by Jane Dunn
* 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.
† 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.
* 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.
* As this was the equivalent today of more than £1.25 million per annum it becomes obvious why his stepfather Sir Edmund Carey worked so assiduously to try to save this estate from the crown when Sir Charles Danvers died a traitor. Lord Danby gave Oxford some of his land in 1621 to create the first ‘physick garden’ in the country with the stated purpose ‘to promote learning and glorify the works of God’.
† This house next to the river at Chelsea was called Danvers House and adjoined what used to be Sir Thomas More’s mansion, known in the seventeenth century as Beaufort House. In 1696 Danvers House was pulled down to make way for Danvers Street. This runs now from Paultons Square to Cheyne Walk, parallel with Beaufort Street: only the names of these great houses remain.
* Although his brother was mortified by this marriage and the gossips wondered how such an eligible young man had chosen a woman more than twice his age, making him a stepfather of ten, it was reputably a happy union that lasted until Magdalen’s death in 1627. Aubrey did not share the world’s surprise, pointing out that the gorgeous youth had married Lady Herbert ‘for love of her Witt’. Magdalen Herbert was one of the lucky ones. Her life and character were celebrated in print by both her brilliant son George Herbert and her friend, the matchless poet and preacher John Donne.
† However, Sir John Danvers died at his house in Chelsea in 1655, without the disgrace that would come with the restoration of Charles II, and was buried in the family church at Dauntsey in Wiltshire. Five years later, with a king on the throne again, his name was added to the Act of Attainder as an enemy of the state.
* Gilbert, who became St Gilbert, was still alive in the middle of the twelfth century, a Lincolnshire lad born to wealthy Norman parents who set up in all thirteen religious communities. The Gilbertine Order remained the only truly English monastic order.
† Chicksands was sold to the Crown Commissioners in 1936. In 1939 it was leased to the Air Ministry and was known as RAF Chicksands. The USAF were tenants from 1950–95 when some American servicemen collected the incidents of the ghost in the night for a booklet, entitled Legend and Lore of Chicksands Priory.
* The weekly charge to the exchequer of £59 1s 10d for this enterprise was broken down thus: 16s a day to the governor; 4s a day for the lieutenant; 2s 6d a day for the ensign; four sergeants, 12d a day each; four drummers, 12d a day each; two surgeons, 12d a day each; two gunners, 12d a day each; one clerk, 12d a day; 200 men, 8d a day each. The feeding of the men however fell on the townspeople of St Peter Port.
* The first English translation of his The Education of a Christian Woman, a handbook on the education and conduct of girls and women, commissioned by Henry VIII’s Queen Catherine, was launched from the household of Sir Thomas More. It was published in 1528–9 and, immediately successful in England, went through at least nine editions in sixty years.
* It is hard to get accurate mortality rates for infants at the time, but Stone, in The Family, Sex and Marriage, conjectures that up to one-third of all babies died before they were one year old.
* Anne Harrison (1625–80) married the royalist Sir Richard Fanshawe, who became secretary to Charles II in exile. Her life was full of adventures and reversals of fortune. She had six sons and eight daughters but all but one son and four daughters predeceased Sir Richard, who died of a fever in 1666. Like Dorothy Osborne, Lady Fanshawe was consort to a diplomat on missions abroad during Charles II’s restoration. Dorothy went with her husband to the Netherlands, Anne to Portugal and then Spain.
† Margaret Lucas (1623–74), as maid of honour to Charles I’s Queen Henrietta Maria, followed her into exile in Paris and there met and married William Cavendish. She became the Duchess of Newcastle and, in publishing twenty-three books, the most prolific woman writer that the world had yet seen. She was unconventional, spasmodically brilliant and engaging, apologising for her presumption as a mere woman in daring to seek a commercial readership and fame.
* George Savile (1633–95), 1st Marquis of Halifax, writer, moderate politician and friend of William and Dorothy; after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 he was chosen to offer the crown to William and Mary II.
* Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), born in Cambridge and educated at the university there and at Oxford All Souls. He was a chaplain to Charles I and was arrested in 1645 during the first civil war. He retired to Wales until the restoration and wrote most of his highly successful books at this time. Two of the most famous, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), were practical and spiritual manuals written with a direct simplicity and grandeur of spirit. Hazlitt wrote: ‘When the name of Jeremy Taylor is no longer remembered with reverence, genius will have become a mockery and virtue an empty shade.’ Taylor became Bishop of Down and Connor and later of Dromore in Ireland where he died.
* This was the equivalent of about £49,000 today.
* Careye obsessively noted their meagre and putrid rations: ‘peas which were sprouting and rancid bacon’; ‘cheese boiled with stinking grease, beer and bread as usual’. The water supply for the castle was contaminated when a cannon ball destroyed part of the storage cistern and there was not enough to drink. After the prisoners’ beer rations were stopped the lack of drinking water and the saltiness of the preserved food meant they began to suffer serious effects of dehydration. There is little reason to think that the governor and garrison were much better victualled.
CHAPTER THREE
When William Was Young
When I was young and in some idle company, it was proposed that every one should tell what their three wishes should be, if they were sure to be granted: some were very pleasant, and some very extravagant; mine were health, and peace, and fair weather
WILLIAM TEMPLE, essay, ‘Of Health and Long Life’
WILLIAM TEMPLE WAS born into a family of clever and robust country gentlemen who showed an independence of mind and political fleetness of foot in navigating the quicksand of allegiances during the middle of the seventeenth century. Not for them the self-sacrifice and dogged certainties of a Sir Peter Osborne. More intellectually curious perhaps, more pragmatic than idealistic, they served both king and parliament, and managed to promote their careers despite the reversals of civil war, establishment of a new republic and restoration of a king.
William’s nephew Henry Temple, 1st viscount Palmerston, believed that the family was descended from the eleventh century magnate Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Lady Godiva who, tradition had it, rode naked through Coventry to force her husband to revoke his oppressive taxation. More certain, and closer in time, was that William’s grandfather, after whom he was named, was the Sir William Temple who became provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1609. He was born in 1555 in a time of turmoil and suspicion at the end of Mary Tudor’s reign. The younger son of a younger son, he had to earn his own living. He flowered with the Elizabethan age and was a close friend and then secretary to the soldier poet Sir Philip Sidney.* When both were in their early thirties, he followed Sidney to the Netherlands when he was made governor of Flushing: family
lore had it that Sir William then held Sidney in his arms as he died of infection from a war wound in 1586.
From being the intimate of one young Orpheus, Temple now allied himself with an Icarus. He became secretary to Elizabeth I’s ambitious favourite the Earl of Essex.† When Essex was executed in 1601 for plotting against the queen, Temple temporarily lost favour but Elizabeth had only two more years to live. He had spent almost a whole lifetime as an Elizabethan, but was to survive through two more kings’ reigns. His post as provost of Trinity was awarded under James I, as was his knighthood in 1622; he then died in 1627, the year of Dorothy’s birth and two years into the reign of Charles I.
Sir William’s intellectual and independent qualities of mind had been a large part of his attraction to Sir Philip Sidney. Educated at Eton, Temple had won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he quickly showed an aptitude for philosophical debate. Controversially he there became a passionate advocate of the philosopher Ramus‡ against the then orthodoxy of medieval scholasticism, with its highly convoluted definitions and terminology. Ramus had made a widely influential case for clarity, distinctness and analysis of all kinds, a systematisation of knowledge which turned out to be much easier to carry through in the new print culture. Temple’s annotated edition of Ramus’s Dialectics, arguing for a simplified system of logic, was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It had the distinction of probably being the first book published by the Cambridge University Press in 1584. According to his granddaughter, William’s sister Martha, this was ‘writ … as I have bin told in the most elegant Latin any body has bin Master off’.1
Sir William became provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1609 and was active in transforming the college and university so that it more resembled Cambridge. He was a lively presence around Dublin and was elected to the Irish House of Commons in 1613 as a member for the university. He was knighted rather late in his career and died five years later aged seventy-two and still in office. He had died in harness, although his resignation had already been mooted owing to ‘his age and weakness’.2 His granddaughter noted that he died as he had lived, with a certain blitheness and a concern with learning, ‘with little care or thought of his fortune’,3 and so had only a modest estate to pass on to his heir.
Sir William Temple’s elder son, Sir John Temple, was our William’s father. The family’s friendship with the family of the Earl of Essex continued through the next two generations. Sir John too had a distinguished career, as member of both the Irish and English parliaments and, most significantly, as Master of the Rolls* in Ireland. Born there in 1600, his life and fortune were to be very much bound up with that country. In the service of Charles I he was knighted in 1628. The next ten years were spent in a very happy marriage to Mary Hammond with the subsequent birth of seven children, five of whom survived infancy. The tragic death of his wife in September 1638, nine days after their twins were born, was a heavy blow to Sir John. Leaving his children with family in England, he returned to Ireland by the beginning of 1640 to take up his position as Master of the Rolls. At the beginning of the civil wars, he was forty-two years old and had just been elected a member of parliament for County Meath.
Although his efforts on behalf of the crown against the Irish rebels in 1641 had been much appreciated by the king, in the ideological conflicts his sympathies increasingly lay with the parliamentarians. He became one of the minor members of an influential cabal of disaffected aristocrats, called the ‘Junto’, concerned enough with the king’s growing autocracy to plot his downfall.* In the summer of 1643 Sir John was imprisoned on Charles I’s orders, having been charged with writing two scandalous letters suggesting the king supported the Catholic rebels. He remained in close confinement for a year.
Sir John was eventually released and returned to his family in England, rewarded for what was considered unnecessarily harsh treatment with a seat in the English parliament in 1646. That year he published the book, probably partly written during his imprisonment, for which he would become famous: Irish rebellion; or an history of the beginning and first progresse of the generall rebellion … Together with the barbarous cruelties and bloody massacres which ensued thereon. This was a powerful partisan account of the rebellion, given emotive force by gruesome eyewitness reports and sworn statements. It caused an immediate sensation on publication, fomenting anger in England against the Irish and outrage back in Ireland. Its effects lived on over the centuries. It was used in part justification of Cromwell’s subsequent violent suppression of the Irish and decades later, in 1689, the Irish parliament ordered that it be burned by the common hangman. Ulster Protestants to this day still call on the powerful accounts of Irish atrocities in its pages to fuel their own partisan feeling.
In the summer of 1655 Sir John returned to Ireland, highly commended by Cromwell, to take up his old job of Master of the Rolls, a position that was reconfirmed after Charles II’s restoration. He was also awarded leases on various estates, specifically in the area round Carlow, amounting to nearly 1,500 acres of prime farmland, and Dublin, including 144 acres of what was to become Dublin’s famous Phoenix Park. Having managed skilfully to ride both parliament’s and the king’s horses, Sir John Temple lived a full and productive life: unlike Sir Peter Osborne, he managed to evade paying a swingeing price for his allegiances. However, dying in 1677 at a good age, he ended his days an old and successful, but not particularly rich, man. He had always hoped that his eldest son would not do as he and his father had done, but would establish the family finances securely by marrying a woman of property. Instead he had lived to see his beloved son and heir turn his back on repairing the Temple family fortune to repeat the pattern of his forefathers, in this respect at least, and follow his heart.
Sir John Temple had married a woman with an eminent intellectual lineage from the professional rather than the landed classes. Mary Hammond was the daughter of James I’s physician, John Hammond, and the granddaughter of the zealous Elizabethan lawyer the senior John Hammond who was involved with the interrogation under torture of a number of Catholic priests, including the scholar and Jesuit Edmund Campion. Mary was the sister of Dr Henry Hammond, one of the great teachers and divines of his age who became a highly regarded chaplain to Charles I and whose sweetness of disposition endeared him to everyone.
While this branch of the family dedicated itself to saving the royal body and ministering to his soul, another brother Thomas and a nephew Robert were in just as close proximity to the king but actively engaged in supporting his enemies. Thomas Hammond sat as a judge at Charles I’s trial and Colonel Robert Hammond, having distinguished himself fighting for parliament during the first civil war, ended up as governor of the Isle of Wight and, albeit reluctant, jailer of the king. This was one of the many families where passionately held convictions, translated into civil war, split brother from brother, mother from son.
The Temples and the Hammonds were not aristocratic families but both excelled as successful administrators and scholars. What qualities of intelligence and energetic pragmatism they had were united in the children of Sir John and Lady Temple. Into the mix went a high degree of physical attractiveness and charm, for the Hammond genes produced their mother Mary, known as a beauty, and their uncle Henry, whose good looks were remarked on even by his colleagues, along with his inner grace: ‘especially in his youth, he had the esteem of a very beauteous person’.4
Within ten months of the marriage, Mary fulfilled every expectation of a young wife and produced her first child, the precious son and heir. William Temple was born on 25 April 1628. His father had just been knighted and the family’s fortunes were looking up. William was born at Blackfriars in London and was followed by a sister, Mary. This little girl died aged two, when William was four. Two months before her death a second brother, John, was born, followed by James two years after that. Then another daughter, again named Mary, was born in 1636 but she also died, this time aged five, when her eldest brother was thirteen.
At about the time this sister Mary was born, William was sent to be educated by his Hammond uncle Henry and live with him and his grandmother at the parsonage house on the Earl of Leicester’s Penshurst estate in Kent. Apart from his role as a much loved uncle, Dr Hammond became a highly important figure in young William’s life, more influential in nurturing the boy’s view of himself and his relationship to the world than his own father. William was seven or eight years old at the time and would grow up with much less of his father’s political intelligence and much more of his uncle’s romantic idealism, high-mindedness and social conscience.
Henry Hammond was barely thirty when he assumed his nephew’s moral and intellectual education. Despite a complete lack of self-promotional zeal, his academic career to that point had described a blazing trajectory. Excelling at Eton in both Latin and Greek and, unusually for the time, Hebrew, he was appointed as tutor in Hebrew to the older boys. Hammond’s lack of boyish aggression was remarked on and his gentle kindness and natural piety gave cause for some alarm in his more robust teachers. But something about this quietly studious and spiritual boy gained everyone’s respect. At the age of only thirteen he was deemed ready to continue his studies at Oxford, and became a scholar at Magdalen College. Before he was twenty he had gained his master’s degree and then turned his studies to divinity and was ordained by the time he was twenty-four.
Plucked from academia and court by the Earl of Leicester and planted in his rural idyll at Penshurst, Henry Hammond took up the much more varied and less exalted responsibilities of a country parish priest. It was in this role that his reputation as the most godly and lovable of men was burnished. Not only were his sermons marvels of accessible and provocative scholarship but also his pastoral care was exemplary, funding from his own income all kinds of schemes to support local children deprived of schooling, or their families of food or shelter. Strife and disharmony physically pained him and consequently he was the most successful peacemaker between families, neighbours and colleagues.