Robert Boyle

by Flora Masson

Back in London, after taking Eton on the way, the Earl of Cork and his wife and daughters made a little pilgrimage. They all rode to “my Uncle Browne’s to Deptford,” and visited little Roger’s grave in Deptford parish church. They “viewed” the monument that the Earl had set up there, and for which the “Tombe-maker” had sent in his bill. And the Earl was so pleased with it that he employed the same man to make “a faier alabaster tombe” over the grave of his parents, in the parish church of Preston in Kent.

As the year drew to a close, the Earl’s moneys from his furnaces, forges, ironworks, “tobackoe farms” and what-not, were added to the great iron chest at Lismore; and Christmas and New Year gifts were showered among his English friends. A manuscript Bible was sent to Dr. Weston for Christchurch Library; “cane-apples” (variously described as the Arbutus and the Espalier apples) and pickled scallops from Ireland, to other friends; “a rare lyttle book” to the Earl of Arundel, and usquebaugh to the Earl of Suffolk. Sir Edmund Verney’s new butler from Ireland came in for the Earl’s own scarlet doublet with hose and cloak, while the Archbishop of Canterbury[23] accepted a “ronlett of usquebaugh” and a piece of black frieze for a cassock.

And then the Earl made an ominous entry in his diary: “I gave Dr. Moor £5 and Dr. Gifford 20s. for visiting my wife in her sickness”; and “my wife’s phisick” is an item in the Earl’s accounts. But they spent the early spring at Langley Park near Windsor, and in April were back again in Channell Row, where on April 15th Lady Cork’s fifteenth child—a little girl—was born. In June they removed to Lord Warwick’s house in Lincoln’s Inn; and in October 1629—the baby Margaret being left behind them with her nurse and maid—they were back in Ireland again.

The return journey had been made with even more pomp and ceremony than the setting forth eighteen months before. For one of the King’s ships, the Ninth Whelp—one of the fleet of “Lion Whelps,” built at Deptford—was at the last moment put at their disposal to “wafte them over.” Lord Cork distributed presents among the ship’s company, and gave the captain at parting a magnificent pair of fringed and embroidered gloves, to which Lady Cork added a black silk night-cap, wrought with gold. The men, horses and luggage, followed safely in two barques—no Dunkirker being sighted on the way.

Before the Earl left Ireland, he and the Lord Chancellor[24] had not been on the best of terms. But now, fresh from the civilisation of the Metropolis, and with all the reflected glory of a crossing in the Ninth Whelp, the Earl, by the King’s desire, made up his quarrel with the Chancellor. Both were sworn Lords Justices for the joint government of Ireland in the absence of a Deputy; and both resolved to “join really in the King’s Service”—a resolution which they were, for a little while, to keep. Meantime, Mr. Perkins, “my London Tailor,” had sent over to Dublin an enormous trunk of magnificent wearing-apparel, and a very long bill; and the retiring Lord Deputy[25] delivered up the King’s Sword and government of Ireland to the Lord Chancellor and the Earl.

This was in October 1629. On the 16th of February following, 1630, Lady Cork died at Dublin.[26] It had “pleased my mercifull God for my manifold syns ... to translate out of this mortall world to his gloriows kingdome of heaven the sowle of my deerest deer wife....”

The baby Peggie—ten months old—was still in England; and the ex-baby Robyn, reared by his country nurse, was just three years old. Had the lady of the “free and noble spirit,” in those short months spent in Dublin, between October and February, been able to see Robyn again—to hold him in her arms a little moment—before she died?

For a year or two after Lady Cork’s death, the Earl was very busy with the government of Ireland and the management of his own family and estates; and his migrations were for a time to be only from his Dublin town house to the Council Chamber and Great Hall of Dublin Castle. Lady Cork had been buried with solemn ceremonial in the Chancel of St. Patrick’s Church, in the same tomb with her grandfather the Lord Chancellor Weston and her father Sir Geoffrey Fenton, Secretary of State. The business connected with “my deer wive’s ffunerals” occupied the Earl for some time; and a splendid black marble monument was in course of erection in the upper end of the chancel of St. Patrick’s. Meantime the widower was surrounded by his children;—the Barrymores and their children, and Lady Digby with her comfortable husband, while Lettice Goring, with or without George Goring, was always coming to and fro from England. Poor Lady Lettice Goring was not a happy woman. She had nearly died of smallpox when she was thirteen, and perhaps on this account her education had been woefully neglected. There was a certain amount of cleverness in her of a small-natured type; but she was childless, delicate, and discontented, with a continual “plaint.” Her younger sister, Katherine, was of a very different nature. Handsome, intelligent, and high-spirited, by far the finest character of all the Earl’s daughters, Katherine, now that her engagement to Sapcott Beaumont had been broken off, was at sixteen quickly affianced and married to Arthur Jones, Lord Ranelagh’s son, and carried off to Athlone Castle, a gloomy old Norman castle in Roscommon;—with how small a chance of happiness in life she fortunately did not know.

The two boys, Lewis and Roger—Lord Kynalmeaky and Lord Broghill—were fetched to Dublin and entered at Trinity College; and Joan was married to the Earl of Kildare as soon as that young nobleman returned to Ireland in company with her brother Dick. The baby Peggie was brought from England with her nurse and maid; and sometime in 1631 the two youngest boys, Francis and Robert, were brought home; and “my children,” their little black satin doublets, and “Mownsier,” their French tutor, began to find a place in the Earl’s diary. It was then, too, that the Earl began to make those settlements, the first of many, in various counties, on “Robyn”, and that a son of one of the Earl’s own old servants was engaged “to attend Robert Boyle.” The minute philosopher, at five years old, had his own valet.