Amelia Zurcher
By all accounts the eleven children of Catherine Fenton and Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, were an extraordinary seventeenth-century aristocratic family. Their English father’s legendary rise, from a penniless adventurer at the turn of the seventeenth century to an Irish landholder collecting more in rents by the 1630s than any other Irish or English aristocrat, put his children in positions of great political and cultural influence. Several of them were also individually very accomplished, most famously the natural philosopher and theological writer Robert Boyle. But after Nicholas Canny’s groundbreaking 1982 study of the First Earl of Cork, there has been little attention to the ways the Boyle siblings’ experience in Ireland affected the thought of any of the family besides Robert and, beyond some discussion of Robert and Katherine’s close relationship as the major context for her interest in natural philosophy, little attention given to the family network as a force in shaping their thought and writing.1 This chapter takes as its starting point the hypothesis that the life writing of Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, née Boyle (1615–91), and Lady Mary Rich, née Boyle, Countess of Warwick (1624–78), cannot be understood without attention both to their roles in the Boyle sibling network and to their identity and history as members of an Irish-English family. I use the term “Irish-English,” rather than subordinate either term to the other as in “Anglo-Irish,” to signal the dual residence of much of the family after the 1630s in both kingdoms. “Irish” I place first because all the siblings were born there. In Ireland the Boyles would have been Protestant “New English,” as distinct from the Catholic Old English who had settled in Ireland before the sixteenth century, and in the culturally polyglot world that most of them inhabited, it is likely that the Boyles most often referred to themselves simply as “English” for reasons of status. But the historically anachronistic “Irish-English” captures the hybrid nature of their identity and reminds us how deeply the culture of each kingdom was implicated in that of the other.
Cork’s incredibly quick accumulation of Irish wealth, made possible by the interval of relative peace in Ireland between the late 1590s and the 1641 rebellion, brought the Boyle family to prominence in the seventeenth century with a speed and definitiveness rarely paralleled. All the Boyle children were born into, and to varying degrees remained connected to all their lives, a distinctively Irish-English planter society that shaped their sense of their place and duties in the world. After a rocky start in Ireland, Richard Boyle was enabled by the intervention of his patron George Carew, president of Munster, to buy all of Walter Raleigh’s Irish lands and marry as his second wife Catherine Fenton, daughter of Irish privy counselor Geoffrey Fenton, and these two acquisitions provided the foundation for all his success. For the next three decades he continued to accumulate land and to “improve” his holdings, settling them with English tenants; establishing fortified towns; constructing churches, schools, and almshouses; and installing preachers. Like many English planters in Ireland, Cork professed strong belief in a Puritan providence, a conviction that God would reward those doing his work and that virtue could be measured by the success of one’s endeavors. The motto he adopted when he was knighted in 1603, “God’s providence is mine inheritance,” was described as “humble and Christian” by Gilbert Burnet in Robert Boyle’s funeral sermon in 1691, but by the time Cork became wealthy it was not only an appropriately pious nod to his low origins but also a boast of his certainty of God’s favor.2
Ireland in the first decades of the seventeenth century, for its Protestant English and continental settlers, was a kind of proving ground for piety, a place to establish not only individual virtue but also the progress of God’s Protestant kingdom on earth. Such piety rationalized colonialist exploitation of resources and people, and in turn, by the familiar logic of early modern colonialism, Cork and his peers viewed their worldly success as evidence of God’s sanction.3 In political terms their accumulation and development of property in Ireland encouraged the New English aristocrats to develop a sense of themselves as a service nobility, their political virtue defined not by old-style loyalty to the monarch so much as by public service to the Commonwealth.4 Even as it facilitated their own advancement, this ideology allowed them to imagine themselves aloof from the politics of factionalism in London in the 1630s and afterward. In the uncertain and sometimes hostile environment of Ireland they valued political stability above all else, necessitating steady support from whatever government was in power in England, and their political loyalties throughout the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Restoration were dictated by their most firmly held interests, in the security of their lands and the titles by which they were owned. To ensure the viability of their Protestant colonialist project, the landed New English also saw dynastic succession as essential, and Cork’s near obsession with advantageous marriages for his children was unusual only because there were so many of them. The marriages he arranged for all the Boyle children (or in Mary’s case failed to arrange) largely determined their material and political relation to Ireland in the ensuing decades. Cork married most of his daughters, including Katherine, to Irish nobility, offering large dowries to relatively poor husbands in exchange for social status in Ireland. His sons, in contrast, he mostly married to English heiresses, whose assets helped to build the family’s Irish holdings and whose familial connections, he hoped, would give the Boyles political access in England—a hope that was fulfilled, although not in the ways he expected, during the next tumultuous decades. To a greater extent perhaps even than other landed New English in Ireland, the Boyles remained throughout the seventeenth century a family in-between two kingdoms, their familial and political interests determined to a large extent by the complex relationship between England and Ireland.
Ranelagh’s and Rich’s life writing is not only embedded in this history but also helps illuminate it. Only Rich left writing that can properly be called autobiographical, her brief Some Specialities in the Life of M Warwicke, but a rich array of other surviving texts offers a window onto their lives and their complex strategies for making sense of them. For the most part the writing I consider here cannot be said to participate in the historical construction of life writing or autobiography as a genre, because it was private or was written for other rhetorical ends. My goal in this chapter is historical with a different emphasis—to understand how the Boyles represented their selves and their lives’ shape and significance, as individuals and also as part of a social network.5 The Boyle family left a whole host of writing that could legitimately be called life writing in this sense: Cork’s True Remembrances, widely circulated in manuscript in the 1630s; Robert’s very early autobiographical account and autobiographical notes from later life, as well as works such as his Occasional Reflections and Seraphic Love that frequently foreground his own experience; the books of essays written in old age to make a “strict examination of his own life” by Francis Boyle, Viscount Shannon; the vast romance Parthenissa by Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and eventually Earl of Orrery, as well as some of his poetry; Rich’s autobiographical Some Specialities in the Life of M Warwicke, her Occasional Meditations, and her diary; and a large body of correspondence, sometimes personal and sometimes more public, scattered across many archives, in which Katherine, Robert, and Roger have particular prominence. As a powerful Irish-English Protestant family, the Boyle siblings shared significant interests and assumptions, and Ranelagh’s and Rich’s life writings are part of a shared familial and cultural project in which the sisters played a still-underappreciated part. Their life writings also offer us a way into the complex relation for women between Protestant piety and other intellectual and social concerns in the period, a relation that in modern histories of women’s writing has sometimes been given insufficient attention, and sheds significant light on the gendered nuances of the emergent dichotomy between public and private.6
Unlike her father and the siblings to whom she was closest, Katherine Ranelagh left no explicitly autobiographical accounts of herself. In recent years historians of science have become especially interested in her medical thought and her contributions of chemical and medical recipes to receipt books, but in neither of the two in which she’s known to have had a major part is it possible to see a persona.7 Katherine, born in 1615, was one of Cork’s middle daughters. Brought up in Ireland and England (in the household of a prospective husband), she was unhappily married at fifteen to Irish aristocrat Arthur Jones, eventually Lord Ranelagh; bore three surviving daughters and a son; and spent all her life after 1641 estranged from her husband, mostly in England. She was especially close to Robert, twelve years her junior, and from 1668 on they shared a house in Pall Mall. In her own time she was unusually prominent among elite women, for her knowledge of natural philosophy and especially for her contributions to religious and political debates.8 In Gilbert Burnet’s reminiscence at Robert’s funeral in 1691 (she and Robert died within a week of each other), she was said to have “lived the longest on the publickest Scene” and to have “made the greatest Figure in all the Revolutions of these Kingdoms for above fifty Years, of any Woman of our Age.”9
The two great contexts for her thought and conversation throughout her life, both of which she shared with various of her siblings, were the Irish-English aristocracy she was born into, many of which joined her in exile in London after the 1641 rebellion, and the intellectual circles she eventually joined in England and Ireland, first through Irish-born Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, and the group at Great Tew and then through the Hartlib Circle in the 1640s and 1650s. The latter came together in the famous 1642 pact made by Samuel Hartlib, John Comenius, and John Dury, in which they agreed to dedicate themselves “to the glory of God and the utility of the public,” and Hartlib, who called himself the “great intelligencer of Europe” and a “conduit-pipe of knowledge,” took as the network’s mission the basic principle that “Every one as he hath received any gifft from God (which is a Character of his vertue and glorie) should communicat the same unto others.”10 The linking of God’s glory with public utility and the insistence on mobilizing God’s gifts sound very much like the Protestant piety espoused by Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, and in fact many of the major ideas of the Hartlib Circle had already been held for at least a decade by the Irish exiles who joined it in the 1640s. In the Hartlibean view the pursuit of practical goals was an essential part of piety, and pluralism in methodology—“a certain generosity and liberty in all our Studies,” in Hartlib’s words—was valued over an attachment to one approach or body of knowledge.11 Correspondingly, belief in a broadly construed Protestant theology aimed to avoid the excesses of both sectarianism and rigid conformity. All of these were ideas, as Canny shows, central to planter society in the first half of the seventeenth century.12
This is not to say that the Irish exiles, much less the Boyles in particular, brought these ideas to Hartlib and his European-English network but rather that the aspirations of Protestants from and in Ireland in this period were quite like those of Protestants from the Palatinate, Bohemia, and the Netherlands and that their confederation around these ideas was all but seamless.13 Throughout the period that the Hartlib network was active, associates who spent significant time in Ireland and were known to correspond with the Boyles included Cromwell’s surveyor general Benjamin Worsley, economist William Petty, physicians Gerard and Arnold Boate, and religious and educational reformers John Dury and Dorothy Moore Dury, the last of whom was Ranelagh’s aunt by marriage and in the 1640s her personal friend. As historians have shown, English settlers to Ireland throughout the seventeenth century consistently took Cork’s colonialist view of the island as a proving ground for their own piety. Ireland was, in effect, a laboratory for experiments in social improvement.14 In the deep interest Ranelagh and Robert Boyle took in the religious, social, and scientific projects of the Hartlib network in Ireland as elsewhere, they were effectively sustaining and extending the agenda into which they had been born.
Unlike women such as Elizabeth of Bohemia or Anna van Schurman, Ranelagh did not educate herself as a scholar (she does not appear to have had Latin), and she does not seem to have had the familiarity with or interest in secular continental history and literature characteristic of contemporary salonnières such as Madeleine de Scudéry or Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette.15 The context and intellectual framework for her participation on the “publickest Scene” was instead overwhelmingly the ideology of Protestant piety she was born into in Ireland and thereafter cultivated mainly in London from the 1640s. The Hartlibean program, as has often been noted, in its emphasis on practical “improvement” and empiricism did not require deep traditional humanist learning of its participants, making it more accessible to women and nonelite men than other intellectual networks, and Ranelagh’s immersion in Protestant ideology was a sufficient gateway to many of the more ostensibly secular issues with which her Hartlib correspondents were concerned. As she says to her brother Robert in a letter from 1665, lamenting the almost constant recourse to “swords & guns” she has witnessed in recent decades, the proper route to “Mans ruleing the Creatures” is “his Imploying those faculties to that purpose which god himselfe has fitted In their Imployment to make him able to doe, so, & those are his rational ones whereby as he may discover the properties & uses of other things soe he may chuse to aply them thereby to their proper ends.”16 Ranelagh’s correspondence suggests that she was interested in a broad range of those proper ends—educational reform, to which she remained committed throughout her life; agricultural development, which she discussed with her close correspondent John Beale; and the medical use of chemical and natural remedies, a project she shared for decades with Robert.
But her particular concern, perhaps her life project, was her dedication to freedom of conscience and therefore to religious toleration across the Protestant spectrum. She stayed within the Anglican Church for the duration of her life, but her house was a meeting place for nonconformists in the 1660s, and she and her sister Mary went to hear preaching by nonconformists as well as Anglicans.17 In the 1650s, there is evidence to suggest, she and Robert were persuaded by millenarian ideas, almost certainly the context for her decision to learn Hebrew in that decade.18 She and Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, intervened on behalf of Quakers and other nonconformists at the Restoration, and her one surviving treatise, “Discourse concerning the plague in 1665”, argues against the inhumane imprisonment of nonconformists.19 Minister Benjamin Denham commented in a 1667 letter to Robert that “I have some times visited, that truly Pi[ous La]dy. Your Sister Rannelo, and have received from her mouth, more Religious discourses in one halfe houre, then I have done from some Bishops table in ten; . . . And shee hath cleerely made mee of her mind, That Relaxing Somewhat of the Penal lawes to Some sober non Conformists, would not drive but bring them to Church, and at last to a sober Condescention.”20 Bulstrode Whitelocke similarly recalled a 1670 dinner at her house at which they “had private discourse about Liberty of Conscience, to wch she was a great friend.”21 One of her last projects with Robert, in the 1680s, was the commissioning and distribution of an Irish translation of the Bible, opposed by the Anglican clergy in Ireland because it seemed to marginalize Anglican, and English, hierarchy and culture in favor of a direct connection between Irish subjects and the contents of scripture.22
Ranelagh’s commitment to freedom of conscience pointed both outward, toward the goal of uniting the Protestant churches in a worldwide empire that would at last vanquish Roman Catholicism and provide for the reign of reason and justice on earth, and also inward, toward the development of the capacities of every individual subject. As Ruth Connolly astutely notes, the opposite of freedom of conscience in this period, perhaps a little counterintuitively to us, was not oppression or coercion, only one of many forces that might detach one from one’s own reason and inner light, but hypocrisy, the disjunction between the soul’s convictions and one’s words and actions.23 If religious belief and relation to God was the framework for a relation to the entire world, then the self necessarily made itself through the work of coming to God, and it was crucial for Ranelagh that it be provided the opportunity, the liberty, to do so. Associations of early women’s public speech with immodesty, as has been well documented, made them vulnerable to particularly toxic accusations of hypocrisy, challenging their entire ground for speech, and Ranelagh’s emphasis on piety as a counter to hypocrisy, whether she intended it this way or not, was probably strategically powerful in authorizing her public voice. (Although it is impossible to know for certain, her commitment to eradicating the conditions for hypocrisy may also echo in her father’s struggle in the 1630s against Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth, who very publicly denounced Cork for his hypocritical profession of dedication to the common good to mask his mere self-interest in pursuing luxury and status.)24 Ranelagh’s resistance to hypocrisy became part of her public persona, not only in the later years of her life but as early as the 1640s, when she functioned as the public guarantor for the virtue of John Dury and Dorothy Moore Dury’s marriage by circulating a set of letters among the three of them defending the sanctity and pious efficacy of their union against “scrupulous carnalitie.”25
Current scholarship bringing new visibility to Ranelagh concurs with Burnet in seeing her as truly exceptional, as a woman, for her participation in conversations and activities that we would now call public. This view seems accurate, perhaps more in the religious than the natural philosophical or medical realms, to the extent those can be distinguished. In Ranelagh’s private letters, however, she offered a more complex view of her social role, one that blurs the dichotomy between public and private as we think about them. As life writing, these letters illuminate her negotiation of the gendered constraints she functioned within and the strikingly nuanced speaking positions she constructed for herself. In one pivotal 1658 letter to her brother Roger, Lord Broghill, from Ireland, where she had been living for a couple of years apparently to find some kind of permanent resolution with her estranged husband and negotiate her children’s futures, she meditates on her next step now that Oliver Cromwell has died. Broghill has been preferring a petition for her maintenance to Cromwell, who has had “authority and severity against such practices, as my lord’s [i.e., her husband’s] are,” but she has little expectation of a similar response from his son Richard, and first she muses in characteristically wry and balanced fashion on the public implications of his father’s death, predicting that “we shall learn to value [Cromwell] more by missing him, than we did when we injoyed him; a perverseness in our nature, that teaches us in every condition, wherein we are, therewith to be in discontent, by undervaluing what we have, and overvaluing what we have lost.” Concluding that his death is God’s “warneing-piece of great confusions and disorders approaching upon these nations” against which all must make “provisions,” she shifts to focus on her own predicament, resolving “as to outward things” to cut unnecessary expenses, which have burdened the friends protecting her from “my lords oppressions.” Regarding inward things,
though I can remove lightly, and need bestow but few thoughts or cares, in getting my wealth together, or considering how to dispose of it, I have some provision to make against this riseing storm, in geting a greater stabilety of thoughts, and preparedness of mind, than can be descomposed, by the shakeing of the world, and to the making of that provision retyredness is absolutely necessary, and therefore into that I desier to hasten, which not being to be got in this country by me, because of the unkindnes of my friends, and the unreasonablenes of my lord, I shal seeke it, and I hope speedely get into it, in England, . . . [and if there I] find no other provision, I shall have a much experienced providence to depend on, which was all the meanes I had for the greatest part of the time I lived there . . . here I am altogether unserviceable, and yet very chargeable to my friends.26
Ranelagh had hoped that her life in Ireland among her friends (i.e., family) would be a kind of retirement, but instead she has put them to great expense, apparently because of the kind of life she has been expected to live there as a landed aristocrat. Clearly she remains concerned about her material support at this moment of personal and political crisis, but equally significant to her in this passage is her preparation of her mind, her quest for internal “stabilety,” and for this she requires disengagement from the burdens of her social roles in Ireland.
In a highly interesting conclusion, Ranelagh says that if Broghill confirms that she cannot get from Richard the maintenance she has sued for, she will be
set free to seeke it some other way, wherein my owne honest endeavors may contribute toward it, and show the world I left not my lord upon humour, but upon necessety, and that in soe doing I sought privacy, and submitted to scarcety, rather then pursued a croud, or designed aboundance to my selfe, which, in the way I have hetherto binn, amongst my friends, may have binn suspected, and none has reason to suspect my owne hart than I have, and only upon tryal shal I find, wheather I be mistaken in suspecting it or noe, and since God thus seems to cal me to put it to that, it is my purpose to doe so.27
Ranelagh goes from Ireland to London not to move from margin to center, to pursue a more public life, but rather to leave the familial and social network that constitutes the “croud” of aristocratic women’s society, to find “privacy” and “scarcety” in a more genuine retirement than she was able to make in Ireland. Toward this end she seems almost to hope that Broghill will not be able to get any concession from Richard Cromwell so that she will have to embark on “my owne honest endeavors.” God has called her to retirement as a test of her piety, which is also to say, for Ranelagh, her sincerity—to prove to him and to “my owne hart” by “tryal,” in the language of Protestant theology, that she has not left her husband out of mere hypocritical self-interest, to pursue greater “aboundance.” Her “honest endeavors,” which seem to refer both to means toward material provision and also to some kind of spiritual work in the world, find their meaning not as public, extrafamilial pursuits, as we might tend to read them, but rather as signs of authentic retirement, and in their hoped-for success as indications of her virtue. There are echoes here of her friend and correspondent Dorothy Moore, who had written to Ranelagh a decade earlier of her disinclination to marry again so that she could better pursue “that aime . . . of service” that “every Member of Christ ought to propose unto themselves as theire Duty without excluding our Sex,” which required the “imployment of our best strength spirituall & corporall.”28 Both effectively single women, both declining conventional aristocratic female roles, Moore and Ranelagh turn to a model of religious trial and service to imagine life projects for themselves that can be justified ethically and culturally.
There is an echo too of Cork’s ideology, significantly inverted: London, not Ireland, is Ranelagh’s proving ground for piety, and her virtue will be measured not by her material survival (that “much experienced providence” that in London in the past was “all the meanes I had”) but by the thoroughness of her proof, through retirement, that she has not “designed aboundance to my selfe.” In the early 1630s, as part of his long-term campaign against Cork, lord deputy of Ireland Wentworth mocked Cork’s older daughters, whom Cork had just finished marrying to Old and New English landed wealth, as parodies of real English nobility. Represented on the family tomb, Wentworth scoffed, like “sea-nymphs . . . with coronets upon their heads, their hair disheveled down upon their shoulders,” they were the very embodiment of their father’s uncultured greed and unwarranted self-importance.29 Undoubtedly Ranelagh’s vigorous disavowal of self-interest in the purer air of London two decades later proceeds in part from her gender; it seems likely that it worked, too, to separate her from the kind of criticism that had shadowed her family during her early adulthood in Ireland.
Ranelagh’s private letters also give some insight into the intersections between her personal and more public negotiations of gender. Like Broghill, and doubtless also to some extent through him, alone among her female siblings she seems to have had substantial political access. As early as 1646 she was writing to Elizabeth of Bohemia about the princess’s brother Charles I’s conflicts with Parliament, and in the 1670s she reported in letters on private visits to the royal family with her sister Mary.30 After the Restoration she functioned as a representative of Irish landowners, particularly her oldest brother Richard, Second Earl of Cork, at court.31 Even in the midst of such public activities her more “retired” intellectual and activist role remained fundamental to her identity, and she seems to have acted as a bridge between different parts of her family, linking Richard and Roger’s world of Irish landed wealth and political office and influence to her own and Robert’s intellectual and spiritual pursuits. In 1681, in the midst of a long power struggle with the Boyles, lord lieutenant of Ireland James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, wrote disparagingly to the Earl of Arlington that Ranelagh still wielded great influence over her brother Richard, and “as for the other branches [of the family] she governs them very absolutely.”32 Ormonde was probably scapegoating Ranelagh, but his complaint also reflects a shared sense, from the outside, of her dominant position among her siblings.33
An enormously artful letter to her brother Robert from 1665, three years before he moved for good into her house in Pall Mall, tells a more complex story, illuminating the subtle play of authority and affection between them. From Lees, where she was probably staying with her sister Mary for the duration of an outbreak of plague in London, Ranelagh opens by rebuking Robert, at Oxford, for failing to write to her and then goes on,
To repair to myself, your absence, as much as I can, next my submitting to the will of the all-wise Disposer, who is pleased so to cast us, I entertain myself with your books, which yet, by the very few studious persons I meet here, are, as fast as I can suffer them to be, begged or borrowed from me, who lend them willingly, upon the same account I spare you patiently, the hope, that both they and you will do more good abroad, than by being still with me; and I shall ere long have read them all over, as well those I had read before, as the last; and then my fingers will be itching, to look into the sealed roll of papers, written upon, “About religious matters”; and I would fain open them, with your leave, which I hope my being so ingenious a coxcomb as not to do without asking it, will rather bribe you to give, than deny me. But if it should not, I know not what I may be tempted to; and you know I am of a sex, that has long been allowed for an excuse of the frailties of those, who are of it; and, considering how much you believe of those, I must not fear, but you will consider them as tenderly as they require to be considered, and then you will not stick to afford me such a pardon. I am very much pleased with the assurance my experience of God’s goodness to you gives me, of your neither being idle, nor ill employed; nor only for your own good; but I should be much more pleased, in having a share in what you are about, that exceeds not my capacity of understanding; and if you would let me receive some such present by the return of this bearer, you would do me a great favour, and give me a profitable employment; for all persons great and fair are not company, nor can give entertainment, that reaches beyond our senses in its pleasingness.34
This letter is remarkable, among other reasons, for its extraordinarily sophisticated play with the norms and prejudices informing gender roles and the ways these are negotiated within sibling relationships. Robert had published his Occasional Reflections earlier this same year, and Ranelagh had been pushing him to publish another volume, which he had refused to do.35 Throughout his career she remained particularly enthusiastic about and engaged with his theological work, probably in part because of her sustained dedication, less ambivalent than his, to the English Protestant project in Ireland. Stuck at Lees with company from only “very few studious persons” while he works among his colleagues in Oxford, she cites her itching fingers not just to announce her boredom with the “great and fair” at her sister’s house and her appreciation of his more substantive companionship but to remind him, humorously, of her position in their dispute.
In an elaborate joke, Ranelagh suggests coyly that her “ingenious” move to request permission to pry into his sealed papers (“ingenious” might in this period mean clever and discerning, candid, or liberal—all of these would seem possible here) should work as a bribe for his assent. If he won’t give it she threatens to look anyway, and she pronounces herself comforted by the prospect of his taking the inherent frailty of her sex as excuse for her excessive curiosity—a claim she then ironizes with her winking assurance that “considering how much you believe” of women’s frailties, “you will consider them as tenderly as they require to be considered,” which is to say, presumably not at all. Concluding a bit more imperiously that she is pleased to find he is not “idle” or “ill employed,” she insists that she would nevertheless be “much more pleased” to “hav[e] a share” in his work—if, and she softens her demand, it will not exceed her “capacity of understanding.” Ranelagh’s witty presentation of herself here as “so ingenious a coxcomb,” an Erasmian wise fool, allows her at once to claim and to disavow authority. She knows, as her joke indicates, that she can count on her brother’s shared disregard for misogynist stereotypes, and she assumes herself his match in requiring “entertainment, that reaches beyond our senses in its pleasingness.” It is on such authority that she stakes her claim to participate in his religious work even if she cannot persuade him to publish all of it at once. At the same time her imperious manner can guarantee no results. She has not received the letters from him that she expected, and her joking demands construct the rhetorical upper hand she cannot lay practical claim to, marooned as she is at Lees while he works within his circle of male colleagues at Oxford. This wonderful letter offers a close look at Ranelagh’s intelligence and wit and the intimacy and equality of her partnership with Robert, but it also reminds us of the limitations her gender placed on her sphere of action and the kinds of concessions she was required to make throughout her intellectual career.36
Ranelagh’s sister Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, nine years younger than Ranelagh and two years older than Robert Boyle, was a much less prominent figure than Ranelagh, but the extensive body of life writing she left in manuscript, including both her Occasional Meditations, written between 1663 and a year before her death in 1678, and her autobiographical narrative Some Specialities in the Life of M Warwicke, begun in 1672 and published in 1848, demonstrates both her sharp intelligence and independence of mind and her embeddedness in the interests of her family. Brought up in Ireland in a foster family from the age of two or three after her mother died, Mary went to London with her family at thirteen; married Charles Rich, younger son of the Second Earl of Warwick; and spent the rest of her life at Lees, the Rich family estate, and at their house in London. Rich’s Occasional Meditations are a series of pious reflections, most between a half and a full printed page in length. Modeled on the published meditations of Bishop Joseph Hall, circulated broadly throughout the seventeenth century, as well as on the work of Puritan divines Nathanael Ranew and Richard Baxter, whom she knew personally, each meditation opens with an observation from daily life—“Upon blowing of a fire to warme another and finding my selfe heated whilst I was doing it,” “Upon my forgettfullnes to wind upe my watch”—which is then made by analogy to signify a spiritual observation or lesson.37 A total of 182 meditations survive in a single manuscript, edited after her death by a family member of one of the Riches’ household chaplains, and thirteen (four of which are also in the manuscript) were published in Eureka, Eureka the virtuous woman found, an expanded version of her funeral sermon by Anthony Walker, another Rich family chaplain and one of Mary Rich’s closest friends and advisers.38
Robert Boyle published his own Occasional Reflections in 1665, as noted earlier, at the repeated urging of Ranelagh, to whom his volume is dedicated. According to Boyle’s own account, many of those reflections were written earlier, and apparently he kept considerably more in his papers than he published.39 Rich had a close and affectionate relationship with her brother Robert, who, like Katherine, made extended visits to Lees, and she was the dedicatee of his 1659 treatise Seraphic Love, on the practice and virtues of love for the divine.40 In the introduction to his Reflections Robert defined his own practice of written meditation as communal, claiming that he had written them “not to get Reputation, but Company” and urging his readers to “addict” themselves to a similar practice.41 It seems very likely that Rich saw her own pious practice of written meditation as partly modeled by Robert and anchored by the pious practice of her siblings more generally, as well as by the community of divines associated with her household. Rich’s Meditations are consistently solemn, but like most pious reflections categorized as occasional in the period, they give the impression of spontaneity, as if they have arisen all at once from a momentary observation. Among others in the genre, including Robert’s, they are distinguished by vividness of detail and an unconcern with the scaffolding of erudition.42 Lacking moralistic tags, alluding directly only to scripture, and focusing consistently on the ordinary and the daily, they seem deceptively artless, as if the coherently signifying world they describe were simply a given. In his funeral sermon Walker called the Meditations the “Master-piece” of Rich’s life.43 Although there is no evidence that she circulated them outside her own private devotional circle so that they might have the kind of polemical function that her brother Robert and even her sister Katherine imagined for their own pious writings, nevertheless Rich almost certainly thought of the Meditations as her contribution to the project of Protestant piety to which her siblings were also devoted.
As the record of a practice, Rich’s Meditations offer great insight into her conceptualization of herself and the relation of that self to experience.44 Like the habit of keeping diaries and what Dorothy Moore called “directories,” or schedules for daily life, the practice of occasional meditation was most simply a way to capture and order daily experience, “redeeming” time that would otherwise be lost to lack of awareness and focus and parceling one’s day into discrete, intentionally related segments.45 Occasional meditation was also a continued training in the art of making analogies. Part of the value of pious analogizing in Rich’s Protestant context, of course, was recognizing how suffused the created world was with divinity, but her reflections also tend another way, toward not just the consolidation of the world and experience in it into one unified story but also an appreciation of multiplicity. In a meditation on her own reflective practice, “Upon the Consideration of the different manner of the working of a Bee and a Spider,” Rich sets the spider, “the Formalist or proud Professor, who works all from himself and his own strength,” against the “industrious Bees, that are busily employed in making of their useful Combs” and “do daily fly abroad. . . . And flying from one Flower to another, gather from every of them.”46 As the several surviving volumes of her diary reveal, Rich tended to pray (or to engage in “solemn” or “set” meditation) in her closet, but for her occasional meditative practice she walked most mornings in what she called the “wilderness” at Lees, amid the undomesticated and uncataloged.47
Part of the point of occasional meditation was to range in search of new matter, to bring ever more examples into her storehouse. Though, unlike her sister Katherine, Rich did not embark so far as we know on a broad-ranging project of study, it is possible to discern here the influence of the Hartlibean emphasis on the value of reflection and diary writing in making its practitioners “easily Pansophicall,” able to set all kinds of knowledge next to one another to derive, as Robert says in the introduction to his Occasional Reflections, a whole set of harmonious truths.48 Interestingly, the natural philosophical terminology of experiment and empiricism also surfaces in the Meditations. In “Upon viewing a map” Rich considers how much better a man knows the territory who has “travelled into it and deliberately view’d it, as he makes himselfe more particular observations,” and thanks the Lord for the “experimentale divinity” she has learned from “thy old desipulles [disciples]”; in “Upon my keapeing in a rome for som time a bird,” which she finally gives its “desired liberty,” she remembers how “really advantageous it has proved to me that I have by my own trying things had my esteem taken off from them” and resolves to “lett this which I have experimented make me to allow that” to “those young ones” so that they in turn will be “experimentally able to say with that great and wise experimenter of the world” what is vain and what not.49 In a moral context, this is the same message Robert Boyle and other new empiricists in the period repeated often, that education through experiment was not an illicit penetration into God’s secrets but rather holy participation in a practice modeled everywhere by God himself.
One of the great virtues of occasional meditation was that it mobilized all one saw and experienced for use. So, as Robert Boyle stated in his introduction, those who wrote occasional meditations gained “the Satisfaction of making almost the whole World a great Conclave Mnemonicum, and a well-furnished Promptuary, for the service of Piety and Vertue.”50 The influential Presbyterian divine Richard Baxter, whom Rich knew personally, echoed this idea in a letter to Robert thanking him for a gift of his books, in which he exclaimed, “And your speciall way of Occasionall Meditation, I take to be exceeding usefull! Your examples are the translating of the severall Creatures into a language understood; so that it will teach men when they see the words, (the things) to see withall the signification (the use).”51 Rich, too, emphasized this value in her meditation on the spider and the bee, noting that the spider’s web is “good for nothing; but is soon brush’d down and flung away,” whereas bees make “useful Combs,” which “give hony, and become good for something.”52 For these spiritual meditations, of course, use signified particularly in a moral framework: the aim of brother and sister alike in mobilizing the things of the world was explicitly to strive against sin and, by claiming them and the experience of them for the divine, to bring them, as it were, into the shelter of God’s logic. The Boyles, like other pious Protestants in the seventeenth century, cultivated piety in themselves and others to engage their minds in the work of becoming conscious of God in the world. The work of redeeming time also redeemed the self, which might otherwise be lost on the one hand to what both Rich and her brother call “dulness,” an insensibility to creation, and on the other to Robert’s much-noted “raving,” by which he meant undisciplined intellectual energy stimulated, for him, by the abstract and fantastically wandering narratives of romance.53 In both cases the mind was like the spider, disengaged from its environment. Occasional meditation, in contrast, situated the self in the world and in doing so awakened it to presence.
In the introduction to his Reflections, Robert Boyle supposed that occasional meditation, in particular, required great intellectual skill, “something of Dexterousness and Sagacity that is not very ordinary” in contrast to the “docile” nature of reading a book, but once the occasional meditator got into the habit of “Heavenly mindedness,” a Puritan phrase that both Boyle and his sister seized on, she or he “acquire[d] an aptitude and disposition to make pious Reflections upon almost every Occurrence”—even, says Boyle, “oftentimes without particularly designing it.”54 Indeed, the reflections that arise from this disposition might surprise “ev’n him, whose Thoughts they are. . . . For our Instructions are suddenly, and as it were out of an Ambuscade, shot into our Mind, from things whence we never expected them.” Written meditations seemed to bypass eloquence and even, imaginatively, language itself: as Boyle declared to Ranelagh in his dedication to her, his goal was to present “Thoughts, rather than Words.”55 In Marie-Louise Coolahan’s words in her study of Boyle’s Reflections, the “relationship between occasion and ejaculation is apparently unmediated.”56 Occasional reflection did not go deep—its goal was not to produce profundity—but for a skilled practitioner it might entirely occupy the mind, sidelining its awareness of itself as observing and writing agent. The middle way between the spiritual, and intellectual, sins of dullness and raving, this suggests, was an oddly unliterary state of mind, if we think of the literary as the inclination of the observing self to be conscious of the techne, or skill, by which it represents our experience of the world. Reflection in the Boyle siblings’ sense, as the conceptual mobilization of God’s creation, served paradoxically to banish reflexivity.
This imaginary removal of any filter between the observing eye and the world has long been a scientific ideal, what philosopher of science Donna Haraway calls the “God trick,” by which we imagine seeing things just as they are, without the inevitable screen of bias.57 Robert Boyle, as one of the founders of the scientific method, certainly participated in that same historical trajectory of scientific thought by which we dream of erasing the standpoint of the observing self in pursuit of complete objectivity. But Boyle, and even more so Rich, pursued this state not only to achieve mastery but also with a desire to dwell in the world, to become truly God’s creatures. Their piety, as expressed in their meditations, adopted not simply an exploitative but also an immersive position in the world. For Rich, especially, the impulse to banish mediation and to participate in the nature or essence of what she observed was in the service of a sincerity one and the same with piety.
Rich’s diary records many efforts to arouse herself to “breathe after God” so that she may present him a “broken and contrite heart” that will allow her access to his love.58 In her meditation “Upon my forgettfullnes to winde up my watch,” she compares her watch to that love, which is “free and unmerited” but when meditated on acts as a “constraineing and most powerfull engine” winding up her “affectiones to the highest pitch” possible.59 Like many religious women in the seventeenth century, Rich experienced piety as an affective state, of lack in self and desire for other. In her Meditations and other pious practices she deliberately conjured constraints that would conduce to that lack and correspondingly to desire. But she was also, inevitably, part of a culture that forced those constraints on her. One particularly apposite example can be found in the 1689 Discourses and Essays of Francis Boyle, Viscount Shannon, elder brother of Mary and Robert, produced at another moment of exile for the Boyle family, when Francis lost his lands in the Jacobite risings. His observations are notable not only for the typicality of his misogynist anxieties but also because of the great familiarity of his social world to his siblings. After the loss of his lands, in a nod to the family habit that was perhaps partly ironic, Francis decided to make a “strict examination of my own life, and faults.” Chief among them, he decided, was his “ill and foolish distemper of loving and delighting too much in the Company of . . . vain handsome Ladies,” which oddly enough led him to produce an entire volume of essays dedicated to the reform not of his own self but of the “Ladies.”60 Like his siblings, interestingly, though in a courtly rather than religious context, he was deeply concerned with hypocrisy, and women for him, as for many early modern observers, were the focal point for his anxiety. In one essay, pondering the difficulty of knowing a woman’s “inward intentions” through her words, he inclined initially toward the truism that women’s “outward Actions” speak more loudly than their words but ultimately found his way to the far more radical conclusion that a woman must inherently fail to “be a credible Witness . . . as to her own inward intentions.”61 By their very nature women were hypocritical speakers, their female selves getting in the way of authentic utterance. Breaking their own hearts for God was a way for women to neutralize those selves so that their prayers, their most “inward intentions,” might be taken as sincere. The kind of play with gender norms that Katherine engaged in with Robert probably would not have found a sympathetic audience in Francis, but occasional meditations were clearly useful in this context, seeming to subordinate or even erase the self in line with Rich’s culture’s complex set of imperatives for virtue. At the same time, perhaps surprisingly, in Rich’s hands the genre may also have offered some compensation for such self-erasure, through its invitation into a relatively unconstrained “wilderness” generative of great thought.
While Rich pointed her analogizing lens in her reflections always toward God, Robert Boyle held in the introduction to his own published reflections that they should not be confined “to Divinity it self, though that be a very comprehensive Subject,” but might demonstrate “not onely a Theological and a Moral, but also a Political, an Oeconomical, or even a Physical use.”62 It is all but inarguable that Robert enjoyed a larger discursive theater than his sisters, and although he remained deeply concerned with theology throughout his life, he was less insistent than Ranelagh that it frame all of his inquiry. Probably not merely coincidentally, he spent far less time in Ireland as an adolescent and young adult than she did, and his cultural ties to Ireland seem to have grown more tenuous in middle adulthood than Ranelagh’s.63 But his shift toward natural philosophy in the course of his publishing career was not an abandonment of the habits of thought in his theological work. Headway in science, Claire Preston argues in her study of the rhetoric of early modern science, was accomplished by methods borrowed or repurposed from other kinds of inquiry, and analogy itself was a scientific method. In historical retrospect Boyle’s use of analogy was his leading edge, the means he employed to push out of theology into fields that would eventually demonstrate their own integrity. Preston calls the rhetorical figures in Boyle’s natural philosophy “literary,” but it might be more accurate to see them as connective tissue between different kinds of discourse, signs of methodological continuity.64 Analogy for Robert was a kind of deep structure, a law that described the created world prior to any particular mode of inquiry into it and that thus constructed as parallel forms of inquiry that we see as distinct.
Similarly, to the extent that Rich’s, and Ranelagh’s, faithfulness to and indeed extension of their father’s pious Irish-English worldview signaled removal or retirement, that removal was not in contradistinction to natural philosophy or other more ostensibly public endeavors. Their life writing is thus not on the margins of cultural discourse but in the mainstream, grappling with the same problems by means of the same methods as their male contemporaries and peers. Since the late Victorian period, which produced a couple of biographies of her, there has been a tendency to see Rich as the small, especially virtuous Boyle sibling, retiring into a gentle, pious private life in England.65 In her definition of religion as a “form of desire” for women, Mary Ellen Lamb, among others, gives a welcome corrective to outdated contemporary modes of reading early modern Protestant women’s piety as simply a renunciation of social agency.66 As I have suggested, Rich’s pious discourse, and the life writing that intersects with it, also share modes of seeing and conceptualizing with other intellectual and cultural discourses, including natural philosophy. Robert Boyle’s interest in theology, as historians have increasingly seen, was not distinct from but woven throughout his work in ethics and natural philosophy; similarly, the pious discourse of his sisters and of early modern women more generally was often implicated in large cultural conversations about empiricism, observation, retirement, and the emerging distinction between public and private.
It is not merely coincidental that natural philosophy in the mid-seventeenth century also showed a powerful impulse toward retirement, an “ethos of seclusion,” in Preston’s phrase.67 One of the ways natural philosophers defined their new realm of study at midcentury was by declaring themselves members of “colleges,” often “invisible,” and scholars have tended to anachronize these colleges as more established and institutionalized than they were (in part, since women were participants, to make women’s scientific contributions more visible). But such colleges were mainly fictions of sociality, ways to imagine confederations of people—European scholars, English aristocrats, tradesmen, gentlewomen—who had never come together as relative equals before. Natural philosopher John Evelyn calls them, evocatively, “tabernacles in the wilderness,” holy places entirely removed from civilization.68 As that echo of Rich might suggest, they were thus open to those to whom a more established civil structure might deny access, and their nature as hypothesis was one of the reasons they were authorizing for women, whose numbers in natural philosophical circles diminished sharply, as is well known, when the actually institutional Royal Society was founded in the early 1660s. We might also draw a link here between Evelyn’s, and Rich’s, “wilderness” and the space Ireland afforded to so many members of the Hartlib Circle, both materially and in its nature as cultural crossing ground, for practical experimentation and “improvement.” Reading Rich’s and Robert Boyle’s meditations as two parts of a common endeavor that was in turn indebted to the New English culture of 1630s and 1640s Ireland opens the scope of Rich’s ambition and accomplishment to larger questions, situating her life writing in that ambiguous space of generic instability and mixture that fosters so much innovation in seventeenth-century discourse. Her Irish context helps us see, too, the potential stakes of her Protestant piety, which, like her brother’s, extended far beyond private virtue.
Rich’s Some Specialities in the Life of M Warwicke, begun and probably mostly finished in 1672, is a very different kind of text from the occasional meditations she was still composing until close to her death in 1678. One of several autobiographical accounts left by the Boyle family—among them her father’s True Remembrances, which Rich almost certainly knew, and her brother Robert’s “Account of Philaretus during his Minority,” written when Robert was twenty-one or twenty-two—Rich’s is the most fully articulated, structurally, as an autobiography.69 Unusually for early modern women’s life writing, it construes her life as a whole, beginning “I was born,” giving a sequential narrative of major life events, and concluding with the announcement of an “end to my worldly business,” as she has discharged her duties both to her nieces and her husband and can now turn entirely toward God for “my remaining days.”70 Most of the interest the account has evoked as a narrative, rather than merely as a source for biographical details, has been for its play between spiritual and apparently more secular aims. On the one hand, it is clearly a conversion story, a relation of her gradual awakening to an inward and personal relation with God, and belongs to the well-documented tradition of early modern self-narratives testifying to God’s providence in human life.71 On the other, Rich devotes considerable attention to her defiance of her father’s plans in marrying Charles Rich, younger son of the Earl of Warwick, and some critics have seen in this account of assertive feminine agency an identification with the genre of romance.
In construing romance, justly, as a “mode” available to women writers in the seventeenth century, we tend to emphasize its interest in secular love as psychological motivation and to see this love as a form of rebellion against, or at least relief from, more stringent spiritual models for feminine virtue. Spiritual autobiography, by this logic, in subordinating human agency to divine often constructs the narrativized feminine self as abject, while more secular romance offers agency as an alternative and more modern route to subjectivity.72 Critics have thus found in Rich’s ostensible mix of genres a tension, if not an irreconcilable conflict, in her concept of self, and correspondingly an incoherence in her narrative, a failure, or a disinclination, to build a bridge between her generic models.73 But we might be better served to remember that our perceptions of conflict and incoherence stem in part from an insufficiently full and precise understanding of seventeenth-century romance as a genre and of the ways her narrative does and does not participate in it. In fact, Some Specialities depicts an unambivalently agentive subject, if also one deeply aware of the strictures on women’s agency.
In the discursive world the Boyles occupied in the mid-seventeenth century, romance often served as an easy signifier for worldliness and self-interest; hence Rich’s repeated use of the phrase “seeing plays and reading romances” almost as a tagline to represent the vanity of her misspent youth.74 But the term in this period also referred to a specific set of texts, political and international in focus, that were as concerned with history and ethics as with secular love. This genre had strong ties to France, which is one of the reasons scholars have misidentified it as mainly royalist in its politics, but also, tantalizingly and as yet insufficiently explored, to Ireland and Scotland. Roger Boyle, of course, wrote and published most of Parthenissa, probably the most celebrated midcentury romance in English, while fighting for Cromwell in Ireland; the obscure Judith Man translated and epitomized Barclay’s Argenis probably while living in the Irish household of Thomas Wentworth; and Francis Quarles wrote Argalus and Parthenia, the only romance in his extensive body of writing, while in Dublin. George MacKenzie’s Aretina is explicitly Scottish, and Percy Herbert’s The Princess Cloria deals at length with the wars at midcentury in Ireland and Scotland. And Robert Boyle, although he identified romance early in his life with the intellectual “raving” that he had to subdue in his quest to achieve true reason, remained interested in the genre throughout his life, incorporating romance elements into his treatise Seraphic Love and revising and publishing his religious romance The Martyrdom of Theodora, and of Didymus, as late as 1687.
For Roger and Robert romance was not distinctive so much for its subject matter as for its approach. Like occasional reflections as Robert imagined them, romance was a capacious genre with a wide variety of uses: in the words of the anonymous author of the 1661 Eliana, it included not only “Amatory” matters but “things Oeconomical, Ethethical [sic], Physical, Metaphysical, Philosophycal, Political and Theological”—that is, the entire gamut of subjects covered by prose discourse in the seventeenth century.75 Its particular virtue as a genre was its courtly, aristocratic style, as Robert acknowledged to Roger in the 1661 dedication to Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Scriptures, trying to convince his brother to extend his authorship from romance to theology. At its best, he conceded, romance possessed “some pleasing Je ne scay / quoy, something of Easie Genuine and Handsom that’s peculiar to It.” Romance’s authors, courtly, or at least presenting themselves as such, and thus ostensibly freed by their social status from the motives of professionalism and publication, occupied the realm of true amateurs, and their work consequently made “Deeper Impressions” in their readers, not only by ranging over a wide field of knowledge but by detaching from ordinary self-interest: “by being suppos’d,” as he argues, “more Disinteress’d, and look’d upon not as Suggested by their Profession or Self-ends, but as the Sincere dictates of their Unbribed souls.”76 The value of sincerity was also championed at a thematic level, where lovers’ extravagancies proved the authenticity of their attachments and where, for instance, one of Parthenissa’s signature moves is for even its antagonists to establish their fitness, were the plot another way, for “disinterested friendship.”77
It would not be going too far to say that in its effort to provide a “shining example” against the dissimulation and hypocrisy of courtly rhetoric, romance served in this era as the worldly analogue for pious discourse, as an argument for and an occasion to practice sincerity.78 In this sense, as I’ve argued elsewhere, it was a fundamentally ethical genre, taking as its subject and mission the establishment of possibility for authentic relations between people.79 It is probably for related reasons that, like pious discourse, romance in this period was also distinctive for its friendliness to the agency of women, who could find in the rules and strategies of the genre’s social world means to protect themselves from accusations of self-interest and hypocrisy. For the Boyles, then, romance was useful especially for its rhetorical ethos, its appeal to a broadly interested, relatively inclusive audience that wished to imagine itself as unbound to any particular interest and also sincerely devoted in its ethical attachments. Such a version of aristocratic liberality was different from the ideological commitment that united the Hartlib network, but in their similar relation to the values of pious discourse there were also obvious parallels between the two.
Rich’s Some Specialities does tell the story of her marriage to Charles Rich for love rather than money, which has persuaded some readers to call it romance, but in neither form nor content does it show many similarities to romance as employed by her brothers or other contemporary writers: uninterested in the rhetoric of courtesy and compliment, it is also resolutely demystificatory about marriage, and it seems almost deliberately to frustrate romance plot trajectories.80 Figuring herself as a romance protagonist or narrator would have created a perfect setting for an apologia, if Rich had been interested in one—an admission of guilt for defying her father or a justification of her own choices, either one ethically validated for the reader, in the mode of romance, by the narrator’s expression of affective ties to the appropriate subject, whether husband, friend, or father. About Charles’s unexpected inheritance of the Warwick estate after the deaths of his elder brother and nephew, Rich’s narrator does assure her readers, and perhaps herself, that “I never had so much as a wish for it. . . . It was [Charles’s] person I married and cared for, not an estate.”81 This is the closest she comes to ethical justification through affect—though if she means to argue that providence has rewarded her for it, that remains implicit. Although she does not enact rhetorically the mortification of her heart in this text as she does in the diary and her Occasional Meditations, in describing her conversion she also declares directly to God her love and gratitude, and it would be inaccurate to say that in this account she turns away from affective piety. She also presents herself as having a kind of genius for building substitute familial relationships—Ann Clayton, with whom her father fosters her in Ireland until she is about eleven, is like a “kind mother”; her father-in-law, the Earl of Warwick, was “to me the most civil, kind, and obliging father that ever any person had”; and with both her mothers-in-law she lived “as lovingly as it was possible for an own mother and daughter to live.”82 Nonetheless, the signal move of Some Specialities, against romance practice, is the establishment not of Rich’s embeddedness in social relations but, to a truly striking degree for a female-authored narrative of the period, of her independence. Repeatedly she turns away from the social structures into which she was born to construct her own—a repudiation of her father, perhaps, but also a recapitulation of his life’s trajectory.
Richard Boyle married his first two daughters to Irish-English nobility on the same day in 1621; after that, the next period of family marriages began with a nearly all-family sojourn in London in 1628, during which the children were presented to the king and queen, and Cork made arrangements for Lettice Boyle’s marriage to (English) George Goring in a deliberate attempt to facilitate his access to court. Two more daughters (one of them Katherine) were married within another year, and one two years later, all to Irish nobility. Cork aimed to expand his family’s holdings, in all senses, by his daughters’ Irish marriages, and he managed in several cases to build substantial control over the assets of his sons-in-law. In 1634 he bought the English estate of Stalbridge, eventually inherited by Robert Boyle (his only untitled son), and in 1639 the entire family, including married daughters and sons-in-law, was again in London for an extended period. During this stay or because of it he married three sons at court, one to a maid of honor to the queen in the royal chapel, with a wedding dinner hosted by the royal family; one to a Villiers connection; and the last, Roger, to Margaret Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, with a strong financial settlement. During this time Cork also attempted to complete negotiations he had begun “some years before,” according to Mary, for an Irish match for his youngest daughter, in London for the first time, but alone among her sisters she refused that match and several others and then arranged for herself a marriage to Charles Rich, a younger son at that point without much wealth or the prospect of it.83
Extraordinarily for a girl of fourteen, Mary refused the Earl of Clandeboye’s son and defied her entire family, she says, because of an “aversion” that, characteristically, she cannot explain either to her father or to the reader.84 The refusal of this first match was also a refusal of the family pattern for Boyle daughters—perhaps in part because she was aware of the marked marital unhappiness, well documented in family correspondence, of her sisters Katherine and Lettice. It was a refusal as well of the Irish destiny her father had charted for her; for the rest of her life, as far as we know, alone among her siblings she never visited Ireland again. As a gesture of independence from her family and from an entire generation of their history, her refusal cleared the ground for autonomous action: after noting that Cork had acquiesced to a marriage for Roger that he hadn’t desired (though the union was later aborted), she committed to marry Charles Rich on her own, subsequently engaging in a complex negotiation with her father that she won at every step. Faced with her father’s strong displeasure after he was approached by Charles’s father, she told him through her brothers that she would refrain from marrying without his consent but also would not marry “any other person in the world” but Rich—interestingly a vow that, like other frustrated parents in the period, he apparently believed he would have to honor.85 After she had spent ten weeks in isolation from her own family (but visited near constantly by the Riches) at Hampton as a gesture of penance, Warwick and Lord Goring, Lettice’s father-in-law, brought her to apologize formally to her father, at which point he reinstated her dowry of 7,000 pounds and gave consent for an immediate marriage. In her portrayal of these events Rich no doubt plays up the heroic nature of her stand, a point made all the more emphatically when, as she tells it, she defied her father’s wishes yet again, “being a great enemy always to a public marriage,” and wed “without my fathers knowledge” in a private ceremony outside London, a “fault” that once again his “great indulgence to me made him forgive me.”86 At several moments in the rest of the narrative, as also in her diary, Rich expresses her contrition for defying her father’s wishes, but she never regrets her actions.87 Describing her own negotiations for the marriage of her niece at the very end of her account, as an extension perhaps of her own willfulness she makes a point of noting that she gives the niece “her free choice to choose or not, to do as she liked or disliked.”88
Similarly, at the beginning of her account of her extended religious conversion, Rich includes an episode that emphasizes her independence in this process even from her much-loved husband. During her young son’s illness, she had promised God that she would “become a new creature” if he restored her child to health, and after her son recovered she found in herself a new desire to leave London for the Warwick estate at Lees. On the road she met Charles, on his way back to London with a parliamentary force, and though he asked her not to go on to Essex alone for fear of her safety, and “though I found in myself a loathness to deny going with my husband (having never before left him hardly, when I could conveniently be with him),” she so much desired solitude that she asked him “to leave me to myself, which he did.” It was when she went alone to Lees that she first grew acquainted with Anthony Walker, the priest who much later delivered her funeral sermon and who ministered to her through the first stages of her turn toward God. (Again characteristically, she also notes the secular angle, explaining that her decision to go on to Essex was “well for the house” because she was in residence when a parliamentary force led by Lord Goring, now “one of my best friends,” stopped at Lees for munitions, and “I was upon that account used so well that, bating some arms they took, there was not anything touched.”) Although Charles soon joined her again at Lees, her inclusion of this episode clearly is meant to distinguish between her roles as wife and as convert, highlighting her spiritual independence.89 Rich’s diary details later conflict between her and Charles, and some readers have seen in her accounts of his shouting and her tears evidence that he was abusive, but their fights as she recounts them consist entirely of her insistent counsel that he piously accept and even welcome his own suffering during his long and painful struggle with gout, countered by his just as insistent refusal to do so.90 Clearly she believed that her piety gave her the responsibility to evaluate and improve her husband’s spiritual state even or perhaps especially during his illness, and, though he resisted locally, in a more general sense he acquiesced. Some Specialities consistently records her affection for him, and when he died, which “afflicted” her more “than ever before for anything in my fore-past life,” including the wrenching death of her twenty-one-year-old son, he showed his respect for her by “giving me his whole estate for my life and a year after, and making me his sole executrix,” a role that she discharged, Walker says in his funeral sermon, with “indefatigable pains,” “scrupulous exactness, and admirable prudence.”91
One of the most pronounced effects, or perhaps stimulants, of Rich’s conversion in Some Specialities is social withdrawal, a refusal of the “vain and idle pleasures” characterizing her aristocratic society in preference for the quieter world of clergy gathered at and around Lees.92 Such withdrawal might seem on the surface to involve a rejection of agency, but the collective effect of both sisters’ writings is to question that too simplified notion of the public as the only significant field for action. Viewed through the lens of the Boyle sisters’ experiments in life writing, Rich’s Some Specialities can be read as a culmination of a narrative trajectory toward solitary independence, as she sheds first much of her identity as an Irish-English Boyle daughter, then her dependence as a young wife and secular mistress of a great house. At the end of her account she asks God to make her a “widow indeed,” entirely detached at last from worldly ties, but also the sole and final inheritor of a substantial patrimony.93 Her turn to God and her preference for solitude, as I have suggested, are not a repudiation of her rebellious bid for independence in her youth but an extension of it; like Ranelagh, she retires in search of her “own honest endeavors.” With most of his daughters, Cork’s plans were successful; marrying and bearing children to Irish nobility, they furthered his dynastic ambitions and solidified the family’s worldly success. Ranelagh and Rich seized on a different part of the New English inheritance, its colonizing piety, which leveraged Ireland as a theater for ambition even as it ostensibly renounced self-interest. In ways Cork could not have intended, but that must have had some connection to the world he helped construct, both women found in that piety potential and authorization for broad and independent thought.
1. Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On Cork’s economic and political influence, see also David Edwards and Colin Rynne, eds., The Colonial World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork (Dublin: Four Courts, 2018).
2. For Cork’s motto, see the 1632 version of his True Remembrances, printed in the introduction to Robert Boyle, The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch, 5 vols. (London, 1774), 1:vi–xi, xi; see also Canny, Upstart Earl, 19. Gilbert Burnet’s “A Sermon at the Funeral of the Honourable Robert Boyle,” originally published in 1692, is reprinted in Michael Hunter, ed., Robert Boyle by Himself and His Friends (Brookfield VT: Pickering, 1994), 36–58; for “humble and Christian” see page 47.
3. Canny, Upstart Earl, 22–29; Marie-Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 256–57; Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 159–60; Patricia Coughlan, “Natural History and Historical Nature: The Project for a Natural History of Ireland,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 298–317; Toby Barnard, “The Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement in Ireland,” in Greengrass, Leslie, and Raylor, Universal Reformation, 281–97.
4. For the social and political identity of the landed peerage in Ireland in the seventeenth century, see Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
5. For life writing’s concern with the negotiation of shared and conflicting interests with others, see Douglas Catterall, “Drawing Lives and Memories from the Everyday Words of the Early Modern Era,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 3 (2005): 651–72.
6. See Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, eds., Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), esp. Lloyd Davis, “Critical Debates and Early Modern Autobiography,” 19–34; Conal Condren, “Specifying the Subject in Early Modern Autobiography,” 35–48; and Helen Fulton, “Autobiography and the Discourse of Urban Subjectivity: The Paston Letters,” 191–216.
7. For Katherine Ranelagh’s receipt books, see Michelle DiMeo, “‘Such a sister became such a brother’: Lady Ranelagh’s Influence on Robert Boyle,” Intellectual History Review 25, no. 1 (2015): 21–36; DiMeo, “Lady Ranelagh’s Book of Kitchen-Physick? Reattributing Authorship for Wellcome Library MS 1340,” Huntington Library Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2014): 331–46; and DiMeo, “Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615–91): Science and Medicine in a Seventeenth-Century Englishwoman’s Writing” (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2009). For receipt books as self-writing, see Catherine Field, “‘Many hands hands’: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books,” in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007), 49–63, esp. 49–50.
8. For Ranelagh’s work and social persona in medicine, see Michelle DiMeo, “The Rhetoric of Medical Authority in Lady Katherine Ranelagh’s Letters,” in Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690, ed. James Daybell and Andrew Gordon (New York: Routledge, 2016), 96–109.
9. Burnet, “Sermon at the Funeral,” in M. Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself, 52.
10. Samuel Hartlib, qtd. in Mark Greengrass, “Archive Refractions: Hartlib’s Papers and the Workings of an Intelligencer,” in Archives of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Michael Hunter (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 36.
11. Samuel Hartlib, qtd. in Greengrass, “Archive Refractions,” in M. Hunter, Scientific Revolution, 46.
12. Canny, Upstart Earl, 145–50.
13. Canny, Upstart Earl, 149; see also Pal, Republic of Women, 159–60; and Ruth Connolly, “‘A Wise and Godly Sybilla’: Viscountess Ranelagh and the Politics of International Protestantism,” in Women, Gender, and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sylvia Brown (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 287–88.
14. Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 256–57; Coughlan, “Natural History,” in Greengrass, Leslie, and Raylor, Universal Reformation, 302; Frances Harris, “Ireland as a Laboratory: The Archive of Sir William Petty,” in M. Hunter, Scientific Revolution, 73–90.
15. See William Robertson, The First Gate or, the Outward Door to the Holy Tongue, Opened in English (London, 1654), dedication “To Vice-Countess Ranalaugh,” in which Robertson says that her speed in learning Hebrew by his method has shown him both that women are capable of learning the language and that students of Hebrew need not have Latin, A2v.
16. Katherine Ranelagh to Robert Boyle, July 29, 1665, in The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe, electronic ed., 6 vols. (Charlottesville VA: InteLex, 2004), 2:499.
17. Ruth Connolly, “A MS Treatise by Viscountess Ranelagh, 1614–91,” Notes and Queries 53, no. 2 (2006): 171n4.
18. See Ranelagh to Robert Boyle, September 14, [1652], in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1:138; see also Malcolm Oster, “Millenarianism and the New Science: The Case of Robert Boyle,” in Greengrass, Leslie, and Raylor, Universal Reformation, 140, 142–43; and Connolly, “Wise and Godly Sybilla,” in Brown, Radical Religion, 297–99.
19. Connolly, “MS Treatise”; see also Connolly, “Wise and Godly Sybilla,” in Brown, Radical Religion, 289–91.
20. Benjamin Denham to Robert Boyle, [August 1667?], in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 3:327.
21. Bulstrode Whitelocke, The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 751.
22. See Betsey Taylor-FitzSimon, “Conversion, the Bible and the Irish Language: The Correspondence of Lady Ranelagh and Bishop Dopping,” in Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650–1850, ed. Michael Brown, Charles I. McGrath, and Thomas P. Power (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), 157–82.
23. Connolly, “Wise and Godly Sybilla,” in Brown, Radical Religion, 291.
24. For Wentworth’s political and propaganda campaign against Cork, see Canny, Upstart Earl, 9–18.
25. For an explanation of the exchange, see Dorothy Moore Dury to Samuel Hartlib, March 28, 1645, in Dorothy Moore, The Letters of Dorothy Moore, 1612–64: The Friendships, Marriage, and Intellectual Life of a Seventeenth-Century Woman, ed. Lynette Hunter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 64; see also John Dury to Katherine Ranelagh, December 14, 1644; and Dorothy Moore, copy letter to Katherine Ranelagh, July 8, 1643, both in D. Moore, Letters of Dorothy Moore, 114–17, 17–20.
26. Katherine Ranelagh to Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, September 17, 1658, in A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. Thomas Birch, 7 vols. (London, 1742), 7:395–97.
27. Ranelagh to Roger Boyle, September 17, 1658, in Birch, State Papers, 397.
28. D. Moore to Ranelagh, July 8, 1643, in D. Moore, Letters of Dorothy Moore, 18–19.
29. Thomas Wentworth to Archbishop Laud, qtd. in Canny, Upstart Earl, 12.
30. For Ranelagh’s letters to Hyde and Elizabeth and her political activity and opinion more generally, see Ruth Connolly, “A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (1614–1691),” Seventeenth Century 23, no. 2 (2008): 244–64; Connolly, “Wise and Godly Sybilla,” in Brown, Radical Religion, 285–306; and Pal, Republic of Women, 173–75.
31. Harris, “Ireland as a Laboratory,” in M. Hunter, Scientific Revolution, 85.
32. Ormonde to Earl of Arlington, qtd. in Pal, Republic of Women, 220.
33. See also Pal, Republic of Women, 219, on her friend Clarendon’s possible irritation at what Pal calls her “politicking.”
34. Ranelagh to Robert Boyle, November 14, [1665], in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 2:583–84.
35. See Ranelagh to Robert Boyle, September 9, 1665, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 2:583–84, 2:499, 2:525.
36. See DiMeo, “Such a sister,” for a reading of the working relationship between the two primarily having to do with his work in natural philosophy.
37. Mary Rich, The Occasional Meditations of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, ed. Raymond A. Anselment (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009), 107, 102. All subsequent references to Rich’s Occasional Meditations are to this edition.
38. Anthony Walker, Eureka, Eureka the virtuous woman found (London, 1678).
39. See Raymond A. Anselment, “Robert Boyle and the Art of Occasional Meditation,” Renaissance and Reformation 32, no. 4 (2009): 74.
40. See Mary Rich to Robert Boyle, [late 1656]; December 29, [1677], both in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1:205, 4:482; Robert Boyle, Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God (Seraphic Love) (1659), in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, electronic ed., 14 vols. (Charlottesville VA: InteLex, 2003), 1:52. All subsequent references to Robert Boyle’s works are to this edition.
41. Robert Boyle, introd. to Occasional Reflections (1665), in Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 5:20.
42. See Anselment’s excellent introduction to his modern edition, Rich, Occasional Meditations, 1–39, esp. 3–4.
43. A. Walker, Eureka, 61.
44. For a discussion of Rich’s meditations as autobiographical writing, see Julie A. Eckerle, Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 149–50.
45. Dorothy Moore Dury to Katherine Ranelagh, June 12, 1645, in D. Moore, Letters of Dorothy Moore, 76; Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation,” Seventeenth Century 22, no. 1 (2007): 124–43; Anselment, “Art of Occasional Meditation,” 76–77.
46. Rich, “Upon the Consideration of the different manner of the working of a Bee and a Spider,” in Occasional Meditations, 176.
47. For the distinction between solemn or set and occasional or extempore meditation, see Anselment, introd. to Rich, Occasional Meditations, 22. For examples of Rich’s recourse to the “wilderness,” see Memoir of Lady Warwick, also her diary, from A.D. 1666–1672 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1847), 74, 75, 78, 80, 81, 83, 156, 163, 241.
48. Samuel Hartlib, qtd. in Greengrass, “Archive Refractions,” in M. Hunter, Scientific Revolution, 44; Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections, in Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 5:28.
49. Rich, “Upon viewing a map,” “Upon my keapeing in a rome for som time a bird,” both in Occasional Meditations, 102-3, 142–43.
50. Robert Boyle, introd. to Occasional Reflections, in Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 5:19.
51. Richard Baxter to Robert Boyle, June 14, 1665, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 2:476.
52. Rich, “Upon the Consideration,” Occasional Meditations, 176–77.
53. For “dulness,” see Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections, in Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 5:52; and Rich, Memoir of Lady Warwick, 103, 217. For “raving,” see Boyle, “An Account of Philaretus during his Minority,” in M. Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself, 8, 12.
54. Robert Boyle, introd. to Occasional Reflections, in Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 5:27, 5:52. On heavenly mindedness, see Anselment, “Art of Occasional Meditation,” 80–81.
55. Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections, in Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 5:27, 5:7.
56. Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time,” 127.
57. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 58–62.
58. Rich, Memoir of Lady Warwick; for “breathe after God,” see, for example, 84, 85, 93, 103, 110, 133, 136, and 199; for “broken and contrite,” see, for example, 140, 145, 171, 203, and 213.
59. Rich, “Upon my forgettfullnes to wind upe my watch,” Occasional Meditations, 102.
60. Francis Boyle, Discourses and Essays (London, 1689), Epistle (n.p.).
61. F. Boyle, Discourses and Essays, 18.
62. Robert Boyle, introd. to Occasional Reflections, in Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 5:30.
63. For an example of his apparent disavowal of Ireland as a useful context for him, see the exasperated letter from Samuel Hartlib to Robert Boyle, February 28, 1654, in Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1:159, in which Hartlib urges Boyle, then in Ireland to resolve problems with his inheritance and complaining of the country’s “barbarousness,” to contact other members of the network also in Ireland.
64. Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4–5.
65. Mary E. Palgrave, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (New York: Dutton, 1901); Charlotte Fell-Smith, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, Her Family and Friends (London: Longmans, Green, 1901).
66. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs,” in Dowd and Eckerle, Women’s Life Writing, 94.
67. C. Preston, Poetics of Scientific Investigation, 147.
68. Evelyn, qtd. in C. Preston, Poetics of Scientific Investigation, 149.
69. See Eckerle, Romancing the Self, 148–49, for a full account of Rich’s autobiographical antecedents.
70. Rich, Some Specialities in the Life of M Warwicke, in Mary Rich, The Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick, ed. T. Crofton Croker (London: Percy Society, 1848), 37–38. For the unusualness of serializing, totalizing life writing by early modern women authors, see Megan Matchinske, “Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford,” in Dowd and Eckerle, Women’s Life Writing, 65–80; and Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6–7.
71. Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, esp. 219–21. See also Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
72. See Eckerle, Romancing the Self, 12; and Ramona Wray, “[Re]constructing the Past: The Diametric Lives of Mary Rich,” in Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (London: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 148–65.
73. See esp. Wray, “[Re]constructing the Past”; see also Sara Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Stories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 62–115.
74. See, for example, Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 4, 21; and Rich, Memoir of Lady Warwick, 129, 221, 259.
75. Eliana (London, 1661), A3v.
76. Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Scriptures, in Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 2:384.
77. See Amelia Zurcher, Seventeenth-Century English Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 131–35.
78. The phrase “shining example” to describe romance is Robert Boyle’s, in the preface to the second part of his martyrology-romance Theodora, which he published without the first part in 1687; see Hunter and Davis, Works of Robert Boyle, 11:8.
79. Zurcher, Seventeenth-Century English Romance, 4–17.
80. Rich avoids the kind of “extravagant” language of courtesy and compliment characteristic of Parthenissa and other seventeenth-century romance, and she is explicit about and accepting of the financial goals of aristocratic marriage; see Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 3, 7–8. The narrative about sister-in-law Elizabeth Killigrew’s role in her marriage, which I do not have space to discuss in this chapter, begins as a standard romance plot but then dwindles away without resolution.
81. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 28.
82. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 27, 16.
83. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 2.
84. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 3.
85. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 13. Lamb, “Secular and the Spiritual,” discusses a similar vow by Anne Halkett and her mother’s obligation to respect it, 85–88.
86. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 14.
87. See, for example, Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 15; and Rich, Memoir of Lady Warwick, 213, 220, 247.
88. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 36.
89. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 18–20.
90. See, for example, Rich, Memoir of Lady Warwick, 103, 217. For abuse, see Wray, “[Re]constructing the Past,” 149–50.
91. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 33–34; A. Walker, Eureka, 47.
92. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 22.
93. Rich, Some Specialities, in Rich, Autobiography, 38.