Robert Boyle

by Flora Masson

And meantime Lady Ranelagh was doing her best to push her young brother’s literary interests, and make his London visit a pleasant one. She had been showing one of his manuscripts to her friend the Countess of Monmouth. The Countess was the daughter of an old acquaintance of the Earl of Cork, Lionel Cranfield, the clever merchant-adventurer, Lord Mayor of London, High Treasurer, and first, Earl of Middlesex. It may be remembered that Marcombes had been tutor in the Middlesex family before he took Kynalmeaky and Broghill abroad. The Countess had read and liked the manuscript, and had sent the young Squire a flattering message and invitation in a note to his sister Ranelagh. And it was with more than ordinary pleasure that Robert Boyle sat down to indite his little letter of reply, a model of seventeenth-century epistolary homage, to the Countess of Monmouth at Moore Park—

“Madam,” so runs the letter: “in your ladyship’s (imparted to me by my sister Ranelagh) I find myself so confounded with civilities, that if she that blessed me with the sight of your letter had not (for her own discharge) exacted of me this acknowledgment of my having seen it, I must confess I should scarce have ventured to return a verbal answer, deterred by the impossibility of writing without wronging a resentment[160] which I can express as little as I deserved the praises and the favours that have produced it.”

And so on. The Countess had suggested the publication of his pamphlet. But she did more: she had invited the young Squire to pay a visit to Moore Park, and to bring his manuscript in his pocket—

“As for my pamphlet, Madam, had it expected the glory of entertaining you, it should certainly have appeared in a less careless dress ... yet my just sense of the smallness of the accession the Press can be to the honour of your ladyship’s perusal makes me decline its publication. And as that paper cannot have either a higher applause or nobler end than the being liked and practised at Moore Park, so if it have either anyway diverted your ladyship, or had the least influence upon my lord, I have reached my desires and gone beyond my hopes. However, Madam, I am richly rewarded for writing such a book by being enjoyned to fetch it where you are. So welcome a command is very unlikely to be disobeyed; but my obedience, Madam, must be paid to the order, not the motive. The fetching of my book may be one effect of my remove, but not the errand of it; for sure, Madam, your modesty cannot be so injurious, both to yourself and me, as to persuade you that any inferior (that is, other) motive can be looked upon by me as an invitation to a journey which will bless me with so great a happiness as that of your ladyship’s conversation, and give me the opportunity of assuring you, better than my present haste and my disorder will now permit me, in how transcendent a degree I am, Madam, your Ladyship’s humble and obliged servant, Robert Boyle.”

It was a particularly cold, wet July[161]; the confusions of the country seemed to have infected the very air; and those people who were “wont to make fires, not against winter but against cold,” had “generally displac’d the florid and the verdant Ornaments in their chimneys,” where “Vulcan” was more proper than “Flora.”[162]

But it must be taken for granted that the sun shone out one day, not long after the folding and dispatching of this letter to the Countess; and that Robert Boyle and his horse did find their way by the old coach-road from London into Hertfordshire. And when they came to the little town of Rickmansworth, lying sleepily in the valley, clustered about the huge Church in its midst, horse and rider must have turned upwards to the left, under spreading oak-trees. The “common way” still runs upwards through the Park.

For Moore Park, that once belonged to Shakespeare’s Earl of Pembroke, “stands on the side of a hill; but not very steep.” Sir William Temple has described it, as it was in that day, when the Monmouth family owned it, “the sweetest place, I think, that I have ever seen in my life, either before or since, at home or abroad.” The length of the house lay upon the breadth of the garden. The great parlour, where the Countess would receive her guest, opened on the middle of a terraced gravel-walk, set with standard laurels, which looked like orange-trees out of bloom. There were fountains and statues and summer-houses in that garden—“the perfectest figure of a garden”—and shady cloisters, upon arches of stone, clustered over with vines. And beyond lay a wilderness, which was always in the shade. Robert Boyle must have been a happy man that day, as he alighted before those portals with his manuscript in his pocket.

Henry Cary, second Earl of Monmouth, was a Royalist peer: his younger brother, Thomas Cary, was the faithful groom of the bedchamber to Charles I. They were sons of the old Robert—the man who, the moment Queen Elizabeth was dead, had started on his record ride from London to Edinburgh to be the first to tell James VI that he was King of England. The first Earl and his Countess—a Trevanion—lay buried in Rickmansworth Church; and the second Earl and his Countess were, at the time of Robert Boyle’s visit, living quietly at Moore Park, the Earl having of late withdrawn into retirement among his books and manuscripts.[163] For he was a scholar, skilled in modern languages, and a writer—though not one of his manuscripts remains. And he and the Countess were still passionately mourning the death of Lionel, their elder son and heir, who had fallen in the battle of Marston Moor. The second son was married, in London[164]; and the family at Moore Park must have consisted entirely of daughters, though the eldest daughter had been married for some years to Mary Boyle’s rejected suitor, Mr. James Hamilton.[165] Mr. Hamilton had married the Lady Anne Cary a few weeks after the Lady Mary Boyle’s runaway marriage with Charles Rich. But not any of the other daughters at Moore Park—and there was a bevy of them—were married, or to be married, for many years to come; which, in those days of early marriages, is a matter for some wonder, especially as it is known, on Evelyn’s authority, that one at least of these daughters was “beautifull and ingenious.”[166]

However pleasant the visit to Moore Park may have been, it was soon over. Early in August Robert Boyle was staying with his sister Mary at the Earl of Warwick’s house of Leeze, in Essex, and there finishing his treatise on “Seraphick Love.” It purported to be written “by one young gentleman to another”—to that Lindamor, in fact, the “learned youth both well-born and well-bred,” who makes the fourth of the little quartet in the Reflections. The manuscript was handed, “almost sheet by sheet,” as it was written, to the enthusiastic Mary; and then, having been, after the fashion of the day, circulated among a favoured few, it was laid carefully by, among the young Squire’s other papers. And in September he was back again at Stalbridge.

The last months of that fateful year must have been, in many a quiet English manor, the most dismal and depressing ever lived through. In his seclusion, with pen and ink, limbecks and recipients, Robert Boyle was to employ the months as best he could. To his Manor, set among its autumn orchards, reached by its stone-paved way between rows of elm-trees, there must have come from week to week, by friend or messenger or weekly news-sheet, the straggling tidings of those events that one after the other were hurrying the Sovereign to his doom. The second civil war had been trampled out; Cromwell’s great battle of Preston had been fought and Hamilton taken prisoner, while Robert Boyle was still at “delicious Leeze,” perfecting his treatise on “Seraphick Love.” And before he left Leeze there had come the news of the surrender of Colchester to Fairfax, and the shooting of the two Royalist leaders. In September the Parliamentary Commissioners were in the Isle of Wight; and through the shortening days of October and November even Dorsetshire and its “bye-paths of intelligence” must have been stirred by the doings of Parliament, the “high and fierce” debate that followed the Army Remonstrance, and the coup d’état of the King’s abduction from the Isle of Wight to the melancholy Hurst Castle on the Hampshire mainland. And then—Fairfax was at Whitehall; the Army was in possession of London.