His letter to his old governour gives a vivid picture of the political conditions of the time. In England there was “not one Malignant garrison untaken”; in Wales “but two or three rocky places held out for the King.” The Scots were about to deliver up their garrisons and return into their own country, the Parliament having agreed to compound with them for all their arrears. A sum of £300,000 had been agreed upon, but “the first payment is yet in debate.” The King was still at Newcastle, “both discontenting and discontented”; and the Scots would be obliged to make up their minds how to “dispose of his person,” which the Houses had “voted to remain in the disposition of both Houses of Parliament.” People were flattering themselves with hopes of a speedy settlement of things, but Robert Boyle was not so hopeful. He has, he says, “always looked upon Sin as the chief incendiary of this war”; and yet, “by careful experience,” he has observed that the war has “only multiplied and heightened those sins to which it owes its being.” And his simile is characteristic: “As water and ice,” he adds, “which by a reciprocal generation beget one another.” In Ireland the state of things was no more hopeful than nearer home. The news of Lord Ormonde’s peace must have reached Geneva; but Robert Boyle explains carefully to Marcombes the respective attitudes of the three parties;—the Protestant English proper; the “mere natives,” who hoped by rebellion “to exchange the Throne of England for St. Peter’s Chair,” or “to shake off the English yoke for that of some Catholic foreign prince”; and, thirdly, the Catholic Lords of the English Pale—“so we call the counties about Dublin”—who are “by manners and inclination Irish, though English by descent.” In Inchiquin’s absence from Munster, Broghill, Governor of Youghal, had been left in full command.[139] Robyn is very proud of Broghill, not only as a gallant soldier, but as “none of the least wits of the time.” Broghill had come to England to appeal for troops and supplies for Munster;[140] but Parliament was so slow in granting them that “the physic will not get thither before the patient be dead.” And then Robert Boyle gives Marcombes a piece of his mind about the sects and sectaries:— “The Presbyterian Government is at last settled (though I can scarce think it will prove long lived) after the great opposition of many, and to their no less dislike.” But many people had begun to think it was high time to “put a restraint upon the spreading impostures of the sectaries,” who had made London their general rendezvous. The City “entertains at present no less than 200 several opinions in point of religion.” Some have been “digged out of the graves,” where they had been long condemned to lie buried; others have been “newly fashioned in the forge of their own brains”; most are but “new editions of old errors.”