Flora Masson

“ On May 30, Charles Rich’s elder brother, who had so recently succeeded to the earldom, died; and Charles Rich and my Lady Molkin found themselves Earl and Countess of Warwick. Five days before, Richard Cromwell had abdicated. The months of Richard’s Protectorate had been, as all the world knows, months of dire confusion. With one man’s death, the whole fabric of a great Republic had crumbled into dust. Lady Ranelagh came back to her house in the Mall to find a very different London from the London she had left three years before. ”

“ One other man there was, a mere boy in 1654, but in a way, perhaps, the most notable of them all: a little deformed man, with a pale, sharp, clever face, and lank dark hair that hung about his eyes; a man with a stooping figure and a quick step; a queer little solitary man who ate little and slept less, and worked restlessly and incessantly; a man, even in those young days, of a melancholy, jealous temper, warped by ill-health. This was Robert Hooke, who had come to Oxford in 1653, when he was eighteen, as servitor or chorister of Christ Church. ”

“ The fortunes of the Boyle family were at this time at their lowest ebb, and everywhere that he went he was in the track of the brutalities of war; the very bloodstains of those last engagements could scarcely have been dried; the severed head and limbs must still have been sticking on the poles. “About the years 1652 and 1653 ... the plague and famine had swept away whole counties, that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature, either man, beast, or bird, they being either all dead, or had quit those desolate places.” ”

“ He is to be seen in them as the young Squire of gentle, studious tastes and simple habits, sitting, book in hand, over the slow-burning wood fire in the parlour with the carved stone chimney-piece “fair and graceful in all respects”; or riding [155] his horse along the up-and-down-hill Dorset lanes; angling by the side of a stream, or walking in his own meadows, with his spaniel at his heels: philosophising as he goes; observing all things always; dreaming, perhaps, a little too—within bounds. The very titles of his Reflections are an epitome of the life of those Stalbridge days. ”

“ Probably Boyle was in London, for on September 10, Oldenburg was writing as if Boyle had just left town, and he says nothing in his letter to Boyle of the Fire itself, but begins, as it were, when the Fire left off. Boyle had called at Oldenburg’s house to say good-bye, and Oldenburg was much disappointed that he had been out, but was glad that Boyle had been well enough to make the journey: “I cannot omit acquainting you,” he goes on, “that never a calamity—and such a one—was borne so well as this is. It is incredible how little the sufferers, though great ones, do complain of their losses. ”

“ In the autumn of 1654 he was back in England. In the previous year, during his flying visit to London, he had talked with Dr. Wilkins, of Wadham, about Oxford, and had probably ridden down to Oxford to see what it was like. Stalbridge was all very well, but it was removed from the by-paths of intelligence; somehow, since his illnesses, there was a sadness over its orchards which Vulcan himself could not dispel. London was a fascinating labyrinth of interests, but in Oxford he believed he could “live to philosophy.” Oxford was to be his Athens. ”

“ It was Oxford six years after the Parliament’s Visitation and Purgation; Oxford after the imposition of the Covenant. The old Heads had conformed or been summarily ejected, the new Heads were Commonwealth men; and Cromwell himself was Chancellor. It was an Oxford where the use of the Liturgy was not openly permitted. And yet, “speech is thrall, but thocht is free,” says the old Scottish proverb. At Oxford a man could still fast quietly, if he was so minded, for forty-one hours, without being sent down for it. ”