READ MY HEART

A Love Story in theAge of Revolution

JANE DUNN

DEDICATION

To Ellinor, Theodore, Dora –thrice blessed in you

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

FAMILY TREES

THE TEMPLE FAMILY TREE

THE OSBORNE FAMILY TREE

PREFACE

1 Can There Bee a More Romance Story Than Ours?

2 The Making of Dorothy

3 When William Was Young

4 Time nor Accidents Shall not Prevaile

5 Shall Wee Ever Bee Soe Happy?

6 A Clear Sky Attends Us

7 Make Haste Home

8 Into the World

9 A Change in the Weather

10 Enough of the Uncertainty of Princes

11 Taking Leave of All Those Airy Visions

AFTERWORD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ENDNOTES

INDEX

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A ROMEO AND JULIET

LIFE AT A GLANCE

A WRITING LIFE

ABOUT THE BOOK

GROWING UP IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

IF YOU LOVED THIS

READ ON

HAVE YOU READ

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

FAMILY TREES

THE TEMPLE FAMILY TREE

THE OSBORNE FAMILY TREE

PREFACE

‘In the seventeenth century, to be sure, Lewis the Fourteenth [Louis XIV] was a much more important person than Temple’s sweetheart. But death and time equalize all things … The mutual relations of the two sexes seem to us to be at least as important as the mutual relations of any two governments in the world; and a series of letters written by a virtuous, amiable, sensible girl, and intended for the eye of her lover alone, can scarcely fail to throw some light on the relations of the sexes.’

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, Essays

THE LIVES OF Dorothy Osborne and William Temple are bound together in one of the great love stories of the seventeenth century, with timeless elements that all of us, like Macaulay, recognise and share. But they also offer a personal view of their world. Against a background of civil-war destruction and family power, it is a world of letters and gardens, of friendship and scientific experiment, of international Realpolitik fraught with the treachery of princes. We only know their story because of a terrific piece of good luck. Seventy-seven letters written by Dorothy to William during their long clandestine courtship survive. Throughout we hear Dorothy’s voice, flirtatious, politically canny, philosophical and overflowing with feeling. ‘Love is a Terrible word,’ she wrote to William, ‘and I should blush to death if anything but a letter accuses me on’t.’ Into their letters went all the thoughts and emotions too difficult or dangerous to say in person and their honesty and the details of their lives open up a shaft of light on this period, this man, this woman.

Intelligent, eloquent, unalike, Dorothy and William recreate their world through letters, romances and essays in which their humour and humanity dissolve the barriers of time and circumstance to bring them both to life again. What is more, they lived through one of the most eventful centuries of British history, marked with both bloody and peaceful revolutions. The age is illuminated through the contrasting experiences of these two gentry families, the Osbornes indomitably royalist and the Temples more pragmatically parliamentarian – but open to offers. Dorothy and William faced hardships and reversals, resisted family threats and blackmail, and in the end triumphed over all, even the spectre of illness and death, to marry at last. William went on, in the reign of Charles II, to become a fluent and engaging essayist, an innovative gardener and a celebrated diplomat, with Dorothy so actively engaged at his side that she was termed ‘Lady Ambassadress’.

All this contributes to the appeal of their story. But nothing of their love affair would be known in any detail if these letters had not survived, and it is William, unable to bring himself to destroy them as the lovers had agreed to do, in a desperate attempt to evade detection, who ensures their love a lasting memorial. There was initially a larger hoard, so much so that Dorothy wondered what William meant to do with all her letters, joking he had ‘enough to load a horse’. It is possible that the majority were destroyed by a protective granddaughter in the more circumspect eighteenth century. What remain, however, represent the last two years of a six-and-a-half-year courtship and were recognised by William and then his sister Martha as wonderful literary creations, and, even then, worthy of publication. These seventy-seven letters and a few later notes were saved, wrapped in bundles and stored in a special cabinet, still in the possession of the Osborn family.

Over crisp sheets of paper Dorothy’s elegant cursive hand wrote in measured loops and curlicues of everything that mattered to her, from her deepest hopes and feelings to shopping requests and the gossip of the neighbourhood. Letters were the only means of communication between them, and on to paper she and William poured all their pent-up emotion, their covert rebellion against family and the thrill of exploring philosophical and political ideas. These love letters were not only powerful tools of seduction but also revealing of the lovers themselves in the continual ebb and flow of conversation.

But history rolled on and although William’s celebrity for a while did not fade, Dorothy and her story remained silent, known only to her descendants who guarded the letters, recognising their extraordinary quality, until the Victorians discovered her and fell in love. There is no other word for the emotion she aroused in fine intellectual Victorian gentlemen such as the great historian and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay, William’s first biographer the Right Honourable Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, and the first editor of Dorothy’s letters Edward Abbott Parry. All these men declared themselves to be among her ‘servants’, i.e. suitors for her hand.

Courtenay first brought Dorothy to public gaze when he incorporated part of forty-two of her letters in his biography of William, Memoirs of the Life, Works and Correspondence of Sir William Temple, published in 1836. It was in a lengthy essay review that Macaulay revealed his own tenderness for the Dorothy of the letters. His description of her character as he saw it, however, showed more his own prejudices: ‘She is said to have been handsome; and there remains abundant proof that she possessed an ample share of the dexterity, the vivacity and the tenderness of her sex.’

Though enchanted by the letters, this lofty Victorian still managed to underestimate their great literary and historical value, and patronised the author while he praised her: ‘Her own style is very agreeable; nor are her letters at all the worse for some passages in which raillery and tenderness are mixed in a very engaging namby-pamby.’

The young barrister Edward Abbott Parry, later to be a judge and knighted, was equally enchanted by the Dorothy who emerged from the shadows in her husband’s biography. After publishing his own essay on her he was contacted by the Longe family, descendants of Dorothy’s and keepers of her papers, and given permission to edit a book of the letters the family had guarded for so long. Parry’s edition of seventy of the letters, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple 1652–54, was published in 1888 and enjoyed an immediate success. One anonymous reviewer in Temple Bar expressed a general consensus in hailing, ‘a most loveable portrait of a charming and high-souled woman, who possessed strong common sense, the clearest judgement and a keen sense of humour’. These seventy letters were bought by the British Museum in 1891 (an extra seven seem to have been retained by the family) and many published editions of her letters followed, the later ones incorporating all seventy-seven. My husband Nick Ostler, ever a truffle-hunting boar when it comes to second-hand bookshops, turned up one of these editions in Padstow in Cornwall and immediately my fascination with Dorothy and William and their life began.

To my surprise there has never been a biography of Dorothy Osborne, apart from an elegant but soft-centred essay by Lord David Cecil in his book about her and Thomas Gray, Two Quiet Lives. Dorothy, nevertheless, has become famous in the history of English literature as an early and brilliant exponent of the epistolary art, but her complex personality and the extraordinary adventures of her life – if they have been mentioned at all – are used merely as context for her letters.

William has been better served, his life more public, his achievements recognised in the world of men. There have been a few biographies of him, most notably the first by the Victorian Courtenay and a judicious and comprehensive modern life published by Homer E. Woodbridge in 1940. They inevitably concentrated on the man, his ideas and diplomatic career, with Dorothy very much off-stage as the silent supportive spouse. In fact it was a marriage of intellectual equals, as Dorothy had always intended it should be, and as the more egalitarian Dutch fully recognised when William was ambassador there: it is more interesting and truthful, to my mind, to place them side by side and attempt to write about their lives together.

There are few female voices that call to us from the early seventeenth century and no one has been more full of character, or more conversationally present as we read her words than Dorothy Osborne. William’s letters and essays also are so seemingly modern in their frankness and informality, his confiding voice draws us into his life while revealing his warmth and easy charm. His literary style was held up as exemplary for at least two centuries after his death: he was considered by many to be the best essayist of the restoration after Dryden. Dr Johnson credited William with being the first writer to bring cadence to English prose and Charles Lamb wrote an essay commending his ability to mimic casual conversation, ‘his plain natural chit-chat’ as if from an easy chair, while sharing nuggets of information and inventive speculations that effortlessly informed and entertained his readers.

Editions of Dorothy’s letters and William’s essays were found in every good literary library during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The distinguished poet Peter Porter, inspired by Dorothy’s letters, wrote the poems for a song cycle composed by Nicholas Maw, The Voice of Love.* But in subsequent years they have slipped from view. Dorothy and William’s re-emergence into public consciousness is well overdue: their love story is timeless, and the period of revolutions and unrest in which they played their part resonates with the preoccupations and political shifts today.

Dorothy Osborne and William Temple grew up during the British civil wars. They were fifteen and fourteen respectively when Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham in 1642, heralding the beginning of the greatest political and social turmoil in the nation’s history. They were still only twenty-one and twenty when the king was executed in January 1649. In recent times the suffering of the Serbs and Croats as Yugoslavia turned on itself brings something of the domestic terror of civil wars home to us now. But nineteenth-century critics, who discovered Dorothy Osborne through her letters, liked to see her as the embodiment of English life, womanly discretion and the national virtues of stoicism, humour and keeping up appearances. Even Virginia Woolf recalls Dorothy’s memory to bolster a moment of awe at the continuity of rural life, remembering a delightful passage in one of Dorothy’s letters where she describes an afternoon spent with local shepherdesses in the fields.

But civil war touched everyone and destroyed more than flesh and stone. Trust and hope for the future were also casualties in this most pernicious of conflicts. William Temple’s family were parliamentarians, although William seemed to be at ease on either side of the ideological divide. The Osborne family, as steadfast royalists, suffered far greater depredation. Their fortunes were wasted, two sons killed and the parents’ health destroyed.

The civil wars stamped a heavy footprint on the impressionable years of their youth. Both Dorothy Osborne and William Temple grew to adulthood in a country at war with itself. But when the old regimes are lost, there is everything to play for in the creation of the new. They took their places on the world stage during Charles II’s reign, attempting to promote peace and prosperity by building strong bonds with the Dutch, the most successful mercantile nation of the age. With William away, Dorothy and their family also lived through the terror of the Great Plague in London which, to everyone’s horrified disbelief, was followed by the Great Fire that destroyed much of the city, for a while appearing to be an outrageous act of international terrorism. William and Dorothy played a crucial role in one of the most important alliances in that rebellious century – the marriage of William of Orange with Mary, James II’s daughter, whose claim to the throne would make possible the remarkable Glorious Revolution of 1688 that finally secured the nation’s religion as Protestant with William and Mary on the throne.

William and Dorothy both lived to old age and died in their own beds, having survived smallpox, plague and the deaths of all nine children before them. They had lived honourably and well, as the confidants of princes, queens and kings, but had been concerned too for their servants and for the sailors, soldiers and yeomen who made the country work. In the end, William was a better man than diplomat: sent to lie abroad for his country he would not compromise his personal principles and refused to do his monarch’s dirty work. His career began with meteoric ascent, but lacking the propellant of ambition it fell to earth, where he was happiest. There in his gardens and library, in the midst of family and friends he reflected on life and looked outwards to the world. Their happy domestic life allowed him and Dorothy to endure the tragedies that befell them, seeking solace from their friends, their reading and writing, the revolving gardening year and the good fortune that had come their way.

During their rollercoaster courtship and prolonged exile from each other, Dorothy returned time and again to the poignant question, ‘shall wee ever bee soe happy?’ – as happy as they longed to be. She assured William it was just the intensity of her love that made her fearful: ‘I love you more than Ever, and tis that only gives mee these dispaireing thoughts.’ But in hindsight there are two answers to her question. Yes – because against all the odds they did marry at last, and there could be no more satisfactory consummation than that. And yet no, too – because contemplating their lives together, as they did, as an epic romance that could only end with twin souls transmuted into one, would always be a happier state than the reality of the world.

Through letters and memoirs their words draw us into their lives and illuminate the extraordinary times in which they lived: ‘Read my heart,’ Dorothy wrote as she laid her hopes before him and William too claimed his writing to her was ‘a vent for [my feelings] and shewd you a heart wch you have so wholly taken up’. Their clear voices tell us the story of that grand romance of thwarted passion, conniving families, ridiculous acquaintances, disease and disappointments, together with major political achievements and the fulfilment of love – all lived out in an age of revolution.*

* The first performance was given in 1966 at Goldsmith’s Hall, London, with the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker singing as Dorothy with the refrain ‘Shall we ever be so happy?’

* I hope my use of footnotes in the pages that follow will illuminate rather than distract from the story. There are so many fascinating bit players on this stage I could not allow them to crowd the narrative in their full distinction but equally was loath to let them pass without note.

CHAPTER ONE
Can There Bee a More Romance Story Than Ours?

All Letters mee thinks should bee free and Easy as ones discourse not studdyed, as an Oration, nor made up of hard words like a Charme

DOROTHY OSBORNE [to William Temple, September 1653]

as those Romances are best whch are likest true storys, so are those true storys wch are likest Romances

WILLIAM TEMPLE [to Dorothy Osborne, c.1648–50]

THE ROMANCE BEGAN in the dismal year of 1648. It was much wetter than usual with an English summer full of rain. The crops were spoiled, the animals sickened ‘and Cattell died of a Murrain everywhere’.¹ The human population had fared no better. The heritage of Elizabeth I’s reign had been eighty years of peace, the longest such period since the departure of the Romans over twelve centuries before. After this, the outbreak of civil war in 1642 had come as a severe shock. Few had remained unscathed. By the time the crops failed in 1648, the first hostilities of the civil war were over but the bitterness remained. The nightmare of this domestic kind of war was its indistinct firing lines and the fact the enemy was not an alien but a neighbour, brother or friend. The rift lines were complex and deep. Old rivalries and new opportunism added to the murderous confusion of civil war. Waged in the name of opposing interests and ideologies, the pitiful destruction and its bitter aftermath were acted out on the village greens and town squares, in the demesnes of castles and the courtyards of great country houses.

One of the many displaced by war was the young woman, Dorothy Osborne. She was twenty-one and in peaceful times would have been cloistered on her family’s estate in deepest Bedfordshire awaiting an arranged marriage with some eligible minor nobleman or moneyed squire. Instead, she was on the road with her brother Robin, clinging to her seat in a carriage, lurching on the rutted track leading southwards on the first leg of a journey to St Malo in France, where her father waited in exile. Low-spirited, disturbed by the catastrophes that had befallen her family, Dorothy could not know that the adventure was about to begin that would transform her life.

Dorothy’s family, the Osbornes of Chicksands Priory near Bedford, was just one of the many whose lives and fortunes were shaken and dispersed by this war. At its head was Sir Peter Osborne, a cavalier gentleman who had unhesitatingly thrown in his lot with the king when he raised his standard at Nottingham in August 1642. Charles’s challenge to parliament heralded the greatest political and social turmoil in his islands’ history. And Sir Peter, along with the majority of the aristocracy and landed gentry, took up the royalist cause; in the process he was to lose most of what he held dear.

Dorothy was the youngest of the Osborne children, a dark-haired young woman with sorrowful eyes that belied her sharp and witty mind. When war first broke out in 1642 she was barely fifteen and her girlhood from then on was spent, not at home in suspended animation, but caught up in her father’s struggles abroad or as a reluctant guest in other people’s houses. After the rout of the royalist armies in the first civil war, the Osborne estate at Chicksands was sequestered: the family dispossessed was forced to rely on the uncertain hospitality of a series of relations. Being the beggars among family and friends left Dorothy with a defensive pride, ‘for feare of being Pittyed, which of all things I hate’.²

By 1648 two of her surviving four brothers had been killed in the fighting, and circumstances had robbed her of her youthful optimism. Her father had long been absent in Guernsey. He had been suggested as lieutenant governor for the island by his powerful brother-in-law Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby, who had been awarded the governorship for life. To be a royalist lieutenant governor of an island that had declared for the parliamentarians was a bitter fate and Sir Peter and his garrison ended up in a prolonged siege in the harbour fortress of Castle Cornet, abandoned by the royalist high command to face sickness and starvation. Dorothy, along with her mother and remaining brothers, was actively involved in her father’s desperate plight and it was mainly the family’s own personal resources that were used to maintain Sir Peter and his men in their lonely defiance.

Camped out in increasing penury and insecurity at St Malo on the French coast, his family sold the Osborne silver and even their linen in attempts to finance provisions for the starving castle inmates. When their own funds were exhausted, Lady Osborne turned to solicit financial assistance from relations, friends and reluctant officials. Often it had been humiliating and unproductive work. Dorothy had shared much of her mother’s hardships in trying to raise funds and both had endured the shame of begging for help. These years of uncertainty and struggle took their toll on everyone.

Dorothy’s mother, never the most cheerful of women, had lost what spirits and health she had. She explained her misanthropic attitude to her daughter: ‘I have lived to see that it is almost impossible to believe people worse than they are’; adding the bitter warning, ‘and so will you.’ Such a dark view of human nature expressed forcefully to a young woman on the brink of life was a baleful gift from any mother. Lady Osborne also criticised her daughter’s naturally melancholic expression: she considered she looked so doleful that anyone would think she had already endured the worst tragedy possible, needing, her mother claimed, ‘noe tear’s to perswade [show] my trouble, and that I had lookes soe farr beyond them, that were all the friends I had in the world, dead, more could not bee Expected then such a sadnesse in my Ey’s’ [she could not look any sadder].³

So it was that this young woman, whose life had already been forced out of seclusion, set out with her brother Robin in 1648 for France. Dorothy recognised the change these hardships had wrought, how pessimistic and anxious she had become: ‘I was so alterd, from a Cheerful humor that was always’s alike [constant], never over merry, but always pleased, I was growne heavy, and sullen, froward [turned inward] and discomposed.’⁴ She had little reason to expect some fortunate turn of fate. More likely was fear of further loss to her family, more danger and deaths and the possibility that their home would be lost for ever.

An arranged marriage to some worthy whose fortune would help repair her own was the prescribed goal for a young woman of her class and time. Dorothy had grown up expecting marriage as the only career for a girl, the salvation from a life of dependency and service in the house of some relation or other. But it was marriage as business merger, negotiated by parents. Love, or even liking, was no part of it, although in many such marriages a kind of devoted affection, even passion, would grow. She struggled to convince herself it was a near impossibility to marry for love: ‘a happiness,’ she considered, ‘too great for this world’.⁵

Dorothy, however, had been exposed also to the more unruly world of the imagination. She was a keen and serious reader. She immersed herself in the wider moral and emotional landscapes offered by the classics and contemporary French romances, most notably those of de Scudéry. These heroic novels of epic length, sometimes running to ten volumes, enjoyed extraordinary appeal during the mid-seventeenth century. Some offered not just emotional adventure but also the delights of escapism by taking home-based women (for their readers were mostly female) on imaginary journeys across the known world.

Despite having her heart and imagination fired with fables of high romance, Dorothy knew her destiny as an Englishwoman from the respectable if newly impoverished gentry lay in a grittier reality. As she and her brother passed through their own war-scarred land they were faced by the hard truth that the conflict was not yet over and the country was becoming an increasingly disorderly and lawless place. Traditions of accepted behaviour and expectation were upended. Authority, from the local gentry landowners to the king, had been fundamentally challenged and law and order were beginning to crumble. Travelling was dangerous at any time, for the roads were rutted tracks and travellers were vulnerable to desperate or vicious men. There was no police force, and justice in a time of war was random and largely absent. In her memoirs Lady Halkett,* a contemporary of Dorothy’s, noted the increase in unprovoked acts of murderous sectarian violence against individuals: ‘there was too many sad examples of [such] att that time, when the devission was betwixt the King and Parliament, for to betray a master or a friend was looked upon as doing God good service.’⁶

Dorothy recalled later the self-imposed tragedy, witnessed at first hand, of what had become of England, ‘a Country wasted by a Civill warr … Ruin’d and desolated by the long striffe within it to that degree as twill bee usefull to none’.⁷ Certainly her family’s fortunes and future prospects appeared to be as ruined as the burned houses and dying cattle they passed on their journey south. However destructive civil war was to life, fortune and security, the social upheavals broke open some of the more stifling conventions of a young unmarried woman’s life. Although exposing her to fear and humiliation, the struggle to save her father propelled Dorothy out of Bedfordshire into a wider horizon and a more demanding and active role in the world.

Now she was on the road again: however disheartening the reasons for her journey, whatever the dangers, she was young enough to rise to this newfound freedom and the possibility of adventure. The bustling activity of other travellers was always interesting, the unpredictability of experience exhilarating to a highly perceptive young woman: for Dorothy the small dramas of people’s lives were a constant diversion. She shared her amusement with her brother Robin on the journey, possibly making similar comments to the following, when she noted the extraordinary diminishment wrought by marriage on a male acquaintance whom she had thought destined for greater things. It is as if she is talking to us directly, confiding this piece of mischievous gossip to an inclined ear:

I was surprised to see, a Man that I had knowne soe handsom, soe capable of being made a pretty gentleman … Transformed into the direct shape of a great Boy newly come from scoole. To see him wholly taken up with running on Errand’s for his wife, and teaching her little dog, tricks, and this was the best of him, for when hee was at leasure to talke, hee would suffer noebody Else to doe it, and by what hee sayd, and the noyse hee made, if you had heard it you would have concluded him drunk with joy that hee had a wife and a pack of houndes.⁸

Dorothy’s analytic, philosophical turn of mind always searched for deeper significance as well as humour in the antics of her fellows. Her conversational letters, full of irony and gossip, showed her striving to do right herself and yet highly entertained by the wrongs done by others. As Dorothy and Robin crossed by ferry to the Isle of Wight to await the boat to France there was much to watch and wonder at. When they eventually arrived at the Rose and Crown Inn they had the added piquancy of being close to the forbidding Norman fortress, Carisbrooke Castle, where Charles I was imprisoned, with all the attendant speculation around his recent incarceration and various attempts at escape and rescue.

Also en route to France was a young man of quite extraordinary good looks and ardent nature. William Temple was only twenty and had evaded most of the bitter legacies and depredations of the civil war. His family were parliamentarians, his father sometime Master of the Rolls in Ireland and a member of parliament there. William was his eldest son and although not dedicated to scholarship was highly intelligent and curious about the world, with an optimistic view of human nature. His easy manners, interest in others and natural charm were so infectious that his sister Martha claimed that on a good day no one, male or female, could resist him. Sent abroad by his father to broaden his education and protect him from the worst of the war at home, William Temple, naturally independent-minded and tolerant, avoided playing his part in the sectarianism that divided families and destroyed lives.

There was nothing, after all, to keep him at home, as his sister later explained: ‘1648 [was] a time so dismal to England, that none but those who were the occasion of those disorders in their Country, could have bin sorry to leave it.’⁹ William headed first for the Isle of Wight to visit his uncle Sir John Dingley who owned a large estate there. He had another more controversial family member on the island, his cousin Colonel Robert Hammond,* who as the governor of Carisbrooke Castle had the unenviable task of keeping the defeated king confined.

Having lost the first of the civil wars and in fear for his life, Charles I had escaped from Hampton Court in November 1647 but, like his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots nearly eighty years before, had decided against fleeing to France. Instead he turned up on the shores of the Isle of Wight. Taken into captivity in Carisbrooke Castle, Charles’s restive mind turned on schemes of rescue. He was plotting an uprising of the Scots and hoping even for help from the French, encouraged by his queen Henrietta Maria who had sought asylum there.

There has been some speculation that William may have visited his Hammond cousin too and seen the king at this time. If he did see Charles he was not impressed. In a later essay, written in his early twenties, he wrote disparagingly about how disappointed he was with the Archduke Leopold† in the flesh after his ‘towring titles gave mee occasion to draw his picture like the Knight that kills the Gyant in a Romance’. The sight instead of a mere mortal, in fact a very ordinary man that ‘methinks … looks as like Tom or Dick as ever I saw any body in my life’ reminded him of the commonplace appearance and ‘aire of our late King’.¹⁰ Emotionally, William was more royalist than parliamentarian but this less than respectful reference just three years after Charles’s traumatic execution, to what true royalists at that time would consider a martyred king, revealed his independent mind in action. To write of the ‘aire’ or manner of the king also suggested he had seen Charles I in life. If this was so then this visit to the Isle of Wight was the probable occasion for such a meeting.

Whether he saw the king or not, the most momentous event that year for William Temple was his chance meeting with Dorothy Osborne, a coup de foudre that transformed their lives. In 1648, probably in the early summer, an unexpected and potentially inflammatory confrontation with the nervous authorities on the island propelled their attraction for each other into something deeper. Just as Dorothy and her brother Robin were on their way to embark the boat for France, Robin impulsively ran back to the inn where they had just spent the night. A hotheaded young royalist, his outrage at the imprisonment of the king, and possibly festering resentment of his father’s ill-treatment too, had been fuelled by their proximity to the castle. With the diamond from a ring he scratched into the window pane a biblical quotation in defiant protest at Governor Hammond’s actions: ‘And Hammon was hanged upon the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.’¹¹ The insult was not just aimed at Hammond, it implied (for everyone knew their Bible) a complete political reversal and the confounding of one’s enemies. The unwritten next sentence was: ‘Then was the King’s wrath pacified.’

As Robin made his escape and ran back to where his sister, and most likely William Temple too, was waiting he was seized by the authorities and the youthful party were taken before the governor. That summer the parliamentary forces guarding the island were particularly suspicious and quick to react, having been alerted to the fact that their royal prisoner had already attempted two abortive escapes from their custody: in this febrile atmosphere these foolhardy young people were in danger of imprisonment, if not of actually being shot.

It was not only William’s relations who seemed to be influential on the island, however, for Dorothy and Robin also had a close kinsman, Richard Osborne, living in the castle as Charles I’s gentleman-of-the-bedchamber. He was implicated in at least one of the harebrained plots for the king’s escape, and the family connection may well have added further reason for their father’s exile in St Malo. The Osbornes were becoming known as royalist troublemakers. Little wonder then that this young Osborne’s appearance before a hard-pressed governor, confronted with his personally insulting and seditious graffiti, was not treated as a youthful prank.

Robin was one year older than Dorothy but she was the quicker witted and more judicious. As her brother was charged, Dorothy confounded all by stepping forward and claiming the offence as her own. This took a certain courage given her avowed dislike of drawing attention to herself and her almost pathological fear of inviting others’ scorn. It was also a dangerous time to admit to royalist affiliation expressed in such a threatening analogy. But Dorothy may not have just been impetuously protective of her brother, she may have hoped too that natural chivalry and social prejudices would work in their favour. Men were held responsible for the politics of a family and this meant women, like children, should not be punished for political crimes, their opinions considered the responsibility of their husbands and fathers.

Perhaps it was not just the governor’s reluctance to charge a woman that saved Dorothy and her brother: the fact that her new friend happened to be Governor Hammond’s cousin might have brought some influence to bear on the case. Almost certainly William was present when the Osbornes were arrested. His sister Martha remembered his report of this incident and how impressed he was with Dorothy’s spirited action: she considered this the moment when William committed his heart. The unfolding national drama and their own sense of shared danger had inflamed their youthful spirits into a passion grand enough to withstand anything. From that point William and Dorothy chose a lengthy and difficult path that became an epic tale in itself: ‘In this Journey began an amour between Sr W T and Mrs Osborne of wch the accidents for seven years might make a History.’¹²

Dorothy and her brother were free to continue their journey to France, now with heightened spirits, having with ingenuity escaped punishment, even death. They were joined by William whose easy talk and dashing good looks transformed the whole expedition. On the journey to St Malo the boat either passed near Herm, or Dorothy and William made a later expedition to it. One of the smallest Channel Islands, or Les Iles de la Manche as they were still known, it was then home to deer and rabbits, its coast a haven for smugglers, pirates and seabirds. The sight there of an isolated cottage caught the romantic imaginations of both young people: a few years later Dorothy reminded William, at a time when she was longing to escape with him the constraints of their more mundane world: ‘Doe you remember Arme [Herm] and the little house there[?] shall we goe thither[?] that’s next to being out of the world[.] there wee might live like Baucis and Philemon,* grow old together in our little Cottage and for our Charrity to some shipwrakt stranger obtaine the blessing of dyeing both at the same time.’¹³

Ovid’s story of these two lovers had particularly affected Dorothy who admitted to William that she cried the first time she read it in the Metamorphoses. She thought this the most satisfying of Ovid’s stories and identified with ‘the perfectest Characters of a con[ten]ted marriage where Piety and Love were all there wealth’.¹⁴ Perhaps as she was reunited in St Malo with her broken and dispossessed father she was reminded of how, like him, the gods, whom Baucis and Philemon had sheltered, had first been denied help by those from whom it was most due. She and her mother too had had doors closed against them in their desperate attempts to get food and supplies through to Sir Peter and his garrison. In her sense of abandonment she might have felt like Ovid’s gods ‘mille domos clausere serae¹⁵ [a thousand homes were barred against them]’.

Already emotionally committed to Dorothy, William stayed on with her and the Osborne family for at least a month, delaying his departure on the rest of his European tour. Dorothy was to write to him later that his frankness and his good nature were his most attractive qualities: ‘twas the first thing I liked in you, and without it I should nere have lik[ed] any thing’. Good nature was thought by some to be the sign of a simple nature, she thought, ‘credulous, apt to bee abused’, but Dorothy would always rather they both erred that way than became cynical and two-faced: ‘People that have noe good Nature, and those are the person’s I have ever observed to bee fullest of tricks, little ugly plotts, and design’s, unnecessary disguises, and mean Cunnings; which are the basest quality’s in the whole worlde.’¹⁶ This honesty and plain speaking was something they both shared, a quality that was not necessarily appreciated, in a woman at least. ‘Often I have bin told,’ Dorothy wrote to William later, ‘that I had too much franchise in my humor [frankness in my disposition] and that ’twas a point of good breeding to disguise handsomly.’¹⁷ Dorothy’s excuse was that such discretion could hardly be expected from someone who had been isolated from court life since she was a child.

During this month of close company and constant conversation Dorothy and William discovered a rare compatibility: ‘his thoughts mett with hers as indeed they could not choos, since they had both but one heart,’ he added in one of his personalised romances written specially for her. It is most likely that it was William who first declared his feelings. He was of a more impetuous and immediately expressive nature: his sister described him as having ‘passions naturaly warme, & quick, but temper’d by reason & thought’.¹⁸ Dorothy anyway was horrified at the idea of a woman courting a man and objected to fictions where this was made to happen: ‘It will never enter into my head that tis possible any woman can Love where she is not first Loved.’¹⁹

Dorothy noticed that they had a similar recipe for contentment, possibly highlighted by their mutual response to the dream of living like Philemon and Baucis in their island retreat: ‘only you and I agree,’ she wrote later, ‘[contentment] tis to bee found by us in a True friend,* a moderat fortune, and a retired life’.²⁰ This sense of destiny, made more intense by their youth (they were both just over twenty), would arm them against the pain of separation and frustration of their desires that they endured in the long years to come. The unusualness for the time of their dogged resistance to their parents’ wishes and their obstinate insistence on the pursuit of love also spoke of their own romantic temperaments and the extraordinary power of their clandestine letters to each other. These alone, through periods of extended separation and family harassment, were all they had to keep the flame alive and bolster each other’s belief in the possibility of marriage and consummation at last. ‘Read my heart,’ Dorothy wrote in one of her letters and that heartfelt quality is just what gave them such compelling force, for they carried all her intelligence, humour and longing for William in their separate exiles.

William and Dorothy united their fates against great practical, cultural and familial odds. Their falling in love with each other was not just a transformation of the heart. It involved a revolution against everything they had been bred to be, challenging the blind duty of children towards their parents, the pecuniary aspect of marriage and the inferiority of women in their relations with men.

Dorothy was intellectual, self-contained and enigmatic, her dark-eyed beauty perhaps inherited, along with her forthright character, from her Danvers grandmother, who the biographer John Evelyn claimed had Italian blood. William was even more conventionally good-looking; in Dorothy’s own words, ‘a very pritty gentleman and a modest [one]’.²¹ According to his sister his luxuriant dark brown hair ‘curl’d naturaly, & while that was esteem’d a beauty nobody had it in more perfection’.²² In an age of shaved heads and extravagant wigs, he wore his own hair long and unpowdered. He was tall and athletically built and overflowing with a breezy energy and enthusiasm that attracted everyone. Dorothy’s seriousness of mind would deepen his character while his own ‘great humanity & good nature, takeing pleasure in makeing others easy and happy’²³ brought warmth and optimism to a woman who felt keenly the darker side of life. ‘I never apeare to bee very merry, and if I had all that I could wish for in the World I doe not thinke it would make any visible change in my humor,’²⁴ was how she explained her naturally pensive, even sorrowful, expression.

Their stolen month of ecstatic discovery was brought to an abrupt end. Sir John Temple had learned with irritation that his son had barely travelled beyond the English shores; his irritation became alarm when he heard ‘the occasion of it’: his son’s delight in an impoverished young woman. He issued the stern parental order to depart to Paris without delay. This was an age when even grown children expected to obey their parents absolutely and in this William conformed immediately. Both he and Dorothy would continue to honour their parents’ wishes, even when they ran diametrically opposed to their own, although through evasion and covert rebellion they managed not always to comply. There were crucial material, social as well as moral imperatives for filial duty and both Temple and Osborne fathers intended to enforce them. For Dorothy and William to marry without family support meant a precipitous plunge into poverty as family money was withheld; and with the debilitating loss of social status came diminished opportunities for suitable employment. However, much as both families disliked the idea of love entering marriage negotiations and obstinately continued to frustrate this renegade plan, the subversive lovers made a private commitment to each other while in St Malo and trusted they might have a future together some day.

Looking back on their lives, William’s sister had thought his and Dorothy’s courtship was as good a love story as any fiction and that their letters should have been published as a ‘Volum’. ‘I have often wish’d the[y] might bee printed,’ she wrote, and even though she thought her brother’s writings exceptional it was Dorothy’s letters that she particularly admired: ‘I never saw any thing more extraordinary then hers.’²⁵ This call for their publication was a radical statement at the time. It was perhaps a measure of how highly esteemed Dorothy’s letters were, even by contemporaries, that Martha could envisage personal love letters from a woman to a man, to whom she had been forbidden to write and had yet to marry, could ever properly be published when such exposure was considered unwomanly, or worse. The extreme vicissitudes of their love affair were recognised by everyone who knew them, and most acutely by Dorothy and William themselves, as making their story akin to the best fictional romances where true love was thwarted at every turn until the final satisfying embrace.

No letters survived from this first stage of their separation but both refer to this period in other contexts. In the following two to four years William re-wrote romances from the French* and amplified them for his own and Dorothy’s enjoyment. He also used the dramas to work out his own youthful thoughts and feelings on the conundrums of human experience and to distract him from his own unhappiness at being forcibly separated from the woman he loved. They were an outlet too for his frustrated desires, a proxy voice for feelings he was unable to express to her in person: ‘a vent to my passion, all I made others say was what I should have said myself to you upon the like occasion’.²⁷ He revealed just how much she haunted him: ‘[I] shewd you a heart wch you have so wholly taken up that contentment could nere find a room in it since first you came there.’²⁸ William told Dorothy they were meant to be read as letters from him to her.

A letter composed by William and introduced into the plot of one of these romances, The Constant Desperado, spoke directly to her alone, he declared, the more passionate the feeling, the more personally it was written for her: ‘you will find in this a letter that was meant to you though nere superscribd, and bee confident whatever in it is passionate said twas you indited [it was composed for you].’²⁹

Embedding his messages in the overheated atmosphere of a French romance also gave William a means of communicating intense emotion and dramatic declarations without embarrassment. Despite some hyperbole necessary for the genre, his sense of loss and despair in being separated from Dorothy was real and direct and expressive of his own youth and overflowing feelings. It also gave an insight into her conversations with him before he left on his journey, when she feared most that his declarations of love were just airy confections and would disperse on the wind:

Madam

I count all that time but lost which I liv’d without knowing you … Tis impossible to tell you how often I have died since I left you, for I have done it as often as I have thought of you, and thought of you as often as I have breath’d; you thinke it strange that I am dead and yet have motion enough to write, alas (Madam) though I am dead, my passion lives, and tis that now writes to you, not I; have I not often told you that would never dye? And as often I could never outlive the losse of your sight; you at first thought them winde like other words, and they would soone blow over, but learne (Madam) a lovers heart is allwayes at his mouth when his Mistresse is neere him … for all this[,] dead as I am[,] if my hopes are not so too, and there are any of seeing you, methinks your eyes would revive mee … Let me know by your letters you remember mee, if you would not have mee dye beyond all hopes of a resurrection.³⁰

In writing these personalised romances for Dorothy, William was also setting himself up in competition with the French writers she so much esteemed. Throughout their courtship she urged the turgid volumes upon him, begging him to read them too so that she could discuss character and motivation with him. Here he was attempting a pre-emptive strike, hoping perhaps that she would rate his work as highly as theirs, or at least see him in an enhanced light. His romances also pursued certain philosophical and moral arguments that suggest something of their youthful discussions, as well as the surge of emotion that overcame them both during their transfiguring month in St Malo.

In speaking of the hero of one of his stories, William amplified his country pursuits into allegories on life itself. Here he appears to acknowledge that his newfound love also brought danger; the greater the ecstasy the more painful the loss. In love, he was now no longer safe and self-contained and his carefree days were over:

sometimes he flies the tender partridge, others the soaring hearne [heron] and his hawkes never missing, hee concludes that fly wee high or low wee must all at length come alike to the ground; if there bee any difference that the loftier flight has the deadlier fall. sometimes with his angle hee beguiles the silly fish, and not without some pitty of theire innocence, observes how theire pleasure proves theire bane and how greedily they swallow the baite wch covers a hooke that shall teare out theire bowels, hee compares lovers to these little wittlesse creatures, and thinks them the fonder [more foolish] of the two, that with such greedy eyes stand gazing at a face, whose beguiling regards will pierce into theire hearts, and cost them theire freedome and content if they scape with theire lives.³¹

The face he had gazed on he described thus: ‘her eyes black as the night seem’d to presage the fate of all such as beheld them. Her browne haire curl’d in rings, but indeed they were chaines that enslav’d all hearts that were so bold as to approach them.’³² There is no doubt that he was pointedly describing Dorothy, from whom he was exiled at the time. During the six and a half years of their separation she was indeed circled by suitors bold enough to approach her. She was pressed by her father, and then more threateningly by her brother, to accept anyone with a suitable fortune, but she withstood the emotional blackmail, deprecating each suitor to William with a sharp wit and dispatching them all with unsentimental glee. But her position was parlous. For most of their courtship, Dorothy was secluded in her family’s country house, not knowing whether William would remain loyal or that either of them could continue to resist the family pressure on them to conform. At times their spirits and hope failed them. Illness, depression and threats of death made their ugly interjections. There could never be any certainty until their struggle had run its course.

Somehow, through personal tragedy, family blackmail, enforced separation, misunderstandings, ridicule and despair, Dorothy and William clung against all the odds to a sometimes faltering faith in each other and in the triumph of romantic love. For a young couple to maintain their fidelity to an ideal of a self-determined life, no matter what outrage, arguments and threats were marshalled against them, merely compounded in the eyes of the world their disrespect and folly. For Dorothy Osborne and William Temple to remain constant to each other and overcome every obstacle, from when they first met in 1648 through to their eventual, longed-for consummation at Christmas 1654, was remarkable indeed. Dorothy wrote to him in the midst of their trials: ‘can there bee a more Romance Story than ours would make if the conclusion should prove happy[?]’³³ but it seemed the vainest hope.

* Lady Halkett (1623–99) was born Anne Murray, her father a tutor to Charles I and then provost of Eton College. He died when she was a baby and her remarkable mother became governess to the royal children. Anne was a highly intelligent and spirited young woman and after a wild and adventurous life as the assistant to a secret agent employed by Charles I she eventually married a widower, Sir James Halkett, at the late age of thirty-three. After the death of her husband she became a teacher herself.

* Robert Hammond (1621–54), a distinguished parliamentarian soldier and friend of Cromwell, nephew of the royalist divine Dr Henry Hammond, chaplain to the king, and cousin to William Temple. Sent by Cromwell to Ireland as a member of the Irish council responsible for reorganising the judiciary, he caught a fever and died at the age of thirty-three.

† Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria (1614–62), governor of the Spanish Netherlands and art collector. His collection is now part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

* Ovid’s Metamorphoses, viii, 620–724. Philemon’s name connoted love and that of his wife Baucis modesty. Dorothy had identified closely with the old couple who had been wedded in their youth and lived in contented poverty, growing older and ever closer. For their simple kindness and hospitality to the gods Jupiter and Mercury, who were travelling incognito and had been denied succour at every other door, they were rewarded with a temple in place of their cottage and transformed into priests and granted their only request: that having lived so long together in close companionship they might be allowed to die together. As death approached, they both transmuted into trees, Philemon an oak and Baucis a linden tree, their trunks and branches so closely intertwined they were as one. Dorothy’s own signed copy of the 1626 edition of Sandys’s translation of Ovid is now in the Osborn collection in the Beinecke Library at Yale.

* They both used the word ‘friend’ to mean also a close family member, most notably a spouse.

* William Temple adapted his series of romances from François de Rosset’s Histoires Tragiques, a collection of nineteen versions of true stories that were collected and published in 1615 with many further editions. William’s additions and departures from the original were expressive of his more sympathetic nature and philosophical mind, as well as outlets for frustrated feeling. Most significantly, however, they were personal messages to the woman for whom he was writing.

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.†

Certainly Dorothy and her family seemed to have nothing but affection for the place and the quiet and prosperous rural life that they lived there. However her father’s duties as lieutenant governor of Guernsey were to require long absences from home and in the end almost beggared the Osborne fortune. The first scare occurred in the period around Dorothy’s birth and infancy. At the beginning of 1626 England was at war with Spain and intelligence reports suggested the islands of Guernsey and Jersey were likely to be invaded. The attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada barely thirty-eight years before lingered in the memory and mythology of many, even those who were as yet unborn at the time. To make matters worse, France too seemed ready to strike at these vulnerable islands in response to the Duke of Buckingham’s failed attempt to aid the Protestants under siege at La Rochelle. By October 1627, Sir Peter Osborne was dispatched to Guernsey in charge of 200 men* as reinforcements in the defence of Castle Cornet against possible French or Spanish adventuring.

Guernsey, along with all the Channel Islands, was of great strategic importance, sited as it was in the middle of a trade route and within striking distance of France: a contemporary scholar described them, ‘seated purposely for the command and empire of the ocean’.⁸ At a time when prosecutions for witchcraft on the English mainland were in decline, Guernsey was distinguished for its zealous persecution of witches and sorcerers and its more barbaric treatment of the accused. It seemed that being old, friendless and female carried an extra danger there: ‘if an ox or horse perhaps miscarry, they presently impute it to witchcraft, and the next old woman shall straight be hal’d to prison.’⁹ The minister of the established Presbyterian Church of Guernsey wrote of the cruelties practised on convicted witches in Normandy in an attempt to get them to confess: ‘the said judges … before the execution of the sentence, caused them to be put to the torture in a manner so cruel, that to some they have torn off limbs, and to others they have lighted fires on their living bodies.’¹⁰ Anglo-Norman in culture, Guernsey followed this approach rather than that of the more moderate English in their treatment of convicted witches. As the dungeons of Castle Cornet provided the only real jail on the island, Sir Peter Osborne would have become responsible for any poor wretch incarcerated there prior to eventual execution by hanging or burning.

The threat of war evaporated, however, soon after these extra troops had arrived and the townspeople, restive at having to support their living expenses, agitated to have them dismissed. They were ordered back to England by the beginning of 1629. Sir Peter Osborne may well have returned with them and travelled on to his estate in Bedfordshire, to spend some time with his family. His father had died and he had inherited the estate, and his youngest and last child, Dorothy, was by then in her second year.

Dorothy’s mother, along with the vast majority of women of her class, was unlikely to have breast-fed her children. The Puritan tendency was gaining moral force by the beginning of the seventeenth century and proselytised the benefits of maternal breast-feeding but the Osbornes of the time did not identify themselves either with such radical religious or political interests. For a woman like Dorothy’s mother to feed her own child was still such a rarity that it would have excited some kind of comment or record. She was much more likely to have paid another woman, already nursing her own baby, to do the job. However there were various progressive tracts advising that maternal breast-feeding helped make the mother and child bond stronger, re-enacted the Blessed Virgin’s relationship with Jesus, and safeguarded the child from imbibing the inferior morality of the wet nurse (a name first given to these practitioners in 1620).

Juan Luis Vives,* the celebrated educationalist of the previous century, whose ideas influenced the education of both Mary I and Elizabeth I and extended well into the seventeenth century, looked to the animal kingdom to support his treatise that a mother who fed her own child built a stronger bond: ‘Who can say to what degree this experience [maternal breast-feeding] will engender and increase love in human beings when wild beasts, which are for the most part alien to any feelings of love for animals of a different species, love those who nourished and raised them and do not hesitate to face death to protect and defend them?’ He also feared for the effect on the child of suckling from a woman other than its own mother: ‘we are often astonished that the children of virtuous women do not resemble their parents, either physically or morally. It is not without reason that the fable, known even to children, arose that he who was nurtured with the milk of a sow has rolled in the mire.’¹¹

By Vives’s standards the woman who was chosen to feed the youngest Osborne must have had not only a talent for childcare, for Dorothy survived infancy,* but also moral and intellectual qualities of some distinction. By the time her father returned from Guernsey, Dorothy would have been weaned and begun to take her place in the family. Despite the eight sons already born to her mother and father, it was still customary to deplore the birth of a girl. Give me sons and yet more sons was the usual cry from both men and women. Letters and journals of the time were full of fathers’ disappointments and mothers’ apologies for failing to provide the family with another boy. Lady Anne d’Ewes wrote to her absent husband, already the father of sons, making the best of their disappointment, ‘though we have failed in part of our hope by the birth of a daughter, yet we are freed from much care and fear a son would have brought.’¹²

Dorothy does not write directly of her early education but there was no doubt from her letters that she was wonderfully expressive in her own language and reasonably fluent in French. She had a sophisticated and unusually direct writing style that was highly valued by William Temple and his sister, and other contemporaries lucky enough to receive them. Dorothy was sharply intelligent and perceptive with a strong will and mischievous wit. A keen reader, she knew her classical authors, was particularly fond of Ovid, and devoured contemporary French novels of interminable length so enthusiastically that she even bothered to reread some of them in English, commenting unfavourably on the quality of the translations.

It is most likely that her education was mostly at home at Chicksands and then, with the political upheavals of civil war, possibly for a time in Guernsey with her father, and later in France. It was usual for a daughter in her position at the end of a big family and very close in age to the brother above her to be educated initially with him, sharing some lessons at least. In the case of the Osborne family, home education of the previous generation was conducted by the local curate, as was the case for their uncle Francis growing up at Chicksands some two decades earlier. A cynical man who felt he had not fulfilled his promise, he blamed his home education for his lack of skills necessary to progress in a self-serving world. School learning, on the other hand, he believed, would have instilled the duplicity and opportunism necessary for success.

Personal ambition and independence of mind were reckoned absolutely undesirable, even a sign of madness, in a girl growing up in the early seventeenth century. The remarkable flowering of English women’s education among the elite had been a temporary phenomenon of the mid-sixteenth century and was now over. For a while, Sir Thomas More’s famous statement, ‘I do not see why learning … may not equally agree with both sexes,’¹³ was put into triumphant practice by a number of noblewomen of the time. Elizabeth I and the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke (who united their brilliance with the Cecil and Bacon families) were shining examples of this efflorescence. However, by the time Dorothy was a girl the rising tide of Puritanism stressed a more obedient and domestic role for women. Certainly daughters of the gentry were taught to read and write. Fluency in French was also considered a useful refinement for a lady. But equally important was learning the social arts of music, dancing, drawing and embroidery. There is lasting evidence that Dorothy excelled at the last, for a beautiful silk coverlet finely embroidered by her with a variety of animals and insects, birds and flowers still exists in her family’s keeping.

A contemporary of Dorothy’s, Anne, Lady Fanshawe, had a broadly similar structure to her life* and described in her memoirs her early education in the country and frustration at learning the womanly arts when she longed to be living an active life: ‘[it] was with all the advantages that time afforded, both for working all sorts of fine works with my needle, and learning French, singing, lute, the virginals, and dancing; and, not withstanding I learned as well as most did, yet was I wild to that degree that the houres of my beloved recreation took up too much of my time, for I loved riding in the first place, and running, and all acteive pastimes; and in fine I was that which we graver people call a hoyting girle.’¹⁴

However, all these social graces were only the gloss on a seventeenth-century gentlewoman’s education, for at the heart of her moral and intellectual schooling was religion. This and a due respect for the authority of her parents was the structure by which she was expected to live her life. The mother of Margaret Lucas, who later as the Duchess of Newcastle† became notorious for her lack of self-effacement, laid on tutors for her daughter in all the basic ladylike skills, but Margaret reckoned they were more for ‘formality than benefit’ and consequently ‘we were not kept strictly thereto, for my mother cared not so much for our dancing and fiddling, singing and prating of several languages, as that we should be bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest principles’.¹⁵

Another daughter of a royalist family, Lady Halkett, recalled the emphasis put on her religious education under the eye of an intellectual mother. Each day began and ended with prayer and devotional reading, usually of the Bible, and the local church was a regular meeting-place for worship and for instruction: ‘for many yeares together I was seldome or never absent from devine service att five a clocke in the morning in the summer and sixe a clock in winter.’¹⁶ This routine continued until the Puritan ascendancy during the commonwealth discouraged displays of public worship.

Religion played more a pragmatic than a spiritual role in the average young woman’s life by setting and enforcing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. It provided the moral framework to an individual life and the badge of identity for the extended family. As Sir George Savile* explained to his daughter, her education very much in mind: ‘Religion is exalted reason, refined and sifted from the grosser parts of it … it is both the foundation and the crown of all virtues … It cleanseth the understanding, and brusheth off the earth that hangeth about our souls.’¹⁷ He also thought it better if young women remained loyal to the religion they were brought up in as it was ill-advised for a girl to trouble her head with religious debate, ‘in respect that the voluminous inquiries into the truth, by reading, are less expected from [your sex]’.¹⁸

Dorothy was brought up to be the ideal daughter with an unquestioning belief in God and acceptance of His will and, by extension, the authority and dictates of her family. Growing up just before the cataclysmic upheavals of the civil wars, she was the youngest child in a comfortably off patriarchal family. There was a well-ordered pattern to life and a narrow range of choices for her future. The quality and horizons of her adult life depended on two things above all else: the nature, status and financial means of the man she would marry; and her health, for few women escaped their destiny of multiple childbirth and untreatable diseases that could only be left to run their course.

The influential religious writer Jeremy Taylor,* whom Dorothy considered her spiritual mentor, offered his tolerant and practical interpretation of the scriptures by which a young woman like her could choose to live a worthwhile and pious life: ‘Let the women of noble birth and great fortunes … nurse their children, look to the affairs of the house, visit poor cottages, and relieve their necessities, be courteous to the neighbourhood, learn in silence of their husbands or spiritual guides, read good books, pray often and speak little, and “learn to do good works for necessary uses”, for by that phrase St. Paul expresses the obligation of Christian women to good housewifery and charitable provisions for their family and neighbourhood.’¹⁹

Chicksands Priory housed not only the Osborne family but also their servants with whom they lived closely. The real wealth of the estate consisted in about 800 acres of arable land, a similar amount of pasture providing grazing for sheep and cattle. There was a similar acreage again of woodland, with all the essential resources that provided building and fencing materials, firewood, cover for game and protection from the wind and the worst of the weather. On top of this was a further acreage of uncultivated heathland. Chicksands estate also housed its tenant farmers and estate workers in some forty different houses. There were two water mills to grind the corn they harvested. Vegetables and fruit, meat, milk, flour, all would have been produced for the substantial community who relied on the Osborne family and their land for their livelihoods.

Before the civil wars and the depredations on his fortunes, together with the swingeing fines that followed, Sir Peter Osborne’s annual income was £4,000 a year, the equivalent today of just under half a million. Life was lived in the raw, the poor and sick alongside the well-off and hearty, the yeoman workers and tradesmen amid the leisured classes of gentry and aristocracy. On a country estate everything was on an intimate scale, the people living close to the earth and its seasons: deer were hunted, wild animals trapped and domestic beasts slaughtered and butchered on site; the mentally ill or retarded were absorbed in the family and the larger community; babies were born in equal travail and danger, be it in the big house or the hovel; people suffered and died at home while all around them life went on.

The Duchess of Newcastle, a contemporary of Dorothy’s, remembered being a sensitive child who shrank from the extremes of life and death that assailed her sensibilities on her parents’ estate in Essex. She refused to join the other ladies of quality who crowded round a hunted deer as it was killed ‘that they might wash their hands in the blood, supposing it will make them white’ and, unusually for her time, honoured the life in all creatures: ‘it troubles my conscience to kill a fly, and the groans of a dying beast strike my soul.’²⁰

Dorothy Osborne owned up to a similar liveliness of imagination and fellow feeling: ‘Nothing is soe great a Violence to mee, as that which moves my compasson[.] I can resist with Ease any sort of People but beggers. If this bee a fault in mee, tis at least a well natured one, and therefore I hope you will forgive it mee.’²¹ Growing up at Chicksands, Dorothy’s days had a rhythm and regularity dictated by the seasons and interrupted only by the visits of family and friends. Journeys were difficult and lengthy and young unmarried women could not undertake them on their own, so Dorothy usually had to wait until an obliging member of her large extended family could accompany her. In one of her later letters to William, Dorothy described in detail the pattern of her daily life. She happened to choose a June day in 1653 when she was twenty-six but, as she made clear, the pattern of rural life remained essentially unaltered through the years: it is reasonable to believe it was a sketch of many summer days at Chicksands when she was still a girl. It is this famous passage that Virginia Woolf recalled when she gazed on that country wedding in 1928.

You ask mee how I passe my time heer, I can give you a perfect accounte not only of what I doe for the present, but what I am likely to do this seven yeare if I only stay heer soe long. I rise in the morning reasonably Early, and before I am redy I goe rounde the house til I am weary of that, and then into the garden till it grows to[o] hott for mee. About ten a clock I think of making mee redy, and when that’s don I goe into my fathers Chamber, from thence to dinner, where my cousin [Henry] Molle and I sitt in great State, in a Roome & at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner wee sit and talk till Mr B [Levinus Bennet, Sheriff of Cambridgeshire] com’s in question and then I am gon. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working [needlework] and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shade singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare theire voices and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vast difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee. I talke to them and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the Knoledge that they are soe. Most Comonly when wee are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay behinde, & when I see them driving home theire Cattle I think tis time for mee to retyre too. When I have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the side of a small River that runs by it where I sitt downe and wish you with me.²²

Under the brilliance of this evocation of the centuries-old pattern of country life and the idyll of an English summer day lay a sense of personal frustration. While the herd girls were unaware, Dorothy believed, of the sublime simplicity of their lives she, the young unmarried daughter of the estate, was over-conscious of her own youth idled away while she waited on the will of others. She was richer, better educated and living in greater comfort than the girls minding the cattle, yet she had to look to marriage for purpose in her life and seemed in part to envy the useful and natural freedom of their days. Where she was solitary they had comradeship; where she was weighed down with her heavy seventeenth-century dress, its tight bodice and bulky petticoats and all the expectations laid upon a lady of quality, they were less encumbered, sprightly and carefree. In reality the lives of these country girls were hard and narrow, and winter would have made their labour much less enviable, but Dorothy’s reaction to their lively conversation and the simplicity of their working lives, making them ‘the happiest People in the world’, revealed the feeling that her own life lacked autonomy and purpose.

The civil war that began in 1642 only destroyed for a while this ordered rural life, but the Osbornes’ easy prosperity was gone for ever. The effects on the family were catastrophic but commonplace. Two of Dorothy’s brothers died in action fighting for the king; Henry, lieutenant colonel of foot, at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 when he was thirty-one and Charles, only seven years older than Dorothy, also lieutenant colonel of foot, was killed at Hartland in Devon the following year when he was twenty-six. The depredations went deep and wide: her father’s annual income was reduced by 90 per cent to £400 per annum;* both parents were prematurely aged by the hazards and relentless strain of their circumstances, and Dorothy herself, temporarily at least, lost her belief in a benign world. But along with the destruction and suffering of war also came opportunity. Civil war particularly touched everyone and it affected Dorothy’s life as deeply as any. Most significantly, it interrupted the rural seclusion of her life, introducing her to new and at times alarming experiences, and it disrupted the marriage dance choreographed for her by the wider family.

Dorothy’s early life had been lived against the uncertain backdrop of Charles I’s personal rule. After his relationship with a succession of parliaments had broken down over intractable financial, political and religious issues, the king had dismissed his 1629 parliament with little intention of meeting them again. He became increasingly isolated from his own people who were suspicious that his private relationships, with his Catholic wife Henrietta Maria and reckless favourite Buckingham, until his assassination in 1629, exerted a sinister influence on his public policies. After what was called the ‘Eleven Years’ Tyranny’, Charles was forced to recall parliament in 1640 and agree to a raft of concessions, limiting his power and redressing some of the grievances against him. These agreements he subsequently ignored. Having lost the trust of a thoroughly disenchanted parliament, the king withdrew from Westminster and in the summer of 1642 raised his standard at Nottingham, marking the formal start of civil war.

Dorothy was fifteen when the country’s gentry and nobility were forced to choose between their king or their elected parliament. This choice could be a matter of life and death, placing their fortunes, their lives and the lives of their retainers at the disposal of their masters at war. There was no doubt that Dorothy’s father was one of the king’s men. Her immediate family seems to have been solidly royalist, with four brothers at least available to serve their king, two of whom were sacrificed in the process.

So it was that loyal Sir Peter Osborne was called upon once more to defend Castle Cornet, the only royalist stronghold in Guernsey, an independent-minded island long attached to its Presbyterianism, which had declared quickly for parliament. By comparison, its larger neighbour, Jersey, remained royalist largely due to the pervasive influence of the all-powerful Carteret family. Lieutenant governor of the island at the time was Captain Carteret, later Sir George Carteret, who was a man of outstanding courage and capability as a naval commander but also acquisitive and ambitious for himself. He had freedom of movement and action while Sir Peter stoically endured real privation in his attempt to hold Castle Cornet against a hostile populace. Carteret’s opportunism and Sir Peter’s incorruptible and ingenuous nature, together with his reliance on Carteret for much of the provisions needed by his garrison, meant conflict between the two governors was inevitable.

When Sir Peter Osborne returned to Guernsey in 1642 the inhabitants were already ill-disposed towards him. They had long memories of the unwelcome garrison he had brought over during the fear of invasion in 1627 and imposed on them for two years. There was natural antipathy anyway towards the mainland and previous governors who had looked to help themselves to the lion’s share of island revenues. The inhabitants’ independence was also fostered by the republican sensibilities of many of their clergy, some of whom were French Calvinists escaping from the cruel persecutions of their own king. Although there were no hostilities at first, from the beginning of the civil war Sir Peter seems to have lived in the castle almost entirely separate from the townspeople and islanders. This they resented, eventually listing their complaints against him the following year in a letter to the Earl of Warwick, whom Cromwell had appointed as governor of Jersey and Guernsey. The gist of these complaints was Osborne’s aloofness from the islanders and his misuse of the king’s grants by building promenades and genteel accommodation within the castle rather than bolstering its fortifications and providing extra billets for the soldiers.

By the spring of 1643, parliament had issued instructions to the newly appointed commissioners in Guernsey to seize Sir Peter Osborne and convey him back to them to answer for his disobedience and various other misdemeanours. When the commissioners attempted to fulfil this order, Sir Peter refused all compromise and threatened to destroy the town, firing several cannon shots over it and even some into it, terrifying the inhabitants. He was defiant, truly believing that no human agency could challenge King Charles’s right to rule the British Isles, and determined to expend whatever blood or fortune it took in defending his particular belief through the agency of his governorship of this one fort in a very small island. Sir Peter Osborne’s answer to the parliamentarian governor of the islands was morally clear, eloquent and quintessential of old royalist sentiment:

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

WILLIAM TEMPLE, essay, ‘Of Health and Long Life’

WILLIAM TEMPLE WAS born into a family of clever and robust country gentlemen who showed an independence of mind and political fleetness of foot in navigating the quicksand of allegiances during the middle of the seventeenth century. Not for them the self-sacrifice and dogged certainties of a Sir Peter Osborne. More intellectually curious perhaps, more pragmatic than idealistic, they served both king and parliament, and managed to promote their careers despite the reversals of civil war, establishment of a new republic and restoration of a king.

William’s nephew Henry Temple, 1st viscount Palmerston, believed that the family was descended from the eleventh century magnate Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Lady Godiva who, tradition had it, rode naked through Coventry to force her husband to revoke his oppressive taxation. More certain, and closer in time, was that William’s grandfather, after whom he was named, was the Sir William Temple who became provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1609. He was born in 1555 in a time of turmoil and suspicion at the end of Mary Tudor’s reign. The younger son of a younger son, he had to earn his own living. He flowered with the Elizabethan age and was a close friend and then secretary to the soldier poet Sir Philip Sidney.* When both were in their early thirties, he followed Sidney to the Netherlands when he was made governor of Flushing: family lore had it that Sir William then held Sidney in his arms as he died of infection from a war wound in 1586.

From being the intimate of one young Orpheus, Temple now allied himself with an Icarus. He became secretary to Elizabeth I’s ambitious favourite the Earl of Essex.† When Essex was executed in 1601 for plotting against the queen, Temple temporarily lost favour but Elizabeth had only two more years to live. He had spent almost a whole lifetime as an Elizabethan, but was to survive through two more kings’ reigns. His post as provost of Trinity was awarded under James I, as was his knighthood in 1622; he then died in 1627, the year of Dorothy’s birth and two years into the reign of Charles I.

Sir William’s intellectual and independent qualities of mind had been a large part of his attraction to Sir Philip Sidney. Educated at Eton, Temple had won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he quickly showed an aptitude for philosophical debate. Controversially he there became a passionate advocate of the philosopher Ramus‡ against the then orthodoxy of medieval scholasticism, with its highly convoluted definitions and terminology. Ramus had made a widely influential case for clarity, distinctness and analysis of all kinds, a systematisation of knowledge which turned out to be much easier to carry through in the new print culture. Temple’s annotated edition of Ramus’s Dialectics, arguing for a simplified system of logic, was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It had the distinction of probably being the first book published by the Cambridge University Press in 1584. According to his granddaughter, William’s sister Martha, this was ‘writ … as I have bin told in the most elegant Latin any body has bin Master off’.¹

Sir William became provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1609 and was active in transforming the college and university so that it more resembled Cambridge. He was a lively presence around Dublin and was elected to the Irish House of Commons in 1613 as a member for the university. He was knighted rather late in his career and died five years later aged seventy-two and still in office. He had died in harness, although his resignation had already been mooted owing to ‘his age and weakness’.² His granddaughter noted that he died as he had lived, with a certain blitheness and a concern with learning, ‘with little care or thought of his fortune’,³ and so had only a modest estate to pass on to his heir.

Sir William Temple’s elder son, Sir John Temple, was our William’s father. The family’s friendship with the family of the Earl of Essex continued through the next two generations. Sir John too had a distinguished career, as member of both the Irish and English parliaments and, most significantly, as Master of the Rolls* in Ireland. Born there in 1600, his life and fortune were to be very much bound up with that country. In the service of Charles I he was knighted in 1628. The next ten years were spent in a very happy marriage to Mary Hammond with the subsequent birth of seven children, five of whom survived infancy. The tragic death of his wife in September 1638, nine days after their twins were born, was a heavy blow to Sir John. Leaving his children with family in England, he returned to Ireland by the beginning of 1640 to take up his position as Master of the Rolls. At the beginning of the civil wars, he was forty-two years old and had just been elected a member of parliament for County Meath.

Although his efforts on behalf of the crown against the Irish rebels in 1641 had been much appreciated by the king, in the ideological conflicts his sympathies increasingly lay with the parliamentarians. He became one of the minor members of an influential cabal of disaffected aristocrats, called the ‘Junto’, concerned enough with the king’s growing autocracy to plot his downfall.* In the summer of 1643 Sir John was imprisoned on Charles I’s orders, having been charged with writing two scandalous letters suggesting the king supported the Catholic rebels. He remained in close confinement for a year.

Sir John was eventually released and returned to his family in England, rewarded for what was considered unnecessarily harsh treatment with a seat in the English parliament in 1646. That year he published the book, probably partly written during his imprisonment, for which he would become famous: Irish rebellion; or an history of the beginning and first progresse of the generall rebellion … Together with the barbarous cruelties and bloody massacres which ensued thereon. This was a powerful partisan account of the rebellion, given emotive force by gruesome eyewitness reports and sworn statements. It caused an immediate sensation on publication, fomenting anger in England against the Irish and outrage back in Ireland. Its effects lived on over the centuries. It was used in part justification of Cromwell’s subsequent violent suppression of the Irish and decades later, in 1689, the Irish parliament ordered that it be burned by the common hangman. Ulster Protestants to this day still call on the powerful accounts of Irish atrocities in its pages to fuel their own partisan feeling.

In the summer of 1655 Sir John returned to Ireland, highly commended by Cromwell, to take up his old job of Master of the Rolls, a position that was reconfirmed after Charles II’s restoration. He was also awarded leases on various estates, specifically in the area round Carlow, amounting to nearly 1,500 acres of prime farmland, and Dublin, including 144 acres of what was to become Dublin’s famous Phoenix Park. Having managed skilfully to ride both parliament’s and the king’s horses, Sir John Temple lived a full and productive life: unlike Sir Peter Osborne, he managed to evade paying a swingeing price for his allegiances. However, dying in 1677 at a good age, he ended his days an old and successful, but not particularly rich, man. He had always hoped that his eldest son would not do as he and his father had done, but would establish the family finances securely by marrying a woman of property. Instead he had lived to see his beloved son and heir turn his back on repairing the Temple family fortune to repeat the pattern of his forefathers, in this respect at least, and follow his heart.

Sir John Temple had married a woman with an eminent intellectual lineage from the professional rather than the landed classes. Mary Hammond was the daughter of James I’s physician, John Hammond, and the granddaughter of the zealous Elizabethan lawyer the senior John Hammond who was involved with the interrogation under torture of a number of Catholic priests, including the scholar and Jesuit Edmund Campion. Mary was the sister of Dr Henry Hammond, one of the great teachers and divines of his age who became a highly regarded chaplain to Charles I and whose sweetness of disposition endeared him to everyone.

While this branch of the family dedicated itself to saving the royal body and ministering to his soul, another brother Thomas and a nephew Robert were in just as close proximity to the king but actively engaged in supporting his enemies. Thomas Hammond sat as a judge at Charles I’s trial and Colonel Robert Hammond, having distinguished himself fighting for parliament during the first civil war, ended up as governor of the Isle of Wight and, albeit reluctant, jailer of the king. This was one of the many families where passionately held convictions, translated into civil war, split brother from brother, mother from son.

The Temples and the Hammonds were not aristocratic families but both excelled as successful administrators and scholars. What qualities of intelligence and energetic pragmatism they had were united in the children of Sir John and Lady Temple. Into the mix went a high degree of physical attractiveness and charm, for the Hammond genes produced their mother Mary, known as a beauty, and their uncle Henry, whose good looks were remarked on even by his colleagues, along with his inner grace: ‘especially in his youth, he had the esteem of a very beauteous person’.⁴

Within ten months of the marriage, Mary fulfilled every expectation of a young wife and produced her first child, the precious son and heir. William Temple was born on 25 April 1628. His father had just been knighted and the family’s fortunes were looking up. William was born at Blackfriars in London and was followed by a sister, Mary. This little girl died aged two, when William was four. Two months before her death a second brother, John, was born, followed by James two years after that. Then another daughter, again named Mary, was born in 1636 but she also died, this time aged five, when her eldest brother was thirteen.

At about the time this sister Mary was born, William was sent to be educated by his Hammond uncle Henry and live with him and his grandmother at the parsonage house on the Earl of Leicester’s Penshurst estate in Kent. Apart from his role as a much loved uncle, Dr Hammond became a highly important figure in young William’s life, more influential in nurturing the boy’s view of himself and his relationship to the world than his own father. William was seven or eight years old at the time and would grow up with much less of his father’s political intelligence and much more of his uncle’s romantic idealism, high-mindedness and social conscience.

Henry Hammond was barely thirty when he assumed his nephew’s moral and intellectual education. Despite a complete lack of self-promotional zeal, his academic career to that point had described a blazing trajectory. Excelling at Eton in both Latin and Greek and, unusually for the time, Hebrew, he was appointed as tutor in Hebrew to the older boys. Hammond’s lack of boyish aggression was remarked on and his gentle kindness and natural piety gave cause for some alarm in his more robust teachers. But something about this quietly studious and spiritual boy gained everyone’s respect. At the age of only thirteen he was deemed ready to continue his studies at Oxford, and became a scholar at Magdalen College. Before he was twenty he had gained his master’s degree and then turned his studies to divinity and was ordained by the time he was twenty-four.

Plucked from academia and court by the Earl of Leicester and planted in his rural idyll at Penshurst, Henry Hammond took up the much more varied and less exalted responsibilities of a country parish priest. It was in this role that his reputation as the most godly and lovable of men was burnished. Not only were his sermons marvels of accessible and provocative scholarship but also his pastoral care was exemplary, funding from his own income all kinds of schemes to support local children deprived of schooling, or their families of food or shelter. Strife and disharmony physically pained him and consequently he was the most successful peacemaker between families, neighbours and colleagues.

His social life exemplified that favourite biblical invocation: ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’⁵ His contemporary and biographer, Dr John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, enjoyed this inclusive hospitality too: ‘he frequently invited his neighbours to his table, so more especially on Sundays, which seldom passed at any time without bringing some of them his guests’.⁶ In fact so generous and unexpected was his charity that sometimes it appeared to strangers that it was he who was the angel after all: ‘his beneficiaries frequently made it their wonder how the Doctor should either know of them, or their distress: and looked on his errand, who was employed to bring relief, as a vision rather than a real bounty.’⁷

When Henry Hammond took up this position as country vicar his friends immediately urged him to marry in order to acquire the kind of domestic support necessary for the post, but when he found there was a richer rival for the woman he had chosen he withdrew, reconciling himself to celibacy. Luckily, his mother, for whom he had the greatest affection, uncomplicatedly fulfilled the domestic role in his life, managing to run the household, at least for the years he was tutoring his nephew. She as grandmother added her own motherly presence to the household William entered as a boy.

William arrived from the hustle of London into this atmosphere of benign social responsibility and scholarly devotion. Equally lasting in its effects on him was the joy he discovered in nature, his own acute senses and the rich variety of rural life that surrounded him at Penshurst. But into this idyll came tragedy. William’s mother, possibly accompanied by his younger surviving siblings, arrived at the parsonage house in the summer of 1638. Mary Hammond was close to the end of her sixth pregnancy and needed the support of her own mother and beloved brother. She went into labour and on 27 August Martha was born, followed fifteen minutes later by her twin brother Henry.

The celebration was short-lived, for their mother did not recover from the birth. Her long and painful decline, probably due to blood poisoning from puerperal fever, was endured by everyone in the household with increasing horror and dread. They watched over her for nine days before death inexorably claimed her.

William’s father, although only thirty-eight when his wife died, never married again. At a time when widowers invariably remarried quickly, this was highly significant as to the depth of his devotion and became a powerful part of the family lore on the constancy of love. Sir John expressed something of his feelings to his friend Leicester on whose estate his wife had just died:

I know your Lordship hath understood of the sad conditions it hath pleased the Lord to cast me into, since my return to these parts; your Penshurst was the place where God saw fit to take from me the desire of mine eyes, and the most dear companion of my life – a place that must never be forgotten by me, not only in regard of those blessed ashes that lie now treasured up there, and my desires that by your Lordship’s favor cum fatalis et meus dies venerit [when my fatal day should come], I may return to that dust.⁸

William was ten at the time of his mother’s death. As the eldest son he would have carried much of the burden of the family’s grief, particularly given his father’s shocked despair. With his mother dead and his father distraught, the existence of these twin babies, christened quickly the day after their birth in case they did not survive, were a consolation and proof of the continuity of life. From time immemorial twins have had a certain magic. In an age of high infant mortality their survival could be seen as close to miraculous. It seemed that the babies remained at the rectory and were under the care, along with William, and probably the other children too, of their Hammond grandmother. Out of those emotionally fraught days of grief for his dead mother and hope for the flickering lives of his new brother and sister, William nurtured a lifelong protectiveness and love for this baby sister Martha, and she a passionate connection with him.

At no time perhaps was Dr Hammond’s legendary sweetness of disposition and spiritual certainty more needed. His house had been the stage for this familial tragedy; now with his sister dead, his young nieces and nephews deprived of a mother, the family could only turn to him as a man of God. His A Practical Catechism, published six years later and written in conversational style, revealed his humane approach to living a godly life full of the kind of scholarly explication and pragmatic advice that his students and more questioning parishioners sought. He pointed out, for instance, that there were practical expressions in everyday life of Christ’s resurrection to help those grieving, the simplest being to ‘rise to new life’.⁹ And his emphasis on the benign paternity of God offered soothing words in a crisis that seemed bleached of reason: ‘the word “Father” implying His preparing for us an inheritance, His glorious excellence, and after that His paternal goodness and mercy to us, in feeding us and disposing all, even the saddest, accidents, to our greatest good, is a sufficient motive and ground of love’.¹⁰

Supported by avuncular insight and kindness and the practical care of his grandmother, William appeared to accept Uncle Henry’s exhortation to live in the present and trust in the goodness of God. He was naturally a far more energetic and robust child than his uncle had been and while an intelligent and intellectually curious boy he did not share the extraordinary aptitude for study and self-effacement shown by the student Hammond at Eton and Oxford. Sports and the outdoor life held as much attraction to William as his books. However, he shared with his uncle the distinction of height and great good looks. His sister Martha described him with some embarrassment, she wrote, because the truth sounded too flattering to be impartial: ‘He was rather tall then low [than short] his shape when he was young very exact [in perfect proportion]. His hair a darke browne curl’d naturally … His eyes gray but very lively. In his youth lean but extream active; soe yt nobody acquitted them selves better at all sorts of exercise, & had more spirit & life in his humor [disposition] then ever I saw in any body.’¹¹

Dorothy later, agreeing with Martha that William’s hair was a crowning glory, complained that he barely bothered to brush it: ‘You are soe necgligent on’t and keep it soe ill tis pitty you should have it.’¹² It was an illuminating glimpse of a naturally handsome man who nevertheless seemed to lack personal vanity of this kind.

All his life William Temple was to find the countryside more congenial than the town, gardening and family life more sympathetic than the sophistic toils of court. He had a highly developed sense of smell and a love of the sweet scent of earth, fresh air and fruit straight from the tree. When he first arrived in Kent as a boy he had left behind his early life in the biggest and smelliest city of them all. He found Dr Hammond living in the parsonage house that he had recently refurbished, ‘repaired with very great expense (the annual charge of £100) … till from an incommodius ruin, he had rendered it a fair and pleasant dwelling’.¹³ The garden was also replanted and the orchards restored.

The adult William’s delight in his own home life, his garden and simple things was nurtured when he was a boy in the care of his uncle. Dr Hammond’s biographer noted the scholar’s abstemiousness: ‘his diet was of the plainest meats … Sauces he scarce ever tasted of … In the time of his full and more vigorous health he seldom did eat or drink more than once every twenty-four hours.’¹⁴ Although of a much more sensual nature, William was influenced by the simplicity of his life at Penshurst and, as his sister Martha noticed later, he would rather eat at home than out, and when at home, ‘of as little as he thought fit for his company: alwayes of the plainest meats but the best chosen, & commonly din’d himselfe of ye first dish or whatever stood next him, & said he was made for a farmer & not a courtier, & understood being a shepheard & a gardener better than an Ambassador’.¹⁵ He did however indulge all his life in good wine, even when in his later years it cruelly exacerbated his gout.

With the advantages of experience and hindsight, William wrote his recipe for the social education of a young gentleman, with some recognition of what the Hammond household offered him when a boy: ‘The best rules to form a young man: to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one’s own opinions, and value others that deserve it.’¹⁶

Apart from learning by example about general hospitality towards others, modest conduct and the necessity for altruism in one’s actions in the world, William was also set to study more conventional subjects. Dr Hammond’s wide learning ranged over Greek and Latin, Hebrew (William doodled the Hebrew alphabet in one of his essay books), philosophy and the natural sciences, rhetoric, divinity and literature both ancient and modern. He had an extraordinary fluency in writing, starting on his elegantly argued sermons often as late as the early morning of the Sunday he was to preach and writing pages of well-reasoned and original prose straight off, quoting copiously and often rather creatively from memory. Hammond hated idleness, and never slept more than four or five hours a night, going to bed at midnight and rising before dawn. He filled his days with study, prayer and tireless pastoral care, visiting the sick and dying even while they had highly infectious diseases such as smallpox. No moment was wasted; even the everyday necessities of dressing and undressing were achieved with a book propped open beside him.

Although young William was a boy of ability and tremendous charm, inevitably his lack of superhuman dedication to study and denial of the senses were to be a disappointment to his uncle. This sporty boy loved tennis and outdoor pursuits. As he entered middle age, his sister reported he ‘grew lazy’ though all his life he had practised the ideal of effortless brilliance, ‘it had bin observed to be part of his character never to seem busy in his greatest imployments’. Like his uncle, and indeed his father, he showed little concern for material fortune and was disinclined to do anything he did not value merely to earn a living: ‘[he] was such a lover of liberty yt I remember when he was young, & his fortunes low, to have heard him say he would not be obliged for five hundred pounds a year to step every day over a Gutter yt was in ye street before his door’.¹⁷

Certainly Dr Hammond managed to inculcate Greek and Latin into his nephew and William learned to write philosophical essays in the most pleasing and mellifluous style. All those sermons he had to sit through found some expression in his youthful exhortatory works in which he built up great rhetorical pyramids musing on subjects such as hope and the vagaries of fortune. William was fortunate indeed to have Dr Hammond as his tutor, for this was a man of great gentleness and tolerance, even in the face of his pupil’s lack of application or lapses of concentration. The good doctor was well known for living by his claim that ‘he delighted to be loved, not reverenced’.¹⁸

In his friends’ view Henry Hammond was saintly, self-sacrificing and preternaturally meek; even if only half true it meant that a lively, attractive boy like William had a great deal of freedom and much kindness and affection from both his uncle and his Hammond grandmother, herself the daughter of a religious scholar. He did not have to endure the harsh regimes that characterised the upbringing of most of his contemporaries, where an absolute obliviousness to the emotional or psychological welfare of the individual child meant a schooling enforced by fear and flogging.

It was widely accepted by parents and teachers alike that educating young children, the males particularly, was akin to breaking horses – in the old-fashioned way by cracking whips not whispering. John Aubrey, an exact contemporary of both William and Dorothy, felt keenly the lack of parental sympathy and understanding in his own youth, a condition that he considered the norm in the first half of the seventeenth century: ‘The Gentry and the Citizens had little learning of any kind, and their way of breeding up their children was suitable to the rest: for whereas ones child should be ones nearest Friend, and the time of growing-up should be most indulged, they were as severe to their children as their schoolmaster; and their Scoolmasters, [were as severe] as masters of the House of correction [a prison charged with reforming prisoners]. The child perfectly loathed the sight of his parents, as the slave his torturer.’¹⁹

By this time the Renaissance ideal of education was degraded, with classics reduced to the drudgery of learning everything by rote and it was accepted that Latin and Greek, for instance, had to be whipped into a boy. The contemporary schoolmaster and writer Henry Peacham,* in his book on etiquette for the upper classes, described with resignation the cruelties that most educators believed had to be inflicted on boys in order to turn them into scholars: ‘pulled by the ears, lashed over the face, beaten about the head with the great end of the rod, smitten upon the lips for every slight offence with the ferula’.²⁰

In marked contrast William Temple’s boyhood education was almost exclusively in the benign company of an uncle who could not bring himself even to raise his voice in anger and sought instead to teach by encouragement and example. Henry Hammond’s friend and colleague Dr Fell seemed to approve of this pacifist approach to teaching: ‘his little phrase, “Don’t be simple,” had more power to charm a passion than long harangues from others.’²¹

When the boy William wasn’t sitting over his books or being coaxed to a love of study, he was free to explore the gardens and grounds of the estate, etching still deeper his natural affinity with the rural life. When a father himself, William replicated these early experiences in the freedom he allowed his own children and the affectionate indulgence with which he treated them. In one of his later essays he wrote that despite choosing personal liberty always over material gain, matters of the heart were of even greater priority, ‘yet to please a mistress, save a beloved child, serve his country or friend, [this man] will sacrifice all the ease of his life, nay his blood and life too, upon occasion’.²²

In fact the most violent treatment William had to endure while in the care of his uncle was the medical treatment at the time for various common ailments: ‘I remembered the cure of chilblains, when I was a boy, (which may be called the children’s gout,) by burning at the fire, or else by scalding brine.’ He recalled too how a deep wound when he was a youth was ‘cured by scalding medicament, after it was grown so putrefied as to have (in the surgeon’s opinion) endangered the bone; and the violent swelling and bruise of another taken away as soon as I received it, by scalding it with milk’.²³

Both William and his uncle shared a love of music. Dr Hammond, particularly in the youthful period of his life when he was in loco parentis for his nephew, would accompany himself on the harpsichon, a kind of virginal, or take up his theorbo, a large double-necked bass lute, and play and sing ‘after the toil and labour of the day, and before the remaining studies of the night’.²⁴

The kind of music-making indulged in by William and his uncle at Penshurst was of an unexacting domestic kind, practised in the home, sometimes in the company of a few country friends. In joining in the relaxation at the end of the day by playing and listening to music, William was merely doing what most people were doing across the land, in church, court and country. Aubrey famously declared: ‘When I was a Boy every Gentleman almost kept a Harper in his house: and some of them could versifie.’²⁵ For him the ‘Civill Warres’ changed everything, but informal music-making would continue regardless: Dorothy Osborne’s shepherdesses singing in the fields in summer remained just part of the rich musicality of a time when all classes of people made music domestically and turned to each other for entertainment.

This youthful interlude in a rural paradise under his uncle’s care had to come to an end. About the age of eleven, William left Penshurst and was sent to board at the grammar school at Bishop’s Stortford, a town some thirty miles from London and twenty-six from Cambridge. Despite an inevitably rude awakening to school life, this was as happy a choice as possible, for the school’s reputation and success were in rapid ascendancy under the inspired headship of Thomas Leigh. He not only set up Latin and writing schools but was also instrumental in building a library of repute, partially by insisting that every pupil donate a book as a leaving present. His regime was more tolerant and less violent than elsewhere. When he finally retired in the 1660s after a triumphant forty-seven years at the helm the school went into rapid decline, but he was still in charge while William and his younger brothers were schooled there. All his life William Temple retained his respect for Mr Leigh to whom, he was wont to say, ‘he was beholding for all he knew of Latin & Greek’.²⁶ His sister Martha added that he managed to retain all his Latin perfectly but regretted losing much of his Greek.

By the beginning of the 1640s William was just a teenager and still safely in school while the kingdom’s political certainties fell apart. For most of William’s life, Charles I had ruled without parliament, having dissolved his rebellious House of Commons, he hoped for ever, in 1629. The country had limped on under the king’s absolute rule until Scotland, always resistant to coercion, kicked back. Charles’s pig-headed insistence on imposing a Book of Common Prayer on the country of his birth brought to the fore long-held Scottish resentments against the crown. Two inflammatory passions that had so effectively driven the Scottish reformation, the hatred of foreign interference and of popery, were reignited. The eminent moderate Presbyterian Robert Baillie was shocked at the blind and murderous fury he found on the streets of his native Glasgow: ‘the whole people thinks poperie at the doores … no man may speak any thing in publick for the king’s part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day. I think our people possessed with a bloody devill, far above any thing that ever I could have imagined.’²⁷

Equally blind in his anger and faced with approaching war, Charles refused to capitulate. His inability to finance any sustained war forced him to recall in 1640 what became known as the Short Parliament. The members, given eloquent voice by John Pym, were too full of grievances over the misrule of the last eleven years to be in any mood to cooperate with the king’s demands, and Charles was in no mood to make amends. Within three weeks he dissolved this parliament. Barely six months later, his authority fatally undermined, forced to surrender to the Scottish terms and cripplingly short of money, the king had little recourse but to recall parliament for a second time. The sitting that began in November 1640 became known as the Long Parliament, hailed as a triumph for the people.

Sitting simultaneously to both Short and Long Parliaments was the convocation of divines, one of whom was William’s uncle Dr Hammond. With the introduction of seventeen new canons of ecclesiastical law, Charles intended to have his clergy insist from the pulpit on the power of monarchy. He also sought to make the subject matter and rituals of church service conform to a model that was anathema to the growing Puritan element among his clergy, with the altar being railed off, for instance. As a loyal supporter of the king, Dr Hammond was in the minority in this gathering. With parliament and king increasingly polarised and military action looming, Dr Hammond’s uncompromising position made him vulnerable. By 1643, in the middle of the first civil war, his vicarage was sacked and he was forced to flee his parish to seek refuge in Oxford, the new headquarters for the king, where he was later kept under house arrest himself. Although he was to become Charles’s personal chaplain in his various confinements, including for a while his imprisonment at Carisbrooke Castle, the place to which Hammond longed to return was his parish at Penshurst: ‘the necessity to leave his flock … was that which did most affect him of any that he felt in his whole life’.²⁸

It was a measure of the depth of ideological passions and the widespread effects of the political hostilities at the time that even such a naturally pacifist scholar as Henry Hammond, ministering to a country parish far away from the centres of political and ecclesiastical power, should have his daily life completely disrupted, his own life, even, threatened. He was never able to take up his living again at Penshurst but continued to write with all the fluency he had shown when young, sheltered by various friends and admirers, and enduring with unflagging patience the agony of kidney stones and gout that afflicted him in middle age. He died aged fifty-four of kidney failure in 1660, just as his old patron’s son was restored to the throne.

William’s father too suffered a reversal of fortune that reverberated in his son’s life. Sir John Temple had been a member of Charles I’s forces riding north in 1639 to confront the rebellious Scots. The following year he was rewarded with the position of Master of the Rolls in Ireland, one of the most senior appointments in the Irish chancery, and he left England to assume his responsibilities. His good fortune was not to last long, however, for in October 1641 he was in the thick of the Irish rebellion (or massacre as it was called by contemporaries). Deeply held resentments over the plantation policies of both James I and Charles I, encouraging Protestant settlers from England and Scotland, finally erupted in anarchic and bloody violence. The Irish Catholics joined forces with the equally disaffected Anglo-Norman ‘Old English’ aristocracy in an attempt to drive out the Protestants. Although the numbers killed are still open to dispute, there is little doubt that thousands of settlers were murdered, their farms burned, their families dispossessed. Rumour of inhuman atrocities spread like wildfire throughout England and Scotland, reviving fears of a popish conspiracy. With Charles’s situation so parlous at home, his cause was damaged further by the suspicions that he too was complicit in the conspiracy.

Sir John was undoubtedly appalled by the sights he witnessed and the stories he was told and had every reason to fear that this rebellion could turn into a St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, first against all Protestants but then drawing everyone in to a wholesale bloodbath. His anger towards the rebels was unassuaged, even as savage reprisals against them were carried out by the army. He was commended for his efficiency in ensuring that provisions got through to Dublin where the army was quartered but was obdurately against the official decision in 1643 to broker a deal with the rebels in order that Charles could withdraw his troops for use against the parliamentarian forces back in England. Sir John was suspended from his duties as punishment for this opposition and, along with three other privy counsellors, imprisoned in Dublin Castle for more than a year.

The bloody rupture of civil war affected everyone. William left Bishop’s Stortford School in 1643, the same year his uncle was forced out of his parish and his father was imprisoned. By then he was fifteen and although his sister claimed that he had learned as much as the school had to teach him, it was just as likely that the uncertainty of the times and his father’s fate had something to do with it too. He was old enough to go to Cambridge, the university fed by his school, but this transition was delayed by the family situation and the turmoil in the country. William’s world was in flux, his uncle had just been deprived of his living and his father disgraced and in danger. The parsonage house at Penshurst, for so long home to him, was gone, as was the family’s source of income, while his father’s life and future hung in the balance. The country had plunged into civil war.

By the summer of 1643 the royalist armies seemed to be marginally in the ascendant. It would be two years before individual parliamentary forces were consolidated into a disciplined fighting force, renamed the New Model Army, and the war swung decisively against Charles I. The destruction of life and livelihoods, the rupture of friendships and family loyalties, the waste of war were apparent everywhere.

There is no record of how William spent the eighteen months or so between his leaving school and entering university. Certainly for the first year his father was imprisoned, with all the uncertainty and hardship to his family that entailed. Only on Sir John’s release and return to England in 1644 did William’s life again seem to move forwards. On 31 August of that year William Temple was enrolled at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with Ralph Cudworth* as his personal tutor.

The college was known to be sympathetic to the Puritan cause and Ralph Cudworth, still a young man at twenty-seven, was a recently elected fellow with a growing reputation as a profound theological scholar and philosopher. At the time William came under his care, Cudworth was the leader of a group of young philosophers who became known as the Cambridge Platonists.† Cudworth himself had just published his first tract, A Discourse concerning the true Notion of the Lord’s Supper, and was to remain at Emmanuel only for William’s first year before taking up in 1645 his new post as master of Clare Hall and regius professor of Hebrew. His magnum opus, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated, was not published until 1678. Industrious, scholarly and prolific in his writings, Cudworth was described, memorably but probably unfairly, by Bolingbroke* as someone who ‘read too much to think enough, and admired too much to think freely’.

This immensely serious and learned young man had an uphill battle getting this sixteen-year-old fresher to buckle down to the finer points of theological and moral philosophy. William’s sister recalled that Cudworth ‘would have engaged [William] in the harsh studies of logick and phylosophy wch his humor was too lively to pursue’. His disposition certainly was lively, and his interests wide-ranging and not solely intellectual. Martha, his doting sister, explained what she considered the tenor of William’s life at Cambridge: ‘Entertainments (which agreed better with [his merry disposition] & his age, especially Tennis) past most of his time there, soe that he use to say, if it bin possible in the two years time he past there to forgit all he had learn’t before, he must certainely have done it.’²⁹

This sounds like a sister’s pride in her dashing, fun-loving, older brother and she was right about his passion for tennis which he continued to play at every opportunity until gout caught up with him in his forties. She was also right about his sybaritic, sensual and adventurous nature that drew him to experience the world for himself rather than live a scholar’s life of received opinion and reflection. However, there were aspects of his tutor’s profoundly argued philosophies that might have found some answering echo in William’s own interests and style as expressed in his later essays. Cudworth explored his theory of morality from the viewpoint of Platonism. He argued that moral judgements were based on eternal and unchanging ideals but, unlike Plato, he believed these immutable values existed in the mind of God. This kind of ethical intuitionism informed much of William Temple’s gentlemanly essays, although he was less insistent on a divine presence behind the moral patterns of human behaviour. In his jottings in old age on a range of subject matters for a forthcoming essay on conversation he wrote this:

The chief ingredients into the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding … Good nature and good sense come from our births or tempers: good breeding and truth, chiefly by education and converse with men. Yet truth seems much in one’s blood, and is gained too by good sense and reflection; that nothing is a greater possession, nor of more advantage to those that have it, as well as those that deal with it.³⁰

In fact William’s lack of orthodox religious certainty was to be used against him at various times in his life when he was accused of atheism, an absence of belief that was generally feared as criminal and depraved. A young man in seventeenth-century England flirting with the thought that God was not the answer to everything was as dangerously exposed as an American flirting with Communism in the mid-1950s during the McCarthyite inquisitions. The Church abhorred unbelievers and sought to demonise them. Ralph Cudworth, William’s tutor at Emmanuel, wrote in the preface to his True Intellectual System of the Universe that he would address ‘weak, staggering and sceptical theists’ but was not even going to try to argue with atheists, for they had ‘sunk into so great a degree of sottishness [folly]’ as to be beyond redemption. Even the new breed of empirical natural scientists were horrified by this absence of Christian belief and Robert Boyle, one of the founding fathers of physics and chemistry and a leading member of the Royal Society, left money in his will for a minister to preach eight sermons a year ‘for proving the Christian religion against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans’.³¹

In France, it was illegal to publish works in defence of atheism right up to the period of the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and in England the poet Shelley was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for writing and distributing a moderate little pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. As late as 1869, avowed atheists could not sit in the House of Commons or give credible evidence in a court of law.

Montaigne, who became William’s intellectual hero, was most influential in marshalling and expressing the current philosophical debate as reflected through the prism of the new scepticism. His essay Apologie de Raimond Sebond summed up why all of man’s rational achievements to date were seriously in doubt. He pointed out the subjective nature of sensual experience, how personal, social and cultural factors influenced all men’s and women’s judgements, how everything we thought we knew could just as likely be a dream. The Libertins, the avant-garde intellectuals of the early seventeenth century centred in Paris, with whom William may well have had some dealings when on his travels in France, carried this scepticism to its logical conclusion of doubting even the existence of God.

While William absorbed some of the intellectual atmosphere of Emmanuel and played tennis in the open air, his impoverished father, back in London, turned his energies to bringing up the rest of his children. He returned from imprisonment in 1644 to his further diminished family, for his second daughter Mary had died three years before at the age of five. Four sons and one daughter remained and were to live into happy and successful adulthood. They were William, who was sixteen and just starting at Cambridge; John, twelve and probably at Bishop’s Stortford School; James who was ten; and the twins Henry and Martha who were only six years old. Martha remembered her father’s paternal care with gratitude: ‘though his fortunes in theese disorders of his Country were very low, he chose to spare in any thing, rather then what might be to ye advantage of his children in their breeding & Education. by wch he Contracted a Considerable debt, but lived to see it all payed.’³²

During the next two years when William pursued his studies at Cambridge the country was exhausted and sickened by the continuing bloodshed and war. The Battle of Naseby in the summer of 1645 saw Cromwell’s New Model Army humiliate the royalist forces under Prince Rupert. Dorothy’s twenty-one-year-old brother, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Osborne, was just one of the many young men who perished on that muddied, bloody field. Bristol then surrendered and finally, in June 1646, Oxford, the headquarters of Charles I’s war effort. The first of the English civil wars staggered to a halt. But there was to be only a short respite before the local uprisings against the parliamentarians and invasion of the Scots fired up the second civil war in 1648.

At this point there was no indication what William’s own sympathies in the conflict were. Although his father had been a loyal executive of the crown he was a moderate who in dismay at the increasing despotism of Charles’s rule had thrown his weight behind the parliamentary cause and had chosen a school for his son that reinforced this ideological preference. However, the person William had been closest to during his early formative years was his resolutely royalist uncle Henry Hammond. Personally and intellectually, he was progressive, rational and tolerant, but emotionally William was a patriot and a romantic with more conservative instincts. All three men, however, deplored civil war. In an essay William wrote of the ‘fatal consequences … the miseries and deplorable effects of so many foreign and civil wars … how much blood they have drawn of the bravest subjects; how they have ravaged and defaced the noblest island of the world’.³³ He saw his country as a land blessed by temperate climate and fertile soil, a beacon of happiness and moral probity to its continental neighbours, but all undermined by the bloody conflict of the worst kind of all wars.

Certainly William looked the part and owned the tastes popularly ascribed to a cavalier gentleman and, lacking ideological or religious fervour, fitted a moderate and tolerant mould much as did both his father and uncle. But he had no overweening reverence for monarchy and practised a philosophy of individual responsibility and humanist concern. Most significantly perhaps, William Temple belonged to a new, scientifically minded generation where observation and rational thought were beginning to challenge orthodox views of the natural world and superstitious elements of belief, while being careful to uphold the existence of God and His intelligent design. William was born within a few years of many of the founding members of the Royal Society: the natural philosopher Robert Boyle; the economist and scientist William Petty; the physician Thomas Willis, who became known as the father of neurology; and the brilliant scientist and architect Sir Christopher Wren, who had yet to rebuild much of London after the Great Fire of 1666. This was his generation. Even the great mathematician John Wallis, who was some twelve years older, was just leaving Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as William arrived but his influence in understanding systems, be they the forerunner of modern calculus or a language he was to invent for deaf-mutes, remained, encouraging an open-minded but analytic approach to knowledge. The intellectual atmosphere was stirring with the excitement of infinite possibilities and explanations at last for some of the mysteries of the natural world.

William Temple did not finish his degree but left Cambridge in 1647 after only two years. Perhaps the difficulties of the time, his father’s lack of funds, or his own relaxed attitude to study and desire to explore the wider world played a part in this decision. Certainly by the time he was twenty, in 1648, William was sent off on his European travels, for this was the traditional way that a young English gentleman completed the education that prepared him for the world.

This period saw the beginning of the great popularity of the Grand Tour for ‘finishing’ the education of a gentleman of quality. Dorothy’s uncle Francis Osborne, after the runaway success of his Advice to a Son, had become the arbiter of how a young gentleman like William should conduct himself in the world. Along with his age, he accepted the desirability of foreign travel for the young male but he could not wholeheartedly agree with those who claimed ‘Travel, as the best Accomplisher of Youth and Gentry’, pointing out that experience showed it more as ‘the greatest Debaucher; adding Affectation to Folly, and Atheism to the Curiosity of many not well principled by Education’.³⁴ Disapproving of the superficial kind of tourism indulged in by fools, he did agree that travel was a necessary experience in the learning of foreign languages, although was opinionated about that too: ‘Next to Experience, Languages are the Richest Lading [cargo] of a Traveller; among which French is most useful, Italian and Spanish not being so fruitful in Learning, (except for the Mathematicks and Romances) their other Books being gelt [castrated] by the Fathers of the Inquisition.’³⁵

Another of Dorothy’s famous uncles, the aesthete and regicide Sir John Danvers, saw travel in a more emotional light, declaring it was used by parents who had no intimacy with their children as a way of breaking their sons’ emotional bonds with the servants: ‘for then [the beginning of the seventeenth century] Parents were so austere and grave, that the sonnes must not be company for their father, and some company men must have; so they contracted a familiarity with the Serving men, who got a hank [hankering, bond] upon them they could hardly clawe off. Nay, Parents would suffer their Servants to domineer [prevail] over their Children: and some in what they found their child to take delight, in that would be sure to crosse them [and some parents were intent on denying their child whatever happiness he found].’³⁶

Osborne’s Advice ranged from warning not to gamble at cards while abroad (the stranger is always cheated), to exhorting the young Englishman to avoid his own countrymen (‘observed abroad [as] more quarrelsom with their own Nation than Strangers, and therefore marked out as the most dangerous Companions’³⁷) and, as a true son of the Reformation, he was keen that ‘those you see prostrate before a Crucifix’³⁸ should be pitied not scorned. When he was not anxious about a young man being inveigled into fights he could not win, or risking his money or his faith, he was most exercised about the dangers of foreign sex. If it was not the horror of a hurried marriage to ‘a mercenary Woman’ who had inflamed the boy and snared him in her toils, it was the fear that something even more shameful awaited the unwary tourist: ‘Who Travels Italy, handsom, young and beardless, may need as much caution and circumspection, to protect him from the Lust of Men, as the Charms of Women.’ Osborne had heard lurid stories how elderly homosexual men, ‘so enamoured to this uncouched* way of Lust (led by what imaginary delight I know not)’, sent procurers out ‘to entice men of delicate Complexions, to the Houses of these decrepit Lechers’.³⁹

His concern for the right and proper conduct of a young English gentleman abroad was just part of the wide-ranging advice contained in his extraordinarily popular book that illuminated the preoccupations, inner struggles and expected conduct of the seventeenth-century English gentleman (and woman too, where their lives crossed). Published in Oxford in 1656, it was devoured by the scholars there and within two years went to five editions. It was written for William’s and Dorothy’s generation and its avid readers felt Osborne was speaking directly to them, and his comprehensive edicts on education, love and marriage, travel, government and religion were closely consulted. It was written in a worldly, practical and authoritative tone of voice, occasionally embellished with cynical wit and flights of rhetorical fancy.

A couple of years after it was first published, the book was suppressed for a while by the vice-chancellor of the university in response to several complaints by local vicars that it encouraged atheism. Half-hearted suppression by elderly members of the establishment, however, would only add to its lustre among the young. Samuel Pepys, twenty-three when it was first published, was part of the generation of aspiring young bloods to whom this book was addressed. He took note of its advice on neatness of dress, reflecting glumly on his own untidiness and the loss of social confidence this caused him. The Oxford professor of anatomy, founder member of the Royal Society (and inventor of the catamaran), the brilliant Sir William Petty, admitted in a casual conversation with Pepys in a city coffee house in January 1664 ‘that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world – Religio Medici,* Osborne’s Advice to a Son, and Hudibras’.† To be in such company was elevated indeed.

It took the distance of the next century, however, to kick the Advice into touch: Dr Johnson aimed his boot at its author, ‘A conceited fellow. Were a man to write so now, the boys would throw stones at him.’ This outburst had been in response to Boswell’s praise of Osborne’s work, although Boswell stuck doggedly to his original opinion that here was a writer ‘in whom I have found much shrewd and lively sense’.⁴⁰

No young man’s education was complete without some kind of sexual adventure and William was no exception. His warm emotions and romantic temperament protected him from cynicism but made him susceptible to love – the most important thing, he maintained, in his life. In his youth William appears to have had an enjoyable time, hardly surprising given his age and the fact that he was strikingly handsome, healthy and full of an exuberant energy that needed more expression than merely tennis. Unfortunately he was rash enough to boast, when he was middle-aged, to Laurence Hyde,‡ an upwardly mobile politician who did not repay his friendship, of the sexual prowess of his youth. The much younger man found this distasteful in someone almost old enough to be his father and committed his disapproval to paper: ‘[Temple] held me in discourse a great long hour of things most relating to himself, which are never without vanity; but this was especially full of it, and some stories of his amours, and extraordinary abilities that way, which had once upon a time nearly killed him’.⁴¹ A kinder interpretation of William’s character in this revealing aside is that, older and physically impaired with gout, he wished to share his pleasure and amusement in the memory of a more vigorous and younger self.

Inevitably Francis Osborne’s handbook had an answer to the unchecked male libido. Predictably cynical about marriage, he was suspicious of love and fearful of where sexual desire could lead: he painted a ghastly picture of what horrors awaited a man who chose a woman as his wife because he found her attractive or thought he loved her: ‘Those Vertues, Graces, and reciprocal Desires, bewitched Affection expected to meet and enjoy, Fruition and Experience will find absent, and nothing left but a painted Box, which Children and time will empty of Delight; leaving Diseases behind, or, at best, incurable Antiquity.’⁴² Escape from such a snare and delusion as sexual love, he believed, was best effected by leaving the object of your desire and crossing the sea. But of course journeys abroad also brought unexpected meetings, unfamiliar freedoms and adventure of every kind.

* Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) embodied the Elizabethan ideal, being not only a man of culture and a leading literary figure but also someone at ease in the worlds of politics and military action. His early death sent his reputation skywards, the touch paper lit by his spectacular funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, the propellant being posthumous publication of his prose and poetic works.

† Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1566–1601), courtier and soldier of grandiose ambition. Favourite of an ageing queen, his desire for power and military glory, allied to arrogance and incompetence, in the end alienated everyone, apart from the populace to whom he remained a flamboyant hero. A half-baked plot against Elizabeth I forced her hand and, in his thirty-fifth year, he was tried and executed, to the dismay of the queen and her people.

‡ Petrus Ramus (1515–72) was a French humanist and logician who argued against scholasticism, insisting the general should come before the specific, consideration of the wood before the trees. As professor of philosophy at the Collège de France, his eloquence and controversial stand regularly attracted audiences of 2,000 or more. Attacks on him became even more virulent when he converted to Protestantism; he perished finally in the conflagration of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

* Master of the Rolls is an ancient office where the holder originally was keeper of the national records, acting as secretary of state and lord chancellor’s assistant. Judicial responsibilities were gradually added over the centuries until the present day when the Master of the Rolls presides over the civil division of the Court of Appeal and is second in the judicial hierarchy, behind the lord chief justice.

* For a detailed discussion of the constituents and aims of the Junto, see The Noble Revolt, John Adamson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).

* Henry Peacham (1576–1643) rather confusingly was the writer and poet son of the curate Henry Peacham (1546–1634) who was himself well known for his book on rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence (1577). Lack of funds meant the younger Peacham was ‘Rawlie torn’ in 1598 from his student life at Cambridge to make his way in the world. He became a master of the free school at Wymondham, Norfolk, where he encountered the brutal schooling of boys that he reluctantly accepted as necessary if they were to be educated. He made his name with The Compleat Gentleman (1622), a book that was keenly read in the New England colonies, and possibly was responsible for its author’s name being immortalised in the naming of Peacham, Vermont.

* Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), an English philosopher opposed to Thomas Hobbes and leader of the Cambridge Platonists. Master of Clare Hall and then of Christ’s College, Cambridge and professor of Hebrew. He had an intellectual daughter, Damaris, Lady Masham, who became a friend of the philosophers John Locke and Leibniz.

† The Cambridge Platonists were a group of philosophers in the middle of the seventeenth century who believed that religion and reason should always be in harmony. Although closer in sympathy to the Puritan view, with its valuing of individual experience, they argued for moderation in religion and politics and like Abelard promoted a mystical understanding of reason as a pathway to the divine.

* Henry St John, Viscount Bolinbroke (1678–1751), an ambitious and unscrupulous politician and favourite of Queen Anne’s. He turned his brilliant gifts to writing philosophical and political tracts. His philosophical writings were closely based on the philosopher John Locke’s (1632–1704) inductive approach to knowledge, reasoning from observations to generalisations (to which Ralph Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists were opposed). Few were published in his lifetime. He died, after a long life, a disappointed man.

* The use of uncouched is interesting. It can mean rampant, the opposite of the heraldic term couchant, but more to the point uncouched also refers to an animal that has been driven from its lair. The image of a beast unleashed is very appropriate here, for it expressed Osborne’s fear, fascination and recoil from homosexuality: already he had referred to it as ‘noisom Bestiality’, but also that telling parenthesis revealed a curiosity about the ‘delight I know not’.

* Religio Medici was Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605–82) famous meditation on matters of faith, humanity and love, first published in 1642, reprinted often and translated into many languages. As a doctor and a Christian he illuminated his tolerant, wide-ranging thesis with classical allusions, poetry and philosophy.

† Written by Samuel Butler (1613–80), Hudibras was a mock romance in the style of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, written in three parts, each with three cantos of heavily satirical verse, published 1662–80. With his framework of a Presbyterian knight Sir Hudibras and his sectarian squire Ralpho embarked on their quest, Butler poked lethal fun at the wide world of politics, theological dogma, scholasticism, alchemy, astrology and the supernatural.

‡ Laurence Hyde, 4th Earl of Rochester (1641–1711), was the second son of the great politician and historian the Earl of Clarendon. A royalist, he rose to power and influence at Charles II’s restoration and was made an earl in 1681, becoming lord high treasurer under his brother-in-law James II. His nieces became Queens Mary and Anne.

CHAPTER FOUR
Time nor Accidents Shall not Prevaile

I will write Every week, and noe misse of letters shall give us any doubts of one another, Time nor accidents shall not prevaile upon our hearts, and if God Almighty please to blesse us, wee will meet the same wee are, or happyer; I will doe all you bid mee, I will pray, and wish and hope, but you must doe soe too then; and bee soe carfull of your self that I may have nothing to reproche you with when you come back.

DOROTHY OSBORNE, letter to William Temple

[11/12 February 1654]

ALTHOUGH TRAVEL ABROAD was accepted as an important part of the education of a young English gentleman of the seventeenth century, a young unmarried lady was denied any such freedom; even travelling at home she was expected to be chaperoned at all times. For her to venture abroad to educate the mind was an almost inconceivable thought. But much more unsettling to the authority of the family, to her reputation and the whole social foundation of their lives was the idea that a young man and woman might meet outside the jurisdiction of their parents’ wishes, free to make their own connections, even to fall in love.

Not only were serendipitous meetings like that of Dorothy and William unorthodox for young people in their station of life, the idea that they themselves could choose whom they wanted to marry on the grounds of personal liking, even love, was considered a short cut to social anarchy, even lunacy. With universal constraints and expectations like this it was remarkable that they should ever have met, let alone discovered how much they really liked each other. Their candour in expressing their feelings in private also belied the carefulness of their public face. Dorothy admitted to William her eccentricity in this: ‘I am apt to speak what I think; and to you have soe accoustumed my self to discover all my heart, that I doe not beleeve twill ever bee in my power to conceal a thought from you.’¹

The grip that family and society’s disapproval exerted was hard to shake off. In a later essay when he himself was old, William likened the denial of the heart to a kind of hardening of the arteries that too often accompanied old age: ‘youth naturally most inclined to the better passions; love, desire, ambition, joy,’ he wrote. ‘Age to the worst; avarice, grief, revenge, jealousy, envy, suspicion.’²

Dorothy had youth on her side and laid claim to all those better passions, but it was the unique and shattering effects of civil war that broke the constraints on her life and sprang her into the active universe of men. Although personally strong-minded and individualistic, her intent was always to comply with her family’s and society’s expectations, for she was an intellectual and reflective young woman and not a natural revolutionary. But for the war she would have been safely sequestered at home, visitors vetted by her family, her world narrowed to the view from a casement window. In fact this containment is what she had to return to, but for a while she was almost autonomous, a traveller across the sea – accompanied by a young brother, true, but he more inclined to play the daredevil than the careful chaperone.

As they both set off on their travels, heading on their different journeys towards the Isle of Wight, both Dorothy and William would have had all kinds of prejudice and practical advice ringing in their ears. Travel itself was fraught with danger: horses bolted, coaches regularly overturned, cut-throats ambushed the unwary and boats capsized in terrible seas. Disease and injury of the nastiest kinds were everyday risks with none of the basic palliatives of drugs for pain relief and penicillin for infection, or even a competent medical profession more likely to heal than to harm. The extent of the rule of law was limited and easily corrupted, and dark things happened under a foreign sun when the traveller’s fate would be known to no one.

As William Temple began his adventures for education and pleasure, Dorothy Osborne was propelled by very different circumstances into hers. Travel was hazardous, but it was considered particularly so if you were female. One problem was the necessity for a woman of keeping her public reputation spotless while inevitably attracting the male gaze, with all its hopeful delusions.

Lord Savile, in his Worldly Counsel to a Daughter, a more limited manual than Osborne’s Advice to a Son, was kindly and apologetic at the manifest unfairnesses of woman’s lot, yet careful not to encourage any daughter of his, or anyone else’s, to challenge the sacred status quo. He pointed out that innocent friendliness in a young woman might be misrepresented by both opportunistic men, full of vanity and desire, and women eager to make themselves appear more virtuous by slandering the virtue of their sisters, ‘therefore, nothing is with more care to be avoided than such a kind of civility as may be mistaken for invitation’. The onus was very much upon the young woman who had always to be polite while continually on guard lest her behaviour call forth misunderstanding and shame. She had to cultivate ‘a way of living that may prevent all coarse railleries or unmannerly freedoms; looks that forbid without rudeness, and oblige without invitation, or leaving room for the saucy inferences men’s vanity suggesteth to them upon the least encouragements’.³

Dorothy was often chided by William during their courtship for what he considered her excessive care for her good reputation and concern at what the world thought of her. With advice like this, it was little wonder that young women of good breeding felt that strict and suspicious eyes were ever upon them. A conscientious young woman’s behaviour and conversation had to be completely lacking in impetuousity and candour. It seemed humour also was a lurking danger. Gravity of demeanour at all times was the goal, for smiling too much (‘fools being always painted in that posture’) and – honour forbid – laughing out loud made even the moderate Lord Savile announce ‘few things are more offensive’.⁴ Certainly a woman was not meant to enjoy the society of anyone of the opposite sex except through the contrivance of family members, with a regard always to maintaining her honour and achieving an advantageous marriage.

After Dorothy and William’s fateful meeting on the Isle of Wight in 1648, they spent about a month together at St Malo, no doubt mostly chaperoned by Dorothy’s brother Robin, as travelling companions and explorers, both of the town and surrounding countryside, and more personally of their own new experiences and feelings. William would have met Sir Peter Osborne there, aged, unwell and in exile. Like the Temple family, the Osbornes were frank about their insistence that their children marry for money. Both Sir Peter Osborne and Sir John Temple were implacably set against any suggestion that Dorothy and William might wish to marry; rather it was a self-evident truth that their children had the more pressing duty to find a spouse with a healthy fortune to maintain the family’s social status and material security. For a short while neither father suspected the truth.

St Malo was an ancient walled city by the sea, at this time one of France’s most important ports. Yet it retained its defiant and independent spirit as the base for much of the notorious piracy and smuggling carried on off its rocky and intricate coast. This black money brought great wealth to the town and financed the building of some magnificent houses. There was much to explore either within the walls in the twisting narrow alleyways or on the heather-covered cliffs that dropped to the boiling surf below.

These days of happy discovery were abruptly terminated when William’s father heard of his son’s delayed progress, and the alarming reason for it. When Sir John Temple ordered William to extricate himself from this young woman and her dispossessed family and continue his journey into France, there was no doubt that William, at twenty, would obey. The impact of this wrench from his newfound love can only be conjectured but he wrote, during the years of their enforced separation, something that implied resentment at parental power and a pained resignation to the habit of filial submission: ‘for the most part, parents of all people know their children the least, so constraind are wee in our demanours towards them by our respect, and an awfull sense of their arbitrary power over us, wch though first printed in us in our childish age, yet yeares of discretion seldome wholly weare out’. As a young man he thought no amount of kindness could overcome the traditional gulf between parents and their children (as parents themselves, he and Dorothy strove to overcome such traditions), but freedom and confidence thrived between friends, he believed, implying a close friend (i.e. a spouse) mattered as much as any blood relation: ‘for kindred are friends chosen to our hands’.⁵

Dorothy made an equally bleak point in one of her early surviving letters in which she declared that many parents, taking for granted that their children refused anything chosen for them as a matter of course, ‘take up another [stance] of denyeing theire Children all they Chuse for themselv’s’.⁶

As William reluctantly travelled on to Paris, Dorothy remained with her father and youngest brother, and possibly her mother and other brothers too, at St Malo, hoping to negotiate a return to their home at Chicksands. Five years before, at the height of the first civil war, it had been ordered in parliament ‘that the Estate of Sir Peter Osborne, in the counties of Huntingdon, Bedford or elsewhere, and likewise his Office, be sequestred; to be employed for the Service of the Commonwealth’.⁷ Towards the end of 1648, however, peace negotiations between parliament and Charles I, in captivity in Carisbrooke Castle, were stumbling to some kind of conclusion. There was panic and confusion as half the country feared the king would be reinstated, their suffering having gained them nothing, while the other half rejoiced in a possible return to the status quo with Charles on his throne again and the hierarchies of Church and state comfortingly restored.

Loyal parliamentarians Lucy and her husband Colonel Hutchinson were in the midst of this turmoil. The negotiations, she wrote, ‘gave heart to the vanquished Cavaliers and such courage to the captive King that it hardened him and them to their ruin. This on the other side so frightened all the honest people that it made them as violent in their zeal to pull down, as the others were in their madness to restore, this kingly idol.’⁸

Revolution was in the air and, to general alarm, suddenly the New Model Army intervened in a straightforward military coup, taking control of the king, thereby pre-empting any further negotiations, and purging parliament of sympathisers. About 140 of the more moderate members of the Long Parliament were prevented from sitting, Sir John Temple among them. Only the radical or malleable remnants survived the vetting, 156 in all, and they became known for ever as the ‘Rump Parliament’. The king’s days were now numbered.

Dorothy and her family in France were part of an expatriate community who, away from the heat of the struggle, were subject to the general hysteria of speculation and wild rumour, brought across the Channel by letter and word of mouth, reporting the rapidly changing state at home. William was also in France, but by this time separated from Dorothy and alone in Paris. Revolution was in the air there too. ‘I was in Paris at that time,’ he wrote, referring to January 1649, ‘when it was beseig’d by the King* and betray’d by the Parliament, when the Archduke Leopoldus advanced farr into France with a powerfull army, fear’d by one, suspected by another, and invited by a third.’⁹

It was an alarming but exciting time to be at the centre of France’s own more half-hearted version of civil war, the Fronde,† when not much blood was spilt but a great deal of debate and violent protest dominated the political scene. The Paris parlement had refused to accept new taxes and were complaining about the old, attempting to limit the king’s power. When the increasingly hated Cardinal Mazarin‡ ordered the arrest of the leaders at the end of a long hot summer, there was rioting on the streets and out came the barricades. The court was forced to release the members of parlement and fled the city. Parlement’s victory was sealed and temporary order restored only by the following spring. Having left one kind of turmoil at home, William was embroiled in another, but was not in the mood to let that cramp his youthful style. At some time he met up with a friend, a cousin of Dorothy’s, Sir Thomas Osborne,* and reported their good times in a later letter to his father: ‘We were great companions when we were both together young travelers and tennis-players in France.’¹⁰

It was also while he was in Paris in its rebellious mood that William discovered the essays of Montaigne† and perhaps even came across some of the French avant-garde intellectuals of the time. The most contentious were a group called the Libertins, among them Guy Patin, a scholar and rector of the Sorbonne medical school, and François de la Mothe le Vayer, the writer and tutor to the dauphin, who pursued Montaigne’s sceptical philosophies to more radical ends, questioning even basic religious tenets. Certainly from the writings of Montaigne and from the intellectual energy in Paris at the time – perhaps even the company of these controversial philosophers – William learned to enjoy a distinct freedom of thought and action that reinforced his natural independence and incorruptibility in later political life.

Just across the Channel, events were gathering apace. By January 1649 in London the newly sifted parliament had passed the resolutions that sidelined a less compliant House of Lords, allowing the Commons to ensure the trial of the king could proceed. There was terrific nervousness at home; even the most fiery of republicans was not sure of the legality of any such court. In a further eerie echo of the fate of his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, Charles was brought hastily to trial, all the while insisting that the court had no legality or authority over him. On 20 January 1649 he appeared before his accusers in the great hall at Westminster. Like his grandmother too he had dressed for full theatrical effect, his diamond-encrusted Order of the Star of the Garter and of St George glittering majestically against the sombre inky black of his clothes. Charles was visibly contemptuous of the cobbled-together court and did not even deign to answer the charges against him, that he had intended to rule with unlimited and tyrannical power and had levied war against his parliament and people. He refused to cooperate, rejecting the proceedings out of hand as manifestly illegal.

All those involved were fraught with anxieties and fear at the gravity of what they had embarked on. As the tragedy gained its own momentum, God was fervently addressed from all sides and petitioned for guidance, His authority invoked to legitimise every action. Through the fog of these doubts Cromwell strode to the fore, his clarity and determination driving through a finale of awesome significance. God’s work was being done, he assured the doubters, and they were all His chosen instruments. It was clear to him that Charles had broken his contract with his people and he had to die. His charismatic certainty steadied their nerves.

The death sentence declared the king a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy of the nation. There were frantic attempts to save his life. From France, Charles’s queen Henrietta Maria had been busy in exile trying to rally international support for her husband. Louis XIV, a boy king who was yet to grow into his pomp as the embodiment of absolute monarchy, now sent personal letters to both Cromwell and General Fairfax pleading for their king’s life. The States-General of the Netherlands also added their weight, all to no avail.

Charles I went to his death in the bitter cold of 30 January 1649. He walked from St James’s Palace to Whitehall, his place of execution. Grave and unrepentant, he faced what he and many others considered judicial murder with dignity and fortitude. As his head was severed from his body, the crowd who had waited all morning in the freezing air let out a deep and terrible groan, the like of which one witness said he hoped never to hear again. Charles’s uncompromising stand, the arrogance and misjudgements of his rule, the corrosive harm of the previous six years of civil wars, had made this dreadful act of regicide inevitable, perhaps even necessary, but there were few who could unequivocally claim it was just. There was a possibly apocryphal story passed on to the poet Alexander Pope, born some forty years later, that Cromwell visited the king’s coffin incognito that fateful night and, gazing down on the embalmed corpse, the head now reunited with the body and sewn on at the neck, was heard to mutter ‘cruel necessity’,¹¹ in rueful recognition of the truth.

For the first time, the country was without a king. The Prince of Wales, in exile in The Hague, was proclaimed Charles II but by the early spring the Rump Parliament had abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords. England was declared a commonwealth with all authority vested in the Commons. The brutal suppression of the Irish rebellion continued through the summer with particularly gruesome massacres at Drogheda and Wexford and the following year, 1650, saw the Scottish royalist resistance broken up by parliamentarian forces. Slowly the bloodshed was being brought to an end and life returned to a new kind of normality.

Most important for the Osborne family in unhappy exile in St Malo was the deal they managed to negotiate with the new government whereby they were allowed to return to their estate at Chicksands on the payment of a huge fine, possibly as much as £10,000 (more than a million by today’s value). This concession might have been in part due to some helpful intervention from Lady Osborne’s brother, the talented garden planner and member of parliament Sir John Danvers. He had become one of Cromwell’s loyal colleagues who served on the commission to try the king and, unlike many, had not baulked at putting his signature to the infamous death warrant. In February 1649 he was appointed one of the forty councillors of state of the new commonwealth, a position he kept until its dissolution in 1653. Dorothy and her mother had stayed with him in his house in Chelsea when she was younger and it is likely he would have exerted whatever influence he could to have their ancestral home restored to them at whatever cost.

So Dorothy and her family returned to Bedfordshire, their lives completely changed and their prospects dimmed. Dorothy’s father was aged and unwell and her mother exhausted by the heavy toll of the last few years of exile, impoverishment and uncertainty. She would only live for another year or so, dying, aged sixty-one, in 1651.

For Dorothy, return to the family home was a mixed blessing. Once again she was subject to the demands made on a dutiful unmarried daughter. After her mother’s death the organisation of the household fell to her, as did the care and companionship of her father. Her favourite brother Robin, who had shared her adventures on the Isle of Wight, was still around and unmarried, as was Henry, eleven years her senior. As men they could come and go at will. Her only sister Elizabeth, the eldest of the family, had married at the age of twenty-six and, after just six years of marriage, died in 1642, before the first civil war. Dorothy was only fifteen at the time and remembered her as a clever bookish girl, cut down far too young, perhaps by puerperal fever, that scourge of childbearing women: ‘my Sister whoe (I may tell you too and you will not think it Vanity in mee) had a great [deale] of witt and was thought to write as well as most women in England’.¹² Dorothy’s eldest brother John had also married and appeared occasionally at Chicksands, the estate he was to inherit on their father’s death.

Dorothy professed herself unconcerned at the loss of her family’s fortune: ‘I have seen my fathers [estate] reduced [from] better then £4000 to not £400 a yeare and I thank god I never felt the change in any thing that I thought necessary; I never wanted nor am confident I never shall.’¹³ This was brave talk, for the family’s impoverishment made her marriage to a man of good fortune all the more pressing. The family matchmakers increased their efforts: Dorothy appeared to entertain their ideas but in fact merely procrastinated, prevaricated and in the last resort refused. She found her seclusion on the family estate increasingly tedious. Paying visits to elderly neighbours and keeping all talk small had limited appeal when she had been exposed to adventure and love. ‘I am growne soe dull with liveing in [Chicksands] (for I am not willing to confess that I was always soe),’¹⁴ she admitted.

As a young woman, Dorothy chose to try to live a good life, and while she was unmarried and waiting on her family’s needs this was inevitably a dull one too. She attempted to reconcile her own conduct with the highest standards of her family’s expectations and the precepts of the Bible. She turned to the religious writer Jeremy Taylor, ‘whose devote you must know I am’,¹⁵ for his meditations on how to live a useful Christian life. Yet Taylor, in urging a lofty disregard for public opinion, ‘he that would have his virtue published, studies not virtue, but glory’,¹⁶ accepted that women’s lives were more constrained. Dorothy, like every other young woman of her time, felt she had to be careful of her reputation. Her and her family’s honour, her marriage prospects, her place in society, all depended on it. She explained this rather defensively in a letter to William Temple: ‘Posibly it is a weaknesse in mee, to ayme at the worlds Esteem as if I could not bee happy without it; but there are certaine things that custom has made Almost of Absolute necessity, and reputation I take to bee one of those.’¹⁷

As an emotionally impetuous young man living with greater freedom of conduct than any young woman of his time, William might have wished that Dorothy was more reckless but in fact she was merely expressing a cast-iron truth that most other young unmarried women in her position had learned from the cradle. Lady Halkett, who was to live an unusually adventurous adult life, was equally obedient and careful while young to avoid accusations of ‘any immodesty, either in thought or behavier … so scrupulous I was of giving any occation to speake of mee, as I know they did of others’.¹⁸

The social and moral structures of men’s and women’s lives were based on the teaching and traditions of Christian religion and to a lesser extent the philosophy of the classical authors of Greece and Rome. The Church’s view of women was well established and deeply embedded in society’s expectations of human behaviour. The Bible provided the authority. It was read daily and studied closely, making depressing reading for any young woman seeking a view of herself in the larger world. In the Old Testament woman was a mere afterthought of creation. Apart from rare and shining examples, like the wise judge Deborah and the beneficent Queen of Sheba, they had little significance beyond being subjects in marriage and mothers of men. When it reared its head at all, female energy was more often than not duplicitous, contaminatory and dark.

The poet Anne Finch,* of a younger generation than Dorothy, still smarted under the limited expectations for girls, comparing the current generation unfavourably to the paragon Deborah:

A Woman here, leads fainting Israel on,

She fights, she wins, she tryumphs with a song,

devout, Majestick, for the subject fitt,

And far above her arms [military might], exalts her witt,

Then, to the peacefull, shady Palm withdraws,

And rules the rescu’d Nation with her Laws.

How are we fal’n, fal’n by mistaken rules?

Debarr’d from all improve-ments of the mind,

And to be dull, expected and dessigned;

… For groves of Lawrell [worldly triumphs], thou wert

never meant;

Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.¹⁹

A thoughtful girl’s reading of the classics in search of images of female creativity or autonomy was almost as unedifying. Unless they were iconic queens such as the incomparable Cleopatra, women of antiquity were subject to even more containment than their seventeenth-century English counterparts. The main role of Greek and Roman women was as bearers of legitimate children and so their sexuality was monitored and feared. Women had to be tamed, instructed and watched. Traditionally they were expected to be silent and invisible, content to live in the shadows, their virtues of a passive and domestic kind.

Dorothy had certainly grown up unquestioning in her belief in God and duty to her parents, expecting to obey them without demur, particularly in the crucial matter of whom she would marry, and wary of drawing any attention to herself. There was more than an echo down the centuries of the classical Greek ideal: that a woman’s name should not be mentioned in public unless she was dead, or of ill repute, where ‘glory for a woman was defined in Thucydides’s funeral speech of Pericles as “not to be spoken of in praise or blame”’.²⁰ The necessity of self-effacement and public invisibility was accepted by women generally, regardless of their intellectual or political backgrounds. The radical republican Lucy Hutchinson, brought up by doting parents to believe she was marked out for pre-eminence, insisted – even as she hoped for publication of her own translation of Lucretius – that a woman’s ‘more becoming virtue is silence’.²¹

The Duchess of Newcastle was another near contemporary of Dorothy’s but she was one of the rare women of her age who refused to accept such constraints on her sex. Her larger than life persona, however, and her effrontery in publishing her poems and opinions with such abandon attracted violent verbal assaults on her character and sanity. The cavalier poet Richard Lovelace* inserted into a satire, on republican literary patronage, a particularly harsh attack on the temerity of women writers, possibly aimed specifically at the duchess herself, whose verses were published three years prior to this poem’s composition:

… behold basely deposed men,

Justled from the Prerog’tive of their Bed,

Whilst wives are per’wig’d with their husbands head.

Each snatched the male quill from his faint hand

And must both nobler write and understand,

He to her fury the soft plume doth bow,

O Pen, nere truely justly slit till now!

Now as her self a Poem she doth dresse,

Ands curls a Line as she would so a tresse;

Powders a Sonnet as she does her hair,

Then prostitutes them both to publick Aire.²²

It was no surprise that even someone as courageous and individual as the Duchess of Newcastle should show some trepidation at breaking this taboo, addressing the female readers of her first book of poems published in 1653 with these words: ‘Condemn me not as a dishonour of your sex, for setting forth this work; for it is harmless and free from all dishonesty; I will not say from vanity, for that is so natural to our sex as it were unnatural not to be so.’²³

As a young woman, Dorothy Osborne was intrigued by the duchess’s celebrity, a little in awe of her courage even, for Dorothy too had a love and talent for writing, owned strong opinions and was acutely perceptive of human character. Eager as she was to read the newly published poems (this was the first book of English poems to be deliberately published by a woman under her own name), Dorothy recoiled from the exposure to scorn and ridicule that such behaviour in a woman attracted. And she joined the general chorus of disapproval: ‘there are many soberer People in Bedlam,’²⁴ she declared. Perhaps the harshness of this comment had something to do with the subconscious desire of an avid reader and natural writer who could not even allow herself to dream that she could share her talents with an audience of more than one?

Writing in the next generation, Anne Finch, who did publish her poems late in her life, knew full well the way such presumption was viewed:

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem’d,

The fault, can by no vertue be redeem’d.

They tell us, we mistake our sex and way;

Good breeding, fassion, dancing, dressing, play

Are the accomplishments we shou’d desire;

To write, or read, or think, or to enquire

Wou’d cloud our beauty, and exaust our time;

And interrupt the Conquests of our prime;

Whilst the dull mannage, of a servile house

Is held by some, our utmost art, and use.²⁵

Secluded in the countryside, Dorothy cared for her ailing father, endured the social rituals of her neighbours and read volume upon volume of French romances. The highlight of her days and the only, but fundamental, defiance of her fate was her secret correspondence with William Temple. In this Dorothy engaged in the creative project of her life, one that absorbed her thoughts and called forth every emotion. Through their letters they created a subversive world in which they could explore each other’s ideas and feelings, indulge in dreams of a future together and exorcise their fears. Dorothy’s pleasure in the exercise of her art is evident, and she had no more important goal than to keep William faithful to her and determine her own destiny through the charm and brilliance of her letters.

William and Dorothy started writing to each other from the time they were first parted in the later months of 1648 when they were both in France. Martha, William’s younger sister, wrote that he spent two years in Paris and then exploring the rest of the country, by the end of which time he was completely fluent in French. His days drifted by pleasantly enough, playing tennis, visiting other exiles, looking at chateaux and gardens, reading Montaigne’s essays, practising his own writing style and thinking of love. He returned to England for a short while, when Dorothy and her family were also once more resident on the family estate at Chicksands, possibly managing a quick meeting with her then, before he ‘made another Journey into Holland, Germany, & Flanders, where he grew as perfect a Master of Spanish’.²⁶

The surviving letters date from Christmas Eve 1652. It is from this moment that Dorothy’s emphatic and individual voice is suddenly heard. The distant whisperings, speculation and snatches of commentary on their thoughts and lives become clear stereophonic sound as Dorothy, and the echo of William in response, speaks with startling frankness and clarity. The three and a half centuries that separate them from their readers dissolve in the reading, so recognisable and unchanging are the human feelings and perceptions she described. This is the voice even her contemporaries recognised as remarkable, the voice Macaulay fell in love with, of which Virginia Woolf longed to hear more: the voice that has earned its modest writer an unassailable eminence in seventeenth-century literature.

Only the last two years of their correspondence survived, one letter of his and the rest all on Dorothy’s side, but her letters are so responsive to his unseen replies that the ebb and flow of their conversation is clear and present as we read. As William’s sister recognised, the reversals of fortune, much of it detailed in these letters, made their courtship a riveting drama in itself. In order for their love to defy the world and finally triumph, they endured years of subterfuge, secret communication, reliance on go-betweens, stand-up arguments against familial authority, subtle evasions and downright refusals of alternative suitors. The progress of their relationship is revealed in this extraordinary collection of love letters.

As artefacts they are remarkable enough, beautifully preserved by Dorothy’s family over the years and now cared for by the manuscript department at the British Library. Most of the letters are written on paper about A4 size folded in two and with every margin, any spare inch, covered by Dorothy’s elegant, looping script. But it is what they contain that makes them exceptional: frank and conversational in style, the writer’s character and spirit are clear in the confiding voice that ranges widely over daily life and desires, social expectations, and a cavalcade of lovers, family and friends. Sharp, intelligent, full of humour, it is as if Dorothy sits talking beside us. This was exactly the effect she sought to have on William, for these letters were the only way that she could communicate with him through their years of separation, keeping him bound to her and believing in their shared dream.

Dorothy’s first extant letter is a reply to one by William, written on his return to England and after a lengthy gap in their communication. He had previously wagered £10 that she would marry someone other than him and had written, claiming his prize in an attempt to discover obliquely if she remained unattached, even still harbouring warm feelings for him. This was an early indication of his exuberant gambling nature for his bet, at the equivalent of more than £1,000, was significant for a young man who had only just finished his student days. He referred to himself as her ‘Old Servant’, ‘servant’ being the term she and her friends used to refer to anyone actively courting another, or being themselves courted. This was a fishing letter that could not have made his romantic intent more clear.

This was all Dorothy had been waiting for. William had been silent for so long, she had feared he had forgotten her. In her lonely fastness in the country, tending to her father and fending off the suitors pressed on her by her family, his longed-for letter arrived unannounced, revealing clearly his continued interest. All her unexpressed intelligence and pent-up feelings suddenly had a focus again. The brilliance and intensity of her letters expressed this force of emotion and her longing for a soulmate to whom she could talk of the things that really mattered. Later, once she was married, William and others complained that Dorothy’s letters lacked the passion and energy of these written during her courtship. How could they not? These letters were most importantly her means of enchantment, the only recourse she had to seduce his heart and keep him faithful through the long years of enforced separation.

At first her response was careful and controlled. Her handwriting is at its most elegantly formal and constrained. None of her subsequent letters, when she was confident of his feelings, was quite so neatly and carefully written. A great deal of thought has gone into her reply and Dorothy’s answer is masterly in its covert disclosure of her pleasure in hearing from him again, her delight that he still seems to care, the constancy of her feelings and her continuing unmarried state. Despite the fundamental frankness and honesty, her style is full of subtle charm and flirtatious teasing. His revelation of his interest in her had restored her power. She started as she meant to continue, with the upper hand:

Sir

You may please to Lett my Old Servant (as you call him) know, that I confesse I owe much to his merritts, and the many Obligations his kindenesse and Civility’s has layde upon mee. But for the ten poundes hee claims, it is not yett due, and I think you may do well (as a freind) to perswade him to putt it in the Number of his desperate debts, for ’tis a very uncertaine one [she is unlikely to claim it, i.e. marry]. In all things else pray as I am his Servant.

And now Sir let mee tell you that I am extreamly glad (whoesoever gave you the Occasion) to heare from you, since (without complement [without being merely courteous]) there are very few Person’s in the world I am more concer’d in. To finde that you have overcome your longe Journy that you are well, and in a place where it is posible for mee to see you, is a sattisfaction, as I whoe have not bin used to many, may bee allowed to doubt of. Yet I will hope my Ey’s doe not deceive mee, and that I have not forgott to reade. But if you please to Confirme it to mee by another, you know how to dirrect it, for I am where I was, still the same, and alwayes Your humble Servant²⁷

Her request that he write again to reassure her and her signing off ‘for I am where I was, still the same, and alwayes Your humble Servant’ is eloquent of how nothing for her has changed since their last passionate meeting and, she implied, nothing would change, however many eligible suitors, however great the familial pressure. William himself may have had his sexual adventures as a young man abroad, but his heart too had remained constant over the last four years, despite the competing charms of young women with greater fortunes promoted by his family. His sister Martha recalled Dorothy’s and William’s single-minded commitment to each other over the years, to the confounding of some of their friends and all their family, the general thought being that they were negligent of their duty to marry well and disrespectful to their parents: ‘soe long a persuit, though against the consent of most of her friends, & dissatisfaction of some of his, it haveing occasion’d his refusall of a very great fortune when his Famely was most in want of it, as she had done of many considerable offers of great Estates & Famelies’.²⁸

This first letter, tantalisingly revealing and yet concealing so much, had the desired effect on William’s febrile emotions. His answer threw caution to the winds and his professions of affection transformed Dorothy’s confidence. She was emboldened enough to scold him in the next for his neglect in not calling in to see her secretly on his recent trip to Bedford, when he had blamed his horse’s sudden lameness: ‘Is it posible that you came soe neer mee at Bedford and would not see mee, seriously I should never have beleeved it from another. Would your horse had lost all his legg’s instead of a hoofe, that hee might not have bin able to carry you further, and you, somthing that you vallewed extreamly and could not hope to finde any where but at Chicksands. I could wish you a thousand little mischances I am soe angry with you.’²⁹ She was dismayed too by the length of his recent absence and the infrequency of his letters: ‘for God sake lett mee aske you what you have done all this while you have bin away[?] what you mett with in holland that could keep you there soe long[?] why you went noe further, and, why I was not to know you went so farr[?]’³⁰

Perhaps in answer to this William wrote a letter to her, which he embedded in the translated and reworked French romances he sent to her during their separation. They were a way of expressing his frustrated feelings for her, he told Dorothy, and a cartharsis too, for contemplating the miseries of others put his own suffering into perspective:

I remember you have asked me what I did[,] how past my time when I was last abroad. such scribling as this will give you account of a great deal ont. I lett no sad unfortunate storys scape mee but I would tell um over at large and in as feeling a manner as I could, in hopes that the compassion of others misfortunes might diminish the ressentment of my owne. besides twas a vent for my passion, all I made others say was what I should have said myself to you upon the like occasion. you will in this find a letter that was meant for you.³¹

He entitled the collection of stories, A True Romance, or the Disastrous Chances of Love and Fortune, with more than an eye to his own much impeded love affair with Dorothy. William then added a dedicatory letter, quite obviously written to Dorothy about their own emotional plight. His conversational writing style, so valued in his later essays, was already evident. Although this letter was formal, as there was a chance that the collection of romances would be read by others, it was remarkably simple and straightforward for someone with the emotional exuberance of youth, writing at a time when grandiose prose style was still admired. This was a rare letter in his youthful voice to his young love and worth quoting extensively as it transmitted something of his character and energy, setting his epistolary presence beside hers. He started by offering her his heart and his efforts at creative story-telling, diminished, he believed, by his all-consuming love for her:

To My Lady

Madame

Having so good a title to my heart you may justly lay claime to all that comes from it, theese fruits I know will not bee worth your owning for alas what can bee expected from so barren a soile as that must needs bee having been scorched up with those flames wch your eys have long since kindled in it.

He added that the story of the viccissitudes of their love was more than a match for the ‘tragicall storys’ that follow. But it would take too long, was too painful to recall and it had no end, ‘should I heer trace over all the wandring steps of an unfortunate passion wch has so long and so variously tormented me … Tis not heer my intention to publish a secrett or entertain you with what you are already so well acquainted [i.e. their own love story] tis onely to tell you the occasion that brought thees storys into the frame wherein now you see them.’ William then admits his painful longing for her presence and inability to endure this long separation:

‘Would I could doe it without calling to mind the pains of that taedious absence, wch I thought never would have ended but with my life, having lasted so much longer then I could ever figure to myself a possibility of living without you. How slowly the lame minutes of that time past away you will easily imagine, and how I was faine by all diversions to lessen the occasions of thinking on you, wch yett cost mee so many sighs as I wonder how they left mee breath enough to serve till my return.’

He continued with an explanation of how the translating and reforming of these tales took his mind off his own misfortunes and gave a voice to his overflowing feelings:

‘I made it the pastime of those lonely houres that my broken sleeps usd each night to leave upon my hands. besides in the expressing of their severall passions I found a vent for my owne, wch if kept in had sure burst mee before now, and shewd you a heart wch you have so wholly taken up that contentment could nere find a room in it since you first came there. I send you thees storys as indeed they are properly yours whose remembrance indited [inspired] whatever is passionate in any line of them.’

William then signed off, dedicating his life to her:

And now Madam I must onely aske for pardon for entitling you to The disastrous chances of Love and Fortune; you will not bee displeasd since I thereby entitle you to my whole life wch hath hitherto been composed of nothing else. but whilst I am yours I can never bee unhappy, and shall alwaies esteem fortune my friend so long as you shall esteem mee Your servant³²

In fact this second journey abroad, of which Dorothy had been so keen to hear more, was not spent merely moping for his love and writing melodramatic romances. He also found himself highly impressed by what he found in the Dutch United Provinces, a republic in its heyday, full of prosperous, liberal-minded people who nevertheless lived frugally and with a strong sense of civic duty and pride. This golden age was immortalised by the extraordinary efflorescence of great Dutch painters, among them Vermeer, Rembrandt and van Hoogstraten, whose paintings of secular interiors, serene portraits and domestic scenes of vivid humanity reflected the order and self-confidence of an ascendant nation. William was particularly impressed by how willingly the Dutch paid their taxes and took the kind of pride in their public spaces, transport and buildings that Englishmen took only in their private estates. Brussels also attracted him greatly; still at the centre of the Spanish Netherlands, it was here that he learned Spanish. He suggested to his sister, and probably to Dorothy too, that he was considering a career as a diplomat and should Charles II return to the throne and offer him employment, ‘whenever the Governement was setled agin, he should be soe well pleas’d to serve him in, as being His Resident there [in Brussels]’.³³

William’s expansive reply to Dorothy’s letter requesting details of what he had been up to during his prolonged absence abroad, prompted her to divulge just how many rivals for her hand she had had to fend off in his absence. First there was an unidentified suitor ‘that I had little hope of ever shakeing of[f]’ until she persuaded her brother to go and inspect his estate. To Dorothy’s delight the house was found to be in such dire condition that she was able to grasp this as reason enough to decline his offer of marriage. Not long after, she heard that this suitor had been involved in a duel and was either killed or had been the one who had done the killing and therefore had fled.* ‘[Either way] made me glad I had scaped him, and sorry for his misfortune, which in Earnest was the least retourne, his many Civility’s to mee could deserve.’

Her mother’s death, she continued, gave her a brief respite for mourning but then a bossy aunt, most probably Lady Gargrave, asserted her authority and pressed another possible husband on her. Luckily her dowry was considered too meagre for him (he wanted an extra £1,000 from her father: this enraged Dorothy who thought him so detestable that even if her dowry was £1,000 less she considered that too much). Then she introduced to William the suitor she nicknamed ‘the Emperour’ who was to be the subject of a running joke between them: ‘some freinds that had observed a Gravity in my face, which might become an Elderly man’s wife (as they term’d it) and a Mother in Law [step-mother] proposed a Widdower to mee, that had fower daughters, all old enough to be my sister’s.’ To William she pretended that the reputation of this man for intelligence and breeding, as well as his owning a great estate, made her think he might do. ‘But shall I tell you what I thought when I knew him, (you will say nothing on’t) ’twas the vainest, Impertinent, self conceated, Learned, Coxcombe, that ever I saw.’³⁴

This ‘impertinent coxcomb’ was Sir Justinian Isham, a royalist from Northamptonshire who had lent money to Charles I and been imprisoned briefly during the civil wars for his pains. He was forty-two when he sought her hand in marriage and, as Dorothy admitted, a learned gentleman and fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who built an excellent library at his country seat, Lamport Hall. His scholarship, however, impeded his letter-writing style, she believed, and in her explanation she sent a mischievous backhanded compliment to William:

In my Opinion these great Schollers are not the best writer’s, (of Letters I mean, of books perhaps they are) I never had I think but one letter from Sir Jus: but twas worth twenty of any body’s else to make mee sport, it was the most sublime nonsence that In my life I ever read and yet I beleeve hee descended as low as hee could to come neer my weak understanding. twill bee noe Complement after this to say I like your letters in themselv’s, not as they come from one that is not indifferent to mee. But seriously I doe. All Letters mee thinks should bee free and Easy as ones discourse, not studdyed, as an Oration, nor made up of hard words like a Charme.

She went on to explain how frustrating it was when people tried so hard for effect that they obscured meaning, like one gentleman she knew ‘whoe would never say the weather grew cold, but that the Winter began to salute us’.³⁵ Whether this was ‘the Emperour’s’ stylistic weakness she did not say but continued her characterisation of him in subsequent letters: he was over-strict with his poor daughters (and Dorothy surmised would have been with her too if she had become his wife) and ‘keep’s them soe much Prisoners to a Vile house he has in Northamptonshyre, that if once I had but let them loose they and his Learning would have bin sufficient to have made him mad, without my helpe’. She also enjoyed exploring the conceit with William that in marrying Isham she would then offer one of her stepdaughters to him in marriage ‘and ’tis certaine I had proved a most Exelent Mother in Law’.³⁶

Dorothy’s lively descriptions of a colourful list of suitors not only entertained William, they also inevitably impressed him with the competition he was up against and quickened his already urgent desire. She knew this and throughout there was a sense of her playfulness and control. She was relating these stories in the January and February of 1653 but this particular courtship had taken place the previous spring and early summer, as was clear in the laconic entries in her brother Henry’s diary. By the beginning of March 1652, Henry had thought it necessary to prod Sir Justinian Isham into some kind of definite offer. There were various dealings between the two families, and Dorothy’s polite but evasive stance seemed to win out.

William’s young friend, Sir Thomas Osborne, who had been such a good companion to him during his first travels in France, also decided to open marriage negotiations with Dorothy, the girl he had known all his life as his older cousin, aged twenty-five to his twenty-one. This frantic marriage-trading overlapped with the Sir Justinian Isham period. Again brother Henry’s diary recorded meetings between the suitors and their families: letters whizzed back and forth, with Dorothy under pressure but holding her ground. There was some exasperation or misunderstanding and Sir Thomas’s mother, Lady Osborne, broke off negotiations. Dorothy was then removed from her brother-in-law’s London house, where she had been staying, as her favourite niece, Dorothy Peyton, and her stepmother Lady Peyton had contracted smallpox. By 10 April, the dread disease had attacked Thomas Osborne too. All three were to survive but the aftermath of the failed marriage negotiations continued to haunt Dorothy.

Henry’s diary told how the following month the protagonists converged on Aunt Gargrave’s house: first Lady Osborne explained why they had withdrawn; then Dorothy gave her version of events; and finally Sir Thomas related ‘what hee had said to his mother’. In the middle of all these excuses and accusations, Sir Justinian Isham re-entered the fray. Dorothy was isolated and under siege but courageously maintained her resistance. Her despairing brother, usually so matter-of-fact and unemotional in his diary entries, confided on 28 June this heartfelt cry: ‘I vowed a vow to God to say a prayer everie day for my sister and when shee is married to give God thanks that day everie day as long as I lived.’³⁷

Sir Justinian quickly found a more receptive hand in Vere, the daughter of Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh. They married in 1653 and she produced two sons, each of whom inherited their father’s baronetcy. Like the Emperour, Sir Thomas Osborne also married in 1653 although Dorothy had already felt that their relationship as cousins was spoiled by the sour end to their courtship. This affected even his friendship with William, she feared: ‘Sir T. I suppose avoyd’s you as a freind [suitor] of mine, my Brother tells mee they meet somtim’s and have the most adoe to pull of theire hatts to one another that can bee, and never speake. If I were in Towne i’le undertake, hee would venture the being Choaked for want of Aire rather than stirre out of doores, for feare of meeting mee.’³⁸

Little wonder that she retired during the late summer of 1652 to the spa at Epsom, just outside London, to take the waters there. Leaving Chicksands on 16 August, Dorothy was to spend over two weeks drinking the waters daily in hope of a cure. She often referred to how she suffered from melancholy and low or irritable spirits that were commonly called ‘the Spleen’. This time her indisposition was due to ‘a Scurvy Spleen’ with little indication as to what scurvy meant in that context. In a later essay, ‘Of health and Long Life’, William, writing about the fashions in health complaints and various cures, claimed that once every ailment was called the spleen, then it was called the scurvy, so perhaps Dorothy’s doctor was covering all possibilities. It could be that she had a skin disease alongside the depression (the Epsom waters were good for skin complaints), or in fact she might have been using ‘scurvy’ figuratively meaning a sorry or contemptible thing, in this case her depression. She was aware of the fact that some people considered ‘the Spleen’ a largely hysterical condition and therefore wholly feminine, and was shy of naming William’s occasional depressions of spirit as melancholy: ‘I forsaw you would not bee willing to owne a disease, that the severe part of the worlde holde to bee meerly imaginary and affected, and therefore proper only to women.’³⁹

There was no doubt that Dorothy herself considered her symptoms to be real, even ominous. Her brother Henry and his friends had no sensitivity to her feelings and threatened her with imbecility, even madness, as she reported to William: ‘[they] doe soe fright mee with strange story’s of what the S[pleen] will bring mee in time, that I am kept in awe with them like a Childe. They tell mee ’twill not leave mee common sence, that I can hardly bee fitt company for my own dog’s, and that it will ende, either in a stupidnesse that will have mee incapable of any thing, or fill my head with such whim’s as will make mee, rediculous.’⁴⁰

So concerned was she that she used to dose herself with steel, against William’s advice. This involved immersing a bar of steel in white wine overnight and then drinking the infusion the next morning. The effects were unpleasant: ‘’tis not to be imagin’d how sick it makes mee for an hower or two, and, which is the missery all that time one must be useing some kinde of Exercise’. Such prescribed exercise meant for Dorothy playing shuttlecock with a friend while she felt more and more nauseous. The effects were so extreme, she wrote to William, ‘that every day at ten o clock I am makeing my will, and takeing leave of all my friend’s, you will beleeve you are not forgot then … ’tis worse then dyeing, by the halfe’.⁴¹ By the next morning, all the suffering would be worthwhile ‘for Joy that I am well againe’.⁴²

William was not convinced by this treatment, in fact he had little respect for doctors or their cures, and it was obvious from Dorothy’s letters that he would rather she desist. The effects of ‘the Spleen’ interested him and in the same essay on health he gave a description drawn from his personal experience in his own family, together with a very modern analysis of the importance of attitude of mind in maintaining health:

whatever the spleen is, whether a disease of the part so called, or of people that ail something, but they no not what; it is certainly a very ill ingredient into any other disease, and very often dangerous. For, as hope is the sovereign balsam of life, and the best cordial of all distempers both of body and mind; so fear, and regret, and melancholy apprehensions, which are the usual effects of the spleen, with the distractions, disquiets, or at least intranquillity they occasion, are the worst accidents that can attend any diseases; and make them often mortal, which would otherwise pass, and have had but a common course.⁴³

Dorothy returned from Epsom on 4 September 1652 only to find her brother Henry, who was fast becoming the bane of her life, had been nurturing another suitor in her absence, the scholarly Dr Scarborough. To William she admitted her amazement that such a reserved and serious intellectual should have any interest in courtship and marriage: ‘I doe not know him soe well as to give you much of his Character, ’tis a Modest, Melancholy, reserved, man, whose head is so taken up with little Philosophicall Studdy’s, that I admire how I founde a roome there, ’twas sure by Chance.’⁴⁴ In fact this suitor was to be one of the founders of the Royal Society. Dr (later Sir) Charles Scarborough was a physician and mathematician, eleven years Dorothy’s senior, who was to become eminent as a royal doctor to Charles II, James II and William III. He was so dedicated to research that Dorothy feared that the only way she could ever occupy any part of his thoughts would be by becoming a subject for scientific investigation herself, particularly that aspect of her nature others considered least attractive, like her fits of melancholy.

The pragmatic approach to marrying off one’s daughters was evident in her family well before Dorothy had met William and unhelpfully set her heart on him alone. After the death of her sister Elizabeth, it was considered for a while that her brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Peyton, an excellent royalist gentleman with an estate in Kent, might then marry Dorothy. Both she and Elizabeth had been clever bookish girls with a fine writing style: to the practical and undiscerning they might have seemed interchangeable. Except Dorothy was only fifteen when her sister died and seemed already to hope for more in life than a marriage of convenience, particularly one to a widowed brother-in-law.

Whatever these inchoate plans might have been, Sir Thomas Peyton confounded them all by marrying a woman with a completely opposite temperament to the Osborne girls: Cecelia Swan, the widow of a mayor of London, was ‘of a free Jolly humor, loves cards and company and is never more pleased then when she see’s a great many Others that are soe too’. Dorothy marvelled that her brother-in-law could be such an excellent and contented husband with two such different wives. She explained to William why he briefly considered her as his next wife, and in the process continued her deft and generous character sketch of the second Lady Peyton: ‘His kindenesse to his first wife may give him an Esteem for her Sister [Dorothy herself], but hee [was] too much smitten with this Lady to think of marrying any body else, and seriously I could not blame him, for she had, and has yet, great Lovlinesse in her, she was very handsom and is very good, one may read it in her face at first sight.’⁴⁵

Her most eminent suitor, and her most surprising given she was of such loyal royalist stock, was Henry Cromwell,* fourth son of Oliver Cromwell, soon to be lord protector. There is no indication as to how these two young people met and their unlikely friendship is a tantalising one. Henry was an exact contemporary of William’s, one year younger than Dorothy and her favourite suitor among the also-rans. He lacked William’s romantic good looks but was a thoroughly amiable, intelligent and capable young man: while William was abroad playing tennis, perfecting his French and pining for love, Henry was in the thick of battle, serving under his father during the latter part of the civil wars.

Dorothy remained friends with him even after their courtship came to nothing and he had married another. She shared with him a love of Irish greyhounds and already owned a bitch he had given her that had belonged to his father. Unlike other ladies of her acquaintance, she eschewed lap dogs for the grandeur of really big breeds and had asked Henry Cromwell to send her from Ireland a male dog, ‘the biggest hee can meet with, ’tis all the beauty of those dogs or of any indeed I think, a Masty [mastiff] is handsomer to mee then the most exact little dog that ever Lady playde withall’.⁴⁶ When no hound was forthcoming she transferred the request through William to his father Sir John Temple, when he was next in Ireland. Three months later, at the end of September 1653, it was Henry Cromwell who came up with the goods: ‘I must tell you what a present I had made mee today,’ she wrote excitedly to William, ‘two [of] the finest Young Ireish Greyhounds that ere I saw, a Gentelman that serv’s the Generall [Oliver Cromwell] sent them mee they are newly come over and sent for by H. C.’⁴⁷

Rivalry over which suitor could provide the best dog may have spurred William on to entreat his father to send a dog from Ireland, as previously requested, or in fact he may have sent his own hound to stay with Dorothy at Chicksands when he himself set out for Ireland the following spring, but a Temple greyhound did arrive at Chicksands to compete for Dorothy’s attention with the Cromwell pair. In March, Dorothy wrote to William expressing her care and affection for this new dog and her efforts to protect him from the pack. It is easy to see how her relationship with this dog was used by her as a metaphor for her feelings for William, and her constant defence of him against the malice of his detractors: ‘Your dog is come too, and I have received him with all the Kindnesses that is due to any thinge you sende[,] have deffended him from the Envy and the Mallice of a troupe of greyhounds that used to bee in favour with mee, and hee is soe sencible of my care over him that hee is pleased with nobody else and follow’s mee as if wee had bin of longe acquaintance.’⁴⁸

There is no letter from William to Dorothy that could tell us what he thought of all these human rivals when he was kept so strictly from her. His one existing letter, written later in their courtship when he had arrived in Ireland on a visit to his father, was passionate, ecstatic and extreme; he vowed he could not live without her and, in the absence of a letter, strove to reassure himself of her love. At this time, judging from her own letters in response to his, there were occasions when he lost confidence in his powers to keep her, feared he did not write such fine letters as others, or thought her less passionately committed to him than he was to her.

William’s sense of frustration at their separation and his powerlessness to effect anything was expressed in his anxiety that Dorothy should not be taken in by young men engaged merely in the pursuit of love, full of pretence and false emotion, ‘one whining in poetry, another groaning in passionate epistles or harangues … how neer it concerns young Ladys in this age to beware of abuses, not to build upon any appearance of a passion wch men learne by rote how to act, and practise almost in all companys where they come’.⁴⁹ It seemed his fears were frankly and easily expressed to Dorothy and she was quick to console him with her continual longing for him and desire for his happiness: ‘if to know I wish you with mee, pleases you, tis a satisfaction you may always’s have, for I doe it perpetualy, but were it realy in my Power to make you happy, I could not misse being soe my self for I know nothing Else I want towards it.’⁵⁰

He did describe, however, in one of his early essays, written during these fraught times of separation and uncertainty, the corrosive power of jealousy from what seemed to be personal experience: his style, formal here as befits an essay, would have been much more conversational had this been expressed instead in a letter to Dorothy:

Amongst all those passions wch ride mens soules none so jade and tire them out as envy and jealousy … jealousy is desperate of any cure, all thinges nourish, nothing destroyes it … where this suspicion is once planted, the fondest circumstances serve to encrease it, the clearest eveidences can never root it out; though a man beleeves it is not true yet tis enough that it might have been true … tis the madness of love, the moth of contentment, the wolfe in the brest, the gangreen of the soule the vulture of Tityus still knawing at the heart, tis the ranckest poyson growing out of the richest soile, engender’d of love, but cursed viper, teares out its mothers bowells … tis allwayes searching what it hopes never to find.⁵¹

Everything was made far worse by their enforced separation. In absence, rivals grow in the imagination, fantasies become real and love and fear of loss inflate into obsession. There was little reassurance to be had from anyone but each other and their letters assumed enormous significance. But then letters took so long to be delivered that the mood had passed by the time a reply arrived. Most were carried privately by a post boy, whose horse was changed at regular stages along the journey, or by a carrier’s wagon. The charge was based on how many pages were sent. Dorothy’s letters were closely written on every spare margin and corner of her sheet of paper and sometimes finished abruptly when she ran out of space. The cost of sending a letter from Chicksands to London was 2 old pence.* She usually wrote on a Sunday to catch the Monday morning carrier and it arrived that evening or Tuesday morning. William wrote his reply on a Wednesday, or often very early on the Thursday to catch the dawn carrier so that his letter would be in Dorothy’s eager hands by the evening or following Friday morning. Dorothy was so desperate for her precious lifeline to him that sometimes she sent one of the Chicksands’ grooms to meet the courier, fortunately oblivious of the emotional import of what he had to collect. Her relating of this in a letter to William in the spring of 1653 was a tour de force that revealed the unbearable tension of waiting for the object of desire, recalled in the warm glow of possession:

Sir, Iam glad you escaped a beating [from her if he had missed the courier] but in Earnest would it had lighted upon my Brother’s Groome, I think I should have beaten him my self if I had bin able. I have Expected your letter all this day with the Greatest impatience that was posible, and at Last resolved to goe out and meet the fellow, and when I came downe to the stables, I found him come, had sett up his horse, and was sweeping the Stable in great Order. I could not imagin him soe very a beast as to think his horses were to bee served before mee, and therfor was presently struck with an aprehension hee had noe letter for mee, it went Colde to my heart as Ice, and hardly left mee courage enough to aske him the question, but when hee had drawled out that hee thought there was a letter for mee in his bag I quickly made him leave his broome. ’Twas well ’tis a dull fellow [for] hee could not but … have discern’d else that I was strangly overjoyed with it, and Earnest to have it, for though the poor fellow made what hast hee could to unty his bag, I did nothing but chide him for being soe slow. At last I had it, and in Earnest I know not whither an intire diamond of the bignesse on’t would have pleased mee half soe well, if it would, it must bee only out of this consideration that such a Juell would make mee Rich Enough to dispute you with Mrs Cl [a possible wife for him promoted by his father]: and perhaps make your father like mee as well.⁵²

About three weeks later, Dorothy was in even greater need of William’s letters as she sat in vigil by her father’s bed, afraid he might be dying. Exhausted and strained, she vented her disappointment at the scrappy letter she had just received from him, exhorting him to start writing to her earlier instead of leaving it to the last minute. She was exasperated too with his petulant comment that she did not value his letters enough:

But harke you, if you think to scape with sending mee such bits of letters you are mistaken. You say you are often interupted and I believe you, but you must use then to begin to write before you receive mine, and hensoever you have any spare time allow mee some of it. Can you doubt that any thing can make your letters Cheap. In Earnest twas unkindly sayed, and if I could bee angry with you, it should bee for that. Noe Certainly they are, and ever will bee, deare to mee, as that which I receive a huge contentment by … O if you doe not send mee long letters then you are the Cruellest person that can bee. If you love mee you will and if you doe not I shall never love my self.⁵³

Portraits were also necessary and affecting substitutes for the absent. They were painted and exchanged as important reminders of the loved one’s presence. Interestingly both Dorothy and William, neither of them rich or aristocratic, were to have portraits painted of themselves by some of the greatest artists of the day. In the summer of 1653 William was obviously missing her greatly and had asked for some memento: Dorothy suggested she get a miniature done of herself to send to William to console him in her absence. Nerves were obviously fraying: ‘For god sake doe not complaine soe that you doe not see mee, I beleeve I doe not suffer lesse in’t then you, but tis not to be helpt. If I had a Picture that were fitt for you, you should have it, I have but one that’s any thing like and that’s a great [full size] one, but I will send it some time or other to Cooper or Hoskins,* and have a litle one drawne by it, if I cannot bee in Towne to sitt my selfe.’⁵⁴

As suitors came and went it was not just William and Dorothy who suffered. Dorothy’s brother Henry, the family member most assiduous about arranging a good marriage for her, many times came close to hysteria. He certainly subjected her to endless probing conversations, tearful reproaches, emotional blackmail and downright bullying in his attempts to undermine her adamant loyalty to William and antipathy to the candidates he steered her way. He once threatened with violence the messenger bringing the mail to Chicksands and periodically searched the house for evidence of letters from Dorothy’s forbidden lover: this accepted violation of her privacy was possibly the reason why only one of William’s letters from this period exists today, for it would seem Dorothy was forced to dispose of them once she had read them. On one occasion she wrote to William that she was unwilling to destroy the letter she had just received: ‘You must pardon mee I could not burn your other letter for my life, I was soe pleased to see I had soe much to reade, & soe sorry I had don soe soone, that I resolved to begin them again and had like to have lost my dinner by it.’⁵⁵

If in fact Dorothy felt compelled to destroy each of William’s longed-for letters it would have caused great anguish, for they were largely her only contact with him and had an iconic power. The emotional journey they described was the most important of her life and, as her co-conspirator, his was the only reassuring voice in a chorus of ignorance and hostility. For all she knew, their clandestine letters might have been all they would ever have to show for these years of heightened feeling, should their love story end the way the world expected.

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