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

(#ulink_977b7875-d89f-52c6-b793-9413ffe6e8ad) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#ulink_88f475d5-7615-572e-832b-d5688660eb66) 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’.

(#ulink_66a5f846-544c-5915-9da8-0f8ed1042e6b) 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.

(#ulink_e6f4dc25-f2c2-5d5e-8eb2-f0aad72837a7) 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.

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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

(#ulink_0f51e219-3081-5222-9d56-d099dfe15eaf) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#ulink_7688b108-f7b9-55ef-8af2-1c8edc69320b) 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.’

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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,

(#ulink_384a3baf-b9ac-513f-b702-e070fd4147b5) 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.’

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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,’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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

(#ulink_b2509282-c20c-5d77-bd18-b19d23700388) 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.’

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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

(#ulink_7b27fa2b-8470-5b30-8b00-661f37e71ce7) 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’.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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

(#ulink_9c095b7e-8cc2-5633-8417-092d192d6bff) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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]’.

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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,

(#ulink_61c42351-46bf-50ae-890d-98787b000d53) 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.’

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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.’