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

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.

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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.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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[?]’

(#litres_trial_promo) but it seemed the vainest hope.

* (#ulink_196cd34d-45fa-57e6-a48a-96670d52af2a)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.

* (#ulink_4ed039d6-89df-5b96-9789-72b1026c1b47)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.

† (#ulink_6205e6bc-c7d9-5900-8280-8afcfcac14ef)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.

* (#ulink_00b8a745-4742-5eff-81bf-0f8a0f24a087)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.

* (#ulink_4a0b0594-cb1c-555d-a9cc-9f9a0e6f3e30)They both used the word ‘friend’ to mean also a close family member, most notably a spouse.

* (#ulink_a2d50e49-fb92-587b-bba7-fdeaf97f4f96)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 (#ulink_1d7a9f03-3320-5b17-99fc-fcf1344af99d)

The Making of Dorothy (#ulink_1d7a9f03-3320-5b17-99fc-fcf1344af99d)

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

(#ulink_9bb4d604-3903-5eca-b0c3-cad687a8acdf) 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.

(#ulink_d3ababda-ca82-5425-b65b-5645386a7e9b) 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,

(#ulink_472f4683-e6c4-57cc-a38a-fa019a93232d) 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

(#ulink_b4004c06-72dd-587a-a14a-05cb239edcd6) described as ‘a most beautifull and good and even-tempered person’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Sir John’s wife, Dorothy’s grandmother, was Elizabeth Danvers

(#ulink_791f2432-0d88-52ec-8281-8ba7ba625654) 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’,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#ulink_ff9cddfe-fd89-599b-9fd3-2d8036b4906b) 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’,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#ulink_e4db8b7d-dc93-530c-a1e8-f7074f731e3a) A great Oeconomist’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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So great was his interest and skill in gardening that Aubrey claimed the garden Sir John created for his house at Chelsea