Be that as it may, Sir Henry Wotton was already ill when Frank and Robyn
were removed from Eton in November 1638; and it was Mr. Harrison who duly
sent after them to Stalbridge the furniture of their chamber—the blew
perpetuana curtains and all the other things so carefully inventoried by
poor Carew. And Carew himself no longer served his sweet young masters:
he had been succeeded by a manservant with the suggestive name of Rydowt,
who appears to have been a married man, and was accommodated with a
little cottage of his own at Stalbridge, with a garden which the Earl
planted with “cane apples” from Ireland. The boys were to live and learn
their lessons with Mr. Dowch at the Parsonage; and that “old divine”
was very soon to discover that Robyn had not learnt much Latin at Eton
after all, and “with great care and civility” to proceed to read with
him the Latin poets as well as the Latin prose-writers. And while the
Earl gave Frank a horse of his own, and knew him to be happy and gallant
in the saddle, it was Robyn who was the old Earl’s Benjamin, most loved
of all his sons. The family saw a likeness in Robyn to his father—a
likeness both in body and mind. It is difficult to credit the Earl of
Cork with any of his youngest son’s habit of “unemployed pensiviness,”
but there must have been something in Robyn when he was quite a little
fellow—a quiet self-reliance—that impressed the old Earl strangely. Robyn
was only twelve years old; he had as yet shown none of the traits of
character that the Earl so “severely disrelished” in some of his sons
and sons-in-law. And so, when he gave Frank the horse, the Earl listened
perhaps with some wonderment to Robyn’s “pretie conceptions” in excellent
language, spoken still not quite smoothly; and he was content to let the
boy wander as he liked. He gave his Benjamin the keys of his orchard, not
afraid to leave him in a very paradise of unplucked apples, “thinking at
random.”
CHAPTER V
THE HOUSE OF THE SAVOY
“You shall have all this winter att the Savoy, in Sʳ. Tho.
Stafford’s howse, the greatest familie that will be in London
(I pray God the ould man houlds out).”—Letter from Sir John
Leeke to Sir Edmund Verney, 1639: _Verney Memoirs_, vol. i.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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