Times had changed, indeed, since England was the royal throne of Kings, another Eden, and a demi-paradise. No doubt the Invisibles met as usual in Wood Street, and Robert Boyle was often in congenial company with Hartlib and the others there or at Gresham College. Young Lord Barrymore was no longer with Milton in the Barbican. Milton had given up his school, and he and his wife and their one little girl were living in High Holborn—very near to Warwick House—and Milton was now leading a literary life, but keenly watching the doings of Parliament and Army; it was some months before he was made Secretary of Foreign Tongues to the Council of State. The young philosopher in St. James’s, who had his own ideals, was watching them too, as keenly; though exactly how Robert Boyle felt about the trend of events it is very difficult to guess. His “exact evenness of carriage” never deserted him: to use his own words, “The point of a mariner’s needle shows its inclination to the Pole both by its wavering and rest.” Royalists, Parliament-men, Army-men, Churchmen, Presbyterians, and Independents,—he was in the midst of them all, bound to many of them by ties of friendship and kinship, but steadfastly going his own way. If he was in the company of Mary’s father-in-law, the Earl of Warwick, he was also in Archbishop Usher’s study, listening to a very different kind of exposition, and he was writing affectionately to “dear Broghill” in his difficult position in Munster. If he spoke of “Our Masters” at Westminster, he spoke also of “Our Brethren” across the Borders. On the whole, like Milton in Holborn, but from quite another standpoint, Robert Boyle seems to have fixed, if not his faith, his expectations, upon the New Model. “Victory,” he wrote, “is as obedient as the very Parliament to the Army.”[159] And meantime Lady Ranelagh was doing her best to push her young brother’s literary interests, and make his London visit a pleasant one. She had been showing one of his manuscripts to her friend the Countess of Monmouth. The Countess was the daughter of an old acquaintance of the Earl of Cork, Lionel Cranfield, the clever merchant-adventurer, Lord Mayor of London, High Treasurer, and first, Earl of Middlesex. It may be remembered that Marcombes had been tutor in the Middlesex family before he took Kynalmeaky and Broghill abroad. The Countess had read and liked the manuscript, and had sent the young Squire a flattering message and invitation in a note to his sister Ranelagh. And it was with more than ordinary pleasure that Robert Boyle sat down to indite his little letter of reply, a model of seventeenth-century epistolary homage, to the Countess of Monmouth at Moore Park—