The letter heralds Robert Boyle’s own arrival in Ireland on a visit to his sister at Castle Lyons, and to the various family homes in Munster. His Irish estates were certainly calling for his attention; but the visit was to be postponed. Broghill’s diplomatic victories were but the beginning of bloody warfare. Broghill was to serve Cromwell through the whole of the war with Ireland, in a series of brilliant engagements. “A’ Broghill! A’ Broghill!” was the battle-cry that led on his men; and he narrowly escaped with his life in the last engagement of all—his victory at Knockbrack. Broghill was the man aimed at. “Kill the fellow in the gold-laced coat!” the Irish soldiers shouted to each other. But Broghill was not killed, though “my boldest horse,” he wrote, “being twice wounded, became so fearful that he was turned to the coach.”[174]
In the summer of 1650 Robert Boyle was still at Stalbridge, writing on May Day to thank Hartlib for his gossip about Utopia and Breda:[175] “my inclinations as much concerning me in Republicâ Literariâ as my fortune can do in Republicâ Anglicanâ. Nor am I idle, though my thoughts only are not at present useless to the advancement of learning; for I can sometimes make shift to snatch from the importunity of my affairs leisure to trace such plans and frame such models, etc., as, if my Irish fortune will afford me quarries and woods to draw competent materials from to construct after them, will fit me to build a pretty house in Athens, where I may live to philosophy and Mr. Hartlib.”
At this time, Ireland and Athens were equally remote. Was there an attraction, other than the Invisibles, that still kept Robert Boyle within reach of London? Many years afterwards—after Robert Boyle was dead—his old friend John Evelyn, writing about him to Dr. Wotton said: “Tho’ amongst all his experiments he never made that of the maried life, yet I have been told he courted a beautifull and ingenious daughter of Carew,[176] Earl of Monmouth, to which is owing the birth of his Seraphick Love.”
Was this, indeed, the love-story of Robert Boyle’s life? If so, it was lived through between the years 1648 and 1650. As early as the cold January of 1648, at Stalbridge, on the very day he came of age, in some moment of depression or decision, the boy had made a little sacrifice to Vulcan: he had resolutely burned most of the verses, “amorous, merry and devout” that he had written in idle moments, and laid away “uncommunicated.”[177] Then, when spring came, and the Stalbridge orchards were white with blossom, he had set off on his visit to London, and taken up his abode in those rooms in St. James’s that had been engaged for him by his sister Ranelagh. Early in June, he was writing to his friend Mrs. Hussey—presumably a Dorsetshire friend and neighbour—a letter full of political gossip, written the very day after he had supped with the ladies at Warwick House. But how does the letter end?
“But, Madam, since I began to write this letter, I had unexpectedly the happiness of a long conversation with the fair lady, that people are pleased to think my mistress; and truly, Madam, though I am as far from being in love as most that are so are from being wise, yet my haste makes me gladly embrace the old excuse of
‘Then to speak sense
Were an offence’
to extenuate my having hitherto written so dully, and my concluding so abruptly; for whilst this amorous rapture does possess, I neither could write sense without being injurious to my passion, nor can any longer continue to write nonsense, without some violation of that profound respect which is due to you from, and vowed you by, Madam, your ladyship’s most faithful and most humble servant.”
If the fair lady who talked so delightfully, were indeed a “beautifull and ingenious daughter” of the Earl of Monmouth, Robert Boyle’s love-story goes into a nutshell. For just a month later came the Countess of Monmouth’s letter to Lady Ranelagh, which so confounded the young squire with its civilities, and contained the invitation to Moore Park. The two young people had already met, and been attracted to one another: the lady’s name had been already spoken of among their mutual friends as that of a possible bride for the young Squire; Lady Ranelagh, at whose house, it is probable, they had first met, and who was certainly anxious to see Robyn with a wife of his own at Stalbridge, had been in private conclave with Lady Monmouth; and the Countess herself, the mother of a bevy of daughters, was disposed to look kindly on the young Squire, in spite of his Geneva-bred philosophy, and his not very robust health. For he was the youngest son of a very great family; cultured, amiable, virtuous—and likely to be a moderately rich man, when once his Irish affairs could be put in order. But there was the Earl of Monmouth to deal with; a Churchman, and passionately Royalist. There is a sentence in Robyn’s letter to the Countess which carries with it a suggestion that she, rather than the Earl, was interested in the young suitor: “If,” he says, of his precious manuscript, which she had asked him to bring to Moore Park, “it have either any way diverted your Ladyship, or had the least influence upon my Lord, I have reached my desires and gone beyond my hopes.” Did the Earl of Monmouth look unfavourably upon the young Puritan, or desire to extract from him promises—a statement about his religious and political convictions—which Robert Boyle was unwilling to make? And the fair lady herself—what amount of say had she in the matter? If Robyn had joined the King’s Army would he have won his Hermione?[178] In his Seraphick Love, he speaks of Hermione’s “cold usage.” It is quite possible that this beautiful and ingenious daughter of the Monmouth family may have merely looked shyly on Robert Boyle, his manuscript treatises and his little valetudinary ways; but it is also possible that, young as she was—she can scarcely have been more than seventeen—she was a girl not only of strong hereditary feelings, brought up a strict Churchwoman and Royalist, but of spirit and conviction—a character as firm as Robert Boyle’s itself. The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus, Robert Boyle’s quaint and powerful prose romance—of which only the second part was ever published, and that not until 1687—was written in his early youth, and even more than his Seraphick Love seems as if it may hold the internal evidence of his own love-story. If Seraphick Love speaks of a woman’s “cold usage” the story of Theodora and Didymus explains it. The character of Theodora is worth studying, if this is indeed Robert Boyle’s ideal of womanhood. It is the character of a woman young and beautiful, who is not only an uncommonly good talker, but “declares her aversion for marriage.” Her reasons are given to her friend Irene, who has “solicited favour for Didymus.”