It was to visit this Milton—the Latin Secretary, blind among his books—that Lady Ranelagh used so frequently to knock at the door of the pretty garden-house in Petty France. Her boy, Dick Jones, who was now fifteen, had, like his cousin young Lord Barrymore, been one of Milton’s pupils, and was probably at this very time taking his private lessons with Mr. Milton in preparation for a year at Oxford—to be followed by a foreign tour—with Henry Oldenburg as his tutor. And Lady Ranelagh herself, fired, perhaps, by her brother Robert’s study of Oriental languages, and under Milton’s influence, was taking lessons in Hebrew of a Scottish divine who lodged in Holborn.
A year later—some time in October 1656—Dick Jones and Henry Oldenburg were settled at Oxford, where Dick’s cousins, the Earl of Cork’s two sons, were already at the University,[217] with their tutor, Peter du Moulin, in attendance on them; and all five were basking in the personality of the virtuoso-uncle, Mr. Robert Boyle. Henry Oldenburg and Peter du Moulin were both to become protégés of Robert Boyle.[218] Henry Oldenburg especially was to link himself with the Invisibles and the future Royal Society; and it was probably in the Oxford laboratory that Henry Oldenburg won Robert Boyle’s admiration, and that Dick Jones first learned to dabble in experimental science and earned for himself his uncle’s sobriquet, “Pyrophilus.”[219]
Meantime, Henry Oldenburg and Dick Jones had kept up a correspondence with Mr. Milton in London, and Milton had written kindly to his “well-beloved Richard.” Milton’s letters to Dick Jones are in Latin, and there is more than a touch of the pedagogue in their tone. It seems likely, in the light of after events, that the brilliant Dick had already caused his mother some uneasiness of mind, and that she hoped much from this year at Oxford, with her brother Robert Boyle as mentor, before Dick and Henry Oldenburg set out on their foreign tour. In October 1656 Lady Ranelagh was herself in Oxford: she had taken it on her way to Ireland, whither she was bound on a long visit, with her daughters, servants, and eight horses.[220] And she had brought with her to Oxford a letter from Mr. Milton to her son Dick. The blind secretary, left behind in London, was missing Lady Ranelagh’s frequent kindly knock at the door of the garden-house in Petty France—
“And now your most excellent mother,” Milton wrote to Dick Jones at Oxford, “on her way to Ireland, whose departure ought to be a matter of no ordinary regret to both of us (for to me also she has stood in the place of all kith and kin), carries you this letter herself.”
As a matter of fact Milton must have been thinking of his own domestic affairs when he wrote to Dick Jones, for he was to marry his second wife, Katharine Woodcock, shortly after Lady Ranelagh’s departure. But the words “to me also” carry a special meaning; for Lord Ranelagh, between whom and his wife there had long been estrangement, can have taken little part in his son’s upbringing. The mother had been left to bring up her children—to stand for them, as for Milton, in the place of “all kith and kin.” And, after all, Dick was not a good boy—he was but the son of his father.[221]
Lord Broghill had been quartered lately in Edinburgh. He had remained in Ireland for some time after Cromwell had re-conquered it. He had sat in Cromwell’s Parliament of 1654 as Member for Cork, and he was Member for Cork and Edinburgh in the Parliament of 1656. In 1655 he had been appointed President of Council (Head of the Civil Establishment of the new Government in Scotland), with his headquarters in Edinburgh; and according to Baillie he was more popular in Scotland than “all the English that ever were among us.” But the Scottish atmosphere was not to Broghill’s liking, and in 1657 he was back in London, where he was to prove himself one of the most energetic of Cromwell’s supporters in the last stage of the Protectorate.
His philosopher-brother, all this time, had held himself studiously aloof from political parties and “affairs.” Cromwell was approaching his zenith when Robert Boyle went to Oxford. The great warship, newly built in the spring of 1655—a ship of 1000 tons burthen, carrying 96 brass guns—had for the figurehead in her prow Oliver on horseback, trampling six nations underfoot. Scot, Irishman, Dutchman, Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman, in their several national garbs, lay under his horse’s hoofs. “A Fame,” wrote Evelyn in his Diary, after inspecting the ship as she lay in the dock, “held a laurel over his insulting head: the word, God with us.”
Poor Evelyn, bereft of his Church services, lamenting that there was “no more notice taken of Christmas Day in our Churches,” smuggling a Clergyman into his house at Deptford to administer the Sacrament, or stealing up to receive it in Dr. Wild’s lodging in Fleet Street, could yet not resist going to look at the new warship in the dock; to hear Dr. Wilkins preach before the Lord Mayor in St. Paul’s, a very common-sense sermon on the superiority of obedience to sacrifice; to stare at the proud and melancholy Quakers who were hunger-striking in prison; and even to peep into Whitehall itself, now “very glorious and well-furnished” for the Protector. It was no doubt Evelyn’s many-sidedness that made life bearable in what to him was “a dangerous and treacherous time.” Ships and prisons and persecuted clergy, rare jewels, miniatures, “achates and intalias,” carved wood, other people’s houses and gardens and picture-galleries, the “incomparable pieces” that he loved to look at, and the incomparable performances of violin and theorbo and human voice that he loved to listen to—these were the things that made Evelyn happy, and his Diary so fascinating. Above all, perhaps, his passion was for “curiosities.” He was almost as “universally curious” as Dr. Wilkins of Wadham himself. Those were red-letter days when he could examine a clock, whose sole balance was a crystal ball sliding on parallel wires, or a Terrella, showing all the magnetical deviations, or an elixir, or a perspective, or a way-wiser, or the charring of sea-coal; or when he had a glimpse into the “elaboratory” of an aristocratic friend, or a gossip about all and sundry with worthy Mr. Hartlib or Dr. Wilkins himself. It may have been Wilkins or it may have been Hartlib who, in the spring of 1656, brought Boyle and Evelyn together.[222] The good Hartlib was a friend of both. Robert Boyle was then in London; but whether or no to hear Wilkins’s sermon in St. Paul’s on the Superiority of Conformity to Sacrifice, is not recorded. In April, at any rate, the acquaintance between Evelyn and Boyle had begun, and Boyle and Wilkins were guests at a little dinner-party given by Evelyn at Sayes Court. It was then that Evelyn presented Wilkins with his “rare burning-glass,” in return, probably, for the beehive that Wilkins had given him during that visit to Oxford in 1654. And after dinner, the little company adjourned to look at Colonel Blount’s “new-invented plows.”
The friendship so pleasantly begun was to last for nearly forty years. It is to be remembered that Robert Boyle’s mother and Mrs. Evelyn’s family[223] were related; that Sayes Court had belonged to the Brownes, and had come to Evelyn through his wife; and that little Hodge, Robert Boyle’s eldest brother, had many years before died at Sayes Court, and been buried in Deptford Church. Boyle and Evelyn were men of very different natures; but they had memories, sympathies, and friends in common. Their intercourse soon grew “reciprocal and familiar”; and it is to Evelyn we owe the finest and most intimate description that exists of Robert Boyle.[224] Boyle was to return to Experimental Philosophy at Oxford, where the lion and the lamb proverbially lay down together then as now;—the lion, as it has been wittily said, sometimes with the lamb in its inside. And Evelyn and his family at Sayes Court were to live on as pleasantly as possible, “the times considered.”
In 1657 the Protectorate was in its last stage. In June, Cromwell was “his Highness,” a monarch in arbitrariness and splendour, with all the formalities of purple velvet, Bible, sword, and sceptre—everything, indeed, except the Crown, and a good many things that the Crown itself might not have had. Lord Broghill, back in London, and one of Cromwell’s House of Lords, had been one of the prime movers in the Petition and Advice, which pressed Cromwell to accept the Kingship; and report says, that when that failed, Broghill’s “well-armed head” was filled with an even bolder project, an alliance between Cromwell’s youngest daughter Frances and Charles II. This, too, came to nothing; and in November 1657 Cromwell’s daughter Frances was married to the old Earl of Warwick’s grandson, son of Charles Rich’s elder brother. This boy died in the sickly spring of 1658, four months after his wedding; and the old Earl of Warwick’s death in April left Charles Rich heir-presumptive to the Earldom of Warwick.