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

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘[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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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.’

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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.’

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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.’

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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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the next morning, all the suffering would be worthwhile ‘for Joy that I am well againe’.

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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.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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Her most eminent suitor, and her most surprising given she was of such loyal royalist stock, was Henry Cromwell,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.