Editing Robert Boyle (section)

===Early years===
[[File:IRL Dublin St Patrick 03.jpg|thumb|Sculpture of a young boy, thought to be Boyle, on his parents' monument in [[St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin]].]]
Boyle was born at [[Lismore Castle]] in [[County Waterford]], in the far south of [[Ireland]], the seventh son and fourteenth child of [[Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork|the 1st Earl of Cork]] ("the Great Earl of Cork") and [[Catherine Fenton Boyle|Catherine Fenton]].<ref name="EB1911" /> Lord Cork, then known simply as Richard Boyle, had arrived in [[Dublin]] from [[England]] in 1588 during the [[Tudor dynasty|Tudor]] [[plantations of Ireland]] and obtained an appointment as a deputy [[escheator]]. He had amassed enormous wealth and landholdings by the time Robert was born and had been made [[Earl of Cork]] in October 1620. Catherine, his wife, was the daughter of [[Sir Geoffrey Fenton]], the former [[Secretary of State (Ireland)|Secretary of State for Ireland]], who was born in Dublin in 1539, and Alice Weston, the daughter of [[Robert Weston]], who was born in [[Lismore, County Waterford|Lismore]] in 1541.<ref>{{Citation|title=Catherine Fenton|work=Family Ghosts|url=http://www.stanford.edu/group/auden/cgi-bin/auden/individual.php?pid=I4234&ged=auden-bicknell.ged|access-date=9 June 2011|archive-date=21 September 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130921055240/http://www.stanford.edu/group/auden/cgi-bin/auden/individual.php?pid=I4234&ged=auden-bicknell.ged|url-status=dead}}</ref>

As a child, Boyle was raised by a [[wet nurse]],<ref name="McCartneyWhitaker">{{citation|title=Physicists of Ireland: Passion and Precision|first1=Mark|last1=McCartney|first2=Andrew|last2=Whitaker|publisher=Institute of Physics Publishing|year=2003|location=London}}</ref> as were his elder brothers. Boyle received private tutoring in Latin, Greek, and French and when he was eight years old, following the death of his mother, he, and his brother Francis, were sent to [[Eton College]] in England. His father's friend, [[Sir Henry Wotton]], was then the [[Provost (education)|provost]] of the college.<ref name="EB1911" />

During this time, his father hired a private tutor, Robert Carew, who had knowledge of [[Irish language|Irish]], to act as a private tutor to his sons in Eton. However, "only Mr. Robert sometimes desires it [Irish] and is a little entered in it", but despite the "many reasons" given by Carew to draw their attention to it, "they practise the French and Latin but they affect not the Irish".<ref name="canny">{{citation|first=Nicholas|last=Canny|title=The Upstart Earl: a study of the social and mental world of Richard Boyle|publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |location=Cambridge|year=1982|page=127}}</ref> After spending over three years at Eton, Robert travelled abroad with a French tutor. They visited Italy in 1641 and remained in [[Florence]] during the winter of that year studying the "paradoxes of the great star-gazer", the elderly [[Galileo Galilei]].<ref name="EB1911" />