Events crowded the canvas: Charles II’s melodramatic ending; the accession of the bigot James II; Monmouth’s rising and execution; the “Bloody Assizes” of Judge Jeffreys, in Dorset and Somerset; James’s league with the French; the revoking of the Edict of Nantes and the horrible atrocities that followed. Catholicism spread its fibres throughout England, permeating Army, Law Courts, Parliament and University. Priests—Carmelites, Benedictines and Franciscans—walked about the streets of London, and a huge Jesuit school was set up in the Savoy. In Scotland, a Catholic was in command at Edinburgh Castle: in Ireland, a Catholic was at the head of the Army, and thousands of Catholic Irish were drafted into its ranks.[338]
A boy was born to James II and Mary of Modena, and there were whispered stories of imposture and the historic warming-pan. Then Protestantism closed up its ranks, the State Church and the Nonconformists combined in face of a common danger, and the hopes of Protestant England were fixed upon William and Mary. Another message carried from England to The Hague brought another Prince to English shores, but this time “to intervene in arms for the restoration of English liberty and the protection of the Protestant religion”. Another proclamation in London, but this time of an Anglo-Dutch Prince, and a Princess who was not only the daughter of James II but the granddaughter of Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Another bloody rebellion in Ireland, another chapter of massacre and terrorism; but this time it was Ulster, and the Ulster Scots, who were fighting for Protestantism. Robert Boyle and Lady Ranelagh, growing old in the house in the Mall—two children of the great Elizabethan Puritan Earl of Cork—had watched Munster pass again into the hands of the Catholic Irish; but they lived just long enough to see William and Mary Sovereigns of England, and to have the tidings of the Siege of Londonderry and the Battle of the Boyne. One of the last reports of the Rebellion that can have reached Lady Ranelagh was the taking of Athlone by the English: it must have brought back to her the early days of her married life, when Arthur Jones had carried her off to Athlone Castle, a beautiful, high-spirited girl of sixteen.
And now she was seventy-six. To her, if to nobody else in the world, her philosopher brother, twelve years her junior, was still “Robyn”—the “Deare Squire.” There were some empty rooms and many memories in the house in Pall Mall; but the sister and brother were together, and it was a hospitable and pleasant house, and open to many friends. Distinguished strangers from many parts of the world came to pay their respects to Mr. Boyle, the celebrated Sceptical Chymist and Christian Virtuoso, and his incomparable sister, the Lady Ranelagh, who for fifty years had lived “on the most public scene,” and “made the greatest figure in all the revolutions of these kingdoms of any woman of that age.”[339] The London virtuosi—and there were bishops as well as mathematicians among them—brought their latest literary and scientific gossip to the house in the Mall. The elder brother, old Lord Burlington, was sometimes to be found there, with a conversational statesman or two in tow, who could successfully dodge the politics of the moment by indulging in such a pleasant and safe topic as the amours of Mary, Queen of Scots, with “the Italian favourite.”[340] Gilbert Burnet—that eloquent and happy Scotsman south of the Tweed—sat at Mr. Boyle’s feet and took notes: his bishopric was to come with the accession of William and Mary. Even Pyrophilus must have looked in upon his mother and uncle now and then. Dick’s fortunes were up; he was an important man, had grown fat and very witty, and was building himself a fine house in Chelsea.[341] His mother’s portrait was to hang on the wall of his private closet, looking at him long after she was dead; outliving other loves.[342]
Men and women of the younger generation of this great family were living round about Piccadilly, St. James’s, and Pall Mall. One niece especially, my Lady Thanet, a married daughter of Lord and Lady Burlington, was a “greate virtuosa,” known in London Society as one who “used to speak much of her uncle.”[343] And Evelyn, the friend of nearly forty years, though he was a good deal older than Boyle, still found his way from Deptford to Pall Mall to visit the philosopher and his sister.
In the afternoons, Boyle was seldom without company; “neither did his severer studys,” says Evelyn, “soure his conversation in the least.” He had “the most facetious and agreeable conversation in the world among the ladys, whenever he happen’d to be engag’d; and yet so very serious, compos’d and contemplative at all other times; tho’ far from moroseness, for indeede he was affable and civil rather to excesse, yet without formality.”[344]
So popular were Mr. Boyle’s cosmopolitan receptions that about the year 1689 he was obliged to put a “board” on the door in Pall Mall, mentioning the days on which he was “at home.” And he actually printed an announcement, beginning “Mr. Boyle finds himself obliged to intimate to those of his friends and acquaintances who are wont to do him the honour of visiting him,” and going on to explain that his “skilful and friendly physician, seconded by his best friends”, had strongly advised him not to see quite so many people.[345]
The forenoons of Tuesdays and Fridays, therefore, “both foreign post-days,” and the afternoons of Wednesdays and Saturdays, he proposed in future to reserve for himself, “that he might have some time, both to recruit his spirits, to range his papers and fill up the lacunæ of them, and to take some care of his affairs in Ireland, which are very much disordered, and have their face often changed by the public calamities there.”[346]
The announcement seems to have had the desired effect. “The mornings,” says Evelyn in his description of the daily routine of Boyle’s last years, “after his private devotions, he usually spent in philosophic studys and in his laboratory, sometimes extending them to night.” But he told Evelyn he had quite given up reading by candle-light, on account of his eyes. His amanuensis used to read to him, and write from notes, or at his dictation; and “that so often in loose papers, pack’d up without method, as made him sometimes to seeke upon occasion, as himself confesses in divers of his works.” And apparently Boyle was not more tidy than other learned men. “Glasses, potts, chymical and mathematical instruments, books and bundles of papers, did so fill and crowd his bedchamber, that there was but just room for a few chaires, so as his whole equipage was very philosophical, without formality.” Among the other rooms in the house there was a small library. Boyle did not want more: “as learning more from men, real experiments, and in his laboratory (which was ample and well furnished) than from books.”[347]
And the man himself, in these last years? He was “rather tall, and slender of stature, pale, and much emaciated.” Owing to his delicacy of constitution, “he had divers sorts of cloaks to put on when he went abroad, and in this he governed himself by his thermometer.” His little difficulty of speech had never quite forsaken him. “In his first addresses, being to speake or answer,” says Evelyn, “he did sometimes a little hesitate, rather than stam’er or repeate the same word; imputable to an infirmity which, since my remembrance, he had exceedingly overcome. This, as it made him somewhat slow and deliberate, so after the first effort, he proceeded without the least interruption in his discourse.”[348]
In diet and in habit, Robert Boyle was “extreamely temperate and plaine”; nor could Evelyn, in all their friendship, ever discover in him “the least passion, transport, or censoriousnesse, whatever discourse, or the times, suggested: