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

(#litres_trial_promo)

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,

(#litres_trial_promo) and have a litle one drawne by it, if I cannot bee in Towne to sitt my selfe.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.