Wren explained to Oldenburg that he had been obliged to act quickly, “before other designs came in.” And Oldenburg, in his letter to Boyle, took comfort in remembering that, after all, “it was a Member that had done it,” and that, when Wren’s design was accepted—as it undoubtedly would be—all the world would know that the model of a New London was the work of a Member of the Royal Society.[311]
Robert Boyle, in his Oxford arm-chair, with his books and instruments about him, must have listened sadly to such war news, and news of Court and Parliament, as found its way to him in letters out of an anxious and distracted London. All the talk of late had been of the Navy muddle; the huge sums of money required; the poverty of the Exchequer; the mutinous and “pressed” men, and the “natural expression of passion” of the women left behind, who had “looked after the ships as far as they could see them by moonlight”: a most sad state, truly, of public affairs. Distrust and anger filled the hearts of men and women, and strange rumours were afloat. During the summer, before the fire broke out, the war with the Dutch had been the one thing thought of and talked about. In June, Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and the Dutch de Ruyter had engaged in a fight “the longest and most stubborn that the seas have ever seen.”[312] The English fleet had been ruined, but the English were not conquered, and in July the two fleets, refitted, had met again. This time it was the Dutch fleet that was destroyed and the Dutch who refused to be conquered. And just before the Fire of London broke out in Pudding Lane the French fleet had joined the Dutch fleet, and the English, with a weakened navy and an exhausted exchequer, were at a standstill. After the fire, when London was in ruins from the Tower to the Temple, strange rumours ran from mouth to mouth. There was “some kind of plot in this”; it was “a proper time for discontents”; it was the French who did it; it was the Dutch who did it; it was the Papists who did it; it was the old Republicans—a dire revenge on the eve of Cromwell’s Lucky Day. The prophecies in Booker’s Almanack for the year were the topics of conversation at dinner-tables; and Lady Carteret told Pepys that pieces of charred paper had been blown by the wind as far as Cranborne,[313] and that she herself had picked up, or been given, a little bit of paper on which the words were printed: “Time is, it is done.”
In the spring of 1667, a Peace Congress was sitting at Breda, but an armistice had been refused; and then it was that de Witt had seized his moment and that the Dutch fleet sailed for the mouth of the Thames. The English were unready, their seamen mutinous, their coffers empty, their big ships laid up, for economy’s sake, in dock. Everybody knows the panic and confusion that followed—the impotent rage of a people that felt itself betrayed: Ruyter and de Witt were at hand, coming up our own beloved Thames with “a fine and orderly fleet of sixty sail.” And Monk, the Duke of Albemarle, in his shirt-sleeves, at Gravesend, was doing his best to “choke the channel.”
But the Dutch were not intending to land. After they had burnt the English ships in the river, they were content to sail away again, carrying with them, as an insolent trophy, the half-burnt hull of the ship that had once been the Naseby, and was now the Royal Charles.
The rage of the Londoners knew no bounds. England was undone;—with a debauched and lazy Prince and a licentious court; “no council, no money, no reputation at home or abroad.”[314] The very men who had stood in the Strand and blessed God at the Restoration now wished Cromwell back again: “Everybody nowadays,” says Pepys, “reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour Princes fear him.”
Towards the end of 1666 Lady Ranelagh was expecting her brother from Oxford to make her a prolonged visit in the house in Pall Mall. And where Robert Boyle was, there must some kind of chemical laboratory be also.
“I have ordered Thomas,” she wrote, “to look out for charcoal; and should gladly receive your orders to put my back house in posture to be employed by you, against your coming, that you may lose no time after.”[315]
The Royal Society was again holding its meetings;—still, at first, under difficulties, in Gresham College, which was now the Exchequer. Hooke and Croone were both enthusiastic over the “pretty experiments” of transfusion of blood: “one dog filled with another dog’s blood,” is Pepys’s way of expressing it. Croone told Pepys that the performances at Gresham College had given occasion for “many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such-like.” The City was still in a melancholy condition; it was difficult and dangerous to walk about the ruins, with a link, after dark; but the “Greate Streetes” were now being “marked out with piles, drove into the ground”; and people were wondering why so many of the new Churches were to be built “in a cluster about Cornhill.” In January 1667, Gresham College being occupied by the Exchequer, Mr. Henry Howard, one of the Society’s most generous members, put rooms in Arundel House in the Strand at the disposal of the Royal Society—
“To the Royal Society,” says Evelyn, “which since the sad conflagration were invited by Mr. Howard to sit at Arundel House in the Strand, who at my instigation likewise bestow’d on the Society that noble library which his grandfather especially and his ancestors had collected. This gentleman had so little inclination to bookes, that it was the preservation of them from imbezzlement.”[316]
In May, the meetings of the Society were in full swing: May 30, especially, must have been a gala occasion—