And what had the Earl’s young daughter, the “unrewly Mary,” been doing? She and Frank’s wife, Betty, having spent the summer at Stalbridge with the Earl and his customary house-party, were now back in town, staying with Lady Dungarvan in her house in Long Acre. Betty had taken the measles, and Mary had promptly followed suit; and they had both been packed off to another house in Holborn. Charles Rich had shown such anxiety about Mary that the family’s suspicions were at last aroused; and Betty’s mamma, very much afraid of the Earl of Cork, had threatened to tell everything, “and in a great heat and passion did that very night do it.”[101] Betty in the meantime contrived to give the lovers one more chance. Charles Rich went down on his knees before the convalescent Mary, and remained in that attitude for two hours, while Betty kept guard at the door; and “so handsome did he express his passion” that Mary at last said “yes.” The very next day Broghill—himself a married man—carried his little sister off in disgrace to a very small house near Hampton Court which belonged to Betty’s sister, Mrs. Katharine Killigrew; and there for weeks Mary lived in exile, Charles Rich riding down daily to see her. His father, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Goring interceded with the old autocrat, and at last their combined influence carried the day The Earl saw, “and was civil to,” Mr. Charles Rich, and Mary’s portion was to be £7000. It was now Mary who went down on her knees before her father, begging for his pardon. The old man upbraided her, shed some tears, and told her to marry Charles Rich as soon as she liked.
It might be supposed that this was enough, but no;—Mary Boyle at sixteen had been “always a great enemy to a public marriage.” She much preferred running away. Charles Rich was quite willing, and the young people were privately married on July 21, 1641, in the little parish church of Shepperton, near Hampton Court. And a few days later, Mary’s elder sister, the Lady Katharine Jones, too kind and too wise to be angry with so rare a thing as a love-match, especially when the wedding was over, accompanied the young couple in her carriage to the Earl of Warwick’s house of Leeze in Essex, and handed them over to the care of that patriarchal family.[102]
Some of the Cork family,—the Barrymores, and Kynalmeaky, without his wife,—seem to have been already in Ireland in the autumn of 1641; and the Earl of Cork was making his own preparations to return to Lismore. He had been buying six black horses and harnesses for his new light travelling coach, a sedan chair lined with carnation velvet, and a “horslytter,” with two black stone coach-horses. August is a hot month for “feasting” in any case, and the summer of 1641 had been particularly hot, and the plague and smallpox were rife in London; but in August the old Earl had entertained at his Cousin Croone’s at the Nag’s Head Tavern in Cheapside all the Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen of the Committees of both Houses of Parliament for Ireland; and a few days later, Cousin Croone, at the Nag’s Head, had “feasted” his great kinsman the Earl of Cork.
During those last months also the Earl had been busy settling his affairs: there was the purchase of Marston Bigot in Somersetshire for Broghill and his wife, and the purchase of the smaller Devonshire estate of Annarye, and the settling of Stalbridge on Robert, his Benjamin. There was the paying of debts and bonds and jointure moneys, and the packing, locking, sealing and lettering of “yron chestes” and “lyttle trunckes” and “lyttle boxes,” to be left behind in the care of various trusted friends. Among them were boxes of deeds and writings for Frank, to be left with Betty’s stepfather, Sir Thomas Stafford; and at least two other boxes, “fast sealed”, for Robert, one of them to be left with the Earl’s friend, Lord Edward Howard of Escrick, and the other, containing duplicates, with the Earl’s own cousin, Peter Naylor, the lawyer, of New Inn. Stalbridge was to belong to Robert after the Earl’s death, besides the Irish lands already settled on him, and a house specially built for him at Fermoy. And the old man had set his match-making old heart on a splendid marriage for Robyn—with the Lady Ann Howard, the very young daughter of Lord Edward Howard of Escrick, first cousin of “Lady Pegg.” One of the Earl’s last rides in England was with his son Dungarvan to Hatfield to take leave of the Salisbury family; and there also he saw “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.,” to whom on this occasion the Earl presented “a small gold ring with a diamond.”
The last visit of all was to Leeze in Essex—carried there in Charles Rich’s own coach—to bid good-bye to the beloved “unrewly Mary”. The last of the Earl’s many gifts in England appears to have been to an “infirme cozyn” of his own—a welcome gift from one old man to another—“a pott of Sir Walter Raleigh’s tobackoe.”[103]
There were a good many leavetakings with English friends and kinsfolk between London and Stalbridge, and an almost royal progress from Stalbridge by Marston Bigot—where he held a “Court”—to the coast. Lady Kynalmeaky had been persuaded to accompany her father-in-law to Ireland, and Broghill and his wife crossed with them. The Dungarvans were, apparently, to follow shortly after. Youghal was reached on October 17, and a day or two later the Earl and his family were at the House of Lismore again.
The old biographers give a picturesque account of a great banquet at Castle Lyons in honour of the Earl’s home-coming. They tell how, while Lord Barrymore was feasting his guests, the old Earl was called out of the banqueting hall to see a messenger, who, in a few breathless, horror-stricken words, brought him tidings of the bloody outbreak of rebellion in Munster. A week or two later Lord Barrymore—the only one of the old Irish nobility to remain absolutely loyal to the Protestant cause—was buying ordnance for the defence of Castle Lyons. Lismore was being strengthened and stored with ordnance, carbynes, muskets, Gascoigne wines and aqua vitæ. Gunpowder and match were being bought in large quantities, money was being paid out on every hand—the Earl was “maintaining” everything and everybody—and money was getting ominously scarce. In December, Lady Kynalmeaky left Ireland for the Hague, and Kynalmeaky took over the charge of Bandonbridge, with a troop of horse and 500 foot, “all English Protestants.” In January 1642, Broghill was defending Lismore with a troop of horse and 200 “good shot.” He was a dependable son: “My lord,” he wrote to his father, “fear nothing for Lismore, for if it be lost it shall be with the life of him that begs your lordship’s blessing, and stiles him, my lord, your lordship’s most humble, most obliged, and most dutiful son and servant, Broghill.” The old Earl himself had undertaken to hold Youghal, to keep the command of that harbour, and to “preserve that towne”; and he was never to leave it. The sheet-lead on the “tarras” of the old college was to be torn up to make “case-shott” for his ordnance. Pikes, muskets, halberds and “brownbills”—everything in the shape of a weapon—were collected from Devonshire and Dorsetshire and everywhere else, and the “Mortall Sowe” was to play a great part in the defence of Bandonbridge and Lismore. Dungarvan, at the head of 1200 foot, was with the Lord President.[104] The Protestant ladies had left, or were leaving, for England or the Hague; but Dungarvan’s wife and Broghill’s wife stayed as long as possible on the spot.[105]
It was from Lismore—just before the Earl was sent to defend Youghal—that he negotiated the bills of exchange to be sent through Perkins, the London tailor, to Marcombes: the quarterly allowance of £250 for the three months from March 1 to June 1, 1642. And it was from Youghal, on March 9, that he sent the letter—one of the finest and saddest appeals ever written by a father to his children—that was to greet Marcombes and the boys on their arrival at Marseilles.[106]
It is a long letter. The Earl had received their news from Florence, and was glad to hear of their health and proficiency; but the thought of them, and how hereafter they were to subsist, was most grievous unto him—
“And now or never,” he wrote to Marcombes, “is the tyme for you to give yourself honour, and to make me and them your faithfull friends for ever hereafter. Necessitie compells me to make you and them know the dangerous and poore estate whereunto, by God’s providence, I am at this instant reduced.”