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

CHAPTER TWO

The Making of Dorothy

I felt this is the heart of England … history I felt; Cromwell; The Osbornes; Dorothy’s shepherdesses singing … the unconscious breathing of England

VIRGINIA WOOLF, watching a country wedding, Diary,

22 September 1928

DOROTHY’S DETERMINATION TO direct her own fate and modify her central role as dutiful daughter and marriage pawn was highly unusual for the time. The kind of family she was born into, and the possible influences and mythologies that were brought to bear on her while growing up a well-bred Stuart girl, contributed to her unique insistence on self-determination. The Osborne family for centuries had been part of the lifeblood of rural and administrative England. Dorothy Osborne was born in 1627, two years after Charles I had come to the throne. Her most recent ancestors on her father’s side were landed gentry and faithful officers of the crown, who, from the fifteenth century, were settled as landowners in Essex. But it was the women they married who brought a certain intellectual strength and unorthodox cast of mind to the genetic mix she inherited. Perhaps there was an extra helping of independence of mind in these women that could be expressed more openly by Dorothy, freed by the revolutionary chaos of the time.

Her great-grandfather Peter Osborne was born in 1521, when Henry VIII was in his prime, and subsequently became keeper of the privy purse to Henry’s son, Edward VI. He and his heirs were granted the hereditary office of treasurer’s remembrancer* in the exchequer. He married Anne Blythe, the daughter of the first regius professor of physick at the University of Cambridge and niece of Sir John Cheke, the celebrated Greek scholar, regius professor of Greek and tutor to Edward VI.† This venerable man died in Sir Peter’s house, shamed at having publicly recanted his Protestantism under Mary I. The intellectual Cheke descendants were important to Dorothy and were mentioned often in her letters where she referred to them as ‘cousins’, making a particular point of their kinship.

Peter and Anne’s son was Dorothy’s grandfather Sir John Osborne, born in 1552. He married Dorothy Barlee, ten years his junior and lady-in-waiting to Anne of Denmark, consort to James I. She was the heiress and granddaughter of the fearsome Richard Lord Rich, a brilliant, ruthlessly opportunistic lawyer who betrayed Sir Thomas More during Henry VIII’s reign and under Mary I was a zealous burner of heretics. Sir John Osborne inherited the office of treasurer’s remembrancer on his father’s death in 1592. It was he who acquired Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, which remained the country seat of this branch of the family right into the twentieth century.

Sir John and Lady Osborne’s eldest son, another Sir Peter Osborne, was our Dorothy’s father. Born in 1585, the first of five sons, he went to Emmanuel College, Oxford, when he was eighteen. Dorothy’s uncle Francis, the youngest of her father’s brothers, was the only writer in her immediate family, publishing his hugely popular Advice to a Son in 1656. Although he was not a published writer himself, Sir Peter’s letters are remarkable for their candour and expressiveness, a family characteristic that his daughter in her own writing was to transform into art. The brothers grew up at Chicksands where their father had installed in the neighbouring rectory at Hawnes the radical Puritan preacher and writer, Thomas Brightman,* whose influential preaching and writings were full of the sense of an imminent fulfilment of the apocalyptic prophesies of the Book of Revelations. Scholarly and saintly in appearance, he was passionately opposed to the established church and believed the Pope was the anti-Christ whose destruction was foretold by God.

The Osbornes at this time were members of a militant anti-establishment Church and Francis at least was educated at home, much of it in the challenging intellectual company of Brightman. When it came to choosing allegiances during the civil war, the eldest and evidently more conventional Peter fought doggedly and in vain for the royalists while the radicalised Francis chose to support parliament. It is interesting that Dorothy’s grandfather, a man so clearly sympathetic to an extreme wing of Puritanism, should have nurtured in his eldest son, Dorothy’s father, such resolute conservatism that he was prepared to sacrifice everything to support the king and maintain the status quo. These opposing family loyalties, complex and often painfully divisive as they were during this war, might have been one of the reasons for Francis’s rift with his family, mentioned in the preface to his book. There was also some dispute with his eldest brother over property that had to go to arbitration as Sir Peter lay dying.

Dorothy’s father was knighted in 1611 and he too held the family’s hereditary position in the treasury. His influential wife, Dorothy Danvers, and her family were responsible for changing his fortunes for ever. Her brother, the Earl of Danby, was created governor of Guernsey by Charles I in 1621 and at his instigation Sir Peter Osborne was made his lieutenant governor. In effect this meant that at the outbreak of civil war he would have to shoulder what turned out to be the thankless, prolonged and self-destructive ordeal of defending for the king Castle Cornet, the island’s principal fort.

Dorothy’s mother, Lady Osborne, was the youngest daughter of Sir John Danvers of Dauntsey in Wiltshire, whom John Aubrey* described as ‘a most beautifull and good and even-tempered person’.1 Sir John’s wife, Dorothy’s grandmother, was Elizabeth Danvers† with whom he had nine children who survived to adulthood. She was an even more remarkable person, described by Aubrey as very beautiful, with some Italian blood, and clever too. Knowing Chaucer off by heart she was ‘A great Politician; great witt and spirit but revengefull: knew how to manage her estate as well as any man’,2 with a jeweller’s knowledge and eye for gems and fine jewellery. She lived into her late seventies, if not her eighties, long enough to see her granddaughter Dorothy born. Women like her made no mark on the grand tide of history, leaving just a ripple in a family memoir or contemporary’s diary. Mothers and grandmothers were historically considered of note only in relation to their connections with others, and those usually male. Absent from the nation’s history, even in the stories of their families they seldom featured as individuals whose character and talents were worth memorialising, unless they took up the pen themselves. But their qualities lived on in their descendants.

Both Dorothy’s mother and grandmother came from more adventurous and spirited stock than the Osbornes’ solid pragmatic line. Daughters share not only the genetic inheritance of their brothers but, in early childhood at least, the family circumstances and ethos too. The sexes usually were separated later by expectations, education and opportunity, but the girls were just as much participants in the experiences of their childhood, the personalities that surrounded them and the animating spirit of the family. If brothers were educated at home then part of that education at least became accessible to any willing and able sister. The intellectual and personal qualities that distinguished the men, however, were more likely expressed in their sisters’ lives domestically and obliquely.

Dorothy’s mother had three remarkable brothers. She and her youngest sister Lady Gargrave might well have been remarkable too if they had been allowed to express themselves on a wider stage, the one becoming a resourceful melancholic and the other a forceful busybody. These three brothers all lived adventurous and boldly individual lives, all in the public eye, and suffered dramatically opposing fates. As uncles to Dorothy and brothers to her mother, their characters and experiences, and the family stories about them, were part of what made Dorothy Osborne’s own life and character what they were. She even, along with her family, spent some time living in the house of the youngest uncle in Chelsea in London.

Her eldest uncle, Sir Charles Danvers, was a soldier and man of action. Born in 1568 at the heart of Elizabeth I’s reign, he could have made a great career for himself in that world of swaggering and ambitious men. At barely twenty years old, he was knighted by his commander for courageous service in the Netherlands. Unfortunately he was later implicated in the murder, by his brother Henry, of a Wiltshire neighbour, and both had to flee as outlaws to France, where they came to the notice of the French king Henri IV, who, along with some Danvers sympathisers from their own country, petitioned Elizabeth I and William Cecil for a pardon. According to John Aubrey, also born in Wiltshire with a Danvers grandmother of his own, Lady Elizabeth Danvers, Dorothy’s formidable grandmother, having been widowed in her forties, then married Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Sir Edmund Carey,* himself only ten years older than her eldest son, specifically to expedite her sons’ pardons.

When he eventually returned to England in 1598, Sir Charles’s gratitude and loyalty to the Earl of Southampton, who had come to his aid and offered him refuge after the murder, led him into the ill-fated Essex Plot against their queen. When this was discovered he admitted all and was beheaded for treason in 1601, still only in his early thirties. This happened two decades before Dorothy’s birth, but Sir Charles Danvers was the eldest son and heir and the stain of treason marked a family for generations, laying waste to their fortunes in the process.

Dorothy’s next uncle, Henry, the perpetrator of the original murder, was born in 1573. He was to be raised to great heights as the Earl of Danby and would die in 1644 ‘full of honours, wounds, and dais’ at the considerable age of seventy. He was already a middle-aged man when Dorothy was born. Like his elder brother he showed precocious military leadership and valour. He was commander of a company of infantry by the age of eighteen and knighted after the Siege of Rouen in 1591 when he was only nineteen. He was twenty-one when, involved in a neighbourly dispute, he fired the fatal shot that killed Henry Long and branded him a murderer. This scandal and resulting exile of both brothers devastated the family, and was the fatal blow for their gentle father. Aubrey wrote how he had been particularly affected, ‘his sonnes’ sad accident brake his heart’,3 and in fact Sir John died only two months later in 1594, without further contact with his eldest exiled sons, or any intimation of the adventures and celebrity that awaited them. Sir Henry’s outlawry was reversed eventually in 1604, but by then his father had been dead for ten years, his mother had married again and his elder brother Charles had died the ignominious death of a traitor.

More honours were heaped on Sir Henry Danvers’s head. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign he was made sergeant-major-general in Ireland, James I created him Baron Danvers of Dauntsey for his valiant service there and Charles I made him Earl of Danby in 1626. Aubrey described him as having ‘a magnificent and munificent Spirit’. He was tall and lean, ‘sedate and solid … a great Improver of his Estate, to eleaven thousand pounds per annum at the least, neer twelve.* A great Oeconomist’.4 In 1621 he had been awarded the governorship of the Isle of Guernsey for life but when required to do something to defend the island appeared to find this honour rather less attractive and somewhat beneath his dignity: ‘[Danby] thinks it not for the king’s honour, nor suitable to his own reputation, that he, who was appointed general against anticipated foreign invaders in Ireland, should go to Guernsey to be shut up in a castle’.5 When civil war loomed, this poisoned chalice was passed to his brother-in-law, Dorothy’s father, Sir Peter Osborne, whose dogged loyalty to the king and defence of the said castle cost him his health, his fortune and possibly hastened the death of his wife.

Dorothy’s youngest Danvers uncle, Sir John, born in 1588, was perhaps the most individual of them all and the uncle she knew best. He had a strong aesthetic taste in houses and gardens and when Dorothy was a girl she and some of her family lodged for a time in his magnificent house in Chelsea. His influence on his young niece was likely to be lasting as he lived until she was in her late twenties. As a young man John Danvers’s beauty matched his singular discrimination in art and architecture. Aubrey recalled his good looks and charming nature: ‘He had in a faire Body an harmonicall Mind: In his Youth his Complexion was so exceedingly beautifull and fine, that … the People would come after him in the Street to admire Him. He had a very fine Fancy, which lay (chiefly) for Gardens, and Architecture.’6

So great was his interest and skill in gardening that Aubrey claimed the garden Sir John created for his house at Chelsea† was the first to introduce Italianate style to London. Its beauty was legendary and it was this garden, full of harmony of scale and proportion, of scented plants and fruiting trees, that Dorothy would have known as a child. Sir John’s own sensual response to its delights was captured by the great biographer in this evocative vignette of how he scented his hat with herbs: ‘[he] was wont in fair mornings in the Summer to brush his Beaver-hatt on the Hyssop and Thyme, which did perfume it with its naturall spirit; and would last a morning or longer’.7 He leased a part of his land to the Society of Apothecaries and eventually they established the famous Chelsea Physic Garden there in 1673, one of the oldest botanical gardens in Europe.

When John Danvers was barely twenty he married Magdalen Herbert, the widow of Richard Herbert and mother of ten children, one of whom became the famous poet and divine, George Herbert.* John was knighted by James I the following year in 1609. Two more marriages to heiresses followed but his extravagant tastes in interior decoration and horticultural grandeur resulted in mounting debts. He was a member of parliament and a gentleman of the privy chamber under Charles I. Always generous ‘to distressed and cashiered Cavaliers’, eventually his own debts caught up with him, making him reluctant to help finance the king’s expedition to Scotland in 1639. By the beginning of the civil war in 1642 he took up arms for parliament against the king. On Charles’s defeat he was one of the commissioners appointed to try the king and subsequently a signatory to the royal death warrant.

Dorothy’s Danvers uncles had had ‘traitor’ and ‘murderer’ attached to their names; now Sir John, to whom she had been closest, became notorious in history as Danvers the ‘regicide’.† Given her father’s passionate and unquestioning support for Charles I, willing to give his fortune and even his life for him, it must have been difficult for Dorothy in this febrile time to reconcile a fond and admired uncle being so closely implicated in the murder of the king.

Katherine Danvers was Dorothy’s Aunt Gargrave, a formidable battleaxe in the family armoury who would be used against Dorothy in the intractable matter of her marriage. She herself had married a profligate husband, Sir Richard Gargrave, who had squandered his vast fortune in record time. This meant all her redoutable talents were put to work in squabbling with her family and the government over various properties she claimed as hers.

So it was that Dorothy grew up in a family of very mixed talents and fortunes. This continuity of domestic life included the legacy of ghosts and stories of the previous generations with their individual extremes of triumphs and sorrow. Born in 1627, most probably at Chicksands Priory, she was the youngest of ten children, two of whom had already died. Her eldest surviving sibling was her seventeen-year-old sister Elizabeth, who was yet to marry and have three daughters before dying aged thirty-two at the outbreak of the first civil war. The rest were all older brothers, the closest of whom was Robin, the brother who accompanied Dorothy to the Isle of Wight on their fateful visit in 1648. He was only one year older than Dorothy and they grew up closely bonded as the babies at the end of a large family.

It was unusual then for Dorothy, as the youngest of a large family, to have so many grandparents still living. Her Osborne grandfather died the year after she was born at the age of seventy-six, Sir John’s wife, another Dorothy Osborne, died at the same great age but when Dorothy was eleven and old enough to have memories of her. Her dashing maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Danvers, by this time Lady Carey, was even longer lived, dying in 1630 when Dorothy was three years old, but she remained a great personality in family lore.

Chicksands Priory was the Osbornes’ family home and already an ancient building full of history when they lived there. In the twelfth century, at the height of the religious fervour that drove the second crusade against the Muslims, the manor of Chicksands (there was a variety of spellings through the centuries) was donated by Countess Rose de Beauchamp and Baron Payne to the Gilbertine Order for the building of a religious house.* Two cloisters, one for men and one for women, were constructed on the north bank of the River Flit near the village of Campton and the market town of Shefford. The troublesome priest Sir Thomas à Becket, when Archbishop of Canterbury and at odds with Henry II, was believed to have sought refuge at Chicksands Priory in 1164 before fleeing into temporary exile in France. After centuries of mixed fortunes but relative peace, the cataclysmic dissolution of the monasteries enacted under Henry VIII’s decree ended the religious life at Chicksands in 1538, some 388 years after the priory was first founded.

Once the resident monks and nuns had been dispersed the agricultural land was leased to farmers and the buildings and estate sold off: by the end of the sixteenth century the priory itself had fallen into serious disrepair. At the time Dorothy’s grandfather acquired the estate, the only remaining building that was suitable as a domestic dwelling was the ancient stone cloister built for the nuns. Along with the estate came legends of a series of secret escape tunnels and the ghost of a nun who had been walled up in a windowless room. Given its history, the existence of tunnels to lead religious personages to safety (or offer the inmates a means of escape back to the secular world) would seem perfectly reasonable, yet after generations of curious investigators have banged and tapped and excavated the property nothing has been found. However, the less likely tale of a cruelly sacrificed nun has been given more enduring life through the reporting – and probable exaggeration – across the centuries of various strange sightings and supernatural experiences. A false window on the east front of the priory added fuel to the over-heated speculations of the nun’s forbidden liaisons, scandalous pregnancy and a murdered lover in the priory’s murky past.†