Once again, evidently, the Boyle family had done their best for a Puritan friend in trouble. “I have learnt during this Commitment,” says Oldenburg to Boyle, “to know my real friends. God Almighty bless them, and enable me to convince them all of my gratitude. Sir, I acknowledge and beg pardon for the importunities I gave you at the beginning; assuring you that you cannot lay any commands on me that I shall not cheerfully obey to the best of my power.”
But the news of Oldenburg’s release—though Boyle must have been glad to hear of it—had come at an anxious time. A few days before Boyle received Oldenburg’s letter the Lord Chancellor Clarendon had been required to resign the Seals. The Boyle family must have known something of what was happening: the Burlingtons and the Clarendons were next-door neighbours in the two great palaces in Piccadilly, and their children were married,—“Lory Hide” to Henrietta Boyle.
“Dear Broghill”—now my Lord Orrery—had been in England by the King’s wish for some little time, having left Munster under the care of a Vice-President. “Lord Orrery,” says his chaplain, Dr. Morrice, quaintly, “saw thoroughly into the tempers of people and the consequences of things.” And he had foreseen Clarendon’s fall, and had already warned Clarendon in vain. In August, Lady Clarendon had died: “the mother of all his children and the companion in all his banishment, and who had made all his former calamities less grievous by her company and courage.” Lady Clarendon had been buried in Westminster Abbey; and alone, in his new palace, among his pictures and books, the widower had received his Majesty’s visit of condolence. And then, only a few days later, had come the King’s message, carried by the Chancellor’s son-in-law the Duke of York. It was desirable “on various grounds, but especially for his own safety,” that Clarendon should resign the Seals.
During the next day or two the Duke of York, the Duchess—Clarendon’s daughter—and Archbishop Sheldon, and various other people, interceded for Clarendon with the King. And on the morning of August 26 Clarendon was sent for to Whitehall. The audience lasted two hours, in the King’s own chamber, and then the Chancellor was dismissed and departed, “looking sad,” through the private garden of Whitehall, which was “full of people” waiting to see him come out. Lady Castlemaine, in her smock, looked down upon the garden from her aviary window, laughing with the gallants below, and “blessing herself at the old man’s going.”
Next day Evelyn called on the Chancellor at his house in Piccadilly. “I found him,” says Evelyn, “in his bedchamber, very sad.” The tide had turned against him: the Parliament had accused him, and he had enemies at Court; “especialy the buffoones and ladies of pleasure, because he thwarted some of them and stood in their way.”
All this is old reading: the fall of Clarendon is a chapter of British history. But it is not quite so well known that Lord Orrery, “dear Broghill,” the uncle of “Lory Hide’s” wife, was asked to take the seals that Clarendon had been forced to give up. According to Morrice, the Duchess of York appealed to Lord Orrery to take the seals and heal the breach between the King and the Duke, whose suspected papacy was “against him.” And then the Duke tried to persuade Lord Orrery; and lastly the King himself offered him the Chancellorship. But Broghill’s had always been a “well-armed head”; and now that he was Lord Orrery he knew his King—and he knew his gout; and he made his gout serve as an excuse for declining the honour offered him by his King. “I am a decrepit man,” he said to the Duchess of York; but he took a turn or two in his coach, in the park, planning what could be done to make the King and the Duke agree, and thinking what a pity it was that Clarendon had been so imperious—even towards the King himself.
So far Morrice. Lord Orrery went back to Ireland, and Sir Orlando Bridgeman was the new Chancellor: “the man of the whole nation that is best spoken of, and will please most people,” says the fickle Pepys, who had himself, such a little while before, been “mad in love with my Lord Chancellor.”
In October Lord Orrery’s new play, The Black Prince, was produced at the King’s Theatre. The house was “infinite full,” the King and Duke there, and not a seat to be got by Mr. Pepys in the pit, so that he was obliged to pay four shillings for a seat in the upper boxes, “the first time ever I sat in a box in my life.” In November and December both Houses were “very busy about my Lord Chancellor’s impeachment,” and Lory Hide was going about saying that if he thought his father had done only one of the things that were being said against him, he, Lory Hide, would be “the first that should call for judgment against him”, which Mr. Waller, the poet, “did say was spoke like the old Roman—like Brutus—for its greatness and worthiness.”
On December 3, Henry Oldenburg, back at his work as Secretary of the Royal Society, was writing to Boyle of the “grand affair,” the wrangle of Lords and Commons over the terms of Clarendon’s impeachment. And the same letter announced that the Royal Society had “greatly applauded” Boyle’s recently communicated Experiments of Light; and that at the Anniversary Meeting of the Society, on St. Andrew’s Day, Boyle had been elected one of the new Council—“a very numerous meeting ... never so great a one before.” Boyle was then still in Oxford; but Evelyn, the Chancellor’s old friend, had been calling again at the great house in Piccadilly: “To visit the late Lord Chancellor. I found him in his garden at his new built Palace, sitting in his gowt wheele-chayre, and seeing the gates setting up towards the North and the fields. He look’d and spoke very disconsolately ... next morning I heard he was gon....”
Clarendon, by the King’s orders, had hurriedly escaped to France, to be followed into exile by an Act of Parliament banishing him for life. Clarendon was gone; and the “Cabal” administration had begun.[319]