Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, A Love Story in the Age of Revolution

these islands being no ways subordinate to other jurisdiction, but to his majesty alone, as part of his most ancient patrimony enjoyed by those princes, his glorious predecessors, before that, by claim or conquest, they came to have interest in the crown of England, – no summons, by virtue of what power soever, hath command here, nor can make me deliver it up to any but to him by whom I am trusted, and to whom I am sworn, that have never yet made oath but only to the king. And God, I hope, whose great name I have sworn by, will never so much forsake me but I shall keep that resolution (by yourself misnamed obstinacy) to maintain unto my sovereign that faith inviolate unto my last.23

In a time of conflict and upheaval many decisions of allegiance were made out of opportunism or self-preservation, but there were just as many men and women who stood by their passionately held principles and suffered the consequences. This statement of resolve epitomised the conservative loyalty and unshowy courage of the idealised cavalier spirit. Sir Peter did not just mouth ringing sentiments, he intended to live by them. He stockpiled what ammunition and provisions he could in preparation for a long siege. He attempted to instil a military discipline in his garrison by threatening draconian punishments for any insubordination. A brawling soldier would have his right hand chopped off, and a similar punishment would be meted out to anyone who merely threatened to punch an officer: whosoever actually struck his superior ‘shall be shot to death’.24

Although Sir Peter maintained his royalist stronghold, parliament deposed the island’s royalist bailiff and dissolved the royal court, placing the government of Guernsey in the hands of twelve commissioners. The exploits of three of these, Careye, de Beauvoir and de Havilland, became the stuff of legend when in October 1643 they were captured through trickery and brought to Castle Cornet as prisoners, only to effect a miraculous escape some six weeks later and within hours of being hanged. Careye’s memoir is interesting in evoking the high state of tension between the island and its governor, the daily alarms and dangers that the garrison and islanders endured, the shortage of food,* the hunger for news from the mainland. He also mentioned that Sir Peter had both his sons with him in late October when the commissioners were first brought into the castle as prisoners.

The news of the war that filtered back to Sir Peter in his isolated keep at first looked hopeful for the royalist cause. By the end of 1644 a loyal optimist could consider Charles had gained the upper hand and was well placed to take London. The following February, however, saw the establishment of parliament’s New Model Army and by early summer the royalist momentum was slammed into reverse. The new army’s comprehensive defeat of Charles I and Prince Rupert in the Battle of Naseby in June 1645 marked the beginning of the end for the king.

In the face of the debacle on the mainland, Sir Peter Osborne’s struggle to hold Castle Cornet was low on the list of royalist priorities and the defence of the strategic fort for the king was largely financed by his own resources. He set his family to work raising extra funds against his own property in support of the crown’s interest. Dorothy’s mother had already been employed in support of her embattled husband. By the beginning of 1643 Lady Osborne had travelled from Chicksands to Jersey to try to negotiate support from Sir George Carteret. This involved raising bonds against the Osborne estate to pay for any provisions that might be forthcoming.

The period of the civil war propelled women from the domestic sphere into political activity, even war, providing many opportunities to exhibit their courage and executive abilities while their men were away fighting or already dead. Stories were commonplace of remarkable women who resisted the opposing armies’ sieges of their houses and castles, one of the most notable being the royalist Countess of Derby who, refusing safe conduct from Latham House in Lancashire, withstood a three-month siege there in 1644, only surrendering the house at the end of the following year when the royalist cause was all but lost. However she then, with her husband, held Castle Rushen on the Isle of Man for the king. Again, with the earl away fighting in England, she attempted to withstand parliamentary forces, eventually having the distinction of being probably the last person in the three kingdoms to submit to the victorious parliament in October 1651.

The defence of Castle Cornet and the attempt to deliver practical assistance to the besieged lieutenant governor involved all Sir Peter Osborne’s immediate family. His letters mention his sons John, Henry and Charles who were variously visiting the castle, supporting the garrison, organising funds and provisions and running messages to the king or his followers. His wife, and on some occasions certainly Dorothy herself, were frantically pawning the family’s silver and begging for gifts and loans to finance Sir Peter’s defence. Dorothy suggested that her recoil from being pitied and the more melancholy aspects of her nature dated from this time of fear, uncertainty and danger. In the summer of 1645 Dorothy’s father sent word to their mother, via her brother John, that since her departure he and his men had had no more to eat than one biscuit a day and porridge at night, but he was adamant that any supporters of parliament, should they ask, were to be told instead that everyone at Castle Cornet was well and sufficiently supplied. Sir Peter was sixty when he wrote this, an old man by the standards of the time, and yet he suffered the daily strain and deprivation of this lengthy siege, largely unsupported by the monarch for whose cause he was sacrificing fortune, life and family.

Dorothy’s endurance of these betrayals and humiliations along with her mother taught her some baleful lessons. She described her sense of injustice, her fear that fleeting glimpses of happiness were easily crushed by a disproportionate weight of misfortune, that each flicker of hope revived the spirits only to have them dashed again, leaving her resigned to the dreariness of life:

This world is composed of nothing but contrariety’s and sudden accidents, only the proportions are not at all Equall for to a great measure of trouble it allow’s soe small a quantitye of Joy that one may see tis merely intended to keep us alive withal … I think I may (without vanity) say that nobody is more sencible of the least good fortune nor murmur’s lesse at any ill then I doe, since I owe it merely to custome and not to any constancy in my humor or something that is better; noe in Earnest any thing of good com’s to mee like the sun to the inhabitants of Groenland [Greenland] it raises them to life when they see it and when they misse it it is not strange they Expect a night half a yeer long.25

Parliament was keen to persuade Sir Peter Osborne to surrender Castle Cornet and after only a year of siege had offered to return his confiscated estates to him. Liberty for himself and his garrison with the freedom to return to England to take up their lives and property with impunity was the generous and tempting offer. He was threatened that, should he refuse, such favourable terms would never be offered again: his estates would be sold and lost to him for ever. Gallantly, pig-headedly even, the old cavalier pursued his Quixotic destiny: ‘Gentlemen – Far be from me that mean condition to forfeit my reputation to save an estate that, were it much more than it is not, would be of too light consideration to come in balance with my fidelity, and in a cause so honourable, where there is no shame in becoming poor, or hazard in meeting death.’26

Despite the fundraising activities of Lady Osborne and her children in St Malo, the family could not single-handedly support Castle Cornet and conditions for everyone continued to deteriorate. Dorothy and her mother were virtually homeless; three of her brothers were away engaged in various military and administrative duties on behalf of the king. Impoverished and anxious for the safety and health of their father, they could only imagine how he was enduring his lonely siege. By the end of 1644, facing winter, he wrote apologetically to King Charles pointing out that he had exhausted his own resources, had lost his estate and he and his men were facing starvation and forced surrender unless provisions were rapidly sent to the castle. He regretted mentioning the loss of his estate to his monarch, he said, but as he had exhausted all his resources he explained it was necessary to be so blunt, ‘only to make it appear in what need I stand of further help, having nothing left to serve your majesty with, but with my life, which likewise upon all occasion I shall, by the grace of God, be most ready to lay down’.27 Two boats were dispatched from Jersey but the Guernseymen, aware that the castle was running out of food and fuel and soon would be forced to surrender, manned the artillery on the coast and sent out armed men in boats to try to intercept the supplies. Cannon were fired and a sporadic battle ensued but on this occasion the boats got through, the provisions were unloaded and the castle could hold out for a few months more.

By now the relations between Sir George Carteret in Jersey and Sir Peter Osborne on lonely watch in Guernsey had broken down completely. They were both royalist governors struggling against the political tide, short of supplies and support. However Carteret had freedom of movement and islanders who themselves had remained loyal. Although he attempted and sometimes succeeded in getting provisions through to the besieged castle on the neighbouring island, Carteret was more interested in looking after his own political and financial interests. There was a general belief that he grew rich during these troubled times on the cargoes of intercepted ships and the proceeds of piracy, so much so that it was estimated that he increased his family’s fortune by about £60,000 – a fortune of more than £7 million by modern standards. With both men engaged in the same cause, the rewards available to the opportunistic Carteret contrasted bleakly with the destruction of the Osborne fortunes. Carteret meanwhile had grown tired of Sir Peter’s complaints and continual requests for food and fuel when his own community needed all that was available. More seriously, he had grown suspicious of the activities of the whole Osborne family who, disenchanted, were increasingly acting independently of him. Osborne himself had realised he could not rely on Carteret, and his family subsequently looked further afield in their search for support.

In the bitter February of 1645 with the castle down to its last week’s bread rations, Dorothy’s aunt, Lady Gargrave, set out for St Malo with some of Sir Peter’s clothes and a couple of trunks of the family’s linen to try to pawn or sell in order to purchase provisions. Within six days this doughty woman set sail on her return journey to Jersey with a boat full of supplies but was chased by pirates ‘and narrowly escaped by running with great danger among the rocks’. So alarmed was she by the prevalence and zeal of the pirates in the area, she asked Sir George Carteret to loan her one of his experienced seamen to help ensure a safe delivery of the provisions to Castle Cornet. This he apparently refused her. Instead, he wrote a letter to one of Charles I’s advisers suggesting the Osborne family were guilty of double-dealing. More shockingly, he accused them of possible betrayal of the king’s cause by citing various activities of Lady Osborne and her sister.

This brought forth a cry of eloquent outrage from Sir Peter against ‘these maliciously invented slanders’. He explained how his wife’s tireless efforts of fundraising had exhausted her: ‘For when her mony was spent, and plate sold, she made no difficultie among strangers to ingage her self in a great debt for the releife of this castle, till her credit at last fayled.’ What provisions Lady Osborne then obtained were left to rot in Jersey due, it seemed, to Sir George Carteret’s inertia, or worse. This frustration of her Herculean efforts seemed to be the last straw for his long-suffering wife: ‘oppressed with trouble and greife, she fell into a desperate sicknes, that her self, and all those about her, feared her life’.28

It was possible that her eighteen-year-old daughter Dorothy was with her during this ordeal for, barely conscious, Lady Osborne was carefully embarked on a Dutch ship and accompanied back to England, a journey of two days of which she hardly noticed the passing. Dorothy was to write later of the harsh experiences she had endured in France and the lowering effect they had had on her spirit and demeanour, so much so that her friends on her return hardly recognised her: ‘When I cam out of France nobody knew mee againe … and that Country which usualy gives People a Jollynesse and Gayete that is natural to the Climate, has wrought in mee soe contreary effects that I was as new a thing to them as my Cloth[e]s.’29

The whole Osborne family was transformed very much for the worse by their experiences of war. Sir Peter Osborne had entered into his costly defence of Castle Cornet in 1642 when he was already fifty-seven years old, elderly by seventeenth-century standards. He was over sixty and exhausted in spirit, health and fortune when he eventually relinquished his post in the early summer of 1646. Lady Osborne’s pleas had some effect at last, although it was months before King Charles got round to writing about her husband’s plight to his queen Henrietta Maria, in exile in France. Uxurious and suppliant, the king asked his wife to release Sir Peter Osborne with the following letter dated 21 September 1646:

Dear Heart … I have but one thing more to trouble you with, it is, that I have received lately a letter from my Lady Osbourne, which tells me that her husband, who is governor of Guernsey, is in much want and extremity, but yet without my leave will not yield up his government; wherefore she hath earnestly desired me either to shew him some hopes of relief, or give him leave to make his own conditions. To this I have answered, that I would (as I do) recommend his relief heartily to thee, commanding her to direct her husband to observe the queen’s orders. So praying God to bless thee, and longing to hear from thee, I rest eternally thine,

Charles R30

Sir Peter’s long and uncomfortable defiance at Castle Cornet was also a completely wasted effort with nothing good to come from it but the demonstration of his own uncompromised loyalty. There was no hope of reward or recompense and scant recognition. In October 1647 when Sir Peter had requested through his son that the king relay to him his commands, the reply came back: ‘I can give no commands, for I am now commanded; but when I shall be in any condition to employ his loyal affections, he shall know that he is a person I have a very particular regard to; commend me to him, and tell him I am beholding to him.’31 The king’s son Prince Charles had also vaguely promised some favour on a future occasion, possibly while he spent the summer months of 1646 in pleasant exile in Jersey, but Sir Peter died before his restoration as king in 1660. At that point, however, the newly enthroned Charles II had more pressing affairs to attend to. The diarist John Evelyn wrote an appreciation of him in which he recalled the shameful neglect of many hundreds of quiet heroes like Sir Peter Osborne, uncomplaining and unsung, while Charles II indulged his rapacious lovers and favourites: ‘An excellent prince doubtlesse had he ben lesse addicted to Women, which made him uneasy & allways in Want to supply their unmeasurable profusion, & to the detriment of many indigent persons who had signaly serv’d both him & his father.’32

The father Dorothy greeted at St Malo after he had sailed away from Guernsey for ever was much diminished. His health was broken, his estate confiscated, his fortune beggared. His loyal wife’s own health and peace of mind had suffered too, his daughter Dorothy had lost her hopes and his family of brave sons was reduced by two, the promise of their youth and the pride of his old age destroyed in the random violence of war. The Osbornes’ plight was by no means unique but it would affect them all profoundly. Above all it made it imperative that their last daughter to marry should make an alliance with a man of property and conventional prospects to help restore the family’s status and fortune.

* An officer of the exchequer responsible for collecting debts due to the crown, the term probably dating from a time when these transactions were remembered rather than written down.

† Milton was some twenty years older than Dorothy Osborne and published his great works during her lifetime. In Sonnet XI he honoured the scholar: ‘Thy age, like ours, O Soul of Sir John Cheek/Hated not learning worse than toad or asp/When thou taught’st at Cambridge, and King Edward, Greek.’

* Thomas Brightman (1556–1607) had a great influence on the Puritan movement in England. Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he was a modest man, a fine scholar and a fiery preacher. Brightman chose to remain unmarried, ‘preferring a bed unfilled to a bed undefiled’ and died suddenly, as he had wanted, on a summer’s day and in the company of his benefactor Sir John Osborne while they were bowling along in the latter’s carriage.

* John Aubrey (1626–97), antiquarian and writer best known for his brilliant extempore biographical sketches collected as Brief Lives and his recognition of the importance of Avebury and mapping of the prehistoric stones, which he showed to Charles II in 1663, the same year he became a member of the Royal Society. His wide friendships, warmth, curiosity and charm made his writing uniquely informative and entertaining.

† Lady Osborne was Elizabeth Nevill, daughter of John Nevill, 4th Lord Latymer. Born before 1552, she died in 1630, thirty-six years after her first husband Sir John Danvers.

* Sir Edmund Carey (1558–1637), son of Elizabeth I’s cousin (some said her half-brother) Henry Carey. Once married to Elizabeth Danvers he worked vigorously and unscrupulously to attempt to save the Danvers estates from the crown. They had been confiscated when Lady Danvers’s son and heir, Sir Charles, admitted his involvement with the Essex Plot and was declared a traitor.

* As this was the equivalent today of more than £1.25 million per annum it becomes obvious why his stepfather Sir Edmund Carey worked so assiduously to try to save this estate from the crown when Sir Charles Danvers died a traitor. Lord Danby gave Oxford some of his land in 1621 to create the first ‘physick garden’ in the country with the stated purpose ‘to promote learning and glorify the works of God’.

† This house next to the river at Chelsea was called Danvers House and adjoined what used to be Sir Thomas More’s mansion, known in the seventeenth century as Beaufort House. In 1696 Danvers House was pulled down to make way for Danvers Street. This runs now from Paultons Square to Cheyne Walk, parallel with Beaufort Street: only the names of these great houses remain.

* Although his brother was mortified by this marriage and the gossips wondered how such an eligible young man had chosen a woman more than twice his age, making him a stepfather of ten, it was reputably a happy union that lasted until Magdalen’s death in 1627. Aubrey did not share the world’s surprise, pointing out that the gorgeous youth had married Lady Herbert ‘for love of her Witt’. Magdalen Herbert was one of the lucky ones. Her life and character were celebrated in print by both her brilliant son George Herbert and her friend, the matchless poet and preacher John Donne.

† However, Sir John Danvers died at his house in Chelsea in 1655, without the disgrace that would come with the restoration of Charles II, and was buried in the family church at Dauntsey in Wiltshire. Five years later, with a king on the throne again, his name was added to the Act of Attainder as an enemy of the state.

* Gilbert, who became St Gilbert, was still alive in the middle of the twelfth century, a Lincolnshire lad born to wealthy Norman parents who set up in all thirteen religious communities. The Gilbertine Order remained the only truly English monastic order.

† Chicksands was sold to the Crown Commissioners in 1936. In 1939 it was leased to the Air Ministry and was known as RAF Chicksands. The USAF were tenants from 1950–95 when some American servicemen collected the incidents of the ghost in the night for a booklet, entitled Legend and Lore of Chicksands Priory.

* The weekly charge to the exchequer of £59 1s 10d for this enterprise was broken down thus: 16s a day to the governor; 4s a day for the lieutenant; 2s 6d a day for the ensign; four sergeants, 12d a day each; four drummers, 12d a day each; two surgeons, 12d a day each; two gunners, 12d a day each; one clerk, 12d a day; 200 men, 8d a day each. The feeding of the men however fell on the townspeople of St Peter Port.

* The first English translation of his The Education of a Christian Woman, a handbook on the education and conduct of girls and women, commissioned by Henry VIII’s Queen Catherine, was launched from the household of Sir Thomas More. It was published in 1528–9 and, immediately successful in England, went through at least nine editions in sixty years.

* It is hard to get accurate mortality rates for infants at the time, but Stone, in The Family, Sex and Marriage, conjectures that up to one-third of all babies died before they were one year old.

* Anne Harrison (1625–80) married the royalist Sir Richard Fanshawe, who became secretary to Charles II in exile. Her life was full of adventures and reversals of fortune. She had six sons and eight daughters but all but one son and four daughters predeceased Sir Richard, who died of a fever in 1666. Like Dorothy Osborne, Lady Fanshawe was consort to a diplomat on missions abroad during Charles II’s restoration. Dorothy went with her husband to the Netherlands, Anne to Portugal and then Spain.

† Margaret Lucas (1623–74), as maid of honour to Charles I’s Queen Henrietta Maria, followed her into exile in Paris and there met and married William Cavendish. She became the Duchess of Newcastle and, in publishing twenty-three books, the most prolific woman writer that the world had yet seen. She was unconventional, spasmodically brilliant and engaging, apologising for her presumption as a mere woman in daring to seek a commercial readership and fame.

* George Savile (1633–95), 1st Marquis of Halifax, writer, moderate politician and friend of William and Dorothy; after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 he was chosen to offer the crown to William and Mary II.

* Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), born in Cambridge and educated at the university there and at Oxford All Souls. He was a chaplain to Charles I and was arrested in 1645 during the first civil war. He retired to Wales until the restoration and wrote most of his highly successful books at this time. Two of the most famous, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), were practical and spiritual manuals written with a direct simplicity and grandeur of spirit. Hazlitt wrote: ‘When the name of Jeremy Taylor is no longer remembered with reverence, genius will have become a mockery and virtue an empty shade.’ Taylor became Bishop of Down and Connor and later of Dromore in Ireland where he died.

* This was the equivalent of about £49,000 today.

* Careye obsessively noted their meagre and putrid rations: ‘peas which were sprouting and rancid bacon’; ‘cheese boiled with stinking grease, beer and bread as usual’. The water supply for the castle was contaminated when a cannon ball destroyed part of the storage cistern and there was not enough to drink. After the prisoners’ beer rations were stopped the lack of drinking water and the saltiness of the preserved food meant they began to suffer serious effects of dehydration. There is little reason to think that the governor and garrison were much better victualled.

CHAPTER THREE

When William Was Young

When I was young and in some idle company, it was proposed that every one should tell what their three wishes should be, if they were sure to be granted: some were very pleasant, and some very extravagant; mine were health, and peace, and fair weather