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

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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;

(#ulink_7bb9dad4-d515-5a48-a58d-da9708c67cd6) 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.

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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’.

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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,

(#ulink_7dce064b-2427-5ef6-87e1-c80666ac98ec) 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.

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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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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.’

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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 R

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.

* (#ulink_9656bc86-daae-5d03-89a9-918f32894ef9)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.

† (#ulink_9656bc86-daae-5d03-89a9-918f32894ef9)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.’

* (#ulink_205788aa-59e9-5856-a60c-11ca50e1457c)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.

* (#ulink_3cf413e9-879c-5c75-99e8-7446f650b1cb)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.

† (#ulink_3cf413e9-879c-5c75-99e8-7446f650b1cb)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.

* (#ulink_00b959fc-daff-578e-9d05-1fa74a0e7a9a)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.