In February, Boyle brought out at last his little volume of Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects; youthful essays, written long before, in the Dorset lanes or by the slow-burning wood fire in his manor-house: “the mislaid scribbles which I drew up in my infancy,” he calls them. The book was published by Herringman at his shop at the Anchor in the Lower Walk in the New Exchange. It was not intended to occasion the mirth that Buckhurst’s “ballet” had produced: it was criticised, rather sharply, by some people at the time; but it gained an extraordinary popularity, and it was to be ridiculed as only the books that have been very popular ever are. And its appearance gave great pleasure to Lady Ranelagh, who had long begged him to collect and publish these fugitive pieces, and now at last held in her hand a little volume containing a dedicatory letter to herself—to Sophronia, “my dearest sister.”
The spring of 1665 in London was, as everybody knows—in spite of impending war, and the absence of “many gallants” at sea—one of the gayest of gay London seasons. The theatres were full; the great “noon-hall” at Whitehall had been turned into a playhouse. Another comet, every bit as bright as the last, was reported in the April sky. The Park was filled with fair women; chief among them, according to Pepys, was the “very great beauty,” Mrs. Middleton, for whom Boyle’s hopeful young nephew—Milton’s pupil—Mr. Dick Jones, had quite forsaken the Philosophers.[294] And while the bees in Evelyn’s garden at Deptford were making their honey and combs “mighty pleasantly,” and Evelyn himself was immersed in the provision of hospital accommodation for sick and wounded seamen, in the coffee-houses the talk was all of the Dutch fleet, and of the Plague that was growing in London. Everybody was ready with a remedy, “some saying one thing and some another.” On June 3, all London was on the river, listening to the guns of the opposing Dutch and English fleets;[295] and on June 7, the day before the news of the great victory arrived in London, Mr. Pepys, much to his discomfiture, saw those red crosses on the doors in Drury Lane, and the poor human appeal, “Lord, have mercy on us!”[296]
While the Plague raged in London, Lady Ranelagh and her two daughters—“my girls” she always calls them—were at delicious Leeze. It was not the same patriarchal Leeze to which the romantic runaways had been carried in Lady Ranelagh’s coach. The husband and wife, who were Charles and Mary Rich in those days, were Earl and Countess of Warwick now. It was four-and-twenty years since they had been obliged to run away to be married, because Charles Rich was only a younger son. Charles Rich was “my Lord of Warwick” now. It was six years since he had succeeded to the earldom; and a great deal can happen in six years. Their son—their only child—whose illness in babyhood had so changed Mary’s outlook on life, had been reared to manhood, and had been married—a girl and boy marriage it was—to my Lord of Devonshire’s very young daughter. For the sake of her boy, and to arrange this alliance satisfactorily, Mary had gone to London, leaving “the sweet quiet of the country for the horrid confusion of the town”; and from there she had written to Robert Boyle at Oxford, whom she still always called her “dearest, dearest squire,” in great spirits: “We are like to be very great,” she said, “for the lad is like to be a successful lover.”
After the marriage, the bridegroom had been sent to travel in France, and the bride taken home by her husband’s parents to Leeze; and after the boy husband came back to her, for a very little while they had all lived together, and Mary had seen her son with a wife of his own. But in May 1664 he fell ill of smallpox. They were all in London at the time, at Warwick House, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Mary herself had had smallpox in 1648. The little wife was removed, out of the infection, to her father’s house. The “young ladies,” Charles Rich’s nieces, who lived with them, daughters of the dead elder brother, were packed off to Leeze. “My Lord” himself was persuaded to go to his sister-in-law Ranelagh’s house in Pall Mall. And then—
“I shut up myself with him,” says Mary, the mother, “doing all I could both for his soul and body.” But the boy died in eight days: “He wanted about four months of being of age.” Mary sent the Earl of Manchester to Lady Ranelagh’s house to break the news to my Lord of Warwick, who, when he heard it, “cried out so terribly that his cry was heard a great way.” But Mary was “unrewly” no longer; she had made her vow and she had found her Master: “I was dumb,” she says, “and held my peace, because God did it.”
For the second time Lady Ranelagh fetched Mary away to her own house. The great Warwick House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was put up for sale—Mary never entered it again. Later she went to drink the waters at Epsom and Tonbridge, “to remove the great pain I had constantly at my heart after my son’s death.” And Dr. Walker, the worthy chaplain who had preached so awakingly to Mary twenty years before, after her child recovered, did his best to comfort her after her child was dead.
A year had passed since then, and now, in the summer of 1665, with the Plague raging in London, the childless pair were at Leeze again with the young ladies and the very young widow, and Lady Ranelagh and her girls; and my Lord of Warwick—much in the minority—was not quite so good-tempered as he used to be in the old-young days before he was so tormented by gout.[297]
They had left London only just in time; for early in July several of the houses in Pall Mall were infected, and one “almost emptied.”[298] The meetings of the Royal Society had been adjourned. The King and Court were gone:[299] people were rapidly leaving town. Hooke and Petty and Wilkins were thinking of removing to Nonsuch, taking an operator with them in order to carry on their experiments out of range of infection.[300] Oldenburg and his family remained in London. He had carefully separated his papers—Mr. Boyle’s, the Society’s, and his own—into bundles, and had written instructions what should be done with them should he succumb to the Plague. Robert Boyle was back in Oxford before the end of June, but before leaving town he had sent Oldenburg a “receipt for the Sickness.” Pepys, it is known, went about with a bottle of “Plague-water” presented to him by Lady Carteret, of which he took a sip when he felt particularly depressed. Whether Oldenburg drank Mr. Boyle’s medicine or not is unrecorded, but he escaped infection; and the Transactions of the Royal Society, and some of Boyle’s papers with them, went safely through the Plague only to suffer havoc in the Fire.
In July Lady Ranelagh was writing to her brother at Oxford, begging him to join the family-party at Leeze, and to bring any number more of his Occasional Meditations with him, which the ladies of the family would help him to transcribe for a second edition of his delightful book. At Leeze they were all taking “palsy-balsam.” “Our palsy-balsam does wonders here,” she wrote. “Crip,” who seems to have been the family apothecary, major-domo, and factotum, had been very careful of them all, she says. The palsy-balsam, Crip’s “jealousy,” and God’s providence together had kept, not only the family at Leeze itself, but the entire neighbourhood, free of infection. And all the ladies, and the Countess, and “my girls” were at Robert Boyle’s service.[301]