CHAPTER XVII
THE HOUSE IN PALL MALL
“... Only this methinks I am sure of, that it is a brave thing to be one of those, that shall lift up their heads with joy in expectation of a present redemption, when all these ruins and confusions shall be upon the Earth; and such brave men and women are only true Christians. Therefore, my dear brother, let us endeavour for that dignity, though in maintaining it we take courses, that have the contempt of the world heaped upon them; for to be contemned by the contemptible is glorious in the opinion of your K. R.”—Lady Ranelagh to Robert Boyle, September 14 (1653?).
“The Book of Nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty and symmetry, little by little, as it gradually comes to be more and more unfolded or displayed.”—Robert Boyle, Second Part of the Christian Virtuoso, Aphorism xxi.
The intellectual atmosphere of Oxford, when Robert Boyle said good-bye to it, was not the same “ayre” that he had weighed so pleasantly in 1659. Indeed, he must have been rather glad to be out of it before the great occasion of the opening of the Sheldonian at the Encænia of 1669. Evelyn, who was present, was scandalised, not only by the University Orator’s “malicious and indecent reflections on the Royal Society as undermining of the University,” but by the performance of the University Buffoone, “which, unless it be suppressed,” he says, “it will be of ill consequences, as I afterwards plainly expressed my sense of it both to the Vice-Chancellor[321] and severall heads of houses, who were perfectly ashamed of it and resolved to take care of it in future.” The “old facetious way” had given place to ribald and libellous attacks: “In my life,” says Evelyn, “I was never witnesse of so shamefull entertainment.”
Boyle’s old friend, Dr. Wallis, Professor of Mathematics, was equally distressed. In fact, he wrote about it to Mr. Boyle in London. Wallis had been one of those who objected to the fulsome wording of the proposed letter of thanks from the University to the Archbishop—a letter acknowledging Sheldon as their “Creator and Redeemer”: non tantus condere, hoc est creare, sed etiam redimere.[322] And he was as angry with the University Orator’s attack on “Cromwell, fanatics, the Royal Society and the New Philosophy,” as he was at the abominable scurrilities of the University Buffoone. Real stage-plays, too, imported from the Duke’s House, had been acted in the Oxford Town Hall—and were less objectionable than what had gone on in the Sheldonian.
But even Wallis seems to have been infected by the summer madness of that Encænia of 1669. He had been entertaining some of the guests at his own house; Sir James Langham and his Lady, and other “persons of quality”; and in an after-dinner chat Sir James had been expatiating on the qualities of “an excellent lady,” Lady Mary Hastings, sister to the Earl of Huntingdon—a lady for whom Sir James had a very great esteem. So highly, indeed, did he think of “her temper, her parts, her worth, her virtue, her piety and everything else,” that he would have been quite willing to marry her himself except that she was his deceased wife’s sister, and that he was already married again. But Sir James thought—and Wallis concurred with him—that Lady Mary would make “not only an excellent wife, but an excellent wife for Esquire Boyle.” And Wallis wrote then and there to Boyle to offer to be “the happy instrument of making two so excellent persons happy in each other.”
Wallis may in his youth have studied cryptology; but in his middle age he did not understand Robert Boyle. Lady Mary Hastings probably never knew of the future that had been so neatly mapped out for her in that after-dinner chat. She married Sir William Joliffe, of Caverswell Castle, in Staffordshire. The Manor of Stalbridge stood empty; and Mr. Boyle went on living in Pall Mall.
But if Oxford was changed of late years, so also was Pall Mall—very much changed indeed since a certain dark evening of 1649, when Cromwell’s “sightly lieutenant,” carrying the message to Broghill, rode up to Lady Ranelagh’s door. One of the first things that Charles II had done was to make a new Mall in St. James’s Park, and to improve the Park itself—“now every day more and more pleasant by the new works upon it,” wrote Pepys in January 1662. A river was made through the Park; and there on frosty winter days Pepys stood to watch the gay groups “sliding with their skeates—which is a very pretty art.” The Duke of York was an accomplished skater, and the King was a great hand at the game of Mall.