The only Campus Martius that Robyn had ever known had been the fields outside Geneva, where every Sunday after the evening devotions the young townsmen were allowed to exercise their arms, practising diligently with the gun and the long and cross bows, for prizes of pewter plates and dishes. Robert Boyle had brought his bows and arrows back with him to London. He must have practised with the rest, as John Evelyn did two years later, on that peaceful Champs de Mars, and played with the rest on its “noble Pall Mall.” He had known the gardens of rare tulips and other choice flowers outside the earthen fortifications, and he must have seen Geneva also in its sterner moods. For that same “Mars’ Field” was the place of public execution; and in Geneva there was then no hospitality of extradition-law. Capital crime in other countries was capital crime there. Fugitives from other countries were put to death in the sunshine of that spacious field; and for the Genevans, by Genevan law, adultery was death.[116]
But Geneva and its Mars’ Field lay behind him. And in front? Robert Boyle must have heard something of what had been happening at home. Accounts had reached him from time to time of the “dreadful confusion of affairs” in England, Ireland and Scotland. During those last two years in Geneva he must have heard all kinds of rumours of the struggle that was going on between the Parliament and the Crown, between the Prelates and the Presbyterians. His friends in Geneva must have talked of the Solemn League and Covenant, and the Great Assembly of Divines that was meeting in Westminster; and of Archbishop Laud, then still alive, still in prison, his trial still deferred.
But it takes seeing to realise civil war. When Robyn arrived in England it was to find a kingdom in arms against itself, a nation divided into two great opposing armies; husbands and wives taking different sides, fathers and sons in opposite camps, brother against brother. The king’s headquarters were at Oxford; Prince Rupert with his Royalist army was in Lancashire. York was defended by the Marquis of Newcastle against the combined Parliamentarian forces under Manchester, Fairfax and Cromwell. Robert Boyle had arrived in England almost on the eve of the battle of Marston Moor.
And what to do? There was only one thing at this moment that the great Earl’s Benjamin could think of doing. He was no soldier, this dreamy youth, with his books and his bows and arrows; but force of heredity—a kind of force of inertia—would have carried him into the Royalist camp. His brothers were all soldiers; though it is doubtful if he knew, when he came home, where they were and what they were doing. The very politics of the various members of this scattered family, the “sides” they were taking in the quick march of political events, must have been a puzzle to him. And so it was Robert Boyle’s intention to join the army, where he told himself he would find, besides his brothers, “the excellent King himself, divers eminent divines, and many worthy persons of several ranks.” But he knew also that “the generality of those he would have been obliged to converse with were very debauched, and apt, as well as inclinable, to make others so.”
If Robert Boyle had joined the King’s army! It is difficult to think of him in “armor of prooff,” and quite impossible to picture him as a laughing Cavalier. He disliked “customary swearing”; he drank water; he did not smoke; he dearly loved to point a moral; and he never adorned a tale. It is certain no officers’ mess would have endured him for ten minutes, in the rôle either of sceptical chymist or of Christian virtuoso. And what would have become of the Invisible College, and the Royal Society?
But, fortunately for them, for him, and for posterity, it was to be ordered otherwise. It happened that his sister Katherine, now, since the death of her father-in-law,[117] Lady Ranelagh, was in the summer of 1644 actually living in London, and “it was by an accident” that Robyn found her out; an accident to which he used afterwards to ascribe “a good part of his future happiness.”
In later years, when Robert Boyle was giving Bishop Burnet some of the facts of his life for an intended biography, he did not mention what the “accident” was. Perhaps, so soon after the Restoration, he had still reason to be discreet in the use of names; for Lady Ranelagh, in the summer of 1644, was very much among the Parliamentarians.
In the light of after events, one or two possibilities suggest themselves, if it be forgivable in anything concerning an experimental chemist to indulge in speculation. Marcombes must surely have furnished Robyn with letters to persons in London who would be of practical help to the boy on his arrival. Who were they? Mr. Perkins the tailor had proved perfidious, and was out of the question. There were Peter Naylor, the lawyer-cousin in New Inn, and Cousin Croone of the Nag’s Head, and Philip Burlamachy, once Lord Mayor, with whom the old Earl had done so much business, and who was also a relation of the Diodati family, Dr. John Diodati’s wife being a Burlamachy. But it could scarcely be called an accident if in a business call on any of these Robyn had obtained his sister’s address. It must have been some chance meeting with, or news of, her in some unexpected quarter.
Other men there were to whom the boy may well have carried letters from Marcombes or his Genevan friends. There was Dr. Theodore Diodati, the London physician—brother of Dr. John in Geneva,—who knew a great many people in London; and there was Samuel Hartlib, the naturalised German, the merchant-philanthropist who knew everybody and whom everybody knew. And there was Milton himself, a friend of the Diodati family in Geneva, and a friend also of Dr. Theodore Diodati and Mr. Hartlib. Dr. Theodore Diodati lived in the parish of St. Bartholomew the Less, not far from Milton’s house in Aldersgate Street, and Hartlib was living in Duke’s Place, Aldgate. He was a man with many hobbies and interests, and a large correspondence. He conducted, in fact, “a general news agency,” and must have been as well known in Geneva as in London from his connexion with Durie and the great project of a union of all the Protestant Churches of Europe, and for his friendship with Comenius, and his active part in the scheme which the English Parliament was then itself taking up of a reform, on Baconian lines, of the English Universities and Public Schools. It is certain that Hartlib was one of Robert Boyle’s earliest friends in London; that Hartlib and Milton were intimate, and that Milton had first addressed his Tract on Education to Hartlib. And it is difficult to believe that Milton was unknown—by name at least—to Robert Boyle. For Milton had been in Geneva in the summer of 1639, just before Frank and Robyn went there. Milton’s great friend Charles Diodati was the son of Dr. Theodore in London and the nephew of Dr. John of Geneva; and when Milton passed through Geneva on his way home from his Italian tour Dr. John had been very hospitable to him. Milton had been an honoured guest at the Villa Diodati, and it is supposed that he heard there the news of Charles Diodati’s death. Even if Robyn had not met Milton at Sir Henry Wotton’s table when Milton dined at Eton, he may well have heard in Geneva all about Charles Diodati and John Milton, and the Epitaphium Damonis—the Latin poem that Milton wrote on his return home, in memory of his dead friend. And it is probable he knew of Comus, acted by the Bridgewater family, and of Lycidas also, and Milton’s friendship for Edward King, the brilliant young Irishman, whose relatives in Ireland must have been well known to the Boyle family. Robyn may well have read the Epitaphium Damonis in the Villa Diodati; and in the house of the Italian teacher and refugee, Count Cerdogni, he may have looked through the famous autograph album in which Milton had written the words (of which Robyn would certainly have approved)—
“If Vertue feeble were,