Heaven itself would stoop to her.”
It is not so certain that Milton’s prose would have pleased the boy;—the church-politics, the anti-episcopal pamphlets, and the divorce tract that had recently been the topic of conversation in London. There is no trace of a personal friendship between Milton and Robert Boyle. Their paths constantly crossed, but they were to walk apart. Boyle deplored religious controversy, and did not sympathise with the sects and sectaries. And yet it is here that the possibility of the “accident” comes in. For Lady Ranelagh was a very progressive Puritan, whose interests were already bound up with the Parliamentarian Party and its reforms. She must have known Milton well personally or by reputation at this time, and she can have had no bad opinion of him or his prose-writings, or she would not have sent, as she did, her own nephew, young Lord Barrymore, to be one of Milton’s pupils. Barrymore, only four years younger than Robert Boyle, was one of Milton’s resident pupils when, in September 1645, Milton removed from Aldersgate Street into a larger house in Barbican with the purpose of being able to board a larger number of boys. Lady Ranelagh was later on to send her own boy, Dick Jones, to be taught by Milton; her friendship for Milton was to endure through many troublous years; in his own words she stood “in place of all kith and kin”[118] to him in his blindness and solitude; and her good offices seem not to have stopped even there. May it have been through this Diodati-Milton-Hartlib connexion that Robert Boyle and his sister Ranelagh were brought together?
But London was not so large a place in 1644. Cousin Croone was presumably still at the Nag’s Head in Cheapside, and people met in Cheapside in those days. Had not Dr. John Diodati himself, on his one visit to London in 1627, run up against the very man he most wanted to meet—Mr. Bedell, afterwards the Bishop—in Cheapside? Whatever the “accident” was, Lady Ranelagh received her young brother with open arms. Her address in that summer of 1644 still remains uncertain, though not long afterwards she seems to have been living in the house in the Old Mall which was to be her home to the end of her life.[119] It may have been in Pall Mall that Robyn came knocking at his sister’s door. Lord Ranelagh—he had taken his seat in the House of Peers in February 1644—was probably in Ireland, for there is no mention of him as one of the family circle at this time; and the husband and wife, as the years went on, had lived more and more apart. Lord Ranelagh, who had run through his own and his wife’s money, lived in Ireland, and Lady Ranelagh in London. She was in the receipt, for some reason unexplained, of a pension from Government of £4 a week, and was otherwise helped by the members of her own family.
For nearly five months, Robert Boyle lived with his sister and her young children,[120] and a strongly Parliamentarian sister-in-law—wife of a member of the House of Commons.[121] And Mary, “my Lady Molkin,” as Robyn calls her, now Charles Rich’s wife, and daughter-in-law of the great Earl of Warwick, was not far off, whether at Warwick House in Holborn, or at “delicious Leeze” in Essex. Mary had had her troubles, since her romantic marriage three years before. She had lost her first baby, a little girl, when it was “one year and a quarter old,”[122] and her second child, a boy, had been born just at the dark time of the old Earl’s death. Charles Rich had kept back the bad news till his young wife was “up again.”[123]
In his sister’s house, Robert Boyle found himself in the very thick of the Parliamentarian interests. She was still a young woman—only thirty—and a very clever woman, highly educated for her time, and popular by reason of her “universal affability.” In her house, Robyn came to know, as real friends, “some of the great men of that Party, which was then growing, and soon after victorious.”[124] Her house was, in fact, even then, a rendezvous of the Parliamentarian Party. And what a vehemently interesting time it was, in London! Both Houses were sitting: the Westminster Assembly was busy with the new Directory of Worship and the new frame of Church Government. In September, Essex was beaten by the King’s forces in Cornwall; and Manchester and Cromwell were back in London from the north. During the last weeks of Robert Boyle’s sojourn under his sister’s roof, the talk must have been all of, if not with, Manchester and Cromwell, and of Cromwell’s “Toleration Order” and the abolition of the use of the Prayer Book. In October the King was moving back to Oxford, and there was fought the second battle of Newbury. And now the thoughts of the Parliament men were veering round from Church Government to Army Reform; and towards the end of that year, the talk was of Cromwell’s “Self-denying Ordinance” and the great changes it would carry with it; and of the new modelling of the Army—the “new noddle” as the scoffers called it. And all the time Hartlib, in Aldgate, was immersed in his social and educational schemes; and Milton, in Aldersgate Street, was teaching his boys and writing his second divorce tract and his Areopagitica; and all the time Laud was lying in the Tower, his trial dragging wearily on. What did Robert Boyle think of it all after the profound peace of Geneva?
Whatever was in his thoughts at this time—and it is very certain Robert Boyle had no intention of giving up the Book of Common Prayer, or any book he might wish to keep—there was no more talk of joining the King’s Army; and when at last, towards the end of the year, the state of the roads south-west of London permitted it, it was under a Parliamentarian escort that the young Squire found his way into Dorsetshire, to take possession of his own Manor of Stalbridge. Through his sister’s influence with her Parliamentarian friends, Robyn had got “early protection for his English and Irish estates.”
Even with this protection, there were difficulties in front of him. There must have been a sadness about his solitary return to the Manor, empty except for the child-memories of five years before. The fair chimney-pieces and carved balustrades, the beautiful rose-coloured furniture “hastened home” for those great house-parties of 1639—must have talked to him of a chapter of his life wiped out for ever. What things had happened there! There was the arrival of Mary’s suitor, and Mary’s high averseness and contradiction, and the young man’s discomfiture and departure to the Bath: Mary was the same imperious little woman now, as then; she now had a “high averseness” to Charles Rich’s “engaging in the wars.” Here poor Lettice had drooped and complained, and George Goring, with his wounded leg, had limped up and down stairs. Then there was the “private discourse” in the Stalbridge parlour, that had settled poor Frank’s fate: Betty had refused to live with the old Earl after Mary’s marriage, and had gone her own way; she was now, nominally with the Staffords, at The Hague, the gay little courtier that she was, a Killigrew all over!... There were the paths where Mr. Dowch had discoursed Latin Syntax, and where Robyn had first come to know the cheerful and choleric Marcombes, as they talked in “familiar French” about all the European cities they were going to see. Through these gates Frank and Robyn had come “home” after the years at Eton—the “blew-perpetuana” curtains following duly. Through these gates, he and Frank and Marcombes had passed, on that memorable journey to London, where Frank was to “make his addresses” to Betty in the Savoy. All round him lay the fields where he had dreamed, and the orchards of which he had been so proud to possess the keys. And it was all his own, now—all empty and neglected: “my own ruined cottage in the country”:[125] a depressing place for a boy of eighteen to return alone to. One of the first events of the new year, 1645, the news of which could have reached Stalbridge was the execution of Laud on Tower Hill.
Nobody could have been very glad to see Robert Boyle come back again; least of all Tom Murray, whom the old Earl had left in charge, and who proved himself to have been, during his reign there, as untrustworthy as Mr. Perkins the London tailor. “The roguery of Tom Murray” was one of the first difficulties that faced the young squire.
Two other pieces of business, however, could have admitted of no delay. Marcombes was to be repaid; and partly to that end, apparently, in August 1645, as soon as Robert Boyle could put his hands on some of his own money, he set out from Stalbridge, “the necessities of my affairs,” as he explained in a letter to his brother Broghill, “calling me away (according to the leave the Parliament has given me) into France.”[126] By August 1645, the New Model had done extraordinary things. In the spring, Cromwell and Waller had been in the west of England. Naseby had been fought in June, and the King’s private correspondence taken and published. In July, George Goring had been badly beaten in the west; Bath had surrendered on July 30. Was Robert Boyle still at Stalbridge on August 15, when Sherborne Castle was stormed and battered—Sherborne Castle, where the old Earl and his sons had killed that buck and dined the very day that Lady Ranelagh’s baby had been born? Probably not. It was probably wise that he should absent himself, “according to the leave the Parliament had given him.” At any rate, he was well away from English shores again when on September 10 there came “the splendid success of the storming of Bristol.”[127]
It is not known if Robert Boyle went so far as Geneva, or whether he actually saw his old governour again; but in any case his visit was a brief one. His business was done, and he was back in London before the end of that year, staying with Lady Ranelagh, and able to attend to the other business that remained to be done—if indeed it had not been done before he left Stalbridge in August.