Glimpses of Robert Boyle there are, however, in those first years of the Restoration. Up to the very end of 1659 he had been living in Oxford, making the journey by coach now and then between Oxford and the London of his tastes. He was busy with his air-pump and his laboratory experiments and the publication of his Seraphick Love, and he was in correspondence with Dick Jones and Henry Oldenberg in Paris, and with Evelyn and Hartlib in London. “Your most noble letter,” writes Hartlib to Boyle at Oxford; but Boyle’s letters of this date to Hartlib do not seem to be extant. Hartlib’s to Boyle were full of all sorts of gossip, home and foreign, and political even more than scientific. For Hartlib, in his old character of universal newsagent, was still able to pick up little bits of information at Westminster and in the City; and he sent Boyle a good deal of gossip about the intrigues and factions of those last months of anarchy under Monk’s dictatorship; about Bradshaw’s death, and the movements of Lambert, Desborough, Fleetwood, Vane, and Monk himself; and the mysterious person of whom he wrote as “C. S.,” over the water. And when “C. S.” was actually back in London and the Restoration was a fait accompli, Robert Boyle and his air-pump were in London also, both to be received with open arms by the Invisibles, and especially by Evelyn and the good Hartlib, now old and ill, and very poor, since his pension under a Commonwealth Government had stopped.
“I went to Chelsey to visit Mr. Boyle,” writes Evelyn,[250] “and see his pneumatic engine perform divers experiments.” And, “To visite Mr. Boyle in Chelsey, and saw divers effects of the Eolipile for weighing aire.”[251]
But, meantime, the weeks and months that followed immediately on the Restoration—weeks and months occupied with the passage of the Indemnity Bill through the Convention Parliament and with the trial of the Regicides—must have been a painful time for Robert Boyle and for his sister Ranelagh. Lord Broghill, Cromwell’s right-hand man in Ireland and in Scotland, was, it is true, safe, and to come off with honours; but some other people—old family friends and political comrades—were not so happily placed. Robert Boyle had held aloof from sectaries and armies, though some of his best friendships had been among the Puritans; but Lady Ranelagh, whose house ever since the early days of the Long Parliament had been a rendezvous of the Parliamentarian Party, and whose personal sympathies and fortunes had been bound up with Cromwell’s Protectorate, must have followed with a heavy heart the deliberations of the Houses which were to determine the fates of many political and personal friends. The Regicides: why, in the last ten years England and Ireland had been governed by Regicides! Some of them, it is true, were beyond reach. Cromwell—chief graves; but there were to be a great many exceptions to the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion. There were those who were to be excepted as actual “Regicides”; and those who were to be excepted as “Non-regicides,” and those classed as “miscellaneous exceptions.” There were men to be excepted “absolutely”—which meant their execution; and men to be excepted “non-capitally,” which meant everything but execution; and men to be excepted “for incapacitation only,” which meant a lifelong obscurity. There were men who had absconded, and men who had remained on the spot; men who had pleaded and extenuated, and men who steadfastly maintained the righteousness of their acts. How was it to fare with all and each of these? What was to be the fate of Richard Cromwell, so lately “his now Highness,” and Henry Cromwell, the broadminded and melancholy young Lord Lieutenant of Ireland—poor Henry, who had been in love with Dorothy Osborne, who was in love with Sir William Temple? And what was to become of Cromwell’s widow—“Old Noll’s wife,” the Londoners called her now: the voice of the people had strangely changed its tone. And the great men of the Party—so many of whom had been among Lady Ranelagh’s personal friends—how was it to fare with Lambert, Ludlow, St. John, Fleetwood, Haselrig, Lenthall, Whitlocke, Vane, Desborough, Pennington, Thurloe, and President Lawrence? Henry Lawrence, the President’s son, had been young Lord Barrymore’s friend ever since they were pupils together with Milton, in the Barbican. And Henry Lawrence was still one of Milton’s disciples—a constant visitor to the garden-house in Petty France. And young Lord Barrymore’s second wife was a Lawrence—Martha Lawrence. How is it possible to unravel the cruel intricacies of civil war?[252] And what would be done with Goodwin and Hugh Peters, and the blind Milton himself, whose Eikonoklastes and Pro Populo Defensio were by order of the House—issued within a week or two after the Restoration—to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman?
Hangings, drawings and quarterings were not extraordinary events in those days; but it would be interesting to know how the sentence pronounced on Major-General Harrison—first sentenced of the Regicides—affected so humane and sensitive a man as Robert Boyle. His sister Ranelagh, woman as she was, had more of the old soldier-earl in her composition, and perhaps, like her Elizabethan father, looked upon such a death as an inevitable “cloudy end.”
“... The Court doth award that you ... be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and, being alive, shall be cut down and ... your entrails to be taken out of your body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and head and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty; and the Lord have mercy upon your soul!”[253]
Was Boyle weighing the air with his Eolipile on October 13 when Pepys set off to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered? “Which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.”[254] But in that hungry crowd Pepys could scarcely have been near enough to hear Harrison’s last words, which sometimes seem to echo in Charing Cross to this day: “He hath covered my head many times in the day of battle. By God I have leaped over a wall; by God I have run through a troop; and by my God I will go through this death, and He will make it easy to me.... Now unto thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commit my Spirit....”
Nor could Mr. Pepys have seen Harrison strike out at the hangman half-way through the horrible, bloody work.
Mr. Evelyn did not go out purposely to see any of the executions of the Regicides;[255] but on the 17th he chanced to meet “their quarters, mangl’d and cutt and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. O the miraculous Providence of God!”[256]
But what of Milton all this time—the blind Republican, to whom Lady Ranelagh had been more than all kith and kin? Had Boyle and Hartlib ever got from Mr. Milton that prescription they so much wanted?
Milton’s escape from punishment at the Restoration is one of the puzzles of English history. How was it effected—by what combination of political influences—who, in fact, pulled the wires? Parliament has always been very clever in engineering itself, more or less constitutionally, out of its own tight corners; but there has never been a cleverer piece of parliamentary engineering than the way in which Milton was brought off at the Restoration. When, after Cromwell’s death, Lady Ranelagh returned from Ireland to her house in the Mall, Milton was still living, almost a neighbour, in his garden-house in Petty France; still in correspondence with her boy Dick Jones and his tutor Oldenburg, in Paris; still Latin Secretary to the Council, with Andrew Marvell as his loyal assistant; and the uneasy dawn of the New Year 1660 had found him, despondent but undaunted, still fighting hard, by tract-warfare, for a doomed Republic. Milton the Pamphleteer and Lambert the General are to be remembered together as the last two opponents of the Restoration. But in March, after Milton’s printed exhortations to the Council and to Monk himself, the blind secretary had been discharged from his office, and an order issued for the arrest of Milton’s publisher. And on May 7—the very day before Charles II was proclaimed in London—Milton had disappeared from the garden-house in Petty France. Nobody knows what had been done about his children, or whose friendly hand guided the blind man’s steps into his hiding-place. “In the house of a friend in Bartholomew Close”—a narrow passage, entered from West Smithfield under an archway that was very old even in Milton’s day[257]—Milton was to lie concealed for more than three months. His case and Goodwin’s[258] came up together before the House on June 16, and it was ordered that their books were to be called in and burnt, and that the men themselves were to be “forthwith sent for in custody.” But both men were in hiding, and somehow it was August 13 before the two names came up again; and at that moment the Indemnity Bill was hanging in mid-air between the Lords and Commons. Neither of the two men had been found; and though the Proclamation calling in all copies of their books for burning by the hangman was then duly placarded all over London, there was no further order for the arrest of the two men themselves. On August 28 the Indemnity Bill had passed both Houses; on August 29 it had received the King’s assent, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was on the Statute Book, and there was no mention of Milton in it from first to last. Goodwin’s name appeared; he was incapacitated for life for any public trust. But of Milton, the Republican pamphleteer, Cromwell’s Latin secretary, who had done so incalculably much more, nothing—his name had somehow dropped out. Milton was saved—“to the surprise of all people,” says Bishop Burnet.[259]