by Jane Dunn
Dorothy’s family, the Osbornes of Chicksands Priory near Bedford, was just one of the many whose lives and fortunes were shaken and dispersed by this war. At its head was Sir Peter Osborne, a cavalier gentleman who had unhesitatingly thrown in his lot with the king when he raised his standard at Nottingham in August 1642. Charles’s challenge to parliament heralded the greatest political and social turmoil in his islands’ history. And Sir Peter, along with the majority of the aristocracy and landed gentry, took up the royalist cause; in the process he was to lose most of what he held dear.
Dorothy was the youngest of the Osborne children, a dark-haired young woman with sorrowful eyes that belied her sharp and witty mind. When war first broke out in 1642 she was barely fifteen and her girlhood from then on was spent, not at home in suspended animation, but caught up in her father’s struggles abroad or as a reluctant guest in other people’s houses. After the rout of the royalist armies in the first civil war, the Osborne estate at Chicksands was sequestered: the family dispossessed was forced to rely on the uncertain hospitality of a series of relations. Being the beggars among family and friends left Dorothy with a defensive pride, ‘for feare of being Pittyed, which of all things I hate’.2
By 1648 two of her surviving four brothers had been killed in the fighting, and circumstances had robbed her of her youthful optimism. Her father had long been absent in Guernsey. He had been suggested as lieutenant governor for the island by his powerful brother-in-law Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby, who had been awarded the governorship for life. To be a royalist lieutenant governor of an island that had declared for the parliamentarians was a bitter fate and Sir Peter and his garrison ended up in a prolonged siege in the harbour fortress of Castle Cornet, abandoned by the royalist high command to face sickness and starvation. Dorothy, along with her mother and remaining brothers, was actively involved in her father’s desperate plight and it was mainly the family’s own personal resources that were used to maintain Sir Peter and his men in their lonely defiance.
Camped out in increasing penury and insecurity at St Malo on the French coast, his family sold the Osborne silver and even their linen in attempts to finance provisions for the starving castle inmates. When their own funds were exhausted, Lady Osborne turned to solicit financial assistance from relations, friends and reluctant officials. Often it had been humiliating and unproductive work. Dorothy had shared much of her mother’s hardships in trying to raise funds and both had endured the shame of begging for help. These years of uncertainty and struggle took their toll on everyone.
Dorothy’s mother, never the most cheerful of women, had lost what spirits and health she had. She explained her misanthropic attitude to her daughter: ‘I have lived to see that it is almost impossible to believe people worse than they are’; adding the bitter warning, ‘and so will you.’ Such a dark view of human nature expressed forcefully to a young woman on the brink of life was a baleful gift from any mother. Lady Osborne also criticised her daughter’s naturally melancholic expression: she considered she looked so doleful that anyone would think she had already endured the worst tragedy possible, needing, her mother claimed, ‘noe tear’s to perswade [show] my trouble, and that I had lookes soe farr beyond them, that were all the friends I had in the world, dead, more could not bee Expected then such a sadnesse in my Ey’s’ [she could not look any sadder].3
So it was that this young woman, whose life had already been forced out of seclusion, set out with her brother Robin in 1648 for France. Dorothy recognised the change these hardships had wrought, how pessimistic and anxious she had become: ‘I was so alterd, from a Cheerful humor that was always’s alike [constant], never over merry, but always pleased, I was growne heavy, and sullen, froward [turned inward] and discomposed.’4 She had little reason to expect some fortunate turn of fate. More likely was fear of further loss to her family, more danger and deaths and the possibility that their home would be lost for ever.
An arranged marriage to some worthy whose fortune would help repair her own was the prescribed goal for a young woman of her class and time. Dorothy had grown up expecting marriage as the only career for a girl, the salvation from a life of dependency and service in the house of some relation or other. But it was marriage as business merger, negotiated by parents. Love, or even liking, was no part of it, although in many such marriages a kind of devoted affection, even passion, would grow. She struggled to convince herself it was a near impossibility to marry for love: ‘a happiness,’ she considered, ‘too great for this world’.5
Dorothy, however, had been exposed also to the more unruly world of the imagination. She was a keen and serious reader. She immersed herself in the wider moral and emotional landscapes offered by the classics and contemporary French romances, most notably those of de Scudéry. These heroic novels of epic length, sometimes running to ten volumes, enjoyed extraordinary appeal during the mid-seventeenth century. Some offered not just emotional adventure but also the delights of escapism by taking home-based women (for their readers were mostly female) on imaginary journeys across the known world.
Despite having her heart and imagination fired with fables of high romance, Dorothy knew her destiny as an Englishwoman from the respectable if newly impoverished gentry lay in a grittier reality. As she and her brother passed through their own war-scarred land they were faced by the hard truth that the conflict was not yet over and the country was becoming an increasingly disorderly and lawless place. Traditions of accepted behaviour and expectation were upended. Authority, from the local gentry landowners to the king, had been fundamentally challenged and law and order were beginning to crumble. Travelling was dangerous at any time, for the roads were rutted tracks and travellers were vulnerable to desperate or vicious men. There was no police force, and justice in a time of war was random and largely absent. In her memoirs Lady Halkett,* a contemporary of Dorothy’s, noted the increase in unprovoked acts of murderous sectarian violence against individuals: ‘there was too many sad examples of [such] att that time, when the devission was betwixt the King and Parliament, for to betray a master or a friend was looked upon as doing God good service.’6
Dorothy recalled later the self-imposed tragedy, witnessed at first hand, of what had become of England, ‘a Country wasted by a Civill warr … Ruin’d and desolated by the long striffe within it to that degree as twill bee usefull to none’.7 Certainly her family’s fortunes and future prospects appeared to be as ruined as the burned houses and dying cattle they passed on their journey south. However destructive civil war was to life, fortune and security, the social upheavals broke open some of the more stifling conventions of a young unmarried woman’s life. Although exposing her to fear and humiliation, the struggle to save her father propelled Dorothy out of Bedfordshire into a wider horizon and a more demanding and active role in the world.
Now she was on the road again: however disheartening the reasons for her journey, whatever the dangers, she was young enough to rise to this newfound freedom and the possibility of adventure. The bustling activity of other travellers was always interesting, the unpredictability of experience exhilarating to a highly perceptive young woman: for Dorothy the small dramas of people’s lives were a constant diversion. She shared her amusement with her brother Robin on the journey, possibly making similar comments to the following, when she noted the extraordinary diminishment wrought by marriage on a male acquaintance whom she had thought destined for greater things. It is as if she is talking to us directly, confiding this piece of mischievous gossip to an inclined ear:
I was surprised to see, a Man that I had knowne soe handsom, soe capable of being made a pretty gentleman … Transformed into the direct shape of a great Boy newly come from scoole. To see him wholly taken up with running on Errand’s for his wife, and teaching her little dog, tricks, and this was the best of him, for when hee was at leasure to talke, hee would suffer noebody Else to doe it, and by what hee sayd, and the noyse hee made, if you had heard it you would have concluded him drunk wi
th joy that hee had a wife and a pack of houndes.8
Dorothy’s analytic, philosophical turn of mind always searched for deeper significance as well as humour in the antics of her fellows. Her conversational letters, full of irony and gossip, showed her striving to do right herself and yet highly entertained by the wrongs done by others. As Dorothy and Robin crossed by ferry to the Isle of Wight to await the boat to France there was much to watch and wonder at. When they eventually arrived at the Rose and Crown Inn they had the added piquancy of being close to the forbidding Norman fortress, Carisbrooke Castle, where Charles I was imprisoned, with all the attendant speculation around his recent incarceration and various attempts at escape and rescue.
Also en route to France was a young man of quite extraordinary good looks and ardent nature. William Temple was only twenty and had evaded most of the bitter legacies and depredations of the civil war. His family were parliamentarians, his father sometime Master of the Rolls in Ireland and a member of parliament there. William was his eldest son and although not dedicated to scholarship was highly intelligent and curious about the world, with an optimistic view of human nature. His easy manners, interest in others and natural charm were so infectious that his sister Martha claimed that on a good day no one, male or female, could resist him. Sent abroad by his father to broaden his education and protect him from the worst of the war at home, William Temple, naturally independent-minded and tolerant, avoided playing his part in the sectarianism that divided families and destroyed lives.
There was nothing, after all, to keep him at home, as his sister later explained: ‘1648 [was] a time so dismal to England, that none but those who were the occasion of those disorders in their Country, could have bin sorry to leave it.’9 William headed first for the Isle of Wight to visit his uncle Sir John Dingley who owned a large estate there. He had another more controversial family member on the island, his cousin Colonel Robert Hammond,* who as the governor of Carisbrooke Castle had the unenviable task of keeping the defeated king confined.
Having lost the first of the civil wars and in fear for his life, Charles I had escaped from Hampton Court in November 1647 but, like his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots nearly eighty years before, had decided against fleeing to France. Instead he turned up on the shores of the Isle of Wight. Taken into captivity in Carisbrooke Castle, Charles’s restive mind turned on schemes of rescue. He was plotting an uprising of the Scots and hoping even for help from the French, encouraged by his queen Henrietta Maria who had sought asylum there.
There has been some speculation that William may have visited his Hammond cousin too and seen the king at this time. If he did see Charles he was not impressed. In a later essay, written in his early twenties, he wrote disparagingly about how disappointed he was with the Archduke Leopold† in the flesh after his ‘towring titles gave mee occasion to draw his picture like the Knight that kills the Gyant in a Romance’. The sight instead of a mere mortal, in fact a very ordinary man that ‘methinks … looks as like Tom or Dick as ever I saw any body in my life’ reminded him of the commonplace appearance and ‘aire of our late King’.10 Emotionally, William was more royalist than parliamentarian but this less than respectful reference just three years after Charles’s traumatic execution, to what true royalists at that time would consider a martyred king, revealed his independent mind in action. To write of the ‘aire’ or manner of the king also suggested he had seen Charles I in life. If this was so then this visit to the Isle of Wight was the probable occasion for such a meeting.
Whether he saw the king or not, the most momentous event that year for William Temple was his chance meeting with Dorothy Osborne, a coup de foudre that transformed their lives. In 1648, probably in the early summer, an unexpected and potentially inflammatory confrontation with the nervous authorities on the island propelled their attraction for each other into something deeper. Just as Dorothy and her brother Robin were on their way to embark the boat for France, Robin impulsively ran back to the inn where they had just spent the night. A hotheaded young royalist, his outrage at the imprisonment of the king, and possibly festering resentment of his father’s ill-treatment too, had been fuelled by their proximity to the castle. With the diamond from a ring he scratched into the window pane a biblical quotation in defiant protest at Governor Hammond’s actions: ‘And Hammon was hanged upon the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.’11 The insult was not just aimed at Hammond, it implied (for everyone knew their Bible) a complete political reversal and the confounding of one’s enemies. The unwritten next sentence was: ‘Then was the King’s wrath pacified.’
As Robin made his escape and ran back to where his sister, and most likely William Temple too, was waiting he was seized by the authorities and the youthful party were taken before the governor. That summer the parliamentary forces guarding the island were particularly suspicious and quick to react, having been alerted to the fact that their royal prisoner had already attempted two abortive escapes from their custody: in this febrile atmosphere these foolhardy young people were in danger of imprisonment, if not of actually being shot.
It was not only William’s relations who seemed to be influential on the island, however, for Dorothy and Robin also had a close kinsman, Richard Osborne, living in the castle as Charles I’s gentleman-of-the-bedchamber. He was implicated in at least one of the harebrained plots for the king’s escape, and the family connection may well have added further reason for their father’s exile in St Malo. The Osbornes were becoming known as royalist troublemakers. Little wonder then that this young Osborne’s appearance before a hard-pressed governor, confronted with his personally insulting and seditious graffiti, was not treated as a youthful prank.
Robin was one year older than Dorothy but she was the quicker witted and more judicious. As her brother was charged, Dorothy confounded all by stepping forward and claiming the offence as her own. This took a certain courage given her avowed dislike of drawing attention to herself and her almost pathological fear of inviting others’ scorn. It was also a dangerous time to admit to royalist affiliation expressed in such a threatening analogy. But Dorothy may not have just been impetuously protective of her brother, she may have hoped too that natural chivalry and social prejudices would work in their favour. Men were held responsible for the politics of a family and this meant women, like children, should not be punished for political crimes, their opinions considered the responsibility of their husbands and fathers.
Perhaps it was not just the governor’s reluctance to charge a woman that saved Dorothy and her brother: the fact that her new friend happened to be Governor Hammond’s cousin might have brought some influence to bear on the case. Almost certainly William was present when the Osbornes were arrested. His sister Martha remembered his report of this incident and how impressed he was with Dorothy’s spirited action: she considered this the moment when William committed his heart. The unfolding national drama and their own sense of shared danger had inflamed their youthful spirits into a passion grand enough to withstand anything. From that point William and Dorothy chose a lengthy and difficult path that became an epic tale in itself: ‘In this Journey began an amour between Sr W T and Mrs Osborne of wch the accidents for seven years might make a History.’12
Dorothy and her brother were free to continue their journey to France, now with heightened spirits, having with ingenuity escaped punishment, even death. They were joined by William whose easy talk and dashing good looks transformed the whole expedition. On the journey to St Malo the boat either passed near Herm, or Dorothy and William made a later expedition to it. One of the smallest Channel Islands, or Les Iles de la Manche as they were still known, it was then home to deer and rabbits, its coast a haven for smugglers, pirates and seabirds. The sight there of an isolated cottage caught the romantic imaginations of both young people: a few years later Dorothy reminded William, at a time when she was longing to escape with him the constraints of their more mundane world: ‘Doe you remember Arme [Herm] and the little house t
here[?] shall we goe thither[?] that’s next to being out of the world[.] there wee might live like Baucis and Philemon,* grow old together in our little Cottage and for our Charrity to some shipwrakt stranger obtaine the blessing of dyeing both at the same time.’13
Ovid’s story of these two lovers had particularly affected Dorothy who admitted to William that she cried the first time she read it in the Metamorphoses. She thought this the most satisfying of Ovid’s stories and identified with ‘the perfectest Characters of a con[ten]ted marriage where Piety and Love were all there wealth’.14 Perhaps as she was reunited in St Malo with her broken and dispossessed father she was reminded of how, like him, the gods, whom Baucis and Philemon had sheltered, had first been denied help by those from whom it was most due. She and her mother too had had doors closed against them in their desperate attempts to get food and supplies through to Sir Peter and his garrison. In her sense of abandonment she might have felt like Ovid’s gods ‘mille domos clausere serae15 [a thousand homes were barred against them]’.
Already emotionally committed to Dorothy, William stayed on with her and the Osborne family for at least a month, delaying his departure on the rest of his European tour. Dorothy was to write to him later that his frankness and his good nature were his most attractive qualities: ‘twas the first thing I liked in you, and without it I should nere have lik[ed] any thing’. Good nature was thought by some to be the sign of a simple nature, she thought, ‘credulous, apt to bee abused’, but Dorothy would always rather they both erred that way than became cynical and two-faced: ‘People that have noe good Nature, and those are the person’s I have ever observed to bee fullest of tricks, little ugly plotts, and design’s, unnecessary disguises, and mean Cunnings; which are the basest quality’s in the whole worlde.’16 This honesty and plain speaking was something they both shared, a quality that was not necessarily appreciated, in a woman at least. ‘Often I have bin told,’ Dorothy wrote to William later, ‘that I had too much franchise in my humor [frankness in my disposition] and that ’twas a point of good breeding to disguise handsomly.’17 Dorothy’s excuse was that such discretion could hardly be expected from someone who had been isolated from court life since she was a child.