Collins[3] has a little to tell us about Cavendish’s boyhood.
[3] P. 25.
“After his school-learning, he was entered a scholar of St. John’s College, in Cambridge; but, delighting more in sports than in books, his father finding he had a ready wit, and a very good disposition, suffered him to follow his own genius, and had him instructed, by the best masters, in the arts of horsemanship and weapons, which he was most inclined to, and soon became master of them.”
As the Duchess of Newcastle is said to have consulted her husband about her writings, and as he is reported to have helped her considerably in writing them, it is highly probable that her account of the education of a boy of the period describes Newcastle’s own experiences. In her Nature’s Pictures by Fancy’s Pencil, she says: “His education, in the first place, was to learn the horn-book, from that his primer, and so the Bible, by his mother’s chambermaid or the like. But after he came to ten years old or thereabouts he went to a free school where the noise of each scholar’s reading aloud did drown the sense of what they read, burying the knowledge and understanding in the confusion of many words, and several languages; yet was whipt for not learning by their tutors, for their ill-teaching them, which broke and weakened their memories with the over-heavy burthens, striving to thrust in more learning than could be digested or kept in the brain.... After some time he was sent to the University, there continuing from the age of fourteen to the years of eighteen; at last considering with himself that he was buried to the world and the delights therein, conversing more with the dead than the living, in reading old authors, and that little company he had, was only at prayers, and meat; wherein the time of the one was taken up in devotion, the other in eating, or rather fasting; for their prayers were so long and their commons so short, that it seemed rather an humiliation and fasting, than an eating and thanksgiving. But their conversation was a greater penance than their spare diet; for their disputations, which are fed by contradictions, did more wrack the brain, than the other did gripe the belly, the one filling the head with vain opinions and false imaginations, for want of the light of truth, as the other with wind and rude humours, for want of a sufficient nourishment. Where upon these considerations he left the University.”
Could there be a greater contrast than that between Oxford or Cambridge life in the seventeenth century and in the twentieth?
Despite what Collins says about the young Cavendish delighting more in sports than in books, as well as a statement by his Duchess that “to school-learning he never showed a great inclination,” it is said in the Biographia Britannica[4] that his father, “discovering, even in his infancy, the strongest marks of an extraordinary genius, etc...., was extremely careful in the cultivation of them, and took all imaginable pains to have him instructed, as well in sciences as in languages; so that, at an age when most young gentlemen are but entering on knowledge, he might be truly said to have acquired a large stock of solid learning, which was adorned with an easy and polite behaviour, that, except on proper occasions, entirely concealed the scholar under the more taking appearance of the fine gentleman.”
[4] Edition 1748, vol. II, p. 1208.
Thomas Hobbes, the “Philosopher of Malmsbury,” was tutor to William’s first cousin, whose name was also William. Hobbes may or may not have acted as tutor to the subject of our story; but it was probably through Hobbes’s introduction in a tutorial capacity into the Cavendish family that he became an intimate friend of the William with whom we are concerned.
Cavendish was taken early to the Court of James I who made him a Knight of the Bath when he was about 17 or 18, and he was sent from thence to Savoy, with the Ambassador Extraordinary, Sir Henry Wotton. It was thus Cavendish’s fortune to be thrown early in life into the company of a man of considerable culture and no little experience of foreign Courts. Wotton had had an opportunity of earning the deep gratitude of James I in a rather romantic episode; but when that King sent him as his Ambassador to Venice, he was asked (at Augsburg) to contribute to a lady’s album, and he was so imprudent as to write: “An Ambassador is an honest man, sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.” King James was told of this and was so offended that, for five years after Wotton’s return from Venice, he gave him no further employment. Then he relented, and, at the time with which we are now dealing, James sent him as his representative to the Duke of Savoy, who, after having been allied with Spain against France, was now making an alliance with France against Spain.