Ann-Maria Walsh
The notion of family preoccupies, inspires, and underlines much of the life writing of the seventeenth-century Boyle women, whose number included Lady Katherine Ranelagh (1615–91) and Lady Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1624–78) but also the lesser-known wife, daughters, daughters-in-law, and granddaughters of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork (1566–1643). The women’s writings, which encompass letters, a diary, an autobiography, a memorandum book, account books, medical receipt books, prose treatises, and pious meditations, form part of the surviving Boyle archive. The practice of keeping records and preserving the family’s papers originated with Richard Boyle, who, as a New English Protestant planter, recognized the importance of using textual and other (nontextual) media to legitimize and consolidate his status as a landowner and as a member of the ruling elite in Ireland.1 Thus, planting, custodianship, and self-publicizing became the bedrock of Boyle’s strategy for success, and it was that kind of environment, with an intense focus on fashioning and maintaining an “English” identity, that conditioned the upbringing of the natal Boyle women and shaped the cultural understanding of those other women who subsequently married into the family. The volume, variety, and intergenerational character of the manuscript materials in the Boyle archive attest to the critical importance of the family’s writerly skills in enabling them to establish and sustain their authoritative presence in seventeenth-century Ireland and beyond. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate through a brief survey and analysis of letters within the Boyle archive how Ireland, the source and mainstay of the family’s wealth and privilege, was perceived and represented by the Boyle women in their life writings.
First, it is necessary to situate the Boyle women’s writings within the familial context and the larger Boyle archive, as this rich and vibrant writing culture initially prompted the women to pick up their pens and thereafter facilitated and encouraged them to continue developing their literary skills throughout the remainder of their lives. Furthermore, positioning the women’s texts within that familial framework also allows us to see more clearly how they responded individually and collectively to their bifurcated existence with homes, landed estates, family connections, and a network of friends located on both sides of the Irish Sea. But it is also pertinent, as Kate Chedgzoy has argued, to study early modern women’s writing by “situating it in relation to more expansive, detailed, and complex cultural geographies of the period.”2 Therefore, the second part of this chapter explores specific letters from the archive that illustrate the different ways in which locatedness mattered to the Boyle women. Six letters in particular highlight the competing and often conflicted ways in which Ireland is imagined from a familial perspective: as a home place, as a valuable resource, as somewhere that needed constant minding, as a distraction, as a threat, and as a source of endangerment.3 This correspondence shows how Ireland challenged each individual female writer to identify and evaluate her core values, not only to cope with the experience of loss but also to recognize and seize those rare moments when she could strive toward achieving her personal objectives. Altogether, this survey and analysis of the archive is aimed at providing a more nuanced understanding of the complex place that early modern Ireland occupied in the imagined lives of the Boyle women as articulated from each of their varying perspectives.
The significant amount of extant material relating to the Boyles can be accessed in the National Libraries of England, Ireland, and Scotland, as well as within the archival collections of various stately homes and a number of other repositories. The sheer size and dispersed character of the archive is a tangible reminder of the Boyle family’s impactful presence on what was the Three Kingdoms. The collection known as the Cork Manuscripts is associated with the Boyle family and the earls of Cork and Burlington but also with subsequent dukes of Devonshire and the Cavendish family. Dating from 1586 to 1885, the Cork Manuscripts are composed of the Boyles’ private papers and correspondence and is primarily maintained at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, home to the current Duke of Devonshire. A large proportion of the archive is related to the legal and business side of the estate; it also includes key life writing texts such as the correspondence and papers of the First and Second Earls of Cork, the men’s diaries, and—particularly significant for the purposes of this chapter—a memorandum book started in 1659 by the second earl’s wife, Elizabeth Boyle, née Clifford (1613–91), containing the countess’s handwritten account of the family’s history and the key events that shaped her life over a thirty-year period.4 She begins with her marriage in 1634 to Richard Boyle (Second Earl of Cork) and goes on to describe the circumstances of the births, christenings, marriages, and deaths of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.5 Thus, relying on the two earls’ diaries and the countess’s memorandum book, a picture can be reconstructed of how the Boyle family lived and sustained itself throughout the changes and turbulence that characterized seventeenth-century Ireland.
Most of the Boyle correspondence stored at Chatsworth is addressed, in the main, to the First or Second Earls of Cork, with the exception of the period from 1648 to 1650. At that time the Second Countess of Cork, Elizabeth Boyle, necessarily took charge of the Irish estates to maintain a visible presence and safeguard the Boyles’ propertied interests while her husband and other members of the family were absent, living in royalist exile, or fighting on the side of Oliver Cromwell.6 But the letters that do survive reveal much about different members of the family and their movements as they traveled away from home: to complete their education; to transact business and political matters; or to relocate, often as newly married women, to another estate, county, or country. Moreover, a cursory glance at the Chatsworth holdings can also affirm that every single one of the seventeenth-century Boyle women is represented in some guise and to varying degrees, whether directly as a correspondent or as a diarist or indirectly by way of reference in a memorandum note or in the account books.
The British Library in London also has a number of important holdings linked to the Boyle family, including much of the First Earl of Cork’s correspondence and a copy of his autobiography, “True Remembrances,” which he began sometime between 1610 and 1611, when he was in his midforties.7 Additional pertinent holdings include the diary, meditations, and memoir of Mary Rich, née Boyle, and several of the family’s recipe books, including “Lady Rennelagh’s choise receipts, as also some of Capt. Willis’; who valued them above gold.”8 The Ranelagh recipe book is filed among the Sloane Manuscripts, and its survival exemplifies the fate of many other individual items related to the Boyle family that were kept and preserved as part of the British Library manuscript collections of other noble households, such as Althorp, Blenheim, Egerton, Egmont, Hyde, Petty, Portland, Sloane, Southwell, Stowe, and Verney.
The Althorp Papers collection is a special case in point because it includes archival material relating to the Earls of Cumberland, Burlington, and Halifax, each of whom was dynastically connected to Elizabeth Boyle (Second Countess of Cork and later First Countess of Burlington), signaling her importance as the lynchpin within that dynamic.9 In terms of archival importance, the section of the Althorp Papers that includes the Burlington Papers is particularly significant because it covers an extensive period, from 1627 to 1692, as well as affording a comprehensive view of the Burlington marriage and the next generation of Boyles. In one box of papers alone (Add. MS 75354, covering 1632–78) are ten courtship letters exchanged by Richard and Elizabeth (later Second Earl and Countess of Cork); their marriage settlement; six letters from Elizabeth to Richard, which are undated but estimated to fall between 1664 and 1667; and a number of letters written by Boyle siblings Roger (five letters), Robert (three), Mary (one), and Katherine (thirty to older brother Richard). Another box (Add. MS 75355, covering 1661–82) contains correspondence exchanged between Boyle children Charles (eleven letters), Frances (two), Elizabeth (two), Anne (one), and Henrietta (seven) with their parents, Richard and Elizabeth, along with some correspondence from the respective in-laws. Yet another (Add. MS 75356) relates to incoming correspondence addressed to Elizabeth Boyle, Second Countess of Cork, and includes letters from Mary of Modena, wife of James, Duke of York; Elizabeth Butler, Duchess of Ormonde; and Lady Anne Clifford, the Dowager Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery, a cousin of Elizabeth’s and of course a famous diarist in her own right. This material reveals a great deal about Elizabeth Boyle’s persona and the kinds of interpersonal relationships she maintained through her epistolary networks and letter-writing activities. On the other hand, another series of letters and papers (these in Add. MS 75357) revolve around Boyle’s dealings with the Standing Committee for the East Riding of Yorkshire during 1645 and 1646, when the family’s estates were under sequestration and thus testify to her legitimate status as a Clifford heiress and the sole owner of the Londesborough lands. In addition, personal and household accounts, as well as receipts from Ireland for the period 1638 to 1666, reflect the family’s high-status lifestyle, as is illustrated with the hefty goldsmith and apothecary bills.
Apart from the British Library, there are several more repositories in London that hold a variety of archival materials relating to the Boyle family: the Royal Society Library, the National Archives, the Wellcome Library, and the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum.10 The Boyle Papers at the Royal Society Library are a good example of the generic diversity of siblings Robert’s and Katherine’s writings; Robert’s, for example, include copious amounts of correspondence and papers on matters scientific and philosophical, as well as a copy of his autobiography, “An Account of Philaretus during his Minority,” which looks back at his youth in Ireland and the time he spent traveling around Europe in the 1640s.11 The Royal Society Library also has correspondence between Ranelagh and other members of the Royal Society that reflect both the sophisticated content and geographic scope of her epistolary engagements, starting with her brother Robert and broadening out to include John Beale, John Eliot, and very possibly Samuel Hartlib and Henry Oldenburg.12 Two further items in the Royal Society Library that represent the multifarious and complex nature of Ranelagh’s writing are an extant manuscript treatise, “Discourse concerning the plague of 1665,” in which Ranelagh advocates for liberty of conscience, and a medical commonplace book containing several entries filed under Ranelagh’s name.13 Within the Boyle Papers there are also four letters from Boyle sibling Mary Rich to brother Robert.14
The Orrery Papers, currently housed at the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester, contain the manuscript holdings of Roger Boyle (1621–79) and his wife, Margaret (1623–89), who after 1660 were known as the First Earl and Countess of Orrery. The massive collection, amounting to more than 750 items covering a thirty-year period from 1660 to 1690, includes copies and drafts of the Orrerys’ outgoing correspondence, plus some of the couple’s epistolary exchanges.15 Incoming correspondence comprises thirty-three letters addressed to the Earl of Orrery from his daughter-in-law, Lady Mary Broghill, and twenty-four letters addressed by her to the Countess of Orrery, with as many responses in return to Lady Broghill, concerning outstanding monies due on the marriage settlement, which eventually resulted in a lengthy legal action (Broghill was successful).16 Apart from the nineteen extant letters written by Ranelagh to her sister-in-law, the Countess of Orrery, there are numerous other letters exchanged between the Orrerys and Richard, Robert, and Mary, the content of which revolves around land, finance, health, and the long-running dispute with Lady Broghill.17 Various miscellaneous household accounts attest to Margaret Boyle’s personal involvement in managing the estate, while a receipt for the purchase of “a bird cage,” “two baskets of sugar,” “a hundred and a half of oranges,” “a box of browne citron,” and “two boxes of marmalade” serve as a salient reminder of the Orrery family’s privileged existence.18 Margaret’s jointure deeds are listed in the papers, along with a document containing “Rules of Margaret. Dowager Countess of Orrery for the management of the Almshouses at Castlemartyr, Co. Cork, ca. 1680,” which sheds some light on how one Boyle woman sought to use her dower money to establish a legacy and substantiate her future reputation as a worthy widow.19
One of the archive’s gems is the correspondences, before and during the war, of Countess Alice Barrymore, née Boyle (1608–66), who wrote to her friend and member of Parliament Sir Ralph Verney over many years.20 A reading of the correspondence underlines the importance of letter writing in allowing the women in the family not only a social outlet but also a medium through which they could voice their opinions and concerns about the world in which they lived. Barrymore’s younger sister, Ranelagh, similarly conducted epistolary conversations with a wide selection of male and female acquaintances across Europe and the British Isles.21 The precise locations of some, at least, of Ranelagh’s surviving letters are representative of her epistolary network within and across the Three Kingdoms: five letters are spread between the Carte Papers, Clarendon State Papers, and Burnet Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford; six more are filed with the Hartlib Papers at the Sheffield University Library; and, farther north, five letters to the Countess of Panmure and another to the Duchess of Hamilton, dated August 6, 1690, are housed at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh.22
Across the Irish Sea, the Lismore Castle Estate Papers are housed at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin.23 As already mentioned, the family correspondence of the First and Second Earls of Cork was transferred to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, but the manuscript calendar summarizing that material is still available on microfilm at the library. After the removal of the family’s papers to Chatsworth, some manuscripts, which most likely were misfiled, have since been recovered and remain at the library. Examples include letters written by Ranelagh and the Second Countess of Cork, Elizabeth Boyle, which offer a rare female view of Ireland during and immediately after the 1641 Irish rebellion.24 Those individual letters are also a tangible reminder that the Boyles had many connections with other noble families resident in Ireland whose libraries and archives might still contain materials related to the Boyle women.25 Over the course of the seventeenth century, siblings Mary, Katherine, Roger, Francis, and Robert Boyle actively encouraged one another to experiment with new writing techniques and different literary genres.26 Roger achieved fame and credit as a poet and playwright, but he also demonstrated his literary dexterity by writing and publishing on subjects as diverse as the liturgical festivals and A treatise of the art of war dedicated to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty and written by the Right Honourable Roger, Earl of Orrery.27 The Boyle men availed of print publication to disseminate their ideas and imaginative outpourings, while the two most intellectually creative female writers in the family, Ranelagh and Rich, were far more limited in the options available to them. Ranelagh’s writings never appeared in print under her own name, but her manuscript treatises were often copied, excerpted, translated, and circulated among a European-wide intellectual community.28 Rich’s literary endeavors reached a larger audience by virtue of being published either posthumously or under the name of godly associates with whom she was acquainted. George Berkeley, for instance, persuaded her to write “Rules for holy living” for his collection of spiritual reflections, and her pious meditations featured as an attachment to her funerary sermon, which was printed under the name of her chaplain, Anthony Walker.29 Two centuries after Rich’s death, religious societies published her diary and memoir as an example of a saintly life.30 Apart from sharing an interest in writing technologies, Robert and Mary also recognized Ireland in their autobiographical texts as the locus where they each were introduced to reading, learning, and pious principles. In a departure from the spiritual, philosophical, political, and scientific themes, Elizabeth Boyle (Second Countess of Cork), like her father-in-law, the First Earl of Cork, constructed her memorandum book around a family-centric model that focused on tracking the Boyles’ movements at the apex of Irish and English society. Yet one of the more noticeable attributes that defines the entire Boyle archive is the way in which both the men and women engaged with the familial correspondence network as a way of connecting and maintaining their unity at a time when division and uncertainty were rife. In the next section of this chapter, I consider how Ireland is figured by the Boyle women as an important signifier in delineating their gendered lives.
An initial reading of the Boyle women’s archived letters underlines the degree to which mobility was both a central feature of their lives and the justification for much of their writing. As elite early modern heiresses and mistresses of large households, the Boyle women participated in routine progresses around the family’s properties, which were located in Cork, Dublin, Waterford, Yorkshire, Dorset, Somerset, and London. Over the course of those sojourns, the women wrote to those at home, giving accounts of their movements and various social encounters.31 In many more instances, however, the women remained at home while the men traveled abroad.32 On those occasions letter writing allowed the women to keep in touch with the travelers so that they could allay their anxieties about the men’s safety, as well as liaise on more pragmatic issues concerned with the estates, which the women often managed alone for several months at a time.
One example of the latter scenario is evoked in a letter that the First Countess of Cork, Catherine Boyle, née Fenton (1588–1630), wrote to her husband, Richard Boyle, on March 18, 1604/5.33 The letter was primarily designed as a love letter in its attempt to bridge the emotional and physical gap by reuniting the countess with her husband—in spirit, at least—while he was away traveling around Munster. The materiality of the letter, the impulse to write, and the act of writing are all represented by Lady Cork as reminders of her wifely devotion, figured in “my pen the mes[s]inger of my heart.” The letter conveys the experiential reality for the countess and many other noblewomen who lived in Ireland at that time and had to cope with an absentee husband and the accompanying feelings of loneliness. Further enunciating that condition, the writer self-deprecatingly compares herself to a “poure scab,” which flatteringly suggests that she was dying of neglect without her husband’s life-enhancing presence. Yet the letter is more complex than simply attempting to counteract loss and to underline Boyle’s impatience for her husband’s return home; the “pen” also empowers the writer to privilege her voice and to highlight her accomplishments, separate from her husband. The catalog of news items reported along with the list of duties performed and the solicitations received and enacted indicate that, in the absence of her husband, Boyle was not pining at home but instead industriously dividing her time fulfilling a number of important roles as well as prompting some initiatives of her own. Accountably, the letter reveals how Boyle availed of the connectivity and disseminating potential of the letter to compensate for her physical confinement and used her husband’s absence to draw attention to her own efforts to improve the family’s future prosperity and security.
On the other hand, the perspective of a traveling woman (in contrast with the stay-at-home woman) is seen in a letter that Catherine Boyle’s granddaughter, Henrietta Boyle (1647–87), wrote home to her father, the Second Earl of Cork, Richard Boyle, while she was visiting the baths in Kent with her mother and older sisters.34 On June 16, 1659, Henrietta and her family had departed from Youghal and crossed over to England without the company of Richard Boyle, who was forced to remain in Ireland according to the terms agreed on following his return from royalist exile eight years previously.35 In a similar approach to that formerly employed by her grandmother, Henrietta uses her geographic distance from the addressee and the occasion of writing to renegotiate her position of favor within the family hierarchy. Determined to set herself apart from her older siblings, Henrietta uses her letter as an outward manifestation of her filial persona. The opening line makes explicit her intentions: “By not drinking the waters I gain the priviledge of writing to your Lordship which I employ the best I can to divert your Lordship with newes.”36 As the letter unfolds, the lively tone and amusing content reflect an acute awareness of the reader, showing Henrietta’s understanding of the medium’s capacity to connect, while enabling her father to share, even if remotely and retrospectively, in those events and experiences that his family was enjoying. Toward the end of the letter, Henrietta reinforces the favorable impression she has built up by inserting a postscript in which she helpfully presents her sisters’ “most humble dutys,” reminding her father that the other sisters were “hindered from” writing because they were otherwise preoccupied “takeing the water.” In a reverse of Lady Cork’s response to her situation of isolation, Henrietta exercises her letter-writing skills to command her father’s exclusive attention while he remains in Ireland, and, by assuming the role of dependable “eye-witnesse,” Henrietta successfully carves out a separate identity from that of her older Boyle siblings.37
When Countess Alice Barrymore wrote to her friend Sir Ralph Verney in 1639 and 1642, she used her presence in her north Cork home at Castlelyons to positively affirm and pronounce different aspects of her persona as a good and loving mother and as a loyal and courageous Protestant landowner. Barrymore’s motives in writing to Verney on February 18, 1639, reflect the relative peace and prosperity that prevailed in Ireland at that time as she sought help in the search for a suitable tutor who might come over and prepare her son to attend school in England.38 Nicholas Canny and Jane Ohlmeyer have previously noted how settlers who benefited from the plantation of Ireland, like the “New English” Boyles, were encouraged by the Dublin administration to uphold an English way of living through their commitment to English customs, language, law, and the Protestant faith, with the hope that their civilizing influence might also have a positive impact on the native Irish populace. Furthermore, while it was customary for Catholics’ heirs to be sent to continental colleges, their Protestant counterparts opted instead for an English equivalent.39 Therefore, Barrymore’s letter served to counteract Ireland’s seeming deficiencies by investing in an English education for her son, in addition to signaling her support for the government’s policy in Ireland. However, as the request for a tutor is reiterated with some urgency toward the end of the letter, the writer also attempts to protect herself and the boy from any blame in regard to his “Mad” behavior.40 A distancing effect is achieved when the writer applies a passive verbal construction, calling on the addressee to send over the tutor with “as much speede as may bee[,] for see hee [her son] [is] spoyld for want of one good sarvant.”41 The Oxford English Dictionary defines the adjective “spoiled” as “persons, especially children: Injured in character by excessive indulgence, leniency, or deference,” but, given the sociopolitical backdrop in which the letter was composed, the term “spoyld” might have connoted the perceived danger and potential spoiling facing “English” children in Ireland at that specific moment in time.42 Arguably, Barrymore presents her letter as a necessary and timely intervention to correct her son’s deviant behavior and to ensure that he is ready to take on the prestigious Barrymore earldom in the not-too-distant future. More fundamentally, the letter underscores Barrymore’s civilizing presence at Castlelyons, without whose efforts the Boyle-Barry inheritance might have been permanently destroyed by the effects of the local environment on her young and seemingly innocent boy.
The experience of being surrounded by a dangerous enemy becomes a stark reality for Barrymore when she writes to Verney on March 16, 1642, giving a “full relation of the many miserys this poore Kingdom has been redust to.” Writing through the lens of a siege, Barrymore conveys how Castlelyons has been transformed into a theater of war and how her altered circumstances involve “living everey houer att the mercey of our increasing enemeys.”43 At that point in the Irish rebellion, several of Barrymore’s Catholic neighbors and kinsmen of her husband had become the aggressors on the battlefield as well as instigators of violent attacks on the homes and castles of Munster Protestants. Contemporary testimonies confirm that many Protestants were forced to abandon their outlying holdings and seek refuge in garrison towns and fortified properties, and it has been further acknowledged that fifty Protestant families were given shelter at Castlelyons.44 Barrymore’s cryptic comment to Verney that she felt terrified but “dare not, as yet ster, because the safety of so many depends upon my stay heare” hints at the dilemma she faced in having to decide between abandoning Castlelyons to save her family or refusing to surrender her home so that her Protestant neighbors might be afforded temporary protection.45 The ostensible purpose in writing was to convey the danger and terror that Barrymore and her household faced on a daily basis, but it appears that the letter also had a larger remit in advocating for all Munster Protestants who, like Barrymore, needed English military assistance if both they and Ireland were to survive the “Papists cruelty.” Capitalizing on the long-standing friendship between the Boyle and Verney families, while conveniently ignoring the ever-widening gap between her royalism and Verney’s support for Parliament, Barrymore makes the most of the remaining lines of the letter to convince the addressee of her dire straits. Part of that process of persuasion involves Barrymore aligning her future with that of Ireland and merging the personal with the political, when she asks the addressee to “send us more aide, which I beg you to doe that you may presarve in Ierland your unconstant enemy, but faithfull friend to sarve you A Barrymore.” Thus, by reading Barrymore’s 1639 and 1642 letters side by side, it is possible to see how she deliberately and effectively exploits her familiarity with the situation on the ground in Ireland to portray a particular epistolary persona in the pursuit of her evolving list of priorities.
War also provides the background to the letters that Ranelagh wrote from London to her brother Richard Boyle while he was visiting the family’s estates in Ireland over the summer of 1667.46 In early June the Dutch fleet had begun a series of daring attacks, during which they traveled up the River Thames, breaching security lines and setting fire to the English navy ships, with the intention of landing in the capital city and seizing power.47 Ranelagh’s two letters dated June 1 and 15 capture the immediacy and drama of those events, as well as the battles that ensued as part of England’s response.48 Like the other Boyle women, Ranelagh is self-reflexive in her letter, showing how she sought to fill the physical void by capitalizing on her relative proximity to the center of the action and compensating for Richard’s absence by supplying him with the most up-to-date news at a time of enormous significance in London, at sea, and throughout the Three Kingdoms. The range of topics that Ranelagh covers in both letters is illustrative of how she exploits the boundlessness of the medium and the multiple perspectives it could afford. Together both letters fill fifteen foolscap pages, and the subjects discoursed include the current state of play in the war against the Dutch, as well as accounts of the French and their latest maneuverings, news of family members and their movements, and reports of recent events inside the royal household. Ranelagh’s epistolary accounts also highlight her ease of access to a range of intelligence networks that she uses to gather information, which she then makes available to her eldest brother. On June 1 she notes having seen “a French letter from a very good hand something writ of the easiness of their Kings landing forces & making a disorder in Ireland,” to which she adds her own view that she wished “people [there in Ireland] be not to[o] much asleep.”49 That perceived relation of codependency between Ireland and England chimes somewhat with the sentiments expressed by her sister Alice Barrymore when she wrote to Verney at the time of the 1641 Irish rebellion.50 Perceptibly, Ranelagh adopts a more detached, analytical stance in her letters, which are designed with the readership in mind, and that writerly approach serves to reveal a self that could look beyond her immediate concerns and anticipate those larger issues that might be a priority for Richard as head of a family whose fortunes were deeply intertwined with that of Ireland.
Consolidating many of those points, Ranelagh’s letter to Richard on June 15 includes the news that the “French are discovered to be hovering about the Isle of Weight [Wight]” and had joined in “a confederacy” with the Dutch. That news makes the prospect of a French invasion of Ireland even more likely, but additionally it serves to underline the soundness of Ranelagh’s previous forecast in that regard. In the closing stages of that same correspondence, Ranelagh makes an explicit request that the addressee “acquaint” their brother Roger (First Earl of Orrery) with the reported events, while urging that they all pray for “poore England” because “in Ireland that wil[l] not be like to subsist when its ruined [England’s ruination will also lead to Ireland’s demise].”51 The reference to Roger highlights the way in which Ranelagh expands the remit of her letter and reaches beyond the addressee, knowing that as a more permanent resident in Ireland and as a zealous supporter of the local Protestant cause, Roger needed to be apprised so that the family might be prepared to deal with the implications of an invasion. Altogether the composition of Ranelagh’s news reports and the accompanying annotations reflect a desire to use her intellectual prowess for the greater good of the entire family. Not only does this kind of contribution enhance Ranelagh’s credibility, but her position at the helm of the family also becomes more firmly cemented because of the constant, voluminous flow of letters sent to her older brother, who is suggestively characterized as closely reliant on her advice, on her judgment, and on her leadership instincts. Because Richard had to divide his time between the family’s significant interests in Ireland and Yorkshire and his obligations associated with the Cork and Burlington earldoms and was thus frequently absent, Ranelagh’s letters clearly attest to her worth as his trusted representative in London and as someone who had the appropriate political contacts, intellectual capacity, and pragmatic vision to play a prominent part in steering the family safely into the next century.
This study of six women’s letters within the Boyle archive illuminates an umbilical relationship that bound the family to Ireland throughout the seventeenth century. Yet Ireland is characterized as much more than just an enduring presence in the women’s lives. The First Countess of Cork’s letter, for example, shows how she responded to her husband’s absence in Munster by projecting a marital persona that underscored her sense of self-worth and purposeful intent. Her daughter Alice’s letters demonstrate how her rootedness to Castlelyons, in both good times and bad, served to enliven her favorable reputation as a mother, planter, Protestant, neighbor, and Munster landowner. Young Henrietta’s letter is representative of how the epistolary medium and tradition within the family afforded the Boyle women fertile ground to demarcate and define themselves apart from both the nucleus of the family and the homeplace. But, additionally, Ranelagh’s letters illustrate how her broader understanding of Ireland’s politico-religious importance within the dynamic of both the Three Kingdoms and Europe enabled her to earn the respect and confidence of the kin group, therein allowing her a significant say in the running and future development of the family. Thus, altogether the letters reflect and reinforce why Ireland is essentially, instinctively, and appropriately placed at the very heart of the Boyle women’s individual and familial conceptions of a life.
1. The Boyle motto, “God’s Providence is my Inheritance,” was inscribed and remains visible on the outer walls of Lismore Castle, County Waterford.
2. Kate Chedgzoy, “The Cultural Geographies of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Journeys across Spaces and Times,” Literature Compass 3, no. 4 (2006): 884–95.
3. Catherine Boyle, Lady Cork to Sir Richard Boyle, March 18, [endorsed 1604/5], vol. 1 (129), Cork Manuscripts, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire; Henrietta Boyle to Richard Boyle, Second Earl of Cork, July 24, [endorsed 1659], vol. 31 (49), Cork Manuscripts, Chatsworth House; Countess Alice Barrymore to Sir Ralph Verney, February 18, [1639], letters, 1639, Verney Papers, Claydon House, Middle Claydon, Buckinghamshire; Barrymore to Verney, March 16, 1641[2], letters, 1642, Verney Papers, Claydon House; Lady Katherine Ranelagh to Richard Boyle, First Earl of Burlington, June 1, [1667]; and Ranelagh to First Earl of Burlington, June 15, [1667], both in Add. MS 75,354, Althorp Papers, British Library (BL), London.
4. In 1864 a manuscript calendar was drawn up to identify and document the correspondence and papers of the First and Second Earls of Cork for the period 1586 to 1774. The material was placed in chronological order and organized into thirty-six volumes, comprising more than five thousand items. The calendar registers incoming and outgoing correspondence while also providing summaries of key documents, including, for instance, excerpts drawn from the two earls’ diaries.
5. Elizabeth, Lady Burlington, memorandum book, Misc. Box 5, Cork Manuscripts, Chatsworth House.
6. See, for example, the following documents in vol. 28, Cork Manuscripts, Chatsworth House, confirming that Elizabeth Boyle was present in Youghal and personally involved in the estate: Murrough O’Brien, Lord President of Munster, First Earl of Inchiquin, to the Countess of Cork, July 12, 1648, item 8; Col. William Kingsmill to the Countess of Cork, July 24, 1648, item 9; Elizabeth Boyle, Countess of Cork, petition to the Commissioners for Settlement of Contributions in the Province of Munster, November 27, 1649, item 14; Countess of Cork, petition on behalf of the Earl of Cork to the Lord President of Munster, February 16, 1650, item 16; and “A Note of such writings as my lady took with her into England,” May 18, 1650, item 18.
7. Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, correspondence, 1632–44, Add. MS 19,832, Boyle Papers, BL, fols. 31–50; “True Remembrances,” copy, Boyle Papers, Add. MS 19,832, BL, fols. 23–30.
8. Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, diary, July 1666–November 1677, Add. MSS 27,351–55, BL; Mary Rich, “Ocasionale Meditationes,” 1663–77, Add. MS 27,356, BL; and “Some Specialities in the life of M. Warwicke,” 1625–74, Add. MS 27,357, BL, fols. 1–40; and Katherine Ranelagh, “Lady Rennelagh’s choise receipts, as also some of Capt. Willis’; who valued them above gold,” MS 1,367, Sloane Manuscripts, BL, fols. 1–83.
9. Althorp Papers, [1509]–eighteenth century, Add. MSS 75,351–71, BL.
10. Key documents include Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, copy letter to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, TS23/1/43, National Archives of England (TNA), London, fols. 62–63; Ranelagh to Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, SP3/30, TNA; Ranelagh to Robert Thornhill, E192/14/5 and E192/14/11, TNA; Ranelagh to Joseph Williamson, SP29/197, SP29/230, and SP29/251B, TNA; Boyle Family Receipt Book, Western MS 1,340, Wellcome Library, London; and Ranelagh to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, August 7, 1646, Forster MS 454, 40/1, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, fols. 74–75.
11. Robert Boyle, “An Account of Philaretus during his Minority,” R/B/1/37/39, Boyle Papers, Royal Society Library (RSL), London.
12. These RSL documents are as follows: Ranelagh to Boyle, July 29, 1665, RB/3/5/6; Ranelagh to Boyle, September 9, 1665, RB/3/5/7; Ranelagh to Boyle, August 6, 1665, RB/3/5/8; Ranelagh to Boyle, January 7, [1657], RB/3/5/10; Ranelagh to Boyle, September 14, [1652], RB/3/5/11; Ranelagh to Boyle, September 18, [1666], RB/3/5/12; Ranelagh to Boyle, June 3, [1657], RB/3/5/13; Ranelagh to Boyle, [1645], RB/3/5/14; Ranelagh to Boyle, October 12, [1655], RB/3/5/15; Robert Boyle to Ranelagh, November 13, [1648?], RB/3/1/46; Boyle to Ranelagh, August 31, 1649, RB/3/1/54; Boyle to Ranelagh, May 13, 1648, RB/3/1/56; Boyle to Ranelagh, August 2, 1649, RB/3/1/58; Boyle to Ranelagh, [1660?], RB/3/1/73; John Beale to Ranelagh, September 5, 1660, RB/3/1/23; Beale to Ranelagh, September 6, 1660, RB/3/1/24; Ranelagh to John Eliot, August 13, 1676, RB/3/5/9; Ranelagh to [Samuel Hartlib?], April 3, 1658, RB/3/6/3; Henry Oldenburg, commonplace book that includes extracts from at least one of Ranelagh’s letters [1657], Liber Epistolari, “Ex.Litt.M.Ra.,” MS/1, fols. 190–94; James Gordoun to Ranelagh, June 29, 1680, RB/3/7/32.
13. [Ranelagh], “Discourse concerning the plague of 1665,” Boyle Papers, RB/1/14/4, RSL, fols. 27–42. For the medical commonplace book used by Ranelagh and Robert Boyle, see the Boyle Papers, RB/2/8, RSL.
14. Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, to Robert Boyle, July 30, [1673], RB/3/5/92; Rich to Boyle, December 29, [1677], RB/3/5/93; Rich to Boyle, [late 1663], RB/3/5/94; Rich to Boyle, [late 1656], RB/3/5/95, all in Boyle Papers, RSL.
15. In 1941 Edward MacLysaght compiled and edited the “Calendar of the Orrery Papers” based on the National Library of Ireland (NLI) files MSS 13,177–225: Calendar of the Orrery Papers (Dublin: Stationary Office, 1941). The original manuscripts have since been microfilmed and transferred to the West Sussex Record Office (West Sussex RO) in Chichester, where they are attached to the Howard Archive, known as the Petworth House Collection, MSS 13,177–225.
16. Lady Mary Broghill, thirty-three letters to the First Earl of Orrery, MS 13,218, fol. 2; and twenty-four letters to the First Countess of Orrery, MS 13,218, fol. 4, all in Orrery Papers, West Sussex RO.
17. Ranelagh, nineteen letters to the Earl and Countess of Orrery, MS 13,219, Orrery Papers, West Sussex RO.
18. Margaret Boyle, receipt, MS 13,199, Orrery Papers, West Sussex RO.
19. Margaret Boyle, “Rules of Margaret. Dowager Countess of Orrery for the management of the Almshouses at Castlemartyr, Co. Cork, ca. 1680,” MS 13,184, Orrery Papers, West Sussex RO.
20. The original manuscripts relating to the Alice Barry, Countess of Barrymore, and Sir Ralph Verney correspondence, 1639–43, have been preserved at the Verney home of Claydon Manor, Claydon, but facsimile copies of the letters are also available in microfilm, under reference MS 636/4, at the BL.
21. Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 142–76.
22. Ranelagh, letters, MS 217, Carte Papers, Bodleian Library (Bodl.), Oxford, fols. 452–59, 66; letters, vols. 78–79, Clarendon State Papers, Bodl., fols. 231, 73–74; letter, Add. MS 191, Burnet Manuscripts, Bodl., Oxford, fols. 113–14; see also the Hartlib Papers database, www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/; and letters to the Countess of Panmure, GD 45/14/237/1–5, and letter to the Duchess of Hamilton, August 6, 1690, GD 406/1/3797, both in National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh.
23. MS 12,813, microfilm, POS 8685 (A), Collection List 129, Lismore Castle Estate Papers, compiled by Stephen Ball, 2007, NLI; see Ball’s introduction. This archive is one of the largest and most valuable of the NLI’s manuscript collections because it provides an uninterrupted view of the estate and the conditions of land ownership in Ireland from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.
24. Elizabeth Boyle, Second Countess of Cork, to the Right Honourable, Murrough O’Brien, Lord President of Munster, First Earl of Inchiquin, petition letter, May 1648, MS 43,346/3, Lismore Castle Estate Papers, NLI; Katherine Jones to Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, December 26, 1642, MS 43,266/20, Lismore Castle Estate Papers, NLI.
25. See, for example, Katherine Ranelagh, four letters to Bishop Anthony Dopping, January to April 1682, P001498149; Anthony Dopping, “Collection of State Papers Connected With Meath, 1633–1733,” vol. 1, nos. 10–21, Dopping Collection, Armagh Robinson Library, Armagh, Northern Ireland.
26. Four letters to Bishop Anthony Dopping, January to April 1682, Armagh Robinson Library, P001498149. For example, the dedication is addressed “To The Countess of Warwick. My Deare Sister” in the opening page of Robert Boyle, Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God: Pathetically discours’d of, in A Letter to a Friend (London, 1659).
27. Roger Boyle, Poems on most of the festivals of the church composed by the Right Honourable Roger, Earl of Orrery (London, 1681); Roger Boyle, A treatise of the art of war dedicated to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty and written by the Right Honourable Roger, Earl of Orrery (London, 1677). See also Toby Barnard, “Boyle, Roger, First Earl of Orrery (1621–1679), Politician and Writer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 23, 2004. www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-3138; and Kathleen M. Lynch, Roger Boyle: First Earl of Orrery (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1965), 147, 160–61, 165.
28. Pal, Republic of Women, 175.
29. Mary Rich, “Rules for holy living,” in Historical Applications and Occasional Meditations upon several subjects written by a person of honour, by George Berkeley (London, 1670), 131–59; Anthony Walker, Eureka, Eureka the virtuous woman found (London, 1678); M. Rich, “Ocasionale Meditationes,” BL. Rich’s pious meditations were handed down to Rev. Thomas Woodroffe, chaplain to the Earl of Warwick, and thereafter through the generations of the Woodroffe family.
30. Mary Rich, Memoir of Lady Warwick: also her diary, from A.D. 1666 to 1672 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1847); Mary Rich, The Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick, ed. T. Crofton Croker (London: Percy Society, 1848).
31. See Elizabeth Boyle, Second Countess of Cork, letters to Richard Boyle, Second Earl of Cork, Cork Manuscripts, Chatsworth House, vol. 31 (33, 35, and 49), spanning the summer of 1659, when the countess was visiting London and the baths at Tunbridge Wells in Kent.
32. Elizabeth, Lady Burlington, memorandum book, Chatsworth House; see fols. 3r, 3v, 4v, 7r, 7v, and 8r, which refer to various journeys the Boyles undertook around their estates. See also letters written by Burlington and her daughters, Anne Boyle and Henrietta Hyde, to Richard Boyle during the summer of 1667, Althorp Papers, Add. MSS 75,354–55, BL.
33. C. Boyle to Richard Boyle, March 18, [endorsed 1604/5], Chatsworth House.
34. H. Boyle to Richard Boyle, July 24, [endorsed 1659], Chatsworth House.
35. Toby Barnard, “Boyle, Richard, First Earl of Burlington and Second Earl of Cork (1612–1698), Royalist Army Officer and Politician,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, January 3, 2008, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-3135.
36. H. Boyle to Richard Boyle, July 24, [endorsed 1659], Chatsworth House.
37. See Anne Boyle to Richard Boyle, Second Earl of Cork and First Earl of Burlington, July 2, [1667], Add. MS 75,355, Althorp Papers, BL. Anne’s letter differs somewhat from Henrietta’s letter in approach, as she writes some years later from Scarborough to their father, the Second Earl of Cork, and draws attention to her scribal role, as she alone attended to her sick mother, Countess Elizabeth, who was taking the curative waters as a treatment for her seizures. The image of a dutiful daughter is figured in and through Anne’s role as scribe but makes it difficult for the reader to separate out Anne’s identity and sentiments from that of her mother, thereby complicating the authorial source of the letter.
38. Barrymore to Verney, February 18, [1639]; David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005). Dickson’s first chapter describes the peacetime conditions in Cork leading up to the 1641 rebellion.
39. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University, 2009), 247, 250, 279, 281; Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 433, 437, 447, 433–34.
40. While it is unclear exactly how young Richard’s “Mad” behavior manifested itself, it is known that he did follow in his maternal grandfather’s footsteps by marrying and remarrying until eventually he had fifteen children to his name. See “Richard Barry, 2nd Earl of Barrymore,” Peerage, www.thepeerage.com/p11658.htm#116575.
41. Barrymore to Verney, February 18, [1639], Claydon House.
42. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Spoiled, adj.,” def. 4, accessed June 21, 2018, www.oed.com.
43. Barrymore to Verney, March 16, 1641[2], Claydon House.
44. Magdalen Faulkner to Sir Ralph Verney, March 8, 1641[2], letters 1642, Claydon House. Faulkner (gentlewoman companion to Alice and kinswoman of Verney) reports that there were fifty families sheltering at Castlelyons and four times as many staying in their Barryscourt Castle.
45. Barrymore to Verney, March 16, 1641[2], Claydon House.
46. Elizabeth, Lady Burlington, memorandum book, Chatsworth House, fol. 13r, confirms Richard Boyle’s departure for Ireland on May 20, 1667, and return to Yorkshire on July 8, 1667.
47. James Rees Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1996).
48. Ranelagh to Richard Boyle, June 1, [1667], BL; and Ranelagh to First Earl of Burlington, June 15, [1667], BL.
49. Ranelagh to Richard Boyle, June 1, [1667], BL.
50. Barrymore to Verney, March 16, 1641[2], Claydon House.
51. Ranelagh to Richard Boyle, June 15, [1667], BL.