...

For who on things remote can fix his sight

That’s always in a Triumph or a Fight?”

Lines to the Royal Society,
by Abraham Cowley.

(Prefixed to the History of the Royal Society
of London, by Thos. Sprat, 1667.)

Two of the Boyle brothers were among the recipients of King’s Honours at the Restoration: the old Earl would have been proud of his sons. “Dear Broghill,” who, with each shake of the political kaleidoscope, showed himself like a bright central bit of glass, about which the smaller pieces fell together into a new combination,—was created Earl of Orrery, with a brilliant career of soldier-politician and dramatist before him. As President of Munster, and one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, he was to make his headquarters at Charleville, with frequent visits to England. And the sweet-spirited Frank, the boy hero of Liscarrol, became Viscount Shannon, and a Privy Councillor. Not much is known of Frank’s after life, except that he lived and brought up his family on his Irish estate at Shannon Park. He seems, following the example set by his literary brothers, to have ventured, at least once, into print.[239] His wife, the “black Betty” of the letters, is better known to posterity than her husband, for she is remembered not only as Viscountess Shannon, the mother of Frank’s children, but as the brilliant sister of Tom Killigrew, the wit and profligate, and as the mother of one of Charles II’s natural daughters.[240]

The fortunes of the Royalist elder brother, Lord Cork, who had been diligently nursing the family fortunes through the Protectorate, were now so far reinstated that he was able to do for Charles II what the Great Earl had done for Charles I. He assisted an impecunious king with sums of money; and in recognition of his services he was, in 1663, to be created Earl of Burlington in the English Peerage. Presently, the great town house—Burlington House in Piccadilly—was being built, next door to the Lord Chancellor’s.[241] The families of Cork and Clarendon were to be further united by the marriage of Lord Clarendon’s son and Lord Burlington’s daughter; and another daughter was to marry Lord Hinchinbroke, son of the Earl of Sandwich, who, as Admiral of the Fleet (with Pepys as his secretary), had brought Charles back from The Hague. The prosperous and good-natured Earl of Burlington, treading softly with his compeers in the Matted Gallery at Whitehall, or making one of the group of courtiers about my Lord Duke in his Chamber, was of all the Cork family the likest to the great Earl in his ingenuous love of comfort and display. He thoroughly enjoyed his position as head of the family. It is told of him that, sailing down the Thames in some gay barge-load of noble company, he would never forget to raise his hat when he came in sight of Deptford Church. “Have I not reason?” he would say; and he would tell how there, in Deptford Church, little Hodge, the first-born, lay buried, and how by this child’s death, so many years before, he, Richard Boyle, the second son, had come to be Earl of Cork. Lady Ranelagh, back from Ireland, had her reservations about the luxurious living at “my brother Corke’s.” “Alas!” she wrote to Robert Boyle, not long before the Restoration, “the Entertainment of Lords, Ladies, and Reasonable Creatures are yet several things, to the great grief of your K. R.”[242]

But the Earl and his Countess had always been popular people. After the Restoration, when their daughter Anne married young Lord Hinchinbroke, the Earl of Sandwich’s son, Lady Sandwich’s gratification in this alliance knew no bounds: “They are very good condition, wise and chearfull people,” she wrote just after the wedding. “She” (the bride) “hath a very fine free kind way of writing soe have they all, something Mr. Boiles styll.”[243] And poor Pepys, much hurt by not having received “a favour” after the Hinchinbroke wedding, was mollified when he met my Lord of Burlington at Whitehall; for Lord Burlington, “first by hearing the Duke of York call me by my name did come to me and with great respect take notice of me and my relation to my Lord Sandwich, and express great kindness to me.” And not long after this little interview Pepys was at Burlington House, burning his periwig in the candle out of sheer nervousness. Little wonder; for he had just seen for the first time and saluted my Lady Burlington—the Lady Dungarvan of the old Dublin days, for whom the plums on the Lismore plum tree had been kept when she was expecting her first baby.[244] “A very fine-speaking lady, and a good woman,” says Pepys; “but old and not handsome, but a brave woman.” He was to see more of her daughter, young Lady Hinchinbroke. “I cannot say she is a beauty, nor ugly,” wrote the truthful Pepys; but he had saluted her too, and she had been “mighty civil” on the occasion; a very good-humoured young niece, this of Robert Boyle’s, “a lover of books and pictures and of good understanding.” In honour of the young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys ventured on a little dinner-party, which Pepys had “much in his head” till it was successfully over, and for which he purchased his new “pewter sesterne.” The dinner was good and plentiful, and the company mighty merry. “Most of the discourse,” Pepys adds naïvely, “was of my Lord Sandwich and his family, as being all of us of the family.”[245]

Burlington—Orrery—Shannon. Robert Boyle, in Oxford, was, of all the great Earl’s sons surviving, to remain “Mr. Boyle”—a virtuoso and an “Honourable Person.” He could have been a peer, he could have been a bishop, he could have been Provost of Eton. It is said he repeatedly refused a peerage. He certainly, not long after the Restoration, declined to take Orders with a view to a Bishopric. “He was treated with great civility and respect,” says Birch, “by the King as well as by the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England.” But to Robert Boyle the heirdom of a great family was “but a glittering kind of slavery,” and “titular greatness” seemed to him “an impediment to the knowledge of many retired truths.”[246] He believed that the less he participated in the patrimonies of the Church the more influence he should have in things religious. And besides—as he explained in after years to Bishop Burnet—he had felt “no inward motion to it by the Holy Ghost.” For the same reason he would not be Provost of Eton. How little Sir Henry Wotton, sitting on the bank by Black Pots in the company of Izaak Walton, could have foreseen that the “Spiritay Robyn” would one day be asked to be his successor as Provost of Eton! Robert Boyle had chosen his way of life: he desired to be free to pursue knowledge for the good of mankind in the service of God. He would not fetter himself by tests and oaths; he could not alter his character. He had, as he himself expresses it, “a great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths.”[247] And so there is no record of him in the Matted Gallery, no glimpse of him in lawn sleeves, or with diamond hatband among the Courtiers, or among the nice critics of the Restoration Drama, who no longer cared for Shakespeare: “I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played,” says Evelyn,[248] “but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesties being so long abroad.” It is extremely doubtful if Robert Boyle ever witnessed a performance of “dear Broghill’s” Mustapha, even when Betterton and Ianthe took the chief parts, and the King and Lady Castlemaine, and “pretty witty Nell” were there to see it.[249]