Sir George Carew went a step further. He “dealt very nobly and fatherlike” with Mr. Boyle in recommending him to marry again. And the lady whom Carew had in view for his _protégé_ was Katharine Fenton, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Sir Geoffrey Fenton, the wise and enlightened Secretary of State. There is a pretty tradition handed down in the Boyle family—the Earl’s own daughter used to tell it—that Mr. Boyle first met his second wife when he was a very young man newly arrived in Dublin. Calling one day on business at Sir Geoffrey Fenton’s house, and waiting in an ante-room till the great man should be disengaged, Mr. Boyle had “entertained himself” with a pretty child in her nurse’s arms; and when Sir Geoffrey at last appeared and apologised for having kept his visitor waiting, the young man “pleasantly told him he had been courting a young lady for his wife.” This must have been in 1588. The marriage took place fifteen years later, and a great deal had happened in the interval. Joan Apsley and her baby were buried in Buttevant Church, and “Richard Boyle of Galbaly in the County of Limerick, Gent.” had purchased the vast Raleigh Estates. In July 1603 he was a wealthy widower of thirty-seven, and Katharine Fenton was seventeen. “I never demanded any marriage portion with her, neither promise of any, it not being in my consideration; yet her father, after my marriage, gave me one thousand pounds[14] in gold with her. But this gift of his daughter to me I must ever thankfully acknowledge as the crown of all my blessings; for she was a most religious, virtuous, loving, and obedient wife to me all the days of her life, and the mother of all my hopeful children.”[15] Elizabeth was dead, and James I reigned in her stead. Sir George Carew—the new Lord Deputy—had conferred a knighthood on Mr. Boyle on his wedding day. Two years later he was made Privy Councillor for the Province of Munster, and thenceforward there was to be no stop nor hitch in the upbuilding of his great fortunes. In 1612, after another visit to London and an audience of King James, he found himself Privy Councillor of State for the Kingdom of Ireland. He was created Lord Boyle, Baron of Youghal, in 1616, and Viscount of Dungarvan and Earl of Cork in 1620. His home life had run parallel with his public services. “My Howses,” “My deare Wife,” “the Children,” “my Famullye,” fill an important place in the Earl’s life and diary and letters; while the wife’s few little epistolary efforts to her husband have only one beginning: he was to her always “My owne goode Selfe.”