Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed
That still, though dead, greater than death he laid,
And in his altered face you something feign
That threatens Death he yet will live again.”
Andrew Marvell, “A Poem upon the Death
of his Late Highness the Lord Protector.”
“My Lady Molkin,” Charles Rich’s wife, now lived almost always at delicious Leeze. For Mary had long ago become devout, and was surrounded by the Earl of Warwick’s chaplains. The story of her conversion has been told by herself.[212] When she was scarcely more than one-and-twenty, her little son, her only child—“which I then doated on with great fondness”—had fallen dangerously ill. In her agony of mind, Mary, like her brother Robyn in the thunderstorm, had made a vow to God. If he would restore her child to her, she would become “a new creature.” The little boy recovered, and Mary “began to find in myselfe a greate desire to go into the country, which I never remember before to have had, thinking it allways the saddest thing that could be when we were to remove.” It was indeed a great change for the little lady who had lived in “constant crowds of company” ever since she had left the care of Lady Clayton in Cork. Even after her marriage with Charles Rich and her separation from Frank’s frivolous little wife Betty, Mary had remained “stedfastly set against being a Puritan.” But after hearing the great Usher preach “against Plays,” she had given up going to see them acted, and her sister Ranelagh had encouraged her in her new course of life. Moreover, Dr. Walker, the household chaplain at Leeze, had preached “very awakingly and warmly”; and though some of the Warwick family were inclined to laugh at her, Mary pursued her own way, stealing from them into the wilderness at Leeze, and keeping to her quiet life of reading, meditation, and prayer.
She was, however, at Warwick House in Holborn towards the end of 1648, after Robert Boyle had finished writing his Seraphick Love at Leeze; and in Holborn Mary fell ill of the smallpox. Lady Ranelagh was then at her house in Pall Mall. She had been fortunate enough to escape smallpox, but she was not afraid to sit with her little sister, who had been isolated in Warwick House. The great Dr. Wright was in attendance—“Cromwell’s Physician,” the man afterwards chosen by the Council to be sent, with Dr. Bates and an apothecary, to consult with Dr. Goddard when Cromwell was so ill in Edinburgh. Mary was scarcely convalescent when the news was brought to her sick-room of “that barbarous and unheard-of wicked action of beheading Charles I.”[213]
A year or two later, while Robert Boyle was in Ireland, Mary fell ill again; this time “strangely and extremely ill” at delicious Leeze. Poor Charles Rich once more sent post-haste for Lady Ranelagh, who set out from London the very next morning. She found My Lady Molkin in an extraordinary condition, to all appearances well enough, but, “her disease lying more in stupidness than pain,” she was “no more joyed” to see her sister. It was “a mortifying encounter”; Mary was “the carcase of a friend,” her “soul gone as to any rational use she had of it”; her “kindness was dead.”
Nerves were little understood in those days. The Essex doctor diagnosed Mary’s illness as “a spice of the palsy.” The Warwick family talked of “fumes of the spleen.” Dr. Wright held a more modern opinion, which he confided to Lady Ranelagh; but he agreed with the opinion of the country doctor that the disease was “very inward and hidden”; and Lady Ranelagh wrote to her brother Robert in Ireland that they were “all going blindfold towards a cure.”[214] Charles Rich and Mary’s mother-in-law had been “very obligingly careful of, and kind to, her”; and as soon as Mary was well enough Lady Ranelagh carried her off to London, where, under her sister’s care and Dr. Wright’s, she was once more restored to health. Lady Ranelagh was, in Mary’s own words, “the most useful and best friend for soul and body that ever any person, I think, had.”[215]
Somebody else thought so too. In 1655 Lady Ranelagh had known Milton for ten years. For the last six years Milton had been Latin Secretary to the Council of State; and he was now living in the “pretty garden house” in Petty France, Westminster, next door to my Lord Scudamore, and not far from Lady Ranelagh’s house in the Old Mall. If only as the great Republican pamphleteer, one of the chief State officials under the Protectorate, Milton was a very eminent and important man, visited by many “persons of quality” besides Lady Ranelagh, and by all the learned foreigners of note who passed through London. Some of the old Hartlib-Durie circle of the Aldersgate and Barbican days, with Milton’s pupils, Henry Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner, came about Milton almost daily; and among his more recent friends was the Agent for Bremen, Mr. Henry Oldenburg. Durie himself, who was Keeper of the library at St. James’s, was a near neighbour. Milton’s wife, poor Mary Powell, and their little son had been about three years dead; and the widower had been left with three little girls, the youngest but a month or two old at the mother’s death. In 1655 they were nine, seven, and three years old, and were being brought up, in strange, motherless fashion, in the house in Petty France; while Milton himself, with the help of readers and amanuenses, pursued his work for the Council through all the difficulties of his blindness. For Milton was now quite blind.[216]