In Ireland the state of things was no more hopeful than nearer home. The news of Lord Ormonde’s peace must have reached Geneva; but Robert Boyle explains carefully to Marcombes the respective attitudes of the three parties;—the Protestant English proper; the “mere natives,” who hoped by rebellion “to exchange the Throne of England for St. Peter’s Chair,” or “to shake off the English yoke for that of some Catholic foreign prince”; and, thirdly, the Catholic Lords of the English Pale—“so we call the counties about Dublin”—who are “by manners and inclination Irish, though English by descent.”
In Inchiquin’s absence from Munster, Broghill, Governor of Youghal, had been left in full command.[139] Robyn is very proud of Broghill, not only as a gallant soldier, but as “none of the least wits of the time.” Broghill had come to England to appeal for troops and supplies for Munster;[140] but Parliament was so slow in granting them that “the physic will not get thither before the patient be dead.”
And then Robert Boyle gives Marcombes a piece of his mind about the sects and sectaries:—
“The Presbyterian Government is at last settled (though I can scarce think it will prove long lived) after the great opposition of many, and to their no less dislike.” But many people had begun to think it was high time to “put a restraint upon the spreading impostures of the sectaries,” who had made London their general rendezvous. The City “entertains at present no less than 200 several opinions in point of religion.” Some have been “digged out of the graves,” where they had been long condemned to lie buried; others have been “newly fashioned in the forge of their own brains”; most are but “new editions of old errors.”
“If the truth be anywhere to be found,” wrote the young philosopher, “it is here sought so many several ways that one or other must needs light upon it.” But he speaks with respect of that kind of tolerance that tries to see even in impostures “glimpses and manifestations of obscure or formerly concealed truths,” and that would not “aggravate very venial errors into dangerous and damnable heresies.”
“The Parliament is now upon an ordinance for the punishment of many of these supposed errors; but since their belief of their contrary truths is confessedly a work of divine revelation, why a man should be hanged because it has not yet pleased God to give him his Spirit, I confess I am yet to understand....”
After this the letter goes off into domestic and personal matters. Robert Boyle had been in company with the Archbishop of Armagh[141]—“our Irish St. Austin”[142]—and had been telling him of Marcombes’s French translation of a sermon of the Archbishop’s, “The Mystery of the Incarnation.” “He seemed very willing that you should publish it, upon the assurance I gave him of the fidelity of its translation.” Lady Ranelagh and Broghill were anxious to find Marcombes some more pupils; but all the great families of England were at present “standing at a gaze.” Whether peace or war be the outcome of events, “it is probable that a good many of them will make visits to foreign climates.”[143]
Robyn himself had seen a variety of fortune since he and his governour had parted: “plenty and want, danger and safety, sickness and health, trouble and ease.” He had actually once been a prisoner in London, “on some groundless suspicion,” but had quickly got off with advantage. At Stalbridge he was pursuing his studies by fits and starts. “Divers little essays, both in prose and verse, I have taken the pains to scribble upon several subjects”; and as soon as he can “lick them into some less imperfect shape” he will send some of the “least bad” to Marcombes in Geneva. He tells Marcombes about his study of ethics, and his desire to “call them down from the brain into the breast, and from the school to the house”; and he mentions his little treatise that goes on so slowly.
“The other humane studies I apply myself to are natural philosophy, the mechanics, and husbandry, according to the principles of our new philosophical college, that values no knowledge but as it hath a tendency to use.” And he begs Marcombes to inquire for him into the “ways of husbandry” practised about Geneva; “and when you intend for England, to bring along with you what good receipts or good books of any of those subjects you can procure, which will make you extremely welcome to our invisible college.”
The “Invisible College,” the embryo of the Royal Society of London, was then already in existence. Since some time in 1645, a little club composed of a few “worthy persons inquisitive into natural philosophy” had been holding its weekly meetings; sometimes in the lodging of the physician, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, in Wood Street, Cheapside; sometimes at a “convenient place” in Cheapside itself,—in fact, the Bull’s Head Tavern; and sometimes in Gresham College, near by. Its originator was Theodore Haak, who, like Hartlib, was a naturalised German; and among its first members were Dr. John Wallis, clerk to the Westminster Assembly; Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell; Foster, the professor of astronomy at Gresham College; the young William Petty; Dr. Goddard himself; and one or two other “doctors in physic” more or less well known in London. They had their telescopes and microscopes and their attendant apothecaries, etc.; and, “precluding theology and state-affairs,” they wandered at will among the sciences,—the physics and chemics, and mechanics and magnetics,—“as then cultivated at home and abroad.” Hartlib was from the very first connected with this club: “The Invisible College of his imagination seems to have been that enlarged future association of all earnest spirits for the prosecution of real and fruitful knowledge of which this club might be the symbol and promise.”[144]