BOYLE, Charles (1674-1731)

Charles Boyle was born of a family illustrious for its multifaceted activities throughout the seventeenth century. This biography is based on Lawrence B. Smith, ‘Charles Boyle, 4th earl of Orrery, 1674-1731’ (Edinburgh Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1994). His great-uncle was the natural philosopher Robert Boyle and his grandfather was the soldier-statesman-playwright Roger Boyle^‡, earl of Orrery [I]. In his own many interests as classical scholar and poet, bibliophile and literary patron, scientific virtuoso and dilettante, military officer, diplomat, courtier (briefly) and statesman, Charles Boyle tried to emulate the achievements of his forebears. In his prickly sense of his own worth as a nobleman from a famous house he epitomized the polite, cultured and proud English ‘milord’ of the eighteenth century. Yet despite his efforts he was never able to match the achievements of his ancestors and was in the end largely reduced to basking in the reflected glory of those he patronized – most notoriously Francis Atterbury, later bishop of Rochester, but more positively the Quaker George Graham, the deviser of the astronomical instrument which still bears the earl’s name.

His family was indeed a troubled inheritance for him. Despite all his public appearance of pride, his branch of the Boyles was in decline by the time he came to the Irish earldom of Orrery in 1703. His possession of an Irish title was deceptive as Boyle had little or no ties to the country so closely connected with his grandfather and his great-grandfather Richard Boyle^†, earl of Cork. In 1675, the year after his birth, his parents separated permanently. From 1677 Charles was raised at Knole, the Kentish seat of the Sackvilles, by his grandmother the dowager countess of Dorset, while his elder brother Lionel Boyle^‡, styled Lord Broghill [I] from 1679 (later 3rd earl of Orrery [I]) and sister Mary stayed at the home of their aging paternal grandfather. Smith, 1-11. Undeniably proud of his Boyle patrimony, Charles Boyle was actually raised more as a Sackville in Kent, and it may have been from his maternal uncle, Charles Sackville, 6th earl of Dorset that he developed his interest in poetry and penchant for literary patronage.

As a young and intelligent nobleman Boyle was groomed as ‘the great ornament of our college’ by the dean Henry Aldrich when he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in June 1690. Aldrich and Boyle’s tutor, Francis Atterbury, encouraged him in his studies of the classical authors, to the point where in May 1694 Boyle was the first scion of a noble house for 30 years to proceed to a BA at the college. In early 1695 Boyle published his translations of the ‘Epistles’ of the (reputedly) sixth-century BC Sicilian tyrant, Phalaris. In the introduction to this work Boyle made acerbic comments about the keeper of the royal library, and noted classicist, Richard Bentley. This sparked off a famous literary exchange between Bentley, who launched an attack on Boyle and the historical authenticity of the ‘Epistles’, and Atterbury and his fellow ‘wits’ at Christ Church, who published, under Boyle’s name, their skilful and witty ripostes to Bentley’s serious and scholarly allegations. In the years following his graduation from Oxford, Boyle was concerned with maintaining his status as a man of letters, frequenting John Dryden’s coffee house Wills, publishing verse, epigrams and a comedy ‘As You Find It’ (1703) and even resurrecting a stage tragedy written by his grandfather (which the first earl of Orrery may have left unpublished for good reason). Ibid. 13-38, 454-81.

Apart from its importance in intellectual history, there was a political dimension to the Phalaris feud as Atterbury and his Christ Church colleagues were closely identified with the Tories and Bentley and his defenders with the Whigs. For the next few years Boyle was to be associated with the Tories. He began his political career in Ireland, where he was elected to the Irish parliament for the family borough of Charleville in 1695 but was absent for much of the parliament’s sittings. Ibid. 41-44. In October 1699, he was made receiver general of the alienations office, an ancient (and by that time largely redundant) office, from which he received an annuity of £160. Ibid. 44-46. He was returned as a Tory for the borough of Huntingdon in the election of February 1701, standing on the interest of his second cousin Edward Montagu*[1123], 3rd earl of Sandwich and, more importantly, of the earl’s strong-willed and high Tory wife Elizabeth, a daughter of John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester. His opponents, the Whig candidates John Pedley^‡ and the town recorder Francis Wortley Montagu^‡, were both put forward by Sandwich’s uncle, and the principal trustee of his estate, Sidney Wortley Montagu^‡ (Francis's father). On 15 Feb. 1701 the defeated candidate Pedley petitioned that intimidation had been used against his electors during the poll and Boyle made his maiden speech defending himself and casting aspersions not on Pedley but on his own fellow Member for Huntingdon, Francis Wortley Montagu. Add. 10388, ff. 39-40. The two fought a duel in which Boyle was so badly wounded that he was unable to take part in proceedings in the Commons for many months, although he was healthy enough to be returned again for the borough in the two subsequent elections.

Boyle did not stand in the election of 1705, perhaps because his ambitions were raised upon inheriting the earldom of Orrery following the death of his elder brother on 24 Aug. 1703. The Irish estates attached to his illustrious earldom were in bad condition. In 1706 they barely yielded £2,000 p.a., far less than their nominal value of £4,000 p.a. Smith, 490-498. Orrery was able to supplement this in 1706 by contracting a short-lived but lucrative marriage, with a portion of £4,000, to Lady Elizabeth Cecil, sister of John Cecil, 6th earl of Exeter. She died in 1708. In March 1704 Orrery bought a colonel’s commission for a regiment of foot on garrison duty in Ireland, which he seems to have rarely visited. Despite this neglect of his responsibility, he somehow gained the support and patronage of two of the leading military figures of the age – James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, and John Campbell, 2nd duke of Argyll [S] and, from 1705, earl of Greenwich in the English peerage. Through Argyll’s influence Orrery, an Irish peer, was made a knight of the thistle in October 1705. In February 1707 Orrery took over the regiment previously commanded by Argyll when the Scottish peer was made colonel of the 3rd Regiment of Foot. From this time Orrery was actively involved in the campaigns in Flanders and his regiment appears to have taken part in action or sieges at Oudenarde, Lille, Tournai, Malplaquet and Mons. Smith, 70-79, 80-95. In August 1709 Orrey was made a brigadier general, with the full blessing of his commander-in-chief John Churchill, duke of Marlborough. Yet throughout 1709-10 Orrery joined his friend Argyll in his feud with Marlborough, which became increasingly bitter after Malplaquet, which Argyll, Orrery and others saw as an unnecessarily bloody encounter. After returning to England for the winter in October 1709 Orrery began to act as the emissary to Argyll for Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, and he became increasingly drawn into Harley’s political schemes. Harley appears to have assigned Orrery the difficult task of convincing Argyll to vote in the House for a full acquittal of Henry Sacheverell, even though Argyll had already publicly condemned the minister and stated that he merited some sort of reproof. Orrery was eventually able triumphantly to report that Argyll was prepared to vote against the severe punishments for Sacheverell proposed by the Junto and that he would furthermore be able to bring Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset, and Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, along with him on this vote. In a sense Orrery’s work in persuading Argyll to abandon the more extreme projects of the Junto was an important step in the downfall of the Whigs, helping to lead to the change of ministry in the autumn of 1710. HMC Portland, iv. 537, 538-9.

Back in Flanders from April 1710 Orrery continued to supply Harley with missives lauding Argyll and his brother Archibald Campbell, earl of Ilay [S] (later 3rd duke of Argyll [S]), and condemning Marlborough. He told Harley that he and Argyll had no wish to have any communication with Marlborough, ‘further than the duty of our posts obliges us to’. For his part Marlborough felt the same way, ‘considering the temper [Argyll and Orrery] are in at this time’. Ibid. 544-5, 553-4, 568-9; Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. iii. 1465-6. In August 1710 Harley, and perhaps more importantly Orrery’s friend Henry St John, (later Viscount Bolingbroke) forced through Orrery’s promotion to major general over the bitter opposition of Marlborough. With the queen’s special permission Orrery and Argyll returned from the front in late September 1710, and Orrery took an active role in assisting Argyll, Ilay and John Erskine, 22nd earl of Mar [S], to manage the Scottish elections for Harley’s interest. He also drafted plans for St John for a reform of the army, in which he envisaged a further diminution of Marlborough’s authority. All commissions were to come directly through the queen, instead of through her commander-in-chief, and there was to be a separate committee of the privy council consisting of all the general officers on the council, as a counterbalance to the Marlborough-influenced board of general officers. HMC Portland, iv. 568-9, 575, 600-1, 603-605, 628-9, 635.

Orrery demanded to be rewarded for his work in securing the new ministry and in November threatened to retire to private life ‘if I had not soon some mark of the queen's favour’. Ibid. 626, 627. Harley was able to satisfy only some of Orrery’s long list of requests. In December 1710 he was made colonel of the 21st Regiment of Foot, later known as the Royal Scots Fusiliers, replacing a Whig colonel who had been cashiered for toasting to the confusion of the new ministry. He was sworn of the privy council on 9 Feb. 1711, about a month after he had accepted the post of English envoy to the council of state in Brussels, the provisional government in the Spanish Netherlands established after the allied conquest of large parts of that territory. He arrived on the continent on 23 Feb. 1711 and spent the next eight months serving in both Brussels and then briefly in the summer at The Hague, temporarily replacing Thomas Wentworth, 2nd Baron Raby (later earl of Strafford) there. Smith, 143-200; Cam. Soc. ser. 4, xiv. 137-200. He may have agreed to this posting on the promise of further reward and as early as 7 May he wrote to Harley that ‘now the sessions is so near an end you must give me leave to put you in mind of my peerage’ and St John’s correspondence with Orrery in June assured him of the impending honour. HMC Portland, iv. 686; v. 7; Bolingbroke Corresp. ed. Parke, i. 245, 261; Bodl. ms Eng. misc. e 180, ff. 83-87. It was not until 5 Sept. 1711, however, that Orrery’s patent creating him a peer of Great Britain, as Baron Boyle of Marston (his family’s principal English estates in Somerset), was sealed.

Orrery returned from his embassy sometime in October and was introduced as Baron Boyle in the House on 27 Nov. 1711, a day of prorogation. Although he sat in the House as Baron Boyle, he was best known, then as now, by his senior Irish title of Orrery and he will continue to be referred to by that name in this biography. Orrery dutifully sat in 83 per cent of the meetings of the tumultuous session of 1711-12. Throughout December he was a loyal supporter of the ministry, voting against the ‘No Peace without Spain’ clause in the address to the queen on 7 Dec. 1711, supporting the right of James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton [S], to sit in the House under his British title as duke of Brandon on 20 Dec. and helping to introduce five of the 12 newly created Harleyite peers to the House on 2 Jan. 1712. On 25 Mar. 1712 he reported from the committee of the whole that the mutiny bill was fit to pass without amendment, and on 3 May 1712 he assigned his proxy to George Hay, recently created Baron Hay (later 8th earl of Kinnoul [S]) but this was vacated when Orrery returned to the House nine days later. On 28 May Orrery supported the ministry by voting against an address condemning the ‘restraining orders’ which had been issued to Ormond. PH, xxvi. 179. Near the end of the session, on 7 June, he was named to a committee assigned to prepare an address thanking the queen for providing the House with details of the terms for peace, after the attempt by the Whigs to add the ‘Guaranty Clause’ to the peace treaty had been defeated. Orrery further showed his attachment to the ministry, or at least a portion of its personnel, when on 13 Dec. 1711 he was inducted into the Society of Brothers, the exclusive society St John had founded in the summer, which quickly became a meeting place for supporters of the Tory ministry and St John in particular. Jnl. to Stella ed. Williams, 423, 431, 437.

Orrery, nevertheless, has been dubbed by leading historians of the period ‘a court Whig who supported Harley 1710-13’. Pols. in Age of Anne, 426; Jones, Party and Management, 127-8. This categorization probably derives from Orrery’s close and abiding association with Argyll. As Argyll slipped further into opposition in 1713, spurred on particularly by his disgust at the malt tax, Orrery joined him. Orrery’s politics, however, were not ideological but largely influenced by his own self-interest, particularly his constant feeling that he was insufficiently rewarded for his status and achievements. His growing opposition to Oxford (as Harley had become in May 1711) was born out of both loyalty to Argyll and his own personal dissatisfaction. From February 1712 to the end of the year he constantly badgered Oxford for the arrears of his pay as a general officer and as ambassador in Brussels, his requests becoming more importunate as Orrery prepared in the autumn to resume his diplomatic tasks in Brussels. HMC Portland, v. 100, 129, 145, 215-16, 232-3.

He was once again based on the continent from November 1712 to June 1713, struggling to extricate Britain during the Utrecht negotiations from the expensive morass of the Spanish Netherlands. Smith, 204-50; Cam. Soc. ser. 4, xliv. 349-71. Away in Brussels, he was not able to participate in the first three months of the parliamentary session of spring 1713, but Bolingbroke (as St John had become) still considered him a reliable prop to the ministry and in January 1713 sent him a number of blank proxies, to be signed and returned to be used by the ministry as the need arose in divisions. Cam. Soc. Misc. xxxi. 359, 360. Unfortunately the proxy records for 1713 are missing, so the recipient(s) cannot be determined. Oxford also still considered him a court supporter in June 1713 when he listed him as a supporter in the vote on the French commerce bill. He was, however, quickly apprised of Orrery’s true feelings when Orrery returned to the House on 2 July. Orrery sat in only a further 11 meetings until Parliament was prorogued on 16 July but that was enough time for Oxford to assess, as he later stated in his ‘Account of Public Affairs’, that in the session beginning 4 April 1713 ‘a combination was set on foot against’ him and the ministry by Shrewsbury, Argyll, Orrery, Ilay, Arthur Annesley, 5th earl of Anglesey; Bolingbroke, Thomas Hanmer^‡ and others. HMC Portland, v. 467. Orrery’s relations with both Oxford and Bolingbroke continued to deteriorate over the remainder of 1713 as he made clear his dissatisfaction with the growing violence of partisan strife and what he saw as their failure to reward sufficiently his services, or even to pay the arrears owing him from his diplomatic service. Add. 70212, Orrery to Oxford, 13 Oct. 1713. In the autumn Orrery, desirous to be ‘out of the way’ of the tumults in Westminster, was clearly hoping to be appointed as ambassador to the States General in the place of the earl of Strafford (as Raby had become), but Bolingbroke had to tell his friend that in the post-Utrecht world the queen intended to assign only a lowly envoy, and not an ambassador, to The Hague, a foreign policy with which Orrery disagreed. Cam. Soc. Misc xxxi. 370; HMC Portland, v. 348-9. By December 1713, still angling for the ambassadorial post, his letters to Oxford had become curt and plaintive, showing how ‘mortified’ he was ‘to find myself so unkindly neglected as you, upon reflections, I’m confident, must agree I have been’. HMC Portland, v. 368, 369.

By 1714 Orrery had joined his old friend Argyll and had turned his back on Oxford and Bolingbroke, wholeheartedly supporting the Hanoverian succession. In February 1714 Baron Schütz was able to report to his Hanoverian masters that ‘Oxford has done everything in his power to be reconciled with the duke of Argyll, and entreated Lord Orrery to be always his [Oxford’s] friend … but both the one and the other continued firm, without giving him the smallest hopes’. Stowe 226, ff. 175-7. Orrery attended all but ten of the 79 meetings of the session of the new Parliament which began on 16 Feb. 1714. He probably moved even further into opposition when Oxford humiliatingly dismissed Argyll from all his military offices on 4 Mar. 1714. Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, later reminisced of this period that ‘The duke of Argyll is flaming against the ministry [and] Lord Orrery is entirely broke with them’. Add. 61475, ff. 67-68.

From 3 Mar. to 12 Apr. 1714 Orrery held the proxy of Thomas Windsor, Baron Mountjoy (more commonly known as Viscount Windsor [I]), one of the five new peers he had introduced to the House at the beginning of 1712 but who by June 1713 started maintaining a ‘strict connection’ with Argyll. William Berkeley, 4th Baron Berkeley of Stratton, wrote to his friend, Strafford, in Utrecht that by this proxy Strafford’s ‘friend’ Windsor had effectively ‘ranged himself among the malcontents’. Add. 22220, ff. 106-8 (in French). On 11 Mar. 1714 Orrery used this proxy when voting against the ministry and in favour of additional words to an address which expressed concerns that Jonathan Swift in his libel The Public Spirit of the Whigs ‘pretends to know the secrets of your Majesty’s administration’. Their contemporaries especially took note when on 5 Apr. Orrery (with Windsor’s proxy), Argyll and the Hanoverian Tories Anglesey and Montagu Bertie, 2nd earl of Abingdon, were among those lords who ‘have gone over to the Non contents’ and voted against the motion that ‘the Protestant Succession is not in danger under her Majesty’s government’. The ministry won this vote by a scant majority of 12. Jones, Party and Management, 128, 141, 146nn42, 43; BLJ, xix. 170-1; Wentworth Pprs. 364, 366. Ralph Bridges thought that the division of 16 Apr. in favour of an address thanking the queen for delivering Britain ‘by a safe, honourable, and advantageous peace … from the heavy burden of a consuming land war’ effectively ‘smoked out’ the ‘revolters from the Church party’, amongst whom he included Abingdon, Anglesey, Argyll and Orrery. BLJ, xix. 172. Orrery himself registered his proxy with Argyll on 14 June 1714. Orrery may have expected Argyll to cast his vote against the schism bill. Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, predicted that both Orrery and Argyll would vote against this measure. Proxies were used and Argyll did sign the protest against the bill’s passage on 15 June. The proxy was vacated by Orrery’s return to the House on 17 June, but Argyll in turn entrusted Orrery with his proxy on 30 June for two days until his return to the House on 2 July. On 30 June Orrery was a teller in the division on the previous question whether to read the bill for the examination of public accounts a second time. HMC Lords, n.s. x. 474. He was also frequently named to committees to draw up addresses: to desire that the Emperor and other princes be encouraged to guarantee the Protestant Succession (5 Apr.); to thank the queen for offering a reward for the capture of the Pretender if found in Britain and to request that the laws against recusants and non-jurors be put into effect (24 June); and to represent to her the difficulties of conducting trade according to the terms of the treaty of commerce with Spain recently ratified by the ministry (5 July).

Argyll and Shrewsbury played leading roles in the machinations in the Privy Council at the time of the queen’s fatal illness but Orrery does not appear to have been in London at that time, although he was in the House on the day following her death, 2 Aug. 1714, and continued to attend for another eight sittings before Parliament was prorogued on 25 Aug. 1714. Upon the new king’s arrival Orrery was rewarded for his support of the Hanoverian succession with court and local posts. He was made a gentleman of the bedchamber on 16 Oct. 1714, kept his place on the new king’s revamped Privy Council and in early December was appointed lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of Somerset, where he had just inherited the Orrery lands and manor house at Marston upon the death of his widowed sister-in-law the dowager countess of Orrery. He was recommissioned a major general and placed on a new Board of General Officers. Smith, 272. He probably owed these military and court appointments to his old patron Argyll, who was high in the king’s favour at the beginning of his reign. Early in 1715 John Perceval^‡, Baron Perceval [I] (later earl of Egmont [I]), included him in a list of Tories who had been ‘continued or on whom Honours and marks of favour are conferred’, alongside his old allies, Anglesey, Abingdon and Windsor. Add. 47028, f. 7; Add. 47087, f. 89v, quoted in Smith, 273. Orrery’s own political trajectory continued to follow that of Argyll. Both men became adherents of the rival court of George, prince of Wales (later George II), and Orrery lost his offices (except for his place on the Privy Council) and military commissions shortly after Argyll’s dismissal from all his posts in June 1716.

For the remainder of his life Orrery was a permanent member of the parliamentary opposition against the prevailing Whig ministry, moving further and further into the Tory camp. In addition, he had many Scottish contacts through Argyll and one of them, perhaps the earl of Mar, approached him in the summer of 1717 to act as an emissary between the court of St Germain and Argyll. From this point he began a regular, though infrequent, correspondence with the exiled court. The extent and timing of his conversion to Jacobitism is still a hotly debated topic, but it is clear that by 1720 he was in close contact with the Pretender and his ministers and actively worked for a Stuart restoration. Albion, xxiii. 681-96, xxvi. 27-53; EHR, cix. 52-73, cxiii. 65-90. He pounded away repetitively in his own letters to St Germain on the same themes – that a return of the Stuarts to the British throne was dependent on the assistance of large numbers of foreign troops and trustworthy assurances from the Pretender of his commitment to the protection of the Protestant religion. Sterner and more committed Jacobites were dismissive of his caution and, though trusted and respected by the exiled court, he stood outside the inner circle of Jacobite councils. A fuller account of his political career under the Hanoverians will appear in the ensuing volume treating the years 1715-90.

Orrery’s final years were marked by a growing estrangement from his son John Boyle* , styled Lord Boyle (later 2nd Baron Boyle, 5th earl of Orrery [I] and 5th earl of Cork [I]). This was in part caused by Orrery’s long-term liaison with Margaret Swordfeger, wife of his own secretary (who was probably complicit in the arrangement) and the existence of their four illegitimate children. In 1728 Lord Boyle married Henrietta, daughter of George Hamilton, earl of Orkney [S], and his countess, Elizabeth Villiers, sometime mistress of William III. Lady Orkney, despite her own chequered past, objected to Orrery’s domestic arrangements and forbade her daughter to associate with her new father-in-law. Furious at this snub, Orrery redrafted his will on 6 Nov. 1728, with a codicil of 1730, granting Margaret and her children £10,000 in bequests and annuities, the latter coming from the interest of £6,000 invested in South Sea Company bonds.

A reconciliation between father and son was effected before Orrery died on 28 Aug. 1731, but Orrery had not been able to revise his will in time and its controversial legacies were dutifully fulfilled by the new earl, who appears to have tried his hardest to help his illegitimate half-siblings, despite their conversion to Catholicism. Smith, 507-12. In his will Orrery also gave rings and gold watches inscribed with his arms to his old friends Uxbridge and Windsor, but the greatest beneficiary was his old college, Christ Church, Oxford, which received Orrery’s library of over 10,000 volumes, valued at £8,000, as well as his collection of scientific instruments. Rather than his early attempts at classical scholarship or his eccentric and largely unsuccessful political career, Orrery’s most significant and lasting legacy is this bequest, still guarded by the college, coupled with his patronage early in the eighteenth century of craftsmen who built for him a clockwork mechanism designed to show the celestial motions of the heavenly bodies, an astronomical model which quickly became popular among the virtuosi and which was, in his own lifetime, named after the earl in his honour. Ibid. 481-6, 505-10.