so, travelling by slow degrees, by Monaco, Mentone, Nice and Antibes, they reached Marseilles in May 1642.