And once a week every philosopher was to “render a public account of his studies,” and every man was to wear “a decent habit or uniform”; and, oh bliss! “one month in the year may be spent in London, or any of the Universities, or in a perambulation for the public benefit.” How the Philosophers would prance!
This was on September 3, 1659, the first anniversary of Cromwell’s death. A week or two later, Evelyn wrote again.[230] He had been reading Boyle’s Seraphick Love, probably in manuscript, since it did not appear in print till 1660. The “incomparable book” seemed to Evelyn to have been “indicted with a pen snatched from the wing of a seraphim.” “I extremely loved you before,” he wrote, “but my heart is infinitely knit to you now.” And yet, the pity of it! There is a cry of appeal in poor Evelyn’s letter to his friend, and there is no further mention of any Carthusian College. The little cells, and the chess, and the bowls, and the philosophers walking two and two along the garden paths are for the moment forgotten; and in their places comes a shadowy procession of fair and virtuous women—
“What think you, Sir, of Alceste, that ran into the funeral pile of her husband? The goodness of Aemilia, the chastity of Lucretia, the faith of Furia, of Portia?... Take away this love, and the whole earth is but a desert!”
As for St. Paul’s remarks, Evelyn thinks very little of them; they were all very well for an itinerant apostle in a time of persecution, but “he confesses he had no command from the Lord.” And what pious and studious wives some of the philosophers have had! Take, for example, Pudentilla, who “held the lamp to her husband’s lucubrations.” And good Madame Grotius, and others; while, not to go abroad, in London itself, “the committee-chambers, the parliament-lobby,[231] are sad but evident testimonies of the patience, and the address, the love, and the constancy of those gentle creatures....”
Is there no hope that Mr. Boyle may relent, and realise that if Love be virtuous it is seraphic? At least he may remember that in paradise, and in the ark, “there were but couples there, and every creature was in love.”
Manuscript copies of Seraphick Love were evidently in circulation. A pirated and incorrect copy had been offered for sale to a London stationer, who had communicated with Mr. Boyle; and Boyle, who had long refused, was persuaded at last to publish it himself. It may have been in proof-form that Evelyn, in September 1659, read the little treatise—written eleven years before by a very sad young man at delicious Leeze. Eleven years had not altered Mr. Boyle’s convictions; and Seraphick Love was to be one of the most notable, if the least characteristic, publications of the “Annus Mirabilis.”[232]
Meantime the year 1659 was to be memorable to another branch of the Boyle family. On May 30, Charles Rich’s elder brother, who had so recently succeeded to the earldom, died; and Charles Rich and my Lady Molkin found themselves Earl and Countess of Warwick. Five days before, Richard Cromwell had abdicated. The months of Richard’s Protectorate had been, as all the world knows, months of dire confusion. With one man’s death, the whole fabric of a great Republic had crumbled into dust. Lady Ranelagh came back to her house in the Mall to find a very different London from the London she had left three years before. “The nation,” Evelyn has recorded in his Diary, “was in extreame confusion and unsettl’d, between the Armies and the Sectaries.” “Several Pretenders and Parties,” he wrote, “strive for the Government: all anarchy and confusion; Lord, have mercy on us!”[233]
As long as it was possible, Lord Broghill seems to have supported Richard’s protectorate;[234] but before Richard’s abdication Broghill and Coote were back in Ireland, and Broghill in command of Munster and Coote in Connaught were both working for Charles II’s return. Early in 1660, Monk in England and Coote and Broghill in Ireland were in communication with the Royal Orphan. Broghill’s letter to Charles was carried to Breda by the sweet-spirited Frank: it is said to have been in Charles’s hands before Monk’s emissary had done his work.[235] Broghill’s proposal, however, that Charles should land in Ireland proved superfluous. Monk’s offers were eagerly accepted. Sir Edward Montagu—afterwards Earl of Sandwich—was sent to The Hague to bring back Charles II; and on May 8, 1660, “after a most bloudy and unreasonable rebellion of neere 20 years,”[236] Charles II was proclaimed in London. On May 29, he was there. Amid the blare of trumpets, 20,000 horse and foot brandished their swords and shouted aloud for joy. The pavements were strewn with flowers, the bells of the City rang out, the fountains poured out wine among the people. Ladies leaned over the windows and balconies: the Lords and Gentlemen made a brave show in their rich velvets and cloth of gold. “I stood,” says Evelyn, “in the Strand, and beheld it, and bless’d God!”[237]