A HISTORY OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE 



loo candidates for election to college, and in 

 1615 the commensals' tables in hall had to be 

 enlarged. Con O'Neil, son of the Earl of 

 Tyrone, held a hostage for his father, was sent 

 there by the Government in 1616. It cost him 

 90 a year, but he had two or three servants. 

 Young Lord Wriothesley and a page paid about 

 I if. a week or some 60 a year. Ordinary 

 commensals paid 31. 6d. and 5*. 8d. a week, 

 according as they commoned as scholars or as 

 fellow commoners. Barlow, the Bishop of 

 Lincoln, as diocesan, attacked Langley, ' who, 

 having 2 rich benefices (as I am informed) farr 

 distant from his schole, and beeing a Doctor of 

 Divinity, continueth the teaching of children, and 

 neglecteth his principall charges, which are the 

 souls of his people.' Savile defended him, where- 

 upon Barlow replied that he thought no one 

 could sink so low ' as from an interpreter of the 

 Holy Ghost to become an expositor of profane 

 facts.' At length in 1611 he was forced to 

 resign. Langley died a canon of Windsor in 

 1615. Savile promoted the usher, Richard 

 Wright, fellow of Merton, to the vacant post. 

 Barlow attacked him for being a priest, describ- 

 ing it as ' a gross abusing of our sacred function 

 that a Priest should either bee or bee entituled an 

 kostiarius.' The real gravamen seems to have 

 been that he was not an Etonian. Savile yielded, 

 got Wright elected a fellow, and put in two 

 Kingsmen, Matthew Bust as master and William 

 Otes as usher. 



On Savile's death in 1622 an impecunious 

 Scotsman, ' neither English, graduate or priest,' 

 Thomas Murray, became provost, but died next 

 year. A crowd of candidates then came for- 

 ward, including the great Bacon, then Lord 

 St. Albans. The place remained vacant until 

 the all-powerful favourite, the Duke of Bucking- 

 ham, returned from Spain, when it was given to 

 Sir Henry Wotton, who had just been recalled 

 from being ambassador at Venice. In that post 

 he had never got over his famous mot that an 

 ambassador was 'an honest man sent to lie 

 abroad for the good of his country ' ; which, 

 reported in Latin, in which the pun disappeared, 

 was misrepresented as a piece of Jesuitry. He 

 was the last Wykehamist, being a commoner of 

 Winchester and New College, to preside over 

 the destinies of the daughter college. Wotton, 

 though a layman and statutably ineligible, was 

 given the place as a convenient way of paying 

 arrears due to him as ambassador. He gave to 

 Eton the great picture of contemporary Venice 

 which hangs in Election Hall. He is also said 13 

 to have set up the row of wooden pillars in 

 Lower School, 'on which he caused to be choicely 

 drawn the pictures of divers of the most famous 

 Greek and Latin historians, poets and orators, 

 persuading them not to neglect rhetorick. . . 



None despised eloquence but such dull souls as 

 were not capable of it.' The pillars, however, 

 could only have been recased at most, for men- 

 tion is made of them in 1514-15, when Will 

 Edmunds was paid i 'according to agreement 

 for the pillars (postibus) in school.' There had no 

 doubt been 'posts,' as the existing posts in chambers 

 and the old school at Winchester are still called, in 

 the old school at Eton. It would almost seem 

 that the provost of this time took part in teach- 

 ing, for Izaak Walton continues : ' He would 

 often make choice of some observations out of 

 these historians and poets ; and would never 

 leave the schole without dropping some choyce 

 Greek or Latin apopthegme or sentence, such as 

 were worthy of a room in the memory of a 

 growing scholar.' 



The school flourished under Provost Wotton, 

 Matthew Bust, and his successor as master, John 

 Harrison. It was ' very much thronged with 

 young nobility.' Robert Boyle, ' the father of 

 chemistry and uncle of the Earl of Cork,' was 

 sent there with his brother in 1635 at the age 

 of eight, and placed specially under the protec- 

 tion of Wotton, because Wotton was ' not only 

 a fine gentleman, but very well skilled in the art 

 of making other so.' Harrison, the master, 

 ' would often dispense with him from school to 

 instruct him privately and familiarly in his 

 chamber.' It was well to be a magnate in those 

 days. Among Boyle's contemporaries were the 

 sons of the Earls of Peterborough, Northampton, 

 and Westmorland. The scholars were largely 

 nominees of the court, sometimes nominated by 

 the Secretary of State, sometimes by the king 

 himself. Thus, 25 July i624, m the king him- 

 self wrote to the provost recommending ' Robert 

 Newman as a scholar of Eton, an exception 

 having been taken to a former recommendation 

 as not being under his own hand,' the former 

 one being by Secretary Conway on 8 July 1623. 

 Newman was duly elected and went on to 

 King's in 1628. A curious mixture of classes 

 was nominated : in 1624 the sons of 'one of 

 the pastry ' and of the king's shoemaker ; in 



1628 Sir Robert Hatton's son was admitted on 

 pressure, and Wotton wrote to John Dineby, 

 ambassador at the Hague, about his son ; in 



1629 a place was begged for the son of an 

 exiled baron of Austria, and Sir George Kevet's 

 (? Knyvett's) son headed the list. The election 

 of that year Wotton describes as ' the most 

 troublesome election that has ever been since 

 that nurse first gave milk, over charged with 

 King's letters 4 recommendatory and one man- 

 datory, besides messengers and intercessions from 

 divers great personages . . . enough to make us 

 think ourselves shortly electors of the empire.' 

 Next year he writes to a ' noble nephew ' that 

 ' his list of names cannot be served,' and recom- 



130 Izaak Walton, Lives (ed. 1864), 117. 



131 Etoniana, May 1907, from Cat. S.P. Dom. 



194 



