“It has pleased God to bring us safe to Oxford, and I am lodged at Mr. Crosse’s, with design to be able to give you from experience an account which is the warmer room; and indeed I am satisfied with neither of them, as to that point, because the doors are placed so just by the chimnies, that if you have the benefit of the fire you must venture having the inconvenience of the wind, which yet may be helped in either by a folding skreen; and then I think that which looks into the garden will be the more comfortable, though he have near hanged, and intends to matt, that you lay in before. You are here much desired, and I could wish you here as soon as you can: for I think you would have both more liberty and more conversation than where you are, and both these will be necessary, both for your health and usefulness.” Mr. Crosse was an apothecary, and his house was in the High Street, adjoining University College. He seems to have been recommended to Boyle as a convenient landlord, not only on account of Boyle’s own fickle health, but as one who might be useful to him in laboratory work. He was a staunch Churchman, and a particular friend of John Fell, the son of the famous old Royalist Dean of Christ Church, who had been ejected at the Visitation of 1648. Many scenes have been enacted in Christ Church quadrangle, but none more melodramatic than the ejection of Mrs. Fell and her family after the Dean himself had been carried off in custody to London. Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn must have shaken their heads indeed if they were shown the identical spot in the Quad where Mrs. Fell and her lady friends had been deposited, having chosen to be forcibly carried out, rather than voluntarily walk out, of the Deanery. John Fell, the son, a student of Christ Church, had been ejected too, but he lived on in Oxford; and one of his sisters married Dr. Willis, the physician, who set up in practice in a house in Merton Street, opposite to Merton College. In a room in this house, thanks to John Fell and his brother-in-law Dr. Willis, with one or two more strong Churchmen, the Services of the Church were to be privately maintained through all the years of the Commonwealth. Did Robert Boyle, Geneva-bred, make one of the little semi-forbidden congregation of men and women that gathered in Dr. Willis’s house for service and Communion? It is doubtful. Boyle’s own letter to John Durie, written in 1647, speaks his mind on denominational differences.[194]