“Marriage,” says Theodora, “is one of the most important Things of Life; and though I esteem it a mean Notion of Happiness to think that one Person can make either of them the Portion of another, yet Discretion, as well as Sincerity and Chastity, oblige a woman to have a great deal of Care of that which concerns the Term of her Life; and a Woman that designs to behave herself like a Wife, ought to take care in a Choice she can make but once, and not carelessly to enter on a Voyage where Shipwracks are so frequent, though she be offered a fine ship to make it in. But since my dear Irene takes this opportunity to know more of my Thoughts than I should disclose to any other Person, I must tell her that were I at my own disposal, and should be willing to make such a Change as I have always been averse to, Didymus’s Virtues and Services would influence me more than the Advantages of Titles, Riches or Dignities of his Rivals could. But dear Irene, the times are such, and my Circumstances too, that it would be very extravagant for me to engage myself further in the World. For a Christian cannot think to be happy, whilst the Church is miserable, and perplexed with outward Calamities.... When I think,” proceeds Theodora, “of the Church’s Desolation, and that I should not only be content to be a Spectator, but an Actor in the Tragedy, I cannot relish the Complements of a Lover, nor hope for Contentment, except from a Place above the reach of Persecution. And these Sentiments,” says she, “are warranted by the Apostle, who Discouraged Women that were free, in much less troublesome times, from entering into a Marriage State....”
And which of the bevy of Monmouth daughters was it that would not marry Robert Boyle?—“a beautifull and ingenious daughter,” says Evelyn; that is all that is known of her. Anne, the eldest, had in 1648 been some years married to James Hamilton, Earl of Clanbrassil; and of the six other daughters born to the Earl and Countess of Monmouth, only three seemed to have reached maturity—Elizabeth, Mary and Martha—of whom Elizabeth must have been seventeen in 1648. These three, with the Countess, his widow, were left in the Earl’s will—dated July 1659—his co-heirs. They were then all three unmarried; the Earl their father left some of the property under certain conditions relating to their being, as he quaintly expressed it, “in my life preferred in marriage or otherwise dead.” It was not till some years after the Earl of Monmouth’s death that Mary and Martha married—Mary becoming the second wife of the Earl of Desmond and Martha the second wife of the Earl of Middleton. Elizabeth died in December 1676, and was buried a few months before the Countess of Monmouth, her mother, in Rickmansworth Church. The inscription on the stone over her grave is not an ordinary one—
Sacred to the Memory
of yᵉ Right Honᵇˡᵉ yᵉ Lady Elizabeth
Cary one of yᵉ Davghters & Co-heirs
of the Right Honᵇˡᵉ Henry
Lord Cary Baron of Leppington
and Earle of Monmovth. Shee
dyed the 14ᵗʰ day of December in
the year of ovr Lord 1676 & in
the 46ᵗʰ year of her age having
livd all her time vnmarried bvt
now expecting A joyfvll Resvrrecᵗⁱᵒⁿ
and to be joynd to her onely
Spouse and Saviour Jesvs Christ,
lies here interd near the said
Earle her Father.
Was this the heroine of Boyle’s love story—the Hermione whose “cold usage” sent him to write his Seraphick Love at Leeze?—the woman whose views on a Marriage State found their way into his Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus? It will probably never be known. Whoever the lady, whatever the reason, the affair seems to have been, in modern parlance, “off” before the end of 1648. And yet, a whole year later, in December 1649, Robert Boyle was in London again, scorching his wings at the flame.
“I know Frank will endeavour to persuade you,” he wrote to his sister Barrymore, “that it is the thing called Love that keeps me here”; and to Lord Broghill, at the same date, “My next shall give you an account of my transactions, my studies, and my amours; of the latter of which black Betty will tell you as many lies as circumstances; but hope you know too well what she is and whence she comes not to take all her stories for fictions....”
Some strong attraction, then, in or near London, there undoubtedly was, and Robert Boyle’s family knew of it; but all their thrusts were successfully parried in what Sir Henry Wotton had called Robyn’s “pretty conceits.” In company Robert Boyle was to “prate” with “pure raillery” of “matrimony and amours.” He was to pity those who “dote on red and white.” He never could deplore the lover who “by losing his mistress recovers himself.” He was to declare that he had “never known the infelicities of love except by others’ sufferings”; to write exultantly about “this untamed heart.” He had, he said, so seldom seen a happy marriage, that he did not wonder “our Lawgivers should make marriage indesolvable to make it lasting.” Marriage was “a Lottery, in which there are many blanks to one prize.” And yet Robyn was as sensitive as he was proud. Not in company which prated of “matrimony and amours,” he had his own ideal. Love to him remained “the Noblest Passion of the Mind”; and at twenty-one he acknowledged the existence of “a peculiar unrivaled sort of Love, which constitutes the Conjugal Affections.” Lady Ranelagh, frustrated in one attempt, might go on hoping. “If you are in the west,” she wrote at a later date to this incorrigible brother, “let me beseech you to present my humble service to my two Lady Bristols, and wish you would disappoint Frank[179] by bringing a wife of your own to Stalbridge, a business I must still mind you of, though you give me cause to doubt you will as hardly pardon me those few words as the rest of the trouble given you here by your K. R.”
But there was to be no other fair lady in Robyn’s letters or in Robyn’s life—no lady whose conversational powers ever again produced in him an “amorous rapture.” He returned to his “kind of Elysium,” and the lethal chamber of chemical research. And when once a rumour reached his relatives in Ireland that he was actually married, and his nephew Barrymore’s wife[180] was foremost in her congratulations, there was a touch of the philosopher-uncle in Robert Boyle’s superlatively polite reply. “Alas! The little gentleman and I,” he assured her, “are still at the old defiance.”
Not till 1652, after Cromwell’s campaign was over, and the war in Ireland nearly at an end, did Robert Boyle revisit the land of his birth. And then he did not like it. “I must sadly confess,” he wrote, in very evident dejection, to his Dorsetshire friend, John Mallett, “that the perpetual hurry I live in, my frequent journeys, and the necessary trouble of endeavouring to settle my long-neglected and disjointed fortune, has left me very little time to converse with any book save the Bible, and scarce allowed me time to sew together some loose sheets that contain my thoughts about the Scriptures.”
It must have been with a strange conflict of feelings that he found himself at last in Youghal, standing before the tomb of his great father, on the very scene of the old Earl’s last struggle in the Protestant and Royalist cause. He wandered about the house and gardens of Lismore once again, and found this home of his childhood, in his father’s day “one of the noblest seats and greatest ornaments of the province of Munster,” now “ruined by the sad fate of war.”[181] The fortunes of the Boyle family were at this time at their lowest ebb, and everywhere that he went he was in the track of the brutalities of war; the very bloodstains of those last engagements could scarcely have been dried; the severed head and limbs must still have been sticking on the poles. “About the years 1652 and 1653 ... the plague and famine had swept away whole counties, that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature, either man, beast, or bird, they being either all dead, or had quit those desolate places.” And in the mountains so greatly had the number of wolves increased, that rewards were being offered for wolves’ heads.[182]