Boyle was received at Court, and when he was sent back to Ireland it was as Clerk to the Council of Munster, the very post that Spenser had held. He bought Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship, the Pilgrim, freighted her with victuals and ammunition, sailed in her, “by long seas” to Carrickfoyle, and took up his new work under the splendid Presidentship of Sir George Carew. His wife’s lands were recovered: “Richard Boyle of Galbaly in the County of Limerick, Gent.,” waited on Carew through all the siege of Kinsale, and was employed by him to carry the news of victory to the Queen in London. There he was the guest of Sir Robert Cecil, “then principal secretary,” in his house in the Strand, and was taken by Cecil next morning to Court, and into the bedchamber of her Majesty, “who remembered me, calling me by name, and giving me her hand to kiss.”[12]
Quickly back in Ireland, Richard Boyle became the Lord President’s right hand in all his strenuous services to the Crown: in later years one of the few literary treasures in the great Earl’s “studdie” was the copy of Carew’s Hibernia Pacata given him by his Chief. It was Carew who sent him in 1602 to London, furnished with letters to Cecil and to Sir Walter Raleigh, recommending him as a fit purchaser of the Raleigh Estates in Ireland. The thousands of acres in the counties of Cork and Waterford known as the “Raleigh-Desmond Estates” were then and there, in London, bought from Sir Walter Raleigh “at a very low rate.” In Richard Boyle’s hands, the waste lands that to Raleigh had been a source of anxiety and money loss were to become the best “settled” and most prosperous territory in Ireland, and a source of wealth and power to him who made them so. For Richard Boyle was not only a great landowner, he was a shrewd man of business, a capitalist and a large employer of labour. It was, says Grosart, “his perseverance and governing faculty and concentrated energy that transformed bleak mountain and creation-old fallow moor and quaking bog into hives of population and industry.”[13]
Sir George Carew went a step further. He “dealt very nobly and fatherlike” with Mr. Boyle in recommending him to marry again. And the lady whom Carew had in view for his protégé was Katharine Fenton, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Sir Geoffrey Fenton, the wise and enlightened Secretary of State. There is a pretty tradition handed down in the Boyle family—the Earl’s own daughter used to tell it—that Mr. Boyle first met his second wife when he was a very young man newly arrived in Dublin. Calling one day on business at Sir Geoffrey Fenton’s house, and waiting in an ante-room till the great man should be disengaged, Mr. Boyle had “entertained himself” with a pretty child in her nurse’s arms; and when Sir Geoffrey at last appeared and apologised for having kept his visitor waiting, the young man “pleasantly told him he had been courting a young lady for his wife.” This must have been in 1588. The marriage took place fifteen years later, and a great deal had happened in the interval. Joan Apsley and her baby were buried in Buttevant Church, and “Richard Boyle of Galbaly in the County of Limerick, Gent.” had purchased the vast Raleigh Estates. In July 1603 he was a wealthy widower of thirty-seven, and Katharine Fenton was seventeen.
“I never demanded any marriage portion with her, neither promise of any, it not being in my consideration; yet her father, after my marriage, gave me one thousand pounds[14] in gold with her. But this gift of his daughter to me I must ever thankfully acknowledge as the crown of all my blessings; for she was a most religious, virtuous, loving, and obedient wife to me all the days of her life, and the mother of all my hopeful children.”[15]
Elizabeth was dead, and James I reigned in her stead. Sir George Carew—the new Lord Deputy—had conferred a knighthood on Mr. Boyle on his wedding day. Two years later he was made Privy Councillor for the Province of Munster, and thenceforward there was to be no stop nor hitch in the upbuilding of his great fortunes. In 1612, after another visit to London and an audience of King James, he found himself Privy Councillor of State for the Kingdom of Ireland. He was created Lord Boyle, Baron of Youghal, in 1616, and Viscount of Dungarvan and Earl of Cork in 1620. His home life had run parallel with his public services. “My Howses,” “My deare Wife,” “the Children,” “my Famullye,” fill an important place in the Earl’s life and diary and letters; while the wife’s few little epistolary efforts to her husband have only one beginning: he was to her always “My owne goode Selfe.”
Robert Boyle speaks of his mother’s “free and noble spirit”—which, he adds, “had a handsome mansion to reside in”—and of her “kindness and sweet carriage to her own.”[16] The hopeful children came quickly. Roger, the first, born at Youghal in 1606, was sent at seven years old to England, at first to his uncle John, then Dr. John Boyle, a prebendary of Lichfield, and a year later to his mother’s relatives, the Brownes, of Sayes Court, Deptford. There was an excellent day-school at Deptford, to which Roger Boyle was sent; and a rather pathetic little figure he must have cut, going to and from school, with “shining morning face” in his baize gown trimmed with fur.[17] On high days and holidays he wore an ash-coloured satin doublet and cloak, trimmed with squirrel fur, and a ruff round his little neck; and his baby sword was scarfed in green. Mrs. Townshend, in her Life of the Great Earl, points out that the child wore out five pairs of shoes in a year, and that his book of French verbs cost sixpence. He was to die at Deptford, after a very short illness, when he was only nine years old. The Brownes were terribly distressed, and did everything they could. Mrs. Browne moved him into her own chamber, and nursed him in motherly fashion. His Uncle John was sent for, and sat by the little fellow’s bed till he died. The physician and apothecary came from London by boat and administered a “cordial powder of unicornes’ horns,” and other weird “phisicks.” “Little Hodge” was very patient, and said his prayers of his own accord; and after he was dead Mrs. Browne found that in his little purse, which he called his “stock” (he must have been very like his father in some ways), there was still more than forty shillings unspent. All these details, and many more, were sent in letters to the parents at Youghal, and to the grandparents, Sir Geoffrey and Lady Fenton, in Dublin, after “my jewel Hodge,” as the grandfather used to call him, was buried in Deptford Parish Church.
There were by this time four daughters, born in succession: Alice, Sarah, Lettice, and Joan; a second son, Richard, born at Youghal in 1612; and a fifth daughter, Katharine, who was a baby in arms when “little Hodge” died. A few months after his death came Geoffrey; and then Dorothy in 1617, and Lewis two years later. Another boy was born in 1621 and christened Roger; Francis and Mary followed in 1623 and 1624; and then came the fourteenth child, “my seaventh son”, and the Earl made that memorable entry in his diary at Lismore: “God bless him, for his name is Robert Boyle.”