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

By this time the Renaissance ideal of education was degraded, with classics reduced to the drudgery of learning everything by rote and it was accepted that Latin and Greek, for instance, had to be whipped into a boy. The contemporary schoolmaster and writer Henry Peacham,* in his book on etiquette for the upper classes, described with resignation the cruelties that most educators believed had to be inflicted on boys in order to turn them into scholars: ‘pulled by the ears, lashed over the face, beaten about the head with the great end of the rod, smitten upon the lips for every slight offence with the ferula’.20

In marked contrast William Temple’s boyhood education was almost exclusively in the benign company of an uncle who could not bring himself even to raise his voice in anger and sought instead to teach by encouragement and example. Henry Hammond’s friend and colleague Dr Fell seemed to approve of this pacifist approach to teaching: ‘his little phrase, “Don’t be simple,” had more power to charm a passion than long harangues from others.’21

When the boy William wasn’t sitting over his books or being coaxed to a love of study, he was free to explore the gardens and grounds of the estate, etching still deeper his natural affinity with the rural life. When a father himself, William replicated these early experiences in the freedom he allowed his own children and the affectionate indulgence with which he treated them. In one of his later essays he wrote that despite choosing personal liberty always over material gain, matters of the heart were of even greater priority, ‘yet to please a mistress, save a beloved child, serve his country or friend, [this man] will sacrifice all the ease of his life, nay his blood and life too, upon occasion’.22

In fact the most violent treatment William had to endure while in the care of his uncle was the medical treatment at the time for various common ailments: ‘I remembered the cure of chilblains, when I was a boy, (which may be called the children’s gout,) by burning at the fire, or else by scalding brine.’ He recalled too how a deep wound when he was a youth was ‘cured by scalding medicament, after it was grown so putrefied as to have (in the surgeon’s opinion) endangered the bone; and the violent swelling and bruise of another taken away as soon as I received it, by scalding it with milk’.23

Both William and his uncle shared a love of music. Dr Hammond, particularly in the youthful period of his life when he was in loco parentis for his nephew, would accompany himself on the harpsichon, a kind of virginal, or take up his theorbo, a large double-necked bass lute, and play and sing ‘after the toil and labour of the day, and before the remaining studies of the night’.24

The kind of music-making indulged in by William and his uncle at Penshurst was of an unexacting domestic kind, practised in the home, sometimes in the company of a few country friends. In joining in the relaxation at the end of the day by playing and listening to music, William was merely doing what most people were doing across the land, in church, court and country. Aubrey famously declared: ‘When I was a Boy every Gentleman almost kept a Harper in his house: and some of them could versifie.’25 For him the ‘Civill Warres’ changed everything, but informal music-making would continue regardless: Dorothy Osborne’s shepherdesses singing in the fields in summer remained just part of the rich musicality of a time when all classes of people made music domestically and turned to each other for entertainment.

This youthful interlude in a rural paradise under his uncle’s care had to come to an end. About the age of eleven, William left Penshurst and was sent to board at the grammar school at Bishop’s Stortford, a town some thirty miles from London and twenty-six from Cambridge. Despite an inevitably rude awakening to school life, this was as happy a choice as possible, for the school’s reputation and success were in rapid ascendancy under the inspired headship of Thomas Leigh. He not only set up Latin and writing schools but was also instrumental in building a library of repute, partially by insisting that every pupil donate a book as a leaving present. His regime was more tolerant and less violent than elsewhere. When he finally retired in the 1660s after a triumphant forty-seven years at the helm the school went into rapid decline, but he was still in charge while William and his younger brothers were schooled there. All his life William Temple retained his respect for Mr Leigh to whom, he was wont to say, ‘he was beholding for all he knew of Latin & Greek’.26 His sister Martha added that he managed to retain all his Latin perfectly but regretted losing much of his Greek.

By the beginning of the 1640s William was just a teenager and still safely in school while the kingdom’s political certainties fell apart. For most of William’s life, Charles I had ruled without parliament, having dissolved his rebellious House of Commons, he hoped for ever, in 1629. The country had limped on under the king’s absolute rule until Scotland, always resistant to coercion, kicked back. Charles’s pig-headed insistence on imposing a Book of Common Prayer on the country of his birth brought to the fore long-held Scottish resentments against the crown. Two inflammatory passions that had so effectively driven the Scottish reformation, the hatred of foreign interference and of popery, were reignited. The eminent moderate Presbyterian Robert Baillie was shocked at the blind and murderous fury he found on the streets of his native Glasgow: ‘the whole people thinks poperie at the doores … no man may speak any thing in publick for the king’s part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day. I think our people possessed with a bloody devill, far above any thing that ever I could have imagined.’27

Equally blind in his anger and faced with approaching war, Charles refused to capitulate. His inability to finance any sustained war forced him to recall in 1640 what became known as the Short Parliament. The members, given eloquent voice by John Pym, were too full of grievances over the misrule of the last eleven years to be in any mood to cooperate with the king’s demands, and Charles was in no mood to make amends. Within three weeks he dissolved this parliament. Barely six months later, his authority fatally undermined, forced to surrender to the Scottish terms and cripplingly short of money, the king had little recourse but to recall parliament for a second time. The sitting that began in November 1640 became known as the Long Parliament, hailed as a triumph for the people.

Sitting simultaneously to both Short and Long Parliaments was the convocation of divines, one of whom was William’s uncle Dr Hammond. With the introduction of seventeen new canons of ecclesiastical law, Charles intended to have his clergy insist from the pulpit on the power of monarchy. He also sought to make the subject matter and rituals of church service conform to a model that was anathema to the growing Puritan element among his clergy, with the altar being railed off, for instance. As a loyal supporter of the king, Dr Hammond was in the minority in this gathering. With parliament and king increasingly polarised and military action looming, Dr Hammond’s uncompromising position made him vulnerable. By 1643, in the middle of the first civil war, his vicarage was sacked and he was forced to flee his parish to seek refuge in Oxford, the new headquarters for the king, where he was later kept under house arrest himself. Although he was to become Charles’s personal chaplain in his various confinements, including for a while his imprisonment at Carisbrooke Castle, the place to which Hammond longed to return was his parish at Penshurst: ‘the necessity to leave his flock … was that which did most affect him of any that he felt in his whole life’.28

It was a measure of the depth of ideological passions and the widespread effects of the political hostilities at the time that even such a naturally pacifist scholar as Henry Hammond, ministering to a country parish far away from the centres of political and ecclesiastical power, should have his daily life completely disrupted, his own life, even, threatened. He was never able to take up his living again at Penshurst but continued to write with all the fluency he had shown when young, sheltered by various friends and admirers, and enduring with unflagging patience the agony of kidney stones and gout that afflicted him in middle age. He died aged fifty-four of kidney failure in 1660, just as his old patron’s son was restored to the throne.

William’s father too suffered a reversal of fortune that reverberated in his son’s life. Sir John Temple had been a member of Charles I’s forces riding north in 1639 to confront the rebellious Scots. The following year he was rewarded with the position of Master of the Rolls in Ireland, one of the most senior appointments in the Irish chancery, and he left England to assume his responsibilities. His good fortune was not to last long, however, for in October 1641 he was in the thick of the Irish rebellion (or massacre as it was called by contemporaries). Deeply held resentments over the plantation policies of both James I and Charles I, encouraging Protestant settlers from England and Scotland, finally erupted in anarchic and bloody violence. The Irish Catholics joined forces with the equally disaffected Anglo-Norman ‘Old English’ aristocracy in an attempt to drive out the Protestants. Although the numbers killed are still open to dispute, there is little doubt that thousands of settlers were murdered, their farms burned, their families dispossessed. Rumour of inhuman atrocities spread like wildfire throughout England and Scotland, reviving fears of a popish conspiracy. With Charles’s situation so parlous at home, his cause was damaged further by the suspicions that he too was complicit in the conspiracy.

Sir John was undoubtedly appalled by the sights he witnessed and the stories he was told and had every reason to fear that this rebellion could turn into a St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, first against all Protestants but then drawing everyone in to a wholesale bloodbath. His anger towards the rebels was unassuaged, even as savage reprisals against them were carried out by the army. He was commended for his efficiency in ensuring that provisions got through to Dublin where the army was quartered but was obdurately against the official decision in 1643 to broker a deal with the rebels in order that Charles could withdraw his troops for use against the parliamentarian forces back in England. Sir John was suspended from his duties as punishment for this opposition and, along with three other privy counsellors, imprisoned in Dublin Castle for more than a year.

The bloody rupture of civil war affected everyone. William left Bishop’s Stortford School in 1643, the same year his uncle was forced out of his parish and his father was imprisoned. By then he was fifteen and although his sister claimed that he had learned as much as the school had to teach him, it was just as likely that the uncertainty of the times and his father’s fate had something to do with it too. He was old enough to go to Cambridge, the university fed by his school, but this transition was delayed by the family situation and the turmoil in the country. William’s world was in flux, his uncle had just been deprived of his living and his father disgraced and in danger. The parsonage house at Penshurst, for so long home to him, was gone, as was the family’s source of income, while his father’s life and future hung in the balance. The country had plunged into civil war.

By the summer of 1643 the royalist armies seemed to be marginally in the ascendant. It would be two years before individual parliamentary forces were consolidated into a disciplined fighting force, renamed the New Model Army, and the war swung decisively against Charles I. The destruction of life and livelihoods, the rupture of friendships and family loyalties, the waste of war were apparent everywhere.

There is no record of how William spent the eighteen months or so between his leaving school and entering university. Certainly for the first year his father was imprisoned, with all the uncertainty and hardship to his family that entailed. Only on Sir John’s release and return to England in 1644 did William’s life again seem to move forwards. On 31 August of that year William Temple was enrolled at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with Ralph Cudworth* as his personal tutor.

The college was known to be sympathetic to the Puritan cause and Ralph Cudworth, still a young man at twenty-seven, was a recently elected fellow with a growing reputation as a profound theological scholar and philosopher. At the time William came under his care, Cudworth was the leader of a group of young philosophers who became known as the Cambridge Platonists.† Cudworth himself had just published his first tract, A Discourse concerning the true Notion of the Lord’s Supper, and was to remain at Emmanuel only for William’s first year before taking up in 1645 his new post as master of Clare Hall and regius professor of Hebrew. His magnum opus, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated, was not published until 1678. Industrious, scholarly and prolific in his writings, Cudworth was described, memorably but probably unfairly, by Bolingbroke* as someone who ‘read too much to think enough, and admired too much to think freely’.

This immensely serious and learned young man had an uphill battle getting this sixteen-year-old fresher to buckle down to the finer points of theological and moral philosophy. William’s sister recalled that Cudworth ‘would have engaged [William] in the harsh studies of logick and phylosophy wch his humor was too lively to pursue’. His disposition certainly was lively, and his interests wide-ranging and not solely intellectual. Martha, his doting sister, explained what she considered the tenor of William’s life at Cambridge: ‘Entertainments (which agreed better with [his merry disposition] & his age, especially Tennis) past most of his time there, soe that he use to say, if it bin possible in the two years time he past there to forgit all he had learn’t before, he must certainely have done it.’29

This sounds like a sister’s pride in her dashing, fun-loving, older brother and she was right about his passion for tennis which he continued to play at every opportunity until gout caught up with him in his forties. She was also right about his sybaritic, sensual and adventurous nature that drew him to experience the world for himself rather than live a scholar’s life of received opinion and reflection. However, there were aspects of his tutor’s profoundly argued philosophies that might have found some answering echo in William’s own interests and style as expressed in his later essays. Cudworth explored his theory of morality from the viewpoint of Platonism. He argued that moral judgements were based on eternal and unchanging ideals but, unlike Plato, he believed these immutable values existed in the mind of God. This kind of ethical intuitionism informed much of William Temple’s gentlemanly essays, although he was less insistent on a divine presence behind the moral patterns of human behaviour. In his jottings in old age on a range of subject matters for a forthcoming essay on conversation he wrote this:

The chief ingredients into the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding … Good nature and good sense come from our births or tempers: good breeding and truth, chiefly by education and converse with men. Yet truth seems much in one’s blood, and is gained too by good sense and reflection; that nothing is a greater possession, nor of more advantage to those that have it, as well as those that deal with it.30

In fact William’s lack of orthodox religious certainty was to be used against him at various times in his life when he was accused of atheism, an absence of belief that was generally feared as criminal and depraved. A young man in seventeenth-century England flirting with the thought that God was not the answer to everything was as dangerously exposed as an American flirting with Communism in the mid-1950s during the McCarthyite inquisitions. The Church abhorred unbelievers and sought to demonise them. Ralph Cudworth, William’s tutor at Emmanuel, wrote in the preface to his True Intellectual System of the Universe that he would address ‘weak, staggering and sceptical theists’ but was not even going to try to argue with atheists, for they had ‘sunk into so great a degree of sottishness [folly]’ as to be beyond redemption. Even the new breed of empirical natural scientists were horrified by this absence of Christian belief and Robert Boyle, one of the founding fathers of physics and chemistry and a leading member of the Royal Society, left money in his will for a minister to preach eight sermons a year ‘for proving the Christian religion against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans’.31

In France, it was illegal to publish works in defence of atheism right up to the period of the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and in England the poet Shelley was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for writing and distributing a moderate little pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. As late as 1869, avowed atheists could not sit in the House of Commons or give credible evidence in a court of law.

Montaigne, who became William’s intellectual hero, was most influential in marshalling and expressing the current philosophical debate as reflected through the prism of the new scepticism. His essay Apologie de Raimond Sebond summed up why all of man’s rational achievements to date were seriously in doubt. He pointed out the subjective nature of sensual experience, how personal, social and cultural factors influenced all men’s and women’s judgements, how everything we thought we knew could just as likely be a dream. The Libertins, the avant-garde intellectuals of the early seventeenth century centred in Paris, with whom William may well have had some dealings when on his travels in France, carried this scepticism to its logical conclusion of doubting even the existence of God.

While William absorbed some of the intellectual atmosphere of Emmanuel and played tennis in the open air, his impoverished father, back in London, turned his energies to bringing up the rest of his children. He returned from imprisonment in 1644 to his further diminished family, for his second daughter Mary had died three years before at the age of five. Four sons and one daughter remained and were to live into happy and successful adulthood. They were William, who was sixteen and just starting at Cambridge; John, twelve and probably at Bishop’s Stortford School; James who was ten; and the twins Henry and Martha who were only six years old. Martha remembered her father’s paternal care with gratitude: ‘though his fortunes in theese disorders of his Country were very low, he chose to spare in any thing, rather then what might be to ye advantage of his children in their breeding & Education. by wch he Contracted a Considerable debt, but lived to see it all payed.’32

During the next two years when William pursued his studies at Cambridge the country was exhausted and sickened by the continuing bloodshed and war. The Battle of Naseby in the summer of 1645 saw Cromwell’s New Model Army humiliate the royalist forces under Prince Rupert. Dorothy’s twenty-one-year-old brother, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Osborne, was just one of the many young men who perished on that muddied, bloody field. Bristol then surrendered and finally, in June 1646, Oxford, the headquarters of Charles I’s war effort. The first of the English civil wars staggered to a halt. But there was to be only a short respite before the local uprisings against the parliamentarians and invasion of the Scots fired up the second civil war in 1648.

At this point there was no indication what William’s own sympathies in the conflict were. Although his father had been a loyal executive of the crown he was a moderate who in dismay at the increasing despotism of Charles’s rule had thrown his weight behind the parliamentary cause and had chosen a school for his son that reinforced this ideological preference. However, the person William had been closest to during his early formative years was his resolutely royalist uncle Henry Hammond. Personally and intellectually, he was progressive, rational and tolerant, but emotionally William was a patriot and a romantic with more conservative instincts. All three men, however, deplored civil war. In an essay William wrote of the ‘fatal consequences … the miseries and deplorable effects of so many foreign and civil wars … how much blood they have drawn of the bravest subjects; how they have ravaged and defaced the noblest island of the world’.33 He saw his country as a land blessed by temperate climate and fertile soil, a beacon of happiness and moral probity to its continental neighbours, but all undermined by the bloody conflict of the worst kind of all wars.

Certainly William looked the part and owned the tastes popularly ascribed to a cavalier gentleman and, lacking ideological or religious fervour, fitted a moderate and tolerant mould much as did both his father and uncle. But he had no overweening reverence for monarchy and practised a philosophy of individual responsibility and humanist concern. Most significantly perhaps, William Temple belonged to a new, scientifically minded generation where observation and rational thought were beginning to challenge orthodox views of the natural world and superstitious elements of belief, while being careful to uphold the existence of God and His intelligent design. William was born within a few years of many of the founding members of the Royal Society: the natural philosopher Robert Boyle; the economist and scientist William Petty; the physician Thomas Willis, who became known as the father of neurology; and the brilliant scientist and architect Sir Christopher Wren, who had yet to rebuild much of London after the Great Fire of 1666. This was his generation. Even the great mathematician John Wallis, who was some twelve years older, was just leaving Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as William arrived but his influence in understanding systems, be they the forerunner of modern calculus or a language he was to invent for deaf-mutes, remained, encouraging an open-minded but analytic approach to knowledge. The intellectual atmosphere was stirring with the excitement of infinite possibilities and explanations at last for some of the mysteries of the natural world.

William Temple did not finish his degree but left Cambridge in 1647 after only two years. Perhaps the difficulties of the time, his father’s lack of funds, or his own relaxed attitude to study and desire to explore the wider world played a part in this decision. Certainly by the time he was twenty, in 1648, William was sent off on his European travels, for this was the traditional way that a young English gentleman completed the education that prepared him for the world.

This period saw the beginning of the great popularity of the Grand Tour for ‘finishing’ the education of a gentleman of quality. Dorothy’s uncle Francis Osborne, after the runaway success of his Advice to a Son, had become the arbiter of how a young gentleman like William should conduct himself in the world. Along with his age, he accepted the desirability of foreign travel for the young male but he could not wholeheartedly agree with those who claimed ‘Travel, as the best Accomplisher of Youth and Gentry’, pointing out that experience showed it more as ‘the greatest Debaucher; adding Affectation to Folly, and Atheism to the Curiosity of many not well principled by Education’.34 Disapproving of the superficial kind of tourism indulged in by fools, he did agree that travel was a necessary experience in the learning of foreign languages, although was opinionated about that too: ‘Next to Experience, Languages are the Richest Lading [cargo] of a Traveller; among which French is most useful, Italian and Spanish not being so fruitful in Learning, (except for the Mathematicks and Romances) their other Books being gelt [castrated] by the Fathers of the Inquisition.’35