How soon did Robert Boyle hear the details of those last weeks and days and hours, with all the little traits, so kingly and so human, as the unhappy royal delinquent blindly approached his doom? How soon did some pale-faced horseman bring the news to Stalbridge of that last scene of all?—the King walking in procession through the Park, from St. James’s to Whitehall; his stepping out of that Whitehall window on to the scaffold hung with black; the block and axe, and men in black masks; the companies of horse and foot below in the street; and from Charing Cross on the one side to Westminster Abbey on the other, the close-packed crowds of the populace, waiting.... “The axe descended, severing the head from the body at one blow. There was a vast shudder through the mob, and then a universal groan.”[167] * * * * * Lord Broghill had given up his post in Munster under the Parliament; and he and Lady Broghill and their young children were living quietly at Marston Bigot. There Broghill amused himself by writing his _Parthenissa_; and there, in the spring of 1649, Robert Boyle paid a visit to his brother and Lady Pegg. He, too, was busy with his manuscripts, and in pleasant enough correspondence with the Invisibles in London. But in August he was at Bath. A letter to Lady Ranelagh, dated from Bath, August 2, “late at night,” was written in by no means a light-hearted vein. His “native disposition” had made him shy, he said, of disclosing his afflictions where he could not expect their redress. He was “too proud to seek a relief in the being thought to need it.” Moreover, he had been ill again, of “a quotidian ague.” His manuscript on “Public Spiritedness” had been laid aside, and his “vulcanian feats” abandoned. “The melancholy which some have been pleased to misrepresent to you as the cause of my distempers is certainly much more the effect of them.” He had only just arrived at Bath, having been carried there on a litter; and there he was intending to stay till he could leave it on horseback. The physicians had led him to hope he might be able to crawl to London before very long. But the end of August found him back in his laboratory among the orchards—not very pleasantly occupied in “drawing,” for his own use, “a quintessence of wormwood.” He had been too much occupied of late even to write to his sister Ranelagh. There is in his letter the least little suggestion that the events of this last year—personal, it may be, as well as political—had kept even this brother and sister apart; but it was for the time only.