His other recollections of his Eton schooldays are for the most part of accidents that happened to him there. He was not so good a horseman as his brother Frank. Once he fell from his horse, and the animal trod so near to his throat as to make a hole in his neckband, “which he long after preserved for a remembrance.” Another time his nag took fright as he was riding through a town, and reared upright on his hinder feet against a wall; and the boy just saved himself by slipping off. Yet a third time he nearly met his death by a “potion” given him “by an apothecary’s error”; and it is interesting, in the light of what happened and did not happen in Boyle’s later life, to hear that “this accident made him long after apprehend more from the physicians than the disease, and was possibly the occasion that made him afterwards so inquisitively apply himself to the study of physick, that he might have the less need of them that profess it.”[47] The fourth and last of this almost Pauline enumeration of disasters was the falling, one evening, of the greater part of the wall of the boys’ bedroom in Mr. Harrison’s house. The two brothers had gone early to their room; Robyn was already tucked into the big four-post bed, with its “feather bedd, boulster, and two pillows,” and the curtains of “blew perpetuana with lace and frenge”,[48] and Frank was talking with some other boys round the fire when, without a moment’s warning, the wall of the room fell in, the ceiling with it, carrying bed, chairs, books and furniture from the room above. A bigger boy rescued Frank from the debris and dust, the chair in which he had been sitting broken to pieces, and his clothes torn off his back; and Robyn, the future chemist, peeping from the blew-perpetuana curtains, remembered to wrap his head in the sheet, so that it might serve “as a strainer, through which none but the purer air could find a passage.”
It is observable that there is no mention of any of those accidents in the letters to the Earl of Cork from either the Provost or the boys’ personal servant, Carew. Perhaps it was as well that the Earl, much harassed at home, should not be told everything that was happening at Eton. As it was, he knew too much. Some go-between—Mr. Perkins, the tailor, or somebody equally officious—must have told the Earl in what manner Carew—“poor unmeriting me”, as Carew called himself in one of his fascinating letters to the Earl—had been utilising his idle hours by the meandering Thames. Frank and Robyn, and Carew with them, were spending their holidays with Lady Lettice Goring, when one morning Sir Henry Wotton, sitting in his study at Eton, received a letter from the Earl of Cork. The contents came as a thunderbolt. “Truly, my good Lord,” Sir Henry Wotton wrote back to the Earl, “I was shaken with such an amazement at the first percussion thereof, that, till a second perusal, I was doubtfull whether I had readd aright.” For everybody in the college was so persuaded of young Mr. Carew’s discretion and temper and zeal in his charge, and “whole carriadge of himself,” that it would be “harde to stamp us with any new impression.” However, Mr. Provost had somewhat reluctantly put away his pipe and “bestowed a Daye in a little Inquisitiveness.” And he had found that the Earl, in Dublin, was quite right; that between Carew and a certain “yonge Mayed, dawghter to our under baker—” and Mr. Provost could not but own that she was pretty—there had passed certain civil, not to say amorous, language. The old Provost was evidently disposed to look leniently on this particular foolish pair. Had he not himself once, in his youth, written a little poem which began—
O faithless world, and thy most faithless part
A woman’s heart!
...
Why was she born to please, or I to trust
Words writ in dust?[49]
However, Sir Henry told the Earl he was going to talk to Carew on his return from Sussex, and warn him how careful, in his position, he ought to be; and he would write again to the Earl after seeing Carew. But, in the meantime he wished to reserve judgment: “For truely theare can not be a more tender attendant about youre sweete children.”
And after all news travelled slowly. Those little love passages were already six months old: “Tyme enough, I dare swere”—wrote the old diplomatist, sitting alone in his study, with his Titian and his Bassanos looking down upon him—“to refrigerat more love than was ever betweene them.”