The Return of Troubles and a Change of Mind

Orrery’s financial problems eventually returned to haunt him. The famed and wealthy patron of the arts Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington and fourth Earl of Cork, died in December 1753, passing on to Orrery the title of the Earl of Cork (which is how John would sign his letters until

376

Boswell, Life of Johnson, 445.

377

Orrery to Dr. William King, 27 August 1739, Houghton MS Eng. 218.2, 4:59 (Orrery Papers, 1:265). And around the same time: “His [Pliny’s] Sentiments are fine, his way of thinking open, humane, and noble: His Freindships sincere and well-chosen: His Fortune easy, & well manag’d; and his whole Life a Scene of Virtue and honourable Acts,” Orrery to Baron Waynright, 13 October 1739, Houghton MS Eng. 218.2, 4:63-4 (Orrery Papers, 1:268).

378

Remarks, 337-8. Orrery’s Remarks on Swift made him quite a few enemies among Swift’s inner circle, who accused the fifth earl of disloyalty and betrayal. For a detailed study of public reactions to this text, and of Orrery’s literary career generally, see Mildred Weeks Prince, “The Literary Life and Position in the Eighteenth Century of John, Earl of Orrery” (PhD Diss., Smith College, 1948), esp. 150-190.

379

his death). As the fifth earl later told Horace Mann, the British ambassador in Florence, he had repeatedly received assurances from Burlington that the ancestral Boyle estates in Ireland, which belonged to Burlington, would not be separated from the title of the Earl of Cork. But Burlington left all of his estates to his daughter. Certain of such a large impending increase in his fortune, Orrery in the meantime “involved himself into difficulties which the strictest economy was the only remedy left to extricate himself from, when he found his disappointment,” as Mann reports from the earl’s words.380 The precise nature of the difficulties is not apparent from Orrery’s own correspondence, but he once again had to relinquish much of his annual income to creditors. In order to live as economically as possible, Orrery and his wife moved to Italy and settled near Florence in late 1754. There, the earl could both be frugal and play the role of a connoisseur in the place best suited for it. He wrote travel letters about France and Italy to William Duncombe, a friend and fellow writer, with the clear intention of eventually publishing them. (For some reason, this was not done during Orrery’s life, although the manuscript was fully prepared for

publication, with the author’s marginal notes on it; the Letters from Italy were published only in 1773 by Duncombe’s son.) Moreover, Orrery seriously considered the idea of writing a full- blown history of Florence. But the plans for a serious scholarly work were cut short by financial circumstances. Less than a year after arriving in Florence, the earl abruptly left Italy and headed back to Britain after receiving troubling news from his banker and relative, John Hoare. As Hoare later communicated to his friend Horace Mann, the Orrery family’s “agent in Ireland made an ill use of his power, and… their presence was absolutely necessary to prevent some very bad consequences.”381 Old problems of distance, unreliable agency, and Irish corruption came back, and Orrery’s financial affairs may have now been even worse than they were twenty years previously. And this time, the earl resorted to a source of much-needed money that had hardly been imaginable a decade earlier.

Before departure, Orrery met with Horace Mann, with whom he had been getting on very well, and asked for a favor. In Mann’s words, the earl “desired I would give testimony in my letters to the ministry of his conduct here, saying that he knew that he had been formerly misrepresented to the King, and assured me, that though his early connections with certain people might have given cause to suspect his principles, yet nobody was more sincerely attached to the present

establishment than he was, being convinced from his heart that the nation could only be happy under it; and indeed the whole tenor of his conversation, since I have known him, has been agreeable to that assertion.” Mann did write to London about Orrery’s great veneration and personal respect for George II, and Orrery praised him unreservedly in his Letters from Italy.382 Of course, it was prudent of the fifth earl to secure reliable testimonies of his “proper conduct” in Florence, since his Jacobite reputation made his moving so close to the court of the Pretender appear suspicious. But his designs may have already gone further; in England, he solicited the patronage of the Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, and secured through him an annual pension of £800 from the court beginning in 1756. We also know that in 1757 he solicited a judicial post from Newcastle.383 So, once again finding himself in difficult financial

380

Horace Mann to Horace Walpole, 10 April 1756, Yale Edition, 20:545-6.

381

Idem to idem, 10 April 1756, Yale Edition, 20:545.

382

Idem to idem, 20 September 1755, Yale Edition, 20:499, and editor’s footnote.

383

Orrery to the Duke of Newcastle, 16 October 1756, BL Add MS. 32868, Newcastle Papers, vol. 183, f326; 14 December 1757, BL Add. MS 32876, Newcastle Papers, vol. 191, ff303-304.

circumstances late in his life, Orrery resorted to the very system of ministerial corruption, pensions and places that it was a duty of a true man of the Country to detest.

Getting drawn into the system of government patronage was certainly a self-interested move, but it likely coincided with the growing acceptance of the Hanoverian status quo on Orrery’s part and signaled his alienation from politics rather than any deeper involvement in it. Orrery’s desire to testify to the King “how earnest I am in retrieving all past misbehavior, and in strict duty and adherence to his sacred person, and no less sacred commands”384 certainly goes counter to his earlier contemptuous remarks about the Hanoverians and the quality of their “divine right.” But the earl’s commonplace book, begun in Florence in 1755, also registers his growing distaste for Tories (a “Set of People obstinately bent to follow their own inclinations,” “[n]oisy in Taverns, indolent in the Senate,” [r]ough, sullen, and ignorant”) and attention to the negative consequences of retirement, which makes a man savage and sullen.385 In his 1759 contribution to The Busy Body, a weekly paper, Orrery gives a character sketch of an “odd man”: “Next to foreigners he abhors courtiers. The Court is a scene of politeness. The odd man seldom or ever appears at court. He calls his absence patriotism. If he called it perverseness, oddness, or sheepishness he would give it the true name.”386 This badly concealed hint at the old unreformed Tories reads differently when we know that its author received a secret government pension. But a shift in Orrery’s perception of “the world” is nevertheless noticeable in these years. He did not become a “practicing” courtier (aside from the pension), but came to appreciate in theory the polishing quality, and with it the intellectual and moral effects, of “society” in the narrow sense of the term. Given the worsening state of the fifth earl’s health, neither such abstract appreciation nor the pension entailed a more active practical involvement in politics or the life of the court and high society. The gout, another “material” encumbrance inherited from his ancestors, followed Cork for many years and finally finished him off in 1762.

For much of his life, the fifth earl had been distancing himself from the model of politician, soldier, courtier, and promiscuous man of the world that so appealed to his father and great- grandfather. He looked for the excellence of mind not in the public world but in the freedom from it – in retirement, intimate friendship, and orderly, pure familial life. This was for Orrery the circle in which morality, good nature, sentiment, and, in essence, the mind as such were

cultivated. The outgoing and promiscuous (in more senses than one) life of his father was not for him. More importantly for this project, John rejected not only the practice of this life but also the key anthropological postulates that came with it.

Eustace Budgell, the fourth earl’s devoted client and biographer, responded thus to the accusations that Charles was prone to take “too great Liberties with respect to Women”: since some of the greatest men of all ages were guilty of this fault, then perhaps “those very animal Spirits, which by their Fineness and Quantity, are the immediate Cause of Wisdom, Wit, and Courage, do naturally and strongly incline those Men, in whom they reside, to the Commission of

384

Idem to idem, 16 October 1756, BL Add MS. 32868, Newcastle Papers, vol. 183, f326.

385

Houghton MS Eng. 218.12, R1-2, T7-9.

386

The Busy Body, no. 11, 1 November 1759, the original of the letter in Houghton MS Eng. 218.6. Compare a commonplace-book characteristic of Tories: “Hating business, they decline It. Unfit for a court, They avoid It: and think that they shield themselves by the specious, but prostituted, name of Honour. Did they truly love their country, would they not endeavour to serve it?” Houghton MS. Eng. 218.12, T9.

this Fault.”387 If William Byrd had read this statement, he perhaps would have acknowledged, reluctantly and with regret, that it could be true. His intellectual and moral life passed in efforts to decouple the mind and body, but those efforts were rarely convincing. John Boyle endeavored to do the same, but he never quite accepted the basic assumption behind Budgell’s statement. In this chapter, I have outlined his life as a series of efforts to minimize and segregate away his material concerns, and to gain intellectual, moral, and emotional freedom from them in the privacy of his simple and refined home, orderly family, and a narrow circle of close friends. It was in such privacy that the fifth earl found his literary and critical voice, and it was in such freedom that he found his own intellectual and moral strength as well as the possibility of continuing the

reputation of his dynasty. Orrery’s acceptance of an annual pension from the Court was of a piece with his quest for freedom from material encumbrances. I will later try to show that this

acceptance coincided with his growing attention to implications of the social nature of the free mind, refinement, wisdom, and morality, inherent in Orrery’s own cultivation of privacy and interpersonal mental immediacy. Orrery’s moral and intellectual upbringing sorely lacked such immediacy of a genteel family. His father’s perceived play of “animal spirits” only got in the way of the son’s proper familial education and indirectly led to a public questioning of John’s

intellectual endowments. So, the cultivation of a mental and emotional private society was personally significant for the fifth earl. In the next chapter, I will explore in more depth the world of anthropological assumptions behind John Boyle’s intimate ethics and aesthetics.

387