Robert Boyle’s Head Master at Eton

Robert Boyle went to Eton with his elder brother, Francis, in October 1635, at the age of eight years and nine months. The two boys left in November 1638 (1) . They were both Commensals of the second table. The Commensals, in accordance with the Statutes of the Founder, received their tuition free, but paid for their meals which they took in College Hall with the Scholars. Those who were sons of noblemen or of particular friends of the College sat ‘at the second table’. They lodged with one or other o f the Fellows, and, although they were taught in school by the Head Master and the Usher or Lower Master, it is clear that they often also received some kind of special tuition from the Fellow with whom they lived. Some facts about Robert Boyle’s life at Eton may be found in Dorothea Townsend’s Life and letters of the great Earl of Cork (Boyle’s father), in Logan Pearsall Smith’s Life and letters of Sir Henry Wotton , who was Provost of Eton at the time, and especially in Boyle’s autobiographical sketch of his early life. This was incorporated by Thomas Birch in the Life which prefaced Boyle’s complete works, first published in 1744. This sketch, written when Boyle was still quite a young man, gives a good deal of information about his days at Eton. In fact, there is no other boy at Eton about whom we know half as much as about Robert Boyle, until we come to Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole a hundred years later. Of Boyle while he was at Eton there remains one relic. The College Library contains a book which belonged to him, a copy of Cicero’s Epistolae familiares , with the Scholia of Paulus Manutius, printed at Paris by Robert Estienne in 1550. On the title-page are the names of two previous owners and the name ‘Boyle’ scribbled up the margin. On the last page is the inscription, ‘Robert Boyle his booke witnes by John Akester’, the second name being in a different hand (2) . It is obviously a schoolboy’s book. Nothing is known of John Akester, who was a Colleger at Eton and Boyle’s exact contemporary, though five years older, except that he went up to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1639 and left it a year later. This is the only book known with Boyle’s signature in it, although he eventually accumulated a library of over 3,000 volumes (3) .