Perhaps some details from the education of Robert Boyle will serve to illustrate the manner of taking the Grand Tour.  His father, the great Earl of Cork, was a devoted adherent to this form of education and launched his numerous sons, two by two, upon the Continent.  He was, as Boyle says, the sort of person “who supplied what he wanted in scholarship himself, by being both a passionate affecter, and eminent patron of it."[335] His journal for 1638 records first the return of “My sones Lewis and Roger from their travailes into foreign kingdomes,... ffor which their safe retorn, god be ever humbly and heartely thancked and praised both by me and them."[336] In the same year he recovered the Lord Viscount of Kynalmeaky and the Lord of Broghill, with Mr Marcombes, their governor, from their foreign travels into France and Italy.  Then it was the turn of Francis and Robert, just removed from Eton College.  With the governor Marcombes, a French servant, and a French boy, they departed from London in October 1639, “having his Majestie’s license under his hand and privy signett for to continew abrode 3 yeares:  god guide them abrod and safe back."[337]

Robert, according to his autobiography, was well satisfied to go, but Francis, aged fifteen, had just been married to one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, aged fourteen, and after four days of revelry was in no mood to be thrust back into the estate of childhood.[338] High words passed between him and his father on the occasion of his enforced departure for Paris.  He was so agitated that he mislaid his sword and pistols—­at least so we hear by the first letter Marcombes writes from Paris.  “Mr Francis att his departure from London was so much troubled because of your Lordship’s anger against him that he could never tell us where he put his sword and ye kaise of pistoles that your Lordship gave them, so that I have been forced to buy them here a kaise of pistolles a peece, because of the danger that is now everywhere in France, and because it is so much ye mode now for every gentleman of fashion to ride with a kase of Pistoles, that they Laugh att those that have them not.  I bought also a Sword for mr francis and when Mr Robert saw it he did so earnestly desire me to buy him one, because his was out of fashion, that I could not refuse him that small request."[339]

Marcombes did not expose the boys long to the excitement of Paris, but at once hurried them to Geneva, and settled them to work, where Francis showed a great deal of resignation and good-humour in accepting his fate.  He was not so sulky as Lord Cranborne, who in a similar situation fell ill, could not eat, and had to be taken back to England.[340] “And as for Mr francis,” writes Marcombes to Cork, “I protest unto your Lordship that I did not thinke yt he could frame himselfe to every kind of good Learning with so great a facilitie and passion as he doth, having tasted already a little drope of ye Libertinage of ye Court, but I find him soe disciplinable, and