What fate had overtaken the Earl’s choice dun mare that waited at Lismore for Robyn’s home-coming? The old order had changed; and it was on a borrowed courser, “none of the freest of his legs,” that Robert Boyle made the journey. Lord Broghill was with him, and they had the company of a States-Messenger, who was travelling the same way. The account of their long ride, by Farnham and Winchester and over Salisbury Plain is a little romance in itself.[132] The war was drawing to an end. The King was again at Oxford:—it was not long before his escape, in disguise, to the Scots at Newcastle. The new-modelled Army had very nearly completed its work of conquest in the south-west. The Cavaliers were out between Egham and Farnham, but the travellers dodged them.[133] Farnham was deserted—“all the townsmen having gone to oppose the King’s Army.” Robert Boyle almost lost himself in meditation, “invited by the coolness of the evening and the freshness of the garden,” in which he walked up and down waiting for his supper. The travellers supped, and retired quietly to bed; and it was not till the dead of night that they were roused by a thundering at the chamber door. Robyn slept in his clothes and stockings: “my usual night-posture when I travel.” He produced his bilboa from under his pillow, and a pistol from one of his holsters; his bows and arrows were not far off. But it turned out to be only the town-constable with a group of musketeers, in search of somebody else. “Away went my gentleman,” wrote Robyn gaily to his sister, “in prosecution of his search; and I even took my bows and arrows and went to sleep.”
They dined next day at Winchester, and lay that night at Salisbury; and there Robyn overtook his trunks, which had been sent on in front of him. In the middle of Salisbury Plain they were surrounded by a party of horse, who would have searched them for “Malignant Letters” such as “use to be about the King’s Picture in a Yellow-Boy.”[134] But the States-Messenger carried them safely through, and they rode on, past weary troops of foot, “poor pressed countrymen,” goaded on by the party of horse. “Amongst them,” wrote Robert Boyle, “I saw one poor rogue, lacqueyed by his wife, and carrying a child upon his shoulders.” Even then, as now, “new models” leave much to be desired.
In spite of his bilboa and pistols, Robert Boyle hated the sight of war. “Good God!” he wrote, “that reasonable creatures, that call themselves Christians too, should delight in such an unnatural thing as war, where cruelty at least becomes necessity....”
He reached Stalbridge in safety; but the weather had broken, and was wretchedly cold. “We all suspect the almanac-maker of a mistake in setting down March instead of January.” The bad weather kept him indoors, and was “so drooping that it dulls me to all kinds of useful study.” Even his country neighbours were prevented from making their usual “visitations.” Robert Boyle was depressed: Stalbridge was not so lively as London. “My stay here,” he says, “God willing, shall not be long.”
There were still troops in the neighbourhood, and the plague had “begun to revive again”; there had been cases at Bristol, and at Yeovil, only six miles off. Dorsetshire was suffering from “fits of the Committee”;[135] and at the Manor itself there were many calls on the Squire’s slender purse. This had for the time been replenished by one of his brothers; and he was going to cut down some of his wood, to repay the loan. He was arranging to make “my brother’s sixty trees bear him some golden fruit”; but this was to be done by instalments—one third at May Day next. And meantime he was trying to settle down to his “standish and books”; but even writing did not come easily. “My Ethics,” he wrote to his sister (of a little treatise he had begun, one of his first literary attempts), “go very slowly on.”[136]
And the days must have passed slowly too. “I am grown so perfect a villager, and live so removed,” runs a letter to Lady Ranelagh, “not only from the roads, but from the very by-paths of intelligence, that to entertain you with our country discourse, would have extremely puzzled me, since your children have not the rickets nor the measles.”[137] He was feeling the difficulties of his position, in being one of a family so important to both political parties. “I have been forced to observe a very great caution and exact evenness in my carriage, since I saw you last,” he wrote to Marcombes in Geneva; “it being absolutely necessary for the preservation of a person whom the unfortunate situation of his fortune made obnoxious to the injuries of both parties and the protection of neither.” And his money matters were still in disorder, as indeed were everybody else’s. Out of his Irish estates he had not received “the worth of a farthing.”
The roguery of Tom Murray at Stalbridge, however, had had one good result: it had obliged Robyn to make “further discoveries into æconomical knowledge” than he would otherwise have done. He had turned Tom Murray away, “to let him know that I could do my business very well without him”; and then, towards the end of 1646, Tom Murray was to be taken back: “Having attained to a knowledge of my own small fortune beyond the possibility of being cheated, I am likely to make use of him again, to show my father’s servants that I wish no hurt to the man, but to the knave.”
In October 1646, Robert Boyle was back on a visit to London, perhaps to see the great Essex buried “in kingly state.” On that day, the solemn pageant just over, he sat down to write a letter—a wonderful letter for a boy not yet twenty—to Marcombes in Geneva. He wrote of the long procession of four hundred officers, “not one so low as a captain,” the House of Peers, the House of Commons, the City-Fathers, and the Assembly of Divines, that had followed Essex to the grave. But to Robert Boyle the “pageants of sorrow” had “eaten up the reality”; the “care of the blaze” had “diverted men from mourning.”[138]
His letter to his old governour gives a vivid picture of the political conditions of the time. In England there was “not one Malignant garrison untaken”; in Wales “but two or three rocky places held out for the King.” The Scots were about to deliver up their garrisons and return into their own country, the Parliament having agreed to compound with them for all their arrears. A sum of £300,000 had been agreed upon, but “the first payment is yet in debate.” The King was still at Newcastle, “both discontenting and discontented”; and the Scots would be obliged to make up their minds how to “dispose of his person,” which the Houses had “voted to remain in the disposition of both Houses of Parliament.” People were flattering themselves with hopes of a speedy settlement of things, but Robert Boyle was not so hopeful. He has, he says, “always looked upon Sin as the chief incendiary of this war”; and yet, “by careful experience,” he has observed that the war has “only multiplied and heightened those sins to which it owes its being.” And his simile is characteristic: “As water and ice,” he adds, “which by a reciprocal generation beget one another.”