“For Vulcan,” he wrote, “has so transported and bewitched me, that, as the delights I taste in it make me fancy my laboratory a kind of _Elysium_, so as if the threshold of it possessed the quality the poets ascribed to that _Lethe_ their fictions made men taste of before their entrance into those seats of bliss, I there forget my standish and my books, and almost all things, but the unchangeable resolution I have made of continuing till death, Sister, your “R. B.”[168] CHAPTER XI HERMETIC THOUGHTS “A Monarch may command my Life or Fortune but not my opinion: I cannot command this myself; it arises only from the Nature of the Thing I judge of.”—ROBERT BOYLE. “... A general chemical council, not far from _Charing Cross_, sits often, and hath so behaved itself hitherto, that things seem now to hasten towards some settlement.... They are about an universal laboratory, to be erected after such a manner as may redound, not only to the good of this island, but also to the health and wealth of all mankind.”—SAMUEL HARTLIB _to_ ROBERT BOYLE, _May 1654_. Lord Broghill had laid aside his _Parthenissa_. The story goes that in the autumn of 1649 he was meditating, under cover of a course of treatment for the gout, a visit to Spa, which would take him into the neighbourhood of the “royal orphan”; and one account, at least, of how Cromwell intercepted Broghill in London is too picturesque to be discarded. Nobody—so runs the story—was in the secret of Broghill’s little plan except his wife, Lady Pegg, and perhaps his sister Ranelagh, at whose house, in the Old Mall, Broghill arrived on a certain day in the dusk, with only four servants in attendance, to take leave of her before setting out on his journey to Spa. “My Lord came, and was no sooner housed but heard a voice ask for my Lord Broghill: he thereupon charged his faithful sister with treachery; but her protestation of being innocent tempered him.” The messenger proved to be a “sightly Lieutenant,” sent by the Lord General to know when and where he might interview Broghill; and, after a good deal of parleying, a meeting was arranged for early next morning in St. James’s Garden. Cromwell was there first, with a group of his officers about him, and Broghill soon learnt that his correspondence with the “royal orphan” was discovered, and that he must make his choice. “The dilemma is short,” Cromwell is reported to have said; “if you go with me in this expedition to reduce the Irish rebels, you may live, otherwise you certainly die.”[169]