by Jane Dunn
During this month of close company and constant conversation Dorothy and William discovered a rare compatibility: ‘his thoughts mett with hers as indeed they could not choos, since they had both but one heart,’ he added in one of his personalised romances written specially for her. It is most likely that it was William who first declared his feelings. He was of a more impetuous and immediately expressive nature: his sister described him as having ‘passions naturaly warme, & quick, but temper’d by reason & thought’.18 Dorothy anyway was horrified at the idea of a woman courting a man and objected to fictions where this was made to happen: ‘It will never enter into my head that tis possible any woman can Love where she is not first Loved.’19
Dorothy noticed that they had a similar recipe for contentment, possibly highlighted by their mutual response to the dream of living like Philemon and Baucis in their island retreat: ‘only you and I agree,’ she wrote later, ‘[contentment] tis to bee found by us in a True friend,* a moderat fortune, and a retired life’.20 This sense of destiny, made more intense by their youth (they were both just over twenty), would arm them against the pain of separation and frustration of their desires that they endured in the long years to come. The unusualness for the time of their dogged resistance to their parents’ wishes and their obstinate insistence on the pursuit of love also spoke of their own romantic temperaments and the extraordinary power of their clandestine letters to each other. These alone, through periods of extended separation and family harassment, were all they had to keep the flame alive and bolster each other’s belief in the possibility of marriage and consummation at last. ‘Read my heart,’ Dorothy wrote in one of her letters and that heartfelt quality is just what gave them such compelling force, for they carried all her intelligence, humour and longing for William in their separate exiles.
William and Dorothy united their fates against great practical, cultural and familial odds. Their falling in love with each other was not just a transformation of the heart. It involved a revolution against everything they had been bred to be, challenging the blind duty of children towards their parents, the pecuniary aspect of marriage and the inferiority of women in their relations with men.
Dorothy was intellectual, self-contained and enigmatic, her dark-eyed beauty perhaps inherited, along with her forthright character, from her Danvers grandmother, who the biographer John Evelyn claimed had Italian blood. William was even more conventionally good-looking; in Dorothy’s own words, ‘a very pritty gentleman and a modest [one]’.21 According to his sister his luxuriant dark brown hair ‘curl’d naturaly, & while that was esteem’d a beauty nobody had it in more perfection’.22 In an age of shaved heads and extravagant wigs, he wore his own hair long and unpowdered. He was tall and athletically built and overflowing with a breezy energy and enthusiasm that attracted everyone. Dorothy’s seriousness of mind would deepen his character while his own ‘great humanity & good nature, takeing pleasure in makeing others easy and happy’23 brought warmth and optimism to a woman who felt keenly the darker side of life. ‘I never apeare to bee very merry, and if I had all that I could wish for in the World I doe not thinke it would make any visible change in my humor,’24 was how she explained her naturally pensive, even sorrowful, expression.
Their stolen month of ecstatic discovery was brought to an abrupt end. Sir John Temple had learned with irritation that his son had barely travelled beyond the English shores; his irritation became alarm when he heard ‘the occasion of it’: his son’s delight in an impoverished young woman. He issued the stern parental order to depart to Paris without delay. This was an age when even grown children expected to obey their parents absolutely and in this William conformed immediately. Both he and Dorothy would continue to honour their parents’ wishes, even when they ran diametrically opposed to their own, although through evasion and covert rebellion they managed not always to comply. There were crucial material, social as well as moral imperatives for filial duty and both Temple and Osborne fathers intended to enforce them. For Dorothy and William to marry without family support meant a precipitous plunge into poverty as family money was withheld; and with the debilitating loss of social status came diminished opportunities for suitable employment. However, much as both families disliked the idea of love entering marriage negotiations and obstinately continued to frustrate this renegade plan, the subversive lovers made a private commitment to each other while in St Malo and trusted they might have a future together some day.
Looking back on their lives, William’s sister had thought his and Dorothy’s courtship was as good a love story as any fiction and that their letters should have been published as a ‘Volum’. ‘I have often wish’d the[y] might bee printed,’ she wrote, and even though she thought her brother’s writings exceptional it was Dorothy’s letters that she particularly admired: ‘I never saw any thing more extraordinary then hers.’25 This call for their publication was a radical statement at the time. It was perhaps a measure of how highly esteemed Dorothy’s letters were, even by contemporaries, that Martha could envisage personal love letters from a woman to a man, to whom she had been forbidden to write and had yet to marry, could ever properly be published when such exposure was considered unwomanly, or worse. The extreme vicissitudes of their love affair were recognised by everyone who knew them, and most acutely by Dorothy and William themselves, as making their story akin to the best fictional romances where true love was thwarted at every turn until the final satisfying embrace.
No letters survived from this first stage of their separation but both refer to this period in other contexts. In the following two to four years William re-wrote romances from the French* and amplified them for his own and Dorothy’s enjoyment. He also used the dramas to work out his own youthful thoughts and feelings on the conundrums of human experience and to distract him from his own unhappiness at being forcibly separated from the woman he loved. They were an outlet too for his frustrated desires, a proxy voice for feelings he was unable to express to her in person: ‘a vent to my passion, all I made others say was what I should have said myself to you upon the like occasion’.27 He revealed just how much she haunted him: ‘[I] shewd you a heart wch you have so wholly taken up that contentment could nere find a room in it since first you came there.’28 William told Dorothy they were meant to be read as letters from him to her.
A letter composed by William and introduced into the plot of one of these romances, The Constant Desperado, spoke directly to her alone, he declared, the more passionate the feeling, the more personally it was written for her: ‘you will find in this a letter that was meant to you though nere superscribd, and bee confident whatever in it is passionate said twas you indited [it was composed for you].’29
Embedding his messages in the overheated atmosphere of a French romance also gave William a means of communicating intense emotion and dramatic declarations without embarrassment. Despite some hyperbole necessary for the genre, his sense of loss and despair in being separated from Dorothy was real and direct and expressive of his own youth and overflowing feelings. It also gave an insight into her conversations with him before he left on his journey, when she feared most that his declarations of love were just airy confections and would disperse on the wind:
Madam
I count all that time but lost which I liv’d without knowing you … Tis impossible to tell you how often I have died since I left you, for I have done it as often as I have thought of you, and thought of you as often as I have breath’d; you thinke it strange that I am dead and yet have motion enough to write, alas (Madam) though I am dead, my passion lives, and tis that now writes to you, not I; have I not often told you that would never dye? And as often I could never outlive the losse of your sight; you at first thought them winde like other words, and they would soone blow over, but learne (Madam) a lovers heart is allwayes at his mouth when his Mistresse is neere him … for all this[,] dead as I am[,] if my hopes are not so too, and there are any of seeing you, methinks your eyes would revive mee …
Let me know by your letters you remember mee, if you would not have mee dye beyond all hopes of a resurrection.30
In writing these personalised romances for Dorothy, William was also setting himself up in competition with the French writers she so much esteemed. Throughout their courtship she urged the turgid volumes upon him, begging him to read them too so that she could discuss character and motivation with him. Here he was attempting a pre-emptive strike, hoping perhaps that she would rate his work as highly as theirs, or at least see him in an enhanced light. His romances also pursued certain philosophical and moral arguments that suggest something of their youthful discussions, as well as the surge of emotion that overcame them both during their transfiguring month in St Malo.
In speaking of the hero of one of his stories, William amplified his country pursuits into allegories on life itself. Here he appears to acknowledge that his newfound love also brought danger; the greater the ecstasy the more painful the loss. In love, he was now no longer safe and self-contained and his carefree days were over:
sometimes he flies the tender partridge, others the soaring hearne [heron] and his hawkes never missing, hee concludes that fly wee high or low wee must all at length come alike to the ground; if there bee any difference that the loftier flight has the deadlier fall. sometimes with his angle hee beguiles the silly fish, and not without some pitty of theire innocence, observes how theire pleasure proves theire bane and how greedily they swallow the baite wch covers a hooke that shall teare out theire bowels, hee compares lovers to these little wittlesse creatures, and thinks them the fonder [more foolish] of the two, that with such greedy eyes stand gazing at a face, whose beguiling regards will pierce into theire hearts, and cost them theire freedome and content if they scape with theire lives.31
The face he had gazed on he described thus: ‘her eyes black as the night seem’d to presage the fate of all such as beheld them. Her browne haire curl’d in rings, but indeed they were chaines that enslav’d all hearts that were so bold as to approach them.’32 There is no doubt that he was pointedly describing Dorothy, from whom he was exiled at the time. During the six and a half years of their separation she was indeed circled by suitors bold enough to approach her. She was pressed by her father, and then more threateningly by her brother, to accept anyone with a suitable fortune, but she withstood the emotional blackmail, deprecating each suitor to William with a sharp wit and dispatching them all with unsentimental glee. But her position was parlous. For most of their courtship, Dorothy was secluded in her family’s country house, not knowing whether William would remain loyal or that either of them could continue to resist the family pressure on them to conform. At times their spirits and hope failed them. Illness, depression and threats of death made their ugly interjections. There could never be any certainty until their struggle had run its course.
Somehow, through personal tragedy, family blackmail, enforced separation, misunderstandings, ridicule and despair, Dorothy and William clung against all the odds to a sometimes faltering faith in each other and in the triumph of romantic love. For a young couple to maintain their fidelity to an ideal of a self-determined life, no matter what outrage, arguments and threats were marshalled against them, merely compounded in the eyes of the world their disrespect and folly. For Dorothy Osborne and William Temple to remain constant to each other and overcome every obstacle, from when they first met in 1648 through to their eventual, longed-for consummation at Christmas 1654, was remarkable indeed. Dorothy wrote to him in the midst of their trials: ‘can there bee a more Romance Story than ours would make if the conclusion should prove happy[?]’33 but it seemed the vainest hope.
* * *
* Lady Halkett (1623–99) was born Anne Murray, her father a tutor to Charles I and then provost of Eton College. He died when she was a baby and her remarkable mother became governess to the royal children. Anne was a highly intelligent and spirited young woman and after a wild and adventurous life as the assistant to a secret agent employed by Charles I she eventually married a widower, Sir James Halkett, at the late age of thirty-three. After the death of her husband she became a teacher herself.
* Robert Hammond (1621–54), a distinguished parliamentarian soldier and friend of Cromwell, nephew of the royalist divine Dr Henry Hammond, chaplain to the king, and cousin to William Temple. Sent by Cromwell to Ireland as a member of the Irish council responsible for reorganising the judiciary, he caught a fever and died at the age of thirty-three.
† Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria (1614–62), governor of the Spanish Netherlands and art collector. His collection is now part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
* Ovid’s Metamorphoses, viii, 620–724. Philemon’s name connoted love and that of his wife Baucis modesty. Dorothy had identified closely with the old couple who had been wedded in their youth and lived in contented poverty, growing older and ever closer. For their simple kindness and hospitality to the gods Jupiter and Mercury, who were travelling incognito and had been denied succour at every other door, they were rewarded with a temple in place of their cottage and transformed into priests and granted their only request: that having lived so long together in close companionship they might be allowed to die together. As death approached, they both transmuted into trees, Philemon an oak and Baucis a linden tree, their trunks and branches so closely intertwined they were as one. Dorothy’s own signed copy of the 1626 edition of Sandys’s translation of Ovid is now in the Osborn collection in the Beinecke Library at Yale.
* They both used the word ‘friend’ to mean also a close family member, most notably a spouse.
* William Temple adapted his series of romances from François de Rosset’s Histoires Tragiques, a collection of nineteen versions of true stories that were collected and published in 1615 with many further editions. William’s additions and departures from the original were expressive of his more sympathetic nature and philosophical mind, as well as outlets for frustrated feeling. Most significantly, however, they were personal messages to the woman for whom he was writing.
CHAPTER TWO
The Making of Dorothy
I felt this is the heart of England … history I felt; Cromwell; The Osbornes; Dorothy’s shepherdesses singing … the unconscious breathing of England
VIRGINIA WOOLF, watching a country wedding, Diary,
22 September 1928
DOROTHY’S DETERMINATION TO direct her own fate and modify her central role as dutiful daughter and marriage pawn was highly unusual for the time. The kind of family she was born into, and the possible influences and mythologies that were brought to bear on her while growing up a well-bred Stuart girl, contributed to her unique insistence on self-determination. The Osborne family for centuries had been part of the lifeblood of rural and administrative England. Dorothy Osborne was born in 1627, two years after Charles I had come to the throne. Her most recent ancestors on her father’s side were landed gentry and faithful officers of the crown, who, from the fifteenth century, were settled as landowners in Essex. But it was the women they married who brought a certain intellectual strength and unorthodox cast of mind to the genetic mix she inherited. Perhaps there was an extra helping of independence of mind in these women that could be expressed more openly by Dorothy, freed by the revolutionary chaos of the time.
Her great-grandfather Peter Osborne was born in 1521, when Henry VIII was in his prime, and subsequently became keeper of the privy purse to Henry’s son, Edward VI. He and his heirs were granted the hereditary office of treasurer’s remembrancer* in the exchequer. He married Anne Blythe, the daughter of the first regius professor of physick at the University of Cambridge and niece of Sir John Cheke, the celebrated Greek scholar, regius professor of Greek and tutor to Edward VI.† This venerable man died in Sir Peter’s house, shamed at having publicly recanted his Protestantism under Mary I. The intellectual Cheke descendants were important to Dorothy and were mentioned often in her letters where she referred to them as ‘cousins’, making a particular point o
f their kinship.
Peter and Anne’s son was Dorothy’s grandfather Sir John Osborne, born in 1552. He married Dorothy Barlee, ten years his junior and lady-in-waiting to Anne of Denmark, consort to James I. She was the heiress and granddaughter of the fearsome Richard Lord Rich, a brilliant, ruthlessly opportunistic lawyer who betrayed Sir Thomas More during Henry VIII’s reign and under Mary I was a zealous burner of heretics. Sir John Osborne inherited the office of treasurer’s remembrancer on his father’s death in 1592. It was he who acquired Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, which remained the country seat of this branch of the family right into the twentieth century.
Sir John and Lady Osborne’s eldest son, another Sir Peter Osborne, was our Dorothy’s father. Born in 1585, the first of five sons, he went to Emmanuel College, Oxford, when he was eighteen. Dorothy’s uncle Francis, the youngest of her father’s brothers, was the only writer in her immediate family, publishing his hugely popular Advice to a Son in 1656. Although he was not a published writer himself, Sir Peter’s letters are remarkable for their candour and expressiveness, a family characteristic that his daughter in her own writing was to transform into art. The brothers grew up at Chicksands where their father had installed in the neighbouring rectory at Hawnes the radical Puritan preacher and writer, Thomas Brightman,* whose influential preaching and writings were full of the sense of an imminent fulfilment of the apocalyptic prophesies of the Book of Revelations. Scholarly and saintly in appearance, he was passionately opposed to the established church and believed the Pope was the anti-Christ whose destruction was foretold by God.