The Earl was still asserting his right to his lands, and unwilling to
compound—no-one had ever heard the Earl of Cork, he said, “enclyned to
offer anything.” Things were at this pass when at the end of April Lady
Dungarvan, six weeks after her baby’s birth, fell sick; and the next day,
“the smallpockes brake owt uppon her.” On that very day, under pressure
from his friends and from his son Dungarvan, who went down on his knees
before his father, the Earl of Cork gave way. Very unwillingly, on May
2, he agreed to pay the £15,000 “for the King’s use,” and for his own
“redemption out of Court”—though his “Innocencie and Intigritie” he
declared, writing in his own private diary, were “as cleer as the son
at high noon.” The old Royalist, even then, believed that if his King
only knew how undeservedly the mighty fine had him imposed, “he would not
accept a penny of it.” The Earl was hard hit, though his great Conveyance
was at last signed and sealed, and he could talk of drinking a cup of
sack “to wash away the care of a big debt.”[52] It is comforting to note
that he had meantime cash in hand not only to tip Archie Armstrong, the
King’s Jester, who seems to have passed through Dublin, but to pay for
two knitted silk waistcoats for his own “somer wearings.”
While all this was going on, Kynalmeaky and Broghill were enjoying
what the Earl called their “peregrination.” A tutor had been found
to accompany them on their foreign travels; a M. Marcombes, highly
recommended to the Earl by Sir Henry Wotton, as a man “borne for your
purpose.” Sir Henry wrote from London, where he had been spending a
week or two, and was returning next day “to my poore Cell agayne at
Eton”;[53] but he gave the Earl a careful account of Marcombes, whom he
had seen in London. He was “by birthe French; native in the Province of
Auvergne; bredd seaven years in Geneve, verie sounde in Religion, and
well conversant with Religious Men. Furnished with good literature and
languages, espetially with Italian, which he speaketh as promptly as his
owne. And wilbe a good guide for your Sonns in that delicat Piece of
the Worlde. He seemeth of himself neither of a lumpish nor of a light
composition, but of a well-fixed meane.”
M. Marcombes had already won golden opinions in the family of Lord
Middlesex, a former Lord Mayor of London; and was well known to the then
Lord Mayor, Mr. Burlamachy, who also wrote to the Earl about him. And Mr.
Perkins, the tailor, seems to have put in a word; for there had been a
meeting in the “fumie citie” between Sir Henry Wotton and M. Marcombes
and Mr. Perkins, at which Sir Henry had found the French tutor’s
conversation “very apposite and sweet.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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