Mary, Countess of Warwick, survived her husband just five years. Her death at Leeze, in 1678, must have closed a chapter in the life of the sister and brother in Pall Mall. Lady Ranelagh had been with Mary in all her hours of trial—and they had been so many—the little, “unrewly” sister! Lady Ranelagh had been at Stalbridge when the Earl of Cork was so angry because Mary dismissed Mr. James Hamilton; it was Lady Ranelagh who had accompanied Charles and Mary to Leeze after their runaway marriage, and stayed with them there till Mary had found her place in that patriarchal family. It was Lady Ranelagh who had tended Mary in all her illnesses, and had taken Mary and Charles under her own roof after their son’s death. And Robert Boyle, too;—how tenderly romantic Mary had been when the “deare Squire” took refuge at delicious Leeze in the summer of 1648, and she sat beside him while he wrote his Seraphick Love! How she had wept over the pages as they were handed to her, the ink scarcely dry!
But an even greater loss was to come in Broghill’s, my Lord of Orrery’s, death in 1679. He had been ill for a year or two, and back and forward between Ireland and England, in the hands of the physicians; but otherwise he had been living the life of a great landowner on his Irish estates at Charleville and at Castle Martyr. His Art of War, dedicated to Charles II, had been published in 1677, and had met with a certain success. He was to have written a continuation of it, if the first volume had proved sufficiently popular. But warfare, like other things, has its fashions; and even warriors grow old: it was nearly forty years since the “Mortall Sowe” had done such good service on the walls of Lismore.
Lady Pegg was with her husband, his strong friend and helpmate, to the last. The beautiful bride of Suckling’s wedding-ballad, with the slender ring-finger and the bee-stung lip, was now surrounded by children, grown up and married, some of them, and with great homes of their own. But Lady Pegg was beautiful and comfortable still. “A rose in autumn,” as old Lord Goring used to say, “is as sweet as a rose in June.” There is no doubt that Broghill, the soldier-statesman and dramatist—“my dearest Governor,” as Robert Boyle called him—was the favourite brother, and that Lady Pegg was the chief of sisters-in-law, “the great support, ornament and comfort” of her family.
On St. Andrew’s Day 1680 Boyle was elected President of the Royal Society. The anniversary meeting and the dinner that followed it had brought a large gathering of the philosophers together. Evelyn was there, and his diary records the election of “that excellent person and greate Philosopher Mr. Robert Boyle, who indeede ought to have been the very first; but neither his infirmities nor his modestie could now any longer excuse him.” But Evelyn omits to mention that Boyle declined the presidency. He had an insuperable objection to tests and oaths. He took Counsel’s opinion in the matter, and he wrote to his old assistant Hooke,[331] explaining his “great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths”; asking Hooke to convey his thanks to the Society, but begging them to “proceed to a new election.”
Less and less able now to attend the meetings of the Society, Boyle was gradually to withdraw also from the meetings of the East India Company, of which he was a Director, and of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, of which he was Governor. More and more did he retire into his quiet home-life in the house in Pall Mall, which had been enlarged to suit his purposes. There is no mention of him at the famous supper-party of the Royal Society, at which everything was cooked in Monsieur Papin’s Digestors—that “philosophical supper” which caused so much mirth and “exceedingly pleas’d all the company.” He is more likely to have been present a week or two later to see the Morocco Ambassador subscribe his name and titles in Arabic, on the occasion of his being admitted honorary member of the Royal Society.
Boyle lived, indeed, much among his books and manuscripts, and in his laboratory. With the help of an amanuensis, he carried on a large correspondence among the new philosophers of the Old World, and the Christian missionaries in the New. The New Englanders wrote to him as their fount of charity: “Right Honourable, charitable, indefatiguable, nursing father.” He had tried to spread the knowledge of the Bible in the East, in Turkish and Arabic, and in the Malayan tongue; and the publication of the Irish Bible was one of the great interests of his later years. While Narcissus Marsh[332] and others did the actual work of translation and dissemination in Ireland, Robert Boyle in Pall Mall promoted it “with his influence and purse”; and Boyle’s Irish Bible was to find its way into Gaelic Scotland also, before Scotland had a Gaelic Bible of her own.[333]
But Boyle spent his money also in helping individual cases—people whose lots were less happy than he thought they deserved; poor hard-worked clergy; the “distress’d refugees of France and Ireland”; and “learned men who were put to wrestle with necessities.” He did this, very quietly, for many years—usually by the hands of one or two personal friends in whose discretion he could trust. Gilbert Burnet, in those latter years, was one of these friends; and Burnet’s own History of the Reformation would never have been published without Boyle’s assistance. So quietly did Boyle dispense his charities that sometimes the very men so helped did not know from whence the help came; but Burnet says that for years Boyle spent on this form of charity more than £1000 a year, which would mean more than three times that sum to-day. And he gave impartially, without thought of race or creed, holding himself to be “a part of the human nature, a debtor to the whole race of men.” Perhaps his especial protégés were those who had suffered for their religious and political convictions. A story of any kind of persecution would bring a flush of anger and distress to his gentle face, and words of the deepest indignation to lips which rarely opened to “speak against men.”
Each year saw the publication of new tracts and treatises, and revised editions. They follow each other almost too quickly for enumeration. His Discourse of Things above Reason: inquiring whether a philosopher should admit there are any such, appeared in 1681; his Memoirs of the Natural History of the Human Blood, in 1684. That was the winter of the Great Frost, 1683-4, when all London bivouacked and made merry on the frozen Thames, and the smallpox was “very mortall.” It must have been a trying winter for the invalid philosopher; for London “by reason of the excessive coldnesse of the aire hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so fill’d with the fuliginous steame of the sea-coale that hardly could one see crosse the streetes, and thro’ filling the lungs with its grosse particles exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one could scarcely breathe.”[334] And there was no water to be had from pipes or engines; the birds and beasts died in the parks, the breweries were at a standstill, and fuel was exorbitantly dear.
The treatise Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God appeared in 1685, and A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature in 1686. The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus, written in his youth, was revised and printed in 1687; and about this time Boyle was advertising among the virtuosi for his lost and plagiarised manuscripts, evidently with some intention of bringing out a collected edition of his works. The only collection hitherto had been a very incomplete Latin edition, published without his knowledge in Geneva, in 1677. In 1690 he published his Medicina Hydrostatica, and the first part of The Christian Virtuoso;[335] and in 1691—the last year of his life—his Experimenta Observationes Physicæ. Some of his writings, left with his executors, were to appear posthumously; and he had deposited with the secretaries of the Royal Society a sealed packet containing his account of the making of phosphorus—not to be opened till after his death.[336]
A busy life, to the last; but what a quiet life it was for the sister and brother during those last momentous years, in the house in Pall Mall! History swept past them: Kings came and went, Cabinets changed, beautiful faces faded, Parliaments were dissolved, creeds and parties wrangled and plotted, brave men—and women too—died on scaffolds and the gallows-tree and at the stake for political crimes. All the world knows about Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney; but it is sometimes forgotten that Mrs. Lisle, the wife of a regicide, laid her head on the block for “harbouring a rebel”, and that Elizabeth Gaunt, for the same political crime, was burned at Tyburn.[337] A new London grew up over the old ruins—new steeples on old foundations—and fashionable new squares were built where green fields had been. And all the time a great and cumbrous Constitution was raising itself over centuries of abuse and sacrifice—a nation’s blood and tears.