The winter of 1657-8 had been, according to Evelyn, the severest winter that any man alive had known in England. “The crowes feete were frozen to their prey, Islands of ice inclos’d both fish and fowl frozen....” It was on Christmas Day that Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn went into London to receive the Communion in Exeter Chapel, and that the Chapel was surrounded by soldiers and the communicants surprised and taken prisoners—the soldiers’ muskets pointed at them as they knelt before the Altar. The Evelyns were allowed to go home; and a month after this memorable Communion, in January 1658, they lost their little prodigy of an eldest son—just five years old—who died of a quartan ague. “Such a child I never saw: For such a child I blesse God in whose bosome he is!” He was buried in Deptford Church; and a week or two later their youngest child followed him, “after 7 weeks languishing at nurse, breeding teeth, and ending in a dropsie.” The season was still very cold and sickly, and in May a public Fast was ordered “to avert an epidemical sicknesse, very mortal this Spring.” But in spite of the Fast, June came in with an extraordinary storm of hail and rain, “the season as cold as winter, the wind Northerly nere 6 moneths.” It may have been in consequence of this epidemic, following on an unhealthy winter, that Hartlib was even more than usually curious about the ingredients of certain arcana—or medical “secrets” as he always called them. He mentioned one, in particular, in a letter to Robert Boyle, dated February 2, 1658. Hartlib himself had been a sufferer from the “extremity of the frosty weather.”
It appears from Hartlib’s letter to Boyle that Mr. Milton had in his possession a “secret” which Hartlib, and apparently Boyle also, was at this time anxious to obtain. “I shall not be wanting,” wrote Hartlib to Boyle, “to obtain that secret which hath been imparted to Mr. Milton. It may be the public gentleman, that sent it unto him, will let me have a copy, in case the other should not come off readily with the communication of it. But if yours[225] would ask it from Mr. Milton, I am confident he would not deny it.”
If by “yours” Hartlib meant Lady Ranelagh, that lady was still in Ireland, on difficult domestic business of her own, and far away from the garden-house in Petty France; and Dick Jones and Henry Oldenburg were on their “peregrination” abroad. Whether or no Mr. Milton was induced to part with his prescription remains unrelated. Hartlib’s letter to Boyle was written on February 2, and only a few days later Milton’s second wife died—the baby girl she had borne him in October was to live on into March. That spring, in his darkness and solitude, Milton’s mind was turning once more to his scheme of a Paradise Lost. It was not exactly a time for Mr. Hartlib to trouble him about a prescription.
The news of Cromwell’s illness fell like a thunderbolt on the nation. The people about him had known that all through that cold, unhealthy summer of 1658 the burdens of State, heavy as they were, were not for Cromwell so hard to bear as the sight of a much-loved daughter’s sufferings. The Cromwell family were gathered round Lady Claypole’s couch when she died at Hampton Court on August 6. Cromwell himself was ill, even then, though for another fortnight his illness was as much as possible concealed, and he was able intermittently to attend to State business, and on some days even to show himself, riding with his Life Guards in the Park at Hampton Court. On August 21 it became known that the Protector was very ill of an ague, which his Physicians called a “bastard tertian”; but on the 24th they were able to remove their patient from Hampton Court to Whitehall, where again, between the ague-fits, till August 28, the Iron Man transacted public business. On that day the fits of ague changed their character; the “bastard tertian” had changed to “double tertian”—with two very exhausting ague-fits in the twenty-four hours: His Highness’s strength was failing. Next day, Sunday the 29th, prayers were offered up in the Churches.
“And then came that extraordinary Monday (August 30, 1658) which lovers of coincidence have taken care to remember as the day of most tremendous hurricane that ever blew over London and England. From morning to night the wind raged and howled, emptying the streets, unroofing houses, tearing up trees in the parks, foundering ships at sea, and taking even Flanders and the coasts of France within its angry whirl. The storm was felt, within England, as far as Lincolnshire, where, in the vicinity of an old manor house, a boy of fifteen years of age, named Isaac Newton, was turning it to account, as he afterwards remembered, by jumping first with the wind, and then against it, and computing its force by the difference of the distances....”[226]
Cromwell died on September 3, and the news had reached Ireland by September 17. On September 17 Lady Ranelagh, in Youghal, wrote the long letter to her brother Lord Broghill, an extract from which stands at the head of this chapter. The man who a few days before “shooke all Europe by his fame and forces” was dead; and with his death the face of British history was changed. In Cromwell Lady Ranelagh herself had lost a generous and powerful friend; and in the last part of her letter she reverts, sadly enough, to what she calls “the penny half-penny of my own particular.” For Cromwell had helped her not only with her Irish estates, but with her recalcitrant husband. “His now Highness,” she says of Richard Cromwell, “seems not to me so proper a person to summon my lord[227] or to deal with him in such an affair as his father did, from whose authority and severety against such practices as my lord’s are, I thought the utmost would be done that either persuasions or advice would have effected upon my lord ... soe, as there being little hopes left of bringing him to reason either here or there, I thinke my present work is to seeke a maintenance for me and my children without him.”
She had consented, she says, some time before, to “retyre” among her own friends from “my lord’s oppressions”; and she can now “remove lightly”, not having much wealth to gather together. Owing to “the unreasonableness of my lord” her children “are neither like to be preferred in marriage nor prepared for the narrow condition their father’s obstinacy condemns them to live in.” She wishes people to know that “I left not my lord upon humour, but necessety, and that in soe doing I sought privacy and submitted to scarsety than persued a croud or designed aboundance to myselfe.”[228]
The friendship between Boyle and Evelyn was at this time ripening in letters—letters about books, and the shapes of fruits, and recipes for varnish, and many other things—which passed between Evelyn at Sayes Court, and Boyle at Oxford. In one of these letters[229] Evelyn imparted to Boyle his pet scheme of a resident “philosophic mathematic college,” to be built some five-and-twenty miles out of London, where “some gentlemen whose geniuses are greatly suitable might form themselves into a Society,” and live “somewhat after the manner of Carthusians.” Evelyn had planned it out to the smallest detail—the thirty or forty acres of land to be acquired, with “tall wood” and upland pasture, “sweetly irrigated.” The house itself was to be a “goodly pavilion” containing gallery, refectory, library, withdrawing-room, kitchen, larders, service-rooms and what-not, all “well and nobly furnished”; and opposite to the house “towards the wood” was to be erected a “pretty chapel” and “six apartments or cells for members of the Society.” And then Evelyn, prince of gardeners, goes on to describe the “elaboratory” in the grounds, with “a repository for rarities and things of nature”; the aviary, dove-house, physic-garden, kitchen-garden, plantation of orchard fruit, stalls for one or two horses, and conservatory for tender plants. The philosophers were to be allowed to play at bowls and chess, and walk—presumably two and two—in the garden paths. And Mrs. Evelyn, paragon of wives, had cheerfully consented to go and live there, and allow her husband to be a Carthusian, while she, located apparently in solitary glory in the Pavilion, reigned over the refectory and the domestic staff. This last was to consist of “a chaplain well qualified,” an “ancient woman to dress the meat,” a man to buy provisions and keep the garden and stable, and a boy to run about doing everything else.
Robert Boyle must have smiled as he read Evelyn’s enthusiastic letter, culminating in its pseudo-Carthusian Orders—
“At six in summer prayers in chapel. To study till half-an-hour after eleven. Dinner in the refectory till one. Retire till four. Then called to conversation (if the weather invite) abroad, else in the refectory. This never omitted but in case of sickness. Prayers at seven. To bed at nine. In the winter the same, with some abatements for the hours; because the nights are tedious, and the evening’s conversation more agreeable. This in the refectory. All Play interdicted, sans bowls, chess, etc. Everyone to cultivate his own garden. One month in spring a course in the elaboratory on vegetables, etc. In the winter a month on other experiments. Every man to have a key of the elaboratory, pavilion, library, repository, etc. Weekly fast. Communion once every fortnight, or month, at least. No stranger to be easily admitted to visit any of the Society, but upon certain days weekly, and that only after dinner.... Every Thursday shall be a music-meeting at conversation hours....”